Analytic Narratives

Robert Bates, Avner Greif, Margaret Levi and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal
Additional contact information
Margaret Levi: Department of Political Science, University of Washington
Jean-Laurent Rosenthal: Department of Business Economics, California Institute of Technology

in Economics Books from Princeton University Press

Abstract: Students of comparative politics have long faced a vexing dilemma: how can social scientists draw broad, applicable principles of political order from specific historical examples? In Analytic Narratives, five senior scholars offer a new and ambitious methodological response to this important question. By employing rational-choice and game theory, the authors propose a way of extracting empirically testable, general hypotheses from particular cases. The result is both a methodological manifesto and an applied handbook that political scientists, economic historians, sociologists, and students of political economy will find essential. In their jointly written introduction, the authors frame their approach to the origins and evolution of political institutions. The individual essays that follow demonstrate the concept of the analytic narrative--a rational-choice approach to explain political outcomes--in case studies. Avner Greif traces the institutional foundations of commercial expansion in twelfth-century Genoa. Jean-Laurent Rosenthal analyzes how divergent fiscal policies affected absolutist European governments, while Margaret Levi examines the transformation of nineteenth-century conscription laws in France, the United States, and Prussia. Robert Bates explores the emergence of a regulatory organization in the international coffee market. Finally, Barry Weingast studies the institutional foundations of democracy in the antebellum United States and its breakdown in the Civil War. In the process, these studies highlight the economic role of political organizations, the rise and deterioration of political communities, and the role of coercion, especially warfare, in political life. The results are both empirically relevant and theoretically sophisticated. Analytic Narratives is an innovative and provocative work that bridges the gap between the game-theoretic and empirically driven approaches in political economy. Political historians will find the use of rational-choice models novel; theorists will discover arguments more robust and nuanced than those derived from abstract models. The book improves on earlier studies by advocating--and applying--a cross-disciplinary approach to explain strategic decision making in history.

Keywords: comparative politics; social scientists; rational-choice; game theory; political scientists; economic historian; sociologist; political institutions; politics; Genoa; Europe; conscription law; France; United States; Prussia; antebellum; coffee; international coffee market; Civil War; coercion; warfare; history (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1998
Edition: 1
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (155)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pup:pbooks:6355

Access Statistics for this book

More books in Economics Books from Princeton University Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Webmaster ().