For over three decades the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has based its deterrent on the principle that the United States would retaliate with nuclear weapons if a Soviet conventional attack against Western Europe succeeded. This notion has long troubled most strategic analysts. It remained generally acceptable to political elites, however, when U.S. nuclear superiority appeared massive enough to make the doctrine credible (as in the 1950s); when the conventional military balance in Europe improved markedly (as in the 1960s); or when détente appeared to be making the credibility of deterrence a less pressing concern (as in the 1970s). None of these conditions exists in the 1980s, and anxiety over the danger of nuclear war has prompted renewed attention to the possibility of replacing NATO's Flexible Response doctrine (a mixture of nuclear and conventional deterrence) with a reliable conventional deterrence posture that might justify a nuclear no-first-use (NFU) doctrine.1

In the mid-1950s, the Eisenhower administration proposed that the U.S. government subsidize the expansion of American corporate interests abroad. In 1954 and again in 1955, the Republican administration recommended that Congress ease the provisions of the Internal Revenue Code applicable to income earned abroad in order to encourage American multinational corporations (MNCs) to increase their investments overseas. The MNCs and exporters opposed specific components of the administration's tax package, however; Congress therefore refused to endorse it. By the end of its tenure in office, the administration itself retreated from its attempts to subsidize private capital exports and began to advocate a crackdown on tax abuse by American multinational firms.

Our knowledge of the operations of the centrally planned East European economies has become increasingly detailed; unfortunately, this accumulating scholarship has led to a certain disregard for some of the larger issues, especially concerning long-term developmental trends. The adverse results of this loss of focus have become quite apparent from the discussions about Soviet and East European economic problems—occasioned by the deaths of Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov—in the popular and semi-popular press. Most of the sweeping generalizations presented to the public were at considerable variance with scholarly assessments tucked away in publications for specialists. Further, many of the important empirical lessons in earlier comparative studies of long-term growth in East and West (for example, the remarkable survey by Bergson)1 appear to have been forgotten; and U.S. governmental policy statements often appear to be based on false assumptions about what actually happened.

Despite its widespread currency in political science, the concept of clientelism has rarely found its way into the literature on communist systems. Students of communist politics regularly note the importance of personal ties, and many recognize the significance of informal bonds in economic and political spheres at all levels of society. Some even apply the term “clientelism” to the political behavior they describe. Yet these studies are generally limited to elite-level politics, to factionalism, career mobility, recruitment patterns, and attainment of office at the top- to middle-level echelons of the bureaucracy.2 Few have considered clientelism as a type of elite-mass linkage through which the state and the party exercise control at the local level, and through which individuals participate in the political system.

In this paper, I examine two key relationships relevant to the comparative study of policy implementation. The first is the linkage between the structure of elites, techniques of mobilization, and local policy implementation. Although many studies of elites have emphasized the effects of integration on political stability, they have only recently addressed the question of how elite integration affects policy implementation. More specifically, how does the existence of elites that are deeply divided over policy issues affect the power capabilities and opportunities of those elites and, therefore, the methods they employ to mobilize support for their policies? And how do these techniques affect the pattern