The Harvard political science professor Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008) made visits to Brazil in 1972 and 1974 to advise the government about ‘decompression’ or regime liberalisation. The literature on Brazil's dictatorship references these visits as having had a major causal impact. This article argues that his influence on Brazilian regime change is greatly exaggerated. It also argues that Huntington, who became a leading theorist of democratisation, had an interest in and commitment to democracy that was more recent and circumstantial than is often thought. This helps to explain the current period of democratic ‘deconsolidation’ associated with the rise of authoritarian national populism in Brazil.

This article examines the development of buyer-supplier relations in the telecom sector. The literature on telecoms in Scandinavia has been dominated by the narrative praising the trusting and collaborative relations between Telia, the Swedish public telephone operator (PTO), and Ericsson, the equipment supplier. The Norwegian PTO, Telenor, diverted from this path and was a pioneer in preferring competitive tenders and arm’s length relations with its suppliers starting in the 1970s. The article argues that Telenor’s history and nationality had a significant impact on its business strategy. In addition, the article examines why some business narratives persist while others remain unknown. One finding is that shareholder-friendly narratives have a handicap because they focus on self-interest and money, and not societal values.

This article explores the process and impact of liberalisation on the legal profession in England and Wales. Liberalisation brings a tendency to consider the profession in market-focused terms, with the professional–client relationship reconfigured in overtly economic fashion as constituting the interaction of supply and demand. The article examines the past and present structure of the profession, arguments for liberalisation and manifestations of liberalisation efforts. Having identified the distinctive dynamics of supply and demand within legal services markets, the article considers the potential implications, both immediate and in broader societal terms, of reconceptualising the legal profession in this manner.

This article analyses how the state in Senegal has managed the hajj since the liberalisation era in the early 2000s. Although the essence of the hajj is religious, it is also deeply political and requires that the state manages complex relations with pilgrims, religious leaders, private travel agencies, politicians and Saudi authorities. This article argues that three inter-related imperatives structure the conduct of the Senegalese state: a security imperative, a legitimation imperative, and a clientelistic imperative. Security concerns lead the state to monitor and control pilgrims travelling to Mecca. Legitimation is seen in the collaborative relations with Sûfi orders and in the framing of the hajj organisation as a ‘public service’. Finally, given the magnitude of financial and symbolic resources attached to the hajj, clientelistic relations are constitutive of state officials’ actions. Overall, despite the post-2000 liberalisation of the hajj, the state has maintained its role as a gatekeeper, regulator and supervisor.

This article studies the political conflict surrounding the implementation of the European Union’s Services Directive in Greece between 2010 and 2018, the period in which the country was subject to external conditionality by external institutions. Focusing on the opening of jurisdictional boundaries for four professions (tourist guides, taxi owners, lawyers and engineers) that differ in terms of power and of organisational structure, we find that power differences, including control of the professions’ institutions of interest aggregation and representation, explain the liberalisation outcomes across the four professions. This article thus puts the spotlight on the role of domestic interest groups in the implementation of EU legislation and directs researchers’ attention to the broader issue of bias in interest intermediation, a classic, but lately understudied, issue in the study of politics.

This article will situate public debates about – and experiments in features of – basic income within European countries in the context of welfare state crisis and change. Treating access to basic income security as a policy problem, I argue basic income policy debate highlights the need for multi-level and multifactorial analysis of public governance capacity as a key factor in driving the relationship of basic income with welfare state transformation. Drawing on the cases within this themed section, I attempt to tease out what comparatively are long-run conditions for basic income within state and society, and what are the political and institutional trade-offs at the current juncture. Exploring contributing determinants of governance corrosion and adaptation of public economic security structures under globalisation contributes to deepen our understanding of contemporary patterns of institutional change.

A political spring is an abrupt, broad, sustained increase in public dissent in a state that has prohibited it, as in Czechoslovakia in 1968 or Tunisia in early 2011. Some springs produce offspring – clusters of events within neighbouring states (civic unrest, increased state repression, co-option of dissent, revolution) and among those states (intensification of international rivalries, foreign interventions). An English Spring in 1558–9 produced such a cluster in Northwestern Europe. This article addresses the underlying causal mechanism connecting springs and their offspring, rather than the related correlational question (viz. under what conditions a spring is followed by offspring). That mechanism is transnational group polarisation, or the progressive separation of preferences across a population into pro- and anti-government groups. Transnational polarisation along a pro-versus-anti-government axis is an endogenous process triggered by exogenous events, such as violence or public demonstrations that raise the status of, or threat to, one of the groups. It presents powerful actors across states with new threats and opportunities and can help explain how the Tunisian Spring of early 2011 produced throughout the Arab Middle East infectious unrest, serial repressions and reforms, heightened international tensions, and foreign interventions.

Following formal economic liberalisation in 1991, business, in particular big business, has gained increasing access to and influence over policy decision-making in India. Industry has been an outspoken critic of national labour laws and has lobbied extensively for greater labour market flexibility. While business has not been successful in influencing “official” labour reform at the national level, it was able to influence labour policy within the National Manufacturing Policy 2011, which curtailed labour protections and implemented “hire and fire” policies. Utilising qualitative data from 40 face-to-face interviews with policy stakeholders in New Delhi, India, this paper aims to explore how business was able to influence labour reform within this policy as well as underscore the wider social welfare implications that may follow. It will be argued that the ability of business to dictate labour reform, while strong, is somewhat variable as competing factors serve to constrain business influence. Furthermore, the extent to which labour laws are hindering manufacturing investment is widely debatable. Nevertheless, curtailment of labour protections, as afforded in this policy, will have a widespread and damaging impact on workers. While the policy promises to empower rural youth, provide gainful employment, and enable growth to become more sustainable and inclusive for its citizens, it is questionable whether these goals can be achieved alongside the curtailment of labour protections.

This paper is an attempt at assessing the economic impact of market-oriented reforms undertaken during General Franco's dictatorship, in particular the 1959 Stabilisation and Liberalisation Plan. Using an index of macroeconomic distortions, the relationship between economic policies and the growth record is examined. Although a gradual reduction in macroeconomic distortions was already in motion during the 1950s, the 1959 Plan opened the way to a new institutional design that favoured a free market allocation of resources and allowed Spain to accelerate growth and catch up with Western Europe. Without the 1950s reforms and, especially, the 1959 Plan, per capita GDP would have been significantly lower in 1975.