How do churches influence public policy and why does their influence vary across similarly religious societies? Prevalent accounts focus on the mobilization of voter demand and coalitions with political parties that offer policy concessions in exchange for electoral support. This article argues, by contrast, that such strategies are both risky and costly, and it demonstrates instead the power of direct institutional access for writing legislation, vetting officials, and even running sectors of the state. Such institutional access is available only to churches with high moral authority: those perceived by the public as representing the common good and the national interest. Churches in Christian democracies have gained such moral authority by defending the nation against a foreign regime, state, or colonial power. In short, churches are most influential when they have the high moral authority to obtain direct institutional access—thus avoiding popular backlash against overt and partisan church politicking.

While development strategies of international assistance organizations and governments of less developed states have become more complex over the past decade, the methods of planning and management used during the 1960s and 1970s to formulate and implement policies have become less effective. Synoptic planning and scientific management techniques are used to control development activities rather than to facilitate and encourage the flexibility, experimentation, and social learning that are essential. The prospects of improving control-oriented administration are constrained by difficulties in defining objectives; lack of appropriate data; inadequate understanding of local social and cultural conditions; ineffective means of controlling behavior; the dynamics of political interaction; and low levels of administrative capacity in developing countries. Changes that must be made include: recognizing explicitly the uncertainty and complexity of development problems; managing development activities as policy experiments; building widespread administrative capacity; relying on adjunctive and strategic planning; simplifying analytical techniques; creating incentives for error detection and for innovation; and viewing effective program and project management in new ways.

After two decades of parliamentary democracy, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) have quite different records of government stability. At the same time there continues to be turbulent fluctuation within the individual countries. To explain this variation, the authors draw on characteristics of parties and party systems for 138 governments in 12 CEE countries. The analysis is structured by two distinct logics that underlie the effect of party-related attributes on government survival: the logic of internal friction within the government and the logic of external pressure from the opposition. The authors argue that in the “difficult” contexts of postcommunist party systems, these two logics do not operate independently of each other. Instead, they suggest that standard theory needs to be revised to account for the interactions of government and opposition characteristics. Their model of these interactions not only includes standard numeric and ideological variables but also integrates specificities of the postcommunist context: the regime divide and the low degree of party-system consolidation. Quantitative and qualitative findings demonstrate that government stability in CEE is interactively determined by whole constellations of party attributes.

The Mexican state is based on a constantly renewed bargain among several ruling groups and interests representing a broad range of ideological tendencies and social bases. Mexican political stability rests primarily not upon formal institutions, but upon the interaction of principles of political discipline (closely linked to the concept of authoritarianism) and political negotiation (associated with the concept of proto-democracy). The combination of repression and co-optation with just the “right” mix of responsiveness and compromise produces: (1) elites that are both linked to, and insulated from, their potential constituencies; (2) a pattern of political and administrative decision making called “policy incoherence”; and (3) avoidance of the crystallization of factional alliances, and their opposition to one another.

What explains the persistence of racial or ethnic inequalities in descriptive representation in the absence of strongly politicized racial or ethnic cleavages? This article uses new data to demonstrate a substantial racial gap between voters and politicians in Brazil. The authors show that this disparity is not plausibly due to racial preferences in the electorate as a whole, for instance, deference toward white candidates or discrimination against nonwhites, and that barriers to candidate entry or discrimination by party leaders do not likely explain the gap. Instead, they document persistent resource disparities between white and nonwhite candidates, including large differences in personal assets and campaign contributions. The findings suggest that elite closure—investments by racial and economic elites on behalf of elite candidates—help perpetuate a white political class, even in the absence of racialized politics. By underscoring this avenue through which representational disparities persist, the article contributes to research on elite power in democratic settings.

Earlier studies of economic sanctions underestimated the role and importance of more subtle forms of coercion because they concentrated attention on highly public, formally legislated attempts at economic coercion in world politics, such as the cases of Italy in the 1930s and Rhodesia since 1965. The author agrees with Galtung, Knorr, and others that in highly public cases, sanctions will often fail in their avowed political purpose because they actually stimulate nationalism and thus resistance in the target-state; he argues that in an increasingly (but unequally) interdependent world, relatively subtle sanctions can be politically effective—with only moderately purely economic effects—by exploiting the LDC's typically fragmented interest-group and class structure. In order to describe and explain how such economic coercion works, it is necessary to bridge several “islands” of literature: on economic sanctions, on the structure of dependency, and on the causes of political instability.

Since the 1850's there has been intermittent but always renewed interest on the part of politicians, academics, and journalists in the particular aspect of interstate rivalry generally termed an “arms race.” Despite the longevity of concern and the eclecticism of approach, the prime impetus behind the inquiry that has resulted in this article is the sad truth that aside from somewhat banal and highly questionable hypotheses we really know very little about arms race phenomena. This analysis will attempt a systematic investigation of some of the most important aspects of the subject.

Conventional accounts of the 19th-century international system describe it as a conservative restoration of the 18th-century system and account for the general stability of the 19th century primarily on the basis of the actors' peaceful dispositions. They fail to recognize or explain the profound structural changes in 19th-century politics. Problems that could not be successfully dealt with in the 18th century were solved or managed by 19th-century statesmen by means of three new systemic arrangements: a system of intertwined guarantees and duties for the great powers; arrangements for shielding European politics from extra-European quarrels; and a network of intermediary bodies, separating and linking the great powers, to serve as buffers and spheres of influence.

There seems little doubt that the defense and strengthening of the “free world” in our time depends largely upon American leadership. Confidence that America will continue to play this role in world affairs is weakened by the memory of America's political isolation following World War I, and by certain currents of American opinion noted by observers since World War II.1 Barbara Ward warns the peoples of the West that “we shall certainly fail unless our effort is at once sustained, calm and supremely positive.”

International relations scholars do not agree on the connection between the balance of power and war. They question whether or not an equal distribution of power among states or alliances leads to stability, whether the preponderance of power in favor of one actor or alliance leads to peace, or whether the key lies in the transition of preponderance from one power to another. Everyone is familiar with these questions; yet, more than twenty years of rigorous elaboration and sophisticated quantitative testing have done little to produce the answers.1 Do these inconclusive results suggest that there is no relation between the distribution of power and war?

Modern international negotiation is evolving toward a managerial process and away from a classical dispute-settlement procedure. Negotiation between governments is becoming the functional equivalent of bureaucracy within governments, and it is designed to increase orderly decision making and reduce uncertainty in the international society. Theories of bargaining and diplomatic representation are less useful in understanding modern large-scale negotiation than are theories about the management of information, or theories about how individuals develop common perceptions in complex situations. Concepts that help to explain modern negotiation are: problem-solving search, which emphasizes the development of relationships or hierarchies in complex data; programmed operations, which emphasize the tedious trial-and-error process of building agreement; and final agreement, which emphasizes the reformulation of problems.

Why was official racial domination enforced in South Africa and the United States, while nothing comparable to apartheid or Jim Crow was constructed in Brazil? Slavery and colonialism established the pattern of early discrimination in all three cases, and yet the postabolition racial orders diverged. Miscegenation influenced later outcomes, as did economic competition, but neither was decisive. Interpretations of these historical and economic factors were shaped by later developments. This article argues that postabolition racial orders were significantly shaped by the processes of nation-state building in each context. In South Africa and the United States ethnic or regional “intrawhite” conflict impeding nation-state consolidation was contained by racial domination. Whites were unified by excluding blacks, in an ongoing dynamic that took different forms. Continued competition and tensions between the American North and South or South Africa's English and Afrikaners were repeatedly resolved or diminished through further entrenchment of Jim Crow or apartheid. With no comparable conflict requiring reconciliation in Brazil, no official racial domination was constructed, although discrimination continued. The dynamics of nation-state building are then reviewed to explain variations in black mobilization and the end of apartheid and Jim Crow.

The strategic elites model of turnout argues that elites mobilize more when the probability of their effort deciding the electoral outcome is greater. Although the literature assumes that this probability depends solely on how close the election is, logically it depends jointly on how many votes are needed to affect the outcome (closeness) and on how many additional votes elite efforts are likely to garner (vote yield). Because the vote yield of mobilizational effort varies with the social capital of the district that elites face, the level of elite mobilizational effort (hence turnout) should depend interactively on closeness and social capital. The authors test their predictions using datafromJapanese lower house elections for the years 1967–90. Japan is an interesting test case both because its (former) electoral system differs from that for which the model was first developed and because the literature clearly stresses the role of elite mobilization through social networks but does not examine the particular hypotheses advanced here.

How do changes in electoral rules affect the nature of public policy outcomes? The current evidence supporting institutional theories that answer this question stems almost entirely from quantitative cross-country studies, the data of which contain very little within-unit variation. Indeed, while there are many country-level accounts of how changes in electoral rules affect such phenomena as the number of parties or voter turnout, there are few studies of how electoral reform affects public policy outcomes. This article contributes to this latter endeavor by providing a detailed analysis of electoral reform and the public policy process in Thailand through an examination of the 1997 electoral reforms. Specifically, the author examines four aspects of policy-making: policy formulation, policy platforms, policy content, and policy outcomes. The article finds that candidates in the pre-1997 era campaigned on broad, generic platforms; parties had no independent means of technical policy expertise; the government targeted health resources to narrow geographic areas; and health was underprovided in Thai society. Conversely, candidates in the post-1997 era relied more on a strong, detailed national health policy; parties created mechanisms to formulate health policy independently; the government allocated health resources broadly to the entire nation through the introduction of a universal health care system, and health outcomes improved. The author attributes these changes in the policy process to the 1997 electoral reform, which increased both constituency breadth (the proportion of the population to which politicians were accountable) and majoritarianism.

Accounts of the acute crises of international politics occupy a substantial place in the diplomatic history of the past hundred years. These compounded events have been interpreted as manifestations of international rivalries among the Great Powers. Intermittently, they have drawn intense public attention and have generated heavy anxieties over the possibility that they may lead into general warfare. After the fact, they have become subjects of historical reconstruction, with students and commentators attempting to describe “what really happened.” Thus, both scholarly and popular interest has persisted in the “inside stories” of the several crises belonging to three historical periods: from 1870 to World War I, the interwar period, and the era since World War II.

There is, consequently, a large descriptive literature of the crises, mainly connected with the diplomacy of opposing coalitions and of interstate conflicts during these three periods. The depth and quality of this literature vary greatly, most often according to the recency of the events and the amount of available and relevant historical documentation. The Moroccan crisis of 1905 and the circumstances of the Anschluss of 1936 are, quite naturally, better known and more firmly established factually than the inner details of the Suez crisis of 1956. However, the accumulated knowledge of the series of crises of the post-World War II period, uncertain and impressionistic as it still is, has a great deal to do with our understanding of current international affairs. Take away the facts and meanings commonly associated with the crises of Berlin, Korea, Indochina, Suez, Quemoy, the Congo, and Laos and, obviously, the usual estimates of the scope, intensity, and workings of the Cold War will greatly change. Despite this fact, acute crises have not often been made the focus either of theorizing or of intensive analytic research. Students of international relations have not found it important or necessary to consider these events as if they constituted a significant class of phenomena in the international field. The reasons for passing over the acute international crisis as a focus of explanation are worth consideration.

Recently published histories of national groups living under Soviet rule provide a rich secondary literature on the various paths taken by these groups to be incorporated into the Russian empire and the Soviet state. Social scientists who want a differentiated understanding of political mobilization among the various nationalities should not ignore these important contributions. This review essay attempts to synthesize these histories in order to provide a coherent model of nationality politics. Proposing an “elite incorporation model” of political mobilization, the essay accounts for different sources of national protest. The model weight not only the pressures for national autonomy and republican sovereignty but also the pressures that provide support for the Union.

The globalization of finance in recent years and the concurrent growth in the financial sector's influence, manifested most dramatically in the recent financial crisis, highlights the importance for political scientists of understanding the political economy of global finance. The authors review six important books that are representative of recent thinking by political scientists on the topic. They address the central questions that have been at the heart of the literature on global finance from its beginning in new and interesting ways. The most important developments highlighted in this article are the move from a predominant focus on state-centered patterns of regulation to the consideration of transnational governance regimes that mix public and private regulation; the effort to understand the causal forces that shape the political economy of global finance by allowing for an interaction among interests, institutions, and ideas; and giving increased attention to new sources of systemic risk in the global financial system, as well to the consequences for domestic politics of interactions with the global financial system. Notwithstanding the progress that has been made in coming to grips with the political economy of global finance, the authors highlight a number of questions that need to be addressed in future research. Although various nonstate actors have been recognized as important in the constitution of the rules of global finance, it is also necessary to understand the behavior of the actors who enact these rules. It is also important to generate evidence that forges some agreement on the causes of the globalization of finance, especially as the arguments made become more complex. Finally, there is a need for a more realistic assessment of the costs and benefits of financialization at the global and national levels. This last challenge is essential for a thorough understanding of the current global financial crisis.

During the last ten years the study of comparative politics has undergone a methodological revolution. Reacting against the static, formalistic, “country-by-country” approach of earlier students of foreign governments, numerous contemporary political scientists have endeavored to create a more dynamic, empirically interpreted, and truly comparative method of analysis. This group of political scientists makes three general assumptions concerning the new approach.

This paper presents a spatial analysis of political competition in Taiwan in an effort to explore the role of conflict displacement in the process of democratic transition. In recent elections, a new cleavage on socioeconomic justice has emerged as a salient political issue in Taiwan, crosscutting the traditional cleavage on national identity. The authors first trace the historical trajectory of regime transition in order to provide a structural explanation of such a displacement of conflicts. Using data from the 1992 General Survey on Social Changes designed primarily by the authors for the Institute of Ethnology of Academia Sinica, they then present the results of a spatial analysis. The empirical findings confirm that socioeconomic justice together with national identity are the defining dimensions of the latent ideological space in which political competition takes place. The authors argue that, because of the availability of the new issue, political elites in Taiwan are undertaking a partisan realignment in both electoral and legislative politics, a process the authors consider conducive to both the transition to democracy and the consolidation of the new regime.

The usefulness of the concept of “small states” as an analytical tool is discussed in a review of books by Edward Azar and Marshall Singer. The size of states has both domestic and international ramifications. Authors who use the concept of “small states” struggle with the problem of defining it. Such definitions can be clear and unambiguous but arbitrary at the same time; more sophisticated definitions are also more ambiguous and difficult to apply to concrete cases. Inquiry into the role of small states in international politics is shown to be still in a very elementary stage. Although there does of course exist a continuum of size of states in international relations, small states form too broad a category for purposes of analysis.