What makes political regimes rise, endure, and fall? The main question is whether the observed close relation between levels of economic development and the incidence of democratic regimes is due to democracies being more likely to emerge or only more likely to survive in the more developed countries. We answer this question using data concerning 135 countries that existed at any time between 1950 and 1990. We find that the level of economic development does not affect the probability of transitions to democracy but that affluence does make democratic regimes more stable. The relation between affluence and democratic stability is monotonic, and the breakdown of democracies at middle levels of development is a phenomenon peculiar to the Southern Cone of Latin America. These patterns also appear to have been true of the earlier period, but dictatorships are more likely to survive in wealthy countries that became independent only after 1950. We conclude that modernization need not generate democracy but democracies survive in countries that are modern.

The authors construct a statistical model with which to test whether the regularity that democracy is more commonly found among wealthy countries stems from a democratizing effect of high income or is due entirely to other factors, such as the historical context, various features of the institutional setting, and simultaneity with the process of leadership change. Even after correcting for these many other influences, the democratizing effect of income remains as a statistically significant factor promoting the emergence of democratic political institutions. The authors go on to find that leaders' risks of losing power rise during their time in office and that these risks are higher in more democratic countries.

The authors confirm the finding by Burkhart and Lewis-Beck that the democracy-promoting effect of income is stronger among the European countries. They suggest that high income has a more powerful democratizing effect among the Southern European countries because it interacts with pressure from major trading partners to democratize. This suggests a revaluation of policies designed to foster the replacement of authoritarian regimes by democratic ones through free trade.

This article extends recent work on a comparative theory of retrenchment in social policy by asking whether the politics of retrenchment travels well across policy areas, with policy feedback remaining a crucial variable for explaining government success or failure. The article analyzes policy change in agriculture in the United States and France, a natural choice for an extension of retrenchment theory because agricultural policy resembles social policy in some respects but also provides telling points of contrast. The article finds that the call for new theories focusing on retrenchment is justified: the politics of agricultural retrenchment differs from that of expansion, and success at retrenchment varies by program.

The analysis shows, as well, that retrenchment has been significant both in the U.S. and in France and the European Union. Variations in policy feedback help explain why these policy changes occurred. Moreover, the France-U.S. comparison highlights how systemic institutional factors shape the politics of retrenchment. Finally, focusing on agriculture, a policy sector in which international developments have a greater direct importance than they do in social policy, the article identifies an additional systemic retrenchment strategy: constraining domestic programs through international agreements.

The 1934 Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (RTAA) changed the structure of the making of U.S. trade policy and made possible a dramatic reduction in tariffs. The authors demonstrate that the key institutional innovation in the RTAA was its mandate to lower tariffs through reciprocal agreements with foreign nations. The expansion of exports under the RTAA enhanced political support for increasingly lower U.S. tariffs. Evidence that export interests were positively associated with congressional votes for free trade supports this view.

How is one to understand contentious acts that open channels of participation while also making use of existing channels? Rightful resistance is a partly institutionalized form of popular action that employs laws, policies, and other established values to defy power holders who have failed to live up to some ideal or who have not implemented a popular measure. Analysis of opposition to cadre misconduct in rural China, supported by evidence from the United States, Norway, and South Africa, suggests that resistance can share a common dynamic despite its occurrence in strikingly dissimilar settings. Aggrieved individuals and groups turn to established principles to anchor their defiance; use legitimating myths and normative language to frame their claims; rely on existing statutes and government commitments when leveling their charges; and locate and mobilize advocates within officialdom. In differing contexts, a combination of rights talk, legal tactics, and open confrontation may induce power holders to surrender advantages in accord with principles that usually favor them. The cases examined further suggest that rightful resistance springs from rights consciousness and increases it and, finally, that it may be more consequential than most “everyday resistance” while remaining less risky than wholly uninstitutionalized defiance.

The recent wave of democratic transitions has stimulated scholarly interest in a previously undeveloped area of study: comparative presidentialism. Comparative presidentialism seeks to define variant types of presidentialism that have emerged from transition processes, to identify the conditions that shape institutional choice and to understand more clearly the causal relationship between institutional choice and democratic regime outcomes. Using the postcommunist transitions, this paper contributes to the emerging comparative presidentialism literature by suggesting a revision to the argument that presidentialism leads to failed democratic transitions. The paper focuses attention away from the institutional rules of the game and toward the actors who actually make the institutional choice. Three postcommunist cases, distinguished by their different regime outcomes, are compared: Russia, Uzbekistan, and Estonia.

Governing parties face two fundamental tasks: they must pursue policies effectively, and they must win elections. Their national coalitions, therefore, generally include two types of constituencies—those that are important for policy-making and those that make it possible to win elections. In effect, governing parties must bring together a policy coalition and an electoral coalition. This distinction sheds light on how the transitional costs of major economic policy shifts can be made sustainable in electoral terms. It also provides a starting point for analysis of how two of Latin America's most important labor-based parties, the Peronist party in Argentina and the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in Mexico, maintained electoral dominance while pursuing free-market reforms that adversely affected key social constituencies. Peronism and the PRI are conceived of as having encompassed historically two distinctive and regionally based subcoalitions: a metropolitan coalition that gave support to the parties' development strategies and a peripheral coalition that carried the burden of generating electoral majorities. This framework permits a reconceptualization of the historic coalitional dynamics of Peronism and the PRI and sheds light on the current process of coalitional change and economic reform.

In 1992 governments negotiated a multilateral treaty regime to manage biological diversity. Unlike the United Kingdom, the United States rejected this treaty. Yet both nations were equally at risk from biodiversity loss and equally likely to benefit from its protection. This empirical puzzle is used to explore state choice in regulatory cooperation. Epistemic community analysis helps to explain the onset of negotiations and the contours of debates over regime norms and rules. But state choices, and the regime itself, primarily reflected the regulatory politics of biodiversity management. The international commitments on biodiversity, ostensibly alike for the U.K. and the U.S., had to be implemented through their domestic regulatory structures; the result was a distinct set of domestic ramifications. Electoral incentives and especially domestic institutions influenced both industry and governmental assessments by shaping expectations about the impact of the regime in operation. As states increasingly seek to regulate internationally, domestic institutions and anticipated implementation will play ever greater roles in explaining state choice and, because powerful states are equally influenced by these dynamics, in explaining international outcomes.

Since 1990 Russia has experienced an unexpected “ethnic revival.” Varying widely in geography, culture, economic development, and institutional history, the country's thirty-two ethnic regions offer a chance to weigh the evidence for alternative theories of separatist activism. This paper examines statistically why some—such as Chechnya and Tatarstan—have come to epitomize demands for greater independence, while others—such as Mordovia or Chukotka—have remained largely quiescent. It finds that, while a Muslim religious tradition predisposed a region's leaders to press greater separatist demands, such primordial factors werefilteredthrough a rational calculus of the region's relative bargaining power in negotiations with the center and of the leader's own organizational interests. Contrary to some leading theories, the most developed, resource-rich, and high-income groups and regions were more separatist than more economically backward ones.

When one state engages in a military buildup, other states sometimes take this as a sign that it is more aggressive or expansionist than they previously thought. Some argue that such increases in mutual suspicion can drive arms races and even lead to war. Psychological bias is often invoked to explain this pattern of growing suspicions leading to hostility. This article presents an incomplete information model of an arms race and investigates when escalations should rationally generate increased fears and when, in order to reduce such fears, security seekers can refrain from building. It shows that escalations rationally provoke fear even in the absence of bias and that weak states and states facing high costs of arms racing and war will be especially likely to refrain from building as a way of signaling benign intentions.

Qualitative analysts have received stern warnings that the validity of their studies may be undermined by selection bias. This article provides an overview of this problem for qualitative researchers in the field of international and comparative studies, focusing on selection bias that may result from the deliberate selection of cases by the investigator. Examples are drawn from studies of revolution, international deterrence, the politics of inflation, international terms of trade, economic growth, and industrial competitiveness. The article first explores how insights about selection bias developed in quantitative research can most productively be applied in qualitative studies. The discussion considers why qualitative researchers need to be concerned about selection bias, even if they do not care about the generality of their findings, and it considers distinctive implications of this form of bias for qualitative research, as in the problem of what is labeled “complexification based on extreme cases.” The article then considers pitfalls in recent discussions of selection bias in qualitative studies. These discussions at times get bogged down in disagreements and misunderstandings over how the dependent variable is conceptualized and what the appropriate frame of comparison should be, issues that are crucial to the assessment of bias within a given study. At certain points it becomes clear that the real issue is not just selection bias, but a larger set of trade-offs among alternative analytic goals.

Practically everywhere one looks these days the concept of “civil society” is in vogue. Neo-Tocquevillean scholars argue that civil society plays a role in driving political, social, and even economic outcomes. This new conventional wisdom, however, is flawed. It is simply not true that democratic government is always strengthened, not weakened, when it faces a vigorous civil society. This essay shows how a robust civil society helped scuttle the twentieth century's most critical democratic experiment, Weimar Germany. An important implication of this analysis is that under certain circumstances associationism and the prospects for democratic stability can actually be inversely related. To know when civil society activity will take on oppositional or even antidemocratic tendencies, one needs to ground one's analyses in concrete examinations of political reality. Political scientists should remember that Tocqueville considered Americans' political associations to be as important as their nonpolitical ones, and they should therefore examine more closely the connections between the two under various conditions.

The end of the cold war and the attendant security vacuum unleashed aflurryof intellectual activity and international commissions that reflected on the world that was being left behind and the world that should be created in its place. The reports under review are among the best and most influential of the lot. This article focuses on three issues raised by these reports. First, the portrait of the new international order offered by these reports is a liberal international order. Second, the concept of legitimacy appears in various guises, and the UN is considered the site for the legitimation of a particular order. Few international orders are ever founded or sustained by force alone, something well understood by the policymakers who drafted these reports and wisely heeded by international relations theorists who attempt to understand their actions and the international orders that they construct and sustain. Third, these reports envision the UN as an agent of normative integration. As such, it contributes to the development and maintenance of a liberal international order by increasing the number of actors who identify with and uphold its values.

The 1980s were bracketed by crises in Africa, as protracted economic malaise was succeeded by a wave of political reform. Analysts have sought to understand the sources of economic decline as well as the political requisites for recovery in the region. Neoclassical and structuralist analyses have been challenged by state-centric views of economic change. The latter perspective emphasizes the need for capable developmental states as a basis for long-term adjustment, but a political theory of economic change is still lacking. Such a theory must address the institutional foundations of growth, as well as the shifting basis of social coalitions in African regimes. Political liberalization suggests the possibility of a new setting for economic reform, though the effects of political reform on institutions and coalitions remain ambiguous, and democratization cannot be regarded as a panacea for the region's developmental failure. Future research must look more closely at the interests and structures in transitional regimes, and scholars should adopt a more comparative vantage on Africa's challenges of reform.

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.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the concept of “normalcy” has occupied a prominent place in the pronouncements of Germany's most powerful politicians and policy makers. In addition, it has also suffused much of the emerging literature on the domestic and international implications of German unification. Some observers argue that unification embodies the call to normalcy, offering Germany's leaders the opportunity to put their nation's past behind them. Others treat the events of 1989–90 as part of an ongoing challenge to German identity. Finally, a third group of scholars regards the invocation of German unity as an excuse for papering over the crimes of the Nazi past. Although there is no a priori basis for considering any one of these approaches the most appropriate for assessing contemporary German affairs, this does not mean one's choice of terms is totally arbitrary. If German normalcy is to mean anything analytically, it must minimally represent an attainable and worthy goal to which the leaders of the Federal Republic can aspire in their efforts to make Germany more like other European states.

The recent trend toward democratization in countries across the globe has challenged scholars to pursue two potentially contradictory goals. On the one hand, they seek to increase analytic differentiation in order to capture the diverse forms of democracy that have emerged. On the other hand, they are concerned with conceptual validity. Specifically, they seek to avoid the problem of conceptual stretching that arises when the concept of democracy is applied to cases for which, by relevant scholarly standards, it is not appropriate. This article argues that the pursuit of these two goals has led to a proliferation of conceptual innovations, including numerous subtypes of democracy—that is to say, democracy “with adjectives.” The article explores the strengths and weaknesses of alternative strategies of conceptual innovation that have emerged: descending and climbing Sartori's ladder of generality, generating “diminished” subtypes of democracy, “precising” the definition of democracy by adding defining attributes, and shifting the overarching concept with which democracy is associated. The goal of the analysis is to make more comprehensible the complex structure of these strategies, as well as to explore trade-offs among the strategies. Even when scholars proceed intuitively, rather than self-consciously, they tend to operate within this structure. Yet it is far more desirable for them to do so selfconsciously, with a full awareness of these trade-offs.

Since the end of the cold war internal conflicts have received unprecedented attention. Of special interest has been the effort of neorealists to employ an approach traditionally used to explain interstate conflict to make internal war understandable. While neorealism has been useful in explaining the behavior of groups in anarchic conditions, it is inadequate in explaining internal wars occurring in states that retain a strong government and that stem from motives other than power and security. Neorealism also does little to explain how anarchy is created in the first place and what can be done to restore central control. Another approach offers “bad leaders” as a proximate cause of internal war. There is much to this explanation, but more work needs to be done in understanding just what makes leaders “bad” and whether leaders have the latitude to be “good.” Finally, the diverse nature of internal wars has frustrated efforts to develop an overall means of settling them. At a point in which armed conflict has become almost exclusively an internal affair, useful generalizations for causes and cures remain elusive.

In the 1990s scholars working within the subfield of immigration studies in Western Europe have advanced four major arguments. (1) In a liberal era of global economic markets the capacity of states to govern their territorial borders has significantly eroded. (2) The widespread diffusion of liberal norms has severely inhibited the ability of governments to execute a rational immigrant policy. (3) The experience of mass immigration has transformed the boundaries of national citizenship. And 4) postwar immigration has fostered the surge of radical right-wing populist movements. This article evaluates these arguments in light of the evidence presented in both the collected scholarship under review and other select works. It concludes by arguing the case for new scholarly initiatives to synthesize and unify the separate literatures represented by the volumes under review.