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  3. Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics

This series publishes comparative research that seeks to explain important cross-national domestic political phenomena. The series is based on a broad conception of comparative politics and will promote critical dialogue among different approaches. The Editorial Board expects series authors to comply with the ethical and transparency standards and norms of the discipline as laid out in Principles and Guidance for Human Subjects Research (approved by the APSA Council, April 4, 2020).

  • General Editors: Kathleen Thelen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Editor Emeritas: Margaret Levi, Stanford University, California
  • Associate Editors: Lisa Blaydes, Stanford University, California, Catherine Boone, London School of Economics and Political Science , Thad Dunning, University of California, Berkeley, Anna Grzymala-Busse, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Torben Iversen, Harvard University, Massachusetts, Stathis Kalyvas, Yale University, Connecticut, Melanie Manion, Duke University, North Carolina, Prerna Singh, Brown University, Rhode Island, Dan Slater, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Susan Stokes, University of Chicago, Illinois, Tariq Thachil, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee, Erik Wibbels, Duke University, North Carolina

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218 results in Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics

Page 1 of 11

Building Social Mobility
  • How Subsidized Homeownership Creates Wealth, Dignity, and Voice in India
  • Tanu Kumar
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2025
    Print publication:
    31 August 2025
  • Which policies can help households improve their economic, social and political status? Building Social Mobility is an in-depth exploration of how policies to subsidize homeownership in low- and middle-income countries shape beneficiaries' decision-making in nearly every facet of their lives. Tanu Kumar develops a multidimensional and cross-disciplinary theory that argues that these initiatives affect how citizens invest in the future, climb out of poverty, develop agency in their social relationships, and exert power in local politics. Kumar supports the theory using a multi-method study of three policies in India. Evidence includes a natural experiment, original surveys, paired qualitative interviews, and an 18-year matched panel study. Building Social Mobility is a book about both housing and behavior. It goes beyond assessing the effects of an important policy to provide deep insights about how upwardly mobile citizens make decisions and the interactions between wealth, dignity, and voice in low- and middle-income countries.

The Birth of Democracy in South America
  • Raúl L. Madrid
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • South America contains some of the oldest democracies in the world, yet we still know relatively little about how and why democracy arose in the region. Raúl L. Madrid argues that three main developments – the professionalization of the military, the growth of parties, and splits within the ruling party – led to democratization in the early twentieth century. Military professionalization increased the incentives for the opposition to abandon the armed struggle and focus on the electoral path to power. The growth of parties boosted the capacity of the opposition to enact and enforce democratic reforms that would level the electoral playing field. And ruling party splits created the opportunity for the opposition and ruling party dissidents to ally and push through reforms. This persuasive and original book offers important implications for the study of democracy. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Incumbency Bias
  • Why Political Office is a Blessing and a Curse in Latin America
  • Luis Schiumerini
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2025
    Print publication:
    30 June 2025
  • The conventional wisdom in political science is that incumbency provides politicians with a massive electoral advantage. This assumption has been challenged by the recent anti-incumbent cycle. When is incumbency a blessing for politicians and when is it a curse? Incumbency Bias offers a unified theory that argues that democratic institutions will make incumbency a blessing or curse by shaping the alignment between citizens' expectations of incumbent performance and incumbents' capacity to deliver. This argument is tested through a comparative investigation of incumbency bias in Brazil, Argentina and Chile that draws on extensive fieldwork and an impressive array of experimental and observational evidence. Incumbency Bias demonstrates that rather than clientelistic or corrupt elites compromising accountability, democracy can generate an uneven playing field if citizens demand good governance but have limited information. While focused on Latin America, this book carries broader lessons for understanding the electoral returns to office around the world.

States against Nations
  • Meritocracy, Patronage, and the Challenges of Bureaucratic Selection
  • Nicholas Kuipers
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2025
    Print publication:
    31 May 2025
  • In States Against Nations, Nicholas Kuipers questions the virtues of meritocratic recruitment as the ideal method of bureaucratic selection. Kuipers argues that while civil service reform is often seen as an admirable act of state-building, it can actually undermine nation-building. Throughout the book, he shows that in countries with high levels of group-based inequality, privileged groups tend to outperform marginalized groups on entrance exams, leading to disproportionate representation in government positions. This dynamic exacerbates intergroup tensions and undermines efforts towards nation-building. Drawing on large-scale surveys, experiments, and archival documents, States Against Nations provides a thought-provoking perspective on the challenges of bureaucratic recruitment and unearths an overlooked tension between state- and nation-building.

Inside Parties
  • How Party Rules Shape Membership and Responsiveness
  • Georgia Kernell
  • Published online:
    25 February 2025
    Print publication:
    31 March 2025
  • While extensive research examines electoral systems and institutions at the country-level, few studies investigate rules within parties. Inside Parties changes the research landscape by systematically examining 65 parties in 20 parliamentary democracies around the world. Georgia Kernell develops a formal model of party membership and tests the hypotheses using cross-national surveys, member studies, experiments, and computer simulations of projected vote shares. She finds that a party's level of decentralization – the degree to which it incorporates rank and file members into decision making – determines which voters it best represents. Decentralized parties may attract more members to campaign for the party, but they do so at the cost of adopting more extreme positions that pull them away from moderate voters. Novel and comprehensive, Inside Parties is an indispensable study of how parties select candidates, nominate leaders, and set policy goals.

Inside Criminalized Governance
  • How and Why Gangs Rule the Streets of Rio de Janeiro
  • Nicholas Barnes
  • Published online:
    06 February 2025
    Print publication:
    13 February 2025
  • For over four decades, drug trafficking gangs have monopolized violence and engaged in various forms of governance across hundreds of informal neighborhoods known as favelas in Rio de Janeiro. Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork, over 200 interviews with gang members and residents, 400 archival documents, and 20,000 anonymous hotline denunciations of gang members, this book provides a comprehensive examination of the causes and consequences of these governance arrangements. The book documents the variation in gang-resident relationships – from responsive relations in which gangs provide a reliable form of order and stimulate the local economy, to coercive and unresponsive relations in which gangs offers residents few benefits – then identifies the factors that account for this variation. The result is an unprecedented ethnographic study that provides readers a unique, in-depth insight into the evolution of Rio de Janeiro's drug trafficking gangs from their emergence in the 1970s to the present day.

The Welfare Workforce
  • Why Mental Health Care Varies Across Affluent Democracies
  • Isabel M. Perera
  • Published online:
    02 January 2025
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
  • The Welfare Workforce is a thought-provoking exploration of mental health care in the United States and beyond. Although all the affluent democracies pursued deinstitutionalization, some failed to provide adequate services, while others overcame challenges of stigma and limited resources and successfully expanded care. Isabel M. Perera examines the role of the “welfare workforce” in providing social services to those who cannot demand them. Drawing on extensive research in four countries – the United States, France, Norway, and Sweden – Perera sheds light on post-industrial politics and the critical part played by those who work for the welfare state. A must-read for anyone interested in mental health care, social services, and the politics of welfare, The Welfare Workforce challenges conventional wisdom and offers new insights into the complex factors that contribute to the success or failure of mental health care systems. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Crime, Insecurity, and Community Policing
  • Experiments on Building Trust
  • Edited by Graeme Blair, Fotini Christia, Jeremy M. Weinstein
  • Published online:
    09 December 2024
    Print publication:
    05 December 2024
  • How can societies effectively reduce crime without exacerbating adversarial relationships between the police and citizens? In recent decades, perhaps the most celebrated innovation in police reform has been the introduction of community policing, where citizens are involved in building channels of dialogue and improving police-citizen collaboration. Despite the widespread adoption of community policing in the United States and increasingly in the developing world, there is still limited credible evidence about whether it realistically increases trust in the police or reduces crime. Through simultaneously coordinated field experiments in a diversity of political contexts, this book presents the outcome of a major research initiative into the efficacy of community policing. Scholars from around the world uncover whether, and under what conditions, this highly influential strategy for tackling crime and insecurity is effective. With its highly innovative approach to cumulative learning, this project represents a new frontier in the study of police reform.

Uprooted
  • How post-WWII Population Transfers Remade Europe
  • Volha Charnysh
  • Published online:
    07 November 2024
    Print publication:
    21 November 2024
  • Each year, millions of people are uprooted from their homes by wars, repression, natural disasters, and climate change. In Uprooted, Volha Charnysh presents a fresh perspective on the developmental consequences of mass displacement, arguing that accommodating the displaced population can strengthen receiving states and benefit local economies. Drawing on extensive research on post-WWII Poland and West Germany, Charnysh shows that the rupture of social ties and increased cultural diversity in affected communities not only decreased social cohesion, but also shored up the demand for state-provided resources, which facilitated the accumulation of state capacity. Over time, areas that received a larger and more diverse influx of migrants achieved higher levels of entrepreneurship, education, and income. With its rich insights and compelling evidence, Uprooted challenges common assumptions about the costs of forced displacement and cultural diversity and proposes a novel mechanism linking wars to state-building.

Inequality and Political Cleavage in Africa
  • Regionalism by Design
  • Catherine Boone
  • Published online:
    18 April 2024
    Print publication:
    25 April 2024
  • This pathbreaking work integrates African countries into broader comparative theories of how spatial inequality shapes political competition over the construction of markets, states, and nations. Existing literature on African countries has found economic cleavages, institutions, and policy choices to be of low salience in national politics. This book inverts these arguments. Boone trains our analytic focus on the spatial inequalities and territorial institutions that structure national politics in Africa, showing that regional cleavages find expression in both electoral competition and policy struggles over redistribution, sectoral investment, market integration, and state design. Leveraging comparative politics theory, Boone argues that African countries' regional and core-periphery tensions are similar to those that have shaped national economic integration in other parts of the world. Bringing together electoral and economic geography, the book offers a new and powerful map of political competition on the African continent.

The Patriarchal Political Order
  • The Making and Unraveling of the Gendered Participation Gap in India
  • Soledad Artiz Prillaman
  • Published online:
    30 November 2023
    Print publication:
    14 December 2023
  • Women across the Global South, and particularly in India, turn out to vote on election days but are noticeably absent from politics year-round. Why? In The Patriarchal Political Order, Soledad Artiz Prillaman combines descriptive and causal analysis of qualitative and quantitative data from more than 9,000 women and men in India to expose how coercive power structures diminish political participation for women. Prillaman unpacks how dominant men, imbued with authority from patriarchal institutions and norms, benefit from institutionalizing the household as a unitary political actor. Women vote because it serves the interests of men but stay out of politics more generally because it threatens male authority. Yet, when women come together collectively to demand access to political spaces, they become a formidable foe to the patriarchal political order. Eye-opening and inspiring, this book serves to deepen our understanding of what it means to create an inclusive democracy for all.

Fair Enough?
  • Support for Redistribution in the Age of Inequality
  • Charlotte Cavaillé
  • Published online:
    07 September 2023
    Print publication:
    21 September 2023
  • Fair Enough? proposes and tests a new framework for studying attitudes toward redistributive social policies. These attitudes, the book argues, are shaped by at least two motives. First, people support policies that increase their own expected income. Second, they support policies that move the status quo closer to what is prescribed by shared norms of fairness. In most circumstances, saying the “fair thing” is easier than reasoning according to one's pocketbook. But there are important exceptions: when policies have large and certain pocketbook consequences, people take the self-interested position instead of the 'fair' one. Fair Enough? builds on this simple framework to explain puzzling attitudinal trends in post-industrial democracies including a decline in support for redistribution in Great Britain, the erosion of social solidarity in France, and a declining correlation between income and support for redistribution in the United States.

The Scarce State
  • Inequality and Political Power in the Hinterland
  • Noah L. Nathan
  • Published online:
    23 February 2023
    Print publication:
    02 March 2023
  • States are often minimally present in the rural periphery. Yet a limited presence does not mean a limited impact. Isolated state actions in regions where the state is otherwise scarce can have outsize, long-lasting effects on society. The Scarce State reframes our understanding of the political economy of hinterlands through a multi-method study of Northern Ghana alongside shadow cases from other world regions. Drawing on a historical natural experiment, the book shows how the contemporary economic and political elite emerged in Ghana's hinterland, linking interventions by an ostensibly weak state to new socio-economic inequality and grassroots efforts to reimagine traditional institutions. The book demonstrates how these state-generated societal changes reshaped access to political power, producing dynastic politics, clientelism, and violence. The Scarce State challenges common claims about state-building and state weakness, provides new evidence on the historical origins of inequality, and reconsiders the mechanisms linking historical institutions to contemporary politics.

The Governance Cycle in Parliamentary Democracies
  • A Computational Social Science Approach
  • Scott de Marchi, Michael Laver
  • Published online:
    02 February 2023
    Print publication:
    09 February 2023
  • Parliamentary democracy involves a never-ending cycle of elections, government formations, and the need for governments to survive in potentially hostile environments. These conditions require members of any government to make decisions on a large number of issues, some of which sharply divide them. Officials resolve these divisions by 'logrolling'– conceding on issues they care less about, in exchange for reciprocal concessions on issues to which they attach more importance. Though realistically modeling this 'governance cycle' is beyond the scope of traditional formal analysis, this book attacks the problem computationally in two ways. Firstly, it models the behavior of “functionally rational” senior politicians who use informal decision heuristics to navigate their complex high stakes setting. Secondly, by applying computational methods to traditional game theory, it uses artificial intelligence to model how hyper-rational politicians might find strategies that are close to optimal.

State-Building as Lawfare
  • Custom, Sharia, and State Law in Postwar Chechnya
  • Egor Lazarev
  • Published online:
    02 February 2023
    Print publication:
    09 February 2023
  • State-Building as Lawfare explores the use of state and non-state legal systems by both politicians and ordinary people in postwar Chechnya. The book addresses two interrelated puzzles: why do local rulers tolerate and even promote non-state legal systems at the expense of state law, and why do some members of repressed ethnic minorities choose to resolve their everyday disputes using state legal systems instead of non-state alternatives? The book documents how the rulers of Chechnya promote and reinvent customary law and Sharia in order to borrow legitimacy from tradition and religion, increase autonomy from the metropole, and accommodate communal authorities and former rebels. At the same time, the book shows how prolonged armed conflict disrupted the traditional social hierarchies and pushed some Chechen women to use state law, spurring state formation from below.

Recognition Politics
  • Indigenous Rights and Ethnic Conflict in the Andes
  • Lorenza B. Fontana
  • Published online:
    05 January 2023
    Print publication:
    05 January 2023
  • This pioneering work explores a new wave of widely overlooked conflicts that have emerged across the Andean region, coinciding with the implementation of internationally acclaimed indigenous rights. Why are groups that have peacefully cohabited for decades suddenly engaging in hostile and, at times, violent behaviours? What is the link between these conflicts and changes in collective self-identification, claim-making, and rent-seeking dynamics? And how, in turn, are these changes driven by broader institutional, legal and policy reforms? By shifting the focus to the 'post-recognition,' this unique study sets the agenda for a new generation of research on the practical consequences of the employment of ethnic-based rights. To develop the core argument on the links between recognition reforms and 'recognition conflicts', Lorenza Fontana draws on extensive empirical material and case studies from three Andean countries – Bolivia, Colombia and Peru – which have been global forerunners in the implementation of recognition politics.

Precolonial Legacies in Postcolonial Politics
  • Representation and Redistribution in Decentralized West Africa
  • Martha Wilfahrt
  • Published online:
    14 October 2022
    Print publication:
    22 December 2022
  • Why are some communities able to come together to improve their collective lot while others are not? Looking at variation in local government performance in decentralized West Africa, this book advances a novel answer: communities are better able to coordinate around basic service delivery when their formal jurisdictional boundaries overlap with informal social institutions, or norms. This book identifies the precolonial past as the driver of striking subnational variation in the present because these social institutions only encompass the many villages of the local state in areas that were once home to precolonial polities. The book develops and tests a theory of institutional congruence to document how the past shapes contemporary elite approaches to redistribution within the local state. Where precolonial kingdoms left behind collective identities and dense social networks, local elites find it easier to cooperate following decentralization. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Power in Movement
  • Social Movements and Contentious Politics
  • 4th edition
  • Sidney Tarrow
  • Published online:
    25 August 2022
    Print publication:
    11 August 2022
  • Social movements have an elusive power but one that is altogether real. From the French and American revolutions to the Arab Spring, and to ethnic and terrorist movements of today, contentious politics exercises a fleeting but powerful influence on politics, society and international relations. Covering key episodes up to the attack on the US Capitol in January 2021, leading scholar of politics and government Sidney Tarrow uses a number of recent, historical and comparative case studies to introduce his theory of social movements and political parties. The fourth edition of this classic study emphasizes the symbiotic relations between social movements and parties by focusing attention on the growing role of populism in Europe, Latin America, and the US; analyzes the role of social media as a mobilizing and aggregating force for social movements; highlights the relations between structural changes in the economy and new forms of contention; draws on new material on movements in the Global South and the relations between movements and democracy.

Coalitions of the Weak
  • Victor C. Shih
  • Published online:
    26 May 2022
    Print publication:
    02 June 2022
  • For the first time since Mao, a Chinese leader may serve a life-time tenure. Xi Jinping may well replicate Mao's successful strategy to maintain power. If so, what are the institutional and policy implications for China? Victor C. Shih investigates how leaders of one-party autocracies seek to dominate the elite and achieve true dictatorship, governing without fear of internal challenge or resistance to major policy changes. Through an in-depth look of late-Mao politics informed by thousands of historical documents and data analysis, Coalitions of the Weak uncovers Mao's strategy of replacing seasoned, densely networked senior officials with either politically tainted or inexperienced officials. The book further documents how a decentralized version of this strategy led to two generations of weak leadership in the Chinese Communist Party, creating the conditions for Xi's rapid consolidation of power after 2012.

Big Data and the Welfare State
  • How the Information Revolution Threatens Social Solidarity
  • Torben Iversen, Philipp Rehm
  • Published online:
    25 May 2022
    Print publication:
    19 May 2022
  • A core principle of the welfare state is that everyone pays taxes or contributions in exchange for universal insurance against social risks such as sickness, old age, unemployment, and plain bad luck. This solidarity principle assumes that everyone is a member of a single national insurance pool, and it is commonly explained by poor and asymmetric information, which undermines markets and creates the perception that we are all in the same boat. Living in the midst of an information revolution, this is no longer a satisfactory approach. This book explores, theoretically and empirically, the consequences of 'big data' for the politics of social protection. Torben Iversen and Philipp Rehm argue that more and better data polarize preferences over public insurance and often segment social insurance into smaller, more homogenous, and less redistributive pools, using cases studies of health and unemployment insurance and statistical analyses of life insurance, credit markets, and public opinion.

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