This paper explores two quite different visions of the democratic processes that can create congruence between citizen preferences and public policies. In the Majority Control vision, electoral competition and citizen choices result in the direct election of governments committed to policies corresponding to the preferences of the median voter. In the Proportionate Influence vision, election outcomes result in legislatures that reflect the preferences of all citizens; legislative bargaining results in policies linked to the position of the median voter. The authors give more explicit theoretical form to those visions and link them empirically to specific types of modern democracies. They then attempt to test the success of each vision in bringing about congruence between citizen self-placements and the estimated positions of governments and policymaker coalitions on the left-right scale in twelve nations in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Although the analysis reveals weaknesses in each approach, it suggests a consistent advantage for the Proportionate Influence vision.

The consolidation of democratic regimes requires the extension of political rights to the entire citizenry, but this process does not necessarily follow from electoral competition. The transition from authoritarian clientelism to respect for associational autonomy is an important dimension of democratization, unfolding unevenly through iterative cycles of conflict among authoritarian rulers, reformist elites, and autonomous social movements. This process is illustrated by a study of changing bargaining relations between rural development agencies and grassroots indigenous movements in Mexico. The results suggest that the transition from clientelism to citizenship involves three distinct patterns of state-society relations within the same nation-state: redoubts of persistent authoritarianism can coexist with both new enclaves of pluralist tolerance and large gray areas of “semiclientelism.”

A fundamental political-institutional question that has only recently received serious scholarly attention concerns the impact of different constitutional frameworks on democratic consolidation. Little systematic cross-regional evidence has been brought to bear on this question. This article reports the findings of the analysis of numerous different sources of data, all of which point in the direction of a much stronger correlation between democratic consolidation and the constitutional framework of pure parliamentarianism than between consolidation and pure presidentialism. The systematic analysis of these data leads the authors to conclude that parliamentarianism is a more supportive constitutional framework due to the following theoretically predictable and empirically observable tendencies: its greater propensity for governments to have majorities to implement their programs, its greater ability to rule in a multiparty setting, its lower propensity for executives to rule at the edge of the constitution and its greater facility in removing a chief executive if he or she does so, its lower susceptibility to a military coup, and its greater tendency to provide long party-government careers, which add loyalty and experience to political society. In contrast, the analytically separable propensities of presidentialism also form a highly interactive system, but they work to impede democratic consolidation by reducing politicians' degrees of freedom.

This article proposes revisions to the theory of political transitions by analyzing patterns of recent popular challenges to neopatrimonial rule in Africa. The approach is explicitly comparative, based on contrasts between Africa and the rest of the world and among regimes within Africa itself. Arguing against the prevalent view that transitions unfold unpredictably according to the contingent interplay of key political actors, the authors contend that the structure of the preexisting regime shapes the dynamics and sometimes even the outcomes of political transitions. They find that in contrast to transitions from corporatist regimes, transitions from neopatrimonial rule are likely to be driven by social protest, marked by struggles over patronage, and backed by emerging middle classes. Following Dahl, the authors compare African regimes on the basis of the degree of formal political participation and competition allowed. They find that regime variants—personal dictatorship, military oligarchy, plebiscitary one-party regime, and competitive one-party regime—are associated with distinctive transition dynamics. Whereas transitions from military oligarchies are typically managed from the top down and are relatively orderly, transitions from plebiscitary systems often occur discordantly through confrontational national conferences. A consolidated democracy is least likely to result from the abrupt collapse of a personal dictatorship and is most likely, though never guaranteed, from a graduated transition from a competitive one-party regime. In general, getting to democracy is problematic from all regimes that lack institutional traditions of political competition.

In shifting responsibilities from government to market, privatization has the potential to alter the institutional framework through which citizens normally conceive and pursue their individual and shared interests. But the literature has presented it as a relatively apolitical adaptation to changing conditions. Rather than a choice among means to achieve broadly shared goals, privatization often takes the form of a strategy to realign institutions so as to privilege the goals of some groups over the competing aspirations of other groups. Drawing primarily on the experience of Western, industrialized nations, a political typology is developed that distinguishes between privatizations undertaken foi different reasons—whether pfagmatic, tactical, or systemic.

This article analyzes conflicts in the 1980s over the decentralization of bargaining between labor and capital in Sweden and Germany. The analysis highlights the role of institutional arrangements, some of them previously “dormant” politically, that mediated common pressures to enhance plant-level flexibility. Whereas the drive for plant flexibility in Sweden contributed to the demise of traditional bargaining arrangements, similar pressures in Germany were more successfully accommodated within its “dual” system. In both cases, institutional links among different levels and arenas of bargaining shaped the strategic interactions of labor and capital in ways that either complicated (Sweden) or facilitated (Germany) the search for compromise within traditional bargaining institutions. While confirming the central role of institutions in explaining cross-national variation in outcomes, the analysis also adds a dynamic element to institutional analysis, highlighting how changing substantive interests of political actors interact with preexisting institutions to produce distinctive patterns of stability and change.

This article presents and tests a theory of learning in international politics. Drawing primarily from social psychology and organization theory, the learning theory proposes that lessons tend to be drawn only from high-impact events in world politics, such as large wars and economic depressions. Lessons drawn tend to be simple and are oriented around the question of which policies are likely to be successful and which policies are likely to fail. This learning theory is tested on the alliance choices of small powers in the twentieth century. The predictions of two learning hypotheses are compared with those of a leading realist explanation of alliance choices, balance of threat theory. Quantitative analysis of small powers' alliance choices reveals that a small power's experience in the previous world war is a very powerful explanation of its peacetime alliance choices after that war, whereas the level of threat in the international environment has only marginal effects on the small power's alliance choices. Further, these threat effects may be in the opposite direction of that predicted by balance of threat theory.

This article examines the impact of gender relations on democratization. It considers a number of key questions: what role do women's movements play in the transition to democratic rule and what impact does a return to competitive electoral politics have on women and women's movements. The starting point is a critique of the existing literature on democratization. That literature cannot provide a satisfactory analysis of the role of women in transition politics because of the narrow definitions of democracy used and the top-down focus of much of it. The article then develops a gendered analysis through a comparison of the different processes of transition in Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe. It highlights the significance of the relationship between civil society and the state and the existence of “political space.”

In Australia, Denmark, New Zealand, and Sweden in the 1980s, coalitions of politicians, fiscal bureaucrats, and capital and labor in sectors exposed to international competition allied to transform the largest single nontradables sector in their society: the state, particularly the welfare state. They exposed state personnel and agencies to market pressures and competition to reduce the cost of welfare and other state services. The impetus for change came from rising foreign public and private debt. Rising public debt levels and expensive welfare states interacted to create a tax wedge between employers' wage costs and workers' received wages. This undercut international competitiveness, worsening current account deficits and leading to more foreign debt accumulation. Two factors explain variation in the degree of reorganization in each country: differences in their electoral and constitutional regimes; and the willingness of left parties to risk splitting their core constituencies. Introduction of market pressures is an effort to go beyond the liberalization of the economy common in industrial countries during the 1980s, and both to institutionalize limits to welfare spending and to change the nature of statesociety relations, away from corporatist forms of interest intermediation. In short, not just less state, but a different state.

This essay examines and reformulates the realist-neoliberal debate. It focuses initially on the issue of the attribution of instrumental goals to states—the goals they pursue as a function of the environment they confront—and argues not only that such goals are epiphenomena of other things but also that their specification constitutes a mere redescription of the alternative equilibria that states can achieve in anarchic systems. The world orders that realists and neoliberals envision are but alternative equilibria to a more general game. In that game cooperation, regardless of its form, must be endogenously enforced, and a debate over instrumental goals (whether it is best to model states as relative or absolute resource maximizers) is not central to the development of a theory that explains and predicts world orders.

Instead, the realist-neoliberal debate should be recast. The central research agenda should be to develop models that illuminate the following: how the equilibrium to a game in which states structure international affairs influences the types of issue-specific subgames states play, how countries coordinate to equilibria of different types; how the coordination problems associated with different equilibria can be characterized; how institutions emerge endogenously to sustain different equilibria; how states can enhance the attractiveness of an equilibrium; and how states can signal commitments to the strategies that are part of that equilibrium.

Between the late 1970s and the early 1990s, after decades of trying to limit short-term international capital movements, advanced industrial states moved decisively in the direction of decontrol. What has driven this remarkable policy convergence? The answer lies not in ideological change or shifts in relative political power, but in the prior development of international financial markets and in the increasing globalization of business. In a policy environment fundamentally reshaped by these factors, financial institutions and multinational firms were able to threaten or implement strategies of evasion and exit. Thus, the usefulness of controls declined as their effective costs rose sharply. In this light, the cases of Japan, Germany, Italy, and France are examined. The analysis points to the tightening link between short-term capital movements and foreign direct investment, issues that have long been treated as conceptually distinct. It also underlines the intricate connection between national policies governing capital movements and those aimed at managing international financial markets.

This article uses two puzzles from the Brezhnev period to test competing models of Soviet military policy and of innovation in military “doctrine.” An organizational model of Soviet military policy offers the best explanation of both cases: why the Soviet Union's Brezhnevera military strategy contradicted the Politburo's priorities (to prevent any war from escalating to nuclear use) and why the Soviet Union agreed to the ABM treaty. The ABM case shows that civilian leaders can force change in military “doctrine” when they have a policy handle–a way of redefining the issue to remove it from the military's exclusive area of competence. When civilians lack a policy handle, as in the military strategy case, they are unable to force innovation if the military is unwilling.

The Russian government now faces the task of finding effective policy handles that will institutionalize civilian control of military policy. The fate of Russia's reforms may depend on it.

This article examines the state of the field in the Western study of Chinese foreign policy. After briefly surveying the earlier generations of scholarship, it critiques the current narrow focus and apolitical tendency in studying Chinese foreign policy-making institutions and perceptions of foreign policy makers and specialists. The author argues for a more balanced and more comprehensive approach that combines analytical vigor and empirical validity.

Institutionalist models of macroeconomic performance in advanced industrial countries focus on central bank independence. In newly industrializing countries, however, the behavioral authority of the central bank is a much more significant predictor of inflation than is legal independence, because laws there are not the source of central bank ability to create or defend macroeconomic stability. Financial structures and the incentives they create for government politicians, private bankers, and industrialists explain cross-national variation in the interest and capacity of central banks in developing countries. The greater public sector deficits are, the weaker and/or more dependent private banks are on state assistance; and the larger the portion of industry finance covered by commercial bank loans or state credits, the less likely it is that there will be an authoritative, conservative central bank. Mexico, Thailand, Brazil, and South Korea are the four country cases considered in depth.

After comparing the predictions of Marxist, moral economy, and rational-choice theories concerning collective actions by workers in Egypt in the period since the 1952 Free Officers coup, this article concludes that a moral economy perspective is best able to explain the nature and frequency of these protests. The supporting evidence is the correlation between labor protest and violations of workers' feelings of entitlement, as manifest in declining real wages or disruptions to established patterns of wage differentials. The targeting of state institutions, combined with the fact that workers have eschewed actual production stoppages in favor of symbolic protests, indicates a view of reciprocal rights and obligations between themselves and the state. The latter reinforces the moral economy by combining significant concessions with its repressive response to labor protests. Marxism proves unable to explain the largely defensive and reactive nature of labor protest, while rational-choice theory is reduced to efforts to quantify workers' reactions to this repression.

Peasant upheavals are studied from the perspective offered by the selective incentives solution to Olson's collective action problem. This article presents much evidence from three different forms of peasant struggles—everyday forms of peasant resistance, unorganized rural movements, and organized peasant rebellions—that demonstrates the widespread existence of selective incentives. Questions about the causes and consequences of selective incentives are then examined. First, what are the conditions under which peasant struggles emphasize material selective incentives rather than nonmaterial altruistic appeals? The level of selective incentives in any peasant upheaval is a function of demand and supply considerations. Peasants demand selective incentives. The suppliers include one or more dissident peasant organizations, the authorities, and the allies of both. A political struggle ensues as the suppliers compete and attempt to monopolize the market. Second, what are the conditions under which the pursuit of material self-interest hurts rather than helps the peasantry's collective cause? Selective incentives supplemented by ideology can be effective; selective incentives alone are counterproductive.

These questions and answers lead to the conclusion that the selective incentives solution reveals much more about peasant upheavals than simply that peasants will often be concerned with their own material self-interest. It is therefore important to study the following three aspects of peasant collective action: the dilemma peasants face, or how peasant resistance is in the interest of all peasants but in the self-interest of none; the paradox peasants face, or that rational peasants do solve their dilemma (for example, with selective incentives) and participate in collective action; and the irony peasants face, or that self-interest is both at the root of their dilemma and at the foundation of a solution to their paradox.

While scholars outside the Arab world often link authoritarianism there to some dark cultural template involving religious doctrine or family structure, scholars of the region ground their explanations in political economy, in the historical evolution of the state, in patterns of state-society interactions, and in ideological appeals. To understand authoritarian outcomes, they draw attention to economic transformations, to social actors and the importance of organized social groups, to the role of state efforts to contain them in shaping political outcomes, to the repressive institutions that sometimes arise from this process, and to weaknesses of state ideologies that arise to justify authoritarian outcomes. Their work allows us to unpack the phenomenon of authoritarianism by reorganizing it into three different sets of forces: those that precipitate authoritarianism, those that sustain it, and those that resist it. The result is a clearer and more nuanced understanding of the range of factors that affect the likelihood of any state resorting to violence.

The author examines the question of why labor in the former Soviet Union has remained so quiet during this tumultous period. He conducts a most similar case study of coal miners, who have struck and organized militant trade unions, and of steelworkers in the same communities, who have not. To explain the lack of strike activity, the concept of mutual dependence is developed, whereby the enterprise is dependent on workers in a labor-short economy and workers in turn have been dependent on the enterprise for the provision of goods and services in short supply. The provision of a high level of such goods and services through the workplace was found to prevent independent worker activity in steel mills and certain coal mines. Implications are drawn for theories of collective action and the study of the former Soviet Union and its economic and political transformation.

This review essay of four recent books on democratic transitions is written from the standpoint of contemporary South African politics. Each of the books takes the Schumpetarian model of democratic politics for granted, and in the course of evaluating them the author explores the advantages and limitations of that model for thinking about the prospects for democracy in South Africa. He concludes that the Schumpeterian model diverts attention from questions that should concern promoters of democracy. The most important such questions deal with the internal structure of political parties, public organizations, and civil institutions.

This essay reviews three recent books on the political economy of finance in postcolonial Asia and Latin America and suggests a framework for examining the relationship between political power and varying patterns of control over investment resources. The stress is on the constraints different controllers of capital can impose on state leaders, the conditions under which policymakers can subvert these constraints, and how conflicts within the state over the trajectory of policy are mediated by who (or what) supplies critical investment resources and the institutional channels through which the resources flow.