Volume 40, Number 1, October 2007

Pinochet’s dictatorship is widely believed to have changed Chilean politics by creating a new authoritarian/democratic political cleavage that reorganized the party system and voter alignments. However, religious and class differences have not lost their salience in determining political attitudes in Chile. An original survey focusing primarily on religion shows that religion continues to mold political views along three polarities: irreligion versus religiosity, Catholicism versus Protestantism, and progressive versus traditional forms of religiosity. The irreligious, Protestants, and religiously progressive Catholics place themselves more to the left and are more supportive of the Concertation coalition. Class differences also remain important.

Agriculture has long been one of the most protected sectors in advanced industrial democracies. The rural biases of electoral systems, high organization by farmer interest groups, and an autonomous policy community have allowed agriculture to resist reform. However, market principles and partial liberalization have begun to be introduced. Japan has one of the highest levels of agricultural protection. Political changes, budget constraints, consumer demands, and international pressure all pushed for a major overhaul of Japanese agricultural policies, but international pressure was necessary to produce substantive reforms. International agreements, in particular, play a major role in bringing about domestic reforms in policy areas with strong vested interests.

During the postcommunist transition, inherited welfare states came under intense pressures to retrench and restructure. Most governments initiated reform projects based on a liberal paradigm of reduced entitlements and social sector privatization, moving welfare away from the state toward the market. Yet the patterns of reform diverged in puzzling ways, producing distinct trajectories of change and outcomes. Case studies of three postcommunist states show that the political influence of societal and state-based welfare stakeholders was a key factor in welfare state change. Where political institutions gave stakeholders access, they moderated reforms during recession and sustained a predominant state role in welfare after economic recovery. Where stakeholders were weak, reformist executives retrenched and restructured with little constraint.

How does a nation’s welfare spending affect people’s concern for immigrants in comparison with other needy groups? Economic self-interest and cultural ideology theory and knowledge about immigration rates in welfare states suggest several hypotheses. Multilevel regression analyses of data for eighteen countries from the European Values Survey 1999/2000 demonstrate that a nation’s welfare spending positively affects people’s relative concern for immigrants. However, it is not the level of welfare spending itself but rather the level of immigration that makes people relatively more concerned. These findings suggest that fears of tensions about welfare redistribution toward immigrants is not justified in European countries.

Comparative studies of social capital, operationalized as social trust between citizens, have revealed two major puzzles. First, why has social capital eroded in the U.S. and other liberal welfare regimes, while it is stable in social democratic and conservative welfare regimes? Second, why does the group of social democratic regimes have extremely high levels of social trust? The answer to both puzzles lies in the presence or absence of a poor and culturally distinct underclass. The social democratic welfare regimes hinder, while the liberal welfare regimes generate, such underclass phenomena.

This article reviews four recent books on nationalist mobilization and ethnic violence in the former Yugoslavia. The focus on political elites as instigators of ethnic conflict is too narrow. A fully adequate causal explanation of ethnic violence requires closer attention to contextual factors, especially competing nationalist narratives as elaborated by religious and secular intellectual elites. Because nationalist myths, symbols, and narratives play a greater role in nationalist mobilization than in class or issue-specific politics, causal explanations of nationalist mobilization must satisfy Weber’s requirement of  adequacy on the level of meaning. Theoretically driven generalizations have a limited explanatory potential in explaining specific instances of nationalist mobilization.