The Journal of Comparative Politics

Why do state policies toward religious minorities—shaped by long-term historical institutions—change? Although explanations based on secularization, religion, ideology, rational choice, and international context have advanced our knowledge of the origins of freedoms for religious minorities, they have not sufficiently addressed the interaction between international pressure and domestic actors. In an effort to develop a synthetic theory of religious freedoms, this article argues that the implementation of international norms on religious freedoms depends on the availability of relatively stronger domestic actors who support the reforms due to either their material interests or normative commitments. This argument is demonstrated by an in-depth study of liberal reforms for Christian minorities in Turkey in the 2000s.

A growing literature argues that division of powers matter for economic growth by increasing the security of property rights. However, less effort has been devoted to examining the political and institutional conditions under which property rights have economic effects. This paper emphasizes that the economic effects of property rights depend on the division of powers between veto players, meaning that the interaction of veto players and property rights matters for economic growth. This argument is tested empirically on a panel of developing countries. The results show that the economic effects of property rights increase significantly as power sharing between veto players increases. This suggests that property rights matter mainly in the context of institutions dividing political powers between veto players.

Institutional factors are increasingly highlighted to explain the “resource curse” or, why some countries with rich natural resources have little long-term economic and political development. This paper makes the analytical distinction between institutions of extraction (institutions enabling and protecting rents extraction) and institutions of redistribution (institutions of power and revenue sharing). The paper uses Angola to illustrate that the former are protected and buttressed to enable rents-appropriation, whereas the latter are side-lined and impaired to prevent power and wealth redistribution. The strengths of the former and the weaknesses of the latter have led to monopolization, elite predation, and usurpation. Angola also strengthens the hypothesis that countries are cursed only when the oil boom appears before accountable and democratic state institutions are established and consolidated.

India is often said to be going through an “age of intolerance” manifest in extensive demands for censorship in the wake of cultural offense. This study uses an analysis of a case of sub-national variation in the demand for and supply of censorship to suggest that, rather than merely being a manifestation of intolerance or extremism, “seeking offense” may also be used as a political strategy in ethnic politics. Moreover, this strategy may achieve a special potency in contexts in which the “offended” group can make a credible claim of being neglected by incumbents. The findings suggest that censorship in India may be a medium through which demands for equal treatment and substantive inclusion play out politically.

When do incumbent parties that expect to win elections under majoritarian electoral rules adopt more proportional electoral systems and forgo seat-maximization? Electoral system reforms from two different political contexts, late 19th-century Belgium and post-communist Bulgaria disrupt predictions that PR is adopted by parties facing electoral defeat or high uncertainty. I argue that dominant party status and the extra-institutional tactics of the opposition can cause incumbents to eschew seat-maximization. When a powerful ruling party is more concerned about the stability of the regime than about victory in the upcoming election, it can accept a tactical loss of legislative seats in exchange for gains in the arena of regime transition.

Political trust can have a major impact on democratic politics by affecting political participation, institutional effectiveness, and policy choices. Given the significance of political trust for the functioning of democracy, it is important to know how the way citizens relate with political actors and institutions changes in times of extraordinary shock. Using Greece as a case, this article shows that during times of major distress, the way schools and hospitals are run—the “social” performance of government—has an important effect on political trust. This effect is stronger during extraordinary circumstances than under normal conditions. The evidence suggests that international creditors must pay more systematic attention to the administrative effectiveness of social welfare institutions rather than focusing solely on economic performance.

During the third wave of democratization, all Latin American countries except Cuba have had competitive political regimes, but the quality or level of democracy has varied significantly across countries and over time. One of the best predictors of this variance across countries and time is each country’s experience with competitive politics before 1978. Even controlling for a wide range of other explanations, countries with more democratic heritages before 1978 have higher levels of democracy in the contemporary period. This finding, in turn, raises another question: what accounts for the effects of past levels of democracy on the post-1978 period? A hybrid fixed-effects model shows that democratic trajectories are institutionalized through political parties and judicial institutions. Countries that had institutionalized parties under democracy and supreme court justices who served under democracy in the pre-1978 period have been more able to build high-level democracy in the contemporary period.

When parties adopt internal elections to choose candidates, power shifts from party leaders to party activists. Some authors suggest that this results in more ideologically extreme candidates and helps party outsiders. However, based on surveys of legislative candidates in Mexico’s 2006 national elections, two findings are evident. First, candidates chosen via internal elections were significantly more moderate and more likely to be party insiders than candidates chosen by party leaders. Second, organizational dynamics explain these outcomes. Because in Mexico legislative primary elections get little media attention, candidates rely on factional networks to mobilize support. Successful candidates appeal across factional divisions, resulting in winners who are more moderate, but not less connected to the party.

Why are citizens willing to cast ballots for corrupt politicians? On the one hand, voters may simply lack information about corruption. On the other hand, voters may knowingly overlook corruption when politicians otherwise perform well in office, delivering public goods to their constituents. Citizen responses to a nationwide survey in Brazil indicate that the vast majority of voters express a willingness to punish corrupt politicians, regardless of politician performance. High income voters form a partial exception to this overall rejection of corruption; they react less negatively to information about corruption and more strongly to information about competence than the general population. These findings imply that specific, credible, and accessible information will lead most voters to punish corrupt politicians at the polls.

Recent research on political representation in new democracies indicates that the quality of representation in Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe is substandard when compared to the older, Western democracies. There are, however, theoretical reasons to presume that microstates form an exception to this rule, especially in light of the natural closeness between citizens and politicians in these states. On the basis of an in-depth, qualitative analysis of the characteristics and quality of political representation in the microstates of St. Kitts and Nevis, Seychelles, and Palau, this expectation is rejected. Instead, it is found that the small-scale political dimensions of microstates engender a political environment that is marked by personalistic politics and the pervasiveness of various forms of particularism.

Why is the Korean welfare state underdeveloped? From the institutionalist point of view, it is evident that existing institutions influence the policy preferences of key actors of welfare politics: organized labor and employers on the demand side and politicians on the supply side. Distributive demands of organized labor have been satisfied by affluent big business (or chaebol) through an implicit or explicit cross-class alliance with parochial enterprise unions, and the nation’s single-member-district electoral rules have induced politicians to sell geographically targeted benefits rather than promising social welfare for all beyond their district. As a result, despite the nation’s successful economic growth and democratization, neither the supply nor the demand side has been conducive to significant welfare state expansion in Korea.

State legitimacy is a concept that is frequently invoked, rarely defined, and notoriously difficult to pin down. The four books under review represent three schools of thought that dominate the scholarship on the legitimacy of the African state. The first approach relies on universal standards of governance to assess state legitimacy. The second attributes legitimacy to culturally specific understandings of appropriate forms of power, and the third uses institutional coherence to evaluate the legitimacy of state rules. While each approach contains insightful and convincing pieces of scholarship, no one provides a satisfying account of legitimacy and the state. A more holistic approach to state legitimacy as a dynamic, interactive process is needed.

Standard theories about elections in Africa suggest that they are little more than ethnic headcounts. Data from an exit poll conducted on Election Day in Ghana’s 2008 election challenges this view. The two main parties, the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP), drew support from many ethnic groups; and there was little evidence of ethnic block voting. Rather, voters’ beliefs about the parties and incumbent performance were the main determinants of vote choice. Evaluations of the attributes of the NDC and NPP shaped the outcome of Ghana’s 2008 election far more than the ethnic identity of the candidates. These results hold important implications for understanding voting, parties, and government performance in multiethnic democracies.

The antigovernment protests that erupted in one ethnic region of Ethiopia can be attributed to the group’s historical grievances or to its access to mobilizing resources. However, conventional explanations are insufficient in accounting for protest patterns in terms of their geographic distribution or varying levels of violence. The likelihood of protest onset was inversely related to local heterogeneity, intraethnic as well as interethnic. Protest violence spiraled through the interaction between ethnic homogeneity and the government’s policing strategy. Woundings were less likely to occur in localities where protesters were repressed by police forces staffed by their own co-ethnics.

Latin America’s political economy has shifted in the three decades since the return to democratization, with the inflationary crises of the 1980s fading into the past. One consequence of this change is a reduction in the electoral salience of inflation. While electoral support for the incumbent in the 1980s and 1990s was strongly tied to his or her ability to prevent increases in prices, in the 2000–2010 period there was no significant association between inflation rates and election outcomes. Instead, incumbents who presided over a growing economy in the last decade reaped electoral benefits. The importance of the economy for electoral outcomes varies over time and even across economic indicators.

Latin American women are less likely than Latin American men to express a preference for democracy. This gender gap in support for democracy is partly a function of the level of attachment that women as a group have for the democratic regime, and this level of attachment is determined by the mode in which democratic transition occurs. Four models examining the gendered attitude-toward-regime decision in seventeen countries over four time periods show that when women are involved as significant political actors at the time of the democratic transition, their support for democracy varies in ways similar to their male counterparts. When women have lesser roles, gender specific behaviors emerge.

Why did a highly redistributive, nationalized health care system emerge in the UK, where the Left was comparatively weak, while a more redistributively neutral, cash-centric, insurance-based system was pursued in Sweden, where the Left was strong? The explanation is two fold. First, in contrast to the Swedish Social Democrats, the weakness of the British Labour Party constrained it to pursue redistribution via health policy. Second, given the redistributive goals of the National Health Service, it became imperative for the Labour Party to construct a system that would be difficult for future Conservative governments to retrench. More generally, this formulation posits rational actors operating in the kinds of processes typically studied by historical institutionalists. The result is a tendency for a type of path dependence by design.

The tension between immigration and redistribution has attracted increased attention in recent years. Many authors argue, based on economic self-interest theory, that there is a negative relationship between support for redistribution and preferred levels of immigration. Notwithstanding the role of economic self-interest, there is in fact a multitude of motivations that moderate the relationship between preferences for redistribution and attitudes toward immigration. A model of preferences for immigration shows that self-interested and strongly reciprocal individuals experience a tension between immigration and redistribution, while egalitarians do not experience this tension. Humanitarians express a general willingness to help those who are worse off, immigrants included, but this motivation does not affect their preferences for redistribution.