Suchergebnisse

This study takes aim at a burgeoning dissensus in the social sciences, a dissensus over nothing less than the manner in which social, economic and political phenomena are to be explained. Until about the mid-l970s, there was broad acceptance in Western sociology and political science of a perspective that may be termed culturalist; without ignoring the importance of structures or institutions, it highlighted the role of shared cultural norms and values in determining behavior in given societies. The proliferation of area studies programs was but one manifestation of the great popularity of this trend. Marxist interpretations existed, of course, but they tended to be relegated to the lunatic fringe of social science: they were regarded as overly simplified, highly dogmatic and fundamentally biased toward the political cause of socialism or communism. Some rational-choice theory had been developed by that time, but it, too, was seen as fringe material in most fields except economics. In any case, the more realistic of its conclusions could be readily absorbed by exploiting the underlying elasticity of the culturalist paradigm. A great deal has changed since that time. Marxist theories have become ever more provocative, stimulating and politically acceptable; rational-choice theory is now a major growth area in several of the social sciences, not the least of which is my own field of political science. In contrast, the culturalist perspective, far from absorbing the valid points of the other two paradigms, has come increasingly under attack for the vapidity of its concepts, the inability to test its hypotheses and the lack of generality of its theoretical formulations. As one rational-choice theorist put it, culture is simply too squishy to be of use in causal analysis.

The Logic of Political Survival, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair
Smith, Randolph Siverson, and James Morrow, Cambridge, MA and London: The
MIT Press, 2003, pp. xiii, 536The Logic of Political Survival is much more than its title
suggests. Its main focus is certainly on the survival of political
leaders, but its embrace extends to economic development, nation-building,
democratization, war and peace, protest, civil war, and revolution. All of
these topics are subsumed under a single theory that is elaborated
formally and validated through a truly gargantuan exercise in data
analysis. It is, without doubt, an extraordinary attempt to answer some
very big questions.

In this study, I investigate the linkage between trends in key economic indicators (inflation, unemployment, and growth in gross domestic product) and government survival in 16 postwar European parliamentary democracies. The partial likelihood method, which allows for variation in indicator values over the lifetimes of individual governments, constitutes the basic analytic tool. The findings reveal overall causal roles for both inflation and unemployment, as well as important differences in these roles between socialist and bourgeois governments and between pre-oil crisis and post-oil crisis eras. Most significant, the introduction of these indicators to the analysis helps to resolve the debate between two rival explanations of governmental stability, the bargaining complexity hypothesis and the ideological diversity hypothesis, in favor of the latter.

A major lacuna in the empirical investigation of government stability in Western European parliamentary regimes is the failure to test rigorously the hypothesis that the ideological diversity within governments influences their survival in office. This study attempts to remedy this deficiency by developing and testing measures of the concept based on a wide variety of sources, including expert scales of party positions, voter-based estimates of party ideologies, and assessments of party positions derived with the aid of the European Manifestos Project's coding of electoral platforms. The key findings are that not only is ideological diversity inversely related to government survival, even when other relevant factors are taken into account, but that this connection seriously challenges bargaining environment interpretations of stability advanced within the past 2 years.