In a world where capital moves freely across national borders, developing countries have increasingly been subjected to devastating financial crises caused by the sudden withdrawal of foreign capital. How do such crises develop? This book focuses on a novel causal path: that of miscommunication. By examining the determinants of Asia's financial crisis of 1997-98, it demonstrates why developing democracies are exceptionally vulnerable to breakdowns in communication between financial officials and the chief executive and outlines the disastrous consequences of such breakdowns.

This book explores the political process by which property rights are defined and enforced in two traditional states in colonial Ghana. The case studies within the book ask how colonial institutions transformed indigenous political and economic life; and how colonization and decolonization affected prospects for future economic development and stability in Africa. The introductory chapter outlines a theory of the transformation of property rights system while the remaining empirical chapters refine this theory through a detailed analysis of the transformation of property rights within an...

Rationalizing Parliament examines how institutional arrangements in the French Constitution shape the bargaining strategies of political parties. Professor Huber investigates the decision by French elites to include in the Constitution legislative procedures intended to "rationalize" the policy-making role of parliament and analyzes the impact of these procedures on policy outcomes, cabinet stability, and political accountability. Through its use of theories developed in the American politics literature, the study reveals important similarities between legislative politics in the United...

The Political Economy of Property Rights investigates the transformation of property rights in post-communist countries and China. The movement to effective market economies requires the creation of more effective supporting institutions, especially systems of property rights that decentralize the control of economic resources. This process is inherently political, and thus should be studied from the perspective of political economy.

In this book, Michael L. Ross explores the breakdown of the institutions that govern natural resource exports in developing states. Using case studies of timber booms in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, he shows that these institutions often break down when states receive positive trade shocks--unanticipated windfalls. Drawing on the theory of rent-seeking, he suggests that these institutions succumb to a problem he calls "rent-seizing"--the predatory behavior of politicians who seek to supply rent to others, and who purposefully dismantle institutions that restrain them.

This book points out that the interaction between the chambers in bicameral legislatures is central to understanding behavior in each chamber, a point neglected in previous studies. It surveys bicameral institutions from numerous countries and presents models that explain the significance of different institutional arrangements. These hypotheses are illustrated and tested with data from the French Fifth Republic, and supplemented with data from Germany, Japan, Switzerland, the United States, and the European Union.

In this path-breaking book, David Epstein and Sharyn O'Halloran produce the first unified theory of policy making between the legislative and executive branches. Examining major US policy initiatives from 1947 to 1992, the authors describe the conditions under which the legislature narrowly constrains executive discretion, and when it delegates authority to the bureaucracy. In doing so, the authors synthesize diverse and competitive literatures, from transaction cost and principal-agent theory in economics, to information models developed in both economics and political science, to...

In this 1989 book Charles Stewart analyses the development of the budgetary process in the House of Representatives between 1865 and 1921. The period began with the creation of the House Appropriations Committee and ended with the passage of the Budgetary Accounting Act. Attempts at change were closely related to societal and economic, but also to institutional, developments during this period. Both the electoral system and the national party system, as well as war and other economic crises, impacted upon the budgetary process.

In the time span of a two-term US presidency, Poland went from an authoritarian one-party state with a faltering centrally planned economy to become a relatively stable multiparty democracy and a market economy with one of the highest GDP growth rates in Europe. A central feature of these economic and political reforms is a high rate of entry of new, domestically owned firms. This book uses detailed economic and political data to examine how these new firms contributed to the Polish transition. The authors test propositions about why some regions have more new firms than others and how the...

This book presents a quantitative history of constitutional law in the United States and brings together humanistic and social-scientific approaches to studying law. Using theoretical models of adjudication, Tom S. Clark presents a statistical model of law and uses the model to document the historical development of constitutional law. Using sophisticated statistical methods and historical analysis of court decisions, the author documents how social and political forces shape the path of law. Spanning the history of constitutional law since Reconstruction, this book illustrates the way in...