Students of comparative politics have long faced a vexing dilemma: how can social scientists draw broad, applicable principles of political order from specific historical examples? In Analytic Narratives, five senior scholars offer a new and ambitious methodological response to this important question. By employing rational-choice and game theory, the authors propose a way of extracting empirically testable, general hypotheses from particular cases. The result is both a methodological manifesto and an applied handbook that political scientists, economic historians, sociologists, and students of political economy will find essential.
In their jointly written introduction, the authors frame their approach to the origins and evolution of political institutions. The individual essays that follow demonstrate the concept of the analytic narrative - a rational-choice approach to explain political outcomes - in case studies. Avner Greif traces the institutional foundations of commercial expansion in twelfth-century Genoa. Jean-Laurent Rosenthal analyzes how divergent fiscal policies affected absolutist European governments, while Margaret Levi examines the transformation of nineteenth-century conscription laws in France, the United States, and Prussia. Robert Bates explores the emergence of a regulatory organization in the international coffee market. Finally, Barry Weingast studies the institutional foundations of democracy in the antebellum United States and its breakdown in the Civil War. In the process, these studies highlight the economic role of political organizations, the rise and deterioration of political communities, and the role of coercion, especially warfare, in political life. The results are both empirically relevant and theoretically sophisticated.
Analytic Narratives is an innovative and provocative work that bridges the gap between the game-theoretic and empirically driven approaches in political economy. Political historians will find the use of rational-choice models novel; theorists will discover arguments more robust and nuanced than those derived from abstract models. The book improves on earlier studies by advocating - and applying - a cross-disciplinary approach to explain strategic decision making in history.
"The transformation of politics in Latin America, the consolidation of a democratic consensus in the Anglophone Caribbean, and the able performance of many democratic governments in fashioning economic policies made this book intellectually possible. Most of Latin America's democratic governments have carried economic reforms more effectively than their authoritarian predecessors and have remained stunningly resilient despite many problems. The naysayers have not been proven right. Indeed, even if democratic governments were to be overthrown tomorrow, the history of democratic politics in the 1980s and 1990s is already noteworthy."—from the Introduction
In Democratic Politics in Latin America and the Caribbean, Jorge Domínguez focuses on the successful accomplishments of democratic politics in the region—a process that nations in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa seek to emulate. Domínguez considers the role of British colonial rule and United States policies. But he also examines the development of parties, other civil institutions, and competitive markets, which lend permanence to democracy. He also discusses the prospects for democracy in Cuba and Mexico. Despite recurrent problems, Dom?nguez concludes, the outlook is good for stable democracies in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Students of comparative politics have long faced a vexing dilemma: how can social scientists draw broad, applicable principles of political order from specific historical examples? In Analytic Narratives, five senior scholars offer a new and ambitious methodological response to this important question. By employing rational-choice and game theory, the authors propose a way of extracting empirically testable, general hypotheses from particular cases. The result is both a methodological manifesto and an applied handbook that political scientists, economic historians, sociologists, and students of political economy will find essential.
In their jointly written introduction, the authors frame their approach to the origins and evolution of political institutions. The individual essays that follow demonstrate the concept of the analytic narrative—a rational-choice approach to explain political outcomes—in case studies. Avner Greif traces the institutional foundations of commercial expansion in twelfth-century Genoa. Jean-Laurent Rosenthal analyzes how divergent fiscal policies affected absolutist European governments, while Margaret Levi examines the transformation of nineteenth-century conscription laws in France, the United States, and Prussia. Robert Bates explores the emergence of a regulatory organization in the international coffee market. Finally, Barry Weingast studies the institutional foundations of democracy in the antebellum United States and its breakdown in the Civil War. In the process, these studies highlight the economic role of political organizations, the rise and deterioration of political communities, and the role of coercion, especially warfare, in political life. The results are both empirically relevant and theoretically sophisticated.
Analytic Narratives is an innovative and provocative work that bridges the gap between the game-theoretic and empirically driven approaches in political economy. Political historians will find the use of rational-choice models novel; theorists will discover arguments more robust and nuanced than those derived from abstract models. The book improves on earlier studies by advocating—and applying—a cross-disciplinary approach to explain strategic decision making in history.
Coffee is traded in one of the few international markets ever subject to effective political regulation. In Open-Economy Politics, Robert Bates explores the origins, the operations, and the collapse of the International Coffee Organization, an international "government of coffee" that was formed in the 1960s. In so doing, he addresses key issues in international political economy and comparative politics, and analyzes the creation of political institutions and their impact on markets. Drawing upon field work in East Africa, Colombia, and Brazil, Bates explores the domestic sources of international politics within a unique theoretical framework that blends game theoretic and more established approaches to the study of politics.
The book will appeal to those interested in international political economy, comparative politics, and the political economy of development, especially in Latin America and Africa, and to readers wanting to learn more about the economic and political realities that underlie the coffee market. It is also must reading for those interested in "the new institutionalism" and modern political economy.
This article argues that the strictly pragmatic, step–by–step approach of Oslo has reached a dead end and that cajoling the parties into signing an agreement is now irrelevant. To move the peace process to a successful conclusion, the parties must now commit themselves to a principled solution whose key elements include prior commitment to a genuine two–state solutions the end point of the final status negotiations, provision of meaningful citizenship to the Palestinians of the territories and the refugees, and mutual acknowledgment of the other?s nationhood and humanity. Such a proposal, though seemingly utopian, represents the most realistic option at the present juncture.
Published in Journal of Palestine Studies 28, no. 1 (1998): 36-50; and Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 5, no. 2 (1999): 101-115.
Policy Reform, Volume 1, 1–45
Recent growth theory fails to provide a convincing account of underdevelopment in terms of economic "fundamentals". As a result, many accounts cite "bad" government policy (including the failure to support appropriate institutions) as a casual factor behind stagnations. Yet this perspective is hard to understand from the viewpoint of welfare economics. This paper studies theories of endogenous policy which can possibly account for such bad policy. I stress three (interrelated) general intuitions about causes of bad policy which apply, irrespective of the type of political regime: 91) inability to use transfers to separate efficiency and distribution, (2) inability to commit, (3) the close connection between development and changes in the distribution of political power. I particularly stress the ability (or inability) of these theories to explain cross country differences.
WCFIA Working Paper 98-08
Since the collapse of the bipolar world power paradign in 1991, the concept of security in the Americas has come under intense review. This paper will examine the historic tension between U.S. and Latin American/Caribbean security interests as addressed within the Inter–American System, and how these institutions have evolved as a result.
The first part of this paper critically examines existing explanations for institutional innovation on the one hand and economic reform measures on the other, and offers an alternative, synthetic explanation for understanding the relationship between them. The second section derives hypotheses for disaggregating the political economic dynamics of institutional creation and durability, and illustrates the empirical manifestation of these dynamics through various "observations" 7 of financial institutional innovation in Wenzhou. The final section frames Wenzhou’s apparent exceptionalism in comparative perspective both within and beyond China.
Tsai, Kellee S. "Curbed Markets? Financial Innovation and Policy Innovation in China's Coastal South." Working Paper 98–06, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, May 1998.
Download PDFMultilateral trade complaints are significant for politics because they serve as a stimulus for the targeted state to alter its status quo trade policy. This paper seeks to explain and predict patterns of multilateral trade complaints filed by states under the dispute settlement mechanism of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its successor as of 1995, the World Trade Organization (WTO). A two-level model of complaint-raising is proposed, which argues that variation in the design of GATT and WTO institutions affects the costs to governments of filing complaints -- such as bureaucratic costs, information costs, and opportunity costs -- and these costs in turn affect state strategies for domestic oversight of treaty compliance by one's trading partners. Specific hypotheses drawn from the model are tested against a data set of over 300 multilateral trade complaints, from 1948-1994 under the GATT and 1995-96 under the WTO.