戀戀風塵 Hong Kong

First of all, this is an excellent book focused on the concept and empirical measurement of legitimacy, an idea troubled political science for decades. The author argued that the concept should include three dimensions: legality, justification and consent. The three dimensions can be empirically estimated by surveys and behaviors of citizens.

In Ch.2 the author tested the constructed empirical index. The findings are that the degree of legitimacy is highly correlated with citizen's satisfaction of general governance, income level, gender equality, welfare level, economic governance and national happiness. The following two chapters discussed the changing factors impacted on legitimacy in the long run.

In Ch.5 the author turned to the consequences of legitimacy. The empirical tests showed that the higher degree legitimacy may contribute to state building, but can hardly avoid internal conflicts. Also, a lower degree of legitimacy of authoritarian regime may lead to democratic transition. These findings are very interesting for normative and empirical arguments.

However, the study suffered from three traditional statistical problems: aggregated problem, cross-sectional data and endogenous problem. The first issue is, simply, why the measurement of legality, justification and consent can be add together as one degree of legitimacy? Second, the author only constructed one cut of cross-sectional data, which can hardly argue the changes over time. At last, the endogenous problem among legitimacy, economic performance and the other variables is still concerned.

Chapter 6 is the core of the thick book. Its about the debate of the origins of Industrial Revolution. Chapter 8 is also impressive in terms of claiming that from 1914 to 1939 is a de-globalization world. BTW, Pp. 284-294 is notable if one is interested in the Manchuian trade policies. Table 9.1 (494-5) is also useful to show the declining pattern of the tariffs' standard around the world. On the contrary, the conclusion is not so relevant.

I agree with the observations of Yang and Naughton in most aspects of the introduction. We are witness of the rebuilding of the Chinese state in terms of taxation, financial system, administration and the military. However, the state building has its constraint, the serious principal-agent problem of the authoritarian rule. Definitely, China can be hold together by the coercion, but can hardly improve the quality of public goods without a more democratic system of political participation.

Tilly divided the reason-giving behavior into four categories: convention, code, story and technical account. The unequal social relations between giver and receiver such as professional and others as well as the power and the powerless can change the reasons from popular to specialized, from cause-effect account to formula. Hence, reasons conducted by the social scientists always face some embarrassing situations that challenge the conventions and may add some codes. It can also be used to tell stories and change the world.

This book is a excellent summary of the changing ownership of farming land in China. Although the author claims that the ambiguous property rights or the empty institutions of Chinese farming land is intended, I still tend to explain this by the weakness of the state (the enduring weak ancent regime for sure). The state could not handle the cost of registration and taxation of farming lands, so it forced the collectivization to squeeze the agricultural surplus by the commune. So the production team owned the land. After Mao's years the government still has on way to clarify the ownership of lands under the household responsibility system. It is not intended but disable (like the other weak state-buildings on the earth). That's all. A pathway from the central disability, my opinion, is the political decentralization and local democracy.

The degree of democracy (freedom house/polity IV/Vanhannen) is the dependent variable of the book. The author reviews the old issues of how institutions consolidate democracy by OLS regressions with the panel data (this may be a big problem). The results show that the economic development level, proportional representation, parliamentary executives, decentralized federalism, press freedom are positive for democracy.

A classical study of modern tax regime in US, UK and Sweden. Following an institutionalist approach, the author argue that the changes of tax regime match the concern of "maximum revenue with minimum political cost." Secondly, he explained how democratization and wars resulted in the increasing of tax revenue and changing structure of modern states. Third, the political process and institution of US, UK and Sweden shaped the differences (but not the total tax rates) of the tax regime. At last, the empirical studies reflected that from the late 1970s, the globalization process did impact on tax reduction, espacially of the rich, in these countries.

In the classical book originally pressed at 1971, the author argued that American social mobility studies ignored the special historical contexts such as the frontier experiences and racism in the US. Moreover, the idea of social order implied the urban values such as the underestimation of the status of peasants and of the importance of downward mobility. These criticisms are still insightful for the students of social stratification field.