Are large landowners, especially those engaged in labor-dependent agriculture, detrimental to democratization and the subsequent survival of democracy? This assumption is at the heart of both canonical and recent influential work on regime transition and durability. Using an original panel data set on the extent of labor-dependent agriculture in countries across the world since 1930, the author finds that labor-dependent agriculture was indeed historically bad for democratic stability and stunted the extension of suffrage, parliamentary independence, and free and fair elections. However, the negative influence of labor-dependent agriculture on democracy started to turn positive around the time of democracy's third wave. The dual threats of land reform and costly domestic insurgencies in that period—often with more potent consequences under dictators—plausibly prompted landowners to push for democracy with strong horizontal constraints and favorable institutions that could protect their property more reliably over the long term than could dictatorship. The shift in support for democracy by labor-dependent landowners is a major untold story of democracy's third wave and helps explain the persistent democratic deficit in many new democracies.

Does the enumeration of ethnic, racial, and/or religious categories on national household censuses increase the likelihood of conflict? The authors propose a theory of intergroup relations that emphasizes the conflictual effects of institutionalizing boundaries between social identity groups. The article investigates the relationship between counting and various forms of conflict with an original, global data set that classifies the type of enumeration used in more than one thousand census questionnaires in more than 150 countries spanning more than two centuries. Through a series of cross-national statistical analyses, the authors find a robust association between enumeration of ethnic cleavages on the census and various forms of competition and conflict, including violent ethnic civil war. The plausibility of the theory is further demonstrated through case study analysis of religious conflict in India.

Why do some individuals embrace nationalist rhetoric and feel proud of their citizen ship while others do not? This article introduces an exchange-theoretic perspective, according to which national pride depends on access to political power. Seen from this perspective, members of ethnic groups that are not represented in national-level government should be less proud of their nation than those included in the polity. Furthermore, ethnic violence in the past or power-sharing arrangements in the present should reduce trust in the future stability of political representation and thus pride in the nation. From a dynamic point of view, members of ethnic groups whose level of political representation decreased in the past should also see their nation in a less positive light today. To show this, the author uses existing surveys to assemble a new dataset with answers to a similar question about national pride. It covers 123 countries that comprise 92 percent of the world's population. For roughly half of these countries, the ethnic groups listed in the surveys could also be found in another data set that contains information on the political status of these groups. Multilevel ordered logistic regressions at both the country and the group level confirm these hypotheses while taking into account a wide range of individual-level and country-level variables discussed in the existing literature.

The transition from Fordist manufacturing to the so-called knowledge economy confronts organized labor across the advanced market economies with a new and more difficult landscape. Many scholars have suggested that the future of egalitarian capitalism depends on forging new political coalitions that bridge the interests of workers in the “new” and “old” economies. This article explores current trajectories of change in Denmark and Sweden, two countries that are still seen as embodying a more egalitarian model of capitalism. The authors show that labor unions in these countries are pursuing two quite different strategies for achieving social solidarity—the Danish aimed at equality of opportunity and the Swedish aimed at equality of outcomes. The article examines the origins of these different strategic paths and explores the distinctive distributional outcomes they have produced. The conclusion draws out the broad lessons these cases hold for the choices currently confronting labor movements throughout the advanced industrial world.

What explains different levels of clientelism across countries? Why do some politicians deliver clientelistic goods to their electoral constituencies, and why do some voters demand them? This article focuses on the historical origins of trust in states and shows that they have a lasting impact on contemporary patterns of patronage. The shift to programmatic politics reflects a historical transition from personalized trust in politicians to trust in impersonal bureaucracies tasked by political parties to implement policy. Past experience with public bureaucracy informs the expectations of voters and parties regarding the performance of the state and its ability to provide public goods, which in turn shape the degree of clientelistic exchange across societies. To capture state capacity, the authors focus on the critical juncture before the expansion of women's suffrage, and use the ability of public bureaucracies to reduce infant mortality in the interwar period as a proxy for historical state capacity and as an instrument to predict trust. Macrodata from eightyeight electoral democracies and microdata from the most recent wave of the World Value Survey provide supportive evidence for the theory.

Within a single conflict, the scale of government violence against civilians can vary greatly—from mass atrocities in one village to eerie restraint in the next. This article argues that the scale of anticivilian violence depends on a combatant's relative dependence on local and external sources of support. External resources make combatants less dependent on the local population, yet create perverse incentives for how the population is to be treated. Efforts by the opposition to interdict the government's external resources can reverse this effect, making the government more dependent on the local population. The article tests this relationship with disaggregated archival data on German-occupied Belarus during World War II. It finds that Soviet partisan attacks against German personnel provoked reprisals against civilians but that attacks against railroads had the opposite effect. Where partisans focused on disrupting German supply lines rather than killing Germans, occupying forces conducted fewer reprisals, burned fewer houses, and killed fewer people.

Using data from the European Social Survey (2002–14), this article explores the effect of union membership on support for redistribution. The authors hypothesize that the wage-bargaining practices of unions promote egalitarian distributive norms, which lead union members to support redistribution, and that this effect is strongest among high-wage workers. Consistent with the authors’ expectations, the empirical analysis shows that the solidarity effect of union membership is strongest when unions encompass a very large share of the labor force or primarily organize low-wage workers. The authors also show that low-wage workers have become a significantly less important union constituency in many European countries over the time period covered by the analysis.

Several recent studies link rising income inequality in the United States to the global financial crisis, arguing that US politicians did not respond to growing inequality with fiscal redistribution. Instead, Americans saved less and borrowed more to maintain relative consumption in the face of widening economic disparities. This article proposes a theory in which fiscal redistribution dampens the willingness of citizens to borrow to fund current consumption. A key implication is that pretax inequality will be more tightly linked with credit in less redistributive countries. The long-run partisan composition of government is, in turn, a key determinant of redistributive effort. Examining a panel of eighteen OECD democracies, the authors find that countries with limited histories of left-wing participation in government are significantly more likely see credit expansion as prefisc inequality grows compared to those in which the political left has been more influential.

What explains the persistence of racial or ethnic inequalities in descriptive representation in the absence of strongly politicized racial or ethnic cleavages? This article uses new data to demonstrate a substantial racial gap between voters and politicians in Brazil. The authors show that this disparity is not plausibly due to racial preferences in the electorate as a whole, for instance, deference toward white candidates or discrimination against nonwhites, and that barriers to candidate entry or discrimination by party leaders do not likely explain the gap. Instead, they document persistent resource disparities between white and nonwhite candidates, including large differences in personal assets and campaign contributions. The findings suggest that elite closure—investments by racial and economic elites on behalf of elite candidates—help perpetuate a white political class, even in the absence of racialized politics. By underscoring this avenue through which representational disparities persist, the article contributes to research on elite power in democratic settings.

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.

What is the nature of religion and state relations in authoritarian regimes? How do religious and regime actors negotiate the terms of their relationship;what do the two sides want from one another; and how cooperative or conflictual are their interactions? To address these questions, the author compares religion-regime relations in contemporary Russia and China—two autocracies with long histories of religious repression, diverse religious profiles, and distinct relations between religion and the state. The article introduces a new theoretical framework anchored in interests and subnational authoritarian politics to explain how religious and political authorities negotiate their relationship and the constraints and opportunities that shape their interaction. Although there are many reasons to expect different types of religion-regime relations across Russia and China, the data demonstrate that subnational governments and diverse religious actors often forge innovative partnerships to govern more efficiently, gain access to resources, and safeguard their survival.

Do elections reduce or increase the risk of autocratic regime breakdown? This article addresses this contested question by distinguishing between election events and the institution of elections. The authors propose that elections stabilize autocracies in the long term but at the price of short-term instability. Elections are conducive to regime survival in the long run because they improve capacities for co-optation and repression but produce short-term instability because they serve as focal points for regime opposition. Drawing on data from 259 autocracies from 1946 to 2008, the authors show that elections increase the short-term probability of regime failure. The estimated effect is retained when accounting for the endogeneity of autocratic elections; this finding is critical, since some autocrats may or may not hold elections because of perceived effects on regime survival. The authors also find that this destabilizing effect does not operate in the long term. They find some, although not as strong, evidence that elections stabilize autocratic regimes in the medium to long term, despite their destabilizing immediate effects. These temporal effect patterns are present for both executive and legislative elections, and they are robust to using different measures, control variable strategies, and estimation techniques. In line with expectations, both effect patterns are much clearer for multiparty autocratic elections than for completely uncontested elections.

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.

There is a growing consensus that status concerns drive state behavior. Although recent attention has been paid to when states are most likely to act on behalf of status concerns, very little is known about which actions states are most likely to engage in when their status is threatened. This article focuses on the effect of publicly humiliating international events as sources of status threat. Such events call into question a state's image in the eyes of others, thereby increasing the likelihood that the state will engage in reassertions of its status. The article presents a theory of status reassertion that outlines which states will be most likely to respond, as well as when and how they will be most likely to do so. The author argues that because high-status states have the most to lose from repeated humiliation, they will be relatively risk averse when reasserting their status. In contrast to prior work arguing that humiliation drives a need for revenge, the author demonstrates that great powers only rarely engage in direct revenge. Rather, they pursue the less risky option of projecting power abroad against weaker states to convey their intentions of remaining a great power. The validity of this theory is tested using an expanded and recoded data set of territorial change from 1816 to 2000. Great powers that have experienced a humiliating, involuntary territorial loss are more likely to attempt aggressive territorial gains in the future and, in particular, against third-party states.

Settlers flocking to boomtowns on the American western frontier were faced with the same task that communities in weak states across the globe face in contemporary times: self-governance. Peer sanctions can enforce cooperation in these environments, but their efficacy depends on the social networks that transmit information from peer to peer. The author uses a game-theoretic model to show that peripheral network positions can generate such strong incentives to misbehave that persistent cheating occurs in equilibrium. The model reveals that groups maintaining high levels of cooperation that face shocks to their strategic environment or to their network can ratchet down into less cooperative equilibria in which the most peripheral become ostracized. Furthermore, population change that features rapid growth, high turnover, and enclave settlements can undermine cooperation. The insights from this article help to explain the trajectory of cooperation in the mining towns of the Wild West in which high levels of cooperation deteriorated as the population surged, and help to make sense of why only certain nonwhite settlers were targets of hostility and racism.

Coordinated welfare capitalism has been subject to comprehensive change since the 1990s, with workfare measures and the deregulation of employment protection at the heart of labor market reforms. Developments in Sweden, Germany, and South Korea challenge not only the assumption of relative stability that is commonly associated with the study of coordinated market economies, but also the assertion that this stability is associated with the persistence of established political coalitions. The authors contend that a collapse of longstanding welfare state coalitions is the key political driver of labor market reform, with the withdrawal of employers from previous welfare settlements at the center of this development.

This article documents systematic deviations from standard models of trade politics, each of which has the effect of undermining sustained efforts at coherent industrial opposition to trade. Industries have internal disagreements about liberalization, support for trade liberalization extends bilaterally across borders in the same industry, and comparative disadvantage industries feature convincing expressions of public support for liberalization. These surprising outcomes are explained by a model of trade politics that emphasizes three factors: firm heterogeneity in export performance, product differentiation, and reciprocal liberalization. The author uses a new data set of industry attitudes about fifteen US trade agreements to show that product differentiation is strongly correlated with these outcomes, even conditional on plausible alternatives. The author concludes that public position-taking and lobbying on trade politics have been fundamentally altered by the rise of product variety; trade's opponents and indifferents have been overwhelmed by pro-globalization firms breaking out to support trade on their own.

This article discusses three recent books that analyze patterns of political conflict and regime change in postcolonial Asia and Africa using a social forces approach to political analysis. The social forces tradition, originally pioneered by Barrington Moore, studies the social origins and political consequences of struggles between social groups whose members hold shared identities and interests. The works under review examine, respectively, the varied regime trajectories of Southeast Asia's states, divergent regime outcomes in India and Pakistan, and the institutional origins of social cleavages and political conflict in sub-Saharan Africa. Although historically the social forces paradigm has focused on conflict between class actors, the author argues that these three works fruitfully extend the social forces approach to encompass struggles between nonclass social groups, including those defined along the lines of ethnicity, religion, nationality, region, and family. This pluralized version of the social forces approach is better suited to studying patterns of regime change in Asia and Africa, where the paradigm has been less frequently applied than it has been to cases in Europe and Latin America.