Around the world, courts with the power to declare legislative and executive actions unconstitutional are playing a more and more prominent role. Establishing a constitutional court to act as the guardian of the constitution is often seen as a necessary part of making a transition to democracy (Howard 1993; Schwartz 2000; Widner 2001). Thus, in one of the most sweeping waves of democratic transition in history, each of the newly democratic states in Eastern Europe chose to include judicial review in its new constitutional order (Elster, Offe, and Preuss 1998:102). Nor is the influence of courts limited to new democracies. In countries where constitutional review has been a part of the political process for decades, courts appear to be playing a more and more active role (e.g., Shapiro and Stone 1994, 2002; Stone Sweet 2000). The reach of courts extends even beyond the nation-state. Supranational courts like the ECJ that can rule on the validity of national legislation are growing increasingly influential (Alter 2001; Mattli and Slaughter 1998; Stone Sweet and Brunell 1998). It is perhaps not surprising that scholars have begun to speak of a “globalization of judicial power” (Tate and Valinder 1995) and a “judicialization of politics” (Stone Sweet 2000).

Given these trends, understanding how courts interact with legislative majorities and other institutions of governance is of central importance in understanding politics in constitutional democracies today. And yet, comparative political scientists have traditionally devoted surprisingly little attention to studying courts.

Previous chapters have focused primarily on explaining variations across the four countries that are the subject of this study, and have traced the roots of important differences in vocational training institutions back to the political dynamics and coalitions that were forged around the turn of the century and into the 1920s. This chapter takes up the German case again and tracks its further development through National Socialism and into the post-World War II period. This involves a shift in focus, away from the origins of cross-national differences to variations over time within a single country. This shift allows us to address a related but distinct set of questions and theoretical issues concerning institutional stability and change.

As discussed in Chapter 1, the most commonly invoked metaphor for institutional change is the punctuated equilibrium model as it was adapted from the work of evolutionary biologists and interpreted for politics by Krasner in 1988 (Krasner 1988). This model emphasizes long stretches of institutional “stasis” periodically punctuated by episodes of relatively rapid innovation. In most treatments, innovation occurs as a result of some kind of exogenous shock that disrupts the stable reproduction of institutions and provides an opening for substantial institutional reconfiguration. This view of political and institutional change is pervasive, finding expression in a good deal of the literature on “critical junctures” as well as some treatments of path dependence. This kind of model captures one important mode of change in political life.

The German case provides a good point of departure for a study of the politics of skill formation. Germany has long been considered exemplary for its vocational training system, which even despite current strains (discussed in Chapter 5) continues to attract large numbers of German youth and to produce an abundance of high-quality skills (Streeck 1992b; Culpepper and Finegold 1999; Green and Sakamoto 2001: 73). Since the turn of the century, observers from abroad have looked to the German training model as a source of ideas and inspiration (see, for example, Cooley 1912; and, more recently, Reich 1991). This chapter examines the genesis and early evolution of the German system. As we will see, this system was not created “of a piece” but rather, evolved as successive layers were patched on to a rudimentary framework developed at the end of the nineteenth century. The critical legislative innovation around which the whole system was constructed was passed by an authoritarian government, initiated and originally conceived as part of a deeply conservative political strategy aimed mostly against the country's nascent organized labor movement. This chapter begins to track the processes through which this system evolved subsequently into what is now considered a pillar of social partnership between labor and capital in Germany today.

To preview the argument: The crucial starting point in Germany was the survival of an independent artisanal sector, formally (and legally) endowed with rights to regulate training and to certify skills.

The past two decades have witnessed an enormous outpouring of literature on the putative effects of “globalization” on the political economies of the advanced industrial countries. A good deal of this literature was inspired by early, sometimes rather breathless predictions of a trend toward convergence in the institutional arrangements governing these political economies. Such convergence, it was argued by some, would result from the pressures imposed by footloose firms engaged in “regime shopping” which would in turn drive competitive deregulation among the advanced countries (see, for example, Kapstein 1996; Kurzer 1993). These prospects were especially worrisome to students of Europe's “corporatist” political economies, which had long been admired as models of economic efficiency and social equality.

In the meantime, however, a good deal of evidence has accumulated that calls into question arguments about a convergence among the institutional arrangements that characterize different political economies (Berger and Dore 1996; Brown, Green, and Lauder 2001; Ferner and Hyman 1998; Garrett 1998; Iversen, Pontusson, and Soskice 2000; Kitschelt et al. 1999; Streeck and Yamamura 2002; Vogel 2001; Wallerstein and Golden 1997). Although there are certainly changes afoot in all countries, a number of scholars have pointed to systematic and apparently enduring differences in the organization of capitalism across the advanced industrial countries. Different authors characterize these differences each in his or her own way, but the consensus that has emerged is truly striking.

In the case of Germany, we saw that state policy in the early industrial period was crucial to establishing the trajectory that skill formation there would take. Legislation targeted at the artisanal sector contributed to the survival of a relatively stable system of apprenticeship, and at the same time discouraged unions from pursuing skill-based strategies for labor market control. Firms in industries that depended heavily on skills drew on the artisanal sector as a source of skilled labor but they also competed with Handwerk as a corporate actor, especially over skill certification. This produced a dynamic through which industry was pushed and pulled toward training practices that built on, and in some ways paralleled, those developed in the artisanal sector.

In Britain, state policy worked in the opposite direction, contributing to the deregulation of traditional apprenticeship and indirectly encouraging the development of skill-based unions pursuing strategies premised on craft control. The legal framework in place in the nineteenth century discouraged the formation of unions among unskilled laborers while encouraging skilled workers to organize around the provision of friendly society benefits. Responding to this set of incentives and constraints, early trade unions organized their strategies around the attempt to influence wages and employment by manipulating the supply of skilled labor. This set up a completely different set of dynamics in Britain in which apprenticeship was contested not – as in Germany – between an independent artisanal sector and an emerging industrial sector, but rather between craft unions and employers in skill-dependent industries.

This chapter extends the analysis and the line of argumentation developed for Germany and Britain to two further cases, Japan and the United States. Japan provides an important counterpoint to Germany, for there, too, firm-based training rests on institutional arrangements that ameliorate costly competition among firms and mitigate the collective action problems typically associated with private-sector training. Both German and Japanese employers overcame their collective action problems in the area of training, but they did so in radically different ways: in Germany through the construction of a national system that generates a plentiful supply of workers with portable skills, and in Japan, through plant-based training in the context of stronger internal labor markets. Applying the terms introduced in Chapter 1, we note a broad difference between skill formation regimes based on “collectivism” in the German case and “segmentalism” or “autarky” in the Japanese case.

The other case considered in this chapter, the United States, provides a useful counterpoint to that of the British. In both countries, apprenticeship was a source of conflict between employers and craft unions, and therefore, strongly contested across the class divide. As in Britain, so too in the United States only in rare cases (the construction industry is an example) could an accommodation be reached that stabilized coordination across firms and between organized labor and employers in the area of apprentice training. The U.S. case also shares some similarities with Japan, however.

I am well aware that vocational training is not going to strike some readers as the most scintillating of topics, but I hope they persevere long enough for me to make the case that this subject holds many valuable insights for political economy and comparative politics generally. I myself became interested in skill regimes as an offshoot of my interest in what defines and sustains different models of capitalism. Wolfgang Streeck's pioneering work first drew my attention to the importance of training in Germany's successful manufacturing economy in the 1980s. In the meantime, a broad consensus has emerged that skill formation is a crucial component in the institutional constellations that define distinctive “varieties of capitalism” in the developed democracies and very possibly beyond. This literature has made it very clear that different skill formation regimes have important consequences for a variety of contemporary political economic outcomes, but it had nothing to say about where these institutions had come from in the first place. This is what I wanted to find out.

The cross-national component of this book, therefore, explores the genesis of some striking institutional differences across four countries – Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan – asking the question: “Why did these countries pursue such different trajectories with respect to skill formation and plant-based training?” My research led me back to the nineteenth century and pointed specifically to differences in the coalitional alignments among three key groups – employers in skill-intensive industries (especially metalworking), traditional artisans, and early trade unions.

This chapter summarizes the main empirical findings of the analysis, both the cross-national and the longitudinal dimensions, and relates these findings to several major theoretical debates in the literature. The analysis of cross-national differences in the institutions governing in-plant training and the over-time analysis tracking the evolution of the German system over a longer period speak to debates in the political–economic literature on “varieties of capitalism” concerning institutional origins and institutional complementarities. Moreover, the analysis here provides insights into a broader literature in political science concerning issues of institutional reproduction, institutional change, and path dependence in politics.

Cross-National Comparisons: The Origins of Divergent Skill Regimes

The single variable that mattered most crucially to the divergent trajectories of skill formation documented here was the behavior and strategies of leading firms in skill-intensive industries, particularly the machine and metalworking industries. Around the turn of the century, large machine and metalworking firms across all four countries shared similar interests and were pursuing roughly similar strategies with respect to skill formation. Circa 1895 firms like M.A.N., Mather and Platt, Yokosuka, and General Electric were all engaged in efforts to develop their own in-plant capacities for skill formation and combining these with various policies designed to co-opt workers and exclude unions. From then on, however, trajectories diverged as these firms adapted their strategies to the particular constellation of incentives and constraints they faced in their separate countries.

Migration promises to be one of the most pressing topics of debate in the twenty-first century. Emigrants are leaving from an ever increasing number of countries, and their destinations are equally varied, so that the phenomenon is, using a much abused word, global. The rapid decrease in transport costs, the availability of cheap information, the political and economic upheavals in eastern Europe, and the outbreak of local conflicts have all meant that the number of potential emigrants has multiplied. At the same time, many former countries of emigration have reached an overall standard of living that makes them potential destination areas.

Thus, one of the most difficult challenges of the twenty-first century will be how to manage immigration and emigration. Destination countries would like to control the inflow of foreigners, but their policies risk being ineffective because the flows are changing and becoming more complex as labor immigration is replaced or largely integrated by family reunification (about half of the foreigners in Europe entered as family members) and refugees. In addition, development policies designed to help countries of origin to raise their standard of living will take time to have any effect so that individuals' propensity to emigrate will not decrease in the near term. The political changes that are necessary in many countries of origin cannot be completed easily; consequently, the demand and supply of migrants will not be balanced in the near future.

The southern European countries are a very interesting case to study.

This chapter focuses attention on how receiving countries can handle the problem of immigration by passing suitable legislation. Immigration is a complex phenomenon because it affects a number of core issues, such as national identity, sovereignty, and so on. It also has demographic, economic, and social effects. The receiving country will therefore want to control the flow of immigrants according to its political, social, and economic priorities. It is perfectly right that a country should do this, as recognized in the 1977 Helsinki agreement, which states that the “right to emigrate” is not matched by a symmetric “right to immigrate.” Immigration – that is, accepting an immigrant – is left to the “mercy of the nation state” (Garson 1997), and the policies adopted by each state should be considered in this light. The multiplicity of the consequences of immigration forces “immigration policy, in its strictest sense” – that is, the laws that regulate entry into and residence in a country and an immigrant's assimilation or eventual deportation – to be supplemented by norms that define who is considered to be an alien.

The widespread dissatisfaction with immigration policies is due in part to the numerous aspects that are involved. They range from the difficulty of anticipating changes in flows to the need to solve the conflicts that can arise. This may mean adopting measures that go against the basic principles of a modern democracy or that are extremely expensive.

This chapter considers the choice to migrate. We chose an approach of individual (or family) choice, ignoring the structural explanations, which suggest that individuals move only because of deep social change. However, it is acknowledged that the historical-sociological context in which the choice to migrate is made is extremely relevant, and so such factors are incorporated into a model of individual choice.

The aim of this chapter is to carry out empirical tests on the choice made by immigrants from Spain, Greece, Italy, and Portugal to northern European countries in the postwar period. We compare the explicative power of three approaches – economic, gravitational, and sociological – to analyze the choice to emigrate.

The economic approach draws on the theory of human capital and its development. Individuals decide to invest in migration if it implies a better return on their human capital, net of economic and psychological costs.

In contrast, the gravitational pull approach emphasizes territorial factors, in that it is derived from regional economics. Movement from one area to another is interpreted as in the physical sciences – that is, forces attract each other but are hindered by the inertia of distance.

The sociological approach to the individual choice to emigrate emphasizes the relevance of certain factors, such as social organization, especially the networks of knowledge and family links that can be found in the migratory chain.