An assessment of the forms in which, and tlie extent to which, the population of the entire world may be coming to participate in a coherent global social system may be made by crude measurement of variations in the degree of autarky, interconnectedness, dependence, interdependence, integration, hegemony, and convergence. In the recent modern era, we can show that interconnectedness has been rising at an exponential rate across numerous dimensions ranging from the exchange of students to world trade. Interdependence is also increasing, but less dramatically. The greater dependence of less developed countries is unmistakable, but integration has advanced very little in the period after World War II. In studying convergence we must differentiate among modes of production, institutional forms, patterns of social relations, the content of popular values, and systems of political and economic control, each of which may change at different speeds and even move in different directions. The argument that there is substantial convergence in political and economic forms at the national level may be seriously challenged. Marked convergence is widely prevalent, however, in the utilization of science, technology, and bureaucratic procedures, and in the consequent incorporation of whole populations into new social roles. These in turn induce new attitudes and values forming a widespread complex or syndrome identified as modern and postmodern. Countervailing tendencies are, however, evident and should be weighed.

It is a truism that all action within the international system can be reduced to the action of individuals. It is also true, however, that international relations cannot be adequately understood in terms of individual attitudes and behaviors. Models of the international system usually deal with larger units, nation-states, as prime actors. To what extent can such models give us adequate explanations of international relations without some built-in variables to deal with individual decision-making?

It may be that some processes in international relations can be adequately explained on the level of social structure without explicit consideration of the personality, predispositions, attitudes, and behavior of the individual decision-maker. In that case, the introduction of variables dealing with individual behavior would complicate the model without commensurate payoff in terms of increased understanding and prediction. This would be true if the impact of individual decision-making on the behavior of nations in their relations with other nations were slight, or if the impact varied randomly (because, for instance, of idiosyncratic factors) among the population of international events that one was trying to explain. If, on the other hand, models of the international system that either ignore or make grossly simplifying assumptions about individual decision-making can explain international relations only very imperfectly, it may well be worth the additional effort to build variables about individual decision-making into them.

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.

Most of the nations of Africa and Asia remain predominantly rural and agricultural. However, more than half the people in most Latin American countries are no longer rural, and a fifth to a third live in cities of 100,000 or more. In Asia and North Africa, Lebanon, the U.A.R., and the Philippines are also substantially urbanized, and Morocco, Syria, Turkey, South Korea, and Taiwan are not far behind. Moreover, virtually everywhere in the developing world, regardless of the extent of urbanization already achieved, cities are growing at rates of 5 to 8 percent annually. That is, they are doubling their populations every ten to fifteen years.

This article examines the capacity of Latin American labor-based parties to adapt to the challenges of economic liberalization and working class decline. It presents an organizational approach to explaining party change, highlighting the ways in which informal and weakly institutionalized structures may contribute to party adaptation. It argues that loosely structured labor-based parties, such as many mass populist parties, possess a distinctive advantage in adapting to environmental change. Though a source of inefficiency and even internal chaos, populist legacies such as fluid internal structures, nonbureaucratic hierarchies, and centralized leaderships yield a high degree of strategic flexibility. The argument is applied to the case of the Argentine Justicialista Party (PJ), a mass populist party that adapted with striking success to the socioeconomic changes of the 1980s and 1990s. The weakly institutionalized nature of Peronism's party-union linkage facilitated the dismantling of traditional mechanisms of labor participation, which resulted in the Pj's rapid transformation from a labor-based party into a predominantly patronage-based party. At the same time, the Pj's nonbureaucratic hierarchy and weakly institutionalized leadership bodies provided President Carlos Menem with substantial room for maneuver in developing and carrying out a radical neoliberal strategy that, while at odds with Peronism's traditional program, was critical to its survival as a major political force. The conclusion places the Peronist case in comparative perspective by examining the cases of five other Latin American labor-based parties.

In an effort to take stock of the claims put forth by advocates of game theory, this article offers an assessment that considers game theory both as a set of theoretical principles that extends rational choice theory to interdependent decision making and as a type of formal methodology. Some important strengths of game theory are identified, such as its emphasis on actors and strategic choices and its ability to generate predictions in a logically rigorous and internally consistent manner. But many shortcomings are also discussed. One shortcoming is that the effort to develop a theory of action falls short, both in the sense of failing to provide a full explanation of actions and in the sense of not applying to domains of great significance. A second shortcoming is the failure of the procedures used in formal modeling to offer guidance pertaining to a critical step in the process of modeling: the conceptualization of the model. Thus, the challenge facing scholars in comparative politics is to consider the new perspectives offered by game theory and draw upon its strengths, but to do so without losing sight of a series of old concerns in the social sciences that game theory is not suited to tackle.

The transition from Fordist manufacturing to the so-called knowledge economy confronts organized labor across the advanced market economies with a new and more difficult landscape. Many scholars have suggested that the future of egalitarian capitalism depends on forging new political coalitions that bridge the interests of workers in the “new” and “old” economies. This article explores current trajectories of change in Denmark and Sweden, two countries that are still seen as embodying a more egalitarian model of capitalism. The authors show that labor unions in these countries are pursuing two quite different strategies for achieving social solidarity—the Danish aimed at equality of opportunity and the Swedish aimed at equality of outcomes. The article examines the origins of these different strategic paths and explores the distinctive distributional outcomes they have produced. The conclusion draws out the broad lessons these cases hold for the choices currently confronting labor movements throughout the advanced industrial world.

The signal performances of Southeast Asian countries in attaining economic growth and political stability are frequently explained by cultural and policy factors. Recent research suggests, however, that the role of the state is extensive and central to economic and political goals. The present approach to the comparative evaluation of state capacities attempts to account for the variations and nuances of the performance of Southeast Asian states. The structure of political support and available means of social control provide relatively greater capacity to state elites in Singapore and Malaysia, and less capacity to state elites in the Philippines and Indonesia; Thailand is an intermediate case.

Modern Turkish history furnishes numerous examples of active participation by the military in politics. The so-called “Young Turk Revolution” of 1908, in fact, may well be regarded as the prototype of Near Eastern military coups of this century. A decade later, Mustafa Kemal [Atatürk] and other army officers took the lead in creating a nationalist Turkish Republic out of the ruins of the multinational Ottoman Empire. Since the proclamation of the Republic in 1923, however, the Turkish army has abstained from any such obvious role on the political stage.

ISMs matter. They reflect underlying philosophical points of departure and are rooted in specific explicit assumptions about how the world works. The very different expectations and conclusions of diverse theories often stem from the fact that those theories were derived from distinct and contrasting paradigmatic roots. To be aware of those foundations is to understand the likely strengths, weaknesses, limitations, controversies, and specific attributes of the various theories. In contemporary international relations (IR) scholarship there is a common claim that we are past paradigms, and many younger scholars are expected to recite this mantra. But making such a claim is a political act, not an intellectual one. It reflects the hegemony of one particular paradigmatic perspective—one with specific analytical building blocks of individualism, materialism, and hyperrationalism—an approach that is a paradigm and one so powerful that it has been described as an “intellectual monoculture.”

A birth certificate is essential to exercising citizenship, yet vast numbers of poor people in developing countries have no official record of their existence. Few academic studies analyze the conditions under which governments come to document and certify births routinely, and those that do leave much to be explained, including why nontotalitarian governments at low to middle levels of economic development come to prioritize birth registration. This article draws attention to the impetus that welfare-building initiatives give to identity documentation. The empirical focus is on contemporary Latin America, where extensions in institutionalized social protection since the 1990s have increased the demand for and supply of birth registration, raising the life chances of the poor and building state infrastructure in the process. The authors' argument promises to have broader applicability as welfare states form in other developing regions.

This article argues that it is a fallacy to regard “social citizenship” as granting social rights equivalent to civil rights and suffrage. The argument is based partly upon a textual analysis showing that in formulating his influential “trinity” of citizenship, T. H. Marshall obfuscated differences between the distributional logic of redistributive policy and political and civil rights. The second part of the argument is based upon an empirical discussion of how social citizenship arguments have been applied to create comprehensive social reform.

The Scandinavian welfare states play a central role in the discussion as examples of the inclu-sionary benefits of social citizenship. Three instances of welfare state expansion are discussed: the passage of legislation establishing flat-rate retirement benefits, the institution of supplementary earnings-related retirement benefits, and feminist mobilization in the 1980s for a “woman-friendly” welfare state. It is shown that claims to social citizenship are used by out-groups to demand inclusion in electoral coalitions aiming at welfare state expansion.

The article concludes that social citizenship is inextricably linked to redistributive political conflict between in-groups and out-groups and depends upon state capacity to raise revenues and to police entitlement. A key difference between social rights and political and civil rights is that consumption of the former hinges on both the consent of the community and the willingness of others to pay for such consumption, while consumption of the latter does not impose direct costs upon others.

This review article examines four recent volumes on the European Union, each of which takes as its substantive and theoretical starting point the relaunching of the European Community in the mid-1980s around the single market initiative. Taken together, they provide a comprehensive account of the momentous events leading up to the Maastricht summit. They also present an accurate reflection of the current state of the subfield. Their basic research agenda, a continuation of traditional approaches in Community studies, revolves around the “big bangs” of integration and the conventional models of neofunctionalism and intergovemmentalism. This scholarly continuity generates unwelcome consequences for the selection of research puzzles and for the robustness and reach of the findings. As a remedy, several strategies—some methodological, others theoretical—are outlined for generating new insights into the growing complexity of the European Union.

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.

Games have been used in the study of international politics; if they were not so demanding of time and energy, they would probably be used more. A Berlin crisis, or a busy day in the life of the United Nations, lends itself to this procedure. Participants usually represent “countries” and they may be encouraged to play the “role” of the country, acting as they believe the country would act, or they may be encouraged to behave in the game as they believe the country ought to behave in its own interest. The game may be organized for research, the participants being scholars and policy analysts; or it may be organized as training, to give students vicarious experience in the complexities of international politics.

The conventional wisdom of the sixties and early seventies held that, except in the very long run, rapid development and human rights are competing concerns. Needs satisfaction, income equality, and civil and political rights were regularly held to be luxury goods. An examination of the development experiences of Brazil and South Korea, however, shows much of this conventional wisdom to have been mistaken. Rapid growth and development can be achieved without sacrificing social and economic equity. Furthermore, theoretical considerations suggest that even civil and political rights are more compatible with sustained rapid development than is frequently recognized.

Coordinated welfare capitalism has been subject to comprehensive change since the 1990s, with workfare measures and the deregulation of employment protection at the heart of labor market reforms. Developments in Sweden, Germany, and South Korea challenge not only the assumption of relative stability that is commonly associated with the study of coordinated market economies, but also the assertion that this stability is associated with the persistence of established political coalitions. The authors contend that a collapse of longstanding welfare state coalitions is the key political driver of labor market reform, with the withdrawal of employers from previous welfare settlements at the center of this development.

This article provides a critical examination of the current theoretical debate concerning the effects of indiscriminate violence. It argues that indiscriminate violence has been treated as an essentially random counterinsurgency tactic, but that the important distinction between its random and retributive variations has been overlooked, along with critical issues of timing and location, which has made it difficult to evaluate its efficacy in quelling rebel violence. Prior research has shown that both random and retributive violence reduced insurgent activity in the targeted locations and in the short term, but it does not necessarily follow that indiscriminate violence is effective. This article uses microlevel ethnographic evidence from Chechen villages during the period from 2001 to 2005 to show that indiscriminate violence deployed retributively against village communities generated insurgent activity in other areas because local avengers and rebels from the targeted populations sought to avoid further retributive violence against their village communities. Moreover, the insurgent activity occurred at least nine months after the initial act of retributive violence. Indiscriminate violence deployed randomly against village communities generated insurgent activity within the same targeted area, since the insurgents did not fear retributive violence in retaliation, and occurred with a delay of at least six months. As a result, the rebel reaction to indiscriminate violence is not observed immediately or, in the case of retributive violence, in the same location. This finding has crucial implications for evaluating the efficacy of indiscriminate violence in counterinsurgency operations, and underscores the importance of understanding how the social and political context can shape the way populations react to different forms of violence.

How does political polarization occur under repressive conditions? Drawing on psychological theories of social identity, the author posits that the nature of repression drives polarization. Repression alters group identities, changing the perceived distance between groups and ultimately shaping the level of affective and preference polarization between them through differentiation processes. The author tests the proposed causal relationship using mixed-method data and analysis.The results of a laboratory experiment reveal that exposure to a targeted repression prime results in greater in-group identification and polarization between groups, whereas exposure to a widespread prime results in decreased levels of these same measurements. The effect of the primes appears to be mediated through group identification. Case-study evidence of polarization between political opposition groups that were differently repressed in Egypt and Tunisia reinforces these results. The findings have implications for understanding how polarization, as conditioned by repression, may alter the likelihood of the cooperative behavior among opposition actors necessary for the success of democratic politics.

Military predominance in public life has a long and strong tradition in Turkey. Lybyer has told us: “The Ottoman government had been an army before it was anything else. … in fact, Army and Government were one. War was the external purpose, Government the internal purpose, of one institution, composed of one body of men.” And Gibb quotes el-Gazali, at the end of the eleventh century: “Government in these days is a consequence solely of military power, and whosoever he may be to whom the holder of military power gives his allegiance, that person is the caliph.”