This article examines how government policies affect ethnic relations by comparing outcomes across two nearby districts, one in Kenya and one in Tanzania, using colonial-era boundary placement as a “natural experiment.” Despite similar geography and historical legacies, governments in Kenya and Tanzania have followed radically different language, education, and local institutional policies, with Tanzania consistently pursuing more serious nation building. The evidence suggests that nation building has allowed diverse communities in rural Tanzania to achieve considerably better local public goods outcomes than diverse communities in Kenya. To illustrate, while Kenyan communities at mean levels of diversity have 25 percent less local school funding than homogeneous communities on average, the comparable figure in the Tanzanian district is near zero. The Kenya-Tanzania comparison provides empirical evidence that serious reforms can ameliorate social divisions and suggests that nation-building should take a place on policy agendas, especially in Africa.

Liberal political theory and contemporary expositions of human rights focus largely on the individual. Some liberal theorists even deny that ethnic communities and other groups, as collective entities, can have moral rights at all. The outlook is narrow and unfortunate. It reflects a preoccupation with domestic politics and a model of domestic politics that neglects the common fact of heterogeneity. It ignores widespread practices and urgent problems, for in many countries groups identified by race, language, or religion make moral claims, and their claims are sometimes conceded. It ignores the common view that nations or “peoples” have a (moral) right of self-determination, and it even leaves the state itself without justification. If theory is to give adequate guidance, its focus must be broadened. The question of group rights needs to be explored, and interrelationships between the rights of individuals, of groups, and of the state need to be clarified.

How do crises lead to change? Rationalist approaches to the question that emphasize inexorable structural responses and the pursuit of distributive preferences by newly dominant coalitions are inadequate because they obscure the social mediation of material events and the pervasive uncertainty that follows destabilization of the precrisis status quo. The latter constrains actors from fully grasping their distributive preferences. Until uncertainty is reduced, persuasion emerges as a key mechanism of change. Although constructivist approaches emphasize persuasive practices, they have yet to adequately specify the scope conditions underpinning the selection of new ideas. This article goes beyond much of the constructivist focus on domestic legitimacy and static notions of resonance by emphasizing external credibility and dynamic processes of resonance-building by norm entrepreneurs. The author specifies four features—what he calls the four Cs of crisis resolution—that shape the process of idea selection: carriers, composition, crossover appeal, and credibility. Developing these arguments in the case of the early years of New Order Indonesia, the article suggests that whenever a prominent and cohesive group of advocates promotes an idea that has sufficient ideational and distributive appeal and the endorsement of external actors whose seal of approval is perceived as important, intersubjective belief change, and thus institutional and policy change, is more likely.

In an operational sense, European integration amounts to the transnational harmonization and standardization of diverse national laws, practices, and norms. Insight into the integrative process in Western Europe, therefore, can be gleaned by looking into problems encountered during attempts at transnational harmonization. Case studies of national attempts to implement EEC directives in the fields of regional aid, pharmaceutical marketing, investment control, and fiscal harmonization point up important interplays between regional harmonization and domestic politics. Evidence concerning the politics of regional implementation shows that the ability of an EEC country to contribute to European integration depends fundamentally upon its government's ability to act politically in its domestic arena.

The term “political development” originated during the cold war. After World War II, the prevalent attitude in the United States toward the Third World resembled that toward Europe: Unless economic progress and political stability were encouraged by the United States, these areas would turn Communist. Underlying foreign aid was the sober calculation that communism would lose its appeal once men's bellies were full. Robert Packenham reports that when AID officials were asked in the mid-sixties how they viewed development, “one of the most common responses was, in effect, that political development is anti-Communist, pro-American political stability.”

The notion that the attitudes of the American public vis-a-vis the Soviet Union are driven essentially by emotion, and that they are more extreme and volatile than those of the government itself, is widely believed but may not be valid. While the public typically desires a combination of tough and conciliatory policies, it also tends to express, at any given moment, particular concern about whichever of the two it feels is most slighted in U.S. policy. Thus, the public will tend to seek conciliatory behavior from hawkish administrations while preferring a tough stance from administrations it deems dovish. By so doing, the public is likely to have a moderating effect on official behavior toward Moscow. The proposition is tested with reference to shifts in public approval of presidential Soviet policy, and certain implications are suggested for the manner in which political leadership perceives of its mandate.

Recent explanations of transformations of macroeconomic policy under crisis conditions spotlight the intrinsic properties of ideas and the persuasiveness with which they are marketed. Bridging the divide between power and discourse approaches, this article reveals the causal role played by the power resources of expert ideational entrepreneurs, conditional on the political conjuncture in which they operate. The authors exploit a fortuitous natural experiment from the early 1980s, when the Israeli economy spiraled into hyperinflation. Two similar proposals for economic stabilization and reform were offered by different teams of economists, less than two years apart. While the government rejected the dollarization plan, its authorization of the stabilization plan inaugurated a new political-economic regime. This case, in which similar programs were advocated by different ideational entrepreneurs in a largely stable institutional and economic context, makes it possible to pinpoint why radically new ideas succeed or fail. Previously underutilized analytical tools are employed to conceptualize the power of idea carriers, at both the individual and the group level.

How do state policies that regulate the relationship between ethnicity and nationality change? This article examines the dynamics of persistence and change in state policies toward ethnicity. In order to better comprehend the nature of political contestation over these state policies, the author first develops a new typology, “regimes of ethnicity,” and categorizes states as having monoethnic, multiethnic, and antiethnic regimes. These regimes are defined along dimensions of membership and expression. Second, he develops a theory of ethnic regime change. He explains the persistence and change in policies related to ethnicity and nationality in Germany, the Soviet Union/post-Soviet Russia, and Turkey since the 1950s by reference to the presence or absence of three independent variables: counterelites, new discourses, and hegemonic majority. He argues that if counterelites representing constituencies with ethnically specific grievances come to power equipped with a new discourse on ethnicity and nationality and garner a hegemonic majority, they can change state policies on ethnicity. These three factors are separately necessary and jointly sufficient for change. Reform in the German citizenship law, removal of ethnicity from Russian internal passports, and the beginning of public broadcasting in Kurdish and other minority languages on state television in Turkey are examined as major changes in state policies.

While scholars outside the Arab world often link authoritarianism there to some dark cultural template involving religious doctrine or family structure, scholars of the region ground their explanations in political economy, in the historical evolution of the state, in patterns of state-society interactions, and in ideological appeals. To understand authoritarian outcomes, they draw attention to economic transformations, to social actors and the importance of organized social groups, to the role of state efforts to contain them in shaping political outcomes, to the repressive institutions that sometimes arise from this process, and to weaknesses of state ideologies that arise to justify authoritarian outcomes. Their work allows us to unpack the phenomenon of authoritarianism by reorganizing it into three different sets of forces: those that precipitate authoritarianism, those that sustain it, and those that resist it. The result is a clearer and more nuanced understanding of the range of factors that affect the likelihood of any state resorting to violence.

In the struggle to find a successor to the totalitarian model for study of Soviet politics, the interest-group approach has won significant support. Yet this concept fails to meet all three of Huntington's criteria for a “useful” model. First, the group concept emphasizes the peripheral at the expense of what is of critical importance. Second, as a comparative concept it introduces errors in logic as well as a myriad of ambiguities in definition and taxonomy. Third, it is more likely to obscure than to clarify the dynamic character of the Soviet system. The group approach does not promise, as some assert, to bring the study of Soviet politics into the mainstream of comparative political theory.

In contrast, the totalitarian model still goes far toward meeting Huntington's criteria. When supplemented by the notion of political culture and by middle-range concepts of organization theory and bureaucracy, the totalitarian model retains great heuristic value as an ideal construct from which Soviet realities diverge in various ways.

How do legacies of conflict affect choices between state and nonstate legal institutions? This article studies this question in Chechnya, where state law coexists with Sharia and customary law. The author focuses on the effect of conflict-induced disruption of gender hierarchies because the dominant interpretations of religious and customary norms are discriminatory against women. The author finds that women in Chechnya are more likely than men to rely on state law and that this gender gap in legal preferences and behavior is especially large in more-victimized communities. The author infers from this finding that the conflict created the conditions for women in Chechnya to pursue their interests through state law—albeit not without resistance. Women’s legal mobilization has generated a backlash from the Chechen government, which has attempted to reinstate a patriarchal order. The author concludes that conflict may induce legal mobilization among the weak and that gender may become a central cleavage during state-building processes in postconflict environments.

Achen and Snidal's deductive theory of deterrence contributes very little to an understanding of the uses and limitations of deterrence strategy as an instrument of foreign policy. Lacking operationalization, their “rational deterrence theory” is incapable of predicting the outcome of individual cases. Furthermore, it has not yet addressed the need (i) to reconceptualize the problem of deterrence for different levels of conflict; (2) to refine the assumption of “rationality”; (3) to deal with the phenomenon of equifinality; (4) to develop a framework of strategic interaction between Initiator and Defender acknowledging that an Initiator often has multiple options for challenging the status quo from which to choose an action that meets his cost-benefit criteria; (5) to find a way of taking into account decision-making variables that, as case studies have demonstrated, often affect deterrence outcomes; and (6) to broaden the conceptualization of deterrence strategy to encompass the possible use of positive inducements as a means of discouraging challenges to a status quo situation.

The growing recognition of the importance of ethnic, racial, and religious groups in the politics of the new states has given rise to an urgent need for theory. Although this need extends to all aspects of group relations, the first priority is for systematic classification to reduce the bewildering array of descent-groups in the developing world to manageable proportions and comparable cases. With a view to facilitating comparative analysis, the aim of this paper is to make a modest beginning in the formulation of meaningful categories.

The author examines the hypothesis that U.S. Soviet policy is largely driven by electoral considerations rather than by the shifting nature of the Soviet challenge. He combines historical and quantitative analysis to probe the forces that shape these electoral calculations as well as the manner in which they manifest themselves at various stages of the electoral cycle. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the domestic determinants of America's Soviet policy for the USSR's own foreign policy behavior.

This article focuses on the legacies of the authoritarian regimes of South America for the contemporary consolidation of democracy. In particular, it considers their lasting effects on the region's informal networks and formal institutions of political representation. It questions several assumptions made by the literature on regime transition and democratic consolidation in South America about political culture, institutional reform, and electoral realignment: taken together, these assumptions are misleading about how much and what kind of political change has occurred in Latin America as a result of authoritarian rule. To understand how the challenges of democratic consolidation have been shaped, the article proposes instead to examine how the economic policies and political strategies pursued by military regimes preserved, altered, or destroyed the clientelistic and corporatist networks of mediation between state and society prevailing at the onset of authoritarianism, as well as those constructed upon the representative base of programmatic political parties.

This article analyzes the prospects for globalizing the varieties of capitalism (voc) debate. It identifies and compares firm-centered, governance-centered, and state-centered approaches to extending the debate on capitalist diversity, and discusses the distinctive contributions of each approach as well as the trade-offs between them. The author draws on three agenda-setting volumes that engage with the voc framework and study capitalist diversity in three regions not usually covered by this literature: Latin America, East and Southeast Asia, and East Central Europe. As these regions play an increasingly important role in the world economy, this article examines what the books imply about the current state of knowledge about global voc. The author argues that the extension of the voc debate to these parts of the world is important for advancing the understanding of economic institutions; the approach can reinvigorate research on capitalist diversity and the institutional foundations of economic development in the current era of globalization.

Do ethnic federations undergoing democratization promote or discourage regional secessionism? This article argues, based on evidence from the Russian Federation, that when democratization produces a transfer of political accountability from center to region, the incentives of regional leaders shift, forcing them to react to local constituencies in order to retain office. If these constituencies desire autonomy, regional leaders must respond, making separatism not merely an opportunistic strategy but a necessary one for their own political survival. Democratization, then, can transform administrative regions into electoral arenas.

However, the case of Russia also demonstrates that regional demands for autonomy are not inevitable and may dissipate after they have begun. Popular support for nationalism and separatism varied significantly among Russia's sixteen ethnic republics in the late Soviet and early post-Soviet period. This variation is explained by showing that mass nationalism, contrary to conventional wisdom, is neither a latent attribute of federal regions, nor a simple function of natural resource endowments, nor something summoned into existence by the manipulations of regional leaders. Rather, it is argued that increasing competition for jobs in the Soviet Union's failing economy allowed particular issues articulated by nationalist leaders to resonate with ethnic populations. Through the framing of issues of ethnic economic inequality, nationalist leaders were able to politicize ethnicity by persuading people to view their personal life chances as dependent on the political fate of their ethnic community. Thus, secession in democratizing ethnic federations can be best understood by directing attention toward the origins of popular support for nationalism and the role that support plays in the elite contest for power within subfederal regions.

Scholars from a number of disciplines have argued that the massive expansion of the welfare state in the postwar period was at least in some part a byproduct of the cold war and the associated political competition between two rival regime blocs. However, the question of whether regime competition fuelled welfare-state growth has never been subject to systematic examination. Applying spatial econometrics, this article offers the first empirical test of this argument. The authors' findings support the notion that regime competition stimulated the expansion of the welfare state on both sides of the Iron Curtain in the postwar period.

Political modernization involves, let us assume, three things. First, it involves the rationalization of authority: the replacement of a large number of traditional, religious, familial, and ethnic political authorities by a single, secular, national political authority. This change implies that government is the product of man, not of nature or of God, and that a well-ordered society must have a determinate human source of final authority, obedience to whose positive law takes precedence over other obligations. Rationalization of authority means assertion of the external sovereignty of the nation-state against transnational influences and of the internal sovereignty of the national government against local and regional powers. It means national integration and the centralization or accumulation of power in recognized national law-making institutions. Secondly, political modernization involves the differentiation of new political functions and the development of specialized structures to perform those functions. Areas of peculiar competence—legal, military, administrative, scientific—become separated from the political realm, and autonomous, specialized, but subordinate, organs arise to discharge those tasks. Administrative hierarchies become more elaborate, more complex, more disciplined. Office and power are distributed more by achievement and less by ascription. Thirdly, political modernization involves increased participation in politics by social groups throughout society and the development of new political institutions—such as political parties and interest associations—to organize this participation. Broadened participation in politics may increase control of the people by the government, as in totalitarian states, or it may increase control of the government by the people, as in some democratic ones. But in all modern states the citizens become directly involved in and affected by governmental affairs. Rationalized authority, differentiated structure, and mass participation thus distinguish modern polities from antecedent polities.

Terrorist groups repeatedly include operatives of varying commitment and often rely on a common set of security-reducing bureaucratic tools to manage these individuals. This is puzzling in that covert organizations are commonly thought to screen their operatives very carefully and pay a particularly heavy price for record keeping. The authors use terrorist memoirs and the internal correspondence of one particularly prominent group to highlight the organizational challenges terrorist groups face and use a game-theoretic model of moral hazard in a finitely sized organization to explain why record keeping and bureaucracy emerge in these groups. The model provides two novel results. First, in small heterogeneous organizations longer institutional memory can enhance organizational efficiency. Second, such organizations will use worse agents in equilibrium under certain conditions. The core logic is that in small organizations the punishment strategies that allow leaders to extract greater effort are credible only when operatives can identify and react to deviations from the leaders' equilibrium strategy. This dynamic creates incentives for record keeping and means that small organizations will periodically use problematic agents in equilibrium as part of a strategy that optimally motivates their best operatives.