Paradigms and Sand Castles demonstrates the relationship between thoughtful research design and the collection of persuasive evidence in support of theory. It teaches the craft of research through interesting and carefully selected examples from the field of comparative development studies. Barbara Geddes is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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In Latin America as elsewhere, politicians routinely face a painful dilemma: whether to use state resources for national purposes, especially those that foster economic development, or to channel resources to people and projects that will help insure political survival and reelection. While politicians may believe that a competent state bureaucracy is intrinsic to the national good, political realities invariably tempt leaders to reward powerful clients and constituents, undermining long-term competence. Politician's Dilemma explores the ways in which political actors deal with these contradictory pressures and asks the question: when will leaders support reforms that increase state capacity and that establish a more meritocratic and technically competent bureaucracy? Barbara Geddes brings rational choice theory to her study of Brazil between 1930 and 1964 and shows how state agencies are made more effective when they are protected from partisan pressures and operate through merit-based recruitment and promotion strategies. Looking at administrative reform movements in other Latin American democracies, she traces the incentives offered politicians to either help or hinder the process. In its balanced insight, wealth of detail, and analytical rigor, Politician's Dilemma provides a powerful key to understanding the conflicts inherent in Latin American politics, and to unlocking possibilities for real political change.

Examining 36 democracies from 1945 to 2010, this text arrives at conclusions about what type of democracy works best. It demonstrates that consensual systems stimulate economic growth, control inflation and unemployment, and limit budget deficits.

Employing analytical tools borrowed from game theory, Carles Boix offers a complete theory of political transitions, in which political regimes ultimately hinge on the nature of economic assets, their distribution among individuals, and the balance of power among different social groups. Backed up by detailed historical work and extensive statistical analysis that goes back to the mid-nineteenth century, this book explains, among many other things, why democracy emerged in classical Athens. It also discusses the early triumph of democracy in both nineteenth-century agrarian Norway, Switzerland and northeastern America and the failure in countries with a powerful landowning class.

State structures, international forces, and class relations: Theda Skocpol shows how all three combine to explain the origins and accomplishments of social-revolutionary transformations. Social revolutions have been rare but undeniably of enormous importance in modern world history. States and Social Revolutions provides a new frame of reference for analyzing the causes, the conflicts, and the outcomes of such revolutions. It develops a rigorous, comparative historical analysis of three major cases: the French Revolution of 1787 through the early 1800s, the Russian Revolution of 1917 through the 1930s, and the Chinese Revolution of 1911 through the 1960s. Believing that existing theories of revolution, both Marxist and non-Marxist, are inadequate to explain the actual historical patterns of revolutions, Skocpol urges us to adopt fresh perspectives. Above all, she maintains that states conceived as administrative and coercive organizations potentially autonomous from class controls and interests must be made central to explanations of revolutions.

Rebellion, insurgency, civil war-conflict within a society is customarily treated as a matter of domestic politics and analysts generally focus their attention on local causes. Yet fighting between governments and opposition groups is rarely confined to the domestic arena. "Internal" wars often spill across national boundaries, rebel organizations frequently find sanctuaries in neighboring countries, and insurgencies give rise to disputes between states. In Rebels without Borders, which will appeal to students of international and civil war and those developing policies to contain the regional diffusion of conflict, Idean Salehyan examines transnational rebel organizations in civil conflicts, utilizing cross-national datasets as well as in-depth case studies. He shows how external Contra bases in Honduras and Costa Rica facilitated the Nicaraguan civil war and how the Rwandan civil war spilled over into the Democratic Republic of the Congo, fostering a regional war. He also looks at other cross-border insurgencies, such as those of the Kurdish PKK and Taliban fighters in Pakistan. Salehyan reveals that external sanctuaries feature in the political history of more than half of the world's armed insurgencies since 1945, and are also important in fostering state-to-state conflicts. Rebels who are unable to challenge the state on its own turf look for mobilization opportunities abroad. Neighboring states that are too weak to prevent rebel access, states that wish to foster instability in their rivals, and large refugee diasporas provide important opportunities for insurgent groups to establish external bases. Such sanctuaries complicate intelligence gathering, counterinsurgency operations, and efforts at peacemaking. States that host rebels intrude into negotiations between governments and opposition movements and can block progress toward peace when they pursue their own agendas.