Volume 45, Number 1, October 2012

Scholars have made substantial progress toward understanding the connections between ethnic relations and civil war, but important theoretical and empirical gaps remain. Existing explanations often ignore the constructivist origins of ethnic group formation, or are too proximate to the outcome under investigation, so that the link between ethnic political competition and ethnic violence is difficult to pick apart. An alternative approach is an explanation of ethnic violence rooted in the microfoundations of social identity theory (SIT). When states consistently employ ethnic categories across institutions, they lay the foundation for conflicts over status and power, facilitating recruitment and mobilization on the basis of emotion-laden intergroup comparisons and competition. The strength of these claims is demonstrated through a comparative-historical analysis of ethnic violence in eleven Southern African countries.

Surprisingly, waves of political regime contention in Europe have slowed down through history but have achieved more success in triggering advances toward democracy, as a comparison of the revolutions of 1848 and 1917—1919 shows. Major organizational developments account for these inverse trends. Before political mass organizations arose, ordinary people decided whether to emulate foreign challenges to established autocrats. Short on information, citizens relied heavily on inferential shortcuts and acted rashly, with little success. After the rise of mass organizations, common people took cues from their representative leaders, who had more information and greater processing capacity. Before emulating an external precedent and challenging their ruler, leaders waited for propitious circumstances. Therefore, twentieth century regime contention diffused more slowly yet with greater success.

Theories of environmental outcomes have been developed mostly through large-N cross-national studies, which have a structuralist bias and rely heavily on correlations. Structured, focused case studies can help overcome those limitations by incorporating political processes and identifying causal mechanisms. Climate policy outcomes in Germany vary greatly across policy areas such as emissions target setting, the economic transformation of eastern Germany, renewable energy, ecological tax reform, voluntary agreements with industry, emissions trading, and unregulated increases in the consumption of household heating, transportation, and electricity. Comparative analysis of nine case studies indicates that environmental outcome theories should more fully include external focusing events, advocacy coalition formation, multiple paths of influence for green parties, and the negative effects of neocorporatism and unregulated technological change and consumption.

Why do party systems in longstanding democracies sometimes experience sudden change? Neither sociological nor institutional explanations can account for the swift increase in support for regional political parties in India in the 1990s. Instead, the shift from single-party majority to coalition government explains the rise of regional parties. The advent of coalition government increased the incentives associated with joining and establishing regional parties, prompting many already popular politicians to leave their national parties and take their supporters with them as they formed new regional parties in the 1990s. This finding reverses the causal arrow that usually links party systems and coalition government and illustrates how noninstitutional elements of the political context can determine elite incentives and thereby shape party systems.

Party brokers have information about voters’ political preferences and likelihood of turning out to vote, and are able to target clientelistic inducements and monitor voter participation in exchange for voters’ electoral support. However, brokers may also use the clientelistic inducements they receive from bosses to pursue their personal enrichment, at the cost of lost votes for their party. An original dataset tracing the political careers of 137 municipal candidates in Argentina shows how bosses combine information from voter turnout at rallies and elections. By comparing a broker’s ability to mobilize voters, bosses are able to make inferences about reliable brokers who will distribute party goods to voters, and unreliable brokers who will use party goods to pad their own pockets.

Until recently the mass murder and civil war scholarships developed alongside each other without engaging in fruitful dialogue or building on one another’s insights and findings. However, as the reviewed books demonstrate, following the “micropolitical turn” in the study of civil war, and with the genocide scholarship moving away from the state-centered approach, there is a convergence between the two literatures. The new wave of research on mass violence builds on the findings and theories of the civil conflict literature, proposes ways in which each field can contribute to its counterpart, and puts forward new questions and research agendas for further research on mass violence.