Bøger i Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics serien

This book addresses the long-standing puzzle of how China's private sector manages to grow without secure property rights. Drawing on rich empirical evidence, this book challenges existing theories of property rights and growth, and shows that a selective property rights regime can generate and sustain economic growth and political stability.

This book focuses on clientelism, the pattern of exchanges between politicians and votes as citizens promise to vote for a politician in order to receive benefits. While many scholars have explored the threats to clientelism, this book is the first exploration into why clientelism survives, and even thrives, in certain countries.

For students and researchers in Latin American politics, with a focus on violence, post-civil war dynamics, state reform/capacity and illicit economies, this is the first comparative book to explain and analyze the striking and varied homicide rates in Latin America, alongside a systematic analysis of three post-civil war cases.

The first rigorous comparative study of movement-based parties, this book shows not only how movements form parties but also how movements contribute to shaping parties' internal politics and organizational models. Anria sheds new light on Latin America's three most innovative leftist parties: Bolivia's MAS, Brazil's PT, and Uruguay's FA.

Drug wars have ravaged Latin America, from Pablo Escobar in Colombia and El Chapo in Mexico to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. This book helps social scientists, area specialists, and policymakers understand why state crackdowns often backfire, and why deterrence-based approaches have been successful but hard to implement and sustain.

How do democracies form and what makes them die? In a wide-ranging narrative of democracy's history in Europe, from 1830s Britain to Adolf Hitler's 1933 seizure of power in Weimar Germany, the book offers a re-interpretation of how stable political democracy is built, coming to the bold conclusion that democracy's historical adversaries, conservative political parties, shape democracy's viability.

Can meaningful representation arise in an authoritarian setting? Making Autocracy Work identifies the trade-offs associated with representation in authoritarian environments and then tests the theory with original data from China's National People's Congress (NPC), the country's highest formal political institution.

Who Speaks for the Poor? offers a new account of cross-national differences in the political and partisan representation of low-income voters, focusing attention on the electoral geography of income and how it changed over time. Comparative analysis sheds light on the absence of a low-income people's party in the USA.

Deadly Clerics explains why some Muslim clerics adopt the ideology of militant jihadism while most do not. The book explores multiple pathways of cleric radicalization and shows that the interplay of academic, religious, and political institutions has influenced the rise of modern jihadism through a mechanism of blocked ambition.

An analysis of violence against civilians during civil war. Balcells focuses on strategic motives in civil war in Spain and the Ivory Coast, in addition to the emotions that drive revenge. This is essential reading for students and researchers of politics, history, sociology, conflict processes, and conflict resolution.

Exclusion by Elections studies how 'class identities' and 'ethnic identities' become salient in electoral politics, and examines the relationship between identity politics and inequality reduction. A discouraging theme emerging from the research is that inequality invites ethnic rather than class politics, and that ethnic politics makes it difficult to address inequality.

Focusing on the distribution of risk within societies, this book presents a parsimonious theory of social policy emergence, divergence, and change. It is suitable for advanced undergraduate courses and graduate seminars in political economy, social policy, labor market politics, political behavior, political psychology, sociology, and class stratification.

The book explains why and when laws go unenforced in developing countries. It argues that the tolerance of street vending and squatting is a form of informal welfare provision and a more effective means to mobilize the poor than conventional state social policies.

Why do institutional crises emerge, spread, and repeat in some Latin American countries, but not in others? This book shows that concentrating power in the executive branch not only fuels presidential crises under divided government, but also triggers broader constitutional crises that cascade on to the legislature and the judiciary.

In Organized Violence after Civil War, Daly analyzes evidence from militia groups in Colombia, demonstrating the driving forces behind the post-war trajectory of armed groups. Using rich ex-combatant survey data and geo-coded information on violence the author explains the dynamics inside armed organizations and the strategic interactions between them.

This book explores local congressional representation in China. Drawing on original fieldwork and surveys, it demonstrates that the priorities and problems of ordinary Chinese influence who gets elected to local congresses and what congresses do once elected. It will appeal to those interested in China, authoritarianism, democratization, elections, and representation.

Challenging the conventional perception that war zones are chaotic and anarchic, this study analyzes rebel institutions, social order and civilian-combatant relations in the Colombian civil war. The results of extensive fieldwork shed light on how war transforms communities, patterns of local governance, non-violent resistance, state building, and political order.

Clientelism and ethnic favoritism appear to go hand in hand in many diverse societies in the developing world. However, while some ethnic communities receive generous material rewards for their political support, others receive very modest payoffs. In this study the author examines this key, and often overlooked, component of clientelism.

This book is relevant to readers interested in the persistence of traditional institutions in the contemporary world, the possibility for democratic transitions in weak states, the calculus of voters in new democracies, and community-level development in poor countries.

This book shows that land redistribution - the most consequential form of redistribution in the developing world - occurs more often under dictatorship than democracy. It offers a novel theory of land reform and tests it using extensive original data dating back to 1900.

This book presents an account of war settlement in Georgia and Tajikistan as local actors maneuvered in the shadow of a Russian-led military intervention. Combining ethnography and game theory with quantitative and qualitative methods, this book presents a revisionist account of the post-Soviet wars and their settlement.

This book analyzes how increases in international trade, finance, and production have altered voter decisions, political party positions, and the types of public issues that parties focus on in postindustrial democracies.

Why do poor people often vote against their material interests? This puzzle has been famously studied within wealthy Western democracies, yet the fact that the poor voter paradox also routinely manifests within poor countries has remained unexplored. This book studies how this paradox emerged in India, the world's largest democracy.

The fundamental question of political theory, one that precedes all other questions about the nature of political life, is why there is a state at all. This book describes the foundations of stateless societies, why and how states emerge, and the basis of political obligation.

Tying the Autocrat's Hands provides a comprehensive, empirical evaluation of legal reforms in contemporary China. Based on the author's extensive fieldwork and analyses of original data, the book tells a story in which foreign investors with weak political connections push for judicial empowerment in China, while Chinese investors struggle to hold on to their privileges.

Examines the role of social networks in the efficient running of democratic market economies. This title is also available as Open Access.

This book examines contemporary changes in labor market institutions in the United States, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands.

How were reforms that aimed to reduce electoral intimidation adopted? This book provides a micro-historical analysis of the adoption of reforms protecting voter autonomy. It shows that changes in district-level economic and political conditions led to the formation of an encompassing political coalition supporting these electoral reforms.

This book examines how labor policies were made in the US, Germany, and Japan during the 1980s.

Kaplan explores the effect of globalization on Latin American economic policy-making. It investigates why left-leaning politicians from countries with high poverty and wage inequality adopt market-oriented policies. A new form of austerity politics has surfaced where politicians signal their good governance with budgetary discipline yet simultaneously direct spending to supporters.