CP COMPS NOTE CARDS

Kalyvas (1996) -- The Rise of Christian Democracy in Europe PARTIES AND DEMOCRATIC SYSTEMS

Background: - Distinctive features of Christian Democratic parties include mass organization, ties to trade unions, and concerns with welfare and social policies that set them apart from traditional Conservative parties - They are frequently in power in give major European countries - In short, CD is the most successful western European political movement since 1945 Puzzle: - Contradiction between religious roots and success in a secular Europe with decreasing religiosity over time - How, when, why, and by whom confessional parties are formed Main Argument: - The formation of confessional parties was the contingent outcome of decisions made by political actors - it was the unplanned, unintended, and unwanted by-product of the strategic steps taken by the Catholic church in response to Liberal anticlerical attacks - The existing political situation and the preferences of prominent actors involved when these attacks began were not conducive to the formation of such parties, but the process set in motion in response to these attacks led to the creation of a new political identity among lay Catholics and the formation of confessional parties - In short, confessional parties were formed in spite of, and not, as is usually assumed, because of the church's intentions and actions (and those of conservative elites) - More basically, the transition from Catholic social identity to a Catholic political identity has to be accounted for (it did not happen in France despite favorable conditions) - Political actors are important in shaping cleavages, identities, and politics - leads to politicization of certain cleavages and identities in certain periods - Confessional parties were antagonistic to the church by (1) competing for the same constituency of lay people; (2) deemphasizing the salience of religion in politics to appeal to a broader base; (3) altering their religious identity to ensure independence and autonomy of action from the church; as a result, confessional parties detached themselves from church Method: - Evidence from five countries where a successful confessional party formed - Belgium, Netherlands, Austria, Germany, and Italy - and France, where one did not Findings: - The Church formerly acted like an interest group and lobbied all parties; then allied with conservatives who constricted issue space - Governments started to attack church on education and family - Chose outright resistance rather than compromise with liberals - consisted of exclusive use of church's resources in fight against anticlerical measures, and the fundamental element of the strategy was the creation of mass organizations conceived of as the starting point for a counter-society that would swallow the Liberal state and reestablish the church in its former glory - The Church then decided to enter the political process - the church put together electoral coalitions based on existing Conservative factions; this increasingly politicized the Catholic mass organizations - Church fell victim to its own success: could not become a political party for fear of undermining universalism but could not freeze the process of politicization because it was costly to bring Catholic activists back into the fold

Hall and Soskice (2003) -- Varieties of Capitalism GROUPS AND COALITIONS

Comparative Capitalism: - HS initiate a new approach to the comparison of national economies that focuses on firms, called "comparative capitalism" - HS conceive of firms as relational. They seek to develop/exploit "core competencies." - Because these capabilities are relational, firms need to coordinate with many actors in five areas: (1) industrial relations, including bargaining with labor; (2) vocational training; (3) corporate governance, including access to finance; (4) inter-firm relations, including relations with suppliers and clients; and (5) employees, ensuring they have adequate skills and cooperate well to advance firms' interests Types of Economies: - Institutions structuring political economies confer comparative advantages on nations. HS reject the claim that international economic integration will lead to a convergence of institutional and regulatory regimes - HS distinguish between liberal market economies (LMEs) and coordinated market economies (CMEs) LMEs: - Firms coordinate via hierarchies and competitive market arrangements - In response to price signals, actors adjust their willingness to supply and demand things - Markets are a highly effective means of coordination - Finance is more tied to current earnings and equity prices - Regulators tolerate M&As, including hostile takeovers - Firms rely on market relations to organize relations with their labor forces. There is greater emphasis on general skills and less willingness to invest in specific-skill training, given fears about poaching - While firms collaborate in CMEs, in LMEs there are rigorous antitrust regulations. Technology diffuses through the sale of innovations and movement of innovators CMEs: - Firms are more dependent on non-market relations. There is greater exchange of private information within networks, more reliance on collaborative relationships to build firm competencies - Institutions in CMEs are meant to reduce uncertainty and enable credible commitments by actors by allow exchanges of information, monitoring, and sanctioning of defectors. The key institutions are those that provide a capacity for collective deliberation. These include informal rules and understandings - Access to finance is not entirely dependent on public financial data or current returns, allowing skilled workers to be retained during economic downturns - Governing bodies of different firms are linked, reducing uncertainty - Within firms, there is an emphasis on consensus involving supervisory boards - Wages are set through industry-wide bargains with trade unions; this makes it harder to poach workers. - There are industry-wide, publicly subsidized vocational training systems. Technology diffuses through inter-firm relations - Germany is a prototypical example of industry-based coordination. Japan and South Korea are example of group-based CMEs (family companies stretch across industries, with more intense intra-industry competition) Predictions: - HS predict that LMEs will invest more in easily transferable "switchable assets" while CMEs focus on more static "specific assets" - LMEs will have greater paid employment, but greater income inequality, and be more conducive to radical innovation (e.g., entirely new product lines facilitated by fluid labor and equity markets)—the US specializes in medical engineering, biotechnology, etc. - CMEs will have shorter working hours and less inequality, and be better at supporting incremental innovation - Germany specializes in mechanical engineering, consumer durables, etc. Policymaking: - The task of economic policymakers in LMEs is to sharpen market competition. In CMEs, it is to reinforce non-market coordination capacities. - LMEs tend to be accompanied by liberal welfare states, with an emphasis on means testing and low levels of benefits, which reinforce fluid labor markets - CMEs tend to be accompanied by welfare systems with generous replacement rates to assure workers they won't need to switch industries during an economic downturn - In LMEs, firms pressure for deregulation and governments are likely to be sympathetic because they want to protect their comparative advantage. In CMEs, financial deregulation could unravel CMEs.

Lake and Powell (1999) -- Strategic Choice and International Relations STRUCTURE/AGENCY

Focus is on the choices that actors make in strategic settings i.e. when furthering one's ends depends on the actions others will take; the set of decisions made constitute the interaction Principal Components of SCA: - Strategic problems and interactions as the unit of analysis - Actors and environments are differentiated; actors are defined by the preferences and beliefs they hold; environments are made up of the set of actions and the information available to the actors - Agnostic toward level of analysis; strategic interactions at one level aggregate into interactions at another level (4) Boxes-in-Boxes: - Unit of analysis debate is not fruitful - strategic interactions at one level aggregate into interactions at another level (boxes-in-boxes) - What is exogenous (IV) in one box is endogenous (DV) in another; actors are generally aggregates of more basic actors and the appropriate level of aggregation depends on the question - Institutions determine which box's preferences matter most at any point in time - Partial equilibrium perspective: equilibria at different levels of analysis are additive; the domestic level allows rational choice theorizing to get output; at the international level you do the same with actors and interactions in a situation; since they are additive, you add them together to get an answer Microfoundations: - The interaction between actors, their preferences, their environment, and the outcomes of the interactions - In short, the link between assumptions and outcomes, which realism lacks Preferences (Frieden): - Preferences (over outcomes) are exogenous and constant in the short-term and hard to observe. The environment is thus the focal point of change - We must keep preferences separate from the strategic setting in order to distinguish between their respective causal roles; can't induce preferences from behavior, so we must use theoretical deduction - Experiments can either vary the actors and keep environments constant or vary environments and keep actors constant

Simpser (2013) -- Why Governments and Parties Manipulate Elections: Theory, Practice, and Implications AUTOCRACIES

Framework: - Electoral manipulation: set of practices that includes ballot box stuffing, buying votes, and intimidating voters or candidates that violates basic political freedoms, undermines the function of elections as mechanisms of accountability, destroys confidence in electoral and democratic institutions, and can lead to social strife Question: Why do parties, candidates, and governments utilize electoral manipulation? Moreover, why is it often excessive and blatant? Prevailing wisdom: the aim is to help win the election at hand, and it should arise in tight races to yield smaller margins of victory Argument: - He proposes that electoral manipulation can yield substantially more than simply winning the election at hand - Fraudulent supermajorities can signal power even if they do not signal popular support - Fraud as a costly signal - increasing the level of fraud and the cost should increase the strength of the signal (harder to mobilize beyond core supporters; see Stokes) - It is, in sum, it is used to consolidate and monopolize political power and to transmit or distort information - There is no reason to expect that the type of authoritarian regime will predict either the incidence or pattern of electoral manipulation Benefits: - Direct effects: contribution to winning the election at hand - Indirect effects: influence on subsequent choices and behavior of a wide range of political actors - Indirect effects disappear with good electoral competition (fraud washes itself out) - Fraud shapes the behavior of political and social actors in ways that benefit the perpetrator and enhance its political power (over long times frame) - Electoral manipulation conveys information in two ways: attributes & capacities of manipulator - Insofar as electoral manipulation provides information about attributes, it is a costly signal and when it provides information about the behavior of others, it is a coordination device - It can discourage opposition supporters from turning out to vote/protest; convince bureaucrats to remain loyal to the government; persuade potential financial backers of parties and candidates to avoid supporting opponents; deter political elites from opposing the ruling party or entering political fray; increase post-electoral bargaining power vis-à-vis other groups; reduce the need to share rents with other groups and elites; enhance career prospects of politicians at subnational levels of government Prediction: - Excessive and blatant EM occurs where power is disproportionately concentrated in the hands of the party in government and where constraints on the discretion of government action are relatively weak - Regime wants to use fraud to lead people to focal point of no one protesting (only none and all protesting are NE) Findings - Provides a systematic, global picture of electoral manipulation - Shows how largely exogenous variations in background conditions (power and discretion of the ruling party) gave rise to variation in the patterns of manipulation - Citizens who perceive elections to be manipulated are less likely to go vote - Uses local Mexican data and a survey experiment - Excessive manipulation is associated with longer terms in office - Popular rulers were at least as likely to manipulate elections as unpopular ones in the past two decades, and they were more likely to manipulate them excessively - Popular protests and rebellion are less likely to arise following excessive electoral manipulation than following marginal manipulation Problems: - Why, if everyone knows there was fraud, is the big margin not meaningless for indirect effects? - Directly contradicts BDM; they would say you want the smallest possible winning coalition; any spending to drive turnout or increase vote margins is excessive - Stokes / Rundlett and Svolik provide the micro-foundations for this; a problem is his argument focuses purely on central decision-making, but the actual implementation is more local-level

Przeworski, Manin, and Stokes (1999) -- Democracy, Accountability, and Representation CITIZEN/POLITICIAN LINKAGES

Introduction: - Representation: acting in the interest of the represented - A government can be representative because it is responsive or accountable, but neither a responsive nor an accountable government need be representative; happens b/c incomplete information about exogenous conditions or effect of policy on outcomes - not sure which policies are in best interest - Moral hazard: governments can be responsive by acting on opinion polls, but knowingly act in a way that in non-representative as a result; governments can betray the people in good faith because governments have access to information that people do not Chapter 1: Elections and Representation Mandate Representation: - Mandate view: elections serve to select good, policy-bearing politicians; parties propose -> citizens pick -> policies are implemented - Accountability view: elections hold government accountable for past actions, inducing good policy choices - Mandate representation works if electoral campaigns are informative (that is, voters can justifiably expect that parties would do what they proposed), pursuing the winning platform is always in the best interest of voters, politician and citizen interests coincide, reelection is desired, and politicians care about future credibility - Voters will not punish politicians who made them better off by deviating from mandate Accountability: - Accountability representation occurs when: (1) voters vote to retain incumbent only when incumbent acts in best interest and (2) incumbent chooses policies needed to be reelected - Under accountability, politicians shirk by pursuing their own or special interests - Tradeoff: extracting rents and losing office or not extracting rents and keeping office Institutional factors: - Voters must be able to assign clearly the responsibility for government performance - Voters must be able to vote out of office parties responsible for bad performance, and selected parties must be able to enter government - Politicians must have incentives to want to be reelected - The opposition must monitor the performance of the government and inform citizens - "an opposition that always opposes is not any more credible to voters than the government" - The media has a role to play - "unless they have clearly partisan interests, they are more credible than either the government or the opposition" - Voters must have some institutional instruments to reward and punish governments for outcomes they generate in different realms Problems: - Under polarization, does the media assumption hold? How about the opposition one?

Iversen and Cusack (2000) -- The Causes of Welfare State Expansion: Deindustrialization or Globalization? REDISTRIBUTION AND THE WELFARE STATE INSTITUTIONS

Main Argument: - Most of the risks being generated in modern industrialized societies are the product of technologically induced structural transformations inside national labor markets - Increasing productivity, changing consumption patterns, and saturated demand for products from the traditional sectors of the economy are the main forces of change - These structural sources of risk fuel demand for state compensation and risk sharing Theory: - Two previously largest sectors - agriculture and industry - have contracted all over - Change might lead people to take lower-paying jobs, jobs without benefits, or leave the job force altogether - Governments have responded in one of three ways: (1) promote employment in private services via deregulation of product and labor markets and the allowance of greater wage dispersion; (2) maintain extensive regulation of private services and compressed wage structure while expanding employment in public services i.e. more consumption; (3) regulation remains in place and the public sector is not expanded i.e. more transfers - Whether openness is related to risk depends on extent to which international market volatility is greater than domestic market volatility - Two conditions: (1) price volatility in international markets is greater than in domestic markets; (2) trade concentrates more than diversifies risk - Rodrik's analysis includes non-democratic or less developed countries to whom the argument presented here does not apply - Main sources of risk are found in interaction of sector-specific skills and domestic economic processes; labor-market dislocations associated with major shifts in the sectoral-occupational structure have been a driving force behind expansion of welfare state since early 1960s - The importance of changes in occupational structure depends on transferability of skills and social benefits - Firms provide social benefits that are specific to employment in order to reinforce acquisition of firm-specific skills; it follows that workers can protect themselves only via mediation of the state - Forms include state-guaranteed health insurance, old age pensions, early retirement, disability insurance, etc. - When skills/benefits do not travel, but many are expected to have to travel, there should be high demand for state-sponsored compensation and risk sharing; firms like this because without assurance, no investment in skills - Most skills obtained in manufacturing and agriculture do not travel to services - Political and institutional factors (labor unions, left government) still matter Findings: - It does not appear that openness to trade or openness to international financial system increases the volatility of the domestic real economy - Growth in transfers and government consumption can be explained as a function of the severity of internally driven employment losses in traditional sector, not globalization - Only finding that holds is left-labor power creates expansion of government - None of globalization variables - openness and capital mobility - are significant on government transfers - Political factors do affect government consumption, but not transfer payments - Two pathways: governments increase transfers and governments increase public employment - The latter effect is amplified by centralized bargaining and dominance of left parties - Countries with least historical dependence on traditional sectors have experienced the fewest jobs lost over time; speaks to domestic rather than international determinants - They close by saying that globalization is associated with deindustrialization / offshoring Discussion: - Again, it does not necessarily seem that this refutes Rodrik directly; just that his argument might apply to a different sub-sample - Most of the world is not deindustrializing, so Rodrik can explain more countries - Deindustrialization is actually endogenous to capital mobility and globalization! - Relates to NW 1989 (endogenous institutions)

Glaeser et al. (2001) -- Coase Against the Coasians BARGAINING

Question: Should judges or regulators enforce laws and contracts? Coasians say judges! Argument: - The incentives facing regulators and judges shape the choice - Under the Coase Theorem, contracts render regulations unnecessary if properly enforced - But courts often have neither the resources nor incentives b/c contracts are complicated - Regulators are more easily incentivized to punish violators at the potential cost of excessively aggressive enforcement - The disclosure of information by issuers / intermediaries reduces cost of search and promotes enforcement; where disclosure is low and judicial resources low, regulators are good Method: - Comparison of Poland and the Czech Republic in the 1990s - Poland had struct securities law enforcement via a motivated regulator, leading to a developed stock market - CR had hands-off judicial regulation, leading to a moribund stock market and investor expropriation Takeaways: - Judges are not always the best contract enforcers - Need legal protection of shareholders and creditors to prevent expropriation

Greitens (2016) -- Dictators and Their Secret Police: Coercive Institutions and State Violence AUTOCRACIES

Setup: - There is great variation in the different ways authoritarian regimes use violence and repression to maintain power (low-level intimidation vs. mass killing); variation both in the levels and types of violence across countries spatially and across time within the same country unit - Focus on coercive institutions: the specific set of institutions that collectively hold responsibility for internal intelligence and security - Two primary mechanisms by which institutions affect state violence: intelligence pathway and incentives pathway - Intelligence pathway: intelligence allows precise, selective, lower-intensity violence against the right people and only when necessary (requires unitary and inclusive forces) - Incentives pathway: fragmentation incentivizes violence among the organizations and agents of the internal security apparatus; increases competition between the various agencies Questions: - What determines the design of autocratic coercive institutions? - What effect do these design choices have on patterns of repression? Argument: - Autocrats face a coercive dilemma: whether to organize their internal security apparatus to defend against a coup, or to deal with the threat of popular unrest -> Svolik's (2012) twin problems are a tradeoff such that fixing one worsens the other - Coup-proofing calls for fragmented and socially exclusive (often linked to ethnic or underlying social groups) organizations, while protecting against mass protests = unitary and exclusive ones - A fragmented, exclusive coercive apparatus gives its agents social and material incentives to escalate rather than dampen violence and also hampers agents from collecting the intelligence necessary to engage in targeted, discriminate, and pre-emptive repression - A unitary and inclusive (maximize participation often led by civilians to increase responsiveness and penetration) apparatus configured to address significant mass unrest has better intelligence capacity and creates incentives for agents to minimize the use of violence and to rely instead on alternative forms of repression like surveillance and targeted pre-emption; also better at detecting and responding to changes in the nature of threats - Empowering security agencies to conduct effective repression creates a serious risk to the autocrat's political and physical survival: the risk of a coup - Autocrats negotiate the organizational tradeoff by crafting their coercive institutions to address the dominant perceived threat at the time they come to power - Paradox this creates for ordinary people: under the system where they are the primary threat, they lose liberty and privacy, but they are most often killed when they are not the primary threat Cases: - Taiwan and the Philippines are similar in alternative explanations (US allies, anti-communist, popular threat rising over time); yet, the outcomes in terms of violence differ over time Taiwan - Taiwan: state violence drops heavily over time starting in the mid-1950s. yet levels of social protest increase over time; in 1950s moved from fragmented and exclusive to mass and inclusive; coercive institutions shifted to allow Taiwan to get a handle on domestic security problems; reforms gave Taiwan's coercive apparatus a way to maintain control without costly and indiscriminate violence - Philippines: under Marcos, elite, fragmented, and exclusive; Marcos elected in 1965 and martial law in 1972 when constitutionally unable to run for a third term before ousted in 1986; four competing rivals with their own dissident organizations explicitly incentivized to compete through a bounty system; competition -> poor intelligence -> torture

Olson (1965) -- The Logic of Collective Action COLLECTIVE ACTION

Takeaways: - In small groups where a member gets such a large fraction of total benefits that he would be better off if he paid the entire cost himself, we presume the collective good is provided - Groups with inequality (i.e. one member benefits a ton) often have the good provided - In large groups where no individual contribution impacts the group outcome, the good will not be provided without coercion or outside intervention/inducements to lead the group to act in the common interest (free-riding) - The cost of organization is an increasing function of group size - Only separate/selective incentives stimulate group action in a "latent" group

Pepinsky (2014) -- The Institutional Turn in Comparative Authoritarianism AUTOCRACIES INSTITUTIONS

Goal: reviews three books (Geddes, Brownlee, and Gandhi) saying that authoritarian institutions matter and critiques them Argument: - Existing research has not demonstrated causal effects of authoritarian institutions; has yet to address theoretical issues; RD can't rule out institutions as epiphenomena - Riker Objection: institutions as equilibria arising from strategic behavior of individuals; is misleading to call them exogenous constraints on behavior because they are endogenous to both the interests of the individuals whose behavior they constrain and environment in which they interact - Murdoch school: institutions do not have independent causal effects on politics b/c they do not persist w/o persistence of more basic social relations that produce them (think NW 1989) - Empirically, it is not hard to tell whether an institution causes something or whether the thing that caused the institution is doing the work

Fearon (1995) -- Rationalist Explanations for War BARGAINING

Main Argument: - Leaders who consider the risks and costs of war may end up fighting nonetheless Lit Review: - Rationalist explanations for war are neorealist because the explanatory variable is systemic (the nature of the international system) - Current rational explanations of war are insufficient because they fail to resolve the central puzzle that war is costly and risky, so rational states should have incentives to locate negotiated settlements that all prefer to war - Five rationalist arguments: (1) anarchy; (2) expected benefits greater than expected costs; (3) rational preventive war; (4) rational miscalculation due to lack of information; and (5) rational miscalculation or disagreement about relative power - The first three fail to address why no alternative settlement is reached - The last two fail to address why rational leaders do not use diplomacy or other forms of communication to avoid costly miscalculation Three Reasons for War: - Private information about relative capabilities and incentives to misrepresent such information (Blainey 1973 is the precursor for states coming to different conclusions about relative capabilities) - Commitment problems: situations in which mutually preferable bargains are unattainable because one or more states would have an incentive to renege on the terms (i.e. time inconsistency; preemptive war under offensive advantage; preventive war with rising states; most dangerous per Weisiger 2013) - Issue indivisibilities (can be resolved by side payments and issue linkage) Detailed Argument: - There should always exist a bargaining range so long as the issue is divisible given that war is ex post inefficient - Disagreements about relative power: conflicting estimates of the likelihood of military victory can eliminate any ex ante bargaining range - War due to miscalculation of an opponent's willingness to fight: leader's private information about their resolve to fight over specific interests - The above two causes raise the question of why the private information is not shared - must be an incentive to misrepresent as well! - Incentives to misrepresent in bargaining: states may exaggerate their willingness or capability to fight in order to strategically position themselves to obtain a favorable resolution; they can understate to retain first strike - The above is the reason why any effective signal must be costly (i.e. need ability or resolve to do it) but war can be a signal of resolve here - Anarchy only matters where one or both sides in a dispute have incentives to renege on peaceful bargains - First-strike (offensive) advantages narrow the de facto bargaining range and defensive advantage increases it Problems: - Fearon ignores risk-acceptant states outside of Nazi Germany - Jervis would argue that private information is not needed - states can look at the same information and draw different conclusions (perceptions) - If war is a costly signal of resolve/power, how can agreements always be preferable? (The Vietnam/Korean Wars as a signal that the US would fight a nuclear war to defend an ally like Berlin) - Fearon assumes that leaders are perfectly secure which rules out domestic politics (he black-boxes states)

Blaydes (2011) -- Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak's Egypt AUTOCRACIES

Questions: In what ways does the authoritarian regime benefit from holding elections? Why do candidates spend scarce resources to run for a seat in a parliament that does not make policy? Why do citizens engage in the costly act of voting in such a context? Summary: all-pay auction elections that embody Mubarak's delegation strategy; get local elites to drum up support and spend their own money Argument: - Authoritarian regime in Egypt has endured not despite competitive elections, but because of these elections - Elections ease important forms of distributional conflict; conflict over access to spoils within Egypt's broad class of elite - Elections institutionalize dominance through formal channels, provide information for the regime regarding performance of party leaders and rank-and-file cadre, offer a focal point for the redistribution of wealth to state employees and the citizenry, provide a façade for high-level corruption, and enhance the international reputation of the autocrat while strengthening his political hold - Costs are related to the ways elections exacerbate state-society relations between the state and supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, for instance - The argument here is that the benefits of elections to leaders exceed the costs - The elimination of elections would be a utility loss for all major actors and societal groups that have come to rely on competitive electoral institutions - Absent elections, regime would be less durable b/c there would be distributional conflict b/w elite - Elections do more than confer legitimacy; they are a tool to manage domestic elite through the distribution of rents and promotions to important groups - Elections provide information about competence, connections, and commitment - Allocation is done via competitive markets, such as auctions - the bid is the cost of the electoral campaign - Elites accept fair election results b/c long time horizons (system may benefit you tomorrow) - There is a punishment regime in Egypt - governorates that supported opposition candidates in Egypt's first competitive parliamentary elections under Mubarak saw smaller improvements to public infrastructure - The poor are more responsive to vote buying because they benefit more from consumption goods (food, clothes, trips) - Book focuses on the use of quasi-democratic institutions to perpetuate authoritarian rule Egypt: - Millions of underemployed, poor citizens whose economic insecurity encourages a preference for small, targeted economic rewards over the discounted value of programmatic future benefits - Challenge of popular Islamist opposition movement (Muslim Brotherhood) - Competitive parliamentary elections emerged as the mechanism by which the authoritarian regime in Egypt makes difficult redistributive decisions - Elections regularize elite competition (elites redistribute in their regions) and therefore outsource the costs of political mobilization and redistribution - Parliamentary seats offer no shot at policy influence; benefits include informal access and preferential treatment (parliamentary immunity) - Opportunities for rent-seeking and protection from corruption charges - Voters are either (1) poor who think the benefits (financial) outweigh the costs (violence via candidates' armed thugs) or (2) ideologically motivated Muslim Brotherhood members - Less than a quarter of eligible voters generally vote in Egypt Military: - The military is fine with elections given that they enhance stability of regime, do not threaten core regime interests, and offer economic opportunity - Elections have given regime legitimacy, allowed continued US military aid - Public dissatisfaction directed at other institutions than the military; military is still the "protector" of the state i.e. coup Problems: - Per the coup, she should have considered the military; she considers the regime to be unitary and the military is not autonomous (not true) - Tension b/w all-pay auction (where those running spend all the mobilization money) and PBCs (30 calorie consumption increase)

Shepsle (2008) -- Rational Choice Institutionalism INSTITUTIONS

Two rational choice and one other way to think about institutions: - Constraints: rules of the game; exogenously imposed; include actors, behavior, and information - Equilibrium: endogenously determined by players; reflects the collective will of the actors - Macrosociological Practices: defined/altered by historical contingency; slowly changing and never identifiable by human agency Where can we use rational choice? - Rational choice is good for structured institutions; they persist in the same form over time i.e. judicial court, senate, regulatory agency, political party - Selectorates are vulnerable to two kinds of agency problems: (1) adverse selection: hidden information (characteristics unknown by principal); (2) moral hazard: hidden action (strategic agent behavior unknown by principal) - Unstructured institutions are more like norms or collective action and RC is less helpful Limitations of Rational Choice: - Bounded rationality: being rational is costly and constrained by cognitive limitations - Behavioral economics: what happens in markets and firms when individual agents are cognitively constrained by loss aversion, framing effects, hyperbolic discounting, etc. - Transaction-out economics: exchange is neither automatic nor cost free; the work of Coase (1937, 1960) is relevant here - Analytical narratives: use of analytical models - spatial representation, game form - as a framework in which to embed the case Discussion: - Shepsle would be concerned with historical institutionalism (Hall and Taylor); might fit under his concept of endogenous rational choice - Shepsle would take issue with malleable preferences - Hall and Taylor argue that preferences are informed by institutions (which means they change) - Critique is to say that moving preferences and moving institutions simultaneously make it hard for us to determine what drives behavior (Lake and Powell 1999) - We need to pin one down and vary the other to pinpoint drivers of change

Frye et al. (2017) - Is Putin's Popularity Real? AUTOCRACIES

Key Findings: - Putin's approval rating largely reflects the attitudes of Russian citizens; 80% - 6-9% social desirability bias (or preference falsification) b/c chances of being punished are actually pretty low; based more on media manipulation and suppression of opposition figureheads

Magaloni (2006) -- Voting for Autocracy: The Politics of Party Hegemony and its Demise AUTOCRACIES

Question: How does a hegemonic party manage to solve elite disputes and keep the party united? Why would voters support an autocratic regime? Summary: Citizens trade-off economic benefits from clientelism with ideological investments; regime wants a poverty trap to prevent ideological investments; regime wants short-term PBC growth but to stunt long-term development to maintain asymmetric dependency Elite-Splitting: - A politician with stronger ideology faces a stronger trade-off between the incumbent party and opposition; splits are more likely among ideologically-oriented politicians - There is no incentive to split if the opposition stands no chance of winning - Splits are less likely when the value of government spoils given to elites is high - Splits are less likely if an elite is more likely to receive the party's nomination - Splits are less likely when the costs of entering the electoral market are higher - Splits are less likely as the costs of campaigning as an opposition candidate relative to the costs of running as the ruling party candidate increase (media and access to government revenue are key here) Modeling Electoral Support in Autocracies: - Three issues to resolve: (1) expected economic performance under alternative parties; (2) chances of receiving transfers from each party; (3) and expected levels of electoral violence - For the incumbent: voters evaluate expected economic performance based on mean past performance, current economic state, and campaign promises all discounted by credibility of the leader (classic Bayesian updating) - For the opposition: Any priors are based on nothing, and promises could be seen as just rhetoric; uncertainty is shaped by media access, current offices held, and policy stances - The threshold needed for the incumbent to lose is smaller with a challenger that has prior experience in government (i.e. at the local level) - Voters are more forgiving when: (1) the economic history of the regime is good; (2) the autocracy kept its promises; (3) opposition is too uncertain - Voters also care about government transfers and targeted side payments i.e. cash transfers, food subsidies, credit, land titles, etc. - Assumption: regime will reward supporters and punish opposition to maximize votes (must be able to screen support/opposition and target benefits only to those who will vote for the party) - Vote buying works better when votes can be observed; private goods > public goods Calculus of Voting and Tradeoff between Ideology and Transfers: - Utility of voting for the ruling party increases as economy grows, as the size of financial punishment increases, as ideological distance from ruling party is smaller, and as the threat of violence increases - In order for a voter to defect, utility differential attributable to economic performance and ideological proximity must outweigh the expected punishment of foregone financial resources Propositions: - Voters have a socioeconomic dimension and a regime dimension, and the government must pay-off people who want different policies in both realms; two areas are considered to be independent of each other - Middle and high-income workers are more likely to make ideological investments - Poor economic conditions lead to more transfers and vote-buying - The more fiscal resources, subsidies, jobs, etc. the government has at its disposal, the safer it is via transfers - Vote buying should primarily be toward the poor and ideologically akin voters - The party can screen and receive support more effectively in rural localities where local knowledge is better (clientelistic networks are stronger) The Autocrat's Optimal Strategy: - The autocrat is helped by economic growth but harmed by economic development - The key is ensuring a poverty trap to maintain a base of support (dependent on state patronage; Mexico had institutions in place to do this) Coordination Dilemmas: - First, ruling party voters must defect en masse in order to ensure they will not experience economic punishment from defection - Second, the voters must unite around one common opposition group Coordination is more likely when: - Voters perceive the incumbent as effectively defeated (mass opposition) - Strategic voting: abandon lesser opposition candidates for the leading one; opposition vote is less divided among parties; voters set aside ideological differences to oust the autocrat - There are two types of opposition voters: radical and moderate where the difference is whether or not the voter supports post-election violence against the regime Chapter 2: Structural Determinants of Mass Support for the PRI Economic Performance - In general, electoral support for the PRI was stronger when the economy grew and weaker when the economy deteriorated - Long-term growth threatened the PRI; richer voters made ideological investments - Globalization made people less dependent on local-level licenses, permits, etc. - Some of the poor migrated to the U.S., but the remittances sent home actually helped to elevate the wealth level of the poor Chapter 3: Budget Cycles under PRI Hegemony - Theory predicts there should be an increase in government spending around elections when the hegemonic coalition is most vulnerable to potential challengers, including those resulting from splits within the ruling party - Huge vote margins were needed to deter elite splitting and entrench the PRI (Simpser)

Cusack, Iversen, and Soskice (2007) -- Economic Interests and the Origins of Electoral Systems Cusack, Iversen, and Soskice (2010) -- Response to Kreuzer ELECTORAL SYSTEMS: ORIGINS AND CONSEQUENCES

Question: Why do advanced democracies have different electoral systems? Argument: - The right adopted PR when their support for consensual regulatory frameworks, especially those of labor markets and skill formation where co-specific investments were important, outweighed opposition to redistributive consequences; occurred where there were previously densely organized local economies - In countries with adversarial industrial relations and weak coordination of unions and business, majoritarian institutions were kept to contain left - In sum, PR comes about with cross-class alliances when there is sufficiently powerful offsetting interest in collaboration - Systems were then frozen b/c stable regulatory frameworks under PR reinforced incentives to invest in co-specific assets -> neo-corporatist political economy Causal Logic: - PR adopters had a cooperative agreement between business and unions: in exchange for collective bargaining rights and monitoring of skill formation, business would have managerial control of the shop floor and determine training levels - Skills in the system were co-specific assets: the workers could only use their skills in a particular industry and needed protection from holdup - Political system needs to be such that the agreement cannot be changed by a change in government without consent of the groups - Requires PR and consensus decision making in regulatory areas Countries that adopted PR shared these characteristics: - Industrialization based on export specialization, and specialization in areas that demanded a relatively skilled workforce - put a premium on differentiated products and specialized skills - Importance of small-scale industry in relatively autonomous towns closely integrated into surrounding countryside - History of guild activity at the local level, typically transforming into handwork sectors if and when guilds were formally abolished - Unions developing as industry unions, sometimes confessional and/or regional, but with cross-industry linkages, open to cooperation with management over training and accepting of managerial prerogatives - Coordinated employers, though with sectoral differences Boix is Wrong: - Puzzle 1: no attempts were made by center and right to adopt majoritarian systems in the many decades in which religious divisions were no longer salient - Puzzle 2: current varieties of capitalism correlate perfectly with electoral systems - - Contra-Boi, PR should lead to more redistribution and left/bigger government (and in fact it historically has) - Boix ignores the runoff as a solution to the coordination problem on the Right (which means his ENP variable is wrong) - Per Kalyvas (1998) religion did not divide the Right because parties became catchalls before PR Problems: - Note that in practice, PR was adopted almost exclusively around WWI as a shock - 12-17 observations - Lack of micro-motives: why do they actually want PR? Why should capitalists and laborers not just collectivize and lobby rather than seek representative government? Can they have their interests satisfied without representation explicitly? Response to Kreuzer: - Parties in proto-corporatist countries were representative of and closely linked to economic interests - PR offered an obvious solution to the problem of representative, interest-committed parties that were unable to compete for votes outside their interest - it allowed parties to target their own voters and their organized interest to continue effective influence in the legislature

Darden and Grzymala-Busse (2006) -- The Great Divide: Literacy, Nationalism, and the Communist Collapse POLITICAL CULTURE LEGACIES

Question: Why do some governing parties, closely associated with a collapsed authoritarian regime, nonetheless retain power and continue to govern? Specifically, why has communist rule ended in such divergent outcomes? Argument: - The ultimate roots of the explanation lie in pre-communist schooling, which fomented and fostered nationalist ideas that led to the delegitimation of communist rule - The exit itself was the culmination of decades of nursed nationalist grievances, invidious comparisons to proximate non-communist states, and carefully sustained mass hostility to the communist project as a foreign and inferior imposition - Important b/c communist exit in first free elections has been strongly correlated with subsequent democratic consolidation where communist persistence has resulted in democracy with adjectives - Nationalism drove anti-Communism, and education drove shared national identity/history; provides clear channel for the deliberate and systematic inculcation of a set of values; immunized people against communist propaganda - In particular, national ideas instilled in first round of mass schooling - when a community first shifts from oral to literate mass culture - are durable - H1: communist exit is more likely where literacy preceded the onset of communism Findings: - Precommunist schooling alone accounts for 80% of the variance in communist seat share Relation to other readings: - Argues that values were instilled in families and survived with family units, but what about the Laitin (1998) story wherein the family makes a choice to sacrifice indoctrinated beliefs for future utility? Problems: - There is Soviet nostalgia now, so is it just a "grass is always greener" story? Can we differentiate schooling from invidious comparisons? - 28 observations in each regression - Didn't the Soviets change the schooling to indoctrinate different feelings? They co-opted the nationalist project

Ordeshook (1980) -- Response to Riker GROUPS AND COALITIONS

- Ordeshook takes issue with Riker's understanding of equilibrium and disagrees with his conclusion that "there are no equilibria to predict." - Riker has incorrectly confused the possibility of obtaining equilibria with the possibility for conducting scientific inquiry. - Recent scholarship proves that the absence of equilibria (as traditionally defined) does not rule out the study of institutions, i.e. making predictions and explanations. - Riker highly commends microeconomics for its ability to predict market outcomes, and laments the inability of political science to do the same given the unstable nature of political processes ("disequilibrium"). However, Ordeshook notes that even in economics, the presumed stability of markets is an abstract fiction...it is not necessarily the case in reality, where markets are subject to changing tastes and technologies. Cartels routinely form, for example. - Moreover, since market processes are linked to political processes, we cannot understand market functions and outcomes without also understanding political processes. If the latter are in flux, then so are economic phenomena. The task of political science is not to simply transplant economic models into the study of politics, but to contribute to the development of economists' paradigms, to develop new concepts.

Weeks (2008) -- Autocratic Audience Costs: Regime Type and Signaling Resolve AUTOCRACIES

Argument: - Autocracies shouldn't have a less significant audience cost than democracies when (1) domestic political groups can coordinate to punish the leader, (2) when the audience views backing down negatively, and (3) when outsiders can observe domestic sanctions for backing down. - Democracies do not have a significant signaling advantage over autocracies. - Regime stability is the crucial component of audience costs - not, as Schultz argues, open party competition and free mass media. As long as observers can see the leader make a threat, and then sees if they back down, freedom of the media is not required. Theory: - Most autocratic leaders require the support of key constituencies in their country much like the democratic leaders require the support of voting publics in theirs. - When you disaggregate autocracies, you find that most autocracies are just as successful in signaling their intentions as democracies - Only certain kinds of autocracies that can impede elite coordination, like "personalist" regimes (no domestic audience that can effectively sanction the leader), suffer fewer audience costs. - In autocratic countries where the intelligence apparatus is not controlled by the leader, it is easy for elites to congregate together and plan to oust the leader; moreover, the welfare of elites and leaders are often tightly linked Method: Uses the MID data set like everyone else, using the variable RECIP like everyone else to measure escalation, but the IV for autocracies is broken down by regime type Findings: - Democracies do not have a significant signaling advantage over autocracies; autocrats can incur audience costs as well, so the perceived signaling advantage for democrats is nullified. - Single- party regimes can generate threats in ways that are as credible as those issued by democracies.

Arrow (1994) -- Methodological Individualism in Social Knowledge METHODS/PATH DEPENDENCE

Argument: "Social knowledge" is essential to explain economic (and political behavior) that cannot be reduced to the individual knowledge of everyone. This idea challenges the concept of Methodological Individualism (MI). Context: - Methodological Individualism (MI) suggests that individuals are like atoms; all macro behavior is made up of these micro elements, which interact (strategically). - The problem is that the macro outcome need not be identical to any particular micro-motivation (e.g. profit-seeking leads to zero profit for all in perfect competition); and so imputing motivations to entities such as "classes" does not make much sense - Therefore, social knowledge is essential to explain equilibria: in Game Theory players form expectations on the basis of their knowledge of other players and their utility functions. - Example of social knowledge at play: Technological knowledge can be gathered by doing the science yourself, or by learning through communication or observing others. However, we almost exclusively rely on the latter form. Furthermore, even if people/firms wanted, they couldn't keep information private for very long. This shows that knowledge is an externality - and the socially available stock of information is essential to explain economic outcomes. Relation to other readings: - Supports Granovetter and Kuran in the sense that people are learning as they observe others

Young (1996) -- The Economics of Convention INSTITUTIONS METHODS / PATH DEPENDENCE

Background: - Convention: pattern of behavior that is customary, expected, and self-enforcing; everyone conforms, everyone expects others to conform, and everyone has good reason to conform (i.e. road rules, conventional dress codes) - Conventions resolve problems of indeterminacy in interactions that have multiple equilibria; out of many conceivable choices, only one is used - The economic significance is that they reduce transaction costs - Two ways conventions are established: (1) by central authority; (2) gradual accretion of precedent as in spreading from local custom Goal: To examine the accumulation of precedent as a means for conventions arising Argument: - Positive feedback loop: as an interaction is repeated by many different individuals, one particular way of resolving the interaction gains an edge through chance; it gains prominence, which leads to more people using it - Not because it is inherently better, but because historical circumstance gave it an edge Model: - Bottom-up model of how conventions emerge - People are boundedly rational and take the world around them as given - Over time, their dispersed and uncoordinated decisions interact in ways they do not foresee - People rely on focal points (a la Schelling 1960) that provided by precedent (incomplete info) informed by personal experience and information that is obtained from others - Evolutionary dynamic game: local interaction b/w individuals, boundedly rational responses to the perceived environment, and random perturbations Findings: - A different type of path dependence: even if we know the initial state of society, we cannot predict what the prevailing convention will be at each future date (i.e. no lock-in) - Path dependence holds in the short but no the long run (past decisions are eventually forgotten) - Local conformity effect: most of the time most of the population will be using the same convention in locales that interact with each other - Global diversity effect: if we run the process starting from similar initial conditions in independent locales, then at any sufficiently distant future time there is a positive probability that they will be using different conventions - Punctuated equilibrium effect: conventions are eventually dislodged by a series of random shocks and then society careens toward a new convention - Two cases support the model: rules of the road and the norms in distributive bargaining Relation to other stuff: seems most similar to an institutions as equilibria perspective in Shepsle; they are endogenous

Collier and Collier (1979) -- Inducements vs. Constraints: Disaggregating Corporatism GROUPS AND COALITIONS

Corporatism: - Emphasizes systems of interest representation based on non-competing groups that are officially sanctioned, subsidized, and supervised by the state Argument: - This concept can be disaggregated so that it sheds light on rather than obscures the different power relationships and political contexts with which it is associated - There may be inducements to win cooperation and constraints to directly control groups - Labor law has been a key factor in shaping labor movements in Latin America Theory: - Inducements offer methods for elites to motivate organized labor to support the state, cooperate with its goals, and accept its constraints - Labor sweeteners can also be paired with union restrictions, as selective inducements (selective incentives) can undermine radical unions, incentivize unions to meet particular standards, and foster reliance of labor leaders on the state for legitimacy and viability - Governments' preferences regarding labor are determined by the source of their power; unions may be useful in delivering votes, particularly if there is an emergent political threat. Hypotheses: - When governments want to gain/retain labor's support, and when unions are powerful and autonomous, they opt for higher inducements and lower constraints - When governments care less about labor's support and are more interested in controlling labor and preempting the emergence of powerful unions, they opt for higher inducements and higher constraints - When governments' primary concern is control, not support, they opt for lower inducements and higher constraints, often backed by force and repression. This occurs in contexts of strong labor and extremely anti-union governments

Herbst (2000) -- States and Power in Africa THE STATE, INSTITUTIONS, AND STATE STRENGTH

Contribution: Considers state creation and consolidation outside of Europe, where there are entirely different challenges to be faced by leaders Argument: - The fundamental problem for African leaders is broadcasting power over sparsely settled and inhospitable lands; unlike Europe, it is costly to administer the state - States are only viable if they can control their territory (i.e. more than international recognition) - Focus on sub-Saharan Africa because states share similar population structures, levels of technological development, and stocks of material wealth - Historical perspective starting with pre-colonialism rejects the notion that the Europeans changed everything; it was impossible for them to do so in the few decades they ruled Africa given the inherited political geography of Africa - African wars are not over territory, but over people, cattle, and slaves - Pre-colonial history matters a lot; African states survive mainly via colonial boundaries and international norms Leaders face three state-building challenges: (1) cost of expanding the power infrastructure; (2) nature of national boundaries; (3) design of state system - Cost: wars were not over territory and there was no residual state infrastructure after winning - Boundaries: state mediates international pressures via buffers; pre-colonial borders are essential to understanding African states - State system: last century is one of cooperation and not anarchy within Africa On Tilly: - For Tilly, Europe is densely populated (land scarce); in Africa, labor is scarce; without the need to administer land, no investment in bureaucracy - European success was also closely connected to growth of major cities - taxation and power projection - but not in Africa On Scott: - Like Scott on Russia - political elites in Africa wish to project power over rural areas despite peasants' desire to maintain authority over their lives; it has been difficult for parties to organize peasants qua peasants Robinson (2002) Review Essay: - Colonialism is short, but European influence via slavery dates to 1600 and even influences population density (via slavery); also see Nunn and Wantchekon (2011) for slavery's impact Contrasting story is AJR (2001) where there is an inverse relationship between population density in 1500 and present GDPPC b/c sparse population brought settler colonies

Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003) -- The Logic of Political Survival AUTOCRACIES

Framework: - Every form of government has a leader and challenger - Every leader answers to some group: the winning coalition or subset of selectorate whose support is essential for incumbent to remain in power - Coalition members are drawn from a broader group: the selectorate or subset of society that has a formal role in expressing a preference over the selection of a leadership that rules them, though their expression of preference may or may not directly influence the outcome - All actions a leader takes are compatible with a desire to remain in power - Leaders make three related decisions: (1) they choose a tax rate to generate revenue and affect how hard people work; (2) they spend the revenue to keep incumbents in office; (3) they provide various mixes of public and private goods - BDM endogenize the ties between the economy and political institutions such that recession is a product of choices regarding governing institutions (problematic) - Democrats and autocrats have same utility function - Incumbents select on cost first and the affinity (bonds), while challengers accept anyone initially and then use affinity after taking power - Incumbent advantage derives from the idea that the challenger cannot credibly commit to guaranteeing the winning coalition members continued membership - Loyalty is shaped by the size of the winning coalition and the selectorate or the risk of exclusion; bigger selectorate and smaller winning coalition engenders high loyalty Argument: - Public goods become more likely as the winning coalition expands in size (private goods get expensive and therefore decrease) - Civil liberties, political rights, transparency, peace, and prosperity are among the most important public welfare enhancements any government can provide - The larger the coalition or the weaker the loyalty norm, the stronger the society's commitment both to civil liberties and to political rights - Small coalitions are less likely to report tax revenue and income; they have an incentive to hide their kleptocracy - Large coalition size and a weak loyalty norm reduce the probability of war (DPT) - Large coalitions spend more on education than small coalitions; have lower illiteracy rates - Large coalitions spend more on healthcare and get better health more generally - Trade liberalism is promoted by a large winning coalition; otherwise protectionism insulates the interests of a few key members - Private goods examined are: black market exchange-rate premiums, corruption, and construction Problems: - WC stays the same size throughout regime duration, where Svolik says it may change - No discussion of elite threats to regime - Democracies and autocracies may have different utility functions (Debs and Goemans; Doyle)

Shayo (2009) -- A Model of Social Identity with an Application to Political Economy: Nation, Class, and Redistribution IDENTITY POLITICS

Goal: explain why national identification is both common among the poor and reduces the level of redistribution Takeaway: People vote for identity and not just economic interest Argument: - People vote for identity as well as economic self-interest; preferences involve the status of various groups in society as well as the perceived similarity of individuals and groups - Perceived similarity distance changes with attributes of agents and attention paid to different dimensions - Feedback loop: poor associating with nation reduces redistribution/increases inequality which reduces status of poor and so on Method: - ISSP and WVS - Model with three social groups (rich, poor, and nation) and perceived distance changing with attributes of agents and attention paid to various dimensions (i.e. income vs. race) - Status of the group is also important Findings: - There can exist a low-tax equilibrium if national attributes are salient relative to income/class-based attributes - This can happen when there is an exogenous source of national status (war) - Indeed, she finds a negative relationship between national ID and redistributive preferences (Trump and lower class) - This only works in the industrialized world Helps explain three empirical findings: - National identification is more common among the poor than among the rich - National identification tends to reduce support for redistribution - Across democracies there is a strong negative relationship between the prevalence of national identification and the level of redistribution Problems: - Shouldn't status and perceived distance be interdependent?

Huber (2012) -- Measuring Ethnic Voting: Do Proportional Electoral Laws Politicize Ethnicity? IDENTITY POLITICS

Literature: The traditional claim is that PR systems are likelier to cause activation along ethnic lines Argument: - Identification with groups/parties is influenced by political institutions - PR can cut across ethnic lines, as it allows more groups to form along non-ethnic lines, which can then mobilize along cross-cutting cleavages (gender, environment, etc) that split the largest ethnic parties - Ethnicization varies along two dimensions: (1) ethnic groups vs. parties; (2) fractionalization (many small ethnic groups) vs. polarization (large minority vs. small majority) Method: - Huber uses survey data from over 40 countries. Findings: - Contrary to commonly held beliefs, ethnicization is lower in PR system than in majoritarian ones - In majoritarian systems, small geographically dispersed groups can have strong incentives to vote cohesively for larger catch-all parties in efforts to be pivotal - In majoritarian systems with geographically concentrated groups, ethnic parties can also have strong chances of defeating larger catch-all parties - In PR systems, because it is easier for parties to form, it is easy for multiple parties to target members of the same group, often along non-group dimensions. This divides the group against itself. So ethnic identity will often be more relevant to voting behavior in majoritarian system than in PR systems Problems: - Institutions are then potentially a missing variable for Shayo; this is closer to Chandra

Bennett and Elman (2006) -- Complex Causal Relations and Case Study Methods: The Example of Path Dependency METHODS/PATH DEPENDENCE

Main Argument: - Qualitative methods are useful in analyzing causal complexity, particularly path dependence (or tipping, feedback loops, strategic interaction) - Quantitative work is all probabilistic and draws inferences from many cases (closest thing in quant to complexity is an interaction effect) Path dependence focuses on four elements: - Causal possibility: more than one path might have been taken; must have been different feasible paths (generally earlier rather than later in history) - Contingency: causal story influenced by a random factor, the path that results is often highly contingent, many outcomes possible (most narrowly, a stochastic unexplainable process; can be exogenous and either explainable or not) - Closure: Some causal paths become less possible (narrowing) or impossible (closure). - Constraint: keep actors on a path once it is chosen, impossible to move off it (or high costs to doing so; may close other paths via positive feedback loops). In initial period, there are many plausible alternatives. Then there is a critical juncture where contingent events lead one of these alternatives to emerge, henceforth constraining actors to that path.

Rodrik (1998) -- Why Do More Open Economies Have Bigger Governments? REDISTRIBUTION AND THE WELFARE STATE

Main Argument: - Government spending plays a risk-reducing role in economies exposed to a significant amount of external risk Puzzle: - It is widely presumed that the effectiveness of government intervention is lower in economies that are highly integrated with the world economy - Yet, Austria, Netherlands, Norway are SOEs with massive government spending - Societies seem to demand an expanded government role as the price for accepting larger doses of external risk Ancillary hypotheses: - Increases in external risk must lead to greater volatility in domestic income and consumption - A larger share in GDP of government purchases of goods / services must reduce income volatility - Risk-mitigating role of government spending should be displayed most prominently in social security and welfare spending, particularly in advanced countries that possess the requisite administrative capacity to manage systems - Causality should run from exposure to external risk to government spending Methods: - Risk measured as terms of trade risk and product concentration of exports - Interaction terms are used (with openness) Findings: - A positive correlation exists between an economy's exposure to international trade and the size of its government - The finding is robust in the sense that it holds up to: inclusion of control variables, measures of government spending from all available data sets, and low- and high-income countries - Interaction terms are strongly significant and the coefficient on openness per se becomes insignificant or negative - The relationship between openness and government size is strongest when terms-of-trade risk is highest - In advanced countries with administrative capacity, we should see spending on SS and welfare correlated with risk, but in developing countries, just on consumption - There may be a complementarity between markets and governments: markets empower rather than undermine government intervention Problems: - Does not account for politics at all (regime type b/c democracies produce both; the role of the left and labor should be important) - If the WTO truly resolves the terms-of-trade PD as suggested by Bagwell and Staiger then why do we need government spending as contingency? - Why can't it be that these countries are just wealthier, tax more effectively, and therefore want to offer better public goods? Countries driving the basic results are the Luxembourg, Belgium, Netherlands...

Putnam, Leonardi, and Nanetti (1994) -- Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy POLITICAL CULTURE

Question: What are the conditions for creating strong, responsive, and effective representative institutions? Background: - Italy had lacked regional government from 1870s until the 1970s, when it moved back to regional governance to better attempt to provide specialized public goods - 15 regional governments created with identical constitutional structures and mandates and authority over wide range of public issues - The regional governments exhibit great variation in performance and efficiency - A high-performance democratic institution is both responsive and effective - sensitive to demands of constituents and uses limited resources to address demands Preliminary Findings: - The broad observation is that the Northern regional governments are more effective - He probes two broad explanations: o Socioeconomic modernity: the results of the industrial revolution o Civic community: patterns of civic involvement and social solidarity Socioeconomic modernity: - The north is indeed much more advanced than the south - they had a head start on the south in terms of material and human resources - It cannot be strictly financial resources, since they are allocated from central government in a fairly egalitarian way - This correlation broadly does not explain performance within performance categories The civic community: - Democracy is dependent on virtuous citizens and civic solidarity - Civic engagement i.e. active involvement in public affairs - Civic virtue or steady pursuit of public goods at the expense of individual desire; self-interest that is alive to the interests of others (Tocqueville) - Citizens interact under political equality valuing solidarity, trust, and tolerance - Associations as social structures of cooperation; they instill habits of solidarity, public-spiritedness, and cooperation Method: - Interviews of regional councilors and community leaders, six nationwide surveys, statistical measures, a unique experiment, and case study research - Four measures of civic-ness: two dealing with civic community, two political behavior: (1) vibrancy of associational life measured by membership; (2) newspaper readers (more well-informed and creates solidarity); (3) electoral turnout in referendums (no additional voting incentives); (4) preference voting (indicating a specific candidate from party list) is a sign for lack of civic community and the presence of patronage Findings: - Preference voting and referenda turnout are negatively related - Substantial correlation - same areas have strong associations, lots of newspaper readers, high referenda turnout, and low preference voting levels - Can be combined into a single civic community index, which maps onto institutional performance almost perfectly - When we take civic-ness into account, relationship between economic development and institutional performance vanishes - Community leaders describe politics as clientelistic where expected by civic-ness - Citizens in less civic regions report more personal contact with representative - Surveys of regional councilors in south suggest that requests are generally for patronage or jobs - clientelism - while in the north, they are for public goods - Unions: Union membership is voluntary and politically-driven in Italy (much more common in the civic regions) and workplace solidarity maps onto social solidarity broadly - Organized religion is an alternative to civic life; papacy had prevented political participation for a time and cemented vertical authority; all manifestations of religiosity are negatively correlated with civic involvement - Parties: citizens of less civic regions are not less political or partisan; the character of political association is the difference (in the south, no secondary associations) - Civic attitudes: citizens of less civic regions feel exploited, alienated, and powerless - Education also matters - more educated feel more efficacious - Least civic regions are more corrupt; home of mafia; less regard for the law - Less civic regions have citizens demanding more law and order; less dependence on police in more civic regions is facilitated by community and leads to more freedom Problems: - Does this logic work in polarized political systems? What if all associations are drawn along partisan lines preventing cross-cutting moderation? - Do newspapers or mass media actually bring people together and help inform? If the media is polarized, what does it mean?

Scheve and Stasavage (2012) -- Democracy, War, and Wealth: Lessons from Two Centuries of Inheritance Taxation INSTITUTIONS

Question: Why, if inheritance taxes are often very old taxes, the implementation of inheritance tax rates significant enough to affect wealth inequality is a much more recent phenomenon Main Argument: - Significant taxation of inherited wealth depends on (1) extension of suffrage and (2) political conditions created by mass mobilization for war - Mass warfare played a greater role in the development of progressive inheritance taxation than did the advent of universal suffrage (both in early 20th century) - That wars are expensive is not enough; it has more to do with (1) equal sharing in burden of war and (2) the rich profiting from war via increased demand for goods even under conscription - The rich often avoid fighting via age or deferments; they instead pay for war - Political pressure for taxation of the rich may continue post-war to the extent that war is immediately financed by debt that is repaid via taxes and soldiers have political pull - Inheritance tax is an interesting topic because it is less impacted by administrative capacity; requires less than a traditional income tax - Mechanism could also apply to autocrats; still concerned about compliance with conscription policies, broader societal support for war effort to extent that civilians are engaged in necessary wartime fighting and production RD: - First empirical analysis of PE of inherited wealth taxation that covers a significant number of countries (19) and a long timeframe (1816-2000) - Difference-in-differences framework for identification Findings: - Little evidence for the suffrage hypothesis but strong evidence for the mass mobilization hypothesis (i.e. mobilization for war drives higher inheritance taxation) - Country that mobilized for an entire five-year period would increase its inheritance tax rate by 14-25 percent compared to a country that did not mobilize for war - Also, may explain why inheritance taxes have been reduced since WWII in many countries - states have switched from conscription to small professional armies Takeaway: support for progressive taxation is likely when there is a clear argument that it is fair to tax the rich more heavily than others because doing so corrects for some preexisting unfairness involving the way that incomes have been earned or the way in which some have been obliged to contribute disproportionately on other dimensions Problem: on the basis of fairness, could we not always push for progressive income taxes since the rich are born rich (i.e. start with an unfair advantage)? What about the poverty trap?

Moe (1990) -- Political Institutions: The Neglected Side of the Story INSTITUTIONS

Setup: - Political institutions serve two purposes: (1) solve collective action problems, especially commitment and enforcement problems related to political exchange and trade; (2) weapons of coercion and redistribution - Rational choice is capable of telling either side of the story and even of integrating the two into a single perspective on institutions, but the focus has been on former Goal: Suggest why the positive theory of institutions has neglected one side of the story in favor of the other Argument: - The answer inheres in the path-dependent logic by which the field has developed; it encourages certain lines of inquiry and discourages others - Focus here is on public bureaucracy; modern government, democratic or not, is bureaucratic government - Positivists focus on legislatures (which do CA), and it is easy to talk about collective action but not coercion in that context; if we shift to public bureaucracy, the tables are turned - Positivists also see politics mainly as an extension of economics; voluntary exchange among autonomous actors with existing legal system to enforce property rights - In reality, institutions are not that functionalist, and positivists have taken the politics out of social choice (Shepsle 1989); they are used to insulate agencies and protect the bureaucratic drift that comes from political uncertainty - Politics is different from economics - public authority can coercively force an actor to do something that leaves him worse off (foreign in social choice) - Presidents generally want centralized bureaucracies they can control from the top; Moe says the President can do a number of things, including co-opt bureaucrats into the party, appoint bureaucrats who have party ideology, and change veto points

Levitsky and Way (2010) -- Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War AUTOCRACIES

Setup: - Competitive authoritarian: civilian regimes in which formal democratic institutions exist and are widely viewed as the primary means of gaining power, but in which incumbents' abuse of the state puts them at a significant advantage; competition is real but unfair - The assumption that hybrid regimes are moving toward democracy lacks empirical foundations; it is a distinct, nondemocratic regime type (35 in total) - Hybrid regimes violate democracy in the following areas: (1) free elections; (2) civil liberties; (3) level playing field - Free means there is no fraud or intimidation; civil liberties include media, protest often undermined by libel laws; uneven playing field when (1) state institutions are abused for partisan ends; (2) incumbents are favored systematically at the expense of the opposition; (3) the opposition's ability to organize and compete in elections is seriously handicapped Question: Why some competitive authoritarian regimes democratized during the post-Cold War period, while others remained stable and authoritarian, and while others still experienced turnover without democratization Argument: - Two factors: ties to the West and strength of the governing party & state organizations - Where linkage to the West was high, competitive authoritarian regimes democratized - Where linkage was low, regime outcomes hinged on incumbents' organizational power - Where state and governing party structures were well organized and cohesive, regimes remained stable and authoritarian; where they were underdeveloped or lacked cohesion, regimes were unstable, although they rarely democratized - It is a post-Cold War phenomenon - collapse of SU decreased support and finance for dictatorships, encouraged the diffusion of Western norms to position oneself for Western resources, and the US stepped up efforts to defend democracy; external pressure, however, was superficial (election-centric) and applied unevenly Problems: - Continuous variables still need a cutoff - Just shift the residual category to the middle

Wedeen (2010) -- Reflections on Ethnographic Work in Political Science QUALITATIVE METHODS / PATH DEPENDENCE

Takeaways: - Ethnographic work has a much closer connection to the subject under study than in other methods, similar to social constructivism in its emphasis on meaning - An ethnographic interpretation might underscore the tensions and contradictions of everyday life, but its burden is to maintain theoretical sovereignty over those complications - Interpretative social science doesn't have to do away with generalizations or causal explanations. Ethnographic methods can be used to build these - Ethnographers should help ground abstractions, not run from them - Ethnography can demonstrate that previous generalizations were wrong (thereby producing new ones), replicate findings (but not necessarily encounters), explicate mechanisms that can have wide-ranging application, and bring new ways of seeing and understanding into plain view

Miguel (2004) -- Tribe or Nation? Nation Building and Public Goods in Kenya versus Tanzania NATURAL EXPERIMENTS INSTITUTIONS AND GROWTH ETHNIC POLITICS

Takeaway: Serious nation-building (national language policy, village councils vs. tribal law, public schools, equal resource distribution) can help address ethnic rivalry, which drives corruption and stagnation Argument: - Ethnic divisions and diversity are associated with corruption, political instability, poor institutional performance, and slow economic growth - Countries differ in ethnic policies - national language policy, educational curriculum, and local institutional reform - with Tanzania pursuing serious nation-building - Nation-building in Tanzania has allowed ethnically diverse communities in rural Tanzania to achieve considerable success in fund-raising for local public goods, while diverse communities in Kenya typically fail Tanzania v. Kenya: - Both are rural and have the same staple crops and share a pre-colonial history; similar survey political attitudes - Public-school program in Tanzania has been aggressively employed as a nation-building tool (strong sense of national and Pan-African identity) where Kenya has not used schools to promote a national identity or common language - Tanzania overhauled local government institutions to strengthen village councils and district councils (dismantling of tribal law) - While equitable regional distribution of public investment in education, health, and infrastructure has been a centerpiece of Tanzanian socialist policies since the 1960s, the post-independence regime in Kenya favored the ethnically Kikuyu areas that formed the core of Kenyatta's political support RD: - Compares the relationship between local ethnic diversity and public goods across two nearby rural districts, one in western Kenya and one in western Tanzania, using colonial-era national boundary placement as a "natural experiment" - The arbitrary nature of the African border creation is the key - ELF as IV - DV is public goods at the local-level including provision of wells and schooling Problem: - Is this just a Tanzania vs. Kenya CP story?

Persson and Tabellini (2005) -- The Economic Effects of Constitutions ELECTORAL SYSTEMS: ORIGINS AND CONSEQUENCES

Theory: - CP literature portrays choice between majoritarian and PR as trade-off between accountability and representation - Goal here is to limit the analysis to two aspects of constitutions - rules for elections and form of government - and only connect them to economic outcomes (not intermediaries) - Rules for elections determine how voter preferences are aggregated and how the powers to make decisions over economic policy are acquired by representatives - Form of government determines how these powers can be exercised once in office, and how conflicts among elected representatives can be resolved Electoral rules have three features: - District magnitude: number of legislators acquiring seat in a district - Electoral formula: plurality vs. PR - Ballot structure: choice between candidates or party lists Form of government has two features: - Separation of powers: Presidential regimes tend to have stronger separation than parliamentary - Confidence requirement: only parliamentary Predictions: - Large districts and PR (proportional rep) both pull in direction of broad programs, where small districts and plurality (majoritarian) pull in direction of narrowly targeted programs - Majoritarian systems should tax and spend less - Majoritarian systems have higher barriers to entry which should lead to less rent extraction, but more accountability due to direct election - tradeoff between representation and accountability - Electoral cycles in majoritarian governments are more pronounced - Parliamentary regimes have larger governments - Presidential regimes should be associated with less rent extraction and lower taxation as well as more targeted programs at expense of public goods

McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly (1997) -- Towards an Integrated Perspective on Social Movements and Revolutions COLLECTIVE ACTION

Three approaches to studying contentious politics: - Conditions: political institutions and processes that shape collective mobilization - Means: mobilizing structures supporting collective action - Norms: framing processes around which collective action is conceived and acted out Three key strands of research - Political opportunities: shifting motivations include both rational choice (costs / benefits / constraints) calculations and a consideration of cultural influences - Mobilizing structures: those collective vehicles, both formal and informal, through which people come together and engage in collective action. For instance, interest groups, political parties, indigenous institutions, social networks. - Framing processes and shared meanings help mediate between opportunity, organization, and action. They invoke shared meanings. Other notes: - Individuals need to feel both aggrieved about some aspect of their lives and optimistic about the potential for redress through collective action - To the extent that movement entrepreneurs invoke certain identities by choice, we have a rational choice maximization in the context of cultural cues and norms; insurgents, via framing, can will a movement into existence - Social movements and revolutions are part of the same causal continuum. A successful challenge (1) advertises authorities' vulnerability, (2) provides a model for collective claim-making, (3) identifies possible allies, (4) alters relationships between challengers and power-holders, and (5) threatens the interests of other political actors, thus activating them as well. The primary difference between the two is the degree of risk to the existing power structure. Relation to other work: perhaps suggests that Kuran > Granovetter for integrating ideal points

Cameron (1984) -- Social Democracy, Corporatism, Labor Quiescence, and the Representation of Economic Interest in Advanced Capitalist Society COLLECTIVE ACTION REDISTRIBUTION

Tip: Put in conversation with Iversen (1996) Question: Why were some nations more effective at maintaining full employment in the 1970s despite world recession? Are the economic interests of workers better represented by the Left? Argument: - There was great variation in economic performance and policy during this period - two possible sources are (1) parties; (2) organizations of major producer groups under capitalism - We assume a tradeoff b/w short-term economic gains of labor and long-term employment - Economic militancy drives wage increases and inflation, which drives long term unemployment (countries with fewer strikes don't force employers to move overseas and therefore maintain low unemployment with smaller wage growth) - Quiescence is associated with the control of government by social democratic parties and the existence of the structural pre-conditions of corporatism (especially the latter) which can drive low inflation and unemployment - This can explain the positive relationship b/w inflation and unemployment in the 1970s RD: - Focus on Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Austria - five of the most corporatist states with lots of left control and worker mobilization Findings: - There is a close relationship between the inclusiveness of the labor movement, its organizational unity, and the power of confederations to control negotiating position of affiliates on the one hand and control of government by leftist parties on the other - This suggests that the left governs as the representative of organized wage-earners - These factors are also associated with small wage increases, low inflation, low unemployment Problems: - Just correlational evidence

Meltzer and Richard (1981) DEMOCRATIZATION

- There are more poor people than rich; the median voter has below average income; the median voter wants more taxation and redistribution, so democracy should produce these outcomes

Scott (1976) -- The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia NON-ELECTORAL PARTICIPATION

Argument Summary: - Not a pure rational actor framework - The necessary condition for rebellion is for peasants to be below subsistence levels, which requires there to be a breakdown of the moral economy - Modernization (an exogenous factor) puts landlords under pressure, which forces them to exploit peasants more, which erodes reciprocal relations - Rebellion also requires an organization and an ideology that justifies the rebellion as fair. State ideology can portray insurrections as unfair, because it makes people believe that by rebelling, they are robbing their fellow citizens of the rewards they will reap if they stick with the government - Scott's story is one of thresholds, not grievances. Peasants do not revolt out of radical ideas about redistribution. Revolt is more likely when a collective shock threatens the survival of many peasants simultaneously (exogenous, structural change that is environmental or social) and when state capacity is lower. Rebelling is costly, but once you're under the subsistence threshold, you have nothing left to lose Subsistence peasants have distinctive economic behavior: - Cost of failure makes safety and reliability priorities over profit - They work longer and harder for smaller gains than a prudent capitalist - They seek crops that give the highest and most stable returns - Safety-first principles hold most for peasants with very low incomes, little land, large families, highly variable yields, and few outside opportunities - The "security" or stability of one's poverty is of great concern Networks and institutions (kinship ties, friendships, villages, a powerful patron, and the state rarely) can act as shock absorbers: - Patronage relationships are a ubiquitous form of social insurance in Southeast Asia, in the absence of any reliable state assistance - In leaning on others, the peasant gives them a reciprocal claim to his labor and resources - The form of this reciprocity is critical. These reciprocal relations constitute the moral economy - Exploitation framed as subsistent security is seen as more benign, while exploitative claims that are heedless of minimum peasant standards (like fixed rents or taxes) are seen as more malign Colonialism led to an erosion of vertical relations and the moral economy: - The exploitation of the peasantry is a necessary cause of rebellion, but it is not sufficient. There is potential for rebellion when there is a sudden increase in widespread exploitation that threatens existing subsistence arrangements - The conditions here are scope and suddenness - The main deterrent to rebellion is its concomitant risks; there is a memory of past rebellions and histories of violent repression South Asia Case: - In early-20th century South Asia, there was increasing vulnerability to subsistence threats due to demographic change (population growth, overpopulation of arable land), production for the market (advantage shifts to those with capital and away from small-time peasants), and the growth of the state (assumes a coercive role) - What makes particular groups, areas, or classes collectively subject to ruin, thus providing a plausible basis for common perceptions and reactions, are variability of real income, ecological vulnerability, price-system vulnerability, and mono-crop vulnerability - The more differentiated and atomistic villages are, the more vulnerable they are to market disturbances - In more communal environments, peasants are able to redistribute pain to avert subsistence crises - There are four patterns of peasant behavior: reliance on local forms of self-help (horizontal bonds form in the absence of a regular presence by owners), reliance on non-peasant sectors of the economy, reliance on state-supported forms of patronage and assistance (neutralizing "incipient class demands"), and reliance on religious or oppositional structures of protection and assistance

Gurr (1970) -- Why Men Rebel POLITICAL VIOLENCE NON-ELECTORAL PARTICIPATION

Argument: - Focuses on the idea of relative deprivation (RD) or actors' perception of the discrepancy between the "ought" and the "is" of collective value satisfaction - This disposes people to violence, the discrepancy between their value expectations and value capabilities - Values are composed of welfare values (contribute directly to physical well-being and self-realization), power values (capacity to influence others, self-determination, security), and interpersonal values (psychological satisfactions, desire for status, communality, ideational coherence) - Gurr believes aggression to be an innate response activated by frustration, which originates in RD. People are disposed to do violence to the perceived source of their frustration. Gurr calls this the frustration-aggression mechanism - The key determinants of collective action are the scope and intensity Three forms of RD disequilibrium: - Decremental deprivation occurs when value expectations remain constant, but value perceptions decline - Aspirational deprivation occurs when capabilities remain constant, but expectations intensify. People are quick to aspire beyond their social means and slow to accept their limitations. Though people eventually succeed in either increasing their capabilities or lowering their expectations - Progressive deprivation occurs when expectations increase and capabilities simultaneously decrease Definitions: - Value expectations are the average value of positions people believe they are entitled to - Value position is the amount of a value actually attained - Valuable capabilities are the average value positions people believe they are capable of attaining (both now and in the future) - Value opportunities are opportunities to provide oneself with value satisfactions Problems: - This over-predicts violence. Also doesn't consider the outcomes of aggression. Slight deviation from rational actor models. - Can link with Kuran (1992)

Svolik (2012) -- The Politics of Authoritarian Rule AUTOCRACIES

Framework: - Waltzian anarchy w/in an autocratic state - Autocrats face two problems: (1) authoritarian control i.e. masses; (2) authoritarian power sharing i..e elites - Two dismal features: (1) lack an independent authority to enforce agreements; (2) violence is the ultimate arbiter of conflict i.e. Waltzian Argument: - Authoritarian institutions, policies, and survival are shaped by the twin problems against the backdrop of the dismal conditions - Dictatorship is a residual category not conducive to discrete ideal types; any country that fails to elect legislative/executive in free/competitive elections; discrete types are bad (Geddes) - Autocracies consolidate into personalism when there is no credible threat of removal from inner circle; balance of power favors dictator ex ante or imperfect information ex post - When there is Waltzian balancing, autocracy is contested; otherwise it is established; contested rarely become established, but regimes never move backward from established to contested - The threat of rebellion must be credible after the autocrat acts and the imperfect signal is observed (i.e. autocrat acts -> signal -> rebellion threat) - Two ways to resolve the problem of authoritarian control: repression and co-optation CONCEPTUAL DIMENSIONS Military involvement: - Problem of authoritarian control is one of moral hazard; tools needed to repress also empowers them to act against the regime - If dictators exclude soldiers from repression, they become vulnerable to threats from the masses. However, if they rely heavily on their militaries for repression, they expose themselves to challenges from within their repressive apparatus - Use military against mass, organized, and potentially violent opposition - When government oversteps and bargaining breaks down, you get a coup - Perfect control (no mass threats or acceptance of limited protests) -> brinksmanship bargaining (military can credibly threaten to intervene, but the government is not deterred sufficiently) -> military tutelage (resistance is so great that the military's threat to intervene is always credible, and therefore they get concessions) - Intervention is likeliest under brinksmanship b/c military prefers concessions but cannot get them Party restrictions / Legislative selection: - Institutions entail regular interactions between the dictator and allies resulting in greater transparency; formal rules are less ambiguous and more broadly known such that they facilitate the detection of noncompliance; alleviates dismal conditions via monitoring and transparency - Parties and legislature extend ruling coalition spells by preventing intra-elite conflicts and facilitating power sharing - When there is a big disparity b/w dictator and allies, power sharing is not feasible - Parties encourage sunk political investments via co-optation and direct control; co-optation is conditional and lasting; parties co-opt ideologically proximate sects; direct control is more about intelligence gathering, discipline - Three types of authoritarian regimes: single-party, dominant party with > 75 percent of vote, competitive authoritarianism with party < 75 percent of vote - Control and co-optation are complementary: need repression with co-optation because policies that establish state control over a wide range of careers encounter opposition from society; co-optation is selective based on affinity for the regime such that you co-opt the ideologically close and repress the ideologically distant

Bellin (2004) AUTOCRACY

MENA has autocracy because they have strong coercive apparatus driven by rents (money/power base) and patrimonial societies (so they don't have an identity separate from the state).

Skocpol (1979) -- States and Social Revolutions REVOLUTIONS AND REGIME CHANGE

Main Argument: - It is important to break with the idea of revolutionary outbreaks as purposive. They rarely begin with a revolutionary intent. We need to consider transnational relations between groups in different countries, particularly in the context of modernization - A revolutionary situation occurs as follows: (1) International factors lead to a crisis of the state, which creates a divided elite. Patterns of class dominance determine which group will exploit the revolutionary situation (2) A peasant rebellion is a necessary condition for revolution - The role of the state is crucial: the form of the prior regime determines whether it will be able to respond to the crisis (i.e. whether a revolutionary situation will occur) - The crisis of the state is usually driven by domination from modern states abroad - Elites harmed by this situation are unable to restore the status quo but strong enough to paralyze the government. This generates a burst of anti-elite sentiment, which in turn sparks an uprising aimed at transforming the social order - The outcome of the revolution will be shaped by the obstacles and opportunities from the crisis itself, as well as socioeconomic and international constraints that shape how the new regime will rebuild the state Relation to other stuff: - Contra Moore, Skocpol sees the state as its own actor, not as just a product of social forces; the political crises that have launched social revolutions have not at all been epiphenomenal reflections of societal strains / class contradictions - The autonomy of the state explains the revolution: a military crisis in a system of international competitions → reduces the state's legitimacy → creates an opportunity for revolt - International pressures (wars) can both lead to state collapse and allow the new regime to establish and consolidate itself Problems: - Skocpol selects on the dependent variable; she only considers cases where social revolutions did occur Detailed Process of State-Building: - Peasant revolutions against landlords transformed agrarian class relations. Autocratic, proto-bureaucratic monarchies transformed into bureaucratic and mass-incorporating national states, divesting landed elites of their privilege, which had impeded full bureaucratization and mass political incorporation under Old Regimes - Emergent political leaderships were challenged by disunity and counterrevolutions, as well as invasions from abroad, in building new institutions to consolidate revolutionary gains - To successfully do this, leaders mobilized lower-class groups formerly excluded from national politics. In the three revolutions Skocpol considers (France, Russia, and China), landed elites lost out to lower classes and new state cadres - The new state institutions were more centralized and rationalized, and thus more powerful and autonomous at home and vis-à-vis competitors abroad - The way Old Regimes fell determined initial patterns of conflict and influenced the possibilities for stabilization of liberal political regimes. Peasant revolts in France and Russia were sudden and autonomous, leading to immediate and uncontrolled effects on the course of national-urban political struggles. Revolts in China were delayed until peasants' political mobilization, leading to peasants being uniquely influential in shaping the new regime

Hausermann (2010) -- The Politics of Welfare State Reform in Continental Europe: Modernization in Hard Times POLICY CHOICE & REFORM

Question: Whether, why, and how do structural changes lead to policy reform? Argument: - Welfare states can be reformed under the following conditions: multidimensional reform politics, coalitional engineering by policy entrepreneurs, and an institutional context that favors negotiation and compromise (i.e. fragmentation and no veto players) - The question is not whether welfare states can be preserved or dismantled, but whether social protection can be adapted to an altered economic and social context: modernization in hard times - Modernization: adaptation of existing institutional arrangements to the economic and social structures of post-industrialism; transition to high-skill service economy, high rates of temporary or long-term unemployment, flexible labor markets, spread of atypical and female employment, family instability, and mounting demands for individualization and gender equality - Hard Times: gap between declining resources and growing (financial) needs that those modernization processes entail including declining birthrates and demographic aging - The result is strong pressure for retrenchment and expansion Why Continental Europe: - Social insurance schemes rely on contribution financing by means of non-wage labor costs (i.e. social expenditures are not tax-financed) - Male breadwinner institutions have led to low female labor market participation and low birthrates; both put strain on financial viability of welfare state - Distribute benefits on basis of and proportional to contribution payments; those with insufficient contribution records face poverty risks - In sum, continental Europe is a hard case for successful welfare state reform b/c it faces the most urgent need for modernization and most adverse conditions for it - Testing is done with regard to reforms in Germany, France, and Switzerland Three Puzzles in European Reforms: - Reform capacity: despite predicted stickiness of institutions, there has been reform - Against interests of industrial welfare state: reforms have lowered social rights of insiders to a considerable extent - Winners have been social groups that are weak in terms of representation and power Theory: - The translation of social and economic structural change into actual policy output depends on the interplay of structure, institutions, and actors' preferences and strategies, and it consists of three steps 1. Translation of structure change into policy-specific conflict dimensions 2. Variety of political reform dimensions engenders different crosscutting conflict lines, each one splitting social interests in a distinct way; plurality of crosscutting conflict lines gives rise to multi-dimensional space in which reform politics unfold 3. Translation of diverse alliance potentials into actual reforms - Two institutional factors influence chance of success of coalitional engineering: 1. The more that labor, business, and political parties are fragmented, more flexible is the reform-specific coalition formation and the greater the chances for coalitional engineering 2. Where economic and party interests are concentrated, coalitions are more stable and actors cannot opt in and out of specific and variable reform coalitions - In sum, successful welfare state modernization in continental Europe depends on the capacity of policy makers to build encompassing reform coalitions in a multidimensional policy reform space; this capacity depends on their strategies of coalitional engineering and on the institutional framework within which they deploy these strategies RD: - All 36 pension reforms that took place in Germany, France, and Switzerland 1970-2005 - Coded detailed policy positions of involved actors at beginning of the reform processes (different elements) and at the end (whole reform package) via text analysis - At the beginning, actors present own ideas and goals; at the end, they can only agree or reject the package - Argument is that the final position should depend more on institutional constraints, strategies, and bargaining than on initially articulated, issue-specific reform preferences - Focus on pension policy as a hard case for modernizing reforms - Old-age security schemes are under pressure from financial security on one hand and demands for expanded outsider coverage, gender equality, and individualization on the other hand - Pay-as-you-go, no private pensions, linked to employment - Occupations map onto a 2X2: low/high income and insider/outsider (capturing both partisanship and interest group politics) Four potential dimensions for change: 1. Retrenchment: generous insurance conditions stir retrenchment debates 2. Financing: demographic threats raise issues of complementing PAYG schemes with capitalized pension plans (generational aging) 3. Targeting: post-industrial labor markets create specific needs for targeting policies, which improve coverage of occupational groups in precarious employment situations 4. Recalibration: family instability and libertarian values lead to claims for recalibrating policies to cover people (mostly women) with discontinuous employment biographies Discussion: - Are targeting and recalibration really different? Both about expanding benefits to groups that were previously excluded

Haber (2006) -- Authoritarian Government AUTOCRACY

Question: Why are some authoritarian countries able to grow quickly? Why is there heterogeneity? Argument: - It is important not to lump authoritarian regimes into one common bucket - Sociology shows us that there is tremendous variation in the behavior of authoritarian regimes; they develop typologies to illustrate this point - Economics rejects typologies and instead builds generalizable theories based on common goals and incentives faced by regimes i.e. dictators are inherently insecure; the selectorate is often viewed as the group that can remove a dictator - Argues that rational choice theory can be used to derive a logic of authoritarianism that creates a typology of sorts: three arrangements differing on property rights, economic growth, and democratic transitions An Organizational Theory of Dictatorship: - Early on, there is a struggle between the dictator (trying to limit the power of the launching group) and the group (trying to turn the leader into a puppet) that is constrained by the institutions inherited from the previous leadership - Three broad classes of outcomes: (1) dictator terrorizes the leadership of the organization; (2) dictator coopts the leadership of the organization; (3) dictator creates a set of rival/complementary organizations to raise the cost of collective action for the leadership of the organization Property Rights: - The relationship between democratization and per capita income is endogenous to the outcome of the power struggle between dictators and launching organizations - Terror and cooptation leads to limited property rights, which lead to slow growth and limited incomes - Organizational proliferation, on the other hand, lead to broader property rights and thus faster growth. This also vests many citizens and groups with political and economic rights, easing democratization. Democratic transitions are therefore likelier to succeed in dictatorship characterized by organizational proliferation Why are there so Few Stationary Bandits? - Olson invents the idea that benign dictators can enforce property rights, invest in public goods, and tax at the long-run revenue-maximizing rate - It is rare because it implies an underlying model of politics that has no politics; leaders often have short-term horizons contra-Olson (though Blaydes says they may have long time horizons); they don't think about how short-term gains undermine long-term growth strategies The Logic of Terror: - Terror engenders distrust by turning the organization's members on one another to save their own skins; makes it hard to solve the collective action problem (Greitens) - Leader cannot know if denunciations are sincere, so indiscriminate purges occur - This rarely occurs because (1) no margin for error; (2) secret police needed; (3) they undermine the ability of the government to function - The selectorate is then just the dictator, which means low taxes and investment and high levels of expropriation of private property - The result is an economy with private investment limited to resource extraction, a low productivity informal sector, and service/manufacturing firms with low levels of physical or financial capital i.e. low economic growth is the result The Logic of Cooptation: - The key is rents, which tend to come from state-owned firms - Regulatory barriers to entry to prevent competition is the key to the rent stream The Logic of Organizational Proliferation: - The goal is to raise the cost of collective action by: (1) forcing the leadership to coordinate with the leadership of the other since it might come to the rescue of the dictator or (2) aligning the incentives of the members of the launching organization with the leadership of the other organization - A large portion of the population are given property rights, which creates incentives for investment and stimulates impressive economic growth - Democratic transitions are most likely here (highest per capita income and only incremental changes are needed) An example of this is Mexico from 1929 to 2000 with the PRI and PNR. The PRI created a regularized, nonviolent process whereby party elites could rotate into the presidency and other elected offices. The PRI sat at the center of a network of organizations, which were designed to align the incentives of a variety of corporate groups, making it difficult for any one of them to mount a credible challenge to the party monopoly power. Organizational proliferation in Mexico granted a significant portion of the population enforceable economic rights.

Kitschelt (2003) -- Accounting for Post-Communist Regime Diversity METHODS/PATH DEPENDENCE INSTITUTIONAL LEGACIES DEMOCRATIZATION

Question: Why is there no uniform or persistent communist legacy? Background: - Despite common Soviet dominance prior to 1989, the post-communist region exhibits great diversity of political regimes, and Soviet rule cannot possibly explain this - The diversity emerged almost entirely 1990-1993, with regimes locked in thereafter - Polarization of regime types: polities with initially intermediate levels of civic/political rights eventually became entirely democratic or fully authoritarian Literature: - Some arguments are easily eliminated - differentials in economic wealth are negligible, with all countries falling in the middle-income range - Explanations in literature include religion, geographical location, pre-communist regimes and state-formation, post-Stalinist reforms in communist regimes, modes of transition to post-communism, and winners/losers of founding elections - Empirical evidence alone leaves ambiguities that necessitate a reflection on further criteria and qualifications in order to discriminate among more/less satisfactory causal explanations Methods: - Social science is like earthquake prediction - singular events are the result of multiple causal chains that interact; it is not feasible to predict a particular event with certainty - It is all but impossible to predict singular events with a sufficient measure of precision and certainty to improve the ability of policy makers and citizens to act in a more rational, strategic, future-oriented fashion in addressing particular situations - In sum, complexity, reflexivity, and actor uncertainty about the parameters of the situation make it impossible for social scientists to predict singular events - General correlations and causations permit only probabilistic explanations - Argues that the most important factors for causality are temporal sequencing, independence of cause from effect, and process tracing What Counts as a Good Cause: - Causal depth is the problem of temporal priority (differentiate cause from occasion) - Process tracing can help us discover the causal mechanism - In general, we trade-off between causal mechanism and causal depth - Shallower causal explanations explain more variation in outcomes statistically, and intermediate shocks reduce impact of path dependent causes - Power configurations at the time of communist breakdown is a shallow explanation; Putnam is excessively deep - We need to shy away from "event-oriented" framing of object of explanation (democratic breakdown is not a predictable event) - Complex events like regime change are not driven by one specific factor or change Takeaways: - One can argue that long-term factors trump short-term factors as causal explanations - One can argue that short-term factors serve as proximate links in the chain of causation (and are therefore complements to deeper explanations) - One can argue that short-term factors serve as the ultimate causes of outcomes - One can argue that some cases are pure outliers; neither short-run nor long-run factors have explanatory power

Albertus (2015) -- Autocracy and Redistribution: The Politics of Land Reform DEMOCRATIZATION

Questions: - What are the political conditions under which land reform occurs? When is it redistributive, and what is its political purpose? Who are the chief beneficiaries of reform? Setup: - It is assumed in social conflict theory (AR / Boix) that elites will be wary of democratization because of its redistributive consequences. - Albertus says that elites don't always fear democratization; institutions can be designed to protect elite interests - Further, Albertus argues that there is reason to doubt the assumption in social conflict theory that redistribution will be higher and more targeted at the poor under democracy Argument: - Contests Moore's claim that democracy threatens landowners; it is rather a friend and savior to large landowners by delaying land reform - Redistributive land reform occurs more in autocracies than in democracies; this is because it requires lots of state capacity (i.e. avoiding the veto gauntlet of checks and balances) - Albertus argues that what primarily determines reform is intra-elite conflict and institutional constraints; popular mobilization doesn't produce the initial impetus, but it tends to direct the scope and targeting of redistribution once an opening has already been created - In general, land reform seeks to reduce rural poverty by transferring control of farmland to the land-poor, which increases their income, builds demand for labor, and creates farm enterprise opportunities; it also empowers indigenous and minority communities - But land reform is a costly process and landowners try to subvert it; this is why states with low capacity have trouble carrying it out - Specifically, land reform occurs when there is (1) a split between ruling elites and landed elites and (2) few institutional constraints on rule. This split gives the ruling elites an incentive to eliminate rival landed elites while currying the favor of regime insiders. Because land reform is a difficult process, its successful execution requires a high concentration of power most typically found in autocracies. The opposition of the executive, legislature, or judiciary can halt reform, as can a corrupt or incompetent bureaucracy. Landed elites can try to manipulate these actors to impede reform. Land redistribution has to go through a veto gauntlet, where the support of many actors is needed -Land reform thus serves two functions for ruling elites. It eliminates the threat from rival landed elites, and it generates resources to mute the threat of bottom-up instability - Land reform is more common in autocracies because leaders don't face the "horizontal constraints" of their democratic counterparts. The absence of formal institutions and commitment mechanisms makes it easier for autocrats to violate and redefine property rights. Autocrats also typically have smaller support coalitions. Popular democracies originating in mass mobilization may also implement land reform, but democratic transitions are often captured by elites who build in safeguards - Albertus offers four causes of elite splits: drives for state autonomy by the military and secularizing political elites, economic development and diversification (shifts away from agriculture), ethnic differences, and foreign occupation Case: - Latin America, where there is high land inequality and specificity but no redistribution under democractization

Weinstein (2007) CIVIL WAR

RQ: What is the process through which organizations produce violence? Which strategies do groups pursue/ how are they organized? Which institutional choices do they make? Argument: Strategy is a problem of institutional choice • from an array of possible strategies, rebel leader selects those, they believe will serve organizational goals best • "classic" macro-level factors affect how leaders weigh costs and benefits of certain strategies - condition choices and constrain set of strategies that can be employed • micropolitics of rebellion gives understanding on how groups choose strategy • focus on how groups organize violence • how to recruit soldiers, if groups' decisions are centralized or decentralized and structures set in place to make sure that foor soldiers act in accordance with groups' objectives • relations with people outside of group also fundamental • how to extract resources, how to govern civilians in areas of control and how to discipline traitors Two part argument • Central organizational challenges leaders face (micro-level decisions) • Politically salient variation in the initial conditions leaders confront as they organize (macro-level conditions) • Macro-level conditions constrain micro-level conditions Puzzle: How do different groups make choices on how to organize? Economic Approach: individuals are rational and their actions reflect deliberate decisions to maximize payoffs (material and non-material benefits) • problems inherent in organizational/ contract relationships: informational asymmetries such as moral hazard and adverse selection • economists design structures and strategies of organization that properly align incentives so that individual self-interest aligns with the broader goal of the organization Five Challenges of Rebel Organization - Micro-Decisions • Recruitment: Olson's collective action problem with free riding • solutions: selective incentives, activating reciprocity in tightly knit communities, appealing to nonmaterial interests such as sociology, sanctions • even here, there is an adverse selection problem, however • Control: Managing recruits' behavior • moral hazard problem • looking at investments made in training, how command authority is centralized and what kinds of rules and codes are formalized to punish indiscipline • Governance of Noncombatants • credibility problem from civilians side: will rebels not take too much? • choice about structure of government, how much power to noncombatants, lines between military and nonmilitary spheres of movement and who should be face of group interaction with civilians • Use of Violence: could alienate supporter and generate resistance • when and how to use it -> shaped by nature of interactions with potential defectors and structure of organization they manage • Expansion and Recovery: Demonstrate resilience in changing circumstances without alienating their supporters and members Main Argument: Choices of these strategies affect the groups' internal structure and the strategies it can ultimately pursue Constraints on Strategy: The Macro-Level Factors • Based on theory of resource mobilization: dynamic of movement depend on resources and organization • focus on movement entrepreneurs who success is determined by the availability of resources • Argument: variation in the initial endowment affects strategies groups pursue in organizing violence • Economic Endowments: resources that can be mobilized to finance the start-up and maintenance of rebel organizations • can be utilized directly to purchase supplies and pay participants • comes from extraction of natural resources, taxation of local production, conduct of criminal businesses, supporters from diaspora or contributions from external patrons • nature and amount of economic endowments shapes recruitment, organizational and governance tactics rebels employ • Social Endowments; distinctive identities and dense inter-personal networks that can be readily mobilized in support of collective action • sources of solidarity and moral commitment so that groups can draw on interalized values and sentiments • activate norms of generalized reciprocity among leaders and their followers - lower transactions costs and facilitation of cooperation • social networks can be seen as mobilizing structures • these endowments shape and constrain the range of strategies leaders can employ as they organize violence • affect cost-benefit analyses when leaders are evaluating distinct approaches to resolve the organizational challenges The Origins of Constraints • Initial stock of economic and social endowments can be thought of as fixed and exogenous • aware of the fact that the economic and social endowments can also be a function of leadership • Prospective rebel leaders are in a race to form the dominant rebel group • as speed important, often economic endowments mobilized when possible • speed important as it generates credibility among civilians, grabs public attention and gives opportunity to shape what people think • mobilizing recruits on basis of identity takes much more time as popular education and belief formation might be necessary • this process often falls short, if economic resources available • In best conditions for revolutions (grievances and resource rich situation) opportunistic movements based on economic endowments might form, these groups might employ more destructive and violent strategies

Downs (1957) -- An Economic Theory of Democracy ACCOUNTABILITY AND CITIZEN / POLITICIAN LINKAGES

Setup: - There is a one-dimensional policy space with single-peaked preferences, full turnout, and two parties - Parties receive "rents" from office (ego, extraction, wages), and they simultaneously commit to policy platforms Argument: - Electoral competition encourages policy convergence; the best way to win is to appeal to a majority voters, given that your competitor is doing the same; separation is suboptimal - Downs says that parties won't converge if preferences are massed bi-modally near the extremes - If the distribution of preferences is poly-modal, a multiparty system is likely to occur; in multiparty systems, parties seek to distinguish themselves ideologically (key difference from two-party systems) - Hence, voters in multiparty systems are likelier to be swayed by doctrinal considerations (ideology, policy) than voters in two-party systems, who are likely to place greater weight on personality, technical competence, or other non-doctrinal factors (holds up to AP lit maybe) - When a major shift in the distribution of voters occurs (e.g., expansion of the franchise, weakening of traditional views with a cataclysmic event like WW2), existent parties will likely be unable to adjust rapidly because they are ideologically immobile. New parties, on the other hand, can select the most opportune location on the policy spectrum Relation to other stuff: - Alesina (1988) introduces ideological concerns for parties (single-peaked concave utility functions), whereas for Downs parties' only objective is to win elections (meaning they seek to maximize their popularity). If voters are rational and forward-looking, they realize that even though policy-concerned parties have an incentive to converge during the campaign, once in office they have an incentive to implement their preferred policy. In a one-shot game, convergence thus doesn't occur; voters vote for the party with an ideal point closest to your own. Full convergence occurs only when parties are totally indifferent with regard to outcome policies. In an infinitely repeated game, cooperation (convergence on the median point) between parties can emerge—this is more easily sustained in a system where each party has roughly half of all voters; if one party is significantly more powerful, then the policy selected is closer to one party's ideal point. Commitment to the median requires that parties have long time horizons. A key point here is the role of reputations—the microfoundation for why we don't see politicians constantly deviating from what they said they'd do. - Besley and Coate (1997) offer an alternative to Downs, grounding political outcomes directly in underlying tastes and policy technology. Citizens care about policy outcomes and may have policy preferences; they can choose to run for office themselves. Candidates who win implement their preferred policies; they can't credibly commit to doing otherwise. The core intuition is that standing candidates must win with equal probability and have different enough ideal points in order to want to stand; the loss of utility from the others winning must be greater than the cost of running. This provides some rationale for why we don't see tons of people choosing to run with the same platform.

Wilkinson (2004) -- Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India POLITICAL VIOLENCE NON-ELECTORAL PARTICIPATION

Three reasons the literature is lacking: - Scholars look at elites who have incited violence and therefore offer little insight into why some politicians do exactly the opposite (selection issue) - Fail to account for variation in patterns of violence within states (local level) - Role of political incentives in fomenting violence is generally proven from simple fact that violence has broken out and that some politician gained from the outbreak - seldom are political incentives independent shown to exist/matter Argument: - Ethnic riots are not spontaneous; they are often planned by politicians for a clear electoral purpose and are best thought of as a solution to the problem of how to change the salience of ethnic issues and identities among the electorate in order to build a winning political coalition - Town-level electoral incentives account for where Hindu-Muslim violence breaks out and state-level electoral incentives account for where and when state governments use their police forces to prevent riots - Parties that represent elites within ethnic groups will often (especially in most competitive elections) use polarizing antiminority events to encourage members of the wider ethnic category to identify with their party and majority identity rather than a party that is identified with economic redistribution or some ideological agenda; seems to contradict Huber's (2017) argument that the smallest majority will receive the highest payoff from the party and therefore win the election - These events are designed to spark minority backlash that will threaten and polarize the ethnic majority behind the political party with the anti-minority identity - Large scale ethnic rioting does not take place where a state's army or police is ordered to stop it using all means necessary - Democratic states protect minorities when it is in their governments' electoral interest to do so (one of two conditions must apply) - Condition 1: minorities are an important part of the government's current support base or the base of a coalition partner - Condition 2: the overall electoral system is so competitive - in terms of effective number of parties - that there is a high probability the governing party will have to form coalitions with minority-supported parties in the future - In India, Gujarat is the only state with neither of the two conditions satisfied, and we see violence - Minorities can extract promises of security for electoral support in competitive areas - Where there are two parties, for violence to occur, it must be that the police will not be ordered to intervene (b/c one party will own the ethnic issue for sure) - Assumptions: (1) minorities bid low; (2) majority does not think that increased minority security is threatening; (3) there are multiple issue dimensions - An institutional difference dating back to the 1920s - the implementation of job and educational reservations for backward and lower castes in the South but not in the North - is largely responsible for different state patterns of post-independence party competition and fractionalization Method: - Systematic data on Hindu-Muslim riots in India to demonstrate that electoral incentives at two levels (local constituency level and level of government that controls the police) interact to determine when and where ethnic violence against minorities occurs and whether the state will choose to intervene to stop it - Data collection: Indian newspaper of record 1950-95 and other newspapers, government reports, and archives for the rest - India is highly fractionalized - single-member, district-plurality voting, which is normally associated with convergence to two-party system Problems: - Is the assumption that protecting minorities does not endanger security of majority reasonable? - Agency of rioters - they are not puppets, and they make decisions ideologically as well as in the context of collective action problems - Are divisions religious (Muslims as minority) rather than ethnic and does it matter?

Riker (1980) -- Implications from the Disequilibrium of Majority Rule for the Study of Institutions GROUPS AND COALITIONS

- If institutions are constant, you can predict outcomes from tastes (or opinions or values). If tastes are constant, you can predict outcomes from institutions - Political science should focus on the study of institutions rather than tastes (Lake and Powell) - Riker says that institutions represent 'congealed tastes' but they are 'unstable constants.' We can study institutions for their short-run effects; in the long run they are unpredictable. Social decisions are the consequence not only of institutions and tastes, but also the political skill of those who manipulate agendas, frame issues, formulate questions, etc., which makes the future impossible to predict. Structural and cultural factors are constant in the short term. - The "disequilibrium of majority rule" refers to the instability of the status quo, its potential to be upset, which Riker contends is the characteristic feature of politics. - Equilibria under various voting methods are fragile, as under non-voting methods of summing individual preferences - The primary purpose of focusing on institutions as opposed to tastes is that institutions can help us make predictions about social decisions. - Social decision processes embody at least some people's values (not necessarily the values of a majority). They are not random expressions of tastes; decisions are made under a framework of known rules, i.e. institutions. - Since institutions affect the content of social decisions, we can predict social outcomes by studying institutions. - Instead of studying tastes, e.g. through studying public opinion (the nature of society's values and tastes), political socialization (how tastes are created), or representation (how tastes are incorporated in public decisions), we should study how institutions control decision processes, i.e. how values and tastes are brought forward, considered, eliminated, and finally selected. - Institutions may have systematic biases in them which produce certain kinds of outcomes. The stability of outcomes may not reflect the constancy of tastes, but that the issues that are likely to upset the stability of tastes are kept off the agenda/decision-making process. - Moreover, since institutions are simply rules, and are themselves the product of social decisions, we can expect that losers on a series of decisions will attempt to change the rules and hence the kinds of decisions produced under them. In this sense, institutions are simply alternatives in the policy space. The only difference between institutions and policies is one of longevity.

Mares and Young (2016) -- Buying, Expropriating, and Stealing Votes ACCOUNTABILITY AND CITIZEN / POLITICIAN LINKAGES

- Recently, the political science literature has disaggregated clientelism along two dimensions: 1. In recognizing the diversity of actors working as brokers 2. In conceptualizing and disaggregating types of clientelism based on positive and negative inducements of different forms - Much larger proportions of respondents report negative inducements than offers of positive inducements (in Africa) - There is not strong evidence that similar respondents receive positive and negative cues - Two things to study: 1. Whether variation in context, like institutional frameworks and economic conditions, leads to different mixes of clientelistic strategies 2. Whether characteristics of voters increase the likelihood of experiencing or responding to illicit strategies

Scott (1977) -- The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia NON-ELECTORAL PARTICIPATION

Argument Summary: - Not a pure rational actor framework - The necessary condition for rebellion is for peasants to be below subsistence levels, which requires there to be a breakdown of the moral economy - Modernization (an exogenous factor) puts landlords under pressure, which forces them to exploit peasants more, which erodes reciprocal relations - Rebellion also requires an organization and an ideology that justifies the rebellion as fair. State ideology can portray insurrections as unfair, because it makes people believe that by rebelling, they are robbing their fellow citizens of the rewards they will reap if they stick with the government - Scott's story is one of thresholds, not grievances. Peasants do not revolt out of radical ideas about redistribution. Revolt is more likely when a collective shock threatens the survival of many peasants simultaneously (exogenous, structural change that is environmental or social) and when state capacity is lower. Rebelling is costly, but once you're under the subsistence threshold, you have nothing left to lose Subsistence peasants have distinctive economic behavior: - Cost of failure makes safety and reliability priorities over profit - They work longer and harder for smaller gains than a prudent capitalist - They seek crops that give the highest and most stable returns - Safety-first principles hold most for peasants with very low incomes, little land, large families, highly variable yields, and few outside opportunities - The "security" or stability of one's poverty is of great concern Networks and institutions (kinship ties, friendships, villages, a powerful patron, and the state rarely) can act as shock absorbers: - Patronage relationships are a ubiquitous form of social insurance in Southeast Asia, in the absence of any reliable state assistance - In leaning on others, the peasant gives them a reciprocal claim to his labor and resources - The form of this reciprocity is critical. These reciprocal relations constitute the moral economy - Exploitation framed as subsistent security is seen as more benign, while exploitative claims that are heedless of minimum peasant standards (like fixed rents or taxes) are seen as more malign Colonialism led to an erosion of vertical relations and the moral economy: - The exploitation of the peasantry is a necessary cause of rebellion, but it is not sufficient. There is potential for rebellion when there is a sudden increase in widespread exploitation that threatens existing subsistence arrangements - The conditions here are scope and suddenness - The main deterrent to rebellion is its concomitant risks; there is a memory of past rebellions and histories of violent repression South Asia Case: - In early-20th century South Asia, there was increasing vulnerability to subsistence threats due to demographic change (population growth, overpopulation of arable land), production for the market (advantage shifts to those with capital and away from small-time peasants), and the growth of the state (assumes a coercive role) - What makes particular groups, areas, or classes collectively subject to ruin, thus providing a plausible basis for common perceptions and reactions, are variability of real income, ecological vulnerability, price-system vulnerability, and mono-crop vulnerability - The more differentiated and atomistic villages are, the more vulnerable they are to market disturbances - In more communal environments, peasants are able to redistribute pain to avert subsistence crises - There are four patterns of peasant behavior: reliance on local forms of self-help (horizontal bonds form in the absence of a regular presence by owners), reliance on non-peasant sectors of the economy, reliance on state-supported forms of patronage and assistance (neutralizing "incipient class demands"), and reliance on religious or oppositional structures of protection and assistance

Fearon (1999) -- Electoral Accountability and Control of Politicians: Selecting Good Type vs. Sanctioning Poor Performance CITIZEN/POLITICIAN LINKAGES

Argument: - Accountability implies voters see elections as sanction/reward for incumbent - Voters think more about good types - integrity, issue preference, competence - Pure selection can produce responsive public policy Elections are not accountability mechanisms b/c: - Reelection-seeking behavior seen as bad - Term limits are contra-sanctioning - There is a premium on principles/consistency (even forgiving extremism to get it) b/c it suggests that politicians are not easily bought - We should anticipate last-period effects, but we get none Problems (in order): - What if reelection-seeking is just serving the public interest? - If there is a role for the party, that addresses (2) and (4) - Politicians might be consistent b/c already bought

Ferraz and Finan (2008) -- Exposing Corrupt Politicians: The Effects of Brazil's Publicly Released Audits on Electoral Outcomes CORRUPTION

Argument: - Citizens hold politicians accountable if they have information allowing them to evaluate politicians - Improved information is what forces government to act in the public interest Method: - In 2003, Brazil started random audits of federally transferred expenditures; findings were made publicly available - They compare electoral outcomes across areas w/ similar levels of reported corruption and media measured for number of radio / news organizations - Comparison is between municipalities audited before versus after the 2004 elections - Main DV: whether the incumbent mayor was reelected (matching individuals across elections) - Key IV is the interaction between pre-election audit and level of corruption; also a triple interaction with media prevalence added in Findings: - They find that the release of audit outcomes significantly impacted electoral performance, and the effects were more pronounced where local radio was present - Media also promotes non-corrupt incumbents where no corruption is found (see Besley & Burgess 2002) - Bayesian: voters update their priors with new information on incumbents, but voters share a prior of corruption, so the information must surpass a threshold; when none found, incumbent rewarded

McGillivray (2004) -- Privileging Industry: The Comparative Politics of Trade and Industrial Policy POLICY CHOICE & REFORM

Argument: - Democratic politicians are motivated by a desire for political survival; they will benefit those who can help them keep their jobs, but who these people are depends on the voting system and strength of political parties - Rather than focus on industry incentives for organizing and demanding protection (i.e. the demand side of lobbying), he considers the incentives facing governments to reward particular groups of voters (i.e. the supply side) Predictions: 1. In strong-party majoritarian systems (single-party majority government), parties target the re- distributive policies of trade and industry toward rewarding those in marginal districts ex. Britain 2. In strong-party PR systems (multiple parties in government), each party in the governing coalition wants to target redistributive rewards towards their core supporters - Parties reward their base because of the possibility of new-party entry - Generates trade policy in flux: policies vary as parties leave and enter the coalition ex. Germany 3. In weak-party majoritarian system, a coalition of legislators (possibly from different parties) is necessary to pass legislation - Specific institutional features, like which legislators are particularly powerful, strongly influence which legislators secure protection and assistance for their home industries - Industries spread over multiple electoral districts can more easily build a coalition of supportive legislators - In these systems, swing districts are unlikely to have a powerful legislator and thus are less likely to receive favorable legislation - Redistricting can have a major effect on redistribution here, as is the case in the US Comments: - Key difference is that politicians in strong-party majoritarian systems should target swing voters and those in strong-party PR systems core voters - Could be cyclic in strong party majoritarian: favorable policies widen vote margins, reducing government attention to the district, resulting in a narrowed margin, increasing government attention

Boix (2003) -- Democracy and Redistribution DEMOCRATIZATION

Argument: - Democratization occurs when either economic equality or capital mobility is high - Authoritarianism predominates in those countries where economic inequality and lack of capital mobility are high (capital owners resolute) - Inequality dictates the redistributive impact of democratization and capital can flee under high taxes, deterring substantial taxation - Authoritarian structure depends on the distribution of political resources; if the poor are organized, a left-wing dictatorship emerges; if the poor are disorganized, repression occurs - Countries with fixed assets remain autocratic because the degree of expropriation is high - Development drives a shift away from fixed assets (land) to capital -> democratization - At the highest levels of inequality only, revolution is possible; revolution occurs according to Fearon's model i.e. rich downplay the organizational capacity of the poor while the poor underestimate the repressive capacity of the rich - The middle class should prefer limited democracy (b/c above median income); transition to limited democracy occurs where the middle class emerges as a distinct and equivalently wealthy class of actors - In sum, economic growth acts as a valuable but not sufficient condition to secure democracy Model: - One-shot game (i.e. no commitment mechanism) so does not explain why we get democratization vs. a one-time handout Problem: - Mobile capital induces democracy, but countries most often commit to liberalization in order to attract FDI and mobile capital (reverse causality) - No mention of collective action unlike AR 2005 - Why are the poor unhappy here?

Acemoglu and Robinson (2005) -- Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy REVOLUTIONS AND REGIME CHANGE DEMOCRATIZATION

Argument: - Elites democratize as a credible commitment to redistribution under social unrest, but only when the costs of repression are high and the costs of redistribution relatively low - Posit an inverse-U shaped relationship b/w inequality and democratization - Citizens have de facto power today (in recession, for instance) but they have no way to ensure it is not revoked tomorrow; regime change gives them de jure power - Repression can be costly (deaths, international sanctions, destruction of property) particularly when civil society is well-organized; it is more costly now under globalization - Crises increase the likelihood of democratization - Democratization is more likely when elites own capital (harder to tax than land b/c mobile) - Middle class is a buffer and can limit the redistributive impact of democratization; also helps with consolidation of democracy - Elites can influence democracy through the design of democratic institutions (i.e. representative democracy) - No relationship between changes in income and changes in democracy - Coups allow elites to translate de facto power into de jure power and preempt a move further to the left; more likely under Presidential system Relation to other stuff: - AR better than Boix at telling us why democratization as opposed to a one-off transfer - Moore and apolitical and assumes divisions are always along class lines Problems: - Is democratization really a credible commitment? Haggard and Kaufman suggest that most backslides are new democracies

Acemoglu and Robinson (2001) -- A Theory of Political Transitions REVOLUTIONS AND REGIME CHANGE DEMOCRATIZATION

Argument: - Elites want to commit to future income redistribution to prevent revolution and unrest - The poor want to commit to low taxation to dissuade elites from mounting a coup after democratization - High taxation is more likely in highly unequal societies - Highly unequal societies are therefore likely to fluctuate into and out of democracy Model: - Two players: elites (synonymous with the rich) and the poor - In democracy, the median voter (a poor person) sets the tax rate; in non-democracy, elites set the tax rate - The cost of coups and revolutions change with income - Recessions are more conducive to unrest because incomes are lower, meaning the opportunity cost of unrest is lower - There is no threat of coups in "normal time"; they occur when the cost of a coup (instability) is less than the gains from political power (lower taxes) - In a recession, elites either democratize or do not, in which case the poor either revolt or do not - Elites are willing to democratize to avert a revolution because they are assumed to lose everything in a revolution - Regime change is thus a commitment strategy by elites, a "way of eluding costs of repression by credibly assuring the majority of their intent to share the wealth"

Iversen and Soskice (2001) -- An Asset Theory of Social Policy Preferences REDISTRIBUTION & WELFARE STATE

Argument: - Emphasizes composition of people's skills: individuals who have made risky investments in skills will demand insurance against possible future loss of income from those investments - Because transferability of skills is inversely related to specificity, workers with specific skills face a potentially long spell of unemployment or significant decline in income with job loss - Strong incentives to support social policies that protect them against such uncertainty Relation to other stuff: - Does not contradict Esping-Anderson (1990) or Meltzer-Richard model - given particular composition of skills, workers with higher income are likely to demand less protection Method: - Test theory on public opinion data for eleven advanced democracies and suggest how differences in educational systems can help explain cross-national differences in level of social protection - Data: 1996-1997 International Social Survey Program (ISSP) Findings: - People with more specific skills and investments in those skills are more likely to favor social protection - Income also divides support for social protection, but holding income constant at various levels, support for protection is higher when skills are more specific - There is substantial cross-national variation in skills training and average levels of skill investment; this may explain cross-national variation in support for social welfare - Training also is positively associated with income equality Problems: - Are specific skills harder to replace and therefore there is less of a chance of unemployment? - But also, skill specificity might mean higher wages, which means more incentive to replace you; might be able to do it cheaply via outsourcing or machinery - Key conclusion is that probability of being laid off is not constant, and this model requires it to be constant - should really not find a result

Hellman, Jones, and Kaufmann (2003) -- Seize the State, Seize the Day: State Capture and Influence in Transition Economies CORRUPTION

Argument: - Firms can have influence (i.e. impact the rules of the game w/o payments) or capture (i.e. shape the rules through illicit payments to public officials) - High capture economy: public officials create private markets for normally public goods like secure property and contract rights, and for rent-seeking opportunities that a relatively small number of firms can obtain either through state capture or influence - This system benefits firms at the expense of society as a whole - Firms with influence are the incumbent, large SOEs from the communist system - Captor firms are large de novo private firms (less secure property rights and weaker ties to the state) - The private gains to capture are realized only in high-capture economies where state officials have created an extensive private market for the key under-provided public goods and for other rent-generating advantages so that they share in rents - De novo private firms have an incentive to engage in state capture to compete against influential incumbent firms in the high-capture economies Method: - 1999 Business Environment and Economics Performance Survey (BEEPS) to examine state capture and influence in transition economies - Focus on transition (post-communist) economies - Under influence, firms exert power over politicians via firm size, ties to state, control over labor, and economic impact on local communities; implicit political advantages in the form of votes are traded for economic advantages to firm - Under capture, firms do not exert direct power over politicians; collusion instead provides preferential treatment, which creates rents that are shared Findings: - While influence is a legacy of the past inherited by large, incumbent firms with existing ties to the state, state capture is a strategic choice made primarily by large de novo firms competing against influential incumbents - Captor firms, in high-capture economies, enjoy private advantages in terms of more protection of their property rights and superior firm performance - Despite the private gains to captor firms, state capture is associated at the aggregate level with social costs in the form of weaker economy-wide firm performance; falling sales and investment growth and high barriers to entry

Holland (2016) -- Forbearance INSTITUTIONS CORRUPTION

Argument: - Forbearance: intentional and revokable non-enforcement of the law - Politicians often withhold sanctions on law-breakers to maximize votes and rents; it is not a case of institutional weakness, but a choice (i.e. unwillingness rather than inability to enforce law) - Three key features: it can be revoked, hidden from legislative oversight, and targeted at certain groups - It can be progressive or regressive and contingent or non-contingent - More commonly, it is directed at the poor in the presence of bad social programs; it is used to mobilize voters cheaply and to signal distributive commitments to the poor - Three reasons politicians favor forbearance as distributive tool: transfers can be revoked, adjusted informally, and targeted to those willing to violate the law Types: - Corrupt: regressive and contingent - Clientelistic: progressive and contingent - Plutocratic: regressive and non-contingent - Welfarist: progressive and non-contingent Method: - Original data on the enforcement of laws against street vending and squatting in urban Latin America; cases in Colombia, Peru, and Chile - Forbearance predicts high and low responsiveness to electoral concerns and resources respectively Findings: - Politicians intervene to prevent enforcement even when the police and courts are capable - Santiago, Chile: boasts one of the strongest police forces and economies in Latin America; demonstrates how mayors in poor districts systematically prevent the police from using existing enforcement resources as a way to build electoral support - Harder cases in Bogota, Colombia and Lima, Peru show that enforcement drops off at moments when politicians intervene, even after overstretched bureaucrats and courts complete their jobs; welfare states fail to provide for basic social needs - The last stage is sanctioning (demolition) which follows stages of occupation, detection, case, and order. It is at this stage that politicians get involved (and thus at this stage that we see forbearance) Problems: - Demolition is a much costlier step to take than the others, so we may naturally observe attrition (the article does say that surveys show 2/3 of bureaucrats thought it was politicians and not resources constraining the process) - Might accord with the broader clientelism literature; really cheap to just not act in order to gain a vote (as opposed to actual vote-buying)

Huber, Ragin, and Stephens (1993) -- Social Democracy, Christian Democracy, Constitutional Structure, and the Welfare State REDISTRIBUTION & WELFARE STATE

Argument: - Incumbency of left-wing (social democratic) parties is associated with de-commodification and redistribution - Incumbency of Christian democratic parties should be associated with direct transfer payments, less social benefits expenditure, and less redistribution - Constitutional structure that disperses political power and offers multiple points of influence are inimical to welfare state expansion - federalism, presidential government, strong bicameralism, single-member-district electoral systems, and provisions for referenda - Absolutist legacies result in higher expenditure but lower redistribution Method: - Pooled cross-sectional and time-series analysis Findings: - Contrasting effects of Christian democracy and social democracy on transfer payments, social benefits expenditure, and total government revenue - There is a strong effect of constitutional structure on welfare state effort

Inglehart (1988) -- The Renaissance of Political Culture POLITICAL CULTURE

Argument: - Inglehart argues that different societies are characterized to different degrees by a particular syndrome of political cultural attitudes - This syndrome is composed of (1) life satisfaction, (2) political satisfaction, (3) interpersonal trust, and (4) support for the existing social order. These are determined by civic culture, which is in turn determined by economic performance and democratic stability - These cultural differences are relatively enduring, but not immutable (i.e. path dependent) - They have major political consequences, particularly concerning the viability of democratic institutions - The key attitude is life satisfaction. There are large and stable cross-cultural differences, independent of objective economic conditions - There is clear geographic in trust levels within countries. Trust is cultural, shaped by historical experiences - Culture is both shaped by and shapes economic and political outcomes Predictions: - Economic security and stable democracy enhances life satisfaction - A combination of low satisfaction and little trust engenders anti-system parties - Culture is composed of interpersonal trust and life satisfaction. These two things are what sustain good political outcomes

Berman (1997) -- Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic POLITICAL CULTURE

Argument: - It has become conventional wisdom to speak of civil society as a key driver of liberal democracy (see Putnam) - But civil society does not have to be inherently good or bad - its effects depend on the wider political context, in particular the strength and responsiveness of existing political institutions - Berman argues that the case of Weimar Germany is a great example of the reverse relationship between associationism (or civil society) and democracy by illustrating how a robust civil society helped the Nazis' rise to power Evidence: - Associational life was strong throughout the 19th and early 20th century Germany, but instead of uniting German society it fragmented it because of the irresponsive national government and political parties - Faced with weaknesses in German parties, which focused on narrow socioeconomic groups and mostly failed to develop grassroots organizations because of their elite orientations, Germans joined associations that were generally organized within rather than across group boundaries - Contrary to conventional accounts of the Nationalist Socialist German Workers Party's (NSDAP) rise to power by attracting alienated and apolitical Germans, Berman shows its emergence based on support from the rich associational life created by Germans in response to their own frustrations with existing political institutions - Berman concludes that if "a country's political institutions and structures are capable of channeling and redressing grievances and the existing political regime enjoys public support and legitimacy, then associationism will probably buttress political stability placing resources and beneficial effects in the service of the status quo. Otherwise, associational life may undermine political stability and offer resources for oppositional movements" Relation to other stuff: - Contrasts Putnam (1993) but raises the question of whether Italy and Germany are proper counterfactuals a la Fearon (1991, 1996)

Kung and Chen (2011) -- The Tragedy of the Nomenklatura: Career Incentives and Political Radicalism during China's Great Leap Famine AUTOCRACIES

Argument: - Political radicalism (terror) varied across Chinese provinces during the GLF; using excessive grain procurement as a pertinent measure, they find that variations were patterned systematically on the political career incentives of Communist Party officials - Alternate members had incentives to radicalize where full members had distinctly greater privileges, status, and power conferred on them - Even if growth rates higher under dictatorship, added efficiency is outweighed by the unchanging nature of bad policies favored by the dictator Background: - Nomenklatura is hierarchical in structure and bureaucratic in procedure; political resources are concentrated highly at the top - Three levels: Politburo member (PM), full member (FM), alternate member (AM); FM was generally the highest position attainable - The GLF squeezed the agricultural sector to increase industrialization, creating famine - Promotion prospects drove leaders to maximize GDP and other indicators of local economic performance - Radicalism declined when bureaucrats reached the highest career level - This paper moderates the assumption that ideology leads to radicalism; it may be that officials have individual career incentives driving radicalization (Eichmann) Method: - DV: excess grain procurement (difference between normal levels and actual levels) - IV: provincial leader's (party secretary) party rank Results: - PMs are more likely to have Long March experience while AMs and up are more likely to have guerilla experience than NMs - Guerilla experience proxies for radicalism; need more than loyalty to be promoted

Denisova et al. (2009) -- Who Wants to Revise Privatization? The Complementarity of Market Skills and Institutions POLICY CHOICE & REFORM

Argument: - Public support for privatization is dismal, and we have seen reversals in Bolivia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe - Existing literature focuses exclusively on individual-level explanations; they examine how individual-level traits like market skills interact with national-level factors like democracy and governance to shape support for economic reform; in particular, whether democracy and good governance complement market-relevant skills or substitute for them in transition economies - Substitutability: democracy and good governance increase the motives and means for governments to engage in redistribution (thereby compensating the low skilled) so we should expect a smaller gap in democracies b/w low and high skill preferences for market reforms - Complementarity: democracy and good governance constrain politicians from changing policy opportunistically and engaging in corruption and rent extraction, thereby allowing skilled citizens to realize greater gains from economic reforms - In other words, weak institutions may prevent the skilled from realizing returns from reform Theory: - Scholars have identified important individual traits (skills, socioeconomic status, location) that matter for who benefits from economic reforms - Higher levels of skills = greater expected return to reform ex ante Method: - Survey data of 28,000 individuals from 28 transition countries DV question asks whether privatized assets should be expropriated or not - They consider attitudes toward economic reform ex post (i.e. the attitudes of individuals who have already realized gains/losses from reform) which implicitly takes into account the possibility of redistribution and government predation - Two proxies for market-relevant skills: (1) those who have become entrepreneurs or self-employed; (2) those holding managerial positions and work as top-level professionals - NOTE: education and age are poor barometers of market skills because vocational training largely catered to planned economy Findings: - They show that democracy and good governance complement market skills in transition economies - Under autocracy and weak governance institutions, there is no significant difference in support for revising privatization between high- and low-skilled respondents - As the level of democracy and quality of governance increases, the difference in the level of support for revising privatization between the high and low skill workers grows dramatically (i.e. low skill support revisions at a higher level)

Ansell and Samuels (2014) -- Inequality and Democratization: An Elite-Competition Approach DEMOCRATIZATION

Argument: - The tension between autocracy and property, due to lack of voice and accountability, is greater than any threat to property under democracy - They argue that political transitions result from the emergence of intra-elite conflict, between a group that controls the state and wealthy groups that do not control the state - Elites in control are a bigger threat to elites w/o control than the poor (think expropriation) - So democratization is more likely when rising yet politically disenfranchised groups demand greater voice b/c they have more to lose; it is about fear of the autocratic state rather than fear of the poor - Democracy is a defender of property rights - The working class drives change despite being above the median income - Smaller groups with homogeneous interests and a lot to lose - mobilize a la Olson (1965) Key Predictions: - Rising elites challenge the political regime to limit expropriation - They assume that land is controlled by political elites with rising groups in industry / finance; ;and inequality supports autocracy but income inequality supports democracy - Land inequality fosters autocracy because the land owners are concentrated and have unified interests in suppressing workers and wages; when land is evenly distributed, there are more land-owners and more diffuse policy preferences - Income inequality grows with the emergence of non-agricultural middle class (industry/finance), which is a product of modernization - Middle class wants redistribution to itself, not the poor (an example is organized labor); should observe a negative coefficient between income inequality and progressive welfare spending b/c the working and middle classes are better organized and want redistribution only to themselves (and they are above median income) - The poor are unlikely to act and the middle classes should fear the state and are more likely to act on their preferences Method: - Top 20 percent of the income distribution = elites Problems: - The counter is that the middle class has more to lose from protest than the poor, and landed elites are not always in power

Amat and Beramendi (2015) -- Economic and Political Inequality ELECTORAL PARTICIPATION

Argument: - There is a non-linear relationship b/w economic and political inequality - Low-income voters participate more (i.e. turnout inequality is lower) when income inequality is either very low or very high - In other words, turnout inequality is highest at medium levels of income inequality - Under high inequality, clientelism is used to lure the poor to the polls - Development first leads to politics as a conflict over public goods mainly fought b/w middle and upper classes; above a certain threshold, it leads to more normative political debates b/c needs are covered - Clientelism reduces turnout inequality, but programmatism increases it Method: - Experimental design using Brazilian monitoring of corruption in 2000s - An exogenous shift to programmatism induced by monitoring of corruption; it makes clientelism ineffective Findings: - Support for argument that political mobilization strategies mediate the connection between income inequality and turnout, thus accounting for the non-linear relationship between economic and political inequality across different levels of development - Turnout inequality is highest at intermediate levels of economic inequality Problems: - Do the rich turnout at a constant rate? - This seems compatible with the Kasara argument; redistribution is more salient under programmatic politics; papers could probably be reconciled if Kasara is fine with the underlying distribution - They also seem to think that the rich turn out at a constant rate, so inequality is driven mainly by recruitment and turnout of the poor

Calmfors et al. (1988) -- Bargaining Structure, Corporatism and Macroeconomic Performance BARGAINING

Argument: - They study the effect of labor market institutions on macroeconomic outcomes (unemployment) among OECD countries - In particular, they show that the relationship between wage bargaining centralization and unemployment follows a U-shaped pattern - Both highly centralized and highly decentralized systems of wage bargaining are likely to produce high levels of wage moderation and low levels of unemployment, while intermediate systems lead to high levels of real wages and hence high levels of unemployment - In an economy in which wages are determined at the industry-level, unions set wages for all firms that produce similar products. Facing a lower level of competition in their product markets, firms have the option of shifting pay increases to consumers by increasing the relative level of prices. Given their higher capability of externalizing higher labor costs onto consumers, such firms are less likely to resist union's demands for higher wages - By contrast, consider a case in which wages are set at the level of the firm. If competition is intense, individual firms will not be able to raise relative prices in response to an increase in wage levels. Wage increases are likely to result in a decline in employment. This creates incentives for wage restraint in decentralized labor markets - Finally, similar considerations apply to the case in which labor markets are fully centralized. In the limit case, one trade union determines the wage level for the entire economy, and an increase in wages leads to a uniform increase in prices for the entire economy. Again, firms will be unable to affect relative prices and will thus respond to higher wage demands by reducing employment. This reinforces the incentive for centralized unions to internalize the consequences of their militancy Method: - Data for the 1974-1985 in OECD countries Relation to other stuff: - The high centralization case is Cameron (1984)

Granovetter (1978) -- Threshold Models of Collective Behavior COLLECTIVE ACTION

Argument: - Threshold: number/proportion of others needing to make a decision before a given actor does so; it is the point at which benefits of action > costs - Relevant areas: riots, rumor diffusion, strikes, voting, and migration - Two groups can be nearly identical, with one generating a riot and the other none - Norms, preferences, motives, and beliefs therefore are all necessary but not sufficient - the key is understanding how these preferences aggregate - There is a social structure component under which some participants might be "worth more" - Collective actions can be paradoxical - i.e. inconsistent with intentions of individuals who generate them - ex: the cost to an individual of joining a riot declines as riot size increases - Therefore, we can and should not infer individual dispositions from aggregate outcomes - Determinants of thresholds include: social class, education, occupation, social positions - It is hard to determine/observe thresholds before a riot actually occurs Model: - Assumes that individuals are rational but require different levels of safety before entering a riot and also vary in the benefits they derive from a riot. - Types of actors are 'radicals' (who have low thresholds; i.e. believe benefits of rioting are high to them); 'instigators' (people who would riot even when no one else does, i.e. threshold of 0%); and 'respectable citizens/conservatives' (those with high thresholds of 80-90%). The '100 people in a square' example: - In the first instance, one person has a threshold of 0, 1, 2, etc. all the way up to 99 and a riot results. In the second scenario, the person with a threshold of 0 breaks a window but because there are no individuals with threshold levels of 1 no riot ensues. The first instance has an equilibrium of 100 whereas the second has an equilibrium of 1. The point is that 2 crowds, almost identical in composition achieve a different outcome which is the result of the process of aggregation.

Magaloni (2008) -- Credible Power-Sharing and the Longevity of Authoritarian Rule DEMOCRATIZATION

Argument: - To survive, dictators need to establish power-sharing arrangements with ruling coalitions. But these arrangements are often not credible, exposing dictators to coups - Simply offering powerful positions is not credible, as the dictator can ignore a rival's policy demands. So for a powerful rival, it is more sensible to just overthrow the leader regardless of whether it receives a power-sharing transfer - Magaloni considers how dictators can credibly commit to not abuse "loyal friends," arguing that this can be done by delegating control over access-to-power positions and state privileges to a parallel political organization, like a party - Party autocracies should therefore be more stable than military dictatorships - To get concessions, elites can conspire against the dictator to establish an independent power source, which is costly because it requires investment in an underground organization, forging alliances, recruiting supporters, etc. - On the other hand, elites can refrain from conspiracy, which keeps them subservient to the dictator. The dictator then is incentivized to not offer concessions to weak elites and can get away with abusing them - The cost of co-opting a powerful, conspiring elite is exceedingly high. This is a perverse incentive structure, as loyal friends don't receive concessions, leading them to try to acquire power to receive concessions - Dictators' promises to grant potential rivals long-term power are only credible when they give up absolute power via delegating to a ruling party - If there are strong and polarized opponents, a dictator will have more trouble consolidating a stable party autocracy. If rivals are strong but ideologically proximate, they can be co-opted with offers of powerful positions. Dictators can also limit their own power to lessen the reward should a rival seize office - Single party elections make effective power-sharing deals by obliging the ruler to promote potential rivals to powerful positions with certain regularity; institutionalized leadership succession can also keep high-ranking officials loyal - Multiparty elections empower autocratic political parties vis-à-vis the dictator. They constrain the dictator by empowering elites with a credible exit option: a peaceful avenue for challenging the dictator. Therefore, electoral dictatorships only survive if they mobilize citizens in their favor - Dictators like winning huge majorities because it projects an image of invincibility and dissuades potential rivals from defecting Results: - Magaloni finds that party autocracies are signicantly longer lived than military regimes - PRI: every five years, the president changes. Gives everyone access. PRI also gave other parties small local victories

Olson (1993) -- Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development AUTOCRACIES

Argument: - Uncoordinated competitive theft by "roving bandits" destroys incentive to invest and produce, leaving little for the population or bandits - Both can be better off if the bandit sets himself up as a dictator - "stationary bandit" - who monopolizes/rationalizes theft in the form of taxes - Starting point for the theory is that no society can work satisfactorily if it does not have a peaceful order and usually other public goods as well - Stationary bandit takes only some of income in taxes; incentives remain to generate income - Since the warlord takes a part of total production in the form of tax theft, it will also pay him to provide other public goods whenever the provision of these goods increases taxable income sufficiently Autocracy: - Even autocrats should invest in some public goods, but the key is that an autocrat also has an incentive to charge a monopoly rent and to levy this monopoly charge on everything - After the revenue-maximizing tax rate is reached, higher taxes distort incentives and reduce income so much that tax collections fall - Autocrats who expect a brief tenure confiscate assets whose tax yield over his tenure is less than their total value (expropriation) - Autocrat will spend on public goods up to the point where his last dollar of expenditure on public goods generates a dollar's increase in his share of national income Democracy: - A candidate needs only a majority to win, and he might be able to "buy" a majority by transferring income from the population at large to a prospective majority - This voting majority earns a big share of the market income of a society, and this gives it more of an encompassing interest in the productivity of society; means the democratic leader redistributes less to himself - A majority at the revenue-maximizing tax rate is bound to increase income from a reduction in tax rates; optimal tax rate is thus lower in democracies than autocracies Long View: - Stationary bandit reaps the maximum harvest in taxes - and his subjects get the largest gain from his encompassing interest in the productivity of his domain - only if his subjects have total confidence that their "rights" to private property and to impartial contract enforcement will be respected and the currency will retain value - Autocrat's promises are never credible; need an impartial court system to enforce contracts - The emergence of democracy is due to historical conditions and dispersions of resources that make it impossible for any one leader or group to assume all power

Acemoglu et al. (2011) -- The Consequences of Radical Reform: The French Revolution NATURAL EXPERIMENTS INSTITUTIONS AND GROWTH

Argument: - W/NW Germany was invaded and ruled directly by France and reformed - there was a destruction of aristocracy, oligarchy, and clergy which led to industrialization as a byproduct - Clergy and nobility drove unequal political rights - Occupations were controlled by guilds which maintained high entry barriers - French introduced free labor and civil code - Environment became conducive to innovation and entrepreneurship - Main motives for territorial expansion were not related to growth potential, but instead (1) defensive and (2) ideological reasons - Institutional changes led to economic growth Literature: - It is generally assumed that invasion and imposed reforms are bad RD: - Two-stage model where French invasion -> institutional reforms -> economic growth Findings: - Invaded areas have more growth (urbanization as proxy) during second half of 19th century Problems: - Worry about reverse causality - Areas were invaded for defense, including the Rhine, which was resource-rich and had river, and other areas that were not balanced on pre-treatment covariates; in other words, invasion was not as-if randomly assigned wrt economic growth - No control for distance to water or coal mines, and results are weakly significant as is - Potential for spillover effects between invaded and others areas

Laitin (1998) -- Ethnicity in Formation: the Russian-speaking population in the Near Abroad ETHNIC POLITICS

Background: - In Estonia, Soviet citizens who were Russian-speaking could run successful campaigns in local elections because all adult residents were allowed to vote, but not in general elections because only citizens were eligible to vote - After independence (1989), Estonia used the project of naturalizing some 500K mostly Russian non-citizens to impose sanctions on Russians who had not learned Estonian - They wanted to ensure the survival of Estonian culture - Language centers were created but barely funded and tuition was high - Russian speakers who passed the language exams often had their applications languish or disappear in the bureaucratic mill Argument: - Personal identities are genetic/primordial, but social identities are chosen (into social categories) constrained by certain realities - Social forces can motivate identity exploration - Cultural assimilation stems from pragmatism - parents integrate to get by and then their children naturally assimilate over time - Identities change (both chosen and feeling natural) via tipping - people's choices about their actions are based on what they think others are going to do Two salient identity issues in the Soviet/Estonia case: - National revival: Estonia was within the Soviet bloc but was trying to forestall Russian language adoption - Assimilation of minorities into new national culture: affected by out-group and in-group status and economic returns of assimilation Findings: - Cases of medium accommodation (Baltics) lead to Russians learning the titular language rather than vice versa - Two reasons: (1) Russian assimilation is more problematic in culturally proximate Ukraine than in the culturally distant Baltic states; (2) For the cases of low and high incorporation, there was a strong incentive for titulars to learn Russian as a language of work and knowledge; for medium incorporation in the Baltics, there were weaker incentives for titulars to rely on Russian, and greater relative incentives for Russians to accommodate themselves to titular culture

Kydd and Walter (2002) -- Sabotaging the Peace: the Politics of Extremist Violence BARGAINING

Background: - Most extremist violence is not indiscriminate or irrational; violence is timed to coincide with major events in the peace process - Extremists are surprisingly successful at bringing down peace processes if they so desire Question: Why are extremists able to sabotage the peace process in some cases but not others? Argument: - Extremists succeed in destroying a peace settlement if they are able to foster mistrust between more moderate groups that must implement the deal; they fail if moderate groups retain an adequate level of mutual trust in each other's willingness to fulfill a deal - The purpose of extremism is to exacerbate doubts among those on the targeted side that the moderate opposition groups can be trusted to implement the peace deal and will not renege - It is a basic PD where targeting one side increases fear of moderates' defection - Terrorism is most successful when moderates are perceived to be most capable of halting terrorism; Bayesian model whereby targets revise their opinion of "capable" types downward after attack - Attacks convey no information when "weak" moderates are involved; they were not expected to prevent violence Findings: - Terrorists are more likely to succeed in preventing peaceful compromise when mistrust is high, when the public and government are more hard line, and when the moderate opposition seems capable of preventing terrorist violence but fails to do so; this is the situation that appears to exist in Israel today - Terrorists can be rational and purposive actors

Kalyvas (2006) -- The Logic of Violence in Civil War POLITICAL VIOLENCE

CHAPTER 1 Argument: - Makes the case for the analytical autonomy of violence vis-à-vis conflict and introduces three important distinctions: between violence and violent conflict; between violence as an outcome and a process; and between violence in peace and violence in war - Civil war: armed combat within the boundaries of a recognized sovereign entity between parties that are subject to a common authority at the onset of hostilities (i.e. de facto territorial division) - At a basic level, violence is the deliberate infliction of harm on people; specifically, Kalyvas narrows the scope to violence against noncombatants or civilians Violence and War: - Violence should be analytically decoupled from war; there appears to be an inverse relationship between magnitude of conflict, as measured by size of forces and sophistication of weapons used, and magnitude of violence Violence as a process or outcome: - Violence ought to be treated more as a complex process than an outcome; allows an investigation of the sequence of decisions and events that intersect to produce violence, as well as study the otherwise invisible actors who partake in this process and shape it in fundamental ways (so-called "gray zones" of non-perpetrators and non-victims) Violence in peace and war: - Conflating violence in the context of contentious action with civil war violence suggests a failure to recognize that war and peace are radically different contexts that induce and constrain violence in very different ways - Forming and expressing political preferences are fundamentally different in war and peace; the stakes are much higher in wartime - There is difference in degree of violence - more deaths in wartime - and in kind - contentious violence takes place under a state's recognized monopoly over violence Aims of violence: - Some violence serves no instrumental purpose i.e. it is expressive - Deducing motives from behavior is hard; motives are subject to ex post rationalization; and even when revealed, motives are often contradictory - Civil wars place premium on organization i.e. instrumental violence - Violence can be used to exterminate or control a group; Kalyvas focuses on the latter, known as coercive violence, and suggests that targets of violence have the option of surrender - Violence is intended to shape the behavior of a targeted audience by altering the expected value of particular actions; communicative function with clear deterrent - Coercive violence is not usually massive; successful terror = low violence - Violence can be simultaneously tactical (eliminate a particular risk) and strategic (deter others from engaging in similar behavior) - In sum, instrumental use of coercive violence to generate compliance is important Production of violence: - Can be unilateral (one actor, state) or bilateral / multilateral (two or more competitors); strategic interaction is more critical in the latter setting CHAPTER 2 The study of violence in civil war must overcome at least a frequent misconception, referred to as madness (i.e. violence as irrational and atavistic), and five common biases: Partisan bias (taking sides): - Civil wars are sticky - notorious for being a past that won't go away - which producers scholarship where authors take sides and see work as condemnation or justification Political bias (equating war with peace) - Failure to recognize the fundamental distinction between peaceful competition and armed combat i.e. conflation of civil wars with regular politics - Social scientists emphasize political aspects but overlook importance of military process - War is a social and political environment that differs from peace; it entails more constraints and less consent and stakes are incomparably higher for everyone involved Urban bias (overlooking bottom-up processes): - Studies are produced by urban intellectuals though wars are fought in rural areas by predominantly peasant armies - Urban bias refers to general tendency to interpret civil wars a-contextually and in an exclusively top-down manner - There is an inverse relationship between type of societies where civil war takes place and type of societies that produce, preserve, and make available written records - There is also an emphasis on top-down perspectives stressing high politics and elite interactions; not located in the realm of the messy local reality (think Posen) Selection bias (disregarding nonviolence) Over-aggregation bias (working at too high a level of abstraction)

Bates (1981) -- Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The Political Basis of Agricultural Policies POLICY CHOICE & POLICY REFORM

CHAPTER 1: Policies Toward Cash Crops for Export Setup: - Tropical African economies depend on production and export of primary products; commodities like timber, minerals, and oil; beverage crops like coffee, tea, and cocoa; and vegetable oil crops like palm oil, cotton seed, and groundnuts - Monopsony: most African states are single buyers from many agricultural sellers; they strongly influence the price at which goods are sold i.e. they use market power to keep price paid to farmer below world price (rents) Argument: - African states seek fast development and therefore have tried to divert resources from traditional economic sectors to modern sectors (like industrial and manufacturing sectors) - Marketing board systems originated in colonial era, were established in times of economic crisis, and were mandated to use bulk of funds accumulated to benefit farming community; with independence, governments got control of rents - Nascent investors in industry and manufacturing use these funds to establish enterprises and seek concessionary prices for raw materials; rarely repaid and at low interest - essentially became a redistribution from farmers to industry - Takeaway: governments are willing to undercut the interests of rural producers to promote the development of industry CHAPTER 2: The Food Sector: The Political Dynamics of Pricing Policies Argument: - Political pressures for low-cost food come from urban workers as well as employers (who are forced to pay higher wages when food is more expensive) - Erosion of purchasing power is what most often drives Africans to militancy, so governments have remained vulnerable to consumer disaffection - Governments often preside over large public sectors (not to mention nationalized industries) and therefore foot the bill for wages; they also need foreign investment which depends on availability of cheap labor - The answer has been to reduce cost of living, primarily through cheap food; agricultural policy is derivative, as it is devised to cope with political problems whose immediate origins lie outside of the agricultural sector - African governments alter food prices in two ways: (1) manipulation of trade policies, as governments in developing world often over-value their currencies in order to reduce price of imported goods; (2) operation of government-controlled marketing institutions that legalize monopsonies CHAPTER 3: The Food Sector: The Use of Non-price Strategies Argument: - Intensified demand for foreign exchange driven by oil and capital flows have complicated price measures as tools for reducing prices of food - An alternative is to increase domestic farm production by subsidizing cost of farm inputs; this confers benefits on the few and promotes fortunes of privileged farmers - State farms are created, subsidized, and able to sell below market prices, but demand tends to outpace production, requiring states to purchase imported goods at world price to meet demand, and there are huge economic losses - Ghana is an example: huge debt accumulations - Though socially costly, farm schemes and irrigation projects tend to be privately profitable for those (large farmers) fortunate enough to gain access to them - Land used is seized from farmers; water is taken from sources used by farmers; and scarce public services like technical advisors and marketing are put to use in the government schemes at the expense of small-scale farming - They are generally a small percentage of total market (only 2% in Ghana) - How? Manipulation of input prices: by lowering price of inputs, one can make farmed goods cheaper; generally, states promote coteries of privileged "modern" farmers - Subsidies go to fertilizers, seeds, mechanical equipment, and credit CHAPTER 5: The Market as Political Arena and the Limits of Voluntarism Question: How do governments get away with this stuff? Argument: - Two reasons rural dwellers do not organize to oppose state: (1) they fear government reprisals; (2) they can use the market against the state, evading some of the adverse consequences of government policies - By use the market, we mean shift away from the production of goods whose price is falling, harvest less intensively, or place fewer acres under production - Farmers also shift into production of commodities for which the returns have become more favorable by comparison - Farmers can also move (i.e. use the labor market); out-migration is common in places with earnings decreases - Also, rural dwellers are at a disadvantage for collective action: each farmer has an incentive to free-ride in order to secure a price change without expending the resources themselves - Per Olsonian logic, it is the large, subsidized farmers who can lobby effectively to defend their interests and the status quo of privilege Comments: - I wonder where development aid, the IMF and World Bank, etc. enter the picture here - do they encourage this type of behavior (by promoting development) or do aid rents substitute for loans from marketing agencies?

Chong et al. (2015) CORRUPTION

Chong et al. (2015) follow up on Ferraz and Finan's studies, investigating whether revelations of incumbent corruption increase support for challengers and increase participation (as opposed to just reducing support for incumbents). Corruption revelations could mobilize voters to vote out incumbents, or they could reduce participation if voters become disenchanted with the political system (given that voting is costly). Chong et al. run a field experiment before the 2009 local elections in Mexico, randomly assigning corruption and public expenditure information relating to mayors' public good provision. Chong et al. find that exposing rampant corruption reduces incumbent vote share, but also reduces electoral turnout and the number of votes for challengers. Corruption revelations also weaken attachments to the corrupt incumbent's party, and increase the share of voters who don't identify with any party. This is consistent with a mechanism whereby information about corruption disengages voters from the political process, and overrides partisan loyalties.

Stokes et al. (2013) -- Brokers, Voters, and Clientelism CITIZEN/POLITICIAN LINKAGES

Focus: Book is about distributive practices that politicians use to win and retain office; strategies of clientelism, machine politics, and patronage (all non-programmatic distributive strategies) are key Classifying distribution of benefits: - Programmatic distribution: criteria is formalized/public and shapes actual distribution - Non-programmatic: violates either - Non-progammatic can be conditional or nonconditional - Nonconditional partisan bias: politically discriminatory distributions that generate goodwill but there is no individual punishment for defection; if the program targets collectivities, like geographic constituencies, it is pork barrel politics - Clientelism: the party offers material benefits only on the condition that the recipient returns the favor with a vote or political support; must be monitoring i.e. undermining ballot secrecy; quid pro quo raises normative red flags Forms of Clientelism: - Patronage: intra-party flows of benefits, such as public employment - Vote buying: bribe to persuade people to vote for them - Turnout buying: bribe to get voters to the polls - Clientelism is different from constituency service: machines help constituents solve problems, often with voter's electoral responsiveness and willingness to join local organizations in mind Three Basic Questions: How does nonprogrammatic politics, and especially clientelism, work? - Poor people are more likely to sell votes - why? - Machines hire armies of brokers to deal with massive local information requirements - must know who needs what help and how people will/are voting - Brokers are agents who cannot be perfectly monitored, and therefore they cause major problems for leaders - this is a broker-centric theory What causes shifts away from clientelism and toward other, non-broker-mediated distributive strategies? - Clientelism brings costs in the form of rent-seeking and inefficient targeting by brokers as well as benefits - Party leaders chafe at inefficiency of brokers - transitions often involve leaders from different parties colluding against entire class of brokers - Structural forces like economic growth and modernization affect returns to clientelism, and thus incentives to subvert machines (this is the key argument) Which kinds of distributive politics are consistent with the norms of democracy, which are inconsistent, and why? - Democracy is less severely undermined when distributive strategies influence rather than coerce voters - conditionality is toxic Key Findings: - Benefits tend to increase support from core supporters (endogeneity concerns though) - Brokers are not just hired political brokers - they are a variety of actors in different contexts, like employers (Frye 2016) - Parties want brokers to target swing voters (greatest marginal utility) but brokers target core supporters because they are cheapest (leaving more rents for the broker) - Empirics are impressive - four case studies, survey data, talking to lots of people across emerging democracies (instead of just Argentina) Problems: - For a broker-centric theory, the book is a little light on how parties choose brokers (other than they need to be locally embedded to solve information problems like who to target, what to give, etc.) - see Frye (2014)

Diaz-Cayeros, Estévez, and Magaloni (2016) -- The Political Logic of Poverty Relief: Electoral Strategies and Social Policy in Mexico CITIZEN/POLITICIAN LINKAGES

Four paths of welfare system development: - Clientelistic social protection: discretionary and administrated through partisan or personal networks - Entitled social protection: means-testing, etc.; insulated from political manipulation; occurs where systems of checks and balances operate more effectively in counterbalancing majoritarian tendencies - Universalistic social protection: discourages clientelistic manipulation and entails lower administrative costs; accompanied by a broad increase in state intervention in the economy - Failed social protection Argument: - Partisan loyalties are constructed through a history of interaction with party brokers and organizational networks, with history of material exchanges - Party machines deliver particularistic benefits to their core voters and public goods to the population at large - Machines favor exchange of particularistic and excludable benefits to core voters because these can be targeted with precision, rewarding supporters and punishing opponents - DCEM conceive of parties and voters as engaged in strategic interactions that extend indefinitely into the future - They posit that partisan loyalties are conditional, a product of past political exchanges that are embedded in a relational network. This creates a situation where the loyalty of core voters cannot be taken for granted. In an iterated game, if they are not paid, they may become disloyal in future rounds Key Prediction: - Public goods go to swing voters, but targeted goods go to core voters

Grief (2002) -- Institutions and Impersonal Exchange: From Communal to Individual Responsibility INSTITUTIONS

Goal: - Examines institutions that fostered inter-community impersonal exchange during the late medieval period - Presents the community responsibility system that functioned throughout Europe and supported impersonal exchange despite the lack of impartial legal enforcement provided by a third party Argument: - At its center was the use of intracommunity contract enforcement institutions to provide the enforcement required for inter-community impersonal exchange - The problem was that local courts were not motivated to dispense justice impartially; they were biased and reflected interests of their localities - Impersonal: not motivated by knowledge of past actions of one's partner nor did one rely on expectations that one's partner would refrain from cheating on account of fear of losing future gains - The community responsibility system (CRS) functioned throughout Europe from 12th century; if a member of community A defaulted on a contract with a member of community B, each and every member of community A was held legally liable - Members of one's own community then punished the defector once they were reprimanded in the other community - System depended on traders' affiliations with communities, large extent to which these affiliations were common knowledge, and the existence of intracommunity contract enforcement - It was initially self-enforcing in the sense that all relevant incentives were provided endogenously; motivated community members to clearly define their communal membership, establish organizations to indicate to the rest of society who their members were, and to strengthen intracommunity contract enforcement - Ironically, long run, the CRS was brought down by the amplification of the system's deficiencies brought about by the growth of trade, which was itself a product of the CRS - CRS brought about the growth of long-distance trade and the size, number , and heterogeneity of communities, undermining self-enforceability - But transition depended on political environment; England and France, and not politically fragmented Italy, made the transition Model: - Overlapping-generation repeated game with imperfect monitoring - Case study of pre-modern Europe Findings: - A transition toward individual legal responsibility during the late 13th century reflects the system's contributions to its own decline. The processes that it fostered reduced its economy efficiency and (intra-community) political viability Relation to other stuff: - Institutional change is endogenous to prior institutions (Young's path dependence) and institutions are path dependent only in short tern

Mares (2003) -- The Sources of Business Interest in Social Insurance: Sectoral versus National Differences GROUPS AND COALITIONS

Goal: - The dominant literature presumes that employers oppose welfare and social insurance - Mares sets out to develop a theory of social policy preferences of firms that specifies when profit-maximizing firms in a competitive environment support social insurance Two Dimensions of Social Insurance: - (1) The scope of social insurance coverage - (2) The distribution of responsibility for its administration - Insurance may be universalistic (means tested, contributory/occupation-based systems) or individual (private policies, pensions, sick leave, etc.) Argument: - Firms support social insurance to mitigate reluctance of workers to invest in skills - Employer preferences are influenced by the incidence of risks affecting their workforce, relative to the average (e.g., export-dependent industries with high employment volatility and high-skilled industries are high risk, while agriculture, with low incidence of unemployment, is low risk) - As relative risks increase, firms will become more supportive of collective insurance policies, likely contributory and universalistic policies - Low-risk producers, meanwhile, will favor occupation-based, firm-level policies - Furthermore, large employers will want greater control over administration (firm-level, occupational-based, or contributory systems), while small firms will prefer union-administrated or universalistic policies as they are concerned about non-wage labor costs - Mares argues that these cross-sectoral differences will override cross-national variation Findings: - In general, high-risk industries favor expansion of social insurance, while low-risk industries oppose it. This may lead to coalitions between employers and labor Note: relates to the cross-class coalitions in Iversen (1996)

Brubaker (2002) -- Ethnicity without Groups IDENTITY POLITICS

Goal: Brubaker problematizes the idea of a "group" Groupism: - The tendency to take discrete, internally homogeneous, and externally bounded groups as the basic constituents of social life; it is the reification of groups Argument: - Brubaker argues for a break with "vernacular categories" - Ethnic conflict should be understood as conflict between ethnic groups - Actors invoke groups to evoke them: they are categories for doing, stirring, summoning, justifying, mobilizing, kindling, and energizing (relates to Wilkinson 2004) - Ethnicity should be re-conceived of as relationship, processual, dynamic, eventful, and disaggregated - Ethnicization, racialization, and nationalization are processes; groupness is a constantly variable notion or an event - Categories, which are potential bases for groupness, are not necessarily realized as groups, which are mutually interacting, mutually recognizing, mutually oriented, and effectively communicating bounded collectivities with a sense of solidarity, corporate identity, and capacity for concerted action - Group-making is a social, cultural, and political project - Provocative violence can be an effective means of group-making. Attacks and counterattacks in Kosovo increased the groupness of Kosovo Albanians and Serbs - Chief protagonists in ethnic conflict are not ethnic groups, but organizations. "Ethnic" is an adjective attributed to violence by people. Framing can constitute violence as ethnic. Ex-post interpretive framing can have a powerful feedback effect, shaping subsequent experiences and increasing groupness, though it is often contested Note: this relates to Wilkinson (2004) and mirrors some IR constructivism stuff + Olson latent group

North (1990) -- Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance GROWTH

Goal: North seeks to explain divergence and institutional change and its effects on economic performance Setup: - Institutions are "the rules of the game in a society, or, more formally, are the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction" - North includes both formal constraints (e.g., rules) and informal constraints (such as conventions, customs, traditions, and codes of behavior) - Institutions are different from organizations, insofar as organizations are created by groups of people for specific purposes, that can themselves be agents of institutional change Argument: - Institutions reduce uncertainty and allow actors to capture gains from trade by establishing a stable but not necessarily efficient structure for political, social, or economic exchange - Together with technology, institutions affect the performance of the economy by determining transaction and transformation costs and hence the profitability and feasibility of engaging in economic activity - All human interaction is characterized by uncertainty, reflected in transaction costs (TC) of measuring contract compliance and enforcing the exchange; TC are central to institutional theories - Economic stagnation/growth is a function of a society's ability to develop effective, low-cost enforcement of contracts - Institutions allow actors to reduce uncertainty in exchange - Institutions can be informal (norms of behavior, societal codes of conduct) or formal (laws, rules) and both forms involve enforcement - As impersonal exchange increases given the growing complexity of society, third-party enforcement becomes necessary and is provided by the state with its control of coercive force - The development of credible commitment by the state not to abuse its force is a necessary condition for economic growth (see NW 89) - Institutions are designed according to the interests of actors with bargaining power and not necessarily aimed at efficiency - Inefficient institutions that persist over time due to path dependency create economic stagnation - The absence of credible commitments by states not to appropriate property rights has caused inefficient institutions, which in turn provide disincentives to investment in socially profitable enterprises and create actors with vested interests in maintaining status quo constraints - Institutional change results from increasing returns and imperfect markets with significant TC - Economies that capture the gains from trade by creating efficient institutions are able to do so as a result of circumstances that provided incentives for actors with bargaining strength to alter institutions in ways that are socially efficient

Shih et al. (2012) -- Getting Ahead in the Communist Party: Explaining the Advancement of Central Committee Members in China AUTOCRACIES

Goal: Paper is a direct response to Kung and Chen (2011) Key Findings: - No evidence that strong economic growth -> higher party rank; rather, factional ties with top leaders, education, and provincial revenue collection played substantial roles - Promotion systems serve the immediate interests of the regime and its leaders - Consistent with BDM, authoritarian regimes deliver private goods to narrow winning coalition - The children of top official (princelings) are promoted more often Method: - Different DVs and different time periods are examined compared to KC - Kung and Chen would probably say ability to collect revenue is a proxy for competence Problem: - To differentiate b/w the two we would need the marginal effect; do you put marginal dollar on personal connections or growth?

Dixit and Londregan (1995) -- Redistributive Politics and Economic Efficiency GROWTH

Goal: They offer a substantiation of North's claim that path dependence in inefficient institutional arrangements commonly undermines growth Argument: - The political process often compensates the losers from technical change or international competition in an economically inefficient way, namely by subsidizing or protecting declining industries instead of encouraging the movement of resources to other more productive uses - A dynamic inconsistency in the game of redistributive politics contributes to this outcome - To achieve economically efficient outcomes, it is necessary that those making economically inefficient choices not be given offsetting transfers - But the political process distributes income on the basis of political characteristics, which are in general different from the economic characteristics that are rewarded by the market - Subsidies or protection for declining industries have the effect of keeping labor and other resources in an activity where they are less productive than in alternative uses; the extra value forgone represents an economic cost to the nation as a whole Method: - Formal model with textile/apparel industry as the focus Findings: - Garment workers in the US are clustered in swing states and are considered to be politically important - They have low education levels and union membership, which weakens their attachment to political ideology and increases their receptivity to offers of redistributive benefits for their industry - Workers in this industry tend to earn wages below the average for manufacturing. Therefore they have a high marginal utility of income, which tends to make them more responsive to offers of redistributive private consumption benefits - Moving jobs is costly, and a promise of the kind "you will be able to keep enough of your gains to make the move worth your while" is not credible b/c once people have moved, the political process will be free to renege on such promises and produce a new scheme of taxes and transfers that meets new political objectives - The result is a lock-in equilibrium where no-one moves and transfers are given

Boix (2011) -- Democracy, Development, and the International System DEMOCRATIZATION AND DEVELOPMENT

Goal: To clarify the relationship between development and democratization by expanding time period under study with panel data running from early 19th century to end of 20th century Key Findings: - Shows a positive and significant effect of income on the likelihood of democratic transitions and democratic consolidations - Estimates hold controlling for country and time effects and an instrument for income; the size of the income effect is weak during the post-WWII period - Income has a decreasing marginal effect on democratization - The structure of the international system affects the resources and strategies of pro-authoritarian and pro-democratic factions in client states; the proportion of liberal democracies peaks under international orders governed by democratic hegemons, such as the post-CW period; it bottoms out when authoritarian great powers such as the Holy Alliance control the world system Theory: - At higher levels of development, high-income people should be more willing to redistribute (declining disutility of redistribution) - In the long run, development is correlated with lower inequality (and therefore smaller redistributive demands) - Development is correlated with a shift in the nature of wealth from fixed assets to mobile capital, and mobile capital induces declining taxes b/c credible exit threat for business - The income effect should be stronger as income grows but then weak or even nonexistent above a given income threshold - International system matters and can be constrained or unconstrained, where the latter is a single hegemon or a concert of great powers operating under a single security regime o Authoritarian unconstrained systems, as in the holy alliance, repress liberalism o Democratic unconstrained systems favor spread of democracy unconditionally because the costs of a democratic collapse are low (post-CW) o In a constrained or multipower world, the democratic hegemony prefers authoritarianism in poor countries and democracy in rich countries Method: - OLS regression models using all sovereign countries 1820-2000; results contradict Acemoglu et al. (2008) because they only use 25 countries and pool results 1875-2000 in 20-year periods; Boix tries 5-year, 10-year, and 20-year pools and results are consistent - Four instruments for income: (1) trade-shares; (2) genetic distance; (3) and (4) exploit absence of correlation between income and political regime before first wave i.e. ratio of each country's income to world median income in 1850 multiplied by world median income each year for (3) and a time trend instead of world median income in (4) - Temporal variation: Holy Alliance suppressed liberalism; first wave happens pre-CW; CW opens door to backsliding; post-CW second wave

Boix (1999) -- Setting the Rules of the Game: The Choice of Electoral Systems in Advanced Democracies ELECTORAL SYSTEMS: ORIGINS AND CONSEQUENCES

Goal: To map the conditions under which the ruling parties, anticipating the effects of different electoral regimes on voters and candidates, choose different sets of electoral rules to maximize their chances of securing representation and cabinet posts Argument: - As the electoral arena changes (new voters or a change in preferences) the ruling parties modify the electoral system depending on the emergence of new parties and the coordinating capacities of the old parties - If the ruling party calculates that the strategic behavior of voters will not upset its dominant position, it will maintain (or introduce) high entry barriers (i.e. plurality rule) and if it foresees that the current rules will erode its parliamentary power substantially, it will change them (lowering thresholds or entry barriers) to increase proportionality - Universal suffrage introduced new left voters Predictions: - If new parties are strong, old parties shift to PR if no old party enjoys a dominant position, but not if there is dominant old party - When new entrants are weak, a system of non-PR is maintained, regardless of the structure of the old party system - Plurality/majority system survived under two circumstances: (1) in countries in which the new entrant (socialist party) was weak and itself the victim of strategic voting, could not challenge established parties; (2) in countries in which, although the new entrant became strong, one of the established nonsocialist parties retained a dominant position in the nonsocialist camp - PR was introduced where the socialist party was strong and nonsocialist parties controlled roughly similar shares of the electorate Method: - DV: Threat (interaction of strength of socialism and effective number of old parties) Problems: - Boix and Rokkan (1970) argue that religion divided the right (CIS refute this and Kalyvas calls CD parties catchalls) - 22 observations in regressions - There is no regression with both constituent terms in interaction and the controls present - As CIS discusses, the fragmentation measure (count of old parties) is bad; there is heterogeneity here even across districts w/in countries - Why is PR the natural response? Parties have other options like repression, clientelism, runoffs...

Simpser (2017) -- The Culture of Corruption across Generations: An Empirical Study of Bribery Attitudes and Behaviors CORRUPTION LEGACIES

Goal: studies whether culture drives corruption over time, with a focus on bribery Argument: - He compares individuals in a given institutional context who have potentially been exposed to different attitudinal factors by virtue of ancestry - When people migrate, they bring their ideas and attitudes with them but not their institutions - He examines whether a measure of average attitudes toward bribery in a parental country is able to account for variation in respondent attitudes toward bribery today Method: - All respondents are second-generation migrants Findings: - Finds strong evidence that corruption is cultural - Attitudes associated with mother's ancestry are stronger - Bribery attitudes are independent of others like general trust Problems: - IV should have been lagged to account for corruption attitudes when the parents migrated - Also most of the variation in b/w the "wrong" and "very wrong" categories which is not that interesting

Alesina, Giuliano, and Nunn (2013) -- On the Origins of Gender Roles: Women and the Plough POLITICAL CULTURE LEGACIES

Main Argument: Traditional agricultural practices influenced the historical gender division of labor and the evolution of gender norms Tests theory from Boserup (1970) - unlike the hoe, the plough requires upper body strength, grip strength, and bursts of power to pull the plough or control the animal that pulls it: Because of these requirements, men have an advantage in plough farming; men then specialized outside of the home with women in it, creating norms - Cultural beliefs tend to persist even when economy modernizes Three reasons why we observe persistence: - Underlying cultural traits may be reinforced by policies, laws, and institutions, which affect the benefit of beliefs about gender inequality - Complementarity may exist between cultural beliefs and industrial structure - Cultural beliefs, by definition, are inherently sticky Method: - Combine ethnographic pre-industrial data on whether societies practiced plough agriculture with contemporary measures of individuals' views about gender roles and measures of female participation in activities outside of the home - Plough more beneficial for crops that require large tracts of land and that can be grown only in soils that are not shallow, sloped, or rocky - IV procedure Findings: - Descendants of societies that traditionally practiced plough agriculture today have less equal female participation in the workplace, politics, and entrepreneurial activities - Those with a heritage of traditional plough use exhibit less equal beliefs about gender roles today (WVS) Problems: - They note exceptions like NE US where weak female participation in agriculture allowed them to pursue jobs in manufacturing over the long term - To what extent are they just measuring female integration into the labor force? And to what extent did industrialization change this?

Hall and Taylor (1996) -- Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms INSTITUTIONS

Historical institutionalism: - Institutions privilege some interests over others - Institutions defined as formal or informal processes, routines, norms, and conventions embedded in the organizational structure of the polity or political economy - Institutions persist as equilibria (Shepsle but Shepsle likes fixed preferences) - Institutions provide moral/cognitive templates for action (like Young's focal points) - Institutions alter expectations an actor has about the actions that others are likely to take - Preferences are not fixed - There is an emphasis on path dependence and persistence - Continuity is punctuated by critical junctures (Young's punctuated equilibrium?) Rational Choice: - Fixed preferences; strong assumptions; strategic interaction - They tend to see politics as a series of collective action dilemmas which institutions can help solve - They explain how new institutions originate with reference to the value the functions it performs have for the actors affected by the institutions Sociological: - Many of the institutional forms and procedures used by modern organizations were not adopted for efficiency or in line with a transcendent rationality - Many of these forms/procedures should be seen as culturally-specific practices, akin to myths / ceremonies, and assimilated into organizations as a result of the kinds of processes associated with the transmission of cultural practices more generally - Institutions are culturally-specific, broadly defined to include moral templates - Institutions specify what one can imagine himself doing; they are valued culturally and so persist Comparing: - Historical: commodious and eclectic, but not careful about specifying causal chain through which institutions affect behavior - Rational choice: more precise conception of the relationship between institutions and behavior and a highly generalizable set of concepts, but it rests on a simplistic image of human motivation that may miss several important dimensions (exogenous preferences are also of concern); great potential for explaining persistence, but only good for origins in certain settings (namely those where voluntary actors come to an agreement) - Sociological: even an instrumental actor may choose strategies from culturally-specific repertoires

Geddes (2011) -- What Causes Democratization? DEMOCRATIZATION

Key Points: - Democratization includes several different causal processes, but large-N studies lump them into the same statistical model leading to weak findings; need to disaggregate them into distinct processes or subgroups - Models of the interactions b/w rulers and ruled fall into two categories: (1) rich and poor i.e. AR 2001/2005 and Boix 2003; (2) rulers and ruled i.e. BDM et al. 2003 One context: historical period - Early democratization involved leaders born to wealthy and prominent families in capitalist countries moving to limited suffrage - Later democratization takes place where there are oil rents, SOEs, military leaders, etc. - WWII as a potential inflection point - Post-WWII regimes are professionalized military (weak), hegemonic party (strong), or personalist

Mares and Queralt (2015) -- The Non-Democratic Origins of Income Taxation INSTITUTIONS REDISTRIBUTION

Main Argument: - Income taxes provided specific political and economic benefits to political incumbents in limited democracies - This is a contra-war explanation for the expansion of the state and its extractive capacity - Nondemocratic countries with restrictive suffrage rules actually pioneered the permanent adoption of income taxes, contradicting AR (2000) and Boix (2003) as well as traditional redistributive models Economic benefits: - Nondemocratic countries adopted the tax in periods of economic change when the power of incumbent landowning elites was threatened by the rise of a new economic elite linked to manufacturing - Imposing a higher tax on industrial sector rebalances power to incumbents while simultaneously awarding politicians with powerful monitoring tools - Capital mobility places upper bound on tax rate, but did not prevent landowners from imposing higher taxes on mobile assets than land (upper bound but not a deterrant) - Land and capital gains were often exempted from the new taxes Political benefits: - Where electoral laws conditioned voting rights on direct tax payments, elites recognized income tax could be used to exclude low-income voters - Political gains prevented opposition from economic losers i.e. manufacturing elite - Argument relates closely to sectoral conflict postulated by Ansell and Samuels (2015) RD: - Cross-national (17 countries) and micro-historical tests (political and economic determinants of the adoption of Income Tax Act in UK in 1842) - Test link between vote-tax rules and probability of income tax adoption - Quantitative test uses defeat of Napoleon in 1815 as start of sample Findings: - While countries with low levels of electoral enfranchisement and high levels of landholding inequality adopt the income tax first, countries with more extensive electoral rules lag behind - Both concentration of land ownership and vote-tax link increase probability of income tax adoption - Case shows strong and systematic evidence of a political conflict between politicians representing rural and industrial interests during the political deliberations over the adoption of the new tax - Fear of future redistribution do not appear to be salient (as in Boix or AR)

Alesina and Rodrik (1994) -- Distributive Politics and Economic Growth INEQUALITY AND POLARIZATION REDISTRIBUTION AND THE WELFARE STATE

Main Argument: - Inequality is conducive to the adoption of growth-retarding policies - Policies that maximize growth are optimal only for a government that cares solely about pure "capitalists" - The greater the inequality of wealth and income, the higher the rate of taxation, and the lower growth - Main prediction: income and wealth inequality and growth are inversely related b/c distributive struggles harmful to growth are more likely to take place when resources are distributed unevenly Model: - Simple model of endogenous growth with distributive conflict among agents endowed with varying capital/labor shares - There is an accumulated factor called capital (broadly defined) and a non-accumulated factor called labor (unskilled) - Growth is driven by expansion of capital stock, which is determined by individual saving decisions - Long run growth is endogenous and linearly homogeneous in capital and productive government services taken together - Government services financed by a tax on capital - The lower an individual's share of capital income, the higher is his ideal tax, and the lower his ideal growth rate - Derived from MVT, the more equitable the distribution in the economy, the better endowed is the median voter with capital, the lower the equilibrium level of capital taxation, and the higher is the economy's growth rate Empirical Findings: - Inequality in land and income ownership (measured around 1960) is negatively and significantly correlated with subsequent economic growth

Debs and Goemans (2010) -- Regime Type, the Fate of Leaders, and War AUTOCRACIES

Main Argument: - The less the outcome of international interaction affects a leader's tenure and the less punitive are the consequences of losing office, the more a leader is willing to make concessions to strike a peaceful bargain (i.e. leaders make concessions the less they fear punishment) - This is the "ousted democratic leaders write memoirs and nondemocratic leaders are beheaded" argument - Challenges the conventional argument that democracies are more resolved because they face threat of losing office Key Prediction: - Democratic leaders' tenure is less sensitive to war outcomes and their fates less punitive post-office, thus democratic leaders are more likely to strike peaceful bargains than to fight. This is a monadic argument explaining the democratic peace Literature: - They focus on the Bueno de Mesquita et al. (1999) model in which rulers with larger winning coalitions enjoy a smaller incumbency advantage in the provision of private goods and must survive through the provision of public goods - BDM et al. assume war outcomes are public goods, so leaders are reluctant to enter into conflict unless they are certain to win, and you get the democratic peace - The authors disagree with BDM - there is no reason war outcomes should affect democratic leaders more than nondemocratic leaders RD: - Model predicts that peace prevails when the cost of replacing the leader - and therefore his or her survival probability - depends relatively little on war outcome and when the net gain of staying in office is relatively small - They examine the sample of non-democracies post-WWII for evidence Findings: - There is a fundamental difference in the replacement process: it is violent in dictatorships and nonviolent in democracies - The theory successfully predicts war involvement among nondemocratic regimes - civilian dictators are less likely to start wars than military dictators or monarchs - They show that although different types of dictators do not systematically differ in their sensitivity to the war outcome, they do differ systematically in their post-exit fate - civilian dictators do better than military dictators or monarchs - Also serves as an intuitive explanation for the democratic peace - compared to nondemocratic leaders, the tenure of democratic leaders depends relatively little on the war outcome, and democratic leaders fare relatively well after losing office - Thus, democratic leaders should be more willing and able to avoid war

Stasavage (2002) -- Credible Commitment in Early Modern Europe: NW Revisited INSTITUTIONS

Main Contribution: - Proposes a revision to existing arguments that institutions of limited government (characterized by multiple veto points) improve the ability of governments to credibly commit - Argues that establishing multiple veto points can improve credibility, but whether this takes place depends upon the structure of partisan interests in a society, on the existence of cross-issue coalitions, and on the extent to which management of government debt is delegated Argument: - Veto points are neither necessary nor sufficient - Argues that veto points can improve credibility but whether this is true depends on the structure of partisan interests in society, the existence of cross-issue coalitions, and the extent to which management of government debt is delegated - Creditors either need to be represented or be a part of a cross-issue government coalition RD: - Comparison of 17th century UK and 18th century France Findings: - France had good institutions but creditors were not well represented - In England, holders of debt belonged to a cohesive cross-issue coalition in parliament that would otherwise have been dominated by landowners (Whigs) - Whigs were more creditor friendly than the Tories, who were into land - Estates of Holland rates did not drop until long after veto points came into being (i.e. long after Star Chamber is abolished) b/c creditors were not immediately represented - France had an absolutist monarchy for a much longer time; not the same kind of Glorious Revolution or checks and balances (lacked religious coalitions to support creditors as well)

Coase (1960) -- The Problem of Social Cost BARGAINING

Main argument: - If transaction costs are zero, i.e. if any agreement that is in the mutual benefit of the parties concerned gets made and enforced, then any initial definition of property rights leads to an efficient outcome - When TC are high, institutions are necessary to internalize externalities and promote cooperation; TC increasing in number of parties; in reality it is almost always costly to transact Coase Theorem: - Without TC, it is economically irrelevant who is assigned initial property rights; the parties have the capacity to work out and enforce an agreement that internalizes externalities based on economic efficiency (not necessarily equitability) so long as the parties can bargain - With sufficient TC however, initial property rights allocations have a non-trivial effect. The property rights owner can bargain to reach an agreement, go to court to enforce her rights, or internalize the externalities by incorporating both parties into a single firm - As TC increase (because more parties are involved, i.e. public good problem increases, or it becomes harder to identify who is involved or to determine the cost of the externality), it becomes increasingly difficult to bargain the externality problem out of existence, i.e. to internalize the externality without moving to higher levels of centralization - Thus, when TC are high, institutions are needed to promote cooperation. Coase concludes that in order to achieve highest economic efficiency, property rights should be assigned so that the owner of the rights has incentives to take economically efficient action Lit/debate: - Coase's discussion of social cost is at the heart of the debate on institutions and property rights - It is one of the first attempts to theorize the importance of property rights for investment and growth - It is the foundation of subsequent work on the optimal design and protection of property rights (see NW 1987) - The prevailing belief when this was written was that governments should tax the social cost of pollution, for instance - he alters this belief Method: - Coase illustrates his arguments with several examples, including the farmer/cattle rancher, polluting plant/community - Externalities are jointly produced by the "polluter" and the "victim" - A legal rule that arbitrarily assigns blame to one of the parties only yields the most efficient result if that party happens to be the one who can avoid the problem at the lower cost. Critique: - Economists unconvinced by Coase's analysis have argued that the Coase Theorem is merely a theoretical curiosity, of little or no practical importance in a world where transaction costs are rarely zero - Furthermore, the argument crucially relies on the possibility of effective judicial enforcement of complicated contracts (Glaeser et al. 2001)

Page (2006) -- Path Dependence METHODS/PATH DEPENDENCE

Path dependence: - Current/future states, actions, decisions depend on the path of previous states, actions, decisions Causes: - Increasing returns: more an action is taken, greater the benefits - Self-reinforcement: taking an action creates forces, complementary institutions that encourage it in the future - Positive feedback: positive externalities when the choice is made by other people - Lock-in: one choice becomes better than any other because a sufficient number of other people have already made it Types: - Path dependence: path of previous outcomes matters (can be early or recent) - State dependence: paths can be partitioned into a finite number of states which contain all relevant information (Ex: state where t+1 only depends on t) - Phat dependence: events in the path matter, but not their order QWERTY: - Increasing returns of QWERTY is due to both positive externalities for QWERTY and negative externalities imposed on other typewriters

Blattman and Miguel (2010) -- Civil War POLITICAL VIOLENCE

Purpose: literature review Argument: - Existing theory omits behavioral economics and has made little progress in key areas like why armed groups form and cohere or how more than two groups compete - There is little consensus on policies to avert civil war or promote recovery - Micro-level analysis, case studies, and a growth theoretic approach are necessary - Interesting directions for future research are: internal organization of armed groups, rebel governance of civilians, strategic use of violence, counterinsurgency strategy, and the roots of individual participation in violent collective action - Further cross-country regressions will only be useful if they distinguish between competing explanations using more credible econometric methods for establishing causality - The most promising avenue for new empirical research is on the subnational scale, analyzing conflict causes, conduct, and consequences at the level of armed groups, communities, and individuals - In sum: conflict is rooted in endemic competition for resources across groups; low per capita income leads to war; bargained solution sometimes breaking down because of commitment or information problems

Kasara (2007) -- Tax Me If You Can: Ethnic Geography, Democracy, and the Taxation of Agriculture in Africa POLICY CHOICE & REFORM

Puzzle: - Assumption in literature: African leaders enact policies that benefit their ethno-regional group using all types of patronage - Yet two streams of research show that this is not always the case: (1) incumbents allocate resources to achieve political survival; (2) local-level inequalities of wealth, education, and access to political power exert a powerful influence on who benefits from resources Question: How does the ethnic identification of cash crop farmers affect how heavily governments tax them? Setup: - Groups differ in two ways in traditional allocation models: 1. Distribution of preferences for reallocative policies of candidates 2. Candidates can target their resources more efficiently in some areas than others Argument: - It might be that leaders can more easily secure support of co-ethnics (and therefore need not give preferential treatment to this group) - Intermediaries are important for governing the countryside via "indirect rule" and coercion is more effective with good local information about threats; for elections, intermediaries can gauge support and target resources - Taxes on cash crops are important for two reasons: they are the largest source of foreign exchange and easily monitored because they leave country by port - Three forms of taxation: (1) direct taxes, (2) overvalued ER, and (3) prices paid to farmers - Because crop production is spatially concentrated, agricultural policies can be treated as local public goods (benefits of which accrue primarily to one region of country) - It should also be that democracies and leaders with longer tenure expectations levy lower taxes - Crops that require higher initial investments (perennials) are more highly taxed RD: - Data on 50 country-crop combinations w/ matching of location of crops to the government's ethnoregional base - First large-N test of whether regime type affects degree to which farmers are taxed Findings: - Cash crop farmers who are ethnically identified with the head of state face higher taxes - Farmers who have few alternatives face higher taxes - Democratic regimes impose lower taxes; alternatives are more likely to emerge, and bases can exert pressure - African leaders have used local intermediaries to exert control over the countryside and to ensure that farmers do not support alternative candidates; fewer of these alternative candidates emerge in well-controlled regions - As leaders are better at selecting and monitoring these intermediaries in their home areas, they can extract more from the majority at home than abroad using taxes on cash crops, which are regionally but not individually targetable

Frye and Mansfield (2004) -- Timing Is Everything: Elections and Trade Liberalization in the Post-communist World POLICY CHOICE & REFORM

Puzzle: - In the wake of the Soviet bloc's collapse, various post-communist countries rushed to gain greater access to foreign markets; many of them have made substantial progress in liberalizing commerce - But the movement toward free trade has been by no means universal - Why? Key Findings: - One prominent view is that the establishment of democratic institutions has stimulated economic reform in the post-communist world - They conduct one of the first studies on this topic and find that democracies are indeed more likely to liberalize trade than non-democracies - They also find that the electoral calendar has a potent influence on the timing of commercial reform in post-communist democracies - Controlling for a range of factors, politicians are most likely to reduce trade barriers immediately after voters go to the polls - Trade liberalization is much less likely to occur at other points in a democracy's electoral calendar, and elections have no effect on commercial reform in non-democracies Explanation: - Fair, competitive, and regular elections generally spur commercial openness, thereby providing a causal link between regime type and economic reform - Politicians are particularly likely to conduct trade liberalization in the wake of elections b/c (1) public officials seek to retain office and use economic policy, including trade policy, as a means to achieve this end; (2) voters take economic conditions into account when casting their ballots, and trade policy affects their decisions - There is widespread agreement that trade liberalization can affect economic performance by promoting growth and increased efficiency

Corstange (2016) -- The Price of a Vote in the Middle East: Clientelism and Communal Politics in Lebanon and Yemen CITIZEN/POLITICIAN LINKAGES

Puzzle: - The purported beneficiaries of ethnic favoritism (co-ethnics) often receive meager rewards in ex- change for their support - Why would they tolerate poor services instead of shopping their political support around? When can politicians get away with taking their co-ethnic constituents for granted? Takeaway: - Co-ethnics are neglected b/c they don't have any other options. They have to vote for their co-ethnic patron. Argument: - Centers on the idea of ethnic monopsony: a political constituency defined along communal lines that is dominated by a single vote-buying patron or party - Ethnic networks facilitate clientelistic exchanges between co-ethnics by reducing their transaction costs. They also divide the vote market into ethnic constituencies that are hard to enter and exit. - A lack of internal opposition insulates the monopsonist, who is able to pick and choose which co-ethnics to patronize and can offer modest rewards (or none at all) - Strictly defined ethnic rewards eliminate exit options for constituents, making them captive audiences. This enforced in-group unity precludes electoral competitors that would bid up the price of a vote - Elites favor these co-ethnics because their votes are relatively cheap - Ethnic ties make clientelism more efficient by facilitating in-network information transmission, allowing patrons to better monitor clients and clients able to share news with co-ethnics of the benefits of being part of the patronage network - They also impede cross-network information transmission; patrons rarely bother to cultivate non-co-ethnic support because of the higher transaction costs. Clients are unaware of the benefits they could potentially get from non-co-ethnic patrons because they virtually never witness such exchanges (i.e. they think they have no other options) Hypotheses: - Corstange hypothesizes that constituents in dominated communities receive more modest payouts than those in contested communities - He also expects there to be greater variance in payouts in dominated communities, due to greater discretion of monopsonists - Finally, he suggests that there will be greater competition for patronage resources in dominated communities Method: - Corstange measures constituent efforts to attract patronage by recording whether voters proclaim their loyalty by publicly displaying a poster or other political symbol outside their homes - Set in Lebanon and Yemen

Gunitsky (2014) -- From Shocks to Waves: Hegemonic Transitions and Democratization in the Twentieth Century DEMOCRATIZATION AND AUTOCRATIZATION

Puzzle: Democratic evolution has been marked by "waves" - rapid democratization all at once Argument: - Volatility in the international system, manifested through abrupt hegemonic transitions, has been a major catalyst for domestic institutional reforms - Specifically, periods of sudden rise and decline of great powers, or "hegemonic shocks," create powerful incentives and opportunities for sweeping waves of domestic transformations. The fortunes of democracy, communism, and fascism in the twentieth century have been shaped by the outcomes of these geopolitical cataclysms. - Identify and tests three sets of causal mechanisms—coercion, influence, and emulation—that link hegemonic shocks to domestic transformations. - Namely, the outcomes of shocks (1) produce windows of opportunity for regime imposition by temporarily lowering the costs of external occupations; (2) enable rising great powers to quickly expand networks of trade and patronage, and in doing so to exogenously shift the institutional preferences and capabilities of many domestic actors and coalitions; and (3) inspire imitation by credibly revealing hidden information about relative regime effectiveness to foreign audiences Problem: - Theory of change in the international system, but does it explain why exactly states would take any of these actions during these times of transition instead of others?

Kitschelt (2000) -- Linkages between Citizens and Politicians in Democratic Politics CITIZEN/POLITICIAN LINKAGES

Puzzle: The literature emphasizes programmatic linkages at the expense of charismatic/clientelist links Two problems solved by parties: - Collective action: investment in parties' administrative-organizational infrastructure - Social choice: parties work out joint preference ranking supported by multiple politicians through deliberation, indoctrination, and coercion Three resulting types of parties: - Charismatic: solve neither problem; promise everything to everyone - Clientelist Link: solve collective but not social choice problem; side payments and favors i.e. selective incentives - Programmatic Link: solve both problems; offer packages of policies to pursue if elected into office Broader argument: - Clientelism facilitates tight representation/ accountability - Only the procedural nature of exchange relations separates clientelist from programmatic linkages (direct vs. indirect) - Choice of linkage mechanisms is not just predicated on formal democratic institutions but also on substantive economic and political power relations that manifest themselves in socioeconomic development, patterns of state formation and democratic suffrage diffusion, and the control of PE by markets or political-regulatory mechanisms - Both clientelist and programmatic linkages have the capacity to organize and institutionalize relations of democratic accountability and responsiveness

Mahoney and Goertz (2006) -- Tale of Two Cultures: Contrasting Quantitative and Qualitative Research QUALITATIVE METHODS / PATH DEPENDENCE

QUALITATIVE RESEARCH - Explain individual cases, causes of effects (particular outcomes) - Necessary and sufficient causes: if X, then Y; without X, Y would not have happened - INUS causation: Insufficient but Non-redundant parts of a condition which is itself Unnecessary but Sufficient for the occurrence of the effect (i.e. seek to identify combinations of variable values that are sufficient for outcomes of interest; occasionally individual effects, but often factors are jointly sufficient for an outcome) - Equifinality (multiple causal paths to same outcome): key concept, few paths - Narrow scope to avoid causal heterogeneity: belief that this is the norm of large populations; as population increases, potential for causal relationships to be missed or misspecified increases - Oriented towards selecting positive cases of the DV, rarely cases where both cause and effect are absent (so many, ill defined) - Theory evaluation sensitive to individual observations, one misfit has major impact - Substantively important cases must be explained (most likely, least likely, critical case study designs) - Non-conforming cases closely examined and explained - Center of attention is concepts; error leads to concept revision QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH - Estimate average effect of IVs, effects of causes - Correlation causes, probability: if X, then Y with probability Z - Additive causation, occasional interaction terms - Equifinality: ignored, but implicitly many paths; generalizes across population - Broad scope to maximize statistical leverage - Oriented towards random selection of IVs, all cases analyzed; often, the DV is rare (e.g., war) - Theory evaluation not sensitive to individual observations, no assumptions about importance of individual observations - Substantively important cases not given special attention, no ex ante important cases (all equal weight) - Non-conforming cases, non-systematic causal factors, treated as errors (outliers generally not given as much attention) - Center of attention is measurement and indicator, error is modeled DIFFERENCES - Hypotheses of necessity/sufficiency vs. hypotheses of probability/correlation - Logical "AND" vs. multiplication of interaction terms - Logical "OR" vs. addition of terms - What is a mathematical truth in Boolean logic (necessary, sufficient conditions) is a contingent relationship in the parameter estimates of statistical models - Few causal paths to same outcome vs. many (infinitely many?) causal paths - Narrow scope vs. broad scope - Selection of positive cases of DV vs. random selection of IVs - Sensitive to individual cases vs. no assumption about importance of individual observations - Substantively important cases focused on vs. no assumption about importance of individual observations - Non-conforming cases need to be explained vs. non-conforming cases/alternative causal mechanisms relegated to error term - Focus on concepts, errors cause revision to eliminate errors vs. focus on measurement and indicators, errors modeled (not devastating to model)

Sokoloff and Engerman (2000) -- History Lessons: Institutions, Factor Endowments and Paths of Development in the New World INSTITUTIONS LEGACIES

Question: - How and why did the areas favored by the forecasters of the colonial era, and the destinations of the vast majority of migrants to the Americas through 1800, fall behind economically? - Puzzle: there is a wide divergence in income despite similar European heritages / institutions Main Argument: - Initial factor endowments are important; while all the New World countries began with an abundance of land and natural resources relative to labor, and thus high living standards on average, other aspects of their factor endowments varied in ways that meant that the vast majority were characterized virtually from the onset by great inequality in wealth, human capital, and political power - Spanish colonies and sugar colonies had factor endowments abundant in labor and minerals/rich soil, combined with low human capital, which led to inequality - US and Canada had relatively less native labor than Spanish colonies and no comparative advantage in production of plantation-based slave-labor goods; most laborers were European migrants with relatively high human capital and similar skills; with abundant land and low capital requirements, most males were landowners; relatively homogeneous population and relatively less inequality - The differences across societies in the distribution of political power may have contributed to persistence in the relative degrees of inequality through the effects on institutional development (See AJR) Method: - Three factors relevant to inequality: (1) Soils, (2) climates, and (3) size or density of the native population - We might consider these to be relatively exogenous at the start of colonization, but the assumption becomes more tenuous with time - Initial inequality was sticky because governments tended to reproduce the initial conditions - Looking at when the franchise was extended in the New World, the US and Canada extended it far earlier than countries in Latin America - Inequality in land policies maps onto inequality in other areas Findings: - The most apparent explanation is that the extent of inequality or population homogeneity was highly relevant to understanding how quickly societies extended the franchise and pursued other democratizing reforms in the conduct of elections Discussion: - This piece suggests that factor endowments are causally prior to the formation of sticky institutions; different argument than North and Weingast (1989) - Does the southern US fit? The southern US was not really a democracy until after the civil war, and the area is still economically depressed and has voter suppression

Rueda (2005) -- Insider/Outsider Politics in Industrialized Democracies: The Challenge to Social Democratic Parties REDISTRIBUTION & WELFARE STATE

Question: - Why has there been widespread unemployment under social democratic governments since the early 1970s? Summary: Rueda argues that new voter demands transform party strategies. Insider-outsider divisions help explain why some people don't feel represented by mainstream political options Argument: - Rueda challenges the idea that SD governments represent labor interests - Rueda divides labor into insiders (the securely employed) and outsiders (the unemployed, or those with low salaries or few benefits) - Since the early 1970s, insiders have become insulated from unemployment; they are well protected and benefit from outsiders acting as a buffer against cyclic downturns - Over the same period, SD governments have increasingly represented insiders over outsiders (outsiders tend to be less politically active) - The number of outsiders has also grown in recent decades due to post-Oil Shock crises, labor supply shocks (entry of women into labor markets, more international competition, working time flexibility), and increasing use of part-time and temporary contracts - The main goal of SD parties is now insider job security. This means more employment protection legislation (EPL) - They are not interested in active or passive labor market policies (ALMPs, PMLPs), which mean higher taxes for insiders and are preferred by outsiders Findings: - Rueda finds that social democratic governments are associated with more EPL, including higher severance pay Comments: - Insider strategies may become risky (Trump)

Egorov et al (2009) -- Why Resource Poor Dictators Allow Freer Media CORRUPTION

Question: • Why would some nondemocratic regimes allow free or partially free media? Hypothesis: • Free media allow a dictator to provide incentives to bureaucrats and therefore improve the quality of the government • The importance of the benefit varies with the natural resource endowment - in resource-rich countries, bureaucratic incentives are less importance, and free media is less likely to emerge Theory: • Nondemocratic regimes have to provide an incentive system for low-tier officials and most regimes fear the free flow of information as a threat to political survival • In resource-rich countries, the autocrat has larger rents to lose from revolt and has less interest in providing incentives to his bureaucrats (even partial freedom is unlikely) o He is more interested in office and can compensate for bad policies • The need for control over bureaucracy endogenously constrains dictators' suppression of media freedom Model: • Players: dictator, bureaucrat, and a continuum of ex ante identical citizens o Bureaucrat can choose high (at a cost) or low effort o Incumbent resources are taxed modern sector + resource rents o Media sends signal of bureaucratic performance to citizens - always high without free media and truthful with free media o Autocrat can be ousted by popular vote or by revolution dependent on signal o Economy includes two sectors: resource sector and the modern sector o Amount of public goods depends on both the policy chosen by dictator and bureaucratic effort given • Dictator implements a policy that affects both his own and his citizens' interests bureaucrat chooses effort level policy outcome realized dictator pays bureaucrat media report the true/false outcome elections take place revolt chance • Policy succeeds only if it is properly implemented, which requires hiring bureaucrats who may either work or shirk • To induce high effort, the dictator needs some verifiable information on bureaucratic performance (like from free media) o Special monitoring agencies are vulnerable to collusion with the bureaucrats they monitor - preventing collusion is costly o Sometimes dictators create multiple agencies to spy on each other (Stalin) • Collusion is ruled out by free media by the free-rider problem and competition between decentralized media; the media also makes policy outcomes know to public • Dictator can choose three regimes: censored media and low bureaucratic effort, free media and low effort (never chosen), free media and high effort o In SPE, dictator chooses free media if resource rents do not exceed a threshold • In equilibrium, the dictator is replaced whenever there is a public report of the policy failure; then each citizen knows that his or her misery is shared by others, and everyone is sufficiently unhappy to make to make an uprising worthwhile (collective action problem is solved by free media) o The dictator stays in power as long as citizens receive positive signals • At any period of his tenure, a competent dictator is strictly better off allowing free media and choosing a high-powered incentive scheme • Incompetent dictator: If democracy level is low, media depends on level of resource rents; if democracy is sufficiently high, then free media is always allowed Empirics: • On average, the media are less free in oil-rich countries; the effect of natural resources on media freedom is especially strong in less democratic countries, but in mature democracies there is no relationship between oil reserves and media freedom • There is also a negative relationship between oil price and media freedom • Media freedom may be negatively correlated with resource abundance, because the latter provides dictators with the means to compensate citizens for censorship o Natural resources are equivalent to foreign aid or any other sources of income that he can use to pay off his citizens • Oil reserves beat our oil production in the test of significance despite high correlation o Gorbachev chose glasnost when oil prices fell (interesting) • They also show that media freedom does improve the quality of bureaucracy

Huber and Shipan (2002) -- Deliberate Discretion? The Institutional Foundations of Bureaucratic Autonomy INSTITUTIONS

Question: - What explains choices about the specificity of legislation, and why might they matter? - When is delegation actually deliberate? Argument: - Citizens care about policy outcomes, not statute text or language - Politicians can debate policymaking authority to bureaucrats w/ expertise who can address problems politicians might otherwise miss - On the other hand, bureaucrats can shirk in a principal-agent framework to pursue their own interests - Level of discretion is important for the question of which politician is most able to influence policymaking (i.e. vague legislation may give the president wiggle room) Four factors: - Level of policy conflict b/w bureaucrats and politicians - Capacity of politicians to write detailed statutes - Bargaining environment (i.e. veto points) - Expectations about non-statutory factors like courts Predictions: - Want specificity where policy conflict is high, legislative capacity is high, and where non-statutory factors are less reliable (i.e. courts are unable to reverse shirking) - Threat of veto can never lead to less discretion, but in some cases, it leads to more RD: - Long and detailed statutes micromanage where value and short statutes tend to delegate - Scope condition in model that bureaucratic capacity must be high - Look to see how political and institutional differences among the US states affect the design of statutes in these states and how such differences across parliamentary democracies influence statutory design in a variety of countries Problems: - Length might be a bad proxy for specificity b/c of pork; with more veto players, detailed legislation could be easier (earmarks increase length)

Esping-Anderson (1990) -- The Three Political Economies of the Welfare State REDISTRIBUTION & WELFARE STATE

Question: - What is the explanatory power of industrialization, economic growth, capitalism, or working-class political power in accounting for welfare regime-types? - Nations studied are very similar aside from working class mobilization Decommodification: service is rendered as matter of right and a person can maintain a livelihood without dependence on the market Three Clusters: 1. Liberal welfare state: means-tested assistance, universal transfers, or modest social-insurance plans predominate - Contained social rights - Benefits cater to low-income, working class state dependents - Traditional, liberal work-ethic norms: entitlement rules are strict and associated with stigma - State encourages market by guaranteeing a minimum or subsidizing private insurance - Minimizes de-commodification effects and erects order of stratification - Sanctity of market favored above employment 2. Post-industrial welfare state: conservative and highly corporatist welfare states where liberal obsession with markets and commodification was never preeminent and granting of social rights was hardly ever a seriously contested issue - Class structure of Austria, France, Germany, Italy - Preservation of status differential persisted and rights attached to class/status - State edifice was ready to displace market as provider of wealth; private insurance played only a marginal role - Emphasis on status differentials meant redistributive role was minimal - Corporatist regimes are typically shaped by the Church and family-hood norms (subsidiarity) - Waits until family's capacity to aid is exhausted such that the dependence on family maximized - Women are encouraged not to work (leads to less emphasis on employment) 3. Social Democracy: smallest cluster where principles of universalism and de-commodification of social rights extend to new middle classes - Pursued a welfare state that would promote an equality of the highest standards, not an equality of minimal needs - Mix of highly de-commodifying and universalistic programs; all benefit, all are dependent, and all will feel obliged to pay - Preemptively socializes costs of family-hood, maximizes capacities for individual independence, cares for children, aged, and helpless - Fusion of welfare and work: committed to full-employment and welfare Theory: - Three types of social insurance: universalistic, insurance-based with benefits tied to wages, private benefits that involve a buy-in - Welfare state plays a number of roles: (1) decommodification; (2) system of stratification - A labor party alone rarely has the power to command a parliamentary majority and impose its will; need political coalition-building - Emergence of class coalitions depends on historical class formation; in early phases of industrialization, need rural class support; then middle-class post-WWII - In countries with more universalist welfare states, middle class was manufactured by welfare state through expanded social services and public employment - In other countries where middle class had employment security outside of welfare state, the social democratic project met resistance Problems: - A welfare state that activates labor markets (Scandinavia) is not about de-commodification! - Looking at the data, the clusters seem imposed, as there is often more variation in clusters than between clusters

Trejo (2010) -- Religious Competition and Ethnic Mobilization in Latin America: Why the Catholic Church Promotes Indigenous Movements in Mexico COLLECTIVE ACTION ETHNIC POLITICS

Question: - Why do Catholic clergy in Latin American promote indigenous collective action? - What is the causal effect of religious competition on the creation of the social bases for indigenous ethnic mobilization? Argument: - Catholic bishops and priests played a critical role in the unprecedented wave of indigenous mobilization that swept across Latin America during last quarter of 20th century - The competition between Protestants and the Catholic Church led Catholic indigenous parishioners to demand some benefits that Protestants were already getting - social services, ecclesiastic decentralization, and religion in their own language (the power of the outside option) - Unable to decentralize and fearing reputation deficits for siding with rich and powerful elites for centuries, Catholic clergy stepped into the secular realm and promoted indigenous movements and ethnic identities - It was essentially a member retention strategy and not Vatican II that prompted the change - Catholics embraced the Indians RD: - Original data set of indigenous mobilization in Mexico - Mexican Indigenous Insurgency Dataset (MII) which draws on systematic review of eight Mexican daily newspapers 1975-2000 - containing information on 3,553 protest events and 4,500 claims Findings: - Competition with Protestants brought the CC closer to the spiritual and material needs of the power Relation to other readings: - In the McAdam, Tilly, and Tarrow (1997) sense, religious competition provided incentives for clergy to supply ideological frames and mobilizing structures - social bases - for protest movements

Haggard and Kaufman (2012) - Inequality and Regime Change: Democratic Transitions and the Stability of Democratic Rule DEMOCRATIZATION

Question: Are inequality and distributive conflicts a driving force in the transition to democratic rule? Are unequal democracies more likely to backslide? Takeaway: transitions occur at all levels of inequality and in the absence of redistributive politics Argument: - There is an indeterminacy: inequality drives incentives for disadvantaged groups to press for more open and competitive politics; but it also gives elites much to fear from democratic transition and greater incentives to repress challenges from below - Empirically, there is a relationship between income equality and level of democracy, but no clear causal relationship between inequality and transitions to democracy - They look for two key things for a redistributive coding: (1) elites must confront political-cum-distributive pressure from below, or a clear and present danger of it; (2) there must be some evidence that the repression of these challenges appears too costly and that elites make institutional compromises as a result - Note that this is a generous definition of distributive conflict Data: - Focus on regime change during "third wave" 1980-2000; transition affected MICs in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and SE Asia but also a number of LICs in Africa - There were also a number of democratic backslides during this period - Decline/collapse of SU made for a more permissive environment for democracy Method: - Causal process observation on dataset of democratic transitions and backslides 1980-2000 Key Findings: - They show that distributive conflict is present in just over half of transition cases, but a substantial number occurred at high levels of inequality - There are several plausible alternative causal pathways for transition: 1. External actors were sometimes decisive 2. Domestic causal factors often induced incumbents to relinquish power in the absence of strong challenges from below; challenges from elite out-groups or defectors from ruling coalition; or power ceded in absence of pressure because elites believed they could control the design of democratic institutions to protect their interests - Weak democracy syndrome: reversions tend to occur in democracies with Polity scores at or below 6 i.e. marginal democracies at best; survival is vulnerable to economic performance and military coups - Less than a third of reversion cases conform to elite-mass dynamics - There are several plausible alternative causal pathways for reversion: 1. In some cases, incumbent democracies were overthrown by autocrats promising even more redistribution 2. Reversions also driven by conflicts that cut across class lines or arose from purely intra-elite conflicts; factions of military stage coups against incumbents

Leeman and Mares (2014) -- The Adoption of PR ELECTORAL SYSTEMS: ORIGINS AND CONSEQUENCES

Question: Are political or economic explanations for PR more convincing? Argument: - Reformulation of Rokkan (1970) - PR is introduced when legislators face strong district-level competition and when parties expect seat gain - Rokkan argued that the disproportionality of votes to seats and the rise of SD were substitutes, but LM argue they should be complements occurring at different levels of analysis (i.e. the district- and the party-level) Method: - Need to move to the level of the individual politician to (1) move beyond small sample; (2) use hierarchical model - Focus on the vote of the Reichstag in Germany to move to PR Germany: - Treated in literature as a case of the rise of SD threatening a divided right - In reality, different parties on the Right had different preferences (Catholic Zentrum and German Conservative Party opposed PR while National Liberals and Free Liberals supported it) and CIS would say all on right should support it - Germany adopted suffrage early and the left did not burst onto the scene (a la Boix) - German workforce is characterized by high ratios of skilled workers and an unusually high level of vocational skills (high coordination levels under CSI); they proxy with human capital - Germany occupies an asymmetric position for economic and political explanations and represents a "hard" case for Rokkanian explanations Findings: - Results disconfirm human capital (i.e. coordination) as a predictor of PR adoption - Find evidence that disproportionality matters and complements the rise of the left - Some politicians defected from party to recommend the introduction of PR despite proportionality because of competition in their districts from SDP

Truex (2016) -- Making Autocracy Work: Representation and Responsiveness in Modern China AUTOCRACIES

Question: Can meaningful representation arise in an authoritarian setting? If so, how and when? Argument: - Three types of actors: the autocrat, the deputy, and the citizen - Autocrat has incomplete information on citizen preferences/how to placate citizens, but the deputy or representative can convey citizens' preferences to autocrat - Representation is risky because debates in parliament can spillover into public realm - Representation within bounds: a behavioral pattern whereby authoritarian parliamentary representatives reflect the interests of their constituents on a broad range of issues, but remain reticent on sensitive issues core to authoritarian state (avoid spillover into public realm) - Conveys preferences only on regime's weak or no preference issues - Two levers autocrat can manipulate to achieve desirable representation: (1) influence the deputy's empathy with the citizens, but only on non-political issues (regime wants "selective empathy"); (2) autocrat can offer deputy private rents - Goal is simultaneous fostering of empathy with citizens and loyalty to regime - This type of representation is in the middle of the spectrum between minimal and complete representation - Democracies do not have a monopoly on responsive governance or representation Method: - Focus on China and a formal model Comparative Statics: - Regime will incorporate deputy proposals on weak or no preference issues in policy - Deputies in stable authoritarian parliaments should exhibit "representation within bounds" behavior, reflecting the interests of their constituents on the regime's weak or no preference issues, but remaining reticent on strong preference issues - Regimes will devise incentives to foster selective empathy - Regimes will reward deputies with rents to instill loyalty Findings: - Deputies are required to spend 49 weeks per year in home province to stay connected - duty, obligation, and responsibility are key concepts - Those that overstep bounds are kicked out of the CCP and kept off party lists

Nunn and Wantchekon (2011) -- The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa POLITICAL CULTURE LEGACIES

Question: Did the slave trade cause a culture of mistrust to develop within Africa? Main Argument: - In areas heavily exposed to the slave trade, norms of mistrust towards others were likely more beneficial than norms of trust - The environment of ubiquitous insecurity caused individuals to turn on others - including friends and family members - and to kidnap, trick, and sell each other into slavery (heuristics develop) - Individuals could partially protect selves by turning against others in the community - Because chiefs were often slave traders, slave trade also may have engendered mistrust of political figures Key Findings: - Current differences in trust levels within Africa can be traced back to the transatlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades - Individuals whose ancestors were heavily raided during the slave trade are less trusting today RD: - 2005 Afrobarometer survey data (why not other waves?) - Asks how much respondents trust their relatives, neighbors, and locally elected government council (7% say they don't trust relatives at all, and 18% report trusting their relatives only a little) - Country-level estimates of slave trade cover Africa's four slave trades (transatlantic, Indian Ocean, Red Sea, and trans-Saharan) between 1400 and 1900 - Disaggregate data to ethnicity level restricted to transatlantic and Indian Ocean - Three strategies to get at causality: (1) controls for other forms of European influence, notably the period of formal colonial rule that followed the slave trade, as well as precolonial characteristics of ethnic groups such as initial prosperity and political development; (2) calculate that the influence of unobservable factors would have to be between three and 11 times greater than observable factors to explain it away; (3) instrument with distance of ethnic groups from coast at time of slave trade - Alternative explanation: slave trade deteriorated legal institutions, so it was easier to cheat one another, but internal channel (ethnicity) is stronger than external channel (residential area)

Jones and Olken (2005) -- Do Leaders Matter? National Leadership and Growth since WWII GROWTH

Question: Do leaders have a causative effect on economic growth? Argument: - JO relate their findings to Weber (1947) - Weber argues that "charismatic" leadership matters in certain circumstances; individuals are impactful only where the national bureaucracy or societal norms do not constrain the individual - JO similarly argue that leaders matter most in autocratic situations where leaders are not limited by a legislature, party, or the electorate Method: - They only consider deaths by natural causes or accidents to be exogenous - Original dataset on all national leaders 1945-2000 for whom growth data is available in Penn World Tables Key Findings: - Leadership changes affect economic growth; leader death offers exogenous variation - The effects are strongest in autocratic settings w/o parties or legislatures - No effects on growth in democracies - Policy changes: leaders affect MP but not fiscal or trade policy Problems: - They are agnostic about the direction of growth shifts; they merely consider variance - The methods they choose do not allow for the inclusion of covariates - Are there situations where autocrats are more constrained than democrats? Would there be a significant effect for democratic leaders with congressional party majorities? • Polity IV with a cutoff of 0 is a problematic measure, and when using Freedom House scores or the data from Przeworski et al (2000) democracies become statistically significant

Frye (2009) -- Building States and Markets after Communism POLICY CHOICE & REFORM

Question: Does democracy promote robust institutions and market economics? If so, how? Argument: - The impact of democracy on economic and institutional reform depends on the level of political polarization - Polarization dampens the effect of democracy on the pace and consistency of reform - Incumbents offer less generous transfer payments under high polarization - Citizens do not invest in skills, firms do not create new products, and firm creation is low if the likelihood of policy reversal is high; both autocracy and polarization leave the likelihood of reversal high Method: - Post-communism mitigates reverse causation because the initial levels of polarization and democracy come from the first pre-reform post-communist election

Stokes (1999) -- What Do Policy Switches Tell Us about Democracy? CITIZEN/POLITICIAN LINKAGES

Question: Does mandate representation fragility in Latin America mean there is not representation? Summary: evidence of accountability rather than mandate representation in Latin America Argument: - Politicians care about maximizing voters' utility income and holding office - Politicians reveal or conceal beliefs about what is best for the public - Public may support policy switcher if the switch served the public, though prior beliefs weigh it down some (i.e. Bayesian framework) - Switching happens when politicians believe the benefits are substantial - public far underestimates the effectiveness of policy Four hypotheses: - Politicians who switch believe that voters far underestimate the relative effectiveness of efficiency over welfare policies. They believe that they must dissimulate to win the first election but that switching to efficiency policies once in office is both good for voters and improves their or their party's prospects of prevailing at the next election - Policy reversals are associated with situations of voter uncertainty about the impact of policies on outcomes - The economy improves more under switches than under consistent policies - Policy switches are associated with shared rule Method: - Data on competitive presidential elections in LA 1982-1995 Findings: - The economy improves much more under switches and they occur under uncertainty about what the right policy should be

Lupu and Pontusson (2011) -- The Structure of Inequality and the Politics of Redistribution INEQUALITY AND POLARIZATION

Question: Does more inequality lead to more redistribution? Argument: - Inequality matters for redistributive politics in advanced capitalist societies, but it is the structure of inequality, not the level of inequality, that matters - Middle-income voters will be inclined to ally with low-income voters and support redistributive policies when the distance between the middle and the poor is small relative to the distance between the middle and the rich - The 90-50 earnings ratio will be associated with associated with more redistribution while the 50-10 ratio will be associated with less redistribution - The joint nature is captured by 90-50 ratio / 50-10 ratio or skew and should be positively associated with redistribution - They build on recent studies treating racial and ethnic diversity as an obstacle to redistributive politics: social affinity leads to redistributive preferences (like Shayo) - A departure from Iversen and Soskice (2006) as the median voter (middle income) might be willing to impose redistributive taxes on itself - RMR is a short-term model; longer time horizons -> care about future losses/externalities Method: - Data from 15-18 advanced OECD democracies derived from Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) 1969-2005 along with survey evidence - Only 83 country-years, which is reduced to 68 with lagged DV Findings: - Both redistribution and non-elderly social planning increase as the dispersion of earnings in the upper half of the distribution increases relative to the dispersion of earnings in the lower half of the distribution - Survey evidence suggests that redistributive policy outcomes correspond to the policy preferences of middle-income voters and the structure of inequality helps explain why the preferences of middle-income voters may vary over space and time - Left parties are more likely to participate in government when the structure of inequality is characterized by skew (and left parties do redistribute more) - interesting Problems: - This is the US today - no redistribution - Obvious data issues: they use wage data, but lots of the poor don't work - The Shayo framework is a better explanation for the same trend i.e. status costs drive affinity not just wages

Posner (2004) -- The Political Salience of Cultural Difference: Why Chewas and Tumbukas Are Allies in Zambia and Adversaries in Malawi Posner (2005) -- Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa IDENTITY POLITICS

Question: Given multiple axes of ethnic division in a society, when and why does one cleavage become the basis of political competition rather than another? Argument: - Political institutions help determine cleavage salience by (1) shaping the repertoires of potentially mobilizable ethnic identities that individuals possess; (2) shaping incentives for selecting one of these identities over another - "Why players in a card game have the cards in their hand that they do, and why they play one card and not another" - Assumptions: (1) people want resources from the state; (2) they believe having someone from their ethnic group in power is the best way to access those resources; (3) they understand that building a coalition with other group members is the best way to get their co-ethnics in power - Instrumental understanding of ethnic identity: an individual's identity is a deliberate decision made to maximize payoffs - To maximize resources from the state, individuals choose to mobilize along the identity cleavage that puts them in the minimum winning coalition. Therefore it is group size, not depth of attachment, drives individuals' choice and thus society-level cleavage outcomes Method: - Studies political cleavages in Zambia - Political institutions during the British colonial period created two politically salient identity cleavages: language and tribe Book Findings: - During periods of multi-party rule, political competition is at the national level so the minimum winning coalition is formed along language group cleavages - However, during periods of single-party rule, competition is at the local level where coalitions form along tribal lines Article Arg/Findings: - Natural experiment afforded by the division of the Chewa and Tumbuka peoples by the border between Zambia and Malawi - While the objective cultural differences between Chewas and Tumbukas on both sides of the border are identical, the political salience of the division between these communities is altogether different. - Argues that this difference stems from the different sizes of the Chewa and Tumbuka communities in each country relative to each country's national political arena - In Malawi, Chewas and Tumbukas are each large groups vis-a-vis the country as a whole and, thus, serve as viable bases for political coalition-building - In Zambia, Chewas and Tumbukas are small relative to the country as a whole and, thus, not useful to mobilize as bases of political support

McMillan and Zoido (2004) -- How to Subvert Democracy: Montesinos in Peru CORRUPTION

Question: How can democracy be subverted? Where are the weak points? Argument in Peruvian Context: - In Peru, the full set of democratic mechanisms (a constitution, opposition parties, regular elections, a presidential term limit, safeguards for the independence of the judiciary, and a free press) did not stop subversion - Montesinos was the secret police chief for Fujimori in the 1990s; he kept meticulous records via video / tape recordings of illicit activities - Importantly, Montesinos used monthly payments to lengthen the shadow of the future, create dependency networks, and prevent defection; tapes were a threat against anyone who might flip - Montesinos bought off courts and legislature as well as media outlets -- why were most important? Method: - Uses bribe prices to quantify the importance of different checks and balances 1998-2000 Total monthly cost of a majority in congress: $300K - Total monthly cost of bribing judges: $250K - Total monthly cost of bribing media: $3,000,000 Findings: - Way more money was spent on the press than legislature or courts - The TV channels had holdup power; he bought off all but one, which was rarely watched and specific to wealthier audiences - That TV channel ended up doing them in and breaking the extent of the corruption; the government fell three months after the 2000 election when one of Montesinos's videos was broadcast on television - Conclusion: media helps citizens to solve coordination problems by cultivating common knowledge Comments: - How would this work today with the plurality of networks?

Scott (1998) -- Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed INSTITUTIONS

Question: How did states gradually get a handle on its subjects and their environments? Argument: - Forest-planning analogy; symbiosis of different species was needed - Utopian social engineering failed in 20th century b/c it excluded the necessary role of local knowledge and know-how - Global capitalism drives homogenization; the state as the last defender of local variety - Imposition of cadastral maps at the expense of local measures like amount of seed or time to plow; Soviet agricultural planning as case w/ unfree laborers, high modernism (resembles peacekeeping in third world or IMF conditions) Four factors lead to failure: - Administrative ordering of state and society - High modernist ideology (western progress norms) - Authoritarian state willing to use coercion to realize plans - Prostrate civil society lacking capacity to resist Moyn (2017) Critique: - The state also institutionalizes good things like equality and freedom from the top-down - There is no variation in the DV (i.e. no successful cases)

Frye, Reuter, and Szakonyi (2014) -- Political Machines at Work: Workplace Mobilization and Electoral Subversion AUTOCRACIES CLIENTELISM

Question: How do autocrats win elections without relying heavily on costly measures like ballot-box fraud? Argument: - They explore economic (workplace) coercion to mobilize voters and subvert the electoral process in competitive authoritarian regimes - Firms that offer votes at the lowest cost to the autocrat are more likely to do so; workers that are dependent are more likely to be mobilized Method: - Two surveys of employers and workers around 2011 parliamentary elections in Russia - they find that workplace is a key locus of voter mobilization Hypotheses: - Large firms will be more likely to mobilize workers - Firm directors who support the ruling party will be more likely to mobilize workers - State-owned firms, firms that sell to the state, and firms that receive benefits from the state will be more likely to mobilize workers - Firms in sectors characterized by immobile assets will be more likely to mobilize workers - Firms that provide employees with significant non-wage benefits will be more likely to mobilize workers - Employees in slack labor markets are more likely to report being mobilized Findings: - Firms holding immobile assets are more likely to mobilize voters; this is because they are more vulnerable to expropriation, not because they fear redistribution in a potential transition to democracy - Firms with large numbers of workers and dependent workers (non-wage benefits, company towns, state-dependent firms) are more likely to mobilize voters

Meguid (2005) -- Competition Between Unequals PARTIES AND DEMOCRATIC SYSTEMS

Question: What accounts for variation in the electoral success of niche parties? Main Argument: - Niche parties reject class-based politics and politicize sets of issues which were previously outside the dimensions of party competition - The behavior of mainstream parties influences the electoral fortunes of the new, niche party actors - Party tactics work by altering the salience and ownership of issues for political competition, not just party issue positions - Voters accord their support to the most credible proponent of an issue which is known as issue ownership - If strategies alter salience and ownership, parties can target opponents anywhere rather than just ideologically proximate parties - Hesitation undermines attempts to own an issue Spatial voting models: parties can move toward (convergence) or away from (divergence) a competitor in a given policy space - Accomodative strategy: convergence which is employed by parties hoping to draw voters away from a threatening competitor - Adversarial strategy: encourages voter flight to the competing party Parties can manipulate the perceived salience of issues within the political arena; by choosing which issues to compete on in a given election, parties can shape the importance of policy dimensions Mainstream party entry - established parties must decide whether or not to recognize and respond to the issue introduced by niche party - Dismissive strategy: ignoring the issue and signaling that the issue lacks merit - Competing with the new party on an issue increases its salience - Mainstream party can be accommodative and steal voters from niche party - it can try to own the issue based on legislative experience/credibility - Adversarial strategy calls attention to the issue and primes voters to vote on it; it also reinforces the niche party's ownership Method: - Analysis of 30 green and radical right parties in 17 Western European countries 1970-2000 (N = 114) - Used the Comparative Party Manifesto project to look at mainstream responses to niche parties Problems: - Two-party system is modeled, but why do we not see niche parties succeeding in these systems?

Rundlett and Svolik (2016) -- Deliver the Vote: Micromotives and Macrobehavior in Electoral Fraud AUTOCRACIES

Question: How does an incumbent ensure that his agents deliver fraud when needed and as much as needed? Argument: - Incentive conflicts between incumbents and local agents result in a herd dynamic among the agents that tends to either oversupply or undersupply fraud, rarely delivering the amount of fraud that would be optimal from the incumbent's point of view - Two key conflicts: (1) the principal-agent problem between some incumbent and local agents i.e. agents are least willing to commit fraud when incumbents need it most; (2) the collective action problem among agents; most pronounced when the incumbent narrowly trails the challenger b/c agents know enough of them have to do it to win, but each doubts that the others will do it - Popular incumbents allow fraud despite popularity as insurance; unpopular incumbents have undersupplied fraud because of defections from local agents based on a fear of a losing candidate and no subsequent reward - Election monitors increase pressure to commit fraud at unmonitored stations, which heightens the collective action dilemma among all agents - The occurrence of fraud across precincts should not be uniform, but rather increasing in both the incumbent's genuine popularity and his vote share Method: - Putin's Russian elections are a case study - They also look for weird rounding in the vote margins by district (forensics) Results: - Four categories: (1) all agents correctly infer defeat and none commit fraud; (2) fraud occurs but fails; (3) enough agents commit fraud to secure an undeserved victory; (3) fraud occurs unnecessarily - Clean elections can occur in two ways: the incumbent gives up because he desperately lacks popularity, or he offers no reward for fraud because of overwhelming popularity - Often, small rewards are offered as insurance - Fraud is generally under- or over-supplied regardless of the reward size Discussion: - Simpser had a different definition of fraud: he uses secondary analysis of survey resources to create categories (little, some, and blatant fraud); different than explaining the margin of victory, which is what RS do - Simpser says over-supply is intentional, but RS disagree - product of collective action problems

Ponce and Pasquale (2014) -- How Political Repression Shapes Attutides Toward the State: Evidence from Zimbabwe POLITICAL VIOLENCE

Question: How does political repression influence attitudes toward the state? Argument: - Indirect exposure to repression leads citizens to report higher trust in state institutions, including the ruling party, president, parliament, local officials, and the police Two potential mechanisms: 1. State-imposed political order: citizens prefer imposed order over chaos 2. Preference falsification: citizens report support b/c they fear further punishment Zimbabwe: - The Zimbabwean context is an environment marked by an abusive incumbent government, economic instability, and poor socioeconomic conditions - Mugabe's regime is characterized as a militarized form of electoral authoritarianism, yet elections have been held on a regular basis since independence in 1980 - They have been neither free nor fair, and the state routinely uses violence to repress opposition groups and their supporters via vote-buying, vote-rigging, and last minute redistricting - Zimbabwe also offers rich data on political violence and attitudes, which can be leveraged to evaluate the attitudinal impact of violent political repressions RD: - Compares individuals surveyed in the days before violence to similar individuals surveyed the days after violence - Plausibly exogenous variation in exposure to violence generated by the timing of conflict relative to the timing and location of Afrobarometer surveys Findings: - Increased trust is driven by fear of regime; repression increases both fear of electoral violence and the probability that respondents think the state organized the survey - Violence also follows an electoral business cycle

Voigtlander and Voth (2012) -- Persecution Perpetuated: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Semitic Violence in Nazi Germany POLITICAL CULTURE LEGACIES

Question: How persistent are cultural traits? Key Findings: - They use plague-era (1348-50) pogroms (Jews were blamed for the Black Death) as an indicator for medieval anti-Semitism, and reliably predict violence against Jews in the 1920s, votes for the Nazi Party, deportations after 1933, attacks on synagogues, and letters to Der Sturmer - Cities with strong long-distance trade show lower persistence (Hanseatic cities that had economic success and migration) Method: - They conclude that in locations where Jews were present (and transactional records give evidence to that effect) but no violence occurred, anti-Semitic sentiment was weaker or absent - it is a collective action or mob scene story whereby authorities were pressured to act against Jews - Most Jews disappeared from Germany by 1950, and they resettled randomly from the eighteenth century onward (i.e. selection was not based on past pogroms) - Anti-Semitism increased during and after WWI as they were blamed for defeat - Nazis toned-down anti-Semitism during the Depression to capitalize on economic and social issues - anti-Semitism was underrepresented in the Party pre-1933 - As such, they focus on pre-1928 NSDAP vote share as a DV of interest Relation to other stuff: - Could be consistent with Swidler (1986) and unsettled lives Problems: - Deportations were centrally-directed and may not have been very responsive to local pressures - To what extent is culture passed down at the family or interpersonal level (Darden and Grzymala-Busse (2006); Alesina, Giuliano, and Nunn (2013) vs. inculcated in localities and pushed onto residents?

Wittenberg (2015) -- Conceptualizing Historical Legacies LEGACIES

Question: How should we conceptualize historical legacies, especially in the former Soviet Union? Three parts to legacy: 1. Outcome: something inexplicable, like why populations in post-1989 Eastern Europe have been so mistrustful of parties and politics 2. Antecedent: identified as cause of the outcome 3. Candidate mechanism: linking outcome and antecedent - The legacy is the outcome to be explained, and it is only a legacy if the explanatory factor ceased to directly operate before the outcome is observed Outcomes in post-communism are either potential legacies or new, having never appeared in the past (persistence in multiple periods defines potential legacy) - Communist legacies can be pre-post-communist, communist, or pre-communist depending on the periods of temporal persistence

Wallerstein (1999) -- Wage-Setting Institutions and Pay Inequality in Advanced Industrial Societies INEQUALITY AND POLARIZATION

Question: What are the determinants of pay inequality in advanced societies? Argument: - Centralization is designed to measure the explicit coordination of wage-setting among workers in different firms or different industries - Wage-setting institutions are of growing importance with respect to the distribution of earnings and income - The more wages are determined in a centralized fashion, whether through centralized collective bargaining or parliamentary action, the more equal the distribution of earnings; conversely, the more that wages are set in decentralized bargaining between unions and firms at the plant level or workers and their employees, the more unequal - The share of the workforce covered by collective bargaining is less important than cross-national differences in bargaining institutions; centralization of wage-setting and concentration of unions Method: - New dataset of wage-setting institutions in sixteen countries 1950-1992, but the sample of interest is major developed countries 1980-1992 - DV: 90/10 wage ratio - Key IVs: 1. Centralization: Index of confederal involvement in wage-setting, index of government involvement in wage-setting, and index of the level of wage-setting 2. Concentration of unions: measured as (1) extent to which union members belong to a single confederation as opposed to divided among multiple and (2) extent to which membership of a single union is concentrated within small number of affiliates Findings: - The most important factor in explaining pay dispersion is the level of wage-setting (whether wages are set at the level of the individual, plant, industry, or entire private sector) - The impact of centralization is the same whether centralization occurs via collective bargaining or via government involvement in private-sector wage-setting - The concentration of unions and the share of the labor force covered by collective bargaining agreements also matter - Controlling for wage-setting institutions, other variables such as the governing coalition, the size of government, international openness, and the supply of highly educated workers have little impact - The more the wage schedule is determined collectively, whether the coordination is achieved by the explicit centralization of wage-setting or implicit cooperation of a small number of actors, the more egalitarian the distribution of pay

Kuran (1991) -- Now Out of Never COLLECTIVE ACTION

Question: If revolution was inevitable, why was it not foreseen? - Availability heuristic: highlights information consistent with actual events at the expense of information inconsistent with them (i.e. we identify structural causes of revolution afterward) Argument: - Preference falsification: private preferences different from public - adds this to Granovetter - Revolutions have non-linearities (a two point change can matter more than a 200 point change) - Two payoffs: internal (psychological cost) and external (increasing in the size of the opposition) - Threshold: external cost of joining < internal cost of preference falsification (which increases with the degree of sympathy for the cause) - Allows for the possibility of a tipping model where a first mover is needed - Also may generalize to unexpected political outcomes in democracy (i..e Trump) - Allows, like Granovetter, for some individuals to be more important Case: - The trigger of the domino effect of 1989 was the Soviet abandonment of a policy of military enforcement of Communist rule in Eastern Europe (the Breznev Doctrine replaced by the Sinatra Doctrine) - This reduced the probability of a Soviet military intervention in case of anti-communist agitations in Soviet satellites, which in turn reduced the willingness of domestic authorities in those countries to use force to repress rebellions - As the costs of publicly expressing opposition to the regime declined, individuals' thresholds were lowered, to the point that mass demonstrations ensued in one country - The success through peaceful demonstrations in one country caused a further update of risk assessments in other countries, thus allowing the continuation of the domino effect

Hiscox (2001) -- Class Versus Industry Cleavages: Inter-Industry Factor Mobility and the Politics of Trade GROUPS AND COALITIONS

Question: There is empirical support for both class and group approaches. How can the gulf between the two be bridged? Argment: - Hiscox focuses on the role of inter-industry factor mobility - Owners of the same factor share preferences vis-à-vis trade policy, and factor specificity can divide members of the same class employed in different industries - Class conflict is more likely when levels of factor mobility are high - Industry-based conflict is more likely when levels of factor mobility are low - The levels of factor mobility coincide with different stages of industrialization. In the 19th century, there was greater mobility in Britain (fastest industrialization) than in France (legacy of heavy industrial regulation). Technology lowered the costs of factor movement, though by the 1920s, growing complementarity between labor skills and technology led to a decline in inter-industry mobility. Hypotheses: - As class cleavages become more salient (high mobility), Hiscox expects parties representing factor-owning classes to become more unified. - As industry cleavages over trade become more salient (low mobility), Hiscox expects industry groups to be more active in lobbying, with labor unions and import-competing lobbying for more protection and export industries for freer trade. Findings: - When there is low mobility and industry coalitions, class-based parties become more divided over trade and adopt ambiguous trade policy positions - When there is high mobility and class coalitions, class-based parties are more internally unified and adopt protectionist positions (if they represent scarce factors) or free-trade positions (abundant factors) Problems: - Technological advances can be endogenous to free trade

Wood (2003) -- Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador POLITICAL VIOLENCE NON-ELECTORAL PARTICIPATION METHODS

Question: What accounts for the emergence of a powerful insurgent movement in an area where quiescence had long been the response of the rural poor to social injustice? Why did many poor people run high risks in supporting the insurgency? Why did others decline to do this? Method: - Open-ended interviews with rural residents as well as map-drawing (ethnography example) - Responses shaped by: (1) accuracy/intensity of memories, with violent events best remembered; (2) shaping of memories through social processes; (3) respondents' objectives in interview setting - Narratives were consistent with political beliefs / loyalties; some ex-post rationalization - Interviews took place during civil conflict and cease fire; 200 respondents over 5 years Argument: - Wood argues that emotional and moral motives were essential to the emergence / consolidation of insurgent collective action - Songs and legends kept alive memories of heroes of past rebellions - They experienced the pleasure of agency, motivated by the value they placed on making history; in occupying and claiming land, they asserted a new identity of social equality and refuted condescending elite perceptions - Insurgents had long time horizon and did not act expecting material payoffs; this is unique - Political culture is endogenous; a new insurgent culture emerged for FMLN during the war; insurgents emphasized an aspiration for land and resentment at its unjust distribution - Resistance was a source of self-satisfaction and contentment, a process of identity formation. - Liberation theology (evoking the crucifixion for instance) offered a Church-sanctioned condemnation of their poverty and a sense of hope that change was possible Salvadorans supported the insurgency for three reasons: (1) valuing participation (resentment, liberation theology, moral commitments, the "pleasures of protest," companionship, sense of community) driven by a moral vision; (2) defiance (feelings of moral outrage, liberation theology, past suffering); and (3) pleasure in agency (eager to claim "authorship" over success, assert autonomy and improve self-esteem in making history)

Tilly (1990) -- Coercion, Capital, and European States THE STATE, INSTITUTIONS, AND STATE STRENGTH

Question: What accounts for variation in state type in Europe since AD 990? Why did the nation state prevail? Argument: - Coercive-extraction model: state emerged from the need for resource extraction; states extract capital via coercion, build the war-making apparatus, and further increase coercive might and military success, leading to more extraction - The coercion is done primarily by soldiers and landlords - War made the state and the state made war: war/conquest leave ruler responsible for administration of territory, goods, and people acquired; state then extracts and fights more - War and the state then lead to nationalism, popular sovereignty - State did not emerge by purposive design but organically out of the incentive structures of war-making (i.e. Darwinian) - Capital-coercive model: capital absorbed into state rather than decentralized; contrasts with capital-intensive (small trading states seeking trade monopolies) and coercion-intensive (coercion from elites and local power sources, not the state, and focus on settlement, enslavement, extraction) - Contrast with Africa - territory was valuable in Europe leading to expansion impetus unlike Africa where labor, not land, was the scarce resource (Herbst)

Mares (2004) -- Wage Bargaining in the Presence of Social Services and Transfers REDISTRIBUTION & WELFARE STATE

Question: What are the employment consequences of growth in the welfare state? What is the effect of growing tax burdens and social policy commitments on employment? How does the growth of the tax burden affect unions' ideal point for wages? Argument: - Mares argues that the optimal strategy of unions is to deliver wage restraint in exchange for social policy expansion (this is unique to her model, the idea that unions care about a broader set of social transfers going to their members) - There is a parabolic relationship between the level of centralization of wage-bargaining authority and the level of unemployment; when wage bargaining is centralized at the sectoral level, there is the lowest level of employment; there is higher employment when wages are bargained at the firm or economy level - Economies with institutions of wage bargaining centralized at the sectoral level will show worse employment performance than those with highly centralized or highly decentralized wage bargaining given an expansion in social service provision - While welfare state expansion and the pursuit of full employment were compatible policy goals during the first decade of the postwar period, the presence of a high tax burden and the increase in the number of labor market outsiders receiving social service payments has exacerbated the trade-off between the two policy objectives - The model further provides an explanation for the deterioration of the employment performance of European economies (reduces effectiveness of union wage bargaining on employment) Intuition: - Workers are OK with higher taxes if they receive benefits in return. If benefits aren't returned, unions demand higher wages to account for higher taxes - Trouble with industry level bargaining: if you're at the firm level, unions are weak. If you're national, unions are powerful. In the middle, there's chaos where each one has enough to disrupt bargaining, but not enough to determine the outcome Method: - Mares tests her arguments using time-series cross sectional data on advanced industrial countries Findings: - Higher taxes, middle level of centralization in wage bargaining, and larger transfers to those outside the workforce increase unemployment

AJR (2001) -- The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation INSTITUTIONS LEGACIES

Question: What are the fundamental causes of large differences in income per capita across countries? Argument: - In places where European colonizers expected high mortality rates, they could not settle and chose to set up extractive institutions; the institutions persisted to the present - These institutions should have a substantial impact on present income per capita - Mortality -> settlements -> institutions -> income - There were different types of colonization policies which created different institutions: (1) extractive: transfer resources to the colonizing state; (2) settlement: transplant European institutions to colony - In places where disease environment was not favorable to European settlement, the cards were stacked against the creation of Neo-Europes - The colonial state and institutions persisted even after independence where Europeans settled RD: - Expected European mortality rates as an instrument for current institutions: data on the mortality rates of soldiers, bishops, and sailors stationed in the colonies between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries - Europeans were well-informed about the mortality rates at the time - IV: current institutions as measured by protection against "risks of expropriation" index from Political Risk Services (since main concern is property rights and power checks) - Instrumented by settler mortality rates - DV: per capita income Findings: - Mortality rates experienced by settlers explains 25 percent of variation in current institutions - Exclusion restriction holds because disease environment has limited effect on natives (they are immune to native diseases) - There is a substantial negative relationship between institutions and per capita income - No direct effect of mortality rates on economic outcomes in over-identification tests Albouy (2012) Critique: - AJR often used neighboring disease environments as proxies despite substantial cross-border variation (only 28/64 have mortality rates for within their own borders) - Clustering errors kills the results - The mortality rates never come from actual European settlers, although some settler rates are available in the authors' sources; instead they come primarily from European and American soldiers in 19th century; soldiers in barracks vs. campaign is different; campaign is used more often in countries with higher expropriation risk - Bishop data organized by climate not location - AJR response is weak; it is clear that results are pretty sensitive to coding and they do not adequately deal with the theoretical critiques Problems: - Exclusion restriction might not hold: past disease environment might be a proxy for sewage treatment, hospitals, infrastructure; these problems persist and create environments conducive to appearance of new diseases (see Ebola) which then affect per capita income - Institutions for them are a black box; they do not show that they persist through independence

Fearon and Laitin (2003) -- Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War COLLECTIVE ACTION ETHNIC POLITICS CIVIL WAR

Question: What explains the recent prevalence of violent civil war around the world? Argument: - Insurgency: small, lightly armed bands practicing guerilla warfare from rural base areas - We ought to understand the period in terms of insurgency or guerrilla warfare - The factors that explain which countries are at risk for civil war are the conditions that favor insurgency including poverty (favors rebel recruitment), political instability, rough terrain, and large populations Rebutting Literature: - Not due to the end of the Cold War and the associated changes to the system - Not due to greater degrees of ethnic or religious diversity - Not predictable based on where ethnic or political grievances are strongest Hypotheses: - Financially, organizationally, and politically weak central governments (low GDPPC) render insurgency more feasible and attractive due to weak local policing and inept counterinsurgency - Rebel insurgency favored by rough terrain, rebels with local knowledge of the population superior to the government's, and large population - other factors favoring insurgency are foreign base camps, financial support, and training - Civil war may require only a small number with intense grievances to get going (collective action) and can therefore occur even in democracy and without obvious and large societal cleavages Findings: - Show that the current prevalence of civil war is the result of a steady accumulation of protracted conflicts since the 1950s and 1960s rather than a sudden change associated with the post-Cold War order - Controlling for per capita income, more ethnically or religiously diverse countries have been no more likely to experience significant civil violence

Swidler (1986) -- Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies POLITICAL CULTURE

Question: What is culture and how does it shape action? Definitions: - Culture: such symbolic vehicles of meaning, including beliefs, ritual practices, art forms, and ceremonies, as well as informal cultural practices such as language, gossip, stories, and rituals of daily life; culture is not value-based because values define ends; culture defines means - Culture consists of three steps: o Image of culture as a "tool kit" of symbols, stories, rituals, and world-views, which people may use in varying configurations to solve different kinds of problems o To analyze culture's causal effects, it focuses on "strategies of action", persistent ways of ordering action through time o It sees culture's causal significance not in defining ends of action, but in providing cultural components that are used to construct strategies of action Main Argument: - Culture influences action not by providing the ultimate values toward which action is oriented, but by shaping a repertoire or "tool kit" of habits, skills, and styles from which people construct "strategies of action" - In settled periods, culture independently influences action, but only by providing resources from which people can construct diverse lines of action; values may predict action here - In unsettled cultural periods, explicit ideologies directly govern action, but structural opportunities for action determine which among competing ideologies survive in the long run - Cultural lag - people do not readily take advantage of new structural opportunities that would require them to abandon established ways of life Relation to other stuff: - We might think of Laitin (1998) as describing unsettled lives - period of conversion/commitment - It is only during the unsettled period that culture has an independent causal effect b/c it shapes new strategies of action

North and Weingast (1989) -- Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England INSTITUTIONS

Question: What is the effect of institutions (how rules are enforced and might be changed) on economic outcomes? Argument: - For economic growth to occur, the sovereign must establish the relevant set of rights and also credibly commit to them - They attempt to explain evolution of political institutions emerging out of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 - Parliament with central role alongside Crown and independent judiciary (this was following a period of arbitrary expropriation and civil war) - Political institutions governing society can be considered endogenously (equilibrium?) - The more likely it is that the government will change rules to its benefit, the less incentive there is to invest and the lower the expected return on investment (i.e. expropriation) - There are two ways the leader can credibly commit: (1) showing a pattern of responsible behavior, which is rare in practice; (2) being constrained to obey a set of rules that do not permit leeway for violations - In sum, economic growth and the development of free markets requires some commitment British Case: - Problem they sought to solve: control of the exercise of arbitrary and confiscatory authority by the Crown - The Stuarts used "forced loans" to acquire capital and rarely repaid; also used "monopoly grants" to expropriate, which acted as an effective tax - There was then a conflict of interest between the Crown on the one hand and investors/wealth-holders and taxpayers on the other hand - The Crown would dissolve Parliament when it refused grants and judges served at its pleasure; the result was an anti-Crown coalition seeking preservation of personal liberties, rights, and wealth - The opposition took power post-civil war and reduced land use restrictions and restrictions on capital mobility to increase the fluidity and effectiveness of markets - Eventual restrictions prevented Crown from dissolving Parliament unilaterally, gave Parliament a central role in financial matters, and an independent judiciary with Crown subordinated to common law - Dethroning of Charles II and James I made the threat credible, creating a check - Two arrangements made agreement self-enforcing: (1) Crown was restricted by credible threat of Parliament to dethrone; (2) Parliament agreed to fund the Crown and put it on sound financial footing in exchange for increased government power - The result was increased government borrowing and a drop in interest rates - risk decreased significantly despite a flood of government debt Findings: - The institutional changes altered the incentives of governmental actors in a manner desired by winners of the Glorious Revolution; an explicit attempt to make credible the government's ability to honor its commitments - The Crown then had to obtain Parliamentary assent to change agreements - The result was a marked increase in property rights, which reflected in market activity - The government became financially solvent and gained access to unprecedented funds - Government borrowing increased by an order of magnitude, suggesting a substantial increase in perceived commitments Problems: - Prior to institutions is the composition of Parliament (landed elites) - if the Parliament is composed of people similar to the monarch, do we see this arrangement? Relation to other stuff: seems most similar to an institutions as equilibria perspective in Shepsle; they are endogenous

Scheve and Stasavage (2009) -- Institutions, Partisanship, and Inequality in the Long Run INEQUALITY AND POLARIZATION

Question: What is the effect of institutions and partisanship on inequality? Purpose: - The goal is to expand inequality analyses pre-1970 (overcoming data limitations) to determine the extent to which partisanship and bargaining institutions matter - Existing analyses, with a focus on cross-country variation, the OECD, and the post-1970 period, are insufficient Theory: - They engage with two hypotheses: left government and centralized wage bargaining should be associated with higher redistribution and less inequality - Centralized bargaining was often introduced in the 1940s, which tends to fall out of sample - need to see if it had an impact shortly after the change - Three potential arguments: 1. Long-run changes in inequality are driven by broad economic trends involving the race between technology and education, so political factors are secondary 2. Political factors do matter, but not in the way suggested; despite formal institutional differences, maybe similar norms prevailed 3. Politics matters, but it may be that the most prominent political effects on inequality are generated by cataclysmic events - Theoretically, it seems reasonable to suggest that left government would affect top income share, but centralization of bargaining may not directly affect it - Left government should demand more redistribution; centralized wage bargaining leads to more egalitarian income distributions per Wallerstein - The counters are: (1) that governments just shift policies to fit current circumstances; (2) that underlying economic factors drive centralized bargaining and wage equality Method: - Data on wage inequality from 1916-2000 - Three levels of bargaining: decentralized, sectoral-level, and centralized - They study four cases to identify the causal effect of institutions - Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Ireland - Two sources of inequality data: selected time series of variation in wages across different types of workers and measures of top income shares; uses income tax return information to calculate income to top 10 percent - DV: Top 10-1 share and 90-10 earnings correlate substantially (top 10 is appropriate) - IVs: New measures of partisanship and centralization; left executive which is 1 if left-leaning PM or President Findings: - Centralized wage bargaining and left government have little causal effect on inequality over the long run - Centralization matters some, but the effect is being driven by last three decades - Partisanship only has a small effect on the very top incomes, none otherwise; significant only when the DV is Top 1 - They do find a negative relationship between union membership and inequality - Decentralized wage bargaining is positively associated with wage inequality - it is just the case that peak-level centralization is no different than industry-level bargaining - In each of the four cases, both wage and income inequality trended downward after the move to centralized bargaining, but it had already been trending downward well before the institutional change; the trend was not accentuated by the change - In general, any positive correlations are driven by 1976-2000, in line with literature - The general conclusion is that political factors have little effect in the long run because the drivers are exogenous economic factors like race between technology and education i.e. relative demand for different skills in the economy - It could also be that shocks like war (and wartime taxation) lead to less inequality Problems: - Share in Parliament for left is not appropriate; need manifestos or something - This paper shows that union centralization does not increase/affect wages of top 10 percent; not really interesting because these groups are not organized, so mismatch b/w variable and theory

Besley and Burgess (2002) -- The Political Economy of Government Responsiveness: Theory and Evidence from India ACCOUNTABILITY AND CITIZEN / POLITICIAN LINKAGES INSTITUTIONS

Question: What makes governments responsive to citizen's needs? Argument: - Mass media and open political institutions can be built to make politicians responsive (institutions matter!) - Specifically, media can drive higher turnout and political competition, which drive accountability - They focus on the role of media in a low-income country where the population is particularly likely to be poorly informed, politically inactive or unlikely to have policy representation - They argue that higher media presence can mitigate these issues by informing the electorate and making them more politically active so they can hold politicians accountable - In addition, regular elections give politicians an opportunity to perform and create incentives for politicians to be responsive to electorate - The media enhances the political accountability process in elections - They also argue that media institutions can be more effective than "economic development" Method: - Test argument on India - Their time series data includes 16 major Indian states between 1958-2002 - DV: food distribution and calamity relief expenditure during draught and flood respectively - IV: newspaper circulation (total and split by English, hindi and vernacular newspapers) - Admit there are two main problem in their theory 1) that media development in itself is endogenous 2) that it is the correlations of media with omitted variables such as social development, literacy etc. that may be affecting results - Use an instrumental variable method to correct these. IV is ownership of media and claim that this should show that it is not growth of newspapers per se but quality of coverage that affects results Findings: - Newspapers (especially vernacular), political factors and the interaction of newspapers with food grain production makes a difference on government response Criticisms: - Data is at the state level so not convincing how newspaper circulation at constituency level makes a difference - Still not clear why this argument is not about literacy. Literacy will have an effect on newspaper circulation but will also have an independent effect on voter behavior - Given that the Indian population is severely illiterate in a number of states, what difference does newspapers make?

Przeworski and Limongi (1997) -- Modernization: Theories and Facts DEMOCRATIZATION AND DEVELOPMENT

Question: What makes political regimes rise, endure, and fall? Do democracies emerge as a consequence of economic development? Goal: To distinguish two theories—both put forth by Lipset—that relate economic development and democracy. Modernization theory is endogenous where the alternative is exogenous. Modernization Theory (endogenous): - Saying that democracy comes out of economic development in a country is the same as saying dictatorship in a country is killed by economic development - An autocracy develops and becomes democratic after development reaches some "threshold" - As the society becomes more complex, systems can no longer be run by command. One general process of which democratization is the final stage. One would expect to see poor authoritarian countries developing and then turning into democracies once they reached some threshold of development. Alternative Theory (exogenous): - Democracy is established randomly, but only survives in "modern" countries - it's not a process of modernization that brings about the democracy - So democracy survives if a state is modern, but democratization is not related to development Intuitive logic: in poor countries, the value of becoming a dictator is greater and the accumulated cost of destroying capital stock is lower. In wealthy countries, by contrast, the gain from getting all rather than a part of total income is smaller and the recuperation from destruction is slower. Hence, struggle for dictatorship is more attractive in poorer countries. Findings: - It seems like dictatorships have a bell-shaped instability curve - they are stable when they are poor and relatively rich, and in the middle (kind of rich) they are unstable. This refutes modernization theory. - The data does confirm the second theory, that in rich countries democracies are more likely to survive. - What actually destabilizes regimes is economic crisis; democracies, especially poor democracies, are extremely vulnerable to regime change due to economic crisis. With development, democracy can survive even in poor countries.

Kasara and Suryanarayan (2015) -- When Do the Rich Vote Less Than the Poor and Why? Explaining Turnout Inequality across the World ELECTORAL PARTICIPATION

Question: When do the rich vote less than the poor and why? Argument: - The potential tax exposure of the rich explains the positive relationship b/w income and voting in some places, not others - Where the rich anticipate taxation, they have an incentive to turnout, and politicians are more likely to use fiscal policy to gain support - Here, if the rich fail to vote, the median voter is especially poor; note that the poor also face cognitive and information costs to voting - Salient redistribution: government has the capacity to tax and it is an important issue (i.e. there is a difference b/w the opinions of the rich and the poor); under these conditions, candidates should court the rich and poor, but poor parties are at a disadvantage - The two factors are related - redistribution is more salient where capacity to tax is high RD: - They study individual- and country-level determinants of voting using survey data from 76 countries 1996-2010 (CSES, Global Barometer Project, WVS, and LAPOP) - Measure salience as the degree to which the political preferences of rich and poor voters diverge (i.e. degree to which people in each quintile support different political parties) - Estimate a two-stage where the effect of income on voting is estimated separately for each country and survey pair and in which these estimates are the outcome variable in a second regression with country-level predictors of turnout inequality Findings: - They demonstrate that the rich turnout to vote at higher rates when the political preferences of the rich and poor diverge and where bureaucratic capacity is high - Neither endogeneity of bureaucratic capacity nor social desirability bias in reported turnout is likely to account for patterns in the data Problems: - Couldn't the rich lobby or repress instead? - Huber (2017) would suggest that voters could be mobilized on ethnic lines and produce this spuriously - Is bureaucratic quality the proper measure for the ability to tax?

Banerjee and Iyer (2005) -- History, Institutions, and Economic Performance: The Legacy of Colonial Land Tenure Systems in India GROWTH LEGACIES

Question: Whether history, through its effect on patterns of institutional development, has a persistent effect on economic performance Background: - Three types of systems: 1. Landlord areas: revenue liability for a village lay with a single landlord; free to set revenue terms for peasants and dispossess peasants who did not pay 2. Cultivator system: revenue settlement was directly with the cultivator; revenue commitment was not fixed, but calculated as money value of a share of output (i.e. productivity was good for all) 3. Village-based system: village bodies jointly owned the village and were responsible for land revenue; revenue rates were ad hoc Method: - They analyze the colonial land revenue institutions set up by the British in India and show that differences in historical property rights institutions lead to sustained differences in economic outcomes - Instrument for landlord with the British taking over land revenue collection 1820-1856 Key Findings: - Districts in which proprietary rights in land were historically given to landlords have significantly lower agricultural investments and productivity in the post-independence period than areas in which these rights were given to the cultivators - These areas also have significantly lower investments in health and education - These differences are not driven by omitted variables or endogeneity problems; they probably arise because differences in historical institutions lead to very different policy choices - However, there was substantial convergence in inequality between landlord and non-landlord areas after independence as land reform took place Explanation: - Landlord areas had an elite class and inherited a very unequal land distribution after independence as well as social cleavages generally absent elsewhere; class conflict prevented collective action in landlord regions - Landlords appropriated productivity gains, but when cultivators gained from productivity, they could make risky investments, not to mention they had incentives to work harder; but productivity does not diverge much in the two samples until post-1965 - This suggests that class-based antagonism was the primary driver; class conflict limited collective action in landlord regions (and led to less public development expenditure); may be explained by the relative inability of the landlord districts to claim their fair share of public investment - Because it was easier for the colonial government to raise rents in non-landlord areas, the state could capture some of the productivity gains and hence had incentives to invest in irrigation, schools, etc. during colonial period; all canals constructed were in non-landlord areas

Lipset and Rokkan (1967) -- Cleavage Structures, Party Systems, and Voter Alignments: An Introduction PARTIES AND DEMOCRATIC SYSTEMS

Question: Why are certain societal cleavages most salient? Why do we see the cleavages that we see and why are those cleavages so resilient across Europe? Why are the parties the same 1920-1960? Takeaway: Party mobilization is conditional on the actions of other parties in the system Main Argument: - Lipset and Rokkan say there are latent cleavages in society, and then latent demands are satisfied by early parties; the winners consolidate through electoral success - Key point is that it is very hard to mobilize around the initial party legacies that exist - If Catholics mobilize first, the left is weaker b/c Catholics already have captured the working class - Sociological argument: Christian Democratic parties as the creation of the Catholic Church in the face of the rise of anticlericalism and mass politics; parties as the Church's political arm consciously created when conflict erupted between liberal state-building elites and the church Theory: - Parties strengthen national ID and competitiveness sets national system of government above any set of officeholders; the system is not threatened because discontent is aimed at leaders - Parties are expressive and representative; they are united in hostility toward other camps Four lines of cleavage: - Two national (1) nation-building culture vs. ethnic resistance; (2) nation-state vs. church - Two industrial: (3) landed interests vs. industrial interests and (4) owners/employers vs. tenants/workers Four thresholds: - Legitimation: is there a right to petition and protest? - Incorporation: do movement supporters have political rights? - Representation: must the movement ally with older/larger movements to gain access to representative organs? - Majority power: does victory give the party the chance to make major changes? Three crucial junctures in nation's history: - Reformation: struggle for control of ecclesiastical organizations - Democratic Revolution: conflict over control of vast machineries of mass education - Industrial revolution: opposition between landed interests and claims of rising commercial leadership Relation to other readings: - Would contrast with Huber - new parties can't just come in and offer you more; there is stickiness

Fearon and Laitin (1996) -- Explaining Inter-Ethnic Cooperation IDENTITY POLITICS

Question: Why are interethnic relations more tense than intraethnic relations? Why, despite this, is interethnic peace more typical than large-scale conflict? Argument: - Decentralized, non-state institutional mechanisms mitigate problems of opportunism in individual interethnic interactions - These mechanisms that preserve peace can also lead to rapid spirals into violence - Unlike prior theoretical work, FL focus on individual interactions over group-level grievances and animosities - Ethnic groups are close-knit, with members having lots of information about each other; punishment can be targeted - Intragroup institutions for maintaining in-group cooperation including gossip and quasi-formal institutions, and in-group mediators - There's an information asymmetry between ethnic groups: it is difficult to gather information about another group's members - To address this, feuding ethnic groups sometimes hire "mediation merchants" with reputations for objectivity to resolve disputes; they fill information gaps and propose solutions that any one side did not for fear of appearing weak Two equilibria support ethnic cooperation: - Spiral regime: each group holds all members of the other group liable for the actions of any one individual; punishment is indiscriminate, deterring individual group members; when there is noise (occasional mistakes or accidental defections), this is not an efficient system (IDF in Palestine) - In-group policing regime: members of one group may simply ignore violations of trust by members of another group, relying instead on that other group to identify and sanction the appropriate individual; violations here don't trigger a spiral into violence; the problem here is that there's no way to ensure that the defector is being appropriately punished b/c punishment need to be made public; if it is not, you risk returning to a spiral equilibrium The threat of spiral punishment is not credible when used by small groups against larger ones. But it is highly credible if deployed by large groups. Small groups may need to develop strong boundary policing institutions to maintain themselves as distinct groups. They otherwise risk assimilation into the larger group's social control mechanisms. Comments: - Again contra-Brubaker because ethnicity is naturally salient

Chandra (2007) -- Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Patronage and Ethnic Head Counts in India ETHNIC POLITICS

Question: Why do ethnic parties succeed in obtaining the support of members of their target ethnic groups? Individual voters invest in identity because it offers them the best available means to obtain desired benefits and not because the identification is valuable; also may be psychic goods Argues in favor of the natural salience of ethnic identities (contra-Brubaker) Voters in patronage democracies choose b/w parties by ethnic headcounts rather than comparing policy platforms or ideological positions - Voters prefer the party representing co-ethnic elites best - Voters compute expectations about likely outcomes based on counting of heads - Voters vote only when co-ethnics are sufficiently numerous to gain influence; otherwise patronage politics An ethnic party is likely to succeed in patronage democracy when it has competitive rules for intra-party advancement and when the size of the ethnic group it seeks to mobilize exceeds the threshold of winning - Competitive rules give the party a comparative advantage in the representation of elites from its target ethnic category - Size of ethnic category determines whether the party has a shot at winning The rest: - Ethnic parties are principled on ascription, exclusion, and centrality - Any ethnic party that claims to speak on behalf of a single ethnic category is generally trying to unify smaller categories within the broader unified category (i.e. Hispanic) - Patronage democracy: democracy in which the state monopolizes access to jobs and services and in which elected officials have discretion in the implementation of laws allocating the jobs and services at the disposal of the state Method: ethnographic work across India; Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) 1984-1998

Calvo and Murillo (2004) -- Who Delivers? Partisan Clients in the Argentine Electoral Market CITIZEN/POLITICIAN LINKAGES

Question: Why do some parties fail to benefit from patronage in pork-ridden political systems? Two key factors: - Party's access to resources (supply) - Party's dependence on fiscal largesse (demand) Argument: - Partisan biases affect distribution of public resources on the supply side - Patronage offers different returns to voters with different skills and labor market expectations on the demand side - Patronage is a redistributive tool that transfers public resources from net payers of taxes to the poor; lower income/skill workers are more sensitive to these transfers because their mean public wage is smaller and the redistributive premium therefore larger Predictions: - Lower income/skill workers are more sensitive to patronage (utility decreasing in income) - Different returns to patronage influence patrons' policy preferences on the size of the public sector and the wages offered therein Argentina: - Two parties - the PJ and UCR - Institutional effects produced a partisan bias - three elements helped the Peronists achieve a partisan advantage in access to fiscal resources: (1) geographic distribution of the Peronist vote; (2) majoritarian bias in the electoral rules which restricted the entrance of third parties in overrepresented but sparsely populated provinces where the PJ vote is concentrated; (3) fiscal federal institutions that favored PJ-dominated provinces, even controlling for redistribution and provincial overrepresentation - Closed ballot and PR system - elections in small provinces are majoritarian and stable where large provinces have proportional and high variance elections; small provinces are also overrepresented (geographic concentration of PJ voters in these small provinces) - Provincial share of resources is large, and Peronists control more provincial governorships than UCR, which means larger supply to deal from - Peronists have access to 70% of all provincial expenditures and 69% of all provincial employment regardless of Presidency Findings: - With vote share as the DV, they find that public employment has a positive and significant effect on PJ votes but no effect on UCR votes; PJ is more dependent on poor voters, so the returns are greater for them - They prefer larger public sectors and lower wages overall to maximize jobs

Humphreys and Weinstein (2008) -- Who Fights? The Determinants of Participation in Civil War POLITICAL VIOLENCE NON-ELECTORAL PARTICIPATION

Question: Why do some people join and others don't? Why are some abducted and others not? Why do some people fight for the status quo while others seek to defend it? Setup: - HW begin by contesting the assumption that individuals have agency in making choices about participation in civil war, saying this is empirically suspect The Sierra Leone Civil War: - Featured indiscriminate abductions by the RUF (the rebel force) and selective and voluntary recruitment by the CDF (government paramilitary forces) - RUF was more worried about gaining material wealth by any means; CDF had substantive goals - Only 10% of RUF fighters said they supported the group's political goals (vs. 70% for CDF members) or joined to defend their community - 88% of RUF fighters interviewed were abducted - The RUF exploited experiences of oppression, repression, and discontent among alienated rural youth, and expanded as state infrastructures collapsed and rural schooling opportunities eroded - CDF members were largely young men tied to existing political structures; relied on social sanction capacity in small communities to promote participation and maintain discipline; community strength is a predictor of CDF participation (this is the key point) - CDF militias: emerged from within preexisting communities and relied on social sanction to promote participation and maintain discipline - RUF: typically characterized by an absence of ties between the RUF and communities from which it mobilized recruits Argument: - Common arguments about expressive motivations, selective incentives, and social sanctions are rendered irrelevant - Proxies for grievances (poverty, lack of educational opportunities, political opportunities) predict both rebellion and participation in the defense of the state - Social sanctions and community strength matter - Abductions challenge whether fighters have agency

Gingrich and Ansell (2012) -- Preferences in Context: Micro Preferences, Macro Contexts, and the Demand for Social Policy REDISTRIBUTION & WELFARE STATE

Question: Why do some people support social spending more than others? Argument: - Iversen and Soskice argue that people with high unemployment risks or specific skills want more welfare as a hedge; larger welfare states should then follow distribution of individual preferences - GA argue that this presumes that individual risk precedes government policy, despite government policy's ability to amend how risky a particular occupation is (i.e. risk is contingent on policy) - Different social policy institutions create different systems of social risk by altering the risk of unemployment for a particular group or providing benefits irrespective of employment status - Welfare policies create a more uniform distribution of social risk, making individual risk less important and increasing overall support for welfare spending - Skill specificity increases support for unemployment spending (like IS argue) but also decreases support for employment protection legislation Intuition: - Individual risk will be a better predictor of support for public spending where social protection is relatively low - This is amending Iversen and Soskice, who assume individual risk is the key determinant. Can be counteracted by institutionalized protections for everyone

Huber (2017) -- Exclusion by Elections: Inequality, Ethnic Identity, and Democracy IDENTITY POLITICS

Question: Why do voters, given economic inequality, elect parties that oppose policies to address it? Why no class politics? Argument: - Secondary or Shayo (2009) explanations are insufficient because they are often ex-post - Inequality fosters the success of ethnic parties - He assumes that voters only care about economic wellbeing and support the party that credibly offers the most material benefits - Credibility is high when the group has clear / static boundaries (excludability) and when parties know that reneging means loss of support - Ethnicity is an exclusion device, and the amount received is a product of the number of voters each group represents - The comparison is between the number of non-rich and the number in the majority ethnic group - Losing parties form to limit rents to leaders (i.e. need to offer something to put a floor on what the winning party will offer) Empirics: - As Gini coefficient changes, so does size of non-rich majority; as ethnic polarization increases, expected size of the ethnic majority decreases - Inequality discourages democratization if ethnic fragmentation is low (b/c ethnic majority is too large to win) Problems: - We know from AP that party ID is resilient even when parties do not offer what they promise - Leaves voters no agency and assumes they know a lot about what they will get

Rueda and Stegmueller (2016) -- The Externalities of Inequality: Fear of Crime and Preferences for Redistribution in Western Europe INEQUALITY AND POLARIZATION

Question: Why is the difference in redistribution preferences between the rich and poor high in some countries and low in others? Argument: - It has little to do with the poor and much to do with the rich - the preferences of the rich are highly dependent on the macrolevel of inequality - The reason is not related to immediate tax and transfer preferences, but to a negative externality of inequality: crime Theory: - There is a great variation in preferences even after accounting for self-interest - Three theoretical claims: 1. The level of redistribution preferred by a given individual is fundamentally a function of current income; the intensity of redistribution preferences increases with distance from the mean 2. It is important to distinguish between current tax and transfer considerations and externality-driven motivations - these motivations are long term and low stakes; if we accept that the influence of current tax and transfer considerations is sufficiently captured by the micro effect of relative income, macrolevels of inequality will matter to the rich and only the rich because of negative externality reasons 3. The macro effect of inequality can be explained by different micro-factors and the most important of these is a concern for crime - There is a hierarchy of preferences - poor people value redistribution for its immediate TT consequences, but the preferences of the rich are less affected by TT and negative externalities can become more relevant - With higher inequality, the potential gain for the poor from engaging in crime is higher and the opportunity cost is lower; note that rich people must believe this connection exists Method: - Use regional inequality because it is more visible and plausibly connected to crime at the local-level - ESS survey data - four surveys between September 2002 and January 2009 covering 129 regions in 14 countries - DV: preferences for redistribution - IVs: distance between income of respondents and mean income in country; crime concerns via survey item asking if afraid to walk alone in the dark; regional GINI Findings: - There is a clear income effect on redistribution preferences, with regional variation - The rich in more unequal regions in Western Europe are more supportive of redistribution than the rich in more equal regions because of concern with crime - The marginal effect of crime is strong and different from zero, and the remaining marginal effect of inequality is not significant once crime is considered Problems: - Are rich people really aware of connection between inequality and crime? - The rich have other strategies: gated communities, private security, etc. - The level of analysis is a big region; I fear that the result is just capturing whether a region includes a big city (urban areas have more crime and fear of walking in the dark)

Hellman (1998) -- Winners Take All: The Politics of Partial Reform in Post-communist Transitions POLICY CHOICE & REFORM

Setup: - J curve: reforms are expected to make things worse before they get better where magnitude of costs is a function of comprehensiveness of reforms adopted - Ex ante problems (politicians hesitant to enact reform) and ex post issues (politicians are likely to reverse course in the face of political opposition) - Has led to a series of political prescriptions centered around insulation of the state from the pressures of the short-term losers until the reforms have created a constituency of winners powerful enough to sustain them - Yet, in the post-communist region, radical reforms have been introduced and sustained even in the most competitive political systems without short-term losers causing havoc Question: How can politicians initiate and sustain reforms that demand severe sacrifices in the short run for the mere promise of future gains? Main Argument: - Instead of insulating short-term losers, the most common obstacles have come from the earliest and biggest winners of reform i.e. those who seek to block specific advances in the reform process that threaten to eliminate the special advantages and market distortions upon which their own early reform gains were based - They try to stall the economy in a partial reform equilibrium of concentrated rents for themselves and high costs for the rest of society - Takeaway: the emphasis on insulating the state from the short-term losers needs to be replaced with recognition of the importance of restraining early reform winners Findings: - Shows that intermediate reformers suffer the highest costs of reform contra-J curve logic - Electoral reversals rarely overturn reform - GINI highest at intermediate reform levels because the rents accrue to a narrow bloc - Rents come from the price differential between SOE legacy firms and liberalized sectors, and the winners have veto power (see Hellman, Jones, and Kaufmann)

Nichter (2008) -- Vote Buying or Turnout Buying: Machine Politics and the Secret Ballot ACCOUNTABILITY AND CITIZEN / POLITICIAN LINKAGES ELECTORAL PARTICIPATION

Question: With the secret ballot, what prevents people from taking the reward (positive induce-ment) and then voting as they wish? Background: - Stokes (2005) argues that the Argentine Peronist party uses its deep insertion in voters' social networks to violate the secret ballot, and it is therefore able to enforce compliance when it rewards weakly opposed voters for switching Argument: - Turnout buying: why parties might offer rewards even if they can't monitor votes; it activates passive constituencies; only requires monitoring turnout Method: - Argentine data from Stokes (2005) - Also alters the Stokes model to consider non-voters; prediction shifts from targeting moderate opposers to targeting unmobilized strong supporters or latent constituencies - This is dependent on repeated interactions; need a dependency network to prevent staying home Findings: - While Stokes finds evidence for vote buying, the data actually reveals more support for turnout buying - Rewards were focused on strong supporters; they targeted the poor; and rewards were offered where turnout was most easily monitored (i.e. small communities) - Rewarded supporters ex post have stronger support for the regime - Stokes interprets this as "nudging" & Nichter calls it supporter targeting; the key is that they also targeted those who had voted Peronist in the past Problems: - It could be that voters think that the regime can still violate secret ballot; perceptions matter - 36% of Americans think so per Gerber et al.

Wood (2001) -- An Insurgent Path to Democracy: Popular Mobilization, Economic Interests, and Regime Transition in South Africa and El Salvador DEMOCRATIZATION

Questions: - Why did Salvadoran elites - historically among the most antidemocratic in the hemisphere, whose principal party was founded by the mastermind of the country's notorious death squads - eventually accept democratic rule? - Why did the leaders of the apartheid regime in South Africa finally decide to abandon their attempts to limit citizenship and suffrage to negotiate with the ANC? Argument: - Oligarchy: economic elites depend on non-market regulation of labor by the state - The regime and economic elites are by virtue lasting allies, so threats from below cannot depose them; insurgency threatens this cohesiveness by altering the stances of economic elites - In El Salvador and South Africa, mobilization & insurgency by economically and socially marginalized people brought democratization, forcing the initial liberalization of society - Sustained mobilization by the poor and working class actually transformed the interests of economic elites by strengthening regime moderates over hard-liners - The ongoing political mobilization led some economic elites to consider compromise - pushed state elites to negotiate - Elite resistance was not all about redistribution; elites played a huge role in the economy as in state-enforced coercive workplace practices, and their likelihood was very much at risk - Sustained insurgency reflected a common history of coercive labor practices enforced by exclusionary political regimes -> led to opposition leaders becoming "insurgent counter-elite" - Insurgents eventually accepted political influence at the expense of their economic agenda (smart in the context of AR 2005) Method: - Interviews with political actors, including insurgent leaders, business representatives, and government officials in El Salvador between 1987 and 1996 and in South Africa between 1997 and 1999, as well as analysis of documents and macroeconomic data El Salvador: - Elites forcibly prevented labor unions - The factors of production for the expansion of coffee growing were secured by seizure of land and forcing of tenants into bound labor - Two economic effects of civil war: (1) national output and per capita income rapidly declined, capital fled; (2) export agriculture, which fed the oligarchy, declined while the commercial and services sectors surged - Moderate elites gained power and the decline of export agriculture lessened their perceived reliance on coercive labor practices - Important to note the US shifted its policy to negotiation in 1989 - Salvadoran military was dependent on US funding at that point (so international factors mattered a lot) South Africa: - Elites perpetuated racial discrimination - Highly regulated foreign migrant labor and strict controls on mobility of domestic labor; ample and acquiescent labor force for agriculture and mining in the resource-rich, labor-scarce economy - Unionists succeeded in building unions and federations in 1970s; grew larger and more militant after 1979 leading to founding of COSATU in 1985 - Business confidence declined, and foreign and private investment plummeted (foreign again) - Impact was widespread, sparing essentially no holders of wealth because major business agglomerations had diversified holdings and the stock-exchange meant that business leaders individually had diverse assets - Elites began to press the government for reforms in order to rehab economy - Eventually, they moved to a corporatist bargaining forum where capital and labor were both involved in the design of economic policy Problem: How do we deal with international factors? Could be alternative or at least coexistent explanation

Kreuzer (2010) -- Historical Knowledge and Quantitative Analysis: The Case of the Origins of PR ELECTORAL SYSTEMS: ORIGINS AND CONSEQUENCES

Response to CIS (2007) and comparison with Boix (1999) Argument: - Political science draws on history w/o reference to historians; historical knowledge sheds new light on causal direction b/w institutions and their economic effects - Boix's coding is more reliable and his results far more robust - The economic effects of institutions are not endogenous to antecedent economic structures (like guilds and industry unions) Criticism of CIS: - He finds evidence to recode 13 of the 90 codings - Sampling bias: choose 18 of the 32 cases of electoral systems in Europe available prior to 1920 with no discussion - He was unable to replicate 31 of 90 cells based on lack of cited evidence - When the larger set of democracies are included, coordination is insignificant in model Evidence for Boix: - Incumbents will change the electoral rules in response to suffrage expansion - Incumbents, not challengers, undertake transitions to PR - Divided incumbents face a coordination problem and should champion PR - 9 of 25 match all causal links; another 5 offer partial support

Pierson (1996) -- The New Politics of the Welfare State METHODS/PATH DEPENDENCE WELFARE STATE

Retrenchment of the welfare state has been pursued cautiously in Sweden, UK, US, Germany Literature tends to apply the same arguments that cover expansion to retrenchment (power of the left/unions, economic growth) Political forces stabilize welfare states/make changes incremental: - Democratic institutions are conservative and biased toward the status quo (veto points) - Reforms are electorally costly because the recipients of welfare benefits are concentrated and organized (collective action logic) - Commitments tend to lock-in policymakers (a switch to private pensions would require current workers to pay for themselves and new retirees) Only get reforms with: - Electoral slack (government believe they can absorb the electoral consequences of reform) - Budgetary crises (crisis is only credible if leaders work with the opposition) - Low visibility of reform (reform is more visible when power is more concentrated) - Rules of the game can be changed (EC members might blame the EC for retrenchment) Problems: - What about poorly performing programs like in Latin America? - Unclear RD with nonspecific hypotheses that prevent us from testing the theory properly - Might consider authoritarian states as having slack; oil countries as having crises

Shliefer and Vishny (1993) -- Corruption CORRUPTION

Setup: - Corruption: sale of government property by government officials for personal gain; typically involves licenses, permits, passports, or visas for private agents - Principal-agent framework is used to focus on the consequences of corruption for resource allocation and its distortionary effects Argument: - Weak governments that do not control their agencies experience high corruption - Corruption is more distortionary than its sister activity, taxation, because: (1) secrecy; (2) illegality - Issue 1: organization - may need to pay 0, 1, or more government officials - Issue 2: secrecy - makes even well-organized corruption distortionary - Secrecy leads government officials to induce substitution into goods on which bribes can be more easily collected (as in over-invoicing for unique imports); detrimental effects on investment and growth Model / Findings: - Corrupt officials would like to cooperate to maximize bribe amounts; need to monitor prices - Bribes are the highest w/ theft, but revenues are highest w/o theft - In the case without theft, official creates a shortage at the official price to sell at higher price; in case with theft, price may be below official price (consumer only pays the bribe) - Governments can eradicate corruption by inducing competition to drive bribe to zero and by monitoring theft closely

Lustick (1996) -- History, Historiography, and Political Science: Multiple Historical Records and the Problem of Selection Bias LEGACIES

Setup: - Historiography: distribution of hybridic theoretical hunches about what really did happen in the past, varying along three dimensions: 1. The way the past actually unfolded 2. Variation in the way relics of the past have been stylized by the institutions that produced them so as to ensure their survival and make them primary sources for historians 3. Variation in the implicit theories, narrative tropes, and political and personal interests of the historians Argument: - The selection of historical monographs is vulnerable to selection bias because we are attracted to and convinced of accounts that accord with our expectations (see Boix 1999, CIS 2007, and Kreuzer 2010) - We need to expand cases from the number of episodes to the inclusion of all relevant cases Four ways to deal with inconsistent monographs: 1. Be true to your school (i.e. indicate each school's theoretical biases) 2. Explain variance in historiographies 3. Quasi-triangulation 4. Triage (i.e. explain qualitative judgments that led to source selection)

Haggard and Kaufman (2016) -- Dictators and Democrats: Masses, Elites, and Regime Change DEMOCRATIZATION

Setup: - There are two paths to democracy: one from below (distributive model) and one from above (elite- led) - Key factors in distributive models: 1. Repressiveness of the authoritarian regime 2. Capacity for collective action 3. Regime performance as measured by short-term conditions (vs. long-term economic development, as emphasized by modernization theories) - In elite-led transitions, intra-elite conflicts can lead to democratization, particularly in the presence of strong external inducements and constraints - Unified elites may also acquiesce to or lead democratization if they believe they can retain leverage over the political process Argument: - Focus on political accounts of democratization, rooted in the nature of authoritarian/democratic institutions, regime performance, and capacities for collective action - Modernization and class-conflict theories cannot be entirely structural; they must operate through strategic interactions between classes, and all interactions hinge on classes' capacities for collective action - HK's approach to distributive conflict transitions emphasizes the role of prior authoritarian institutions, the social capacity for collective action, and regime performance - Other distributive conflict models overlook institutional differences across autocracies and differences in capacities for collective action - HK argue that enduring organizations are crucial for fomenting the mass protest that drives distributive conflict transitions, helping to turn out supporters, facilitate horizontal coordination across groups, and reframe individual interests in terms of collective identities Predictions: - Distributive conflict transitions are more likely where (1) the autocratic order relies on coercion and exclusion and (2) where enduring social organizations are more dense - Military and one-party regimes are prone to this sort of transition, as are societies with high union density and large manufacturing sectors - Poor economic performance makes distributive conflict transitions more likely - Elite-led transitions are more likely where regimes are less repressive and better at cooptation (i.e. multiparty systems); these transitions are more likely when a country is in a democratic neighborhood Key Findings: - HK find that structural factors have mixed effects on transitions, with many anomalous cases i.e. many democratic transitions occur despite significant inequality; distributive conflict played a proximate causal role in about 54% of transitions during the Third Wave of democratization - Political factors, in contrast, are found to be more important, including how exclusionary or co-optive authoritarian regimes are, the extent to which publics can mobilize grievances, and whether democracy failed due to "weak democracy syndrome"

Murillo (2009) -- Political Competition, Partisanship, and Policymaking in Latin American Public Utilities POLICY CHOICE & REFORM

Summary: (1) Decision to reform. If there's party competition, reform doesn't happen. (2) Policy content. Depends on the actual ideology. If you're right-wing, do market-conforming. If you're left-wing, do market-controlling; want to do reform, but not too much Focus: Studies the effects of electoral competition and incumbent partisanship on Latin American utilities reforms (electricity and telecommunications) Argument: - Electoral competition affected the timing of reforms and weakened the effects of external financial pressures to introduce pro-market reforms - When there were weak electoral pressures and incumbents were forced to introduce reforms, partisanship still played a role in the content of the policies adopted - Also, she shows that left-controlled governments found it easier to introduce reforms because right-leaning opposition was not credible when it objected to reforms - Conversely, high partisan pressures on right controlled government stymied reforms - In terms of policy content, left leaning incumbent were likely to implement "market-controlling" policies that mean greater discretion to bureaucracy, higher levels of regulations and extensive rules governing pricing, service and market expansion - Conversely, right leaning incumbents implemented "market conforming" reforms with minimal regulations, lower discretion to bureaucrats and greater discretion to private players - Her argument also has a second component, the post-reform policy in utilities: partisanship played a role even after policies are established but was determined by the political salience of post-reform policies, who had implemented the original reforms, and the subsequent party in power - She finds that left governments care more about consumers while right governments care more about private providers if they were introducing further policies, but this is not clear as prior experience with initiating the reform or not affects future choices and hence creates a certain path dependence Methodology: - Data on 18 Latin American countries from 1985-2000 - Uses a cox-proportional hazard model to test whether policies were adopted in a certain year - Three dependent variables: 1) privatization; 2) private investment in the sector; 3) independent regulatory body - Three excellent case studies - Chile (dictatorship during reforms), Mexico (that moves from hegemonic party to competitive systems), and Argentina (competitive two party system)

Iversen (1996) -- Power, Flexibility, and the Breakdown of Centralized Wage Bargaining: Denmark and Sweden in Comparative Perspective COLLECTIVE ACTION BARGAINING

Tip: a focus on cross-cutting cleavages; perhaps in tension with Cameron who says that employers and labor groups alike are interested in keeping UE down as well as inflation via centralized wage bargaining Goal: explain the trend away from centralized, corporatist wage bargaining in the 1980s Argument: - Per Cameron (1984) collective wage restraint is a precondition of low inflation, high competitiveness, and economic growth - Wage leveling benefits low-skill workers and high-skill employers - But wage flexibility and flexible incentive structures are hard to design under corporatism - Structural and technological changes in the world economy since the 1970s have stimulated growth of cross-class flexibility coalitions b/w firms producing high quality goods for fragmented and volatile international markets and groups of highly skilled workers enjoying favorable market positions - Laborers exposed to technological shocks and a push for productivity gains had to make investments specific to firms; high-skill employers needed to offer incentives beyond wage leveling Three sectors: - Privileged sector: wage earners with market power to push for higher wages and ability to externalize the costs - Strategic sector: enjoy powerful market positions but have incentives to exercise wage self-restraint to preserve the competitiveness of their firms and thus their future capacity to hire/pay workers - Market vulnerable sector: vested interest in imposing constraints on the ability of privileged workers to engage in militant behavior that will raise cost of living Hypothesis 1: in the absence of an inflationary sector of privileged workers and employers, and in the presence of wage leveling, centralization offers few cost advantages but inhibits wage flexibility that benefits diversified quality producers and high-skilled workers; under these conditions, flexibility coalitions are likely to form to support decentralization Hypothesis 2: if centralized bargaining institutions are dissociated from wage leveling, and/or if the economy is exposed to strong inflationary pressure from a privileged sector, cost-control coalitions are likely to remain powerful, and support for centralization will be strong