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.

This article questions the prevalent argument that civil wars have fundamentally changed since the end of the cold war. According to this argument, “new” civil wars are different from “old” civil wars along at least three related dimensions—they are caused and motivated by private predation rather than collective grievances and ideological concerns; the parties to these conflicts lack popular support and must rely on coercion; and gratuitous, barbaric violence is dispensed against civilian populations. Recent civil wars, therefore, are distinguished as criminal rather than political phenomena. This article traces the origins of this distinction and argues that it is based on an uncritical adoption of categories and labels, combined with deficient information on “new” civil wars and neglect of recent historical research on “old” civil wars. Perceived differences between post—cold war conflicts and previous civil wars may be attributable more to the demise of readily available conceptual categories caused by the end of the cold war than to the end of the cold war per se.

Kenneth Waltz's recent book, Theory of International Politics, is one of the most important contributions to international relations theory since his Man, the State and War. It picks up where the earlier work left off: with the structure of the international system serving as the basis for explaining a variety of international outcomes. The most profound and perhaps the most perplexing outcome Waltz attempts to explain is the lack of fundamental change in the international polity. The author argues that Waltz does not fully succeed in this endeavor for three reasons. First, his definition of structure fails to capture so momentous a change as that from the medieval to the modern international systems. Second, his application of the structuralist method leads him to ask questions in such a way that the answers systematically understate the degree of potential change in the contemporary international system. Third, his model of structural explanation turns out to allow only for a reproductive logic but not for a transformational logic. With the epistemological underpinnings of his theory thus biased against the possibility of change, it is not surprising that Waltz finds the likelihood of future continuity compelling. In the spirit of constructive criticism, this review article tries to amend and augment the theory in a manner that is not incompatible with its basic realist precepts.

Since the collapse of communism the states of postcommunist Europe and Asia have defined for themselves, and have had defined for them, two primary tasks: the construction of viable market economies and the establishment of working institutions of representative democracy. The variation in political and economic outcomes in the postcommunist space makes it, without question, the most diverse “region” in the world. What explains the variation? All of the big winners of postcommunism share the trait of being geographically close to the former border of the noncommunist world. Even controlling for cultural differences, historical legacies, and paths of extrication, the spatial effect remains consistent and strong across the universe of postcommunist cases. This suggests the spatially dependent nature of the diffusion of norms, resources, and institutions that are necessary to the construction of political democracies and market economies in the postcommunist era. The authors develop and adduce evidence for the spatial dependence hypothesis, test it against rival hypotheses, and illustrate the relationships at work through three theoretically important case studies.

This article discusses developments in the field of qualitative methodology since the publication of King, Keohane, and Verba's (KKV's) Designing Social Inquiry. Three areas of the new methodology are examined: (1) process tracing and causal-process observations; (2) methods using set theory and logic; and (3) strategies for combining qualitative and quantitative research. In each of these areas, the article argues, the new literature encompasses KKV's helpful insights while avoiding their most obvious missteps. Discussion focuses especially on contrasts between the kind of observations that are used in qualitative versus quantitative research, differences between regression-oriented approaches and those based on set theory and logic, and new approaches for bringing out complementarities between qualitative and quantitative research. The article concludes by discussing research frontiers in the field of qualitative methodology.

Two views, founded on divergent rationales, have been used to explain the allocation of official bilateral aid. One view explains the allocation of aid in terms of the humanitarian needs of the recipient, the other in terms of the foreign policy interests of the donor. Although the foreign policy view is now clearly dominant, it has not been developed systematically. This paper initially develops an analytic foreign policy model of aid allocation. The model suggests that the provision of aid leads to the establishment of commitment and dependency, enabling the donor to realize certain foreign policy utilities. These utilities in turn allow the donor to pursue its interests. These interests may be ordered into five substantive foreign policy models. The main research objective of the paper is to test these models in the context of U.S. aid by making a cross-national, longitudinal study of the distribution of U.S. aid over the years 1960- 1970. We find that the foreign policy model which best explains the allocation of U.S. aid is one that is consonant with the political interpretation of imperialism.

This article examines the transformation of the Swedish model of economic regulation from an ideational perspective. While the majority of arguments about the decline of the Swedish model have focused on the role of structural factors, this article looks to illuminate the ideational factors that made possible both the emergence and the transformation of the Swedish model. The article details how, during the 1930s and 1940s, economic ideas provided the Swedish state and its trade union allies with the means to construct the institutions of the Swedish model. By the 1970s, however, Swedish business suffered diminishing returns to continued participation within these institutions and responded to labor's challenges by adopting a two-pronged strategy of withdrawal from and ideological contestation of labor's supporting institutions. The politics of ideas was key in this regard. During the 1980s Swedish business marshaled alternative economic ideas to contest and thus delegitimate existing institutions and the patterns of distribution they made possible. Swedish business thus began the process of overturning the Swedish model long before capital mobility or domestic inflation was ever a problem. By highlighting these factors, the article offers an explanation of the transformation of the Swedish model that stresses the centrality of ideational contestation for understanding institutional change in general.

What circumstances favor the realization of mutual interests in the absence of centralized authority? And through what strategies can nations foster the emergence of cooperation by altering the circumstances that they confront? Elementary game theory suggests three sets of conditions that serve as proximate explanations of the incidence of cooperation and discord: (i) Payoff Structure: Mutual and Conflicting Preferences; (2) The Shadow of the Future: Single-play and Iterated Games; and (3) Number of Players: Two-Person and N-Person Games. Each of these three attributes of context may be subject to willful modification. Nations may create the preconditions for cooperation through strategies to alter payoffs, lengthen the shadow of the future, and reduce the number of actors required to realize limited mutual interests.

Central among recent changes in the Soviet Union is an expanding and increasingly public politics of federalism. The Soviet developmental strategy assigned federalism and the cadres of national-territorial administration a central role in its response to the “nationalities question.” This strategy offers a key to three questions about the rise of assertive ethnofederalism over the past three decades: Why have federal institutions that provided interethnic peace during the transition to industrialization become vehicles of protest in recent years? Why have relatively advantaged ethnic groups been most assertive, whereas groups near the lower end of most comparative measures of socioeconomic and political success have been relatively quiescent? Why have major public demands—and the most important issues of contention between center and periphery—focused to such a large degree upon the details of the Soviet developmental strategy and upon federalism in particular

The possibility and widespread practice of exit, on the part of dissatisfied citizens, has important, though highly diverse, bearings on the formation, solidity, and “quality” of the state. An association exists between the wide availability of exit and the condition of statelessness in a number of aboriginal societies as well as in Rousseau's state of nature. In the 18th century, the exit option—which became available to the wealthy as movable forms of property increased in importance—was hailed by such observers as Montesquieu and Adam Smith as a restraint on arbitrary rule or taxation. Today, on the other hand, such exit (capital flight) tends to render the introduction of needed reforms more difficult. Emigration-exit was benign in its effect on the sending countries in the 19th century and may have been helpful to the process of democratization in Europe. Lately, however, exit has been considered a threat to the existence of the state and has led to strong, though very different, defensive reactions in Ireland and East Germany. The small modern state can fend off excessive exit by providing a variety of public goods to its citizens; one of these public goods is “understood complexity.”

Robert Jervis's article “Cooperation under the Security Dilemma” is among the most important works in international relations of the past few decades. In it, Jervis develops two essential arguments. First, he explains that the security dilemma is the key to understanding how in an anarchic international system states with fundamentally compatible goals still end up in competition and at war. The security dilemma exists when “many of the means by which a state tries1 to increase its security decrease the security of others.” It provides the rational foundation for what Jervis termed the “spiral model,” which describes how the interaction between states that are seeking only security can fuel competition and strain political relations.2 Second, Jervis explains that the magnitude and nature of the security dilemma depend on two variables: the offense-defense balance and offense-defense differentiation.3 As a result, the security dilemma can vary across space and time. Although states exist in a condition of international anarchy that does not vary, there can be significant variation in the attractiveness of cooperative or competitive means, the prospects for achieving a high level of security, and the probability of war.

The increased visibility of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and social movements at the international level invites continuing evaluation of the extent and significance of the role they now play in world politics. While the presence of such new actors is easily demonstrated, international relations scholars have debated their significance. The authors argue that the concept of global civil society sets a more demanding standard for the evaluation of transnational political processes than has been applied in prior accounts of transnational activity. Further, most empirical studies of this activity have focused on a limited number of NGOs within a single issue-area. Using three recent UN world conferences as examples of mutual encounters between state-dominated international politics and global civic politics, the authors develop the concept of global civil society to provide a theoretical foundation for a systematic empirical assessment of transnational relations concerning the environment, human rights, and women at the global level.

The article develops an expected-utility model of extended deterrence and tests it on 54 historical cases. Successful deterrence is associated with close economic and political ties between the defender and the state it is trying to protect, and with a local military balance in favor of the defender. Deterrence success is not systematically associated with the presence of a military alliance, with the overall strategic military balance, with possession of nuclear weapons, or with the defender's firmness or lack of it in previous crises. If deterrence fails, only alliance and the military value of the state under attack are associated with the defender's willingness to go to war.

Despite a sophisticated understanding of the impact of electoral institutions on macrolevel political behavior, little is known about the relationship between these institutions and microlevel legislative behavior. This article reviews existing claims about this relationship and develops a model for predicting how electoral institutions affect the relationship between parliamentarians and their party principals in the context of the European Parliament. The European Parliament is an ideal laboratory for investigating these effects, because in each European Union member state, different institutions are used to elect Members of European Parliament (MEPs). The results of this model, tested on four hundred thousand individual MEP vote decisions, show that candidate-centered electoral systems (such as open-list proportional representation or single-transferable-vote systems) and decentralized candidate-selection rules produce parliamentarians independent from their party principals. By contrast, party-centered electoral systems (such as closed-list proportional representation systems) and centralized candidate-selection rules produce parliamentarians beholden to the parties that fight elections and choose candidates: in the case of the European Parliament, the national parties.

Under certain circumstances, the etiology of endogenous institutional change lies in the informal coping strategies devised by local actors to evade the restrictions of formal institutions. With repetition and diffusion, these informal coping strategies may take on an institutional reality of their own. The author calls the resulting norms and practices adaptive informal institutions because they represent creative responses to formal institutional environments that actors find too constraining. Adaptive informal institutions may then motivate elites to reform the original formal institutions. This contention is illustrated by three major institutional changes that have occurred in the course of China's private sector development since the late 1970s—the legalization of private enterprise, the admission of capitalists into the Chinese Communist Party, and the amendment of the state constitution to promote the private economy.

Democracy promotion has been an explicit doctrine of U.S. foreign policy since the end of the cold war. Between 1990 and 2003 resources for democracy programs increased by over 500 percent. Has this policy worked? Prior research has been inconclusive, relying either on case studies or on quantitative efforts that have not distinguished overall foreign assistance from democracy promotion. The authors answer this question using a new data set that includes program information for 165 countries for the years 1990–2003. The analysis distinguishes between direct and indirect causal mechanisms and employs a variety of statistical models that allow the authors to control for the unique democratization trend in each country when assessing causal effects, as well as for the potential endogeneity of U.S. democracy assistance. The analysis shows that democracy assistance does indeed have a significant impact.

Cooperation among nations has become the focus of a wide range of studies in the past decade. The recent international relations literature about cooperation has adopted a distinct approach. It has tended to focus on the systemic level of analysis. It has also used game theory as its central tool of analysis. This review evaluates this literature, arguing that these methodological choices have contributed to both the greatest strengths and the greatest weaknesses of the literature in explaining cooperation among nations.

The recent literature on international cooperation has made two general contributions. First, it has developed a concept of cooperation, which can help distinguish what behavior counts as cooperation and which has been adopted widely in thefield.Second, the literature ha* tried to illuminate the conditions under which cooperation is likely to emerge. Using game theory to model relations at the systemic level parsimoniously, scholars have developed at least six hypotheses about the circumstances that promote cooperative behavior.

The recent literature also suffers from at least two serious problems. The first problem flows from the assumptions used to generate the relatively parsimonious hypotheses. In particular, the way in which the assumption of anarchy is used causes problems. Second, and relatedly, the literature shows a remarkable neglect of domestic politics. As will be argued, this poses a serious limitation for understanding cooperation. Systemic theory simply cannot take us far enough. The international-level hypotheses depend on implicit theories about internal politics. Hypotheses about domestic influences on cooperation among states are not well developed. Although systemic theory has been touted for a variety of reasons, the biggest gains in understanding international cooperation in the future are likely to come from domestic-level theories.

What explains electoral stability and change in competitive authoritarian regimes? This article addresses the question by comparing eleven elections—six of which led to continuity in authoritarian rule and five of which led to the victory of the opposition—that took place between 1998 and 2008 in competitive authoritarian regimes countries located in the postcommunist region. Using interviews conducted with participants in all of these elections and other types of data and constructing a research design that allowed the authors to match these two sets of elections on a number of important dimensions, they assess two groups of hypotheses—those that highlight institutional, structural, and historical aspects of regime and opposition strength on the eve of these elections and others that highlight characteristics of the elections themselves. The authors conclude that the key difference was whether the opposition adopted a tool kit of novel and sophisticated electoral strategies that made them more popular and effective challengers to the regime.

Product cycle theory as expressed in the analogy of flying geese has become a widely accepted way of conceptualizing industrial diffusion across East Asia. As the product cycle is repeated for increasingly sophisticated products, so, it is argued, the development trajectory of Japan will be replicated in a succession of sectors and countries. This approach fails, however, to capture the complexities of the contemporary regionalization of industrial production. East Asian industrial production should not be seen as a tightly coupled process in which the rise of national economies parallels successive product cycles. Rather than Japan's development trajectory being replicated in country after country, industrial diffusion has been characterized by shifting hierarchical networks of production and partial diffusion into diverse politicoeconomic contexts at differing historical junctures. It has also resulted in a triangulation of the region's trade patterns that has generated large imbalances in trade both within the region and between the region and the United States.

Several recent books have argued that comparative case studies of crises demonstrate the failure of rational-deterrence theory; they have offered certain empirical generalizations as substitutes. This paper shows that such contentions are unwarranted. First, the empirical generalizations are impressive as historical insights, but they do not meet the standards for theory set out by the most sophisticated case-study analysts themselves. Second, the “tests” of rational deterrence used in the case studies violate standard principles of inference, and the ensuing procedures are so biased as to be useless. Rational deterrence, then, is a more successful theory than portrayed in this literature, and it remains the only intellectually powerful alternative available.

Case studies are essential to theory building: more efficiently than any other methods, they find suitable variables, suggest middle-range generalizations for theory to explain, and provide the prior knowledge that statistical tests require. Their loose constraints on admissible propositions and suitable evidence are appropriate and even necessary for these tasks. These same characteristics, however, inevitably undermine all attempts to construe case-study generalizations as bodies of theory or tests of hypotheses.