Quiet Politics and Business Power: Corporate Control in Europe and Japan (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics) - Hardcover

Culpepper, Pepper D.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 052111859X ISBN 13: 9780521118590

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2010

Synopsis

Does democracy control business, or does business control democracy? This study of how companies are bought and sold in four countries - France, Germany, Japan, and the Netherlands - explores this fundamental question. It does so by examining variation in the rules of corporate control - specifically, whether hostile takeovers are allowed. Takeovers have high political stakes: they result in corporate reorganizations, layoffs, and the unraveling of compromises between workers and managers. But the public rarely pays attention to issues of corporate control. As a result, political parties and legislatures are largely absent from this domain. Instead, organized managers get to make the rules, quietly drawing on their superior lobbying capacity and the deference of legislators. These tools, not campaign donations, are the true founts of managerial political influence.

About this title

Book Description:

The rules governing hostile takeovers have been fiercely contested since the 1990s, but such struggles rarely took place in parliaments. This book studies these political battles in four countries - France, Germany, Japan, and the Netherlands. Whether managers wanted to maintain the rules preventing hostile takeovers depended on the strength of unions in the workplace. In countries where unions were strong, managers preferred to keep the rules; elsewhere, they abandoned them. Regardless, managerial groups always won these political battles.

About the Author:

Pepper D. Culpepper is Professor of Political Science at the European University Institute. He was previously on the faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is the author of Creating Cooperation and coeditor of Changing France and The German Skills Machine. His work has appeared in International Organization, World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Revue Française de Science Politique, Politische Vierteljahresschrift, West European Politics, the Journal of European Public Policy, the Journal of Public Policy, and the Oxford Review of Economic Policy, among others. Culpepper was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford University and received his Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 052111859X
• ISBN 13: 9780521118590
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 248