PLSC Comp Comp Bibliography, Alpha by Author

Note: when it comes to books, it would be useful, in addition to the description of the book, to reference reviews that are available about the books.

Acemoglu and Robinson 2006 Economic Origins of Dicatorship and Democracy
 * The drive to change regimes is driven by inequality
 * Two Groups: Elites and Citizens
 * No one wants democracy up front
 * ELites do not want democracy as it leads to reappropriation
 * Masses do not want it because...?
 * Given a set of relative prefrences for an unstable political climate, the elite are forced to make some compromise on their power (absolute dictatorship) and facilitate some form of democratization as a credible commitment to change (or non-exploitioation).
 * Would be worth connecting this to Boix
 * Critiques:
 * Sieberg argued that it was not game theoretic, but purely deterministic/a structural model

Adams 2001 Party Competition and Responsible Party Government
 * Problem: Two approaches to studying parties Downs versus the American Voter
 * Solution: Focus on multiparty systems
 * Modifications to the basic Downsian Model
 * Britain serves as one of the case studies

Aldrich 1995 Why Parties?
 * Parites are a mechnaism to overcome problems of social choice and ambition.

'''Arrow, Kenneth. 1963.''' Social Choice and Individual Values.
 * No collective choice rule coherently aggregates individual preferences (other than a dictator rule).

Bates, Greif, Levi, Rosenthal, Weingast 1998
 * Prefers problem-driven approach as opposed to theoretical driven approach

Boix 2003 Democracy and Redistribution
 * Three primary theories of democratization - functionalism, pseudo-functionalism, and modernization.

Buchanan and Tullock 1967 THe Calculus of Consent
 * The coalition always choose to expropriate if it has the ability to do so, thus the model is about such distributive implicaitons. A coalition of n-1 would consume the excluded 1.
 * Players are weighing the risk of expropriation and transaction costs.
 * "The collectivization of an activity will be supported by the utility -maximizing individual when he expects the interdependence costs of this collectively organized activity, as he perceives them, to lie blow those involve din the private voluntary organization of the activity. (62)"
 * "Individuals will choose rules that minimize decision making costs (70)"
 * Critiques Buchanan and Tullock:
 * Different endowments lead to different preferences
 * Non-dynamic model
 * Veil of ignorance: makes it siimlar to making the decision by one person, as it eliminates the conflict over the expected conflict.
 * No strategic component in deciding outside of the box

Clarke, Kevin, and David Primo, 2007. "Modernizing Political Science: A Model-Based Approach.  PS, Dec 2007.
 * Topic: Models, generally.
 * The goal of models is not merely prediction.
 * Consider Downs' spatial model of voting. It predicts candidate convergence; however, this cannot be found, empirically.  Should we then discard the study?  No, because it can provide useful insight into political behavior, even though it is poor at predicting behavior.
 * The EITM insistence on testing models may thus be misguided.

Cohen 1994 Raidcals, Reformers, Reactionaries: The Prisoner's Dilemma and the collapse of Democracy in Latin America. Examines Brazil and CHile
 * Strong critique of existing structural work
 * Prisoner's Dilemma for reformers. Cooperation between Left-RIght moderates would produce ideal democratic insitutions, but either side can defect to the radicals and end the bargain.

Cook, Hardin, and Levi 2007 Cooperation without trust?
 * Ways in which you can have cooperation wihtout law or trust:
 * Social capital (through various networks, capacity, and differences in group and individual access to such capital).
 * Communal Norms of Cooeprativeness and responsibility
 * Honor
 * "Fictive Kinship"
 * Communal Lending
 * Institutional Alternatives to trust

Cox 1987 The Efficient Secret
 * Main Question: Why did English Parliamentary system centralize power with the fusion of the executive and legislative?
 * Primary Issues that drive the centralizaiton of power: Modernization, issue expansion, increase in enfranchisement, a decreasing seperation in the private/public dichotomy, and rational choice of legislature
 * Really about delegation

Cox 1997 Making Votes Count
 * Discusses Durverger's law and Durverger's hypothesis.
 * Enodgeneity between political structure, clevages, and the party system
 * In Multimember districts, the M+1 rule exists.

'''Dion, Douglas. 1998.''' "Evidence and Inference in the Comparative Case Study," Comparative Politics 30(2):127-145
 * Response to Geddes (1990). Topic: Selection on the D.V.
 * Argues that we must be careful to specify whether our argument makes a claim of necessity or sufficiency.
 * If a necessary condition lies at the heart of our hypothesis, we by right must select on the D.V. in order to look for cases where the necessary condition does not correlate with the desired outcome.

'''Döring, Herbert. 1995.''' “Institutions and Policies: Why We Need Cross-National Analysis.” In Parliaments and Majority Rule in Western Europe.
 * Former studies only looked at demand side of legislation, not supply side as well (37-39)
 * Previous studies saw parliamments as rubber stamp institutions that looked at extra-parliamentary institutions as the real generator of legislation.
 * Procedural Agenda control is a necessary not sufficient condition.

'''Geddes, Barbara. 1990.''' "How the Cases You Choose Affect the Answers You Get: Selection Bias in Comparative Politics."

Geddes, 1999.
 * Typology of Dictatorships
 * Defines expectations and does statistical model
 * Personalist, Miliatry, and Party dictatorships


 * Topic: Selection on the D.V.
 * Argues that small n case studies selected on the D.V. may bias conclusions (like Skocpol).
 * If the goal is causal, then just finding cases with the D.V. cannot support a claim that the I.V. caused the D.V.
 * Need, instead, to show that the cases without D.V. do not produce similar conditions.
 * In reply, see Dion (1998)(argues that selection on the D.V. can show necessary conditions).

'''Hinnich, Melvin and Michael C. Munger. 1997.''' Analytical Politics
 * Argues for Spatial Model of POlitics

'''King, Gary, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba. 1994.''' Designing Social Inquiry.
 * Topic: Research design--how to design research that produces valid scientific inferences.
 * Argues that the logic of quant and qual research is the same. The goal of both is inference.
 * Inference is using what we know to understand the unobserved.
 * Four Major components to research: Research question, theory, data, and the use of data.
 * Criticism: Collier (1994): Better theory on its own leads to clearer inferences.

'''Knight, Jack. 1992.''' Institutions and Social Conflict. (Knight is 1992 not 1993)
 * Topic: Institutional Politics.
 * Previous studies don't explain micro-foundations
 * Old studies are too functionalist (i.e., the explain institutions by the need for institutions/what the institutions do).
 * Rational Choice works better because institutions are really about the redistribution of resources and conflict
 * Uses rational choice to explain both institutional formation and change.
 * See also; Knight & Epstein (1996) on the emergence of judicial review in Marbury v. Madison.

Laver 1996 Making and Breaking Governments: Cabinets and Legislatures in Parliamentary Democracies.
 * Portfolio Allocation Model
 * Assumptions of the Portfolio Allocation Model:
 * Policy seeking actors
 * Portfolios have clear, independent jurisdictions
 * parties are unitary actors
 * Party preferences are known
 * No exogenous enforcement of bargains
 * Ministers are agenda setters
 * Collective Responsibility

Lijphart 1971. Comparative Politics and Comparative Method.
 * 4 Different methods of inquiry: Expiremental, Statistical, Comparative, and Case Studies.
 * The latter three can be see as a decreasing set of large-n, 2-20 cases, 1 case.
 * Comparative Politics faces the small-n, too many variables problems. This is its biggest problem.
 * 6 good uses for case studies
 * atheoretical case studies
 * Interpretative case studies
 * Hypothesis-generating case studies
 * Theory-confirming case studies
 * Theory-infirming case studies
 * Deviant case stuides

Lijphart 1999 Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in 36 Countries
 * Evaluates 36 Democracies

'''McCubbins, Mathew D., and Michael F. Thies. 1996.''' "Rationality and the Foundations of Positive Political Theory"
 * Topic: Rational Choice Without Apology.
 * Three fundamental Assumptions: Rationality, Component analysis, Strategic Behavior
 * We all use models that abstract from reality, we just need to be sure to make our assumptions explicit.

'''North, Douglas. 1990.''' Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance.
 * Topic: Institutional Politics.
 * Institutions lower uncertainty and transaction costs.
 * Institutional change is the product of interaction between institutions and organizations
 * When orgs. want marginal changes, we get incremental change.

North and Weignast 1996 "Constitutions and commitment: The Evolutions of Institutions Governing Public Choice in 17th-Century England."
 * Focuses on teh rules and institutions of economic regulation in England
 * Lead to a fiscal revolution, constraints on the Monarch allowed for a more efficient borrowing scheme and enabled the monarch to borrow effectively during war time.

Olson 2000 Peace and Prosperity
 * Roving Bandit Model
 * Long time horizon (or shadow of the future) will induce a roving bandit to stay put!

Peters, Guy B. 1998. Comparative Politics: Theory and Methods.
 * Similar to KKV (1994) - little difference between case studies and large n statistical methods.
 * Both face problems of research design. KKV (1994) inference is the key to both forms of approaches - descriptive or causal.
 * trade-off between complexity and generalization - the more complex your approach is towards understanding something, the less you can generalize
 * Hence case studies - difficult to generalize to other cases
 * Large N studies - inferences difficult to generalize to particular cases.
 * types of comparative studies:
 * single case study - focuses on description.
 * analyses of similar institutions or processes in set of small countries.
 * typologies/ taxonomy developing studies - like Lijphart (majoritarianism versus consensus)
 * regional n studies
 * global large n studies

Pierson 2004 Politics in Time
 * Argues that our analysis must be sensitive to time
 * Our methods do not currently account for temporal variation

Przeworski 1991 Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reofrms in Eastern Europe
 * Focuses on transitions
 * Definition: Democracy is stable when the opposition believes it has a chance to win in the future. This is a stabalizing definition as probability of future success discourages revolution or coups.

Putnam 1993 Making Democracy Works
 * Does institutional context matter?
 * Insitutional socialization caused a change in legislative behavior

Reilly 2002 Democracy in Divided Societies
 * Insitutional engineering can reduce uncertainty
 * Centripetalism is sueperior to consociationalism (Contrary to Lijphart)

Riker 1982 Liberalism versus Populism
 * Liberalism holds the process as important, populism looks at the results.
 * For any decision rule, there is a preferenc eprofile that violates one of Arrow's axioms.

Sartori 1997 Comparative Consitutional Engineering

Sen 1999 Development as Freedom
 * Cannot have freedom before stability

Strom, Muller, and Bergmen 2006 "Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies
 * Three Motives for Delegation
 * Capacity - it's limited
 * Competence - some lack it
 * Social Choice and Collective Action Problems
 * Discusses the Beauty and Perils of Parliamentarism

Wintrobe 1998 The Political Economy of Dictatorship
 * Breaks down types of autocracy into Tyrant, Totalitarian, Timocrat, and Tinpot
 * THe price of lyalty can change
 * Critiques:
 * Assumes a particular kind of dictatorship that is reliant on taxation/seizure as opposed to one that can nationalize a particular industry.
 * Confuses Motives/Definitions with Behiviors

Zakaria 1997/2003
 * Strong elites are necessary condition to moderate popularism
 * Illiberal democracies are more dangerous than autocracies