Product Description
The choices made by governments about how to reward their top employees reveal a great deal about their values and their assumptions about governing. This book examines rewards of high public office in seven Asian political systems, a particularly rich set of cases for exploring the causes and consequences of the rewards of high public office, having some of the most generous and most meagre reward packages in the world.
There are a range of economic, political and cultural explanations for the rewards provided by governments. Likewise, these choices are assumed to have a number of consequences, including variations in the levels of corruption and economic success.
Reward for High Public Office includes case studies focusing on Australia, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, New Zealand and Singapore. It will interest students and researchers of politics, public administration and Asian studies. ... Read more

Product Description

Product Description

Product Description
Comparisons of China and India are both tempting and unavoidable. These two giant neighbors comprise more than one-third of the world's total population in the developing countries. A comparison of the ways in which China and India have gone about their development efforts reveals some remarkable parallels and striking differences in the past and in what they plan to do in the future. ... Read more

Product Description
This is the first detailed comparative analysis of electorates in Sri Lanka since 1947. Dilesh Jayanntha examines electoral allegiance in three contrasting constituencies--Sandville, Mirville and Jung Town--and demonstrates how patronage networks based initially on wealth and later on access to and control of state institutions determined electoral allegiance.Often the patronage network was congruent with caste. But, as Jayanntha shows, where the patron-client tie cut across the caste tie it was the former which proved decisive in deciding electoral allegiance. ... Read more

Product Description
These unique insights into the political struggles of Cambodian women extend the concept of resistance and create a framework of analysis that will inspire researchers in other fields. In a world where there are few women politicians, Cambodia is still noticeable as a country where strong cultural and societal forces act to subjugate women and limit their political opportunities. However, in their everyday life, Cambodian women do try to improve their situation and increase their political power, not least via manifold strategies of resistance. This book focuses on Cambodian female politicians and the strategies they deploy in their attempts to destabilize the cultural boundaries and hierarchies that restrain them. In particular, the book focuses on how women use discourses and identities as means of resistance, a concept only recently of wide interest among scholars studying power. The value of this book is thus twofold: not only does it give a unique insight into the political struggles of Cambodian women but also offers new insights to studies of power. ... Read more

Product Description

Product Description
From 1997 to 2002 Beatty conducted 128 in-depth interviews with 89 of Hong Kong's political elite in order to examine the prospects for democratization under Chinese rule. He reveals the political attitudes that may foster democratization in the long run, but which may hinder democratic progress in the short term. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Watching Chinese Politicians
Bob Beatty's Democracy, Asian Values, and Hong Kong makes a clear and often counterintuitive argument. Seeking to discern the future of democracy in one of the newest parts of the People's Republic of China, Beatty shows quite clearly that many of the movers and shakers of Hong Kong envision direct election of the chief executive, expansion of direct elections for the Legislative Council, and greater openness on other fronts, which contradicts and perhaps explains Beijing's April 2004 decision to postpone these changes. In light of recent events, including massive public demonstrations, the primary contribution of this book is to show that only external constraints can impede Hong Kong from moving further along a democratic path, rejecting Asian Values and other anti-liberal theories along the way.

Beatty's method is exhausting. Whereas Richard Fenno made popular the "watching politicians" style of participant observation in the United States, the author completed a series of transpacific trips over several years. Beatty, who interviewed President Clinton for this book, has mastered the art of gaining access to politicians. Democracy, Asian Values, and Hong Kong should therefore appeal to other researchers who hope to crack open a particular subculture.

This book is also very well written. A particular strength is the use of eye-catching quotations, most from the author's own interviews, to introduce and foreshadow each chapter. One wishes that Beatty would have included a separate appendix comprised only of quotations, to better capture the spirit of the times during a critical era in Chinese history.

Compelling and Timely
Dr. Beatty makes a timely contribution to Asian political studies with this book.The region's unique state of flux is captured through Beatty's incisive commentary and interview technique.Highly recommended. ... Read more

Product Description
Published originally in 1990 to critical acclaim, Robert Wade's Governing the Market quickly established itself as a standard in contemporary political economy. In it, Wade challenged claims both of those who saw the East Asian story as a vindication of free market principles and of those who attributed the success of Taiwan and other countries to government intervention. Instead, Wade turned attention to the way allocation decisions were divided between markets and public administration and the synergy between them. Now, in a new introduction to this paperback edition, Wade reviews the debate about industrial policy in East and Southeast Asia and chronicles the changing fortunes of these economies over the 1990s. He extends the original argument to explain the boom of the first half of the decade and the crash of the second, stressing the links between corporations, banks, governments, international capital markets, and the International Monetary Fund. From this, Wade goes on to outline a new agenda for national and international development policy. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Brilliant Study in Heterodox Economic Growth Theory
Robert Wade's 'Governing the Market' is a landmark text in development economics.Southeast Asian Tigers are often used to describe the success inherent through trade and market liberalization.What Wade discovers is that this finding is only skin deep.The economic policies of all the Tigers were far from 'free' and often manipulated the market to focus on total production rather than marginal efficiency.

Wade focuses on Taiwan (with comparisons to Japan and South Korea).Taiwan developed a dualistic economy where most of the businesses (~70%) were small firms that operated on a relatively free market.However, the rest of the economy (which accounts for most of the countries production) were highly regulated and controlled by government intervention.Taiwan's government led the market by coercing private firms into investing in new industries that were deemed economically viable.When a private firm would not step in the government went ahead and formed their own public enterprises (which account for a large part of Taiwan's economy).Through highly selective use of import-substitution and export-promotion strategies the economy flourished with unprecedented growth.

The other Tigers followed a similar path as Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan but without selective development policy.This is predominantly why they had lower growth rates.Even Hong Kong, the neoliberal bastion of success, turns out to be a highly regulated economy (p331-333 is essential reading).

Wade comes to a disturbing conclusion: Benevolent authoritarian rule may be necessary for developing nations to thrive.Without authoritarian corporatism it may be very difficult for growth to occur.

The 2003 version is highly preferred to the original because of a new, comprehensive, introduction.The introduction gives a response to critics of 'Governing the Market' and a thorough explanation of the Asian Financial Crisis. The introduction alone is worth the price of most texts.

I highly recommend this to anyone interested in economic growth theory.

Classic on the taiwanese developmental state
"Governing the Market" is almost certainly the seminal work on Taiwan's economic development. The work gives a detailed account of the ways in which state intervention actively promoted economic growth, contrary to the protestations of the IMF-led "Washington Consensus". Rather than focusing on polemical argument, as is so often the case in political economy, Wade's study is extremely detailed and persuasive, explaining both the economics, but also the politics of corruption (and how even corruption can be harnessed into economic productivity).

Personally, I think Wade may have underestimated the importance of widespread education, effective infrastructure, and significant quantities of US aid compared with other parts of the developing world as "lubricants" to jump-starting the economy. Nevertheless, his argument that the state-imposed redistribution of agricultural land went a long ways to generating the necessary surplus for development is solid. Wade also recognizes that this surplus was then harnessed by a government savings-and-loan structure that facilitated capital investment in domestic heavy industry (the "commanding heights" of the economy) - often a difficult task to accomplish. As Wade convincingly contends, there was a significant amount of East Asian-style Fabian socialism involved in Taiwan's development - and the Taiwanese were remarkably successful because of it - despite some of the roadbumps encountered by others who tried to replicate the model (the quasi-successful states of SE Asia: Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia).

The first 150 pages of this volume and the conclusion, at minimum, are a must-read for any serious student of developmental economics or political economy. This edition is especially useful because the introduction convincingly addresses claims that rent-seeking led to the 1997-8 crisis with substantial evidence (supported by even conservative economists like Jagdish Bhagwati at Columbia) that excessive portfolio liberalization in the real estate sector was the leading cause of the 1997-8 crash - and even accounting for this, Taiwan and South Korea each recovered remarkably well in a short period of time, and have now joined the ranks of the first world. ... Read more

Product Description

Social exclusion and inclusion remain issues of fundamental importance to democracy. Both exclusion and inclusion relate to the access to participation in the public realm, public goods and services for certain groups of people who are minorities, marginalized and deprived. Democratization has led to the inclusion of the previously excluded in the political process. While the problems of exclusion remain even in advanced Western countries in respect of the minorities of sorts, and the underprivileged, the problem of deep-rooted social and cultural exclusions is acute in post-colonial countries, including India.  This book analyses social exclusions in India, which remain the most solid challenges to Indian democracy and development. Communal clashes, ethnic riots, political secessionist movements and extremist violence take place almost routinely, and are the outward manifestations of the entrenched culture of social exclusion in India. With its interdisciplinary approach, the book looks at the multidimensional problems of social exclusion and inclusion, providing a critical, comprehensive analysis of the problem and of potential solutions. The authors are experts in the fields of historical sociology, anthropology, political theory, social philosophy, economics and indigenous vernacular literature. Overall, the book offers an innovative theoretical perspective of the long-term issues facing contemporary Indian democracy.

Product Description

Running for public office in postwar Japan requires the endorsement of a political party and a sophisticated system of organizational support. In this volume, Gerald L. Curtis provides a detailed case study of the campaign of Sato Bunsei, who in 1967 ran for the Lower House of Japan's parliament as a nonincumbent candidate of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Sato's district consisted of a modern urban center and a tradition-bound rural hinterland and featured a dynamic dialectic between old and new patterns of electioneering, which led Sat? to innovate new strategies and techniques.

Since its publication in 1971, sociologists and anthropologists as well as political scientists have considered Curtis's microanalysis of Japan's political system to be a vital historical document, offering insights into Japanese social behavior and political organization that are still relevant. The Japanese edition of Curtis's pioneering study,Daigishi No Tanjo, a best-seller, is valued today as a classic and read and cited by journalists, politicians, and scholars alike. This edition features a new introduction in which the author reflects on the reception of his book and on the changes in Japan's election process since its publication.

Customer Reviews (1)

Rice-Roots Democracy
Gerald Curtis introduces his classical study of election campaigning in Japan as follows: "For nearly a year and a half I was privileged to examine in microscopic detail the campaign of a candidate for the Japanese Diet. Living in the candidate's home, participating in campaign strategy meetings, visiting innumerable farms and mountain villages, talking for long and enjoyable hours with local politicians, newspaper reporters, and voters, I gradually saw emerge the pattern of campaign strategy and organization documented here."

The politician was Sato Bunsei, a non-incumbent candidate of the ruling Liberal Demoratic Party (LDP), and the district where he campaigned was clustered around the city of Beppu in Oita Prefecture, in the northeastern corner of Kyushu. Sato is what Curtis labels a locally-oriented politician, having served for sixteen years in the Prefectural Assembly and failed once in the national election of 1963. In 1967, the enterprising Sato faced formidable rivals: not from the socialist opposition, whose electorate didn't overlap with the LDP's base, but from his own party's two incumbents, an ex-bureaucrat with ministerial experience and an old politician, temporarily purged after World War II, who at that time held the position of Speaker of the Lower House. As Curtis notes, "the combination of multimember districts with single entry ballots has a divisive effect on any party that runs two or more candidates in any one district. The intensity of intra-party rivalry may be best compared to that of a hotly contested Democratic primary in a one-party American southern state."

Titled "The Birth of a Diet Member" for its Japanese edition, the book follows the candidate on his campaign trail, beginning with the politics of party endorsement and progressing through a detailed description of campaign organisation in rural and urban areas, analysing the structure and function of the koenkai or local support group, then showing how the candidate tried to gain the support of organized groups and moving to the climax of the short official campaign ending in victory for Sato, who defeated a more experienced incumbent by a large margin

The book contains many gems. For instance, a series of graphics illustrate the "benefit of locality" by showing how each candidate obtained the bulk of his votes in areas surrounding his home town, with little overlap in areas of major support. In describing Sato's efforts to gather the women's vote, Curtis shows the pivotal role played by a Mrs. Kawamura, the president of the LDP's women division in Beppu, who designated a core group of women campaigners in each school district to support Sato's campaign. He hints at the role played by the underworld in passing the word for Sato among bar hostesses and resort employees in Beppu. He insists on the fundamental difference between pre-war political patronage in which landlords and community leaders gathered the vote, and the modern koenkai that organizes support horizontally among the electorate. And he offers a classic distinction between the "hard vote" and the floating vote, explaining Sato's success by his ability to gather the latter.

Curtis' book was a landmark study, setting the terms in which Japanese politics was to be discussed and raising the bar on how political scientists should approach their subject. Curtis brought to Japan the best tools that American social science had to offer, combining an ethnographic approach based on participatory observation with quantitative analysis of voters behaviour and structural analysis of the social and legal constraints in which Japanese politicians operated. He was well aware of the peculiarities of the Japanese way of politics, but he didn't verse into particularism nor advocated an irreducible singularity of Japan.

At that time, some observers raised doubts that Japan had really turned into a full-fledged democracy, pointing toward ongoing political patronage and traditional networks of allegiance. To these critics, Curtis replied that the distinctive style of election campaigning ("rice-roots democracy") as well as the hotly contested nature of elections at the local level were the best guarantees that democracy had really taken hold in Japan. Similarly, in his following book, he rebuked critics of "one-party democracy" by showing that, even within the framework of LDP dominance, fierce rivalry between party factions as well as contestation from the socialist opposition ensured that the system remained competitive. In other terms, intra-party competition and fiercely contested elections played the role fulfilled elsewhere by inter-party rivalry and alternation in power.

The lesson for Japan was a revigorating one. Japanese should not be ashamed of their political system or look elsewhere for an ideal model to substitute their own. They should take pride in the vigour of their democracy. Thirty-seven years after its publication, this book hasn't aged a bit. ... Read more

Product Description
Beginning with a history of government reform and concluding with a systems view of democracy in the 21st century, this book provides both vision and practical guidelines for public sector leaders and consultants who want to deliver results at the edge, where government provides services to individuals, families, communities and country. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Government for the 21st Century
Dr. Kahn has taken her extensive experience in reinventing the federal government and distilled that learning to ten powerful ruleson how to make government work better and cost less. Her description of the future of government, with a small center responsible for assuring accountability for the achievement of goals and all the real work being done at the front line, is just what we need to make government work in an information age. Dr. Kahn's book is a must read for anyone who wants to assure the future success of our democratic form of government. ... Read more

Product Description

Caspian Energy Politics analyses the role of oil and gas in the development of the three main petroleum exporters in the Caspian region - Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan - and how energy resources influence interactions with semi-authoritarian Russia and China.

Due to volatile commodity prices and competition for the resources in and around the Caspian Sea, the governments of these petroleum-exporters face a series of difficult decisions. These governments have sought to balance short-term incentives to spend oil revenues as a means to maintain power against the need for a long-term strategy for managing these assets, choices which have further implications for how these countries align themselves internationally. By illuminating important linkages between domestic and international dynamics in these states, the book provides a fresh perspective on energy politics and the impact of petroleum on the development of the Caspian petroleum producers.

Expert contributors from Central Asia and the South Caucasus and international scholars provide context-specific insights into the incentives affecting decision-makers that can provide a foundation for strategies to help the countries in the region overcome the negative effects of reliance on oil and gas. As such, the book will be a valuable tool for business actors seeking to understand the role of Chinese and Russian companies in the region, as well as local and international policymakers and non-governmental organisations.

Product Description

Since its launch in 2006, SaudiDebate.com has become the foremost independent, English-language Web site to address issues facing contemporary Saudi Arabians. Adhering to a nonpartisan stance, the site fosters open debate between distinguished contributors from across the Arab world, quickly making it the chosen destination for perspectives on Arabia and the wider Arab Middle East.

The Kingdom brings together for the first time a targeted selection of these writings, providing readers with much-needed context for the role of Saudi Arabia in the world today. Contributors include such established figures as Madawi Al-Rasheed, Khalid Al-Dakhil, Badriyyah Al-Bishr, Saad Sowayan, and Mona Eltahawy. Chapter topics range from reformism under King Abdullah to Saudi Arabia's position as a regional power broker, speaking to the breadth of issues that currently preoccupy Saudis and other Arab intellectuals.

This collection particularly illuminates the struggle to build a modern society with respect to religious, cultural, and historical traditions. Divided into four sections, the volume specifically tackles domestic politics in Saudi Arabia, the kingdom's role in regional affairs, studies of Saudi society, and Saudi cultural and religious life.