Book Review: Comparative Politics: Quiet Politics and Business Power: Corporate Control in Europe and Japan
| Author | Jaemin Shim |
| DOI | 10.1111/1478-9302.12016_58 |
| Published date | 01 May 2013 |
| Date | 01 May 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Book Review |
conceptual skeleton and examines how Blair and
Howard skilfully married their institutional power
resources with personal power resources in order to
realise their potential for leadership. The heart of the
book comprises five empirical chapters. Three of these
examine the institutional resources at a prime minister’s
disposal, including the cabinet,the party and the central
coordinating structures of government, and two focus
on prime ministers’ personal resources, specifically their
skills and their prominent status in the media and
public eye.A concluding chapter summarises the mate-
rial and explores the trajectories of the two prime
ministers’ personal capital.
Bennister knows his subjects well and makes good
use of primary and secondary sources. Systematic com-
parisons of leaders’ political styles are few and far
between, and this book provides some illuminating
insights into how Blair and Howard used similar
resources in different ways, such as their handling of
cabinet. The structured comparative approach in each
chapter works well,although there is some tendency to
repetition in the summaries at the end of the chapters.
Any limitations are chiefly sins of omission. It would be
useful to know more about the concept of ‘predomi-
nance’, for example, and the extent to which it is a
continuum or a category,and also how it can be opera-
tionalised. More might also have been said of Gordon
Brown,both as a challenge to Blair’s predominance and
as his successor; there are some references to the for-
tunes of Howard’s successors, yet very little is said of
Brown’s ‘predominance’ or, indeed, David Cameron’s.
Overall, however, this is a good book that will be of
interest to all students of Britain’s and Australia’s prime
ministerships and to students of executive politics more
generally.The cost may make it prohibitive to purchase,
but it should certainly be read from the shelves of
university libraries.
Nicholas Allen
(Royal Holloway, University of London)
Quiet Politics and Business Power: Corporate
Control in Europe and Japan by Pepper D.
Culpepper. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011. 221pp., £19.99, ISBN 9780521134132
All too often, political science scholarship pays too
much attention to highly salient issues, assuming that
most of the important issues are equally salient for
electorates and accurately reflected by political parties
and interest groups. In this book, Culpepper focuses
mainly on takeover regulations, which often do not
rank high on the political agenda, but have major
political consequences such as mass layoffs or corpo-
rate reorganisation. By examining how four countries
with different corporate control mechanisms –
France, Germany, the Netherlands and Japan – have
experienced takeover rule changes since the 1990s, he
concludes that the political dynamic of low salience
(‘quiet politics’) is different from high salience (‘noisy
politics’).
Unlike other high-salience issues (e.g. wage bargain-
ing rules or pension systems) which can usually be
explained by variations in government partisanship or
interest group coalitions, managerial preferences are key
to understanding stability/change in low-salience
issues. Although the preferences of managers on take-
over rules vary from one country to another based on
the strength of labour organisations, the central point is
that managers achieve what they want. Given the
absence of voters’ attention and the high technicality of
this issue, both legislators and reporters are disincentiv-
ised to invest resources and,instead, simply defer to the
lobbying capacity, media-framing ability and expertise
of managers.
In proving the validity of his ‘quiet politics’ theory
vis-à-vis ‘partisanship theor y’ (e.g.Tiberghien)1and ‘coa-
lition theory’ (e.g. Gourevitch and Shinn),2Culpepper
adopts systematic process analysis3which sets falsifiable
predictions for each theory and tests the explanatory
power of each in light of the quantity and diversity of
observations. Although the overall methodology
revolves around the qualitative comparison of four
countries, he draws observable implications from both
qualitative and quantitative sources. Particularly note-
worthy is Culpepper’s selection of newspaper coverage
across the political spectrum as a proxy for political
saliency.
Although briefly described (p. 10, p. 46) the book
would have benefited further from systematically incor-
porating ‘temporality’ and ‘complexity’ of policy sali-
ency into the theoretical framework. In addition, given
the comparatively early stage of scholarly application of
systematic process analysis, the author would have
helped readers by specifying its major advantages to
other similar methods such as ‘analytical narratives’.
262 COMPARATIVE POLITICS
© 2013 TheAuthors. Political Studies Review © 2013 Political Studies Association
Political Studies Review: 2013, 11(2)
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