The Journal of Comparative Politics

“Rituals of respect” are recurrent, public, and reciprocal political practices. In Sufi-majority Senegal, such practices first facilitated accommodation among a variety of groups in potential conflict, and later facilitated tolerance, then respect, and eventually democracy. The social construction of horizontal rituals of respect between religious groups, especially Sufis and Catholics, and reciprocal vertical rituals of respect between the secular state and virtually all religious groups, have created this “twin tolerations”- friendly environment. Three of the major dimensions of this pattern—a “co-celebratory” dimension of diverse religions, a consensual state-religion “policy cooperation” dimension, and a “principled distance” dimension of support for human rights and democracy—are also prominent in several countries which have large Muslim populations and are widely seen as having been democracies for the last ten years, namely, Indonesia, India, and Albania.

In the United States, considerable evidence documents the power of partisanship to shape voter preferences. But does partisanship have similar powers beyond American shores? Observational evidence leads some in this old debate to answer yes, but others to contend partisanship merely restates party vote. Experimentation can clarify what powers, if any, partisanship wields over voters in specific countries. If effects differ across countries, then scholars can turn their attention to explaining why. Survey experiments conducted in three countries where multiple parties viably compete for legislative seats—Great Britain, Hungary, and Poland—demonstrate that, when cues are available, party identifiers often follow their party’s lead when expressing policy preferences. However, the pattern of results suggests this power may strengthen with party system crystallization.

Has democratization in Mexico begun to tilt policies in favor of consumers and away from entrenched interest groups, as some scholars predict? Evidence from post-crisis banking reform efforts during 1995 to 2000 suggests that a sharp increase in interparty electoral competition did have salutary effects for consumers. It created incentives for the PRI government, with legislative support from the PAN, to improve capital adequacy and liberalize foreign investment that stabilized the banking system. However, high party discipline—low intraparty competition—created incentives for the PRI-PAN to collude to implement profit-padding regulations that benefitted bankers and harmed consumers. Party discipline appears to be a significant obstacle for consumer-friendly regulatory reforms in Mexico.

Existing explanations of judicial reform emphasize the positive effects of electoral competition. However, multiple, competing, and even contradictory mechanisms behind this association obfuscate causation, and variation in the timing and content of reforms remains puzzling for these accounts. Leveraging a “most similar” comparative design at the subnational level across three Mexican states, and drawing on archival analysis and interviews with judges and other legal elites, principled ideological factors are found to shape judicial reform. That is, judicial reform is less a mechanical side effect of increasing electoral competition and more the product of principled, purposeful action. These findings emphasize the role of agency and ideas in building democratic institutions.

What determines the identity category to which individuals feel they most belong? What is the political significance of one’s proclaimed identity? Recent research addresses these questions using surveys that explicitly ask individuals about their identity. Yet little is known about the nature of the attachments conveyed in responses to identity questions. The findings of a set of studies and experiments investigating these reported attachments suggest that the purported identity captured in survey responses varies significantly within subjects over time; changes in people’s primary identity can be highly influenced by situational triggers; and changes in purported self-identity do not imply a corresponding change in policy preferences. These results are drawn from three studies that vary in terms of design, country sample, and research instrument.

Scholarship on the politics of immigration has increased impressively among political scientists and scholars of comparative politics. The books analyzed in this review all synthesize and, in their own way, build upon the literature that has evolved over the past two decades, addressing questions at the core of this literature or posing new questions. Perhaps most important, each takes a comparative approach to the politics of immigration, focusing on post-World War II immigration policies in Western Europe; variations in immigrant conflict among different immigrant groups, across localities and cross-nationally; differences in citizenship policy among countries at similar levels of development and changes in well-established policies over time; and the connections between naturalization policy and naturalization rates and the historical relationship of colonizing, noncolonizing, and settler countries with immigrant populations.

The events of the Arab Spring have suggested the necessity of rethinking the logic of authoritarian persistence in the Arab world. However, the internal variation in regime collapse and survival observed in the region confirms earlier analyses that the comportment of the coercive apparatus, especially its varying will to repress, is pivotal to determining the durability of the authoritarian regimes. At the same time, the trajectory of the Arab Spring highlights an empirical novelty for the Arab world, namely, the manifestation of huge, cross-class, popular protest in the name of political change, as well as a new factor that abetted the materialization of this phenomenon—the spread of social media. The latter will no doubt be a game changer for the longevity of authoritarian regimes worldwide from now on.

How does the strength of a state’s coercive apparatus under autocracy affect the likelihood of democratic transition? While a broad range of literature posits a negative link between repression and democracy, empirical models of the determinants of democratization rarely include measures that capture this relationship. An original panel dataset with a global scope from 1950?2002 enables an empirical assessment of whether coercive capacity is negatively associated with democracy. The dataset demonstrates that increased coercive capacity under autocracy has a strong, robust negative impact on both a country’s level of democracy as well as the likelihood of democratization. The analysis suggests that empirical studies of democratization should include measures of repression to account for the widely assumed link between coercive capacity and autocracy.

Much of the scholarly debate over Islam and democracy has centered on what has been referred to as the “inclusion-moderation hypothesis,” and whether democratic institutions are capable of incorporating hostile religious actors. To build on this debate, the concept of inclusion and the expectations about its political effects should be broadened to include the interaction between religion-state relationships and democratization processes in predominantly Muslim societies. Inviting ambivalently democratic religious actors into the public democratic space produces dynamics of both political moderation and religious change. The mechanisms of this theoretical model can be evaluated by tracing the evolution of two Islamist political parties in Algeria, the MSP-Hamas and Ennahda-Islah.

The changing nature of state-business relations in China can be analyzed in light of recent privatization experiences. Drawing on an analytical framework based on statist literature, the pervasive governance problems occurring during the privatization of local government-owned firms can be explained by two contributing factors. These are the state’s declining capacity to regulate the market and its reduced autonomy from emerging elites. Consequently, local states were transformed from those in which there was “embedded autonomy” to those with a “clientelistic” form. Thus, the conventional wisdom that local states have played a positive role in China’s economic development is subject to question. A more nuanced understanding of cronyism helps explain the relationship between the Chinese Communist Party and capitalists.

Decentralization advances patronage politics in distinct ways. First, in decentralized states both central and local politicians distribute patronage to enhance their political support. Second, local elections reveal information to central leaders about the geographic distribution of electorally salient voters. Central leaders can use this information to target particularistic benefits to these voters. Third, elected local politicians have individual strategies to distribute patronage, in spite of or in addition to the clientelistic strategies of the political parties they represent. Evidence from India indicates that decentralization has contributed to more extensive distribution of patronage in decentralized states. Data from Indian states and villages illustrates the incentives at the state and local levels that shape the distribution of patronage.

Many theories attempt to explain European Union (EU) integration—the gradual and voluntary transfer of national sovereignty to the supranational level of governance—but few studies have addressed this phenomenon from a grassroots perspective. The books under review shed light on the human dimension of EU integration, utilizing sociological and ethnographic approaches. In particular, these recent studies show how sociological approaches to political science can breathe life into a debate that is oftentimes too academic and theoretically inconclusive. They address a number of questions about the future of Europe, including the extent to which EU citizens identify with Europe and the legitimacy of EU integration in the eyes of European citizens.

Twenty years after the collapse of communism, a rough consensus in the literature on postcommunist politics is that the past matters. Many questions remain, however, about exactly how, when, and why the past matters, especially in terms of political values and behavior. An original theoretical framework facilitates the consideration of the effect of communist-era legacies on postcommunist political values and behavior. The framework includes a set of mechanisms by which these effects can be transmitted and a set of particular values and behaviors whose legacy effects may be particularly important. Illustrating its utility, the framework is applied to an examination of the issue of trust in political parties.

Despite the fact that China and Vietnam have been the world’s two fastest growing economies over the past two decades, their income inequality patterns are very different. An examination of the political institutions in the two countries shows that profound differences between these polities influence distributional choices. In particular, as compared to China, elite institutions in Vietnam encourage the construction of broader policymaking coalitions, have more competitive selection processes, and place more constraints on executive decision making. As a result, stronger political motivations exist for Vietnamese leaders to provide equalizing transfers that limit inequality growth among provinces than for Chinese leaders.

An increasingly large literature on patronage has developed within political science in recent years. Yet this body of scholarship has thus far failed to explain variation in patronage allocation across countries. An original theory based on the logic of institutional choice, whereby political leaders allocate patronage in accordance with the varying political threats they face, explains this variation. Two variables—geography and visibility—capture this variation and thus explain patronage allocation. The theory is tested and validated through a comparative analysis of Rwanda and Uganda, whose current regimes are remarkably similar in origin and structure. The analysis extends to previous regimes in both countries.

What explains the range of nonvictorious outcomes experienced by rebel groups in civil wars? Varying combinations of two structural factors produce different types of rebel groups, whose organizational configurations predict their outcomes. These factors are the external resources provided by cross-border support networks found within regional state systems, and the status reversal grievances produced by the politics of fragmented authority in weak states. Insurgent types are then associated with a given level politico-military effectiveness and a corresponding fate. Eight Ugandan insurgencies illustrate variation in outcomes across groups within a context of contentious domestic and regional politics that controls for the state, regime, and time period.

Corruption has become a key concern throughout the world. Most of what is known about corruption comes from instances in which misdeeds become public, generating a scandal. Why do some acts of corruption become scandals and others do not? Corruption scandals are not triggered by corruption, but rather are initially caused by dynamics of political competition within government. Insiders leak information on misdeeds in order to gain power within the coalition or party in power. A powerful opposition, contrary to common belief, acts as a constraint for insiders, making corruption scandals less likely. These arguments are evaluated using empirical evidence from Argentina and Chile (1989–2008). The findings support the notion that corruption scandals emerge as a consequence of political competition.

Assessing four recent books on participatory budgeting and other participatory innovations in Latin America, this review article identifies these works as illustrative of a “second generation” of scholarship on what the author calls the “Participatory Promise.” Following upon the first generation of mostly single case studies of mostly successful cases, this second generation of scholarship tends to draw on a wealth of data from multiple comparable cases, both successful and unsuccessful. The end result is a clear social scientific advancement in understanding these real-world political phenomena that have demanded the attention of analysts and practitioners of contemporary democracy in Latin America for the last two decades.