Field Seminar in Comparative Politics

Readings

Week 1: Introduction

• The syllabus and questions for class discussion for this week.

Week 2: The State 

• University of Cambridge. January 20, 2016. “Evidence of a Prehistoric Massacre Extends the History of Warfare.”
• Thomas Hobbes. 1651. Leviathan: Or, the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civil (New York: Touchstone, 2008), chapters 13 and 17. ISBN: 9781416573609. 
• Aristotle. c. 350 BCE. Politics. Book 3, Part 6. 
• Ibn Khaldun. c. 1377. Selection from Muqaddimah (Introduction to a Universal History), Chappell Lawson, ed..
• David Hume. 1987 [1742]. “Of the Origin of Government,” Essay V in Essays Moral, Political and Literary, Eugene F. Miller, ed. Liberty Fund Press, pp. 37–41. ISBN: ‎9780865970564. 
• Charles Tilly. 1990. Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1990, pp. 96–114. Basil Blackwell. ISBN: 9781557863683. 
• Jeffrey Herbst. 1990. “War and the State in Africa,” International Security, 14 (4): 117–39.
• Miguel Angel Centeno. 1997. “Blood and Debt: War and Taxation in Nineteenth-Century Latin America,” American Journal of Sociology, 102 (6): 1565–1605.
• Joel S. Migdal. 1988. Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World, pp. 3–19, 15–41, 45–180, 107–116, 139–141, 206–137, 269–177. Princeton University Press. ISBN: 9780691010731. [Preview with Google Books]
• Stephen Skowronek. 1982. Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, pp. 3–16. Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 9780521288651. 

Week 3: Social Structure, Classes, and Political Regimes 

• Aristotle. c. 350 BCE. Politics, book III, parts 7–8; book IV, parts 3–6 and 11–13; book V, parts 2–3; and book VI, part 4. 
• James Madison. 1787. The Federalist, Essay No. 10, Federalist Papers.  
• Max Weber. 1958 [1920]. “Class, Status, and Party,” from Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, part III, chapter 4, in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, pp. 181–90 (Sections 2–8). Routledge. ISBN: 9780415060561.
• Robert Dahl. 1971. Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition, pp. 105–21*.* Yale University Press. ISBN: 9780300153576. [Preview with Google Books]
• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. 1978. Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, pp. 473–83 (skip preamble). W.W. Norton. ISBN: 9780393090406. 
• Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens. 1992. Capitalist Development and Democracy, pp. 45–63. University of Chicago Press. ISBN: 9780226731445.
• Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. 2001. “A Theory of Political Transitions,” (PDF) American Economic Review, (91): 938–63.
• Alfred Stepan. 1978. “Political Leadership and Regime Breakdown: Brazil,” in Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, eds., The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Latin America, pp. 111–37. Johns Hopkins Press. ISBN: 9780801820236. 

Week 4: The Role of Culture (in Democracy, Corruption, Growth, etc.) 

• Waqar Gillani and Rod Nordland. 2016. “Boy’s Response to Blasphemy Charge Unnerves Many in Pakistan,” New York Times, January 18. 
• Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd. 2005. “Culture is Essential,” in Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution, pp. 1–17. University of Chicago Press. ISBN: 9780226712123. [Preview with Google Books]
• Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr, Herbert Gintis, and Richard McElreath. 2001. “In Search of Homo Economicus: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small Scale Societies,” (PDF) American Economic Review, 91 (May): 73–78.
• Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel. 2007. “Corruption, Norms and Legal Enforcement: Evidence from Diplomatic Parking Tickets,” (PDF) Journal of Political Economy, 115 (6): 1020–48. 
• Luigi Guiso, Paola Sapienza, and Luigi Zingales. 2006. “Does Culture Affect Economic Outcomes?” (PDF) Journal of Economic Perspectives, 20 (2): 23–48.
• Ronald Inglehart and Marita Carballo. 1997. “Does Latin America Exist? A Global Analysis of Cross-Cultural Differences,” PS: Political Science and Politics, 30: 34–46.
• Alexis de Tocqueville. 1835. Democracy in America, Volume I: Author’s preface, selections from chapters 2–3, 13, and 17.
• M. Steven Fish. 2002. “Islam and Authoritarianism,” World Politics, 55: 4–37.

Week 5: Leadership

• The Economist. 2015. “Lee Kuan Yew: The Wise Man of the East.” March 26.
• Graham Allison. 2015. “The Lee Kuan Yew Conundrum. Singapore’s Late Leader Governed Undemocratically but Effectively. Which Raises a Question: What is the Ultimate Purpose of Government?” The Atlantic. March 30.
• Daniel L. Byman and Kenneth M. Pollack. 2001. “Let Us Now Praise Great Men: Bringing the Statesman Back In,” International Security, 25 (4): 107–46.
• Benjamin F. Jones and Benjamin A. Olken. 2009. “Hit or Miss? The Effect of Assassinations on Institutions and War,” AEJ: Macroeconomics, 1 (2): 55–87.
• [REVIEW] Alfred Stepan. 1978. “Political Leadership and Regime Breakdown: Brazil.” In Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, eds. The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Latin America, pp. 110–37. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN: 9780801820236.
• Gautam Mukunda. 2012. Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter, pp. 1–35, 243–49. Harvard Business School Publishing. ISBN: 9781422186718.
• Chappell Lawson. [manuscript, no date]. Rulership. Selections from chapters 1–2.
• Dean Keith Simonton. 2006. “Presidential IQ, Openness, Intellectual Brilliance, and Leadership,” (PDF) Political Psychology, 27 (4): 511–26.
• Samuel Popkin. 1988. “Public Choice and Peasant Organization,” in Robert Bates, ed., Toward a Political Economy of Development, pp. 251–61 (on “Free Riders” and “Political Entrepreneurs.”) University of California Press. ISBN: 9780520314054.

Week 6: Constitutional Choices and Governmental Performance

• Arend Lijphart. 2012. Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries, chapters 1, 7–8, and 10. Yale University Press. ISBN: 9780300172027. [Preview with Google Books]
• Maurice Duverger. 1963. Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State, book II: chapter 1, parts 1–2 (pp. 206–54). John Wiley and Sons. ISBN: 9780416683202. 
• Seymour Martin Lipset. 1981. “Economic Development and Democracy,” in Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics, pp. 80–82. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN: 9780801825224.
• Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini. 2005. The Economic Effects of Constitutions, pp. 1–10, 269–78. MIT Press. ISBN: 9780262661928. [Buy at MIT Press]
• George Tsebelis. 1995. “Decision Making in Political Systems: Veto Players in Presidentialism, Parliamentarism, Multicameralism, and Multipartyism,” (PDF) British Journal of Political Science 25: 289–325.

Week 7: Parties, Party Systems, and Electoral Behavior

• Peter Gallagher, Michael Laver, and Peter Mair. 2011. “Cleavage Structures and Electoral Change,” in Representative Government in Modern Europe, pp. 278–325*.* McGraw Hill. ISBN: 9780077129675.
• Donald E Stokes. 1963. “Spatial Models of Party Competition.” American Political Science Review, (57): 368–77.
• Carles Boix. 2007. “The Emergence of Parties and Party Systems.” In Carles Boix and Susan C. Stokes, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics, chapter 21. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780199278480. 
• Herbert Kitschelt. 2007. “Party Systems.” In Carles Boix and Susan C. Stokes, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics, chapter 22. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780199278480. 
• Susan Stokes. 2007. “Political Clientelism.” In Carles Boix and Susan C. Stokes, eds.  The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics, chapter 25. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780199278480.

Week 8: Clientelism and Patronage Politics 

• [VIEW] Nicholas Herriman. “Twenty-Five Concepts in Anthropology: Patron-Client.” December 12, 2012. 
• James C. Scott. 1972. “Patron-Client Politics and Political Change in Southeast Asia,” (PDF) American Political Science Review, 66: 91–113.
• Susan Stokes. 2007. “Political Clientelism.” In Carles Boix and Susan C. Stokes, eds.  The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics, chapter 25. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780199278480.
• Kanchan Chandra. 2007. “Counting Heads: A Theory of Voter and Elite Behavior in Patronage Democracies,” in Herbert Kitschelt and Steven I. Wilkinson, eds., Patrons, Clients, and Policies, pp. 80–10. Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 9780521690041.
• Beatriz Magaloni, Alberto Diaz-Cayeros, and Federico Estevez. 2007. “Clientelism and Portfolio Diversification: A Model of Electoral Investment with Applications to Mexico,” in Herbert Kitschelt and Steven I. Wilkinson, eds., Patrons, Clients, and Policies, pp. 182–204. Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 9780521690041. 
• Federico Finan and Laura Schechter. 2012. “Vote Buying and Reciprocity,” Econometrica, 80(2): 863–81.
• Pedro C. Vicente. 2014. “Is Vote Buying Effective? Evidence from a Field Experiment in West Africa,” Economic Journal, 124 (574): 356–87.
• Kripa Ananthpur, Kabir Malik, and Vijayendra Rao. 2017. “The Anatomy of Failure: An Ethnography of a Randomized Trial to Deepen Democracy in Rural India,” World Development, 99: 481–97.        

Week 9: Modernization and Development 

• [VIEW] Hans Rosling. 2010. “Two Hundred Countries, Two Hundred Years, Four Minutes,” clip from “The Joys of Stats,” BBC Four.
• Samuel P. Huntington. 2006. Political Order in Changing Societies, pp. 72–77, 140–91. Yale University Press. ISBN: ‎9780300116205.
• Seymour Martin Lipset. 1981. “Economic Development and Democracy,” in Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics, p. 28–63. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN: 9780801825224.
• Robert Dahl. 1971. Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition, pp. 62–104. Yale University Press. ISBN: 9780300153576.
• Wayne Cornelius. 1975. Politics and the Migrant Poor in Mexico City, pp. 1–64, 135–65. Stanford University Press. ISBN: 9780804708807.

Week 10: Nationalism and National Identity

• Benedict Anderson. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso. ISBN: 9780860915461. [Preview with Google Books]

and either of the following:

• Keith Darden and Anna Grzymala-Busse. 2006. “The Great Divide: Literacy, Nationalism, and the Communist Collapse,” World Politics, 59 (1): 83–115.
• Yannick I. Pengl, Philip Roesslert, and Valeria Rueda. 2022. “Cash Crops, Print Technologies, and the Politicization of Ethnicity in Africa,” American Political Science Review, 116 (1): 181–99.

Week 11: Colonial Legacies

• George Orwell. 1936. “Shooting An Elephant.” New Writing, 2.
• Robert D. Woodberry. 2012. “The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy,” American Political Science Review, 106 (2): 244–74.
• Tomila Lankina and Lullit Getachew. 2012. “Mission or Empire, Word or Sword? The Human Capital Legacy in Postcolonial Democratic Development,” American Journal of Political Science, 56 (2): 465–83.
• Matthew K. Lange. 2004. “British Colonial Legacies and Political Development,” World Development, 32: 905–22.
• Lakshmi Iyer. 2010. “Direct versus Indirect Colonial Rule in India: Long-term Consequences,” Review of Economics and Statistics, 92 (4), 693–713.
• Daniel M. Klerman, Paul G. Mahoney, Holger Spamann and Mark I. Weinstein. 2011. “Legal Origins or Colonial History?” Journal of Legal Analysis, 3 (2): 379–409.
• Melissa Dell. 2010. “The Persistent Effects of Peru’s Mining Mita,” (PDF) Econometrica, 78 (6): 1863–903.

Week 12: Street-Level Bureaucracy

• Michael Lipsky. 2010. Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Service, preface (xi-xvi), 13–25, 40–53. Russell Sage Foundation. ISBN: ‎9780871545442. [Preview with Google Books]
• Maureen Lewis. 2006. “Tackling Healthcare Corruption and Governance Woes in Developing Countries,” CGD Working Paper 78. (PDF) Center for Global Development: Washington, DC. 
• Leda Zimmerman. 2019. “What Makes for Better Bureaucracy? Political Science PhD Candidates Guillermo Toral and Tugba Bozcaga Find that Government-Appointed Officials Deliver the Goods—Given the Right circumstances.” MIT News, October 21.
• Stephen Kosack, Courtney Tolmie, and Charles C. Griffin. 2010. From the Ground Up: Improving Government Performance with Independent Monitoring Organizations, pp. 50–64. Brookings Institution Press. ISBN: 9780815704126.
• Judith Tendler. 1997. Good Government in the Tropics, pp. 1–20. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN: ‎ 9780801854521.
• Jennifer Davis. 2003. “Corruption in Public Service Delivery: Experience from South Asia’s Water and Sanitation Sector,” World Development, 32 (1): 53–71.
• Rihkil R. Bhavnani and Alexander Lee. 2018. “Local Embeddedness and Bureaucratic Performance: Evidence from India,” Journal of Politics 80 (1): 71–87.

Week 13: Political Institutions and Economic Growth

• Dani Rodrik, Arvind Subramanian, and Francesco Trebbi. 2004. “Institutions Rule: The Primacy of Institutions over Geography and Integration in Economic Development,” Journal of Economic Growth, 9: 131–65.
• Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson. 2005. “Institutions as the Fundamental Cause of Long-Run Growth,” in Philippe Aghion and Steve Durlauf, Handbook of Economic Growth, pp. 386–416 [skip remainder]. North-Holland. ISBN: 9780444520418. [Preview with Google Books]
• Douglass C. North. 1991. “Institutions,” (PDF) Journal of Economic Perspectives, 5 (1): 97–112.
• Hernando de Soto, 2000. The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, pp. 1–37, 208–18. Basic Books. ISBN: 9780465016150. [Preview with Google Books]
• Peter B. Evans. 1995. Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformations, pp. 10–18, 43–73. Princeton University Press. ISBN: 9780691037363. [Preview with Google Books]