"While we were writing this book, one of the authors fell ill. The diagnosis required two CAT scans, two MRIs, consultation with an oto-neurologist, an otolaryngologist, and an audiologist, while the treatment required a week in the hospital, a total of 15 hours of surgery carried out by a team...

"Why are some communities able to come together to improve their collective lot while others are not? This book advances a novel answer to this question by looking at variation in local government performance in decentralized West Africa: communities are better able to coordinate around basic...

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...

"José swung the gate open, hopped back into the bed of the truck, and tapped the window to the cab gently with the butt of his rifle. Iván cut the headlights and put the truck in gear. We inched forward along the bumpy road that carved through the broad southern Venezuelan plains, the dust...

"Many governments face similar pressures surrounding the hotly debated topic of immigration. Yet, the disparate ways in which policy makers respond is striking. The Comparative Politics of Immigration explains why democratic governments adopt the immigration policies they do. Through an in-depth...

This book addresses the long-standing puzzle of how China's private sector manages to grow without secure property rights, and proposes a new theory of selective property rights to explain this phenomenon. Drawing on rich empirical evidence including in-depth interviews, a unique national survey...

"This is a book about the demand for redistribution of income through taxes and transfers. It is also a book about how our main intuition about what affects individual preferences for redistribution (whether a person is rich or poor) needs to be complemented with the consideration of other...

"Why do governments tolerate the violation of their own laws and regulations? Conventional wisdom is that governments cannot enforce their laws. Forbearance as Redistribution challenges the standard interpretation by showing that politicians choose not to enforce laws to distribute resources and...