Series editors' preface

Summary

The Cambridge series on the Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions is built around attempts to answer two central questions: How do institutions evolve in response to individual incentives, strategies, and choices, and how do institutions affect the performance of political and economic systems? The scope of the series is comparative and historical rather than international or specifically American, and the focus is positive rather than normative.

The simultaneous treatment of these two central questions is at the heart of the field of positive political economy. On the whole, the chapters collected in this volume avoid normative judgments and steer a course midway between broad historical generalization and detailed microtheoretical reasoning. Within these limits, they contain a broad set of views of the theoretical structure of the field. Chapters survey both microroots and macrophenomena in the evolution of First World and Third World political economies. Much of the volume is addressed to organizational development, discussed from diverse perspectives that stress the roles of reputation and unforeseen contingencies, of factional competition for amenity potential, and of the cost of attempting to influence collective actions. In later chapters, several contending approaches are represented in discussions of varied units of analysis that have founded research programs: individual decisions, exchange transactions, rent seeking, and indivisibilities.

Nevertheless, while displaying much diversity of approach and content, the chapters of this volume share an underlying unity of purpose: to demonstrate how economic and political outcomes reflect choices constrained by institutions while also explaining why and how, in view of the outcomes, such institutions should have developed.