Existing theories of change in campaign strategies predict cross-national convergence in candidates' linkages to voters and the degree of policy focus and cleavage priming in their appeals. However, the prevailing national patterns of electioneering in Chile, Brazil, and Peru have actually diverged from one another since their transitions from authoritarian rule. Based upon content analysis of television advertising, interviews with campaign staff, and case studies of specific elections in these three countries, this article develops a theory of success contagion that can explain the evolution of presidential campaign strategy in third-wave democracies. The author argues that the first politician to combine a victorious campaign with a successful term as president establishes a model of electioneering that candidates across the ideological spectrum are likely to adopt in the future. Such contagion can occur directly, through politicians' imitation of each other's strategies, or indirectly, with communities of campaign professionals playing an intermediary role. Strategic convergence is less likely in cases of repeatedly poor governing performance. Instead, candidates tend to choose strategies through an inward-oriented process of reacting against previous errors. Initial testing suggests the theory is generalizable to other new democracies with at least moderate organizational continuity across elections.

When detente emerged as the focal point of American foreign policy in the early 1970's, the issue of whether or not communist political systems were becoming more like Western democracies over time (i.e., “converging”) was raised. This paper assesses political scientists' efforts to analyze such a hypotheses, particularly the implication that socioeconomic changes called “development” and “modernization” co-vary with fundamental political change. After identifying three components of the convergence hypothesis—pluralism, nationalism, and legitimacy—the author examines published research for empirical evidence regarding these phenomena. He stresses the similarities and differences of political change among communist states. Convergence theory is found to be inadequate in most respects for understanding the relationships between socioeconomic and political changes, although various political trends (such as pluralization) are evident.

What is the effect of the process of modernization on political stability? That is the question I want to explore theoretically. I will suggest that there are no plausible reasons for the expectation that the process of modernization is destabilizing, and also that there is no problem of political instability in transitional societies or anywhere else. Let us begin by examining some of the arguments used to support the thesis that modernization causes political instability.

Twice within 25 years, in 1919 and again in 1944–5, the idea of the balance of power hasbeen pronounced dead, and twice it has arisen from its seeming demise soon after such funereal exercises. Foremost among the obituaries were those of American statesmen, like Woodrow Wilson and Cordell Hull. When the latter returned from conferences in Moscow in the autumn of 1943, he stated, as if he were the true heir of Wilsonism, that “as the provisionsof the fournations declarations are carried into effect, there will no longer be need for spheres of influence, for balance of power, or any other of the special arrangements through which, in the unhappy past, the nations strove to safeguard their security.”

Since 1947 the major formal institution for channeling national security advice toPresidents has been the National Security Council. The Council has operated (1) as a forum where senior officials meet with the President; (2) as a focal point for formal policy planning and decision processes; and (3) as an umbrella for establishment of a Presidential foreign policy staff. The first was the goal of its proponents; the last is what it has most importantly become. But the N.S.C. has reflected the relationships among each administration's top officials more than it has shaped them; hence the need to think of broader advisory “systems” combining the formal and the informal. Among the variables shaping such systems are; a President's particular organizational sense; his attitude toward formality and regularity; whether he has (and wants) strong Cabinet officials; how his key advisers work out their role relationships and jurisdictional boundaries; how widely he casts his net for advce; how broad a range of substantive issue involvement he seeks; how much he seeks operational involvement; and his attitude toward divided counsel and interpersonal conflict.

Prescriptions about foreign policy advisory systems tend to stress the President's role as decision maker; they should focus also on the oft-competing role of effective Presidential leadership in getting policies and decisions executed. The importance of execution argues for giving the Secretary of State primacy over other advisers; the need to protect the President's decision authority argues for a White House assistant independent of the Secretary, though perhaps with reduced rank. Presidents also need better advice on the domestic politics of U.S. foreign policy, and each could profit from a “mid-term system review” after his institutions and advisory relationships have taken shape.

Garrett Hardin's “tragedy of the commons” metaphor is commonly invoked to account for the unfortunate state of world fisheries. But the world s oceans are no longer a global commons and have not been so for the past two decades. Open-access regimes have persisted within many exclusive economic zones (EEZs) during this time, but coastal states' authority to regulate domestic fisheries has existed for more than a generation. Faced with the prospect of Hardin's tragedy, coastal states have had more than twenty years to devise institutional constraints that would prevent it. This article asserts that the dismal experience with EEZs is in large part attributable to distributive bargaining problems that arose within coastal states in the wake of EEZ extension. Moreover, the article argues that high levels of uncertainty that characterize the early stages of institutional development have exacerbated these problems. Finally, the article demonstrates how the variety of institutional designs and paths of institutional development that are observed in the cases of Iceland, Norway, and Atlantic Canada result from the different configurations of political power and political structure within each case. While the empirical discussion is focused upon property rights and fisheries, the theoretical discussion of bargaining and uncertainty has widespread application across comparative and international politics.

Rather than a case where deterrence was not tried, 1939 is a case where deterrence failed. As such, it has important implications for deterrence theory. Mutual deterrence must operate on roughly the same time perceptions. Britain felt impelled to deter Germany after Prague, but could offer only a long-term deterrent. Germany's short term appeared so favorable that the long-term uncertainties posed by Britain and France failed to restrain her. The experience of 1939 also underlines the importance of political factors, particularly realignment in mutual deterrence. The Russo-German Pact tipped the balance toward war. In the contemporary setting, calculations of time perspectives between the Soviet Union and the United States are important for mutual deterrence, especially in Europe. Changes in the Sino-Soviet split hold further implications for contemporary deterrence.

Until recently, the commonly accepted notion of human social development held that static “traditional” societies passed through a dynamic transitional period and came to rest again as “modern” industrial societies. Such simplistic stage and linear development theories have now been formally superseded by Huntington's formulation of development and decay as concurrent processes with no necessary endstate. There remains, however, an implicit assumption that highly populated, urbanindustrial societies with continuously growing economies are the proper goal of development, and that the current internal political and economic processes of third-world nations are the proper subject of study.

Member states of the GATT/WTO have linked some issue-areas outside trade to the institution and did so with varying depths. At the same time they have chosen not to link other issue-areas. What accounts for this variation? The author argues that states establish a legalized linkage between the GATT/WTO and an issue-area outside it when they are uncertain about the possibilities of disguised protectionism. Such uncertainty exists under two conditions: when diversity in regulations in an issue-area across states generates a large adverse impact on trade (negative externalities) but that diversity can be justified at the international level for (1) having an independent objective apart from hampering trade and (2) when there are few alternative policies to achieve that objective (legitimacy). States establish a highly legalized linkage in these situations to reduce the uncertainty and minimize disguised protectionism. By contrast, when regulatory diversity exhibits low legitimacy, states establish only a weakly legalized linkage. In the absence of meaningful externalities, they do not establish any linkages. The author evaluates this argument in two ways. He provides an overview of eleven issue-areas about which there have been some debates or conflicts about linkages to the GATT/WTO. In addition, he carries out in-depth case studies of three issue-areas—labor standards, environmental standards, and health safety standards. The findings of this article contribute to a better understanding of international institutions and cooperation as well as of the evolution of the multilateral trade institution.

WHEN leaders extend deterrence, they attempt to prevent a military attack against an ally by threatening retaliation should force be used against their protégé. At present, most analysts locate extended deterrence at the intersection of nuclear and conventional force in Europe; the United States relies heavily on this strategy to protect its allies. The extension of deterrence to Europe, however, is only one among several possible applications of the strategy. It has been widely used by the United States, for example, to manage conflict in the Middle East. We propose to examine this wider extension of deterrence.

On the basis of evidence mainly from West Africa, many scholars in the 1960's made predictions about likely trends in Africa as a whole on such issues as one-party states. On the basis of data from Eastern Africa, can we now risk predictions about likely performance of military regimes in Africa as a whole?

There is evidence from Eastern Africa that African soldiers may be agents of retradi-tionalization. The bulk of the army in most countries is recruited from some of the most rural and least acculturated sectors of society. Contemporary African soldiers may be traditionalists in charge of modern armies with modern technology. What happens when a modern organization is manned mainly by rural recruits?

It may be that both modernization and retraditionalization are taking place under military leadership in Africa. The cultural revivalist role of sub-westernized or non-westernized African soldiers is beginning to manifest itself in places like Uganda under Idi Amin and Zaire under Mobutu Sese Seko. The political decline of westernized intellectuals and the rise of soldiers may herald a partial re-Africanization of Africa, but with some painful costs.

Why is there variation in how violent nonstate groups interact in armed conflict? Where armed conflict and organized crime converge in unstable regions worldwide, these groups sometimes enter cooperative arrangements with opposing groups. Within the same unstable setting, violent nonstate groups forge stable, long-term relations with each other in some regions, engage in unstable, short-term arrangements in others, and dispute each other elsewhere. Even though such paradoxical arrangements have intensified and perpetuated war, extant theories on group interactions that focus on territory and motivations overlook their concurrent character. Challenging the literature that focuses on conflict dynamics alone, the author argues that the spatial distribution of illicit flows influences how these interactions vary. By mapping cocaine supply chain networks, the author shows that long-term arrangements prevail at production sites, whereas short-term arrangements cluster at trafficking nodes. The article demonstrates through process tracing how the logic of illicit flows produces variation in the groups’ cooperative arrangements. This multiyear, multisited study includes over six hundred interviews in and about Colombia’s remote, war-torn borderlands.

Most comparative studies of public strategies for competitiveness focus on the links between public agencies and industrial sectors. This paper argues that the professions—or knowledge-bearing elites—that animate these organizational links are equally significant. For public policies to promote technological advance, the visions and self-images of knowledge-bearing elites are particularly important. By examining administrative and technical elites in France and Germany in the 1980s, the paper identifies characteristics that enable these elites to implement policy in some cases but not in others. France's “state-created” elites were well positioned to initiate and implement large technology projects, such as digitizing the telecommunications network. By contrast, Germany's state-recognized elites were better positioned to facilitate framework-oriented programs aimed at the diffusion of new technologies throughout industry. The linkages between administrative and technical elites also explain why French policymakers had difficulty adapting policy to changing circumstances over time, whereas German policymakers managed in many cases to learn more from previous policy experiences and to adapt subsequent initiatives accordingly.

Qualitative analysis of China's behavior in five situations of international conflict suggests several important similarities in the structure and sequence of Peking's actions. These similarities imply the existence of a relatively stable and coherent strategy of conflict management, and provide a basis for inferring the nature of this strategy. As a result of China's strategic vulnerability, this strategy places a major emphasis on engaging in confrontations with stronger adversaries only under carefully controlled conditions, and on manipulating the “incidental” aspects of these confrontations (e.g., time, place, target, and scale of confrontation) to Peking's advantage. Peking's relative success in applying this strategy is assessed in terms of the “coercive diplomacy” model discussed by Alexander George et al. This assessment identifies areas of strength and weakness in the Chinese approach to conflict management.

A Paradigm is more than a perspective but less than a theory. It provides a set of interrelated questions, but no hypothetical answers or account of validated propositions. It provides a “language,” a net of variables, but it does not specify the relationships among the parameters of these variables. It is less vague than a mere perspective, providing an ordered, specific, and often logically exhaustive and tightly ordered focus for research and speculation. A paradigm is often a stage on the way from an old perspective to a new theory.

An important task of the social scientist is the continual reexamination of his vocabulary. His purpose in such a reexamination should be the achievement of greater precision in meaning—that is, a more explicit statement of the real-world phenomena to which his terms apply. This research note is an attempt to stimulate the critical examination of the term “oligarchy” and related phrases identifying a ruling elite which have been used widely and repeatedly in discussions of Latin American political systems.

How important is the enforcement of political rights in new democracies? The authors use the enfranchisement of the emancipated slaves following the American Civil War to study this question. Critical to their strategy, black suffrage was externally enforced by the United States Army in ten Southern states during Reconstruction. The authors employ a triple-difference model to estimate the joint effect of enfranchisement and its enforcement on taxation. They find that counties with greater black-population shares that were occupied by the military levied higher taxes compared to similar nonoccupied counties. These counties later experienced a comparatively greater decline in taxation after the troops were withdrawn. The authors also demonstrate that in occupied counties, black politicians were more likely to be elected and political murders by white supremacist groups occurred less frequently. The findings provide evidence on the key role of federal troops in limiting elite capture by force during this period.

Why is the analysis of Third World foreign policies still labeled the underdeveloped study of underdeveloped countries? Do we know how social cleavages, structures of post-colonial states, and types of dependency influence international behavior and patterns of decision making? Do the barriers to the take-off reside in data problems, lack of sophistication among Third World specialists, or in the state of foreign policy theory itself? Three problems have to be solved if this subfield is to advance conceptually and to provide us with cumulative knowledge about Third World countries: (1) the “what” of foreign policy; (2) the “why” of foreign policy; and (3) the “how” of foreign policy. Despite individual limitations, the authors reviewed here have collectively applied relevant concepts and unearthed needed data. These advances put us on the runway ready for a speedy take-off in the 1980s.

Most Soviet committees, from Politburo to local government executive committee, use procedures designed to encourage broad organizational participation in policy making. These procedures help to minimize capricious policy making and ensure the cooperation of officials responsible for implementing policy. Most importantly, the broad representation of institutional interests in collegial forums reflects the need for institutional checks and balances. The cost of committee procedures is inefficiency. Committee decision making also tends to produce policy that works well in an era of economic prosperity and international stability, but less well during periods of economic shortfall or foreign crisis.