Does democracy induce financial development? There are good theoretical reasons to believe this to be the case, but the evidence adduced to support this claim has been mixed. In this article, the authors posit that only democracies that appeal to the median voter should experience financial development because those democracies have adopted their own constitution after transition, rather than having inherited one from an authoritarian predecessor. The authors empirically test this theory by focusing attention on Latin America, where there have been several reversals and improvements in financial outcomes and where many countries have cycled between regime types. They find robust support for it across different specifications. While popular democracies tend to reform their financial systems, have greater participation in the banking system, increase the supply of credit and reduce its price, and grow their stock markets, elite-biased democracies do not.

The article addresses the question of what role formal constitutions play in mitigating intense conflicts over the religious character of the state. In contrast to common views in constitutional and political scholarship, it demonstrates that the ideal of liberal constitutionalism is not compatible with the political reality and types of conflicts that characterize religiously divided societies. Analyzing four processes of constitution drafting in which issues of religious law and religious identity were at the heart of the debate—India, Indonesia, Israel, and Turkey—it argues that under deep disagreement over the state's religious character, the drafters adopt either a permissive or a restrictive constitutional approach. While the former implies strategies of constitutional ambiguity, ambivalence, and avoidance in order to allow the political system greater flexibility in future decision making on religion-state relations, the latter approach uses repressive constitutional constraints designed to limit the range of possibilities available to future decision makers. The article further explores the long-term consequences of the two approaches and argues that (1) permissive constitutional arrangements, more than restrictive arrangements, are likely to promote the democratic functioning of future governments; and that (2) permissive constitutional arrangements may facilitate greater freedom of religion, but they are also likely to lead to greater restrictions on freedom from religion, compared with restrictive constitutions.

This essay examines and reformulates the realist-neoliberal debate. It focuses initially on the issue of the attribution of instrumental goals to states—the goals they pursue as a function of the environment they confront—and argues not only that such goals are epiphenomena of other things but also that their specification constitutes a mere redescription of the alternative equilibria that states can achieve in anarchic systems. The world orders that realists and neoliberals envision are but alternative equilibria to a more general game. In that game cooperation, regardless of its form, must be endogenously enforced, and a debate over instrumental goals (whether it is best to model states as relative or absolute resource maximizers) is not central to the development of a theory that explains and predicts world orders.

Instead, the realist-neoliberal debate should be recast. The central research agenda should be to develop models that illuminate the following: how the equilibrium to a game in which states structure international affairs influences the types of issue-specific subgames states play, how countries coordinate to equilibria of different types; how the coordination problems associated with different equilibria can be characterized; how institutions emerge endogenously to sustain different equilibria; how states can enhance the attractiveness of an equilibrium; and how states can signal commitments to the strategies that are part of that equilibrium.

This article leverages a phenomenon of racial reclassification in Brazil to shed new light on the processes of identity politicization. Conventional wisdom tells us that race mixture, fluid racial boundaries, and stigmatized blackness lead Brazilians to change their racial identifications—to reclassify—toward whiteness. But in recent years, Brazilians have demonstrated a newfound tendency to reclassify toward blackness. The author argues that this sudden reversal is the unintended consequence of state-led educational expansion for the lower classes. Educational expansion has increased the exposure of newly mobile citizens to information, social networks, and the labor market, leading many to develop racialized political identities and choose blackness. The author develops and tests this argument by drawing on in-depth interview data, systematic analyses of national survey and longitudinal census data, and original survey experiments. This article contributes a novel account of identity politicization and emphasizes the interaction between social structures and citizenship institutions in these processes.

This is a good time to ask what are the important emerging trends in research in international relations. In the first place, the problems of world politics today are as arresting in their implications for the security and well-being of peoples everywhere as they have ever been; at the same time, they seem less subject to human control. Secondly, a generation of experimenting and high-level groping with international problems has produced, or ought to have produced, some valuable conclusions about how to proceed in carrying out fruitful research in the field. Finally, the impressive advances made in various branches of the social sciences in the last few years have provided some interesting new tools and skills that ought to be of great help to the political analyst working on the international level.

This article examines obstacles to economic reform in Ukraine's transition to a market-based economy. Existing explanations for failures of reform in postcommunist states privilege societal actors, as in the case of Przeworski's J-curve, or state actors acting in a private, rent-seeking capacity, as in Hellman's partial reform equilibrium. Other explanations focus on weak state capacity. However, there is evidence to suggest that some groups of individuals who stall or halt market reforms may do so in their capacity as state actors. Their resistance to reform may be sub rosa: state actors may comply with formal institutional requirements of reform even as they seek to preserve the status quo. This tendency is evident in the privatization of land, the focus of this article. This article proposes an explanation for reform failures which suggests that some resistance to economic liberalization may derive from the efforts of state actors to protect the public good.

How do firms protect themselves against infringements of their property rights by their own government? The authors develop a theory based on international law and joint asset ownership with foreign firms. Investment agreements protect the assets of foreign firms but are not available to domestic firms. This segmentation of the property rights environment creates a rationale for international financial relationships between firms. By forming financial relationships with foreign firms, domestic firms gain indirect coverage from the property rights available to foreign firms under investment agreements. If a government is less likely to violate the property rights of covered foreign firms, it is also less likely to violate property rights for assets held jointly by domestic and foreign firms. This article presents systematic evidence from data on the activities of firms in countries that have investment agreements with the United States. International financial relationships between firms, through mergers and acquisitions as well as through bond and equity issues, are more common where property rights are weak. The theory suggests a political logic to the fragmentation of firm-ownership stakes across jurisdictions, offers an institutional explanation of international financial flows, and identifies new distributional consequences of international law.

Support for nationalism among minorities in multiethnic countries has received a great deal of scholarly attention in recent years. Few of these studies, however, have delved into the social bases of support for nationalism within a particular ethnic group. Scholars who study nationalism usually assume that support for nationalism among the members of an ethnic group is either randomly distributed or identical for all members of the group. Both assumptions are implausible. This article seeks to show that support for nationalism among members of an ethnic group is neither constant nor random. Furthermore, it argues that the extent to which members of social subgroups within the ethnic group come to support nationalism is predictable and is based on a particular sequence of mobilization. This sequence depends on the extent to which members of each subgroup possess a sense of common collective identity and on the strength of their social ties with those who are at the forefront of the mobilization effort. Both of these factors in turn depend largely on the extent to which state institutions promote ethnic identification among the minority population and create links that increase the density of intragroup social ties. Ethnic institutions are thus the key factor in explaining the sequence by which social groups within an ethnic minority population come to support nationalism.

“The victory of communism is inevitable.” This claim has been made since the consolidation of the Soviet Union, and it has been restated with relish by the Kremlin's supreme spokesman during his recent visits abroad. It rests on the argument that Russian society, in accordance with the Marxist-Leninist doctrine, has advanced from feudalism to capitalism and socialism, blazing a trail along which all other countries are bound to go. Thus the superiority of the Communist regime is asserted not merely on the basis of operational successes, but with reference to historical considerations which are ascribed to the “classics” of communism, and ultimately to Marx and Engels.

Throughout the ages moralists have expressed horror at the way princes and sovereign states behave toward each other. Behavior which would be considered immoral by any standard can obviously be detected in all realms of life; but nowhere does the contradiction between professed ethical principles and actual behavior appear so patent and universal as in the conduct of foreign relations. Governments spy on each other and lie to each other; they violate pledges and conduct wars, often at the cost of millions of lives and untold misery. No wonder, then, that in western democracies if not elsewhere indignation over such practices should be voiced with vehemence. In our day it frequently expresses itself in wholesale denunciations of the multi-state system on the ground that sovereign states cannot deal with each other except by the use of immoral means, derogatorily called power politics. Some draw the cynical conclusion that morality has no place in international politics, while others would have men fulfill their moral duty by substituting world government for the present immoral political system.

The point of view from which this article is written is that the world-wide trend toward increased use of oil involves Western Europe in greater risks of interruption of supplies than it does the other major world consumers (the United States and the USSR), who produce most of their own oil; and that the implications of permitting the trend to continue to develop at its present rate should be seriously reconsidered. The trend toward increased use of oil in Western Europe has been clear for some years, as it was for the United States a bit earlier and has become for the USSR more recently. What is somewhat alarming at the present time is that the process is speeding up in Western Europe and that resistance to it is weakening.

Party systems provide the essential structure of the coalition bargaining environment. Stability in party systems ensures the presence of regularities that can be observed in government formation, but most empirical research focuses on established democracies. In new democracies, party systems are less institutionalized, which means that interactions between parties can be unpredictable and has significant implications for coalition formation. This article presents the first study of coalition formation in new democracies that employs an empirical design comparable to that of the leading research on Western Europe. The author uses a new data set of potential coalitions in Central and Eastern Europe to examine three explanations for government formation that arise when party systems are weakly institutionalized. The results show first that incumbency is a disadvantage for governments in new democracies when formation occurs postelection. This disadvantage is due to high levels of electoral volatility caused by policy failure and clientelistic practices. Incumbents are advantaged when formation takes place midterm, as weak party system institutionalization leads to an inchoate pattern of interaction between opposition parties, which therefore fail to provide a viable alternative. Second, the presence of former dominant parties influences government formation by stifling the development of programmatic competition. Instead, programmatic competition is subjugated to contestation based on historical enmities. And third, established parties collude to exclude new parties from coalition formation—a possible indicator that a party system is becoming more institutionalized. The article provides new insights into the importance of routinized and stable political practices and institutions.

Rational-choice theories of politics have gained acceptance rapidly and may soon dominate the field. Their popularity is due in part to their real successes, which can be demonstrated in several areas, and to their hypothetical-deductive structure. But some students, in their eagerness to embrace what is by now a theoretical fad, have either ignored inconvenient facts or weakened the theory to fit them. Both the promise and the risk are demonstrated by reference to recent works by Mayhew, Niskanen, Rabushka and Shepsle, and de Swaan.

Historical research since the opening of the British archives in the late 1960s has brought about a substantial revision of the image of appeasement that had generally been accepted after World War II. Yet the traditional image has scarcely been questioned in contemporary writing on international relations. This article examines some of the central themes in recent studies relating to appeasement: the “structural” approach, which offers a new overall interpretation; the economic, military, and intelligence “dimensions” of British foreign policy in the 1930s; and the breaking down of traditional stereotypes of the roles of Chamberlain and Churchill. This reappraisal has important implications for the discipline of international relations, its view of the origins of World War II, and theories of international structural change.

Studies of democratic consolidation tend to highlight the same factors previously used to explain countries' transitional dynamics. Yet one cannot properly understand success or failure in democratic consolidation—much less discern significant qualitative differences among consolidated democracies—by focusing exclusively on formal institutions, modes of transition, incentive structures, or exogenous factors. Close inspection of two newly consolidated democracies—Poland and Hungary—shows that despite radically altered institutional arrangements, legal structures, and political-economic incentives, the most important determinants of the models of democracy emerging today derive from pretransition conceptual frames and informal political settlements. Specifically, the core conflicts between ruling elites and society in communist Poland and Hungary, as well as the patterns of political accommodation that evolved in the management of those conflicts, continue to structure the political agenda and order debate in both countries. In Poland overlapping ethical-ideological cleavages and failures of political accommodation under the ancien regime have resulted in a confrontational-pluralist model of democracy. In contrast, Hungary's compromise-corporatist model stems from early informal accommodation between the party-state and society that recast most conflicts as “economic” in nature. These long-standing conflicts and political patterns explain striking contemporary differences in social mobilization, party competition, and constitutional development. The article concludes with a discussion of how these models are likely to shape each country's prospects for sustained governability and increased democratic legitimacy.

It is not surprising that Western statesmen and students of politics everywhere have recently begun to give major attention to what are variously termed guerrilla warfare, irregular warfare, paramilitary operations, la guerre révolutionnaire, insurrectional warfare, resistance movements, and other, allegedly military, doctrines. Of course, irregular armed struggles are not a unique feature of mid-twentieth-century politics; however, they have occurred with great frequency in our time and, more important, they have resulted in baffling victories over vastly better armed, better trained, and more numerous forces. President Kennedy, in response to the apparent superiority in military doctrine possessed by Communist forces in Asia, has ordered the rapid expansion of United States “guerrilla and counter-guerrilla forces.” On a more prosaic level, the publication in a national Sunday-morning newspaper of excerpts from a celebrated pamphlet on guerrilla warfare by Mao Tse-tung suggests that “guerrilla warfare,” along with “massive retaliation,” has entered the popular Cold War vocabulary.

When he set out to form a secret intelligence agency for President Roosevelt in 1941, “Wild Bill” Donovan made little effort to curb his own characteristic receptivity to the new, the different, and even the unorthodox. Completely in character, he took up with quick enthusiasm the novel idea that scholars—those dreamy inhabitants of ivory towers—would be ideal for the job. He believed that by searching through the Library of Congress and through the files of the many government agencies these men could uncover much of the information for which secret agents risked their lives. In a sense, he dedicated the Research and Analysis Branch of the wartime Office of Strategic Services to the task of making the romantic secret agent obsolete. Since then, more and more people have come to believe that research—and the social sciences—have at last found a home within the formal structure of government.

Great wars, the rise and decline of empires, observed differences in the power and influence of nations, and in general the uneven levels of national achievement in international politics have inspired much speculation and hypothesis-building. Men have felt the need for satisfying explanations of past events and patterns, and even greater need for plausible hypotheses with which to approach the future. The last seventy-five years or so have witnessed a bumper crop of hypotheses designed to account for or to anticipate the ordering of political relationships in the society of nations. One characteristic of most of these activities has been a persistent search for the “master variable” that would provide a simple yet plausible and satisfying basis for explaining or predicting the ordering of political relationships among nations.

A reexamination of revolutionary processes in the developing countries indicates mounting doubts among Soviet academic specialists that radical third-world policies will redound to the U.S.S.R.'s advantage. The author investigates the following topics: the relationship of socialist orientation to socialism; shortcomings of the vanguard parties; correct foreign and domestic economic policies; the suitability of the Marxist model for Eastern societies; and the evolution of the non-aligned movement. The congruence between these academic discussions and fresh official formulations could give Western analysts and policy makers valuable insights into new Soviet proposals for reducing East-West tensions over events in the third world.