The origin of the state, long at the center of political science, can be greatly illuminated by the contemporary approach in evolutionary biology known as “inclusive fitness theory.” Natural selection is now analyzed using cost-benefit models akin to rational actor models in economics, game theory, and collective choice theory. The utility of integrating these approaches is illustrated by using the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Tragedy of the Commons to outline a general model for the evolution of political and legal institutions. This perspective also shows how traditional political philosophers explored “archetypical” problems that are easily translated into scientific terminology. It is thus possible to link biology to the study of human behavior in a nonreductionist manner, thereby generating new empirical hypotheses concerning the environmental correlates of social norms. Ultimately, such a unification of the natural and social sciences points to a return to the classical view that law and justice are not matters of pure convention, but rather are grounded on what is right “according to nature.”

Immigration has fundamentally altered the ethnic and religious makeup of most advanced democracies, but substantial variation is observed in the political representation of immigrant-origin minority groups across countries and cities. Though existing research has highlighted the role of electoral institutions in explaining minority representation, it is often difficult to isolate their effects across contexts. Focusing on Muslims in England and employing a new data set containing over 42,000 candidate-level observations, this article explains Muslim candidate election and selection. To do this, the author makes use of a rule change whereby a subset of localities switched from the use of multimember elections to the use of single-member elections. She finds that these electoral rules have no significant effect on the share of Muslims that gets elected but that they do influence the selection process: in a given election, Muslims are half as likely to be selected when only one seat is up for election as compared with when three seats are in play. Yet parties balance the slate across consecutive single-member elections, leading to similar results across systems. Further, the more undesirable the seat, the more likely it is to have a Muslim on the ticket, but this effect holds only in single-member elections, and it reverses as Muslims gain electoral leverage. Overall electoral leverage proves crucial: the effect of institutions and the potential for institution-based discrimination are conditional on the size and concentration of the local Muslim population and the votes it can deliver at both the election and the selection stages.

In 1991 Germany extended unilateral diplomatic recognition to Croatia and Slovenia in direct contravention of the preferences of its EC partners. In the context of Germany's postwar history of multilateralism in foreign policy, this was an unprecedented decision. As a case of defection from international cooperation, it requires explanation. This article explains how the German preference for recognition was formed and why Germany acted unilaterally when its partners had moved to adjust their policies to coordinate them with Germany's preferences. Defection from cooperation in this case is best explained as a two-level game: the source of Germany's preference for diplomatic recognition of these republics is traced to domestic political factors; its unilateral action is traced to regime weaknesses leading to negotiating failures in a changing post—cold war international environment.

In an earlier issue of this journal, we presented our findings on the composition of the interstate system, along with the diplomatic importance or “status” attributed to each member by die others in the system. Covering the period between the Napoleonic Wars and the onset of World War II, we set out both to calculate the ranking of the states every five years during those 125 years, and to make explicit the criteria by which system membership and status ranks were established. Our major motivation was to identify the empirical domain within which our own research would go forth and to develop certain indicators which were relevant to me Correlates of War project; it also seemed likely that these data might be of use to others in tiie scholarly community.

Ratifying core conventions adopted by the International Labor Organization (ILO) creates legal obligations to improve labor standards in the domestic economy, notably with regard to union rights, minimum age and discrimination in employment, and forced labor. Why and when do states choose to ratify them? Two influential theoretical approaches lead to the expectation that states are influenced by the ratification behavior of other states. Drawing on rationalist institutionalism, the authors expect states to use institutions such as the ILO to improve or consolidate their preferred standards domestically while reducing the risk of suffering competitive disadvantages in world markets. In this view, ILO conventions are devices for the prevention and mitigation of regulatory races to the bottom among trade rivals. Drawing on sociological institutionalism, they expect states to ratify ILO conventions if doing so conforms to a norm of appropriate behavior that is prevalent in a state's peer groups. This article develops observable implications of these hypotheses and tests them by applying spatial regression models to seven core ILO conventions and 187 countries between 1948 and 2009. The analysis yields strong evidence in support of both hypotheses.

A decade after the end of European and Eurasian communism the once acrimonious debates between “area studies” and “the discipline” have largely subsided. Access to archives, survey data, and political elites has allowed east European countries to be treated as normal arenas of research. Recent work by both younger and established scholars has made serious contributions not only to the understanding of postcommunism but also to broader research questions about the political economy of reform, federalism, transitional justice, and nationalism and interethnic relations. The key issue for students of postcommunism is explaining the highly variable paths that east European and Eurasian states have taken since 1989. Compared with the relative homogeneity of outcomes in earlier transitions in southern Europe and Latin America—extrication from previous regimes followed by long periods of consolidation—the record in the east looks profoundly more varied: a handful of successful transitions and easy consolidations, several incomplete transitions, a few transitions followed by reversion to authoritarian politics, even some transitions that never really began at all. The works under review point scholars toward the study of the institutional legacies of state socialism: the “subversive institutions” of the communist state, the institutional dimensions of ethnic solidarity and mobilization, and the emerging patterns of interinstitutional bargaining in the first years of postcommunism.

Political development in Leninist regimes can be understood in terms of the relationships among elite-designated tasks, corresponding political uncertainties, and regime structures. The post-Stalin period has seen a crucial change in relations between polity and society. Whereas under Stalin the relationship between political-organizational status and socio-occupational status was hierarchical and mutually exclusive, after Stalin ruling Communist parties have allowed social elites to complement socio-occupational and political-organizational roles. The major political problem in contemporary Leninist regimes arises from the potential conflict between innovative attempts in this direction and the party's continued pre-emption of any potential political arena or role not coterminous with party organization and membership.

During the last decade, the concept of patrimonialism has become firmly embedded in political science and the sociological literature, being used primarily to explain the operation of bureaucracies in the underdeveloped world. This research note examines some of the usages of the term and attempts to assess its explanatory value. It is suggested that, as employed in much recent literature, “patrimonialism” has not contributed a great deal to the understanding of underdeveloped polities. The author argues that this is primarily because the literature has generally ignored the broader structural factors of which the phenomenon of patrimonialism is a manifestation. Taking account of these structural factors and locating patrimonialism within the broader context of underdevelopment will better equip us to understand the character and operation of Third World bureaucracies.

Reputation has long been considered central to international relations, but unobservability, strategic selection, and endogeneity have handicapped quantitative research. A rare source of haphazard variation in the cultural origins of leaders-the fact that one-third of US presidents were raised in the American South, a well-studied example of a culture of honor-provides an opportunity to identify the effects of heightened concern for reputation for resolve. A formal theory that yields several testable predictions while accounting for unobserved selection into disputes is offered. The theory is illustrated through a comparison of presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson and systematically tested using matching, permutation inference, and the nonparametric combination of tests. Interstate conflicts under Southern presidents are shown to be twice as likely to involve uses of force, last on average twice as long, and are three times more likely to end in victory for the United States than disputes under non-Southern presidents. Other characteristics of Southern presidencies do not seem able to account for this pattern of results. Theresults provide evidence that concern for reputation is an important cause of interstate conflict behavior.

This review article assesses the accomplishments and limitations of the best of recent research on democratization and democracy in Europe, South America, and post-Soviet Eurasia with regard to the challenge of theory building. Concerning the dependent variables of this literature, the article argues that the concepts of democratic transition, democratic consolidation, and democratic quality, as currently conceptualized, do not provide a clear focus for causal theorizing. It recommends, rather, that the proper subject matter of regime analysis should be the origins and stability of regime types and suggests how the semantic field of democracy studies could be clarified through a focus on the concepts of democratic transition and democratic stability. Relatedly, it argues that democracy scholars have made unwarranted use of aggregate and dichotomous measures and advocates instead the use of more disaggregate and nuanced measures. Concerning causal theories, the article shows that researchers have identified a range of potential explanatory factors and proposed suggestive complex causal models. Nonetheless, it also argues that democracy scholars have rarely formulated clearly specified general causal models and identifies some key pitfalls to be avoided as scholars tackle two key tasks: the development of thick and general theory and the definition of causal models. The conclusion raises the need to place theory building in context and argues that scholars must also turn their attention to the demanding challenges of data generation and causal assessment.

Do business contributions to political parties convey different messages in different countries, and, if so, why? This article presents a pioneering cross-national study of firm behavior in political finance. It argues that motivations for contributions to parties are either ideological or pragmatic. The author infers motivation by quantitatively relating the payments of 960 firms to various political parties in Australia, Canada, and Germany over periods of between seven and seventeen years. In coordinated market economy Germany, a small number of firms made ideological payments; in liberal market economy Australia and Canada, large numbers of firms made pragmatic payments. Australia's left-right party system creates an awareness of policy risk, which motivated ideological payments, but in Canada's unusually nonideological party system no ideological bias in business financing of politics was found. The statistical analysis is supplemented by a qualitative investigation of discrete and reciprocal exchanges between businesses and political parties.

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.

Neoliberal economic reforms, rather than unleashing market forces, can result in new institutions for market governance. By vacating institutionalized policy domains, neoliberal reforms can trigger two-step reregulation processes, as first, political entrepreneurs launch projects to build support coalitions by reregulating markets, and second, societal groups respond to these projects by mobilizing to influence the terms of reregulation. Depending on the strengths and strategies of politicians and societal groups, reregulation processes result in varied institutions for market governance. The article develops this argument by analyzing how neoliberal reforms in Mexico led to the construction of distinct institutions for market governance across four states (Chiapas, Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Puebla). The findings from Mexico highlight the importance of moving beyond the questions of why developing countries choose neoliberal policies and how they implement them. Students of the political economy of development should shift their attention instead to understanding the kinds of new institutions that replace those destroyed or displaced by neoliberal reforms.

In a dramatic example of policy diffusion, the past three decades have witnessed the spread of automobile emission standards throughout the world. Contrary to fears that global competition would produce a race to the bottom, there appears to be a race to the top, not only among rich countries but also among poor ones. Using econometric analysis of the adoption of automobile emission standards over the past twenty years for 129 countries, the author argues that this global diffusion results from countries' efforts to stay competitive in the international market. Due to the pressure from importing countries that have adopted stringent emission standards, even developing countries have rapidly moved to adopt rich country standards. The evidence shows that adoption of automobile emission standards correlates with an increase in the total value of automobile exports. Under some conditions, economic incentives in a global market can be a complement to environmental protection.

Why was there an abrupt increase in economic openness in Europe in the 1860s? This increase may have been the result of a contagion process, in which the Cobden-Chevalier treaty between Britain and France threatened to displace third-party exports to France with British exports. As a result, most European states signed similar treaties with France, which had further ripple effects.

This article outlines a formal model of this process, based on the assumption that an agreement between two states increases the desirability of similar treaties to third parties. Propositions regarding the rate and pattern of spread of treaties are derived from this model. This article then discusses the insights these propositions may offer into the rise and fall of the most-favorednation network of treaties between 1860 and 1929.

At a theoretical level the model aims to link the microlevel processes underlying state preferences to system-level phenomena. At a substantive level this analysis offers insight into the current explosion of regionalism.

Why do some individuals embrace nationalist rhetoric and feel proud of their citizen ship while others do not? This article introduces an exchange-theoretic perspective, according to which national pride depends on access to political power. Seen from this perspective, members of ethnic groups that are not represented in national-level government should be less proud of their nation than those included in the polity. Furthermore, ethnic violence in the past or power-sharing arrangements in the present should reduce trust in the future stability of political representation and thus pride in the nation. From a dynamic point of view, members of ethnic groups whose level of political representation decreased in the past should also see their nation in a less positive light today. To show this, the author uses existing surveys to assemble a new dataset with answers to a similar question about national pride. It covers 123 countries that comprise 92 percent of the world's population. For roughly half of these countries, the ethnic groups listed in the surveys could also be found in another data set that contains information on the political status of these groups. Multilevel ordered logistic regressions at both the country and the group level confirm these hypotheses while taking into account a wide range of individual-level and country-level variables discussed in the existing literature.

The central argument of this article is straightforward. (1) The contemporary Quebec nationalist movement has moved through phases of mobilization, demobilization, and remobilization. (2) Interpretations of Quebec nationalism do not successfully explain all three phases. (3) A new model of mobilization can provide a more satisfactory account. The goal is to construct a model that is useful for all three phases and that can say something about nationalism and political mobilization more generally.

This essay is an analysis of the implications of misperception—the inaccurate assessment by one actor of the other actor's preferences—in international relations. The author finds that misperception cannot affect the choice of an actor with a dominant strategy, although it can affect that actor's expectations as long as both actors are self-interested and seek to maximize their own payoffs. Misperception creates conflict only in a narrowly circumscribed range of situations, and even then the misperceived actor has no incentive to mask its true preferences. An actor who deceives does so in order to facilitate coordination through the other's misperception of its preferences, and thus to avoid conflict—not to create it. Three possible outcomes can occur when both actors misperceive, and in only one of the three does misperception cause conflict that would otherwise be avoidable. In a formal analysis of the limited set of situations that characterize international crises, misperception is found neither to create conflict nor to lead to the escalation of crisis into war.

Cognitive maps are representations of the causal beliefs or assertions of a specific individual. Maps of three Latin American policy makers (Carlos Andrés Pérez, Roberto de Oliveira Campos, and Aurelio de Lyra Tavares) suggest new hypotheses and ways of comparing maps across individuals: (i) individuals with broader political responsibility may have more complicated maps with respect to numbers of goals and policies, but less complicated maps with respect to linkages between policies and goals, than individuals with narrower responsibility; (2) maps of different individuals can and should be compared with respect to the degree to which they make (or fail to make) distinctions among related concepts; and (3) maps can be used to predict the future policies of individuals, and should be used in this way to test the theoretical potential of the approach.

The debates of the 1990s over the causes of and responses to substate conflict were significant and wide ranging; there is now a sizable literature on ethnic conflict and civil war. But this literature makes few connections to long traditions of scholarly theorizing about collective violence in political science and in allied fields. This article examines two recent books by Mark Beissinger and Ashutosh Varshney that help turn mainstream theorizing about mass violence back toward its roots in problems of social order, state-society relations, and group mobilization. They break down the intellectual wall that has grown up between the study of something called “ethnic” or “nationalist conflict” and a long line of work on collective action in political sociology and cognate disciplines. These books are part of a new micropolitical turn in the field:a concern with uncovering the precise mechanisms by which individuals and groups go about trading in the benefits of stability for the inherently risky behavior associated with mass killing. The final section of the article assesses what such a turn might mean for research methods and theory making in comparative politics and international relations as a whole.