Despite decades of economic and political liberalization in Latin America, corporate governance among large domestic firms shows remarkable continuity along many dimensions. Most of the largest firms, or business groups, are still widely diversified, closely held, and family controlled. These continuities challenge most theorizing on corporate governance in developed countries and on globalization more generally. A better way to explain stability is to focus on persistent incentives for and advantages of group governance. The core incentives derive largely from endemic volatility and shallow stock markets. Once formed, groups benefit from preferential access to capital, information, and policy. Complementarities among family control, concentrated ownership, and multisectoral diversification further bolster business group resilience.

Examination of abortion policy in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina allows for control of religion, level of development, and (with the exception of Italy) democratic history. Woman’s right to choose to control her body is measured not only by laws on abortion but also by interpretation, access, and policy outcomes to determine how well countries have dealt with reproductive health and abortion in practice. There are three groups with distinct levels of reproductive rights and policies. Public opinion and women’s social, economic, and political position do not explain this variation. Rather, the key factors are, first, class divisions and the differential mobilization of the Catholic church and feminists and, second, their relative influence on right and left politicians and the executive.

Recent findings on radical right parties indicate that their organizational structure is an important variable in their electoral performance. However, they do not explain variation in party organization. The legacies of previous far right organization, particularly from the postwar period, strongly influence the ability of radical right parties to build strong organizations. In Flanders, where far right political parties and organizations persisted after World War II and possessed some political and social legitimacy, radical right parties possessed a structural backbone. In Wallonia, where the far right was decimated after the war and consisted only of fringe elements, radical right parties were unable to build functioning party organizations. More attention should be paid to historical legacies and organizational factors in explaining the trajectories of radical right parties in Europe.

In the discussion of the sources of social capital, it has been stressed that generalized trust is built up by the citizens themselves through a culture that permeates the networks and organizations of civil society. This approach has run into conceptual problems, and empirical evidence has provided only mixed support. An alternate approach is to highlight how social capital is embedded in and linked to formal political and legal institutions. Not all political institutions matter equally, however. Trust thrives most in societies with effective, impartial, and fair street-level bureaucracies. The causal mechanism between these institutional characteristics and generalized trust is illustrated in a cross-national context.

A puzzling aspect of the 1992-95 Bosnian war–the intra-Muslim civil war in northwestern Bosnia–can highlight the role of local elites in capturing important interaction effects between micro-level economic incentives and macro-level ethnic cleavages in civil wars. During civil wars where the broader conflict is cast in macro-ethnic terms, economic incentives can still seriously affect intragroup behavior. Ethnic group unity can be undermined by the presence of charismatic local elites who can guarantee the survival of their local constituents, while providing access to micro-level economic payoffs.

Views on contemporary Russian politics can be divided into two broad groups. The failed democratization school asserts that the transition in Russia is over and that the country has failed to establish the rudiments of a liberal democracy. The democratic evolutionist approach insists that the system remains fluid and dynamic and that the undoubted shortcomings in the quality of Russia’s postcommunist regime can be resolved within the framework of the existing constitutional order. Key issues for future research include problems of class and economic power and their relationship to the political order, diverse forms of elite aggregation and competition, the interaction of geopolitics and democratization, and long-term problems of national and state development.