caa a22 4500 386312397 CHVBK 20180307111553.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130s1988 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0020818300033981 doi S0020818300033981 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0020818300033981 Cameron David R. Associate Professor of Political Science at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. Distributional coalitions and other sources of economic stagnation: on Olson's Rise and Decline of Nations [Elektronische Daten] [David R. Cameron] One of the most important recent contributions to the field of comparative political economy is Mancur Olson's The Rise and Decline of Nations. In that work, Olson deduces, from his logic of collective action, a series of implications regarding the impact of social organizations—in particular, "distributional coalitions”—on economic growth that can explain variations in national growth rates across a wide range of time and space. This article considers the assumptions upon which that logic is founded, the plausibility of the several implications drawn from that logic, and the application of the theory to account for differences among five nations in rates of economic growth in the post-World War II era. The analysis suggests that the characteristics of group activity emphasized by Olson represent, at best, only a small— perhaps negligible—part of the explanation of cross-national differences in growth. Instead, it suggests that an important source of the variation among nations in growth rates is the international political and economic system. In particular, the discussion of the German, Japanese, and British cases suggests that stagnation (or growth) is, to a considerable extent, the product of a nation's position in the world economy, the policy responses through which governments seek to perpetuate or improve that position, and the constraints upon (or opportunities for) growth-oriented domestic economic policy posed by that position. Copyright © The IO Foundation 1988 International Organization Cambridge University Press 42/4(1988), 561-603 0020-8183 42:4<561 1988 42 INO https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818300033981 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818300033981 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Cameron David R. Associate Professor of Political Science at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- International Organization Cambridge University Press 42/4(1988), 561-603 0020-8183 42:4<561 1988 42 INO CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge