In this book the author examines the problems encountered in negotiations among claimants and the political and economic considerations that influence property rights arrangements. The histories of mineral rights, rights to range and timber land, and fishery and crude oil production rights in the United States are examined and reveal a surprising variety of contractual negotiations and economic outcomes. The author concludes that in addition to an analysis of distributional outcomes, an examination of the details of the political bargaining underlying property rights contracts is essential to...

In organization theory a schism has developed between the traditional organizational behavior literature, based in psychology, sociology and political science, and the more analytically rigorous field of organizational economics. The former stresses the importance of managerial leadership and cooperation among employees, while the latter focuses on the engineering of incentive systems that will induce efficiency, and profitability, by rewarding worker self-interest. In this innovative book, Gary Miller bridges the gap between these literatures. He demonstrates that it is impossible to design...

This book examines a key question of modern Japanese politics: why the Meiji oligarchs were unable to design institutions capable of protecting their power. The authors question why the oligarchs chose the political institutions they did, and what the consequences of those choices were for Japan's political competition, economic development, and diplomatic relations. Indeed, they argue, it was the oligarchs' very inability to agree among themselves on how to rule that prompted them to cut the military loose from civilian control--a decision that was to have disastrous consequences not only...

Presenting a theory to explain how politics revolves around one axis of social cleavage instead of another, Daniel Posner examines Zambia, where people identify themselves either as members of one of the country's seventy-three tribes or as members of one of its four principal language groups. Drawing on a simple model of identity choice, Posner demonstrates that the answer depends on whether the country is operating under single-party or multi-party rule, thus revealing how formal institutional rules determine the social cleavages that matter.

Empirical Studies in Institutional Change is a collection of nine empirical studies by fourteen scholars. Dealing with issues ranging from the evolution of secure markets in seventeenth-century England to the origins of property rights in airport slots in modern America, the contributors analyze institutions and institutional change. To make the papers accessible to a wide audience, the editors have written an introduction to each study and added three theoretical essays to the volume, including Douglass North's Nobel Prize address, that reflect their collective views as to the present and...

In Making a Market, Jean Ensminger analyzes the process by which the market was introduced into the economy of a group of Kenyan pastoralists. Professor Ensminger employs new institutional economic analysis to assess the impact of new market institutions on production and distribution, with particular emphasis on the effect of institutions on decreasing transaction costs over time. This study traces the effects of increasing commercialization on the economic well-being of individual households, rich and poor alike, over considerable time and analyzes the process by which institutions...

This book investigates strategic coordination in elections worldwide. Although the classics of electoral studies have dealt with issues of coordination, this is the first book that employs a unified game-theoretic model to study strategic coordination--including both strategic voting and strategic entry--worldwide and that relies primarily on constituency-level rather than national aggregate data in testing theoretical propositions about the effects of electoral laws.

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.

Using recent theoretical developments in the political economy of institutions and electoral behavior, this book attempts to solve an enduring puzzle in women's electoral politics, namely why the increasing importance of women's votes in the 1920s did not imply increasing success for the lobbying efforts of women's organizations. The book argues that women's exclusion from the suffrage created terms that led to distinctive patterns of post-suffrage female electoral politics. These electoral dynamics in turn are responsible for the decline in the political influence of women's organizations by...

This book explains why citizens sometimes comply with and sometimes disobey the demands of democratic governments. It argues that citizens are more likely to comply and even give active consent when they perceive government as procedurally fair in both decisionmaking and implementation processes and when they believe other citizens are also doing their share. The author develops her argument by exploring over two hundred years of military service policies in six democratic countries.