selected publications
Confessions of an Interest Group: The Catholic Church and Political Parties in Europe, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
During earlier research and writing on the origins, success and failure of different Christian Democratic parties in Europe, I had noticed the extensive scheming, maneuvering, and lobbying of the Catholic Church in post-World War II politics. I’d also noticed its influence in the construction of these parties, as well as its tendency to remain a partisan ally even when the party in question became institutionally and politically strong enough to not bow to the Church’s dictates. Basically, the Church was behaving like an interest group, even though it is also a long-standing, institutionalized organized religion. This book is the result of an effort to understand and explain that behavior, and to model, more generally, the behavior of any organized religion or other interest group in the political arena. I use a micro-economic theory of the firm to account for church-party interactions, informed by a perspective which derives church (and thus interest group) and party preferences partly from the historical context of each one. To quote from the comments of Peter Hall (Harvard University) about the book, "This is a book that opens eyes, not only about the role of religion in politics and how to understand it, but about the proper ways of understanding party-interest group relations in all sorts of settings. It elaborates a perspective that is innovative, bold, and powerful. I came away deeply impressed."
"Creating a Common Market for Fraud in the European Union" The Independent Review 8/2 (Fall 2003): pp. 249-257.
This article is the prelude to a much larger, more encompassing study of corruption in the EU institutions and in the EU’s member states. The article focuses on the structural pathologies of the EU as an international organization, which tend to create incentives and opportunities for fraud and corruption. The forthcoming book (Corruption in the European Union, Cornell University Press) looks at how and why various phenomena which have accompanied the development of the EU, such as increased economic competition, decentralization, privatization, tighter campaign finance laws, and more competition in the global export market have been associated with the persistence of, if not also increase in, corruption. The conventional wisdom is that corruption would have decreased under these conditions. I argue that the conventional wisdom is wrong and show that all of the phenomena mentioned above contain the possibility of fostering corruption, instead of diminishing it. .
"Sovereign States and Their Prey: The new institutionalist economics and state destruction in 19th Century West Africa." Review of International Political Economy, 5: 3 (Autumn, 1998): 508-533.
This article, characteristic of my work on state building in Africa, challenges the thrust of international political economy literature when applied to state building and state destruction. In recent decades, that research program has tended to locate the source of imperialism in the failure of the colonized states to adapt to their increased integration into the international economy, and in their failure to look like "real" states. I argue that, instead, it was their success at competing with the Europeans, combined with an international economic depression, that prompted the Europeans to use force to shelter the economic interests of their traders, and to deny that nascent African states could become "real" states.