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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 7 of 11

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.

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.

Subversive Institutions
  • The Design and the Destruction of Socialism and the State
  • Valerie Bunce
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    28 January 1999
  • From 1989 to 1992, all of the socialist dictatorships in Europe (including the Soviet Union) collapsed, as did the Soviet bloc. Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia dismembered, and the Cold War international order came to an abrupt end. Based on a series of controlled comparisons among regimes and states, Valerie Bunce argues in this book that two factors account for these remarkable developments: the institutional design of socialism as a regime, a state, and a bloc, and the rapid expansion during the 1980s of opportunities for domestic and international change. When combined, institutions and opportunities explain not just when, how, and why these regimes and states disintegrated, but also some of the most puzzling features of these developments - why, for example, the collapse of socialism was largely peaceful and why Yugoslavia, but not the Soviet Union or Czechoslovakia, disintegrated through war.

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.

Political Competition, Partisanship, and Policy Making in Latin American Public Utilities
  • Maria Victoria Murillo
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    24 August 2009
  • This book studies policymaking in the Latin American electricity and telecommunication sectors. 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 in the context of capital scarcity. Electoral competition by credible challengers dissuaded politicians from adopting policies deemed necessary to attract capital inflows. When electoral competition was low, financial pressures prevailed, but the partisan orientation of reformers shaped the regulatory design of market-friendly reforms. In the post-reform period, moreover, electoral competition and policymakers' partisanship shaped regulatory redistribution between residential consumers, large users, and privatized providers.

Making Race and Nation
  • A Comparison of South Africa, the United States, and Brazil
  • Anthony W. Marx
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    28 December 1997
  • Why and how has race become a central aspect of politics during this century? This book addresses this pressing question by comparing South African apartheid and resistance to it, the United States Jim Crow law and protests against it, and the myth of racial democracy in Brazil. Anthony Marx argues that these divergent experiences had roots in the history of slavery, colonialism, miscegenation and culture, but were fundamentally shaped by impediments and efforts to build national unity. In South Africa and the United States, ethnic or regional conflicts among whites were resolved by unifying whites and excluding blacks, while Brazil's longer established national unity required no such legal racial crutch. Race was thus central to projects of nation-building, and nationalism shaped uses of race. Professor Marx extends this argument to explain popular protest and the current salience of issues of race.

The Architecture of Government
  • Rethinking Political Decentralization
  • Daniel Treisman
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    02 July 2007
  • Since the days of Montesquieu and Jefferson, political decentralization has been seen as a force for better government and economic performance. It is thought to bring government 'closer to the people', nurture civic virtue, protect liberty, exploit local information, stimulate policy innovation, and alleviate ethnic tensions. Inspired by such arguments, and generously funded by the major development agencies, countries across the globe have been racing to devolve power to local governments. This book re-examines the arguments that underlie the modern faith in decentralization. Using logical analysis and formal modeling, and appealing to numerous examples, it shows that most are based on vague intuitions or partial views that do not withstand scrutiny. A review of empirical studies of decentralization finds these as inconclusive and mutually contradictory as the theories they set out to test.

The Evolution of Modern States
  • Sweden, Japan, and the United States
  • Sven Steinmo
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    19 July 2010
  • The Evolution of Modern States, first published in 2010, is a significant contribution to the literatures on political economy, globalization, historical institutionalism, and social science methodology. The book begins with a simple question: why do rich capitalist democracies respond so differently to the common pressures they face in the early twenty-first century? Drawing on insights from evolutionary theory, Sven Steinmo challenges the common equilibrium view of politics and economics and argues that modern political economies are best understood as complex adaptive systems. The book examines the political, social, and economic history of three different nations - Sweden, Japan, and the United States - and explains how and why these countries have evolved along such different trajectories over the past century. Bringing together social and economic history, institutionalism, and evolutionary theory, Steinmo thus provides a comprehensive explanation for differing responses to globalization as well as a new way of analyzing institutional and social change.

Labor Rights and Multinational Production
  • Layna Mosley
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    01 November 2010
  • Labor Rights and Multinational Production investigates the relationship between workers' rights and multinational production. Mosley argues that some types of multinational production, embodied in directly owned foreign investment, positively affect labor rights. But other types of international production, particularly subcontracting, can engender competitive races to the bottom in labor rights. To test these claims, Mosley presents newly generated measures of collective labor rights, covering a wide range of low- and middle-income nations for the 1985–2002 period. Labor Rights and Multinational Production suggests that the consequences of economic openness for developing countries are highly dependent on foreign firms' modes of entry and, more generally, on the precise way in which each developing country engages the global economy. The book contributes to academic literature in comparative and international political economy, and to public policy debates regarding the effects of globalization.

Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador
  • Elisabeth Jean Wood
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    04 August 2003
  • Widespread support among rural people for the leftist insurgency during the civil war in El Salvador challenges conventional interpretations of collective action. Those who supplied tortillas, information, and other aid to guerillas took mortal risks and yet stood to gain no more than those who did not. Wood's rich tapestry of explanation is based on oral histories gathered from peasants who supported the insurgency and those who did not over a period of many years during and immediately following the war, and interviews with military commanders of both sides. Peasants supported the FMLN, Wood found, not for any material gain that was contingent on their participation, but rather for moral and emotional reasons. Wood's alternative model places emotions and morals, as well as conventional interests, at the heart of collective action.

The Political Construction of Business Interests
  • Coordination, Growth, and Equality
  • Cathie Jo Martin, Duane Swank
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    30 March 2012
  • 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.

The Logic of Violence in Civil War
  • Stathis N. Kalyvas
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    01 May 2006
  • 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.

Legislative Voting and Accountability
  • John M. Carey
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    15 December 2008
  • Legislatures are the core representative institutions in modern democracies. Citizens want legislatures to be decisive, and they want accountability, but they are frequently disillusioned with the representation legislators deliver. Political parties can provide decisiveness in legislatures, and they may provide collective accountability, but citizens and political reformers frequently demand another type of accountability from legislators – at the individual level. Can legislatures provide both kinds of accountability? This book considers what collective and individual accountability require and provides the most extensive cross-national analysis of legislative voting undertaken to date. It illustrates the balance between individualistic and collective representation in democracies, and how party unity in legislative voting shapes that balance. In addition to quantitative analysis of voting patterns, the book draws on extensive field and archival research to provide an extensive assessment of legislative transparency throughout the Americas.

Latin American Party Systems
  • Herbert Kitschelt, Kirk A. Hawkins, Juan Pablo Luna, Guillermo Rosas, Elizabeth J. Zechmeister
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    22 February 2010
  • 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.

Presidentialism and Democracy in Latin America
  • Edited by Scott Mainwaring, Matthew Soberg Shugart
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    13 May 1997
  • This 1997 book addresses the current debate regarding the liabilities and merits of presidential government. Does presidentialism make it less likely that democratic governments will be able to manage political conflict? With the unprecedented wave of transitions to democracy since the 1970s, this question has been hotly contested in political and intellectual circles all over the globe. The contributors to this volume examine variations among different presidential systems and skeptically view claims that presidentialism has added significantly to the problems of democratic governance and stability.

Quiet Politics and Business Power
  • Corporate Control in Europe and Japan
  • Pepper D. Culpepper
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    22 November 2010
  • Does democracy control business, or does business control democracy? This study of how companies are bought and sold in four countries - France, Germany, Japan and the Netherlands - explores this fundamental question. It does so by examining variation in the rules of corporate control - specifically, whether hostile takeovers are allowed. Takeovers have high political stakes: they result in corporate reorganizations, layoffs and the unraveling of compromises between workers and managers. But the public rarely pays attention to issues of corporate control. As a result, political parties and legislatures are largely absent from this domain. Instead, organized managers get to make the rules, quietly drawing on their superior lobbying capacity and the deference of legislators. These tools, not campaign donations, are the true founts of managerial political influence.

Rebuilding Leviathan
  • Party Competition and State Exploitation in Post-Communist Democracies
  • Anna Grzymala-Busse
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    09 April 2007
  • Why do some governing parties limit their opportunistic behaviour and constrain the extraction of private gains from the state? This analysis of post-communist state reconstruction provides surprising answers to this fundamental question of party politics. Across the post-communist democracies, governing parties have opportunistically reconstructed the state - simultaneously exploiting it by extracting state resources and building new institutions that further such extraction. They enfeebled or delayed formal state institutions of monitoring and oversight, established new discretionary structures of state administration, and extracted enormous informal profits from the privatization of the communist economy. 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.

Public Support for Market Reforms in New Democracies
  • Edited by Susan C. Stokes
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    13 August 2001
  • Do people in new democracies undergoing market reforms turn against these reforms when the economic adjustment is painful? The conventional wisdom is that they will. According to 'economic voting' models, citizens punish elected governments for bad economic performance. The contributors to this collection, in contrast, begin with the insight that citizens in new democracies have good reasons to depart from the predictions of economic voting. If they believe the prediction that, with the transition to a market economy, economic conditions must deteriorate before they improve, they may interpret short-term deterioration as signaling that the transition is on course and things will improve in the future. If they perceive that forces from the past are responsible for economic deterioration, they may exonerate the government. With similar data-sets from three new democracies in Europe and three in Latin America, the authors probe the support for governments and economic reforms under economic conditions.

Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements
  • Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings
  • Edited by Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, Mayer N. Zald
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    26 January 1996
  • Social movements such as environmentalism, feminism, nationalism, and the anti-immigration movement are a prominent feature of the modern world and have attracted increasing attention from scholars in many countries. Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements, first published in 1996, brings together a set of essays that focus upon mobilization structures and strategies, political opportunities, and cultural framing and ideologies. The essays are comparative and include studies of the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe, the United States, Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany. Their authors are amongst the leaders in the development of social movement theory and the empirical study of social movements.

Dismantling the Welfare State?
  • Reagan, Thatcher and the Politics of Retrenchment
  • Paul Pierson
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    28 October 1994
  • This book offers a careful examination of the politics of social policy in an era of austerity and conservative governance. Focusing on the administrations of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, Pierson provides a compelling explanation for the welfare state's durability and for the few occasions where each government was able to achieve significant cutbacks. The programmes of the modern welfare state - the 'policy legacies' of previous governments - generally proved resistant to reform. Hemmed in by the political supports that have developed around mature social programmes, conservative opponents of the welfare state were successful only when they were able to divide the supporters of social programmes, compensate those negatively affected, or hide what they were doing from potential critics. The book will appeal to those interested in the politics of neo-conservatism as well as those concerned about the development of the modern welfare state. It will attract readers in the fields of comparative politics, public policy, and political economy.

Page 7 of 11