During the third wave of democratization, all Latin American countries except Cuba have had competitive political regimes, but the quality or level of democracy has varied significantly across countries and over time. One of the best predictors of this variance across countries and time is each country’s experience with competitive politics before 1978. Even controlling for a wide range of other explanations, countries with more democratic heritages before 1978 have higher levels of democracy in the contemporary period. This finding, in turn, raises another question: what accounts for the effects of past levels of democracy on the post-1978 period? A hybrid fixed-effects model shows that democratic trajectories are institutionalized through political parties and judicial institutions. Countries that had institutionalized parties under democracy and supreme court justices who served under democracy in the pre-1978 period have been more able to build high-level democracy in the contemporary period.

When parties adopt internal elections to choose candidates, power shifts from party leaders to party activists. Some authors suggest that this results in more ideologically extreme candidates and helps party outsiders. However, based on surveys of legislative candidates in Mexico’s 2006 national elections, two findings are evident. First, candidates chosen via internal elections were significantly more moderate and more likely to be party insiders than candidates chosen by party leaders. Second, organizational dynamics explain these outcomes. Because in Mexico legislative primary elections get little media attention, candidates rely on factional networks to mobilize support. Successful candidates appeal across factional divisions, resulting in winners who are more moderate, but not less connected to the party.

Why are citizens willing to cast ballots for corrupt politicians? On the one hand, voters may simply lack information about corruption. On the other hand, voters may knowingly overlook corruption when politicians otherwise perform well in office, delivering public goods to their constituents. Citizen responses to a nationwide survey in Brazil indicate that the vast majority of voters express a willingness to punish corrupt politicians, regardless of politician performance. High income voters form a partial exception to this overall rejection of corruption; they react less negatively to information about corruption and more strongly to information about competence than the general population. These findings imply that specific, credible, and accessible information will lead most voters to punish corrupt politicians at the polls.

Recent research on political representation in new democracies indicates that the quality of representation in Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe is substandard when compared to the older, Western democracies. There are, however, theoretical reasons to presume that microstates form an exception to this rule, especially in light of the natural closeness between citizens and politicians in these states. On the basis of an in-depth, qualitative analysis of the characteristics and quality of political representation in the microstates of St. Kitts and Nevis, Seychelles, and Palau, this expectation is rejected. Instead, it is found that the small-scale political dimensions of microstates engender a political environment that is marked by personalistic politics and the pervasiveness of various forms of particularism.

Why is the Korean welfare state underdeveloped? From the institutionalist point of view, it is evident that existing institutions influence the policy preferences of key actors of welfare politics: organized labor and employers on the demand side and politicians on the supply side. Distributive demands of organized labor have been satisfied by affluent big business (or chaebol) through an implicit or explicit cross-class alliance with parochial enterprise unions, and the nation’s single-member-district electoral rules have induced politicians to sell geographically targeted benefits rather than promising social welfare for all beyond their district. As a result, despite the nation’s successful economic growth and democratization, neither the supply nor the demand side has been conducive to significant welfare state expansion in Korea.

State legitimacy is a concept that is frequently invoked, rarely defined, and notoriously difficult to pin down. The four books under review represent three schools of thought that dominate the scholarship on the legitimacy of the African state. The first approach relies on universal standards of governance to assess state legitimacy. The second attributes legitimacy to culturally specific understandings of appropriate forms of power, and the third uses institutional coherence to evaluate the legitimacy of state rules. While each approach contains insightful and convincing pieces of scholarship, no one provides a satisfying account of legitimacy and the state. A more holistic approach to state legitimacy as a dynamic, interactive process is needed.

Why, upon the 1947 Partition of British India, was India able to establish a stable democracy while structurally similar Pakistan created an unstable autocracy? The differential strengths of India and Pakistan’s independence movements directly account for their divergent democratization trajectories. These movements were initially constructed to pursue historically conditioned class interests. An examination of these movements leads to a broader theory of democratic origins, which qualifies the prevailing notion that a country’s democratization prospects can be attributed to its levels of economic development or inequality.

Scholars blame high levels of ethnic heterogeneity for many social and political ills, including poor economic growth, corruption, and policy gridlock. But it can be argued that, in seeking reelection, politicians will join multiethnic coalitions to pass policies in this endeavor. Further, government expenditure increases with coalition size, as each politician seeks policies that benefit his or her own constituents. Subnational data from Zambia, the use of which helps control for country-level factors hindering standard cross-national studies of fiscal politics, indicate that government spending increases with ethnic heterogeneity. This evidence challenges studies which ignore the incentives generated by political institutions and claim that ethnicity leads directly to undesirable outcomes.

In recent years, scholars have struggled to explain high levels of support for both state-sponsored Islamic law (sharia) and democracy in many new Muslim-majority democracies. The origins of popular support for Islamic law in uncertain democratic environments can be considered using the case of Northern Nigeria, where twelve states implemented sharia through democratic institutions during the early 2000s. Sharia implementation movements gain popular support by framing problems common to new democracies (corruption, inequality, poor governance) as moral concerns to be addressed by the state’s enforcement of ethical conduct. While sharia implementation has had a dubious effect on democratic governance in Nigeria and elsewhere, support for Islamic law is likely to endure within Muslim communities where governance remains poor.

Power sharing, or the predetermined allocation of state resources to putative groups, is an increasingly popular conflict resolution mechanism throughout the globe. However, critics argue it rests on ill-founded assumptions of group fixity, deepening divides it seeks to overcome. Proponents respond that liberal consociationalism reduces conflict by allowing for self-determined groups. In order to evaluate these claims, a model of power sharing explains the incidence of conflict in Jos, Nigeria. The findings refute the claims of liberal consociationalism regarding the conflict-mitigating potential of self-determination of groups. National conflagration of localized conflict resulting from power sharing suggests that ethno-federal power sharing does not quarantine conflict.

Foreign donors use a variety of mechanisms to effect public goods in aid recipients. The two most common mechanisms, traditional aid and conditionality, are implemented through the domestic institutions of the recipient state. Yet a third mechanism, the “parallel institution,” bypasses domestic institutions to provide public goods within well-defined sectors or territories. Parallel institutions are distinct from other forms of aid. The autonomy and core capabilities of parallel institutions allow them to produce higher levels of public goods, but simultaneously hinder the infrastructural power of the recipient state.

Why did Russian governors unexpectedly acquiesce to centralizing reforms undertaken by Vladimir Putin? Interviews with regional and central politicians and an analysis of speeches during 1990–2009 reveal that interests alone cannot account for the presence or absence of governors’ political action. Understanding governors’ (in)action requires uncovering the grounds for its justification and legitimation. The enabling role of the discourse, fusing the ideas of democracy and federalism, propelled autonomous behavior on the part of regional elites. The shift in the dominant discursive frame that occurred in Russia under the leadership of Putin brought to prominence the idea of strengthening state power, thus making defiant and autonomy-seeking behavior by regional elites untenable.

Standard theories about elections in Africa suggest that they are little more than ethnic headcounts. Data from an exit poll conducted on Election Day in Ghana’s 2008 election challenges this view. The two main parties, the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP), drew support from many ethnic groups; and there was little evidence of ethnic block voting. Rather, voters’ beliefs about the parties and incumbent performance were the main determinants of vote choice. Evaluations of the attributes of the NDC and NPP shaped the outcome of Ghana’s 2008 election far more than the ethnic identity of the candidates. These results hold important implications for understanding voting, parties, and government performance in multiethnic democracies.

The antigovernment protests that erupted in one ethnic region of Ethiopia can be attributed to the group’s historical grievances or to its access to mobilizing resources. However, conventional explanations are insufficient in accounting for protest patterns in terms of their geographic distribution or varying levels of violence. The likelihood of protest onset was inversely related to local heterogeneity, intraethnic as well as interethnic. Protest violence spiraled through the interaction between ethnic homogeneity and the government’s policing strategy. Woundings were less likely to occur in localities where protesters were repressed by police forces staffed by their own co-ethnics.

Latin America’s political economy has shifted in the three decades since the return to democratization, with the inflationary crises of the 1980s fading into the past. One consequence of this change is a reduction in the electoral salience of inflation. While electoral support for the incumbent in the 1980s and 1990s was strongly tied to his or her ability to prevent increases in prices, in the 2000–2010 period there was no significant association between inflation rates and election outcomes. Instead, incumbents who presided over a growing economy in the last decade reaped electoral benefits. The importance of the economy for electoral outcomes varies over time and even across economic indicators.

Latin American women are less likely than Latin American men to express a preference for democracy. This gender gap in support for democracy is partly a function of the level of attachment that women as a group have for the democratic regime, and this level of attachment is determined by the mode in which democratic transition occurs. Four models examining the gendered attitude-toward-regime decision in seventeen countries over four time periods show that when women are involved as significant political actors at the time of the democratic transition, their support for democracy varies in ways similar to their male counterparts. When women have lesser roles, gender specific behaviors emerge.

Why did a highly redistributive, nationalized health care system emerge in the UK, where the Left was comparatively weak, while a more redistributively neutral, cash-centric, insurance-based system was pursued in Sweden, where the Left was strong? The explanation is two fold. First, in contrast to the Swedish Social Democrats, the weakness of the British Labour Party constrained it to pursue redistribution via health policy. Second, given the redistributive goals of the National Health Service, it became imperative for the Labour Party to construct a system that would be difficult for future Conservative governments to retrench. More generally, this formulation posits rational actors operating in the kinds of processes typically studied by historical institutionalists. The result is a tendency for a type of path dependence by design.

The tension between immigration and redistribution has attracted increased attention in recent years. Many authors argue, based on economic self-interest theory, that there is a negative relationship between support for redistribution and preferred levels of immigration. Notwithstanding the role of economic self-interest, there is in fact a multitude of motivations that moderate the relationship between preferences for redistribution and attitudes toward immigration. A model of preferences for immigration shows that self-interested and strongly reciprocal individuals experience a tension between immigration and redistribution, while egalitarians do not experience this tension. Humanitarians express a general willingness to help those who are worse off, immigrants included, but this motivation does not affect their preferences for redistribution.

Scholars have made substantial progress toward understanding the connections between ethnic relations and civil war, but important theoretical and empirical gaps remain. Existing explanations often ignore the constructivist origins of ethnic group formation, or are too proximate to the outcome under investigation, so that the link between ethnic political competition and ethnic violence is difficult to pick apart. An alternative approach is an explanation of ethnic violence rooted in the microfoundations of social identity theory (SIT). When states consistently employ ethnic categories across institutions, they lay the foundation for conflicts over status and power, facilitating recruitment and mobilization on the basis of emotion-laden intergroup comparisons and competition. The strength of these claims is demonstrated through a comparative-historical analysis of ethnic violence in eleven Southern African countries.

Surprisingly, waves of political regime contention in Europe have slowed down through history but have achieved more success in triggering advances toward democracy, as a comparison of the revolutions of 1848 and 1917—1919 shows. Major organizational developments account for these inverse trends. Before political mass organizations arose, ordinary people decided whether to emulate foreign challenges to established autocrats. Short on information, citizens relied heavily on inferential shortcuts and acted rashly, with little success. After the rise of mass organizations, common people took cues from their representative leaders, who had more information and greater processing capacity. Before emulating an external precedent and challenging their ruler, leaders waited for propitious circumstances. Therefore, twentieth century regime contention diffused more slowly yet with greater success.

Theories of environmental outcomes have been developed mostly through large-N cross-national studies, which have a structuralist bias and rely heavily on correlations. Structured, focused case studies can help overcome those limitations by incorporating political processes and identifying causal mechanisms. Climate policy outcomes in Germany vary greatly across policy areas such as emissions target setting, the economic transformation of eastern Germany, renewable energy, ecological tax reform, voluntary agreements with industry, emissions trading, and unregulated increases in the consumption of household heating, transportation, and electricity. Comparative analysis of nine case studies indicates that environmental outcome theories should more fully include external focusing events, advocacy coalition formation, multiple paths of influence for green parties, and the negative effects of neocorporatism and unregulated technological change and consumption.

Why do party systems in longstanding democracies sometimes experience sudden change? Neither sociological nor institutional explanations can account for the swift increase in support for regional political parties in India in the 1990s. Instead, the shift from single-party majority to coalition government explains the rise of regional parties. The advent of coalition government increased the incentives associated with joining and establishing regional parties, prompting many already popular politicians to leave their national parties and take their supporters with them as they formed new regional parties in the 1990s. This finding reverses the causal arrow that usually links party systems and coalition government and illustrates how noninstitutional elements of the political context can determine elite incentives and thereby shape party systems.

Party brokers have information about voters’ political preferences and likelihood of turning out to vote, and are able to target clientelistic inducements and monitor voter participation in exchange for voters’ electoral support. However, brokers may also use the clientelistic inducements they receive from bosses to pursue their personal enrichment, at the cost of lost votes for their party. An original dataset tracing the political careers of 137 municipal candidates in Argentina shows how bosses combine information from voter turnout at rallies and elections. By comparing a broker’s ability to mobilize voters, bosses are able to make inferences about reliable brokers who will distribute party goods to voters, and unreliable brokers who will use party goods to pad their own pockets.

Until recently the mass murder and civil war scholarships developed alongside each other without engaging in fruitful dialogue or building on one another’s insights and findings. However, as the reviewed books demonstrate, following the “micropolitical turn” in the study of civil war, and with the genocide scholarship moving away from the state-centered approach, there is a convergence between the two literatures. The new wave of research on mass violence builds on the findings and theories of the civil conflict literature, proposes ways in which each field can contribute to its counterpart, and puts forward new questions and research agendas for further research on mass violence.

“Rituals of respect” are recurrent, public, and reciprocal political practices. In Sufi-majority Senegal, such practices first facilitated accommodation among a variety of groups in potential conflict, and later facilitated tolerance, then respect, and eventually democracy. The social construction of horizontal rituals of respect between religious groups, especially Sufis and Catholics, and reciprocal vertical rituals of respect between the secular state and virtually all religious groups, have created this “twin tolerations”- friendly environment. Three of the major dimensions of this pattern—a “co-celebratory” dimension of diverse religions, a consensual state-religion “policy cooperation” dimension, and a “principled distance” dimension of support for human rights and democracy—are also prominent in several countries which have large Muslim populations and are widely seen as having been democracies for the last ten years, namely, Indonesia, India, and Albania.

In the United States, considerable evidence documents the power of partisanship to shape voter preferences. But does partisanship have similar powers beyond American shores? Observational evidence leads some in this old debate to answer yes, but others to contend partisanship merely restates party vote. Experimentation can clarify what powers, if any, partisanship wields over voters in specific countries. If effects differ across countries, then scholars can turn their attention to explaining why. Survey experiments conducted in three countries where multiple parties viably compete for legislative seats—Great Britain, Hungary, and Poland—demonstrate that, when cues are available, party identifiers often follow their party’s lead when expressing policy preferences. However, the pattern of results suggests this power may strengthen with party system crystallization.

Has democratization in Mexico begun to tilt policies in favor of consumers and away from entrenched interest groups, as some scholars predict? Evidence from post-crisis banking reform efforts during 1995 to 2000 suggests that a sharp increase in interparty electoral competition did have salutary effects for consumers. It created incentives for the PRI government, with legislative support from the PAN, to improve capital adequacy and liberalize foreign investment that stabilized the banking system. However, high party discipline—low intraparty competition—created incentives for the PRI-PAN to collude to implement profit-padding regulations that benefitted bankers and harmed consumers. Party discipline appears to be a significant obstacle for consumer-friendly regulatory reforms in Mexico.

Existing explanations of judicial reform emphasize the positive effects of electoral competition. However, multiple, competing, and even contradictory mechanisms behind this association obfuscate causation, and variation in the timing and content of reforms remains puzzling for these accounts. Leveraging a “most similar” comparative design at the subnational level across three Mexican states, and drawing on archival analysis and interviews with judges and other legal elites, principled ideological factors are found to shape judicial reform. That is, judicial reform is less a mechanical side effect of increasing electoral competition and more the product of principled, purposeful action. These findings emphasize the role of agency and ideas in building democratic institutions.

What determines the identity category to which individuals feel they most belong? What is the political significance of one’s proclaimed identity? Recent research addresses these questions using surveys that explicitly ask individuals about their identity. Yet little is known about the nature of the attachments conveyed in responses to identity questions. The findings of a set of studies and experiments investigating these reported attachments suggest that the purported identity captured in survey responses varies significantly within subjects over time; changes in people’s primary identity can be highly influenced by situational triggers; and changes in purported self-identity do not imply a corresponding change in policy preferences. These results are drawn from three studies that vary in terms of design, country sample, and research instrument.

Scholarship on the politics of immigration has increased impressively among political scientists and scholars of comparative politics. The books analyzed in this review all synthesize and, in their own way, build upon the literature that has evolved over the past two decades, addressing questions at the core of this literature or posing new questions. Perhaps most important, each takes a comparative approach to the politics of immigration, focusing on post-World War II immigration policies in Western Europe; variations in immigrant conflict among different immigrant groups, across localities and cross-nationally; differences in citizenship policy among countries at similar levels of development and changes in well-established policies over time; and the connections between naturalization policy and naturalization rates and the historical relationship of colonizing, noncolonizing, and settler countries with immigrant populations.