Volume 43, Number 2, January 2011

Since 1978 when Juan Linz posited his fears about the “perils of presidentialism,” presidential democracies have been less likely to break down. Nonetheless, presidents continue to confront challenges. Between 1978 and 2006, 30 percent of all democratically elected presidents worldwide faced serious efforts to remove them from office, and 12 percent were forced out before their terms ended. While scholars have explored the sources of these crises, focusing on their effects is equally important. If such crises have profound consequences, then even with regime collapse not at issue, presidentialism would remain associated with normatively bad outcomes. Yet if challenges or failures have minimal effects, then early presidential exit may represent an underappreciated equilibrating mechanism. The evidence indicates that the challenges and falls in Latin America cause only superficial and ephemeral damage to democratic governance.

In emerging African democracies, why do judiciaries experience high levels of government interference in some contexts and not in others? Original research conducted in five commonwealth African countries reveals that conventional strategic approaches do not effectively account for patterns of executive interference with the courts in the African cases. An alternative theoretical framework, focusing on the extent to which leaders face acute personal insecurities and the extent to which the courts represent a threat to power holders, proves more effective.

The model of labor politics—social democracy (quasi-revolutionary, evolutionary), insurrectionism (bolshevism, anarchism-syndicalism), or moderate syndicalism—that emerges as dominant in an industrializing society depends on the choices made by labor elites in response to their case-specific environment of labor inclusion. By developing a systematic account for the interaction between elite agency and constraining environment, this theoretical proposition overcomes both theoretical and empirical limitations of prior structural and overly deterministic approaches. An empirical analysis for all industrialized polities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reveals that variation in labor inclusion correctly predicts the outcome in seventeen out of twenty cases, representing a significant increase in predictive power over prior approaches.

Oil consumption has varied significantly among democracies, but scholars have not systematically studied the political determinants of this variation. What effects do political institutions have on a democratic country’s propensity to consume oil? Other things being equal, more centralized national political institutions facilitate the adoption of policies that lower oil intensity. A time-series, cross-sectional analysis of all democracies since the first oil shock in 1973, using an error correction model to separate short- and long-term effects and to correct for the nonstationarity of the dependent variable, provides strong support for a link between numerous veto players and slower reductions in oil intensity along with weaker support for the influence of party decentralization.

The literature on legislative recruitment has existed largely independently of the literature on party clientelism in new democracies. The Romanian data on parliamentary representation can be used to show how the study of recruitment practices improves scholars’ understanding of clientelistic exchanges between political parties and resource-rich constituencies. The findings point to considerable differences in recruitment patterns in new and established democracies, which can be traced to parties and interest groups’ calculus of payoffs under different types of political regimes.

Until now, no academic study has explored the extent and nature of antimonarchism in the British House of Commons. In a statistically representative survey sample, 44 percent of all Members of Parliament identified themselves as “republicans,” nearly twice the share in the British public at large. However, 86 percent called this a personal opinion only. While there may not be a groundswell of active republicanism in the Commons, a substantial group of sympathetic MPs exists who might be willing to seize on a future public crisis in the monarchy in order to effect reforms. Lacking party leadership support, republican MPs are not optimistic about change in the short-to-medium term.