This chapter introduces the forty-six policy episodes that we study in detail. We present their timing, their politicization, and their substantive focus. The association between politicization and pressure, both problem and political pressures, proves to be rather variable across member states and looser than expected. We account for this finding by taking into account the endogenous political dynamics during the crisis. Policy responses at the national level were not only required by the failure of the CEAS and by the inability of the leaders to adopt joint solutions at the EU level, they were also the result of a series of endogenous factors at the national level, which operated independently of problem pressure and, in part at least, created the political pressure in the first place. The strategies of political entrepreneurs – Orbán, Salvini, Seehofer, and Erdogan – most clearly fit this bill, but anticipation of crisis situations to come, legislative cycles, conspicuous events like terrorist attacks, and sequels of policy decisions made earlier in the crisis all contributed to these endogenous dynamics.

Chapter 6 investigates the manifestations of the politicization and securitization of immigration over time in Spain, the UK, and the US, each of which experienced acts of terrorism between 2001 and 2005. The chapter’s objectives are to illuminate the trajectory of inter-political party competition regarding immigration and the propensity of the major parties to securitize and politicize immigration. It plots the interaction of the key variables of our immigration threat politics paradigm as these are illuminated in each country’s political context. Among these are the predominant threat frames, attitudinal influences, popular policy preferences, and patterns of inter-party politics regarding immigration. The evidence reveals that the shift from a predominant economic and/or cultural threat frame to a public safety one precipitates depolitization and a popular and an inter- party consensus regarding immigration in the near term. However, once restrictive policies are embedded and the salience of immigration recedes, familiar patterns of inter-party competition resume.

The Conclusions summarize the book’s findings and revisits the question of whether contemporary liberal states can manage immigration and human mobility in a new security environment. Based on the evidence, we conclude that liberal states in the post-Cold War era are empowered to implement restrictive and illiberal policies by enlisting the cooperation of non-central state gatekeepers and the support of their publics. The chapter then considers the implications of the contemporary migration policy playing field for the civil liberties of citizens and migrants. It also surveys the effects of the 2019-22 Covid-19 pandemic on the course of human mobility worldwide and assesses whether they resonate with the assumptions of the book’s immigration threat politics paradigm. Several emergent inter-generational and values patterns around human mobility and immigration are then identified. We conclude with muted optimism about the liberal compromise elicited by the paradigm shift to embedded securitism. Despite its affront to the core values and principles upon which liberal democracies were founded, the expansion of the migration regulatory field reflects the consent of the governed.

Chapter 2 situates the migration trilemma within a dynamic, securitarian framework. Informed by evidence gathered from cross-national public opinion surveys, media content analyses, an experiment, and original surveys of Members of the European Parliament, it evaluates the ways in which frames have influenced the course of the politics of immigration and the content of immigration policy in post-WWII Europe and the US. It underscores the considerable influence media and political elite frames have on popular attitudes regarding immigration and, indirectly, immigration and human mobility policies. The chapter’s main insight is that the way immigration is primarily framed largely determines whether the subject is salient, and when so, how it influences human mobility considerations. Its central argument is that as the public safety and national security dimensions of immigration have become more salient, liberal states have adopted more expansive and restrictive policies.

Part II establishes the alternative law and political economy framework by unpacking the dynamics between politics and law in the process of China’s market reforms. It starts with describing the relationship between law and politics in constructing one of the primary mechanisms of macro control in China – China’s socio-economic development blueprint, the “Five-Year Plan.”

It then moves to a chapter-by-chapter analysis of the evolving roles of law during China’s market reforms, outlining a three-stage shift in the allocation of market governance authorities within the Party-state system through legal evidence.

Throughout this part of the book, the author examines the legal configurations of political-power dynamics through a systematic investigation of the vast body of market-related primary and secondary sources of law and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) documents that have been promulgated in China since the early reforms until the present day. This Part reflects how two functions of law – economic and political – have developed side by side, each supporting the other.

Scholars have long regarded certain attributes of corporate governance, particularly legal institutions that protect investors, as engines for financial development, capital market expansion, and growth. Yet, the development of China’s market challenges many of the underlying assumptions in those theories and leaves its observers puzzled. Consequently, many have dismissed the role of law in China’s economic development. But they have neglected to consider the political functions of law and how they have bolstered the development of the Chinese market. Part I delineates the conceptual and analytical frameworks underpinning the book. Chapter 1 unpacks the traditional framework that shapes how scholars and policymakers think of corporate governance and its role in financial development and market growth. Chapter 2 offers law and political economy as an alternative analytical framework through which to address the puzzle and the role of law within it.

Chapter 4 is an examination of workers’ blame attribution, looking at when workers direct their grievances to the central government vis-`a-vis other actors. It demonstrates that migrant workers’ social grievances about limited upward mobility, income inequality, and unfairness grow as they gain experience as migrants. While atomized protests focus on economic grievances pertaining to a specific job, the empirical analyses of survey data show that social grievances pose a bigger threat to the regime, since they change the direction of blame attribution. Protest participants are less likely to blame the central government than nonparticipants, which could imply that those that blame the central government might not be interested in atomized protests.

This chapter illustrates how police regulation of drug markets in Rosario, Argentina, mutated from a relatively non-violent source of rents controlled by the police and successive administrations to a blend of splintered corruption and unprecedented violence. The Peronist government’s low fragmentation and entrenchment initially enabled it to politicize the police, using it to run coordinated protection rackets that centralized corruption and mitigated violence. However, starting in the mid-1990s, turnover and fragmentation increased due to factional disputes within the ruling Peronist party, triggering multiple police reform cycles. The arrival in power of the Socialist party in 2007 further increased police autonomy and destabilized the local drug market. Police corruption fractured; practically every police precinct ran its own racket. This chaotic drug market made Rosario one of the most violent cities in the country. Despite three consecutive terms in office (2007-2019), Socialist administrations were unable—and perhaps ultimately unwilling—to reform the police, stabilize the drug market and significantly reduce criminal violence.

This chapter deploys the book’s theoretical framework, which connects political competition, police autonomy and informal regulation of illicit markets. While the electoral costs of police corruption and violence can motivate politicians to reduce police autonomy, political fragmentation and turnover condition whether and how they can achieve this objective. Fragmentation may obstruct policy implementation but also inhibit politicians from centralizing police rent extraction, while turnover impedes sustaining policies that reduce police autonomy over time. Police autonomy will shape how the police regulate drug markets. With greater autonomy police broker particularistic negotiations with, or engage in unbridled violence, or particularistic confrontation, against dealers and traffickers. When politicians reduce police autonomy through politicization, they capture rents from criminal activities and produce coordinated protection rackets, defined by high corruption but also lower violence on both sides. Finally, professionalized police forces regulate drug trafficking through coordinated coexistence regimes, brokering informal agreements that limit violence by both police and criminals.

This chapter reconsiders the radicalization process of the May Fourth youth through the founding of the CYP in Europe and the collapse of the YCA in China. This chapter first highlights how the different material conditions in Europe laid a significant foundation for the emergence of different ideologies among those Chinese students working and studying in Europe. Subsequently, by examining the radicalizing political confrontations between the founders of the CCP and CYP in both Europe and China, this chapter demonstrates how the CYP founders became radicalized and set out for a national socialist revolution in 1923.

Chapters 7 unpacks how lawyers can serve as brokers of compliance when controversial judicial decisions spark backlash. As European integration became politicized from the 1990s onwards, disruptive European Union (EU) laws and European Court of Justice (ECJ) decisions have often provoked on-the-ground resistance. Yet these controversies can also open surprising opportunities for court-driven change, provided that Euro-lawyers mobilize as "interpretive mediators:" Public advocates who vernacularize EU law and rally local stakeholders and the press to promote compliance. The chapter develops a case study design to compare lawyers' role in two explosive controversies that generated litigation before the ECJ: The 1991 Port of Genoa case (analyzed in this Chapter), which quashed the control over port labor of a centenarian union of dockworkers, and the 2015 Xylella case (analyzed in Chapter 8), which mandated the eradication of thousands of centenarian olive trees. The chapter traces how Euro-lawyers in the Port of Genoa case preempted backlash and promoted compliance by mobilizing public and interest group support via media savvy advocacy. It speaks to readers interested in how contentious politics transform legal mobilization, how lawyers cultivate people's legal consciousness when the law is politicized, and how these efforts shape judicial policymaking and Europeanization.

Chapter 8 unpacks how the absence of Euro-lawyering and mediatory public advocacy can embolden on-the-ground backlash to European Union (EU) laws and European Court of Justice (ECJ) decisions. The chapter contrasts Chapter 7's analysis of the Port of Genoa case with a similarly explosive controversy yielding a far more regressive outcome: The 2015 Xylella case. As a plant pathogen described as "the coronavirus of olive trees" began devastating olive groves in southern Italy, the European Commission and the ECJ intervened by mandating the eradication of thousands of diseased trees. Farmers revolted against these decisions and called for disobedience, yet a legacy of noncompliance was hardly inevitable. Contentious resistance proliferated because it unfolded in a context devoid of Euro-lawyers ready to proactively advocate for compliance in a way that resonated with local stakeholders, judges, and journalists. In fact, some local lawyers and judges even joined resistance efforts and began trafficking in conspiracy. The chapter speaks to readers interested in how contentious politics can produce a defiant legal consciousness, how this consciousness can diffuse from the streets to the bar and bench, and how it threatens to corrode the judicial construction of Europe.

Based on a case study on Germany in the first half of the twentieth century, this chapter addresses the administrative dimension of liberal-democratic backsliding by examining the role the state bureaucracy played in the process of system transformation from the Weimar Republic to the Nazi regime. It shows how the state bureaucracy in Germany was approached and transformed by illiberal politicians in the late Weimar Republic and under Hitler. Despite the existence of a professional Weberian bureaucracy with strong regulative barriers against politicization in the Weimar Republic, the civil service did not function as a safeguard of the democratic system. Instead, many civil servants welcomed the roll-back of democratic principles, which facilitated the radical transformation and politicization of the bureaucracy in a short time. This case study underlines the significance of institutionalizing democratic values in the civil service in processes of democratization in order to strengthen its resilience to attempts of eroding liberal democratic institutions.