Why would democracies extend to aliens a right they historically have reserved for citizens—the right to vote? Some scholars argue that transnational movements and global norms increasingly moderate how states treat their aliens. If so, this is important evidence of a change in the meaning and content of sovereignty. This article investigates whether democratic states enfranchise their aliens in response to international, transnational, or domestic factors. While the article finds little support for transnational or systemic arguments, it also finds that political parties and judiciaries affect opportunities for aliens in ways the existing scholarship fails to explain. These findings suggest that both comparative and IR scholarship need to revisit their explanations for contemporary citizenship politics in democracies.

The application of economic sanctions against Rhodesia and the results of that effort raise the question of the effectiveness of economic coercion as an instrument of foreign policy. A review of U.S. economic coercion against Cuba, in effect since June 1960, and against the Dominican Republic during the period 1960–1962 may be timely and instructive. By exploring the steps leading to the application of U.S. economic coercion, its objectives, and its concrete impact on the target states it may be possible to develop some useful generalizations about the role of economic weapons as tools of foreign policy.

This article contributes to the political economic literature regarding the effects of industrial relations institutions on national economic outcomes. Based on an econometric analysis of the determinants of wage moderation in sixteen industrialized countries between 1974 and 2000, it argues that the organizational characteristics of trade unions have a significant impact on wage dynamics. Controlling for a number of institutional and economic factors, the countries in which trade union confederations directly involve workers in the process of collective bargaining ratification have on average lower wage growth relative to productivity than others. The authors also find that collective bargaining coordination and contract ratification magnify each other's wage-dampening effect. Through case studies of Ireland and Italy, the article examines the causal mechanisms underlying the uncovered statistical regularities and concludes that, particularly at a time in which classic political exchange is waning, worker involvement in contract ratification allows confederation leaders to resolve conflicting claims inside their organizations at lower wage levels than are achieved by a less participatory governance process.

National leaders are frequently surprised by the actions of other governments. This paper explores the structure common to problems involving the use of resources for achieving surprise. Such resources include deception through double agents and through sudden changes in standard operating procedures. Still other resources for surprise include cracked codes, spies, and new weapons. Since surprise is usually possible only by risking the revelation of the means of surprise, in each case the same problem arises: when should the resource be risked and when should it be maintained for a potentially more important event later? A rational-actor model is developed to provide a prescriptive answer to this question. Examining the ways in which actual actors are likely to differ from rational actors leads to several important policy implications. One is that leaders may tend to be overconfident in their ability to predict the actions of their potential opponents just when the stakes get large. Another implication is that, as observational technology improves, the potential for surprise and deception may actually increase.

The quality of life that a person leads depends critically on where it is led. Even taking into account levels of economic development, the chances of an individual surviving through infancy, growing up literate, or living a healthy, long life vary dramatically across regions of the world, in different countries, and within the same country. What are the causes of such variation in wellbeing? This article points to a factor that has been virtually ignored in the vast scholarship on social welfare and development—the solidarity that emerges from a sense of shared identity. The argument marks an important departure from the traditional emphasis on the role of class and electoral politics, as well as from the dominant view of the negative implications of identity for welfare. Combining statistical analyses of all Indian states and a comparative historical analysis of two Indian provinces, Kerala and Uttar Pradesh, this article demonstrates how the strength of attachment to the subnational political community—subnationalism—can drive a progressive social policy and improve developmental outcomes.

The transition from Fordist manufacturing to the so-called knowledge economy confronts organized labor across the advanced market economies with a new and more difficult landscape. Many scholars have suggested that the future of egalitarian capitalism depends on forging new political coalitions that bridge the interests of workers in the “new” and “old” economies. This article explores current trajectories of change in Denmark and Sweden, two countries that are still seen as embodying a more egalitarian model of capitalism. The authors show that labor unions in these countries are pursuing two quite different strategies for achieving social solidarity—the Danish aimed at equality of opportunity and the Swedish aimed at equality of outcomes. The article examines the origins of these different strategic paths and explores the distinctive distributional outcomes they have produced. The conclusion draws out the broad lessons these cases hold for the choices currently confronting labor movements throughout the advanced industrial world.

Research on the less industrialized regions of the world has undergone major changes in terms of theoretical rigor, methodological sophistication, and the diversification of analytical approaches since the publication of Samuel P. Huntingdon's essay, “Political Development and Political Decay,” in World Politics in 1965. Yet more than three decades later, comparativists are rediscovering political institutions, highlighting the originality of Huntington's scholarly contribution. The resurgence of institutional analysis has redirected attention to the potential variability of political outcomes in the face of sweeping global currents, generated important theoretical insights, and created new bases for dialogue across disparate research traditions. Nevertheless, the horizons of institutional research need to be broadened to address the challenges posed by international influences, two-way interactions between politics and society, and institutional fluidity.

My argument is that the very existence of international relations poses a serious, and perhaps intractable, problem for Marxism. This is easy enough to see on the level of empirical politics, and even on the level of ideological controversy, but it is a still too little appreciated issue in the context of a thoroughgoing theoretical analysis of Marxian thought. I would like to offer some tentative remarks on this latter plane. My suggestions are not as conclusive as I would like them to be, but they may at least raise some important and topical questions. Briefly, it is my intention to show that since international relations presuppose the horizontal division of mankind into nations or states, and since Marxian thought postulates the absolute unity of mankind as its ideal, problems relating to horizontal group diversity are much more centrally relevant to the Marxian doctrine than it is usually thought. Not only is there a clear moral argument in Marxian thought against group diversity as such, but the very central tenets of Marxism have a direct, though implicit, reference to the relations between horizontal groups such as nations. I believe, further, that these aspects of Marxian thought have been lost sight of and confused or underemphasized over the years, partly by Marx and Engels themselves at the very start, and partly by their political followers, and (later) academic critics.

Analysis of transitions to democracy is marked empirically by democracy's own resurgent vigor, and theoretically by shifts away from focus on global political economy to concern with such political variables as organization or leadership, and study of their expression within national arenas. Contributors to Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Prospects for Democracy (edited by Guillermo O'Donnell, Phillippe Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead) explore these issues with special emphasis on how regime transitions begin and on possibilities for social, cultural, and economic democratization. The collection focuses more on the transitions than on democracy itself, and fails to place transitions in the context of democracy's social and cultural bases. Insufficient attention is given to civil society and to its organized links with politics. This theoretical and empirical position obscures the appeal of liberal democracy to elites and masses, and hinders understanding of why popular groups accept pacts and back the leaders who make them.

Peasant-state relations in developing countries are often a function of the nature and extent of stratification in peasant populations. Where there is a rigid class structure, the prospects for cooperation by members of the peasantry are low, and large landowners tend to ally themselves with the state to exploit the rural poor. Where, on the other hand, the nature of rural stratification is ambiguous, “small” and “middle” peasants are able to organize themselves for collective action and to bargain effectively for state aid to their communities. The hypothesis is confirmed using survey data about the nature of peasant participation in the Harambee selfhelp development movement in rural Kenya. Effective peasant-state bargaining in Kenya has in turn contributed to the legitimacy of the Kenyan political system.

Rising inequality has caused concerns that democratic governments are no longer responding to majority demands, an argument the authors label the subversion of democracy model (sdm). The sdm comes in two forms: one uses public opinion data to show that policies are strongly biased toward the preferences of the rich; the other uses macrolevel data to show that governments aren’t responding to rising inequality. This article critically reassesses the sdm, points to potential biases, and proposes solutions that suggest a different interpretation of the data, which the authors label the representative democracy model (rdm). After testing the sdm against the rdm on public opinion data and on a new data set on fiscal policy, they find that middle-class power has remained remarkably strong over time, even as inequality has risen. The authors conclude that the rich have little influence on redistributive policies, and that the democratic state is apparently not increasingly constrained by global capital.

A reform of German citizenship law in 2000 was expected to greatly increase the number of foreign residents becoming German citizens. In fact, the naturalization rate fell and has remained low ever since. This outcome cannot be explained either by existing research on citizenship laws or by scholarship on individual incentives to naturalize. Instead, this article argues that the family context shapes decision making about citizenship, with distinctive behavioral implications. Parents have an incentive to naturalize and thereby extend their new citizenship status to their children. The introduction of a right to citizenship for many children born in Germany to immigrant parents removed this incentive for the parents to naturalize. The author tests the predictions of this argument against both qualitative and quantitative evidence. The article concludes with a discussion of other domains in which it may be possible to gain analytic leverage by studying political decisions in the family context.

Property rights are important for economic exchange, but in many parts of the world, they are not publicly guaranteed. Private market associations can fill this gap by providing an institutional structure to enforce agreements, but with this power comes the ability to extort from group members. Under what circumstances do private associations provide a stable environment for economic activity? The author uses survey data collected from 1,179 randomly sampled traders across 199 markets in Lagos, Nigeria, and finds that markets maintain institutions to support trade not in the absence of government, but rather in response to active government interference. The author argues that associations develop protrade policies when threatened by politicians they perceive to be predatory and when the organizations can respond with threats of their own. The latter is easier when traders are not competing with one another. To maintain this balance of power, an association will not extort; it needs trader support to maintain the credibility of its threats to mobilize against predatory politicians.

This article argues that explaining institutional differentiation requires the incorporation of public preferences and understandings into accounts of state development. Using primary evidence concerning policy discussions and public opinion, it suggests that culture determined the specific features of both the British National Health Service Act of 1946 and the American Medicare Act of 1965, as well as the differences between them. Examining the interaction of institutions and culture inserts democratic standards into the top-heavy Weberian discussions of state autonomy and accounts for the seemingly inexplicable failure of policymakers to ensure cost control over the new health programs.

A 1990 national sample survey shows that the Chinese population was concerned with issues relating to reform, economic and social grievances, and democracy. Although neither political issues nor social cleavages were the same as in the West, the same dynamics affected the process of ideological alignment. Social position and cognitive sophistication help explain why members of the population hold liberal or conservative attitudes.

The gestation, birth, and continuing life of the new states of Asia and Africa, through all their vicissitudes, are in large measure the work of intellectuals. In no state-formations in all of human history have intellectuals played such a role as they have in these events of the present century.

In the past, new states were founded by military conquest, by the secession of ethnic groups led by traditional tribal and warrior chiefs, by the gradual extension of the power of the prince through intermarriage, agreement, and conquest, or by separation through military rebellion. In antiquity, the demand that subjects acknowledge the divinity of the Emperor was no more than a requirement that the legitimacy of the existing order be recognized.

This article examines the effect of leaders’ foreign policy preferences on their ability to pursue and ratify arms control agreements. Does it take a “Nixon to go to China,” with hawks more effective than doves, when it comes to the domestic politics of treaty ratification? The authors observe that the theoretical logic correctly identifies an asymmetry between hawkish and dovish presidents, with the latter facing a credibility gap in advocating arms reductions. Although existing accounts assume leaders are captives of their type, the authors argue that dovish executives can overcome their credibility gap by obtaining the endorsement of informed legislators. These executives do so by paying a ratification premium, usually in the form of increased defense effort in areas not covered by the treaty. As a result, doves do not necessarily face a lower rate of success at the ratification stage; their disadvantage manifests itself primarily in the higher premium needed to obtain the same level of support as hawkish executives. The article demonstrates this argument through a formal model and tests the implications with paired comparisons of major arms control treaties in the Cold War and post–Cold War periods. The argument helps to resolve the Nixon-to-China theoretical debate. It shows that dovish leaders are not necessarily captives of their type because they can deploy side payments to achieve their policy goals. It also explains important puzzling features of the arms control record.

In the context of the evidence presented in both the collected scholarship under review and other select works, this article asks if and to what extent migration-related issues have been securitized in Europe and the United States. In addressing these questions it executes three tasks. First, it critically assesses the four major dimensions across which contemporary immigration purportedly is securitized: on one side, rhetorically addressing immigration-related issues through political elite discourse, public opinion, and the mass media; and on the other, the policy processes through which immigration is securitized. Second, this article identifies the strengths and weaknesses of securitization theory as it has been applied to immigration. Finally, it draws mostly negative conclusions about the veracity of the central claims of the securitization of immigration literature and, specifically, its causal story.