Social scientists teach that politicians favor groups that are organized over those that are not. Representation Through Taxation challenges this conventional wisdom. Emphasizing that there are limits to what organized interests can credibly promise in return for favorable treatment, Gehlbach shows that politicians may instead give preference to groups organized or not that by their nature happen to take actions that are politically valuable. Gehlbach develops this argument in the context of the postcommunist experience, focusing on the incentive of politicians to promote sectors that are...

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.

This book studies policymaking in the Latin American electricity and telecommunication sectors. Murillo s analysis of the Latin American electricity and telecommunications sectors shows that different degrees of electoral competition and the partisan composition of the government were crucial in resolving policymakers tension between the interests of voters and the economic incentives generated by international financial markets and private corporations in the context of capital scarcity. Electoral competition by credible challengers dissuaded politicians from adopting policies deemed...

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.

Political economists have viewed large public expenditures as a product of leftist government and the expression of a stronger representation of labor interest. The formation of governments' funding bases is a topic that has not been thoroughly explored, and this book sheds important new light on the issue of taxes and welfare. Beginning with a clarification of the development of postwar tax policies in industrial democracies, Junko Kato finds that the differentiation of tax revenue structure is path dependent upon the shift to regressive taxation. Kato challenges the conventional belief that...

This book examines how democracy influences state-building and market-building in 25 post-communist countries from 1990 to 2004.

This 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- and the -demand-side- 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...

Social movements such as environmentalism, feminism, nationalism, and the anti-immigration movement figure prominently in the modern world. Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements examines social movements in a comparative perspective, focusing on the role of ideology and beliefs, mechanisms of mobilization, and how politics shapes the development and outcomes of movements. It includes case studies of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the United States, Italy, the Netherlands, and West Germany.

Why do some state building efforts succeed when others fail? Using newly available archival sources, this book presents a new explanation for the rise and subsequent collapse of the Soviet state. The study explains how personal networks and elite identity served as informal sources of power that influenced state strength. Reconstructing the State also offers new interpretations of how the weak Bolshevik state extended its reach to a vast rural and multi-ethnic periphery as well as the dynamics of the center-regional conflict in the 1930s that culminated in the Great Terror.

By analytically decoupling war and violence, this book explores the causes and dynamics of violence in civil war. Against the prevailing view that such violence is an instance of impenetrable madness, the book demonstrates that there is logic to it and that it has much less to do with collective emotions, ideologies, and cultures than currently believed. Kalyvas specifies a novel theory of selective violence: it is jointly produced by political actors seeking information and individual civilians trying to avoid the worst but also grabbing what opportunities their predicament affords them....