What accounts for the “colored revolutions” of the former Soviet Union? Analysis of postcommunist political economies reveals that states that underwent reform saw the emergence of a new capitalist class whose interests sometimes put them at odds with the regime. Following fraudulent elections, business elites played an active role in financing mobilization and signaling mass discontent, which undermined regime support and hastened regime change. Countries that did not privatize failed to develop an independent capitalist class and therefore faced smaller and weaker oppositions. This argument is demonstrated by analyzing mass protests that toppled regimes in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, and by the negative cases of Azerbaijan, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. It has implications for the study of hybrid regimes, social movements, and postcommunist political development.

Most empirical studies of corruption rely on data using perceptions of corruption as a proxy for actual corruption. While this approach might be appropriate for advanced democracies, it is less effective for hybrid regimes. In these regimes corruption allegations are often used in political battles, raising public perceptions of corruption and thus reflecting the degree of political competition rather than actual corruption. The data on public perceptions of corruption in Russian regions produced by Transparency International and the Information for Democracy Foundation (INDEM) shows that higher levels of political competition and press freedom along with lower economic development appear as the key variables contributing to higher public perceptions of corruption in Russian regions.

The effects of party system features and election rules on ideological representation can be seen in parliamentary elections in Western democracies over a fifty-year period. “Distortion” is short-term representation failure—the distance between the median voter and the legislature or government immediately after the election. Electoral choice and left-right positions of parties (from the manifesto data) can be used to estimate median voter positions. The number of parties, party polarization, and the election rules all independently affect ideological distances. But party system polarization seems to be the predominate factor shaping distortion of governments’ relationship with the median voter. Examining the effects of party systems under different election rules helps clarify the causal connections between legislative and government levels.

On the basis of an in-depth study of the Swiss Vocational Education and Training (VET) system—an extreme case among collectivist regimes—the employer’ constellation and the elites of the public education administration affect patterns of institutional change. If large firms are the dominant actors and collaborate with elites in the public education administration, institutional change follows a transformative pattern. If small and medium firms are in a strong position and have the power to influence public elites according to their interests, self-preserving institutional change results. With reference to causal mechanism of institutional change in VET systems, developments in the international political economy and Europe are important intervening factors in patterns of institutional change.

Taxation is partly a game of credible commitment. Data for eighteen OECD countries show that partisan turnover systematically affects the long-run equilibrium mix of taxes and services. When partisan turnover is low, more right-wing influence permanently increases corporate tax revenue and the corporate share of pre-tax income; more left-wing influence, by contrast, permanently increases consumption tax revenue and social spending. When turnover is high, even powerful partisans do not increase taxes that disproportionately affect their supporters. When partisans tax their own supporters, they raise more revenue, even when we account for some plausible benefits. The theoretical conjectures are consistent with the pattern of partisan behavior within countries, not just between them.

Despite myriad explanations for government spending levels, few studies have included considerations of party system institutionalization. This is surprising since the level of party system institutionalization should significantly affect policymaking. Weakly institutionalized systems, that are characterized by loose ties with societal groups, higher volatility levels, and poorly developed internal organizations, should result in lower public goods but higher parochial goods spending. In contrast, more institutionalized systems should result in more public goods spending as these systems try to appeal to broader swaths of the population. Time-series cross-sectional analyses, with three different spending measures as dependent variables, show that institutionalized party systems significantly influence spending patterns.

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.

Why do Latin American countries exhibit stark differences in their ability to protect citizens from falling into poverty? Analysis of poverty levels measured by ECLAC in eighteen countries shows that political factors-including the democratic record, long-term weight of left-of-center parties in the legislature, and investment in human capital-are significant and substantively important determinants of poverty. These findings contribute to the growing literature that emphasizes the importance of regime form, parties, and policies for a variety of outcomes in Latin America, despite the weaknesses of democracy and the pathologies of some parties and party systems in the region.

Latin American countries pursue a variety of reforms to reduce and prevent violent crime, ranging from new penal codes to restructured police forces. The most promising and popular approach to crime reduction is community-oriented policing which, in contrast to most forms of traditional policing, seeks to empower citizens by building police-community partnerships. Similar reforms in two cities in Brazil and four in Honduras show that community policing will be most effective where executive and security officials engage with social groups, either through direct contact with civil society or through state institutions that address the concerns of highly violent poor areas.

The accountability of state institutions and rulers is a defining feature of democracy. The police form a key state institution that is targeted for reforms to improve its accountability. The surprising case of increased police accountability in Bogotá, Colombia demonstrates the importance of the political strategy of lateral reform, which successfully mitigated obstacles to police accountability to the state and society. Lateral reform is a sequence of policies that strategically alter the societal context in which reforms take place to increase public support for and participation in reform processes over time. This strategy may strengthen the hand of politicians seeking to increase the accountability of recalcitrant state institutions.

The nature and efficacy of specific tactics used by Chinese protesters challenge the conventional wisdom that ordinary people in an authoritarian regime must resort to disruption to obtain bargaining power. An expanded view of mediating mechanisms of protest efficacy includes two dimensions: means (disruption/persuasion) and routes (direct leverage/third-party leverage). In addition to resorting to disruption, Chinese protesters frequently employ tactics to activate three nondisruptive mechanisms: persuasion, publicity, and elite advocacy. While these “troublemaking” tactics can be easily confused with disruption, they work according to a different logic. The efficacy of a wide variety of tactics in China suggests the interactions of elites and subordinate classes are often more nuanced and reciprocal than disruption theory assumes.

Why do states with converging economic policies in southern Asia have diverging educational policies? Variations in the structure of domestic support for political elites in India, Pakistan, and Malaysia show that the state’s role in social provisioning during reforms was differently interpreted and implemented despite economic growth in all three countries. Indian and Pakistani elites, who are more dependent on clientelist networks and religious organizations seeking to provide their own schooling, face incentives to privatize education. In contrast, Malaysia’s government relies on horizontal networks of support, is hostile towards Islamic groups, and therefore faces incentives to increase the public provision of education. Differing incentives construct policies that enable or contain the growth of religious extremism.

This article gauges the impact on comparative politics of the methodological turn in political science through a review of four recent books on the role of comparative historical analysis in the subfield. Two volumes-one edited by James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer and the other edited by Henry Brady and David Collier-defend the accomplishments and strengths of comparative historical analysis. In contrast, the book by Barbara Geddes advocates a scientific approach combining rational choice theory with regression. The article includes a discussion of the interviews conducted by Gerardo Munck and Richard Snyder with prominent comparativists and questions whether strategies of inference should be our most pressing concern.

Stolen elections are triggering events that overcome barriers to revolutionary action against electoral authoritarian regimes. They mobilize ordinary citizens, strengthen the opposition, and divide the regime. As neoinstitutionalist theories of revolution suggest, the relative openness of electoral authoritarianism inhibits mass protest. But when elections are stolen, regimes undergo “closure,” increasing the probability of protest. Using the examples of recent democratic uprisings in Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine, the importance of stolen elections is examined through within-case comparisons. The failure of other potential revolutionary precipitants in these cases underscores that stolen elections are not merely replaceable final straws. Stolen elections have not only been crucial for the emergence of revolutionary situations, they have shaped outcomes as well. Linking popular mobilization to fraudulent elections has become part of the repertoire of contention of democratic revolutionaries.

The politics of national identity influences citizenship rules in new states, but not in the way that existing theories would predict. Existing theories attribute ethnic or civic citizenship laws to dominant ethnic or civic national identity conceptions, but in many new states there is no dominant national identity conception. In the post-Soviet region all civic citizenship laws emerge without the civic national identity conception. The case of Ukraine shows how civic citizenship law may be an unintended side effect of contested identity politics. The post-Soviet experience suggests that the politics of citizenship policy in new and older states is different: national identity is a major source of citizenship policies in new states, but its impact may be different from what existing theories posit.

Secularism and liberalism are often perceived as interlinked and associated with the process of modernization and liberal democracy. Studies of Israel, however, cast doubts on this linkage as antiliberal and ethnocentric attitudes remain entrenched. Secular practices, religious beliefs, and religious practices can coexist within a bricolage of beliefs and behaviors. Secular practices related to everyday life are not necessarily related to a deeper belief system and values associated with liberalism; the commercialization of the Israeli public sphere does not significantly change existing nonliberal perceptions and the structure of Israel as a nonliberal democracy. Secularism and liberalism can develop separately, and the secularization of the public sphere does not necessarily entail a commitment to religious freedom, to toleration associated with liberalism, and, consequently, to liberal democracy.

The split in the Turkish Islamist movement in 1999 between radicals and moderates and the massive electoral victory of the moderate AKP in 2002 gave rise to two major and contrasting explanations for this moderation. Either the movement had not changed because its members had retained their original religious orientations while outwardly pretending to be moderate, or they had finally become assimilated into the secularist system and had truly accepted democratic and secularist values. Yet the fact was that AKP members were neither pretending, nor were they assimilated. They were still pursuing the same interests that had played a major role in their support for the Islamist movement in the first place: their class interests.

Should women’s rights advocates pursue a politics of difference or a politics of equality? This question is addressed by coding for and analyzing the use of gender in constitutional structures in seventy-four countries. Countries with constitutional structures that emphasize women’s different needs and provide gender-based protections are compared to countries with constitutional structures that emphasize equality or gender neutrality. Examining whether these differences have a significant effect on women’s political representation and economic standing, it appears that a politics of difference based on constitutional provisions that proactively promote women’s equality in the political and economic sphere is positively associated with gender equality-especially political equality.

Recent books by Carles Boix and by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson provide bold theoretical arguments about how economic inequality can undermine the survival of democracy. Many of their key assumptions, however, are called into question by existing research on ‘third wave’ Latin American democracies. There is little evidence that the poor are more likely to vote for higher taxes or for left parties, and survey research does not indicate that poor people are more likely to think the distribution of income is unfair. More sustained examination of American democracy by Larry M. Bartels reaches parallel conclusions. A more careful examination of political economy assumptions about the relationship between actors’ objective economic circumstances and their perceived interests and behavior is needed.

The establishment of constitutionalism—defined as widespread adherence to democratic rules and procedures—is a key factor determining a country’s success in institutionalizing democracy. Constitutionalism helps make democracy work, and a framework can be established for analyzing the relationship between constitutions and constitutionalism. Applying this framework to seventeen “third wave” democracies in Latin America, Southern, and Eastern Europe, the findings indicate a relationship between constitutional dispersal of power, system performance, and constitutionalism. They also suggest a new approach to the question of what makes democracies endure.

As Latin America has moved leftward, why have the governments of Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay pursued moderate, gradual change, whereas their counterparts in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador have proceeded with considerable economic and political radicalism? Comparative analysis and case studies of Brazil and Bolivia indicate that backlash against market reform and the differential strength of party institutions do not satisfactorily explain this striking difference. Instead, natural resource rents and commodity booms and busts play a crucial role. The unearned windfalls produced by bonanzas inspire risk-acceptance among political leaders and common citizens, which can prompt ideological radicalism and political confrontation. This argument, based on a novel, cognitive-psychological microfoundation, contributes to theories of the rentier state and the “resource curse.”

Mexico’s Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI), a former electoral authoritarian party, obligated its federal deputy candidates to campaign actively for elections that were almost impossible to lose. Canvassing under electoral authoritarian conditions allowed the hegemonic party to gather information on its local leaders and citizens and to distribute selective, excludable resources to mobilize voters. The PRI’s deputy candidates were forced to manage, organize, and run their own campaigns in “candidate-managed” campaigns. Despite large margins of victory, the PRI had to deal with significant district variation in electoral popularity, while the corporatist sectors had far less coverage than once believed.

Comparative democratization scholars have devoted almost no attention to how property rights regimes shape the dynamics of electoral competition. This oversight is particularly problematic in African studies. In sub-Saharan Africa the absence or weakness of secure property rights regimes in the countryside can have powerful consequences for multiparty dynamics. Land can become a patronage resource in ways that ignite destabilizing redistributive conflicts and threaten minority rights. By ignoring the design and character of underlying property regimes—or by assuming that the rules governing property are fixed, neutral, or essentially liberal in character—analysts have overlooked a fundamental source of illiberalism in many of Africa’s multiparty systems. Côte d’Ivoire, where land politics have contributed to system-wide political breakdown, serves as a case in point.

If elections and civil liberties are the principal institutionalized mechanisms of democratic governance, and if naked coercion is the centerpiece of hard authoritarianism, what allows a soft authoritarian system to survive? The cement of soft authoritarian rule is the ability of elites to frame the political debate, thereby defining the political agenda and channeling political outcomes. The contrast between the strengthening of soft authoritarianism in Kazakhstan and the erosion of soft authoritarianism in Kyrgyzstan shows that soft authoritarianism is effective when it succeeds in making good use of the state’s means of persuasion, although coercion remains a part of the ruling elite’s arsenal. This perspective implies a need to conceptualize soft authoritarian rule in dynamic, rather than static, terms.

In this paper we consider the uses political scientists have made of agent-based modeling (ABM) and the challenges associated with designing research at differing levels of complexity. We propose a typology of ABM research designs—investigating abstractions, testing theories comprised of ensembles of simple variables, or implementing virtualizations of complex situations. Our illustrations are drawn from work done on problems pertaining to the evolution of collective identities and norms and to their contribution to collective action. By increasing the visibility of research design questions and clarifying the choices and opportunities associated with them, we seek to expand the scope of responsible methodological uses of ABM techniques and render the increasing variety of that work accessible to wider audiences.