This dissertation addresses the puzzling persistence of farmers’ influence over politics and policymaking in Europe, despite a dramatic decline in their population and share of economic output. I redeploy theories commonly used to explain welfare state retrenchment to the domain of agricultural policy.

Farmers today account for less than 5 percent of Europe’s population, and agriculture’s contribution to GDP is under 2 percent, yet farmers have repeatedly blocked reform initiatives and extracted new commitments of support. My project describes and explains how farmers have both thwarted proposed agricultural policy spending cuts and contained proposed reforms. It also accounts for the conditions that have facilitated limited instances of reform.

I contend that contemporary farmer power is grounded in four sources: sophisticated organizations, control of the policy space, sympathetic public opinion, and the unique nature of agricultural production. These updated tools have allowed farmers to remain politically influential despite their declining numbers.

Given the resilient power of farmers, I find that reforming agricultural policy is an exercise in managing the claims of farmers. In essence, European agricultural policies are welfare for farmers. In the same way that governments seeking to retrench welfare programs must contend with program claimants, agricultural policy reformers must manage the interests of farmers. A common outcome across reforms is that farmers defend the budget. In exchange for preserving the budget, farmers often accept administrative policy change. Because reformers often use welfare state retrenchment techniques when engaging in Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform, these policy outcomes tend to include compensation for affected claimants, changes to rules and standards, and reforms that seek to improve efficiency and equality of current programs rather than the creation of new programs. Outcomes also depend on how farmers exercise their power. When, for example, their control of the policy space begins to slip, reformers may be able to impose stricter rules and requirements upon farmers.

Important also in accounting for the contents of the final reform are the conditions under which reform takes place. When reform coincides with other periods of major negotiation or change, like enlargement or trade talks, changes to the operation of core CAP policies become possible. When such concurrent events are absent, it becomes incredibly difficult for reformers to enact any change at all to existing policy.

The dissertation draws on a combination of qualitative and quantitative evidence collected over six multi-month fieldwork trips to Belgium, France, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, and brief sojourns to Austria and Ireland. To construct a set of structured case studies, I conducted over one hundred interviews with local, national, and European Union officials. I spoke with current and former members of parliament, government ministers, leaders of farmer organizations, and officials from the European Commission, including several former agricultural commissioners. This unusually rich set of interviews, supplemented by information from EU documents and other data sources, provides the foundation for multiple case studies of major CAP Reform. In these case studies, I systematically analyze the causal processes at work in agricultural reform efforts.

The dissertation’s argument and findings deepen the current understanding of how agricultural policy reform occurs and challenges the widely held notion that farmers are politically irrelevant. The findings of the dissertation demonstrate the efficacy of applying welfare state arguments outside of the domain of the traditional social welfare state. Finally, the dissertation has important implications beyond just agricultural policy, including policy making in the European Union, the handling of powerful groups in social welfare policy creation and reform, and the management of social class decline.

This dissertation analyzes the development of the retail sector in the United States and Western Europe. The predominant literature on the service sector in both economics and political science has argued that the only way to create jobs in services such as retailing is through the low-wage, high-inequality route epitomized by the United States. Nevertheless, in the retail trade sector, a number of European countries have matched or exceeded American productivity and employment growth, despite considerably higher wage levels. How do we explain the puzzling combination of rapid job growth and high wages in European retail?

This dissertation resolves this puzzle through a cross-national comparison of the retailing strategy in three countries: the United States, Denmark, and France. It identifies three modes of competition in retail, labeled "lean retailing" (US), "relational contracting" (Denmark), and "vertical integration" (France). It shows that each approach has strengths and limitations, with none inherently more successful than the others.

The first model, American lean retailing, is a cost-squeezing strategy built around scale, turnover, and low margins. It uses dominating relationships with suppliers and workers to strip costs and retailer control over logistics to improve efficiency. The second model, Danish relational contracting, illustrates that more collaborative relationships can produce equally efficient retailing outcomes. Danish retailers work with workers and suppliers, finding ways to share and reduce long-term costs through worker training, improved productivity, and reduced costs from confrontation. Finally, a third model, French vertical integration, seeks to add and capture as much value as possible throughout the distribution supply chain. French retailers have built their own partners and brands, developing services and private label products that allow them to add value.

Most explanations of retail business strategies emphasize either the imperatives of the technology available to retailers or the vicissitudes of consumer preferences or markets. This dissertation argues, by contrast, that contemporary retailer strategies are rooted in a series of political battles fought in the 1960s. The key to this political explanation is the embedded nature of the retail sector. Retailers are amongst the most connected actors in political economy, with ties to numerous economic and political players, including consumers, suppliers, workers, and both local and national governments. These connections were activated in the 1960s as a new crop of large-scale retail entrants began shifting the retail sector from shopkeepers to supermarkets.

The political coalitions that emerged were a function of national structural factors, notably the power resources of the retail sector, electoral institutions, avenues of interest aggregation, and the economic organization of small shops. These coalitions set in motion longer economic trajectories of firm management and policymaking. Where retailers could defend their interests unilaterally, without coalition partners (US), the lean retail model took hold; where retailers forged multiple coalitions with other stakeholders (Denmark), the relational contracting model developed; and where coalitions were partial and unstable (France), vertical integration predominated.

In the United States, the fragmented and decentralized political environment meant that the opposition to retailers was local and diffuse. Consequently retailers were able to counter with unilateral political action. This unilateral political approach set the stage for a confrontational, and ultimately dominating lean retail strategy that uses market power and digital information as a club against suppliers and workers.

In Denmark, weak retailers confronted powerful small shops, producers, and workers. Needing support, retailers reached a broad compromise involving all of these groups that divided the gains from consumer distribution in a more stable, long-term and equitable fashion. Under this relational contracting approach, retailers were forced to work with partners, but eventually found numerous benefits from these alliances, and have continued their cooperation long after the initial political crisis has past. Policymaking has also continued its history of concertation, and new challenges are still tackled jointly by a broad coalition of groups.

Finally, in France, retailers faced vocal and national, but disjointed opposition movements of shopkeepers and workers. Retailers responded by forging uneasy, partial alliances, but these were constantly contested. In this unstable political environment, retailers pursued a vertical integration strategy, seeking to maximize value by controlling and internalizing much of the production process.

Analysts of the retail sector suggest that new developments, such as trans-national retailing and e-commerce (sales over the Internet) are undermining national models of retailing. This dissertation shows, however, that retailers are largely integrating these new developments into their existing, nationally distinctive business strategies. In the United States, retailers are using market power and fragmented politics to dominate where possible. In Denmark, numerous partners are working collaboratively to share the gains of new opportunities. Finally, in France, national political fights over digital commerce are reopening unresolved policy questions from the pre-digital era. Like the previous set of political challenges facing retailers, therefore, national institutions and politics continue to mediate economic transformations and drive divergence in firm strategy, competitive advantage, and national variation in secondary outcomes such as wage equality, price levels, and patterns of technology implementation.

As long as far-right parties – known chiefly for their vehement opposition to immigration – have competed in contemporary Western Europe, scholars and observers have been concerned about these parties’ implications for liberal democracy. Many originally believed that far- right parties would fade away due to a lack of voter support and their isolation by mainstream parties. Since 1994, however, far-right parties have been included in 17 governing coalitions across Western Europe. What explains the switch from exclusion to inclusion in Europe, and what drives mainstream-right parties’ decisions to include or exclude the far right from coalitions today?

My argument is centered on the cost of far-right exclusion, in terms of both office and policy goals for the mainstream right. I argue, first, that the major mainstream parties of Western Europe initially maintained the exclusion of the far right because it was relatively costless: They could govern and achieve policy goals without the far right. During this period of exclusion, however, major parties of both the left and right attempted to win back voters lost to the far right by enacting more restrictive immigration policies; they would borrow from the far right as long as it was beneficial.

Second, I argue that the mainstream right has increasingly treated the far right as it would any other party during coalition decisions. Major mainstream parties prioritize being in government, and will select the coalition that offers both stability and the ability to achieve policy goals in areas of greatest importance to them at the time. As the far right continued to attract voters throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, the mainstream right realized that working with the far right – which was now a more useful partner, as it had more legislative seats – might result in more advantageous policy compromises. Once far-right parties could be useful to the mainstream right, exclusion became a more costly strategy.

Third, far-right parties can be attractive coalition partners to the mainstream right be- cause they are flexible on most issues – immigration excepted – and thus more willing to give the mainstream right its preferred policies in exchange for gains in immigration. Additionally, far-right parties are nearly always smaller than the major mainstream-right parties, so the mainstream parties are able to carry more weight in coalition decisions and obtain important ministerial positions.

I demonstrate my argument through in-depth case studies of Austria and the Netherlands, from the 1980s through the present. Both countries have had far-right parties in and out of government, providing important variation on the dependent variable. Finally, I show the wider applicability of my argument in two ways by extending my arguments about inclusion and exclusion to coalition-like agreements in the United Kingdom and France, as well as to mainstream left responses to far-left parties in Europe.

A large share of the population in Latin America has historically lacked access to health care, stable income, and old-age pensions. While social protection was granted to workers in the formal sector--that is, those with labor contracts--workers outside the formal sector and their dependents remained unprotected or underserved by social policy. Labor-market outsiders include the urban informal sector--i.e., the self-employed, street vendors, and employees hired off the books--as well as rural workers and the unemployed. Over the last quarter of the 20th century, this mass of unprotected outsiders and dependents represented at least 50 percent of the population in the most industrialized countries in Latin America, and a large part of them lived in poverty.

Beginning in the 1980s, the debt crisis and ensuing market reforms did not seem to augur well for initiatives to address this welfare gap. Most comparative analyses on social policy in Latin America have pointed to declining state capacity to extend social protection, and limited channels for outsiders to influence policymaking. In the face of fiscal constraints and capital scarcity, most research has described a process of social policy retrenchment and the distribution of clientelistic provisions for the poor. In this political and economic scenario, the creation of broad-reaching, stable, rule-based social transfers and services for outsiders appeared highly unlikely.

Contrary to these expectations, this study documents a dramatic expansion of rule-based social policy--health care, pensions, and income-support programs--in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico starting in the late 1980s. These social policy innovations are surprising not just because they reach outsiders, but also because they are massive. For example, pension benefits have been extended to the majority of outsiders aged 65 and over in Argentina and Brazil, where they reach 97 and 80 percent of this population, respectively. Chile and Mexico have also seen significant expansions, with benefits reaching 62 and 38 percent of the outsider population aged 65 and over, respectively. These levels of protection contrast with pronounced lack of coverage before expansion.

Within the general trend of expanding social programs for outsiders, this study identifies two distinct models of social policy, which I term restrictive and inclusive. Restrictive policies have limited scope of coverage, provide lower benefit levels, and do not include the participation of social organizations in implementation. Inclusive policies, by contrast, are broad reaching, often achieving universal or near-universal coverage, provide higher benefit levels, and include social organizations in policy implementation.

To account for social-policy expansion, this study provides an analytical framework that highlights the importance of democracy for social policy change. In contrast to prevailing views about the failure of democratic regimes to respond to outsiders, I argue that social policy expansion was triggered by two causal factors generally favored by democratic politics: a) electoral competition for the vote of outsiders, and b) mobilization from below. These causal factors have further shaped the process of policy design, producing different social policy models. In Mexico and Chile, electoral competition for outsiders propelled incumbents to expand social policy, with the resulting compromises leading to the creation of a restrictive policy model. In Argentina and Brazil, mobilization from below put pressure on incumbents to expand social policies and to include social groups in the implementation of the new programs, producing an inclusive policy model.

This study is based on extensive fieldwork and original data collection in each policy area and country case from the 1980s through 2009. It also undertakes in-depth analyses of the secondary literature and archival materials to test the argument in the four Latin American countries from the mid-20th century until systematic institutionalized program expansion began. It explains not only the massive expansion of programs for outsiders beginning in the 1980s, but also the limited, clientelistic, or even non-existent, coverage in the earlier period. Finally, the argument is tested on other middle-income countries--Venezuela, Uruguay, and South Africa--to provide an assessment of its broader applicability for understanding the conditions under which social protection is extended to populations outside the formal labor market.

Many conventional theories in Economics and Political Science stress that the liberalization and globalization of finance have homogenized the behavior of state and market actors. Some even go so far as to assume that states have become irrelevant actors. However, these theories cannot account for empirical observations laid out in my dissertation research: that responses to the financial crisis in Europe have largely been crafted at the national level.

Since the crisis of 2008, there have been different trajectories of finance across Europe. In France, banks have grown bigger, as they have developed their operations in market-based banking as well as in traditional banking, both globally and at home. In Germany, Deutsche Bank maintained, and even developed, its global market activities until 2014-5. On the other side, local banks have reinforced their incumbent position in domestic retail markets. British banks have shrunk quite dramatically. They have largely retreated from the game of global finance, while foreign financial institutions have continued to use the infrastructures provided by the City of London as a base for their global market operations. Now, which actors dominate the national financial system, and how those actors operate the financial intermediation between surpluses and needs of capital, have important distributive and functional consequences for the whole political economy.

I argue that divergent national trajectories of finance result from the differentiated influence of public authorities on banks’ management, through the passing of diverse regulation, through the differentiated enforcement of international regulation, or through direct intervention of public authorities towards banks’ management. For this research, I have led a comparison of 12 financial regulation policies and cases of regulation enforcement in France, German and the since 2008. I have questioned each national version of a financial policy according to whether they tend to hinder/permit/enhance the expansion of large banks, globally and at home. I find that everywhere, states have been pro-active in the shaping of the post-crisis domestic financial landscapes; yet they have promoted very different re-organizations of their domestic financial industries.

The divergent priorities of the state towards finance can be explained by different institutionalized modes of coordination between private and public actors across political economies. In France, symbiotic mechanisms of interaction between domestic bankers and government officials have led to the crafting of mutually benefiting compromises in response to the crisis. French state officials have thus to a large extent abided by banks' preferences. Yet, this outcome is to understand in mirror of the reciprocal character of the relationship: in important cases, banks also complied with state's preferences. In Germany, local governments have systematically opposed policies that may have been detrimental to "their" local public banks. On the other side, the urge to promote one German champion in the global financial markets and the deference of state officials towards the expertise of banks' top managers, have led the federal government to abide by the preferences of German largest commercial bank. In the UK, adversarial mechanisms of interaction within and between domestic bankers and state officials have enabled identified public actors to exploit political leverage to the detriment of British domestic banks.

I have based my analysis on data collected during more than 100 interviews with a variety of prominent market actors and public officials as well as private and publicly available documentation released by administrative and business organizations. The analysis proceeds through 12 mini case studies of policy-making processes and two more in-depth case studies of the Banking Structural Reform and the management of the sovereign debt crisis of 2010-2011.

The Left came to power in the 2000s after a period of neoliberal reforms. During the prior decade, conservative parties across the region had adopted austerity policies that reversed many social protections. These policies not only increased inequality, poverty, and unemployment, but also severely weakened unions. Leftist candidates were subsequently elected throughout the South American continent with a clear mandate to address these reversals. Individuals prioritized policies of income redistribution that provided immediate material relief. Popular-sector organizations also demanded policies that restored and/or enhanced their power and resources. Specifically, they demanded two types of power redistribution: societal empowerment and state empowerment, i.e. policies to increase their demand-making capacity in the interest arena, and those to increase their power vis-à-vis the national executive. Why, despite these common demands, did leftist parties adopt varying redistributive approaches across the region?

This study distinguishes three main redistributive approaches in Latin America. Poverty Alleviation (Brazil and Chile) consisted of redistribution of only income and only to those at the very bottom of the income ladder, without empowering popular-sector organizations. In Left Populism (Argentina and Venezuela) policies redistributed income to a broader segment of the popular sectors, and also redistributed societal power, but not state power. Social Democracy (Uruguay and Bolivia) was the most highly redistributive strategy. Income redistribution was broad, and social organizations benefited from the redistribution of both societal and state power.

This analysis argues that these three redistributive approaches are explained by the degree to which leftist presidents control the Left movement. In the context of post-ISI (import substitution industrialization) economies, all presidents face intense economic pressures to engage in more limited forms of redistribution. Theories that point to variations in exposure to market pressures or the strength of the Right cannot explain differences among the three redistributive outcomes identified here. Rather, the argument points to political challenges to the president from within the Left: Presidents will disregard economic pressures toward limited forms of redistribution when they face threats to their leadership from actors within the Left, three in particular: social organizations (unions and social movements), rival leftist parties, and party factions and/or party base organizations with considerable veto power within the president’s party. If the president does not control them, the government will engage in substantial redistribution to build coalitions with them and consolidate his/her leadership over the Left. The present argument is thus directly opposed to standard arguments that the power of the Left facilitates the adoption of more extensive redistributive policies. Instead, somewhat paradoxically, the analysis argues that the stronger a leftist president is, the more he or she will respond to economic constraints, and the less he or she will pursue the redistributive preferences of the Left. Conversely, the weaker the president, the more far-reaching will be his or her redistributive policies.

German citizenship law was reformed in the year 2000 in an attempt to incorporate millions of long-term foreign residents. Yet rather than increasing, the numbers applying for German citizenship have been falling ever since the reform. This dissertation offers an explanation of this puzzling development. In so doing it suggests a new answer to the question of why some foreign residents take the citizenship of their country of residence, while others do not.

I argue that the decision to apply for citizenship is typically made along with other family members. In many cases, applying for citizenship together with others in the family allows the benefits of acquiring citizenship to be multiplied and the costs to be split. The benefits of citizenship include increased security, the right to political participation, easier travel and full access to the labor market. Foreign residents place greater value on many of these benefits if they are shared with others in the family. Parents are especially likely to apply if they can thereby acquire citizenship for their children. The financial, cognitive and social costs of changing citizenship can also be reduced by spreading them across the family.

Although the German reform of 2000 eased key criteria for becoming a citizen, it decreased the numbers applying together with other family members. The country introduced birthright citizenship for children whose parents had lived in the country for a number of years, but this has the effect of removing a key reason for many parents to apply for citizenship. The reform of 2000 also brought new tests of individual integration, especially language skills. The focus on the individual is having perverse collective effects. Although most foreign residents satisfy the criteria, many live with someone who doesn't, and the prospect of leaving this person out can discourage the entire family from applying.

The evidence for the argument advanced in this dissertation is drawn from over 100 in-depth interviews as well as statistical analysis of census data. The dissertation makes a novel methodological contribution by using information on other household members to study the dynamics of the decision over citizenship. This reveals not only that citizenship status is clustered by household, but also that people living together commonly apply for citizenship at the same time.

Scholars of Latin American politics have made contrasting predictions about the prospects for contemporary group-based interest representation. Some argue that democratization creates an opportunity for societal groups to intensify their participation in politics. The expansion of political rights, alongside free and fair elections, creates space for all major groups to take part in politics, crucially those excluded under authoritarian rule. Other scholars, by contrast, maintain that neoliberal economic reforms fragment and demobilize major groups. Changes in the economic model, they suggest, have severe consequences for labor organizations, which now have a limited political repertoire.

My research challenges both of these claims, showing how the consequences of democracy and neoliberalism, rather than being uniform, have been uneven. I focus on the diverse forms of political participation by an influential societal group: public school teachers. Over the past thirty years, teachers’ unions have become the largest and most dynamic sector of labor in many countries throughout the region, taking leadership positions in national union centrals. Teachers have developed contrasting types of mobilization: (1) Movementism (movimientismo in Spanish), based on contentious actions and protests; (2) Leftism, based on organic ties to left parties and ongoing electoral mobilization; and (3) Instrumentalism, based on flexible alliances with various parties, which negotiate for the electoral support of teachers. These three types of mobilization map, respectively, onto the cases of Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico.

These contrasting mobilizational strategies of teachers can be traced to two differences: each union’s ties with its members—centralized versus fragmented; and relations among its leaders—cohesive versus divided. Centralization positions unions to participate in electoral politics, because with dense ties to rank and file workers the leadership can build a powerful voting bloc. By contrast, with fragmented relations to members, unions are unable to discipline grassroots activists or mobilize voters, and they fall back on strikes and protests. Second, leadership cohesion positions unions to take strategic actions, such as moving away from long-standing allegiance to a single party and developing instrumental alliances with multiple parties. Unions with divided leaderships, by contrast, are more deeply rooted in longstanding partisan alliances. For them, efforts to develop instrumental alliances exacerbate factional rivalries, and tend to fail.

While the analysis focuses primarily on the evolving patterns of organization and leadership over the past 30 years, the study also steps back to consider the origins of these patterns, which were produced jointly by the initial legacy of union founding and the political opportunities that were created by democratic openings. Finally, the politics of teachers’ unions is obviously of enormous importance for education policy and for national strategies to increase human capital and enhance social welfare. The study addresses these concerns by showing that alternative mobilizational strategies have important implications for education policy and policymaking. This study draws on extensive fieldwork and original data collection in Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico. It also utilizes secondary literature and archival documents to analyze how teachers’ unions were founded and how they evolved in the years leading up to democratic openings.