Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions Series

Congratulations to Elinor Ostrom, Co-Winner of The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2009!The governance of natural resources used by many individuals in common is an issue of increasing concern to policy analysts. Both state control and privatization of resources have been advocated, but neither the state nor the market have been uniformly successful in solving common pool resource problems. After critiquing the foundations of policy analysis as applied to natural resources, Elinor Ostrom here provides a unique body of empirical data to explore conditions under which common pool resource problems have been satisfactorily or unsatisfactorily solved. Dr. Ostrom first describes three models most frequently used as the foundation for recommending state or market solutions. She then outlines theoretical and empirical alternatives to these models in order to illustrate the diversity of possible solutions. In the following chapters she uses institutional analysis to examine different ways--both successful and unsuccessful--of governing the commons. In contrast to the proposition of the tragedy of the commons argument, common pool problems sometimes are solved by voluntary organizations rather than by a coercive state. Among the cases considered are communal tenure in meadows and forests, irrigation communities and other water rights, and fisheries.

Viele der grundlegenden Fragen in der Sozialwissenschaft erfordern eine Untersuchung der Rolle sozialer Institutionen. Warum gibt es so viele soziale Institutionen? Warum nehmen sie in einer Gesellschaft eine Form an und in einer anderen eine ganz andere? Auf welche Weise entwickeln sich diese Institutionen ursprünglich? Und wann und warum verändern sie sich? "Institutionen und gesellschaftlicher Konflikt" behandelt diese Fragen auf zwei Arten. Zunächst bietet es eine gründliche Kritik an einer Vielzahl von Theorien des institutionellen Wandels, von den klassischen Darstellungen von Smith, Hume, Marx und Weber bis zu den zeitgenössischen Ansätzen der evolutionären Theorie, der Theorie sozialer Konventionen und dem neuen Institutionalismus. Zweitens entwickelt es eine neue Theorie des institutionellen Wandels, die die Verteilungskonsequenzen sozialer Institutionen betont. Das Entstehen von Institutionen wird als Nebenprodukt von Verteilungskonflikten erklärt, in denen Machtasymmetrien in einer Gesellschaft institutionelle Lösungen für Konflikte erzeugen. Das Buch zieht seine Beispiele aus einer umfangreichen Vielfalt sozialer Institutionen.

An analytical framework for explaining the ways in which institutions and institutional change affect the performance of economies is developed in this analysis of economic structures.

The Supreme Court's reapportionment decisions, beginning with Baker v. Carr in 1962, had far more than jurisprudential consequences. They sparked a massive wave of extraordinary redistricting in the mid-1960s. Both state legislative and congressional districts were redrawn more comprehensively--by far--than at any previous time in our nation's history. Moreover, they changed what would legally happen should a state government fail to enact a new districting plan when one was legally required. This book provides the first detailed analysis of how judicial partisanship affected redistricting outcomes in the 1960s, arguing that the reapportionment revolution led indirectly to three fundamental changes in the nature of congressional elections: the abrupt eradication of a 6% pro-Republican bias in the translation of congressional votes into seats outside the south; the abrupt increase in the apparent advantage of incumbents; and the abrupt alteration of the two parties' success in congressional recruitment and elections.

The book explores the political evolution of Japan from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, focusing on the transition from oligarchic rule to military leadership. It investigates why the Meiji oligarchs failed to establish lasting institutions to maintain their power, employing a broader analytical framework applicable to oligarchies. The authors, J. Mark Ramseyer and Frances M. Rosenbluth, analyze the implications of these political choices on Japan's governance, economic growth, and international relations, contributing to a deeper understanding of regime change dynamics.

Individuals, Institutions, and Markets offers a theory of how the institutional framework of a society emerges and how markets within institutions work. The book shows that both social institutions, defined as the rules of the game, and exchange processes can be analyzed along a common theoretical structure. Mantzavinos' proposal is that a problem solving model of individual behavior inspired by the cognitive sciences provides such a unifying theoretical structure. Integrating the latest scholarship in economics, sociology, political science, law, and anthropology, Mantzavinos offers a genuine political economy showing how social institutions affect economic outcomes.

Focusing on the intersection of law and economic growth in Japan, the author employs a rational-choice framework to analyze historical markets, particularly those deemed "exploitative," such as indentured servitude and sexual services. He highlights how Japanese courts established clear property rights and how market participants adeptly navigated informational asymmetries during contracts. The findings suggest that Japan's legal system fostered mutually beneficial agreements, leading to efficient economic growth without systematic exploitation based on sex or age.

Empirical Studies in Institutional Change is a collection of nine empirical studies by fourteen scholars. Dealing with issues ranging from the evolution of secure markets in seventeenth-century England to the origins of property rights in airport slots in modern America, the contributors analyze institutions and institutional change. To make the papers accessible to a wide audience, the editors have written an introduction to each study and added three theoretical essays to the volume, including Douglass North's Nobel Prize address, that reflect their collective views as to the present and future status of institutional analysis.

This book offers a new theory of state growth, based on the creation of credible and prudent state budgets.

When are policy makers willing to make costly adjustments to their macroeconomic policies to mitigate balance-of-payments problems? Which types of adjustment strategies do they choose? Under what circumstances do they delay reform, and when are such delays likely to result in financial crises? To answer these questions, this book examines how macroeconomic policy adjustments affect individual voters in financially open economies and argues that the anticipation of these distributional effects influences policy makers' decisions about the timing and the type of reform. Empirically, the book combines analyses of cross-national survey data of voters' and firms' policy evaluations with comparative case studies of national policy responses to the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997/8 and the recent Global Financial Crisis in Eastern Europe. The book shows that variation in policy makers' willingness to implement reform can be traced back to differences in the vulnerability profiles of their countries' electorates.

Constitutional courts have emerged as central institutions in many advanced democracies. This book investigates the sources and the limits of judicial authority, focusing on the central role of public support for judicial independence. The empirical sections of the book illustrate the theoretical argument in an in-depth study of the German Federal Constitutional Court, including statistical analysis of judicial decisions, case studies, and interviews with judges and legislators. The book's major finding is that the interests of governing majorities, prevailing public opinion, and the transparency of the political environment exert a powerful influence on judicial decisions. Judges are influenced not only by jurisprudential considerations and their policy preferences, but also by strategic concerns. By highlighting this dimension of constitutional review, the book challenges the contention that high court justices are largely unconstrained actors as well as the notion that constitutional courts lack democratic legitimacy.

This Book explains why African countries have remained mired in a disastrous economic crisis since the late 1970s. It shows that dynamics internal to African state structures largely explain this failure to overcome economic difficulties rather than external pressures on these same structures as is often argued. Far from being prevented from undertaking reforms by societal interest and pressure groups, clientelism within the state elite, ideological factors and low state capacity have resulted in some limited reform, but much prevarication and manipulation of the reform process, by governments which do not really believe that reform will be effective.

This book puts the debate on commons, commoners, and the disappearance of both throughout early modern and modern western Europe in a new light, through new approaches and innovative methodologies. Tine De Moor links the historical debate about the long-term evolution of commons to the present-day debates on common-pool resources.

European legislation affects countless aspects of daily life in modern Europe but just how does the European Union make such significant legislative decisions? How important are the formal decision-making procedures in defining decision outcomes and how important is the bargaining that takes place among the actors involved? Using a combination of detailed evidence and theoretical rigour, this volume addresses these questions and others that are central to understanding how the EU works in practice. It focuses on the practice of day-to-day decision-making in Brussels and the interactions that take place among the Member States in the Council and among the Commission, the Council and the European Parliament. A unique data set of actual Commission proposals are examined against which the authors develop, apply and test a range of explanatory models of decision-making, exemplifying how to study decision-making in other political systems using advanced theoretical tools and appropriate research design.