The globalization of finance in recent years and the concurrent growth in the financial sector's influence, manifested most dramatically in the recent financial crisis, highlights the importance for political scientists of understanding the political economy of global finance. The authors review six important books that are representative of recent thinking by political scientists on the topic. They address the central questions that have been at the heart of the literature on global finance from its beginning in new and interesting ways. The most important developments highlighted in this article are the move from a predominant focus on state-centered patterns of regulation to the consideration of transnational governance regimes that mix public and private regulation; the effort to understand the causal forces that shape the political economy of global finance by allowing for an interaction among interests, institutions, and ideas; and giving increased attention to new sources of systemic risk in the global financial system, as well to the consequences for domestic politics of interactions with the global financial system. Notwithstanding the progress that has been made in coming to grips with the political economy of global finance, the authors highlight a number of questions that need to be addressed in future research. Although various nonstate actors have been recognized as important in the constitution of the rules of global finance, it is also necessary to understand the behavior of the actors who enact these rules. It is also important to generate evidence that forges some agreement on the causes of the globalization of finance, especially as the arguments made become more complex. Finally, there is a need for a more realistic assessment of the costs and benefits of financialization at the global and national levels. This last challenge is essential for a thorough understanding of the current global financial crisis.

During the last ten years the study of comparative politics has undergone a methodological revolution. Reacting against the static, formalistic, “country-by-country” approach of earlier students of foreign governments, numerous contemporary political scientists have endeavored to create a more dynamic, empirically interpreted, and truly comparative method of analysis. This group of political scientists makes three general assumptions concerning the new approach.

This paper presents a spatial analysis of political competition in Taiwan in an effort to explore the role of conflict displacement in the process of democratic transition. In recent elections, a new cleavage on socioeconomic justice has emerged as a salient political issue in Taiwan, crosscutting the traditional cleavage on national identity. The authors first trace the historical trajectory of regime transition in order to provide a structural explanation of such a displacement of conflicts. Using data from the 1992 General Survey on Social Changes designed primarily by the authors for the Institute of Ethnology of Academia Sinica, they then present the results of a spatial analysis. The empirical findings confirm that socioeconomic justice together with national identity are the defining dimensions of the latent ideological space in which political competition takes place. The authors argue that, because of the availability of the new issue, political elites in Taiwan are undertaking a partisan realignment in both electoral and legislative politics, a process the authors consider conducive to both the transition to democracy and the consolidation of the new regime.

Does the enumeration of ethnic, racial, and/or religious categories on national household censuses increase the likelihood of conflict? The authors propose a theory of intergroup relations that emphasizes the conflictual effects of institutionalizing boundaries between social identity groups. The article investigates the relationship between counting and various forms of conflict with an original, global data set that classifies the type of enumeration used in more than one thousand census questionnaires in more than 150 countries spanning more than two centuries. Through a series of cross-national statistical analyses, the authors find a robust association between enumeration of ethnic cleavages on the census and various forms of competition and conflict, including violent ethnic civil war. The plausibility of the theory is further demonstrated through case study analysis of religious conflict in India.

This essay reviews two sets of books that explore the origins and dynamics of Southeast Asia's growth and economic transformation. One set of books utilizes a structuralist framework and emphasizes the role of the state in creating a (now) powerful capitalist class. The other set of books utilizes an institutionalist framework to explain how new patterns of private/public sector collaboration have resulted in rapid economic growth. The authors point to weaknesses in both approaches and to areas where the two approaches can be fruitfully synthesized. They also offer suggestions for future research.

The empirical literature on mass privatization in the postcommunist context emphasizes the preferences and power of interest groups in order to account for the design of privatization. This approach has been consistent with mainstream theories of property rights formation that focus on the self-interested, rationally calculated pursuit of wealth and/or power as the motivation behind the development of new ownership arrangements. Absent from these theories, however, are the ideological and cognitive components in the creation of property rights systems. This lacuna is extremely problematic when considering the postcommunist privatization experience in which specific ideologies—such as anticommunism, liberalism, pro- or anti-Westernism, and nationalism—have profoundly influenced the particular form that new property institutions have taken. This article explores how ideology interacts with the distribution of power and the formation of material interests in society. After considering the shortcomings of strictly material-based theories of property regime change, the article suggests four mechanisms by which ideology determines the design and implementation of privatization programs in postcommunist countries.

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.

Weber's understanding of bureaucracy, despite substantial qualification and revision, remains the dominant paradigm for the study of administration and formal organizations. We continue the process of revision by accepting his ideal-typical concepts of bureaucratic and patrimonial administration, but subject them to theoretical and historical reinterpretation and application. Our reading of historical change as it relates to bureaucracy leads us to question Weber's interpretations. His conceptualization of bureaucracy in terms of rational-legal-authority and formal rationality fails to take account of the existence and use of power within and outside of organizations, and of the persistence of patrimonial features. The use of power produces conflict and pathologies. When these serve the legitimate values and interests of participants and actors in the organizational environment, they can have benign consequences. The persistence of patrimonial features, rather than signalling the survival of dysfunctional atavisms, can promote administrative effectiveness by mitigating conflict and promoting organizational loyalty, discipline, and efficiency.

Many primitive peoples have political systems which are very much like the international political system. If the characterization of world politics as mere “anarchy” is an exaggeration, surely anarchy moderated or inhibited by a balance of power is a fairly accurate description of the rivalry between sovereign nation-states. The Nuer, a primitive African people, have been described as living in an “ordered anarchy” which depends on a “balanced opposition of political segments.” It is commonplace to describe the international system as lacking a government, so that “might makes right.” “In Nuerland legislative, judicial and executive functions are not invested in any persons or councils”; hence, throughout the society, “the club and the spear are the sanctions of rights.”

Since the end of the cold war internal conflicts have received unprecedented attention. Of special interest has been the effort of neorealists to employ an approach traditionally used to explain interstate conflict to make internal war understandable. While neorealism has been useful in explaining the behavior of groups in anarchic conditions, it is inadequate in explaining internal wars occurring in states that retain a strong government and that stem from motives other than power and security. Neorealism also does little to explain how anarchy is created in the first place and what can be done to restore central control. Another approach offers “bad leaders” as a proximate cause of internal war. There is much to this explanation, but more work needs to be done in understanding just what makes leaders “bad” and whether leaders have the latitude to be “good.” Finally, the diverse nature of internal wars has frustrated efforts to develop an overall means of settling them. At a point in which armed conflict has become almost exclusively an internal affair, useful generalizations for causes and cures remain elusive.

Explanations of the growth of the newly industrializing countries (NICs) by neoclassical economists and dependency theorists neglect the role of politics in shaping development strategies. Different social configurations, state structures, and ideas about development help explain the divergent policy choices made by the export-oriented East Asian NICs—Korea and Taiwan—and the more “inward-looking” countries of Latin America, particularly Mexico and Brazil. These different strategic choices, in turn, account for variations in the patterns of external “dependency” that characterize countries in the two regions.

Democratization in the developing world is, according to Samuel Huntington, “an important—perhaps the most important—global political development of the late twentieth century.” While scholars of comparative politics have explored the domestic political economy of democratic transitions, they, along with scholars of international relations, also recognize that international actors, particularly international organizations (IOs), are crucial for successful political transformation.

The literature on international political economy explains foreign economic policies by integrating systemic, state, and societal features. Theoretical approaches to national security, however, have tended to extract the state from its societal context. An adequate conceptualization of security policy must integrate both systemic forces and the domestic political economy.

One way of integrating these concerns is by examining the state's strategies for mobilizing those financial, productive, and human resources considered necessary for national security.

This article examines the political economy of the state's mobilization of resources for national security, called “war preparation,” and proposes a framework for investigation that consists of three elements: (i) the objectives of state managers, (2) the constraints on the state, and (3) the policies of the state for mobilizing its required resources. Based upon these considerations, some tendencies in the government's war preparation strategies are suggested. The utility of this framework is explored through an empirical examination of Israel between 1967 and 1977. The study demonstrates how Israel's war preparation strategies were shaped by the state's domestic and security objectives, the domestic political economy, and systemic constraints and opportunities.

The literature on the political economy of developing nations has focused attention upon the weakness and vulnerability of the nation-state and its limited ability to deal with and effectively alter the dominant forces of the international economy. Despite common international structures, however, the empirical pattern of foreign ownership and control of the means of production varies in newly industrializing nations. Domestic political structures and alternative state strategies may therefore have a significant impact on the pattern of foreign ownership and on the degree of control that foreign capital may exert on a developing economy.

The author examines the principal legal and bureaucratic mechanisms utilized by the South Korean state to regulate the domestic economy's interaction with international capital, as well as the impact of these mechanisms upon domestic production patterns. The South Korean case demonstrates that, through the formulation and implementation of appropriate policy, the state in a developing nation possesses the capacity to shape the pattern of interaction with international economic forces. Legal and bureaucratic mechanisms have facilitated an industrial development that is predominantly owned and effectively controlled by Korean nationals.

If peace and security are the earmarks of a successful foreign policy, the foreign policies pursued since the end of the first World War by the great Western powers were certainly less successful than any pursued by these powers since the end of the Napoleonic Wars. To say this, of course, is only to state the obvious. That the succession of failures is rooted in a marked decline in the political intelligence of the Western world is less obvious. Yet the recognition of that relationship is decisive for the understanding of the disease which holds the modern state system in its grip.

Foreign policy has been radically transformed by the revolutionary processes of modernization not only in the societies composing the Atlantic region, but wherever high levels of modernization exist. There is a quality about modernization that dissolves the effects of what have generally been considered the major determinants of foreign policy, whether these determinants are based on ideology and type of political system (democratic versus totalitarian foreign policies, for example), or power and capability (great-power versus smallpower policies). Wherever modernized societies exist, their foreign policies are more similar to each other than they are to the foreign policies of nonmodernized societies, regardless of the scale of the society or its type of government.

Four types of regimes of historic importance appeared in Europe between the two world wars: pluralist democracy, social or corporatist democracy, traditional dictatorship, and fascism. The vast body of literature that has grown up around them has rarely cast these political orders as historical alternatives to each other, however. When it has done so, it. has normally cast pluralist democracy as the alternative to fascism. Most commonly, this has taken the form of contrasts between Germany and Britain, and has been accompanied by the question, why was Germany not like Britain? Yet, pluralist democracy such as appeared in Britain was actually the least relevant alternative between the wars, for the possibility of stabilizing it where it did not already exist had been foreclosed by World War I. Where liberal parties had failed to establish responsible parliamentary institutions before the war, it would prove impossible to stabilize a pluralist democracy afterward. Henceforth, stabilization would require corporatism—in either its fascist or social democratic variant—rather than pluralism.

Opinion poll and behavioral evidence indicates that public resistance to the growth of taxation and state expenditure has increased significantly during the last decade in many advanced industrial democracies. This paper examines trends in the magnitude, composition, and consequences of taxation and government spending in relation to cross-national patterns of popular opposition to the expansion of the welfare state in five European industrial societies. The evidence suggests that the politically optimal system of taxation and expenditure relies heavily on indirect and programmatic taxes rather than on direct, general-revenue levies, and channels state resources toward cash transfers to households rather than into labor-intensive public consumption.

States interested in reducing the level of arms competition with a rival can employ a variety of strategies designed to promote cooperation. We examine the ability of three important strategies—unilateral action, tacit bargaining, and negotiation—to reduce the intensity of arms races motivated by different patterns of preferences and complicated by different sources of uncertainty. The latter include strategic misrepresentation, imperfect intelligence, problems of interpretation, and problems of control. Examples are drawn from 19th- and 20th-century arms races that did not result in war.