Raj Chari

As the first book of the Viral Politics Series (www.viral-politics.com), this book brings together novel cross-interdisciplinary investigation from both natural and social science, representing a true hybrid across disciplines examining the ‘politics’ and ‘science’ of COVID-19. Viruses, Vaccines, and Antivirals: Why Politics Matters considers the dynamics surrounding viruses, proposed vaccines, and antiviral therapies, contextualizing what governments have done during the COVID-19 crisis.

The four basic phases of a pandemic are considered with a strong focus on COVID-19, namely the anticipating and early virus detection, containment strategies, policies to control and mitigate the spread of the virus and policies aimed at opening up society. Viruses, Vaccines, and Antivirals examines policy developments throughout these phases in key nations worldwide and puts forward a blueprint for countries developing public policies to deal with a pandemic.

The first academic book to look at COVID-19 that: incorporates thinking from both a social science and a scientific perspective; contextualises the activities of governments around the world; and offers a blueprint for a strong and focused set of public policies to follow during a pandemic.

1st Chapter available on www.regulatelobbying.com. Governments worldwide are developing sunshine policies that increase transparency in politics, where a key initiative is regulating lobbyists. Building on the pioneering first edition, this book updates its examination of all jurisdictions with regulations, from the Americas, Europe, Middle East, Asia, and Australia. Unlike any book, it offers unique insights into how the regulations compare and contrast against each other, offering a revamped theoretical classification of different regulatory environments and situating each political system therein. This edition innovatively considers different measurements to capture the robustness of lobbying laws in terms of promoting transparency and accountability. And, based on the authors' experience of advising governments globally, it closes with a no-nonsense guide on how to make a lobbying law. This is of value to policymakers seeking to introduce or amend regulations, and lobbyists seeking to influence this process.

1st chapter available on www.lifeafterprivatization.com. We know that European countries privatized in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. But what happened to these firms? This book conceptualizes two types of firms emerging after privatization. The ‘Alphas’ are today’s European and global giants, merging with or acquiring other firms, while the ‘Betas’ were taken-over by Alphas or other sectoral leaders. Examining firms in the airline, automobile and the electricity sectors in the EU’s major states, the book’s analytical thrust is to explain why some firms become Alphas and others Betas. Building on a variety of themes from both Political Science and Business Studies, it considers a comprehensive set of explanations both internal and external to the firm. Based on evidence uncovered, the book concludes by developing a novel theory called LIFESHAPERS. The theory offers a significant step forward for scholars and practitioners seeking to better understand of the ‘politics’ that businesses face in global markets.

The financial and economic crisis of the 2000s forced governments and people from around the globe to ask some hard questions about how democracy has evolved.  Some of these are old questions; others are new. Is democracy really the most desirable form of government? How democratic is policy-making during the financial and economic crisis? Why do vote-seeking parties in modern democracies actually make voters miserable? Can women’s under-representation in politics be explained because of voter bias? Why are some citizens still excluded from voting in their country? And can terrorist organizations that promote violence one day, really become democratic the next? This represents the first book of its kind to ask and answer a broad range of hard questions that need to be addressed in times of both flux and calls for democratic change throughout the world. It does so by bringing together leading social scientists and rising stars from around the globe.  Interdisciplinary in its analysis, it is essential reading for students of comparative and international politics, political philosophy, gender studies and economics.

In an age of corruption, sleaze and scandal associated with financial crisis and economic downturn across the globe, citizens want more transparency and accountability in politics. Available in paperback n 2012 due to popular demand, this book originally published in 2010 examines a principal means by which this can be achieved: the regulation of lobbyists. It provides innovative insights into lobbying regulations across four continents - North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. What are these regulations about? What are the differences across the continents? How effective are the rules? How have they changed the lobbying profession? Using qualitative and quantitative analyses, the book compares and contrasts regulatory laws in the US, Canada, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, the EU, Taiwan and Australia.

EU policies and policy-making have taken on an increasing significance as a consequence of the deepened integration process over the last 20 years. The most important EU policies include competition, single market, economic and monetary, agricultural, social, environmental, immigration and common foreign and security policies. This book asks what these policies are about, what actors have shaped them, and what their consequences are in terms of affecting citizens' lives, as well as constraining domestic policy-makers. These are issues of great interest to those seeking to better understand the objectives, development and impact of collective decisions made at the new level of European governance. Raj Chari and Sylvia Kritzinger argue that the policies are highly influenced by corporations, and aimed to create a competitive and efficient market wherein capital is given priority. In contrast to the policies outlined above, one can identify a set of 'second order' policies which do not form a key part of the EU policy-making agenda and which domestic leaders often effectively ignore.

These include social, environmental, structural, agricultural, immigration and common defence policies. The book focuses on the role of corporate capital in the development of EU policies and on the goals of supranational and domestic political actors. It will be a key text for the teaching of EU politics at both upper undergraduate and post-graduate levels.

This article will examine the regulation of lobbyists as a principal means to increase citizen knowledge of, and participation in, EU politics. Focusing on the “hot-bed” of EU policymaking, the European Commission, we specifically ask: what has the Commission done and how does this ...

Many studies of the policy process in Spain use distinct periods as an organising framework for analysis, and this approach implies that the process itself changes according to the different periods in question. However, we argue that this 'periodisation' approach fails to draw an ...

A fun unpublished paper on Eurovision, coauthored with Enrique Leon and Jonathan Schachter in 2008! This paper considers two main questions which are based on a long-standing general debate in political science recently re-emerging with criticisms laid by Gerry Mackie against the late William Riker. First, do elites make more informed decisions than mass-publics? Second, do different voting systems produce different results and, if so, why? We first discuss how the Eurovision song contest provides fruitful data to answer these questions. We then highlight that a novel method of analysis, Self-Organizing Maps, not hitherto applied in political science can be used in order to better understand clusters that may form during voting. The first main conclusion is that mass publics are more likely to demonstrate subjective patterns of voting compared to elites. Second, although different voting systems produce different winners, we confirmed that the stronger the preferences towards a candidate then the less likely there will be different results.