The democratic nation state of the post-war era has undergone major transformations since the 1970s, and political authority has been both internationalized and privatized. The thirteen chapters of this edited collection deal with major transformations of governance arrangements and state responsibilities in the countries of the OECD world. A unified conceptual and explanatory framework is used to describe trajectories of state change, to explain the internationalization or privatization of responsibilities in the resource, law, legitimacy and welfare dimensions of the democratic nation state, and to probe the state's role in the today's post-national constellation of political authority. As the contributions show, an unravelling of state authority has indeed occurred, but the state nevertheless continues to play a key role in emerging governance arrangements. Hence it is not merely a 'victim' of globalization and other driving forces of change.

PART I: INTRODUCTION 1. Explaining State Transformations: A Framework; Steffen Schneider and Heinz Rothgang PART II: RESOURCE DIMENSION: THE TERRITORIAL STATE 2. The Rise and Decline of Public Enterprises in Western Democracies; Carina Schmitt and Herbert Obinger 3. The Competing State: Transformations of the Public/Private Sector Earnings Gap in Four Countries; Markus Tepe, Bernhard Kittel and Karin Gottschall 4. The Evolving Post-national Regulation of Financial Reporting; Jörg R. Werner and Jochen Zimmermann PART III: LEGAL DIMENSION: THE RULE OF LAW 5. The Effects of International Dispute Settlement Procedures; Aletta Mondré 6. Internationalizing Law against the Odds: The Power of Courts and Their Limits; Susanne K. Schmidt, Michael Blauberger and Tilman Krüger 7. Explaining the Transnationalization of Commercial Law; Gralf-Peter Calliess, Hermann B. Hoffmann and Jens Michael Lobschat PART IV: LEGITIMACY DIMENSION: DEMOCRACY 8. Cultures of Political Discourse in Europe: Explaining Multiple Segmentation in the European Public Sphere; Andreas Hepp, Katharina Kleinen-von Königslöw, Swantje Lingenberg, Johanna Möller, Michael Brüggemann and Anke Offerhaus 9. Internationalization and the Discursive Legitimation of the Democratic Nation State; Sebastian Haunss, Henning Schmidtke and Steffen Schneider PART V: WELFARE DIMENSION: STATE INTERVENTION 10. Pioneers of Paradigmatic Change? Welfare State Restructuring in Small Open Economies; Peter Starke and Herbert Obinger 11. Policy Change in Secondary Education: Germany and England Compared; Philipp Knodel, Kerstin Martens and Dennis Niemann 12. The Hybridization of Healthcare Regulation: An Explanation in Cross-national Perspective; Lorraine Frisina Doetter, Ralf Götze, Achim Schmid, Mirella Cacace and Heinz Rothgang PART VI: CONCLUSION 13. The Democratic Nation State: Victim or Master of Transformations?; Steffen Schneider and Heinz Rothgang