Patterns of party system institutionalization have varied widely across regions. In postcommunist democracies, weak party system institutionalization exists at high levels along three dimensions—volatility of representation, party extinction, and incumbency disadvantage—despite sustained economic growth. In these cases, the effects of economic restructuring are critical to electoral outcomes. A sample of democratic elections from 1990 to 2006 shows that postcommunist countries whose reform strategies minimize increases in inequality have more institutionalized party systems.

Analysis of the state-building process in modern Europe rests upon the traditional assumption that monarchs were the central driving force behind the consolidation of power in the form of a centralized state. However, an alternative state-society account challenges the supposition that monarchs were always the centralizing group in early modern society. The formation of the modern European state was ultimately shaped by the state-building strategies adopted by societal elites who possessed certain forms of social power. This alternative understanding of the state-building process helps explain the puzzling developments surrounding the successful rise of Brandenburg-Prussia and the collapse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the early modern period.

Why do countries with similar cultures and political institutions respond differently to international norms? The varied responses among East Asian democracies to the growing international movement to abolish the death penalty show that Japan has been the most resistant, while Taiwan and South Korea have moved closer to embracing the international human rights norm. The movement in these latter countries toward a moratorium on capital punishment has little to do with public opinion, which generally favors retaining the death penalty. Rather, it reflects specific domestic political contexts, especially the power and autonomy of the executive and the experience of a drastic regime change, that open the way for rethinking human rights norms.

What explains the use of selective and indiscriminate violence in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza from 1987 to 2005? Using microlevel data, an aggregated analysis indicates that areas of dominant but incomplete territorial control consistently experience more frequent and intense episodes of selective violence, providing support for Stathis Kalyvas’s theory on the logic of civil violence. Disaggregating the analysis by each zone of control and perpetrator, however, offers only mixed empirical support for Kalyvas’s predictions. While Palestinian-perpetrated violence is still consistent with theoretical expectations, Israel more frequently resorts to the use of selective violence where Palestinians exercise greater control. Such disconfirming evidence points to causal mechanisms previously unaccounted for and contributes to a more nuanced specification of the microfoundations of violence in civil conflict.

Scholars often recommend the implementation of participatory governance institutions to promote pro-poor policy outcomes. Incorporating civil society organizations into decision making should lead to increasing government responsiveness and accountability in addressing key social problems. Few scholars, however, have systematically tested this proposition across contexts. An assessment of the impact of municipal housing councils on the adoption of social housing programs in Brazil indicates that housing councils are associated with an increase in social housing program adoption across municipalities, regardless of whether a strong civil society is in place. This suggests that the act of incorporation into decision making is more important than the strength of civil society for producing pro-poor policy outcomes.

A principal approach to theorizing about economic reform in developing countries has been to assume that market-oriented policies have the properties of public goods, in that their benefits are widespread and their costs concentrated. This article reviews several books, one of them from the World Bank, that suggest that skepticism about these policies has entered the mainstream, calling into question this benchmark approach to reform. In the context of ongoing debate over which policies are best for developing countries, the review offers a framework for future study of reform, arguing that while past work has yielded important insights on how societal divisions and institutional characteristics affect reform, these insights now need to be combined with scholarship on how governments learn and form preferences about policies.

Twenty years after the collapse of communism, a rough consensus in the literature on postcommunist politics is that the past matters. Many questions remain, however, about exactly how, when, and why the past matters, especially in terms of political values and behavior. An original theoretical framework facilitates the consideration of the effect of communist-era legacies on postcommunist political values and behavior. The framework includes a set of mechanisms by which these effects can be transmitted and a set of particular values and behaviors whose legacy effects may be particularly important. Illustrating its utility, the framework is applied to an examination of the issue of trust in political parties.

Despite the fact that China and Vietnam have been the world’s two fastest growing economies over the past two decades, their income inequality patterns are very different. An examination of the political institutions in the two countries shows that profound differences between these polities influence distributional choices. In particular, as compared to China, elite institutions in Vietnam encourage the construction of broader policymaking coalitions, have more competitive selection processes, and place more constraints on executive decision making. As a result, stronger political motivations exist for Vietnamese leaders to provide equalizing transfers that limit inequality growth among provinces than for Chinese leaders.

An increasingly large literature on patronage has developed within political science in recent years. Yet this body of scholarship has thus far failed to explain variation in patronage allocation across countries. An original theory based on the logic of institutional choice, whereby political leaders allocate patronage in accordance with the varying political threats they face, explains this variation. Two variables—geography and visibility—capture this variation and thus explain patronage allocation. The theory is tested and validated through a comparative analysis of Rwanda and Uganda, whose current regimes are remarkably similar in origin and structure. The analysis extends to previous regimes in both countries.

What explains the range of nonvictorious outcomes experienced by rebel groups in civil wars? Varying combinations of two structural factors produce different types of rebel groups, whose organizational configurations predict their outcomes. These factors are the external resources provided by cross-border support networks found within regional state systems, and the status reversal grievances produced by the politics of fragmented authority in weak states. Insurgent types are then associated with a given level politico-military effectiveness and a corresponding fate. Eight Ugandan insurgencies illustrate variation in outcomes across groups within a context of contentious domestic and regional politics that controls for the state, regime, and time period.

Corruption has become a key concern throughout the world. Most of what is known about corruption comes from instances in which misdeeds become public, generating a scandal. Why do some acts of corruption become scandals and others do not? Corruption scandals are not triggered by corruption, but rather are initially caused by dynamics of political competition within government. Insiders leak information on misdeeds in order to gain power within the coalition or party in power. A powerful opposition, contrary to common belief, acts as a constraint for insiders, making corruption scandals less likely. These arguments are evaluated using empirical evidence from Argentina and Chile (1989–2008). The findings support the notion that corruption scandals emerge as a consequence of political competition.

Assessing four recent books on participatory budgeting and other participatory innovations in Latin America, this review article identifies these works as illustrative of a “second generation” of scholarship on what the author calls the “Participatory Promise.” Following upon the first generation of mostly single case studies of mostly successful cases, this second generation of scholarship tends to draw on a wealth of data from multiple comparable cases, both successful and unsuccessful. The end result is a clear social scientific advancement in understanding these real-world political phenomena that have demanded the attention of analysts and practitioners of contemporary democracy in Latin America for the last two decades.

Two views on the impact of church-state relations on civil society draw competing conclusions. According to the first view, state support of religion encourages faith-based social capital by providing vital resources for religious organizations. In contrast, the competing view holds that state support of religion crowds out religious civic engagement, as responsibilities are transferred from citizens to the state. Based on a sample of twenty-four European countries and combining a wide range of church-state indicators with survey data, it is evident that state support of religion does not foster faith-based social capital. Rather, overwhelming evidence shows that government involvement in religion weakens religious membership, volunteering, and donations.

The core idea inspiring democracy is to empower people. To measure democracy in ways that capture its empowering nature, one must focus on popular rights and take into account rule of law as a state quality that makes these rights effective. Based on this premise, an index of “effective democracy,” tested for 150 states, best represents the empowering nature of democracy because it most clearly captures democracy’s embedding in empowering conditions in the wider society. Effective democracy is shown to be most firmly embedded in (a) empowering socioeconomic conditions that make people capable of practicing democracy and (b) empowering sociocultural conditions that make them willing to do so. People empowerment appears to be a unity of empowering societal conditions and empowering regime characteristics.

Three related arguments can be made about the autonomy drives that have gathered strength in the last decade in the most economically vibrant subnational regions in Bolivia and Ecuador. First, based on analysis of the actions and actors associated with each, these phenomena are classifiable as “conservative autonomy movements.” Second, the disjuncture between the concentration of political power in national capitals and economic power in vibrant subnational regions explains why these movements emerged in Bolivia and Ecuador but not elsewhere in Latin America and why they have emerged now and not earlier in each country. Third, the mobilizing structures that these twin movements draw on, as well as the framing choices that each has made, account for the greater strength of the autonomy movement in Bolivia.

The current theoretical debate about the heightened role of Latin American technocrats centers on their autonomy from other sociopolitical actors, especially their political superiors, international financial institutions, and business interests. Assessment of the independence técnicos wield, based on an in-depth analysis of the work of economic experts in Colombia and Peru, shows that a “technocratic autonomy” perspective best accounts for the activity of experts in these countries. Two crucial factors explain this autonomy: (1) technocrats’ use of expertise to enhance and maintain their influence; and (2) the mutual balance among powerful stakeholders, who prefer technocratic independence to control of economic policy by a competing actor.

A transitional polity in the third wave of democratization may adopt many western institutional forms, yet its minority and disadvantaged groups may continue to face greater obstacles in addressing environmental injustice issues than those in more mature democracies. In a recent case in Taiwan, residents in a disadvantaged community were initially unaware of or reluctant to acknowledge the environmental harms that had been inflicted upon them. They were not mobilized until policy entrepreneurs from outside the community began to press the issue on their behalf by gaining their trust and support and by navigating various political and policy institutions, which at the same time were undergoing democratic transformations toward more inclusiveness. The case illustrates the interactions of identity politics and social movement leadership in the context of changing political opportunity structures.

Political scientists typically study how formal institutions work, yet many of the most interesting political phenomena being investigated today involve informal institutions. The books under review represent advances in an emerging research program on informal politics and the state. They address several important questions, including (1) when does informality undermine the state, and when does it compensate for deficiencies in the state? (2) what are the historical roots of the mechanisms by which informality interacts with the state? (3) what are the sources of cohesion that enable actors to pursue goals informally? and (4) how does the relationship between informal politics and the state change over time? Informal politics is found to be consequential even in the presence of “strong” states, and can sometimes interact with the state in unexpected ways. The theoretical issues raised by these works have broader implications for how informality should be conceptualized and studied within comparative politics.

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.

The tradition of historical political sociology has produced highly sophisticated explanations of variations in national political regimes. However, a series of false debates has interfered with further progress. Whereas the various hypotheses in conflict within historical political sociology are substantially more similar than it seems, the outcomes explained are actually different. Even the most antagonistic perspectives—neo-Marxism and neo-Weberianism—have two theoretical underpinnings in common—a conceptual framework centered on the notion of power and an explanatory logic that views national political regimes as local adaptations to a universal transformation in the organization of power. Rather than opposite explanations of the same aggregate outcome, they should be understood as mutually independent hypotheses about the different components of political regimes.

Comparative scholarship conceives of party systems nationally. This has created a situation of conceptual and measurement incompleteness in the study of party systems. The effects of subnational variations in party competition on national politics and the quality of democracy cannot be understood if subnational party systems continue to be erased from the theoretical mapping of party politics. The concept of “federalized party systems” denotes systems composed of national and subnational party subsystems. Its value for the comparative and longitudinal study of party politics can be demonstrated through an analysis of Argentina’s federalized party system.

A decade after Mexico’s watershed 2000 election, Mexicans are disillusioned with democracy and distrustful of politicians, parties, and parliament. Evidence from an original survey, Desencanto Ciudadano en México, indicates that Mexicans’ definitions of democracy play an important role in shaping how satisfied they are with it. Those holding a “substantive” definition of democracy emphasizing socioeconomic improvement tied to redistribution are significantly less satisfied with democracy than “liberal” democrats, who stress rights, or “electoral” democrats, who emphasize procedures. Citizen expectations of democracy are an important but missing ingredient in studies of political disillusionment. Dissatisfaction is worrisome because of its impact on political behavior. The disenchanted vote less, are less involved civically, and engage more in legal and illegal protest.

Many studies suggests a harsh trade off, referred to as the “the new liberal dilemma,” between diversity and immigration and social capital. However, the relationship between immigrant status and trust can be better gauged by considering three interaction variables. First, informal neighbor interaction cushions the negative immigrant effect. Second, a similar role is played by fair treatment by public authorities. Third, no such cushioning interaction occurs from organizational participation. Overall, the results encourage a contingent stance about diversity and social capital. The “minority culture of mistrust” can wither away as a consequence of positive experiences of social interaction and institutional fairness. Because these have a particularly positive impact among immigrants, the trust gap between immigrants and others may, under the right circumstances, be closed at high levels of these variables.

Until now, few studies have focused on states’ increasing extension of voting rights to citizens residing abroad. It is particularly striking that the right to vote from abroad has often been extended not only by democracies or transitional regimes but by authoritarian states as well. The cases of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia help explain this phenomenon. These North African experiences demonstrate that while authoritarian states often appropriate the language of citizenship, the extension of voting rights by these states has implications different from those in democratic settings. In authoritarian contexts, expanding the franchise is aimed at increasing sovereignty over expatriates with resources to be tapped or at reinforcing security through a different means of monitoring communities abroad.

Throughout the Middle East, Islamists, leftists, and other ideological streams are forming coalitions in opposition to their authoritarian regimes. Yet little research has been conducted on the conditions under which these cross-ideological coalitions fail or succeed. Three cases of successful coalition building and one case of failed coalition building in Jordan indicate that cross-ideological coalitions are initiated in the context of external threat and facilitated by organizational forms that ensure the members gain or maintain their ability to pursue their independent goals. Most important, in contrast to other studies, these cases show that the plentifulness of recruits impedes cooperation. Rather than alleviating competition, an abundance of potential recruits increases competition and hinders cross-ideological cooperation.