What explains combat motivation in warfare? Scholars argue that monitoring, material rewards, and punishment alone are insufficient explanations. Further, competing ideological accounts of motivation are also problematic because ideas are difficult to operationalize and measure. To solve this puzzle, the authors combine extensive information from World War II about German soldiers’ combat performance with data about conditionally exogenous potential exposure to Nazi radio propaganda. They find evidence that soldiers with higher potential exposure to propaganda were more likely to be decorated for valor even after controlling for individual socioeconomic factors, home district characteristics like urbanization, and proxies for combat exposure.

This article reviews three recent books critical of America's new “imperial” foreign policy, examines whether the United States can properly be compared to empires of the past, and identifies three aspects of contemporary American policy that may well be called imperialist. It also addresses some of the main objections to recent U.S. foreign policy made by American realist scholars and argues that traditional interstate realism can no longer readily apply to the problem ofAmerican unipolar preponderance over an anarchical, nuclear-armed world.

In the Soviet Union, views on all intellectual subjects—the social sciences, philosophy, and even the biological and physical sciences—are frequently regarded as expressions of political views. As a consequence, all intellectual fields are considered appropriate arenas for the struggle against “reaction” and other supposed manifestations of “bourgeois” ideology. To consider science a-political and supra-national, or to speak approvingly of “world science” or “world culture,” is to subscribe to the “bourgeois” ideology of “cosmopolitism”—an ideology which is assumed by virtue of its universalist emphasis to deprecate the contributions to culture made by individual nations.

Prosperity brings its own disorders. When American sociology, unregarded and undemanding, was pleased to be allowed an academic existence, it suffered from lack of self-confidence. The other academic disciplines thought little of it and it was unknown to the outside world. Its rustic naïveté and its simple enthusiasm aroused no antipathies within its own parochial confines. When, however, it began to thrive—when its output became more interesting intellectually, as it did in the i930's, and the attention of the great world, of foundations, governments, and publicists, was drawn toward it—it also began to suffer the malaise of the prosperous. Professor Robert Lynd was probably the first of those who found that the subject they had fostered had not kept pace with their own political development toward the radical populism which was one trend in the leftward movement of the 1930's. In Knowledge for What? he accused his sociological colleagues of the evasion of the responsibilities implicit in the potentialities of their discipline. He was strongly for planning, for equality, and above all for radical political engagement; American sociologists—indeed, American social scientists in general—were charged with indifference, academic triviality, and subservience to the reigning authorities of state and economy.

Despite a vast literature on nationalism, theoretical investigations on the subject are rare. Historians generally are not interested in theory, although they use typologies. The most thoroughgoing typology has been produced by the sociologist Anthony D. Smith, who has constructed a matrix with 55 locations that allows categorization of both ancient and modern types of nationalism. Smith divides nationalist ideology into a core doctrine and its accretions, but he may underestimate the importance of language. Kedourie has produced a theory of the intellectual development of nationalism, but only Gellner has a theory of modernity in which nationalism plays a key role. Interest in ethnicity has given a new direction to studies of nationalism by stressing the function of group allegiance in achieving political ends. Finally, despite the sharpness of Smith's definitional insights, his theory itself is too narrow to establish the link he seeks between modernization and nationalism.

Why are people in politics? Behind this deceptively simple question lies a promising realm of research and analysis. A satisfactory understanding of political motivation can provide a powerful analytical tool for explaining why different groups of participants behave as they do; ultimately it can suggest why they adopt and sustain different political institutions. The basic axiom which, in principle, yields such explanations is simple: participants behave in a manner consistent with their incentives.

Throughout the 1950's, students of communism almost invariably emphasized the “totalitarian” characteristics of Communist states, a conceptual orientation that coincided with and reinforced the foreign policy of the cold war. T h e doctrines of containment and massive retaliation could be justified most easily if the targeted enemy was considered the embodiment of the unremitting evil suggested by the totalitarian label.

Utilizing two editions of a Soviet textbook that was awarded a state prize and termed “the correct orientation” by a Central Committee official, the author analyzes the evolution of the Soviet view of the outside world in the first half of the 1970s. The movement away from ideological rigidity that began in the 1960s continued in the 1970s on a wide range of subjects. In addition, the analysis of the capitalist countries became intertwined with the debate on the future development of Soviet society; a number of features are said to have resulted from the imperatives of industrialization rather than the inner dynamics of capitalism, and hence are in need of adoption by the Soviet Union. The article closes with a brief survey of the issues subsequently raised in the published Soviet debates that continue on either side of the approved, centrist position.

Many scholars believe that intense warfare propelled state formation in early modern Europe because rulers built tax institutions to pay for wars. Scholars likewise cite milder geopolitical pressures to explain the lackluster state building in the developing world. The authors analyze episodes of ferocious warfare in and beyond Europe and find that despite similar fiscal strains, not all governments built strong tax institutions to service wartime debt. When net creditors in a country's credit market were part of the ruling political coalition, they pressed governments to diversify taxes and strengthen fiscal institutions to ensure debt service. But when net debtors held political sway, governments were indifferent to debt servicing and fiscal invigoration. Coalitional politics can help to explain why mounting debt-service obligations led to fiscal institution building in some cases, but not others. The analysis highlights how the private economic interests of ruling coalition members can affect state building.

Although some scholars claim that the empirical evidence for the very low instance of interstate war between democracies is well established, others have raised new challenges. But even if democratic peace is observed, its theoretical explanation remains unresolved. Consensus has not emerged among competing approaches, some of which are criticized for offering monadic logic for a dyadic phenomenon. This article synthesizes recent literature to advance a simple, but distinct, explicitly dyadic theory about institutionalized political competition, leading to expectations that it is the most important source of democratic peace. While the authors are far from the first to consider political competition, their approach stands out in according it the central role in a dyadic theory focused on the regime type of initiators and target states. They argue that potential vulnerability to opposition criticism on target-regime-specific normative and costs-of-war bases is more fundamental than mechanisms such as audience costs, informational effects, or public goods logic. Incumbents in high-competition states will be reluctant to initiate conflict with a democracy due to anticipated inability to defend the conflict as right, necessary, and winnable. The authors present new and highly robust evidence that democratic peace is neither spurious nor a methodological artifact, and that it can be attributed to high-competition states’ aversion to initiating fights with democracies.

In a world in which popular democracy sometimes seems on the defensive, the rise of the Justice party has a significance that goes beyond the borders of Turkey. That nation's continuing social and political revolution, obscured as it has been in the eyes of most foreigners by the cruel impasse of Cyprus and the revival of Greek-Turkish antagonisms in the eastern end of the Mediterranean, is worth trying to understand. Not only does multiparty rivalry exist, but political power in this important American ally is held by the Near East's only genuine grass-roots political party. This party has its roots deep in the country's social structure and is currently headed by an energetic and intelligent young leader of relatively humble origins.

The water is safe to drink in Alexandria and Cairo, Egypt, thanks to a water filter station established by Czechoslovak engineers. A shoe factory in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, is being built by Czech technicians. Across the frontier, in Somalia, Czechs are building a technical institute to teach some young Somalis the techniques necessary to staff modern factories. Across the continent in Conakry, Guinea, airport inscriptions are in Czech as well as in French and English to accommodate the many Czechs arriving on the direct Prague-to-Conakry airline. In the smaller villages of Ghana special trucks are delivering Czech beer to the local inhabitants. In Mali journalists are being trained by Czechs in the establishment of their own press agency. And in Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia, there are numerous Africans among the more than 2,000 students from Africa, Asia, and Latin America enrolled at Czech state expense in institutions of higher learning. To say that Africa has assumed a role of real importance for the Czechs is an understatement.

A decade ago Roy Macridis waved a red flag in the face of the politicel science fraternity by proclaiming that the collection of data on foreign political systems had become a sterile preoccupation because of its parochial and “monographic” concern with a limited number of Western great powers, and its theoretical shallowness.1 During the intervening years considerable money and time have been spent in a frontal attack on these deficiencies. Spearheading this attack has been a band of younger scholars brought together under the leadership of Gabriel Almond in the Committee on Comparative Politics of the Social Science Research Council.

The long-time neglect of the military establishment by the economics profession at large is now in the process of being rectified. It hardly seems necessary to justify this awakening interest. Since resource allocation is fundamental in military problems, the economist, whose primary interest is the logic of the allocative process, is particularly well-qualified to make a contribution. To be sure, this contribution is purely formal. Economics helps to select and frame the questions that should be asked, but the data necessary for the decision-maker to make a choice must be supplied from elsewhere. Though economics may be lacking in substantive content, in that it tells how to choose rather than what to choose, nevertheless such clarification of the logic of choice is not useless to the decision-maker.

Hypotheses regarding differences (or lack of differences) in policy-orientation or in degrees of influence between the various members of the Soviet Politburo have always been of great interest to students of politics. Thus there have been frequent speculations regarding alleged differences in foreign policy lines and on the problem of succession. The absence of confirming or disconfirming data for any of these hypotheses is striking, and obvious in view of the secrecy that enshrouds the internal operations of the Politburo. Published statements of any kind by members of the Politburo have become infrequent in recent years. Such statements as are available for analysis have usually dealt with different subjects and have been made at different dates, so that they were difficult to compare from the point of view of testing hypotheses regarding differences in policy of influence. Through Stalin's seventieth birthday, December 21,1949, however, a rare opportunity for comparative analysis did occur.

Since 1959 Congress has tried to protect U.S. direct foreign investments from expropriation by quite explicit amendments to various foreign assistance acts. Probably the most important of these legislative efforts, the Hickenlooper amendment, the Gonzales amendments, and the effective repeal of the Hickenlooper amendment, are contradictory and have been applied only sporadically. By developing testable hypotheses that can accurately and parsimoniously predict these varied legislative and diplomatic policies, this article attempts to demonstrate the value of a radical analysis of American foreign policy. After those hypotheses are evaluated, they are compared with propositions derived from pluralist and bureaucratic analysis. Finally, the policy history is reconsidered to show that changes in the external environment, particularly the rise of economically powerful nationalist regimes, have let to a significant evolution in the policy preferences of large multinational firms.

Inflation has long been a fact of economic and political life in Argentina. The Peronist government which assumed office in mid-1973 attempted to control inflation through the so-called Social Pact, a wage-price agreement of two years’ duration involving the leading labor union organization, a leading businessmen's organization, and the Argentine state. An awareness of the principal issues of the economic situation is essential to an understanding of the crisis of contemporary Argentina, and a description of the evolution of the Social Pact reveals some of the essential contours of the economic debate. But the importance of the Social Pact extends beyond mere economic considerations. The study of the latest Argentine experience with anti-inflationary policy suggests some generalizations about the nature of populist political movements, the symbolic functions of economic policy initiatives, and the functions of such policies in co-opting private economic actors and legitimating governmental interference with free market forces. It also reveals some important characteristics of Argentine politics, especially concerning relations between the state and private economic groups. With economic and political implications of comparative significance, the Argentine Social Pact is an important case study in political economy.

The long-standing understanding of the British 1832 Reform Act as an elite response to a revolutionary threat has been given renewed prominence in recent work on the political economy of democratization. But earlier episodes of popular revolt in Britain led to elite unity rather than elite concessions. This article argues that the absence of effective elite closure against parliamentary reform in the early 1830s was the result of an extended process of state reform that had the effect of gradually reducing the capacity of the monarchy. This deprived the crown of patronage required for the construction of an antireform coalition, while also mollifying the reformers' fears that mass mobilization would invite repression and with it the recalibration of theconstitution in favor of the monarchy. Therefore, while pressure from below was indeed critical to the passage of parliamentary reform, its contribution was mediated by institutional changes that, over time, weakened the sources of resistance to change and rendered reformist elites more amenable to the necessary reliance on the threat of force. This case study thus establishes that change at critical junctures can be subject to the influence of incremental institutional change occurring in relatively settled periods.