This book examines the effect of economic conditions on election results in five post-communist countries--Russia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic--in the first decade of post-communist elections. It is the first book length study of economic voting outside of established democracies, as well as one of the few comparative studies of voting in post-communist countries generally. The study relies on an original database composed of regional level economic, demographic, and electoral data, and the analysis features a broadly based comparative assessment of the findings across...

This book explains how postwar Japan managed to achieve a highly egalitarian form of capitalism despite meager social spending. Estevez-Abe develops an institutional, rational-choice model to solve this puzzle. She shows how Japan s electoral system generated incentives that led political actors to protect, if only for their own self-interested reasons, various groups that lost out in market competition. She explains how Japan s postwar welfare state relied upon various alternatives to orthodox social spending programs. The initial postwar success of Japan s political economy has given way to...

This book presents a theoretical framework to discuss how governments coordinate budgeting decisions. There are two modes of fiscal governance conducive to greater fiscal discipline, a mode of delegation and a mode of contracts. These modes contrast with a fiefdom form of governance, in which the decision-making process is decentralized. An important insight is that the effectiveness of a given form of fiscal governance depends crucially upon the underlying political system. Delegation functions well when there few, or no, ideological differences among government parties, whereas contracts...

What do ordinary citizens in developing countries think about free markets? Conventional wisdom views globalization as an imposition on unwilling workers in developing nations, concluding that the recent rise of the Latin American left constitutes a popular backlash against the market. Andy Baker marshals public opinion data from eighteen Latin American countries to show that most of the region's citizens are enthusiastic about globalization because it has lowered the prices of many consumer goods and services while improving their variety and quality. Among recent free-market reforms, only...

Legislatures are the core representative institutions in modern democracies. Citizens want legislatures to be decisive, and they want accountability, but they are frequently disillusioned with the representation legislators deliver. Political parties can provide decisiveness in legislatures, and they may provide collective accountability, but citizens and political reformers frequently demand another type of accountability from legislators at the individual level. Can legislatures provide both kinds of accountability? This book considers what collective and individual accountability require...

Legislatures are the core representative institutions in modern democracies. Citizens want legislatures to be decisive, and they want accountability, but they are frequently disillusioned with the representation legislators deliver. Political parties can provide decisiveness in legislatures, and they may provide collective accountability, but citizens and political reformers frequently demand another type of accountability from legislators at the individual level. Can legislatures provide both kinds of accountability? This book considers what collective and individual accountability require...

Trust and cooperation are at the heart of the two most important approaches to comparative politics rational choice and political culture. Yet we know little about trust s relationship to political institutions. This book sets out a rationalist theory of how institutions and in particular informal institutions - can affect trust without reducing it to fully determinate expectations. It then shows how this theory can be applied to comparative political economy, and in particular to explaining inter-firm cooperation in industrial districts, geographical areas of intense small firm...

Brokers, Voters, and Clientelism addresses major questions in distributive politics. Why is it acceptable for parties to try to win elections by promising to make certain groups of people better off, but unacceptable and illegal to pay people for their votes? Why do parties often lavish benefits on loyal voters, whose support they can count on anyway, rather than on responsive swing voters? Why is vote buying and machine politics common in today's developing democracies but a thing of the past in most of today's advanced democracies? This book develops a theory of broker-mediated distribution...

This book documents the emergence of a new pattern of political instability in Latin America. Traditional military coups have receded in the region, but elected presidents are still ousted from power as a result of recurrent crises. Anibal Perez-Linan shows that presidential impeachment has become the main constitutional instrument employed by civilian elites to depose unpopular rulers. Based on detailed comparative research in five countries and extensive historical information, the book explains why crises without breakdown have become the dominant form of instability in recent years and...

Why do some political parties flourish, while others flounder? In this book, Meguid examines variation in the electoral trajectories of the new set of single-issue parties: green, radical right, and ethnoterritorial parties. Instead of being dictated by electoral institutions or the socioeconomic climate, as the dominant theories contend, the fortunes of these niche parties, she argues, are shaped by the strategic responses of mainstream parties. She advances a new theory of party competition in which mainstream parties facing unequal competitors have access to a wider and more effective set...