Recommending Books for Purchase (Bulletin 84 - June 2020): Comparative Politics

This edited collection gathers together Canadian and non-Canadian scholars to reflect on and celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Quebec Secession Reference, delivered by the Canadian Supreme Court in 1998. It opens with two Canadian scholars exchanging thoughts on the legacy of the reference from a domestic perspective as one of the most questioned decisions of the Canadian Supreme Court. To follow, non-Canadian scholars discuss the impact of this reference abroad, reflecting upon its influence in European and non-European contexts (Spain, Scotland, the EU after Brexit, Eastern European Countries, Ethiopia, and Asia). Two final chapters, one by a lawyer and one by a political scientist, explore the democratic theory behind that reference.

This book explores the politics behind "de-liberalization", defined as policy reforms that constrain markets and their underlying mechanisms. By offering a comparative study on the governmental reform strategies and policy choices of Austria, Germany and Switzerland, it demonstrates that de-liberalization processes are a common reform option for governments. Utilizing a novel dataset on liberalization covering policy reform trajectories in 38 industrialized countries between 1973 and 2013, it shows that governments often draw on strategies of de-liberalization in the fields of social, welfare and labor market policy, where they can be used as compensation for the electorate in the context of liberalizing reforms. As such, the book makes an important contribution to the field of political economy by capturing the turning of the tide in scholarly and policy attention, away from liberalization and towards a re-embedding and re-regulation of economic activity.

Given the profound moral-ethical controversies regarding the use of new biotechnologies in medical research and treatment, such as embryonic research and cloning, this book sheds new light on the role of religious organizations and actors in influencing the bio-political debates and decision-making processes. Further, it analyzes the ways in which religious traditions and actors formulate their bio-ethical positions and which rationales they use to validate their positions.  The book offers a range of case studies on fourteen Western democracies, highlighting the bio-ethical and political debates over human stem cell research, therapeutic and reproductive cloning, and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. The contributing authors illustrate the ways in which national political landscapes and actors from diverse and often fragmented moral communities with widely varying moral stances, premises and commitments formulate their bio-ethical positions and seek to influence political decisions.