This article examines the long-term impact of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) on prosocial behavior in Sierra Leone. Two theoretical arguments are developed and tested. The first draws on the feminist literature and suggests the presence of a decay mechanism: victims and their families are stigmatized by their community and excluded from social networks. The second integrates new insights from social psychology, psychological trauma research, and anthropology, and argues for a resilience mechanism. It argues that CRSV-affected households have a strong incentive to remain part of their community and will invest more effort and resources into the community to avert social exclusion than unaffected households. Using data on 5,475 Sierra Leonean households, the author finds that exposure to CRSV increases prosocial behavior—cooperation, helping, and altruism—which supports the resilience hypothesis. The results are robust to an instrumental variable estimation. The ramifications of this finding go beyond the case of Sierra Leone and generate a more general question: What makes communities resilient to shocks and trauma?

The author examines the hypothesis that U.S. Soviet policy is largely driven by electoral considerations rather than by the shifting nature of the Soviet challenge. He combines historical and quantitative analysis to probe the forces that shape these electoral calculations as well as the manner in which they manifest themselves at various stages of the electoral cycle. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the domestic determinants of America's Soviet policy for the USSR's own foreign policy behavior.

Achen and Snidal's deductive theory of deterrence contributes very little to an understanding of the uses and limitations of deterrence strategy as an instrument of foreign policy. Lacking operationalization, their “rational deterrence theory” is incapable of predicting the outcome of individual cases. Furthermore, it has not yet addressed the need (i) to reconceptualize the problem of deterrence for different levels of conflict; (2) to refine the assumption of “rationality”; (3) to deal with the phenomenon of equifinality; (4) to develop a framework of strategic interaction between Initiator and Defender acknowledging that an Initiator often has multiple options for challenging the status quo from which to choose an action that meets his cost-benefit criteria; (5) to find a way of taking into account decision-making variables that, as case studies have demonstrated, often affect deterrence outcomes; and (6) to broaden the conceptualization of deterrence strategy to encompass the possible use of positive inducements as a means of discouraging challenges to a status quo situation.

How do crises lead to change? Rationalist approaches to the question that emphasize inexorable structural responses and the pursuit of distributive preferences by newly dominant coalitions are inadequate because they obscure the social mediation of material events and the pervasive uncertainty that follows destabilization of the precrisis status quo. The latter constrains actors from fully grasping their distributive preferences. Until uncertainty is reduced, persuasion emerges as a key mechanism of change. Although constructivist approaches emphasize persuasive practices, they have yet to adequately specify the scope conditions underpinning the selection of new ideas. This article goes beyond much of the constructivist focus on domestic legitimacy and static notions of resonance by emphasizing external credibility and dynamic processes of resonance-building by norm entrepreneurs. The author specifies four features—what he calls the four Cs of crisis resolution—that shape the process of idea selection: carriers, composition, crossover appeal, and credibility. Developing these arguments in the case of the early years of New Order Indonesia, the article suggests that whenever a prominent and cohesive group of advocates promotes an idea that has sufficient ideational and distributive appeal and the endorsement of external actors whose seal of approval is perceived as important, intersubjective belief change, and thus institutional and policy change, is more likely.

A growing body of literature argues that war outcomes affect leaders’ tenure in office. But disagreement persists over how domestic political institutions translate performance in war into leader accountability. Some scholars argue that the tenure of democratic leaders is most sensitive to war outcomes, while others posit that autocratic leaders are more likely to be punished or rewarded for the outcomes of conflicts. The authors argue that existing research fails to take into account two important factors: whether the leader is viewed as culpable for the country's entry into the conflict, and whether the country features domestic institutions that make the leader vulnerable to removal from office, which varies greatly across nondemocracies. After taking leaders’ culpability and vulnerability into account, the authors show that the tenures of culpable, democratic leaders and culpable, vulnerable, nondemocratic leaders are sensitive to war outcomes. By contrast, the tenures of nondemocratic leaders who are less vulnerable to removal are not sensitive to war outcomes, regardless of their culpability.

Does inequality between ethnic groups destabilize democracies? While the literature largely agrees that inequality harms democracies, previous studies typically focus on the overall level of inequality in a society, leaving unanswered questions about the effect of inequality between ethnic groups. This article fills this gap and argues that inequality between ethnic groups harms the consolidation of democracy but that its effect is strongest when inequality within groups is low. Using group- and country-level data from more than seventy-one democracies and 241 ethnic groups worldwide, the author conducts the first cross-national test to date of the effect of ethnic inequality on transitions away from democracy. Results provide support for the hypothesis: when within-ethnic-group inequality (WGI) is low, between-ethnic-group inequality (BGI) harms democracy, but when WGI is high, BGI has no discernable effect.

This article focuses on the legacies of the authoritarian regimes of South America for the contemporary consolidation of democracy. In particular, it considers their lasting effects on the region's informal networks and formal institutions of political representation. It questions several assumptions made by the literature on regime transition and democratic consolidation in South America about political culture, institutional reform, and electoral realignment: taken together, these assumptions are misleading about how much and what kind of political change has occurred in Latin America as a result of authoritarian rule. To understand how the challenges of democratic consolidation have been shaped, the article proposes instead to examine how the economic policies and political strategies pursued by military regimes preserved, altered, or destroyed the clientelistic and corporatist networks of mediation between state and society prevailing at the onset of authoritarianism, as well as those constructed upon the representative base of programmatic political parties.

Recent explanations of transformations of macroeconomic policy under crisis conditions spotlight the intrinsic properties of ideas and the persuasiveness with which they are marketed. Bridging the divide between power and discourse approaches, this article reveals the causal role played by the power resources of expert ideational entrepreneurs, conditional on the political conjuncture in which they operate. The authors exploit a fortuitous natural experiment from the early 1980s, when the Israeli economy spiraled into hyperinflation. Two similar proposals for economic stabilization and reform were offered by different teams of economists, less than two years apart. While the government rejected the dollarization plan, its authorization of the stabilization plan inaugurated a new political-economic regime. This case, in which similar programs were advocated by different ideational entrepreneurs in a largely stable institutional and economic context, makes it possible to pinpoint why radically new ideas succeed or fail. Previously underutilized analytical tools are employed to conceptualize the power of idea carriers, at both the individual and the group level.

The transition from Fordism to the knowledge economy in the world’s advanced democracies was underpinned by the revolution in information and communications technology (ict). The introduction and rapid diffusion of ict pushed up wages for college-educated workers with complementary skills and allowed top managers and CEOs to reap greater rewards for their own talents. Despite these common pressures, income inequality did not rise to the same extent everywhere; income in the Anglo-Saxon countries remains particularly unequally distributed. To shed new light on this puzzle, the authors carry out a panel data analysis of eighteen oecd countries between 1970 and 2007. Their analysis stands apart from the existing empirical literature by taking a comparative perspective. The article examines the extent to which the relationship between the knowledge economy and income inequality is influenced by national labor market institutions. The authors find that the expansion of knowledge employment is positively associated with both the 90/10 wage ratio and the income share of the top 1 percent, but that these effects are mitigated by the presence of strong labor market institutions, such as coordinated wage bargaining, strict employment protection legislation, high union density, and high collective bargaining coverage. The authors provide robust evidence against the argument that industrial relations systems are no longer important safeguards of wage solidarity in the knowledge economy.

Political theorists from Plato to the present have concerned themselves not only with the nature of the polity as we know it, but with how it came to be, what purposes it serves, and by what stages it has developed. The last item, however, has more often than not been slighted. This lack now forces itself on our attention for an obvious reason: Never before have so many “new states” come into being in so short a span of time and never before have students of politics been provided with so many living examples of states at all stages of development, many of them conspicuously failing to perform vital functions, frequently to the extent that disorder and violent change prevail.

In international relations, two opposing schools of thought have fought each other throughout the modern age. Ever since Machiavelli published the Prince, his “realistic” views have shocked “idealist” thinkers. As a battle of the mind, fought by and large outside the political arena, the dispute between the two schools was of great concern to philosophers and moralists; but not until Woodrow Wilson set out to bring Utopia down to earth did it become a political issue of the first magnitude. For the first time, the responsible head of one of the leading powers acted as though the world were on the verge of crossing the thresh-old from sordid “power politics” to a “new era” in which the admonitions of the idealist philosophers would suddenly become the political order of the day.

While scholars outside the Arab world often link authoritarianism there to some dark cultural template involving religious doctrine or family structure, scholars of the region ground their explanations in political economy, in the historical evolution of the state, in patterns of state-society interactions, and in ideological appeals. To understand authoritarian outcomes, they draw attention to economic transformations, to social actors and the importance of organized social groups, to the role of state efforts to contain them in shaping political outcomes, to the repressive institutions that sometimes arise from this process, and to weaknesses of state ideologies that arise to justify authoritarian outcomes. Their work allows us to unpack the phenomenon of authoritarianism by reorganizing it into three different sets of forces: those that precipitate authoritarianism, those that sustain it, and those that resist it. The result is a clearer and more nuanced understanding of the range of factors that affect the likelihood of any state resorting to violence.

How do legacies of conflict affect choices between state and nonstate legal institutions? This article studies this question in Chechnya, where state law coexists with Sharia and customary law. The author focuses on the effect of conflict-induced disruption of gender hierarchies because the dominant interpretations of religious and customary norms are discriminatory against women. The author finds that women in Chechnya are more likely than men to rely on state law and that this gender gap in legal preferences and behavior is especially large in more-victimized communities. The author infers from this finding that the conflict created the conditions for women in Chechnya to pursue their interests through state law—albeit not without resistance. Women’s legal mobilization has generated a backlash from the Chechen government, which has attempted to reinstate a patriarchal order. The author concludes that conflict may induce legal mobilization among the weak and that gender may become a central cleavage during state-building processes in postconflict environments.

The growing recognition of the importance of ethnic, racial, and religious groups in the politics of the new states has given rise to an urgent need for theory. Although this need extends to all aspects of group relations, the first priority is for systematic classification to reduce the bewildering array of descent-groups in the developing world to manageable proportions and comparable cases. With a view to facilitating comparative analysis, the aim of this paper is to make a modest beginning in the formulation of meaningful categories.

Do ethnic federations undergoing democratization promote or discourage regional secessionism? This article argues, based on evidence from the Russian Federation, that when democratization produces a transfer of political accountability from center to region, the incentives of regional leaders shift, forcing them to react to local constituencies in order to retain office. If these constituencies desire autonomy, regional leaders must respond, making separatism not merely an opportunistic strategy but a necessary one for their own political survival. Democratization, then, can transform administrative regions into electoral arenas.

However, the case of Russia also demonstrates that regional demands for autonomy are not inevitable and may dissipate after they have begun. Popular support for nationalism and separatism varied significantly among Russia's sixteen ethnic republics in the late Soviet and early post-Soviet period. This variation is explained by showing that mass nationalism, contrary to conventional wisdom, is neither a latent attribute of federal regions, nor a simple function of natural resource endowments, nor something summoned into existence by the manipulations of regional leaders. Rather, it is argued that increasing competition for jobs in the Soviet Union's failing economy allowed particular issues articulated by nationalist leaders to resonate with ethnic populations. Through the framing of issues of ethnic economic inequality, nationalist leaders were able to politicize ethnicity by persuading people to view their personal life chances as dependent on the political fate of their ethnic community. Thus, secession in democratizing ethnic federations can be best understood by directing attention toward the origins of popular support for nationalism and the role that support plays in the elite contest for power within subfederal regions.

Empirical research has demonstrated the utility of an interest group approach for the study of Soviet politics, as well as for interpreting the politics of tsarist Russia and Eastern European communist systems and the dissident movements. The flowering of group activity in Poland and Czechoslovakia at certain times and the activity of dissent movements show, however, the rudimentary character of “normal” interest groups in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. Although the Soviet system has changed since Stalin's death, it remains fundamentally authoritarian in character. The use of models, such as totalitarian, authoritarian, bureaucratic, corporatist, and pluralist, hinders rather than facilitates an understanding of Soviet politics and of the place of interest groups in that system.

Works in political culture have employed a variety of approaches with different assumptions and methodologies. Commentary on the field, however, generally fails to take account of these differences or to assess the merits of the different approaches. Recent works that typify five different approaches are evaluated in terms of the ways that they conceptualize preference formation and the linkage between preferences and cultural norms. The tendency in most approaches to conflate preferences and norms points to the need for further theoretical development.

Political modernization involves, let us assume, three things. First, it involves the rationalization of authority: the replacement of a large number of traditional, religious, familial, and ethnic political authorities by a single, secular, national political authority. This change implies that government is the product of man, not of nature or of God, and that a well-ordered society must have a determinate human source of final authority, obedience to whose positive law takes precedence over other obligations. Rationalization of authority means assertion of the external sovereignty of the nation-state against transnational influences and of the internal sovereignty of the national government against local and regional powers. It means national integration and the centralization or accumulation of power in recognized national law-making institutions. Secondly, political modernization involves the differentiation of new political functions and the development of specialized structures to perform those functions. Areas of peculiar competence—legal, military, administrative, scientific—become separated from the political realm, and autonomous, specialized, but subordinate, organs arise to discharge those tasks. Administrative hierarchies become more elaborate, more complex, more disciplined. Office and power are distributed more by achievement and less by ascription. Thirdly, political modernization involves increased participation in politics by social groups throughout society and the development of new political institutions—such as political parties and interest associations—to organize this participation. Broadened participation in politics may increase control of the people by the government, as in totalitarian states, or it may increase control of the government by the people, as in some democratic ones. But in all modern states the citizens become directly involved in and affected by governmental affairs. Rationalized authority, differentiated structure, and mass participation thus distinguish modern polities from antecedent polities.

This article represents an attempt to describe Soviet society, and JL particularly the Soviet political system, in terms of a typology of society based on modes of coordinating social activity. It is felt that this approach may be of value in pointing up both some of the similarities and some of the differences between Communist and non-Communist industrialized societies.

Terrorist groups repeatedly include operatives of varying commitment and often rely on a common set of security-reducing bureaucratic tools to manage these individuals. This is puzzling in that covert organizations are commonly thought to screen their operatives very carefully and pay a particularly heavy price for record keeping. The authors use terrorist memoirs and the internal correspondence of one particularly prominent group to highlight the organizational challenges terrorist groups face and use a game-theoretic model of moral hazard in a finitely sized organization to explain why record keeping and bureaucracy emerge in these groups. The model provides two novel results. First, in small heterogeneous organizations longer institutional memory can enhance organizational efficiency. Second, such organizations will use worse agents in equilibrium under certain conditions. The core logic is that in small organizations the punishment strategies that allow leaders to extract greater effort are credible only when operatives can identify and react to deviations from the leaders' equilibrium strategy. This dynamic creates incentives for record keeping and means that small organizations will periodically use problematic agents in equilibrium as part of a strategy that optimally motivates their best operatives.