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Thieves, Opportunists, and Autocrats
This book examines how Russia and Kazakhstan navigated the dilemmas associated with building regulatory state institutions on the ruins of the Soviet command and control system. The two nations developed predatory and wasteful crony capitalism but still improved their business climates and economic performance. To better understand these seemingly incompatible outcomes, the book advances a theory of authoritarian regulatory statehood. It argues that politicians use institutions of the state as a means to balance conflicting elite demands for economic rents and popular demands for public goods and economic growth. An effective balancing of the two prevents elite subversion and popular revolt ...
Building Business in Post-Communist Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia
Prior to 1989, the communist countries of Eastern Europe and the USSR lacked genuine employer and industry associations. After the collapse of communism, industry associations mushroomed throughout the region. Duvanova argues that abusive regulatory regimes discourage the formation of business associations and poor regulatory enforcement tends to encourage associational membership growth. Academic research often treats special interest groups as vehicles of protectionism and non-productive collusion. This book challenges this perspective with evidence of market-friendly activities by industry associations and their benign influence on patterns of public governance. Careful analysis of cross-national quantitative data spanning more than 25 countries, and qualitative examination of business associations in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Croatia, shows that postcommunist business associations function as substitutes for state and private mechanisms of economic governance. These arguments and empirical findings put the long-standing issues of economic regulations, public goods and collective action in a new theoretical perspective.
Violent Conflict and Online Segregation
Does the intensity of a social conflict affect political division? Traditionally, social cleavages are seen as the underlying cause of political conflicts. It is clear, however, that a violent conflict itself can shape partisan, social, and national identities. In this paper, we ask whether social conflicts unite or divide the society by studying the effects of Ukraine's military conflict with Russia on online social ties between Ukrainian provinces (oblasts). In order to do that, we collected original data on the cross-regional structure of politically relevant online communication among users of VKontakte social networking site. We analyze the panel of provinces spanning the most active ph...
Building Business in Post-Communist Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia
Prior to 1989, the communist countries of Eastern Europe and the USSR lacked genuine employer and industry associations. After the collapse of communism, industry associations mushroomed throughout the region. Duvanova argues that abusive regulatory regimes discourage the formation of business associations and poor regulatory enforcement tends to encourage associational membership growth. Academic research often treats special interest groups as vehicles of protectionism and non-productive collusion. This book challenges this perspective with evidence of market-friendly activities by industry associations and their benign influence on patterns of public governance. Careful analysis of cross-national quantitative data spanning more than 25 countries, and qualitative examination of business associations in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Croatia, shows that postcommunist business associations function as substitutes for state and private mechanisms of economic governance. These arguments and empirical findings put the long-standing issues of economic regulations, public goods and collective action in a new theoretical perspective.
Economic Regulations, Red Tape, and Bureaucratic Corruption
Should state regulatory involvement in the economy necessarily generate corruption? While excessive regulatory burden is often treated as a cause of corruption, this paper argues otherwise. It disentangles the economic effects of regulatory policy from those of regulatory implementation and offers a more nuanced argument about the relationship between state regulatory policy and the resulting regulatory environment. The analysis of business survey data covering 26 post-communist economies demonstrates that mechanisms of regulatory implementation, rather than heavy-handed regulatory policy, are responsible for bribery. This paper finds that high levels of bureaucratic discretion boost the creation of bureaucratic red tape, those costs often rival the official regulatory burden. Analysis shows that high levels of bureaucratic red tape, rather than the official regulatory burden, exacerbate bureaucratic corruption. This draws attention to the theoretical distinction between different types of regulatory hurdles and their differential effects on business-state relations.
Interest Groups in American Politics
Americans rail against so-called special interests but at the same time many members of society are themselves represented in one form or another by organized groups trying to affect the policymaking progress. This concise but thorough text demonstrates that interest groups are involved in the political system at all levels of government – federal, state, and local – and in all aspects of political activity, from election campaigns to agenda setting to lawmaking to policy implementation. Rather than an anomaly or distortion of the political system, it is a normal and healthy function of a pluralist society and democratic governance. Nonetheless, Nownes warns of the dangers of unwatched i...
How Leaders Mobilize Workers
This book combines a thorough analysis of class politics in twenty countries between 1863 and 1919 with a general theory of political mobilization focusing on individual leadership. It explains why leaders chose social democracy, revolution, or moderate syndicalism to mobilize workers, and shows what lasting consequences their choices produced.
Secessionism
An examination of the reasons independence movements remain peaceful or become violent
Hayek and Popper
Karl Popper and Friedrich von Hayek are remembered as two of the twentieth century’s greatest proponents of open society. However, over the years, Hayek’s ideas have tended to be favoured over Popper’s in both academic and political discussions. This book aims to improve understanding of Popper’s and Hayek’s philosophies by explaining their differences, and whilst doing so, to encourage liberal political philosophers to take a better-informed and more sympathetic look at Popper’s ideas about open society. Popper and Hayek differed in subtle but fundamental ways about rationality, economism, and democracy. They thus differed about whether and to what extent society is well served ...
