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Prevailing explanations of the US secession crisis trace the latter’s origins to slavery and slaveowners’ interests. The central problem with all such explanations, however, is that the Whig Party, the party of the largest slaveowners, opposed secession until the mid-1850s. Why did southern Whigs and their planter base resist secession through the political crisis over slavery only to fold by 1861? Drawing on archival electoral returns by precinct, party newspapers, speeches, and personal correspondence from antebellum Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, I argue for an institutional and sequential approach to the secession crisis that does not take social actors’ individual interests as given, but rather as naturalized and denaturalized in the back and forth struggle of political parties to advance competing solutions to the problem of preserving slavery.

This chapter provides a comprehensive, yet, concise overview of the existing debates on policy networks. The aim of the chapter is to identify those mechanisms that encourage network collaboration among several stakeholders with different motivations, interests, and preferences throughout different stages of policy making from agenda setting to policy evaluation. A systematic review of previous studies on policy networks across various countries highlights the achievements and missing links in the literature, and at the same time, reveals three sets of causal mechanisms, which are crucial to understand Network Collaborative Capacity (NCC) along the structural, relational, and institutional dimensions. Structural and relational mechanisms explain the internal dynamics of a policy network; whereas institutional mechanisms consist of all those external factors in the broader political and economic environment within which the network is embedded. Structural, relational, and institutional mechanisms are further classified into constituting elements that serve as a blueprint for organizing and managing collaborative efforts at the network level. Ultimately this chapter contributes to the existing governance debates by offering an integrated framework for the study of NCC across country cases and policy sectors. Turkish health sector represents a case study to assess the applicability of this framework beyond the context of advanced industrialized economies and democracies with a tradition in collaborative policy making. Finally, the added value of comparative network analysis at the national and sub-national levels will be discussed.

A new database demonstrates that between 1600 and 1830, Parliament passed thousands of acts restructuring rights to real and equitable estates. These estate acts enabled individuals and families to sell, mortgage, lease, exchange, and improve land previously bound by landholding and inheritance laws. This essay provides a factual foundation for research on this important topic: the law and economics of property rights during the period preceding the Industrial Revolution. Tables present time-series, cross-sectional, and panel data that should serve as a foundation for empirical analysis. Preliminary analysis indicates ways in which this new evidence may shape our understanding of British economic and social history. The data demonstrate that Parliament facilitated the reallocation of resources to new and more productive uses by adapting property rights to modern economic conditions. Reallocation surged in the decades following the Glorious Revolution and was concentrated in areas undergoing urbanization and industrialization. The process was open to landowners of all classes, not just the privileged groups who sat in the Houses of Lords and Commons. Parliament's rhetoric about improving the realm appears to have been consistent with its actions concerning rights to land and resources.

The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate the centrality of the tabula rasa concept of self for the medical model of homeless service provision. Using four years of ethnographic data analyzed with a grounded fractal methodology, we illustrate the logical interconnections between the particular phenomena of homeless service institutions and broad cultural contexts. While social science has been somewhat critical of the medicalization of homelessness, its shared supposition about the self has relegated it to structural critiques that offer little to the currently homeless and those who want to help them. In contrast, we illuminate a path toward the development of an alternative pedagogy of individualism that is more directly responsive to the problematics of the medical model of homeless service provision.