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  3. Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions

The Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions series focuses on two central questions: How do institutions evolve in response to individual incentives, strategies, and choices, and how do institutions affect the performance of political and economic systems? The series concentrates on answers to these questions based in methodological individualism. Its scope is comparative and historical rather than international or specifically American. Its focus is positive rather than normative, but many of the studies in the series offer analyses of informal institutional factors, such as social norms and culture, based on a rational-choice approach.

  • General Editors: Jeffry Frieden, Harvard University, Massachusetts, John Patty, University of Chicago, Elizabeth Maggie Penn, University of Chicago
  • Founding Editors: James E. Alt, Harvard University, Massachusetts, Douglass C. North, Washington University, St Louis

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83 results in Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions

Page 4 of 5

Politicians and Poachers
  • The Political Economy of Wildlife Policy in Africa
  • Clark C. Gibson
  • Published online:
    02 December 2009
    Print publication:
    13 June 1999
  • Although wildlife fascinates citizens of industrialized countries, little is known about the politics of wildlife policy in Africa. In this innovative book, Clark Gibson challenges the rhetoric of television documentaries and conservation organizations to explore the politics behind the creation and change of wildlife policy in Africa. This book examines what Clark views as a central puzzle in the debate: Why do African governments create policies that apparently fail to protect wildlife? Moving beyond explanations of bureaucratic inefficiency and corrupt dictatorships, Gibson argues that biologically disastrous policies are retained because they meet the distributive goals of politicians and bureaucrats. Using evidence from Zambia, Kenya, and Zimbabwe, Gibson shows how institutions encourage politicians and bureaucrats to construct wildlife policies that further their own interests. Different configurations of electoral laws, legislatures, party structures, interest groups, and traditional authorities in each country shape the choices of policymakers - many of which are not consonant with conservation. This book will appeal to students of institutions, comparative politics, natural resource policymaking, African politics, and wildlife conservationists.

The Politics of Property Rights
  • Political Instability, Credible Commitments, and Economic Growth in Mexico, 1876–1929
  • Stephen Haber, Armando Razo, Noel Maurer
  • Published online:
    02 December 2009
    Print publication:
    26 May 2003
  • This book addresses a puzzle in political economy: why is it that political instability does not necessarily translate into economic stagnation or collapse? In order to address this puzzle, it advances a theory about property rights systems in many less developed countries. In this theory, governments do not have to enforce property rights as a public good. Instead, they may enforce property rights selectively (as a private good), and share the resulting rents with the group of asset holders who are integrated into the government. Focusing on Mexico, this book explains how the property rights system was constructed during the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship (1876–1911) and then explores how this property rights system either survived, or was reconstructed. The result is an analytic economic history of Mexico under both stability and instability, and a generalizable framework about the interaction of political and economic institutions.

Delegating Powers
  • A Transaction Cost Politics Approach to Policy Making under Separate Powers
  • David Epstein, Sharyn O'Halloran
  • Published online:
    02 December 2009
    Print publication:
    13 November 1999
  • David Epstein and Sharyn O'Halloran produce the first unified theory of policy making between the legislative and executive branches. Examining major US policy initiatives from 1947 to 1992, the authors describe the conditions under which the legislature narrowly constrains executive discretion, and when it delegates authority to the bureaucracy. In doing so, the authors synthesize diverse and competitive literatures, from transaction cost and principal-agent theory in economics, to information models developed in both economics and political science, to substantive and theoretical work on legislative organization and on bureaucratic discretion. Professors Epstein and O'Halloran produce their own deductive specification of the conditions for making or delegating policy, gather a rich, original data set on delegation and discretion in the postwar era to test the propositions derived from their model, and devise appropriate statistical tests to assess the validity of their propositions. With implications for the study of constitutional design, political delegation, legislative organization, administrative law, and the role of the executive in policy making, this book redefines the study of legislative-executive relations under separate powers.

Bicameralism
  • George Tsebelis, Jeannette Money
  • Published online:
    02 December 2009
    Print publication:
    13 June 1997
  • This book examines some fifty countries to ascertain how the chambers of bicameral legislatures interact when they produce legislation. An understanding of this interaction is essential because otherwise legislative behaviour in each chamber may be unintelligible or incorrectly interpreted. The book employs cooperative game theoretic models to establish that bicameral legislatures, when compared with unicameral legislatures, increase the stability of the status quo and reduce intercameral differences to one privileged dimension of conflict. Non-cooperative game theoretic models are used to investigate the significance of a series of insitutional devices used to resolve intercameral conflict where a bill is introduced, which chamber has the final word, how many times a bill can shuttle between chambers, and whether conference committees are called. Empirical evidence, mainly from the French Republic, is used to evaluate the arguments.

The Efficient Secret
  • The Cabinet and the Development of Political Parties in Victorian England
  • Gary W. Cox
  • Published online:
    02 December 2009
    Print publication:
    11 June 1987
  • The Efficient Secret is an analysis of the institutional changes in parliamentary government in nineteenth-century England, concentrating on the years between the first and third Reform Acts. Professor Gary W. Cox employs a rational choice model to analyze the problems of voter choice and to examine the emergence of party loyalty in the electorate, the development of cabinet government, and their legislative consequences. The introductory chapters provide the historical setting for this study and briefly survey nineteenth-century political and economic events. Professor Cox then focuses on the increases in party voting in Parliament and in the electorate. To support his argument concerning these parallel developments, he uses statistical evidence drawn from poll books and newspapers.

Architects of Political Change
  • Constitutional Quandaries and Social Choice Theory
  • Norman Schofield
  • Published online:
    23 November 2009
    Print publication:
    05 June 2006
  • This work offers a set of extended interpretations of Madison's argument in Federalist X of 1787, using ideas from social choice theory and from the work of Douglass North, Mancur Olson, and William Riker. Its focus is not on rational choice theory itself, but on the use of this theory as a heuristic device to better understand democratic institutions. The treatment adapts a formal model of elections to consider rapid constitutional change at periods when societies face quandaries. The topics explored in the book include Britain's reorganization of its fiscal system in the eighteenth century to prosecute its wars with France; the Colonies' decision to declare independence in 1776; Madison's argument about the 'probability of fit choice' during the Ratification period of 1787-88; the argument between Hamilton and Jefferson in 1798–1800 over the long run organization of the US economy and the election of Lincoln in 1860.

Elbridge Gerry's Salamander
  • The Electoral Consequences of the Reapportionment Revolution
  • Gary W. Cox, Jonathan N. Katz
  • Published online:
    10 November 2009
    Print publication:
    04 March 2002
  • The Supreme Court's reapportionment decisions, beginning with Baker v. Carr in 1962, had far more than jurisprudential consequences. They sparked a massive wave of extraordinary redistricting in the mid-1960s. Both state legislative and congressional districts were redrawn more comprehensively - by far - than at any previous time in America's history. Moreover, they changed what would happen at law should a state government fail to enact a new districting plan when one was legally required. This book provides a detailed analysis of how judicial partisanship affected redistricting outcomes in the 1960s, arguing that the reapportionment revolution led indirectly to three fundamental changes in the nature of congressional elections: the abrupt eradication of a 6% pro-Republican bias in the translation of congressional votes into seats outside the south; the abrupt increase in the apparent advantage of incumbents; and the abrupt alteration of the two parties' success in congressional recruitment and elections.

Public Debt and the Birth of the Democratic State
  • France and Great Britain 1688–1789
  • David Stasavage
  • Published online:
    05 November 2009
    Print publication:
    28 April 2003
  • This book develops new theory about the link between debt and democracy and applies it to a classic historical comparison: Great Britain in the eighteenth century which had strong representative institutions and sound public finance vs. ancient regime France, which had neither. The book argues that whether representative institutions improve commitment depends on the opportunities for government creditors to form new coalitions with other social groups, more likely to occur when a society is divided across multiple political cleavages. It then presents historical evidence to show that improved access to finance in Great Britain after 1688 had as much to do with the development of the Whig Party as with constitutional changes. In France, it is suggested that the balance of partisan forces made it unlikely that an early adoption of 'English-style' institutions would have improved credibility.

The Political Economy of Public Administration
  • Institutional Choice in the Public Sector
  • Murray J. Horn
  • Published online:
    28 October 2009
    Print publication:
    24 November 1995
  • 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 also explores the link between agency form and administrative function, agency independence from the legislature, the rights extended to private interests to influence administrative decision making, the role of civil service arrangements that are so often seen as simply frustrating efficiency and responsiveness, and the boundary between public and private sectors. This book should be of value to those with a practical interest in public administration as well as students of political science, public administration, economics, and public policy.

Legislative Institutions and Ideology in Chile
  • John B. Londregan
  • Published online:
    22 October 2009
    Print publication:
    31 July 2000
  • 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. He constructs an analytical model of a democratic transition and provides a new statistical technique for analysing legislative votes, based upon a detailed empirical analysis of Chile's legislative politics. Legislative Institutions and Ideology in Chile extends existing spatial models of policy preferences by incorporating a valence component to policy choices. The valence component enables an agenda setter, in Chile the democratically elected president, to overcome veto players' objections to reform. Londregan specifically also uses Senate committee voting records to study the impact of human rights concessions on the political debate.

Ideology and Strategy
  • A Century of Swedish Politics
  • Edited by Leif Lewin
  • Published online:
    29 September 2009
    Print publication:
    27 January 1989
  • 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. For each, he presents the outcome and its history and the strategic behaviour of the actors. He gives special attention to the strategy used by the potential loser. The first chapter presents the methodology to be employed in the analysis and introduces concepts and strategies such as voter's paradox, prisoners' dilemma, the Condorcet method, logrolling and others. The final chapter includes a review of the concept of politics as rational action. Lewin's analysis begins with the tariff dispute of the 1880s and ranges from suffrage reform, parliamentary government, the crisis programme of the 1930s, economic planning, the pension system, nuclear energy, to employee investment funds. Ideology and Strategy blends history, substantive issues and potential analysis, and is an important contribution to rational choice theory.

Delegation and Agency in International Organizations
  • Edited by Darren G. Hawkins, David A. Lake, Daniel L. Nielson, Michael J. Tierney
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    14 September 2006
  • Why do states delegate certain tasks and responsibilities to international organizations rather than acting unilaterally or cooperating directly? Furthermore, to what extent do states continue to control IOs once authority has been delegated? Examining a variety of different institutions including the World Trade Organization, the United Nations and the European Commission, this book explores the different methods that states employ to ensure their interests are being served, and identifies the problems involved with monitoring and managing IOs. The contributors suggest that it is not inherently more difficult to design effective delegation mechanisms at international level than at domestic level and, drawing on principal-agent theory, help explain the variations that exist in the extent to which states are willing to delegate to IOs. They argue that IOs are neither all evil nor all virtuous, but are better understood as bureaucracies that can be controlled to varying degrees by their political masters.

The European Union Decides
  • Edited by Robert Thomson, Frans N. Stokman, Christopher H. Achen, Thomas König
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    14 September 2006
  • European legislation affects countless aspects of daily life in modern Europe but just how does the European Union make such significant legislative decisions? How important are the formal decision-making procedures in defining decision outcomes and how important is the bargaining that takes place among the actors involved? Using a combination of detailed evidence and theoretical rigour, this volume addresses these questions and others that are central to understanding how the EU works in practice. It focuses on the practice of day-to-day decision-making in Brussels and the interactions that take place among the Member States in the Council and among the Commission, the Council and the European Parliament. A unique data set of actual Commission proposals are examined against which the authors develop, apply and test a range of explanatory models of decision-making, exemplifying how to study decision-making in other political systems using advanced theoretical tools and appropriate research design.

Odd Markets in Japanese History
  • Law and Economic Growth
  • J. Mark Ramseyer
  • Published online:
    21 September 2009
    Print publication:
    28 September 1996
  • Employing a rational-choice approach, Professor Ramseyer studies the impact of Japanese law on economic growth in Japan. Toward that end, the author investigates the way law governed various markets and the way that people negotiated contracts within those markets. For much of the period at stake, the Japanese government was an oligarchy rather than a democracy; the judges operated a civil rather than common law regime; the economy grew modestly but erratically; and social customs changed rapidly and radically. As a result, this study applies an economic logic, but to markets in a vastly different world, in a different historical period, and with a different political regime and legal system. Findings reveal that the legal system generally promoted mutually advantageous deals, and that people generally negotiated in ways that shrewdly promoted their private best interests. Whether in the markets for indentured servants, prostitutes, or marriage partners, Odd Markets in Japanese History reports little evidence of either age- or gender- related exploitation.

Institutions and Social Conflict
  • Jack Knight
  • Published online:
    16 September 2009
    Print publication:
    30 October 1992
  • Many of the fundamental questions in social science entail an examination of the role played by social institutions. Why do we have so many social institutions? Why do they take one form in one society and quite different ones in others? In what ways do these institutions develop? When and why do they change? Institutions and Social Conflict addresses these questions in two ways. First it offers a thorough critique of a wide range of theories of institutional change, from the classical accounts of Smith, Hume, Marx and Weber to the contemporary approaches of evolutionary theory, the theory of social conventions and the new institutionalism. Secondly, it develops a new theory of institutional change that emphasises the distributional consequences of social institutions. The emergence of institutions is explained as a by-product of distributional conflict in which asymmetries of power in a society generate institutional solutions to conflicts.

Appointing Central Bankers
  • The Politics of Monetary Policy in the United States and the European Monetary Union
  • Kelly H. Chang
  • Published online:
    05 September 2009
    Print publication:
    18 August 2003
  • This book examines monetary policy by focusing on how the President and the Senate influence monetary policy by appointing Federal Reserve members. It attempts to answer three questions about the appointment process and its effects. First, do politicians influence monetary policy through Federal Reserve appointments? Second, who influences the process - the President alone or both the President and the Senate? Third, what explains the structure of the Federal Reserve appointment process? The test models show that the President alone, both the President and Senate, or neither, may influence monetary policy with Federal Reserve appointments. The structure of the process reflects political battles between the Democrats and Republicans regarding the centralization of authority to set monetary policy within the Federal Reserve System. The study extends the analysis to the European Central Bank and shows that the Federal Reserve process is more representative of society than the European Central Bank process.

Budget Reform Politics
  • The Design of the Appropriations Process in the House of Representatives, 1865–1921
  • Charles H. Stewart
  • Published online:
    03 September 2009
    Print publication:
    29 September 1989
  • In this 1989 book Charles Stewart analyses the development of the budgetary process in the House of Representatives between 1865 and 1921. The period began with the creation of the House Appropriations Committee and ended with the passage of the Budgetary Accounting Act. Attempts at change were closely related to societal and economic, but also to institutional, developments during this period. Both the electoral system and the national party system, as well as war and other economic crises, impacted upon the budgetary process.

When Majorities Fail
  • The Russian Parliament, 1990–1993
  • Josephine T. Andrews
  • Published online:
    02 September 2009
    Print publication:
    21 October 2002
  • When Majorities Fail is a study of institutional failure in Russia's first democratic legislature. Inadequate rules and a chaotic party system combined to make it nearly impossible to pass a coherent legislative program, including a new constitution. The internal instability in Russia's parliament is known as cycling, one of the most important theoretical concepts in formal study of legislatures. There are few recorded cases of cycling in politically important settings. This book documents the presence of cyclical majorities in Russian Parliament with comprehensive case and statistical analysis, and demonstrates how the failure to adopt a new constitution led to the confrontation between parliament and president in the fall of 1993. Earlier research has shown that the design of a legislative institution is crucial in preventing cycling. The author shows how the institutional design of the parliament failed, underscoring the importance of institutional design in a democratic transition.

Industrializing English Law
  • Entrepreneurship and Business Organization, 1720–1844
  • Ron Harris
  • Published online:
    12 August 2009
    Print publication:
    19 June 2000
  • Between the passage of the Bubble Act in 1720 and the sweeping reforms of the General Incorporation Act of 1844, the legal framework of business organization in England remained remarkably stagnant despite the profound economic and structural changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution. Originally published in 2000, this book analyzes why this discrepancy occurred, especially when other nations of that time, whose economies were far less developed, were evolving more permissive laws of business organization. Employing extensive primary source archival material, Ron Harris shows how the institutional development of major forms of business organization - the business corporation, the partnership, the trust, the unincorporated joint-stock company - evolved and how English law finally took account of these developments.

The Political Economy of Poland's Transition
  • New Firms and Reform Governments
  • John E. Jackson, Jacek Klich, Krystyna Poznanska
  • Published online:
    07 August 2009
    Print publication:
    06 June 2005
  • In the time span of a two-term US presidency, Poland went from an authoritarian one-party state with a faltering centrally planned economy to become a relatively stable multiparty democracy and a market economy with one of the highest GDP growth rates in Europe. A central feature of these economic and political reforms is a high rate of entry of new, domestically owned firms. This book uses detailed economic and political data to examine how these new firms contributed to the Polish transition. The authors test propositions about why some regions have more new firms than others and how the success of these new firms contributed to political constituencies that supported economically liberal parties. The book concludes by contrasting the Polish with the experiences of other transitional countries.

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