The historical clustering of the transitions to democracy of Spain, Portugal, and Greece—all having taken place in the mid-1970s—encourages scholars to search for common causes, patterns, and paths of development. But important differences remain between the cases. Analytical distinctions include the difference between state and regime, and the contrast between regime crises of failure and crises of historical obsolescence. These distinctions make it possible to delineate divergent causes, actors, trajectories, and outcomes for the three cases of redemocratization.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries economic thought and practice were predominantly carried on within the framework of that body of ideas which was later to be called “mercantilism.” Although there has been almost no systematic investigation of the relationship in mercantilist thought between economic and political objectives or ends in the field of foreign policy, certain stereotypes have become so prevalent that few scholars have seriously questioned or examined their validity. One of these stereotypes is that mercantilism was a “system of power,” that is, that “power” was for mercantilists the sole or overwhelmingly preponderant end of foreign policy, and that wealth, or “plenty,” was valued solely or mainly as a necessary means to attaining or retaining or exercising power. It is the purpose of this paper to examine in the light of the available evidence the validity of this interpretation of mercantilist thought and practice. Tracing the history of ideas, however, always runs to many words, and limitations of space force me to confine myself, even with respect to bibliographical references, to samples of the various types of relevant evidence. That the samples are fair ones I can only attest by my readiness in most cases to expand them indefinitely.

Despite wavy national economies and a perception among observers that economic globalization is growing increasingly unpopular, aggregate support for free trade remains quite high across Latin America. This finding is robust to the wording of survey questions and has been quite resilient through time, even in the face of economic stagnation. Current theories of trade preferences, including the widely applied Heckscher-Ohlin model, do not explain this trend. Instead, the author proposes a theory of trade preferences based not on what citizens produce but on what they consume. Statistical analyses of different surveys, including one conducted in fourteen Latin American countries, demonstrate that a consumption-based approach best accounts for trade preferences across individuals and countries. Moreover, the theory provides an explanation for the overall popularity of free trade in Latin America: citizens recognize and appreciate the lower price, increased variety, and higher quality of goods that have come in the wake of trade liberalization.

Corruption—like the weather—is a phenomenon people in the third world talk about a great deal, and, it would seem, do little about. Scholars of political change in the third world share this interest, but—although they are usually not expected to deal with corruption itself —they should move beyond the recounting of vivid anecdotes to a more systematic analysis of the problem. Steps in this direction were made in the 1960s and 1970s, but surprisingly little more work has been done since.

Since the publication of Samuel Huntington's 1991 study of democratization, scholars have come to take for granted the notion that the spread of democracy has come in waves. Although Huntington's work has clearly proved to be an influential study, this article suggests that his analysis is far from compelling. There are two problems embodied in the work. The first is largely conceptual. Huntington's analysis fails to provide a clear and meaningful distinction between democratic and authoritarian regimes because it focuses primarily on what Dahl had defined in 1971 as the dimension of competition and pays insufficient attention to the equally important dimension of inclusion. The second problem is more empirical. Huntington has estimated the incidence of transitions to democracy in terms of the percentages of world states involved. Since the denominator in this equation, that is, the number of states in the world, is far from constant, this measure can be misleading. This article proposes solutions to both of these problems, and this new approach leads to conclusions that are quite different from Huntington's.

The new findings are important not only because they suggest a somewhat altered sequencing and a more accurate count of democratization waves but also because they cast real doubt on the appropriateness of the wave metaphor. As the reverse waves are not really apparent from these data, these results therefore also indicate that future studies should be cautious in comparing, explaining, and forecasting different “waves” of democratization.

In this article I shall examine the origins of a major rural revolutionary movement, Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path). An extremist Maoist organization, Sendero has gained considerable peasant support in Peru's southern highlands, especially in the Ayacucho area. Although peasant unrest has been endemic in Peru, the scope and intensity of the current movement are unprecedented. Never before has a Peruvian guerrilla group ranged over such a wide part of the country, and never before has such a group threatened the order of daily life in the capital.

This research note examines the relationship between economic development and gender equality. Drawing on the concept of the Kuznets curve, the authors hypothesize that the relationship between economic development and gender inequality is curvilinear (S shaped), with three distinct stages. In the first stage, economic development improves gender equality because it enables greater female labor-force participation. An independent income stream increases women's intrahousehold bargaining power. The opportunity to develop human capital confers greater political and social recognition. In the second stage, labor-force stratification and gender discrimination encourage divergent male/female income trajectories, which decrease the opportunity costs of female labor-force withdrawal and lend traction to social resistance against burgeoning gender norms. Consequently, there is a deceleration in initial equality gains. In the final stage, gender equality again improves, as greater educational participation and technological advancement provide new employment opportunities for women, increase the opportunity costs of staying home, and encourage the evolution of new social institutions and norms that overcome prior discriminatory practices. The authors find support for this argument in statistical tests of the relationship between economic development and gender equality on a panel of 146 developing countries for the period 1980–2005. They employ four indicators that reflect distinct dimensions of women's political, social, and economic status. They find economic development positively influences gender equality when per capita incomes are below $8,000–$10,000. These equality gains level off or decline slightly in the second stage, from $8,000–10,000 to about $25,000–$30,000. Beyond this level, economic development is again associated with improvements in gender equality. The key implication is that the effect of economic development on gender equality is contingent on the level of development. Policymakers and social activists should develop policy correctives to ensure that economic development confers improvements in gender equality across phases of development.

This paper has two closely related purposes, both of which, if accomplished, may help to accelerate the development of international relations as an empirically based discipline. One is to identify the shifting and expanding membership of the international system during the 125 years between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the outbreak of World War II. The other is to classify all such members of the system according to their attributed importance or status during the same period. In each case, the intent is not only to provide certain data which may be useful to the discipline, but to describe in considerable detail the procedures by which such data were gathered or, more accurately, “made.”

This study was undertaken in an effort to use data from European history to develop a model that might prove useful for describing, explaining, and predicting the patterns of political development and international behavior of some of the newly independent states of Asia and Africa. My interest in exploring the experiences of several European states grew out of dissatisfaction with efforts to build development theories exclusively upon knowledge of the contemporary developing areas in which the outcomes are unknown, where the periods of time with which we can work are often too short for testing any long-term development theories, and where we are often unable to distinguish between short-term, momentary changes and long-term, persistent patterns of growth or decay.

Wage setting has been one of the most heavily studied institutions in the field of comparative political economy over the past two decades, and quantitative measures of wage-setting arrangements have played a major role in this research. Yet the proliferation of such measures in recent years presents researchers with a sizable array from which to choose. In addition, some scholars are rather skeptical about the validity and/or reliability of these measures. This article offers a survey and assessment of fifteen wage-setting measures. It attempts to answer questions about (1) how these indicators differ from one another in conceptualization and measurement strategy; (2) which are the most valid and reliable; (3) the strengths and weaknesses of measures of wage centralization versus those of wage coordination; (4) particular countries or time periods for which there are noteworthy discrepancies in scoring; (5) how sensitive empirical findings are to the choice of wage-setting measure.

International trade agreements lead to more foreign direct investment (FDI) in developing countries. This article examines the causal mechanisms underpinning this trade-investment linkage by asking whether institutional features of preferential trade agreements (PTAs), which allow governments to make more credible commitments to protect foreign investments, indeed result in greater FDI. The authors explore three institutional differences. First, they examine whether PTAs that have entered into force lead to greater FDI than PTAs that have merely been negotiated and signed, since only the former constitute a binding commitment under international law. Second, they ask whether trade agreements that have investment clauses lead to greater FDI. Third, they consider whether PTAs with dispute-settlement mechanisms lead to greater FDI. Analyses of FDI flows into 122 developing countries from 1971 to 2007 show that trade agreements that include stronger mechanisms for credible commitment induce more FDI. Institutional diversity in international agreements matters.

Deterrence theories purport to supply the auxiliary assumptions rational choice theories need to predict rational strategic behavior. They generally assume that would-be initiators are (i) instrumentally rational; (2) risk-prone gain-maximizers; (3) free of domestic constraints; and (4) able to identify themselves correctly as defenders or challengers. These assumptions are contradicted by empirical studies that indicate that risk-prone, gain-maximizing initiators are relatively uncommon; that leaders at times calculate as deterrence theories expect, but behave contrary to their predictions; and that the calculus of initiators generally depends on factors other than those identified by deterrence theories. Deductive theories of deterrence are also inadequate because they do not define their scope conditions. Nor can they accommodate deviation by initiators from processes of rational calculation. Rational deterrence theories are poorly specified theories about nonexistent decision makers operating in nonexistent environments.

Do elections reduce or increase the risk of autocratic regime breakdown? This article addresses this contested question by distinguishing between election events and the institution of elections. The authors propose that elections stabilize autocracies in the long term but at the price of short-term instability. Elections are conducive to regime survival in the long run because they improve capacities for co-optation and repression but produce short-term instability because they serve as focal points for regime opposition. Drawing on data from 259 autocracies from 1946 to 2008, the authors show that elections increase the short-term probability of regime failure. The estimated effect is retained when accounting for the endogeneity of autocratic elections; this finding is critical, since some autocrats may or may not hold elections because of perceived effects on regime survival. The authors also find that this destabilizing effect does not operate in the long term. They find some, although not as strong, evidence that elections stabilize autocratic regimes in the medium to long term, despite their destabilizing immediate effects. These temporal effect patterns are present for both executive and legislative elections, and they are robust to using different measures, control variable strategies, and estimation techniques. In line with expectations, both effect patterns are much clearer for multiparty autocratic elections than for completely uncontested elections.

Why do some Muslim women adopt fundamentalist Islamic value systems that promote gender-based inequalities while others do not? This article considers the economic determinants of fundamentalist beliefs in the Muslim world, as women look to either marriage or employment to achieve financial security. Using cross-national public opinion data from eighteen countries with significant Muslim populations, the authors apply a latent class model to characterize respondents according to their views on gender norms, political Islam, and personal religiosity. Among women, lack of economic opportunity is a stronger predictor of fundamentalist belief systems than socioeconomic class. Cross-nationally, fundamentalism among women is most prevalent in poor countries and in those with a large male-female wage gap. These findings have important implications for the promotion of women's rights, the rise of political Islam, and the development of democracy in the Muslim world.

For much of the discipline of economics, a closed economy is seen as the result of efforts of distributional coalitions and rent seekers to maintain sector-specific protections. Accordingly, economic liberalization is explained by the policy consistency of uncompromising reform elites. Students of the politics of economic adjustment in the developing world, in turn, have argued that reform programs concentrate costs in the present and disperse benefits in the future. Hence, losers are prepared to engage in collective action, whereas prospective winners, facing uncertainty about payoffs, remain disorganized. They thus posit the cohesiveness and insularity of policymakers as the main variable for explaining successful reform. Both economists and political scientists, therefore, adopt a collective action approach that overlooks how groups organize in support of liberalization.

In the recent Latin American experience, however, these reforms have preserved market reserves for firms that provided vital political support to, and often colluded with, policymaking elites. This setting has thus reproduced incentives for rent-seeking behavior, even in the presence of comprehensive liberalization. This evidence supports two interrelated theoretical claims. First, distributional coalitions may proliferate when the state withdraws from the economy, not only when it intervenes. Second, interest-based variables retain explanatory power in political economy—which state autonomy arguments disregard—irrespective of whether the economy is closed or open—which neoclassical perspectives overlook. To highlight the centrality of interest groups favoring marketization, therefore, the article suggests modifications to the dominant theories of collective action and the literature on the politics of economic adjustment.

Bilateral flows of international migrants exhibit tremendous variance both across destination countries and over time. To explain this variance, studies of international migration tend to focus on economic determinants such as income differentials or on social conditions such as the presence of coethnics in certain destination countries. The authors argue that migration is driven not solely by economic or social determinants; rather, the political environment across destinations plays a substantively large role in influencing bilateral migration flows. They test the importance of the political environment—citizenship rights and the prominence of right-wing parties—using data on migration flows from 178 origin countries into 18 destination countries over the period 1980–2006. They find, even after controlling for a variety of economic, social, policy, and international variables, that variation in political environments across time and destination plays a key role in observed patterns of international migration.

Higher education policy has been subject to considerable reform in OECD states over the past two decades. Some states have introduced tuition fees, others have massively increased public funding for higher education, and still others remain in stasis, retaining the elitist model with which they began the postwar era. This article develops the argument that higher education policy in the OECD is driven by a set of partisan choices within a trilemma between the level of enrollment, the degree of subsidization, and the overall public cost of higher education. The author develops a formal model of the micromechanisms underlying movements within this trilemma, noting the importance of partisan politics, existing enrollment, tax structure, and access. These propositions are tested statistically on a sample of twenty-two OECD countries and through case histories of higher education reform in England, Sweden, and Germany.

Communal conflicts, civil wars, and state collapse have led many to portray the notion of African nation-states as an oxymoron. Some scholars of African politics—often referred to as second-generation modernization theorists—have argued that strong ethnic attachments across the continent resulted from rapid economic and political modernization, the very forces credited with reducing parochial ties and consolidating European nations in classic modernization theory. Others have argued that national consolidation in Africa is particularly unlikely due to high degrees of ethnic diversity, colonial rule that exacerbated that diversity, and the partition of cultural groups. Despite the ubiquity of these arguments, there has been very little comparative empirical research on territorial nationalism in Africa. Using individual-level data from sixteen countries, combined with a novel compilation of ethnic group and state characteristics, the author evaluates the observable implications of these long-respected theoretical traditions within a multilevel framework. She finds that attachment to the nation, relative to one's ethnic group, increases with education, urbanization, and formal employment at the individual level, and with economic development at the state level—patterns more consistent with classic modernization theory than with second-generation modernization theory. Thus, if modernization in Africa does indeed intensify ethnic attachment, the impact is overwhelmed by the concurrent increase in panethnic territorial nationalism. Similarly, the results show that ethnic diversity and the partition of ethnic groups by “artificial” state borders increase, rather than decrease, the degree to which individuals identify nationally. Taken together, these results reject pessimistic expectations of African exceptionalism and instead suggest that the emergence of widespread national identification within African states is not only possible but even increasingly likely with greater economic development.

This article examines a general proposition about democratic legislatures—that their agenda will be cartelized by any majority government—in the context of a case study of the Brazilian Camara dos Deputados (Chamber of Deputies). The main question is to identify when consistent agenda control by a single majority coalition, as opposed to agenda control by shifting majorities, has emerged in the post-1988 Camara. Consistent agenda control emerges routinely in parliamentary regimes: the government commands' a majority in the assembly; the legislative agenda is negotiated among the governing parties, typically with each able to veto the placement of bills on the agenda. However, the Camara faces an external executive, the president, with substantial formal powers to set its agenda. Consistent agenda control thus can emerge only if the president chooses to ally with a majority coalition in the assembly. If the president always chooses to form such an alliance—a presidentially led agenda cartel—then one would expect some consistently parliamentary patterns in Brazil: the appointment of legislative party leaders to the cabinet; the use of statutes rather than decrees to achieve policy goals; the avoidance of bills that split the governing coalition. The authors find that only the Cardoso presidency displays consistent evidence of such a presidentially led agenda cartel. In this sense, the argument differs from that of Figueiredo and Limongi, who argue that presidents have consistently pursued a parliamentary mode of governance in Brazil. Yet it also differs from those who argue that presidents have consistently pursued a shifting-coalitions strategy. The results suggest that presidents make a strategic choice, with much hinging on that choice.

In an effort to contribute to the dialogue between gender studies and international studies, this report presents findings from an empirical investigation based on the integrated secondary analysis of survey data from Israel, Egypt, Palestine, and Kuwait. The goal is to assess the utility of both gender and attitudes pertaining to the circumstances of women in accounting for variance in views about war and peace, and thereafter to examine the degree to which political system attributes constitute conditionalities associated with important variable relationships. Major findings include the absence of gender-linked differences in attitudes toward international conflict in all four of the societies studied and a significant relationship in each of these societies between attitudes toward gender equality and attitudes toward international conflict. Based on data from the Arab world and Israel, with attitudes about a peaceful resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict treated as the dependent variable, the research also aspires to shed light on more practical considerations pertaining to the international relations of the Middle East.