This paper considers the role of reputation and signaling in establishing deterrence. The cost-benefit calculations of rational deterrence are extended to allow for incomplete or imperfect information. The author uses requirements of a sequential equilibrium (and its refinements) to impose consistency restrictions on how strategic players signal a reputation for strength. This provides a way to interpret potentially misleading reputations and offers a resolution to the reputation paradox of Jervis.

Regime analysis has focused on issues of market failure, the resolution of which depends upon knowledge and institution building. Global communications regimes, however, have been concerned either with issues of pure coordination or with coordination problems with distributional consequences. Outcomes have been decided by the underlying distribution of national power. In those areas where power was asymmetrically distributed and there was no agreement on basic principles and norms—radio broadcasting and remote sensing—no regime was formed. In those areas where distributional issues could not be unilaterally resolved—allocation of the radio spectrum and telecommunications—regimes were created, although both principles and rules changed with alterations in national power capabilities.

Economists tend to discount national size in their explanations of development, on the mistaken assumption that all aspects of big and little economies are proportionate. Taking population as the measure of “size,” and focusing on the second of the four demographic giants (China, India, USSR, U.S.), the present analysis dwells on the proposition that giantism adds the awkwardness of more layers to official hierarchies. There are two escapes: acceptable decentralization, that is, downward delegation, and “sideways delegation” to such servomechanisms as self-adjusting markets. India not only needs the market for coping with giantism; its size makes its market substantially different—and on balance better—if government can avoid balkanizing its internal economic space. Giantism has, as well, some human-resource dimensions (it may lend the advantage of critical mass to training of skilled elites) and certainly some international aspects (the trade-to-GNP ratios of giant countries, their aid receipts per capita, and their votes per capita in multilateral institutions are all low).

The intuitively plausible relationship between protest behavior and political instability is empirically supported by a large number of studies. Statistical evidence in support of this conjecture is provided by the correlation between indicators of protest behavior such as the presence of extremist parties and groups or the salience of an antisystem dimension and the rapid rise and fall of governments. The theories of writers such as Huntington, Gurr, and Davies suggest that when social and political mobility overtake the rate of economic growth, die result is radical challenge to the system by extremist parties and protest movements, leading to political instability and the loss of legitimacy. The main argument of this article is that the relationship between protest behavior and legitimacy may be more complicated than that, particularly when state responsiveness under the impact of popular protest and redistributive economic policies is seen as an intervening factor. By drawing on a survey of localelites in India, the article shows that certain forms of protest behavior, used in conjunction with conventional forms of participation such as contacting bureaucrats and political leaders at higher levels, might actually contribute to greater legitimacy of the state by providing an alternative channel of participation, extending the political agenda, and contributing to the recruitment of new and previously powerless social forces.

Five years after the downfall of Ferdinand E. Marcos, scholars of Philippine politics have yet to achieve even minimal consensus on the proper characterization of his authoritarian regime. More importantly, scholarship has failed to account for fundamental continuity, across regimes, in the way in which dominant economic interests interact with the Philippine state. The author argues that a focus on patrimonial aspects of the Philippine state will not only bring a greater sense of coherence to many disparate aspects of Marcos's rule, but will also lead to clearer understanding of enduring characteristics of the Philippine political economy. Throughout the postwar years, political administration is often treated as a personal affair, and the assignment of privileges granted by the state is largely determined by the personal discretion of those oligarchs currently holding official position. The article explores factors that help to explain why there has been no effective pressure from either domestic or external forces to undermine the patrimonial features of the state, and suggests that future research should analyze why patrimonial features have persisted in the Philippines despite enormous change, yet elsewhere seem to have subsided in the face of change.

Until the early 1970s many scholars believed that the process of economic modernization would result in the decline of ethnic political activity throughout the world. This melting pot modernization perspective failed on both theoretical and empirical grounds. After its collapse, scholars promoted a new conflictual modernization approach, which argued that modernization brought previously isolated ethnic groups into conflict. Although this approach accounted for the origins of ethnic conflict, it relied too heavily on elite motivations and could not account for the behavior of ethnic political movements. In the last five years, scholars have tried to develop a psychological approach to ethnic conflict. These scholars see conflict as stemming from stereotyped perceptions of differences among ethnic groups. This approach fails to analyze the tangible group disparities that reinforce these identifications and that may serve as the actual catalysts for ethnic political conflict. The conflictual modernization approach is reinvigorated by applying it to the cases of ethnic conflict in Canada and Belgium. In both of these countries the twin processes of economic modernization and political centralization intensified ethnic conflict while stripping ethnic movements of the romantic cultural ideologies and institutional frameworks that could provide these movements with some long-term stability. Thus, by integrating the modernization approach with a resource mobilization perspective we can develop theories that can account for ethnic conflict throughout the world.