In many recent democracies, candidates compete for office using illegal strategies to influence voters. In Hungary and Romania, local actors including mayors and bureaucrats offer access to social policy benefits to voters who offer to support their preferred candidates, and they threaten others with the loss of a range of policy and private benefits for voting the "wrong" way. These quid pro quo exchanges are often called clientelism. How can politicians and their accomplices get away with such illegal campaigning in otherwise democratic, competitive elections? When do they rely on the worst forms of clientelism that involve threatening voters and manipulating public benefits? Conditionality and Coercion: Electoral Clientelism in Eastern Europe uses a mixed method approach to understand how illegal forms of campaigning including vote buying and electoral coercion persist in two democratic countries in the European Union. It argues that we must disaggregate clientelistic strategies based on whether they use public or private resources, and whether they involve positive promises or negative threats and coercion. We document that the type of clientelistic strategies that candidates and brokers use varies systematically across localities based on their underlying social coalitions. We also show that voters assess and sanction different forms of clientelism in different ways. Voters glean information about politicians' personal characteristics and their policy preferences from the clientelistic strategies these candidates deploy. Most voters judge candidates who use clientelism harshly. So how does clientelism, including its most odious coercive forms, persist in democratic systems? This book suggests that politicians can get away with clientelism by using forms of it that are in line with the policy preferences of constituencies whose votes they need. Clientelistic and programmatic strategies are not as distinct as previous have argued. Oxford Studies in Democratization is a series for scholars and students of comparative politics and related disciplines. Volumes concentrate on the comparative study of the democratization process that accompanied the decline and termination of the cold war. The geographical focus of the series is primarily Latin America, the Caribbean, Southern and Eastern Europe, and relevant experiences in Africa and Asia. The series editor is Laurence Whitehead, Senior Research Fellow, Nuffield College, University of Oxford.

In many recent democracies, candidates compete for office using illegal strategies to influence voters. In Hungary and Romania, local actors including mayors and bureaucrats offer access to social policy benefits to voters who offer to support their preferred candidates, and they threaten others with the loss of a range of policy and private benefits for voting the " way. These quid pro quo exchanges are often called clientelism. How can politicians and their accomplices get away with such illegal campaigning in otherwise democratic, competitive elections? When do they rely on the worst forms of clientelism that involve threatening voters and manipulating public benefits? Conditionality and Coercion: Electoral Clientelism in Eastern Europe uses a mixed method approach to understand how illegal forms of campaigning including vote buying and electoral coercion persist in two democratic countries in the European Union. It argues that we must disaggregate clientelistic strategies based on whether they use public or private resources, and whether they involve positive promises or negative threats and coercion. We document that the type of clientelistic strategies that candidates and brokers use varies systematically across localities based on their underlying social coalitions. We also show that voters assess and sanction different forms of clientelism in different ways. Voters glean information about politicians' personal characteristics and their policy preferences from the clientelistic strategies these candidates deploy. Most voters judge candidates who use clientelism harshly. So how does clientelism, including its most odious coercive forms, persist in democratic systems? This book suggests that politicians can get away with clientelism by using forms of it that are in line with the policy preferences of constituencies whose votes they need. Clientelistic and programmatic strategies are not as distinct as previous have argued. Oxford Studies in Democratization is a series for scholars and students of comparative politics and related disciplines. Volumes concentrate on the comparative study of the democratization process that accompanied the decline and termination of the cold war. The geographical focus of the series is primarily Latin America, the Caribbean, Southern and Eastern Europe, and relevant experiences in Africa and Asia. The series editor is Laurence Whitehead, Senior Research Fellow, Nuffield College, University of Oxford.

The book provides a systematic evaluation of the role played by business in the development of the modern welfare state. When and why have employers supported the development of institutions of social insurance that provide benefits to workers for various employment-related risks? What factors explain the variation in the social policy preferences of employers? What is the relative importance of business and labor-based organization in the negotiation of a new social policy? This book studies these critical questions, by examining the role played by German and French producers in eight social policy reforms spanning nearly a century of social policy development. The analysis demonstrates that major social policies were adopted by cross-class alliances comprising labor-based organizations and key sectors of the business community.

The expansion of suffrage and the introduction of elections are momentous political changes that represent only the first steps in the process of democratization. In the absence of institutions that protect the electoral autonomy of voters against a range of actors who seek to influence voting decisions, political rights can be just hollow promises. This book examines the adoption of electoral reforms that protected the autonomy of voters during elections and sought to minimize undue electoral influences over decisions made at the ballot box. Empirically, it focuses on the adoption of reforms protecting electoral secrecy in Imperial Germany during the period between 1870 and 1912. Empirically, the book provides a micro-historical analysis of the democratization of electoral practices, by showing how changes in district level economic and political conditions contributed to the formation of an encompassing political coalition supporting the adoption of electoral reforms.

Leaders have used economic power as a tool of foreign policy since at least Pericles, whose trade sanctions against Megara helped to spark the Peloponnesian War. But as Cécile Fabre notes, philosophers have spent relatively little time thinking about the relevant ethics, especially compared with the time they have spent thinking about the ethics of war. Yet the moral questions raised by the use of economic statecraft are significant and complex. Fabre deploys a cosmopolitan theory of justice and the theory of justified harm to answer these questions, and concludes that political actors are morally entitled to resort to economic sanctions and conditional aid, but only as a means to protect human rights, and so long as the harms which they thereby inflict are not out of proportion to the goods they bring about. Moreover, they are morally entitled to resort to conditional lending and conditional debt forgiveness, not just with a view to protect human rights, but also, under certain conditions, to pursue other non-wrongful political goals.--