Garrett Hardin's “tragedy of the commons” metaphor is commonly invoked to account for the unfortunate state of world fisheries. But the world s oceans are no longer a global commons and have not been so for the past two decades. Open-access regimes have persisted within many exclusive economic zones (EEZs) during this time, but coastal states' authority to regulate domestic fisheries has existed for more than a generation. Faced with the prospect of Hardin's tragedy, coastal states have had more than twenty years to devise institutional constraints that would prevent it. This article asserts that the dismal experience with EEZs is in large part attributable to distributive bargaining problems that arose within coastal states in the wake of EEZ extension. Moreover, the article argues that high levels of uncertainty that characterize the early stages of institutional development have exacerbated these problems. Finally, the article demonstrates how the variety of institutional designs and paths of institutional development that are observed in the cases of Iceland, Norway, and Atlantic Canada result from the different configurations of political power and political structure within each case. While the empirical discussion is focused upon property rights and fisheries, the theoretical discussion of bargaining and uncertainty has widespread application across comparative and international politics.

Twice within 25 years, in 1919 and again in 1944–5, the idea of the balance of power hasbeen pronounced dead, and twice it has arisen from its seeming demise soon after such funereal exercises. Foremost among the obituaries were those of American statesmen, like Woodrow Wilson and Cordell Hull. When the latter returned from conferences in Moscow in the autumn of 1943, he stated, as if he were the true heir of Wilsonism, that “as the provisionsof the fournations declarations are carried into effect, there will no longer be need for spheres of influence, for balance of power, or any other of the special arrangements through which, in the unhappy past, the nations strove to safeguard their security.”

Until recently, the commonly accepted notion of human social development held that static “traditional” societies passed through a dynamic transitional period and came to rest again as “modern” industrial societies. Such simplistic stage and linear development theories have now been formally superseded by Huntington's formulation of development and decay as concurrent processes with no necessary endstate. There remains, however, an implicit assumption that highly populated, urbanindustrial societies with continuously growing economies are the proper goal of development, and that the current internal political and economic processes of third-world nations are the proper subject of study.

In the history of postcolonial Africa, no country has suffered a more tragic experience than Nigeria. After almost twenty years of gradual constitutional evolution by relatively orderly processes of conferences and negotiations, the structure of constitutional agreement collapsed; the army was broken into regional groups; citizens of Eastern Region origin fled much of the rest of the country during a series of massacres which produced a migration of hundreds of thousands of persons; the central government lost its effective authority over the Eastern Region; and when orderly processes of negotiation were suspended, the Eastern Region sought its own security and survival by declaring its independence, shortly after which the central government sought to reestablish its authority in the area by military action. The resulting war, which lasted two and one-half years, produced over a million casualties from military action, disease, and starvation.

Rather than a case where deterrence was not tried, 1939 is a case where deterrence failed. As such, it has important implications for deterrence theory. Mutual deterrence must operate on roughly the same time perceptions. Britain felt impelled to deter Germany after Prague, but could offer only a long-term deterrent. Germany's short term appeared so favorable that the long-term uncertainties posed by Britain and France failed to restrain her. The experience of 1939 also underlines the importance of political factors, particularly realignment in mutual deterrence. The Russo-German Pact tipped the balance toward war. In the contemporary setting, calculations of time perspectives between the Soviet Union and the United States are important for mutual deterrence, especially in Europe. Changes in the Sino-Soviet split hold further implications for contemporary deterrence.

There is a growing consensus that status concerns drive state behavior. Although recent attention has been paid to when states are most likely to act on behalf of status concerns, very little is known about which actions states are most likely to engage in when their status is threatened. This article focuses on the effect of publicly humiliating international events as sources of status threat. Such events call into question a state's image in the eyes of others, thereby increasing the likelihood that the state will engage in reassertions of its status. The article presents a theory of status reassertion that outlines which states will be most likely to respond, as well as when and how they will be most likely to do so. The author argues that because high-status states have the most to lose from repeated humiliation, they will be relatively risk averse when reasserting their status. In contrast to prior work arguing that humiliation drives a need for revenge, the author demonstrates that great powers only rarely engage in direct revenge. Rather, they pursue the less risky option of projecting power abroad against weaker states to convey their intentions of remaining a great power. The validity of this theory is tested using an expanded and recoded data set of territorial change from 1816 to 2000. Great powers that have experienced a humiliating, involuntary territorial loss are more likely to attempt aggressive territorial gains in the future and, in particular, against third-party states.

WHEN leaders extend deterrence, they attempt to prevent a military attack against an ally by threatening retaliation should force be used against their protégé. At present, most analysts locate extended deterrence at the intersection of nuclear and conventional force in Europe; the United States relies heavily on this strategy to protect its allies. The extension of deterrence to Europe, however, is only one among several possible applications of the strategy. It has been widely used by the United States, for example, to manage conflict in the Middle East. We propose to examine this wider extension of deterrence.

Why is the analysis of Third World foreign policies still labeled the underdeveloped study of underdeveloped countries? Do we know how social cleavages, structures of post-colonial states, and types of dependency influence international behavior and patterns of decision making? Do the barriers to the take-off reside in data problems, lack of sophistication among Third World specialists, or in the state of foreign policy theory itself? Three problems have to be solved if this subfield is to advance conceptually and to provide us with cumulative knowledge about Third World countries: (1) the “what” of foreign policy; (2) the “why” of foreign policy; and (3) the “how” of foreign policy. Despite individual limitations, the authors reviewed here have collectively applied relevant concepts and unearthed needed data. These advances put us on the runway ready for a speedy take-off in the 1980s.

Decision makers in international crises seek to reconcile two values: on the one hand, avoiding the loss of prestige and credibility that capitulation would entail and, on the other, avoiding war. These values conflict with each other, in the sense that any policy designed to further one of them will jeopardize the other. Cognitive theory suggests that in ambiguous circumstances a decision maker will suppress uncomfortable value conflicts, conceptualizing his dilemma in such a way that the values appear to be consonant. President Kennedy's process of decision and rationalization in the Cuban missile crisis fits this pattern. He contended that compromise would allay the risk of war in the short run only at the cost of increasing it in the long run. Thus, he saw his policy of no compromise as furthering both the goal of maintaining U.S. prestige and credibility and the goal of avoiding war.

Russia's recent experience fighting inflation—dramatic success in 1995–96 after repeated failures in 1992–94—poses a challenge for existing theories of the politics of macroeconomic stabilization. Monthly inflation rates fell to close to zero despite a deeply unpopular president distracted by heart disease, a government penetrated by economic lobbies, a far-from-independent central bank, a parliament dominated by opposition factions, a lively election season, and the fiscal pressures of “fighting a regional war. The article reviews this experience, shows its incompatibility with existing political economy theories, and proposes an explanation with implications for other reforming regimes. Success was achieved by offering previous beneficiaries from inflation—major commercial banks and subsidized sectors—other sources of government-protected rents that did not increase the money supply. Even when expropriating powerful rent seekers is politically infeasible, it is sometimes possible to trade them less-inflationary rents for ones that are more inflationary.

Qualitative analysis of China's behavior in five situations of international conflict suggests several important similarities in the structure and sequence of Peking's actions. These similarities imply the existence of a relatively stable and coherent strategy of conflict management, and provide a basis for inferring the nature of this strategy. As a result of China's strategic vulnerability, this strategy places a major emphasis on engaging in confrontations with stronger adversaries only under carefully controlled conditions, and on manipulating the “incidental” aspects of these confrontations (e.g., time, place, target, and scale of confrontation) to Peking's advantage. Peking's relative success in applying this strategy is assessed in terms of the “coercive diplomacy” model discussed by Alexander George et al. This assessment identifies areas of strength and weakness in the Chinese approach to conflict management.

A Paradigm is more than a perspective but less than a theory. It provides a set of interrelated questions, but no hypothetical answers or account of validated propositions. It provides a “language,” a net of variables, but it does not specify the relationships among the parameters of these variables. It is less vague than a mere perspective, providing an ordered, specific, and often logically exhaustive and tightly ordered focus for research and speculation. A paradigm is often a stage on the way from an old perspective to a new theory.

An important task of the social scientist is the continual reexamination of his vocabulary. His purpose in such a reexamination should be the achievement of greater precision in meaning—that is, a more explicit statement of the real-world phenomena to which his terms apply. This research note is an attempt to stimulate the critical examination of the term “oligarchy” and related phrases identifying a ruling elite which have been used widely and repeatedly in discussions of Latin American political systems.

Most comparative studies of public strategies for competitiveness focus on the links between public agencies and industrial sectors. This paper argues that the professions—or knowledge-bearing elites—that animate these organizational links are equally significant. For public policies to promote technological advance, the visions and self-images of knowledge-bearing elites are particularly important. By examining administrative and technical elites in France and Germany in the 1980s, the paper identifies characteristics that enable these elites to implement policy in some cases but not in others. France's “state-created” elites were well positioned to initiate and implement large technology projects, such as digitizing the telecommunications network. By contrast, Germany's state-recognized elites were better positioned to facilitate framework-oriented programs aimed at the diffusion of new technologies throughout industry. The linkages between administrative and technical elites also explain why French policymakers had difficulty adapting policy to changing circumstances over time, whereas German policymakers managed in many cases to learn more from previous policy experiences and to adapt subsequent initiatives accordingly.

Can governments elected under mixed-member majoritarian (mmm) electoral systems use geographically targeted spending to increase their chances of staying in office, and if so, how? Although twenty-eight countries use mmm electoral systems, scant research has addressed this question. The authors explain how mmm’s combination of electoral systems in two unlinked tiers creates a distinct strategic environment in which a large party and a small party can trade votes in one tier for votes in the other tier in a way that increases the number of seats won by both. They then explain how governing parties dependent on vote trading can use geographically targeted spending to cement it. These propositions are tested using original data from Japan (2003–2013) and Mexico (2012–2016). In both cases, municipalities in which the supporters of governing parties split their ballots as instructed were found to have received more money after elections. The findings have broad implications for research on mmm electoral systems, distributive politics, and the politics of Japan and Mexico.

Most Soviet committees, from Politburo to local government executive committee, use procedures designed to encourage broad organizational participation in policy making. These procedures help to minimize capricious policy making and ensure the cooperation of officials responsible for implementing policy. Most importantly, the broad representation of institutional interests in collegial forums reflects the need for institutional checks and balances. The cost of committee procedures is inefficiency. Committee decision making also tends to produce policy that works well in an era of economic prosperity and international stability, but less well during periods of economic shortfall or foreign crisis.

In his book The War Trap Bruce Bueno de Mesquita claims to offer a deductive theory of international conflict based on the assumption that foreign policy makers attempt to maximize their expected utility. The theory is subjected to a systematic empirical test that seems to provide impressive confirmation. The first part of this article examines Bueno de Mesquita's theory and argues that it cannot be derived from his assumptions. The second part examines the operational version of the theory, which was the one actually tested, and argues that it can be more plausibly interpreted as a version of a different theory—one that Bueno de Mesquita claims to have discredited. The essay concludes by discussing the significance of this book with regard to the question of whether theories of individual rational choice can explain foreign policy decisions.

This review essay of four recent books on democratic transitions is written from the standpoint of contemporary South African politics. Each of the books takes the Schumpetarian model of democratic politics for granted, and in the course of evaluating them the author explores the advantages and limitations of that model for thinking about the prospects for democracy in South Africa. He concludes that the Schumpeterian model diverts attention from questions that should concern promoters of democracy. The most important such questions deal with the internal structure of political parties, public organizations, and civil institutions.

Economists have only recently begun to characterize the behavior of the state as rentor profit-seeking. One of the ways in which the rent-seeking state may maximize the resources it extracts from taxpayers is through diversification of the tax revenue base. Empirical evidence presented in this paper may help to explain the extent to which countries are able to engage in this form of rent seeking. The highly developed country's ability to diversify its tax base is constrained by the ease of exit of taxable assets from its jurisdiction; with the exception of this limitation, countries with more diversified tax bases collect more revenue relative to national income. This conclusion does not hold, however, for geographic diversification (i.e., federalism). The case is different for developing countries: although they may have a more diversified tax base than developed countries, they are unable to exploit it because of administrative weakness; therefore, rent seeking on the part of the state may be predicted by more conventional factors such as income or trade.

The association of states known as the Commonwealth of Nations has received little attention from students of international politics. Outside the Commonwealth the association has, on the whole, been ignored; alongside other institutions and alliances, its significance is not great; and the foreign policies of the ten states that now belong to it can to a large extent be accounted for, except in the case of Britain, without reference to the fact of their membership. Within the Commonwealth there has been study of it, but the impulse behind this has been provided less by intellectual curiosity than by the desire to see it prosper: British students have been themselves in the grip of the myth of the Commonwealth, which has become in Britain, along with much else, a totem which it is scarcely good form to examine with an innocent eye.