Comparative politics 

About: Comparative politics is an academic journal published by City University of New York. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Politics & Democracy. It has an ISSN identifier of 0010-4159. Over the lifetime, 1344 publications have been published receiving 64864 citations. The journal is also known as: Journal of comparative politics.

Policy paradigms, social learning, and the state: the case of economic policymaking in Britain

Abstract: This article examines the model of social learning often believed to confirm the autonomy of the state from social pressures, tests it against recent cases of change in British economic policies, and offers a fuller analysis of the role of ideas in policymaking, based on the concept of policy paradigms. A conventional model of social learning is found to fit some types of changes in policy well but not the movement from Keynesian to monetarist modes of policymaking. In cases of paradigm shift, policy respond to a wider social debate bound up with electoral competition that demands a reformulation of traditional conceptions of state-society relations.

The Logic of the Developmental State@@@Asia's Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization@@@The Political Economy of the New Asian Industrialism@@@MITI and the Japanese Miracle@@@Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization

Abstract: Published originally in 1990 to critical acclaim, Robert Wade's Governing the Market quickly established itself as a standard in contemporary political economy. In it, Wade challenged claims both of those who saw the East Asian story as a vindication of free market principles and of those who attributed the success of Taiwan and other countries to government intervention. Instead, Wade turned attention to the way allocation decisions were divided between markets and public administration and the synergy between them. Now, in a new introduction to this paperback edition, Wade reviews the debate about industrial policy in East and Southeast Asia and chronicles the changing fortunes of these economies over the 1990s. He extends the original argument to explain the boom of the first half of the decade and the crash of the second, stressing the links between corporations, banks, governments, international capital markets, and the International Monetary Fund. From this, Wade goes on to outline a new agenda for national and international development policy.

Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model

Abstract: I What conditions make democracy possible and what conditions make it thrive? Thinkers from Locke to Tocqueville and A. D. Lindsay have given many answers. Democracy, we are told, is rooted in man's innate capacity for self-government or in the Christian ethical or the Teutonic legal tradition. Its birthplace was the field at Putney where Cromwell's angry young privates debated their officers, or the more sedate House at Westminster, or the rock at Plymouth, or the forest cantons above Lake Lucerne, or the fevered brain of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Its natural champions are sturdy yeomen, or industrious merchants, or a prosperous middle class. It must be combined with strong local government, with a twoparty system, with a vigorous tradition of civil rights, or with a multitude of private associations. Recent writings of American sociologists and political scientists favor three types of explanation. One of these, proposed by Seymour Martin Lipset, Philips Cutright, and others, connects stable democracy with certain economic and social background conditions, such as high per capita income, widespread literacy, and prevalent urban residence. A second type of explanation dwells on the need for certain beliefs or psychological attitudes among the citizens. A long line of authors from Walter Bagehot to Ernest Barker has stressed the need for consensus as the basis of democracy-either in the form of a common belief in certain fundamentals or of procedural consensus on the rules of the game, which Barker calls "the Agreement to Differ." Among civic attitudes

The Causes of Terrorism

Abstract: Terrorism occurs both in the context of violent resistance to the state as well as in the service of state interests. If we focus on terrorism directed against governments for purposes of political change, we are considering the premeditated use or threat of symbolic, low-level violence by conspiratorial organizations. Terrorist violence communicates a political message; its ends go beyond damaging an enemy's material resources.' The victims or objects of terrorist attack have little intrinsic value to the terrorist group but represent a larger human audience whose reaction the terrorists seek. Violence characterized by spontaneity, mass participation, or a primary intent of physical destruction can therefore be excluded from our investigation. The study of terrorism can be organized around three questions: why terrorism occurs, how the process of terrorism works, and what its social and political effects are. Here the objective is to outline an approach to the analysis of the causes of terrorism, based on comparison of different cases of terrorism, in order to distinguish a common pattern of causation from the historically unique. The subject of terrorism has inspired a voluminous literature in recent years. However, nowhere among the highly varied treatments does one find a general theoretical analysis of the causes of terrorism. This may be because terrorism has often been approached from historical perspectives, which, if we take Laqueur's work as an example, dismiss explanations that try to take into account more than a single case as "exceedingly vague or altogether wrong." 2 Certainly existing general accounts are often based on assumptions that are neither explicit nor factually demonstrable. We find judgments centering on social factors such as the permissiveness and affluence in which Western youth are raised or the imitation of dramatic models encouraged by television. Alternatively, we encounter political explanations that blame revolutionary ideologies, Marxism-Leninism or nationalism, governmental weakness in giving in to terrorist demands, or conversely government oppres

Clarifying a contested concept: Populism in the study of Latin American politics

Abstract: Social scientists commonly encounter concepts that are unclear and contested. Authors inspired by competing theories emphasize different attributes from a complex set of defining characteristics. These differences in intension produce differences in extension as scholars apply the same term to divergent sets of cases. Therefore, it is unclear how one author's findings apply to the cases delimited by another's different definition. Conceptual disagreements thus hinder the cumulation of knowledge. Indeed, scholars can shield their arguments from criticism by attributing discordant results to definitional differences. Due to the lack of conceptual agreement, authors "talk past each other" and avoid addressing counterarguments. The resulting fragmentation obstructs debate and criticism, the engines of scholarly progress.' A particularly confusing concept is populism. Scholars have diverged not only over its specific attributes, but also over its primary domain. Should populism be defined in political, social, economic, and/or discursive terms? Due to these conceptual disagreements, a wide variety of governments, parties, movements, leaders, and policies has been labeled populist, and scholars have found populism to have radically divergent characteristics.2 To flee from this confusion, some authors have advocated abandoning the concept.3 But the scholarly community has refused to follow these calls. Instead, in the last decade studies of populism have thrived.4 Evidently, many authors continue to regard populism as a useful, even indispensable, concept in elucidating Latin American politics. This article therefore applies a different approach, inspired by Sartori's "guidelines for concept analysis."5 It seeks to clarify the meaning of populism and to propose a new definition. To place the debate in a systematic context, it first distinguishes different types of conceptualization. It then assesses the most useful type in clarifying populism. Finally, populism is systematically redefined by determining its domain and genus, clarifying its specific characteristics, and distinguishing two subtypes.