Economic sanctions have long occupied the attention of both scholars and policy makers. Despite the widespread use of sanctions, many observers have concluded that the inherent problems associated with imposing sanctions involving multiple senders substantially limit their effectiveness. This article reviews two books that analyze the factors that influence cooperation among senders of multilateral sanctions. These books indicate that international institutions can do much to promote cooperation of this sort. However, this essay argues that the extent to which international institutions facilitate cooperation among senders of sanctions is likely to depend on the domestic politics of members, the type of institution being used for this purpose, the nature of the strategy being pursued, and the distribution of power among members. Although these books make significant contributions to our understanding of the factors that promote cooperation among senders of multilateral sanctions, they examine the factors that promote the effectiveness of sanctions in only a peripheral manner. One potential influence on the effectiveness of sanctions that are organized by an international institution, however, is the likelihood that the institution will be captured by member states or by interest groups within them. Additional research that investigates the conditions under which international institutions are likely to be captured and the implications of institutional capture for their performance may therefore prove useful to scholars of international relations and economic statecraft.

Institutionalist models of macroeconomic performance in advanced industrial countries focus on central bank independence. In newly industrializing countries, however, the behavioral authority of the central bank is a much more significant predictor of inflation than is legal independence, because laws there are not the source of central bank ability to create or defend macroeconomic stability. Financial structures and the incentives they create for government politicians, private bankers, and industrialists explain cross-national variation in the interest and capacity of central banks in developing countries. The greater public sector deficits are, the weaker and/or more dependent private banks are on state assistance; and the larger the portion of industry finance covered by commercial bank loans or state credits, the less likely it is that there will be an authoritative, conservative central bank. Mexico, Thailand, Brazil, and South Korea are the four country cases considered in depth.

Agap seems to exist between present theory of international regional integration and political reality. The theory explains, generalizes about, or predicts regional integration almost exclusively on the basis of processes and factors internal to the region under consideration. When theory considers phenomena outside the region, they usually appear as residual categories which are left insufficiently examined and about which we know little. Moreover, theory has remained relatively silent about the role of the superpowers.

Why does natural resource wealth prolong incumbency? Using evidence from parliamentary elections in the Islamic Republic of Iran, the author shows that natural resource revenues boost incumbent reelection rates because they are used to provide public or private goods to constituents, which incentivizes voters to reelect incumbents over challengers. To test this hypothesis, the author employs originally assembled data on five parliamentary elections in Iran (1992–2008) in longitudinal hierarchical regression analyses at the district and province levels. By leveraging Iran's mixed-member electoral system, he shows that the resource-incumbency mechanism works primarily in single-member districts with little evidence of an incumbency advantage for politicians in resource-rich multimember districts. Building on the rentier theory of natural resource wealth, the results suggest that voting for the incumbent is attributable to patronage and public goods distribution. The findings offer new insights into the understudied context of Iranian legislative elections, illustrate the mechanisms driving the relationship between resource wealth and incumbency advantage at the subnational level in a nondemocratic setting, and highlight the mediating effects of electoral institutions on the resource-incumbency relationship.

This article analyzes conflicts in the 1980s over the decentralization of bargaining between labor and capital in Sweden and Germany. The analysis highlights the role of institutional arrangements, some of them previously “dormant” politically, that mediated common pressures to enhance plant-level flexibility. Whereas the drive for plant flexibility in Sweden contributed to the demise of traditional bargaining arrangements, similar pressures in Germany were more successfully accommodated within its “dual” system. In both cases, institutional links among different levels and arenas of bargaining shaped the strategic interactions of labor and capital in ways that either complicated (Sweden) or facilitated (Germany) the search for compromise within traditional bargaining institutions. While confirming the central role of institutions in explaining cross-national variation in outcomes, the analysis also adds a dynamic element to institutional analysis, highlighting how changing substantive interests of political actors interact with preexisting institutions to produce distinctive patterns of stability and change.

The 1980s were bracketed by crises in Africa, as protracted economic malaise was succeeded by a wave of political reform. Analysts have sought to understand the sources of economic decline as well as the political requisites for recovery in the region. Neoclassical and structuralist analyses have been challenged by state-centric views of economic change. The latter perspective emphasizes the need for capable developmental states as a basis for long-term adjustment, but a political theory of economic change is still lacking. Such a theory must address the institutional foundations of growth, as well as the shifting basis of social coalitions in African regimes. Political liberalization suggests the possibility of a new setting for economic reform, though the effects of political reform on institutions and coalitions remain ambiguous, and democratization cannot be regarded as a panacea for the region's developmental failure. Future research must look more closely at the interests and structures in transitional regimes, and scholars should adopt a more comparative vantage on Africa's challenges of reform.

Modern clientelist exchange is typically carried out by intermediaries—party activists, employers, local strongmen, traditional leaders, and the like. Politicians use such brokers to mobilize voters, yet little about their relative effectiveness is known. The authors argue that broker effectiveness depends on their leverage over clients and their ability to monitor voters. They apply their theoretical framework to compare two of the most common brokers worldwide, party activists and employers, arguing the latter enjoy numerous advantages along both dimensions. Using survey-based framing experiments in Venezuela and Russia, the authors find voters respond more strongly to turnout appeals from employers than from party activists. To demonstrate mechanisms, the article shows that vulnerability to job loss and embeddedness in workplace social networks make voters more responsive to clientelist mobilization by their bosses. The results shed light on the conditions most conducive to effective clientelism and highlight broker type as important for understanding why clientelism is prevalent in some countries but not others.

The authors explore the often conflictual bargaining relations between transnational corporations and host governments of less developed countries. They focus particular attention on the conflict that surrounded the creation of the Mexican automobile industry (1960–1964), criticizing and reformulating a current approach to these issues. The argument proceeds in two parts—agenda setting and bargaining power. Each part is organized around a central criticism of the bargaining power approach and provides an alternative formulation which is then applied to an analysis of the bargaining relationship between the Mexican Government and the transnational automobile corporations.

It has been persistently demonstrated that militarily superior states that are engaged in wars with militarily inferior ones may end up on the losing side. Unlike the processes by which military capabilities are converted into control over resources, the so-called “paradoxical conflict outcomes” phenomenon is more severe than a lack of correspondence between control over resources and control over outcomes. The paradox of power involves cases in which increased control over resources actually causes reduced control over outcomes. Several of the theoretical examples of this paradox are taken from social choice theory. These examples are applied to the analysis of the outcome of the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 and of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The implications of the power paradox for theories of international politics are briefly discussed.

The Islamic Revolution in Iran is analyzed as the latest of the “great revolutions” in a comparative perspective ranging from the early modern European revolutions to fascism. The analysis highlights the neglected importance of reactive elements, communal solidarities, and tradition in a wide variety of revolutions and revolutionary movements. Comparative inferences bring out the serious deficiency of the Marxian theory of revolution as well as of those structural theories of revolution that focus exclusively on the state. By contrast, these inferences underline the significance of ideology, religion, and culture. Finally it is argued that the emergence of a distinct Islamic revolutionary ideology can only be understood as a part of the process of crystallization of the revolutionary ideology in Western Europe and its spread to the rest of the world.

Studies explaining the end of the cold war and change in Soviet foreign policy tend to emphasize the role of the international system: decision makers “learned lessons” about the international system, and this learning brought about Soviet accommodationist policies. Such systemic and cognitive learning approaches tend, however, to mask the political and highly contingent nature of the policy changes. To understand these changes, one must explore how certain ideas got placed on the political agenda and how others were forced off.

This essay stresses the role of ideas about both the foreign and the domestic scene, as well as the role of a network of specialists that helped put these ideas on the national agenda. Ideas alone cannot explain any one outcome. They must be understood in terms of the political process by which they are selected. Ideas are more likely to be implemented and epistemic communities are more likely to be influential under three conditions: (1) access to the leadership, (2) salience of the ideas to the leadership, and (3) the ability of the leadership to control the political agenda.

One critical example of great change in foreign policy was the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. This study examines the interplay of ideas and politics over time and explains how the decision to withdraw was implemented and why it occurred when it did. It focuses on (1) the mobilization of an epistemic community before Gorbachev came to power, (2) massive personnel changes within Soviet institutions in the 1980s, and (3) the empowerment of the epistemic community once Gorbachev had consolidated his power.

In the past three decades governments around the world have lowered barriers to international capital flows. This movement is widely attributed to the forces of globalization, as developed nations moved toward relative convergence on international financial openness. Yet developing nations with much to gain from openness to foreign investment moved only hesitantly and inconsistently in this direction. Analysis of two decades of capital account liberalization in Latin America and the OECD reveals that nations in Latin America with weaker domestic financial sectors face higher risks of transitional dislocations following liberalization and move less aggressively toward openness. In the OECD, by contrast, financial weakness is associated with greater movements toward capital account opening, as transitional costs are lower and governments are better equipped to ameliorate them. Examination of the transitional costs of liberalization thus helps to explain how market pressures may impede, rather than promote, market-oriented reform in Latin America.

Why did the Johnson Administration decide in the late 1960's to deploy a ballistic missile defense system in the United States? In attempting to answer this question we need to seek an understanding of several distinct decisions and actions. The most puzzling event occurred in San Francisco on September 18, 1967, when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara delivered an address to the editors and publishers of United Press International. McNamara devoted the first fourteen pages of his talk to a general discussion of the strategic arms race, emphasizing the limited utility of nuclear weapons and the fact that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union had gained any increased security from the arms race. With this as background, he turned to a specific discussion of the ABM issue

After comparing the predictions of Marxist, moral economy, and rational-choice theories concerning collective actions by workers in Egypt in the period since the 1952 Free Officers coup, this article concludes that a moral economy perspective is best able to explain the nature and frequency of these protests. The supporting evidence is the correlation between labor protest and violations of workers' feelings of entitlement, as manifest in declining real wages or disruptions to established patterns of wage differentials. The targeting of state institutions, combined with the fact that workers have eschewed actual production stoppages in favor of symbolic protests, indicates a view of reciprocal rights and obligations between themselves and the state. The latter reinforces the moral economy by combining significant concessions with its repressive response to labor protests. Marxism proves unable to explain the largely defensive and reactive nature of labor protest, while rational-choice theory is reduced to efforts to quantify workers' reactions to this repression.

Allison's Model III (governmental or bureaucratic politics) suggests that state policies reflect the parochial concerns of intragovernmental “players in positions” and the relative power of these players. This article offers a critical test. It examines a policy area—U.S. decisions on the composition of naval forces—in which we would, a priori, expect bureaucratic politics to have a maximum effect and which participants, observers, and scholars have routinely described as critically influenced by bureaucratic politics. This article employs statistical methods to assess whether outcomes have indeed been affected by the parochial priorities and perceptions of individuals who, because of their relative power and the rules of the game, have dominated the relevant bureaucratic action-channels. Contrary to the expectations of the bureaucratic politics literature—indeed, contrary to the reports of firsthand observers and the actors involved—bureaucratic politics do not seem to have mattered: knowledge of bureaucratic interests and power does not permit us to predict outcomes. The article then proceeds to suggest an alternative model of state behavior that does provide significant explanatory power: the article demonstrates that shifts in force posture can be modeled as a function of ideas and images rather than of interests. This gives rise to speculation that in explaining American foreign and security policy the name of the game is not, as Allison suggests, politics, but the competition of ideas for intellectual hegemony.

This article investigates the coalitional bases of authoritarian rule to explain striking variation in adjustment policy to the Asian Financial Crisis in Indonesia and Malaysia. Given currency depreciation with financial sector fragility, holders of mobile assets prefer to maintain an open capital account, while owners of fixed assets and labor favor restrictions of capital mobility to facilitate expansionary macroeconomic policies. Differences in adjustment policy across the two countries reflect differences in the political coalitions supporting the authoritarian regimes. These findings illuminate the nature of political conflict during financial crises and show how a nuanced view of the coalitions supporting authoritarian rule can yield powerful insights into the political economy of authoritarianism and economic adjustment in a global economy.

World War I arose from six remarkable misperceptions that swept through Europe before 1914. Europeans exaggerated the efficacy of offensive military strategies and tactics; overestimated the hostility of neighboring states; falsely believed that strength and bellicosity could intimidate opponents; exaggerated the economic value of empire; believed that war itself was beneficial; and taught themselves a mythical nationalistic history. These misperceptions fostered expansionist foreign policies and bolstered arguments for preemptive and preventive war. They also precluded resort to Tit-for-Tat strategies to achieve cooperation through reciprocity. All of the problems discussed in this collection of essays—perverse payoff structures, short shadows of the future, and large numbers of players—were created or exacerbated by these misconceptions. This case suggests that peace can require political action projects to control malignant misperceptions, although history warns that such projects will not succeed easily.

The modernization or developmental model of communist regimes has been widely criticized, but the concept of revolutionary and postrevolutionary phases has endured. Implied in the dichotomy is a fundamental conflict between the politics of revolutionary mobilization (characterized by the push to disrupt and transform bourgeois routines and institutions of the old regime) and the postrevolutionary politics of regularized decision making and institutionalized party rule. The author uses the post-Mao Chinese experience and a case study of China's one-child policy to argue that variant forms of mobilization have remained an integral part of the postrevolutionary Chinese political process, as the Deng regime attempts to rearrange the institutions and routines characteristic of Maoist China rapidly and fundamentally, while preserving a Leninist political order.

Can two or more self-differentiating culture-groups coexist within a single political structure? The question may well seem clearly settled by the overwhelming factual evidence of contemporary international politics, for it is indeed a truism that political and ethnic borders seldom coincide. Thus, the very existence of a host of multinational states, including such a time-tested example as the Soviet Union, would appear to document an affirmative answer. On the other hand, a recent spate of political unrest within such geographically diverse and historically unrelated states as, inter aliay Canada, Guyana, India, Uganda, Belgium, the Sudan, Burma, Yugoslavia, Cyprus, Rwanda, the United Kingdom, and Iraq, focuses attention on the common root cause of intrastate yet international conflict and again brings into question the assumptions of the multinational state.