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"The United States Constitution recognizes the president as the sole legal head of the executive branch and thus the one in charge of the administration. Despite this constitutional authority, the president's actual control over administration varies significantly in practice from one president to the next. Through extensive empirical analysis, Patrick O'Brien argues that presidential control over administration operates as a historical variable and functions as a key component of policymaking. To explain the different configurations of presidential control that recur throughout history and to test the argument, this book develops a new theory and then traces the policymaking process in the domain of public finance across nearly a century of history, beginning with the Great Depression and ending with the first two years of the Trump presidency. O'Brien shows that the initial efforts of Obama and Trump to change the established course during a period of unified party control of the government were largely undercut-or "effectively blocked," respectively-by their own limited control over administration. Due to factors such as time, knowledge, government structure, and incentives, O'Brien demonstrates that presidential control over administration conforms to four configurations that recur in succession: collapse, innovation, stabilization, and constraint. He then shows how these configurations played out in the New Deal, Reagan, and Great Recession eras, thus providing readers with an empirically tested theory for how unilateral and legislative policymaking differs over time. Presidential Control over Administration is a groundbreaking contribution to our understanding of the presidency and policymaking"--

Chapter 1: Historiographical Context and Bibliographical Guide -- Chapter 2: Statistical Bases for a Chronology of Economic Divergence Between Imperial China and Western Europe, 1636-1839 -- Chapter 3: Environments and Natural Resources -- Chapter 4: The Ming and Qing Imperial States and their Agrarian Economies -- Chapter 5: Sino-Centred Reciprocal Comparisons of Europe's and China's Economic Growth 1650-1850 -- Chapter 6: Cosmographies for the Discovery, Development and Diffusion of Useful and Reliable Knowledge in Europe and China -- Chapter 7: Debatable Conclusions.

The unitary executive framework assumes that all presidents hold the same structural advantages relative to Congress or the Court—a first‐mover advantage, a collective‐action advantage, and an informational advantage. Therefore, variation is sought in changes in peripheral institutional conditions such as party control of the presidency, congressional support, and public approval. In this article, I provide a theoretical critique of the unitary executive framework. I show that its foundational assumptions do not hold in practice, and I develop an argument based on the simple idea that systems of administration for individual policy domains change substantially from time to time. Specifically, I contend that when the president relies on the established collective‐action and informational arrangement, it often obstructs or compromises his first‐mover advantage. Conversely, the president's first‐mover advantage in a policy domain is strengthened when he restructures the established collective‐action and informational arrangement.

For centuries before the Great Divergence the priorities of Eurasian states had not been with the specification and protection of property rights, the reduction of transaction costs, the extension of markets, the facilitation of competition or any of the other institutional prerequisites specified for Smithian growth in premodern economies. Their overwhelming concern seems to have been with their own formation in contexts of intensifying geopolitical and imperial violence, attacks from nomads, as well as internal rivalries for control over resources with warlords, local gentries, aristocratic magnates, urban oligarchies, ecclesiastical prelates, and other contenders of power within their own borders. Some comprehension of when, how, and why some states constructed the kind of autonomous, centralized, and effective governments with administrative capacities required to support and sustain institution required for long-term economic growth seems to be a precondition for the initiation of a discourse for a global history of state formation. The aims of this paper are to survey the modern secondary literature covering both historical and theoretical approaches concerned with connections between the formation and constitutions of states and the construction of institutions for the assessment and collection of taxes. For global history its conclusion is that in retrospect the extensive territorial empires in both the Orient (and the Occident?) look suboptimal as political units for the promotion of economic growth.

AbstractO'Brien provides a critical assessment of Ernest Mandel's 1975 monograph Late Capitalism. In so doing, he offers a historical narrative that puts into question Mandel's framing of 'waves' of capitalist development as a process of capital accumulation that was dependent upon uneven development in the Third World. O'Brien starts by problematising Mandel's argument that an initial concentration of money, capital and bullion in the hands of Europeans explains combined and uneven development. He goes on to demonstrate that Mandel's (and Lenin's) notion of imperialism as a necessary conduit for the flow of surplus capital from industrialising Europe does not stand up to the historical evidence. In fact, O'Brien maintains an alternative thesis, namely that these marginalised regions were insuffciently penetrated by European capital.