This study compares democratization in the postcommunist region (or the twenty-seven countries that emerged from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe) in order to evaluate some of the assumptions and arguments in the literature on recent democratization in southern Europe and Latin America. Five conclusions are drawn, all of which challenge the received wisdom about democratization in southern Europe and Latin America. First, the uncertainty surrounding the postcommunist transitions to democracy varied significantly. This influenced, in turn, the strategies of transition and their payoffs. This also meant that the most successful transitions in the postcommunist context involved a sharp break with the old order. Second, popular mobilization often functioned to support the democratic project. Third, nationalist mobilization was also helpful, though this depended upon whether it began with the breakdown of authoritarian rule or had a longer history—with the latter compromising the democratic project. Fourth, if the timing of nationalist mobilization was critical for the success of democratization in those cases where such mobilization occurred, then the strength of the opposition was the key factor in the remaining cases. Finally, while democratic consolidation necessarily enhances the prospects for democratic sustainability, the failure to consolidate democracy does not necessarily threaten the continuation of democratic rule. Indeed, as in the Russian case, such a failure may prolong democratic rule. This suggests, in turn, that a key distinction must be made between the optimal conditions for democratization and optimal strategies.

Economists have recently underscored that the failure of market reforms in producing sustained growth in emerging markets is the result of poor advice from the International Monetary Fund, as well as of erroneous macroeconomic policies of domestic decision makers. This article proposes a complementary hypothesis. If market reforms are enacted in a political system with weak accountability institutions, then one should expect the executive to manipulate such reforms in pursuit of such old-fashioned practices as collusion between government and business, political patronage, and corruption. This, in turn, ends up depriving a given economy of potential advantages that could have accrued had the reforms promoted true competition rather than i reallocating monopolistic rents and squandering a large amount of resources.

Although there is a popular perception that trade liberalization undermines domestic regulation, under certain circumstances international trade can provide a catalyst for making domestic regulations more stringent. This article makes a case extending the applicability of the so-called trading-up thesis by finding evidence of change within the United States in response to the transatlantic trade dispute over genetically modified food. In particular, it argues that political transfer—the transfer of political concern from one jurisdiction to political mobilization in another—can prompt policy change even in the absence of the adoption of foreign standards by domestic firms.

The tragic events of September 11, 2001, came as a terrible surprise, except of course to those who perpetrated them. The four aircraft hijackings, the use of the seized and fully fueled large aircraft as incendiary bombs directed against the perceived centers of American financial, military, and legislative life (on the assumption that the fourth jet was to have been targeted at the U.S. Capitol), and the massive loss of life shattered all assumptions. The terror immediately produced a flood of analysis, instant commentary, articles, books, and gradually also a smaller tide of semiacademic and academic analysis.

Why are certain foreign policy options considered taboo or simply kept off the agenda as necessarily unthinkable or self-destructive? And under what conditions can governments transcend such “policy frontiers”? This article seeks to answer these questions by examining the circumstances that brought about Canada's and Mexico's entry into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)—a move that constituted a surprising reversal of historic prohibitions on formalizing bilateral economic integration that had long been entrenched in these two nations' foreign policies. Policy frontiers develop as certain elements of the “national interest”—sovereignty, security, and identity—become equated with the legitimation of state elites. When these leaders defend the policy frontier (ostensibly to defend the nation), they are also defending their own political power. These barriers are constructed in a path-dependent fashion, through a critical juncture that first establishes the frontier, and then are maintained over time by institutional and ideological mechanisms of reproduction. For the frontier to be transcended, a critical juncture combining an exogenous shock with an internal legitimacy crisis must undermine, and then reconfigure, both mechanisms of reproduction. The origins of NAFTA in the Canadian and Mexican embrace of the once-forbidden bilateral free-trade option in 1985 and 1990, respectively, illustrate this dynamic, while the individual cases offer variations on the policy frontier model that can provide insights into the analysis of other cases of historically resisted foreign policy change.

The welfare state is generally viewed as either providing redistribution from rich to poor or as providing publicly financed insurance. Both views are incomplete. Welfare policies provide both insurance and redistribution in varying amounts, depending on the design of the policy. The authors explore the political consequences of the mix of redistribution and insurance in the context of studying the impact of income inequality on expenditures in different categories of welfare spending in advanced industrial societies from 1980 to 1995. They find that spending on pensions, health care, family benefits, poverty alleviation and housing subsidies is largely uncorre-lated with income inequality, but that spending on income replacement programs such as unemployment insurance, sickness pay, occupational illness and disability are significantly higher i n countries with more egalitarian income distributions. They show that this pattern is exactly what a theory of political support for redistributive social insurance programs would predict.

Are predominantly Muslim societies distinctly disadvantaged in democratization? If so, why? The article presents a straightforward cross-national examination of the link between Islam and political regime. The evidence strongly suggests that Muslim countries are in fact democratic underachievers. The nature of the causal connection between Islam and political regime is investigated. Many conventional assumptions about Islam and politics do not withstand scrutiny. But one factor does help explain the dearth of democracy in the Muslim world: the treatment of women and girls. The rudiments of a provisional theory linking the treatment of females and regime type are offered and the implications of the findings for democracy, both in Muslim societies and elsewhere, are discussed.

This article analyzes the processes of distribution and redistribution in postindustrial democracies. The authors combine a pooled time-series data base on welfare state effort and its determinants assembled by Huber, Ragin, and Stephens (1997) with data on income distribution assembled in the Luxembourg Income Survey (IJS) archive. In the case of the LIS data, the authors recalculate the microdata in order to remove the distorting influence of pensioners on pretax, pretransfer income distribution. They examine the determinants of two dependent variables: pretax, pretransfer income inequality and the proportional reduction in inequality from pre- to post—tax and transfer inequality. They test hypotheses derived from power resources theory against alternatives derived from the literature on the development of the welfare state and the determinants of income inequality, The results offer strong support for power resources theory, particularly in the case of reduction in inequality. Union density, unemployment, and percentage of female-headed households were the main determinants of pre—tax and transfer inequality (R2 = .64), while leftist government, directly and indirectly through its influence on the size of the welfare state, was found to be by far the strongest determinant of distribution (R2 = .81).

When and why have employers supported the development of institutions of social insurance that provide benefits to workers during various employment-related risks? The analysis developed in this article challenges the dominant explanations of welfare state development, which are premised on the assumption that business opposes social insurance. The article examines the conditions under which self-interested, profit-maximizing firms support the introduction of a new social policy, and it specifies the most significant variables explaining the variation in employers' social policy preferences. The model is tested in three political episodes of welfare state development in France and Germany, using policy documents submitted by various employers' associations to bureaucratic and parliamentary commissions.

The author conducted a field experiment in Benin to investigate the impact of clientelism on voting behavior. In collaboration with four political parties involved in the 2001 presidential elections, clientelist and broad public policy platforms were designed and run in twenty randomly selected villages of an average of 756 registered voters. Using the survey data collected after the elections, the author estimated the effect of each type of message by comparing voting behavior in the villages exposed to clientelism or public policy messages (treatment groups) with voting behavior in the other villages (control groups). The author found that clientelist messages have positive and significant effect in all regions and for all types of candidates. The author also found that public policy messages have a positive and significant effect in the South but a negative and significant effect in the North. In addition, public policy messages seem to hurt incumbents as well as regional candidates. Finally, the evidence indicates that female voters tend to have stronger preference for public policy platforms than male voters.

In the ongoing war on terrorism that highlights the “new era” in world politics, East Asia constitutes a crucial swing vote. Its importance derives from its growing economic heft in the world, as well as its central role in three key trends that have characterized international politics since the end of the cold war: globalization, regionalism, and a reequilibration of the national balance of power. This article examines the impact of September 11 on the region, focusing on these three trends as indicators. It finds that while the impact of the war has been in significant respects different in Southeast Asia and in Northeast Asia, in both subregions the dominant preference has been to pursue this new campaign more as a police effort than as a “war” against selected alleged terrorist-harboring nation-states. In this respect, antiterrorist efforts have been modest but thus far fairly effective. Yet the antiterrorist effort has not eclipsed other realms of international diplomacy (such as economic cooperation and regional development) to the extent that it has in American foreign policy. Thus there is some risk that the divergent priorities of Washington and the East Asian nations may unwittingly contribute to a form of regional consolidation in which the U.S. plays a diminished role.

The authors show that economic development increases the probability that a country will undergo a transition to democracy. These results contradict the finding of Przeworski and his associates, that development causes democracy to last but not to come into existence in the first place. By dealing adequately with problems of sample selection and model specification, the authors discover that economic growth does cause nondemocracies to democratize. They show that the effect of economic development on the probability of a transition to democracy in the hundred years between the mid-nineteenth century and World War II was substantial, indeed, even stronger than its effect on democratic stability. They also show that, in more recent decades, some countries that developed but remained dictatorships would, because of their development, be expected to democratize in as few as three years after achieving a per capita income of $12,000 per capita.

Contemporary theories and typologies of welfare states in Western Europe assume that social democratic parties are the engine behind progressive policies on gender roles and on the participation of women in the labor force. The French case challenges these assumptions—this conservative welfare state, surprisingly, provides an extensive system of public day care along with other forms of support that facilitate mothers' employment. This article explains the existence of the French system through a comparative historical analysis of child care policy in France and other European welfare states. The mainfindingsconcern the role of organized religion in shaping contemporary public day care policies. In contrast to most conservative welfare regimes, the French welfare state has been shaped not by clericalism and Christian democracy but by secularism and republican nationalism—forces that influenced some of the earliest public policies for the education of young children in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and that later affected the founding of the contemporary day care system in the 1970s. In that latter period of propitious economic circumstances, pragmatic policy elites eschewed moralizing critiques of mothers' employment and established a system of financing that has enabled the long-term expansion of public day care. These findings have implications for our understanding of gender politics and welfare regimes in Western Europe. The secularization of political life—not social democratic power—best explains why public policies in France and in many Scandinavian countries have promoted the demise of the traditional family model.

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.

The attacks of September 11, 2001, highlight the general absence of attention to religion in international scholarship. The absence is understandable, for it arises from the secularized nature of the authority structure of the international system, described here as the “Westphalian synthesis.” Over the past generation, though, the global rise of public religion has challenged several planks of the synthesis. The sharpest challenge is “radical Islamic revivalism,” a political theology that has its roots in the early twentieth century and that gave rise to al-Qaeda. If international relations scholars are to understand the events of September 11, they ought to devote more attention to the way in which radical Islamic revivalism and public religion shape international relations, sometimes in dramatic ways.

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.

This article takes stock of a plethora of recent works examining the flowering of transnational civil society activism in world politics. The author argues that this work contributes to a progressive research agenda that responds to a succession of criticisms from alternative perspectives. As the research program has advanced, new areas of inquiry have been opened up, including the need for a central place for normative international theory. The author also contends that the focus of this research on the transnationalization of civil society provides a trenchant response to an important puzzle concerning the leverage of civil society vis-à-vis the contemporary state in an era of globalization. Further, the liberal variant of transnational advocacy research constitutes a powerful theoretical counter not only to other nonliberal theories that privilege other agents or structures but also to other varieties of contemporary liberal international theory, such as those privileging preexisting domestic preference formation or state centric versions of liberal constructivism.

This article examines the importance of the internal structural dynamics of the military in the analysis of transitions from nondemocratic rule and in democratic consolidation. The authors argues that factors endogenous to the military—including variations in the size of the officer corps, solidarity among graduating classes from the military academy, and promotional prospects—are important determinants of the political behavior of militaries. As a case study, military structure and politics during Indonesia's recent transition from nondemocratic rule and current consolidation of democracy are explored in detail. While the ongoing interaction between civilians and the military is acknowledged, systematic structural features are identified as being important for understanding the behavior of the Indonesian military between 1998 and 2001. The authors compare and contrast the study of Indonesia with other cases in the literature on transitions—including Ghana, Nigeria, Portugal, and Thailand—and discuss resulting implications for the study of transitions and consolidations.