by Ahmed Anisur Rehman.; Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 1985.; MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND DEWEY.; Includes bibliographical references.

Donors versus Dictators examines the "exporting democracy debate" and the related issue of "nation-building" as manifested in the foreign aid relationship in the post-Cold War era. This dissertation centers on two in-depth case studies of countries where all major donors froze aid on a multilateral basis in order to pressure authoritarian regimes to legalize opposition parties and hold democratic elections. Through careful historical process-tracing, hypotheses drawn from both sides of the debate and from the academic literatures on democratization, aid and economic sanctions are assessed with respect to the attempts at democratization in Kenya and Malawi from 1989 to 2003. Conclusions include the finding that aid conditionality is generally effective in producing multiparty elections and pushing the reform process forward in aid-dependent countries where incumbent regimes have historically been pro-Western and desire to remain engaged in the global economy. However, the ultimate effectiveness of donor policy in producing democratization in these cases has been limited by the patterns of ethnic cleavage within the recipient countries and the relative ability of the emerging constitutional and electoral systems to channel ethnic and clientelist politics in democratic directions...

This work contributes to the study of comparative political economy by examining the impact of financial deregulation on corporate governance in the two main continental European economies, France and Germany. It investigates the process of transformation of the systems of corporate governance of these two countries toward a greater shareholder value orientation. It analyses the divergent responses of large companies in these two countries to the same set of changes in the international economy. Despite similarities in terms of ownership concentration, inactive securities markets, financial opacity, and closed market for hostile takeovers, large firms reacted differently to the new external environment - with dramatically diverging consequences for employees. In France, the majority of large companies have substantially changed their business strategy through a focus on a single business activity. German firms, in contrast, have responded to the new environment with greater financial transparency. The evolution of corporate governance in the two countries does not entail convergence - but different patterns of change with substantial differentiation in some areas, less in others. The argument presented deals with the dynamics of economic adjustment. Why do changes in the structure of corporate governance move in different directions in France and Germany? The power of management...

This dissertation explores the evolution of welfare systems in post-socialist countries. Utilizing a range of data on social policy legislation and outcomes across countries, the author shows the extent to which post-socialist welfare systems vary in their design and effects. Variation is demonstrated using six indicators that measure: the extent of universality of social benefits, active policies, effective redistribution, wage-based financing of social programs, benefit levels and familization. Cross-country variation has occurred in spite of the common experiences of opening their economies to international competition and in spite of political pressure from international organizations and the European Union to adopt similar, pre-packaged policy agendas. To explain this variation, the author uses case studies of unemployment and family policies in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, to argue that domestic policy actors in each country make the critical decisions about welfare reform. Comparative case analyses show that the direction of welfare reform in the post-communist countries was largely set in place during the few years following regime change in each of them.; (cont.) At this time, domestic institutions involved in policy formation were vested with particular inclinations regarding the objectives of state welfare...

This dissertation examines the rise of the modem fiscal state, which enabled the state to use centrally collected revenues from indirect taxes to mobilize financial resources either through long-term borrowing or issuing paper notes. The modem fiscal state greatly enhanced state capacity and stimulated financial development; it thus represented a crucial stage in the transformation from early modem to modem state and economy. My comparative analysis of England, Japan, and China shows multiple sequences and outcomes. All three cases had well-established early modem states and sophisticated market economies. Under the pressure of increasing spending demands, state actors conducted similar experiments, such as short-term borrowing, issuing of paper notes, and the collection of taxes upon domestic consumption. England became a modem fiscal state by the 1750s when its government used the revenues from excises and the customs to service its massive long-term debt. Japan made the leap in the late 1880s when tax revenues were employed to back up paper money, i.e., banknotes issued by the Bank of Japan. China, however, failed to develop into a modem fiscal state. I put forward a temporally-based causal mechanism which resulted from the interactions between a profound state credit crisis and socio-economic conditions. Such credit crises were caused by excessive dependence upon fictitious credit instruments such as bills of short-term borrowing unfunded by tax revenue in England or non-convertible paper notes in Japan. As these credit crises were an unintended consequence of earlier policies or events...

Information on political institutions, data on parties, elections, and governments, has yet to be provided in a format which makes it easily accessible for empirical research. Contemporary data on political institutions is scattered, limited to some countries or time periods only and difficult to combine, so that quantitative studies of political institutions have no systematic data infrastructure available which is equivalent to survey research or OECD data. As a consequence, work on political institutions rests on very heterogeneous information sources and the quality of data does not match standards of replication for empirical research. Political scientists are in need of a modern replacement for data handbooks and recent technological innovations have broadened the opportunities to develop such an infrastructure within the political science community. I discuss existing approaches towards collaborative data collection in political science and highlight contemporary shortcomings. In the paper, I propose a novel approach towards data collection in comparative research and present a new data infrastructure on parties, elections and governments, the Parliament and Government Composition Database (ParlGov). The data infrastructure combines a database...

This paper, initially prompted by the puzzles raised from the atypical emergence of charismatic politics in the otherwise ordinary political system that our contemporary democracy is supposed to be, seeks to bring political charisma back into the study of comparative politics by reconstructing the concept and rendering it applicable to empirical research. Unlike previous approaches, which have suffered from either individual or structural reductionism, the present study examines charisma as a pure power term by focusing on what makes it appear in ordinary democratic politics as an extraordinary phenomenon, namely, its personal (as opposed to impersonal) character of leadership and the pursuit of a politically radical (as opposed to moderate) program. Accordingly, political charisma is defined as a distinct type of legitimate leadership that is personal and aims at the radical transformation of an established institutional order. Such an understanding of political charisma enables us to further analyze the core features of charismatic leadership and construct an “index of charismaticness” ready to be put under comparative empirical investigation. Sampling from postwar and contemporary European politics, a number of charismatic leaders are examined and then contrasted to non-charismatic ones. It is argued that...

This dissertation develops and demonstrates a theory to account for the outbreak of mass mobilization in authoritarian settings. Two conditions make the expansion of protest across community boundaries more likely: (1) low levels of public goods, coupled with (2) economic opportunities that allow elites autonomous from the state to earn revenue. Under regimes where the rule of law is weak, non-state elites have an incentive to protect their assets from state predation by developing a social support base. They do this by making symbolic gestures and providing surrogate public goods to communities. If the regime threatens to harm this relationship, by restricting elites' freedoms or denying them access to resources, top-down mobilization is one of the few means available to advance or defend their position. Elites base their appeal on shared local identity and the material benefit that people derive from elite charity. The ultimate scale of mobilization is determined by the number and geographic dispersion of elites who mobilize locally and then unite their protests.; (cont.) Three mechanisms may be activated to expand mobilization beyond the local level: demonstration, in which people receive information of an event through an impersonal medium and emulate other people's actions by analogy to their own situation; diffusion...

One of the most unexpected changes of the 1990s is that firms in a number of emerging economies not previously known for their high-technology industries have leapfrogged to the forefront in new Information Technologies (IT). Surprisingly, from the perspective of comparative political economy theories, the IT industries of these countries use different business models and have carved out different positions in the global IT production networks. Of these emerging economies, the Taiwanese, Israeli, and Irish have successfully nurtured the growth of their IT industries. This dissertation sets out to establish that emerging economies have more than one option for developing their high technology industries. Moreover, it advances a theoretical framework for analyzing how different choices lead to long-term consequences and to the development of successful and radically different industrial systems. Hence, this dissertation strives to give politics - the art and profession of creating alternatives and the social struggles of choosing between, and acting on, them - the importance that it seems to have lost in the social sciences. The research focuses on the role of the state in shaping the structure of the IT industry in Israel, Ireland, and Taiwan.; (cont.) It argues that the developmental path of the IT industry is influenced by four critical decisions by the state. First...

Theories in international relations posit, and empirical evidence has verified, that unwilling states can be compelled by another state or by an international institution to enact domestic policy reform. However, these theories ignore the important follow-on question of whether such externally imposed reforms can be expected to stick. Using intellectual property rights (IPR) reform as a policy case, this dissertation seeks to explain why imposed reform stabilizes in some states but not in others. Here, stable policy means a government demonstrates credible and ongoing commitment to the reform after enacting new law. For example, the state passes additional legal measures to extend the reform, and provides ample support for domestic institutions necessary for the law's implementation. This dissertation presents a comparative study of IPR reform in Brazil and South Korea, covering seven years in the former case and sixteen years in the latter. The Korean government acquiesced to U.S. pressure in 1987 and strengthened its national IPR regime. Brazil undertook IPR reform in 1996, owing in part to its obligation to abide by the directives of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Accord).; (cont.) The argument put forward is that states commit to imposed reforms once they capture or create reform benefits...

"Policy Without Politicians: Bureaucratic Influence in Comparative Perspective." Edward C. Page. Oxford University Press. September 2012. --- In Policy without Politicians a leading expert on public policy has devoted four years to interviewing middle-ranking civil servants in three languages over six jurisdictions, to construct a comparative survey of bureaucratic influence on secondary legislation. The venture may sound worthy at best, but Patricia Hogwood finds that Edward C. Page has produced a little gem: an intellectually honest, well-constructed, impeccably executed comparative study that probes beyond the speculative answers about bureaucratic influence we have become accustomed to reading.

"Emerging Powers in a Comparative Perspective: The Political and Economic Rise of the BRIC Countries." Vidya Nadkarni and Norma C. Noonan. Bloomsbury. February 2013. --- The book examines the rising influence of emerging powers in global politics, with a special focus on the BRIC countries. The book aims provide a detailed analysis of political, economic, security, and foreign policy trends in the BRIC countries to address such questions as to whether they will seek to revise the international order or work within it, and how they will deal with transnational global problems. Reviewed by Carlos Carrasco Farré.

Political science’ is a ‘vanguard’ field concerned with advancing generic knowledge of political processes, while a wider ‘political scholarship’ utilising eclectic approaches has more modest or varied ambitions. Political science nonetheless necessarily depends upon and is epistemologically comparable with political scholarship. I deploy Boyer's distinctions between discovery, integration, application and renewing the profession to show that these connections are close woven. Two sets of key challenges need to be tackled if contemporary political science is to develop positively. The first is to ditch the current unworkable and restrictive comparative politics approach, in favour of a genuinely global analysis framework. Instead of obsessively looking at data on nation states, we need to seek data completeness on the whole (multi-level) world we have. A second cluster of challenges involves looking far more deeply into political phenomena; reaping the benefits of ‘digital-era’ developments; moving from sample methods to online census methods in organisational analysis; analysing massive transactional databases and real-time political processes (again, instead of depending on surveys); and devising new forms of ‘instrumentation’...

After the financial crises put free market evangelism on the defence, the message of 21st socialism has found increasing resonance across Latin America and abroad. The Triumph of Politics gives a comparative and historical overview of the governments of Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales and Rafael Correa at a time of deep divisiveness and political conflict in the region. Hassan Akram finds the book to be timely and important read, although he argues some of the political science concepts did not always suit the cases presented. The Triumph of Politics: The Return of the Left in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador. George Philip and Francisco Panizza. Wiley and Polity Books. September 2011.

This paper provides full details of the Crisis States Programme in South Asia. It includes a short essay on "Political Ethnography".

This paper attempts to explain cross-national voting behavior in 18 Western democracies over 1960-2003. It starts by introducing a new data set for the median voter that corrects for stochastic error in the statistics from the Comparative Manifesto Project. Next, the paper finds that electoral behavior is closely related to the salience of particular economic institutions. Labour organization, skill specificity, and public sector employment are found to influence individual voting behavior. At the country level, this paper therefore suggests that coordinated market economies move the median voter to the left, whereas liberal market economies move the median voter to the right. The empirical analysis employs cross-sectional and panel data that is instrumented with the level of economic structure circa 1900 to estimate the net effect of economic institutions on the median voter. Significant results show that revealed voter preferences are endogenous to the economic institutions of the political economy. This paper places Political Economy at the heart of voting behavior and implies the existence of institutional advantages to partisan politics.

Due to its competitive political system and strong non-oil export capacity, Mexico is not considered an oil Rentier State. Yet, the consistent and intensive use of crude oil has fundamentally altered the trajectory of its political economy. State institutions, which had consistently relied on oil rents to finance their operations, tend to preserve social stability and political consensus rather than promote development. The central bureaucracy’s need to control oil rent strengthens and reinforces the role of budgetary institutions within politics and administration. Budget institutions provide the government with an inordinate degree of discretion to allocate the budget, a capacity that supports the State’s political legitimation and helps to overcome economic turmoil. Paradoxically, oil produces a policy curse that reinforces the State’s socio-political embeddedness at the expense of its economic leverage. Thus, undermining the incentives for public officials to tax and deliver expenditure quality, thereby deepening the State’s detachment from normal economic behaviour. Oil rent maximization serves to increase the size and cost of public employment and the magnitude of transfers and subsidies at the expense of gross fixed public investment...

This thesis explores how political preferences are shaped by institutions, economic conditions, and personality. Each chapter is a distinct contribution and provides a different perspective on the formation of political preferences and, ultimately, voting behaviour. These different approaches relate to the fields of comparative political economy, behavioural economics, and political psychology. Methodologically, this thesis is empirically applied and the results of these separate enquiries into political preferences are grounded in statistical analysis. A first substantive chapter introduces a median voter data set that provides insight into the ideological position of the electoral centre in over 50 democracies. A second chapter uses this new data and studies cross-national voting behaviour in 18 Western democracies over 1960-2003. It is found that electoral behaviour is closely related to the salience of the following economic institutions: labour organization, skill specificity, and public sector employment. This research shows that political preferences are endogenous to economic institutions and implies the existence of institutional advantages to partisan politics. A third substantive chapter focuses on ideological change in the United States and tests the proposition that voters advance a more liberal agenda in prosperous times and shift towards being more conservative in dire economic times. A reference-dependent utility model relates income growth to political preferences by way of the demand for public goods and the optimal tax rate. This work thus links voting behaviour to economic business cycles and shows that ideological change is endogenous to income growth rates. Finally...

This article analyses the core critiques on institutional change theories within the neoinstitutional research agenda in comparative political science. It offers an explanatory typology using analytical challenges for the development of theories with new institutional approaches. This typology provides key critical issues that should be seriously considered by political scientists when analysing change. The framework suggests that the analytical challenges be posed in five interwoven dimensions: a) inclusion of institutional variables; b) agency and cognition; c) contextual sensitivity; d) increasing precision in the concept of institution (and institutional change); and, e) recursive interaction between agents and institutions in the process of institutional change. Based on these challenges, the article conducts a comparative analysis of the theories of change suggested by North and Aoki to understand how they deal with such issues.