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We address resurgent populism by examining structural processes of state transformation in the UK, the US and France. Scholars stress the 'unifying energy of the state', a set of institutions and policies capable of limiting inequalities and defending legal regimes. One characteristic of modern Western statehood were packages of policies designed to integrate social groups and territories in part by ensuring common standards of provision and social citizenship across the nation state. This echoes James Scott's critical analysis of the modernist project of the state (1998). This 'unifying energy' had different origins including nationalist movements, combatting external influence or powers, war, and preparing citizens for the rigours of industrialization. Overcoming class differences and territorial differences (including cultural, social and economic differences) was a major source of mobilization to feed this 'unifying energy of the state' in France, Italy or Spain for instance. Political and cultural identities are related in significant part to respective nation states. We argue that this 'unifying energy' was an essential component of statehood in Europe and in the US. It is now largely lost. We explain why and the significance of its displacement., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2017.)

This article addresses the recent claim that cross-national policy variations reflect in part differences in institutional origins and state characteristics. It provides a detailed analysis of how states institutionalized public employment exchanges. The authors argue that public employment exchanges will shape the legitimacy of government intervention in the labour market, and thus affect the environment for subsequent labour market policy. Two measures of legitimacy are used. First, the attitude of employers and trades unionists toward exchanges. Second, the role of exchanges in administering unemployment benefits. Cross-national differences in exchanges' legitimacy contribute to an explanation of why different states have different labour market policies.

Focusing on employment exchange systems, the authors explain how early labor market institutions established by British and Swedish governments affected the possibilities for subsequent policy. They demonstrate how the way in which labor exchanges were implemented in Britain and Sweden limited and facilitated, respectively, active labor market policy after 1945. The absence of institutional legitimacy in the legacy of the British labor exchange system contrasts with the legitimacy achieved by the Swedish system. The authors identify the reasons for this comparative pattern and analyze its significance.

Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State by Robert C. Lieberman. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1998. 306 pp. $45.00. The use of 'race' as a political [...]

The authors provide an encompassing eight-point characterization of regimes designed to cover all cases of this complex multicriteria concept, arguing that not all eight characteristics need be present for a regime to exist but that the larger the subset, the more a governing coalition constitutes a regime. The regime concept is then applied to six London boroughs during the early to mid-1990s. They demonstrate the utility and limits of the regime concept in identifying and explaining the politics of these boroughs at this time, suggesting that three of the cases constitute different types of regimes, and the other three constitute failed regimes.

This article addresses contemporary state theory by examining the role of state interests and the constraints upon state autonomy in recent central-metropolitan relations in Britain. The abolition of the Greater London Council and six Metropolitan County Councils in Britain in 1986 is analyzed by reference to liberal, Marxist, and statist propositions about state autonomy and state interests. Three versions of the statist perspective are delineated, and it is argued that an understanding of central state interests is necessary for a complete account of the 1986 abolition.