“As an orchestra conductor sees to it that all the instruments sound harmonious and in proportion, so in social and political life does the Party direct the efforts of all people toward the achievement of a single goal.

In this paper, I investigate why a bureaucratic-authoritarian (hereafter BA) regime emerged in South Korea during the early 1970s. The regime transition was the outcome of conflict among key political actors who were constrained, although not in a deterministic way, by the change in the Korean economic structure. It can be understood as the outcome of strategic choices made by key political actors among alternatives that satisfied structural constraints.

Corruption is one of the key problems facing the Russian state as it seeks to evolve out of its socialist past. Naturally, regional patterns of corruption exist across a country as large and diverse as the Russian Federation. To explain these variations, the authors analyze 2002 data from Transparency International and the Information for Democracy Foundation that provide the first effort to measure differences in the incidence of corruption across forty Russian regions. They find that corruption in Russia is fueled by the size of government and by the level of development. Within each region, the amount of corruption increases as the number of bureaucrats grows and gross regional product per capita decreases. Russian policymakers can therefore work to reduce corruption by effectively reforming or scaling back bureaucracies and by encouraging economic development outside of the key centers of Moscow and St. Petersburg.

IN the early 1960's a great deal of “scare” literature was produced concerning Latin America. The titles and subtitles of many of the books and articles written during the period help bear this contention out: “The Eleventh Hour,” “Reform or Revolution,” “Evolution or Chaos.” The concern of scholars and public officials, stemming principally from the Cuban revolution, was that Latin America was about to explode in violent upheaval, that unless democratic reforms were quick in forthcoming, the Latin American nations would soon be the victims of Castro-Communist takeovers. The “one-minute-to-midnight” mentality shaped not only a great deal of official thinking and policy with regard to Latin America during the 1960's, but also permeated, in varying degrees of sophistication, the large body of development literature dealing with the area.

The landscape of the global economy is dotted with institutions that regulate investment and trade. In recent years, the number of bilateral investment treaties (BITs) and preferential trade agreements (PTAs), in particular, has grown at a torrid pace; practically every country is a member of at least one—if not many—of these institutions. For all the scholarly attention that these institutions have received, however, there is little research tying BITs and PTAs together. This is surprising, since both aim to increase commerce by making it more predictable. The authors seek to fill this gap in the literature. They argue that a BIT between a developed and a developing country should make it more likely that this pair of states will subsequently form a PTA. That said, the wrinkle in the story is that more is not better in this regard; the authors further argue that a developing country that has many BITs is less likely to conclude a PTA with a wealthy state. The authors test these hypotheses using annual data on pairs of developing and developed countries between 1960 and 2004 and find strong evidence in support of their argument.

This article presents and tests a theory of learning in international politics. Drawing primarily from social psychology and organization theory, the learning theory proposes that lessons tend to be drawn only from high-impact events in world politics, such as large wars and economic depressions. Lessons drawn tend to be simple and are oriented around the question of which policies are likely to be successful and which policies are likely to fail. This learning theory is tested on the alliance choices of small powers in the twentieth century. The predictions of two learning hypotheses are compared with those of a leading realist explanation of alliance choices, balance of threat theory. Quantitative analysis of small powers' alliance choices reveals that a small power's experience in the previous world war is a very powerful explanation of its peacetime alliance choices after that war, whereas the level of threat in the international environment has only marginal effects on the small power's alliance choices. Further, these threat effects may be in the opposite direction of that predicted by balance of threat theory.

Many studies of the social backgrounds of terrorists have found that they are wealthier and better educated than the population from which they are drawn. However, studies of political behavior have shown that all forms of political involvement are correlated with socioeconomic status. among those who are politically active, opportunity costs may lead those involved in nonviolent activities to have a higher social status than violent individuals with a similar ideological orientation. this article develops a theory of participation in violence that incorporates both opportunity costs and informational barriers to participation and tests it by comparing violent and nonviolent political activists involved in the anticolonial agitation in Bengal (1906–39) using data from their police files. While the Bengali terrorists are better educated and have higher status jobs than the population average, they are less educated and less wealthy than the nonviolent activists. these results suggest that socioeconomic status may play a substantial negative role in terrorist recruitment within elites.

This article argues that a high degree of relative state autonomy and ideology, while necessary, was not sufficient to explain fully the change from import-substitution industrialization to an open, free-market economy in Chile. A comparison across three distinct policy periods in authoritarian Chile reveals that shifting coalitions of businessmen and landowners, with varying power resources, also played an important part in the outcome. This approach does not seek to vitiate other interpretations of economic change in Chile and elsewhere. The question is not so much which factor is most important, but how and when the different factors matter.

How close is the link between outsized states and economic stagnation in Africa? This article shows that African public bureaucracies are not as large as often portrayed, that they have been getting smaller, and that reducing their size alone has not been a prescription for economic revival. To the contrary, the countries with higher levels of public employment, such as Botswana and Mauritius, are apt to have the better economic records. These findings suggest that a superabundance of public personnel is not in itself?, major impediment to growth in Africa. Too much attention has been paid to quantitative or “first-generation” bureaucratic problems, and too little attention has been given the “second-generation” issues of bureaucratic quality.

Why has voter turnout declined in democracies all over the world? This article draws on findings from microlevel studies and theorizes two explanations: generational change and a rise in the number of elective institutions. The empirical section tests these hypotheses along with other explanations proposed in the literature—shifts in party/candidate competition, voting-age reform, weakening group mobilization, income inequality, and economic globalization. The authors conduct two analyses. The first analysis employs an original data set covering all post-1945 democratic national elections. The second studies individual-level data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and British, Canadian, and US national election studies. The results strongly support the generational change and elective institutions hypotheses, which account for most of the decline in voter turnout. These findings have important implications for a better understanding of the current transformations of representative democracy and the challenges it faces.

This essay explores the relationship between deterrence theory and two distinct notions of rationality associated with it. The author argues that the concept of procedural irrationality, which is the basis of many critiques of contemporary deterrence theory, is not necessarily inconsistent with the instrumental definition of rationality implicit in many models of deterrence. He also argues that some recent rational choice models of deterrence are, nonetheless, deficient in their application of the rationality postulate. Finally, he provides an outline of a possible resolution of the paradox of deterrence.

About the beginning of the present century, the economic historian Werner Sombart proposed an interesting generalization. The share of foreign trade in total national income, he said, was bound to decline in every country as it became more industrialized.

Strategies of repression vary widely between extrajudicial and judicial extremes, from unrestrained acts of violence to highly routinized legal procedures. While the former have received a great deal of scholarly attention, judicial methods remain relatively understudied. When and why do rulers repress their rivals in court? The author argues that autocrats use a judicial strategy of repression when confronting challengers from within the ruling elite. Unlike regime outsiders, who pose a common, external threat to mobilize against, insiders present a more divisive target. When autocrats confront the latter, a judicial strategy legitimizes punishment, deters future rivals, and generates shared beliefs regarding incumbent strength and challenger weakness. Using original data on political prisoners in postcolonial sub-Saharan Africa, the author finds that autocrats were significantly more likely to use a judicial strategy against insiders and an extrajudicial strategy against outsiders. A case study of Kenya traces the logic of the theory, showing how intraregime conflict made courts a valuable instrument of state repression. The findings demonstrate how courts can play a central role in autocratic survival.

The theory of games is used to investigate several controversial issues in the literature on the balance of power. A simple model of an international system is presented as an n-person noncooperative game in extensive form, and the stability of both constant-sum and nonconstant-sum systems is examined. It is shown not only that constant-sum systems with any number of actors from two through five can be stable, but also that stability is actually promoted by conflict of interest. Contrary to much of the literature, however, there is a well-defined sense in which the most stable system is one with three actors. In each type of system, there is at least one distribution of power that leads not only to system stability but also to peace. Some of these peaceful distributions are more stable than others, and these more stable distributions are shown to be characterized by inequality rather than by equality of power. It is possible to distinguish between a bipolar and a multipolar type of stable distribution, the properties of each of which resemble, to some degree, assertions made about them in the literature. Finally, contrary to much of the recent literature on international cooperation, an increase in the ability of states to make binding agreements may actually diminish the stability of international systems.

How does repression influence overt, collective challenges directed against political authority? To date, answers to this question have been inconclusive. This article argues that recent works inadequately address the topic because the focus has been on repression's impact on local civilians, with less consideration of dissident organizations. The author develops an organizational theory of challenger development and specifies predictions for how repression's effects on dissent are contingent upon the types of organizational behaviors targeted for coercion. The analysis employs original, microlevel data collected from previously confidential Guatemalan National Police records to assess the effects of repression during the years 1975 to 1985. Results show that the effects of repression are more complex than previously imagined. When repression targets the clandestine activities necessary to develop and sustain dissident organizations, such as holding meetings, training participants, and campaigning for funds, dissent declines significantly. But when repression is directed at ongoing, overt, collective challenges, it motivates a backlash that escalates dissent. Implications are drawn for how political order and conflict are understood and studied.

A number of comparative judicial scholars have argued that assertions of judicial authority are a function of the level of fragmentation/competition in the formal political sphere. Accordingly, in authoritarian or one-party settings, judges should be deferential to power holders, and in places where political power is divided between branches and/or parties, one would expect to see greater levels of judicial assertiveness. Through a longitudinal, qualitative analysis of one most-likely case (Chile) and one least-likely case (Franco-era Spain) and drawing on a half-dozen other cases from the comparative judicial literature, this article argues that political fragmentation is neither sufficient nor necessary for judges to challenge powerful actors. Instead, it argues that assertive or “positively independent” judicial behavior requires ideational support, in the form of a role conception/professional ideology that gives judges motivation for such behavior. Such professional attitudes are socially and institutionally constituted in a dynamic process that itself shapes judges' perceptions of the opportunities for and obstacles to judicial assertiveness, both within and outside the judiciary.

Recent developments in the study of international politics reflect two major emphases. One comprises a variety of attempts at systematization and stresses the “frame of reference” approach; the other seeks specific knowledge of national policies in greater detail and stresses the “area studies” approach. Theoretically, the first explains international politics in terms of broad generalizations applicable to all international actors insofar as they conform to an ideal model or depart therefrom in a calculable manner. The second seeks to understand international politics in terms of the relationship of foreign policy to the total social and historical context from which it emerges. This article is an attempt to find a middle ground between these two emphases.

How do citizens in authoritarian states feel about their leaders? While some dictators rule through terror, others seem genuinely popular. Using the Gallup World Poll’s panel of more than one hundred-forty countries in 2006–2016, the authors show that the drivers of political approval differ across regime types. Although brutal repression in overt dictatorships could cause respondents to falsify their preferences, in milder informational autocracies, greater repression actually predicts lower approval. In autocracies as in democracies, economic performance matters and citizens’ economic perceptions, while not perfectly accurate, track objective indicators. Dictators also benefit from greater perceived public safety, but the authors find no such effect in democracies. Covert censorship of the media and the Internet is associated with higher approval in autocracies—in particular, in informational ones—but ratings fall when citizens recognize censorship. In informational autocracies, executive elections trigger a ratings surge if there is leader turnover, but, unlike in democracies, reelected autocrats enjoy little honeymoon.