This article analyzes electoral cycles in distributional bargaining in the European Union. The author argues that governments attempt to increase their EU membership benefits above average levels in the preelection period, hoping to appear politically competent to voters. The theory discusses when and how EU members can increase these gains before elections through negotiations in the Council of Ministers. A time-series cross-sectional analysis of EU member states’ annual budget negotiations from 1977 to 2006 supports the existence of conditional electoral cycles in distributional bargaining and generally points to the importance of accounting for such cycles when analyzing patterns of international cooperation.

Research on the less industrialized regions of the world has undergone major changes in terms of theoretical rigor, methodological sophistication, and the diversification of analytical approaches since the publication of Samuel P. Huntingdon's essay, “Political Development and Political Decay,” in World Politics in 1965. Yet more than three decades later, comparativists are rediscovering political institutions, highlighting the originality of Huntington's scholarly contribution. The resurgence of institutional analysis has redirected attention to the potential variability of political outcomes in the face of sweeping global currents, generated important theoretical insights, and created new bases for dialogue across disparate research traditions. Nevertheless, the horizons of institutional research need to be broadened to address the challenges posed by international influences, two-way interactions between politics and society, and institutional fluidity.

My argument is that the very existence of international relations poses a serious, and perhaps intractable, problem for Marxism. This is easy enough to see on the level of empirical politics, and even on the level of ideological controversy, but it is a still too little appreciated issue in the context of a thoroughgoing theoretical analysis of Marxian thought. I would like to offer some tentative remarks on this latter plane. My suggestions are not as conclusive as I would like them to be, but they may at least raise some important and topical questions. Briefly, it is my intention to show that since international relations presuppose the horizontal division of mankind into nations or states, and since Marxian thought postulates the absolute unity of mankind as its ideal, problems relating to horizontal group diversity are much more centrally relevant to the Marxian doctrine than it is usually thought. Not only is there a clear moral argument in Marxian thought against group diversity as such, but the very central tenets of Marxism have a direct, though implicit, reference to the relations between horizontal groups such as nations. I believe, further, that these aspects of Marxian thought have been lost sight of and confused or underemphasized over the years, partly by Marx and Engels themselves at the very start, and partly by their political followers, and (later) academic critics.

Peasant-state relations in developing countries are often a function of the nature and extent of stratification in peasant populations. Where there is a rigid class structure, the prospects for cooperation by members of the peasantry are low, and large landowners tend to ally themselves with the state to exploit the rural poor. Where, on the other hand, the nature of rural stratification is ambiguous, “small” and “middle” peasants are able to organize themselves for collective action and to bargain effectively for state aid to their communities. The hypothesis is confirmed using survey data about the nature of peasant participation in the Harambee selfhelp development movement in rural Kenya. Effective peasant-state bargaining in Kenya has in turn contributed to the legitimacy of the Kenyan political system.

Analysis of transitions to democracy is marked empirically by democracy's own resurgent vigor, and theoretically by shifts away from focus on global political economy to concern with such political variables as organization or leadership, and study of their expression within national arenas. Contributors to Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Prospects for Democracy (edited by Guillermo O'Donnell, Phillippe Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead) explore these issues with special emphasis on how regime transitions begin and on possibilities for social, cultural, and economic democratization. The collection focuses more on the transitions than on democracy itself, and fails to place transitions in the context of democracy's social and cultural bases. Insufficient attention is given to civil society and to its organized links with politics. This theoretical and empirical position obscures the appeal of liberal democracy to elites and masses, and hinders understanding of why popular groups accept pacts and back the leaders who make them.

Significantly, we have few if any studies of the totalitarian O dictator as a personality type. It may be that we are little closer to a working psychological model of him than Plato took us with his brilliant sketch of the ideal type of the “tyrant” in The Republic. The contemporary literature on totalitarianism does, of course, contain materials that are relevant to the problem of characterization of the totalitarian dictator. Yet no frontal attack appears to have been made upon the problem. The purpose of the present article is to argue the need for one, and to do this in the context of a critical reexamination of the theory of totalitarianism. In the course of it I shall put forward some ideas of possible use in developing a conception of the dictator as a personality type.

A reform of German citizenship law in 2000 was expected to greatly increase the number of foreign residents becoming German citizens. In fact, the naturalization rate fell and has remained low ever since. This outcome cannot be explained either by existing research on citizenship laws or by scholarship on individual incentives to naturalize. Instead, this article argues that the family context shapes decision making about citizenship, with distinctive behavioral implications. Parents have an incentive to naturalize and thereby extend their new citizenship status to their children. The introduction of a right to citizenship for many children born in Germany to immigrant parents removed this incentive for the parents to naturalize. The author tests the predictions of this argument against both qualitative and quantitative evidence. The article concludes with a discussion of other domains in which it may be possible to gain analytic leverage by studying political decisions in the family context.

A 1990 national sample survey shows that the Chinese population was concerned with issues relating to reform, economic and social grievances, and democracy. Although neither political issues nor social cleavages were the same as in the West, the same dynamics affected the process of ideological alignment. Social position and cognitive sophistication help explain why members of the population hold liberal or conservative attitudes.

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.

The gestation, birth, and continuing life of the new states of Asia and Africa, through all their vicissitudes, are in large measure the work of intellectuals. In no state-formations in all of human history have intellectuals played such a role as they have in these events of the present century.

In the past, new states were founded by military conquest, by the secession of ethnic groups led by traditional tribal and warrior chiefs, by the gradual extension of the power of the prince through intermarriage, agreement, and conquest, or by separation through military rebellion. In antiquity, the demand that subjects acknowledge the divinity of the Emperor was no more than a requirement that the legitimacy of the existing order be recognized.

In the context of the evidence presented in both the collected scholarship under review and other select works, this article asks if and to what extent migration-related issues have been securitized in Europe and the United States. In addressing these questions it executes three tasks. First, it critically assesses the four major dimensions across which contemporary immigration purportedly is securitized: on one side, rhetorically addressing immigration-related issues through political elite discourse, public opinion, and the mass media; and on the other, the policy processes through which immigration is securitized. Second, this article identifies the strengths and weaknesses of securitization theory as it has been applied to immigration. Finally, it draws mostly negative conclusions about the veracity of the central claims of the securitization of immigration literature and, specifically, its causal story.

The quality of life that a person leads depends critically on where it is led. Even taking into account levels of economic development, the chances of an individual surviving through infancy, growing up literate, or living a healthy, long life vary dramatically across regions of the world, in different countries, and within the same country. What are the causes of such variation in wellbeing? This article points to a factor that has been virtually ignored in the vast scholarship on social welfare and development—the solidarity that emerges from a sense of shared identity. The argument marks an important departure from the traditional emphasis on the role of class and electoral politics, as well as from the dominant view of the negative implications of identity for welfare. Combining statistical analyses of all Indian states and a comparative historical analysis of two Indian provinces, Kerala and Uttar Pradesh, this article demonstrates how the strength of attachment to the subnational political community—subnationalism—can drive a progressive social policy and improve developmental outcomes.

Institutionalist models of macroeconomic performance in advanced industrial countries focus on central bank independence. In newly industrializing countries, however, the behavioral authority of the central bank is a much more significant predictor of inflation than is legal independence, because laws there are not the source of central bank ability to create or defend macroeconomic stability. Financial structures and the incentives they create for government politicians, private bankers, and industrialists explain cross-national variation in the interest and capacity of central banks in developing countries. The greater public sector deficits are, the weaker and/or more dependent private banks are on state assistance; and the larger the portion of industry finance covered by commercial bank loans or state credits, the less likely it is that there will be an authoritative, conservative central bank. Mexico, Thailand, Brazil, and South Korea are the four country cases considered in depth.

Agap seems to exist between present theory of international regional integration and political reality. The theory explains, generalizes about, or predicts regional integration almost exclusively on the basis of processes and factors internal to the region under consideration. When theory considers phenomena outside the region, they usually appear as residual categories which are left insufficiently examined and about which we know little. Moreover, theory has remained relatively silent about the role of the superpowers.

Economic sanctions have long occupied the attention of both scholars and policy makers. Despite the widespread use of sanctions, many observers have concluded that the inherent problems associated with imposing sanctions involving multiple senders substantially limit their effectiveness. This article reviews two books that analyze the factors that influence cooperation among senders of multilateral sanctions. These books indicate that international institutions can do much to promote cooperation of this sort. However, this essay argues that the extent to which international institutions facilitate cooperation among senders of sanctions is likely to depend on the domestic politics of members, the type of institution being used for this purpose, the nature of the strategy being pursued, and the distribution of power among members. Although these books make significant contributions to our understanding of the factors that promote cooperation among senders of multilateral sanctions, they examine the factors that promote the effectiveness of sanctions in only a peripheral manner. One potential influence on the effectiveness of sanctions that are organized by an international institution, however, is the likelihood that the institution will be captured by member states or by interest groups within them. Additional research that investigates the conditions under which international institutions are likely to be captured and the implications of institutional capture for their performance may therefore prove useful to scholars of international relations and economic statecraft.

Why does natural resource wealth prolong incumbency? Using evidence from parliamentary elections in the Islamic Republic of Iran, the author shows that natural resource revenues boost incumbent reelection rates because they are used to provide public or private goods to constituents, which incentivizes voters to reelect incumbents over challengers. To test this hypothesis, the author employs originally assembled data on five parliamentary elections in Iran (1992–2008) in longitudinal hierarchical regression analyses at the district and province levels. By leveraging Iran's mixed-member electoral system, he shows that the resource-incumbency mechanism works primarily in single-member districts with little evidence of an incumbency advantage for politicians in resource-rich multimember districts. Building on the rentier theory of natural resource wealth, the results suggest that voting for the incumbent is attributable to patronage and public goods distribution. The findings offer new insights into the understudied context of Iranian legislative elections, illustrate the mechanisms driving the relationship between resource wealth and incumbency advantage at the subnational level in a nondemocratic setting, and highlight the mediating effects of electoral institutions on the resource-incumbency relationship.

This article argues that the democratic peace theorists have overlooked the defining development that underlies that peace of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the industrial-technological revolution. Not only did that revolution make democracy on a country scale possible; it also made all the countries that experienced the revolution—democratic and nondemocratic—far less belligerent in comparison with preindustrial times. The democratic peace did not exist among premodern democratic and republican city-states, not because they were not democratic or liberal enough but because they were premodern. Other factors that have emanated from the modern transformation and may generate greater aversion to war apply mostly to liberal democratic countries while being only variably connected to their regime. Such factors include the staggering rise in the standard of living; the decrease in hardship, pain, and death; the dominance of metropolitan life and the service economy; the spread of the consumer and entertainment society; sexual promiscuity; women's franchise; and the shrinking ratio of young males in the population.

Rising inequality has caused concerns that democratic governments are no longer responding to majority demands, an argument the authors label the subversion of democracy model (sdm). The sdm comes in two forms: one uses public opinion data to show that policies are strongly biased toward the preferences of the rich; the other uses macrolevel data to show that governments aren’t responding to rising inequality. This article critically reassesses the sdm, points to potential biases, and proposes solutions that suggest a different interpretation of the data, which the authors label the representative democracy model (rdm). After testing the sdm against the rdm on public opinion data and on a new data set on fiscal policy, they find that middle-class power has remained remarkably strong over time, even as inequality has risen. The authors conclude that the rich have little influence on redistributive policies, and that the democratic state is apparently not increasingly constrained by global capital.