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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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215 results in Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics

Page 9 of 11

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.

Selected Works of Michael Wallerstein
  • The Political Economy of Inequality, Unions, and Social Democracy
  • Edited by David Austen-Smith, Jeffry A. Frieden, Miriam A. Golden, Karl Ove Moene, Adam Przeworski
  • Published online:
    27 January 2010
    Print publication:
    17 March 2008
  • Michael Wallerstein was a leader in developing a rigorous comparative political economy approach to understanding substantive issues of inequality, redistribution, and wage-determination. His early death from cancer left both a hole in the profession and a legacy that will surely provide the foundation for research on these topics. This volume collects his most important and influential contributions, organized by topic, with each topic preceded by an editorial introduction that provides overview and context.

Heroic Defeats
  • The Politics of Job Loss
  • Miriam A. Golden
  • Published online:
    20 January 2010
    Print publication:
    13 November 1996
  • Heroic Defeats is a comparative investigation of how unions and firms interact when economic circumstances require substantial job loss. Using simple game theory to generate testable propositions about when these situations will result in industrial conflict, Professor Golden illustrates the theory in a range of situations between 1950 and 1985 in Japan, Italy, and Britain. Additionally, the author shows how the theory explains why strikes over job loss almost never occur in postwar unionised firms in the United States. With its blend of rational choice and comparative politics, Heroic Defeats is the first systematic attempt to account for industrial conflict or its absence in situations of mass job loss. This book should be of interest to political scientists, sociologists, economists, and students of labour and industrial relations, as well as specialists in European and Japanese history.

Voting for Policy, Not Parties
  • How Voters Compensate for Power Sharing
  • Orit Kedar
  • Published online:
    19 January 2010
    Print publication:
    14 December 2009
  • This book proposes an institutionally embedded framework for analyzing voter choice. Voters, Orit Kedar argues, are concerned with policy, and therefore their vote reflects the path set by political institutions leading from votes to policy. Under this framework, the more institutional mechanisms facilitating post-electoral compromise are built into the political process (e.g., multi-party government), the more voters compensate for the dilution of their vote. This simple but overlooked principle allows Kedar to explain a broad array of seemingly unrelated electoral regularities and offer a unified framework of analysis, which she terms compensatory vote. Kedar develops the compensatory logic in three electoral arenas: parliamentary, presidential, and federal. Leveraging on institutional variation in the degree of power sharing, she analyzes voter choice, conducting an empirical analysis that brings together institutional and behavioral data in a broad cross section of elections in democracies.

Hamilton's Paradox
  • The Promise and Peril of Fiscal Federalism
  • Jonathan A. Rodden
  • Published online:
    14 January 2010
    Print publication:
    26 December 2005
  • As new federations take shape and old ones are revived around the world, a difficult challenge is to create incentives for fiscal discipline. A key question is whether a politically-motivated central government can credibly commit not to bail out subnational governments in times of crisis if it funds most of their expenditures. The center can commit when subnational governments retain significant tax autonomy, as in the United States. Or if the center dominates taxation, it can tightly regulate borrowing, as in many unitary systems. In a third group of countries including Brazil and Germany, the center can neither commit to a system of market-based discipline nor gain a monopoly over borrowing. By combining theory, quantitative analysis, and historical and contemporary case studies, this book explains why different countries have had dramatically different experiences with subnational fiscal discipline.

Governing from Below
  • Urban Regions and the Global Economy
  • Jefferey M. Sellers
  • Published online:
    14 January 2010
    Print publication:
    04 March 2002
  • Throughout the world more policy making and the politics that shape it take place in the urban regions where most people live. This book draws on eleven case studies of similar but disparate urban regions in France, Germany and the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s. It documents the growth of this urban governance and develops a pioneering analysis of its causes and consequences. It traces the origins to the expansion and devolution of policy making, to local business mobilization and institutional interests in high-tech and service activities, and the incorporation of local social movements. Nation-states shape the possibilities for this urban governance, but operate increasingly as infrastructures for local initiatives. Where urban governance has succeeded in combining environmental quality and social inclusion with local prosperity, local officials have built on supportive infrastructures from higher levels, the local economy, civil society, and favourable positions in the global economy.

Legislative Politics in Latin America
  • Edited by Scott Morgenstern, Benito Nacif
  • Published online:
    14 January 2010
    Print publication:
    04 March 2002
  • This study, first published in 2002, explores legislative politics in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. Instead of beginning with an assumption that these legislatures are either rubber-stamps or obstructionist bodies, the chapters provide interesting data and a fresh analytical approach to describe and explain the role of these representative bodies in these consolidating democracies. For each country the book provides three chapters dedicated, in turn, to executive-legislative relations, the legislatures' organizational structure, and the policy process. The analytical focus of each section, however remains the same: the role of institutional factors (including the allocation of policy-making authority between the executive and legislative branches of government, the number of relevant parties in the legislature, and the structure of electoral incentives) in shaping the patterns of legislative behavior.

Global Capital and National Governments
  • Layna Mosley
  • Published online:
    14 January 2010
    Print publication:
    03 February 2003
  • Global Capital and National Governments suggests that international financial integration does not mean the end of social democratic welfare policies. Capital market openness allows participants to react swiftly and severely to government policy; but in the developed world, capital market participants consider only a few government policies when making decisions. Governments that conform to capital market pressures in macroeconomic areas remain relatively unconstrained in supply-side and micro-economic policy areas. Therefore, despite financial globalization, cross-national policy divergence among advanced democracies remains likely. Still, in the developing world, the influence of financial markets on government policy autonomy is more pronounced. The risk of default renders market participants willing to consider a range of government policies in investment decisions. This inference, however, must be tempered with awareness that governments retain choice. As evidence for its conclusions, Global Capital and National Governments draws on interviews with fund managers, quantitative analyses, and archival investment banking materials.

Global Capital, Political Institutions, and Policy Change in Developed Welfare States
  • Duane Swank
  • Published online:
    13 January 2010
    Print publication:
    11 February 2002
  • This book argues that the post-1970 rise in international capital mobility has not contributed to the retrenchment of developed welfare states. Nor has globalization reduced the revenue-raising capacities of governments and undercut the political institutions that support the welfare state. Rather, institutional features of the polity and the welfare state determine the extent to which the economic and political pressures associated with globalization produce welfare state retrenchment. In systems characterized by electoral institutions, social corporatist interest representation and policy-making, centralized political authority, and social insurance-based program structures, pro-welfare state interests are favored. In nations characterized by majoritarian electoral institutions, pluralist interest representation and policy-making, decentralization of policy-making authority, and liberal program structure, the economic and political pressures attendant on globalization are translated into rollbacks of social protection. Globalization has had least impact on large welfare states of Northern Europe and most effect on small welfare states of Anglo nations.

The Transformation of European Social Democracy
  • Herbert Kitschelt
  • Published online:
    08 January 2010
    Print publication:
    24 June 1994
  • This book explains the contrasting strategies and their electoral fortunes of social democratic parties in the major European democracies in the 1970s and 1980s. Going beyond approaches that focus on the influence of class structure and political economic institutions, The Transformation of European Social Democracy analyses the party's competitive situation in the electoral arena, the constraints and opportunities of party organisation, and the role of ideological legacies to explain the strategic choices social democratic parties have made and the electoral results they have achieved. Far from being doomed to decline, social democracy's success depends on its ability to transform its political message and to construct new electoral coalitions.

Federalism, Fiscal Authority, and Centralization in Latin America
  • Alberto Diaz-Cayeros
  • Published online:
    08 January 2010
    Print publication:
    21 August 2006
  • This book explores the politics of fiscal authority, focusing on the centralization of taxation in Latin America during the twentieth century. The book studies this issue in great detail for the case of Mexico. The political (and fiscal) fragmentation associated with civil war at the beginning of the century was eventually transformed into a highly centralized regime. The analysis shows that fiscal centralization can best be studied as the consequence of a bargain struck between self-interested regional and national politicians. Fiscal centralization was more extreme in Mexico than in most other places in the world, but the challenges and problems tackled by Mexican politicians were not unique. The book thus analyzes fiscal centralization and the origins of intergovernmental financial transfers in the other Latin American federal regimes, Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela. The analysis sheds light on the factors that explain the consolidation of tax authority in developing countries.

Partisan Politics in the Global Economy
  • Geoffrey Garrett
  • Published online:
    08 January 2010
    Print publication:
    13 March 1998
  • Geoffrey Garrett challenges the conventional wisdom about the domestic effects of the globalization of markets in the industrial democracies: the erosion of national autonomy and the demise of leftist alternatives to the free market. He demonstrates that globalization has strengthened the relationship between the political power of the left and organized labour and economic policies that reduce market-generated inequalities of risk and wealth. Moreover, macroeconomic outcomes in the era of global markets have been as good or better in strong left-labour regimes ('social democratic corporatism') as in other industrial countries. Pessimistic visions of the inexorable dominance of capital over labour or radical autarkic and nationalist backlashes against markets are significantly overstated. Electoral politics have not been dwarfed by market dynamics as social forces. Globalized markets have not rendered immutable the efficiency-equality trade-off.

The Puzzle of Strikes
  • Class and State Strategies in Postwar Italy
  • Roberto Franzosi
  • Published online:
    08 January 2010
    Print publication:
    26 May 1995
  • This book is an attempt to explain the temporal movement of postwar Italian strikes: why and when strikes go up or down and what the strategies of the main actors involved are. In many ways, the book is unique in the social sciences. First, it takes an inductive approach. Rather than start with theories and then use available empirical evidence to test the explanatory power of the theories, the book starts with date. Second, the book is based on a variety of empirical evidence: statistical, historical, ethnographic and survey material. Third, the book considers the strategies of all the actors involved: workers, employers, the state and the radical left. Finally, the book does not simply explain the movement of strikes; more broadly, it attempts to show how strikes, in their turn, deeply affect the economic, institutional and political spheres of society.

Taxation, Wage Bargaining, and Unemployment
  • Isabela Mares
  • Published online:
    06 January 2010
    Print publication:
    13 February 2006
  • Why were European economies able to pursue the simultaneous commitment to full employment and welfare state expansion during the first decades of the postwar period and why did this virtuous relationship break down during recent decades? This book provides an answer to this question, by highlighting the critical importance of a political exchange between unions and governments, premised on wage moderation in exchange for the expansion of social services and transfers. The strategies pursued by these actors in these political exchanges are influenced by existing wage bargaining institutions, the character of monetary policy and by the level and composition of social policy transfers. The book demonstrates that the gradual growth in the fiscal burden has undermined the effectiveness of this political exchange, lowering the ability of unions' wage policies to affect employment outcomes.

Traditional Politics and Regime Change in Brazil
  • Frances Hagopian
  • Published online:
    06 January 2010
    Print publication:
    29 March 1996
  • This 1996 book is about politics in Brazil during the military regime of 1964–85 and the transition to democracy. Unlike most books about contemporary Brazilian politics that focus on promising signs of change, this book seeks to explain remarkable political continuity in the Brazilian political system. It attributes the persistence of traditional politics and the dominance of regionally based, traditional political elites in particular to the manner in which the economic and political strategies of the military, together with the transition to democracy, reinforced the clientelistic, personalistic, and regional basis of state-society relations. The book focuses on the political competition and representation in the state of Minas Gerais.

Political Topographies of the African State
  • Territorial Authority and Institutional Choice
  • Catherine Boone
  • Published online:
    26 December 2009
    Print publication:
    27 October 2003
  • This 2003 study brings Africa into the mainstream of studies of state-formation in agrarian societies. Territorial integration is the challenge: institutional linkages and political deals that bind center and periphery are the solutions. In African countries, as in territorially diverse states around the world, rulers at the center are forced to bargain with regional elites to establish stable mechanisms of rule and taxation. Variation in regional forms of social organization make for differences in the interests and political strength of regional leaders who seek to maintain or enhance their power vis-à-vis their followers and subjects, and also vis-à-vis the center. The uneven political topography of the regions ultimately produces unevenness in the patterns and depth of center-region linkage. Six sub-regions of three West African countries - Senegal, Cote d'Ivoire, and Ghana - are the backbone of the study.

Race and Regionalism in the Politics of Taxation in Brazil and South Africa
  • Evan S. Lieberman
  • Published online:
    22 December 2009
    Print publication:
    01 September 2003
  • Nationally-specific definitions of citizenship proved decisive for the development of the Tax State in Brazil and South Africa in the twentieth century. Although both countries had been divided along racial and regional lines in the late nineteenth century, watershed constitutions addressed these political problems in very different ways. South Africa's institutionalized white supremacy created a level of political solidarity that contributed to the development of a highly progressive and efficient tax system. In Brazil, federalism and official non-racialism proved more divisive, making the enactment and collection of progressive taxes much more difficult. The legacy of these divergent state-building processes remains evident at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Lieberman extends this analysis to a wider group of country cases and finds similar patterns and causal relationships between the politics of race, region, and taxation. The findings are based on field research, large-scale national surveys, macroeconomic data, and various archival sources.

The European Parliament and Supranational Party System
  • A Study in Institutional Development
  • Amie Kreppel
  • Published online:
    18 December 2009
    Print publication:
    06 December 2001
  • This book examines the impact of increased legislative power and political authority on the internal development of the European Parliament and the supranational party group system. This is done through an analysis of changes in the hierarchical structures that regulate the internal organization of both the EP as a whole and the individual party groups. In addition, the changing pattern of coalition formation between party groups across time and legislative procedure is analyzed. The trends of internal development examined suggest that the increases in EP power that have occurred since the creation of the cooperation procedure by the Single European Act in 1987 have caused a fundamental shift in the character of the European Parliament as a legislative institution. Prior to 1987 the European Parliament, despite direct election and several small attempts to increase its powers, served primarily as a chamber of debate where much more was discussed than accomplished.

Public Opinion, Democracy, and Market Reform in Africa
  • Michael Bratton, Robert Mattes, E. Gyimah-Boadi
  • Published online:
    15 December 2009
    Print publication:
    20 September 2004
  • This book is a fascinating exploration of public opinion in sub-Saharan Africa. Based on the Afrobarometer, a comprehensive cross-national survey research project, it reveals what ordinary Africans think about democracy and market reform, subjects on which almost nothing is otherwise known. The authors find that support for democracy in Africa is wide but shallow and that Africans feel trapped between state and market. Beyond multiparty elections, people want clean and accountable government. They will accept economic structural adjustment only if it is accompanied by an effective state, the availability of jobs, and an equitable society. What are the origins of these attitudes? Far from being constrained by social structure and cultural values, Africans learn about reform on the basis of knowledge, reasoning, and experience. Weighing supply and demand for reform, the authors reach cautious conclusions about the varying prospects of African countries for attaining fully-fledged democracy and markets.0

Mandates and Democracy
  • Neoliberalism by Surprise in Latin America
  • Susan C. Stokes
  • Published online:
    10 December 2009
    Print publication:
    13 August 2001
  • Sometimes politicians run for office promising one set of policies, and if they win, switch to very different ones. Latin American presidents in recent years have frequently run promising to avoid pro-market reforms and harsh economic adjustment, then win and transform immediately into enthusiastic market reformers. Does it matter when politicians ignore the promises they made and the preferences of their constituents? If politicians want to be reelected or see their party reelected at the end of their term, why would they impose unpopular policies? Susan Stokes develops a model of policy switches and tests it with statistical and qualitative data from Latin American elections over the last two decades. She concludes that politicians may change policies because unpopular policies are best for constituents and best serve their own political ambitions. Nevertheless, even though good representatives sometimes switch policies, abrupt change tends to erode the quality of democracy.

Page 9 of 11