When will government elites prepare for natural hazards? Existing research posits that governments will respond to disasters, but rarely have incentives to prepare for them. This Element argues that disaster preparedness can, and does, occur in the context of both motivated ruling elites and a...

Claim-making - the everyday strategies through which citizens pursue rights fulfilment - is often overlooked in studies of political behavior, which tend to focus on highly visible, pivotal moments: elections, mass protests, high court decisions, legislative decisions. But what of the politics...

This 'Element' discusses the impacts of missionary work in sub-Saharan Africa. It illustrates inherently more political and context-dependent aspects of missionary behavior, such as local struggles for religious hegemony between Protestants and Catholics and interactions between colonial regimes...

This Element investigates the relationship between the narcotics industry and politics and assesses how it influences domestic political dynamics, including economic development prospects in Latin America. It argues that links between criminal organizations, politicians, and state agents give...

The authors find that compared with other emerging capitalist economies, the Chinese bureaucracy has developed relatively strong capabilities to advance 'innovation-driven development'. This book seeks to provide avenues for comparing it with other late developers.

Nationalism has long been a normatively and empirically contested concept, associated with democratic revolutions and public goods provision, but also with xenophobia, genocide, and wars. Moving beyond facile distinctions between 'good' and 'bad' nationalisms, the authors argue that nationalism...

Scholars and practitioners seek development solutions through the engineering and strengthening of state institutions. Yet, the state is not the only or the primary arena shaping how citizens, service providers and state officials engage in actions that constitute politics and development. These...

This Element studies the causes and the consequences of modern imperialism. The focus is on British and US imperialism in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries respectively. The dynamics of both formal and informal empires are analyzed. The argument is that imperialism is moved mainly by...

This Element documents the diversity and dissensus of scholarship on the political resource curse, diagnoses its sources, and directs scholarly attention towards what the authors believe will be more fruitful avenues of future research. In the scholarship to date, there is substantial regional...