This paper examines the consociational approach to the study of deeply divided societies and notes its weaknesses. It argues that the absence of a well-developed alternative “control” approach to the explanation of stability in deeply divided societies has resulted in the empirical overextension of consociational models. Control models, focusing on how superordinate groups manipulate subordinate groups rather than on the emergence and functioning of elite cartels, need to be developed—not only for the study of stable, deeply divided societies in which consociational models are inappropriate, but also as a means of eliminating certain theoretical problems that have been raised as criticisms of consociationalism. The paper includes a critical review of the literature that is available to guide study of control in deeply divided societies, and concludes with recommendations for the shape of an analytical framework within systematic comparison.

Utilizing a unique data set from the Italian Ministry of Justice reporting the transmission to the Chamber of Deputies of more than the thousand requests for the removal of parliamentary immunity from deputies suspected of criminal wrongdoing, the authors analyze the political careers of members of the Chamber during the first eleven postwar legislatures (1948–94). They find that judicial investigation typically did not discourage deputies from standing for reelection in Italy's large multimember electoral districts. They also show that voters did not punish allegedly malfeasant legislators with loss of office until the last (Eleventh) legislature in the sample. To account for the dramatic change in voter behavior that occurred in the early 1990s, the investigation focuses on the roles of the judiciary and the press. The results are consistent with a theory that a vigilant and free press is a necessary condition for political accountability in democratic settings. An independent judiciary alone is ineffective in ensuring electoral accountability if the public is not informed of political malfeasance.

The preventive motivation for war arises from political leaders' perceptions that their states' military power and potential are declining relative to those of a rising adversary, and from their fear of the consequences of that decline. It is conceptualized as an intervening variable between changing power differentials and the outbreak of war, and is distinguished from preemption and other sources of better-now-than-later logic. The strength of the preventive motivation is hypothesized to be a function of a state's expectations regarding its rate of military decline, the margin of its inferiority in the future, the probability of a future war, and the probability of a victorious war now with acceptable costs. It is also affected by the risk orientation of decision makers; the influence of the military in the political process; and domestic political factors that undermine the political security of decision makers as well as the military power and potential of the state.

Why are unemployment benefits more generous in some countries? This article argues that citizens trade off the redistributive and insuring effect of social insurance. As a result, the distribution of risk in a society has important consequences via popular demand for social policy-making. At the microlevel, the article shows that, in addition to income, the risk of unemployment is a key predictor of individual-level preferences for unemployment benefits. Based on the microlevel findings, the article argues that at the macrolevel the homogeneity of the risk pool is an important determinant of benefit generosity: the more equally unemployment risk is distributed, the higher unemployment replacement rates are. Empirical testing at both levels finds support for this account of social policy by popular demand.

Most scholars hold that the consequences of unipolarity for great power conflict are indeterminate and that a power shift resulting in a return to bipolarity or multipolarity will not raise the specter of great power war. This article calls into question the core assumptions underlying the consensus: (1) that people are mainly motivated by the instrumental pursuit of tangible ends such as physical security and material prosperity and (2) that major powers' satisfaction with the status quo is relatively independent of the distribution of capabilities. in fact, it is known that people are motivated powerfully by a noninstrumental concern for relative status, and there is strong empirical evidence linking the salience of those concerns to distributions of resources. If the status of states depends in some measure on their relative capabilities and if states derive utility from status, then different distributions of capabilities may affect levels of satisfaction, just as different income distributions may affect levels of status competition in domestic settings. Building on research in psychology and sociology, the author argues that even capabilities distributions among major powers foster ambiguous status hierarchies, which generate more dissatisfaction and clashes over the status quo. and the more stratified the distribution of capabilities, the less likely such status competition is. Unipolarity thus augurs for great power peace, and a shift back to bipolarity or multipolarity raises the probability of war even among great powers with little material cause to fight.

The authors construct a statistical model with which to test whether the regularity that democracy is more commonly found among wealthy countries stems from a democratizing effect of high income or is due entirely to other factors, such as the historical context, various features of the institutional setting, and simultaneity with the process of leadership change. Even after correcting for these many other influences, the democratizing effect of income remains as a statistically significant factor promoting the emergence of democratic political institutions. The authors go on to find that leaders' risks of losing power rise during their time in office and that these risks are higher in more democratic countries.

The authors confirm the finding by Burkhart and Lewis-Beck that the democracy-promoting effect of income is stronger among the European countries. They suggest that high income has a more powerful democratizing effect among the Southern European countries because it interacts with pressure from major trading partners to democratize. This suggests a revaluation of policies designed to foster the replacement of authoritarian regimes by democratic ones through free trade.

Under what conditions do democracies emerge and consolidate? Recent theories suggest that inequality is among the leading determinants of both democratization and consolidation. By contrast, this article argues that inequality harms consolidation but has no net effect on democratization. The author shows that the existing theories that link inequality to democratization suffer from serious limitations: (1) they are useful only for understanding transitions from below and thus do not apply to many other transitions (that is, those from above); (2) even for democratization from below, their predictions are unlikely to hold, since inequality actually has two opposite effects; and (3) they ignore collective action problems, which reduces their explanatory power. However, these objections do not affect the relationship between inequality and consolidation. In particular, while inequality has two opposite effects on the probability of transition to democracy, it unambiguously increases the probability of transition away from democracy. This article conducts the most comprehensive empirical test to date of the relationship between inequality and democracy. It finds no support for the main democratization theories. Contrary to what they predict, estimation suggests neither a monotonic negative nor an inverted U-shaped relationship. Yet inequality increases the probability of backsliding from democracy to dictatorship.

A basic debate in world politics involves the impact of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) on international conflict. Liberals, functionalists, and others see IGOs as capable of transforming global anarchy, while realists emphasize the essential irrelevance of IGOs in managing such fundamental processes as war and peace. Recent quantitative studies also yield disparate conclusions depending on particular econometric assumptions, implying variously that IGOs foster pacific relations among states, have no impact on dispute behavior, or even increase dispute propensity. At least part of the problem is a lack of theoretical and empirical specificity. The authors apply bargaining theory to develop a “middle path” between the realist and liberal perspectives. Only some IGOs, those with security mandates and the most sophisticated institutional structures, are likely to influence dispute behavior. The authors combine the theory with two improvements in research design. First, IGOs vary in capability, mandate, and cohesion. The authors construct a dataset of IGO institutional heterogeneity and member cohesiveness. Second, states join IGOs for reasons that are not unrelated to why states fight. The authors control for the level of international involvement among countries and find support for their arguments in initial tests.

The granting of autonomous status to minority populations has gained support among academics and practitioners alike as a way to solve, manage, and even preempt ethnic conflict. In spite of the enthusiasm for ethnofederalism, however, the provision of autonomy to minorities may actually increase rather than decrease the likelihood of conflict. Under certain political conditions, autonomy promotes the separate identity of the minority and increases its motivation and capacity to seek separation from the central state. This article presents a rudimentary theoretical framework identifying which qualities of autonomy solutions increase the likelihood of conflict. It discusses how autonomy relates to other factors conducive to conflict by studying minorities in the South Caucasus and examines the case of Georgia. In Georgia, there were five ethnic minority populations, two of whom—the Abkhaz and the South Ossetians—enjoyed autonomous status and were the only minorities to engage in armed conflict with the Georgian government. This article shows how autonomy, by empowering ethnic elites with control of statelike institutions and by enhancing factors such as leadership, economic viability, and external support, played a crucial role in the escalation of the conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Conversely, the absence of autonomy mitigated separatist and secessionist sentiments among two of Georgia's other minority groups—Javakheti's Armenian and Kvemo Kartli's Azeri populations.

Why do secular states pursue substantially different policies toward religion? The United States, France, and Turkey are secular states that lack any official religion and have legal systems free from religious control. The French and Turkish states have banned students' headscarves in public schools, whereas the U.S. has allowed students to wear religious symbols and attire. Using the method of process tracing, the author argues that state policies toward religion are the result of ideological struggles. In France and Turkey the dominant ideology is “assertive secularism,” which aims to exclude religion from the public sphere, while in the U.S., it is “passive secularism,” which tolerates public visibility of religion. Whether assertive or passive secularism became dominant in a particular case was the result of the particular historical conditions during the secular state-building period, especially the presence or absence of an ancien regime based on a marriage of monarchy and hegemonic religion.

Between the late 1970s and the early 1990s, after decades of trying to limit short-term international capital movements, advanced industrial states moved decisively in the direction of decontrol. What has driven this remarkable policy convergence? The answer lies not in ideological change or shifts in relative political power, but in the prior development of international financial markets and in the increasing globalization of business. In a policy environment fundamentally reshaped by these factors, financial institutions and multinational firms were able to threaten or implement strategies of evasion and exit. Thus, the usefulness of controls declined as their effective costs rose sharply. In this light, the cases of Japan, Germany, Italy, and France are examined. The analysis points to the tightening link between short-term capital movements and foreign direct investment, issues that have long been treated as conceptually distinct. It also underlines the intricate connection between national policies governing capital movements and those aimed at managing international financial markets.

Using data from approximately ninety countries, the author shows that the more a state taxes the rich as a percentage of GDP, the more it protects property rights; and the more it taxes the poor, the more it provides basic public services. There is no evidence that states gouge the rich to benefit the poor or vice versa, contrary to state-capture theories. Nor is there any evidence that taxes and spending are unrelated, contrary to state-autonomy models. Instead, states operate much like fiscal contracts, with groups getting what they pay for.

This article explores the sources of regime competitiveness in the post-cold war era through a structured comparison of regime trajectories in Belarus, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine, for the period 1992–2004. An examination of these cases suggests the need for a fundamental rethinking of the commonly held view of the transition process—especially in countries that face relatively weak international democratizing pressures. Approaching these countries as unconsolidated autocracies rather than as simply emerging democracies draws attention to key sources of political competition that have largely been ignored in the literature on competitive regimes. Thus, competitive politics in Belarus, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine were rooted less in robust civil societies, strong democratic institutions, or leadership than in the inability of incumbents to maintain power or concentrate political control by preserving elite unity, controlling elections, and/or using force against opponents. Such ”pluralism by default” has been the outgrowth of the strength of anti-incumbent national identity and incumbent weakness as defined by a lack of know-how, ineffective incumbent organization, and/or the weakness of certain dimensions of state power.

Within international relations, discussions about how civil wars end have focused mainly on the qualities of the belligerents (ethnicity, commitment to the cause) or on the strategic environment of decision making (security dilemmas). Work in sociology and development economics, however, has highlighted the importance of war economies and the functional role of violence. This article combines these approaches by examining the mechanisms through which the chaos of war becomes transformed into networks of profit, and through which these in turn become hardened into the institutions of quasi states. The first section offers a brief overview of current research on civil war endings. The second section outlines the course of four Eurasian wars and identifies the de facto states that have arisen after them: the republic of Nagorno-Karabakh (in Azerbaijan), the Dnestr Moldovan republic (in Moldova), and the republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia (in Georgia). The third section analyzes the pillars of state building in each case: the political economy of weak states, the role of external actors, the mythologizing function of cultural and educational institutions, and the complicity of central governments. The concluding section suggests lessons that these cases might hold for further study of intrastate violence.

Strategic intelligence failures cannot be prevented by organizational solutions to problems of analysis and communication. Analytic certainty is precluded by ambiguity of evidence, ambivalence of judgment, and atrophy of institutional reforms designed to avert failures. Many sources of error are unresolvable paradoxes and dilemmas rather than curable pathologies. Major failures in attack warning, operational evaluation, and intelligence for strategic planning are due primarily to leaders’ psychological attributes rather than to analysts’ failures to detect relevant data. Since analysis and decision are interactive rather than sequential processes, and authorities often hear but dismiss correct estimates, intelligence failure is inseparable from policy failure. Solutions most often proposed—worst-case analysis, multiple advocacy, devil's advocacy, organizational consolidation, sanctions and incentives for analysts, and cognitive rehabilitation—are either impractical because of constraints on the leaders’ time, or they are mixed blessings because they create new problems in the course of solving old ones.

The political domination of Social Democrats in Denmark and Sweden beginning in the 1930s was stabilized by the absence of intense opposition by capital to reformist programs aggressively opposed by business and the Right elsewhere in the world. This quiescence was not a symptom of weakness or dependency; rather, it was a product of a class-intersecting, cross-class alliance behind institutions of centralized industrial relations that served mutual interests of sectoral groupings dominating both union and employer confederations. Well-organized and militant, and backed by Social Democrats, employers in the two countries used offensive multi-industry lockouts to force centralization on reluctant unions. Analysis of these cross-class alliances and their pay-distributional objectives is used to challenge a widely held view that centralization and Social Democratic electoral strength are sources of power against capital. It also occasions a reassessment of conventional understandings of farmer-labor coalitions and the decline of industrial conflict in Scandinavia in the 1930s. According to the alternative view presented here, capital was included rather than excluded from these cross-class alliances, and industrial conflict subsided dramatically in part because employers achieved politically what they had previously tried to achieve with the lockout.

This article offers the first independent scholarly evaluation of the claims, forecasts, and causal inferences of the State Failure Task Force and its efforts to forecast when states will fail. State failure refers to the collapse of the authority of the central government to impose order, as in civil wars, revolutionary wars, genocides, politicides, and adverse or disruptive regime transitions. States that sponsor terrorism or allow it to be organized within their borders are all failed states. This task force, set up at the behest of Vice President Gore in 1994, has been led by a group of distinguished academics working as consultants to the U.S. CIA. State Failure Task Force reports and publications have received attention in the media, in academia, and from public decision makers. The article identifies several methodological errors in the task force work that cause its reported forecast probabilities of conflict to be too large, its causal inferences to be biased in unpredictable directions, and its claims of forecasting performance to be exaggerated. However, the article also finds that the task force has amassed the best and most carefully collected data on state failure to date, and the required corrections provided in this article, although very large in effect, are easy to implement. The article also demonstrates how to improve forecasting performance to levels significantly greater than even corrected versions of its models. Although the matter is still a highly uncertain endeavor, the authors are nevertheless able to offer the first accurate forecasts of state failure, along with procedures and results that may be of practical use in informing foreign policy decision making. The article also describes a number of strong empirical regularities that may help in ascertaining the causes of state failure.

The welfare state is generally viewed as either providing redistribution from rich to poor or as providing publicly financed insurance. Both views are incomplete. Welfare policies provide both insurance and redistribution in varying amounts, depending on the design of the policy. The authors explore the political consequences of the mix of redistribution and insurance in the context of studying the impact of income inequality on expenditures in different categories of welfare spending in advanced industrial societies from 1980 to 1995. They find that spending on pensions, health care, family benefits, poverty alleviation and housing subsidies is largely uncorre-lated with income inequality, but that spending on income replacement programs such as unemployment insurance, sickness pay, occupational illness and disability are significantly higher i n countries with more egalitarian income distributions. They show that this pattern is exactly what a theory of political support for redistributive social insurance programs would predict.

The concept of the “reactive state” is useful in understanding the foreign economic policy behavior of Japan and certain other middle-range powers deeply integrated in the global political economy, particularly during periods of economic turbulence when international regimes do not fully safeguard their economic interests. The essential characteristics of the reactive state are two-fold: (1) it fails to undertake major independent foreign-policy initiatives although it has the power and national incentives to do so; (2) it responds to outside pressure for change, albeit erratically, unsystematically, and often incompletely.

In the Japanese case, reactive state behavior flows from domestic institutional characteristics as well as from the structure of the international system. Domestic features such as bureaucratic fragmentation, political factionalism, powerful mass media, and the lack of a strong central executive have played an especially important part in Japanese financial, energy, trade, and technology policy formation since 1971.

Theories of fiscal federalism explain the efficiency and other economic gains from decentralization but do not explain its extent and nature in practice. The authors develop a political theory of decentralization that focuses on the lines of political accountability between politicians at different levels of government. The more accountable central-level politicians—presidents and legislators—are to subnational politicians, the greater the extent of decentralization and the more it will conform to the preferences of subnational politicians, for example, with respect to the degree of the center's discretion. The model is tested on five Latin American countries that, although formally decentralized, in fact exhibit wide differences in the distribution of spending and revenue responsibilities. The theory also helps explain a number of problems governments have encountered in decentralizing, including subnational debt crises and a mismatch between responsibilities and resources.