Chapter 3 develops a theory of the domestic politics of intra-industry trade. It argues that changes in the nature of trade away from endowments-based trade to two-way trade within industries change the structure of preferences over trade policy and the way that actors mobilize politically in order to influence trade policy. This, in turn, affects trade policy outcomes and the ease with which trade agreements are concluded. First, I argue that the distributional effects of intra-industry trade drive a wedge through industry preferences over trade policy. As intra-industry trade increases, globalized firms support openness, and smaller, domestic-oriented firms within the same industry support protection. Second, these heterogeneous firm preferences change the ability of industries to overcome collective action problems and organize politically to influence trade policy. I argue that industry associations are hamstrung in their ability to lobby while individual firms have a greater incentive to lobby alone for their preferred policies. Third, exporters will overwhelm domestic-oriented firms in their ability to lobby, and as a result, tariffs will be lower in industries with higher intra-industry trade, though this may not be the case with non-tariff barriers to trade.

The book opens with some compelling examples of puzzling episodes in recent trade policy negotiations. I question why Americans were largely unaware of TTIP, while the TPP became a lightning rod for controversy and went down in flames on day one of the Trump presidency. I also discuss the dramatic rise in firm-level lobbying over these and other trade agreements, despite the IPE literature’s longstanding assumption that firms primarily engage in trade politics collectively via industry associations or class-based coalitions. Then I briefly introduce my theoretical story, which makes sense of these and other puzzles. I discuss the state of our understanding of trade politics in developed democracies before presenting the plan of the book to follow.

The challenges for governance in ancient Athens are dwarfed by the challenges for governance in our own time. Humanity seems incapable of cooperation for collective action. We are failing in problem-solving. This failure is evidenced at every level of governance. It is especially obvious in global governance, where an escalating avalanche of ecological and other crises has already begun and hurtles toward us. The failure of democracies is particularly distressing in that it is the democracies that, in the eyes of those who support and believe in them, are supposed to do the most to meet the common needs of humanity. The human species has survived and thrived because we have cooperated. We must do so now if we are to meet the challenges before us and secure the fullness of human flourishing through sustainable development. We have, however, not yet found the common will that is indispensable to taking the collective action that is necessary to achieve our goals for humanity. Like the ancient Athenians in their triremes, we must learn to row together to serve the public good. We must, like them, form participatory knowledge networks for the public good. This requires vastly more public participation in self-rule at every level of human governance. New cooperative networks for sustainable development are examples of the kind and extent of popular participation we need to continue to survive and succeed as a species.

Environmental policies and enforcement pose fundamental corruption issues relating to the tensions between economic self-interest and the public good. By directing our attention to the challenges of collective action, they also highlight the importance of state-level institutional and political characteristics – notably, the political clout of industrial and environmental lobby groups. High levels of corruption and low levels of trust both weaken the stringency and enforcement of environmental policies and affect levels of emissions, although as levels of trust in a state increase, the effects of corruption weaken or vanish. Our environmental findings closely parallel those in other chapters having to do with COVID policies – not surprising, as they raise similar questions of policy and compliance – and support our argument that thinking solely in terms of specific acts of rule- or law-breaking is an incomplete understanding of corruption, its causes, and its consequences.

This chapter clarifies the concept of revolution, to prepare the way for later chapters that present a theory of revolution as the most dramatic form of resistance to hierarchy. Revolution is distinguished from coups, secessions, and more limited rejections of authority. A distinction is also drawn between political and social revolutions. The chapter then goes on to provide a comprehensive account of what ideologies are and of the explanatory power of appeals to ideology in theories of social change, with special emphasis on the role of ideologies in revolutions. Ideologies are defined as coherent but not necessarily consistent sets of beliefs, attitudes, and belief-management processes that provide individuals with shared evaluative map of the social world. Next, the chapter explains the ways in which ideologies can, depending on the circumstances and the nature of the ideology, either contribute to social change or help maintain the status quo. This chapter emphasizes the fact that the motivating power of ideologies is due, in large part, to their including moral norms and commitments. The chapter also explains that it is by virtue of these moral elements that ideologies can either enable or inhibit collective action aimed either at changing the status quo or sustaining it.

This chapter presents an overview of the book’s theory, empirics, and contributions to the study of Japanese politics. The theory is in two parts. First, I make the case that when politicians run for office in electoral districts divisible into groups of voters, from whom electoral support is discernible and to whom central government resources are deliverable, they can pull those groups into clientelistic exchanges, in which the amount of money groups receive is tied to how they vote. Second, I consider the nuts and bolts of how a politician can go about tying a group’s resource allocation to its electoral support. I elucidate one method that politicians in a dominant party will be able to use. The chapter then presents an overview of the empirical strategy used to test the theory, which uses regression analyses of original data on resource allocations and voting behavior in Japanese municipalities, 1980–2014, buttressed by qualitative evidence. Finally, the chapter presents a summary of the headline findings for scholars of Japanese politics. Ultimately, the book helps to account for why a single party, Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), has been able to win almost every election in Japan.

Politicians in all democracies have goods to distribute, and they employ different modes of distribution to deliver them. They can offer voters goods in the hope those goods turn into votes. Alternatively, they can try to make the distribution of a good conditional on how someone votes. The latter mode is clientelism. I point out that the literature on clientelism has been preoccupied with the idea that politicians form clientelistic relationships with individuals. This has led to an intense scholarly focus on how politicians can consummate such vote buying deals to their satisfaction, given that the secret ballot prevents them from observing how people vote. I argue that under a certain configuration of political institutions, it makes sense for politicians to form clientelistic relationships with groups of voters. To do so, a politician’s electoral district must be divisible into groups of voters, at which electoral support is observable and to which resources are targetable. I take four longstanding questions of interest in the clientelism literature, concerning brokers, economic development, democratic integrity, and club goods and explain how the theory of group-based clientelism opens up new lines of inquiry in each.

Chapter 3 examines mythical, historical, and scientific facts. It offers a brief history of East Asian international relations, paying particular attention to the Chinese World Order, the Khmer Empire, and post-colonial Filipino historiography as samples for how to theorize histories from an IR perspective. The chapter discusses war and peace as well as political economy, the subject matters important for East Asian history and IR theory. It also offers a section on impacts and lessons of history, illustrating how history contributes to background knowledge, historiography and belief systems, foreign policy analysis, and IR theory. A better understanding of East Asian history allows us to contextualize contemporary issues without which we may not be able to put together a puzzle. Historical experiences inform our belief system, into which people typically fit new events or factors as explanation. History is evolutionary by nature, whether we frame it that way explicitly or not.

Balancing individual autonomy and collective action is crucial in promoting dignity in participatory policy processes, particularly within urban policymaking. This chapter presents a case study of Lancaster City Council’s efforts to redesign the deteriorating “Mainway” housing estate, home to approximately 500 diverse inhabitants, within a dignified, inclusive framework. The project required devising a participatory process that effectively solicited input from all community members, including both regular meeting attendees and those sceptical of authority or unable to leave their flats due to health concerns. Amidst these complexities and COVID-19 restrictions, the My Mainway initiative was born. This ongoing initiative aims to transform the challenged estate through a £35 million urban regeneration project. Using a dignity-focused legal design framework, we examine how such an intricate process can facilitate dignified participation, ensuring a fair, respectful platform and offering advocacy for the seldom heard in community decisions.

Chapter 1 outlines why we wrote the book, namely, to provide a clear-cut account of the EU’s ‘silent revolution’ leading to a much more vertical new economic governance (NEG) regime after the crisis of 2008 and its effects on European employment relations, public services, welfare states, and democracy; to develop a new analytical paradigm capable of capturing the interplay between the supranational formulation of the EU’s NEG prescriptions, their country-specific deployment, and their effects on labour politics and democracy; to empirically assess the policy orientation of EU interventions in two policy areas (employment relations and public services), three public service sectors (transport, water, and healthcare), and four countries (Germany, Italy, Ireland, Romania), during the pre-NEG (1957–2008), the NEG (2009–2020), and the post-Covid-19 (2020–2022) period; to analyse the responses of unions and social movements to these NEG interventions since 2009, and their feedback effects on the EU’s post-Covid NEG regime; to show that labour politics matters, as unions and social movements are essential in framing the struggles about the policy direction of EU economic governance along a commodification–decommodification axis rather than a national–EU politics axis – a direction that may lead to the EU’s disintegration.