The Articulation of Different Life Domains among Female Senior Managers and Their Subjective Well-Being : Focusing on Meaning Constructions in Everyday Life

Work-life issues have become a major concern across Western societies with the objective to promote women's careers and well-being. However, despite growing attempts to increase the number of women in senior management positions in European countries, such as Switzerland, they remain highly underrepresented. Inspired from the cultural approach in psychology, this article focuses on these women's concrete everyday life to understand how they articulate different life domains and how this influences their subjective well-being. A narrative approach based on reflexivity is adopted to analyze women's activity. Results show meaning intertwinements between life priorities that are often conflicting. Two psychological functions are identified: the feeling of control and the letting go of control. Each of these contributes to women's subjective well-being through the use of diversified supports, but their structuring roles appear only in relation to one another. Results are discussed in the light of existing literature and of their implications.

How Party Linkages Shape Austerity Politics: Clientelism and Fiscal Adjustment in Greece and Portugal during the Eurozone Crisis

Drawing on an analysis of austerity reforms in Greece and Portugal during the sovereign debt crisis from 2009 onwards, we show how the nature of the linkages between parties and citizens shapes party strategies of fiscal retrenchment. We argue that parties which rely to a greater extent on the selective distribution of state resources to mobilize electoral support (clientelistic linkages) are more reluctant to agree to fiscal retrenchment because their own electoral survival depends on their ability to control state budgets to reward clients. In Greece, where parties relied extensively on these clientelistic linkages, austerity reforms have been characterized by recurring conflicts and disagreements between the main parties, as well as a fundamental transformation of the party system. By contrast, in Portugal, where parties relied less on clientelistic strategies, austerity reforms have been more consensual because fiscal retrenchment challenged to a lesser extent the electoral base of the mainstream parties.

Europeanization or Party Politics? Explaining Government Choice for Corporatist Concertation

This article assesses whether changes in government choice for policy concertation with trade unions and employers are better explained by international or domestic factors. We compare patterns of corporatist governance in a strongly Europeanized policy domain (labor migration policy) and in a weakly Europeanized policy domain (welfare state reforms) over the last 20 years in Austria and Switzerland. We show that there is no systematic difference in patterns of concertation between the two policy sectors and that factors linked to party politics play a bigger role in the choice of governments for concertation. If the base of party support for policies is divided, governments are more prone to resort to corporatist concertation as a way to build compromises for potentially controversial or unpopular policies. By contrast, ideologically cohesive majority coalitions are less prone to resort to concertation because they do not need to build compromises outside their base of party support.

Emotions in International Politics. Beyond Mainstream International Relations

In recent years, social scientists have increasingly recognized the interconnectedness of thought on emotions. Nowhere is the role of passions more evident than international politics, where pride, anger, guilt, fear, empathy, and other feelings are routinely on display. But in the absence of an overarching theory of emotions, how can we understand their role at the international level? Emotions in International Politics fills the need for theoretical tools in the new and rapidly growing subfield of international relations. Eminent scholars from a range of disciplines consider how emotions can be investigated from an international perspective involving collective players, drawing evidence from such emotionally fraught events as the Rwandan genocide, World War II, the 9/11 attacks, and the Iranian nuclear standoff. The path-breaking research collected in Emotions in International Politics will be a valuable theoretical guide to understanding conflict and cooperation in international relations.