This dissertation contains five studies for the award of a Ph.D. by monograph. The thesis addresses one of the underlying questions in the study of the political economy of reform: what institutional and socio-economic factors determine the extent to which political actors can collaborate on reform? The underlying argument this thesis makes relates to the operationalization of empirical models to address this question. The thesis will explain why and how reform can be understood and modeled as a multilayered phenomenon in empirical analysis, that is, as a function of its distinct characteristics that structure the way political actors engage in political transactions. After motivating the research question, chapter 2 reviews the literature on the political economy of reform and situates the contributions in this thesis. The following chapters, chapters 3, 4 and 5, are written and conceived as individual journal articles that, at the time of writing, are either already published (chapter 3), revised and resubmitted (chapter 4), or under review (chapter 5) in peerreviewed journals. Chapter 3 focuses on one dominant theory in the literature and discusses the methodological shortcomings in empirical analyses of the so-called crisis hypothesis, which posits that economic crises induce reform. The fourth chapter introduces and analyzes a novel data set on legislation in Lebanon based on agenda-setting theory, which the fifth chapter leverages for an empirical analysis of the determinants of political collaboration in Lebanon. To address the gaps in the literature identified before, the study develops a theory to interpret political collaboration and leverages a mixed-methods research design that draws on both a quantitative analysis of legislation data as well as 32 expert interviews with Lebanese political actors. Chapter 6 discusses outstanding conceptual issues of research on the crisis hypothesis based on the analysis in chapter 3. Chapter 7 concludes with comments on policy relevance of the findings of this thesis and possible vistas for future research.