Bücher der Reihe Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions

The governance of natural resources used by many individuals in common is an issue of increasing concern to policy analysts. Both state control and privatization of resources have been advocated, but neither the state nor the market have been uniformly successful in solving common pool resource problems. After critiquing the foundations of policy analysis as applied to natural resources, Elinor Ostrom here provides a unique body of empirical data to explore conditions under which common pool resource problems have been satisfactorily or unsatisfactorily solved. Dr Ostrom uses institutional analysis to explore different ways - both successful and unsuccessful - of governing the commons. In contrast to the proposition of the 'tragedy of the commons' argument, common pool problems sometimes are solved by voluntary organizations rather than by a coercive state. Among the cases considered are communal tenure in meadows and forests, irrigation communities and other water rights, and fisheries.

The Robust Federation offers a comprehensive approach to the study of federalism. Jenna Bednar demonstrates how complementary institutions maintain and adjust the distribution of authority between national and state governments. These authority boundaries matter - for defense, economic growth, and adequate political representation - and must be defended from opportunistic transgression. From Montesquieu to Madison, the legacy of early institutional analysis focuses attention on the value of competition between institutions, such as the policy moderation produced through separated powers. Bednar offers a reciprocal theory: in an effective constitutional system, institutions complement one another; each makes the others more powerful. Diverse but complementary safeguards - including the courts, political parties, and the people - cover different transgressions, punish to different extents, and fail under different circumstances. The analysis moves beyond equilibrium conceptions and explains how the rules that allocate authority are not fixed but shift gradually. Bednar's rich theoretical characterization of complementary institutions provides the first holistic account of federal robustness.

Develops a novel theory about how and why politicians and legal elites politicise courts, situating this within the context of the wider American political landscape. Analysing the ideological composition of the nation's courts, this text demonstrates to policy makers and lay political observers the processes and consequences of judicial reforms.

This book presents a quantitative history of constitutional law in the United States and uses a statistical model of law to bring together humanistic and social-scientific perspectives on legal history.

Why do some democracies redistribute more than others? Election practices cause some governments to deliver policies, such as industrial subsidies, that assist small groups of citizens at the expense of many. Spending to Win will find interest amongst scholars of international political economy, public policy, public administration, and comparative politics.

This book provides a new way to think about the process of long-run economic and political development that speaks to several fundamental debates in the social sciences. Thus, it will appeal to a large audience, including political scientists, economists, economic historians, sociologists, and graduate and undergraduate students.

This book argues that bureaucracies can contribute to stability and economic development, if they are insulated from unstable democratic politics. The book will appeal to those interested in political science, economics, law, sociology, and modern political history.

This book is for scholars of political economy and international trade. It explores the conditions under which workers and their employers join together in support of the same trade policies. It also challenges the conventional wisdom in the field of international political economy concerning economic history and contemporary globalization.

This book puts the debate on commons, commoners, and the disappearance of both throughout early modern and modern western Europe in a new light, through new approaches and innovative methodologies. Tine De Moor links the historical debate about the long-term evolution of commons to the present-day debates on common-pool resources.

Governing requires choices, and hence trade-offs between conflicting goals or criteria. This book asserts that legitimate governance requires explanations for such trade-offs and then demonstrates that such explanations can always be found, though not for every possible choice.

This book is the first comprehensive study of foreign direct investment (FDI) liberalization.

The book explains how different political and economic circumstances account for the variation in the economic vote. Based on the analysis of 165 public opinion surveys from 19 countries, the authors demonstrate that their explanations are empirically sound.

This book documents the widespread use of blatant and excessive manipulation of elections and explains what drives this practice. Simpser shows that, in many instances, governments and parties manipulate elections not only to gain votes, but also to transmit or distort information.

A combination of positive political theory, social network research and computational modeling, explaining why some people are more likely to vote than others. Most do not weigh the costs and benefits of participation, but instead rely on largely automatic decision rules that are conditional on the decisions of their friends and family.

This book examines the relationship among the US Supreme Court, Congress, and the public. Contrasting most studies of Court-Congress relations in the United States, the book argues that the Court's primary concern is protecting its institutional legitimacy and securing compliance with its decisions.

This book examines the long-term evolution of political regimes and public finances in Europe. Using a novel combination of descriptive, case study and statistical methods, the book performs a systematic investigation of a new panel database that spans eleven countries and four centuries.

This book examines how the structure of electoral institutions - the rules of democratic contestation that determine the manner in which citizens choose their representatives - affects political corruption, defined as the abuse of state power or resources for campaign finance or party-building purposes.

Challenging the view that American voters' dependence on partisan cues is a consequence of their overall political ignorance, Jeffrey D. Grynaviski argues that voters rely on these cues because party brand names provide credible information about how politicians are likely to act in office.

This book explains why governments respond differently to macroeconomic problems and why necessary reforms are sometimes delayed until a serious financial crisis erupts. Empirical analyses at both the individual level across a broad range of countries and case studies of national policy responses to financial and economic crises in Asia and Eastern Europe support the argument.

This book shows how claim clubs - informal governments established by squatters in each of the major frontier sectors of agriculture, mining, logging and ranching - substituted for the state as a source of private property institutions and how they changed the course of who received a legal title, and for what price, throughout the nineteenth century.

How did Poland go from an authoritarian one-party state with a faltering centrally planned economy to become a relatively stable multiparty democracy and a market economy? This book explains these successes by the high rate of creation and growth of new, domestically owned firms between 1990 and 1997.

This book examines how institutional arrangements in the French Constitution shape the bargaining strategies of political parties.

Based on an in-depth study of the effect of property rights on water control, The Fruits of Revolution examines the impact of revolution on French agricultural development. The book focuses on broad questions of economic change, yet it is based on detailed archival investigations of the impact of property rights on water control.

This book develops new theory about the link between debt and democracy and applies it to a classic historical comparison: Great Britain in the eighteenth century which had strong representative institutions and sound public finance vs. ancient regime France, which had neither.

Combining insights from economics, political science and history, Professors Alston and Ferrie show how the timing and extent of the growth of the American welfare state from the Civil War until the mid-1960s was influenced by the southern agricultural elite.

This is a study of institutional failure in Russia's first democratic legislature. Inadequate rules and a chaotic party system made it nearly impossible for the legislature to pass a new constitution.

This book develops a general model of public policymaking, focusing on the difficulties of securing intertemporal exchanges among politicians. They also undertake a detailed study of Argentina, using statistical newly developed data to complement their nuanced account of institutions, rules, incentives and outcomes.

Special purpose jurisdictions constitute the most common form of local government in the United States today. This book offers the first political theory of special purpose jurisdictions and provides extensive empirical analyses of the politics and finances of these often overlooked but increasingly influential governments.

The book attempts to answer three questions about the appointment process and its effects. First, do politicians influence monetary policy through Federal Reserve appointments? Second, who influences the process - the President alone or both the President and the Senate? Third, what explains the structure of the Federal Reserve appointment process?