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.

Does democratization automatically democratize police forces? Can brutal and unaccountable forces be supplanted by internal security systems rooted in respect for citizen rights, elected civilian control, and accountability? Significant demilitarization of internal security is possible in Latin America, but only where the armed forces are seriously weakened in conjunction with transitions toward democracy. Failure in warfare has usually been necessary to debilitate military regimes in Latin America. A comparison of war transitions (democratization through failure to win a war) to democratic transitions in which the armed forces were not strategically weakened demonstrates that war transitions best account for internal security reforms in new democracies.

Recent political and economic transitions in Latin America have shaped a third transition in the nature of civil society and democratic representation. The conceptual territory of democratic representational regimes can be mapped out in four theoretical patterns of state-society relations: adversarial, delegative, deliberative, and cooptive. A comparison of representational regimes in state-society relations in Argentina and Brazil shows a shift in civil society towards organization in nongovernmental organizations, in addition to social movements. Despite this common characteristic, the different emerging representational regimes in these two countries carry different implications for the quality of democracy.

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.

What accounts for the durability of the postwar democratic political settlement in Mozambique, one of the world’s most unlikely success stories? The fragile postwar political system in Mozambique owes its survival to the coexistence of two contradictory tracks for the management of political conflict. The first comprises the formal processes and institutions of majoritarian democracy. The second consists of informal elite bargaining processes involving the top leadership of the two major parties. This dualistic system has so far succeeded in accommodating contrasting elite notions of democracy and system legitimacy and in compensating for actors’ asymmetrical levels of trust and political capacity.

The political constraints created by dismantling central planning and more recently by fulfilling membership criteria for the European Union present eastern European politicians with an unprecedented lack of public policy options in critical areas of government, such as the economy. East European political parties have thus had little choice but to compete over operating styles rather than substantive programmatic alternatives. Continued party system instability in eastern Europe is a direct consequence of this type of party competition. Parties have had, in effect, to satisfy two constituencies, one informal and the other external, with the very existence of the latter inhibiting the development of the former.

Studies of European monetary cooperation have concentrated largely on the process of domestic preference formation. Ideational, interest-based, and institutional approaches can help explain why European Union member states pursued monetary cooperation. Ideational theories are elite-oriented and emphasize cognitive factors in the decision-making process. Interest-based approaches highlight the material costs and benefits of different social groups. Institutional theories focus on the role of independent central banks in the decision-making process. These approaches are complementary rather than incompatible. Future research should investigate the interrelationship and mutual interdependence of ideas, interests, and institutions and their embeddedness in larger international structures.

By the late 1990s the Chinese economy faced a series of financial problems, often attributed to the persistence of socialist institutions of economic control. However, China’s contemporary political economy is no longer best understood by the distinction between plan and market. Even in its financial sector China has to a large extent transcended this distinction. Rather than reflect the absence of liberalization, its current problems stem from the process of liberalization, the same process that occurred previously in virtually all market systems.

Variations in local state structure and practice have been neglected by political scientists, but they can cause uneven implementation of central policy and variation in state-society relations that can affect the power and sometimes even survival of the central state. Regardless of regime type, local state variation is shaped by superordinate levels of the state, local social contexts, and local officials’ preferences and ideologies. Two regions in Republican and post-Mao China illustrate the causes of local state variation and demonstrate how the differences in local state structure and practice affected state-society relations, policy implementation, and state capacity in public finance and taxation.

How has the double member district electoral system imposed by Pinochet’s regime affected parliamentary candidate selection in Chile? A complex constellation of variables influences candidate selection and placement on coalition lists. Parties and coalitions do not simply choose candidates to maximize district vote. They attempt to realize discrete objectives related to subpact alliances, national coalitions, and presidential candidacies which may not maximize the total individual or list vote. Generally applicable rules govern coalition selection of candidates. The effect of electoral systems and particularly of strategically complex systems on candidate selection processes across Latin America is an important subject for analysis.

The increasing interest of big business in democracy in Turkey is explained by a mix of domestic and global influences. Democracy is highly valued by big business because its absence effectively isolates Turkey from global norms and from benefits of full membership in the European Union. Domestically, democracy is conceived instrumentally as a necessary mechanism to limit arbitrary state intervention and contain redistributive pressures from below and threats from other segments of the business community. Though an improvement over current arrangements, this understanding of democracy does not extend social rights or challenge existing power relations. It seeks instead to create a more stable and predictable environment in which an externally competitive market economy can flourish.

Urban bias is commonly thought to be more intense in nondemocratic nations, in particular in one party systems. As societies democratize and introduce political competition, policy shifts in favor of rural interests. However, during Russian democratization urban bias has intensified through a widening price scissors, an open trade policy, and low domestic purchase prices. This intensification is explained by four factors previously not considered by urban bias theory: ideological differences between the state and rural interests; the ideological compatibility of rural interests; the internal coherence of rural interests; and the nature of political alliances entered into by rural groups.

As the third wave of democratization recedes, many authoritarian regimes persist. The stability of many authoritarian states raises important questions. The four books under review use different approaches to analyze the basic political struggles that occur within authoritarian states. The studies edited by Chehabi and Linz examine fallen patrimonial states and the difficulty of building democracy in their wake. Vandewalle, Herb, and Wedeen analyze the less attended topic of authoritarian continuity and stability through the resilience of dictatorships in the Middle East. Together, these four books offer an encouraging turning point in theorizing about contemporary authoritarianism, independent of democratic transition.