The shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007 was one of the worst mass murders in the U.S., but it did not lead to any new federal gun control policy. In contrast, following a similar event in Montreal in 1989, Canada created new comprehensive gun policy.
Such different outcomes are the focus of this survey, which sets out to explore the gun policymaking process in the U.S. and Canada in the aftermath of major events. It explores the many factors that lead to the drastically different reactions of the federal governments in each state if the aftermath of a mass shooting or assassination. To do so, it examines such elements as institutional arrangements, interest groups pressures (NRA, e.g.), and the party in power, studying the impact of such key events as the assassinations of J.F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Georgina Leimonis and shootings that occurred at Columbine, Stockton, and Vernon.
A unique comparative study, Gun Policy in the United States and Canada will be an essential resource to anyone researching gun policy issues and comparative policymaking.

This book applies established analytical concepts such as influence, authority, administrative styles, autonomy, budgeting and multilevel administration to the study of international bureaucracies and their political environment. It reflects on the commonalities and differences between national and international administrations and carefully constructs the impact of international administrative tools on policy making. The book shows how the study of international bureaucracies can fertilize interdisciplinary discourse, in particular between International Relations, Comparative Government and Public Administration. The book makes a forceful argument for Public Administration to take on the challenge of internationalization.

COVID-19 is the biggest public health and economic disaster of our time. It has posed the same threat across the globe, yet countries have responded very differently and some have clearly fared much better than others. Peter Baldwin uncovers the reasons why in this definitive account of the global politics of pandemic. He shows that how nations responded depended above all on the political tools available - how firmly could the authorities order citizens' lives and how willingly would they be obeyed? In Asia, nations quarantined the infected and their contacts. In the Americas and Europe they shut down their economies, hoping to squelch the virus's spread. Others, above all Sweden, responded with a light touch, putting their faith in social consensus over coercion. Whether citizens would follow their leaders' requests and how soon they would tire of their demands were crucial to hopes of taming the pandemic.

Tourism is a vital tool for political and economic change. Calls for boycotts by tourists of countries reflect the huge impact that tourist activity and the tourism industry has on political change.

This volume chronicles the policy challenges and adaptations faced and made by the South Korean government during the post-industrialization and democratization period. Following the model set by the first volume in the series, which covered the economic and social development during the developmental period from the 1960s to the 1980s, this volume examines how and to what extent the South Korean government has adapted to a variety of political, economic and social transformations since the 1990s. The book is divided in two parts. Part I reviews the changing policy environments and government policy paradigms in the wake of industrialization and democratization, focusing on the reorganization and coordination of government ministries and agencies. Part II explores key public policy areas, such as economics, social welfare, and foreign relations, where the South Korean government has successfully adapted to new policy challenges and environments. Drawing policy implications for the future actions of the South Korean government as well as for those countries wishing to replicate South Korea's success and avoid its errors, this book of interest to both scholars and policy-makers concerned with development in the Asia-Pacific.

Policy issues have grown ever more complex and politically more contestable. So governments in advanced democracies often do not understand the problems they have to deal with and do not know how to solve them. Thus, rational problem-solving models are highly unconvincing. Conversely, the Multiple-Streams Framework starts out from these conditions, which has led to increasing interest in it. Nevertheless, there has not yet been a systematic attempt to assess the potential of such scholarship. This volume is the first attempt to fill that gap by bringing together a group of international scholars to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the Framework from different angles. Chapters explore systematically and empirically the Framework's potential in different national contexts and in policy areas from climate change and foreign policy to healthcare and the welfare state.

Language policies impact language choice, language prestige, and language spread. Rising regional integration, both formal and informal, adds to the sensitivity and complexity of language politics, whether in North America, South America or Europe. This book shows how language politics vary across the Americas and contrast with Europe.

This book examines the practice of international election observation in a Caribbean context. It presents a survey of the Commonwealth Caribbean perspective and a concise case study of Guyana between 1964 and 2015. This research traces the roots of election observation and how this practice became integrated into the landscape of Caribbean electoral politics. More specifically, the study examines the process by which election observers have become key actors in elections in the Commonwealth Caribbean. One of the issues the book contemplates is why Caribbean countries accept the imposition of observation within the context of sovereignty. The case of Guyana and other Anglophone Caribbean states shows the costs of not having observers have been multidimensional and have eclipsed concerns of respecting state sovereignty.

Increased investment in the mining sector in Africa is often presented as a key strategy to leverage growth and development on the continent. It has been described as a "motor for growth," which will contribute to poverty reduction. Massive investment has taken place, but the results in crucial areas such as sustainable economic and social development have been extremely disappointing. These outcomes are most frequently attributed to dysfunctional internal governance processes, mismanagement and corruption. Much attention has been given in recent years to the issue of "the poor resource governance" in mineral rich countries. In this volume, academics, policy-makers and practitioners from Africa and beyond aim to achieve a better understanding of these issues by proposing a renewal of approaches. Discussing the cases of Ghana, Mali and the Democratic Republic of the Congo they explore new ways of thinking about issues concerning governance and revenue flows.

Using the conceptual framework of populism as discourse, Ritchie Savage provides a comparative analysis of U.S. and Latin American speeches and articles covering Betancourt's Accion Democratica, Chavez, McCarthyism, and the Tea Party. In so doing, he reveals an essential structure to populist discourse: reference to the "opposition" as a representation of the persistence of social conflict, posed against a collective memory of the origins of democracy and struggle for equality, is present in all cases. This discursive formation of populism is carried out in comparisons of political discourse in the United States and Venezuela, two countries that are typically classified as empirically specific in their economic and political development and ideological orientation. Populist Discourse in Venezuela and the United States explores how instances of populism, once exceptional phenomena within modern forms of political rule, are becoming increasingly integrated with the structure of democratic politics.

This book is an examination of minority government performance in conjunction with the territorial distribution of state power and the territorial interests of political parties. It examines political institutions, and the reconcilability of party goals and the contingent bargaining circumstances, in multilevel and territorial perspectives.

This book provides an overview of governance and development in the Mesoamerican Region (MAR), the design and scope of the Plan Puebla Panama (PPP), its relationship to pre-existing regional organisms and its transformation into Proyecto Mesoamerica. The PPP was introduced as a holistic project that would reverse the cycles of poverty in Mesoamerica. However, the plan incited huge opposition from many groups within Mesoamerica, and throughout its duration few of its objectives were met. The author analyses the plan and describes the regional setting and precursors, as well as the US policy towards the Mesoamerican countries. Using this approach with an analysis of governance in Mesoamerica, this monograph shows a more complete picture of why this ambitious development project did not reach its goals and draws applicable insights to other regions where governance is complex.

For decades Foucault was mostly known for his diagnosis of modernity as a form of entrapment, both in our modes of thought and our behaviors. This book argues that Foucault's reappraisal of modernity occurs with the 1978 and 1979 lectures, in which he sketches modern power as governmentality and neoliberalism. From this perspective, Foucault's once surprising studies on the Greeks' constitution of the 'self' can be seen as a continuation of his diagnosis of late modernity, and as an attempt to retrieve a form of autonomy for our modern selves. One finds in the late Foucault a postmodern conception of reason and not a destruction of reason; but this is possible only if postmodernity is seen as a critical exercise of reason in the analysis of norms.

Development economists and practitioners agree that close collaboration between business and government improves industrial policy, yet little research exists on how best to organize that. This book examines three necessary functions--information exchange, authoritative allocation, and reducing rent seeking--across experiences in Latin America.

This edited volume revolves around two sets of questions. First, what do the 2019 European elections suggest about the extent to which the mainstream parties of the left are attempting to deal with their decline through an increased, common, emphasis on their project for a more integrated, 'social Europe' as opposed to an emphasis on the more 'traditional', domestically-focussed, issues? Given the heightened profile of Europe in domestic politics; given the polarisation around Europe; given the way in which (especially in the countries of the Eurozone) media discussion of the domestic implications of EU decision-making can influence the climate of opinion regardless of the actions of domestic party actors themselves, we would expect the social democrats among them to seek to reassert control over the conditions of opinion formation through a renewed emphasis on integration (as well as its benefits and its potential as a source of identities to rival national, exclusionary identities) in opposition to their populist and Eurosceptical adversaries. To what extent do the campaigns waged by these parties bear out this expectation? Second, how well are the parties coping with the internal and external, institutional and political obstacles in the way of pursuit of this agenda?

Ideology has been pronounced dead on several occasions in the past. The most recent verdict to this effect has been made in the context of the globalization debate. It proclaims the decline of 'ideological' politics in the fragmented societies of today and especially the irrelevance of established ideological systems and their failure to provide answers to the dilemmas of an increasingly global world.
This popular view is challenged here. On the basis of conceptual and historical analysis applied to a range of major ideological traditions this book argues that no such ideological rupture has in fact occurred. While conceptual shifts are identifiable, changes have occurred within existing ideological configurations and according to their pre-existing logical requirements. Globalization has not destabilized conventional ideologies to an extent that would render them incoherent. On the contrary, they remain meaningful as distinct sets of political beliefs and as such shape the globalization debate.

By comparing the importance of representative democracy to the EU as enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty with the political systems in the EU's newest member states, this study explores whether representative democracy can really exist in an enlarged EU and explores the constraints and opportunities for political parties operating the in the EU.

Intellectual traditions are commonly regarded as cultural variations, historical legacies, or path dependencies. By analyzing road junctions between different traditions of Public Administration this book contests the dominant perspective of path-dependent national silos, and highlights the ways in which they are hybrid and open to exogenous ideas. Analyzing the hybridity of administrative traditions from an historical perspective, this book provides a new approach to the history of Public Administration as a scientific discipline. Original and interdisciplinary chapters address the question of how scholars from the U.S., Germany and France mutually influenced each other, from the closing years of the 19th Century, up until the neo-liberal turn of the 1970s. Offering a thorough analysis of the transatlantic history of Public Administration, the conclusion argues that it is vital to learn from the past, in order to make Public Administration more realistic in theory, as well as more successful in practice. Advanced undergraduate and postgraduate political science scholars will find this to be a valuable tool in understanding the foundations of transatlantic Public Administration. This book will also greatly benefit researchers on comparative and transnational history with a keen interest in Public Administration.

This book investigates drivers and trends in nuclear proliferation in the Global South. Based on an in-depth analysis of South Africa's nuclear history, it examines general causes of proliferation, such as technical capabilities and constraints; a country's motivation to build a nuclear bomb; and particular domestic and international situations. It also highlights Britain's role in the development of technological capability in South Africa and explains how nuclear weapons influence international relations. Finally, the study offers effective solutions to the problem of nuclear proliferation in developing countries.

This analysis seeks to analyse the main trends in Gulf security in light of the changes in the regional and international arena, while examining the relationship between external and internal threats, which are intertwined in the Gulf security agenda.

In 2015, Matteo Renzi's government continued to elicit contrasting reactions while dealing with both internal and external constraints. Some say it passed crucial reforms for economic development in fields such as the labor market, the banking system, education, and public administration, in addition to passing a new electoral law. However, others criticize the substance and, even more, the way reforms were passed by constructing variable parliamentary majorities according to the vote at hand, thus avoiding the need to build consensual decision-making relationships with interest groups and further centralizing power in the office of the prime minister. Be that as it may, the government was able to impose its own agenda in domestic affairs. Although the success of the 2015 Universal Exposition in Milan helped to bolster the image of the country, Italy continued to play a marginal role in key international areas, such as migration, European austerity policies, and the fight against terrorism.

By most accounts, Italian-style liberalism failed. Explanations of its failure vary from economic backwardness or a political culture shaped by autocracy to claims that liberals ruined their chances by pursuing nothing but narrow middle class interests. This study examines the liberal record to weigh the accuracy of these approaches. Ashley focuses on three controversial issues: public works, social reform, and public order. The railroads would test liberal commitment to laissez-faire, labor laws their pledge to protect all citizens, and dissent their allegiance to individual rights. In each case, liberals compromised their principles. What they decided defined the Italian variant of liberalism by transforming it from a doctrine to concrete practices and political behaviors.

Particularly after 1890, liberals increasingly made empiricism the primary justification for policy and dismissed abstract principles as beneath notice. This shift helps explain why liberalism lost authority and credibility as a set of moral imperatives and as a coherent world view in Italy, as well as why it failed to offer most Italians a compelling alternative to either Socialsim or Fascism. Examining what liberals said and did, however, does not entirely support the despairing judgment of so many historians. Italian liberals managed to build a liberal state and to make it function against intransigent obstacles.

This book examines democratizing media reforms in Latin America. The author explains why some countries have recently passed such reforms in the broadcasting sector, while others have not. By offering a civil society perspective, the author moves beyond conventional accounts that perceive media reforms primarily as a form of government repression to punish oppositional media. Instead, he highlights the pioneering role of civil society coalitions, which have managed to revitalize the debate on communication rights and translated them into specific regulatory outcomes such as the promotion of community radio stations. The book provides an in-depth, comparative analysis of media reform debates in Argentina and Brazil (analyzing Chile and Uruguay as complementary cases), supported by original qualitative research. As such, it advances our understanding of how shifting power relations and social forces are affecting policymaking in Latin America and beyond.

Spanish politics has been transformed. Using new techniques, this book looks at 30 years of Spanish political history to understand party competition, the impact of the EU, media-government relations, aspirations for independence in Catalonia and the Basque region, and the declining role of religion.