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.

In recent years it has become commonplace for comparativists to emphasize the resilience of welfare states in advanced capitalist societies and the failure of neoliberal efforts to dismantle the welfare state. Challenging some tenets of the resilience thesis, this article seeks to broaden the discussion of welfare-state retrenchment. The authors argue that a sharp deceleration of social spending has occurred in most OECD countries since 1980, that welfare states have failed to offset the rise of market-generated inequality and insecurity, and that welfare programs have become less universalistic. They stress the distributive and political consequences of market-oriented reforms of the public sector.

The paper discusses the role of public opinion in the foreign policy-making process of liberal democracies. Contrary to prevailing assumptions, public opinion matters. However, the impact of public opinion is determined not so much by the specific issues involved or by the particular pattern of public attitudes as by the domestic structure and the coalition-building processes among the elites in the respective country. The paper analyzes the public impact on the foreign policy-making process in four liberal democracies with distinct domestic structures: the United States, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, and Japan. Under the same international conditions and despite similar patterns of public attitudes, variances in foreign policy outcomes nevertheless occur; these have to be explained by differences in political institutions, policy networks, and societal structures. Thus, the four countries responded differently to Soviet policies during the 1980s despite more or less comparable trends in mass public opinion.

This article draws on a new data set that enables the authors to compare the distribution of income from employment across OECD countries. Specifically, the article conducts a pooled cross-sectional time-series analysis of the determinants of wage inequality in sixteen countries from 1973 to 1995. The analysis shows that varieties of capitalism matter. The authors find that the qualities that distinguish social market economies from liberal market economies shape the way political and institutional variables influence wage inequality. Of particular interest to political scientists is the finding that the wage-distributive effects of government partisanship are contingent on institutional context. Union density emerges in the analysis as the single most important factor influencing wage inequality in both institutional contexts.

Since the 1960s, new left-socialist or ecology parties have appeared in approximately half of the advanced Western democracies. These parties have a common set of egalitarian and libertarian tenets and appeal to younger, educated voters. The author uses macropolitical and economic data to explain the electoral success of these left-libertarian parties. While high levels of economic development are favorable preconditions for their emergence, they are best explained in terms of domestic political opportunity structures. There is little evidence that these parties are a reaction to economic and social crises in advanced democracies. The findings suggest that the rise of left-libertarian parties is the result of a new cleavage mobilized in democratic party systems rather than of transient protest.

This article seeks to explain why Denmark and the Netherlands made dramatic progress reforming their welfare systems in the 1990s and why Germany had a relatively slow start. Some possible explanations found to be incomplete are institutional differences in welfare programs, the uniqueness of circumstances (for example, German unification), and the balance of political power in governing institutions. An important part of the puzzle is an increasing perception of the need to reform that was more widespread in Denmark and the Netherlands. The social construction of an imperative to reform in these countries generated a political consensus that was elusive in Germany but that may be developing under Gerhard Schroder's government.

The Vietnam and Algerian wars have demonstrated that the overwhelming conventional military superiority of major powers is no guarantee against their defeat in wars against small nations. For external powers such wars are necessarily “limited,” which constrains escalation above certain levels. With no direct survival interest at stake, fighting the war does not take automatic priority over the pursuit of other social, political, and economic objectives. Prosecuting the war consumes resources—economic, human, and political—which are thus not available for the pursuit of these other objectives. In the absence of a quick victory this creates the potential for those political divisions which historically have shifted the balance of forces in the metropolis in favor of withdrawal. For the insurgents, the fact of invasion and occupation generates cohesion, minimizes constraints on mobilization, and maximizes the willingness to incur costs. Precisely the opposite effects tend to characterize the war effort of the external power. A conceptual framework for the analysis of the evolution and outcome of such conflicts is presented and its applications and limitations discussed.

This article considers the political situation of an authoritarian province in a nationally democratic country. The objective is to uncover strategies that incumbents (in this article, governors) pursue to perpetuate provincial authoritarian regimes, as well as dynamics that can undermine such regimes. A central insight is that controlling the scope of provincial conflict (that is, the extent to which it is localized or nationalized) is a major objective of incumbents and oppositions in struggles over local democratization. Authoritarian incumbents will thus pursue “boundary control” strategies, which are played out in multiple arenas of a national territorial system. The articlefleshesout these processes via comparative analysis of two conflicts over subnational democratization in 2004: the state of Oaxaca in Mexico and the province of Santiago del Estero in Argentina.

The revolutionary events of 1989 in Eastern Europe took a special shape in the German Democratic Republic: large-scale flights of citizens to the Federal Republic of Germany combined with increasingly powerful mass demonstrations in the major cities to bring down the communist regime. This conjunction of private emigration and public protest contrasts with the way these distinct responses to discontent had been previously experienced, primarily as alternatives. The forty-year history of the German Democratic Republic thus represents a particularly rich theater of operation for the concepts of “exit” and “voice,” which the author had introduced in his book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970). The events of 1989 are scrutinized in some detail as they trace a more complex pattern of interaction than had been found to prevail in most previous studies.

In the classical literature of diplomatic history, the balance-of-power concept occupies a central position. Regardless of one's interpretation of the term or one's preference for or antipathy to it, the international relations scholar cannot escape dealing with it. The model is, of course, a multifaceted one, and it produces a fascinating array of corollaries; among these, the relationship between the number of actors and the stability of the system is one of the most widely accepted and persuasive. That is, as the system moves away from bipolarity toward multipolarity, the frequency and intensity of war should be expected to diminish.

In any area of scholarly inquiry, there are always several ways in which the phenomena under study may be sorted and arranged for purposes of systemic analysis. Whether in the physical or social sciences, the observer may choose to focus upon the parts or upon the whole, upon the components or upon the system. He may, for example, choose between the flowers or the garden, the rocks or the quarry, the trees or the forest, the houses or the neighborhood, the cars or the traffic jam, the delinquents or the gang, die legislators or the legislative, and so on. Whether he selects the micro- or macro-level of analysis is ostensibly a mere matter of methodological or conceptual convenience. Yet the choice often turns out to be quite difficult, and may well become a central issue within the discipline concerned. The complexity and significance of these level-of-analysis decisions are readily suggested by the long-standing controversies between social psychology and sociology, personality-oriented and culture-oriented anthropology, or micro- and macro-economics, to mention but a few. In the vernacular of general systems theory, the observer is always confronted with a system, its sub-systems, and their respective environments, and while he may choose as his system any cluster of phenomena from the most minute organism to the universe itself, such choice cannot be merely a function of whim or caprice, habit or familiarity. The responsible scholar must be prepared to evaluate the relative utility—conceptual and methodological—of the various alternatives open to him, and to appraise the manifold implications of the level of analysis finally selected. So it is with international relations.

The transition from communism in Europe and the former Soviet Union has only sometimes produced a transition to democracy. Since the crumbling of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, most of the twenty-eight new states have abandoned communism, but only nine of these have entered the ranks of liberal democracies. The remaining majority of new postcommunist states are various shades of dictatorships or unconsolidated “transitional regimes.” This article seeks to explain why some states abandoned communism for democracy while others turned to authoritarian rule. In endorsing actorcentric approaches that have dominated analyses of the third wave of democratization, this argument nonetheless offers an alternative set of causal paths from ancien regime to new regime that can account for both democracy and dictatorship as outcomes. Situations of unequal distributions of power produced the quickest and most stable transitions from communist rule. In countries with asymmetrical balances of power, the regime to emerge depends almost entirely on the ideological orientation of the most powerful. In countries where democrats enjoyed a decisive power advantage, democracy emerged. Conversely, in countries in which dictators maintained a decisive power advantage, dictatorship emerged. In between these two extremes were countries in which the distribution of power between the old regime and its challengers was relatively equal. Rather than producing stalemate, compromise, and parted transitions to democracy, however, such situations in the postcommunist world resulted in protracted confrontation between relatively balanced powers. The regimes that emerged from these modes of transitions are not the most successful democracies but rather are unconsolidated, unstable, partial democracies.

Many scholars attribute China's market reforms and the remarkable economic performance they have fostered in part to the country's political and fiscal decentralization. Political decentralization is said to have stimulated local policy experiments and restrained predatory central interventions. Fiscal decentralization is thought to have motivated local officials to promote development and harden enterprises' budget constraints. The locally diversified structure of the prereform economy is said to have facilitated liberalization. Reexamining these arguments, the authors find that none establishes a convincing link between political or fiscal decentralization and China's successes. They suggest an alternative view of the reform process in which growth-enhancing policies emerged from competition between promarket and conservative factions in Beijing.

Standards have become one of the most important nontariff barriers to trade, especially national product standards that specify design or performance characteristics of manufactured goods. Divergent national standards often inhibit trade, whereas regional and international standards increasingly serve as instruments of trade liberalization. Consequently, the setting of international standards—seemingly technical and apolitical—is rapidly becoming an issue of economic and political salience. But who sets international standards? Who wins, who loses? This article offers a fresh analytical approach to the study of international standards, which the authors call the institutional complementarities approach. It builds on insights from realism and the “Battle of the Sexes” coordination game but emphasizes complementarities of historically conditioned standardization systems at the national level with the institutional structure of standardization at the international level. It posits that, after controlling for other factors that influence involvement in international standardization, differences in institutional complementarities play a critical though largely accidental role in placing firms from different countries or regions in a first- or second-mover position when standardization becomes global. The authors illustrate the insightfulness of this approach through statistical analyses of the first scientific set of data on standards use and standardization, collected by the authors through an international online survey.

How is one to understand contentious acts that open channels of participation while also making use of existing channels? Rightful resistance is a partly institutionalized form of popular action that employs laws, policies, and other established values to defy power holders who have failed to live up to some ideal or who have not implemented a popular measure. Analysis of opposition to cadre misconduct in rural China, supported by evidence from the United States, Norway, and South Africa, suggests that resistance can share a common dynamic despite its occurrence in strikingly dissimilar settings. Aggrieved individuals and groups turn to established principles to anchor their defiance; use legitimating myths and normative language to frame their claims; rely on existing statutes and government commitments when leveling their charges; and locate and mobilize advocates within officialdom. In differing contexts, a combination of rights talk, legal tactics, and open confrontation may induce power holders to surrender advantages in accord with principles that usually favor them. The cases examined further suggest that rightful resistance springs from rights consciousness and increases it and, finally, that it may be more consequential than most “everyday resistance” while remaining less risky than wholly uninstitutionalized defiance.

This article takes stock of a plethora of recent works examining the flowering of transnational civil society activism in world politics. The author argues that this work contributes to a progressive research agenda that responds to a succession of criticisms from alternative perspectives. As the research program has advanced, new areas of inquiry have been opened up, including the need for a central place for normative international theory. The author also contends that the focus of this research on the transnationalization of civil society provides a trenchant response to an important puzzle concerning the leverage of civil society vis-à-vis the contemporary state in an era of globalization. Further, the liberal variant of transnational advocacy research constitutes a powerful theoretical counter not only to other nonliberal theories that privilege other agents or structures but also to other varieties of contemporary liberal international theory, such as those privileging preexisting domestic preference formation or state centric versions of liberal constructivism.

During the Tet holiday of 1968, North Vietnamese troops launched massive attacks on a large number of South Vietnamese cities. Why?

Scholars have worked either on civil society or on ethnic conflict, but no systematic attempt has yet been made to connect the two. In an attempt to explore the possible links, this article makes two interconnected arguments. First, interethnic and intraethnic networks of civic engagement play very different roles in ethnic conflict. Because they build bridges and manage tensions, interethnic networks are agents of peace. But if communities are organized only along intraethnic lines and the interconnections with other communities are very weak (or do not exist), ethnic violence is then quite likely. Second, civic networks, both intra- and interethnic, can also be broken down into two other types: associational forms of engagement and everyday forms of engagement. This distinction is based on whether civic interaction is formal or not. Both forms of engagement, if robust, promote peace: contrariwise, their absence or weakness opens up space for ethnic violence. Of the two, however, the associational forms turn out to be sturdier than everyday engagement, especially when confronted with attempts by politicians to polarize the people along ethnic lines. Both arguments have significance for theories of ethnic conflict and social capital.

Levels of subnational democracy vary significantly within countries around the world. Drawing on fiscal theories of the state, the author argues that this variance is often explained by a type of rentierism that is not geographically determined by natural resources but politically created by certain fiscal federalism arrangements. He posits that less democratic regimes are more likely in rentier provinces—those that receive disproportionately large central government transfers and practically forgo local taxation. Intergovernmental revenue-sharing rules that produce large vertical fiscal imbalances and favor the economically smaller districts provide their incumbents with generous “fiscal federalism rents” that allow them to restrict democratic contestation and weaken checks and balances. Statistical evidence from a panel data set of the Argentine provinces strongly confirms this expectation, even after controlling for standard alternative explanations such as level of development. Sensitivity analysis shows that this finding is extremely robust to alternative panel estimators. Qualitative and quantitative evidence suggests that the effect of heavy public spending on the economic autonomy of political actors is the main causal mechanism at work.

Why do rulers employ ethnic exclusion at the risk of civil war? Focusing on the region of sub-Saharan Africa, the author attributes this costly strategy to the commitment problem that arises in personalist regimes between elites who hold joint control of the state's coercive apparatus. As no faction can be sure that others will not exploit their violent capabilities to usurp power, elites maneuver to protect their privileged position and safeguard against others' first-a rising internal threat, rulers move to eliminate their rivals to guarantee their personal and political survival. But the cost of such a strategy, especially when carried out along ethnic lines, is that it increases the risk of a future civil war. To test this argument, the author employs the Ethnic Power Relations data set combined with original data on the ethnicity of conspirators of coups and rebellions in Africa. He finds that in Africa ethnic exclusion substitutes civil war risk for coup risk. And rulers are significantly more likely to exclude their coconspirators—the very friends and allies who helped them come to power—than other included groups, but at the cost of increasing the risk of a future civil war with their former allies. In the first three years after being purged from the central government, coconspirators and their coethnics are sixteen times more likely to rebel than when they were represented at the apex of the regime.