Refine
Document Type
- Article (3)
Language
- English (3)
Has Fulltext
- yes (3) (remove)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (3)
Keywords
- - (3) (remove)
European cross‐border regions often display substantial political and economic activity. A key example is the French‐German‐Swiss Upper Rhine region, where three distinct national governance models come together. In this dynamic cross‐border industry cluster, traditional political‐administrative units often do not meet the functional needs of employers and (future) employees. This comparative institutional analysis refers to Varieties of Capitalism and Local Production Systems perspectives to explore the operations of this cluster. It finds two main patterns through which education and training are embedded in the cross‐border context: on the one hand, the leveraging of distinct institutional advantages in the different parts of the region and, on the other, the creation of cross‐border collective competition goods in the form of jointly provided educational institutions. Through these two strategies, local actors within the cross‐border industry cluster can turn their peripheral location into an institutional advantage.
In most developed democracies, parties adjust their positions to polls and public opinion. Yet, in a coalition government, the policy that emerges is often the outcome of negotiations between governing parties. We argue that the credibility of exit threats by current coalition members and the importance of outside parties for the formation of potential alternative coalitions both matter for policy adoption. Building on a new data set measuring the expected coalition‐inclusion probabilities of parties in parliamentary democracies, we estimate the effect of coalition prospects on an important policy outcome—environmental policy stringency—in nine European countries between 1990 and 2012. Our findings demonstrate that only polling shifts that alter coalition probabilities affect outcomes. Changes in the coalition‐inclusion probability of green parties—regardless of whether they are in government—predict changes in the environmental policy stringency of sitting governments. Political polls, in contrast, do not.
We distinguish between social and liberal collective skill formation systems and demonstrate that the German VET system is a social system with a strong (parity) role for trade unions in its governance. In contrast, unions play a considerably weaker role in the more liberal Swiss system, which privileges employers’ interests. We show that the different position of unions in VET systems has the expected consequences on a range of indicators. We further examine why unions are less important in Switzerland and show how, after the First World War, differences in the institutional environment and power resources of the union movements set Germany and Switzerland on different paths, which are still visible today.