After World War II, the US-led international security order exhibited substantial regional variation. Explaining this variation has been central to the debate over why is there no nato in Asia. But this debate overlooks the emergence of multilateral security arrangements between the United States and Latin American countries during the same critical juncture. These inter-American institutions are puzzling considering the three factors most commonly used to explain divergence between nato and Asia: burden-sharing, external threats, and collective identity. These conditions fail to explain contemporaneous emergence of inter-American security multilateralism. Although the postwar inter-American system has been characterized as the solidification of US dominance, at the time of its framing, Latin American leaders judged the inter-American system as their best bet for maintaining beneficial US involvement in the Western Hemisphere while reinforcing voice opportunities for weaker states and imposing institutional constraints on US unilateralism. Drawing on multinational archival research, the author advances a historical institutionalist account. Shared historical antecedents of regionalism shaped the range of choices for Latin American and US leaders regarding the desirability and nature of new regional institutions while facilitating institutional change through mechanisms of layering and conversion during this critical juncture.

When Max Weber published in 1906 two book-length studies of contemporary Russian politics, Zur Lage der bürgerlichen Demokratie in Russland (On the situation of bourgeois democracy in Russia), and Russlands Übergang zum Schein-konstitutionalismus (Russia's transition to pseudo-constitutionalism), he was venturing upon a field of inquiry in which he had previously shown no interest, and which seemingly lay entirely outside the range of his professional qualifications. He was by this time widely known as an economic historian specializing in agrarian and financial problems, and in the methodology of the social sciences. True, two years earlier he had also departed from his specialty by writing on the relationship between capitalism and Protestantism, but in that instance his deviation had not been quite as radical, since these studies had concerned the economic implications of a religious movement. What could have induced him, so shortly after recuperation from a nervous breakdown which had incapacitated him for the better part of five years (1897–1903), to interrupt his academic routine, acquire a reading knowledge of Russian, and devote several months to the tedious perusal of the Russian daily press? Why did he, as his widow and biographer reports, “follow for months in breathless tension the Russian drama” of 1905? Weber's interest in Russian politics, it is obvious, had deeper motives than mere fascination with current events; indeed, it was intimately connected with his two most vital concerns: the future of Germany, and the future of free society.

Empirical research on the United Nations has been characterized as fragmented, noncumulative, and lacking in the coherence necessary for conceptual integration—a condition at least partly due to the variegated nature of the institution itself. Yet in some important respects the research literature projects a rather homogeneous image. This image is shaped by a prevailing research perspective that treats the U.N. as (1) an arena for the political maneuvering of member states rather than an actor in its own right, and (2) as a resultant of exogenous forces governing world politics rather than as a source of influence affecting the larger world community. One or both of these traits may be found in 36 of 41 research articles published between 1970 and 1977. This perspective probably derives from numerous factors, including the state-centric orientation dominating our discipline and the tendency to view the U.N. as a convenient source of data for the study of world politics.

Recent works on contemporary China stress the importance of the nonmarket economy in shaping a pattern of state-society relations quite unlike those found in capitalist economies. Nevertheless, these studies present strikingly different pictures of the Chinese case: a new, party-dominated, divided, yet compliant network society on the one hand; and an enduring, localistic, solidary, and resistant cellular society on the other. The author suggests that such divergent images may be partially reconciled if local variation (by region and social sector) is systematically incorporated into our models of Chinese politics. Calling for a nuanced and dynamic approach to state-society relations, the article argues for the importance of historically grounded research.

The study draws on evidence from South Asia to explore how union partisan ties condition industrial protest in the context of rapid economic change. It argues that unions controlled by major political parties respond to the economic challenges of the postreform period by facilitating institutionalized grievance resolution and encouraging restraint in the collective bargaining arena. By contrast, politically independent unions and those controlled by small parties are more likely to ratchet up militancy and engage in extreme or violent forms of protest. The difference between the protest behavior of major party unions and other types of unions is explained by the fact that major political parties are encompassing organizations that internalize the externalities associated with the protest of their affiliated unions. Using original survey data from four regions in South Asia, the study shows that party encompassment is a better predictor of worker protest than other features of the affiliated party or the union, including whether the party is in or out of power, the ideological orientation of the party, or the degree of union encompassment. The analysis has implications for the policy debate over whether successful economic reform is contingent upon the political exclusion or repression of organized labor.

In light of their nineteenth-century political economies, why did poor, agricultural Denmark become a leader in public, mass primary education (1814) and a multiple-track education system that included vocational training, while rich, industrial Britain did not create public, mass schooling until 1870, and embrace a one-track, academic secondary-education system? The author argues that literary narratives shed light on these cross-national differences. Danish narratives imagined education as social investment for a strong society; diverse educational tracks were necessary to meet the varied skills needs of the economy. British narratives portrayed schooling as essential to self-development and to cultivating the ideal individual. The author uses a close reading of texts and computational linguistics analyses of 521 Danish and 562 British works of fiction from 1700 to 1920 to document the different portrayal of education in the two countries. Case studies show that writers are crucial political actors in important reforms and understudied political agents in policy development stories. The method allows the author to evaluate empirically the complex relationship between culture and political outcomes, to falsify cultural claims, and to improve on thin, vague, national cultural arguments. The article shows how literature helps to reconcile the contradictions embedded in diverse models of governance. Literature provides a site for reworking cultural symbols in response to societal struggles over exogenous change, and provides a source of continuity at moments of institutional change.

Studies of electoral clientelism—the contingent exchange of material benefits for electoral support—frequently presume the presence of strong parties. Parties facilitate monitoring and enforcement of vote buying and allow brokers to identify core voters for turnout buying. Where money fuels campaigns but elections center around candidates, not parties, how do candidates pitch electoral handouts? The authors analyze candidates’ distribution of cash during an Indonesian election. Drawing upon varied data, including surveys of voters and brokers, candidates’ cash-distribution lists, and focus-group discussions, they find heavy spending but little evidence of vote buying or turnout buying. Instead, candidates buy brokers. With little loyalty or party brand to draw on, candidates seek to establish credibility with well-networked brokers, who then protect their turf with token payments for their own presumed bloc of voters. The authors find little evidence of monitoring of either voter or broker behavior, which is consistent with their argument that these payments are noncontingent.

The nature of modern society, the quality of the modern social, civil, and moral order, has been in the forefront of sociological thought and inquiry since the very beginning of sociology. This interest has been greatly reinforced by the growing preoccupation with the extension of the processes of modernization beyond their initial place of origin in Western Europe and the United States to Eastern Europe and later to Asian and African countries. The continuous processes of modernization in these societies have greatly added to the store of knowledge about the nature and variety of modern society, and they also have enabled us to reformulate many of the most crucial problems in this area.

Until very recently social interpretations of revolution have enjoyed a position of virtual orthodoxy among both historians and social scientists. Sociologists and political scientists concerned with the problem of revolution have been mainly of the structural-functional school. They describe a revolutionary situation as one of “multiple dysfunction” in the relations between the political system and the society it serves. Revolution thus interpreted is a violent redress of imbalance among functionally interrelated and historically synchronous social and political parts of one total system. It is commonly assumed that it is the social process, including economic change, that is the dynamic element in any revolutionary event, and that political institutions play a causative role only in so far as they fail to provide mechanisms for resolving the state of disequilibrium. Historians of revolution, many of them strongly if not consciously influenced by Marxist traditions of interpretation, have taken much the same position. If they tend to think more in terms of trends than of equilibrium systems, nevertheless they agree with the social scientists that revolution is primarily the result of accumulating social and economic pressures, with politics playing only a secondary role in shaping the course of events.

Recent research on separatist nationalism has focused on the most common location of new states in the international system—the postcommunist world. While providing the largest number of cases for exploration, the arguably unique features of the Soviet system may have effects that do not easily translate to other parts of the world. This article reviews a recent set of books that highlights this question, focusing on the legacies of Soviet ethnofederalism in catalyzing secession, separatist war, and nation-state crisis. These books share in common a tendency to deemphasize the historical lineages of separatist nationalism and to focus more proximately on institutions. The article builds on the discussion of recent research by engaging two separate cross-national data sets to explore the role of ethnofederal institutions and of historical legacies. It concludes by arguing for a return to historically situated studies of center-minority conflicts and for greater engagement across regional lines of expertise.

Legacy unions—formerly state-backed unions that survived democratic transitions—are one of the most persistent legacies of authoritarian rule. While usually successful in maintaining their preeminent position, legacy unions have in some cases been overtaken by competing unions. Deploying a set of paired comparisons of legacy unions that entered the transition with similar legacies but experienced different fates—Indonesia with South Korea and Poland with Russia—this article examines why some legacy unions continued to dominate (Indonesia and Russia) and others did not (South Korea and Poland). The author identifies four pathways of change: endurance (Indonesia), attrition (South Korea), hegemony (Russia), and rupture (Poland). Several features of the transition context propelled legacy unions down distinct pathways of change—the widespread mobilization of workers outside of state-sponsored unions early in the transition, partisan links, and the structure of union competition.

The World Bank has encountered serious difficulties as it has moved from an almost exclusive concern with capital infrastructure into social sectors of development, such as rural development and population planning. The present study, based on an intensive examination of the Bank's experience in the population sector, concludes that the Bank's effectiveness has been constrained by its institutionalized commitments to (i) its clients, the finance and planning ministries of developing countries; (2) its technology for rendering assistance as embodied in its project lending procedures; and (3) its independence from other organizations that provide development assistance. Instead of modifying these commitments in order to improve the Bank's performance in the population field, its officials have recently reorganized the population program in a way that preserves the Bank's basic priorities and procedures without necessarily advancing its population objectives.

Integrated rural development has become the focus of growth with equity policies in developing countries. Evaluations of development programs and plans over the past two decades indicate that little change can be achieved in developing societies through single purpose policy interventions and that diversified and integrated programs aimed at increasing agricultural productivity and dispersing directly productive and social overhead investments in rural regions are essential for socially equitable economic growth. Because of their importance to emerging development strategies, this paper identifies and analyzes the political and administrative problems of planning and implementing integrated rural development programs. It reflects a sympathetic but skeptical view of the prospects for achieving rural development without fundamental political and administrative reforms. It suggests that unless governments in developing countries and international assistance agencies can resolve three crucial problems—those of mobilizing political commitment, restructuring administrative arrangements, and delivering basic services to the rural poor—integrated rural development may go the way of all previous development fads, and have little impact on intended beneficiaries.

Only in the past decade has the study of political socialization grown into a central concern of political science. Although political philosophers since Plato and Aristotle have been interested in the process by which the child acquires behavior appropriate to the role of a citizen, political scientists had, as of ten years ago, devoted little attention to studying this phenomenon systematically.

Eighteenth-century Britain displayed patterns of corruption similar to those of developing countries today. Reforms enacted in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries eliminated many of these patterns. This article develops a theoretical argument that seeks to explain why the British elite enacted anticorruption reforms and provides evidence using a new data set of members of the House of Commons. The author argues that the shock that pushed the British elite from preferring the old corrupt regime to preferring the reformed one was an increase in government spending and a corresponding increase in the costs of tolerating corruption. Features unique to Britain allowed the reformist outcome to emerge and illuminate why such an outcome is difficult to achieve in general.

Recent literature demonstrates that modern military regimes are actually military-civilian coalitions. The old dichotomy of civil/military is no longer a useful explanation for the politics and the dynamics of military regimes. Role expansion, new professionalism, and mission orientation have changed military missions, doctrines, and self-perception. The author proposes and develops a comparative analysis and a typology of contemporary military regimes: corporative; market-bureaucratic; socialist-oligarchic; personal tyrannies; and army-party. Case studies include Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. His conclusion, based on the literature, is that military regimes have not succeeded (at least not better than civilian regimes) in reforming, modernizing, and developing their respective societies despite organizational, structural, and personal commitments to development and reform.

Until these recent studies by Riker, Watts, and Wildavsky appeared, the theory of federalism was embodied largely in the work of K. C. Wheare. Wheare published the first truly pathbreaking book in the comparative study of federalism shortly after World War II. He defined federalism as that system of government in which the federal and regional governments are both coordinate and independent. In applying this definition, he stressed the sharp division in the powers and functions of two coequal sovereignties as a basis for classifying systems of government as federal. Wheare's definition was derived primarily from his analysis of die American Constitution and, in particular, its formally sharp division of powers between national and state governments.

Economists tend to discount national size in their explanations of development, on the mistaken assumption that all aspects of big and little economies are proportionate. Taking population as the measure of “size,” and focusing on the second of the four demographic giants (China, India, USSR, U.S.), the present analysis dwells on the proposition that giantism adds the awkwardness of more layers to official hierarchies. There are two escapes: acceptable decentralization, that is, downward delegation, and “sideways delegation” to such servomechanisms as self-adjusting markets. India not only needs the market for coping with giantism; its size makes its market substantially different—and on balance better—if government can avoid balkanizing its internal economic space. Giantism has, as well, some human-resource dimensions (it may lend the advantage of critical mass to training of skilled elites) and certainly some international aspects (the trade-to-GNP ratios of giant countries, their aid receipts per capita, and their votes per capita in multilateral institutions are all low).

The internal political life of Turkey since the revolution of 1960 JL has been beset by military coups and conflicts between political parties and social groups far more frequent and intensive than might normally be expected in a post-revolutionary period. This unrest contrasts sharply with the political stability which prevailed before 1960, and comes after a series of constitutional changes intended to establish a better system for orderly change and control of government.

This study systematically identifies the Soviet lessons of Vietnam as presented in eleven Soviet newspapers (specialized and regional as well as the central papers) and eight journals. Altogether, 1,585 citations were coded, representing more than 70 different lessons. A predominant finding is that the most common lessons the Soviet Union learned from Vietnam differed from their American counterparts: the Soviet lessons would not have warned the leadership about the dangers of military intervention in Afghanistan. A left/right scale was constructed, based on such issue clusters as why the communists won in Vietnam, the nature of imperialism, and the implications of Soviet policy in the Third World. Substantial variation was found among the media examined, many of which are linked to specific Soviet institutions. The implication is that Soviet foreign policy is contingent upon individual choices, institutional interplay, and changing contexts. This, in turn, suggests that Western policy makers should not lose sight of their capacity to influence the Soviet policy dialogue, and hence Soviet policy choices.