Scarcely a day has passed in the last decade without reports appearing of yet another act of suicide terrorism (the subject matter of this issue's cover graphic) in the world's established and emerging hotspots. In “The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” Robert Pape posits that “Even if many suicide attackers are irrational or fanatical, the leadership groups that recruit and direct them are not.” Rather, such attacks are intended to achieve specific political purposes. To examine these acts, Pape has assembled a database of suicide attacks worldwide, 1980–2001. His findings–among other things, that suicide terrorism often “pays” from the perspective of group leaders because it leads governments to make concessions–will enable scholars to achieve a new understanding of this complex phenomenon. Nor does Pape shy away from considering the policy implications of his findings. Consequently, this important article is destined to inform not only scholarship but also policy-making for years to come.

Suicide terrorism is rising around the world, but the most common explanations do not help us understand why. Religious fanaticism does not explain why the world leader in suicide terrorism is the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a group that adheres to a Marxist/Leninist ideology, while existing psychological explanations have been contradicted by the widening range of socio-economic backgrounds of suicide terrorists. To advance our understanding of this growing phenomenon, this study collects the universe of suicide terrorist attacks worldwide from 1980 to 2001, 188 in all. In contrast to the existing explanations, this study shows that suicide terrorism follows a strategic logic, one specifically designed to coerce modern liberal democracies to make significant territorial concessions. Moreover, over the past two decades, suicide terrorism has been rising largely because terrorists have learned that it pays. Suicide terrorists sought to compel American and French military forces to abandon Lebanon in 1983, Israeli forces to leave Lebanon in 1985, Israeli forces to quit the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in 1994 and 1995, the Sri Lankan government to create an independent Tamil state from 1990 on, and the Turkish government to grant autonomy to the Kurds in the late 1990s. In all but the case of Turkey, the terrorist political cause made more gains after the resort to suicide operations than it had before. Thus, Western democracies should pursue policies that teach terrorists that the lesson of the 1980s and 1990s no longer holds, policies which in practice may have more to do with improving homeland security than with offensive military action.I thank Robert Art, Mia Bloom, Steven Cícala, Alex Downs, Daniel Drezner, Adria Lawrence, Sean Lynn-Jones, John Mearsheimer, Michael O'Connor, Sebastian Rosato, Lisa Weeden, the anonymous reviewers, and the members of the program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago for their superb comments. I especially thank James K. Feldman and Chaim D. Kaufmann for their excellent comments on multiple drafts. I would also like to acknowledge encouragement from the committee for the Combating Political Violence paper competition sponsored by the Institute for War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, which selected an earlier version as a winning paper.

September 11 did not fundamentally change world politics. Instead, it exacerbated already existing tensions about how to implement post-cold war collective security rules. Using a rule-oriented constructivist theory of global security, I argue that the dominant post-cold war global security trend is the gradual construction of collective security rules, including rules punishing human rights abuses, terrorism, and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Using an interpretive method called dialogical analysis, I analyze the debate about intervention in Kosovo and argue that the recent conflict over intervention in Iraq revolves around similar claims about how to implement collective security rules. This analysis challenges arguments that September 11 ushered in a new era of world politics that necessarily justifies more aggressive, preemptive U.S. policies.I would like to thank Karin Fierke, Yale Ferguson, Gavan Duffy, and David Ahola for comments on earlier drafts, as well as Maximo Sanchez Pagano for research assistance. Any errors are my own.

Do electoral institutions and ethnopolitical cleavages shape the structure of party systems separately or jointly? We examine the independent, additive, and interactive effects on the number of electoral and legislative parties of two institutional variables (district magnitude and proximity of presidential and legislative elections), one intervening variable (effective number of presidential candidates), and two new measures of ethnopolitical cleavages based on constructivist specification of ethnopolitical groups (fragmentation and concentration). Ethnopolitical fragmentation independently reduces the number of parties but, interactively with ethnopolitical concentration, increases it. However, the additive and interactive combinations of both measures with electoral institutions explain the largest amount of variance in the number of parties. These results emphasize the importance of ethnopolitical cleavages in mediating the effects of electoral institutions on the structure of party systems, with important implications for the stability of Africa's emerging democracies in which parties are weak and multiethnic coalitions are fluid.The National Science Foundation provided financial support (Grant SBER-9515439; Shaheen Mozaffar, Principal Investigator) for the larger project from which this article is drawn. Scarritt supervised the data collection on ethnopolitical groups and Mozaffar supervised the data collection on elections, electoral systems, and party systems. Adrian Prentice Hull of Jackson State University and Michelle Camou and Eitan Schiffman of the University of Colorado at Boulder provided invaluable assistance in the coding of ethnopolitical groups. For many helpful comments on early drafts, the authors thank the editor and three anonymous reviewers, as well as Fabian Camacho, Gary Cox, Ted Gurr, Richard Katz, David Leblang, Arend Lijphart, Tom Mayer, Susan McMillan, Kathleen O'Doherty, Dan Posner, Donald Rothchild, and members of the Globalization and Democratization colloquium at the Institute of Behavioral Science, University of Colorado at Boulder. Mozaffar thanks the Boston University African Studies Center for continued research support. The data set for the article is available at http://webhost.bridgew.edu/smozaffar/. Final responsibility for the article rests with the authors.

Do democracies suffer higher inflation than nondemocracies? We identify two competing hypotheses regarding the impact of democracy on inflation. In the “populist” approach, inflation is the result of public demands for transfers financed by the inflation tax, suggesting that electoral competition will increase inflation. In the “state-capture” approach, inflation is a result of pressure from elites who derive private benefits from money creation, suggesting that electoral competition may constrain inflation. We present a simple model that captures both ideas and argue that the impact of democracy is conditioned by the prevailing level of income inequality. This claim is tested with data from more than 100 countries between 1960 and 1999 using different dynamic panel estimation methods to control for unobserved effects and the potential endogeneity of some independent variables. We find robust evidence that democracy is associated with lower inflation in lower-inequality countries but with higher inflation in higher-inequality countries.The authors thank Michael Bailey, Robert Cumby, Philip Keefer, Torsten Persson, Dennis Quinn, George Shambaugh, David Stasavage, and David Strömberg for comments on early drafts. The central bank turnover data used in this paper were generously provided by Jakob de Haan. Previous versions of this paper were delivered at the annual meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association and American Political Science Association. Financial support from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and research assistance from Jorge Ugaz and Mouneer Odeh are gratefully acknowledged.

Governments unable to make credible promises hinder economic development and effective policymaking. Scholars have focused considerable attention on checks and balances and the delegation of authority to independent agencies as institutional solutions to this problem. The political conditions under which these institutions enhance credibility, rather than policy stability, are still unclear, however. We show that checks—multiple veto players—enhance credibility, depending on the extent of uncertainty about the location of the status quo, on how agenda control is allocated among the veto players, and on whether veto players have delegated policymaking authority to independent agencies. In the context of monetary policy and independent central banks, we find evidence supporting the following predictions: Delegation is more likely to enhance credibility and political replacements of central bank governors are less likely in the presence of multiple political veto players; this effect increases with the polarization of veto players.We have benefited from the generous advice of many people, including Alberto Alesina, Tim Besley, Georgios Chortareas, Roberta Gatti, Simon Hug, Stephan Haggard, Witold Henisz, Aart Kraay, Francesca Recanatini, and Mary Shirley, and from comments of seminar participants at DELTA (Paris), George Mason, and Oxford. Three anonymous referees and the editor were especially helpful. This paper's findings, interpretations, and conclusions are entirely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of The World Bank, its executive directors, or the countries they represent.

The relevance of socioeconomic class and of class-related parties for policymaking is a recurring issue in the social sciences. The “new politics” perspective holds that in the present era of austerity, class-based parties once driving welfare state expansion have been superseded by powerful new interest groups of welfare-state clients capable of largely resisting retrenchment pressures emanating from postindustrial forces. We argue that retrenchment can fruitfully be analyzed as distributive conflict involving a remaking of the early postwar social contract based on the full employment welfare state, a conflict in which partisan politics and welfare-state institutions are likely to matter. Pointing to problems of conceptualization and measurement of the dependent variable in previous research, we bring in new data on the extent of retrenchment in social citizenship rights and show that the long increase in social rights has been turned into a decline and that significant retrenchment has taken place in several countries. Our analyses demonstrate that partisan politics remains significant for retrenchment also when we take account of contextual indictors, such as constitutional veto points, economic factors, and globalization.Author names are in alphabetical order and they share equal responsibility for the manuscript. Early versions of this paper were presented at annual meetings of the Nordic Political Science Association in Aalborg, 2002, and the American Political Science Association in San Francisco, 2001, the International Sociological Association RC 28 meeting in Mannheim, 2001, the International Sociological Association RC 19 meeting in Tilburg 2000, and the American Sociological Association in Washington, DC, 2000, as well as at various seminars. For constructive comments on different versions of the manuscript we thank Rainer Lepsius, Anders Lindbom, Ingalill Montanari, John Myles, Michael Shalev, Sheila Shaver, and Robin Stryker, as well as other participants in these meetings. We want to thank Olof Bäckman, Stefan Englund, Ingrid Esser, Helena Höög, and Annita Näsström for very valuable help and Dennis Quinn for providing us his data on international financial deregulation. Our thanks are also due to three anonymous referees for careful reading. This research has been supported by grants from the Bank of Sweden Tercentennial Foundation and the Swedish Council for Social Research.

This paper discusses “normalization” as a problem for the liberal order through a detailed examination of the liberal political theory of Michael Oakeshott. Oakeshott links the poststructuralist normalizing problematic with the “existential” dilemma of human finitude. In liberalism, he argues, selves become disciplined and normalized when they respond to finitude with an overemphasis on instrumentality. They understand freedom as an instrumental good, a means to external ends. Oakeshott reformulates liberalism based on another response when selves appreciate experience as a self-sufficient or intrinsic good. They understand freedom as a first-order good valuable for itself and this lessens the normalizing pressure. I argue that F. A. Hayek's theory of liberalism confirms Oakeshott's warning about an overemphasis on instrumentality. I show the importance of Oakeshott's work in that he restates the distinction between the public and the private and demonstrates the limits of contemporary liberal theories insofar as they neglect the problem of normalization.

This essay examines the tension between agenda-setting and majority rule in the writings of one of the earliest and most original theorists of participatory democracy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Exploring Rousseau's views on lawmaking and the complexities associated with legislative initiation, specifically, this essay challenges the notion that representatives or legislative experts in a democracy inevitably reduce popular participation to acclamation. Contrary to authors who believe that Rousseau surreptitiously devolves political power to an elected elite who predecide a legislative agenda for a passive majority to vote upon later, I argue that the philosopher delegates authority to initiate the laws to representatives without undermining either the sovereignty or the robustness of citizen self-rule. This argument reveals, in part, why contemporary participatory democracy is not inherently “immobile” owing to the self-reinforcing benefits of democratic participation within a well-balanced constitution.The author wishes to thank Mads Qvortrup, Benjamin Wong, and APSR's Reviewers.

Malapportionment of seats in bicameral legislatures, it is widely argued, confers disproportionate benefits to overrepresented jurisdictions. Ample empirical research has documented that unequal representation produces unequal distribution of government expenditures in bicameral legislatures. The theoretical foundations for this empirical pattern are weak. It is commonly asserted that this stems from unequal voting power per se. Using a noncooperative bargaining game based on the closed-rule, infinite-horizon model of Baron and Ferejohn (1989), we assess the conditions under which unequal representation in a bicameral legislature may lead to unequal division of public expenditures. Two sets of results are derived. First, when bills originate in the House and the Senate considers the bill under a closed rule, the equilibrium expected payoffs of all House members are, surprisingly, equal. Second, we show that small-state biases can emerge when (1) there are supermajority rules in the malapportioned chamber, (2) the Senate initiates bills, which produces maldistributed proposal probabilities, and (3) the distributive goods are “lumpy.”We thank seminar participants at New York University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the 2002 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association for helpful comments. James Snyder and Michael Ting gratefully acknowledge the financial support of National Science Foundation Grant SES-0079035. Stephen Ansolabehere gratefully acknowledges the support of the Carnegie Corporation under the Carnegie Scholars program. This paper was written while Michael Ting was at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and he thanks the Department of Political Science there for their support.

Using the racial integration of national labor unions as a case study, I find that courts played an important and meaningfully autonomous role in integrating unions while elected officials largely failed to act. Courts, unlike elected officials, offered civil rights groups relatively easy access to the legal agenda. In response to thousands of cases in federal courts, judges rewrote key civil rights statutes, oversaw the implementation of their rulings, and used attorneys' fees and damage awards to impose significant financial costs on resistant unions. Court power was the product of multiple and historically contingent forces that involved the interaction of elected officials, civil rights activists, and the legal community. Elected officials delegated to the courts the power to enforce civil rights laws and tacitly endorsed procedural changes that augmented the courts' institutional powers and the legal community's professional influence. In response, judges and lawyers promoted and implemented a civil rights agenda far beyond the endorsement of elected officials. An historical–institutional approach helps explain how courts achieved and wielded independent power and the consequences of their action for civil rights, labor unions, and the American state.Thanks for very helpful comments go to Amy Bridges, Kerstin Carlson, Malcolm Feeley, Beth Garrett, Howard Gillman, Mark Graber, Jeff Haydu, David Karol, Ken Kersch, David Mayhew, Jim Morone, Shehzad Nadeem, Ruth O'Brien, Corey Robin, Pam Singh, John Skrentny, Mark Tushnet, Rick Valelly, Keith Whittington, Janelle Wong, the APSR reviewers, and Lee Sigelman. The University of California's Institute for Labor and Employment provided generous financial assistance.