Books

CoverPoliticsCapitalism2015 The Politics of Advanced Capitalism, New York, Cambridge University Press (co-edited with Silja Häusermann, Herbert Kitschelt, and Hanspeter Kriesi)

This book serves as a sequel to two distinguished volumes on capitalism: Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism (Cambridge, 1999) and Order and Conflict in Contemporary Capitalism (1985). Both volumes took stock of major economic challenges advanced industrial democracies faced, as well as the ways political and economic elites dealt with them. However, during the last decades, the structural environment of advanced capitalist democracies has undergone profound changes: sweeping deindustrialization, tertiarization of the employment structure, and demographic developments. This book provides a synthetic view allowing the reader to grasp the nature of these structural transformations and their consequences in terms of the politics of change, policy outputs, and outcomes. In contrast to functionalist and structuralist approaches, the book advocates and contributes to a “return of electoral and coalitional politics” to political economy research.

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InequalityCover22012 The Political Geography of Inequality:  Regions and Redistribution, New York, Cambridge University

Winner of the 2013 Best Book Award by the European Politics and Society section of
the American Political Science Association.
Honorable Mention for the 2014 Luebbert Best Book Award by the Comparative Politics
section of the American Political Science Association.

This book addresses two questions – why some political systems have more centralized systems of interpersonal redistribution than others, and why some political unions make larger efforts to equalize resources among their constituent units than others. This book presents a new theory of the origin of fiscal structures in systems with several levels of government. The argument points to two major factors to account for the variation in redistribution: the interplay between economic geography and political representation on the one hand, and the scope of interregional economic externalities on the other. To test the empirical implications derived from the argument, the book relies on in-depth studies of the choice of fiscal structures in unions as diverse as the European Union, Canada and the United States in the aftermath of the Great Depression; Germany before and after Reunification; and Spain after the transition to democracy.

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DemocracyBookCover 2008 Democracy, Inequality, and Representation, New York, Russell Sage Foundation (co-edited with Christopher J. Anderson).

The gap between the richest and poorest Americans has grown steadily over the last thirty years, and economic inequality is on the rise in many other industrialized democracies as well. But the magnitude and pace of the increase differs dramatically across nations. A country’s political system and its institutions play a critical role in determining levels of inequality in a society. Democracy, Inequality, and Representation argues that the reverse is also true– inequality itself shapes political systems and institutions in powerful and often overlooked ways.

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