Policymakers and scholars have turned their attention to federalism as a means for managing conflicts between central governments and subnational interests. But both the theoretical literature and the empirical track record of federations make for opposing conclusions concerning federalism's ability to prevent civil conflict. This article argues that the existing literature falls short on two accounts: first, it lacks a systematic comparison of peaceful and conflict-ridden cases across federal states, and second, while some studies acknowledge that there is no one-sizefits-all federal solution, the conditional ingredients of peace-preserving federalism have not been theorized. The authors make the argument that the peace-preserving effect of specific federal traits—fiscal decentralization, fiscal transfers, and political copartisanship—are conditional on a society's income level and ethnic composition. The argument is tested across twenty-two federal states from 1978 to 2000.

That rebels face a collective action problem is one of the most widely shared assumptions in the literature on civil wars. The authors argue that the collective action paradigm can be both descriptively inaccurate and analytically misleading when it comes to civil wars. They question both pillars of the paradigm as applied to the study of civil wars, namely, the free-riding incentive generated by the public goods dimension of insurgency and the risks of individual participation in insurgent collective action. The authors argue, instead, that although insurgent collective action may entail the expectation of future collective benefits, public (rather than just private) costs tend to predominate in the short term. Moreover, the costs of nonparticipation and free riding may equal or even exceed those of participation. The authors support these claims by triangulating three types of evidence: historical evidence from counterinsurgency operations in several civil wars; data from the Vietnam War's Phoenix Program; and regional evidence from the Greek Civil War. They conclude by drawing implications for the study of civil wars.

Although Taiwan is widely regarded as one of the purest examples of middle-class-driven democratization, this article suggests that the conventional accent on the middle class is misplaced. Instead, the true heroes in the struggle for democracy were the island's working classes, although proper recognition of this fact requires an empirically derived understanding of class that looks beyond formal labor politics. Although the author does not dispute the importance of ethnicity in Taiwanese politics, the findings clearly indicate that ethnic identity was in itself a class issue, as the island's working classes were the most deeply attached to a nativist Taiwanese identity, while members of the middle classes were far more successfully assimilated into the elite “national” culture. The Taiwanese experience thus provides a reminder that many political phenomena apparently framed in ethnic, sectarian terms are in fact undergirded by essentially class-based grievances.

The causal logic behind many arguments in historical institutionalism emphasizes the enduring impact of choices made during critical junctures in history. These choices close off alternative options and lead to the establishment of institutions that generate self-reinforcing path-dependent processes. Despite the theoretical and practical importance of critical junctures, however, analyses of path dependence often devote little attention to them. The article reconstructs the concept of critical junctures, delimits its range of application, and provides methodological guidance for its use in historical institutional analyses. Contingency is the key characteristic of critical junctures, and counterfactual reasoning and narrative methods are necessary to analyze contingent factors and their impact. Finally, the authors address specific issues relevant to both cross-sectional and longitudinal comparisons of critical junctures.

To what extent do international factors affect domestic conflict processes? How do external conditions affect the state's repressive capabilities and the opportunities for opposition groups to mobilize, launch an insurgency, and sustain it? This article argues that because state strength is limited by international boundaries, rebel groups often organize transnationally in order to evade repression. External bases, refugee communities, and characteristics of neighboring states are expected to increase the likelihood of civil war onset and continuation. Importantly, external mobilization is difficult for states to monitor and verify, a factor that exacerbates bargaining problems and increases the probability of armed conflict. These claims are tested through a quantitative analysis of civil conflicts from 1951 to 1999. Results suggest that weak neighbors, rival neighbors, and refugee diasporas contribute to rebellion and that conflicts endure longer when rebels have access to external bases.

Despite substantial evidence that international trade has promoted peace in the post—World War II era, the commercial peace research program still faces an important historical challenge. Dramatic economic integration in the nineteenth century failed to prevent the increasing interstate hostilities that culminated in the outbreak of war in 1914. This article uses a theoretical revision grounded in standard trade theory to reexamine the relationship between commerce and peace in the fifty years before World War I, a period often referred to as the first era of globalization. The article focuses on domestic conflict over commercial policy rather than on interdependence to understand the conditions under which globalization promotes peace. In a sample dating from 1865 to 1914, the authors find that lower regulatory barriers to commerce reduce participation in militarized interstate disputes. Contradicting conventional wisdom, this evidence affirms a basic premise of commercial liberalism during the first era of globalization—free trade promotes peace.

The literature on civil society in postcommunist regimes highlights its weakness as compared with civil society in other democracies. In this article the authors make a general argument on how different patterns of antecedent dictatorship affect the development of civil society across a range of democracies. They examine the slow emergence of two behaviors associated with a robust civil society—participation in organizational life and in protest—and explain variation across countries as a function of regime history. They draw their individual-level data from the World Values Survey and analyze the behavior of over forty-one thousand citizens from forty-two democracies. Using methods of hierarchical linear modeling to control for both national-level and individual-level factors, the authors find that different types of dictatorship and variation in their duration produce different negative legacies for the development of civil society.

This article presents evidence that electoral institutions affect the geographic distribution of both candidate electoral support and government resources. The author exploits two electoral reforms in Japan to identify the effect of institutional incentives: (1) the 1994 electoral reform from a multimember single nontransferable vote (SNTV) system to a mixed-member majoritarian (MMM) system with a single-member district (SMD) component and a proportional representation component; and (2) the 1925 electoral reform from a predominantly SMD system to a multimember SNTV system. Using several new data sets, the two main findings of this article are that (1) Japanese representatives competing in multimember SNTV districts had more geographically concentrated electoral support than those competing in SMDs and that (2) intergovernmental transfers appear to be more concentrated around Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) incumbents' home offices under the multimember SNTV system than under the MMM system. The findings in this article highlight the connection between institutions and geographic patterns of representation.

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.

As communist regimes collapsed in the years 1989—91, communist parties and leaders exited power in roughly half the cases. The causes and the impact of this variation have generated considerable controversy. The authors show that the combined timing and content of the introduction of mass literacy was responsible for generating the national standards and comparisons that either sustained the legitimacy of communist party rule or led to its rapid and complete demise during the collapse of communist regimes. Mass literacy explains more of the patterns of the communist exit than do structural, modernization, or communist legacy accounts, and it provides a clear and sustained causal chain.

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.

This article argues that, beginning in the mid-1990s, there has been a transformation of immigrant integration policies in Western Europe, away from distinct “national models” and toward convergent policies of “civic integration” for newcomers and “antidiscrimination” for settled immigrants and their descendants. This convergence is demonstrated by a least-likely case comparison of the Netherlands, France, and Germany—states that had pursued sharply different lines in the past. The author fleshes out the conflicting, even contradictory logics of antidiscrimination and civic integration and grounds them in opposite variants of liberalism, an “old” liberalism of nondiscrimination and equal opportunity and a “new” liberalism of power and disciplining, respectively.

Hereditary succession, the conventional method for preserving monarchies, has also been used to perpetuate republic-style dictatorships. With an original data set of 258 post-World War II nonmonarchical autocrats, the author tests Gordon Tullock's hypothesis that hereditary succession appeals to the ruler and to nonfamilial elites wary of a leadership struggle. The full data and close comparisons of succession outcomes are consistent with Tullock's account. In the absence of prior experience selecting a ruler through a party, regime elites accepted filial heirs apparent; when the incumbent had arisen from a party, his successor predominantly emerged from that organization. Among twenty-two cases of potential hereditary succession, variations in institutional history account for 77 percent of succession outcomes. Where the ruler preceded the party, five rulers in seven cases groomed sons and all five sons took office. In contrast, where the party predated the ruler, incumbents successfully installed sons in only three of fifteen cases.

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.

What explains the selection of cases for WTO adjudication? This article explores the business conditions under which industries lobby their home government to use the WTO adjudication process and the political factors that influence government decisions. It explains the industry pattern of selection for international trade disputes as a function of the velocity of the business environment. While WTO adjudication is seen as costly and slow, a positive ruling brings broad benefits in terms of deterrence against future discrimination. Firms in static industries will invest in WTO dispute settlement to achieve these benefits, but firms in industries shaped by dynamic competition have high opportunity costs that make them less willing to pursue adjudication. This argument accounts for why there are fewer WTO cases about electronics industry issues than there are likely incidences of protectionist measures. Since Japan is a leading exporter and provides a government report with unique data on potential WTO disputes, it was chosen to test the argument in greater depth. Interviews with Japanese business officials and statistical analysis of an original data set provide support for the argument. The authors conclude that the passive attitude toward WTO adjudication by Japan's largest export industry, electronics, and the sensitivity of Japan's diplomatic relations with China have constrained the cases that Japan files. These findings suggest that the effectiveness of the WTO for dispute settlement is conditional upon the time horizon of the industry and the political relations among members.

Drawing on historical and rational choice institutionalism, this article seeks to explain the evolution of the Workers' Party as it moved from opposition to government between 1989 and 2002. The Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), a once radical and programmatic party, came to look more like its catchall competitors over time. This shift resulted from the heightened emphasis placed on immediate vote maximization after Brazil's adoption of market reforms rendered the party's socialist project unviable. Vote maximization made the PT more susceptible to the institutional incentives for building electoral and political support in Brazil, incentives that induce parties to weaken their programmatic positions, forge opportunistic alliances, and resort to patronage and even corruption. To grow, the PT ended up applying such tactics, which it had long condemned. Yet its adaptation was incomplete and uneven due to historical legacies that hindered change. The analysis thus suggests that institutions evolve in response to changing environmental conditions but in ways constrained by past trajectories.

Post-9/11 security concerns and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq have renewed scholarly interest in nation-building as a form of externally fostered democratization. The selected works assess Iraq and its precursors, seeking general lessons for establishing new democracies. They principally conclude that successful nation-building depends on sustained commitments of time, materiel, and manpower. Although this thesis improves upon earlier studies of democracy promotion, which often treated intentions as determinative, it does not fully reckon with the effect of antecedent conditions on external intervention. As this review addresses, American efforts at nation-building have historically been enabled or constrained by local political institutions. Rather than autonomously reengineering the target society, nation-builders have buttressed bureaucracies and parliaments where they were already available (Germany, Japan) and foundered in countries that lacked such institutions (Somalia, Haiti). In sum, nation-building has been most effective when pursued least ambitiously, amid functioning states with prior experience in constitutional government.

This article examines the importance of regions in shaping world order. Reviewing two recent books that claim that the contemporary world order is an increasingly regionalized one, the author argues that regions matter to the extent they can be relatively autonomous entities. While both books accept that regions are social constructs, their answer to the question of who makes regions reflects a bias in favor of powerful actors. A regional understanding of world politics should pay more attention to and demonstrate how regions resist and socialize power—at both global and regional levels—rather than simply focusing on how powers construct regions. Power matters, but local responses to power, including strategies of exclusion, resistance, socialization, and binding, matter more in understanding how regions are socially constructed. The article elaborates on various types of responses to power from both state and societal actors in order to offer an inside-out, rather than outside-in, perspective on the regional architecture of world politics.

Comparative research on the determinants of genocide has surged in recent years, as reflected in the six books under review. The new research makes genocide studies more systematic and theoretical; integrates the topic into mainstream social science disciplines; points to three emerging explanatory paradigms; and yields some surprising cumulative findings. However, the works also reveal significant conceptual, empirical, and methodological problems that limit the comparative enterprise and the search for a general theory. The article argues for an alternative, disaggregated approach that situates genocide within a spectrum of organized violence against civilians and links genocide studies to studies of violence in war.

This article explores the unintended gendered consequences of employment protection and vocational training systems. It develops a micrologic of skill investment by workers and employers to identify the mechanism by which specific skills become disadvantageous for women. The central claim of the article is that institutions that encourage male investment in specific skills exacerbate occupational sex segregation. The article finds that coordinated market economies, because of their robust institutional protection of male skill investments, are generally more sex segregating than are liberal market economies. The empirical section provides cross-sectional analyses of advanced industrial countries.