Books in the Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics series

Trust and cooperation are at the heart of the two most important approaches to comparative politics - rational choice and political culture. Yet we know little about trust's relationship to political institutions. This book sets out a rationalist theory of how institutions - and in particular informal institutions - can affect trust without reducing it to fully determine expectations. It then shows how this theory can be applied to comparative political economy, and in particular to explaining inter-firm cooperation in industrial districts, geographical areas of intense small firm collaboration. The book compares trust and cooperation in two prominent districts in the literature, one in Emilia Romagna, Italy, and the other in Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany. It also sets out and applies a theory of how national informal institutions may change as a result of changes in global markets, and shows how similar mechanisms may explain persistent distrust too among Sicilian Mafiosi.

Murillo's analysis of the Latin American electricity and telecommunications sectors shows that different degrees of electoral competition and the partisan composition of the government were crucial in resolving policymakers' tension between the interests of voters and the economic incentives generated by international financial markets and private corporations.

What happens to the rural folk - to their power and economic well-being - when development takes place in a democratic framework? Focusing on India, where an exceptional democratic system has flourished for four decades, this book examines how the rural sector uses its numbers in a democracy to further its economic and political interests.

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.

Government size has become the most important policy difference between the left and right in post-war politics but the formation of the government's funding base is also important. In this book, Kato finds that the differentiation of tax revenue structure is path dependent upon the shift to regressive taxation.

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.

This book compares two ideologically opposed examples of women's movements in Chile: the movement against the democratically-elected government of President Salvador Allende and that against the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. This book explains the similarities between these movements.

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.

This book investigates the history of political and economic change in similar Akan villages on either side of the Ghana-Cote d'Ivoire border. Drawing on extensive village-based fieldwork and archival research, Lauren M. MacLean examines the historical construction of the state role in mediating risk at the local level.

Political parties provide a crucial link between voters and politicians. This link takes a variety of forms in democratic regimes, from the organization of political machines built around clientelistic networks to the establishment of sophisticated programmatic parties. Latin American Party Systems provides a novel theoretical argument to account for differences in the degree to which political party systems in the region were programmatically structured at the end of the twentieth century. Based on a diverse array of indicators and surveys of party legislators and public opinion, the book argues that learning and adaptation through fundamental policy innovations are the main mechanisms by which politicians build programmatic parties. Marshalling extensive evidence, the book's analysis shows the limits of alternative explanations and substantiates a sanguine view of programmatic competition, nevertheless recognizing that this form of party system organization is far from ubiquitous and enduring in Latin America.

This 2010 book examines the politics, history, and public policy of three countries in different continents. It shows how these countries' economic systems, social welfare policies, and political institutions have co-evolved over time to give these countries remarkably different abilities to adapt to the pressures they face in the twenty-first century.

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.

Immigration and Conflict in Europe presents a wealth of qualitative and quantitative materials on immigrant conflict in Great Britain, Germany, and France from the postwar years until the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Ordering Power draws on theoretical insights dating back to Thomas Hobbes to develop a unified framework for explaining the tremendous variation in state capacity and authoritarian durability in Southeast Asia.

This book examines state-building and market-building in 25 post-communist countries from 1990 to 2004. Timothy Frye argues that democracy promotes economic reform, capable state institutions, and generous transfer payments when political polarization is low, but that increases in polarization dampen the positive impact of democracy by making policy less stable.

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.

Social scientists teach that politicians favor groups that are organized over those that are not. Gehlbach uses the postcommunist experience to suggest an alternative model of policy choice, focusing on the incentive of politicians to promote sectors that are relatively easy to tax, regardless of their organization.

This book explores the relationship between workers' rights and economic globalization in developing countries. Mosley posits that multinational production has both positive and negative consequences for labor rights. This book speaks to contemporary debates regarding the race to the bottom, corporate social responsibility, and economic development in low- and middle-income nations.

This book explores the political sources of racially segmented elections and ANC dominance in South Africa.

The rules governing hostile takeovers have been fiercely contested since the 1990s, but such struggles rarely took place in parliaments. This book studies these political battles in four countries - France, Germany, Japan and the Netherlands.

In sub-Saharan Africa, property relationships around land and access to natural resources vary across localities, districts and farming regions. These differences produce patterned variations in relationships between individuals, communities and the state. This book analyzes the politics of land and the use of natural resources in Africa.

In this provocative and wide-ranging book, Ken Kollman examines the histories of the US government, the Catholic Church, General Motors, and the European Union as examples of federated systems that centralized power over time. He shows how their institutions became locked-in to intensive power in the executive.

This book argues that alien rule can become legitimate to the degree that it provides governance that is both effective and fair. Governance is effective to the degree that citizens have access to an expanding economy and fair to the degree that rulers act according to the strictures of procedural justice.

This book argues that Latin America has a distinctive, enduring form of hierarchical capitalism characterized by multinational corporations, diversified business groups, low skills and segmented labor markets. It is intended to open a new debate on the nature of capitalism in Latin America and link that discussion to related research on comparative capitalism in other parts of the world.

Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements, first published in 1996, examines social movements in a comparative perspective, focusing upon the role of ideology and beliefs, mechanisms of mobilization, and how politics shapes the development and outcomes of movements.

Examining a broad range of countries, time periods and policy areas, Gingrich helps readers make sense of the complexity of market reforms in the industrialized world. The use of innovative multi-case studies and in-depth interviews with senior policymakers enriches the debate and brings clarity to this multifaceted topic.

Using a historical and comparative analysis of countries as diverse as Sweden, Greece, England, Spain, France, Italy, Iceland and the Netherlands, this 2001 book charts the evolution of clientelist practices in several western European countries in order to identify the circumstances under which these practices are retained, transformed or eradicated.

This book examines the causal impact of ideology through a comparative-historical analysis of three cases of 'post-imperial democracy': the early Third Republic in France (1870-86); the Weimar Republic in Germany (1918-34); and post-Soviet Russia (1992-2008).

In the later decades of the twentieth century, Africa plunged into political chaos. States failed, governments became predators, and citizens took up arms. In When Things Fell Apart, Robert H. Bates advances an exploration of state failure in Africa. In so doing, he not only plumbs the depths of the continent's late-century tragedy, but also the logic of political order and the foundations of the state. This book covers a wide range of territory by drawing on materials from Rwanda, Sudan, Liberia, and Congo. A must-read for scholars and policy makers concerned with political conflict and state failure.

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.