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1566 results in Comparative politics

Page 1 of 79

The Guardian State

Outsourcing Authoritarianism
  • Private Security Actors in the Shadow of the Arab Uprisings
  • Engy Moussa
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    February 2027
    Print publication:
    28 February 2027
  • The 2010–2011 Arab uprisings constituted a wake-up call to authoritarian regimes. In this book, Engy Moussa demonstrates how the multifaceted changes affecting the market for security, particularly the booming privatization of security, were central to authoritarian survival across the region. By investigating the privatization of security since 2011, Moussa argues that this phenomenon is deeply influenced by regime security and interests, with serious political ramifications. At times, it fails to support democratization efforts. In other cases, it endorses authoritarian consolidation through advanced co-optation and repression, and expansive patrimonial networks. Recognizing the global growth of private security, this innovative work pushes beyond the Arab region and generates an analytical framework to study the manifestations and impact of security market reconfigurations across cases. By comparing Tunisia and Egypt, Moussa shows how post-uprisings outcomes depend on key generalized factors interacting with unique local dynamics amidst an evolving, unpredictable and hardly controlled process.

Severed Connections
  • How Intraparty Politics Erodes Representation in Democratic Africa
  • Donghyun Danny Choi
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2027
    Print publication:
    31 January 2027
  • Political parties are often seen as guarantors of democratic accountability. Yet their internal decisions over who may run for office can have pernicious consequences for the quality of representation. Severed Connections reframes our understanding of democratic dysfunction by tracing how politics inside parties shapes whether elected officials are attentive to their constituents, well before voters cast a ballot. Drawing on Kenya as a central case, with comparisons across democratic Africa and beyond, the book argues that party leaders use control over candidate selection to balance two competing objectives: winning elections and consolidating power within the party. They resolve this tension strategically, nominating voter-oriented candidates in competitive districts and loyal insiders in party strongholds. These choices leave citizens in strongholds systematically underserved - not because institutions are weak or voters are uninformed, but because the party decided their legislators' priorities long before election day. Severed Connections places the internal life of political parties at the center of how democratic representation succeeds or fails.

How Policies Create Electoral Cleavages
  • The Politicization of Ethnic Identity under Programmatic Party Competition
  • Maayan Mor
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2027
    Print publication:
    31 January 2027
  • Why do ethnic cleavages emerge under programmatic party competition? How Policies Create Electoral Cleavages offers a novel explanation that focuses on the impact of government policies on the incentives of voters to prioritize their ethnic identity over other interests and identities. Government policies that pose a threat or cause relative deprivation to co-ethnics in domains central to voters link their fates and drive them to seek out pro-ethnic candidates and parties. In the face of damaging policies, activists, political aspirants, and incumbents have powerful incentives to organize the emerging voter coalition into a new ethnic constituency and connect it to the party system. How Policies Create Electoral Cleavages tests this argument on multiple case studies in nineteenth century Prussia, Baden, and Bavaria, mid-twentieth century Belgium, and late twentieth century Israel. It shows that policies that were damaging to voters' material interests or social status drove their mobilization along ethnic lines.

Artificial Intelligence, Politics, and Political Science

Balancing Institutional Power in European Policymaking
  • Arthur Benz, Adrienne Héritier
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2027
    Print publication:
    31 January 2027
  • Since the EU has been confronted with multiple crises, scholars have debated the consequences from the viewpoint of integration, disintegration, or differentiated integration. This book takes a different perspective. Rather than focusing on macro-structures, it highlights the ongoing contestation and balancing of power in everyday policymaking. These processes lead to incremental, often hidden informal institutional change rather than overall Treaty amendments. They unfold in European legislation under the Community Method, in intergovernmental politics, administrative policymaking, and court proceedings and often link all these venues. The book analyses and empirically describes different conflicts, strategies, and processes through which actors respond to power imbalances in policymaking and seek to reshape rules and patterns of interaction. The authors argue that this enduring balancing of power is essential to the EU's resilience, as it compels actors to respond to challenges and find institutional solutions, particularly in a fast-changing international order.

Green Germany
  • Local Pathways to Global Sustainability
  • Carol Hager, Thomas M. Lekan
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2027
    Print publication:
    31 January 2027
  • Germany is an environmental pathbreaker among industrial societies, maintaining its export-driven economy while reducing greenhouse gas emissions and committing to carbon-neutrality by 2045. Yet it was ordinary citizens rather than bureaucrats or industry who generated its most durable policy solutions. Drawing on a range of case studies from the twentieth century to the present, Carol Hager and Thomas M. Lekan show how local residents combined social and ecological agendas and often defied government officials or corporate interests. These citizens promoted renewable energy, accessible public transportation, sustainable housing, biosphere reserves, and urban green spaces. Each chapter advances a three-pronged understanding of Germany's sustainability culture anchored by a deep sense of place; a 'do-it-yourself' mentality; and the generative power of conflict. By showing how a highly industrialized country became ecologically wiser, this study seeks to re-energize conversations about climate action and green transitions in societies across the globe.

Trust in Crisis?

Becoming Madam Europe
  • Ursula von der Leyen and the Pursuit of a Union of Equality
  • Joyce Marie Mushaben
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2026
    Print publication:
    31 December 2026
  • Joyce Marie Mushaben assesses the extraordinary political career and policy legacy of Ursula von der Leyen. A medical doctor and mother of seven children, von der Leyen entered national politics at age forty-two. Consistently opposed by hardliners within her own party, the CDU, she mastered three ministerial portfolios across four Merkel governments, enabling her to transform Germany's obsolete gender regime and its historically anti-militarist 'strategic culture.' As the first female President of the EU Commission in 2019, she pursued a 'Union of Equality,' extending women's and gender rights in new domains. Forced to tackle the Covid pandemic, climate change and Russia's war against Ukraine, she met each crisis with dignity and calm. She strengthened the EU's identity as a 'value community' and redefined its role as a 'geopolitical' global actor. This is the first book to analyse von der Leyen's achievements in the context of an era of global crisis.

Fragmented Policy Change
  • Fiscal and Bureaucratic Politics in 1960s–1980s United Kingdom
  • José Tomás Labarca
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2026
    Print publication:
    30 November 2026
  • This book challenges the conventional narrative that the 1970s were a fundamental watershed between two seamless economic policy paradigms in postwar United Kingdom, Keynesianism and neoliberalism. Drawing on extensive archival research, José Tomás Labarca highlights heterogeneity and discontinuity in postwar economic policymaking rather than consensus. The book argues that there was no seamless Keynesian economic policy epoch, challenging widespread misconceptions about excessive government spending in the 1960s and 1970s to offer a novel interpretation of shrinking policy space in the 1970s. Centering the multidimensional politics of official knowledge, Labarca provides an original analysis of how conflicts between competing government elite coalitions drove fragmented policy change before and after the 1970s. While most research focuses exclusively on the politics of economic ideas, Fragmented Policy Change proves that not only economic but also organizational and bureaucratic ideas, processes, and interests influence the evolution of relatively (in)coherent policy regimes.

Representation from Below
  • The Grassroots Origins of Women's Political Power in India
  • Tanushree Goyal
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2026
    Print publication:
    30 November 2026
  • After decades on the sidelines, women are now central to India's political and development agenda. Representation from Below traces this transformation away from the halls of power toward women's inclusion in local politics and their reordering of party organization. Drawing on fieldwork, survey data, and natural experiments, the book shows how women in local politics built grassroots chapters of women's party wings and recruited other women into them, expanding parties' organizational capacity to mobilize women voters. As women became electorally consequential, party elites adapted, reshaping policies and opening pathways to higher office. Challenging views that clientelist parties or patriarchal norms block women's agency, the book demonstrates how gendered constraints became sources of leverage over parties. The book expands how we understand women's political inclusion-not only as a matter of legitimacy or representation-but as a source of organizational capacity that reshapes who parties mobilize and who they ultimately serve.

Interim Constitutions
  • Legal Nature and Performance
  • Leena Grover
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2026
    Print publication:
    31 October 2026
  • In the wake of wars and revolutions, fragile societies increasingly turn to interim constitutions to enact their visions for a brighter future. With more than 150 interim constitutions enacted globally since 1789, an understanding is needed of these legal instruments and how well they perform. As the first major comparative study, Interim Constitutions: Legal Nature and Performance fills this void.  This authoritative guide for practitioners and scholars addresses how interim constitutions compare to other constitutional reform options, when they are used and why, their functions, drafting processes and main design features, negotiation challenges, and the benefits they yield – including whether they lead to final (non-interim) constitutions, as well as greater peace and democracy. Dozens of hypotheses in the state of the art on achieving successful transitions are tested and disrupted, leading to novel and useful insights for improving future practice. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

The Rise and Fall of Tunisian Democracy
  • Populism, Polarization, and the Perils of Power-Sharing
  • Sharan Grewal
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2026
    Print publication:
    31 October 2026
  • After the Arab Spring, Tunisia emerged as the one success story to transition to democracy, winning a Nobel Peace Prize in 2015 for its focus on inclusion and power-sharing. How, then, did its democracy collapse in 2021? Drawing on unique interviews with senior Tunisian officials, alongside three nationally representative surveys of the population, The Rise and Fall of Tunisian Democracy points to an overemphasis on compromise, consensus, and power-sharing. Although power-sharing institutions can be useful at the start of a transition, the book finds that extending them beyond that point can lead democracy to unravel by frustrating voters and spurring the rise of populists and extremists. The book takes an in-depth look at Tunisia's transition and then explores how far the theory travels through a quantitative analysis of all democratic transitions between 1942–2020. Overall, the book reveals the dark side of power-sharing, broadening our understanding of the causes of populism, polarization, and democratic breakdown.

The Political Economy of Public Bureaucracy
  • Socioeconomic Conflict, Imperialism, and the Emergence of Modern Administrative Organizations
  • Jan P. Vogler
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2026
    Print publication:
    31 October 2026
  • How do domestic socioeconomic conflicts and imperial legacies from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continue to shape contemporary governance? This book offers a groundbreaking dual perspective on bureaucratic development. It challenges Max Weber's prediction of uniform bureaucratic rationalization by revealing that public administrations exhibit fundamental and lasting differences across advanced capitalist countries. This divergence originates in historical conflicts between social groups, producing outcomes that remain embedded in current institutions across various European countries and the United States. Moreover, using innovative research designs, including assessments of Poland and Romania's historical divisions based on rigorous spatial methods, Jan P. Vogler demonstrates that bureaucracies imposed by empires over a century ago still affect government efficiency, meritocracy, and state–citizen relations today. Beyond in-depth historical analyses, he provides key insights for policymakers. Specifically, readers will learn why bureaucratic reforms that ignore historical legacies will likely fail, enabling them to understand why administrative systems have not converged, but instead differ so markedly across seemingly similar countries.

Transnational Repression
  • A Comparative Perspective Across Autocracies and Democracies
  • Edited by Klaus Brummer, Šumit Ganguly
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2026
    Print publication:
    31 October 2026
  • Transnational repression, understood as the extraterritorial repressive actions by states against members of their national community abroad, has become a global phenomenon. Several trends and developments, including cross-border migration, technological advances, and democratic backsliding, suggest that acts of transnational repression are likely to increase further in the future. Importantly, transnational repression is not exclusively driven by autocracies: Liberal states also contribute to those challenges when they question the legitimacy of international institutions or when they engage in outright acts of transnational repression themselves. Covering more than a dozen countries from both the Global North and the Global South, this volume explores transnational repression along three dimensions. First, what are the motives for states to engage in transnational repression (the 'why')? Second, what instruments and tactics do states employ when engaging in acts of transnational repression (the 'how')? Third, what are the implications and consequences of transnational repression (the 'so what')?

Policy in Transition
  • How Regime Change Affects Policymaking
  • Emilia Simison
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2026
    Print publication:
    30 September 2026
  • Regime transitions often raise expectations for sweeping policy change-yet those expectations are not always realized. Focusing on the mechanisms linking regime type and policy, Policy in Transition explains how, and under which conditions, policy changes are likely to occur after a regime transition. Whether policies change depends on how the transition reshapes the space for contestation and on the visibility of the policy in question. This finding argument is supported through an in-depth comparative historical analysis of the evolution of housing and financial policies across regime types changes in Argentina and Brazil since the 1960s. Drawing on extensive archival materials, public records, historical media, and interviews with key actors, the book studies policymaking across different authoritarian and democratic regimes providing nuanced insights into the relationship between political regimes and policy change.

No Neutral Ground
  • NGOs and Democracy Promotion after Civil War
  • Justine Maisha
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2026
    Print publication:
    30 September 2026
  • No Neutral Ground examines the complexities of promoting democracy after civil wars, focusing on the role of domestic non-governmental organizations (NGOs). While peace and democracy promoting NGOs are expected to be impartial in their activities, in the aftermath of violence, citizens may distrust these organizations and perceive them as exclusionary, detracting from their effectiveness. The book explores how post-war polarization shapes the interactions among citizens, NGO leaders, and governments, influencing citizen attitudes toward democracy promotion. Each actor is shaped by the destabilizing effects of war, resulting in unintended consequences. Drawing on extensive original data collected through years of fieldwork in Côte d'Ivoire, encompassing interviews, participant observation, focus groups, surveys, experiments, and lab-in-the-field games, No Neutral Ground reassesses the theory and practice of post-conflict democratization and offers insights into whether and how wartime legacies might be overcome to achieve democracy.

We Have the Rights
  • Protest and Democracy in Three African Cities
  • Marcus Walton
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2026
    Print publication:
    30 September 2026
  • Does democracy matter for urban protest? Africa is the fastest urbanizing region in the world, with more citizens every day requiring access to goods like housing, energy, food, and transportation. At the same time, citizens across the continent have also indicated declining satisfaction with democracy. Thus, many citizens have turned to strategies like protest to meet their basic needs. Yet for urban communities fighting for access to these goods, does democracy still make a difference? Drawing on a decades-long comparison of urban protest in Cairo, Lagos, and Johannesburg, We Have the Rights challenges the conventional wisdom of the social movement literature, by showing that even when democratization has not altered the prevailing forms of protest, it can significantly improve protest outcomes. These findings suggest that democracy can empower urban communities, not by enclosing citizen participation, but by expanding the avenues and boundaries of institutional engagement.

Insurgent Witness
  • Archetypes of Action in Revolutionary Iran
  • Arash Davari
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2026
    Print publication:
    30 September 2026
  • How do we describe the collective identity of people who make a popular revolution? Notwithstanding marked differences, most accounts understand revolutionary collectives as partisan and relegate spectators to irrelevance-or, worse, to the ignominy of cowards and traitors. Revisiting histories of the 1979 revolution in Iran, Arash Davari explores how millions of people defied expectations and joined popular assemblies to demand the fall of the Pahlavi regime. Through the lens of recent global social movements, Insurgent Witness presents an archetype of collective identity as partisan and spectator at once. Combining novel findings with a fresh methodological approach to previously considered collections, this book presents a distinct concept of revolutionary subjectivity-one that describes the terms of mass revolt in Iran and at the same time challenges prevailing assumptions about social change and popular sovereignty in contemporary political thought.

Incomplete Constitutions and Coordination in Deeply Divided Societies
  • The Afghan Experiment
  • Shamshad Pasarlay
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2026
    Print publication:
    30 September 2026
  • Why are some deeply divided societies able to craft stable constitutional regimes while others have failed and continue to be mired in endless communal conflict? This puzzle constitutes the central question this book seeks to address. This book is directed at scholars who wish to understand the riddles of constitutional performance in deeply divided societies, and those who are interested in understanding Afghanistan's troubled constitutional history. By providing the most comprehensive account of the drafting and performance of Afghanistan's 2004 constitution, the book is aimed at scholars who want to understand the nuances of the process that produced the Constitution and evaluate its performance with fresh eyes. The world is full of divided, post-conflict societies which continue to witness tragic violent conflicts. This book is thus a valuable resource for policy makers who are currently grappling with how to approach thorny problems of constitutional design and nation-building in these societies.

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