Volume 42, Number 1, October 2009

While democracy is widely expected to control corruption, by commonly used yardsticks democratic India has done no better than China at checking corruption, and may have fared worse. Important aspects of corruption in India reflect institutional and political shortcomings of its democracy. Differentiating among types of corruption, and among the kinds of monopolies they embody, helps account for that contrast. Further, in the absence of economic development, democracy may have particular vulnerabilities to corruption, as economic development involves not just resources but also institutions protecting opportunities and assets while restraining excesses and abuses. Thus, prospects for reform in a poor democracy are not encouraging, even by comparison to liberal authoritarian regimes.

The relationship among economic contexts, political institutions, and the dynamics of national policymaking can be examined through an analysis of contemporary French and German labor market reform. Economic austerity and the failure of earlier policymaking models have led to qualitative shifts in the incentives facing governments and interest groups. These shifts have produced new bargaining patterns—”competitive interventionism” in France and “conflictual corporatism” in Germanywithin formal institutional stability. These changes have implications for understanding national models of capitalism and institutional change and require rethinking the relationship between formal institutions and the dynamics of bargaining across economic and historical contexts.

After introducing pharmaceutical patents in the 1990s, Brazil subsequently adjusted the patent system to ameliorate its effects on drug prices, while Mexico introduced measures that reinforce and intensify these effects. The different trajectories are due to the nature of the actors pushing for reform and the patterns of coalitional formation and political mobilization. In Brazil government demand for expensive, patented drugs made health-oriented patent reform a priority. The existence of an autonomous local pharmaceutical sector allowed the Ministry of Health to build a supportive coalition. In Mexico government demand made reforms less urgent, and transformations of the pharmaceutical sector allowed patent-holding firms to commandeer a reform project. The existence of indigenous pharmaceutical capacities can broaden the political coalitions underpinning health reforms.

Since the 1980s, Mexico has transformed its social protection system through the partial retrenchment of contributory social insurance and the expansion of noncontributory social assistance. By comparing social insurance and social assistance policies under Presidents Salinas (1988-1994), Zedillo (1994-2000), and Fox (2000-2006), these apparently contradictory patterns of welfare change can be explained. Economic and political liberalization created pressure for policy change and shifted the political capacity of domestic political actors, while existing welfare institutions shaped the politics of welfare. As a result, new social assistance institutions were layered alongside reformed social insurance institutions, which reflected recent changes in the economic and political context.

Democratic attitudes toward regimes consist of at least two types of attitudes: liberal and delegative. The notions that delegative democratic attitudes exist and affect institutional confidence are evident in Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. Salvadorans and Nicaraguans with delegative attitudes give greater support to the judiciary and legislature than persons with liberal democratic and authoritarian attitudes. No such difference exists in the institutional assessments of Costa Ricans. In new democracies, the institutional support expressed by delegative democratic persons cannot be reliably interpreted as support for the judiciary or the legislature because delegative support reflects support for the regime rather than for the institution.

How do people in authoritarian societies respond to the introduction of semicompetitive elections? Conventional wisdom suggests that once elections are introduced into an authoritarian society, people will quickly grasp the newly available opportunity to pursue their interests. The responses of people in rural China to the introduction of village elections seem to be different from what this conventional model assumes. Many peasants hesitated to vote when elections were available for the first time in their political lives. A two-stage political learning model captures people’s responses to electoral reform, and survey data collected from China at both the individual and village levels in 2002 examine the model’s validity.