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This chapter is an overview of Yeltsin's economic reforms, with a focus on the financial markets and banks associated with privatization. The architects of Russian reform hoped that private activity could be rapidly and irreversibly severed from the polity such that a “depoliticized” market would quickly fill the void left by the rapid destruction of the state planning system. In contrast, the emergence of a new market system actually evolved through a gradual process of economic experimentation and political settlement where the domains of states and markets were inextricably intertwined. Market reform policies helped dismantle the economic and political structures of the Soviet regime, but they did not dictate what emerged in its place.

Economic growth in developing countries is an ‘episodic’ phenomenon, with countries undertaking discrete shifts from periods of low to periods of high growth and vice versa. Not all growth acceleration episodes lead to reductions in poverty, and there is wide variation in the relationship between growth and poverty across episodes of growth of the same magnitude or duration. This chapter shows that several cases of growth acceleration episodes may be defined as episodes of immiserizing growth, in that poverty either increases or remains roughly the same across the duration of these episodes. Similarly, the chapter shows that not all growth deceleration episodes lead to increases in poverty. A political economy explanation is presented for episodes of immiserizing growth, focusing on the nature of the political settlement, and in particular on the distribution of power. We find that settlements with dispersed vertical power can lessen the likelihood of immiserizing growth episodes. We also find that dispersed horizontal power is not necessarily conducive to pro-poor growth episodes.

This chapter describes the contours and limits of the political settlement in Great Britain and the United States in the middle of the twentieth century. It shows how at the heart of both New Deal liberalism and the British Liberal and Labour reforms was a happy conception of the state so long as its power was in the hands of an enlightened and expert policy elite. The famous Brain Trust around Franklin Roosevelt and the progressive liberal civil service personified by Beveridge and Keynes fit exactly this notion of top-down reform for the benefit of society as a whole. The progressive liberal project was not revolutionary; it was born of a desire to preserve and defend liberal democracy and the capitalist system.

This chapter examines political corruption and the politics of state-building in postwar Lebanon, with particular emphasis on why the country's political elites failed to establish sound and effective institutions that could have withstood endemic corruption. It begins by discussing how postwar political settlement eroded the independence and capabilities of the state's watchdogs to guard the bureaucratic qualities of state institutions. It then considers the failure to put in place bureaucratic institutions in the health sector, the politics of the importers' cartel in the energy and power sector, Syria's interference in the regulation of the oil sector, the debacle of the port of Beirut, and the controversy surrounding quarrying. It also analyzes the politics of reconstruction in Lebanon and the political bickering over the return of the country's large number of internally displaced persons. The chapter suggests that Lebanon's postwar political settlement obstructed bureaucratic organization while providing incentives for political actors to look for alternative institutional arrangements.

This chapter outlines how patterns of socio-political organizing diverged in the Palestinian and Salvadoran cases during the beginning of their respective conflict to peace transitions. Departing from explanations that focus on the professionalization of mass-based organizations, the author explains how the domestic political contexts shaped the mediating role of Western donor funding. More specifically, the book argues the that “inclusivity” of political settlements (assessed by the extent of participation of major political groups and the degree of societal support) shaped the relative effectiveness of democracy promotion efforts and the impact of Western donor assistance on civil society and democratic development more generally. This chapter also explains how civil society is being addressed in the book and the methodology employed, which is a structured, focused comparison that is historically sensitive but conducive to generalizing across cases. It also explains how the quality of civil society and democratic development are assessed, and why the women’s sectors were chosen to examine these developments. It concludes with an outline of the remaining chapters of the book.

This chapter examines whether the general failure to build sound bureaucratic institutions in Lebanon can be attributed to the politics of formation. More specifically, it highlights five interrelated features of the political settlement that influenced the process of decision making in the Second Republic from 1989 until 2005. It begins with a discussion of the political debate over the Ta'if Accord, along with its role in the political controversies of postwar Lebanon. It then considers various constitutional amendments pursued by Lebanon in accordance with the Ta'if agreement as well as Syria's role in postwar Lebanon. It also explores how Lebanon's political elites—and Syria's growing interventions—gave rise to a political process that can be characterized in reference to five (interrelated) patterns that constitute the political settlement of the Second Republic.

This book has shown how political corruption permeated Lebanon's bureaucratic institutions throughout the post-Ta'if period. It has analyzed incidences of corruption in their immediate institutional and political contexts by focusing on the institutions' bureaucratic organization and the underlying politics of their evolution. The book concludes with a summary of its findings, first by discussing how political settlement contributed to the failure of public institutions in postwar Lebanon to meet the criteria of bureaucratic organization. It then considers why the central bank was spared from the bickering of political elites and describes the Lebanese state as a state of muhasasa, or an allotment state. It also presents some key Lebanese voices on the subject of corruption and explains why Lebanon's attempts at administrative reform to combat corruption have been widely regarded as a failure. Finally, the book assesses the implications of its findings for the comparative study of postwar recovery.

This chapter sets out the analytical framework of political settlements and elaborates the framework to account for the socialist experiences of Tanzania and Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. A political settlement, as defined by Mushtaq Khan, is a combination of power and institutions that is mutually compatible and also sustainable in terms of economic and political viability. The chapter clarifies the core building blocks of the approach and sets out the main differences between political settlements and new institutional economics. The chapter then defines a socialist political settlement where productive rights are formally held by the collective and formal institutions protect common and collectively owned assets. The attempts to construct a socialist political settlement left important institutional, political, and economic legacies. These shaped incentives and constraints which influenced a number of critical processes at the heart of economic development—related to technological learning, accumulation for investment, and political stabilization.

This chapter discusses in detail the question pertaining to policy priorities by presenting an analysis of the political settlement in each state within a historical context. It tries to pinpoint the major political factors, both at the state and national level, which have influenced the course of politics. This, in turn, has indirectly influenced the policy orientation of the state. In this chapter, readers can learn about certain developments made in the political history of Tamil Nadu and its subsequent consequences to the political settlement for state power and social classes. It also looks at the background information of the important political outcomes that surfaced in Tamil Nadu, the pro-poor politics in the state, the patterns of support for the state, and the distribution of caste and fractured dominance.