This book argues that the dramatic post-1970 rise in international capital mobility has not systematically contributed to the retrenchment of developed welfare states as many claim. Nor has globalization directly 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.

During the past two decades, virtually all developing countries shifted from state-led to market-oriented neoliberal economic policies. This book analyzes fresh evidence from Southern Mexico about the effects of this global wave of policy reforms. The evidence challenges the widely held view that these reforms have set countries on a convergent path toward unregulated markets. The analysis shows that free-market reforms, rather than unleashing market forces, trigger the construction of different types of new regulatory institutions with contrasting consequences for economic efficiency and...

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. Goodwin demonstrates how the actions of specific types of authoritarian regimes unwittingly channeled popular resistance into radical and often violent directions. By comparing the historical trajectories of more than a dozen countries, Goodwin also shows how revolutionaries were able to...

This book addresses the current debate regarding the liabilities and merits of presidential government. Does presidentialism make it less likely that democratic governments will be able to manage political conflict? With the unprecedented wave of transitions to democracy since the 1970s, this question has been hotly contested in political and intellectual circles all over the globe. The contributors to this volume examine variations among different presidential systems and skeptically view claims that presidentialism has added significantly to the problems of democratic governance and...

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 explores these questions by developing a model of policy switches and then testing it with statistical and qualitative data from Latin American elections over the past two decades. She concludes that politicians may change policies because unpopular policies are best for constituents and hence also will best serve their own political ambitions.

This book synthesizes and extends modern political-economic theory to explain the postwar evolution of macroeconomic policy in developed democracies. The chapters 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...

Cities play a growing role in governing. This new role fits within a context that nation-states, global market forces and cities themselves continue to define. The analysis of this book focuses on how local efforts in the distinct European systems of France and Germany as well as American counterparts have provided for environmental quality and social inclusion alongside local economic development. Only in certain European settings has policy making at multiple levels accomplished all three objectives at once. In those settings, effective governance from below has relied on adequate support...

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 European Parliament 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.

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 the parties survived, with some even returning to power.

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. By combining theory, quantitative analysis, and historical and contemporary case studies, this book provides a new perspective on why different countries have had dramatically different experiences with subnational fiscal discipline.