Recent studies appear to show that democracy has no robust association with economic growth. Yet all such work assumes that the causal effect of democracy can be measured by a country's regime status in a particular year (T), which is correlated with its growth performance in a subsequent period (T+l). The authors argue that democracy must be understood as a stock, rather than a level, measure. That is, a country's growth performance is affected by the number of years it has been democratic, in addition to the degree of democracy experienced during that period. In this fashion, democracy is reconceptualized as a historical, rather than a contemporary, variable—with the assumption that long-run historical patterns may help scholars to understand present trends. The authors speculate that these secular-historical influences operate through four causal pathways, each of which may be understood as a type of capital: physical capital, human capital, social capital, and political capital. This argument is tested in a crosscountry analysis and is shown to be robust in a wide variety of specifications and formats.

Among the laws that rule human societies,” de Tocqueville said, “there is one which seems to be more precise and clear than all others. If men are to remain civilized or to become so, the art of associating together must grow and improve in the same ratio in which the equality of conditions is increased.”1 In much of the world today, equality of political participation is growing much more rapidly than is the “art of associating together.” The rates of mobilization and participation are high; the rates of organization and institutionalization are low. De Tocqueville's precondition for civilized society is in danger, if it is not already undermined. In these societies, the conflict between mobilization and institutionalization is the crux of politics. Yet in the fast-growing literature on the politics of the developing areas, political institutionalization usually receives scant treatment. Writers on political development emphasize the processes of modernization and the closely related phenomena of social mobilization and increasing political participation. A balanced view of the politics of contemporary Asia, Africa, and Latin America requires more attention to the “art of associating together” and the growth of political institutions. For this purpose, it is useful to distinguish political development from modernization and to identify political development with the institutionalization of political organizations and procedures. Rapid increases in mobilization and participation, the principal political aspects of modernization, undermine political institutions. Rapid modernization, in brief, produces not political development, but political decay.

The consolidation of democratic regimes requires the extension of political rights to the entire citizenry, but this process does not necessarily follow from electoral competition. The transition from authoritarian clientelism to respect for associational autonomy is an important dimension of democratization, unfolding unevenly through iterative cycles of conflict among authoritarian rulers, reformist elites, and autonomous social movements. This process is illustrated by a study of changing bargaining relations between rural development agencies and grassroots indigenous movements in Mexico. The results suggest that the transition from clientelism to citizenship involves three distinct patterns of state-society relations within the same nation-state: redoubts of persistent authoritarianism can coexist with both new enclaves of pluralist tolerance and large gray areas of “semiclientelism.”

Scholars in comparative politics and international relations routinely evaluate causal hypotheses by referring to counterfactual cases where a hypothesized causal factor is supposed to have been absent. The methodological status and the viability of this very common procedure are unclear and are worth examining. How does the strategy of counterfactual argument relate, if at all, to methods of hypothesis testing based on the comparison of actual cases, such as regression analysis or Mill's Method of Difference? Are counterfactual thought experiments a viable means of assessing hypotheses about national and international outcomes, or are they methodologically invalid in principle? The paper addresses the first question in some detail and begins discussion of the second. Examples from work on the causes of World War I, the nonoccurrence of World War III, social revolutions, the breakdown of democratic regimes in Latin America, and the origins of fascism and corporatism in Europe illustrate the use, problems and potential of counterfactual argument in small-N-oriented political science research.

This study explores the donor side of debates revolving around the proper role of foreign assistance as a foreign policy tool, by empirically testing for the aid determinants of four industrial democracies: France, Japan, Sweden, and the United States. A pooled cross-sectional time-series design is employed to assess the impacts of six sets of variables on aidflowsto thirty-six African states during the 1980s. Three sets of these variables—humanitarian need, strategic importance, and economic potential—are constructed using data traditionally employed in empirical foreign aid studies. Three additional sets of variables—cultural similarity, ideological stance, and region—are constructed from data that regional specialists consider to be important in the foreign aid equation. Although no two cases are alike, one can nevertheless draw some tentative conclusions about the nature of the foreign aid regime of the final cold war decade of the 1980s on the basis of several cross-national patterns. In short, the results (1) contradict rhetorical statements of northern policymakers who claim that foreign aid serves as an altruistic foreign policy tool designed to relieve humanitarian suffering; (2) confirm the expected importance of strategic and ideological factors in a foreign aid regime heavily influenced by the cold war; and (3) underscore the importance of economic, particularly trade, interests in northern aid calculations.

This article presents an analysis of the postindustrial economy from a political economy perspective. It identifies a set of specific distributional trade-offs associated with the new role played by the services sector as the chief source of employment growth in advanced democracies over the last three decades. It is argued that three core policy objectives—budgetary restraint, wage equality, and expansion of employment—constitute a political “trilemma” that allows only two of the goals to be successfully pursued at the same time. Using a combination of statistical and caseoriented analysis, the authors demonstrate the political and economic salience of the trilemma, the distributional tensions inherent in each strategy to cope with it, and the political-institutional constraints under which these strategies are chosen.

This article reports the results of a survey of women in legislatures and executives around the world as they were constituted in 1998 (N = 180). The chief hypotheses regarding the factors hindering or facilitating women's access to political representation were tested by multivariate regression models. The regression models juxtaposed a cocktail of institutional, political, cultural, and socioeconomic variables with the following dependent variables: (1) the percentage of MPs who are women and (2) the percentage of cabinet ministers who are women.

A number, although not all, of the cited hypotheses were statistically confirmed and more finely quantified. The socioeconomic development of women in society has an effect on the number of women in parliament but not in the cabinet. A country's length of experience with multipartyism and women's enfranchisement correlates with both the legislative and the executive percentage. Certain electoral systems are more women friendly than others. The ideological nature of the party system affects the number of women elected and chosen for cabinet posts. And last, the state's dominant religion, taken as a proxy for culture, also statistically relates to the number of women who will make it to high political office. However, other long-held hypotheses were not proved. The degree of democracy is not a good indicator of the percentage of women who will make it into the legislature or the cabinet, nor is the dichotomy between a presidential or parliamentary system.

What accounts for the waves of policy diffusion that increasingly sweep across regions of the world? Why do many diverse countries adopt similar changes? Focusing on the spread of Chilean-style pension privatization in Latin America, this article assesses the relative merit of four theoretical explanations that scholars of diffusion have proposed. As the principal mechanism driving innovations' spread, these approaches emphasize external pressures, emanating especially from international financial institutions; the quest for symbolic or normative legitimacy; rational learning and cost-benefit calculation; and cognitive heuristics, respectively. The article assesses which one of these frameworks can best account for the three distinctive features of diffusion, namely its wavelike temporal pattern; its geographical clustering; and the spread of similarity amid diversity. While several approaches contribute to understanding policy diffusion, the analysis suggests that the cognitive-psychological framework offers a particularly persuasive account of the spread of pension reform.

Under the banner of “1992,” the European Communities aim to remove all barriers to the movement of persons, capital, and goods among the member countries. The 1992 movement comprises a set of bargains among European elites. Structural change (relative U.S. decline and Japanese ascent) provoked a rethinking of European roles and interests. The 1992 project emerged as a response because of: (1) the policy leadership exercised by the Commission of the European Communities, with support from a transnational business coalition; and (2) a changed domestic political context in several key countries—specifically, the failure of previous national economic strategies and the transformation of the left. The changes under way will alter regional business competition and politics and will affect the world economic system.

Latin American populism is generally associated with the developmental stage of import substitution industrialization; it is thus widely presumed to have been eclipsed by the debt crisis of the 1980s and the free market reforms of the neoliberal era. However, the leadership of Alberto Fujimori in Peru suggests that new forms of populism may be emerging despite the fiscal constraints of neoliberal austerity. This new variant of populism thrives in a context where economic crisis and social dislocation undermine traditional representative institutions, enabling personalist leaders to establish unmediated relationships with heterogeneous, atomized masses. Political support can be cultivated through populist attacks on entrenched political elites or institutions, along with targeted but highly visible poverty alleviation programs. This new form of populist autocracy complements the efforts of neoliberal technocrats to circumvent the representative institutions that are integral to democratic accountability. The Peruvian case thus demonstrates that populism has been transformed rather than eclipsed during the neoliberal era and that it should be decoupled theoretically from any particular phase or model of economic development.

The concept of state is not much in vogue in the social sciences right now. Yet it retains a skeletal, ghostly existence largely because, for all the changes in emphasis and interest of research, the thing exists and no amount of conceptual restructuring can dissolve it. The present article develops a conceptual approach in which no violence is done to historical or empirical fact, but which offers a means of integrating the concept of state into the current primacy of social science concerns and analytical methods. It is hoped that this approach not only will provide a convenient conceptualization, but will contribute to attacking a substantive problem of some consequence. Since the relevant area is potentially huge, no more than a brushstroke configuration can be attempted.

This paper explores two quite different visions of the democratic processes that can create congruence between citizen preferences and public policies. In the Majority Control vision, electoral competition and citizen choices result in the direct election of governments committed to policies corresponding to the preferences of the median voter. In the Proportionate Influence vision, election outcomes result in legislatures that reflect the preferences of all citizens; legislative bargaining results in policies linked to the position of the median voter. The authors give more explicit theoretical form to those visions and link them empirically to specific types of modern democracies. They then attempt to test the success of each vision in bringing about congruence between citizen self-placements and the estimated positions of governments and policymaker coalitions on the left-right scale in twelve nations in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Although the analysis reveals weaknesses in each approach, it suggests a consistent advantage for the Proportionate Influence vision.

Why do nations create institutionalized modes of multilateral collaboration? How can common interests develop in the face of inequalities in power and asymmetries in interdependence? The author explores the role of knowledge in the definition of political objectives and interests. The systematic interplay of changing knowledge and changing objectives results in the redefinition of “issues” and the practice of “issue linkage.” The dynamics of issue-linkage, in turn, tell us something about international regimes for the management of progressively more complex issue areas. An ideal-typical “regime” is described, theoretically applicable to all types of issues. Since the cognitive attributes of the actors who set up such a regime cannot be expected to remain stable, this concept of a “regime” can illuminate cliscussion and analysis, but cannot be expected to provide a clear model for desirable policy. However, it can illustrate the options open to policy makers wishing to choose a mode of collaboration. Regimes dealing with money, the oceans, and technology transfer are used for illustrative purposes.

That rebels face a collective action problem is one of the most widely shared assumptions in the literature on civil wars. The authors argue that the collective action paradigm can be both descriptively inaccurate and analytically misleading when it comes to civil wars. They question both pillars of the paradigm as applied to the study of civil wars, namely, the free-riding incentive generated by the public goods dimension of insurgency and the risks of individual participation in insurgent collective action. The authors argue, instead, that although insurgent collective action may entail the expectation of future collective benefits, public (rather than just private) costs tend to predominate in the short term. Moreover, the costs of nonparticipation and free riding may equal or even exceed those of participation. The authors support these claims by triangulating three types of evidence: historical evidence from counterinsurgency operations in several civil wars; data from the Vietnam War's Phoenix Program; and regional evidence from the Greek Civil War. They conclude by drawing implications for the study of civil wars.

This study examines the effects of globalization, democratization, and partisanship on social spending in fourteen Latin American countries from 1973 to 1997, using a pooled time-series error-correction model. The authors examine three sets of issues. First, following debates in the literature on OECD countries, they want to know whether social spending has been encouraged or constrained by integration into global markets. Within this context, they examine the extent to which such outcomes might be influenced by two additional sets of domestic political and institutional factors discussed in work on developed countries: the electoral pressures of democratic institutions and whether or not popularly based governments are in power.

The authors show that trade integration has a consistently negative effect on aggregate social spending and that this is compounded by openness to capital markets. This is the strongest and most robust finding in the study. Neither democratic nor popularly based governments consistently affect overall social spending. The authors then disaggregate spending into social security transfers and expenditures on health and education. They find that popularly based governments tend to protect social security transfers, which tend toflowdisproportionately to their unionized constituencies; but they have a negative impact on health and education spending. Conversely, a shift to democracy leads to increases in health and education spending, which reaches a larger segment of the population. The authors conclude by emphasizing the contrasting political log-ics of the different types of social spending.

Scholars associated with theories of “nation-building” have tended either to ignore the question of ethnic diversity or to treat the matter of ethnic identity superficially as merely one of a number of minor impediments to effective state-integration. To the degree that ethnic identity is given recognition, it is apt to be as a somewhat unimportant and ephemeral nuisance that will unquestionably give way to a common identity uniting all inhabitants of the state, regardless of ethnic heritage, as modern communication and transportation networks link the state's various parts more closely. Both tendencies are at sharp variance with the facts, and have contributed to the undue optimism that has characterized so much of the literature on “nation-building.”

A fundamental political-institutional question that has only recently received serious scholarly attention concerns the impact of different constitutional frameworks on democratic consolidation. Little systematic cross-regional evidence has been brought to bear on this question. This article reports the findings of the analysis of numerous different sources of data, all of which point in the direction of a much stronger correlation between democratic consolidation and the constitutional framework of pure parliamentarianism than between consolidation and pure presidentialism. The systematic analysis of these data leads the authors to conclude that parliamentarianism is a more supportive constitutional framework due to the following theoretically predictable and empirically observable tendencies: its greater propensity for governments to have majorities to implement their programs, its greater ability to rule in a multiparty setting, its lower propensity for executives to rule at the edge of the constitution and its greater facility in removing a chief executive if he or she does so, its lower susceptibility to a military coup, and its greater tendency to provide long party-government careers, which add loyalty and experience to political society. In contrast, the analytically separable propensities of presidentialism also form a highly interactive system, but they work to impede democratic consolidation by reducing politicians' degrees of freedom.

The authors test Kantian and realist theories of interstate conflict using data extending over more than a century, treating those theories as complementary rather than competing. As the classical liberals believed, democracy, economic interdependence, and international organizations have strong and statistically significant effects on reducing the probability that states will be involved in militarized disputes. Moreover, the benefits are not limited to the cold war era. Some realist influences, notably distance and power predominance, also reduce the likelihood of interstate conflict. The character of the international system, too, affects the probability of dyadic disputes. The consequences of having a strong hegemonic power vary, but high levels of democracy and interdependence in the international system reduce the probability of conflict for all dyads, not just for those that are democratic or dependent on trade.

Students of world politics have tended to assume that states act as units. Yet trans-governmental relations—direct interactions among sub-units not controlled or closely guided by the policies of cabinets or chief executives—are frequently important. Trans-governmental relations are facilitated by extensive personal contacts among officials and by conflicts of interest between departments or agencies within modern governments. International organizations can play important roles in transgovernmental networks by (i) affecting the definition of issues; (2) promoting coalitions among governmental subunits with similar interests; and (3) serving as points of policy intervention in trans-national systems. As policy interdependence among developed-country governments becomes more extensive and complex, these roles of international organizations are likely to become increasingly important. Internationalism of this relatively informal, non-institutionalized type is not a “dead end.”

Qualitative analysts have received stern warnings that the validity of their studies may be undermined by selection bias. This article provides an overview of this problem for qualitative researchers in the field of international and comparative studies, focusing on selection bias that may result from the deliberate selection of cases by the investigator. Examples are drawn from studies of revolution, international deterrence, the politics of inflation, international terms of trade, economic growth, and industrial competitiveness. The article first explores how insights about selection bias developed in quantitative research can most productively be applied in qualitative studies. The discussion considers why qualitative researchers need to be concerned about selection bias, even if they do not care about the generality of their findings, and it considers distinctive implications of this form of bias for qualitative research, as in the problem of what is labeled “complexification based on extreme cases.” The article then considers pitfalls in recent discussions of selection bias in qualitative studies. These discussions at times get bogged down in disagreements and misunderstandings over how the dependent variable is conceptualized and what the appropriate frame of comparison should be, issues that are crucial to the assessment of bias within a given study. At certain points it becomes clear that the real issue is not just selection bias, but a larger set of trade-offs among alternative analytic goals.