Analyses of military strategy often overlook its political consequences—its effect on the adversary's basic goals and understanding of the defender's resolve. As a result, they prescribe the wrong type of military policy and reduce states' security. This article explores how a variety of factors interact to produce political consequences. These factors include the type of adversary (specifically, its motives for expansion); the type of military strategy the defender adopts (offensive or defensive and unilateral or bilateral); the source of the adversary's misperceptions; and the process through which political consequences are generated. The article reformulates Jervis's spiral and deterrence models and argues that they overlook types of adversaries, including most importantly insecure greedy states; that shifts in the adversary's balance of domestic power offer an alternative to individual learning as the basic way in which political consequences are generated; that national-level failures of evaluation provide an alternative source of exaggerated insecurity; and that these differences can require the defender to follow different policies. Final sections explore military options for managing political consequences and implications for U.S. security policy.

This paper tests the objective (professionalization) and subjective (party penetration) models of Soviet civil-military relations. The objective model is found to provide the best fit and is used to investigate further the factors leading to military participation in, and withdrawal from, the coup of August 1991. The objective model points to the importance of threats to professional autonomy and national unity, the politicization of the military, and declining regime legitimacy as the primary causal factors in the participation of the military in the coup. It also stresses the importance of military professionalism as a barrier to intervention and as a cause of military paralysis during the coup. Furthermore, the model points to the importance of democratic legitimacy in future civilian control and to the need for increased military professionalism to forestall threats to the post-Soviet regime.

Evidence is accumulating that, in the modern international system, democracies rarely fight each other. But the reasons for the phenomenon are not well understood. This article explores a similar phenomenon in other societies, using cross-cultural ethnographic evidence. It finds that polities organized according to more participatory (“democratic”) principles fight each other less often than do polities organized according to hierarchical principles. Stable participatory institutions seem to promote peaceful relations, especially if people perceive that others also have some control over politics.

This study examines the case of the Brazilian debt rescheduling agreement of 1988 as a two-level game in which each of the two main negotiators—the Brazilian state and the international bank advisory committee—must satisfy its own constituents while trying to negotiate an international agreement. It is argued that the interaction between the domestic and international levels must be understood in order to explain the outcomes of international debt negotiations. This article draws on Robert Putnam's concept of the two-level game in international politics and on a wider literature concerning the influence of domestic political considerations in international negotiations to demonstrate that such an analysis can explain the process and outcome of the 1988 agreement, where a unitary negotiating level fails to predict the final result. The two-level model explains how domestic constraints and opportunities affect international outcomes, and it highlights the importance of the ratification process.

By focusing on some major contributions to political economy and economic policy-making within advanced capitalism, among the richest subfields of the discipline, the article seeks to analyze the relation between structural constraints and political choice. With the partial exception of Politics against Markets, all the works reviewed here seek to interpret rather than change the world. Attending to the fine grain of historical detail, they insightfully describe important political developments. They provide fine accounts of the interplay of structure and agency in concrete historical settings. By developing impressive theory to illuminate these developments, the works considerably advance our knowledge of the way that political forces affect economic policy outcomes. However, they generally share three important and interrelated shortcomings: they do not adequately conceptualize the structural dynamics of democratic capitalism; they adopt an economistic perspective concerning the organization of interests and social identities; and they confine attention to what is and fail to consider what might be.