A review of the recent literature reveals that during the 1970s there were three major positions in the North-South debate over the New International Economic Order (NIEO). Each represented a relatively coherent perspective on and strategy for reforming the international economy. The Structuralist position, advocating the NIEO, captured the allegiance of much of the South (the developing countries). The Functionalist position, supported by most of the governments of Northern capitalist societies, rejected the NIEO and sought to promote stable and dependable change through the specialized international agencies, such as the IMF, in which the North has considerable influence. A third position, with nongovernmental adherents from both North and South, urged Neofunctionalist reform directed toward global human rights, both civil and economic. Each of these perspectives represented a significant aspect of the actual condition of the international order, but none had the capacity to carry out its strategy. The result has been stalemate both in the negotiations for a NIEO and in the debate over the direction future international change should take.

Theories of development are derived from readings of history. Modern historical research challenges many of the basic beliefs about how economies develop. More specifically, recent research suggests that the lessons drawn from the history of industrialization in England are highly misleading. The article thus challenges the empirical foundations for much of classical and Marxian development theory.

Negotiation is one of the basic political or decision-making processes, but if processes in general have been sorely neglected in political analysis, negotiation has been neglected more than most. Legislation as an institutional function has a respectable literature; as a process wherein goal values are constant and decisions are made by aggregating a sufficient number of parties to constitute a numerically superior side, it has become the subject of coalition theory. Adjudication has also given rise to a large quantity of institutional literature, although a theory explaining the process wherein a single party combines events and values to produce a decision is less well established. Similarly, diplomacy—and more recently, collective bargaining—has been thoroughly described, and economists and mathematicians using game and utility theories have developed some complex models of bargaining. But negotiation as a political process, specifically explained in terms of power, is an underdeveloped area of theory.

In the history of postcolonial Africa, no country has suffered a more tragic experience than Nigeria. After almost twenty years of gradual constitutional evolution by relatively orderly processes of conferences and negotiations, the structure of constitutional agreement collapsed; the army was broken into regional groups; citizens of Eastern Region origin fled much of the rest of the country during a series of massacres which produced a migration of hundreds of thousands of persons; the central government lost its effective authority over the Eastern Region; and when orderly processes of negotiation were suspended, the Eastern Region sought its own security and survival by declaring its independence, shortly after which the central government sought to reestablish its authority in the area by military action. The resulting war, which lasted two and one-half years, produced over a million casualties from military action, disease, and starvation.

Recently, much attention has been focused on the influence that multinational corporations (MNCs) have on the politics of developing countries. Even setting aside past legacies of sinister corporate conduct, most students of politics agree that MNCs are potentially important actors—for better or for worse—in a country's political development because they can influence the rate, direction, and beneficiaries of change. Most case studies begin with the assumption that the political impact resulting from the presence of MNCs in developing countries is primarily a function of the international economic system. However, all but one of the books under review focus on the domestic political system in individual host countries as the independent variable rather than on the international economic system. Taken together, these studies make a strong case that the analysis of the MNC and its impact on politics in developing countries must prace heavy emphasis on the particular political circumstances prevailing in each country. The wants, needs, and motivations of key domestic political actors—many of whom do not behave in the manner predicted by either Liberal or Marxist world models—appear to be of fundamental importance in determining how MNCs affect a developing country's politics, and whether that country can counter any potentially adverse political impacts that may accompany MNCs.

This article studies the effects of traditional chiefs—a common type of broker—on voters’ ability to extract state resources from politicians. Using original data from Northern Ghana, the author shows that chieftaincy positions invented by colonial authorities are especially prone to capture, leaving voters worse off compared both to more accountable chiefs whose authority dates to the precolonial period and to voters who lack formal chiefs who can serve as brokers. The latter comparison exploits exogenous assignment of ethnic groups to the colonial invention of chieftaincy in the late nineteenth century. The findings suggest that whether voters benefit from brokers amidst clientelistic electoral competition depends on the accountability relationship between brokers and their clients.

What is today in the United States conventionally known as international relations is a subject different in content and emphasis from its counterpart of even two decades ago. Much of what seemed important in 1929 seems irrelevant, and some of it even trivial, in 1949. Another twenty years may perhaps bring a similar judgment on work now being done. But we ought at least to be aware of the direction in which we have been moving if we are to control the future development of the field.

In 1930 the following statement passed unchallenged in a discussion among some of Ameria's leading social scientists: “The emotional drive is so highly developed in the kind of person who goes into the international relations field that it often leads to unclear thinking.” The implication that no one without this drive could conceivably be persuaded to enter the field is a commentary on the disesteem with which international relations research was then regarded.

THE importance of nuclear deterrence in the modern world does not require exposition. It became an issue of extended public discussion after the speech on massive retaliation by Secretary of State Dulles, who in the opinion of this writer came closer to an adequate theory of deterrence than most of his critics. This article will develop the view that the threat of counterattack is the best strategy against the possibility of aggression and that a nuclear counterattack is the most effective version of that strategy.

In the 1970s, discussion of the international economy frequently turned to the emergence of a “new protectionism” among the industrial countries after the accomplishments of trade liberalization in the 1960s. International organizations such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the International Monetary Fund (I.M.F.) documented an increase in trade barriers erected against imports of manufactures. The protectionism was “new” in two respects: (1) it was directed against dynamic exporters of manufactured goods (especially Japan and the newly industrializing countries) that had recently become important elements in world trade; (2) the means of protection were nontariff barriers —quotas, voluntary export restraints, and a host of governmental impediments to competitive trading practices.1

This article extends recent work on a comparative theory of retrenchment in social policy by asking whether the politics of retrenchment travels well across policy areas, with policy feedback remaining a crucial variable for explaining government success or failure. The article analyzes policy change in agriculture in the United States and France, a natural choice for an extension of retrenchment theory because agricultural policy resembles social policy in some respects but also provides telling points of contrast. The article finds that the call for new theories focusing on retrenchment is justified: the politics of agricultural retrenchment differs from that of expansion, and success at retrenchment varies by program.

The analysis shows, as well, that retrenchment has been significant both in the U.S. and in France and the European Union. Variations in policy feedback help explain why these policy changes occurred. Moreover, the France-U.S. comparison highlights how systemic institutional factors shape the politics of retrenchment. Finally, focusing on agriculture, a policy sector in which international developments have a greater direct importance than they do in social policy, the article identifies an additional systemic retrenchment strategy: constraining domestic programs through international agreements.

The decision to use and develop a low-status language in translations and creative works is often based on a desire to provide symbols that will assist the efforts of political leaders to challenge existing national and ethnic frontiers and to create new groups loyal to different institutions. New frontiers alter the relationships between peoples and also affect patterns of access to power and wealth within a group. Writers, translators, dictionary makers, and other literary figures who innovate for this reason should be called “language strategists.” Although primarily moved by a creative and artistic spirit, these persons are often intimately associated with national and ethnic movements because they share the interests of the political elites who lead them. This conscious or unconscious alliance is essential in the creation of ethnic and national identities.

Discussion of troop requirements and weaponry for NATO is much concerned with the battlefield consequences of different troop strengths and nuclear doctrines. But the battlefield criterion is only one criterion, and when nuclears are introduced it is secondary. The idea that European armament should be designed for resisting Soviet invasion, and is to be judged by its ability to contain an attack, is based on the notion that limited war is a tactical operation. It is not.

For years, mainstream international relations (IR) theorists have essentially ignored reconciliation as a special—and perhaps the most difficult—form of cooperation building in international politics. This review article seeks to make the study of reconciliation a more visible field for further inquiry in IR, comparative politics, and sociology for both theoretical and practical reasons. After summarizing important themes emerged from the recent literature on reconciliation, the author addresses four issues for understanding interstate reconciliation: the interplay of group emotions and group politics, the interplay of domestic politics and international politics, the institutionalization of memories, and methodological issues. Better understanding of these issues also contributes to broadening the scope of inquiry in IR, comparative politics, and the sociology literature.

The consequences that flow from the collapse of empires have never been easily predicted. Seldom, however, has the demise of an imperial system been accompanied by as many systematic analyses and projections as has the current period of decolonization. Much of the recent discussion concerning the newer members of the international system has made reference to their so-called artificial political boundaries. It has been predicted, among other things, that the political boundaries of Asia and Africa, by virtue of their presumed artificiality, harbor the seeds of “many a troublesome irredenta in the future.” Frequent references are made, in the growing literature on nation-building and political modernization, to the “natural” or “unnatural” qualities of these boundaries, and the absence of careful general studies of this topic has been noted. This article proposes to examine the dominant characteristics of African political boundaries and the circumstances under which disputes over their location have so far been generated, and to deduce some general propositions about their conflict potential. The thrust of the argument to be presented is that there is a low conflict potential in contemporary African boundaries and that earlier predictions of instability are not likely to be borne out.

A“political” explanation of collective political activity is examined in the light of 58 varied historical cases. The cases support a description of these activities as largely rational, collectively arrived at, and heavily influenced by recent changes in motives and opportunities.“In” groups are most likely to act collectively when newly threatened,“out” groups when new opportunities present themselves. Emotion and frustrated expectations do not seem to be the best variables on which to base predictive hypotheses. Violence is not strongly associated with communal groups or with emotion as such, but it does seem to be associated with“bad times.” While action is usually based on collectively made decisions, its occurrence does not depend on strong organization; the latter seems, however, to be a condition of continuing and durable effectiveness.

Increasingly, decentralization is being adopted by countries in which assumptions made by formal models of decentralization, such as electoral accountability and population mobility, fail to hold. How does decentralization affect public service delivery in such contexts? The authors exploit the partial rollout of decentralization in the autocratic context of Ethiopia and use a spatial regression discontinuity design to identify its effects. Decentralization improves delivery of productive services, specifically, agricultural services, but has no effect on social services, specifically, drinking water services. This finding is consistent with a model in which local leaders have superior information about the public investments that will deliver the greatest returns and they are incentivized by decentralization to maximize citizens’ production—on which rents depend—rather than citizens’ utility. These findings shed light on nonelectoral mechanisms through which decentralization affects public goods provision and help to explain decentralization’s mixed effects in many nondemocratic settings.

Specialists in the study of Soviet foreign policy increasingly feel torn between the positivist culture of political science departments and the holistic traditions of the Soviet area-studies programs. In fact, these approaches are largely complementary. Examples taken from literature on Soviet security policy and on the domestic sources of Soviet expansionism show how positivist theories and methods can be used to clarify holist (or traditionalist) arguments, to sharpen debates, to suggest more telling tests, and to invigorate the field's research agenda.

“Future revolutions will doubtless be directed against the admin- JL istration and not against the political system.” Thus states one writer in the opening sentence of his book on l'Administration au pouvoir. There is little doubt that the institution in France that today bears the brunt of attacks coming from the entire range of the political, economic, and social spectrum, is the French administration—the state bureaucracy that, since the early part of the nineteenth century, has been charged with directing most of the state's affairs. Today, the parties of the Left, Right, and Center; big business, small business, and the propertyless; the privileged and the underprivileged; the in-tellectuals, the students, and the unions—all these groups, that is to say, the French people, are agreed on what they regard to be the excessive and nefarious role that the bureaucracy plays in French life. Few Frenchmen would agree with Francois Gazier, former Director of the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, when he writes in his preface to Belorgey's book that “the French administration, thriving under praise and criticism alike, can at least be credited with one success: it has known how to keep in tune with its times” (p. 7). One is tempted to say that were these words not merely the manifestation of hyperbolic tendencies sometimes common in preface-writing, some courage would have been needed to write them. It is hard to conceive in present-day France of an attempt to sustain the thesis that the administration is in tune with its times.

Three types of thought approach the question of future world order: the naturalrational, positivist-evolutionary, and historicist-dialectical. The normative criterion in the natural-rational approach has, in recent times, most commonly been bound up with the view that liberal pluralism in polities is the condition for a just world order. This view has, however, succumbed both under the critique of positivist-evolutionary political science which argues that authoritarianism is characteristic of early stages of political development, and to the manipulation of “pluralism” in poor countries by powerful external forces (investment, trade union, and intelligence). The positivist-evolutionary approach has two main currents. One is functionalism, of which the transnational and transgovernmental relations versions are currently fashionable. The other is the notion of a global ecological system. Both versions take existing structures of power and social relations as implicit givens from which future trends are extrapolated; they provide no basis for considering the possibility of changes in these structures. The historicist-dialectical approach offers the possibility of understanding change in these basic structures of power and social relations by searching out points of emerging conflict and the alternative conceptions of order which the forces in conflict express.

Existing theories of change in campaign strategies predict cross-national convergence in candidates' linkages to voters and the degree of policy focus and cleavage priming in their appeals. However, the prevailing national patterns of electioneering in Chile, Brazil, and Peru have actually diverged from one another since their transitions from authoritarian rule. Based upon content analysis of television advertising, interviews with campaign staff, and case studies of specific elections in these three countries, this article develops a theory of success contagion that can explain the evolution of presidential campaign strategy in third-wave democracies. The author argues that the first politician to combine a victorious campaign with a successful term as president establishes a model of electioneering that candidates across the ideological spectrum are likely to adopt in the future. Such contagion can occur directly, through politicians' imitation of each other's strategies, or indirectly, with communities of campaign professionals playing an intermediary role. Strategic convergence is less likely in cases of repeatedly poor governing performance. Instead, candidates tend to choose strategies through an inward-oriented process of reacting against previous errors. Initial testing suggests the theory is generalizable to other new democracies with at least moderate organizational continuity across elections.