Publications by Type: Book

Social science theories of contentious politics have been based almost exclusively on evidence drawn from the European and American experience, and classic texts in the field make no mention of either the Chinese Communist revolution or the Cultural Revolution—surely two of the most momentous social movements of the twentieth century. China's record of popular upheaval, moreover, stretches back well beyond this century, indeed all the way back to the third century B.C. This is a direct effect of the Confucian "mandate of heaven" which bestowed instant legitimacy on successful rebel leaders. This book, by bringing together studies of protest that span the Imperial, Republican, and Communist eras, introduces Chinese patterns and provides a forum to consider ways in which contentious politics in China might serve to reinforce, refine or reshape theories derived from Western cases.

Genetically modified (GM) food crops have inspired increasing controversy over the past decade. By the mid-1990s they were widely grown in the U.S., Canada, and Argentina, but precautionary regulations continue to limit their use elsewhere. The restrictive policies of Europe and Japan toward GM crops have been much discussed. Less attention has been paid to the policies affecting the adoption of GM crops in the developing world, where their potential impact on the availability and quality of food is even greater.

In this book Robert Paarlberg looks at the policy choices regarding GM food made by four important developing countries: Kenya, Brazil, India, and China. Of these, so far only China has approved the planting of GM crops. Paarlberg identifies five policy areas in which governments of developing countries can either support or discourage GM crops: intellectual property rights, biosafety, trade, food safety, and public research and investment. He notes that highly cautious biosafety policies have so far been the key reason that Kenya, Brazil, and India have hesitated to plant GM crops. These cautious policies have been strongly reinforced by international market forces and international diplomatic and NGO pressures. China has been less cautious toward GM crops, in part because there is less opportunity in China for international organizations or independent critics of GM crops to challenge official policy.

The high-tech bubble seems to have burst-or has it? Knowing where you are in the business cycle is crucial. Historical perspective helps, and so does keen analysis. Ruling the Waves offers both.

Debora Spar begins the historical context with pirate tales. Jean Lafitte's domination of the seas and Rupert Murdoch's domination of the British airwaves with BskyB have much in common. Tales of the telegraph and radio help you understand the natural evolution of Microsoft, the trials of the codemakers who fought the U.S. government to protect Internet privacy, and the revolutionary rap stars who challenged the record industry. Great stories of quirky pioneers and their roller-coaster rides make this the one book that you need to become an expert on the path of future innovations and the natural development from idea to market in a changing world.

Before the Nazis killed him for his work in the Resistance, the great French historian Marc Bloch wrote a famous short book, Strange Defeat, in which he puzzled over Germany's six-week conquest of his nation in the spring of 1940. In Strange Victory, the distinguished diplomatic historian Ernest R. May argues that Germany's success is even more of a puzzle than Bloch could have imagined, for we now know that its armed forces were measurably inferior to those of France and its allies, even in tanks, and its top military leaders all considered an attack on France to be a long-odds gamble.

Strange Victory, a riveting study not only of those crucial six weeks but of the years and days leading up to the German invasion, makes it clear how Hitler, though a lazy, ill-informed psychopath, outguessed his own experts as to how French and British leaders would respond to German actions. May's dramatic narrative, laced with vivid character sketches, draws on little-used German, French, and British archives to show how German intelligence officers found the keys to plan a successful surprise attack on the Western front, and, on the Allied side, how French and British officers failed to see or understand the plain signs of Germany's intentions, even though they had well-placed spies in Berlin. His interpretative history suggests new ways to think about the decisions taken on both sides, and new ways to see how this history relates to issues of our own time.

Strange Victory makes it clear that French and British leaders (Winston Churchill not excepted) clung to their expectations of a nearly bloodless victory over Germany, even through the first devastating days of the German offensive. This part of the story is especially important, for it has some of the qualities of a parable: Nazi Germany was taking advantage of governmental habits of mind and custom in 1940s France that have parallels today—among them, confidence in technology, a high aversion to incurring casualties, and decision-making processes that did not favor rapid response. In the future, Professor May suggests, nations may suffer strange defeats of their own if they do not learn from their predecessors' mistakes.

Contrary to popular opinion, increasing numbers of migrants continue to participate in the political, social, and economic lives of their countries of origin even as they put down roots in the United States. The Transnational Villagers offers a detailed, compelling account of how ordinary people keep their feet in two worlds and create communities that span borders. Peggy Levitt explores the powerful familial, religious, and political connections that arise between Miraflores, a town in the Dominican Republic, and Jamaica Plain, a neighborhood in Boston and examines the ways in which these ties transform life in both the home and host country.

The Transnational Villagers is one of only a few books based on in-depth fieldwork in the countries of origin and reception. It provides a moving, detailed account of how transnational migration transforms family and work life, challenges migrants' ideas about race and gender, and alters life for those who stay behind as much, if not more, than for those who migrate. It calls into question conventional thinking about immigration by showing that assimilation and transnational lifestyles are not incompatible. In fact, in this era of increasing economic and political globalization, living transnationally may become the rule rather than the exception.

Exchange rates have been central to the course of economic development in Latin America from the heyday of import substitution to the rapid expansion of foreign debt in the 1970s, and from the debt crisis and its troubled aftermath to renewed growth and borrowing in the 1990s.

Why do governments choose the currency policies they do, and how do economic and political factors affect these policies? Although currency policy is made by governments operating in a political environment, there has been little study of the political economy of exchange rate policy. The Currency Game looks to fill this void by examining the range of potential determinants of currency choices by Latin American governments. While purely economic factors (especially economic structure, trade patterns, and exogenous economic conditions) are of course important to these choices, the book focuses on the political and political economy considerations that have typically been underrepresented in the literature. These include the effects of interest groups, electoral competition, and the timing of elections on exchange rate decisions.

Since exchange regimes are adopted for reasons as diverse as inflation control, reduced volatility and improved competitiveness, the book also features a cross-country analysis of national exchange rate policies, as well as case studies of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Peru.

The ideal introduction to U.S.-Mexican relations, The United States and Mexico moves from the conflicts all through the nineteenth century up to the current democratic elections in Mexico. Domínguez and Castro deftly trace the path of the relationship between these North American neighbors from bloody conflict to (wary) partnership. By covering immigration, drug trafficking, NAFTA, democracy, environmental problems and economic instability, this volume provides a thorough look back and an informed vision of the future.

In recent years the German economy has grown sluggishly and created few new jobs. These developments have led observers to question the future viability of a model that in the past seemed able to combine economic growth, competitiveness in export markets, and low social inequality. This volume brings together empirical and comparative research from across the social sciences to examine whether or not Germany's system of skill provision is still capable of meeting the economic and social challenges now facing all the advanced capitalist economies.

At issue is the question of whether or not the celebrated German training system, an essential element of the high-skill, high-wage equilibrium, can continue to provide the skills necessary for German companies to hold their economic niche in a world characterized by increasing trade and financial interdependence. Combining an examination of the competitiveness of the German training system with an analysis of the robustness of the political institutions that support it, this volume seeks to understand the extent to which the German system for imparting craft skills can adjust to changes in the organization of production in the advanced industrial states.

This study seeks to better understand the long-term development of efforts to manage interactions between society and the global environment. It conceives "management" broadly to include problem and goal definition, as well as the formulation and implementation of action programs and policy. It explores the impact and interactions of ideas, interests, and institutions on the development of management practice. It investigates the extent to which, and means by which, efforts at global environmental management entrain multiple actors in multiple national and super-national arenas. Similarly, it is interested in the extent to which the management capacity for dealing with any specific global environmental concern is affected by the management capacity developed for dealing with other issues. Finally, it asks to what extent and in what ways, learning has played a significant role in the development of society's approach to the management of its interactions with the global environment.

To illuminate these questions, the study traces the evolution of efforts to address the issues of acid rain, stratospheric ozone depletion, and climate change over a period extending from the International Geophysical Year of 1957 through the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development of 1992. It offers a comparative exploration of the development of these issues across a range of national and international settings including Japan, the United States, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, the former Soviet Union, Hungary, the European Union and the family of international environmental organizations. It describes the development of management response along two dimensions: one focusing on problem framing, agenda setting, and issue attention; the other on management functions of risk assessment, monitoring, option assessment, goal and strategy formulation, implementation and evaluation.

Numerous studies of global environmental change have concentrated on particular countries, issues, institutions, periods and policies. This work seeks to complement such focused efforts by fashioning a long-term, large-scale overview of how the interplay between ideas and actions across multiple problem areas has laid the foundations on which contemporary efforts in global environmental management are now building. It has been written by, and should be of interest to, scientists, policy advisors and others involved in contemporary efforts to manage global environmental change, as well as scholars seeking to advance our broader understanding of global environmental issues and governance.

Prosperity and Violence considers the history of human civilization and explains the origins of the modern state, focusing on the evolution of capitalism as cultures move from dispersed agrarian clans to the dense modern metropolis. Informed by firsthand experience with the political and economic development of many diverse cultures, Bates demonstrates how successful modern states harness ethnic diversity for prosperity rather than for violence and political power. Brief and compelling, Prosperity and Violence is certain to be an excellent supplement in any comparative politics course.

This book brings together a diverse group of experts on international monetary policy to examine the basic conceptual issues of currency unions and other monetary regimes, including flexible and fixed exchange rates, and assess the available empirical evidence on the performance of these alternative monetary systems. They also draw some policy conclusions on the desirability of currency unions for countries in various circumstances.

Currency Unions reviews the traditional case for flexible exchange rates and countercyclical?that is, expansionary during recessions and contractionary in booms monetary policy and shows how flexible exchange rate regimes can better insulate the economy from such real disturbances as terms-of-trade shocks. The book also looks at the pitfalls of flexible exchange rates and why fixed rates, particularly full dollarization might be a more sensible choice for some emerging-market countries. The contributors also detail the factors that determine the optimal sizes of currency unions, explain how a currency union greatly expands the volume of international trade among its members, and examine the recent implementation of dollarization in Ecuador.

Michèle Lamont takes us into the world inhabited by working-class men—the world as they understand it. Interviewing black and white working-class men who, because they are not college graduates, have limited access to high-paying jobs and other social benefits, she constructs a revealing portrait of how they see themselves and the rest of society.

Morality is at the center of these workers’ worlds. They find their identity and self-worth in their ability to discipline themselves and conduct responsible but caring lives. These moral standards function as an alternative to economic definitions of success, offering them a way to maintain dignity in an out-of-reach American dreamland. But these standards also enable them to draw class boundaries toward the poor and, to a lesser extent, the upper half. Workers also draw rigid racial boundaries, with white workers placing emphasis on the “disciplined self” and blacks on the “caring self.” Whites thereby often construe blacks as morally inferior because they are lazy, while blacks depict whites as domineering, uncaring, and overly disciplined.

This book also opens up a wider perspective by examining American workers in comparison with French workers, who take the poor as “part of us” and are far less critical of blacks than they are of upper-middle-class people and immigrants. By singling out different “moral offenders” in the two societies, workers reveal contrasting definitions of “cultural membership” that help us understand and challenge the forms of inequality found in both societies.

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.

Prayer in public schools, abortion, gay and lesbian rights—these bitterly divisive issues dominate American politics today, revealing deep disagreements over basic moral values. In a highly readable account that draws on legal arguments, political theory, and philosophy, Ronald F. Thiemann explores the proper role of religious convictions in American public life. He proposes that religion can and should play an active, positive part in our society even as it maintains a fundamental commitment to pluralist, democratic values.

Arguing that both increased secularism and growing religious diversity since the 1960s have fragmented commonly held values, Thiemann observes that there has been an historical ambivalence in American attitudes towards religion in public life. He proposes abandoning the idea of an absolute wall between church and state and all the conceptual framework built around that concept in interpreting the first amendment. He returns instead to James Madison's views and the Constitutional principles of liberty, equality, and toleration. Refuting both political liberalism (as too secular) and communitarianism (as failing to meet the challenge of pluralism), Thiemann offers a new definition of liberalism that gives religions a voice in the public sphere as long as they heed the Constitutional principles of liberty, equality, and toleration or mutual respect.

The American republic, Thiemann notes, is a constantly evolving experiment in constructing a pluralistic society from its many particular communities. Religion can act as a positive force in its moral renewal, by helping to shape common cultural values.

All those interested in finding solutions to today's divisive political discord, in finding ways to disagree civilly in a democracy, and in exploring the extent to which religious convictions should shape the development of public policies will find that this book offers an important new direction for religion and the nation.