The concluding chapter identifies three broad contributions of the book: explaining the choices made by states about language; offering explicit historical institutionalist accounts of the politics of language by centering the analysis on the state and using notions of legacies, critical juncture, path dependency, layering, conversion, and drift, among others; and, the further development, leveraging, and testing of the concept of state traditions as a theoretical and analytical focus for explaining language policy. The chapter also synthesizes the important points coming out of the case studies drawn from a multiplicity of contexts, namely that processes of state-making and state-building are central in forging the state traditions that steer linguistic policies towards specific developmental paths; that the specific nature and configuration of political institutions within a state, not only at founding but also as it evolves over time when adjusting to changing societal dynamics and circumstances, heavily condition the choices states make about language; and that political ideas and norms are central to state traditions since they tend to structure both political and policy development by conditioning the choices of political actors, pushing societies into specific paths of linguistic choices at the expense of others.

Does regional inequality give rise to political cleavages in African countries? If so, why and how? At what scale of politics? How do regional difference and inequality shape national politics and policy? The theory of regional politics advanced here is drawn from comparative politics theories of regional tensions that arise in the course of state-building and national economic integration. These are accentuated when socioeconomic inequality and territorial institutions align. This book argues that regional economic differentiation and spatial inequalities, in interaction with strongly territorial state institutions, shape politics and policy in African countries as they do in countries in other parts of the world. National economic integration and state-building activate subnational interests and fuel political tensions over the integration of subnational regions into the national polity and the national market. Regional economic and political heterogeneity and cross-regional inequalities shape both preferences and the relative bargaining power of subnational collectivities. These forces combine to produce persistent regional cleavage structures in national politics. Empirical support is drawn from electoral data from 44 elections across 12 countries, historical maps, and nighttime luminosity, household survey, and crop production data.

This chapter collects the historical threads about the economic growth of the two Iberian nations. From a disappointing nineteenth century, during which they fell behind the rest of Europe, and the conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century, the two nations quickly caught up from the 1950s. Growth was mostly extensive and pulled by physical capital accumulation, with small contributions from human capital or productivity. The Iberian divergence from its European peers has often been blamed on natural endowments, modest domestic markets and savings, as well as on second-nature geography (market access). However, this volume shows that all of these were endogenous to the growth itself, which requires looking for deeper explanations. Institutions and the political equilibria that underpin them loom large here. After a century of fragile liberal monarchies and radical republican regimes, the two nations stood out for their long authoritarian regimes. Inward-looking economic policies promoted by the dictators favoured domestic incumbents but harmed the growth potential of the two countries. Only their gradual reopening from the 1950s unleashed this potential. Nevertheless, the gains from growth have not been equally distributed and convergence stalled in the new millennium, with the adoption of the Euro.

The Islamic Republic relies on a number of distinct but related institutional clusters to maintain power. This include the institutional means through which the state politically incorporates social groups into its orbit; institutional mechanisms of control; a number of “veto players”; those institutions that help maintain the system; the deep state; intra-elite competition; and, patronage and clientelism.

This chapter describes the relationships between domestic political institutions and war. Moving beyond older debates comparing democracies and autocracies, it presents a conceptual structure for differentiating among different types of autocracies. Autocracies vary as either being personalist or non-personalist, and also as being led by either military officers or civilians. Personalist regimes are less constrained by domestic audience costs, and military leaders are more likely to embrace the effectiveness and legitimacy of using force. The likely onset and outcome of conflicts vary across autocracy types. The chapter explores other ideas linking domestic politics and war, including the diversionary theory of war, coup-proofing (when autocrats take steps to reduce their risk of being overthrown in a military coup d’état), and the marketplace of ideas (when foreign policy issues can be freely debated in government and society). The chapter applies many of these ideas to a quantitative study on what kinds of political systems are more likely to win their interstate wars, and a case study of Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

Government budgets can be complex and contentious. Chapter 1 explains the importance of understanding government budgetary behavior and argues for taking a more realistic view of the process. If governments change part of the budget, then they may need to jostle other budgetary pieces as well. We introduce the broad brushstrokes of our theoretical argument that explains when governments have the desire and power to alter budgets, given both their ideological preferences and contextual factors. We acknowledge that spending increases or decreases in some policy areas may require shifts in budgets for other areas, so we use a compositional methodological approach to investigate those changes. In addition, we foreshadow how our theoretical argument also helps to explain the linkages between expenditures, revenues, deficits, and budgetary volatility. To test theories about these linkages we use panel vector autoregressive (pVAR) models. In order to make our findings from the complex models that we use to test our theoretical propositions accessible, we will use a series of graphical interpretation strategies and present technical details of our models and graphs in appendices. Overall, Chapter 1 sets the stage for a book that unravels the brainteaser of government budgetary behavior across countries and years.

In Chapter 3, we focus on explaining the tradeoffs between expenditure categories in government budgets. Rather than explain total expenditures or expenditures in specific policy areas, we argue that the competition for expenditures is in the spending allocations. Governments of varying ideological stances prefer increasing or decreasing spending for different policy areas, but we argue that their ability to do this is hindered by their government status. Governments with a majority of the seats in the lower house of parliament are better able to push through their preferred changes to spending budgets. Using a compositional methodological approach on data for 33 developed democracies across 35 years (1975–2010), we find that government ideology does influence budgetary allocations for majority governments, with left and right governments altering budgets in different, but expected, ways. For minority governments, our results suggest they too are strategic in making relative budgetary changes, but it is less about ideology and more about appeasing the necessary political parties in order to stay in power. This focus on budgetary compositions highlights the political competition for resources between policy areas that previous work has overlooked.

Public petitions to the Commons were part of a broader subscriptional culture. This chapter examines the nature and extent of petitions to other authorities to reassess the evolution of the UK state during the nineteenth century. During this period, petitions were transformed from being generic requests to power to their more modern meaning as expressive and participatory practices linked to representative institutions. Accordingly, other types of petitions to Parliament concerning contested elections and private bills were hived off into specialised processes. Petitions to the House of Lords, though smaller in scale than the Commons, reinforced the upper house’s authority during an era of democratisation and allowed peers to claim popular backing for their veto power. Addresses to the monarchy were a major form of interaction between monarch and subjects, and called upon the monarch to exercise their political supremacy over the other branches of state. Memorials to government provided a discrete mechanism for interest groups to lobby ministers and officials, and were increasingly adopted by pressure groups. The relationship between the state and the people was recast through petitionary interactions that underpinned and renewed the legitimacy of different branches of the state even in the absence of electoral or institutional reforms.

Solomon Islanders often refer to the idea that women may not, cannot and do not speak about land matters, and it is clear that the recursive constitution of property and authority not only sediments land control, but state norms and institutions, as (hyper)masculine domains. Yet it is equally clear that women do ‘speak’, and this chapter focuses on collaborative efforts to disrupt dominant understandings of property, territory and political authority and assert more expansive practices. This chapter argues that first, an analytical emphasis on state-sanctioned property reinforces the dominant portrayal of gender relations in the region, according to which women are silenced and victims of their culture and religion, and reproduces material inequalities. Second, the political strategies actually used by women, which appear to resonate elsewhere in the region, suggest that custom and Christianity provide greater scope to contest the terms of property, territory and authority than is generally recognised. This has important implications for understanding the ways in which property might be challenged and re-formed.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the key issues that are addressed in the book as a whole. It addesses two key questions that are at the heart of the book. First, what is the current state of racial and ethnic politics in Britain today? Second, how can we locate the forms of racialised politics that have become entrenched in our everyday political institutions within a wider historical frame that traces their development up to the current conjuncture? Addressing these questions against the background of recent trends in British society allows us to explore both the processes that are helping to shape the current conjuncture as well as locating the present in the wider frame of the period from 1945 onwards and likely trends in the future.

In this chapter I consider the consequences for political participation where an institutional change closes one avenue of political action. Since the early 1990s, multiple American states have ended closed party primary elections, rules that restricted participation to voters previously registered with the political party. I show that if participating in closed primaries is costly to voters, reforms to liberalize access to primary elections have different empirical implications for existing theories of political action than for intensity theory. I present a difference-in-differences research design and data to evaluate the different implications.

You might expect a textbook on Australian politics to begin with a discussion of contemporary Australian politics taking place in a strangely shaped building in Canberra, or with a somewhat esoteric discussion of colonial parliaments. What we will explore in this first chapter are two connected ideas: what is politics and why do we study it. There will, of course, be an overview of the political institutions, as well as discussion of some important terms, and a peek at what challenges might lie ahead for Australian political structures.

So how should we think about with an examination of contemporary politics in Australia? We should begin with acknowledging that the politics we study now is the product, one way or another, of a series activities, actions and interactions that stretch far back in time. The real politics and history of Australia starts somewhere between 50,000 and 65,000 years prior to white settlement – although how far back is not clear. If we acknowledge the past, we can understand how it has shaped our contemporary society.

Legacies of past institutionalized political discrimination reverberate in present-day patterns of commercial drinking water consumption. We investigate several case studies – redlining, the Voting Rights Act implementation in North Carolina, institutionalized neglect in Appalachia, and political marginalization of Hispanics in the Southwest – to illustrate the relationship between moral distrust of government and citizen-consumer behavior. We find that areas redlined in the 1930s are more likely to host present-day water kiosks. Parts of North Carolina protected by the Voting Rights Act in 1965 have lower present-day bottled water sales than unprotected areas. Counties located within Appalachia have higher bottled water sales than counties outside of Appalachia. Water kiosks in the Southwest today are most likely to be located in predominantly Hispanic communities. Commercial water companies capitalize upon these legacies of moral distrust to market commercial water products to politically marginalized populations. “Cultural” preferences for commercial water stem from citizen-consumers’ beliefs about the competence and morality of government.