Professor Cathie Jo Martin: Award Winning Political Scientist
The American Political Science Association awarded Boston University Professor Cathie Jo Martin and Duane Swank the Jack L. Walker, Jr. Outstanding Article Award for her article “The Political Origins of Coordinated Capitalism.” This award “honors an article published in the last two calendar years that makes an outstanding contribution to research and scholarship on political organizations and parties.”
In the article, the authors examine the relationship between business associations and structures and the nature of party systems across 16 countries covering the 1900-1930s period. This is an extremely important question for students of interest groups, party organizations and systems, and comparative political economy. The authors find that proportional, multiparty systems facilitate the development of business peak associations, whereas non-proportional two-party systems lead to the development of pluralistic organizations. The article is a model of political science at its finest: a very important question with broad appeal to diverse audiences tested using multiple methods and executed with great care.
In addition, Professor Martin had a recent article published in September 2010. It was co-authored with Jette Steen Knudsen.“Scenes from a Mall: Retail Training and the Social Exclusion of Low-Skilled Workers.” Regulation & Governance 4(3) (September 2010). If you would like some more information on this article the abstract is shown here!
Abstract
This article examines how post-industrial Britain and Denmark undertake vocational training for low-skilled retail workers. Specifically, we evaluate whether leaders in training skilled industrial workers are also doing the best job with low-skilled service workers. We find somewhat surprisingly that Denmark has relatively more very low-skilled retail workers than Britain. While Danish retail is increasingly becoming a haven for low-skilled workers, British workers are gaining in skills-levels with the transition to services even in the retail sector. While some suggest that social democratic countries have sacrificed the political interests of low-skilled workers in order to protect core manufacturing workers, we find no evidence of this. Rather the high expectations of vocational training in Denmark have forged barriers to the easy admission of low-skilled service workers, while the British system provides more entry points for vocational training at different levels. The structures of coordination that have narrowed the gap between white-collar and blue-collar manufacturing workers during the industrial age are creating new cleavages in the post-industrial economy.