Thanks to the vigor of the dependency school's attack on the established “developmentalist” framework for studying change in the Third World, debates going on today in development studies are perhaps the most interesting and important in the field of comparative politics. The debates are interesting because, both methodologically and substantively, a wide range of new issues has been raised in a field that by around 1970 had become relatively moribund. They are important because, in the Third World especially, the mainstream developmentalist models earlier formulated in the United States—such as those sponsored by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC)—have been angrily discarded by many in favor of politically explosive explanations of underdevelopment that lay the manifold problems of these areas squarely at the feet of Western imperialism (and, in the case of the Latin Americanists heading this school, at the doorstep of Washington in particular). Thus, there are acutely perceived moral and political dimensions to this clash of paradigms for the study of Third World development, beyond the intellectual, or academic, interest that such controversy is sure to excite.

This essay reviews two books that seek to account for China's success in making economic reforms and sustaining rapid growth. One perspective explains China's reformist approach in terms of politicians making choices under certain institutional rules. The other sees an economic logic of market transition and emphasizes policymakers' limited abilities in governing the economy. The essay assesses the merits of these competing claims. It calls for better specification of the causal linkages between institutional rules and politicians' choices and concludes that both the dynamics and dilemmas of China's political economy are explained in terms of increasing market competition. Finally the essay evaluates the argument that decentralization leads to market segmentation and points to the Chinese government's evolving role in dealing with the economy.

This article is a study of everyday resistance and political protest among East German workers under communism. It develops and adduces evidence for two hypotheses based on evidence from Communist Party and state archives. First, in contrast to the standard explanation for the revolution of 1989, which emphasizes intellectual and popular mobilization against the regime, this essay emphasizes the long-term capacity of otherwisepowerless workers to immobilize the regime through nonpolitical acts of everyday resistance. This resistance, coupled with the rare act of political protest, rendered ineffective the conventional methods of labor discipline and undermined any hope of meaningful economic reform. The second hypothesis concerns the motivation for working-class behavior. Two models of social action have dominated studies of subalterns: rational choice and moral economy. The models are evaluated against the archival record. While the evidence is not overwhelmingly in favor of either model, the moral economy approach provides a better account of the sporadic acts of rebellion and the myriad acts of everyday resistance.

Fundamental to modern politics is the fact that politics of security and diplomacy are central to society. Historically, foreign and security politics have been the main priorities of the political center, conducted primarily on that level. Since 1945, these political centers have gained predominance in die U.S. In the absence of well-integrated political elites, a highly centralized political party or parties, and powerful and permanent bureaucracies and civil service, the presidential political center has become the pivotal political center with almost exclusive control over foreign affairs and national security. The locus and degree of power widiin the American political and constitutional context, rather than elite orientations and practices, are identified to explain who dominates American foreign policy.

Despite substantial evidence that international trade has promoted peace in the post—World War II era, the commercial peace research program still faces an important historical challenge. Dramatic economic integration in the nineteenth century failed to prevent the increasing interstate hostilities that culminated in the outbreak of war in 1914. This article uses a theoretical revision grounded in standard trade theory to reexamine the relationship between commerce and peace in the fifty years before World War I, a period often referred to as the first era of globalization. The article focuses on domestic conflict over commercial policy rather than on interdependence to understand the conditions under which globalization promotes peace. In a sample dating from 1865 to 1914, the authors find that lower regulatory barriers to commerce reduce participation in militarized interstate disputes. Contradicting conventional wisdom, this evidence affirms a basic premise of commercial liberalism during the first era of globalization—free trade promotes peace.

Why is it that some governments recognize only one language while others espouse multilingualism? Related, why are some governments able to shift language policies, and if there is a shift, what explains the direction? In this article, the authors argue that these choices are theproduct of coalitional constraints facing the government during critical junctures in history.During times of political change in the state-building process, the effective threat of an alternate linguistic group determines the emergent language policy. If the threat is low, the government moves toward monolingual policies. As the threat increases, however, the government is forced to co-opt the alternate linguistic group by shifting the policy toward a greater degree of multilingualism. The authors test this argument by examining the language policies for government services and the education system in three Southeast Asian countries (Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand).

Surely, more has been written about the Russian Revolution and the ensuing forty years of Soviet rule than about any comparable episode in human history. The bibliography of items on the French Revolution occupies, it is said, one wall of the Bibliothéque Nationale. A complete bibliography on the Soviet Union—which is yet to be compiledand may never be because of the geometric rate at which it multiplies—would probably make that earlier cenotaph to scholarship shrink the way in which the earlier tombs diminished before the great complex at Karnak.

Arguing counter to the accepted positions of political sociology, we contend that voters' decisions are best explained by the absence or presence of strong loyalties to political parties rather than by social or economic factors. Hence, in areas where most people have strong party attachments, marked change in the partisan division of the vote occurs only when an exceptionally large number of new voters enters the electoral arena; alterations in the social composition of a party's voters follow changes in the occupation or social categories of those who consistently vote for the party. In presenting this argument, we analyze time-series data for Britain, West Germany, and Sweden which negate the predicted development of “catch-all” electorates, and we test the relative power of party and class variables as predictors of voting behavior in Butler's and Stokes's panel study of British voters between 1963 and 1970.

No single model adequately explains the American foreign policy-making process. At least six models are required, singly or in some combination, to understand recent American foreign policy formation under the Nixon Administration. The six models are: democratic politics, organizational process/bureaucratic politics, the royal-court model, multiple advocacy, groupthink, and shared images or mind-sets. After a review of the rules of the foreign policy game in Washington and the main elements of the Nixon-Kissinger National Security Council system, the article seeks to apply the models to a number of cases in recent American policy making toward Europe. U.S.-Soviet relations, the “Year of Europe,” and Nixon's New Economic Policy of August 1971 are examined as cases of royal-court decision making. A second category of cases exhibits mixed patterns of decision making: SALT, the Berlin negotiations, U.S. troops in Europe, MBFR, and U.S. trade policy. Bureaucratic variables alone explained policy outcomes in international economic policy making in the autumn of 1971, and an organizational process model was found to be dominant generally in the formation of recent international monetary policy, led by the Treasury Department. The conclusion considers the relationships between the models and certain kinds of policies.

Integration theorists are increasingly turning their attention away from an examination of the relationship of gains to the integration process and towards the elaboration of complex models in which the salience of the former is obscured. As this variable appears to influence the durability of integrative systems among third-world countries and, by entering into actor calculations of alternatives, effects changes within the integrative system, an analysis is warranted which places the relationship of gains to the integration process in bolder relief.

The twenty-five German states from 1871 to 1914 present a useful data set for examining how increasing economic integration affects tax policy. After German unification the national government collapsed six currencies into one and liberalized preexisting restrictions on capital and labor mobility. In contrast, the empire did not directly interfere in the making of state tax policy; while states transferred certain indirect taxes to the central government, they maintained their own autonomous tax and political systems through World War I. This paper examines the extent to which tax competition forced the individual state tax systems to converge from 1871 to 1914. In spite of a diversity of political systems, tax competition did require states to harmonize their rates on mobile factors like capital and high income labor, but it did not affect tax rates on immobile factors. In states where the political system guaranteed agricultural dominance, taxes on land were reduced, while in states with more open systems, tax rates remained higher. One unexpected result is that tax rates on capital and income converged upward instead of downward. The most dominant state, Prussia, served as the lowest-common-denominator state, but pressure from the national government, especially to increase expenditures, forced all states to raise their tax rates. These results suggest possible ways for the European Union to avoid a forced downward convergence of member state tax rates on capital and mobile labor.

Implicit in most recent social science explanations of human behavior is a conception of man as universal homo economicus. Although such a conception is capable of giving a powerful account of a great deal of human action, its account of the nature and variety of human values is inadequate. Cultural assumptions about the meaning of “self” and “others,” and about relations between human beings, are likely to vary from one society to another. These assumptions affect the collective decision processes of political elites under conditions of complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity. The author first addresses the question of how to construct a compelling cultural explanation, and then offers evidence which suggests that, because Chinese, Japanese, and Russians tend to hold somewhat different conceptions of “self” and “others” than do Americans (the former tending to be more collectivist than the latter), these different conceptions have implications for collective decision making.

With the exception of Libya, Egypt, the Sudanese Republic, and Ethiopia, where no political parties exist, some variation of the single-party political system or a distinctive tendency in that direction may be found in nearly all of the independent African states. That this should have come to pass within the relatively short period of the rise of African states has been a surprise to some observers of African nationalist movements and parties during the colonial period—who were rather sanguine about the prospects of Western-type democracy and party systems in Africa—as well as to the colonial powers themselves (especially Britain and France)—who presumably assumed that their policies of decolonization in Africa were providing the institutional framework within which Western-type party systems and politics would prevail.

This article examines mass public discourse on religion and pluralism in diverse societies. It argues that religion enters the public sphere by defining countervailing narratives about sectarianism, which is exclusive and divisive, and ecumenicism, which is inclusive and unifying. Most empirical studies focus on elites as the producers of discourse and ignore the regular people who comprise the “real” public. In contrast to prior work, this article systematically examines mass public discourse, with Lebanon, a religiously diverse developing world society, as its research venue. It uses a novel combination of original survey data and publicly displayed religious and political iconography to study the exchange of ideas about religion and pluralism among the mass public. It shows that sectarian discourse articulates ethnocentric and antiplural statements, whereas ecumenicism, by contrast, mitigates ethnocentrism and valorizes pluralism.

A close look at the commitments of World Trade Organization (WTO) members presents a striking paradox. Most states could raise their duties significantly before falling afoul of their WTO obligations. Moreover, such “binding overhang” varies between countries: some could more than double the amount of trade protection they offer overnight, whereas others are tightly constrained. What accounts for this variation? The author argues that more flexibility is not always better: obtaining it and subsequently using it are both costly. Rather than maximize flexibility, states thus seek an optimal amount. If they have access to policy space through other means, such as currency devaluations and trade remedies, they will exercise restraint in seeking binding overhang. The same supply-side logic holds at the domestic level: governments strategically withhold binding overhang from industries that are able to rely on trade remedies, despite the fact that these tend to have the greatest political clout.

This essay makes four points: (1) despite the assertions of some of their proponents, static game-theoretic and optimal-tariff arguments suggest that states should not undertake hegemonic responsibilities to maintain an open trading system; (2) hegemonic states have, in fact, cooperated with others, despite risks to themselves; (3) Japan, the hegemonic successor or condominial associate of the United States in the years to come, is also likely to cooperate to prevent the collapse of the international trading system. This means (4) that hegemonic or near-hegemonic powers have either acted irrationally or that their calculations have rested upon a different and more dynamic rational foundation. Specifically, systemic as well as domestic considerations have influenced their thinking and determined their policies. A major creditor power like Japan must find means of allowing others to earn surpluses in its own market or of providing assistance on concessional terms.

The intuitively plausible relationship between protest behavior and political instability is empirically supported by a large number of studies. Statistical evidence in support of this conjecture is provided by the correlation between indicators of protest behavior such as the presence of extremist parties and groups or the salience of an antisystem dimension and the rapid rise and fall of governments. The theories of writers such as Huntington, Gurr, and Davies suggest that when social and political mobility overtake the rate of economic growth, die result is radical challenge to the system by extremist parties and protest movements, leading to political instability and the loss of legitimacy. The main argument of this article is that the relationship between protest behavior and legitimacy may be more complicated than that, particularly when state responsiveness under the impact of popular protest and redistributive economic policies is seen as an intervening factor. By drawing on a survey of localelites in India, the article shows that certain forms of protest behavior, used in conjunction with conventional forms of participation such as contacting bureaucrats and political leaders at higher levels, might actually contribute to greater legitimacy of the state by providing an alternative channel of participation, extending the political agenda, and contributing to the recruitment of new and previously powerless social forces.

The argument in this essay can be reduced to the following form: the better a planning system is in terms of central planning techniques, the less likely it is to depart from central planning. The author proposes an information approach to explain why China launched economic reforms at a relatively earlier stage of development than did the Soviet Union. The claim is twofold regarding the connections between initiation of reform and information flows in China and in the Soviet Union. First, all else being equal, a bureaucracy better informed about economic conditions is more likely to pursue realistic economic objectives and its policies are less likely to induce macroeconomic instability. To the extent that macroeconomic instability activates a search for alternatives to the status quo, including reforms, a bureaucracy with better information-collection capabilities is less likely to initiate such a search and therefore less likely to initiate reforms.

Second, policymakers choose between reforms and the strengthening of central planning as alternative solutions to the status quo. The choice of one solution over another depends on their relative costs. Again, all else being equal, the higher the costs of strengthening central planning (or reform), the more likely is reform (or strengthening of central planning) to be chosen. This essay focuses on one aspect of these costs—the costs of information provision.

In an era of increasingly public diplomacy, conventional wisdom assumes that leaders who compromise damage their reputations and lose the respect of their constituents, which undermines the prospects for international peace and cooperation. This article challenges this assumption and tests how leaders can negotiate compromises and avoid paying domestic approval and reputation costs. Drawing on theories of individuals’ core values, psychological processes, and partisanship, the author argues that leaders reduce or eliminate domestic public constraints by exercising proposal power and initiating compromises. Employing survey experiments to test how public approval and perceptions of reputation respond to leaders’ strategies across security and economic issues, the author finds attitudes toward compromise are conditioned by the ideology of the audience and leader, with audiences of liberals being more supportive of compromise. In the US case, this results in Republican presidents having greater leeway to negotiate compromises. The article’s contributions suggest that leaders who exercise proposal power have significant flexibility to negotiate compromise settlements in international bargaining.