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.”

Why do trade unions organize antigovernment strikes in some countries but not in others? This article argues that there is a curvilinear relationship between union density and political strike activity. Political strikes are rare in countries with low union density, since effective protests require a basic level of organizational capacity. They are also rare in countries with high union density, since a government that faces a strong union movement has powerful incentives to adjust its policies in order to avoid open confrontation. But political strikes are relatively common in countries with moderate levels of union density, since it is difficult for governments and unions to find viable compromises when the strength of the unions is not secure. The empirical part of the article estimates the relationship between union density and the likelihood of political strikes in two samples of advanced democracies.

Market reform is advocated in developing countries to improve economic efficiency and prevent privileged groups from obtaining rents from the policy-making process. Yet this prescription fails to address the complex political process that governments are likely to confront when moving toward the market. This study shows how political considerations during President Salinas's administration distorted economic reform in Mexico.

During the 1990s Mexican finance policy contradicted the government's declared neoliberal principles. While the banks were reprivatized and deregulated, they were also given a high degree of protection from competition, enabling the new owners to charge excessive interest rates. In addition, the government artificially inflated the value of the currency through exchange-rate intervention. These contradictory policies are best understood as a coherent political response to the electoral vulnerability of the ruling party (PRl) at the end of the 1980s. When viable political opposition threatened the PRl's ability to maintain power, it responded by using financial policies to distribute economic benefits to social groups, particularly business, the middle class, and the poor, whose support was critical for electoral victory.

Are the military coups that have shaken Africa recently simply a working-out of personal animosities, are they due to chance, or are they the result of something inherent in the very nature of present-day African political systems? It is to questions such as these that this article is addressed, and to which it seeks to provide tentative answers. Further, if, as will be argued here, the African coups result from something inherently systemic, what conclusions can be drawn at present about Africa's future political development?

Cooperation among creditors has been the foundation of international debt arrangement! and is critical to preserving the value of foreign capital. Such cooperation is inherently difficult because every debt rescheduling involves hundreds of banks worldwide, each witr its own financial interests. Nevertheless, large money-center banks have been able to devisi common negotiating positions and conclude rescheduling agreements. Their cooperation i based partly on their extensive daily interactions, which permit both reciprocity and retal iation. In addition, most large banks are permanent fixtures in international capital markets; their ties to other banks and foreign borrowers could be jeopardized if they obstructed a rescheduling. Smaller banks, which lack these international ties, are more apt to hold out from joint arrangements. To secure their agreement, creditor committees (composed of large banks) rely on their domestic ties to these smaller institutions, which is occasionally reinforced by support from central banks.

This study examines the case of the Brazilian debt rescheduling agreement of 1988 as a two-level game in which each of the two main negotiators—the Brazilian state and the international bank advisory committee—must satisfy its own constituents while trying to negotiate an international agreement. It is argued that the interaction between the domestic and international levels must be understood in order to explain the outcomes of international debt negotiations. This article draws on Robert Putnam's concept of the two-level game in international politics and on a wider literature concerning the influence of domestic political considerations in international negotiations to demonstrate that such an analysis can explain the process and outcome of the 1988 agreement, where a unitary negotiating level fails to predict the final result. The two-level model explains how domestic constraints and opportunities affect international outcomes, and it highlights the importance of the ratification process.

In examining patterns in international crises, the authors offer one path to a cocerted attack on a central phenomenon in world politics. After surveying the releva literature, including competing definitions, they set forth a conceptual map of int national crisis variables: actor attributes (age, territory, regime, capability, values system characteristics (size, geography, structure, alliance configuration, stability); a the crisis dimensions they wish to explain (trigger, actor behavior, superpower activity, and the role of international organizations—that is, crisis management, of come, and consequences). From this taxonomy they have developed a research frar work on international crisis, and, as an illustration of more narrow explanatory devie a crisis management-outcome model. Three clusters of hypotheses on the substar and form of crisis outcomes, and the duration of crises, are then tested against I evidence from 185 cases for the period from 1945 to 1962. The ultimate aim is illuminate international crises over a 50-year period, 1930–1980, across all continer cultures, and political and economic systems in the contemporary era.

Modern clientelist exchange is typically carried out by intermediaries—party activists, employers, local strongmen, traditional leaders, and the like. Politicians use such brokers to mobilize voters, yet little about their relative effectiveness is known. The authors argue that broker effectiveness depends on their leverage over clients and their ability to monitor voters. They apply their theoretical framework to compare two of the most common brokers worldwide, party activists and employers, arguing the latter enjoy numerous advantages along both dimensions. Using survey-based framing experiments in Venezuela and Russia, the authors find voters respond more strongly to turnout appeals from employers than from party activists. To demonstrate mechanisms, the article shows that vulnerability to job loss and embeddedness in workplace social networks make voters more responsive to clientelist mobilization by their bosses. The results shed light on the conditions most conducive to effective clientelism and highlight broker type as important for understanding why clientelism is prevalent in some countries but not others.

Three trade wars are examined using variable-sum game theory. The Anglo-Hanse trade wars (1300–1700) are explained as an iterated Prisoners' Dilemma that failed to evolve into cooperation due to transaction costs, rent seeking, and economic recession. The late-igthcentury tariff war between France and Italy is a case of an asymmetric trade war that illustrates the danger to a weak country of provoking a trade war with a strong country, with the result that the former is forced to make major concessions. The Hawley-Smoot conflicts of the 1930s are cited as an example of the cooperation-inhibiting effect of publicness in trade negotiations.

Several years ago we reviewed in this journal a collection of books dealing with various aspects of Britain's role in international politics. In the opening paragraph of that review article we observed that “these writings can be viewed simply as discrete accounts of a single nation's unique experience. But one can also view such literature from a broader perspective. Particular cases are always unique in their totality. But they may be exhibits of more widely encountered types of phenomena. It is always possible, and it may be interesting and fruitful, to formulate general comparative questions about particular cases, and to derive hypotheses which could be tried out for credibility in other cases.”

Using a game-theoretic model of international interactions, the author shows that systemtransforming wars can result from a relatively small dispute between rivals who are basically satisfied with the international status quo. Such wars are likely to be relatively low in costs even if they are profound in their consequences. The possibility of such system-transforming wars is overlooked by the theories of power-transition, or hegemonic, war.

The Seven Weeks' War is an example of a system-transforming conflict that can be understood by combining the insights of theories concerned with differential growth rates and of those derived from the game-theoretic perspective suggested here. The combination of these two perspectives expands the explanatory potential of existing theories of system-transforming wars.

A growing trend in the comparative politics literature on patterns of minority incorporation emphasizes the emerging policy convergence in this area, conventional oppositions between national models notwithstanding. This convergence is further illustrated by drawing upon the cases of two countries often analyzed within an “exceptionalist” framework and generally viewed as polar opposites as far as the political legitimacy and legal validity of race-based classifications are concerned: the United States and France. The analysis of recent programs designed to increase the “diversity” of the student body in selective institutions of higher education demonstrates that indirect affirmative action is the instrument around which French and U.S. policies have tended to converge. This increasingly visible convergence obtains in part because of the current move toward color-blindness as a matter of law in the United States. Yet it is also a reflection of the fact that the ultimate purpose of affirmative action in liberal democracies requires a measure of indirection and/or implicitness.

The recent growth of minority nationalist movements poses the conceptual question of the validity of social science theories dealing with national integration, and the practical question of assessing the options open to governments faced with nationalistic agitations and demands for secession. Older theories predicting the decline of ethnic and cultural conflicts have been challenged by the theory of internal colonialism and by a group of theories stressing the durability of ethnic loyalties. The theory of internal colonialism is analyzed and found to be unhelpful. The durability of ethnic loyalties is accepted; four propositions are advanced to explain the growth of minority nationalist movements. It is suggested that this is a rational development in view of recent changes in the international order. Canadian and British experience indicates that it is difficult for governments to prevent demands for secession from arising. However, the growth of interdependence has reduced the significance of secession; this view is supported by a brief analysis of relations between the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic.

Are large landowners, especially those engaged in labor-dependent agriculture, detrimental to democratization and the subsequent survival of democracy? This assumption is at the heart of both canonical and recent influential work on regime transition and durability. Using an original panel data set on the extent of labor-dependent agriculture in countries across the world since 1930, the author finds that labor-dependent agriculture was indeed historically bad for democratic stability and stunted the extension of suffrage, parliamentary independence, and free and fair elections. However, the negative influence of labor-dependent agriculture on democracy started to turn positive around the time of democracy's third wave. The dual threats of land reform and costly domestic insurgencies in that period—often with more potent consequences under dictators—plausibly prompted landowners to push for democracy with strong horizontal constraints and favorable institutions that could protect their property more reliably over the long term than could dictatorship. The shift in support for democracy by labor-dependent landowners is a major untold story of democracy's third wave and helps explain the persistent democratic deficit in many new democracies.

As the consequences of science and technology impinge more and more on international relations, states attempt to deal with the promise and dangers implicit in these consequences by the creation of international regimes. The nature and scope of such regimes are justified, in part, by the scientific and technological givens with which they are to deal. Increasingly, however, the process of justification is dominated by constructs and arguments taken from systems theory, thus mixing the epistemological styles of the natural and the social sciences. It is often not clear whether justification in terms of systems theory is rhetoric or based on demonstrated isomorphisms. The article seeks to answer this question by presenting a four-fold typology of systems theories together with their assumptions and relevance to the creation of international regimes. The article then examines three specific proposals for international action on science and technology, prepared under OECD auspices, in order to demonstrate the extent to which they rely on systems theory and to determine how persuasive the systemic justification is. The conclusion: there is an inverse relationship between the elaborateness of the systemic justification and the acceptability of the regime on logical, empirical, and moral grounds.

Tocqueville referred to the behavior of the French peasantry during the Revolution as a wonder of history. The centers of revolution, he noted, were the very districts in which social reform and progress had been most visible, whereas resistance to revolution sprang up in areas where the old order had been most completely retained.

A number of contemporary studies rightly emphasize the notion that policy outcomes result from institutional determinants. But as a growing literature on institutional development notes, these institutions are themselves impermanent. Sometimes, in crisis moments, institutions are replaced wholesale. More frequently, institutions evolve gradually over time. using the Brazilian Central Bank as a case study, this article illustrates that the policy-making process itself can be a central driver of gradual institutional development, with institutions evolving through the accumulation of policy choices made over many years and under different policymakers in response to contemporaneous events and unforeseeable economic and political challenges.

Recent work on political development fails because it does not address the fundamental questions of “developmental theory.” The questions, answered in the essay, are: What “grows” in the passage from rudimentary to “modern” polities? What is the polity in its rudimentary form? Why is advancement from the primal to the advanced form ineludible? Through what stages does it pass? What forces move it through its passage? Political development is conceived as the necessarily increasing politicalization of society through six stages; and, along with this, as the gradual transformation of ceremonial, theatrical polities into “efficient,” managerial ones.

Shortly after James Forrestal resigned as Secretary of Defense in late March 1949, the nation was shocked to learn that he was under treatment for a severe mental illness. Within a few months Forrestal committed suicide. This tragic occurrence, coming after Forrestal's highly successful career in government, directly challenged the long-standing mental-health mythology prevalent in Washington. The essence of the myth, as noted by Albert Deutsch at the time, was the belief that “no Very Important Person, under any circumstances, can possibly suffer from a psychosis.” The denial of this possibility in official Washington was of a piece with widely shared beliefs that to suffer a mental illness was a disgrace that automatically and permanently rendered one unfit for public office.

This paper sets forth a preliminary theory of the substructure of Chinese politics. Power is based on an influential constituency in China as elsewhere, but here there are two types of such constituencies: the formal, consisting of an actor's bureaucratic colleagues and subordinates, which exerts formal power [ch'üan-li]; and the informal, consisting of interested family members, long-term friends, and protégés, which exerts informal influence [shih-li]. The support of the former may be relied upon during “nonantagonistic contradictions”; but if the contradiction becomes “antagonistic,” only the informal base is likely to be of any avail, because of the severe sanctions applied to any associate of an “enemy of the people.” The “Gang of Four” could be considered as “favorites” of Mao Tse-tung, inasmuch as their narrow and shallow “backgrounds” afforded them no constituency, formal or informal, aside from the Chairman himself. Their political actions were characterized by exclusive loyalty to their patron and by a disregard for the formal rules of the game. Sensitive to the long-range untenability of their positions, the Four sought to expand their base by appealing to the masses through the media and by building an incipient bureaucratic constituency. Their ultimate failure may be attributed not only to their ineptitude at base-building, but to the inherent limitations of their positions in an increasingly determinate bureaucratic-political game.