This chapter compares the decision-making process of the Bank of England to that of the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve. The move towards making monetary policy decisions via committees coincided with the shift to central bank independence. This was a natural consequence of central banks no longer taking orders from their governments but being given the operational independence. Members of committees then needed to pool the information that would help them make good decisions in uncertain circumstances – a necessary step when performing complex tasks like monetary policy. The move towards central bank independence was crucial to ensure politically independent and goal-oriented conduct of monetary policy. The more long-term orientation and objectivity of monetary policy’s goals – contrasting with the shorter-term nature of political cycles and political bias to inflate the economy – proved beneficial to price stability, with more credible signals helping to manage inflation expectations

Chapter 3 focuses on political mobilizers of welfare nationalism, mainly popular attitudes toward welfare deservingness, and agents that mobilized anti-immigrant politics. The chapter elaborates on four types of deservingness criteria for migrants; need or vulnerability, ethnic closeness, contributions to receiving states’ economies and to their national security. It argues that societal norms for outsiders’ deservingness have narrowed in both Europe and Russia. Populist parties, anti-immigrant, and Euroskeptic are shown to be key mobilizers of welfare nationalism, abetted by anti-immigrant mass media. The chapter tracks one major populist party each in Britain, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and Poland, showing how that party gained vote share and national influence by opposing the CEE and MENA migrations. Using party programs and electoral outcomes, it shows how populists reinforced and amplified welfare nationalist grievances in societies, channeling them into electoral success and pressures for exclusionary migration policies. In authoritarian Russia, popular grievances against migrants are shown to be similar to grievances in Europe, but welfare nationalism was mobilized by regional elites, governors, and mayors. The chapter draws on arguments about authoritarian elites’ motivations to respond to popular grievances in order to explain how sub-national leaders used anti-immigrant mobilization for political advantage in Russia’s hybrid regime.

This chapter highlights a number of potential explanations for the apparent disconnect between the votes and the views of dissenting members of the Monetary Policy Committee. The MPC appears to agree more than would be expected on the basis of views expressed elsewhere in speeches and papers. None of them are particularly satisfactory. The obvious way to establish which, if any, of these explanations are relevant is to ask former members of the Committee what they think. There remains a compelling case for producing an oral history of the Monetary Policy Committee if we want to understand how and why committees function in practice.

The chapter examines how the size and diversity of the migrant population shaped economic outcomes in western Poland using statistical analysis. It shows that when state institutions were extractive, the composition of the migrant population played no role in shaping economic performance. Once institutions became more inclusive, however, municipalities settled by more regionally diverse populations registered higher incomes and entrepreneurship rates. The chapter then rules out a series of alternative explanations for these findings.

Provides a brief overview of elements of the Islamic normative tradition. I consider three key concepts – justice, the common good and community – and ambiguities of their contemporary application. The primary focus of the discussion concerns resources (including wealth and property) – their attribution and distribution. To whom do wealth, property and resources belong, and what are their responsibilities? How, by whom, and for what purposes are wealth and resources to be distributed, and who has the authority to make such determinations? In broad strokes, I outline how, according to religious norms, resources ought to be utilized and managed for the sake of the "common good." The purpose of this discussion is to provide a framework that facilitates a deeper understanding of the extent to which religious norms have been instrumentalized and at times, reformulated in the conduct of the four oil-financed institutionalized practices explored in subsequent chapters.

A discontinuous period for agrarian policies since 1990

The study of class relations in India and their interaction with state policy necessitates an overview of Indian polity in the post-liberalisation era. Liberalisation of India's economic policies started in 1991, aiming to make the economy more market oriented and expand the role of private and foreign investments. That decade was a period of economic, social, and political flux, from which India took about eight years to stabilise. Kohli (2001) points out that between 1947 and 1990, India had five general elections, and five general elections were held during the 1990s alone. Following this, the BJP-led NDA held power for two terms (1998–2004). The period between 1997–98 and 2004–05 registered low agricultural growth at 1.6 per cent per annum, which recovered to 3.5 per cent between 2003–04 and 2010–11 (Dev, 2012). The late 1990s witnessed the lowest agricultural growth since Independence. The period since 1997 has been characterised by agrarian distress culminating in farmer suicides (Patnaik, 2003). Political commentators argue that in view of the agrarian distress across states, the NDA lost support of India's rural voters, which proved to be the NDA's undoing. Against this backdrop, the UPA with the Congress at its helm came to power in the 2004 general election (Birner, Gupta, and Sharma, 2011; Bose, 2006; Mooij, 2005). The rise in agricultural growth right after that makes the problem of who benefitted worth thinking about. The various regional parties that had mushroomed during the 1970s and 1980s came to play a determining role in the formation of governments at the centre, because the national parties were unable to attain a simple majority on their own. Be it the BJP-led NDA or the Congress-led UPA, the coalition had to include regional parties to form governments.

Until 2014, the UPA held power at the centre, while governments changed hands at regional levels. The three states studied here – Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, and Karnataka – have mostly been under the rule of the BJP since 2000. Since its formation in 2000, Chhattisgarh has had a BJP government until 2018.

I conclude with a review of my findings in Chapters 3–7. I elucidate the relationship between “oil” and “Islam” and what that relationship teaches us about politics in Gulf monarchies. The overwhelming message is that with their abundant wealth, Gulf rulers have been exploiting not only oil rents but also religious doctrine and its (re-)formulations to function as tools of social management and social control. Their aim is to bolster their authoritarian ambitions: ruling families’ capacity to both dominate and shape their societies and retain their monopoly over resources. For the sake of maintaining – and enriching – dynastic states and constructing the nation, oil and Islam are their principal tools.

Chapter 4 focuses on labor migration from Central Asia to Russia as the first exclusionary migration cycle. Growing migration after 2000 made Russia one of the world’s major migrant-receiving states. The chapter explains why Putin retained a visa-free regime with the much poorer former Soviet states of CA, allowing millions of their citizens free entry to Russia, where most stayed and worked with undocumented status. As the numbers of the ethnically distant Muslim migrants rose, welfare nationalist grievances emerged in the cities and regions where migrants were concentrated. Citing public opinion surveys, speeches by mayors and governors, election and party platforms, and mass media, the chapter shows how politicians framed and used welfare nationalist discourses to placate citizens and scapegoat migrants for declines in popular welfare. It highlights the role of sub-national officials in mobilizing anti-immigrant politics and channeling pressures for exclusionary policies to Putin. These pressures produced legislative and normative changes that progressively excluded migrant families from social sectors and subjected workers to increasing abuses, including deportations and other forms of exclusion. A sub-set of migrants who contributed to Russia’s national security were treated as more deserving.

This introductory chapter presents the puzzle of the variation in agrarian elites’ capacity to organize electoral representation across Latin America after the third wave of democratization and discusses the consequences of this variation for redistributive politics. It summarizes the book’s central argument that agrarian elites’ strategies of political influence are explained by two factors: the perception of an existential threat and the level of intragroup fragmentation. Then, it discusses the relevance of that argument for the comparative politics literature, in particular regarding the relationship among economic elites’ representation, democratic consolidation, and redistribution. The chapter also offers background about a series of structural and political transformations that have changed agrarian elites’ sources of power in Latin America over the last six decades and describes my research methods, case selection strategy, and data sources.

Chapter 4 opens up the black box of the firm to assess the effects of leadership on reform outcomes in China Infrastructure (CI) (pseudonym), a central SOE in the construction industry. The chapter features paired comparisons of the consecutive tenures of chairmen in CI and process tracing of original data gathered during fifteen months of fieldwork inside the company, primarily in its Beijing headquarters, between January 2014 and June 2016, with follow-up visits in June 2018, December 2019, and December 2023. It presents evidence that the chairman’s leadership generated variation in the degree to which market expansion was decentralized and in the balance of influence among intra-firm actors. The chapter also evaluates and rules out alternative explanations: guanxi with and intervention by higher-level officials, shifts in policy by administrative superiors, and changes in industry competition in domestic and international markets.

Chapter 5 examines the effects of leadership on reform outcomes in four other central SOEs: State Grid, China General Nuclear Power Group, Sinochem, and China Railway Engineering Corporation. These companies are selected to capture full variation along two key dimensions: industry strategic importance and firm type. For each of these four central SOEs, the chapter compares the consecutive tenures of their chairmen to assess the effects of leadership on reform at the firm level. This survey provides additional evidence that successive leaders’ decisions about organizational strategy and structure are an important driver of variation in reform outcomes. Cross-firm analysis further suggests that the effects of leadership on reform are a matter of degree and are conditioned by existing institutions, policies, and economic factors.