Volume 38, Number 1, October 2005

Ethnic cleavages have significantly influenced electoral volatility in Latin America, but not in the way that theories of social cleavages and electoral volatility would predict. The failure of the traditional political parties in Latin American to represent the indigenous population adequately has led indigenous people gradually to shift their votes away from these parties, resulting in high levels of electoral volatility in indigenous areas. This argument is explored through a national-level analysis of the determinants of electoral volatility in Latin America as a whole and a provincial-level analysis of the causes of electoral volatility in Bolivia.

What causal factors drive the diffusion of policy innovations across countries? Bolivia’s decision to adopt the Chilean model of pension privatization was not imposed by powerful external forces; even in a poor, aid-dependent country, domestic decision makers had considerable latitude. Policymaking was also not driven by the symbolic quest for international legitimacy, but rather by the pragmatic goal to resolve clear, widely recognized problems. Most important, problem solving did not comply with ideal-typical standards of comprehensive rationality; instead, policymakers relied on cognitive shortcuts, especially the heuristics of availability, representativeness, and anchoring, that facilitate decision making but risk distortions and biases in judgment.

Why do different export platforms appeal to different types of investors? The origins of investment in the Dominican Republic’s export processing zones can be traced to two features of their regional environments: the nature of the region’s relationship to the world market and the power of the region’s indigenous capitalist class. The first predicts whether zones will lure investors; the second, who will invest in them. Thus, the traditionally integrated sugar growing southeast and tobacco, cocoa, and coffee growing north feature successful zones, while the traditionally isolated import-substituting and subsistence agricultural regions to the south have unsuccessful ones. The traditionally foreign-dominated southeastern zones are dominated by foreigners, while the traditionally domesticated northern zones are dominated by Dominicans.

Scholars of decentralization have explained degrees and patterns of intergovernmental conflict with William Riker’s classic argument that centralized, disciplined party systems with high degrees of national-subnational concordance in partisan loyalties are able to limit such conflict. Democratic Spain challenges this argument. It mixes a centralized political party system and highly disciplined national organizations with a decentralized and decentralizing state. While subnational interests fail to aggregate with the party system and the national parliament, they organize in the poorly institutionalized arena of intergovernmental distributive conflict. Regional governments defend their interests in bilateral relations with the center that undermine national partisan and legislative attempts to control the decentralization process.

Despite a fundamental shift in China since 1978, elements of continuity persist. The concept of path dependence can be refined by distinguishing two levels on which policy is made and implemented: tactical and programmatic/strategic. Path dependence is lodged in institutional practices, not necessarily in the content of particular programs. This formulation offers a way to account for continuity amid change and a means of extending the concept of path dependence to polities where continuity occurs outside of the democratic electoral accountability of politicians to constituents. Recent Chinese unemployment insurance and poverty alleviation programs illustrate this argument.

All states struggle to construct controversial facilities that focus costs asymmetrically on local communities while providing benefits to the larger population. The policy instruments employed by state agencies and their plasticity under citizens’ pressure vary widely; some bureaucracies remain wedded to older coercive tools, while others develop new ones that alter citizen preferences. The five books under review address the issue of the state’s handling and management of contentious civil society. They show how authorities relate to opposition and underscore the need to analyze states in terms of flexibility and rigidity, rather than strength or weakness.