During the 1990s Russia appeared to be a classic example of the perils of federalism in political transition. Powerful ethnically based republics challenged the center on key reforms, and a weak federal government appeared unable to counter their claims to sovereignty. Since the election of 2000, however, regional prerogatives have been substantially curtailed. An assertive center has dramatically reined in much more pliant republics. How could the center roll back the regions’ privileges so quickly? In fact, republic sovereignty was seriously limited. Federal authorities retained key controls over local resources, and federal inability to create effective market institutions constrained regional opportunities to develop countervailing external ties.

Political party development in transitional polities can usefully be understood to emerge from imperfect competition in a market for electoral services in which candidates are consumers. The roots of weak party development are potentially to be found not only in institutional design and social cleavages, but also in the possible presence of strong party substitutes capable of successfully competing against parties in such markets. This model is shown to offer a solution to seemingly contradictory findings. It is backed by an original dataset on candidates and voting patterns in the understudied single member district half of Russia’s parliamentary elections.

Economic development produces two types of environmental movement: pollution-driven protests and world-view motivated nongovernmental organizations. These different types require different political opportunities and therefore interact with the political process in different ways. Local environmental protests are mainly materialistic and do not challenge the political structure in fundamental ways. The political opportunity they require is not large, and they do not play a decisive role in political transition. Nongovernmental environmental organizations, in contrast, require the redefinition of state-society relations. They demand more political space, challenge the authoritarian political structure, and play a much bigger role in political transition. With democratization, environmental movements become a serious political actor and ally for political elites.

Who participates in demonstrations? Analyses of participants have emphasized the role of political disaffection, strategic resources, and context. Against the backdrop of the rise of protest politics in both older and newer democracies, this article addresses the question by focusing on Belgium, a postindustrial society that exemplifies changes in protest politics and can be studied through detailed surveys of participants in demonstrations. Demonstrators are similar to the Belgian population in general. There is little evidence that they are antistate radicals. Yet some significant social, attitudinal, and behavioral contrasts demarcate different groups of demonstrators. Far from threatening the state, demonstrations have become a major channel of public participation in democracies.

African regimes’ repressive strategies changed during the post-1989 wave of democratization. Conventional methods of coercion—targeting of the opposition by the official security forces—were insufficient and costly in multiparty regimes. Democratization enfranchised the opposition and broadened the range of political challengers to include rural constituencies and entire ethnic groups. Furthermore, human rights abuses raised the threat of international sanctions at a much lower threshold than during the cold war. Rulers in Kenya and Rwanda responded by privatizing state violence. Privatized repression allowed them to neutralize widespread challenges, while distancing themselves from political violence to minimize friction with aid donors.

The patron-client, patrimonial or elite democracy, and neocolonial or dependency frameworks have been the three prominent interpretations of Philippine politics. New interpretations — the patrimonial oligarchic state, bossism, and the clientelist electoral regime — are essentially variations of the patrimonial/elite democracy framework. Both old and new interpretations suffer from a critical weakness: a one-sided, top-down view of Philippine politics. An alternative interpretation is contested democracy, combining the frameworks of elite democracy and democracy from below. Philippine politics is characterized by a contestation between a patrimonial elite that promotes a minimalist view of democracy and subordinate classes and ethnic communities that want a more participatory and egalitarian democracy.

Chile and Uruguay have not figured prominently in the theoretical debate over decentralization. Absent from each are the types of powerful subnational actors who have forced national politicians to decentralize in many countries in recent years. Nevertheless, national politicians in both countries decided to decentralize in pursuit of partisan advantages, demonstrating that decentralization can occur even when subnational officials are structurally weak within their parties. Decentralization has delivered several gains anticipated by reformers, but it has also created important new challenges, including the weakening of traditional sources of national control over subnational officials.

A comparative examination of the initial phases of market reform in Chile and Argentina reveals a merging of traditional elements of Latin American patrimonialism with the market reform agenda of technocrats. In both cases, patrimonial leaders and methods played an essential role in getting market reform under way and in keeping it on track. Patrimonial leaders and methods contributed to the concentration of political power and to the nature of the reform process. Such methods had a nefarious impact on market reform policy outcomes. The commonality of patrimonial features and their importance in breaking down political resistance under military and electoral democratic regimes suggests the resilience and persistence of patrimonial norms and behaviors, especially in times of crisis. They will remain a powerful challenge to democracy.

Recent theoretical arguments on judicial policy implementation posit a public enforcement mechanism for judicial decisions that challenge governmental authority. While this mechanism nicely links insights from both positive and normative theories of compliance, it raises two issues. First, there is a distinction between the degree of support constituents may afford a court and the real political costs people are capable of imposing on their recalcitrant representatives. Second, insofar as information concerning the nature of the conflicts high courts resolve is purported to be vital to the possibility of public enforcement, public officials should be expected to attempt to influence the information available to their constituents.

Oil contributed to civil war in the Republic of Congo, but this conflict would never have arisen in the first place had democratization not generated substantial political instability. Once the fighting began, moreover, petroleum’s overall effect was ambiguous. Oil tempted elites to fight, but the oil fields’ remote location also limited most combat to the capital city. Later, oil money helped underwrite a 1999 peace settlement. Despite polarization among Congo’s three main ethnoregional groups, the country did not fracture into ethnic, secessionist, or warlord zones. Thus, Congo qualifies prevailing theories linking natural primary commodities and civil war.

Malaysia’s pseudo-democracy has begun to change. On one side, in the wake of economic crisis Malaysia’s politics started to unravel in fuller democracy. Analysis is guided by the work of Haggard and Kaufman on crises and democratic transitions. More recently, though, amid partial economic recovery, the government has checked democratizing pressures. Nonetheless, it has been unable to reequilibrate its pseudo-democracy fully, prompting it to tighten the regime in a baser form of authoritarianism. After having persisted for three deccades, Malaysia’s pseudo-democracy has lost resilience.

This article reviews three recent books that explore the social and political foundations of the regulatory changes in the governance of British society and economy. Beyond privatization, there is increasing delegation to autonomous agencies, formalization of relationships, and proliferation of new technologies of regulation in both public and private spheres. Sociolegal, public administration, and political economic perspectives can help explore the forces that shape these new institutions. The notion of regulatory society accompanies the rise of the regulatory state.

Conditionality has had negative effects on neoliberal reform in Africa, and scholars now contend that governmental commitment to reforms, rather than conditionality, yields success. This article explores the dilemmas of commitment and the complexity of success in two highly praised reformers to establish a benchmark against which to judge reform in other countries. Commitment is a protracted negotiation between the state and social actors. Furthermore, even in successful cases, restructuring is the product of a dynamic interaction between institutional legacies and the policy choices of engaged agents and results in varied trajectories. Lastly, new alliances and fissures generated by structural change may undermine reform success over time.

In the 1990s presidents Menem of Argentina and Cardoso of Brazil reduced their countries’ chronic inflation rates to close to zero. Not since 1944 in Argentina and 1937 in Brazil had inflation stayed so low for so long. How did these leaders succeed where so many had failed? Models of the political economy of reform, which focus on crisis, the electoral calendar, wars of attrition, party control of veto points, or the enhanced credibility of left-wing converts to neoliberalism, do not provide convincing explanations. Success depended instead on other particular tactical choices. The article identifies the stakeholders impeding reform and analyzes Cardoso’s and Menem’s tactics to marginalize some while coopting others.

Recruitment, electoral contestation, political socialization, interest aggregation, and organizational resources of political parties have contributed to the consolidation of democratic processes in Ghana. Despite a turbulent political history, including several long military regimes, a two-way cleavage has evolved into a virtual two party system that advances consolidation processes. Elections over four republics have remained highly competitive, and governance has alternated almost equally between the two sides of the cleavage. Their shared dominance over forty-four years has significantly strengthened their command of recruitment, socialization, and interest aggregation. While organizational resources remain weak, a strong electoral commission and robust media have added managerial heft and extensive public exposure. On balance, democratic consolidation processes, and perhaps system consolidation, are well along.

Democracy is generally defined as a combination of procedures and inclusiveness, but inclusiveness has presented a challenge for comparative historical theories of democratization since they operationalize their dependent variable with universal adult male suffrage as the standard of inclusiveness. Raising the bar to include women is an important first step in revamping theories of democratization, but it is also necessary to incorporate gender and race as categories of analysis even when the group being enfranchised is white working class men. Two additional variables, transnational activism and historical timing, are important for theories of democratization.

The applicability of rational choice models is dependent upon the levels of stability and certainty in the political area. This point can be demonstrated through an analysis of the politics of preserving electoral systems, in particular, through a critique of a rational choice analysis of Israel. The very nature of the arenas in which electoral reform was adopted in the 1990s, in Israel and other established democracies, and the nature of the proposed reforms make this subject unsuitable for study through the rational choice paradigm. An alternative analysis of Israel and an alternative approach that can incorporate these inherent complexities would be more appropriate.

A first generation of studies of the causes and consequences of decentralization and federalism viewed decentralization as a simple zero-sum transfer of authority from the center to subnational governments, drew upon the assumptions of welfare economics and public choice theory, and employed blunt measures of expenditure decentralization and federalism. More detailed pictures of decentralization and federalism that help explain the growing disjuncture between theory and cross-national evidence can be obtained by defining several alternative forms of federalism and fiscal, policy, and political decentralization, then measuring them and exploring interrelationships across countries and time. This approach points the way toward a second generation of more nuanced empirical research that takes politics and institutions seriously.

Variation in the level and quality of labor mobilization after the fall of authoritarian regimes has been underestimated. Evidence from Bulgaria, Poland, and Russia demonstrates variation across countries, across movements within countries, and in the behavior of the same movements over time. To understand this variation, it is necessary to look at how competition between labor unions interacts with coalitions between unions and political parties. Comparison with Spain and Argentina supports the wider relevance of these mechanisms. Finally, it is necessary to consider the conditions under which competition between unions and strong alliances with political parties are likely to emerge in new democracies.

The place of labor in market reform coalitions, ranging from democratic inclusion to labor repression, triggers a trade-off between the degree of deregulation in the formal sector and the amount of compensations targeted to the unemployed and poor workers in the informal sector. Comparative analysis of Chile (1973-1989), Argentina (1989-99), and Spain (1982-96) reveals that, the more organized labor is included in the policymaking process, the less extensive reform of the system of industrial relations will be. Conversely, the more organized labor is repressed or excluded, the more labor law will be deregulated. In addition, when labor is excluded or repressed, the relative importance of compensatory policies in the form of subsidies to unemployed and unorganized workers in the informal sector is greater.

How has Brazil’s civil society shaped the institutional framework for new policymaking venues? Institutionalism and civil society theories offer partial explanations of institutional innovations under the current democratic regime. The concept of participatory publics can overcome the limitations of each approach and can demonstrate how the expansion of Brazil’s civil society led to the creation of participatory, deliberative policymaking institutions. Participatory publics comprise organized citizens who seek to overcome social and political exclusion through public deliberation, accountability, and implementation of their policy preferences. Participatory budgeting in the municipalities of Porto Alegre, Belo Horizonte, and Recife shows how civil society organizations and political reformers interact to implement new policymaking systems.

Remittances are becoming a more important source of funds for many Third World countries than foreign aid, bank loans, and foreign investment, as families find their own transnational solutions to limited homeland economic opportunities. The impact of remittances, however, is contingent on the social relations and structures in which the foreign currency becomes embedded. While good for recipients, they may have mixed consequences for states. Although Cuba’s Communist regime appears to be a strong state with a weak society, remittance dynamics are transforming and undermining, as well as bolstering, the state and strengthening society differentially within a transnationalized context. Conditions conducive to remittance sending and the effects of informal dollarization are analyzed, with comparisons to Central American countries with similar open economies but different regime types.

North American publics and regional trade liberalization have been little studied. Although the North American free trade arrangement is relatively recent, political debate and grass-roots protest over trade in Canada and the United States are increasingly visible, and a fuller understanding of how citizens in these countries judge trade policy is needed. An analysis of the influences of national identity, economic self-interest, and supranational attitudes on Canadian and American opinion toward NAFTA, using comparative data from the 1995-96 International Social Survey Program, indicates how symbolic predispositions of national identity provide significant and accessible information shortcuts for citizens on trade.

Standing at the crossroads of politics, administration, economy, and society, the study of clientelism has unfolded in three waves of research since the 1960s. While initially research considered clientelism to be mainly a vestige of early modern development, later research has been intrigued by its systemic persistence and continuous organizational change. A review of the most recent wave of research on political clientelism traces some of its major paradigmatic and conceptual trends and shifts, addresses its institutional viability under democracy and market economy, and delineates the future direction of research on the institutional contexts favoring or constraining it.

Largely because the Middle East has defied global trends toward democratization, it has been marginalized in the field of comparative politics. The articles in this special issue argue that nondemocratic regimes like those in the Middle East can serve as counterexamples to enhance explanations of the factors that contribute to democratic transitions and that perpetuate authoritarian rule. The articles eschew cultural explanations and advance instead propositions that spotlight political-institutional variables, such as the rules governing party recognition, electoral competition, nongovernmental organizations, and military professionalization. They also emphasize the strategic choices made by incumbent authoritarian rulers and both religious and secular opposition challengers.

Explanations of the robustness of authoritarianism in the Middle East and North Africa have focused on absent prerequisites of democratization in the region, including weak civil society, state-dominated economies, poor socioeconomic performance, and nondemocratic culture. By contrast, the region’s enduring authoritarianism can be attributed to the robustness of the coercive apparatus in many Middle Eastern and North African states and to this apparatus’s exceptional will and capacity to crush democratic initiatives. Cross-regional comparison suggests factors both external and internal to the region that account for this exceptional strength.

How do state-created institutions influence government-opposition relations during prolonged economic crises? Different experiences in Morocco and Jordan challenge the widespread notion that economic crises promote political opposition. While the opposition in Jordan consistently demanded reform, the opposition in Morocco initially challenged the regime but then became unwilling to challenge it further as the crisis continued. Different institutional structures explain these strategies. In Jordan formal institutions did not promote divisions between opposition groups, and opposition elites were more likely to mobilize political unrest. In Morocco incumbent elites divided political opposition into loyalist and radical camps, and the loyalist opposition became unwilling to mobilize unrest.

Advocacy nongovernmental organizations have led major antiauthoritarian campaigns in many liberalizing Arab regimes because of the weakness of opposition parties. Their actions bode poorly for democratization because they are structurally incapable of sustaining successful campaigns against determined authoritarian regimes. To explain the weakness of opposition to Arab authoritarianism, it is necessary to examine the conditions that promote the expression of opposition through nongovernmental organizations rather than parties. These conditions include both severe limitations on party mobilization, the financial poverty of most opposition parties, and the dramatic increase in donor funds for advocacy nongovernmental organizations.

What prompts radical opposition leaders to abandon their ultimate goals and accommodate themselves to competitive politics? Many studies portray ideological moderation as contingent on a broader process of democratization. Recent change in the public goals of some Islamists in Egypt suggest that more limited political openings can also facilitate moderation. They can generate new incentives for strategic moderation and create new opportunities for political learning, or change in political actors’ core values and beliefs. Prodemocratic learning is most likely when institutional openings create incentives and opportunities for radical opposition leaders to break out of the ideologically insular networks of movement politics and enter into sustained dialogue and cooperation with other opposition groups.

Why have electoral politics emerged in Turkey and nowhere else in the postcolonial Middle East? The nature of nascent indigenous party systems significantly affected the type of political regimes that developed after Middle East states gained their independence in the mid twentieth century. Three variables – the number of parties and the presence or absence of policy polarization and mobilizational symmetry in party systems – explain regime outcomes and help shed light on Turkey’s political exceptionalism. Party system characteristics, treated as the dependent variable, offer an explanation for much of the variance across the region.