Why did modest attempts to decentralize the centrally administered Soviet system lead to its collapse, while more far-reaching decentralization in China left central political and administrative hierarchies intact? This article analyzes the disintegration of centrally planned organizations in the context of a neoinstitutional model of the breakdown of authority within hierarchies. An agency model of hierarchy is presented that incorporates the ambiguous property rights, authority relations, and risk-sharing conditions that prevailed under central planning and then persist during postcommunist transitions. This model suggests that decentralizing reforms could trigger an organizational “bank run,” prompting local agents to seize organizational assets under their control. The article also considers reputation-preserving strategies that central authorities might use to avert disintegration.

As an application of this model, the collapse of Soviet political, industrial, and state fiscal hierarchies are considered and compared with the experience of analogous sectors in China. Reforms in both states transferred significant autonomy from the center to local field agents. In the Soviet case these agents appropriated organizational assets with little interference from the center. In China, by contrast, the center preserved both its capacity for monitoring and its reputation for disciplining transgressions; and the rise of hybrid ownership forms made expropriation of state and Party assets far less attractive.

During the last two decades, the number of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) grew almost exponentially to over 270 by 2010. A majority of these are agreements between developed and developing countries. Existing models provide little economic rationale for these agreements, but the existing literature lumps North-South PTAs together with other types of trade pacts. This article offers an explanation focused on the movement of less capital-intensive manufacturing from North to South, which in turn stimulates the exchange of similar goods differentiated by unit value—also referred to as vertical intra-industry trade. The North exports more capitalintensive goods, while more labor-intensive goods are produced and traded by the South. This kind of specialization creates incentives for governments to support PTAs. The author tests this model using a new measure of vertical trade specialization and finds strong evidence that such specialization promotes PTA formation. North-South PTAs should therefore be seen as part of a broader shift of manufacturing from high- to middle-income countries.

The study of Chinese political economy has experienced a sea change since the late 1990s; instead of debating the origins and direction of national reform, scholars have turned to examining the origins of local economic variation. This article reviews recent work in the regional political economy of contemporary China. In keeping with a movement in comparative politics toward analyzing subnational politics, the “new regionalists” seek to identify and explain meaningful heterogeneity in the Chinese polity and economy. Yet they go further than simply using subnational cases to generate or test theories about Chinese politics. Instead, they propose that subnational political economies in China are a function of endogenous change rather than a reaction to national priorities. After identifying differences between the “new regionalism” and previous studies of decentralization in China, the author discusses this work according to the theoretical approaches (institutional, ideational, and sociohistorical) used to explain the origins of regional differences. She concludes by examining the limitations of the new regionalist agenda in comparative and historical context and suggesting that scholars move past unconditional acceptance of the causal power of “socialist legacies” and instead attend to the importance of changes in the post-Mao administrative hierarchy.

Why does ethnicity become a salient element of electoral politics in some places but not others? The authors argue that in majoritarian systems, ethnic identity is most salient to electoral behavior when there are high levels of inequality between ethnic groups. Theytest this argument in the Indian states and find that state-level party system ethnification is strongly correlated with economic inequality between groups, a pattern they also find in cross-national data. Theyalso show that in India, when income differences between groups increase, the groups tend to support different parties. The analysis reveals a strong class component to ethnic politics in India, underscoring the possibility that what scholars often view as identity politics can have an element of class politics in disguise.

The literature on women's roles in economic and political development, and on the impact of development policies on women, illuminates both the process of modernization and the nature of male-female relations. Three main kinds of approaches-liberal modernization theory and its feminist critiques, socialist approaches and their feminist critiques, and an eclectic “female sphere” position that emphasizes the need to replace male-dominated theory and practice with female experience and values-are discussed. Each approach has a distinct view of the causes, consequences, and significance of women's inferior status during modernization, and each proposes different strategies of change. The clarification of theoretical differences suggests new opportunities for productive research with implications for public policy.

The appearance of major studies by Karl Deutsch and Ernst Haas in the late 1950's won for integration theory a prominent position among the contemporary approaches to the study of international relations. A decade later its achievements are very much a matter of debate. While many students of integration theory have been led, by disappointment with results, to focus their attention on smaller and more manageable units, such as local communities and city-suburb relations, others continue investigations at the international level.

Why has the rate of expansion of postcommunist state administrations varied so widely among countries that are at comparable stages of economic transition, have similar formal institutions, and have been equally exposed to the dynamics of EU integration? Based on a close comparison of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, the author argues that the critical factor in postcommunist state building is the robustness of party competition. The legacy of communism creates strong pressures for patronage politics, which swells the administration, but it is party competition that determines whether the predisposition to patronage politics in fact becomes the practice of patronage politics. The number of state administrative personnel has expanded significantly more in countries where party system development has stalled, and party competition has failed to constrain the party(ies) of government.

This article documents systematic deviations from standard models of trade politics, each of which has the effect of undermining sustained efforts at coherent industrial opposition to trade. Industries have internal disagreements about liberalization, support for trade liberalization extends bilaterally across borders in the same industry, and comparative disadvantage industries feature convincing expressions of public support for liberalization. These surprising outcomes are explained by a model of trade politics that emphasizes three factors: firm heterogeneity in export performance, product differentiation, and reciprocal liberalization. The author uses a new data set of industry attitudes about fifteen US trade agreements to show that product differentiation is strongly correlated with these outcomes, even conditional on plausible alternatives. The author concludes that public position-taking and lobbying on trade politics have been fundamentally altered by the rise of product variety; trade's opponents and indifferents have been overwhelmed by pro-globalization firms breaking out to support trade on their own.

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.

The principal question which this article seeks to answer is: Why was the intention of the Arabs to launch the Yom Kippur War misperceived despite the fact that Israeli Intelligence had ample and accurate information on enemy moves and dispositions? In this anatomy of the Israeli intelligence failure, extensive use is made of the report of the official commission of inquiry that investigated the events leading up to the war. The article is equally concerned with the phenomenon of strategic surprise in general, and this case study is used to explore the psychological and organizational roots of intelligence failures. Some safeguards and institutional reforms for reducing the frequency of failure are examined. However, there is no suggestion that surprise can ever be eliminated altogether. In conclusion a case is made for developing a theory of intelligence through case studies and systematic research.

During the past five years the Social Science Division of The RAND Corporation has been developing a procedure for the study of foreign affairs that we call “political gaming.” This article gives a brief description of the technique and some of our observations about its utility.

In attacking the problem of revolution, as most others of major significance in history, we historians should think twice before we spurn the help offered by our colleagues in the social sciences, who have, as it happens, been particularly active in the last few years in theorizing about the typology, causes, and evolutionary patterns of this particular phenomenon. The purpose of this article is not to advance any new hypothesis, but to provide a summary view and critical examination of the work that has been going on.

THE recent resignations from posts of high civil authority or ceremonial rank of former military officers will no doubt allay somewhat the suspicions current a year or more ago that the military were “moving in” where they did not belong. Although the original appointment to civil posts of such men as Generals George C. Marshall and Walter B. Smith was hardly due to design on the part of the armed services, being quite easily and plausibly explained on other and quite innocuous grounds, the military departments unquestionably do have a greater influence upon high policy decisions than was true before the recent war. It is therefore time to express concern not so much that that military will move in where they do not belong, but rather that in the process of moving in where in part, at least, they do belong, their advice will reflect their imperfections not as diplomatists but as soldiers.

This essay examines the Concert of Europe as an international system and offers some general reflections and tentative conclusions about the meaning, the nature, and the operation of concert diplomacy between 1815 and 1854. It focuses upon the assumptions and procedures engendered by the Concert which restrained and moderated the policies of the European great powers by peaceful means. It concludes that the European Concert was a conscious and reasonably successful attempt to devise a stable and peaceful system of interstate relations.

This article makes a case for viewing the politics of regime transition in communist states as a subcategory of the more generic phenomenon of transition from authoritarian rule. Drawing on case studies from Latin America and Southern Europe and from the more theoretical literature on postauthoritarian transitions that those cases have generated, the article reexamines the politics of reform in the Gorbachev-era USSR. This comparative approach shows that the dynamics of the liberalization process in the USSR adhere to a model of political change previously manifested in other parts of the world. Specifically, it provides a clearer understanding of the initial vitality and subsequent disintegration of Gorbachev's centrist reform program, as well as a new perspective from which to reevaluate Gorbachev's often-criticized program of regime democratization.

Estimates of the extent to which Third World countries have experienced slower rates of growth than those in the industrialized West since i960 indicate a weak relation between initial wealth and subsequent economic growth that follows an inverted U-shape pattern: while the lowest growth rates are found among the poorest countries of the Third World, the highest growth rates are found not in the industrialized West, but in the wealthiest Third World countries. Drawing on contending arguments associated with modernization and dependency perspectives, the relationship between foreign investment and growth within the Third World is examined. Results undermine the idea that foreign investment inhibits growth, suggesting instead that flows of foreign investment may facilitate growth, especially among the initially wealthier countries of the Third World.

Since its inception, the Correlates of War project has been in the forefront of the quantitative analysis of war. This review seeks to integrate some of the major findings of the project into an explanation that identifies the steps that regularly occur before war. The explanation must be seen as an artificial construct, based on inductive generalizations from existing evidence and clues, whose primary utility at this stage of inquiry is to see what patterns precede wars, what conditions are associated with peace, and what factors may be of causal significance. The findings and the explanation derived from them are relevant to assessing some common realist practices and policies of states such as alliance making, military build-ups, hard-line bargaining, balancing of power, peace-through-strength, and deterrence. It is argued that among equals, power-politics behavior does not avoid war, but leads political actors to take steps that bring them closer to war.

In recent years, employer-centered explanations of welfare state development have begun to challenge conventional labor-centered and state-centered explanations. These new explanations suggest that sector-specific business interests and cross-class alliances propelled the adoption and expansion of social programs (the business interests thesis). This article presents a novel explanation of differences in business support for welfare state expansion based on a diachronic analysis of the German case and shadow case studies of Sweden and the United States. The article suggests that when looking at changes in employers’ positions across time rather than across sectors, political constraints turn out to be the central factor explaining variation in employers’ support for social reforms (the political accommodation thesis). The article identifies two goals of business intervention in welfare state development: pacification and containment. In the case of pacification, business interests propel social policy expansion; in the case of containment, they constrain it. Business chooses pacification when revolutionary forces challenge capitalism and political stabilization thus becomes a priority. Business chooses containment when reformist forces appear likely to succeed in expanding social protection and no revolutionary challenge exists. The article shows that changes over time in the type of political challenges that business interests confront best explain the variation in business support for labor-friendly social reforms.

As a direct result of growing economic interdependence and of the accelerating expansion of the international economy and its increasing impact on national economic life, it seems highly probable that diplomacy and international relations among governments will be more and more concerned in the future with financial and monetary matters.

During the past decade two tendencies have come to dominate the field of comparative politics. One of these is the concern for theoretical explication and methodological rigor, and the second is the emphasis on field studies of the “emerging,” “new,” and “non-Western” nations. The theoretical tendency has largely taken the form of applications of "systems" theory to the study of politics, and the chief criticism of this approach has been that it is a static theory, not suitable for the analysis and explanation of political change.