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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 6 of 11

Between States
  • Interim Governments in Democratic Transitions
  • Yossi Shain, Juan J. Linz
  • Published online:
    05 August 2012
    Print publication:
    26 May 1995
  • Between States is the first book that assesses systematically the broad implications of interim governments in the establishment of democratic regimes and on the existence of states. Based on historical and contemporary democratisation experiences, the book presents four ideal types of interim government: opposition-led provisional governments, power-sharing interim governments, incumbent-led caretaker governments, and international interim government by the United Nations. The first part explores the theoretical problems of each of these models from a broad comparative perspective. It uses as illustrations historical and contemporary cases that present a wide spectrum of contexts for comparison. The second part provides extensive case studies that are intended to illustrate, appraise, amplify and criticise the analysis in volume one. These include Iran, East Germany, Portugal, Afghanistan, and Yugoslavia.

Western Intervention in the Balkans
  • The Strategic Use of Emotion in Conflict
  • Roger D. Petersen
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    30 September 2011
  • Conflicts involve powerful experiences. The residue of these experiences is captured by the concept and language of emotion. Indiscriminate killing creates fear; targeted violence produces anger and a desire for vengeance; political status reversals spawn resentment; cultural prejudices sustain ethnic contempt. These emotions can become resources for political entrepreneurs. A broad range of Western interventions are based on a view of human nature as narrowly rational. Correspondingly, intervention policy generally aims to alter material incentives ('sticks and carrots') to influence behavior. In response, poorer and weaker actors who wish to block or change this Western implemented 'game' use emotions as resources. This book examines the strategic use of emotion in the conflicts and interventions occurring in the Western Balkans over a twenty-year period. The book concentrates on the conflicts among Albanian and Slavic populations (Kosovo, Montenegro, Macedonia, South Serbia), along with some comparisons to Bosnia.

Building States and Markets after Communism
  • The Perils of Polarized Democracy
  • Timothy Frye
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    07 June 2010
  • Does democracy promote the creation of market economies and robust state institutions? Do state-building and market-building go hand in hand? Or do they work at cross-purposes? This book examines the relationship between state-building and market-building in 25 post-communist countries from 1990 to 2004. Based on cross-national statistical analyses, surveys of business managers, and case studies from Russia, Bulgaria, Poland, and Uzbekistan, Timothy Frye demonstrates that democracy is associated with more economic reform, stronger state institutions, and higher social transfers when political polarization is low. But he also finds that increases in political polarization dampen the positive impact of democracy by making policy less predictable. He traces the roots of political polarization to high levels of income inequality and the institutional legacy of communist rule. By identifying when and how democracy fosters markets and states, this work contributes to long-standing debates in comparative politics, public policy, and post-communist studies.

Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism
  • Edited by Herbert Kitschelt, Peter Lange, Gary Marks, John D. Stephens
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    13 January 1999
  • In the early 1980s, many observers, argued that powerful organized economic interests and social democratic parties created successful mixed economies promoting economic growth, full employment, and a modicum of social equality. The present book assembles scholars with formidable expertise in the study of advanced capitalist politics and political economy to reexamine this account from the vantage point of the second half of the 1990s. The authors find that the conventional wisdom no longer adequately reflects the political and economic realities. Advanced democracies have responded in path-dependent fashion to such novel challenges as technological change, intensifying international competition, new social conflict, and the erosion of established patterns of political mobilization. The book rejects, however, the currently widespread expectation that 'internationalization' makes all democracies converge on similar political and economic institutions and power relations. Diversity among capitalist democracies persists, though in a different fashion than in the 'Golden Age' of rapid economic growth after World War II.

Clientelism, Interests, and Democratic Representation
  • The European Experience in Historical and Comparative Perspective
  • Edited by Simona Piattoni
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    10 September 2001
  • This 2001 book charts the evolution of clientelist practices in several western European countries. Through the historical and comparative analysis of countries as diverse as Sweden and Greece, England and Spain, France and Italy, Iceland and the Netherlands, the authors study both the 'supply-side' - the institutional context in which party leaders devise and implement their political strategies - and the 'demand-side' - the degree of 'empowerment' of civil society - of clientelism. This approach contends that clientelism is a particular mix of particularism and universalism, in which interests are aggregated at the level of the individual and his family 'particularism', but in which all interests can potentially find expression and accommodation 'universalism'. In contrast, 'consociationalism' and 'corporatism' are systems of interest representation in which interests are aggregated at the level of 'social pillar' or the functional association 'universalism', but in which not all interests can find representation and accommodation 'particularism'.

Paths toward Democracy
  • The Working Class and Elites in Western Europe and South America
  • Ruth Berins Collier
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    13 September 1999
  • The question of whether democratization is an elite-led process from above or a popular triumph from below continues to be an area of contention among political scientists. Examining the experiences of countries which have provided the main empirical base for recent theorizing, namely, Western Europe and South America in the 19th and early 20th centuries and again in the 1970s and 1980s, this book delineates a more complex and varied set of patterns. The volume explores the politics of democratization through a comparative analysis that examines the role of labor in relation to elite strategies in both contemporary and historical perspectives. In her detailed analysis, Professor Collier also describes multiple patterns within each historical period, challenges conventional understandings of these events, and recaptures a role for unions and labor-based parties in contemporary processes of democratization.

Power in Movement
  • Social Movements and Contentious Politics
  • 3rd edition
  • Sidney G. Tarrow
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    04 February 2011
  • Social movements have an elusive power but one that is altogether real. From the French and American revolutions to the post-Soviet, ethnic and terrorist movements of today, contentious politics exercises a fleeting but powerful influence on politics, society and international relations. This study surveys the modern history of the modern social movements in the West and their diffusion to the global South through war, colonialism and diffusion, and it puts forward a theory to explain its cyclical surges and declines. It offers an interpretation of the power of movements that emphasizes effects on the lives of militants, policy reforms, political institutions and cultural change. The book focuses on the rise and fall of social movements as part of contentious politics in general and as the outcome of changes in political opportunities and constraints, state strategy, the new media of communication and transnational diffusion.

Comparative Politics
  • Rationality, Culture, and Structure
  • 2nd edition
  • Mark Irving Lichbach, Alan S. Zuckerman
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    02 February 2009
  • Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, and Structure is a revised second edition of the volume that guided students and scholars through the intellectual demands of comparative politics. Retaining a focus on the field's research schools, it now pays parallel attention to the pragmatics of causal research. Mark Lichbach begins with a review of discovery, explanation and evidence and Alan Zuckerman argues for explanations with social mechanisms. Ira Katznelson, writing on structuralist analyses, Margaret Levi on rational choice theory, and Marc Ross on culturalist analyses, assess developments in the field's research schools. Subsequent chapters explore the relationship among the paradigms and current research: the state, culturalist themes and political economy, the international context of comparative politics, contentious politics, multi-level analyses, nested voters, endogenous institutions, welfare states, and ethnic politics. The volume offers a rigorous and exciting assessment of the past decade of scholarship in comparative politics.

Skeletons in the Closet
  • Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Europe
  • Monika Nalepa
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    25 January 2010
  • This book tackles three puzzles of pacted transitions to democracy. First, why do autocrats ever step down from power peacefully if they know that they may be held accountable for their involvement in the ancien régime? Second, when does the opposition indeed refrain from meting out punishment to the former autocrats once the transition is complete? Third, why, in some countries, does transitional justice get adopted when successors of former communists hold parliamentary majorities? Monika Nalepa argues that infiltration of the opposition with collaborators of the authoritarian regime can serve as insurance against transitional justice, making their commitments to amnesty credible. This explanation also accounts for the timing of transitional justice across East Central Europe. Nalepa supports her theory using a combination of elite interviews, archival evidence, and statistical analysis of survey experiments in Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.

Post-Communist Party Systems
  • Competition, Representation, and Inter-Party Cooperation
  • Herbert Kitschelt, Zdenka Mansfeldova, Radoslaw Markowski, Gabor Toka
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    13 August 1999
  • Post-Communist Party Systems examines democratic party competition in four post-communist polities in the mid-1990s: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. Legacies of pre-communist rule turn out to play as much a role in accounting for differences as the institutional differences incorporated in the new democratic rules of the game. The book demonstrates various developments within the four countries with regard to different voter appeal of parties, patterns of voter representation, and dispositions to join other parties in legislative or executive alliances. The authors also present interesting avenues of comparison for broader sets of countries.

Contemporary Capitalism
  • The Embeddedness of Institutions
  • Edited by J. Rogers Hollingsworth, Robert Boyer
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    28 March 1997
  • This book argues that there is no single best institutional arrangement for organizing modern societies. Therefore, the market should not be considered the "ideal and universal" arrangement for coordinating economic activity. Instead, the editors argue, the economic institutions of capitalism exhibit a large variety of objectives and tools that complement each other and cannot work in isolation. The various chapters of the book explore challenging issues in the analysis of differing institutional arrangements for coordinating economic activity, asking what logics and functions they follow and why they emerge, mature and persist in the forms they do. They conclude that any institutional arrangement has its strengths and weaknesses and that such institutions evolve according to a logic specific to each society. They also note that institutions continuously respond to changing circumstances, and are not static entities.

Democratic Experiments in Africa
  • Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective
  • Michael Bratton, Nicholas van de Walle
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    13 August 1997
  • Between 1989 and 1994, 41 out of 47 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa underwent significant political reform, including in many cases the first competitive elections in a generation. How can this wave of political liberalization be explained? Why did some countries complete a democratic transition, while others could not sustain more than limited political reform and others still suffered authoritarian reversals? What are the long term prospects for democracy in Africa? This study constitutes the first comprehensive analysis of democratic transitions in Sub-Saharan Africa. Using an original data set they assembled, the authors demonstrate that economic and international forces often provided the context in which political liberalization occurred, but cannot by themselves explain the observed outcomes. Instead, the authors develop a political-institutional theoretical framework in which the distinctive political traditions of Africa's neopatrimonial states are shown to have powerfully shaped the regime transitions.

Electoral Systems and the Balance of Consumer-Producer Power
  • Eric C. C. Chang, Mark Andreas Kayser, Drew A. Linzer, Ronald Rogowski
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    22 November 2010
  • 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.

Power in Movement
  • Social Movements and Contentious Politics
  • 2nd edition
  • Sidney Tarrow
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    13 May 1998
  • Unlike political or economic institutions, social movements have an elusive power, but one that is no less real. From the French and American revolutions through the democratic and workers' movements of the nineteenth century to the totalitarian movements of today, movements exercise a fleeting but powerful influence on politics and society. This study surveys the history of the social movement, puts forward a theory of collective action to explain its surges and declines, and offers an interpretation of the power of movement that emphasises its effects on personal lives, policy reforms and political culture. While covering cultural, organisational and personal sources of movements' power, the book emphasises the rise and fall of social movements as part of political struggle and as the outcome of changes in political opportunity structure.

Understanding Ethnic Violence
  • Fear, Hatred, and Resentment in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe
  • Roger D. Petersen
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    02 September 2002
  • This 2002 book seeks to identify the motivations of individual perpetrators of ethnic violence. The work develops four models, labeled Fear, Hatred, Resentment, and Rage, gleaned from existing social science literatures. The empirical chapters apply these four models to important events of ethnic conflict in Eastern Europe, from the 1905 Russian Revolution to the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Each historical chapter generates questions about the timing and target of ethnic violence. The four models are then applied to the case, to learn which does the best job in explaining the observed patterns of ethnic conflict. The findings challenge conventional wisdom, in that the Resentment narrative, centered on a sense of unjust group status, provides the best fit for a variety of cases. While Fear, Hatred, and Rage do motivate hostile actions, Resentment pervasively appears to inflame ethnic animosity and drive outcomes in the timing and pattern of action.

Post-Imperial Democracies
  • Ideology and Party Formation in Third Republic France, Weimar Germany, and Post-Soviet Russia
  • Stephen E. Hanson
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    05 July 2010
  • 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). Hanson argues that political ideologies are typically necessary for the mobilization of enduring, independent national party organizations in uncertain democracies. By presenting an explicit and desirable picture of the political future, successful ideologues induce individuals to embrace a long-run strategy of cooperation with other converts. When enough new converts cooperate in this way, it enables sustained collective action to defend and extend party power. Successful party ideologies thus have the character of self-fulfilling prophecies: by portraying the future polity as one organized to serve the interests of those loyal to specific ideological principles, they help to bring political organizations centered on these principles into being.

The Comparative Political Economy of the Welfare State
  • Thomas Janoski, Alexander M. Hicks
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    28 January 1994
  • Comparative research is exploding with alternative methodological and theoretical approaches. In this book, experts in each one of these methods provide a comprehensive explanation and application of time-series, pooled, event history and Boolean methods to substantive problems of the welfare state. Each section of the book focuses on a different method with a general introduction to the methods and then two papers using the method to deal with analysis concerning welfare state problems in a political economy perspective. Scholars concerned with methodology in this area cannot afford to overlook this book because it will help them keep up on proliferating methodologies. Graduate students in political science and sociology will find this book extremely useful in their careers.

Deliberate Discretion?
  • The Institutional Foundations of Bureaucratic Autonomy
  • John D. Huber, Charles R. Shipan
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    02 September 2002
  • The laws that legislatures adopt provide the most important and definitive opportunity elected politicians have to define public policy. But the ways politicians use laws to shape policy varies considerably across polities. In some cases, legislatures adopt detailed and specific laws in efforts to micromanage policy-making processes. In others, they adopt general and vague laws that leave the executive and bureaucrats substantial autonomy to fill in the policy details. What explains these differences across political systems, and how do they matter? The authors address this issue by developing and testing a comparative theory of how laws shape bureaucratic autonomy. Drawing on a range of evidence from advanced parliamentary democracies and the American states, they argue that particular institutional forms have a systematic and predictable effect on how politicians use laws to shape the policy making process.

Accountability without Democracy
  • Solidary Groups and Public Goods Provision in Rural China
  • Lily L. Tsai
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    27 August 2007
  • Examines the fundamental issue of 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. The state often lacks sufficient resources to monitor its officials closely, and citizens are limited in their power to elect officials they believe will perform well and to remove them when they do not. The answer, Lily L. Tsai found, lies in a community's social institutions. Even when formal democratic and bureaucratic institutions of accountability are weak, government officials can still be subject to informal rules and norms created by community solidary groups that have earned high moral standing in the community.

Social Revolutions in the Modern World
  • Theda Skocpol
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    30 September 1994
  • 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? Skocpol shows how she and other scholars have used ideas about states and societies to identify the particular types of regimes that are susceptible to the growth of revolutionary movements and vulnerable to transfers of state power to revolutionary challengers. Skocpol engages in thoughtful dialogue with critics, and she suggests how culture and ideology can properly be incorporated into historical and comparative studies. She also vigorously defends the value of an institutionalist, comparative and historical approach against recent challenges from Marxists, rational choice theorists, and culturally oriented interpreters of particular revolutions.

Page 6 of 11