Anna Grzymala-Busse

University of Michigan | U-M · Department of Political Science

Cambridge Core - Latin American Government, Politics and Policy - Life after Dictatorship - edited by James Loxton

The state remains the most important political unit of the modern world. In the most recent phase of globalization the role and position of the state has changed, but after a short intermezzo in which nothing less than the “end of the state” was frequently proclaimed, the social sciences have reached consensus about the ongoing centrality of states...

The study of religion holds great promise for the study of identity, institutional origins, the state, and the strategies of institutional actors in comparative politics. Doctrinal differences translate into distinct patterns of state institutions, economic performance, and policy preferences. Religious attachments affect voting and popular mobiliz...

Causal inference and the logic of historical explanation are grounded in temporality. Yet the relationship between causal analysis and aspects of temporality, such as duration, tempo, acceleration, and timing, is often less clear. Using examples from analyses of institutional change and postcommunist regime transitions, the author argues that aspec...

How do informal institutions influence the formation and function of formal institutions? Existing typologies focus on the interaction of informal institutions with an established framework of formal rules that is taken for granted. In transitional settings, such typologies are less helpful, since many formal institutions are in a state of flux. In...

Why do some religions expand without diluting their doctrine? While most explanations of religious growth have focused on market competition, conversion and pronatalist theology, these factors are neither necessary nor sufficient for religious expansion. Instead, religions with both pronatalist norms and strong community support for large families...

In choosing strategies of state capture (the extraction of private benefits by incumbent officeholders from the state), rulers choose whether to share rents with popular constituencies and whether to tolerate competition. These choices are conditioned by existing organizational endowments, the costs of buying support, and the trade-off between the...

As communist regimes collapsed in the years 1989—91, communist parties and leaders exited power in roughly half the cases. The causes and the impact of this variation have generated considerable controversy. The authors show that the combined timing and content of the introduction of mass literacy was responsible for generating the national standar...

The overarching argument of this paper is that the party systems of less developed countries are less institutionalized than those of the advanced industrial democracies. The paper examines three differences between the party systems of the advanced industrial democracies and party systems of less developed countries. First, we show that most democ...

The (re)building of the post-communist states offers new perspectives both on the state and on the multiple transitions that followed communism. Specifically, it shifts our analytical focus from states as consolidated outcomes and unitary actors to the process by which states come into being and into action in the modern era. This pro- cess consist...

The communist parties’ adaptation to democracy is one of the more remarkable developments of post-1989 politics in East Central Europe. Ironically, unresponsive and incompetent ruling communist parties have in some cases spawned successors that have been able to respond to democratic electoral cleavages and convince large portions of the electorate...

Abstract will be provided by author.

Abstract will be provided by author.

Recent work by Carles Boix and Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson has focused on the role of inequality and distributive conflict in transitions to and from democratic rule. We assess these claims through causal process observation, using an original qualitative data set on democratic transitions and reversions during the ―third wave‖ period from 19...

The post-communist state defied early predictions: it has both grown and become newly politicized, often serving the private ends of democratically-elected parties rather than providing public goods. This paper focuses on one aspect of state politicization: the reform of formal state institutions, and specifically, the civil service, oversight and...

Theories of institutional development have tended to view discretion, or the leeway to act within institutional bounds, as an often unintended consequence of agency design and institutional specification. Yet the post-communist states show that discretion is a fundamental goal of institutional creation among competing elites. In turn, while politic...