How do state policies that regulate the relationship between ethnicity and nationality change? This article examines the dynamics of persistence and change in state policies toward ethnicity. In order to better comprehend the nature of political contestation over these state policies, the author first develops a new typology, “regimes of ethnicity,” and categorizes states as having monoethnic, multiethnic, and antiethnic regimes. These regimes are defined along dimensions of membership and expression. Second, he develops a theory of ethnic regime change. He explains the persistence and change in policies related to ethnicity and nationality in Germany, the Soviet Union/post-Soviet Russia, and Turkey since the 1950s by reference to the presence or absence of three independent variables: counterelites, new discourses, and hegemonic majority. He argues that if counterelites representing constituencies with ethnically specific grievances come to power equipped with a new discourse on ethnicity and nationality and garner a hegemonic majority, they can change state policies on ethnicity. These three factors are separately necessary and jointly sufficient for change. Reform in the German citizenship law, removal of ethnicity from Russian internal passports, and the beginning of public broadcasting in Kurdish and other minority languages on state television in Turkey are examined as major changes in state policies.

This article explores the origins of peak employers' associations to understand why countries produce highly centralized macrocorporatist groups, weaker national associations but stronger industry-level groups, or highly fragmented pluralist associations. The authors suggest that the structure of partisan competition played a vital causal role in the development and evolution of these peak associations. The leadership for peak employers' association development came from business-oriented party activists and bureaucrats, who sought both to advance industrial development policy and to solve specific problems of political control. Business-oriented party leaders and bureaucrats in both predemocratic and democratic regimes feared the rising tide of democracy and labor activism and viewed employer organization as a useful tool for political control, to secure parliamentary advantage, and to serve as a societal counterweight to working class activism. Because leadership for association building came from the state, the political rules of the game were crucial to outcomes. The structure of party competition and state centralization shaped incentives for strategic coordination for both political actors and employers. Dedicated business parties were more likely to develop in countries with multiparty systems and limited federal power sharing than in countries with two-party systems and federalism: in a multiparty context where no single party was likely to gain power, each party had an incentive to cooperate with other social groups. Moreover, business-oriented party leaders and bureaucrats in multiparty systems were motivated to delegate policy-making authority to coordinated societal channels for industrial relations, because they anticipated that employers would win more in these channels than in parliamentary settings where the center and left could form a coalition against the right. Again, centralized party systems were more likely than federal ones to develop a dedicated national business party that transcended regional cleavages and to retain a strong role for the state in the governance of industrial relations.

How do changes in electoral rules affect the nature of public policy outcomes? The current evidence supporting institutional theories that answer this question stems almost entirely from quantitative cross-country studies, the data of which contain very little within-unit variation. Indeed, while there are many country-level accounts of how changes in electoral rules affect such phenomena as the number of parties or voter turnout, there are few studies of how electoral reform affects public policy outcomes. This article contributes to this latter endeavor by providing a detailed analysis of electoral reform and the public policy process in Thailand through an examination of the 1997 electoral reforms. Specifically, the author examines four aspects of policy-making: policy formulation, policy platforms, policy content, and policy outcomes. The article finds that candidates in the pre-1997 era campaigned on broad, generic platforms; parties had no independent means of technical policy expertise; the government targeted health resources to narrow geographic areas; and health was underprovided in Thai society. Conversely, candidates in the post-1997 era relied more on a strong, detailed national health policy; parties created mechanisms to formulate health policy independently; the government allocated health resources broadly to the entire nation through the introduction of a universal health care system, and health outcomes improved. The author attributes these changes in the policy process to the 1997 electoral reform, which increased both constituency breadth (the proportion of the population to which politicians were accountable) and majoritarianism.

The authors draw on a natural experiment to demonstrate that states can reconstruct conflictual interethnic relationships into cooperative relationships in relatively short periods of time. The article examines differences in how the gentile population in each of two neighboring territories in Romania treated its Jewish population during the Holocaust. These territories had been part of tsarist Russia and subject to state-sponsored anti-Semitism until 1917. During the interwar period one territory became part of Romania, which continued anti-Semitic policies, and the other became part of the Soviet Union, which pursued an inclusive nationality policy, fighting against inherited anti-Semitism and working to integrate its Jews. Both territories were then reunited under Romanian administration during World War II, when Romania began to destroy its Jewish population. The authors demonstrate that, despite a uniform Romanian state presence during the Holocaust that encouraged gentiles to victimize Jews, the civilian population in the area that had been part of the Soviet Union was less likely to harm and more likely to aid Jews as compared with the region that had been part of Romania. Their evidence suggests that the state construction of interethnic relationships can become internalized by civilians and outlive the life of the state itself.

The rise of the left across Latin America is one of the most striking electoral events to occur in new democracies during the last decade. Current work argues either that the left's electoral success stems from a thoroughgoing rejection of free-market policies by voters or that electorates have sought to punish poorly performing right-wing incumbents. Whether the new left has a policy or performance mandate has implications for the type of policies it may pursue in power and the voting behavior of Latin American electorates. Using a new measure of voter ideology called vote-revealed leftism (VRL) and a time-series cross-sectional analysis of aggregate public opinion indicators generated from mass surveys of eighteen countries over thirteen years, the authors show that the left has a clear economic policy mandate but that this mandate is much more moderate than many observers might expect. In contrast to the generalized view that new democracies are of low quality, the authors reach the more optimistic conclusion that wellreasoned voting on economic policy issues and electoral mandates are now relevant features of politics in Latin America.