This essay discusses the social background and career experiences of a previously unstudied group of Chinese elites: the mayors of Chinese cities. The data are compared with available information on basic-level leaders and higher-ranking cadres. China's mayors are relatively young, have not been in their posts very long, are college graduates (usually majoring in engineering), and quite often are mayors in cities in their native provinces. This last finding is counter to all Chinese bureaucratic practice dating back to the early empires. The authors relate these characteristics to broader developments in the Chinese political system. In particular, localism and elitism are reinforced by China's new mayoral elite; furthermore, the patterns identified appear to contribute to growing political immobilism in China.

One of the defining features of modern states is their incorporation of notions of political and social community based on shared language, history, and myths. However, large numbers of citizens in modern states have come to believe their national communities are under threat from several modern forces, including immigration. Using the European Social Survey (2002–9), this article explores the extent to which perceived threats posed by large-scale immigration undermine national political communities by reducing trust in national politicians and political institutions. The findings indicate that even after controlling for other predictors of trust in the political system, concerns about the effect of immigration on the national community have an impact on trust in politics. Moreover, having a lengthy postwar history with mass immigration mediates this effect, while the potentially mobilizing effects of far-right parties on the relationship between concern about immigration and political distrust are somewhat limited.

This review of new directions in the American and comparative literatures on the state reveals important intellectual trends that parallel each other quite closely. Both comparativists and Americanists address similar questions about the sources of state authority, and both propose similar answers. Collectively, these scholars and others are retheorizing the state—developing a suppler, multidimensional picture of the state's origins, structure, and consequences—to shed light on the reasons for the state's stubborn refusal to cede the stage. The emerging understanding of the state that the authors describe provides a framework not only for revisiting the state in the international realm but also, in dialogue with recent Americanist studies, for revising and deepening the understanding of the state's paradoxical role in American political development and finally setting aside the assumption of the United States as stateless. In this emerging view, American state building, strength, and institutional capacity form through links with society, not necessarily through autonomy from society. But such distinctive patterns provide insights for comparative studies, too, for instance, in respect to the relationship between the state and welfare policy across nations.

There is striking consistency in the international economic behavior of the United States across the bipolar and unipolar eras. The United States has been simultaneously a system maker and privilege taker, and its ability to play that dual role has required the willing collaboration of foreign partners. U.S. influence over those partners, however, has changed in important ways. During the cold war the United States dominated international economic adjustment struggles. Its ability to prevail in those struggles after the cold war has been significantly compromised. The United States, notwithstanding its preponderant power, no longer enjoys the same type of security leverage it once possessed, and the very success of the U.S.-centered world economy has opened a greater range of international and domestic economic options for America's supporters. In the unipolar era the United States may continue to act its own way, but it can no longer count on getting its own way.

One of the most influential arguments in international relations is that international institutions influence states' behavior by monitoring their compliance with treaties, which in turn facilitates reciprocity. Empirically, however, many treaty organizations are not mandated to monitor compliance. The article develops a parsimonious theoretical framework to address the empirical diversity of monitoring arrangements. By mapping strategic environments onto monitoring arrangements, it accounts for who detects noncompliance and who brings it to light. In particular, two factors—the interest alignment between noncompliance victims and their states and the availability of noncompliance victims as low-cost monitors—largely shape the organizational forms of information systems. This simple theory sheds light on a wide range of substantiveh/important treaty regimes.

Social psychologists have long attempted to explain the group-induced shift phenomenon: that it is impossible to predict group choices from knowledge of individual preferences prior to group discussion, and that individuals change their choices during group deliberations. Most explanations of group-induced shifts have focused on substantive changes in individual preferences induced by group dynamics. This study explores the possibility that individual preferences do not necessarily change in the course of group discussions. Rather, decision makers may switch their choice in part because one or more individuals manipulate the decision-making process in a manner that helps them achieve their desired outcome. The study distinguishes between rational and nonrational variations of decisional manipulation and considers examples of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy choices under crisis conditions to illustrate such processes. The implications of these ideas for the study of foreign policy decisions are discussed.

In what must surely rank as one of the strangest episodes in the entirehistory of science, two generations of our immediate forebears in the social sciences managed virtually to ignore the “Darwinian” theory of biological evolution and to exclude from their purview any sustained consideration of the role of biological factors in the shaping of human behavior.

The phenomenon of general or hegemonic war has long been viewed as a distinctive kind of conflict, and one that has played a unique Robert Gilpin states: role in world history.

Do regional hegemons use their power in regional organizations to advance foreign policy objectives? The authors investigate whether Japan leverages its privileged position at the Asian Development Bank (adb) to facilitate project loans for the elected Asian members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), a platform from which it seeks to shape global affairs. Analyzing panel data of adb loan disbursements to twenty-four developing member-countries from 1968 to 2009, the authors find that temporary UNSC membership increases adb loans, particularly during the post–1985 period, when Japan asserted greater influence in multilateral organizations. They estimate an average increase of over 30 percent. Because of Japan's checkered history of imperialism, the adb provides a convenient mechanism by which the government can obfuscate favors for politically important countries. Acting through this regional organization enables Japan to reconcile a low-key approach to foreign affairs with the contradictory goal of global activism–leading without appearing unilateralist.

Over the past decade traditionalists have launched a series of attacks on scientific approaches to international politics. Most of the arguments employed against the scientific approach stem from those used earlier by E. H. Carr in The Twenty Years’ Crisis. The general arguments that have been employed include these among others: that politics involves purpose in a way that physical science does not; that scientific knowledge is applicable to facts, but understanding, wisdom, or intuition are required for areas where human purpose is involved; that those pursuing scientific models tend to mistake their models for reality; that scientific method requires high precision and measurement and therefore is incapable of coping with the most important elements of international politics; and that the practitioners of scientific method can never be sure that they have not left something out of their model.

Although research in the advanced industrial nations has identified a supportive link between an expanded public sector role and economic openness, studies of the developing world have been much less sanguine about the possibilities of broader state intervention in the context of economic liberalization. The authors investigate the possibility that governments in Latin America may “embed” economic openness in a broader public sector effort. They find that while several countries have moved toward an orthodox neoliberal model with minimal state interventions, other Latin American governments have maintained a broader public sector presence on the supply side of the economy while pursuing deep liberalization. They call the latter strategy “embedded neoliberalism,” to distinguish it from the more egalitarian ambitions of postwar embedded liberalism. Cross-sectional time-series analysis reveals that embedded neoliberal strategies in Latin America have grown out of a legacy of advanced import-substitution industrialization and have been promoted by nonleft governments, except in cases where labor is very strong. The orthodox neoliberal model, by contrast, has emerged where postwar industrial development was attenuated and where labor unions were weakened considerably by the debt crisis.

Policies may be characterized in several distinct and competing ways: as best resolved by professional expertise, as fit for political determination, as properly treated in terms of legal rights, as appropriately subject to bureaucratic norms, or as sensibly left to market determination. The consequences of the choice among these frameworks is apparent in contrasting the British and American approaches to a particular policy issue, the education of handicapped children. That analysis reveals the utility of maintaining a policy scheme which builds in a tension among the competing frameworks.

Despite a widespread trend toward the adoption of increasingly participatory approaches to political decision making in developing countries, there is little or no evidence that these practices in fact return the benefits attributed to them. This article investigates one specific worry—that participatory decision-making processes may be vulnerable to manipulation by elites. The authors report on a field experiment, drawing on a unique nationwide experiment in democratic deliberation in São Tomé and Príncipe in which the discussion leaders were randomly assigned across meetings. The randomization procedure provides a rare opportunity to identify the impact of leaders on the outcomes of group deliberations. They find that leader effects were extremely large, in many cases accounting for over one-third of all variation in the outcomes of the national discussions. These results have important implications for the design of such deliberative practices. While the total effect of leadership cannot be assessed, it may still be possible to observe when leader influence occurs and to correct for leader effects in comparisons of outcomes across deliberations.

Arend Lijphart's 1969 article on consociational democracy was a compelling critique of prevailing theories of democratic stability and the launching pad for one of the most widely regarded research programs in contemporary comparative politics. However, Lijphart and others who adopted consociational approaches encountered severe logical, theoretical, and empirical criticisms of their work. The success of the program and its apparent imperviousness to many of these attacks has been remarkable. Lijphart s primary response was to abandon standard norms of social science in favor of an “impressionistic” approach that protected the attractiveness and wide applicability of the theory at the cost of precision and scholarly rigor. The overall trajectory of the consociationalist research program is explained with reference to a shift from early- to late-Lakatosian commitments—from insisting on corroboration for one's theories through repeated encounters with evidence to a late-Lakatosian stance that expects the political and rhetorical skills of scholars operating on behalf of their research program to be more significant than evidence or theoretical coherence.

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.

In defining international free trade as a public good, “hegemonic stability theory” posited early in the 1970s that its reliable supply depended upon a distribution of international power analogous to that within a privileged group. More recently, however, critics have challenged three assumptions fundamental to hegemonic theory: its premises of free trade, public goods, and privileged groups. They have concluded that hegemony is not necessary for, and indeed may be antithetical to, a stable world economy based on market exchange.

The author argues that the critics overstate their case. The assumptions they attack allow hegemonic theory to represent analytically several critically important barriers to free trade among states. Among these are the existence of strategic interdependence among the actors and the prevalence of informational asymmetries. The most significant flaw in hegemonic theory is its neglect of the essence of the domain to which it applies: the politics of inter-state trade in an anarchic world.

Ten Latin American presidents have a power that has not received the study that it deserves: the ability to make positive suggestions to vetoed bills. These “amendatory observations” return to Congress for afinalround of voting. Sometimes the presidential version of the bill becomes the default alternative automatically and may require qualified majorities to be overturned. The authors analyze veto procedures in eighteen Latin American countries and argue that amendatory veto power significantly increases presidential weight in legislative decision making.

At many places and times, tribes have merged to form peoples; and peoples have grown into nations. Some nations founded empires; and empires have broken up again into fragments whose populations later attempted again to form larger units. In certain respects, this sequence appears to describe a general process found in much of history. This process shows a number of patterns which seem to recur, and which to a limited extent seem to be comparable among different regions, periods, and cultures.

Immigration poses individual or collective economic risks that might increase citizen support for government redistribution, but it can also generate fiscal pressure or undermine social solidarity to diminish such support. These offsetting conditions obscure the net effects of immigration for welfare states. This article explores whether immigration's effects are mediated by the economic and social integration of immigrants. Integration can be conceptualized and measured as involving the degree to which immigrants suffer unemployment rates, depend on welfare-state benefits, and harbor social attitudes similarly to the native population. Such integration may alter how immigration reduces solidarity and imposes fiscal and macroeconomic pressures, but does not much alter how immigration spurs economic risks for natives. Where migrants are more integrated by such measures, immigration should have less negative or more positive implications for native support for government redistribution and welfare states than where migrants are less integrated. The article explores these arguments using survey data for twenty-two European countries between 2002 and 2010. The principal finding is that economic integration, more than sociocultural integration, softens the tendency of immigration to undermine support for redistributive policies.

One of the uncertainties of modern international relations is the degree of interdependence among states. Some theorists have asserted that interdependence is high and/or growing, and others have maintained that it is low and/or declining. Essentially, the debate about interdependence has proceeded in three separate phases, (i) In the aftermath of World War II, technology was heralded as the stimulus to an interrelationship among states: The world was shrinking; technological, military, and economic factors would produce interdependence even among erstwhile enemies. (2) Later this conventional wisdom was challenged by Karl Deutsch and his associates, who purported to show that various economic indicators of external reference were declining. International transactions were lessening relative to intranational transactions. More and more, citizens were turning to the nation-state for the satisfaction of their needs, and national economies were taking precedence over the previous international economy of the nineteenth century. This theme has recently been powerfully reinforced by Kenneth Waltz. (3) In reaction to the claims of the Deutsch group, which initially predicted stalemate in European unification efforts and a greater autarchy for industrial states, new presentations of the argument in favor of interdependence have been made. According to this view, interdependence among states is certainly increasing. A symposium on the international corporation partly reinforces Deutsch's view, while one on transnational processes argues against it. The resultant of these theoretical vectors remains uncertain. In this essay we hope to offer new data and to provide a modest reconciliation of the contending claims, drawing a trial balance between them.