What Can We Learn about Corruption from Historical Case Studies?

The chapter shows how a historical approach can offer a productive and useful dataset and tools to understand corruption and anticorruption. Since corruption has existed across time and space, and is multifaceted, involving politics, economics, law, administration, social, and cultural attitudes, it can best be studied in a multidisciplinary way that includes the study of the past as well as the present. A historical approach offers ways of thinking about change and continuity, and hence also about how and why reform processes occur and are successful. Historical case studies can test and challenge social science models but also offer different, more qualitative, evidence that can help us to reconstruct the mentalities of those who refused to accept that their behavior constituted “corruption,” as well as the motives of those bringing the prosecution or making allegations. Historical sources, often offering multiple perspectives of different participants, can also enable us to form a more holistic view of corruption scandals and of the important role of public discussion in shaping quality of government.

The Theory of Selective Accommodation

This chapter presents a theory of selective accommodation, which comprises two elements. The first, the core theory, contains the general conceptual model of selective accommodation and its basic influence formula — the use of positive incentives (e.g., promises, rewards, and concessions) to create divergent pressures on members or potential members of an opposing alliance. It describes how selective accommodation works (when it works) and suggests conditions under which states are likely to attempt it (initiation conditions). Meanwhile, the second consists of propositions about contingent conditions, and associated mechanisms, conducive to the success or failure of attempts. Like the initiation conditions, these are probabilistic. Combined, these elements offer an overarching framework to explain selective accommodation attempts and outcomes, one that is geared to the priorities of policy-applicable theory. It thus furnishes two kinds of “usable” theoretical insight: (1) a general conceptual model of the strategy of selective accommodation, and (2) generic knowledge about the conditions that favor its success. The chapter then sets up the methods — of structured focus comparison and qualitative analysis — that organize the historical case studies in the following chapters.

On the United States and China

This chapter employs intentions pessimism to predict the future of U.S.-China relations. It begins with a review of the theory and a summary of the historical case studies described in chapters 3-6, focusing on the fact that great powers have invariably been uncertain about each other’s intentions, a situation that has caused them to compete for security. The chapter then turns to U.S.-China relations from 2000 to 2020 and shows that the United States has already begun to compete with China, because Washington is acutely uncertain about Beijing’s intentions. The final section addresses the issue of the future, demonstrating that U.S. decision makers will in all likelihood be far from confident that their Chinese counterparts have benign intentions, and arguing that if China completes its rise this uncertainty will make for a considerably more intense security competition and a higher chance of war than is the case today.

Making America Great Again?

This chapter examines a different, but equally tantalizing, option of trying to “bring back” traditional manufacturing and the high-paying production-line jobs that disappeared from many areas decades ago. To analyze the practicality of this strategy, the chapter explores recent changes in the global production landscape that are the result of digitization and other trends. What happened to the vertical manufacturers of yesteryear? How does innovation translate to growth in a globalizing world? To make those changes less abstract and more concrete, the chapters utilizes a few historical case studies. First, it examines the history of the rise and fall of innovation manufacturing in Michigan and Pennsylvania; then it looks at the brief success (and long and bitter decline) of the “high-end manufacturing” stars of the 1990s: Elk Grove, California, and Colorado Springs, Colorado. After effectively killing the two current deadly street drugs of Silicon Valley and Make America Great Again, the chapter leads the reader to appreciate other (and better) choices by moving away from the binary framing of innovation/manufacturing and back to the world of fragmented production, but this time armed with a new point view.

Why They Meddle in Elections—And What Are the Effects on the Results

Chapter 2 lays out in detail the theoretical arguments on the causes and effects of partisan electoral interventions. It also notes the main theoretical assumptions underlying these theoretical arguments, some of which are non-obvious in many political science approaches. It then provides a description of the main methods for testing these theoretical arguments. It first describes how the main historical case studies were chosen and how the data for them was collected. It then concludes by briefly explaining how the definition of electoral interventions was operationalized and how the dataset of partisan electoral interventions (PEIG) utilized for the main statistical analyses was constructed.

Fluchtraum Europa

With its interdisciplinary character, this volume provides a multifaceted overview of flight, refuge and displacement in the context of Europe, spanning the period from antiquity to the present. Its basic chapters illuminate the legal background to the subject and refer to historical discourse connections. By means of historical case studies and the use of the topic of flight in literature and film, the contributions the book contains sketch the contours of Europe as a space of flight and refuge and the research perspectives associated with it. With contributions by Rainer Hudemann, Heinrich Schlange-Schöningen, Thomas Giegerich, Justus Nipperdey, Dietmar Hüser, Mechthild Gilzmer, Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, Peter Riemer, Christiane Solte-Gresser, Christoph Vatter, Romana Weiershausen, Astrid M. Fellner, Joshua Bechtold, Ines Funk, Nils Pendl

On having to be what we cannot be

Chapter 9 sums up the findings of the historical case studies by looking at the long-run changes and making a conjecture about the trajectory they indicate from the beginnings of modern social movements to the late-modern present day. The conjecture is that adherent selves can no longer act for others with the same confidence and authority as they once did. Nor can they give up their desire, based in part on others’ expectations, to assist in other people’s struggles. Nor is it easy for them to change themselves as required to belong in those struggles. The late-modern adherent is therefore cross-pressured. She has to be what she cannot be. The claim is illustrated and supported with empirical examples from contemporary social movements, especially the changing nature of charitable participation.