Readings (Chapters 1-6) Flashcards
Jared Diamond
Guns, Germs, and Steel:
Acemoglu & Robinson
Why Nations Fail:
Collier & Levitsky
Democracy with Adjectives: Discusses the complexities of conceptualizing Democracy and the goals of scholars when dealing conceptually with a great diversity of post authoritarian regimes to increase analytical differentiation and conceptual validity.
King, Keohane, & Verba (KKV)
Designing Social Inquiry: Quantitative and qualitative approaches, rather than being two completely different ways to do social science, are actually based on a single logic: “causal inference”. All good research can be understood and is best understood to derive from the same underlying logic of inference. Although social science indeed tries to answer “why” questions, causes as such are not directly observable. The four characteristics of scientific research are: the goal is inference, the procedures are public, the conclusions are uncertain, and the content is the method. The further implication of these four features are that science at its best is a social enterprise.
Mahoney & Villegas
Historical Enquiry and Comparative Politics: Discusses issues involved in comparative-historical analysis, describes current trends in historically oriented comparative politics, and highlights the differences between “within-case” and “cross-case” analysis, as well as different ways of explaining difference over time. Discusses the importance of the concept of “path dependence”.
Max Weber
Politics as a Vocation: Provides and discusses the definition of state. Offers three “ideal types” of legitimacy: “traditional”, “charismatic”, and “legal-rational”.
Robert H. Bates
Prosperity and Violence:
Francis Fukuyama
The Imperative of State-Building:
Milton Friedman
Using the Market for Social Development: Highlights the advantages of policy reforms that move toward free, private markets. Discusses the arguments “alternatives of partial vs. total privatization” and “gradual vs. rapid decontrol”. Argues for the total and rapid reduction of the government’s role in the economy. Claims that this will best spur economic performance. In other words, government intervention is the primary hindrance to economic success. Friedman favors a quite limited role for the state in the economy.
Gosta Esping-Anderson
The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism:
Schmitter & Karl
What Democracy Is…and Is Not:
Seymour Martin Lipset
Some Social Requisites of Democracy:
