Pinochet’s dictatorship is widely believed to have changed Chilean politics by creating a new authoritarian/democratic political cleavage that reorganized the party system and voter alignments. However, religious and class differences have not lost their salience in determining political attitudes in Chile. An original survey focusing primarily on religion shows that religion continues to mold political views along three polarities: irreligion versus religiosity, Catholicism versus Protestantism, and progressive versus traditional forms of religiosity. The irreligious, Protestants, and religiously progressive Catholics place themselves more to the left and are more supportive of the Concertation coalition. Class differences also remain important.

Agriculture has long been one of the most protected sectors in advanced industrial democracies. The rural biases of electoral systems, high organization by farmer interest groups, and an autonomous policy community have allowed agriculture to resist reform. However, market principles and partial liberalization have begun to be introduced. Japan has one of the highest levels of agricultural protection. Political changes, budget constraints, consumer demands, and international pressure all pushed for a major overhaul of Japanese agricultural policies, but international pressure was necessary to produce substantive reforms. International agreements, in particular, play a major role in bringing about domestic reforms in policy areas with strong vested interests.

During the postcommunist transition, inherited welfare states came under intense pressures to retrench and restructure. Most governments initiated reform projects based on a liberal paradigm of reduced entitlements and social sector privatization, moving welfare away from the state toward the market. Yet the patterns of reform diverged in puzzling ways, producing distinct trajectories of change and outcomes. Case studies of three postcommunist states show that the political influence of societal and state-based welfare stakeholders was a key factor in welfare state change. Where political institutions gave stakeholders access, they moderated reforms during recession and sustained a predominant state role in welfare after economic recovery. Where stakeholders were weak, reformist executives retrenched and restructured with little constraint.

How does a nation’s welfare spending affect people’s concern for immigrants in comparison with other needy groups? Economic self-interest and cultural ideology theory and knowledge about immigration rates in welfare states suggest several hypotheses. Multilevel regression analyses of data for eighteen countries from the European Values Survey 1999/2000 demonstrate that a nation’s welfare spending positively affects people’s relative concern for immigrants. However, it is not the level of welfare spending itself but rather the level of immigration that makes people relatively more concerned. These findings suggest that fears of tensions about welfare redistribution toward immigrants is not justified in European countries.

Comparative studies of social capital, operationalized as social trust between citizens, have revealed two major puzzles. First, why has social capital eroded in the U.S. and other liberal welfare regimes, while it is stable in social democratic and conservative welfare regimes? Second, why does the group of social democratic regimes have extremely high levels of social trust? The answer to both puzzles lies in the presence or absence of a poor and culturally distinct underclass. The social democratic welfare regimes hinder, while the liberal welfare regimes generate, such underclass phenomena.

This article reviews four recent books on nationalist mobilization and ethnic violence in the former Yugoslavia. The focus on political elites as instigators of ethnic conflict is too narrow. A fully adequate causal explanation of ethnic violence requires closer attention to contextual factors, especially competing nationalist narratives as elaborated by religious and secular intellectual elites. Because nationalist myths, symbols, and narratives play a greater role in nationalist mobilization than in class or issue-specific politics, causal explanations of nationalist mobilization must satisfy Weber’s requirement of  adequacy on the level of meaning. Theoretically driven generalizations have a limited explanatory potential in explaining specific instances of nationalist mobilization.

This article compares ethnic competition in the labor market and ethnic violence in Belfast, Chicago, and Johannesburg after World War I using Bonacich’s split labor market theory of ethnic antagonism. Augmented by an analysis of the dominant groups’ power in the workplace and the state, the theory proves quite robust in explaining postwar labor market outcomes in shipbuilding (exclusion), meatpacking (displacement), and gold mining (caste building). However, it remains inadequate in explaining interethnic violence, such as the Belfast workplace expulsions (1920), the Chicago race riot (1919), and the Rand Revolt (1922), which exceeded the bounds of the labor market. The split labor market approach is valuable in explaining segmentation but not as a general theory of ethnic antagonism.

Why do German Social Democrats opt for more corporate governance liberalization than the Christian Democrats, although in terms of the distributional outcomes of such reforms the situation should be reversed? This empirical puzzle seems to contradict insights from comparative political economy and the varieties of capitalism approach, in particular. Social Democrats and trade unions adopted their liberal attitude to company regulation after World War II. In the 1970s competition policy was introduced to make Keynesian macroeconomic policy work. Since the 1990s labor favored shareholder-oriented reforms because they helped employee representatives in conflicts over managerial control. The analysis has implications for partisan theory, institutional complementarity, and conflict models in comparative political economy.

Studies of federalism ascribe a central role to coercion in the birth and death of federations. In contrast, the role of force almost completely disappears when the focus shifts to the management of federations. However, in conditions faced by many federal hybrid regimes, the institutions said to manage federal relations’ political parties, constitutions, and judiciaries’ often are too weak to fulfill this role successfully. Thus, control coercion may play an important role in resolving center-subunit disputes. Securing control over coercive power has been a prominent feature of federal relations in post-Soviet Russia. Despite the weakness of coercion as a mechanism of regulating the federal bargain, certain modes of organizing force may assist federal stabilization, at least until parties and courts develop a stronger capacity to play this role.

Corruption is a notorious companion of the postcommunist economic transition, and it has had an adverse effect on business. Does corruption also inhibit collective action among postcommunist firms? Based on an analysis of survey data on membership in business associations in twenty-five postcommunist countries, and controlling for other factors affecting group membership, firms’ perception of bureaucratic corruption is positively associated with membership. This finding is quite surprising, given the conventional understanding of business-state relations. Causal mechanisms linking bureaucratic corruption to association formation can be traced through the development of two business associations. Business associations attract their members by providing effective mechanisms to confront bureaucratic corruption.

Many sub-Saharan African countries are embarking on major changes in their property rights law with the goal of achieving more vigorous economic growth and alleviating poverty. Uganda has been at the forefront of these changes with constitutional change and a new land law. The Ugandan land law encapsulates recent efforts to formalize existing informal property rights. Implementation and enforcement of the 1998 Land Act are examined through paired case studies. There have been three major impediments to implementation: lack of capacity, corruption, and customary law. While the new land law has been necessary to change property rights, it has faced obstacles in its implementation that undermine secure property rights to land.

Review of three recent books on collective action and interest group activity in the European Union offers an opportunity to analyze the development of interest group studies in relation to European integration. A feasible research agenda can build on the works under review. Scholars can incorporate a sensitivity to the impact of collective action on democracy, particularly on citizens’ participation in their national and supranational polities. In this respect, EU interest group studies can be linked more clearly to questions developed by comparative political approaches elsewhere and thus become a mainstream aspect of EU research.

Competition between two stable multiparty coalitions has dominated electoral and legislative politics in post-Pinochet Chile. However, several scholars dispute the argument that a fundamental change has realigned the party system. The point of contention is whether a bipolar pattern has replaced the traditional three-way split (tres tercios) in political competition. These alternative hypotheses about the cohesion of parties and coalitions in the legislative arena can be tested through an analysis of the voting records of Chilean deputies. Coalition membership rather than partisan positions dictate legislative behavior. Therefore, the Chilean electoral coalitions are not merely electoral pacts. Rather, they constitute two distinct policy-based coalitions.

Political science has never paid much comparative attention to what Schattschneider called the “conflict of conflicts.” However, this question is becoming increasingly important as the conflict structure in many western countries is breaking up. Is the ability to link an issue to an already existing conflict in the party system crucial for it to become a political issue? This question is addressed through a study of the issue of euthanasia in Denmark, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Euthanasia became a political issue in the Netherlands and Belgium because it was linked to the religious/secular conflict in the party system. As a consequence of the politicization, the Netherlands and Belgium have legalized euthanasia.

Economic insecurity is commonly held to be the key psychological mechanism underpinning the relationship between rapid economic change and the size of welfare states. Transformations like deindustrialization and globalization are held to create winners and losers, and the latter demand greater governmental protection against the forces undermining their economic insecurity. This individual-level relationship has been assumed rather than specified and tested. Economic insecurity can take more than one form. Moreover, its different forms vary not only in their socioeconomic roots, but also in their relationship to support for enhanced social protection. A comparison of the United States and Australia highlights the variability of economic insecurity’s impact of welfare preferences and the need to unpack the complexity of their relationship.

Election pledges are made on important issues and on the policy themes parties emphasize most. Pledges made by parties that enter the government after elections are more likely to be enacted than those made by parties that do not. Substantial differences in rates of pledge enactment can be found among majoritarian, coalition, and bicameral systems. New evidence on elections in Ireland, where coalition governments are common, is compared with the Netherlands, the U.K., the U.S., Canada, and Greece. Ireland and the Netherlands are crucial cases for theories of cabinet governance that feature the coalition agreement and the allocation of ministerial portfolios.

How do governments respond to the demands of different social movement organizations? They respond selectively, embracing some movement groups as acceptable bargaining partners, while sidelining or repressing others. Thus, they create uneven political opportunity structures that prompt organizations to pursue divergent protest strategies. Selective engagement is a double-edged sword. Groups that forge a closer relationship with state actors can benefit from increased access, but they also face shorter time horizons to deliver change and risk alienating their members. Over time, these side effects can minimize the worth of “desirable” groups to governments, while making it possible for organizations previously left out of the process to increase their clout and demand entry.

Much like earlier studies of the far right, recent scholarship asks why far right parties advanced in some West European democracies but not in others, but its answers differ. Socioeconomic explanations, which dominated earlier studies, are now only the starting point to explain the electoral trajectories of the far right. Recent scholarship lays more emphasis on the domestic political setting, examining the effects of party competition, organization, and appeals. Moreover, it attempts to correct the earlier neglect of electoral institutions. Its findings do not yield firm conclusions about the drivers of far right performance, but the theoretical implications are too important to miss. Future scholarship must pay closer attention to temporal variation in far right performance.

While the relationship between attempted democratization and large-scale violence has been noticed, the way in which violence is produced has not been fully explored. Three mechanisms produce violence within the wider bargaining process over change: public order policing of protest by mobilized opponents of those in power, incumbent deployment of special forces, and the manipulation of local conflicts by national actors in the context of party formation. Different forms of violence can be used within bargaining to improve the position of one party over another or in some cases to derail negotiations. These mechanisms help to explain not only how large-scale violence escalates but also how it can dramatically deescalate to allow for a successful transition to a more democratic regime.

Causal analysis of why some recent experiments in participatory local government in Latin America have failed while others have succeeded is undeveloped. Comparison of three similar experiments in Caracas, Montevideo, and Port Alegre can provide a more thorough explanation. The program in Caracas largely failed; Porto Alegre’s participatory budgeting became an international model; and Montevideo’s outcome was mixed. Two factors best explain this divergence: the degree of national decentralization of authority and resources for municipal governments and the level of institutionalization of local opposition parties. These conditions shaped the incumbents’ ability to design meaningful participatory programs that could attract lasting citizen involvement.

One of the most prominent features of the peaceful revolutions that swept Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine was the extraordinary upsurge of youth mobilization demanding fundamental political change. Comparative analysis reveals striking similarities in timing, issues, mobilization, framing processes, and action repertoires, in line with McAdam’s distinction between initiator and spin-off movements. The interaction between political generations and political opportunities triggered the rise of the Serbian initiator movement Otpor and set in motion a protest cycle. Shared concerns over increasing authoritarian practices and similarities in political opportunities in turn facilitated the spin-off movements in Georgia and Ukraine.

Older workers and pensioners constitute a large percentage of the membership of European labor movements. It is usually assumed that their relative weight creates a seniority bias that compels union leaders to preserve the pension system status quo. More important, however, is how they are represented within unions. Labor leaders are more likely to support pension reforms that impose significant costs on current workers when internal union institutions allow pensioners to influence unions social policy positions and centralize authority in peak-level bodies. Evidence from Italy and Germany confirms this argument. Strengthening the representation of pensioner interests within unions may help rather than hinder long-term pension system reform.

According to deliberative democratic theory, transparency and publicity have a civilizing effect on political behavior, forcing actors to argue with regard to the public rather than engage in self-interested bargaining. Negotiation theory, in contrast, warns that transparency may damage effective problem solving and lead to sharper group polarization. Comparison of business lobbyists acting in institutional settings with varying degrees of transparency in Sweden and the European Union can test these theories. The results support negotiation theory. However, the deliberative perspective is also necessary to explain the behavior of lobbyists backstage, and standard two level games will often be inadequate in explaining transparency effects.

This review of four books on the origins and consequences of market-based reforms in the past two decades in Latin America argues that it is necessary to accelerate the integration of four separate subfields of study: public opinion, the political economy of structural reform, the components of democratic governance, and institutional design. Each is centrally concerned with identifying the electoral and institutional incentives and constraints in public development policies. The review examines explanations of why only some institutional designs make governments responsive to voters’ preferences while building a consensus in favor of structural reform.

In seminal events, not only policy but also the political processes through which policy evolves undergo dramatic, fundamental change. Seminal events are as important as they are uncommon. Why do they occur, and how comparable are they across political systems? These questions are answered through instances where government attempts to build large-scale dam projects were reversed after they aroused opposition and in the process gave birth to modern environmental movements. Two cases in the United States and Australia are a heuristic through which to analyze the case of Dujiangyan in China. The Chinese case parallels the other two and fits within Schattschneider’s notion of “expanding the sphere,” suggesting that this framework is not limited by regime type. Substantively, the Chinese state may be fundamentally changing the ways it governs itself.

Several influential scholars have argued that organized labor is a consistent champion of democracy and that consequently strong labor movements make democratic outcomes more likely. Evidence from Latin America calls this argument into question. Organized labor has frequently supported nondemocratic regimes. In a comparative analysis of nine countries in Latin America, variation in labor support for democracy after 1945 hinged on two factors, the nature of their partisan alliances and the perceived regime alternatives.

A growing portion of tax policy in postcommunist Europe is driven by external factors relating to regional and global economic integration. The EU accession process and global competition for capital have largely determined tax policymaking and the development of capitalist tax regimes in Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. Eurostat data, OECD and EU reports, and interviews with political and bureaucratic officials support these conclusions. Recent trends in taxation in postcommunist Europe provide a striking example of the declining economic policy autonomy of states, in this case, newly autonomous states with a great sensitivity to issues of national sovereignty.

Why did India’s parliament repeatedly fail to enact the women’s reservation bill, which would have reserved one-third of legislative seats for women. Explanations cite poor drafting of the bill, caste politics, weaknesses of the women’s movements, and, simply, patriarchy. However, these explanations need to be supplemented by a comparative approach that draws on an expanding number of cross-national studies of gender quotas. These studies point to the important role of political parties and the electoral system, but in combination with the negative consequences of India’s “exceptional” democratic development.

Do transitions by pact restrict access to the political system and thus reduce the quality of democracy? A comparison of legislator continuity in Spain, where democracy was established by pact, and Argentina, which had a transition by collapse, demonstrates that, while Spain had greater continuity, continuity did not compromise the quality of democracy. The mode of transition shapes internal party rules, specifically candidate selection procedures, which influence the degree of continuity in nascent democratic regimes. A second comparison of the pacts in Spain, Colombia, and Venezuela demonstrates that transitions by pact vary with respect to how pacts are enforced, with potentially significant implications for the quality of democracy.

In 1969, in “Six Books in Search of a Subject or Does Federalism Exist and Does It Matter,” William Riker reached rather bleak conclusions concerning scholarship about federalism. This review looks at recent books on federalism to see if Riker’s verdict still applies. These books show that federalism indeed exists, so the aim is to evaluate current scholarship to see if federalism matters through four dimensions: democratic participation, representation, and accountability; the representation and accommodation of territorially based ethnic, cultural, and linguistic differences; public policy and governmental effectiveness; and the design of federal institutions.