Open Research Repository ORR
Not a member yet
2835 research outputs found
Sort by
Horizontal and Vertical Integration and Transnational Labour Activism:A Power Resource Approach
No full textPower resource approaches (PRA) remain heavily focused on the national level and have failed to keep apace with contemporary, yet significant, political and economic developments. Whereas the European integration project has put unions on the back foot, it has also resulted in transnational labour activism (TLA), which remains under-theorised by PRA scholars. By drawing on different literatures and two complementary comparative studies, this chapter assesses TLA and ‘scale’ through a PRA lens. We analyse power resources in different sectors by comparing two European Citizens’ Initiatives, one successful and one unsuccessful, and union recognition struggles within Ryanair. Whereas national power resources failed, supranational power resources proved critical in explaining the airline’s decision to recognise unions. We find that TLA is also shaped by structural conditions, i.e. the prevailing mode of European integration. Here, we differentiate between ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ integration and place an emphasis on the interplay of power resources that exist at different scales in explaining successful outcomes
Political alignment and the distribution of investment subsidies:quasi-experimental evidence from Germany
No full textIn fiscally decentralized countries, intergovernmental transfers are essential for reducing regional disparities and ensuring equitable public good provision. However, extensive research has shown that these transfers are often politicized, with higher-level governments disproportionately favoring districts governed by political allies. While this pattern is well-documented in competitive federal systems, less is known about whether party favoritism persists in cooperative federal systems, where intergovernmental interdependence and institutional constraints are designed to limit discretionary allocation. This paper investigates whether partisan alignment between local, state, and federal governments influences the distribution of public investment subsidies in Germany’s cooperative federalism. To test this, we constructed a novel dataset (1995–2018) combining data on investment subsidies to all German districts from federal and state governments with information on partisan alignment across all three governance levels. Using matching techniques and difference-in-differences estimators, we identify the causal effect of political alignment on subsidy allocation. Our findings show that partisan favoritism influences state-level investment subsidies but not federal-level subsidies. At the state level, this effect is particularly pronounced at the end of election cycles, in electorally competitive districts, for right-wing parties, and in West Germany. These findings indicate that party favoritism also influences discretionary transfers like investment subsidies under cooperative federalism but that the political economy of intergovernmental transfers is more intricate than in competitive fiscal federal systems
