The concluding chapter summarizes the book’s argument and findings and describes its key contributions. It then turns to discuss potential theoretical limitations that pertain to the strategic behavior by citizens and incumbents, and potential scope conditions for the theory’s ability to explain incumbency bias in presidential and legislative elections. The chapter also examines the normative implications of the book’s main findings for the state of democracy in Latin America and the developing world more broadly. The chapter closes by touching on the book’s policy implications. Taken together, these findings challenge the conventional wisdom that incumbency bias is a form of failed accountability in which clientelism insulates officeholders from electoral control, or that corruption deprives citizens of the ability to select good representatives.The book instead suggests that incumbency bias is the natural result of properly functioning electoral accountability institutions in settings where citizens have low-quality information. While no panacea, the findings suggest that enhancing the quality of democracy requires improving institutional design and citizens’ knowledge.

This chapter provides a short summary of the book’s contributions to comparative politics, political economy, and Japanese politics. Then, it sketches out a range of questions pertaining to different genres of research in political science, which future scholarship should address.

The conclusion of the book draws together the findings from the statistical analysis and the case studies, suggesting possible nuances and extensions to the theoretical framework. It further explores the financial statecraft of borrowers through short accounts of external finance and aid negotiations in Uganda, Senegal, and Laos. The chapter spells out policy implications of the argument, suggesting steps that policymakers in developing countries can take to derive the greatest benefit from their portfolio of external finance, as well as ways that traditional donor agencies can maintain and enhance their relevance. It concludes with reflections on the pertinence of the book's findings for developing countries in debt crisis, including those negotiating debt relief with diverse creditors.

This chapter reviews the central arguments and empirics, maps out areas for future research, and discusses the policy implications of the book’s findings. It also discusses the relevance of the theory in accounting for the events of January 6, 2021 in the United States.

The chapter begins with a brief summary of the theory and findings. It then examines whether the strong relationship between electoral autocracies and Chinese foreign spending is evident among a wider range of issues based on analysis of United Nations General Assembly votes. The findings indicate that electoral autocracies have displayed a markedly higher propensity to vote with China since the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative. The chapter then discusses theoretical, policy, and business implications in turn.

This concluding chapter summarizes this book’s main contributions to researchers’ understanding of this multifaceted response to rising inequality. It then highlights important take aways for policymakers and researchers and concludes with informed – if more speculative – insights regarding the future of redistributive politics in postindustrial democracies.

In Chapter 7, the authors home in on the policy implications and avenues for future research, which build upon the empirical and theoretical findings that are explicated in Chapters 3–6. The discussion herein revolves around the following questions: What do the empirical operational code results mean for the day-to-day conduct of the politics of the MENA region? How do these at-a-distance leadership analysis findings and inferences help us to make sense of MENA’s international relations today? How does the actor-specific analysis in this book cue regional and international policymakers on understanding and engaging with certain political leaders in the MENA region? This chapter addresses these questions through utilizing a case study approach. These four salient cases are: 1) Iran’s nuclear program and the diplomatic crisis with the United States (2010–2022); 2) the Egyptian crisis in the wake of the Arab uprisings (2011–2014); 3) the Syrian civil war (2011–2022); and 4) the rise and fall of the Islamic State and its top leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in Iraq and Syria (2013–2019). This chapter briefly introduces these cases and discusses how individual-level leadership analyses can be used to make sense of these crises.

The final chapter concludes by first re-outlining the book’s central arguments. The chapter then revisits how the preceding chapters help shed new theoretical light on the source of regulatory barriers while also answering several empirical puzzles, including why similar risks frequently receive dissimilar regulatory treatment, why some nations impose more precautionary regulatory rules than others, and finally what is behind some of the most contentious agricultural trade barriers. Finally, the chapter explores the ethical implications of the book’s central findings and offers several concrete policy recommendations for addressing both the broader information asymmetry problems outlined in the book and the resulting biases that were identified.

The Easterlin paradox states that (1) in a given context richer people are on average happier than poorer people, but (2) over time greater national income per head does not cause greater national happiness. Statement (1) is certainly true. As a benchmark, a unit increase in log income raises wellbeing by 0.3 points (out of 10). The share of the within country variance in wellbeing explained by income inequality is 3% or less. So income is in no sense a proxy for wellbeing.

Across countries the effect of a unit change in log income per capita (other things equal) is also around 0.3 points of wellbeing. But over time the effect of economic growth on wellbeing remains unclear. Studies of individuals show that in most cases a rise in other people’s income reduces your own wellbeing. From a policy point of view, this means that, when a person decides to work harder, she imposes a cost on other people. The natural way to control this is a negative externality is by corrective taxation.

Wellbeing rises in booms and falls in slumps – partly due to unemployment but also due to loss-aversion. So economic stability is vital.

Finally, in Chapter 10 I close the book by discussing some broader conclusions about the study of ethnicity and ethnic change, while also speculating about future prospects for the relationship between industrialization and assimilation. In the former case I focus on such topics as future quantitative work using data on ethnicity, our understanding of individuals who change their ethnic identities, the role of the state in enforcing or promoting ethnic identification and policy implications as regards promoting industrialization. In the latter case I return to my original dataset of country censuses from Chapter 4 to see if the relationship between industrialization and ethnic diversity changes over time. Upon introducing an interaction effect, I find evidence for a declining effect over time, although it appears that the interaction effect is driven by observations from the Americas, a result for which I find evidence in the secondary literature as well.

In Chapter 9, I conclude the book by exploring some of the scholarly, policy, and normative implications of the research topic. I assess the implications of the book’s findings for democratization and democratic consolidation, political party development, and political violence in Pakistan and beyond. I explore limitations of my research and end with numerous policy implications that arise from my findings, in the process outlining several possible avenues for future research.

This chapter presents the multi-scale co-creation methodology used in SURE-Farm to involve stakeholders with the aim of assessing the resilience of European farming systems. This methodology resulted in a wide range of valuable insights and allowed to identify convergent and divergent stakeholders’ perceptions with possible policy implications.

The concluding chapter highlights the key finding that local political incentives can cause powerful, systematic policy waves independent of top-down implementation campaigns. To demonstrate the theory’s applicability beyond China, this chapter examines air pollution trends in municipalities in Mexico. Like local political leaders in autocratic China pleasing their superiors for promotion, local politicians in democratic Mexico face incentives to cater to the desires of their constituents and bolster their political parties. Shen finds a significant peak in PM2.5 concentration level due to regulatory forbearance in municipalities during gubernatorial election years. The chapter demonstrates that across countries and regime types local leaders may opt for laxer regulation to achieve career goals. Yet, environmental policies are not always sacrificed to economic development, employment, and stability. This book’s findings are timely for policymakers and academics studying the determinants of effective regulation and illuminate a solution centering on cooperation between scientists and policymakers to effectively manage complex pollutants.

This concluding chapter first briefly summarizes the argument to explain variation in the processes and mechanisms that lead victims to pursue distinct strategies of resistance to criminal extortion. It then identifies the broader implications that follow from the book’s core findings, including the need to bring victims more squarely into our research on the politics of crime, unpack how victims understand and experience criminal victimization, broaden our approach to the political consequences of criminal victimization to include resistance, and complicate the ways in which we think about relations between police and communities. The chapter outlines a future research agenda on the politics of crime that emphasizes greater attention to the intersection between the political economy of development and the politics of crime as well as criminal governance, armed politics, and the ways in which attention to the understandings of victims can help move us beyond a focus on relations between states and criminals as limited to the binary of corruption or conflict. The final part of the chapter discusses a series of policy implications based on the book’s analysis and findings.

The book ends by asking if there are any policy implications of my theory based on colonial institutions. A likely criticism of my theory is that the structural conditions created by colonialism are persistent and sticky and cannot be changed by the government. I show there are policy implications, for example, if political parties are really committed to land reforms as in Kerala and Karnataka, they can reverse some of the pernicious effects of indirect rule and indirect land tenure. Another possible critique of my theory is whether it can explain recent violence patterns of the Maoist conflict. The level of Maoist violence has declined since 2013-14, and the number of surrenders by Maoist cadres has increased in recent years, but low-level violence and attacks against security forces continue. The Maoist insurgency falls into the pattern of low-intensity but persistent insurgencies like the Kashmir and northeast insurgencies in India. While my theory based on colonial legacies is supposed to explain only the initial spatial variation of insurgency, and not its expansion and patterns of violence, it allows us to explain persistence and historical recurrence of conflict.

Chapter 8 summarizes key findings of the book and explores the feedback loops between legitimacy, institutional design, social trust, and effective governance. We also discuss various implications of our findings. First, we turn to the ambivalent role of the state in areas of limited statehood. Effective governance in most issue-areas is not possible without some degree of security and without some basic infrastructure. Yet, the residual state often behaves as a governance spoiler rather than an active supporter. It needs to be tamed by the rule of law and participatory institutions. Second, we discuss the implications for international affairs. The international system shares the “anarchy problematique” with areas of limited statehood. Many IR theories are highly relevant for explaining effective governance in areas of limited statehood – and vice versa. The global governance system and areas of limited statehood are also firmly intertwined in a multi-level governance system. Third, we discuss the political implications of our findings. Most analysts and policy-makers alike agree that comprehensive state-building efforts in ALS have largely failed. Rather than lowering our normative standards, we suggest a paradigm shift from state-building to governance promotion.

This chapter extends the four basic models --- SEEE, SEEN, DEEE, and DEEN models, in several directions. These extensions are: mixed externality, correlated externalities, increasing returns to scale (IRS) in the economy and environmental externalities, and the environmental externality in exhaustible resource models. These extensions are abstracted largely from climate change research. These extensions revise some of the results obtained in chapters 3 and 4. They allow the readers to better understand the complexity of environmental externality problems. Again, several numerical examples and their programming codes are provided to help the modelling these extensions.

This chapter concludes by pointing to a number of key implications, takeways, and open questions that have emerged throughout this book. It highlights in particular the conclusions that the book derived from the application of the natural monopoly framework to digital platform markets; the competition policy implications that emerge from the economic literature on multisided markets; the role of breakup policies in digital markets; the institional refinements that may be desirable for a contestability and Schumpeterian-based policy approach; and some of the political economy implications that may derive from the emergence of different standards of regulatory intervention and enforcement across jurisdictions.

The final chapter summarizes the book’s findings, evaluates its contributions to the study of post-conflict democracy as well as the limitations of the research, assesses policy implications, and suggests additional avenues for future research.