Books in the Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics series

This study, first published in 2002, explores legislative politics in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. Instead of beginning with an assumption that these legislatures are either rubber-stamps or obstructionist bodies, the chapters provide a fresh analytical approach to describe and explain the role of these representative bodies in these consolidating democracies.

In this collection of essays, Theda Skocpol, author of the award-winning book States and Social Revolutions (1979), updates her arguments about social revolutions. How are we to understand recent revolutionary upheavals in countries across the globe? Why have social revolutions happened in some countries, but not in others that seem similar?

This book argues that national politics are not dominated by global markets. Citizens' demands for government protection from market forces (economic insecurity) are rising, while countries with strong trade union movements that can restrain the wage demands of workers (corporatism) are attractive to investors.

These essays demonstrate how the 'historical institutional' approach to the study of politics reveals the nature of institutional change and its effect on policy making.

This book presents empirical research on the nature and structure of political violence. While most studies of social movements focus on single - nations, Donatella della Porta uses a comparative research design to analyse movements in two countries - Italy and Germany - from the 1960s to the 1990s.

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.

Rightly fearing that unscrupulous rulers would break them up, seize their resources, or submit them to damaging forms of intervention, strong networks of trust such as kinship groups, clandestine religious sects, and trade diasporas have historically insulated themselves from political control by a variety of strategies. Drawing on a vast range of comparisons over time and space, Trust and Rule, first published in 2005, asks and answers how and with what consequences members of trust networks have evaded, compromised with, or even sought connections with political regimes. Since different forms of integration between trust networks produce authoritarian, theocratic, and democratic regimes, the book provides an essential background to the explanation of democratization and de-democratization.

This is a book about strikes, focusing on the strategic interaction of workers, employers and the state. It is based on different forms of empirical evidence: statistical, historical, ethnographic and survey. Focusing on a variety of actors, theories and forms of empirical evidence, the book is almost unique in the social sciences.

In most countries around the world the collection of taxes is centralized in the hands of the national governments. This book studies the process of fiscal centralization in the Latin American federations and the reasons underlying the variation in the roles that state governments and governors have played in them.

As new federations take shape and old ones are revived around the world, a difficult challenge is to create incentives for fiscal discipline. A key question is whether a politically-motivated central government can credibly commit not to bail out subnational governments in times of crisis if it funds most of their expenditures. The center can commit when subnational governments retain significant tax autonomy, as in the United States. Or if the center dominates taxation, it can tightly regulate borrowing, as in many unitary systems. In a third group of countries including Brazil and Germany, the center can neither commit to a system of market-based discipline nor gain a monopoly over borrowing. By combining theory, quantitative analysis, and historical and contemporary case studies, this book explains why different countries have had dramatically different experiences with subnational fiscal discipline.

This book is about why state spending on things like pensions, unemployment benefits, and family allowances is tilted towards the elderly in some countries but not in others. The novel way of looking at what welfare states do leads to very different conclusions from the standard literature.

By examining how post-communist political parties rebuilt the state in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia, Grzymala-Busse explains how even opportunistic political parties will limit their corrupt behaviour and abuse of state resources when faced with strong political competition.

Marc Howard Ross examines battles over diverse cultural expressions and demonstrates how culture drives conflict, but can also help mitigate it when groups develop more inclusive narratives and identities that both acknowledge the past and envision a shared future.

Examines how citizens get government officials to provide them with the roads, schools, and other public services they need by studying communities in rural China. In authoritarian and transitional systems, formal institutions for holding government officials accountable are often weak. This book explores how social institutions influence government officials.

Stuffing the Ballot Box is a pioneering study of electoral fraud and reform. It focuses on Costa Rica, a country where parties gradually transformed a fraud-ridden political system into one renowned for its stability and fair elections by the mid-twentieth century.

Estevez-Abe traces Japan's highly egalitarian form of capitalism to the electoral strategies of its politicians. She analyzes how the current electoral system renders obsolete the old form of welfare capitalism creating a more market-driven society with less equality.

Why do some political parties flourish, while others flounder? In this book, Meguid examines variation in the electoral trajectories of the new set of single-issue parties: green, radical right, and ethnoterritorial parties. Instead of being dictated by electoral institutions or the socioeconomic climate, as the dominant theories contend, the fortunes of these niche parties, she argues, are shaped by the strategic responses of mainstream parties. She advances a theory of party competition in which mainstream parties facing unequal competitors have access to a wider and more effective set of strategies than posited by standard spatial models. Combining statistical analyses with in-depth case studies from Western Europe, the book explores how and why established parties undermine niche parties or turn them into weapons against their mainstream party opponents. This study of competition between unequals thus provides broader insights into the nature and outcome of competition between political equals.

Does democracy reduce state repression as human rights activism, funding and policy suggest? What are the limitations of this argument? Investigating 137 countries from 1976 to 1996, State Repression and the Domestic Democratic Peace seeks to shed light on these questions.

Examines the most influential arguments about the consequences of political decentralization and challenges the conventional wisdom that decentralization improves government and economic performance. It will be relevant to political scientists and economists concerned with political economy and political institutions.

This book analyzes evidence from Southern Mexico about the effects of this global wave of policy reforms. The analysis shows that free-market reforms, rather than unleashing market forces, trigger the construction of different types of new regulatory institutions with contrasting consequences for economic efficiency and social justice.

This 2006 book provides a theory of the logic of survival of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), one of the most resilient autocratic regimes in the twentieth century. The theory explains the logic of 'electoral autocracies', and is the only systematic treatment in the literature today dealing with this form of autocracy.

This book argues that European economies were not deregulated in the 1980s. While old, politically centralized institutions have lost importance, institutional arrangements continue to shape economic behaviour of peripheral actors. The author outlines an alternative pattern for the 'micro-social' regulation of European economies.

Money, Markets, and the State, first published in 2000, provides in-depth explanations behind the various successes and failures of the economic policies of social democratic governments in five Western European countries. Dr Notermans argues that the fate of social democratic economic policy hinges critically on the political and institutional success of maintaining price stability.

In an in-depth comparative analysis, Stefano Bartolini studies the history of socialism and working-class politics through the social contexts, organizational structures, and political developments of thirteen socialist experiences in Western Europe.

Are newly established presidential democracies doomed to fail? Advocates of parliamentarism point to the fact that these regimes tend to last longer than presidential ones in support of their positive answer to this question. This book takes a contrary view on this issue.

Documents the emergence of a pattern of political instability in Latin America. Traditional military coups have receded in the region, but elected presidents are still ousted from power as a result of recurrent crises. Anibal Perez-Linan shows that presidential impeachment has become the main constitutional instrument employed by civilian elites to depose unpopular rulers. Based on detailed comparative research in five countries and extensive historical information, the book explains why crises without breakdown have become the dominant form of instability in recent years and why some presidents are removed from office while others survive in power. The analysis emphasizes the erosion of presidential approval resulting from corruption and unpopular policies, the formation of hostile coalitions in Congress, and the role of investigative journalism. This book challenges classic assumptions in studies of presidentialism and provides important insights for the fields of political communication, democratization, political behaviour, and institutional analysis.

This book presents a theoretical framework to discuss how governments coordinate budgeting decisions. There are two modes of fiscal governance conducive to greater fiscal discipline, a mode of delegation and a mode of contracts. These modes contrast with a fiefdom form of governance, in which the decision-making process is decentralized. An important insight is that the effectiveness of a given form of fiscal governance depends crucially upon the underlying political system. Delegation functions well when there are few, or no, ideological differences among government parties, whereas contracts are effective when there are many such differences. Empirically, delegation and contract states perform better than fiefdom states if they match the underlying political system. Additional chapters consider why countries have the fiscal institutions that they do, fiscal governance in Central and Eastern Europe, and the role of such institutions in the European Union.

Baker's study reveals that most Latin American citizens are enthusiastic about globalization because it has lowered the prices of many consumer goods and services. This sharp awareness informs Baker's argument that a political economy of consumption has replaced a previously dominant politics of labor and class in Latin America.

This book challenges the conventional wisdom that natural resource wealth promotes autocracy. Oil and other forms of mineral wealth can promote both authoritarianism and democracy, the book argues, but they do so through different mechanisms. Dunning builds and tests a theory that explains political variation across resource-rich states.

This book considers what collective and individual accountability require and provides the most extensive cross-national analysis of legislative voting undertaken to date. Drawing on extensive filed and archival research, Carey illustrates the balance between individualistic and collective representation in democracies, and how party unity in legislative voting shapes that balance.