Revolutions are watershed events in international politics, yet the existing literature on revolutions focuses primarily on the causes of revolution or its effects on domestic politics. Revolutions are also a potent cause of instability and war, because they alter the “balance of threats” between the revolutionary state and the other members of the system. First, revolutions alter the balance of power and make it more difficult for states to measure it accurately. Second, they encourage states to exaggerate each other's hostility, further increasing perceptions of threat. Third, revolutions cause states to exaggerate both their own vulnerability and that of their opponents, thereby encouraging them to view the use of force as both necessary and feasible. This combination of insecurity and overconfidence is usually illusory, however. In fact, revolutions are usually harder either to export or to reverse than either side expects.

This article argues that explaining institutional differentiation requires the incorporation of public preferences and understandings into accounts of state development. Using primary evidence concerning policy discussions and public opinion, it suggests that culture determined the specific features of both the British National Health Service Act of 1946 and the American Medicare Act of 1965, as well as the differences between them. Examining the interaction of institutions and culture inserts democratic standards into the top-heavy Weberian discussions of state autonomy and accounts for the seemingly inexplicable failure of policymakers to ensure cost control over the new health programs.

Analyses of military strategy often overlook its political consequences—its effect on the adversary's basic goals and understanding of the defender's resolve. As a result, they prescribe the wrong type of military policy and reduce states' security. This article explores how a variety of factors interact to produce political consequences. These factors include the type of adversary (specifically, its motives for expansion); the type of military strategy the defender adopts (offensive or defensive and unilateral or bilateral); the source of the adversary's misperceptions; and the process through which political consequences are generated. The article reformulates Jervis's spiral and deterrence models and argues that they overlook types of adversaries, including most importantly insecure greedy states; that shifts in the adversary's balance of domestic power offer an alternative to individual learning as the basic way in which political consequences are generated; that national-level failures of evaluation provide an alternative source of exaggerated insecurity; and that these differences can require the defender to follow different policies. Final sections explore military options for managing political consequences and implications for U.S. security policy.

Political surprise provides a double stimulus for social scientists. An unexpected regime change, an unanticipated revolution—indeed, any political event that is both dramatic and unforeseen—forces us to analyze not just the origins of the change itself but the origins of our own amazement. The political surprises that emerged in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s have, accordingly, compelled us to ask not simply why events unfolded as they did but why our predictive theories left us unprepared. The five essays collected here address both of these questions and therefore offer insights about both politics and scholarship.

Like many major revolutions in history, the East European Revolution of 1989 caught its leaders, participants, victims, and observers by surprise. This paper offers an explanation whose crucial feature is a distinction between private and public preferences. By suppressing their antipathies to the political status quo, the East Europeans misled everyone, including themselves, as to the possibility of a successful uprising. In effect, they conferred on their privately despised governments an aura of invincibility. Under the circumstances, public opposition was poised to grow explosively if ever enough people lost their fear of exposing their private preferences. The currently popular theories of revolution do not make clear why uprisings easily explained in retrospect may not have been anticipated. The theory developed here fills this void. Among its predictions is that political revolutions will inevitably continue to catch the world by surprise.

Before the U.S. invasion of December 1989, Panama experienced one of the longest periods of military rule in the modern-day history of Latin America. While numerous authoritarian military regimes emerged in the region during the 1960s and established for themselves a relatively high degree of autonomy from both domestic and international actors, only those in Panama, Paraguay, and Chile survived until the late 1980s. And of these three surviving military regimes, only Panama's was ended through the application of external military force. For the past several years, there has been considerable discussion of the factors that seem best to account for General Manuel Antonio Noriega's personal ability to resist U.S. pressure from 1987 until 1989 and to largely insulate himself from the political and economic constraints of Panamanian domestic politics. However, much less attention has been devoted to discussion of the factors that explain the long-term maintenance of the military authoritarian regime in existence for fifteen years prior to his assumption of power. This analysis suggests that the long-term maintenance of Panama's military authoritarian regime was due in large part to its ability to acquire substantial amounts of foreign capital. During the 1970s, such capital was preferentially obtained from the international banking community. During the 1980s, it was obtained through illicit activities of various kinds, including participation in the growing international drug trade.

Over the last two decades there have been numerous changes in the organization of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in Japan. The pattern of factionalization has changed significantly in terms of the number of competing major factions, the average size of their membership, and their internal structure. Moreover, a new set of institutionalized norms, such as the seniority and interfactional balancing principles, has emerged to govern organizational processes within the LDP. The conventional approach in the literature on Japanese politics, which focuses on factors unique or distinctive to Japanese history, culture, and social behavior, cannot adequately explain these recent changes in the LDP. This paper proposes an alternative, rational-choice explanation based on the standard microanalytic assumptions. More specifically, it argues that the pattern of the LDP's factionalization is primarily determined by the electoral incentives of two sets of rational actors, LDP politicians and LDP supporters, operating under institutional constraints, such as electoral laws and political funding regulations. It also argues that the organizational norms originate in the promotion incentives of the LDP politicians whose strategies are influenced by the uncertainty in the dynamics of the interfactional political process.

This paper tests the objective (professionalization) and subjective (party penetration) models of Soviet civil-military relations. The objective model is found to provide the best fit and is used to investigate further the factors leading to military participation in, and withdrawal from, the coup of August 1991. The objective model points to the importance of threats to professional autonomy and national unity, the politicization of the military, and declining regime legitimacy as the primary causal factors in the participation of the military in the coup. It also stresses the importance of military professionalism as a barrier to intervention and as a cause of military paralysis during the coup. Furthermore, the model points to the importance of democratic legitimacy in future civilian control and to the need for increased military professionalism to forestall threats to the post-Soviet regime.

Evidence is accumulating that, in the modern international system, democracies rarely fight each other. But the reasons for the phenomenon are not well understood. This article explores a similar phenomenon in other societies, using cross-cultural ethnographic evidence. It finds that polities organized according to more participatory (“democratic”) principles fight each other less often than do polities organized according to hierarchical principles. Stable participatory institutions seem to promote peaceful relations, especially if people perceive that others also have some control over politics.

Analyses of economic growth have drawn on the experiences of the East Asian newly industrializing countries to highlight the contribution of cohesive and autonomous states in the resolution of market failures. Within an explicit collective action and public goods framework, this article argues for an institutionalist approach to development that incorporates, but also goes beyond, statism. Through an examination of auto manufacturing in five countries in Southeast and Northeast Asia, the article identifies specific collective action problems central to the development process, and it explores limits to the capacities of even strong states to resolve such problems. The article stresses the role of private sectors and joint publicprivate sector institutions, identifies systematic differences within and among local entrepreneurs with regard to development issues, emphasizes the need for research on factors influencing the supply of institutions; and argues for an approach to development that emphasizes cooperation among domestic interests rather than domination.

Realists have long viewed uneven rates of growth among states as a major cause of wars. According to strict logic of realpolitik, a declining dominant power should launch a preventive war against a rising challenger as a prudent long-term security strategy. But historically, power shifts have only sometimes resulted in war. Although preventive war has been the preferred response of declining authoritarian leaders, no democracy has ever initiated such a war. Instead, depending on the regime type of the rising challenger, democratic states have chosen accommodation, defensive alliances, or internal balancing to solve the problem of impending decline. In addition to establishing the correlation between preventive war and authoritarian regimes and explaining why democratic states forgo this option, this essay (1) develops a model based on the domestic structures of the leader and challenger that predicts which strategy will be employed by a declining dominant power and (2) tests the propositions against historical survey data and several in-depth case studies.

Communism has collapsed in Eastern Europe because the regimes, no ionger justified by their Soviet hegemon, lost confidence in their “mandate from heaven.” Domestically and internationally discredited, East European regimes had traditionally shielded themselves behind a principle of legitimation from the top that saw communism as the global fulfillment of a universal theory of history. Once the theory became utterly indefensible, a crippling legitimacy vacuum ensued. Reacting against that theory, East European dissent, and a civil society of sorts, survived under communism not just as an underground political adversary but as a visible cultural and existential counterimage of communism. This fact must be given proper weight when assessing the capacity of civil society to rebound in postcommunist Eastern Europe.

In the past thirty years the comparative study of communism as conducted in the United States has rested on two conceptual pillars: Weber's theory of routinization and Spencer's notion of progress through industrialism. This article points out some of the limitations of these theories and then develops a more comprehensive framework for comparisons. One of the keys to the understanding of communist politics is the model of a “military society,” also formulated by Spencer but generally ignored by contemporary social science. In terms of this model, communism is presented as a militant geopolitical response to international inequalities, the initial logic of which has been undermined by technological developments in the period following World War II.

This study examines the case of the Brazilian debt rescheduling agreement of 1988 as a two-level game in which each of the two main negotiators—the Brazilian state and the international bank advisory committee—must satisfy its own constituents while trying to negotiate an international agreement. It is argued that the interaction between the domestic and international levels must be understood in order to explain the outcomes of international debt negotiations. This article draws on Robert Putnam's concept of the two-level game in international politics and on a wider literature concerning the influence of domestic political considerations in international negotiations to demonstrate that such an analysis can explain the process and outcome of the 1988 agreement, where a unitary negotiating level fails to predict the final result. The two-level model explains how domestic constraints and opportunities affect international outcomes, and it highlights the importance of the ratification process.

Regional conflicts have played a major role in American interpretations of Soviet foreign policy. They have affected judgments about Soviet intentions and have served as a barometer of Moscow's competitiveness. This study looks at the change in Soviet policy under Gorbachev. It proposes a strategic framework for the analysis of Soviet behavior and then examines Moscow's actions in terms of military support, active involvement, and the terms for peace. Special attention is paid to Soviet behavior in Southwest Asia. The study finds that Soviet behavior changed but in ways that were more subtle than often realized. Moscow pulled back having achieved partial success through compromise more often than it retreated in defeat. The shift to a strategy of detente had numerous causes, but a simple American peace-through-strength explanation that stresses external constraints and Soviet internal weakness is inadequate. Such explanations underestimate the importance of changing perceptions of threat and mistakenly affirm a deterrence conception of reciprocity (i.e., that force begets restraint). The evidence in regional conflicts suggests that a spiral model of reciprocity (i.e., that escalation begets escalation) is more apt.

Neoliberal economists say that growth is easy, provided the state does not obstruct the natural growth-inducing processes of a capitalist economy. They point to the success of South Korea and Taiwan as evidence that this proposition also holds for quite poor economies. Using chapters of Helen Hughes's edited volume by way of illustration, this article shows that the neoliberals ignore so much contrary evidence as to suggest that the neoliberal paradigm has entered a degenerative stage, like classical economics in the years before Keynes's breakthrough and like much Marxist writing of the 1970s.

Two recent books about East Asia offer ways forward. The one by Alice Amsden argues that Korea has done better than other developing countries because it has created a more powerful synergy between a state that aggressively steers market competition and large, diversified business groups whose firms focus strategically on production processes at the shop floor. In conditions of “late development” this synergy is the key to success. Stephan Haggard's book accepts the core economic mechanism of the neoliberals but argues that the choice between sensible export-oriented policies, as in East Asia, or unsensible secondary import-substitution policies, as in Latin America, is determined by a complex conjunction of international pressures, domestic coalitions, political institutions, and ideas.

Both books make important contributions to the debate. But they are weakened by not situating the experience of their case studies within an account of trends in the world system and by not addressing the question of what prevented massive “government failure” in market interventions in the East Asian cases. The last part of this paper takes a short step in this direction.

By focusing on some major contributions to political economy and economic policy-making within advanced capitalism, among the richest subfields of the discipline, the article seeks to analyze the relation between structural constraints and political choice. With the partial exception of Politics against Markets, all the works reviewed here seek to interpret rather than change the world. Attending to the fine grain of historical detail, they insightfully describe important political developments. They provide fine accounts of the interplay of structure and agency in concrete historical settings. By developing impressive theory to illuminate these developments, the works considerably advance our knowledge of the way that political forces affect economic policy outcomes. However, they generally share three important and interrelated shortcomings: they do not adequately conceptualize the structural dynamics of democratic capitalism; they adopt an economistic perspective concerning the organization of interests and social identities; and they confine attention to what is and fail to consider what might be.

Cooperation among nations has become the focus of a wide range of studies in the past decade. The recent international relations literature about cooperation has adopted a distinct approach. It has tended to focus on the systemic level of analysis. It has also used game theory as its central tool of analysis. This review evaluates this literature, arguing that these methodological choices have contributed to both the greatest strengths and the greatest weaknesses of the literature in explaining cooperation among nations.

The recent literature on international cooperation has made two general contributions. First, it has developed a concept of cooperation, which can help distinguish what behavior counts as cooperation and which has been adopted widely in thefield.Second, the literature ha* tried to illuminate the conditions under which cooperation is likely to emerge. Using game theory to model relations at the systemic level parsimoniously, scholars have developed at least six hypotheses about the circumstances that promote cooperative behavior.

The recent literature also suffers from at least two serious problems. The first problem flows from the assumptions used to generate the relatively parsimonious hypotheses. In particular, the way in which the assumption of anarchy is used causes problems. Second, and relatedly, the literature shows a remarkable neglect of domestic politics. As will be argued, this poses a serious limitation for understanding cooperation. Systemic theory simply cannot take us far enough. The international-level hypotheses depend on implicit theories about internal politics. Hypotheses about domestic influences on cooperation among states are not well developed. Although systemic theory has been touted for a variety of reasons, the biggest gains in understanding international cooperation in the future are likely to come from domestic-level theories.

This article makes a case for viewing the politics of regime transition in communist states as a subcategory of the more generic phenomenon of transition from authoritarian rule. Drawing on case studies from Latin America and Southern Europe and from the more theoretical literature on postauthoritarian transitions that those cases have generated, the article reexamines the politics of reform in the Gorbachev-era USSR. This comparative approach shows that the dynamics of the liberalization process in the USSR adhere to a model of political change previously manifested in other parts of the world. Specifically, it provides a clearer understanding of the initial vitality and subsequent disintegration of Gorbachev's centrist reform program, as well as a new perspective from which to reevaluate Gorbachev's often-criticized program of regime democratization.