Why was there an abrupt increase in economic openness in Europe in the 1860s? This increase may have been the result of a contagion process, in which the Cobden-Chevalier treaty between Britain and France threatened to displace third-party exports to France with British exports. As a result, most European states signed similar treaties with France, which had further ripple effects.

This article outlines a formal model of this process, based on the assumption that an agreement between two states increases the desirability of similar treaties to third parties. Propositions regarding the rate and pattern of spread of treaties are derived from this model. This article then discusses the insights these propositions may offer into the rise and fall of the most-favorednation network of treaties between 1860 and 1929.

At a theoretical level the model aims to link the microlevel processes underlying state preferences to system-level phenomena. At a substantive level this analysis offers insight into the current explosion of regionalism.

Studies of democratic consolidation tend to highlight the same factors previously used to explain countries' transitional dynamics. Yet one cannot properly understand success or failure in democratic consolidation—much less discern significant qualitative differences among consolidated democracies—by focusing exclusively on formal institutions, modes of transition, incentive structures, or exogenous factors. Close inspection of two newly consolidated democracies—Poland and Hungary—shows that despite radically altered institutional arrangements, legal structures, and political-economic incentives, the most important determinants of the models of democracy emerging today derive from pretransition conceptual frames and informal political settlements. Specifically, the core conflicts between ruling elites and society in communist Poland and Hungary, as well as the patterns of political accommodation that evolved in the management of those conflicts, continue to structure the political agenda and order debate in both countries. In Poland overlapping ethical-ideological cleavages and failures of political accommodation under the ancien regime have resulted in a confrontational-pluralist model of democracy. In contrast, Hungary's compromise-corporatist model stems from early informal accommodation between the party-state and society that recast most conflicts as “economic” in nature. These long-standing conflicts and political patterns explain striking contemporary differences in social mobilization, party competition, and constitutional development. The article concludes with a discussion of how these models are likely to shape each country's prospects for sustained governability and increased democratic legitimacy.

How close is the link between outsized states and economic stagnation in Africa? This article shows that African public bureaucracies are not as large as often portrayed, that they have been getting smaller, and that reducing their size alone has not been a prescription for economic revival. To the contrary, the countries with higher levels of public employment, such as Botswana and Mauritius, are apt to have the better economic records. These findings suggest that a superabundance of public personnel is not in itself?, major impediment to growth in Africa. Too much attention has been paid to quantitative or “first-generation” bureaucratic problems, and too little attention has been given the “second-generation” issues of bureaucratic quality.

This article reports the results of a survey of women in legislatures and executives around the world as they were constituted in 1998 (N = 180). The chief hypotheses regarding the factors hindering or facilitating women's access to political representation were tested by multivariate regression models. The regression models juxtaposed a cocktail of institutional, political, cultural, and socioeconomic variables with the following dependent variables: (1) the percentage of MPs who are women and (2) the percentage of cabinet ministers who are women.

A number, although not all, of the cited hypotheses were statistically confirmed and more finely quantified. The socioeconomic development of women in society has an effect on the number of women in parliament but not in the cabinet. A country's length of experience with multipartyism and women's enfranchisement correlates with both the legislative and the executive percentage. Certain electoral systems are more women friendly than others. The ideological nature of the party system affects the number of women elected and chosen for cabinet posts. And last, the state's dominant religion, taken as a proxy for culture, also statistically relates to the number of women who will make it to high political office. However, other long-held hypotheses were not proved. The degree of democracy is not a good indicator of the percentage of women who will make it into the legislature or the cabinet, nor is the dichotomy between a presidential or parliamentary system.