Books in the Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions series

As capitalism defeated socialism in Eastern Europe, the market displaced the state in the developing world. Beyond the Miracle of the Market, first published in 2005, focuses on Kenya, a country that continued to grow while others declined in Africa, and mounts a prescient critique of the neo-classical turn in development economics.

Just when Japan and the US are both caught up in a major debate over the effectiveness of their governments this volume offers new explanations of their comparative strengths and weaknesses. Why can Japan keep building nuclear power plants but face difficulty building an information superhighway? Why is the opposite the case in the US?

There is surprisingly little comparative work on how presidential democracies function. The essays in this volume show, through case studies from Asia, Latin America, and Central Europe, how presidential democracies deal with the challenges of economic reform.

This book adapts a formal model of elections and legislative politics to study party politics in Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Britain, and the United States. The model uses the idea of valence, that is the party leader's non-policy electoral popularity.

This analysis builds on earlier theoretical work by Mancur Olson, William Riker and Douglass North. Professor Schofield emphasizes that under some conditions architects of political change can put a new perspective on societal quandaries, such that societies can choose an option that has a better 'probability of a fit choice'.

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.

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.

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.

A rational choice model analyses the problems of voter choice, the emergence of partly loyalty and cabinet government in Victorian England.

This book applies the basic ideas and models of economics to develop a single transactions framework to explain the key institutional arrangements across the whole range of public sector organization, the regulatory commission, the executive tax-financed bureau, and the state-owned enterprise.

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.

Examining constitutional rules and power-sharing in Africa reveals how some dictatorships become institutionalized, rule-based systems.

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 explores the breakdown of the institutions that govern natural resource exports in developing states, using case studies of timber booms in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. These institutions often succumb to 'rent-seizing' - the predatory behavior of politicians who seek to supply rent to others.

The 1980s and 1990s have seen several authoritarian governments voluntarily cede power to constitutionally elected democratic governments. John Londregan uses Chile as a case study of this phenomenon, exploring what sorts of guarantees are required for those who are ceding power and how those guarantees later work out in practice.

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.

Political economy has been an essential realm of inquiry and has attracted myriad intellectual adherents for much of the period of modern scholarship. This volume calls for a reaffirmation of the importance of the unified study of political economy, and explores the frontiers of the interaction between politics and markets.

Just when Japan and the US are both caught up in a major debate over the effectiveness of their governments this volume offers new explanations of their comparative strengths and weaknesses. Why can Japan keep building nuclear power plants but face difficulty building an information superhighway? Why is the opposite the case in the US?

Explores the nature of institutions and institutional change.

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.

This book uses a rational-choice approach to study the impact of Japanese law on economic growth in Japan.

In Making a Market, Jean Ensminger analyses the process by which the market was introduced into the economy of a group of Kenyan pastoralists. This 1993 case study points out the importance of understanding the roles of ideology and bargaining power - in addition to pure economic forces, such as changing relative prices - in shaping market institutions.

Ideology and Strategy is an analysis of issues in Swedish parliamentary history over the past 100 years. Leif Lewin has chosen eight issues and scrutinized them using traditional analysis and, importantly, game-theoretic reasoning.

Integrates economics and politics, theory and econometrics, to provide the first coherent and general formal model of US political economy. Addresses formal tests of rationality in voting behaviour and rational voter behaviour when the executive and legislature are chosen simultaneously. Blends game theory, macroeconomics, voting theory, and econometrics.

Libecap examines the problems in negotiations among claimants and the political and economic considerations that influence property rights arrangements. Through case studies of different natural resources, the author analyses a variety of contractual negotiations and economic outcomes. This book is an important contribution to property rights theory and American economic history.

Individuals, Institutions, and Markets offers a theory of how the institutional framework of a society emerges and how markets within institutions work. Integrating the latest scholarship in economics, sociology, political science, law, and anthropology, Mantzavinos offers a genuine political economy showing how social institutions affect economic outcomes.

This 2000 book addresses the discrepancy between the developing economy of England between 1720-1844, and the stagnant legal framework of business organization during the same period. The book focuses on the ways by which the legal-economic nexus of the period gave rise to the modern institutions of organizing business.

This 2001 book explains why African countries have remained mired in a disastrous economic crisis since the late 1970s. It shows that dynamics internal to African state structures largely explain this failure to overcome economic difficulties rather than external pressures on these same structures as is often argued. Far from being prevented from undertaking reforms by societal interest and pressure groups, clientelism within the state elite, ideological factors and low state capacity have resulted in some limited reform, but much prevarication and manipulation of the reform process, by governments which do not really believe that reform will be effective, which often oppose reforms because they would undercut the patronage and rent-seeking practices which undergird political authority, and which lack the administrative and technical capacity to implement much reform. Over time, state decay has increased.

Managerial Dilemmas extends the use of analytical techniques from organisational economics to the spheres of organisational culture and leadership in politics and business.

Most citizens seem under-informed about politics. Many experts claim that only well-informed citizens can make good political decisions. Is this claim correct? In The Democratic Dilemma, Professors Lupia and McCubbins combine insights from political science, economics and the cognitive sciences to explain how citizens gather and use information.