For the first time since Mao, a Chinese leader may serve a life-time tenure. Xi Jinping may well replicate Mao's successful strategy to maintain power. If so, what are the institutional and policy implications for China? Victor C. Shih investigates how leaders of one-party autocracies seek to dominate the elite and achieve true dictatorship, governing without fear of internal challenge or resistance to major policy changes. Through an in-depth look of late-Mao politics informed by thousands of historical documents and data analysis, Coalitions of the Weak uncovers Mao's strategy of replacing seasoned, densely networked senior officials with either politically tainted or inexperienced officials. The book further documents how a decentralized version of this strategy led to two generations of weak leadership in the Chinese Communist Party, creating the conditions for Xi's rapid consolidation of power after 2012.

An exhaustively researched account of late-Mao power strategy and its consequences on elite dynamics in subsequent decades, including the rise of Xi.

Coalition Politics and Economic Development challenges the conventional wisdom that coalition government hinders necessary policy reform in developing countries. Irfan Nooruddin presents a fresh theory that institutionalized gridlock, by reducing policy volatility and stabilizing investor expectations, is actually good for economic growth. Successful national economic performance, he argues, is the consequence of having the right configuration of national political institutions. Countries in which leaders must compromise to form policy are better able to commit credibly to investors and therefore enjoy higher and more stable rates of economic development. Quantitative analysis of business surveys and national economic data together with historical case studies of five countries provide evidence for these claims. This is an original analysis of the relationship between political institutions and national economic performance in the developing world and will appeal to scholars and advanced students of political economy, economic development and comparative politics.

This book presents an account of war settlement in Georgia and Tajikistan as local actors maneuvered in the shadow of a Russian-led military intervention. Combining ethnography and game theory and quantitative and qualitative methods, this book presents a revisionist account of the post-Soviet wars and their settlement.

International trade often inspires intense conflict between workers and their employers. In this book, Adam Dean studies the conditions under which labor and capital collaborate in support of the same trade policies. Dean argues that capital-labor agreement on trade policy depends on the presence of 'profit-sharing institutions'. He tests this theory through case studies from the United States, Britain, and Argentina in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries; they offer a revisionist history placing class conflict at the center of the political economy of trade. Analysis of data from more than one hundred countries from 1986 to 2002 demonstrates that the field's conventional wisdom systematically exaggerates the benefits that workers receive from trade policy reforms. From Conflict to Coalition boldly explains why labor is neither an automatic beneficiary nor an automatic ally of capital when it comes to trade policy and distributional conflict.

A comprehensive view of coalition formation is presented here. Each of the chapters gives a summary of theories and research findings in a specific field of interest, at various levels of human and primate organisation.