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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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214 results in Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics

Page 8 of 11

Macroeconomic Policies of Developed Democracies
  • Robert J. Franzese, Jr
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    11 February 2002
  • This book synthesizes and extends modern political-economic theory to explain the postwar evolution of macroeconomic policy in developed democracies. Chapters 2-4 study transfers, debt, and monetary/wage policy-making and outcomes, stressing that participation enhances transfer-policy responsiveness to inequality and vice versa, that policy-making veto actors retard fiscal-policy adjustments, inducing greater long-run debt-responses to all other political-economic stimuli, and that monetary policy's nominal and real effects depend, respectively, on the broader political-economic interest-structure and on wage-price bargainers' sectorial composition and coordination. Broadly, the book argues that these developments have exacerbated the distributional conflicts inherent in the policies to which postwar governments had committed while undermining their more-universally desired efficiency-fostering roles. Battles that once raged primarily over policies conducted within postwar-commitment frameworks now rage over the putative 'reforms' of the frameworks that will set the institutional rules within which democratic struggle over macroeconomic policy and free-market competition will continue.

State Power and Social Forces
  • Domination and Transformation in the Third World
  • Edited by Joel Samuel Migdal, Atul Kohli, Vivienne Shue
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    26 August 1994
  • This eminently readable 1994 collection of high-quality, country-specific essays on Third World politics provides, through a variety of well-integrated themes and approaches, an examination of 'state theory' as it has been practised in the past, and how it must be refined for the future. The contributors go beyond the previously articulated 'bringing the state back in' model to offer their own 'state-in-society' approach. They argue that states, which should be disaggregated for meaningful comparative study, are best analysed as parts of societies. States may help mould, but are also continually moulded by, the societies within which they are embedded. States' capacities, further, will vary depending on their ties to other social forces. And other social forces will be capable of being mobilised into political contention only under certain conditions. Political contention pitting states against other social forces may sometimes be mutually enfeebling, but at other times, mutually empowering.

Ordering Power
  • Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia
  • Dan Slater
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    09 August 2010
  • Like the postcolonial world more generally, Southeast Asia exhibits tremendous variation in state capacity and authoritarian durability. Ordering Power draws on theoretical insights dating back to Thomas Hobbes to develop a unified framework for explaining both of these political outcomes. States are especially strong and dictatorships especially durable when they have their origins in 'protection pacts': broad elite coalitions unified by shared support for heightened state power and tightened authoritarian controls as bulwarks against especially threatening and challenging types of contentious politics. These coalitions provide the elite collective action underpinning strong states, robust ruling parties, cohesive militaries, and durable authoritarian regimes - all at the same time. Comparative-historical analysis of seven Southeast Asian countries (Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Vietnam, and Thailand) reveals that subtly divergent patterns of contentious politics after World War II provide the best explanation for the dramatic divergence in Southeast Asia's contemporary states and regimes.

No Other Way Out
  • States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945–1991
  • Jeff Goodwin
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    04 June 2001
  • No Other Way Out provides a powerful explanation for the emergence of popular revolutionary movements, and the occurrence of actual revolutions, during the Cold War era. This sweeping study ranges from Southeast Asia in the 1940s and 1950s to Central America in the 1970s and 1980s and Eastern Europe in 1989. Following in the 'state-centered' tradition of Theda Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions and Jack Goldstone's Revolutions and Rebellion in the Early Modern World, Goodwin demonstrates how the actions of specific types of authoritarian regimes unwittingly channeled popular resistance into radical and often violent directions. Revolution became the 'only way out', to use Trotsky's formulation, for the opponents of these intransigent regimes. By comparing the historical trajectories of more than a dozen countries, Goodwin also shows how revolutionaries were sometimes able to create, and not simply exploit, opportunities for seizing state power.

The Political Geography of Inequality
  • Regions and Redistribution
  • Pablo Beramendi
  • Published online:
    05 April 2012
    Print publication:
    26 March 2012
  • This book addresses two questions - why some political systems have more centralized systems of interpersonal redistribution than others, and why some political unions make larger efforts to equalize resources among their constituent units than others. This book presents a new theory of the origin of fiscal structures in systems with several levels of government. The argument points to two major factors to account for the variation in redistribution: the interplay between economic geography and political representation on the one hand, and the scope of interregional economic externalities on the other. To test the empirical implications derived from the argument, the book relies on in-depth studies of the choice of fiscal structures in unions as diverse as the European Union, Canada and the United States in the aftermath of the Great Depression; Germany before and after Reunification; and Spain after the transition to democracy.

Making Markets in the Welfare State
  • The Politics of Varying Market Reforms
  • Jane R. Gingrich
  • Published online:
    05 July 2011
    Print publication:
    23 June 2011
  • Over the past three decades, market reforms have transformed public services such as education, health, and care of the elderly. Whereas previous studies present markets as having similar and largely non-political effects, this book shows that political parties structure markets in diverse ways to achieve distinct political aims. Left-wing attempts to sustain the legitimacy of the welfare state are compared with right-wing wishes to limit the state and empower the private sector. Examining a broad range of countries, time periods, and policy areas, Jane R. Gingrich helps readers make sense of the complexity of market reforms in the industrialized world. The use of innovative multi-case studies and in-depth interviews with senior European policymakers enriches the debate and brings clarity to this multifaceted topic. Scholars and students working on the policymaking process in this central area will be interested in this new conceptualization of market reform.

Framing the Race in South Africa
  • The Political Origins of Racial Census Elections
  • Karen E. Ferree
  • Published online:
    06 December 2010
    Print publication:
    15 November 2010
  • Post-apartheid South African elections have borne an unmistakable racial imprint: Africans vote for one set of parties, whites support a different set of parties, and, with few exceptions, there is no crossover voting between groups. These voting tendencies have solidified the dominance of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) over South African politics and turned South African elections into 'racial censuses'. This book explores the political sources of these outcomes. It argues that although the beginnings of these patterns lie in South Africa's past, in the effects apartheid had on voters' beliefs about race and destiny and the reputations parties forged during this period, the endurance of the census reflects the ruling party's ability to use the powers of office to prevent the opposition from evolving away from its apartheid-era party label. By keeping key opposition parties 'white', the ANC has rendered them powerless, solidifying its hold on power in spite of an increasingly restive and dissatisfied electorate.

Immigration and Conflict in Europe
  • Rafaela M. Dancygier
  • Published online:
    17 November 2010
    Print publication:
    09 August 2010
  • Contemporary debates give the impression that the presence of immigrants necessarily spells strife. Yet as Immigration and Conflict in Europe shows, the incidence of conflict involving immigrants and their descendants has varied widely across groups, cities, and countries. The book presents a theory to account for this uneven pattern, explaining why we observe clashes between immigrants and natives in some locations but not in others and why some cities experience confrontations between immigrants and state actors while others are spared from such conflicts. The book addresses how economic conditions interact with electoral incentives to account for immigrant-native and immigrant-state conflict across groups and cities within Great Britain as well as across Germany and France. It highlights the importance of national immigration regimes and local political economies in shaping immigrants' economic position and political behavior, demonstrating how economic and electoral forces, rather than cultural differences, determine patterns of conflict and calm.

Structuring Politics
  • Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis
  • Edited by Sven Steinmo, Kathleen Thelen, Frank Longstreth
  • Published online:
    04 August 2010
    Print publication:
    25 September 1992
  • This volume brings together original essays by scholars working on a diverse range of empirical issues, but whose work is in each case informed by a 'historical institutional' approach to the study of politics. By bringing these pieces together, the volume highlights the methodological and theoretical foundations of this approach and illustrates the general contributions it has made to comparative politics. The essays demonstrate the potential of the approach to illuminate a broad range of issues such as how and why institutions change, how political ideas are filtered through institutional structures in the formation of specific policies, and how institutional structure can have unintended effects on the shaping of policy. The reader is provided with both a thorough understanding of the method of analysis and an overview of the theoretical underpinnings of the approach.

Fiscal Governance in Europe
  • Mark Hallerberg, Rolf Rainer Strauch, Jürgen von Hagen
  • Published online:
    04 August 2010
    Print publication:
    16 March 2009
  • This book presents a theoretical framework to discuss how governments coordinate budgeting decisions. There are two modes of fiscal governance conducive to greater fiscal discipline, a mode of delegation and a mode of contracts. These modes contrast with a fiefdom form of governance, in which the decision-making process is decentralized. An important insight is that the effectiveness of a given form of fiscal governance depends crucially upon the underlying political system. Delegation functions well when there are few, or no, ideological differences among government parties, whereas contracts are effective when there are many such differences. Empirically, delegation and contract states perform better than fiefdom states if they match the underlying political system. Additional chapters consider why countries have the fiscal institutions that they do, fiscal governance in Central and Eastern Europe, and the role of such institutions in the European Union.

Why Women Protest
  • Women's Movements in Chile
  • Lisa Baldez
  • Published online:
    06 July 2010
    Print publication:
    26 August 2002
  • Why do women protest? Under what conditions do women protest on the basis of their gender identity? Professor Baldez answers in terms of tipping, timing and framing. She relies on the concept of tipping to identify the point at which diverse organizations converge to form a women's movement. She argues that two conditions trigger this mobilization among women: partisan realignment, understood as the emergence of a new set of issues around which political elites define themselves, and women's decision to frame realignment in terms of widely held norms about gender difference. To illustrate these claims, she compares two very different women's movements in Chile: the mobilization of women against President Salvador Allende (1970–3) and that against General Augusto Pinochet (1973–90). Despite differences between these two movements, both emerged amidst a context of partisan realignment and framed their concerns in terms of women's exclusion from the political arena.

The Politics of Welfare State Reform in Continental Europe
  • Modernization in Hard Times
  • Silja Häusermann
  • Published online:
    06 July 2010
    Print publication:
    15 March 2010
  • This book challenges existing theories of welfare state change by analyzing pension reforms in France, Germany, and Switzerland between 1970 and 2004. It explains why all three countries were able to adopt far-reaching reforms, adapting their pension regimes to both financial austerity and new social risks. In a radical departure from the neo-institutionalist emphasis on policy stability, the book argues that socio-structural change has led to a multidimensional pension reform agenda. A variety of cross-cutting lines of political conflict, emerging from the transition to a post-industrial economy, allowed governments to engage in strategies of political exchange and coalition-building, fostering broad cross-class coalitions in support of major reform packages. Methodologically, the book proposes a novel strategy to analyze lines of conflict, configurations of political actors, and coalitional dynamics over time. This strategy combines quantitative analyses of actor configurations based on coded policy positions with in-depth case studies.

From the Ballot to the Blackboard
  • The Redistributive Political Economy of Education
  • Ben W. Ansell
  • Published online:
    06 July 2010
    Print publication:
    22 March 2010
  • From the Ballot to the Blackboard provides the first comprehensive account of the political economy of education spending across the developed and developing world. The book demonstrates how political forces like democracy and political partisanship and economic factors like globalization deeply impact the choices made by voters, parties, and leaders in financing education. The argument is developed through three stories that track the historical development of education: first, its original expansion from the elite to the masses; second, the partisan politics of education in industrialized states; and third, the politics of higher education. The book uses a variety of complementary methods to demonstrate the importance of redistributive political motivations in explaining education policy, including formal modeling, statistical analysis of survey data and both sub-national and cross-national data, and historical case analyses of countries including the Philippines, India, Malaysia, England, Sweden, and Germany.

Uncertain Boundaries
  • The Social and Political Construction of European Economies
  • Marino Regini
  • Published online:
    26 May 2010
    Print publication:
    27 January 1995
  • During the post-World War II period, a pattern emerged in several European countries: the concentrated and centralized political regulation of the economy, based on the adoption of Keynesian policies, the development of the welfare state and moderately successful attempts at tripartite integration. This pattern entered a deep crisis in the 1980s however, and in the view of many observers, was replaced by a far-reaching deregulation of the economy. The author argues that social and political institutions have by no means lost their ability to structure economic activities. They have, in fact, shaped the different ways in which the European economies have adjusted to market conditions. A pattern of 'micro-social' regulation of European economies emerged as a potential candidate to take the place of the 'macropolitical' one. This volume discusses the conditions under which a change from a macro to a micro form takes place, as well as the features of the emerging pattern.

Policy, Office, or Votes?
  • How Political Parties in Western Europe Make Hard Decisions
  • Edited by Wolfgang C. Müller, Kaare Strøm
  • Published online:
    05 May 2010
    Print publication:
    28 August 1999
  • Leaders of political parties often have to choose between conflicting objectives, such as influence on policy, control of the government, and support among the voters. This book examines the behaviour of political parties in situations where they experience conflict between two or more important objectives. The volume contains a theoretical introduction and case studies of party leaders in Germany, Italy, France and Spain as well as six smaller European democracies. Each case focuses on the behaviour of one of several parties in situations of goal conflict, such as the 'historic compromise' in Italy, the 1982 Wende in West Germany, the making of the new Swedish constitution in the 1970s, and the termination of the Austrian 'black-red' grand coalition. In their conclusions, the editors discuss how such leadership decisions can be understood and examine the causes of different choices among party leaders.

Informal Institutions and Citizenship in Rural Africa
  • Risk and Reciprocity in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire
  • Lauren M. MacLean
  • Published online:
    05 May 2010
    Print publication:
    24 May 2010
  • This book challenges previous assumptions about institutions, social capital, and the nature of the African state by investigating the history of political and economic change in villages on either side of the Ghana-Cote d'Ivoire border. Prior to European colonial rule, these Akan villages had very similar political and cultural institutions. By the late 1990s, however, Lauren M. MacLean found puzzling differences in the informal institutions of reciprocity and indigenous notions of citizenship. MacLean argues that divergent histories of state formation not only shape how villagers help each other but also influence how local groups and communities define citizenship and then choose to engage with the state on an everyday basis. She examines the historical construction of the state role in mediating risk at the local level across three policy areas: political administration, social service delivery, and agriculture.

Language Repertoires and State Construction in Africa
  • David D. Laitin
  • Published online:
    03 May 2010
    Print publication:
    24 April 1992
  • Most African countries have a population composed of a multitude of language groups and most African citizens have a varied repertoire allowing them to rely on different languages for use in the home, at school, in the market, at work and in communicating with political authorities. Language Repertoires and State Construction in Africa analyses the complex language scene in Africa today and asks whether this distinctive web of language use is symptomatic of the early stage of state construction. If so, one would expect that as each of these states develops there will be a rationalisation of language use and agreement on a common language within the country's borders. Alternately, Africa's language scene may be the result of a particular historical context of state construction, with the implication that political development will not lead to the one-state, one-language outcome typical of the idealised nation-state.

Unemployment in the New Europe
  • Edited by Nancy Bermeo
  • Published online:
    26 March 2010
    Print publication:
    27 August 2001
  • The movement for European integration has yielded a European Union of fifteen states with a unified monetary system that will eventually embrace over 370 million people. If current trends continue, an average of one in ten of these people will be unemployed. Not surprisingly, the European public ranks joblessness among its primary political concerns. This book focuses on both unemployment and economic unification. It examines the consequences of each and their interconnections. With chapters on the policy implications of European union, on current workings of domestic bargaining institutions and on how unemployment affects political behavior, this book yields a message with important policy implications: the organized managed economies of Europe should be reformed but not replaced, and a united Europe should be wary of modeling itself on the United States.

Internationalization and Domestic Politics
  • Edited by Robert O. Keohane, Helen V. Milner
  • Published online:
    20 March 2010
    Print publication:
    26 April 1996
  • Rapid increases in international economic exchanges during the past four decades have made national economies very open to the world economy by historical standards. Much recent economic analysis has been devoted to exploring the effects of such internationalization on macroeconomic policy options, national competitiveness, and rewards to various factors of production. The central proposition of this volume is that we can no longer understand politics within countries without comprehending the nature of the linkages between national economies and the world economy, and changes in such linkages. The authors examine the effect of internationalization on the policy preferences of socio-economic and political agents within countries toward national policies and national policy-making institutions and on the national policies and policy institutions themselves.

Labor Unions, Partisan Coalitions, and Market Reforms in Latin America
  • Maria Victoria Murillo
  • Published online:
    05 February 2010
    Print publication:
    07 May 2001
  • Why do labor unions resist economic restructuring and adjustment policies in some countries and in some economic sectors while they submit in other cases? And why do some labor leaders fashion more creative and effective roles for labor unions? This book addresses these critical questions in an in-depth elegant comparative study of Argentina, Mexico, and Venezuela in the 1990s. In each case, the book studies both the role of national confederations as well as individual unions in specific economic sectors in each country. It demonstrates the importance of the presence and nature of alliances between political parties and labor unions as well as the significance of competition between labor unions for the representation of the same set of workers. This work opens new horizons for appreciating the intellectual and practical importance of the variation in the interactions between workers, unions, political parties, and economic policies.

Page 8 of 11