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Reform Capacity
It is often said that effective government requires a concentration of power. If we want our political leaders to adjust public policies to changing economic, social, and political circumstances, we should, in this view, leave our leaders alone: we should put in place electoral procedures that identify a clear winner in each election, and then we should let the winning political party govern without having to cooperate with others. The argument of this book is that this view is mistaken, since it seriously underestimates the ability of political decision makers to overcome democratic paralysis by compensating losers (groups that stand to lose from a reform). Reform capacity - the ability of ...
Inward Conquest
Examining schools, libraries, prisons, asylums, and vaccines, this study is the first comprehensive look at the origins of public services.
Mass Unemployment and the State
Mass Unemployment and the State shows that domestic political arrangements have mattered greatly to the economic and labor market policies that European governments pursued in response to the problem of unemployment from the early 1970s to the present day.
The Lion's Share
This is the most in-depth analysis of inequality and social polarization ever attempted for a preindustrial society. Using data from the archives of the Venetian Terraferma, and compared with information available for elsewhere in Europe, Guido Alfani and Matteo Di Tullio demonstrate that the rise of the fiscal-military state served to increase economic inequality in the early modern period. Preindustrial fiscal systems tended to be regressive in nature, and increased post-tax inequality compared to pre-tax - in contrast to what we would assume is the case in contemporary societies. This led to greater and greater disparities in wealth, which were made worse still as taxes were collected almost entirely to fund war and defence rather than social welfare. Though focused on Old Regime Europe, Alfani and Di Tullio's findings speak to contemporary debates about the roots of inequality and social stratification.
Inward Conquest
Examining schools, libraries, prisons, asylums, and vaccines, this study is the first comprehensive look at the origins of public services.
The Oxford Handbook of Swedish Politics
The Handbook provides a broad introduction to Swedish politics, and how Sweden's political system and policies have evolved over the past few decades.
Inequality and Democratization
This book offers a new theory of the historical relationship between economic modernization and the emergence of democracy on a global scale, focusing on the effects of land and income inequality.
Ruling the Void
A classic account of democracy's crisis of legitimacy The age of party democracy has passed, argues Peter Mair in Ruling the Void. The major parties have become so disconnected from society that they no longer seem capable of sustaining democracy in its present form. First published in 2013, Ruling the Void presciently observed that the widening gap between citizens and their political leaders posed a crisis of legitimacy for the governing class, and was fuelling populist mobilizations against it. Europe’s political elites had remodelled themselves as a homogeneous professional class, withdrawing into state institutions that offer relative stability in a world of fickle voters. Meanwhile, non-democratic agencies and practices proliferated – not least among them the European Union itself. Mair weighs the impact of these changes, and offers an authoritative assessment of the prospects for popular political representation today, not only in the varied democracies of Britain and the EU but throughout the developed world. With a new Introduction by Chris Bickerton, author of The European Union: A Citizen’s Guide.
Precolonial Legacies in Postcolonial Politics
Why are some communities able to come together to improve their collective lot while others are not? Looking at variation in local government performance in decentralized West Africa, this book advances a novel answer: communities are better able to coordinate around basic service delivery when their formal jurisdictional boundaries overlap with informal social institutions, or norms. This book identifies the precolonial past as the driver of striking subnational variation in the present because these social institutions only encompass the many villages of the local state in areas that were once home to precolonial polities. The book develops and tests a theory of institutional congruence to document how the past shapes contemporary elite approaches to redistribution within the local state. Where precolonial kingdoms left behind collective identities and dense social networks, local elites find it easier to cooperate following decentralization. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
