Bücher der Reihe Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics

The collapse of socialist dictatorships in Europe from 1989 to 1992.

Ideas, policies, conflicts about race and images of nationalism have been major themes of politics for more than a century. This book illuminates the particular experiences of South Africa, the United States, and Brazil, but also uses comparisons to reveal patterns and linkages between race, nation, state and class dynamics not otherwise apparent.

This study offers a theoretical framework for understanding how institutional instability affects judicial behavior under dictatorship and democracy. In stark contrast to conventional wisdom, the central findings of the book contradict the longstanding assumption that only independent judges rule against the government of the day.

This book describes the contrasting economic strategies pursued by conservative and social democratic governments. Examining all advanced countries since the 1960s, Professor Boix shows that partisanship and electoral politics play a fundamental role in the selection of policies to generate long-term growth and economic competitiveness.

The institutional arrangements governing skill formation are widely seen as constituting a key element in the institutional constellations that define distinctive 'varieties of capitalism' across the developed democracies. This book explores the origins and evolution of such institutions in four countries - Germany, Britain, the United States and Japan.

This book is a fascinating exploration of public opinion in sub-Saharan Africa. Based on the Afrobarometer, a survey research project, it reveals what ordinary Africans think about democracy and market reforms, subjects on which almost nothing is otherwise known.

This 2003 book offers a complete theory of political transitions. It discusses why democracy emerged in classical Athens, the early triumph of democracy in both nineteenth-century agrarian Norway, Switzerland and northeastern America, and the failure in countries with a powerful landowning class.

In this 2004 book, Daniele Caramani describes the transformation of politics from a situation where voting behavior differs greatly between regions to one where it is homogenous within nations. The author uses data to look at a long-term evolution, spanning from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.

The book provides a systematic evaluation of the role played by business in the development of the modern welfare state. This book studies the critical questions and its analysis demonstrates that major social policies were adopted by cross-class alliances comprising labor-based organizations and key sectors of the business community.

If politicians want to be reelected or see their party reelected at the end of their term, why would they impose unpopular policies? Susan Stokes develops a model of policy switches and tests it with statistical and qualitative data from Latin American elections over the last two decades.

No Other Way Out provides a powerful explanation for the emergence of popular revolutionary movements during the Cold War era. By comparing more than a dozen countries in Southeast Asia, Central America, and Eastern Europe, Goodwin shows how revolutionaries were able to create opportunities for seizing state power.

This book represents the first comprehensive study evaluating the comparative performance of national environmental policies since the beginning of the modern environmental era. It lays out four major explanations of environmental performance and evaluates them using an advanced statistical analysis of data from seventeen wealthy countries.

This 2003 book analyzes the global dynamics of labor movements, introducing a major new database on labor unrest events worldwide from 1870 to 1996. Its purpose is to assess the contemporary crisis of labor movements, but it argues that labor movements need to be studied in a longer historical and wider geographical framework.

This book analyses the economic bases of regional sovereignty movements in the Russian Federation from 1990-1993. It addresses the literature on both nationalism and political economy and provides a novel analytic framework for explaining the origin of economic interests and the development of sovereignty movements.

This book, first published in 1998, analyzes democratization and economic change in the postsocialist societies of East Central Europe.

Why do some ethnic parties succeed in attracting the support of their target ethnic group while others fail? Drawing on a study of variation in the performance of four ethnic parties in India, this book builds a theory of ethnic party performance in 'patronage democracies'.

Using case studies of Mexico and Kenya this book shows how a decade of deep and sustained crisis also became a decade of innovations in ideas, policy directions, political coalitions, and government institutions.

This book examines the politics of social policy in an era of austerity and conservative governance. Focusing on the administrations of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, Pierson provides a compelling explanation for the welfare state's durability and for the few occasions where each government was able to achieve significant cutbacks.

Comparative research is exploding with alternative methodological and theoretical approaches. In this book, experts in each one of these methods provide a comprehensive explanation and application of time-series, pooled, event history, and Boolean methods to substantive problems of the welfare state.

This 2002 book seeks to identify the motivations of perpetrators of ethnic violence. The work develops four models, labeled Fear, Hatred, Resentment, and Rage, gleaned from existing social science literatures. It then applies them to ethnic conflicts in Eastern Europe to learn which has the most explanatory value.

By analytically decoupling war and violence, this book explores the causes and dynamics of violence in civil war. Against the prevailing view that such violence is an instance of impenetrable madness, the book demonstrates that there is logic to it and that it has much less to do with collective emotions, ideologies, and cultures than currently believed. Kalyvas specifies a novel theory of selective violence: it is jointly produced by political actors seeking information and individual civilians trying to avoid the worst but also grabbing what opportunities their predicament affords them. Violence, he finds, is never a simple reflection of the optimal strategy of its users; its profoundly interactive character defeats simple maximization logics while producing surprising outcomes, such as relative nonviolence in the 'frontlines' of civil war.

Most studies of the political economy of money focus on the laws protecting central banks from government interference; this book turns to the overlooked people who actually make monetary policy decisions. Using formal theory and statistical evidence from dozens of central banks across the developed and developing worlds, this book shows that monetary policy agents are not all the same. Molded by specific professional and sectoral backgrounds and driven by career concerns, central bankers with different career trajectories choose predictably different monetary policies. These differences undermine the widespread belief that central bank independence is a neutral solution for macroeconomic management. Instead, through careful selection and retention of central bankers, partisan governments can and do influence monetary policy - preserving a political trade-off between inflation and real economic performance even in an age of legally independent central banks.

Many societies use labor market coordination to maximize economic growth and equality, yet employers' willing cooperation with government and labor is something of a mystery. The Political Construction of Business Interests recounts employers' struggles to define their collective social identities at turning points in capitalist development. Employers are most likely to support social investments in countries with strong peak business associations, that help members form collective preferences and realize policy goals in labor market negotiations. Politicians, with incentives shaped by governmental structures, took the initiative in association-building and those that created the strongest associations were motivated to evade labor radicalism and to preempt parliamentary democratization. Sweeping in its historical and cross-national reach, the book builds on original archival data, interviews and cross-national quantitative analyses. The research has important implications for the construction of business as a social class and powerful ramifications for equality, welfare state restructuring and social solidarity.

Conflicts involve powerful experiences. The residue of these experiences is captured by the concept and language of emotion. Indiscriminate killing creates fear; targeted violence produces anger and a desire for vengeance; political status reversals spawn resentment; cultural prejudices sustain ethnic contempt. These emotions can become resources for political entrepreneurs. A broad range of Western interventions are based on a view of human nature as narrowly rational. Correspondingly, intervention policy generally aims to alter material incentives ('sticks and carrots') to influence behavior. In response, poorer and weaker actors who wish to block or change this Western implemented 'game' use emotions as resources. This book examines the strategic use of emotion in the conflicts and interventions occurring in the Western Balkans over a twenty-year period. The book concentrates on the conflicts among Albanian and Slavic populations (Kosovo, Montenegro, Macedonia, South Serbia), along with some comparisons to Bosnia.

Poverty relief programs are shaped by politics. The particular design which social programs take is to a large extent determined by the existing institutional constraints and politicians' imperative to win elections. The Political Logic of Poverty Relief places elections and institutional design at the core of poverty alleviation. The authors develop a theory with applications to Mexico about how elections shape social programs aimed at aiding the poor. Would political parties possess incentives to target the poor with transfers aimed at poverty alleviation or would they instead give these to their supporters? Would politicians rely on the distribution of particularistic benefits rather than public goods? The authors assess the welfare effects of social programs in Mexico and whether voters reward politicians for targeted poverty alleviation programs. The book provides a new interpretation of the role of cash transfers and poverty relief assistance in the development of welfare state institutions.

This book investigates the effects of electoral systems on the relative legislative and, hence, regulatory influence of competing interests in society. Building on Ronald Rogowski and Mark Andreas Kayser's extension of the classic Stigler-Peltzman model of regulation, the authors demonstrate that majoritarian electoral arrangements should empower consumers relative to producers. Employing real price levels as a proxy for consumer power, the book rigorously establishes this proposition over time, within the OECD, and across a large sample of developing countries. Majoritarian electoral arrangements depress real prices by approximately ten percent, all else equal. The authors carefully construct and test their argument and broaden it to consider the overall welfare effects of electoral system design and the incentives of actors in the choice of electoral institutions.

This book makes two central claims: first, that mineral-rich states are cursed not by their wealth but, rather, by the ownership structure they choose to manage their mineral wealth and second, that weak institutions are not inevitable in mineral-rich states. Each represents a significant departure from the conventional resource curse literature, which has treated ownership structure as a constant across time and space and has presumed that mineral-rich countries are incapable of either building or sustaining strong institutions - particularly fiscal regimes. The experience of the five petroleum-rich Soviet successor states (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, the Russian Federation, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) provides a clear challenge to both of these assumptions. Their respective developmental trajectories since independence demonstrate not only that ownership structure can vary even across countries that share the same institutional legacy but also that this variation helps to explain the divergence in their subsequent fiscal regimes.

This book challenges existing theories of welfare state change by analyzing pension reforms in France, Germany, and Switzerland between 1970 and 2004. It explains why all three countries were able to adopt far-reaching reforms, adapting their pension regimes to both financial austerity and new social risks. In a radical departure from the neo-institutionalist emphasis on policy stability, the book argues that socio-structural change has led to a multidimensional pension reform agenda. A variety of cross-cutting lines of political conflict, emerging from the transition to a post-industrial economy, allowed governments to engage in strategies of political exchange and coalition-building, fostering broad cross-class coalitions in support of major reform packages. Methodologically, the book proposes a novel strategy to analyze lines of conflict, configurations of political actors, and coalitional dynamics over time. This strategy combines quantitative analyses of actor configurations based on coded policy positions with in-depth case studies.

From the Ballot to the Blackboard provides the first comprehensive account of the political economy of education spending across the developed and developing world. The book demonstrates how political forces like democracy and political partisanship and economic factors like globalization deeply impact the choices made by voters, parties, and leaders in financing education. The argument is developed through three stories that track the historical development of education: first, its original expansion from the elite to the masses; second, the partisan politics of education in industrialized states; and third, the politics of higher education. The book uses a variety of complementary methods to demonstrate the importance of redistributive political motivations in explaining education policy, including formal modeling, statistical analysis of survey data and both sub-national and cross-national data, and historical case analyses of countries including the Philippines, India, Malaysia, England, Sweden, and Germany.

In this comparative-historical analysis of Spanish America, Mahoney offers a new theory of colonialism and postcolonial development. He explores why certain kinds of societies are subject to certain kinds of colonialism and why these forms of colonialism give rise to countries with differing levels of economic prosperity and social well-being. Mahoney contends that differences in the extent of colonialism are best explained by the potentially evolving fit between the institutions of the colonizing nation and those of the colonized society. Moreover, he shows how institutions forged under colonialism bring countries to relative levels of development that may prove remarkably enduring in the postcolonial period. The argument is sure to stir discussion and debate, both among experts on Spanish America who believe that development is not tightly bound by the colonial past, and among scholars of colonialism who suggest that the institutional identity of the colonizing nation is of little consequence.