Can governments elected under mixed-member majoritarian (mmm) electoral systems use geographically targeted spending to increase their chances of staying in office, and if so, how? Although twenty-eight countries use mmm electoral systems, scant research has addressed this question. The authors explain how mmm’s combination of electoral systems in two unlinked tiers creates a distinct strategic environment in which a large party and a small party can trade votes in one tier for votes in the other tier in a way that increases the number of seats won by both. They then explain how governing parties dependent on vote trading can use geographically targeted spending to cement it. These propositions are tested using original data from Japan (2003–2013) and Mexico (2012–2016). In both cases, municipalities in which the supporters of governing parties split their ballots as instructed were found to have received more money after elections. The findings have broad implications for research on mmm electoral systems, distributive politics, and the politics of Japan and Mexico.

This review essay of four recent books on democratic transitions is written from the standpoint of contemporary South African politics. Each of the books takes the Schumpetarian model of democratic politics for granted, and in the course of evaluating them the author explores the advantages and limitations of that model for thinking about the prospects for democracy in South Africa. He concludes that the Schumpeterian model diverts attention from questions that should concern promoters of democracy. The most important such questions deal with the internal structure of political parties, public organizations, and civil institutions.

In his book The War Trap Bruce Bueno de Mesquita claims to offer a deductive theory of international conflict based on the assumption that foreign policy makers attempt to maximize their expected utility. The theory is subjected to a systematic empirical test that seems to provide impressive confirmation. The first part of this article examines Bueno de Mesquita's theory and argues that it cannot be derived from his assumptions. The second part examines the operational version of the theory, which was the one actually tested, and argues that it can be more plausibly interpreted as a version of a different theory—one that Bueno de Mesquita claims to have discredited. The essay concludes by discussing the significance of this book with regard to the question of whether theories of individual rational choice can explain foreign policy decisions.

Are the Indian nuclear and space programs driven primarily by defense or development motives? What are India's economic and technological capabilities in these fields?

Defense motives are strong, but are offset by the potential consequences of programs of nuclear weapons and delivery systems that could produce less rather than more security by provoking counter-reactions in Pakistan and China. The underlying development motives are equally strong, but the programs may not be cost-efficient in the short run. Ultimately, the justification for these programs is based on a dual argument: strategic circumstances justify the maintenance of the nuclear weapons option through development of civilian nuclear energy and space programs irrespective of cost or efficiency, while civilian needs in nuclear energy and space-based telecommunications and meteorological systems provide the defense sector with nuclear weapons and delivery systems options. Although at present neither may seem economically justifiable independently of the other, together they provide a reinforcing defense-development justification.

Henry Ashby Turner's recent suggestions concerning the analysis of fascism in terms of its relationship to the processes we have come to understand as “modernization” are too important and interesting to pass without critical comment. So much of what Turner says is persuasive that we run the risk of uncritically accepting what might be the chaff of his discussion along with its welcome substance.

There are at least two types of reservations with respect to Turner's account. One type turns on the general thesis he entertains; the second deals with the specifics of his argument.

Twentieth-Century history provides ample evidence of the variable nature of the authority of political regimes, yet contemporary social scientists devote much more attention to the potential sources of legitimate authority than to the causes and consequences of its absence. In order to understand the very different types of authority that a regime may display, and changes in its authority through time, we must be able to account for the repudiation of regimes as well as for their legitimation. Moreover, it is necessary to explain why so many regimes long remain in intermediate categories, neither fully legitimate nor fully repudiated. The purpose of this paper is to differentiate among the types of authority of a regime, to analyze differences in dynamic changes in authority, and to propose hypotheses specifying influences upon the ability of a regime's leaders to obtain support and compliance from its nominal population.

The association of states known as the Commonwealth of Nations has received little attention from students of international politics. Outside the Commonwealth the association has, on the whole, been ignored; alongside other institutions and alliances, its significance is not great; and the foreign policies of the ten states that now belong to it can to a large extent be accounted for, except in the case of Britain, without reference to the fact of their membership. Within the Commonwealth there has been study of it, but the impulse behind this has been provided less by intellectual curiosity than by the desire to see it prosper: British students have been themselves in the grip of the myth of the Commonwealth, which has become in Britain, along with much else, a totem which it is scarcely good form to examine with an innocent eye.

Economists have only recently begun to characterize the behavior of the state as rentor profit-seeking. One of the ways in which the rent-seeking state may maximize the resources it extracts from taxpayers is through diversification of the tax revenue base. Empirical evidence presented in this paper may help to explain the extent to which countries are able to engage in this form of rent seeking. The highly developed country's ability to diversify its tax base is constrained by the ease of exit of taxable assets from its jurisdiction; with the exception of this limitation, countries with more diversified tax bases collect more revenue relative to national income. This conclusion does not hold, however, for geographic diversification (i.e., federalism). The case is different for developing countries: although they may have a more diversified tax base than developed countries, they are unable to exploit it because of administrative weakness; therefore, rent seeking on the part of the state may be predicted by more conventional factors such as income or trade.

This article examines the significant contributions of recent research on immigration and integration in Europe and North America and highlights the potential of such research to influence the social sciences. The first part of the article advances a framework for analyzing four types of scholarship and then applies that framework to the study of immigration and integration. Type 1 scholarship develops theoretical or conceptual insights for scholars within a subfield, type 2 tests or refines theories that are specific to a particular dimension of the subfield, type 3 imports broader comparative or social scientific concepts to reshape the study of a topic within a subfield, and type 4 uses evidence from a subfield to develop theoretical tools that can be applied more broadly in the social sciences. The second part of the article reviews four books that highlight the empirical frontiers of immigration and integration research. Each book tends to epitomize one of the four types of scholarship, but together they demonstrate the possibility of making contributions on multiple registers. The article concludes by suggesting promising frontiers within the immigration and integration subfield and by defining the concept of a comparative politics of identity and sketching out its terrain. Since immigration and integration researchers are centrally interested in the role of identity in politics, they have the potential to be pivotal in advancing this new arena of inquiry.

A credible opposition is necessary for democratic accountability. However, in a multiparty democracy, a credible opposition may fail to emerge when it is in the strategic interest of political parties to collude rather than compete, effectively extinguishing all credible opposition. The author argues that illicit collusion among parties on a representative council is more likely when all viable parties win seats and are thus able to enter into a self-binding commitment to jointly engage in misconduct without risk of exposure. Conversely, when at least one party fails to win representation on the council, there is a credible opposition with the incentive and ability to threaten exposure of rent seeking among council members. The theory is tested using a regression discontinuity design where the electoral threshold to win a single seat is, within a narrow band, an exogenous determinant of whether or not there is an out-party or credible opposition. Exploiting the fact that Mali's decentralization produces within-country variation in both electoral and governance outcomes, the author uses data from commune council elections alongside local-level public goods provision as a measure of rent seeking. Poorer public goods provision is indeed more likely when all political parties in a district win seats on the council. To show that collusion is the mechanism driving this relationship, the author tests several observable implications in the data and uses qualitative evidence as illustration. This examination of when it is in the strategic interest of parties to engage in uncompetitive behavior contributes to the literature on when elections fail to produce democratic accountability.

Does democratization increase commitment to multilateral security? In this article, the author argues that democratic transitions increase the incentives of states to cooperate in multilateral security and that this is observable in the rate at which new democracies ratify international treaties of arms control, nuclear nonproliferation, and disarmament. New democrats, she asserts, seek a positive international reputation as an insurance mechanism against future regime reversals. By becoming “good citizens” of the global system, newly elected democratic leaders seek to expose potential conspirators to the possibility of diplomatic and economic sanctions if they were to attempt to reverse the transition. First, using original data on the ratification rates of 201 states for twenty major arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament treaties, the present study shows conclusively that new democracies outpace older democracies and all autocracies in committing to multilateral security. Second, the study empirically tests whether the swift ratification of security treaties works as a consolidation strategy and finds that, indeed, it does. That is, new democracies that commit to nonproliferation and arms control treaties are less likely to experience a regime reversal.

With The growing academic and governmental interest in quantitative research on nations, it is becoming increasingly important to separate substantive findings from the technical arcana in which they are embedded. In recognition of this need, this report extracts and consolidates the major results of the Dimensionality of Nations (DON) project.

The Don project (6) has been in existence since 1962 and is now in its second phase. Phase I of DON defined the major dimensions of variation among all nations for the mid-1950's and the grouping of nations on these dimensions. During this phase much of the methodological underbrush surrounding the use on cross-national data of its major mathematical model—factor analysis—was cleared away, and some measure of control was developed over problems of error and noncomparability in the data.

OECD economies were able to reconcile the pursuit of welfare state expansion and full employment during the first decades of the postwar period. Yet the trade-off between these two policy objectives widened in recent decades. To explore the question ofwhy this change occurred, this article extends familiar models of wage determination by adding a number of parameters that capture cross-national differences among welfare states. The model identifies the conditions under which unions deliver wage moderation in exchange for social policy benefits and transfers and explores how different labor-market institutions magnify or decrease the impact of wage choices on the equilibrium level of employment. Next, the author examines the impact of changes in the composition of social policy expenditures and in the level of the tax burden on. unions' wage choices. She shows that mature welfare states, characterized by high tax burdens and a high share of transfers devoted to labor-market outsiders, reduce the effectiveness ofwage moderation in lowering unemployment. The author tests the main propositions using OECD panel data for the period 1960–95.

Because alternative sources of energy cannot be developed fast enough in the short term, the problems of energy security in the next decade will continue to focus on oil. The problem is not that the world will run out of oil in this century, but that low-cost oil is heavily concentrated in the Persian Gulf, an area of domestic and international political instability. The current oil glut and soft markets will not solve the energy security problem. Market forces are a necessary but not sufficient element in an effective strategy for energy security. The same can be said about an effective American military presence in the area. Current enthusiasm for enhancing military capabilities can provide only part of a solution when we are dealing with a transnational system such as international energy. Successful analysis must draw on insights both from traditional realism and from studies of power and interdependence. Theories of interdependence and transnational systems are not based upon a world of detente, but remain relevant to the complex threats to national security we face, such as energy in the 1980s.

Most of the writing on foreign policy in the less developed countries stresses either the importance of idiosyncratic sources of policy or the identification of a number of relatively long-term factors which influence the formation of policy. These studies are helpful in many ways, but in one important respect they are unsatisfying. They do not give us a clear picture of how foreign policy relates to the political and economic problems that constitute the essence of being a less developed country.

This essay examines the balance of constraints and advantages set by the international environment, as that balance impinges upon national decisions relating to the acquisition of nuclear weaponry. The effect of the balance is to reduce constraints against such acquisition, and to increase advantages; thus, some increase in the number of nuclear-weapons states is likely. It is possible that the general and local effects on international stability which would follow from such an increase in number may not affect the stability of the central balance adversely. The effects in local nuclearized environments will vary, depending in part on the policies of outsiders, but any assumption of massive instability would be unwarranted.

Is foreign economic expansion in some sense an “institutional necessity” for corporate capitalism in the United States? Is there something inherent in the internal dynamics of American capitalism that creates such strong pressures for foreign private investment that the U.S. Government must consider the creation and preservation of an international system that facilitates such expansion to be among our most vital national interests? What yardstick can measure the opportunities, the needs, die necessity of investing abroad, or tie cost and risk if tiie option of foreign private investment is threatened

We know more about why laws on violence against women (vaw) were adopted than about how much and in what ways these laws affect society. The authors argue that even weakly enforced laws can contribute to positive social change. They theorize the expressive power of vaw legislation, and present evidence for a cautiously optimistic assessment of current trends on violence against women and the ways that vaw laws affect social norms. Focusing on a time of major legal change related to vaw in Mexico, this article explores trends in behavior and attitudes related to violence by analyzing four waves of the National Survey on the Dynamics of Household Relations (endireh), which include detailed interviews with thousands of Mexican women. The authors find that over this period, the share of women experiencing intimate-partner abuse declined, attitudes condoning violence shifted, reporting rates rose, and most women learned about legislation to protect their rights. These changes are consistent with the authors’ expectations about the expressive power of anti-violence legislation.

At the beginning of the 1990s, a wave of democratization raised new hopes for peace in Africa, but as the decade progressed, violent politics spread and formed two large arcs of conflict that weakened or even collapsed states could not contain. This review article examines five recent books that address the potential impact of identity politics on civil violence in Africa. Two of the authors—Donald Horowitz and Ted Gurr—address these issues in a global comparison, while the other three—Luis Martinez, Stephen Ellis, and Mahmood Mamdani—examine important African instances of protracted internal warfare, in Algeria, Liberia, and Rwanda, respectively. Is identity politics the primary instigator of disorder? What is die impact of a prolonged period of state crisis upon communal relationships? The volumes under review offer useful insights, but large questions remain.