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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 9 of 11

Deliberate Discretion?
  • The Institutional Foundations of Bureaucratic Autonomy
  • John D. Huber, Charles R. Shipan
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    02 September 2002
  • The laws that legislatures adopt provide the most important and definitive opportunity elected politicians have to define public policy. But the ways politicians use laws to shape policy varies considerably across polities. In some cases, legislatures adopt detailed and specific laws in efforts to micromanage policy-making processes. In others, they adopt general and vague laws that leave the executive and bureaucrats substantial autonomy to fill in the policy details. What explains these differences across political systems, and how do they matter? The authors address this issue by developing and testing a comparative theory of how laws shape bureaucratic autonomy. Drawing on a range of evidence from advanced parliamentary democracies and the American states, they argue that particular institutional forms have a systematic and predictable effect on how politicians use laws to shape the policy making process.

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.

Stuffing the Ballot Box
  • Fraud, Electoral Reform, and Democratization in Costa Rica
  • Fabrice E. Lehoucq, Ivan Molina
  • Published online:
    16 July 2009
    Print publication:
    13 June 2002
  • Stuffing the Ballot Box is a pioneering study of electoral fraud and reform. It focuses on Costa Rica, a country where parties gradually transformed a fraud-ridden political system into one renowned for its stability and fair elections by the mid-twentieth century. Lehoucq and Molina draw upon a unique database of more than 1,300 accusations of ballot-rigging to show that parties denounced fraud where electoral laws made the struggle for power more competitive. They explain how institutional arrangements generated opportunities for executives to assemble legislative coalitions to enact far-reaching reforms. This book also argues that nonpartisan commissions should run elections and explains why splitting responsibility over election affairs between the executive and the legislature is a recipe for partisan rancour and political conflict. Stuffing the Ballot Box will interest a broad array of political and social scientists, constitutional scholars, historians, election specialists and policy-makers interested in electoral fraud and institutional reform.

Institutional Change and Political Continuity in Post-Soviet Central Asia
  • Power, Perceptions, and Pacts
  • Pauline Jones Luong
  • Published online:
    02 September 2009
    Print publication:
    29 April 2002
  • The establishment of electoral systems in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan presents both a complex set of empirical puzzles and a theoretical challenge. Why did three states with similar cultural, historical, and structural legacies establish such different electoral systems? How did these distinct outcomes result from strikingly similar institutional design processes? Explaining these puzzles requires understanding not only the outcome of institutional design but also the intricacies of the process that led to this outcome. Moreover, the transitional context in which these three states designed new electoral rules necessitates an approach that explicitly links process and outcome in a dynamic setting. This book provides such an approach. Finally, it both builds on the key insights of the dominant approaches to explaining institutional origin and change and transcends these approaches by moving beyond the structure versus agency debate.

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.

Redeeming the Communist Past
  • The Regeneration of Communist Parties in East Central Europe
  • Anna M. Grzymala-Busse
  • Published online:
    04 December 2009
    Print publication:
    18 February 2002
  • This major study examines one of the most surprising developments in East Central European politics after the democratic transitions of 1989: the completely unexpected regeneration of the former communist parties. After the collapse of the communist regimes in 1989, these ruling communist parties seemed consigned to oblivion. However, confounding scholarly and popular expectations, all of these parties survived. Some have even returned to power. This in-depth, comparative study systematically analyzes the trajectories of four cases: the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, and Hungary (with additional examination of other communist party successors). Relying on extensive, and unprecedented, primary research, this analysis employs a consistent analytical framework that combines the peculiarities of the post-socialist cases with broad theoretical concerns of institutional analysis, democratic transitions and consolidation, and party politics.

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.

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.

Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State
  • Mark R. Beissinger
  • Published online:
    18 November 2009
    Print publication:
    04 February 2002
  • This 2002 study examines the process by which the seemingly impossible in 1987 - the disintegration of the Soviet state - became the seemingly inevitable by 1991, providing an original interpretation not only of the Soviet collapse, but also of the phenomenon of nationalism more generally. Probing the role of nationalist action as both cause and effect, Beissinger utilizes data and case studies from across the USSR during its final years to elicit the shifting relationship between pre-existing structural conditions, institutional constraints, and event-generated influences in the nationalist explosions that brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union. As Beissinger demonstrates, the 'tidal' context of nationalism - i.e., the transnational influence of one nationalism upon another - is critical to an explanation of the success and failure of particular nationalisms, why some nationalisms turn violent, and how a crescendo of events can overwhelm states, periodically evoking large-scale structural change in the character of the state system.

Crony Capitalism
  • Corruption and Development in South Korea and the Philippines
  • David C. Kang
  • Published online:
    31 October 2009
    Print publication:
    24 January 2002
  • Why has the literature on Asian development not addressed the issue of money politics in Korea? How can we reconcile the view of an efficient developmental state in Korea before 1997 with reports of massive corruption and inefficiency in that same country in 1998 and 1999? Politics is central to the answer. In this book the author makes two arguments. First, both Korea and the Philippines experienced significant corruption throughout the post-independence era. Second, political - not economic - considerations dominated policy making in both countries. Focusing on the exchange of favors for bribes between state and business, the author argues that politics drove policy choices, that bureaucrats were not autonomous from political interference in setting policy, and that business and political elites wrestled with each other over who would reap the rents to be had. Even in Korea, corruption was far greater than the conventional wisdom allows.

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.

Clientelism, Interests, and Democratic Representation
  • The European Experience in Historical and Comparative Perspective
  • Edited by Simona Piattoni
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    10 September 2001
  • This 2001 book charts the evolution of clientelist practices in several western European countries. Through the historical and comparative analysis of countries as diverse as Sweden and Greece, England and Spain, France and Italy, Iceland and the Netherlands, the authors study both the 'supply-side' - the institutional context in which party leaders devise and implement their political strategies - and the 'demand-side' - the degree of 'empowerment' of civil society - of clientelism. This approach contends that clientelism is a particular mix of particularism and universalism, in which interests are aggregated at the level of the individual and his family 'particularism', but in which all interests can potentially find expression and accommodation 'universalism'. In contrast, 'consociationalism' and 'corporatism' are systems of interest representation in which interests are aggregated at the level of 'social pillar' or the functional association 'universalism', but in which not all interests can find representation and accommodation 'particularism'.

State in Society
  • Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another
  • Joel S. Migdal
  • Published online:
    05 September 2012
    Print publication:
    27 August 2001
  • The essays in this book trace the development of Joel Migdal's 'state-in-society' approach. That approach illuminates how power is exercised around the world, and how and when patterns of power change. Despite the triumph of concept of state in social science literature, actual states have had great difficulty in turning public policies into planned social change. The state-in-society approach points observers to the ongoing struggles over which rules dictating how people will lead their daily lives. These struggles, which ally parts of the state and groups in society against other such coalitions, determine how societies and states create and maintain distinct ways of structuring day-to-day life - the nature of the rules that govern people's behavior, whom they benefit and whom they disadvantage, which sorts of elements unite people and which divide them, what shared meaning people hold about their relations with others and their place in the world.

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.

Public Support for Market Reforms in New Democracies
  • Edited by Susan C. Stokes
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    13 August 2001
  • Do people in new democracies undergoing market reforms turn against these reforms when the economic adjustment is painful? The conventional wisdom is that they will. According to 'economic voting' models, citizens punish elected governments for bad economic performance. The contributors to this collection, in contrast, begin with the insight that citizens in new democracies have good reasons to depart from the predictions of economic voting. If they believe the prediction that, with the transition to a market economy, economic conditions must deteriorate before they improve, they may interpret short-term deterioration as signaling that the transition is on course and things will improve in the future. If they perceive that forces from the past are responsible for economic deterioration, they may exonerate the government. With similar data-sets from three new democracies in Europe and three in Latin America, the authors probe the support for governments and economic reforms under economic conditions.

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.

Politics after Neoliberalism
  • Reregulation in Mexico
  • Richard Snyder
  • Published online:
    03 December 2009
    Print publication:
    18 June 2001
  • The shift from state-led to market-oriented, neoliberal economic policies has been one of the most important changes in the developing world during the last two decades. Although much existing research has focused on why countries choose these neoliberal policy reforms and how they implement them, Richard Snyder's study offers an analysis of politics after neoliberalism. The book proposes a framework that explains how neoliberal reforms, rather than unleashing market forces, actually trigger 're-regulation' processes involving strategic interactions between political entrepreneurs and societal groups. Depending on the strengths and strategies of politicians and societal groups, reregulation results in different types of new institutions for market governance with contrasting consequences for economic efficiency and social justice. This framework is used in conjunction with an innovative subnational comparative method to analyze evidence from four Mexican states about the politics of reregulation.

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.

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 9 of 11