Volume 42, Number 3, April 2010

Countries around the world have established quotas for women and minorities in electoral politics. The normative arguments often made to justify such measures generate three hypotheses—selection, hierarchy, and competition—which do not account for empirical patterns in how, where, and when groups receive guarantees. Working inductively, this article proposes an alternative explanation highlighting the importance of two types of repertoires of group representation: historical practices with regard to group recognition and transnational influences in the form of international pressure and information sharing. These hypotheses are evaluated via case studies of four countries where proposals have been made for both women and minorities, revealing that quotas are the product of vivid struggles over what kinds of identities deserve recognition.

The links between migration and security are understudied, and the empirical content of the immigration literature tends to be limited to case studies of western democracies. The conventional wisdom holds that democracies adopt liberal immigrant admissions policies. However, the opposite should be expected: dictatorship, along with economic development and large-scale security threats, tends to increase immigration. In immigration policymaking, officials’ hands are not tied by supposed economic or demographic necessities or by domestic or international norms. The theory proposed in this article explains contemporary cross–national variation in and macrohistorical patterns of immigration policymaking. Econometric findings show that dictatorship and large-scale threats tend to increase migrant stocks and inflows, and that there is much more per capita migration into rich dictatorships than rich democracies.

When and why can constitution-making processes be expected to produce an institutional framework that formally serves constitutionalism? Based on a simple and general typology of constituent processes that captures their legal/political character and dynamic nature, constitution-making processes controlled by one cohesive and organized political group (unilateral) can be distinguished from processes controlled by at least two different political groups (multilateral). A sample of eighteen Latin American countries from 1945 to 2005 shows that multilateral constitution-making tends to establish institutional frameworks consistent with constitutionalism.

Brazilian presidents have expanded the authority of the Supreme Court since democratization to improve governance and facilitate the policy pursuits of electoral winners. This conclusion contradicts insurance theories of judicial reform, which argue that incumbents promote judicial power when they foresee an electoral defeat in order to constrain future majorities. In contrast, analysis of judicial reform in Brazil suggests that powerful courts are not antithetical to the interests of elected governments, and that even politicians who expect to remain in office may find it beneficial to support and promote independent judicial authority. As observed in Brazil, a court that is institutionally subject to politics may provide incumbents with benefits that exceed the costs usually associated with judicial review.

Two common strategies for maintaining military loyalty-individual incentives and ethnic preference-produce very different outcomes for defection of government troops when a rebellion arises outside the military. Since a strategy of individual incentives rests on a continuous judgment of regime strength, a rebellion can provoke a self-fulfilling prophecy that the regime will collapse. An ethnic preference policy identifies soldiers as loyal or disloyal based on group identity and gives those soldiers strong incentives to act accordingly. A rebellion by the out-group might generate out-group defection, but not in-group defection. Focusing on information about preferences, these outcomes are illustrated through a comparison of rebellions in Syria, Jordan, and Iran.

Not only is the global economy in crisis, but so too is the social democratic response to it. These crises necessitate a reappraisal of the record of social democracy and a rethinking of core aspects of its project—including its party-based and parliamentary orientation, its geographical and historical scope, and its coalition of interests. In different ways, each of the works under review suggests a creative “re-vision” of social democracy, whether referring to welfare state development in the global periphery, institutional change in the global core, or corporate governance worldwide.