here, but often with some revealing new insight; and only an exceptionally eclectic and voracious reader would fail to find new material. Even so familiar a subject as the Indian railways produces some fresh touches: Headrick remarks that British investors, under the government guarantee system (of 5 percent return on their capital), were not gambling on the profitability of railway operation in India but on the continuing ability of the British Raj to collect taxes; and India was the only nation with a major rail network that failed to industrialize during its railway boom. He describes a masterful use of technical requirements to keep out commercial rivals while maintaining a free trade ideology and a later masterful use of procrastination and indecision to avoid a hard choice between a declining British industry and an emerging India. Ironies abound. Earnest and laborious, although underfunded, efforts produced successful agricultural research programs (for export cash crops, of course) in Indonesia, India, and Malaya. But although research in Indochina "had been disorganized, unfocused, and erratic," it didn't matter, "because neighboring colonies had developed profitable plants and techniques" (p. 231) readily borrowed or stolen by French planters. Nevertheless, the French regime established something the British Raj in India never did. Its Office Indochinois du Riz, established in 1930-31, applied modern research techniques to a major peasant food and subsistence crop. Some fascinating people figure in these case studies, from the Indian geologist Pramatha Nath Bose—whose work made possible the success of Tata Iron and Steel, but only after he resigned from the service of a British Indian government that opposed such efforts—to men like Nigeria's Herbert S. H. Macaulay, Africa's first black civil engineer, who was sent to England to study surveying, civil engineering, and piano tuning. Colonial administrators often thought of technical education in terms of preindustrial crafts and not modern professions, not just out of racism (although there was plenty of that). Many were conservative, in a sense refugees from their own industrialized cultures, who wished to protect and conserve the "best elements" of the colonial cultures from rapid change. Both colonizers and colonized had ambiguous attitudes, which made it easier to transfer technology for transport and communication but difficult to transfer technology for import substitution. Asians and Africans had entrepreneurial skills, but only rarely combined with capital and an understanding of Western technology; and even a great success, such as the Tatas in India or smallholder rubber growers in Malaya, were at the mercy of government policies.

Ethnic Groups in Conflict

Ethnologue: Languages of the World

In this innovative approach to the practice of social science, Charles Ragin explores the use of fuzzy sets to bridge the divide between quantitative and qualitative methods. Paradoxically, the fuzzy set is a powerful tool because it replaces an unwieldy, "fuzzy" instrument—the variable, which establishes only the positions of cases relative to each other, with a precise one—degree of membership in a well-defined set. Ragin argues that fuzzy sets allow a far richer dialogue between ideas and evidence in social research than previously possible. They let quantitative researchers abandon "homogenizing assumptions" about cases and causes, they extend diversity-oriented research strategies, and they provide a powerful connection between theory and data analysis. Most important, fuzzy sets can be carefully tailored to fit evolving theoretical concepts, sharpening quantitative tools with in-depth knowledge gained through qualitative, case-oriented inquiry. This book will revolutionize research methods not only in sociology, political science, and anthropology but in any field of inquiry dealing with complex patterns of causation.

Fuzzy-Set Social Science

Benedict Anderson’s deservedly famous thesis about the origins and nature
of modern nationalism turns around the central notion of an “imagined
community.” This category provides him with a matrix out of which one
can apprehend-theoretically and historically-the different variants of nationalist discourse formulated over the last two hundred years. We will refer,
in the brief comments that follow, to three basic dimensions structuring
the fabric of Anderson’s argument: 1) the presuppositions implicit in the
notion of an “imagined” community; 2) the kind of substitutability or solidarity which is required to be a member of such a community; 3) the kind
of relationship that is established between such a community-which is by
definition finite or limited-and its outside. Before that, however, let us
describe the main features of Anderson’s thesis.

On Imagined Communities

Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives.

A comparison of recent Thai and Japanese politics presents a puzzle. Both nations undertook similar electoral reforms at about the same time, but the results have been dramatically different. Thai leaders are party-oriented and have shifted away from the pork-barrel politics of the past. Japanese leaders and members of parliament remain candidate-oriented and continue Japan's pork-barrel policies. We explain these divergent outcomes by analyzing the different causes of and politics surrounding the electoral reform efforts in both countries. Our findings join with the growing literature that questions the one-way causal effects that are usually purported to flow from institutional changes. Rather, we argue that new institutions, such as new election systems, can be as much a result of political changes as a cause of those same changes.

/pdf/pork-barrel-politics-and-electoral-reform-explaining-the-1w9xolemcn.pdf

Pork-Barrel Politics and Electoral Reform: Explaining the Curious Differences in the Experiences of Thailand and Japan

What explains the passage of Thailand's landmark universal healthcare (UHC) policy? In separate contributions, Selway and Harris emphasized the role of electoral rules and political parties, on one hand, and “professional movements” of developmentally minded state bureaucrats on the other. Which is correct? In this article, Selway and Harris respond to each other's work. While Selway agrees that the actions of the professional movement constitute an underappreciated necessary condition for universal healthcare in Thailand, he argues that Harris overstates the role of the movement in implementation. Harris defends his position and maintains that an institution-focused account is insufficient, arguing that the actions of Thailand's Rural Doctors’ Movement not only explain universal healthcare but also gave rise to the very electoral rule changes that Selway argues were so critical to facilitating universal coverage. Selway responds to these criticisms, and the two researchers jointly consider implications for causation, qualitative research, and policymaking theory.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/184E03848794BD8DAD5886D7EDAAE0C8/S1598240819000420a.pdf/div-class-title-exchange-explaining-the-passage-of-universal-healthcare-in-thailand-div.pdf

Exchange: explaining the passage of universal healthcare in thailand

Buddhists, ballots, and backing for authoritarian successor parties in Thailand

In the mid-nineteenth century, as part of Thailand's modernization programme, Thai elites embarked on the conscious construction of a Thai national identity, which included the promulgation of three central elements: chāt [nation], sādsnā [religion] and Phra Mahāgasat [monarchy]. Essentially, these elements came to mean Central Thai ethnicity and the Buddhist religion. This paper seeks to assess the effects of Thai nationalism on ethnic relations in Thailand with an evaluation of the ethnic composition of income inequality. It specifically tests a structuralist model of social exclusion using a variety of quantitative empirical tests that rely on survey and census data in order to uncover the dynamics of Thai nationalism's effect on ethnic economic inequality. The paper ends with suggestions for a new approach to Thai nationalism.

Turning Malays into Thai-Men: Nationalism, Ethnicity and Economic Inequality in Thailand:

In this article I explore how the current first-past-the-post (FPTP) rules contributed to the failure of ethnic compromise during the democratic period (1948–1962) in Myanmar by encouraging extremist parties, hardening ethnic divisions, and causing political deadlock, ironically the same charges the centripetal school lays against proportional representation (PR). This puzzle of “PR outcomes” under FPTP is explained using geographic information systems techniques that map the country's 2010 electoral districts onto an ethnic population map. It shows that ethnic party success in the 2010 election closely follows the distribution of ethnic groups in Myanmar and that given the high level of ethno-geographic segregation in Myanmar the representation of ethnic parties would be similar under PR and the alternative vote to the current FPTP. I conclude by discussing Indonesia's electoral rules as a possible solution for Myanmar. The general theoretic contribution is that, although past scholars have generally argued that FPTP is bad for ethnically divided societies, their mechanisms are incorrect for ethno-geographically segregated societies.

/pdf/ethnic-accommodation-and-electoral-rules-in-ethno-57fpq1j24e.pdf

Ethnic Accommodation and Electoral Rules in Ethno-Geographically Segregated Societies: PR Outcomes Under FPTP in Myanmar Elections

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