In this book, I argue that our world has become dominated by carefully curated and structured menus, which I call "choice boxes," that severely limit and constrain our autonomy by presenting us with only a narrow set of options designed by profit-minded corporate choice architects. In examining the “menufication” of everyday American life across the twentieth century, the book traces the rise of digital choice architects such as Google and Amazon back to “analog” technologies such as multiple-choice tests, supermarket layouts, industrial employee ratings and Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books.

Napoleon's France saw a transformation in the economic status of daughters, particularly through their newly protected inheritance rights. This article reveals how the emperor utilized these rights to forge marriages between his loyal supporters and wealthy heiresses from old regime nobility. Drawing on confidential reports to the Minister of Police that meticulously monitored young women's wealth and appearance, the study illuminates Napoleon's systematic effort to reshape France's elite class through marriages, and further bind wealthy families to the imperial government. By examining the overlooked role of daughters, the article offers fresh insights into how imperial authority was constituted at the local and familial levels. Yet this attempt at political centralization faced resistance from the very nobility whose support Napoleon sought to secure. Their response reveals the complex negotiations that characterized nineteenth-century state-building, as traditional elites adapted to and challenged new imperial demands.

Dani Filc and Amit Avigur-Eshel employ a neo-Gramscian framework grounded in the distinct analytical concepts of ideology, historical blocs, and growth models to examine the long rule of Israel’s Likud party during 2009-2019. Exemplifying how public policies are crucial to exclusionary-populists retaining power, they find that the combination of neoliberal and heterodox socio-economic policies and the exploitation of Israel’s export-led growth model to improve the material welfare of 'the people', as well as deals struck with non-populist forces based on ideological commonalities were pivotal in Likud’s decade-long reign. Overall, the book illustrates that exclusionary-populist movements maintain power whenever they succeed in stabilizing the social structures around a political project promoted as an alternative to the current hegemony.

This Cambridge Element maps the relationship between taxation and social policy from a comparative and historical perspective. It critically reviews studies in fiscal sociology, history, political science and political economy to highlight blind spots in the body of knowledge that future studies could explore. This Cambridge Element shows that exploring the revenue side of social policy offers compelling answers to central questions tackled in welfare state scholarship. It addresses key questions such as: What explains the introduction and timing of social programs? How can we understand processes of welfare state expansion and retrenchment? What determines the redistributive capacity of welfare states? And what accounts for variations in redistributive capacity between groups and across generations in different countries? As suggested, while bringing in the financing side of social policy complements prevailing accounts in the welfare state literature, in some instances, studying financing can also transform how we understand social policy.

This article examines the political economy of tax policy in developmental states through a comparative historical analysis of Value-Added Tax (VAT) adoption in Israel and South Korea during the 1970s. While developmental state literature has focused on industrial policy and economic management, it has paid limited attention to taxation as an instrument to support these developmental goals. Meanwhile, studies on the political economy of taxation often emphasize distributive politics, overlooking cases where taxation serves allocational functions. This article shows how VAT was introduced in Israel, as in South Korea, as a state-led initiative aimed at supporting export-oriented industrial development and macroeconomic stability. To interpret this pattern, the article proposes the concept of a developmental tax regime – a configuration in which tax systems are designed not to promote redistribution or welfare expansion but to allocate resources in line with long-term developmental objectives.