Those studying development often address the impact of government policies, but rarely the politics that generate these policies. A culmination of several decades of work by Robert Bates, among the most respected comparativists in political science, this compact volume seeks to rectify that...

This paper uses new data on agricultural policy interventions to examine the political economy of agricultural trade policies in Sub-Saharan Africa. Historically, African governments have discriminated against agricultural producers in general (relative to producers in non-agricultural sectors),...

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed...

In interpreting these results, we can make use of several characteristics of the economies of the developing nations. The first is that consumers in poor nations spend a very large portion of their incomes on food — in many cases, in excess of 50 to 60 percent. The second is that...

In stateless societies, coercion is privately provided; violence is employed to engage in, and to defend against, predation. At best, violence results in mere redistribution; being destructive, it more often results in a loss of social welfare. When organized, however, violence can be socially...

In <em>Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History</em>, Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast probe the organizational foundations of development. Outlining the properties of the "natural" and "open entry" societies, they highlight as...

Do new communication technologies, such as social media, alleviate the collective action problem? This paper provides evidence that penetration of VK, the dominant Russian online social network, led to more protest activity during a wave of protests in Russia in 2011. As a source of exogenous...