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.

Does an informal institution grant police wide latitude to use lethal force in Argentina and Brazil? Evidence from extensive fieldwork and a sample of police homicide prosecutions in Buenos Aires and São Paulo indicate that an informal institution is at work in cases involving the killing of a victim perceived as a violent criminal but not in more routine cases of excessive use of force. In the latter cases, the problem is more properly characterized as a failure of the system to gather the requisite information to support a prosecution.

Brazilian political institutions have been the subject of intense debate. A more pessimistic view argues that the electoral and party systems constrain effective policymaking, while a more optimistic one sees Brazilian presidents as relatively unimpeded. However, this debate has taken place with little reference to the most critical area in evaluating institutional performance: public policy. Neither view accounts satisfactorily for the outcome of the privatization of the Brazilian telecommunications system. Instead, noninstitutional factors, especially public opinion and the quality of individual leaders, are critical in explaining policy results. More systematic cross-sectoral and cross-national studies of policy outcomes are needed to understand better the impact of political institutions.

The nexus between regime type and development has long preoccupied scholars of the political economy of development. Investigation of this relationship has generally taken place at the cross-national level of analysis. In a world now dominated by a development strategy that seeks to empower local governments and community groups, an understanding of the development consequences of the local political environment is essential. This article examines the municipal development legacy of Mexico’s principal demand-based poverty alleviation program of the early 1990s, the National Solidarity Program (PRONASOL). Examination of PRONASOL project outcomes across distinct local electoral environments provides strong support for the proposition that characteristics of local electoral regimes play an important role in the success or failure of the decentralized development strategy.

Do individual-level attitudes play a significant role in sustaining democratic institutions at the societal level? In a recent article in Comparative Politics, Seligson argued that the strong aggregate-level correlations Inglehart found between political culture and stable democracy were spurious because there are no individual-level correlations between political culture and overt support for democracy. Seligson’s analysis exemplifies the sort of cross-level fallacy he attributes to Inglehart: he equates individual-level support for democracy with the presence of democratic institutions. However, individual-level support of democracy is only weakly linked with societal-level democracy. Democracy currently has a positive image almost everywhere, but favorable opinions are often superficial. Unless they are accompanied by more deeply rooted orientations of tolerance, trust, and participation, chances for effective democracy are poor.

Political scientists tend to draw a sharp distinction between personalized and institutionalized patterns of rule and to assume that personalization indicates low levels of institutionalization. This view is based on a narrow procedural definition of institutions that makes more sense in democratic than in authoritarian settings. While democratic institutions consist largely of procedures that constrain the executive’s despotic power, authoritarian institutions consist primarily of organizations that enhance the regime’s infrastructural power over political opposition. The practical significance of this distinction can be seen in the personalization of power in Malaysia. An aspiring autocrat ironically took advantage of highly institutionalized political organizations to enhance his personal power, even while maintaining the regime’s resilience in the face of pressures for democratization.

Comparative political economy has reached a moment of theoretical synthesis in which a series of incremental theoretical developments has coalesced into a new paradigm. The theoretical framework of the varieties of capitalism approach to political economy establishes a space for rigorous institutional analysis. It can compellingly explain why distinct national varieties of capitalism exist and how institutions interact to reinforce these varieties. Nonetheless, the varieties of capitalism approach needs to be supplemented by a much greater emphasis on political contestation and the uneven, conflictual, and interdependent development of national capitalisms. Not simply better institutional theory, but also a better institutional theory of capitalism is required.

The distinctive designs of American and Swedish tax regimes closely resemble the characteristics that would be expected from their mass and elite political cultures: individualistic and egalitarian/hierarchical, respectively. The relative influence of rival cultures among relevant organized members of a society’s political elite offers a sound predictor of policy design. Explanations of policy design characteristics grow increasingly satisfactory the more thoroughly they draw on culture and the structure of broad political institutions, both in conjunction with historical contingencies. Yet culture and social structure make distinctive contributions to the process through which policy is designed.

Pension reform is a key political issue in most western European countries but takes a different shape depending on the institutional structure of existing pension systems. There are two different models of pension provision: social insurance and multipillar pension systems. Their vulnerability to socioeconomic developments differ dramatically. Multipillar systems better withstand the demographic challenge and adapt better to internationalized financial markets, but they are less effective than social insurance systems in integrating atypical employment. The distinction between two models of pension provision also helps explain reform trajectories and suggests that the impact of decisions made decades ago will continue to influence pension policy for some time to come.

Subnational comparison can help analyze how nascent democracies construct the rule of law. Variation in judicial autonomy across two neighboring Argentine provinces is a function of interparty competition. The rule of law results from a balance of power between at least two political parties, neither of which has monolithic control; no highly disciplined party sustains control of both the legislative and executive branches. Effective party competition and low party discipline create a climate in which an autonomous judiciary can develop. In contrast, monolithic party control, defined as a prolonged period of unified government under a disciplined party, blocks development of the rule of law.

Why did cronyism impede growth in some developing countries but not in others? Theoretical analyses of transaction costs and the new institutional economics can help answer this question. A comparison of Korea, the Philippines, and Indonesia shows that, if there is a situation of mutual hostages among a small and stable number of government and business actors, cronyism can reduce transaction costs and minimize deadweight losses, while a situation in which there are either too few or too many actors increases deadweight losses through corruption.

Comparative politics approaches the question of the appropriate role of the state in economic life through a nation-centric prism. India, a crucial but puzzling case, offers an alternative framework. The search for developmental states has until now proceeded at too aggregate a level. India is inaccurately perceived as a failed developmental model because of a misspecification of the level of analysis. Under a common interventionist regime, some subnational provinces proved to be high performers. A two level interactive model posits that the policy framework of growth in India is not centrally guided but is a joint product of central rules, provincial strategic choices, and subnational institutional variation.

The four books reviewed in this article represent attempts to explain the process of postcommunist economic reform in ways that go beyond simple appeals to political will. Focusing their analyses on Russia, they exhibit a striking consensus on the broad outlines of transformation, but they differ starkly in how they identify and analyze the actors, interests, constraints, and opportunities at work. Comparison of the arguments’ strengths and weaknesses shows how scholars can build on recent insights into the identity and resources of major players in postcommunist reforms, the nature of institutional change, and the role of the state in economic restructuring.

In democratic transitions, when will women mobilize on the basis of gender identity? While women in many countries have responded to transitions to democracy by mobilizing along gender lines, in most of the transitions in Central and East Europe women who participated in dissident movements did not. There are three significant causes of women’s mobilization: resources, framing of issues, and inclusion or exclusion from the agenda-setting process within the opposition. Women’s preexisting formal or informal networks lead to gender-based organizing. Direct contact with the international feminist community allows women to frame their situation as women and to organize separately from men. And exclusion from the agenda-setting process affords them an opportunity to unite along shared gender identity.

In both Poland and the Czech Republic women are significantly less likely than men to obtain the first or top positions on electoral lists, even when political experience as candidates and elected officials is controlled, but particular types of parties are more likely to place women in top positions on electoral lists. The likelihood of women to secure a top position on electoral lists is examined through logistic regression. Political experience, characteristics of political parties, and district magnitude are controlled. Differences in the effects of political experience, party, and district characteristics on the likelihood of securing a top position on electoral lists are compared.

Islamist parties in Jordan and Yemen have become the most female-friendly in the Middle East since the initiation of political liberalization. Why has women’s participation in two highly conservative Islamist parties increased so dramatically over a relatively short period of time? Expanded women’s participation is not the result of a strong, articulated women’s movement within each party or of the triumph of moderates over hardliners. Rather, Islamist women have found greater voice when male party leaders recognize the utility of mobilizing female voters and when tensions within the parties largely unrelated to women create space that women can seize. In particular, intraparty fissures along two issue axes—commitment to democratization and interpretation of sacred texts—create structural openings for Islamist women. While the openings often disappear as conflicts are resolved, women advance incrementally within the parties.

Governmental inducements, that is, organizational benefits conferred on labor organizations, are a necessary condition of support for economic reforms because of the high costs reforms impose on workers. However, the provision of governmental inducements is not sufficient. Labor organizations must also consider strategic constraints—accountability to the rank and file and horizontal competition among unions—that can undermine support for economic reforms. This framework to analyze contemporary labor strategies toward economic reform is applied to Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and Poland.

Peru under Fujimori was a most likely candidate to deepen economic reforms because it had a dominant chief executive with a lengthy tenure, a rubber stamp legislature, and close collaboration between business and government. Nevertheless, its record of reform was mixed. Social interests play an important role in such market transitions. The move from crisis-induced reforms to the consolidation of reform is affected by shifting governing coalitions and changes in the interactions between state and business. The dominance of different groups across different phases of the economic restructuring process helps account for the slowdown of the market agenda.

Four recent books focus on the importance of the subjective orientations of social actors in empirical political outcomes, but they attempt to overcome the methodological and conceptual problems of research in the culturalist tradition in different ways. There has been a move toward greater specificity in defining the particular kinds of belief systems that can serve as independent variables. This welcome trend indicates the importance of distinguishing more clearly between ideologies—formal, explicit, relatively consistent definitions of political community articulated by political elites—and cultures—informal, implicit, relatively inconsistent understandings of political community held by people within a given institutional setting.

Once taken as primordial givens, ethnic groups are now recognized to be historical constructions. The structure of ethnic cleavages needs to be viewed similarly. The contemporary landscape of linguistic divisions in Zambia, including the number of groups it contains, their relative sizes, and their spatial distribution, can be traced to specific policies implemented by the Northern Rhodesian colonial administration and its missionary and mining company allies. The structure of ethnic cleavages is a heretofore overlooked legacy of colonialism.

Senegal has been at the forefront of democratization in Africa and has consequently increased the representation of political minorities. Despite the growing presence of Senegalese women in elected office, they continue to confront many political obstacles, including exclusion from positions of influence within state and party structures and lack of resources to mobilize support. While these difficulties may be attributed to gendered conceptions of political leadership, democratic reforms have also not altered the patrimonial nature of politics and the structural constraints it imposes on the political participation of women. Women have therefore had marginal access to the hidden public of patronage networks.

Why have ethnic, national, and religious identities not led to violent conflict in Central Asia? Why and when are some identities more salient than others? Although identity has been highlighted as a critical variable in postcommunist transitions, few studies have examined the social roots of identity or asked how identity affects transitional stability or conflict. In the Central Asian countries of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, clan networks both foster social stability and deter ethnonational or religious conflict. However, clans also define the fault lines of instability and conflict.

Accountability in legislative representation carries implications for the relationship between legislators and constituents regarding communication, information, responsiveness, and the potential for punishment. There is an inherent tension between party discipline and responsiveness by individual legislators to their constituents. Recent institutional reforms in Latin America have sought to increase individual responsiveness of legislators, even at the expense of party discipline. The most important are mixed electoral systems combining single member districts with proportional representation and public voting in legislatures.

Judges who lack independence are not automatically subservient to the government of the day. Analysis of the separation of powers can explain why, when, and in which types of cases judges who lack secure tenure strategically defect from the government by ruling against it when it violates the rule of law. This theoretical framework explains a number of otherwise puzzling decisions handed down by the Argentine supreme court in the 1990s. In a context of democratic consolidation, the scope of the court’s defection was reduced but not eliminated.

Recent studies of postcommunist democracy illustrate how the states of East-Central Europe have overcome Leninist social, economic, and political legacies with varying degrees of success. Stark differences in outcomes have led to a more subtle understanding of Leninist legacies. The empirical findings of the three books under review also suggest that the positive influences of Leninist institutions and developmental policies on postcommunist politics should also be considered. Research would also benefit from examination of the unintended external consequences of Leninism, especially the institutions and ideology of a unified Europe, in accounting for the relative success of the states of East-Central Europe in the 1990s.