Does democracy reduce state repression as human rights activism, funding, and policy suggest? What are the limitations of this argument? Investigating 137 countries from 1976 to 1996, State Repression and the Domestic Democratic Peace seeks to shed light on these questions. Specifically, it finds that electoral participation and competition generally reduces personal integrity violations like torture and mass killing; other aspects of democracy do not wield consistent influences. This negative influence can be overwhelmed by conflict, however, and thus there are important qualifications for...

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 paper examines changes in the Lancashire textile industry after the mid-1950s.

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...

The related subjects of political legitimacy and system support are key theoretical concerns of students of democratic societies. They have received very little scholarly attention, however, because of the conceptual and methodological complexities they engender. In this book, the authors address these concerns through systematic multivariate analyses of the sources, distribution and consequences of variations in citizen support for key political objects in one such society, Canada. Although they do so within a comparative context, their primary focus is on Canada because it is not only one...

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...

After developing an argument to determine when actors will try and reshape political rules, rather than operate within them, Joseph Jupille applies it to European Union (EU) integration and politics. Jupille demonstrates that the European Union is far more deeply rule-governed than is traditionally understood and, accordingly, reveals a much more complete picture of the role of rules in political life than is available in most existing research.

This study offers a theoretical framework for understanding how institutional instability affects judicial behavior under dictatorship and democracy. In stark contrast to conventional wisdom, the central findings of the book contradict some assumptions that only independent judges rule against the government of the day. Set in the context of Argentina, the study uses the tools of positive political theory to explore the conditions under which courts rule against the government. In addition to shedding light on the dynamics of court-executive relations in Argentina, the study provides general...

This book investigates one of the oldest paradoxes in political science: why do mass political loyalties persist even amid prolonged social upheaval and disruptive economic development. Drawing on extensive archival research and an original database of election results, this book explores the paradox of political persistence by examining Hungary's often tortuous path from pre- to post-communism. Wittenberg reframes the theoretical debate, and then demonstrates how despite the many depredations of communism, the Roman Catholic and Calvinist Churches transmitted loyalties to parties of the...

In the early 1990s, competitive elections in the Russian Federation signaled the end to the authoritarian political system dominated by a single political party. More than ten years and many elections later, a single party led by Russian President Vladimir Putin threatens to end Russia's democratic experiment. Russia's experience with new elections is not unique but it does challenge existing theories of democratic consolidation by showing that competitive elections cannot guarantee successful democratic consolidation. This book explores the conditions under which electoral competition...