Food and Power: Regime Type, Agricultural Policy, and Political Stability

Book info: Food and Power: Regime Type, Agricultural Policy, and Political Stability (Paperback, 251 pages) – Cambridge University Press, 2022. Language: English.

The relationship between development and democratization remains one of the most compelling topics of research in political science, yet many aspects of authoritarian regime behavior remain unexplained. This book explores how different types of governments take action to shape the course of economic development, focusing on agriculture, a sector that is of crucial importance in the developing world. It explains variation in agricultural and food policy across regime type, who the winners and losers of these policies are, and whether they influence the stability of authoritarian governments. The book pushes us to think differently about the process linking economic development to political change, and to consider growth as an inherently politicized process rather than an exogenous driver of moves towards democracy. About the Author Henry Thomson is an Assistant Professor in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University. From 2014 to 2017 he was a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. In 2015, his dissertation won the American Political Science Association's Juan Linz Prize for the Best Dissertation in the Comparative Study of Democracy.