POLITICAL FRAMES AND LEGAL ACTIVITY - THE CASE OF NUCLEAR-POWER IN 4 COUNTRIES

State-society differentiation and political centralization interact to influence the amount, focus, and effect of legal activity. Using case studies of antinuclear power litigation in the 1970s in the United St ates, West Germany, France, and Sweden, this article develops a genera l theory of political systems and legal activity. While the United Sta tes, West Germany, and France all had considerable amounts of antinucl ear litigation, in France and Germany such litigation was directed alm ost exclusively at the state. In the United States, the targets of ant inuclear litigation were much more diffuse. Centralized Sweden with it s corporatist political system had significantly less antinuclear lega l activity than the other three countries, which were roughly comparab le. Germany was the only country in which the state took an active rol e in shaping the content of legal cases, and it was the only country w here litigation became a critical factor in modifying national policy. Through these case studies, this article explores how contextual fact ors such as the political frames of nation-states, which exist apart f rom individual litigiousness and even apart from legal systems themsel ves may create particular cross-cultural variations in patterns of leg al activity.