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The 2004 Mattei Dogan Award
(for best book published in the field of comparative research) is
shared by Carles Boix for Redistribution
and Democracy (Cambridge) and Evan Lieberman
(Princeton University) for his book Race
and Regionalism in the Politics of Taxation in Brazil and South
Africa (Cambridge).
The SCR awards the 2003 Seymour Martin Lipset Award (for
best comparative Ph.D. dissertation) to Nina
Bandelj (UC Irvine) for her dissertation “Embedded Economies:
Foreign Direct Investment in Central and Eastern Europe”
(Department of Sociology, Princeton University).
2004 Dogan Award:
Carles Boix
Carles
Boix's intriguing and original book, Redistribution and
Democracy, argues that that democracy arises when the ruling
elite believes the economic cost of extending democracy to the
poorer members of a society is less than the cost of repression.
The cost of inclusion for an elite is the economic redistribution
that would occur under democracy, and this is determined by the
inequality of the ownership of resources in a society and the
extent to which those resources can be captured by taxes (hence,
the level of capital mobility). The costs of repression depend on
the organizational mobilization of those towards the bottom of the
society, the repressive resources of the elite, and whether the
elite makes coalitions with middle groups. Boix begins by
formalizing the first part this argument, linking economic
equality and capital mobility to democracy in a two-actor model,
and he goes on to refine this model by introducing a third actor,
the middle class, and examining sectoral variation in the types of
assets within each class. Boix does not build class agency—the
extent to which a class is mobilized or coherent—in his formal
model, but rather discusses the strength and coherence of classes
as a constraint on the capacity of the upper class and lower class
to undertake repression or revolution, respectively.
Evan Lieberman
Lieberman’s Race and Regionalism in the Politics of Taxation in
Brazil and South Africa presents an original analysis of a
vital question: how can one explain the large variations in the
tax capacities of countries that in many other respects, including
economic development, look similar. Lieberman resolves this large
question into a sharper one: under what circumstances will a
country’s richer citizens avoid paying taxes. The answer,
Lieberman argues, lies in the extent to which the rich feel
themselves to be part of a national community. This in turn
depends on the structure of political cleavages in a society. To
what extent, Lieberman asks, are the economic elite divided from
those in control of the state? The evidence Lieberman marshals in
defense of his thesis is impressive. The core of the book
consists of a detailed and compelling historical comparison of two
countries with sharply contrasting tax capacities, Brazil and
South Africa.
Review committee for the Mattei Dogan
Award:
Gary Marks (chair), Susan Stokes, and Colin Crouch.
2003 Lipset Award:
Nina Bandelj
This dissertation assesses the
usefulness of rationalist economic explanations for patterns of
foreign direct investment in eastern Europe. Located at the
intersection of powerful forces of economic globalization and
recently marketized economies, the empirical target of her study
provide ideal opportunities for charting the power of theories of
comparative advantage and marginal return to explain variation in
investment patterns. However, her systematic comparison of the
experiences of eleven central and eastern European countries shows
that the factors emphasized by economistic theories cannot explain
dramatic patterns of difference and similarity in these cases.
Instead the analysis reveals that these outcomes are mediated by
complex social networks and embedded within processes structured
by culture, historically-produced power relations, and macro
political institutions. The dissertation is a significant
challenge to the theory of the firm as a tool for direct
application in the study of cross-national investment patterns.
Review committee for the
Lipset Award:
Michael Hechter (chair), Rebecca Emigh, and Ian Lustick.
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