This paper presents a spatial analysis of political competition in Taiwan in an effort to explore the role of conflict displacement in the process of democratic transition. In recent elections, a new cleavage on socioeconomic justice has emerged as a salient political issue in Taiwan, crosscutting the traditional cleavage on national identity. The authors first trace the historical trajectory of regime transition in order to provide a structural explanation of such a displacement of conflicts. Using data from the 1992 General Survey on Social Changes designed primarily by the authors for the Institute of Ethnology of Academia Sinica, they then present the results of a spatial analysis. The empirical findings confirm that socioeconomic justice together with national identity are the defining dimensions of the latent ideological space in which political competition takes place. The authors argue that, because of the availability of the new issue, political elites in Taiwan are undertaking a partisan realignment in both electoral and legislative politics, a process the authors consider conducive to both the transition to democracy and the consolidation of the new regime.

In 1991 Germany extended unilateral diplomatic recognition to Croatia and Slovenia in direct contravention of the preferences of its EC partners. In the context of Germany's postwar history of multilateralism in foreign policy, this was an unprecedented decision. As a case of defection from international cooperation, it requires explanation. This article explains how the German preference for recognition was formed and why Germany acted unilaterally when its partners had moved to adjust their policies to coordinate them with Germany's preferences. Defection from cooperation in this case is best explained as a two-level game: the source of Germany's preference for diplomatic recognition of these republics is traced to domestic political factors; its unilateral action is traced to regime weaknesses leading to negotiating failures in a changing post—cold war international environment.

A 1990 national sample survey shows that the Chinese population was concerned with issues relating to reform, economic and social grievances, and democracy. Although neither political issues nor social cleavages were the same as in the West, the same dynamics affected the process of ideological alignment. Social position and cognitive sophistication help explain why members of the population hold liberal or conservative attitudes.

The article contends that personal networks may facilitate state-building efforts under postrevolutionary conditions. With the breakdown of formal political structures, personal networks provide an informal social structure along which information may be exchanged, resources may be allocated, and collaborative activities may be planned. To demonstrate this argument, the article returns to the case of Soviet Russia. Using newly available archival sources, the case study shows how informal personal networks intersected with formal political organizations to develop a capacity for territorial administration in the decade following the civil war. The article concludes by suggesting answers to larger questions concerning the success of Soviet state building, the subsequent collapse of the Soviet state, and the implications for comparative state-building theory.

The Hungarian transition from socialism stands out from other examples of political change in the region, in that the ruling Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (MSZMP) suffered an erosion of political power generated largely from within the party itself. The study shows how the Communist Party, after its destruction in the revolution of 1956, sought to institutionalize its rule through a course of limited liberalization and the broad co-optation of the populace. This policy helped create a tacit social compact with society, particularly in co-opting younger intellectuals who identified with the goals of reform socialism. However, the party eventually marginalized this group, creating an internal party opposition that supported socialism but opposed the MSZMP. Consequently, when the limits of Hungarian reform socialism became evident in the mid-1980s, rank-and-file intellectuals within the party began to mobilize against the party hierarchy, seeking to transform the MSZMP into a democratic socialist party. These “reform circles,” drawing their strength primarily from the countryside, spread to all parts of the party and helped undermine central party power and expand the political space for opposition groups to organize. Eventually, the reform circles were able to force an early party congress in which the MSZMP was transformed into a Western-style socialist party prior to open elections in 1990.

The case is significant in that it indicates that the forms of transition in Eastern Europe were not simply the specific outcome of elite interaction. Rather, they were shaped in large part by the patterns of socialist institutionalization found in each country. Therefore, studies of political transition can be enriched with an explicit focus on the institutional characteristics of each case, linking the forms of transitions and their posttransition legacies to the institutional matrix from which they emerged. In short, the study argues that the way in which an autocratic order perpetuates itself affects the manner in which that system declines and the shape of the new system that takes its place.