Oligarchy, by Jeffrey Winters

Winters’ study partakes of two recent trends in political science scholarship: the drive, in the wake of the global financial crisis, to re-examine the effects of concentrated wealth on contemporary democratic institutions, and the attempt to account for new political dynamics in advanced industrial societies by re-importing and generalizing models originally developed for the study of the developing world. Winters, whose previous work notably includes a study of Indonesian political economy and an edited volume on World Bank governance, would appear well placed to offer such a synthesis; the results, however, are somewhat uneven.