This paper outlines an approach for understanding the role of multinational corporations (MNCs) in global governance. We develop a typology of regime types with two dimensions, the goal of the regime, which can be market enabling or regulatory, and the location of authority, which can be national, regional, or international, with public and private elements. MNCs tend to support the creation of market enabling regimes at the international level, and prefer to keep social or environmental regulation under national or private authority. However, these are only generalizations and MNCs develop preferences based on their relative influence in various arenas, the costs of political participation, and competitive considerations. We argue that institutions of global governance represent the outcome of a series of negotiations among corporations, states, and non-state actors. The preferences and power of MNCs vary across issues and sectors, and from one negotiating forum to another, accounting for the uneven and fragmented nature of the resulting system. Our approach differs from the traditional FDI bargaining framework in that it recognizes the multi-party nature of negotiations and multiple sources of power. Moreover, the complexity and dynamic nature of the process results in a somewhat indeterminate process.

Recent years have seen a recognition of the importance of government action to business and a rapidly developing path of research on business and politics, but this research has focused overwhelmingly on the legislative and executive branches and too often ignored the judiciary.1 A failure to consider a role for the courts is a substantial lacuna in the research. The judicial branch plays a substantial role in politics and governance. In most cases, the passage of a statute or even the promulgation of a regulation has legal effect only through the courts. A business's success (or failure) in lobbying the legislative or executive branches for a particular policy program may be entirely counteracted in the courts. At the extreme, such an action might be declared unconstitutional, making it legally null and ineffective, and perhaps eliminating the possibility of any future attempt to revive the action.

In recent years a range of public policy (Howlett 2000) and international relations (Cutler et al., 1999; Hurd, 1999; Haufler, 2001) scholars have devoted attention to the emergence of voluntary (Kernaghan 1999; Prakash 1999), market-based, and “private” regulatory regimes that have emerged to address matters of concern to global civil society that previously were largely addressed through state-centered public policy instruments and processes.

The key objective of this paper is to highlight the interconnectedness between China's political and economic system and its weak enforcement of accounting and auditing standards. The institutional analysis shows that the prevailing political and economic priorities constituting China's “socialist market economy” create a framework, that basically relies on state-led enforcement with weak supplementary private safeguard mechanisms. The resulting policy-mix is characterized by a mismatch of incentives and available devices to effectively enhance enforcement. While the state bureaucracy has little incentive to effectively fight financial misreporting because of both blurred policy–economy boundaries and the coexistence of multiple and even non-economic goals, shareholders and creditors do not have sufficient and effective private safeguard mechanisms at hand. Findings lead to the conclusion that China's recent harmonization move of accounting and auditing standards urgently needs to be backed up by stronger efforts to create effective enforcement mechanisms. Sound reforms would have to center on a rigorous upgrading and restructuring of the responsible bodies supervising auditing quality and financial disclosure. Parallel to these measures, the increasing integration into the global economy may provide incentives and competitive pressure to comply with globally accepted standards.

This paper considers whether highly concentrated industries are better represented in the political process, as Olson's Logic of Collective Action suggests, and, if they are, whether this is so for the reasons that the Logic claims. It begins with a review and critique of the quantitative literature that has largely tried and failed to substantiate Olson's view. The bulk of the paper consists of five longitudinal case studies of firms that dominate or have dominated industries: IBM, Intel, Microsoft, America Online, and Cisco. The cases suggest that there is merit to the Olsonian view, but that alone it does not constitute an adequate political theory of the concentrated industry or the dominant firm. Additional variables drawn from organizational and institutional theory need to be incorporated into such a theory, including variables that bear on the allocation of attention, threat perception, and information flow within dominant firms.

State Supreme Courts have grown in importance during the last thirty years in the formation of public policy. Their judgements determine many aspects of constitutional law, tort reform, judicial selection, and campaign finance reform, among others. A vast body of literature has been developed that analyzes State Supreme Court decision making, which emphasizes the conditioning effects of the legal and institutional environment. This article expands on this previous work by incorporating the interaction of the judiciary with other government institutions, and applies the Positive Political Theory approach to law and legal institutions to the State Supreme Court. In addition, the neo-institutionalist literature of the selection process is incorporated to defend a systematic approach towards decision making. Towards that end, this article explores how judicial decisions are conditioned by institutional rules, resulting in a formal modeling of how the State Supreme Courts interact with political actors to form constitutional interpretation. This model includes the judicial selection process'retention or competitive reelection—and is extended to constitutional amendment rules, explaining how these two interact rather than acting independently. Finally, the hypothesis is tested that when State Supreme Court judges face retention elections and political preferences are homogeneous, the probability increases of observing constitutional amendment prosposals.

The increasing trend towards the internationalization of the world economy coupled with the liberalizing agenda of international institutions and Western governments has profound implications for the delivery of health and other welfare services. As governments pursue policies which extend the scope for the involvement of private companies in the delivery of welfare services, processes of internationalization are likely to become increasingly important to such services as multinational providers emerge. This article begins the process of developing a systematic understanding of the relationships between the structure of welfare states, the social and economic policies of governments and international institutions, and the strategies and interests of private companies. It is argued that it is the particular mix of direct state provision, tax/subsidy, and regulation in the welfare state formation that provides the opportunities for, or barriers to, the expansion of internationalizing private providers of healthcare. This argument is illustrated through a case study of the current process of reform in the British healthcare system, where a relative shift away from direct state provision towards subsidizing and regulating private providers is facilitating a process of internationalization.

This paper addresses the intersection of coalition formation, judicial strategies, and regulatory politics. Coalitions are a low-cost means for assembling minority interests into more powerful blocs. However, in most cases in regulatory politics, judicial strategies are high cost efforts. I argue that coalitions among interests form one basis for judicial participation, but that participation manifests in an array of coalition “microstructures.” For any one event, the microstructure of the interest group coalition varies, but across events the coalitions take on general forms. The paper offers evidence for a variety of coalition microstructures in interest group participation as amici curiae (“friends of the court”) in cases before the United States Supreme Court. The evidence is drawn from the case of the Group of Ten, a stable, long-term coalition of environmental interest groups that operated from 1981 to 1991.

This paper examines the development of EU regulations in the car distribution sector. In the span of approximately fifteen years, the sector has shifted from being regarded by its critics as being one of the most protected havens of European industry to one faced with open competition. The paper claims that the inability of the car industry to resist liberalization in this sector is related to several factors. First, there was declining support from member states for their national producers, in part explained by global shifts in ownership and production which rendered concepts of “national producer” problematic. Second, technological changes combined with the impact of globalization on in the industry undermined the case for a link between sales and service of cars. Third, DG competition, led by Mario Monti, wished to push through the ability of consumers to make cross-border purchases of cars. Fourth, a more general logic embedded in the Single European Market programme (SEM) had led to several decisions to prosecute EU car producers for infringing SEM rules and thereby undermining the ability of EU member states to protect their “national producers.” This has implications more broadly: will increasing globalization of industrial ownership further undermine the state-firm nexus in the EU, thus reducing the propensity of national industries to resist liberalization? In this context, will member states be prepared to give the EU Commission a freer hand in forcing through liberalization in the remaining sectors that remain problematic?

Although the pluralist theory of politics predicts that the focus of organizational activity should shift to the judicial arena whenever the expectations of government as regulator and the demands of regulated interests fail to converge, there has been little systematic research focusing on the question of business litigation as a specific form of interest mobilization. This article develops an integrated organizational choice model of interest mobilization to explain corporate litigation against the United States government. I argue that a company's decision to proceed with litigation is predicated upon the company's (1) resource capacity, (2) constraints of the regulatory environment, and (3) perception of procedural unfairness of the government in the administrative process. The argument is tested with data from a survey of top U.S. business executives whose companies unsuccessfully petitioned the government for administered protection between 1990 and 1995. The argument receives strong empirical support, and suggests that U.S. corporations facing import competition consider litigation an important component of their overall political strategy for obtaining nonmarket benefits.

The problems of rent seeking and state captured by business associations have been prominent among the concerns of economic development theory. This paper argues that firms and the state can make possible the building of new institutions that foster improvements in economic performance through arrangements that emphasize goal setting, problem solving, and continual evaluation of progress toward defined goals. The paper reviews key ideas on the learning-centered approach and builds on them to analyze the kinds of government–business relations that contribute to economic development. It uses case study material based on Chile's agro-industry business association FEPACH. It illustrates how innovative state policy coupled with private firms' efforts led to the discovery of group-based coordination that fostered rapid diffusion of new technology and production organization among Chilean enterprises. This work discusses the institutional reshaping of the business association and business–state relations to encourage learning and advance a process of development.

This study of Japanese consumer electronic networks in North America challenges conventional wisdom on the pervasiveness of keiretsu ties in Japanese production networks abroad. The consumer electronics industry poses hard questions to current views on the relationship between keiretsu and FDI not only because of the more modest internationalization of subcontractors, but more interestingly, because Japanese electronic production networks overseas remained remarkably closed to outside suppliers even in the absence of keiretsu commitments that could constrain purchasing decisions. This article offers a comparison of domestic subcontracting practices in the Japanese automobile and consumer electronic industries, a discussion of the internationalization of electronic part makers, and an analysis of the sourcing strategies of Japanese firms in North America. The article highlights the impact of the non-market environment in Japanese FDI strategies since Japanese companies embarked on foreign production in North America as a direct response to export caps imposed by the American government and/or tighter regional integration rules adopted in NAFTA. Revealingly, Japanese automobile and electronic firms diverged in their reliance on subcontracting firms to meet the more stringent demands for regional production.

This paper discusses the problems in the effective implementation of tort reform policy, focusing on several different areas that seek to review both the fundamental problems associated with punitive damages as well as the legal arguments in favor of tort reform. The limitations against the creation of a truly efficient system lie in the fact that strategic actors have the ability to anticipate the effects of reforms, and act to create feedback loops that diffuse the impact of the reform attempt. To implement effective tort reform policy one must understand how these strategic actors behave within the civil justice system, as well as how feedback loops limit the overall effectiveness of the tort reform policy. The findings suggest that the system of “decoupling” liability is the most efficient of all the current reform attempts or proposals, while the system can also be improved by adopting policies that isolate the incentive structures of plaintiff's attorneys.