Abstract: Past comparative voting-behavior research has revealed that electoral institutions can explain much of the variation in voter turnout between nations. This study takes an alternative and dynamic ap...

Abstract: The ability of European nation-states to control migration has been at the forefront of the immigration debate. Some scholars have argued that international human rights and the freedom of circulation required by a global economy and regional markets are the two sides of a liberal regime that undermine the sovereignty of nation-states. Others have gone even further and declared the double closure of territorial sovereignty and national citizenship to be outmoded concepts. This article inscribes itself in that debate by answering the following questions: (a) To what extent do international legal instruments constrain the actions of national policy makers? and (b) How have nation-states reacted to international constraints and problems of policy implementation? Focusing on Council of Europe's jurisprudence, the authors assess the extent to which national courts have incorporated European norms and governments take them into account. The article examines ways that national policy makers have responded by shi...

Abstract: Using democracy in empirical work requires accurate measurement. Yet, most policy and academic research presupposes the accuracy of available measures. This article explores judge-specific measurem...

Abstract: Comparative studies of democratization have produced two types of generalizations: those having nearly universal application and those applying to a range of countries within a region. In the first category are such arguments as the role of high levels of economic development in guaranteeing democratic sustainability, the centrality of political elites in establishing and terminating democracy, and deficits in rule of law and state capacity as the primary challenge to the quality and survival of new democracies. In the second category are contrasts between recent democratization in post-Socialist Europe versus Latin America and southern Europe—for example, in the relationship between democratization and economic reform and in the costs and benefits for democratic consolidation of breaking quickly versus slowly with the authoritarian past. The two sets of conclusions have important methodological implications for how comparativists understand generalizability and the emphasis placed on historical versus pr...

Abstract: The article explores the intersections between the different perspectives of institutional and policy research and discusses the characteristic purposes and conditions of theory-oriented policy research, where the usefulness of statistical analyses is generally constrained by the complexity and contingency of causal influences. Although comparative case studies are better able to deal with these conditions, their capacity to empirically identify the causal effect of differing institutional conditions on policy outcomes depends on a restrictive case selection that would need to hold constant the influence of two other sets of contingent factors—the policy challenges actually faced and the preferences and perceptions of the actors involved. When this is not possible, empirical policy research may usefully resort to a set of institutionalist working hypotheses that are derived from the narrowly specified theoretical assumptions of rational-choice institutionalism. Although these hypotheses will often be wron...

Abstract: Despite an increased need to measure presidential power and the increased use of such measurements in empirical studies, there has been little examination of the relative merits of alternative methods of measuring presidential power. This study reviews the measures currently in use and identifies the measure developed by Shugart and Carey (1992) as the most useful. The study also suggests improvements to the Shugart and Carey method to improve its applicability to semipresidential regimes. Scoring of Austria, Finland, France, and the six Central and East European states with popularly elected presidents demonstrates the usefulness of these revisions for establishing clearer boundaries for this regime type, which is a necessary step toward empirical testing of the relationship between semipresidentialism and democratic consolidation.

Abstract: The most important causes of globalization differ among the three major components of international market integration: trade, multinational production, and international finance. The information t...

Abstract: Through the examination of one of the most successful cases of a European Community (EC) law litigation strategy, this article develops a general framework for understanding when and how the EC legal system will be successfully used by domestic groups to challenge national policy. The authors show how the European legal system actually shifted the domestic balance of power in favor of equality actors, allowing a previously weak domestic group to influence the United Kingdom's gender equality policy at the height of Conservative Party rule. Expanding beyond the British case, the article develops a series of hypotheses about when the EC legal tool is likely to be used by groups to influence national policy, hypotheses that could account for cross-national variation in the impact of European Court of Justice jurisprudence on domestic policy in areas outside of equality policy.

Abstract: Theoretical reasoning disagrees about what type of bargaining system performs best. The authors have tested the explanatory power of three competing hypotheses: neoliberalism, corporatism, and the hump-shape hypothesis. All of these hypotheses lack empirical support due to two main shortcomings. First, they ignore that wage restraint raises three distinct types of collective-action problems. Second, they do not consider qualitative differences among the national bargaining systems (particularly the role of the state) that do not allow analysis to construct such ordinal rankings of bargaining coordination as adopted by all previous empirical studies. Proceeding from a revised hypothesis and new measures of national bargaining systems, the authors have found a nonlinear relationship between the bargaining system and economic performance in a way that economy-wide wage coordination is superior only when the bargaining system is able to make local bargaining comply with coordination activities.

Abstract: This article compares the relative importance of political capital (in the form of membership in the Chinese Communist Party) and human capital (in the form of higher education) in urban China. Survey data from urban China strongly support two key elements of the intellectual New Class theory: intellectuals will have privileged access into the party, and the importance of education relative to political reliability will increase over time. The data also show how political capital and human capital are converted into high paying and prestigious jobs. There is also evidence of a separate path of career mobility: for the most socially prestigious jobs, a college degree—not a party card—is the key. Economic reforms of the post-Mao era are creating a gap between political power, on one hand, and social prestige and economic power, on the other. This gap can be expected to grow as the reforms continue.

Abstract: The field of comparative politics has begun to take seriously the role of ideas in politics, but to date this interest has not clearly specified the conditions under which ideas influence public pol- icy. The author develops an integrated framework that shows ideas about policy goals and instru- ments are most influential when they do not attract substantial opposition from voters and inter- est groups and when political institutions concentrate decision-making authority. The author tests this framework by examining the fates of three ideas, facing different degrees of societal opposition and concentrated authority, adopted by the first Thatcher government in Britain.

Abstract: Japanese elections are notorious for the money that flows between contributors, politicians, and voters. To date, however, nobody has estimated statistically the impact of this money on electoral o...

Abstract: Working and lower status citizens are more sensitive to macroeconomic fluctuations than their better-off counterparts in the developing world, due to the higher personal stakes involved. This heightened sensitivity affects fluctuations in voter turnout and voter choice across developing democracies. Macroeconomic downturns result in increased voter participation as more lower status voters express their grievances at the polls. This benefits political parties and coalitions with expressly working- and lower-class appeals. This article describes the impact of shifts in voter turnout on party support, the impact of macroeconomic shifts on voter turnout, and the impact of macroeconomic shifts on support for parties that are working-class/economically disadvantaged oriented using regression analysis of aggregate pooled time-series data from 10 countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. Although increased turnout primarily helps parties that are working-class/economically disadvantaged orient...

Abstract: Recent studies underscore the importance of international organizations in transmitting norms, ideas, and values to developing countries. But has this diffusion influenced government policy in less developed countries? During the past two decades, the World Bank has emphasized the need for Third World governments to increase the stock of human capital by investing in education and health. Specifically, it has encouraged developing countries to shift an increasing share of their resources toward primary education. The authors examine 13 Latin American countries between 1980 and 1992 to establish the relationship between World Bank project lending and government investment in human capital. They combine time-series cross-sectional analysis with field research to evaluate the World Bank's influence on government spending on education and health. Although the World Bank may be successful in convincing developing country technocrats to “invest in people,” this research suggests that it is less successful in co...

Abstract: State banking is the intervention of the state in the allocation of credit. State banking became important during the course of this century in some Organization for Economic Cooperation and Develo...

Abstract: What are the implications of the trend toward granting central bank independence for partisan theories of the macroeconomy? The conventional view is that parties of the Left and Right strive to achieve distinctive macroeconomic outcomes when in government. However, when faced with an independent central bank, parties of the Left may prove unable to produce their preferred partisan outcomes, whereas Right parties may be privileged in their ability to pursue their goals. Moreover, granting the central bank independence can be expected to have differing effects depending on whether Left or Right parties prevail in government. These issues are explored with a pooled time-series model of inflation and unemployment in 16 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries from 1961 through 1991. The results support the claim that the effects of partisan government and central bank organization are mutually contingent. The pattern of results anticipated by partisan theory only arises where central b...

Abstract: This study explores the underlying causes of the processes of democratic reform in Japan and Korea over the past decade. In both nations, elite-challenging pressures from below have been the stimulus forcing reforms on the governing elites. For this reason, changes in mass attitudes and values become a crucial explanatory variable in accounting for recent political reforms. The authors discuss the pattern of political development in these two nations and their theory of how and why values are changing from an authoritarian to libertarian set of attitudinal orientations. This pattern of value change has been eroding the traditional tolerance of the mass publics in these two nations for authoritarian and corrupt practices. The authors empirically demonstrate how and why values have been changing and how these changes are related to increasing levels of elite-challenging protest potential and leftist reform-oriented attitudes.

Abstract: The belief that modern democracy is party democracy is widespread. However, the belief may be questioned. A number of small independent island states that subscribe to a high extent to democratic values, standards, and institutions manage without political parties. In all, six such cases exist, namely, Belau (Palau), the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, and Tuvalu. The analysis of these cases is guided by three general assumptions: (a) the impact of diminutive size on the existence and number of parties, (b) the corresponding impact of geographical noncontiguity, and (c) the impact of culturally defined resistances against party life and party rule. Comparisons with conditions in other small island states suggest that the assumptions are valid given that extreme values are entered into the analysis. Extreme smallness, an extremely archipelagic geography, and an intense cultural resistance all contribute to an absence of political parties in democracies.

Abstract: This article reviews four decades of scholarship on political development. It contends that the theoretical ambitions of the early political development literature to frame the comparative inquiry of politics and political change in less developed countries were undermined by intellectual challenges to the paradigms of modernization and structural functionalism and that the literature’s teleological dimension was contradicted by real-world events. Nonetheless, in subsequent decades, the field made great advances in the study of political institutions, democratic stability and breakdown, state structures, civil society, and the uneven character of political development itself. The article argues that amid manifold evidence of plural forms of political development and decay at the century’s end, the field should avoid relapses into neomodernization theory and instead focus on such issues as state reform, democratic governance, political representation and accountability, and the organization of civil societ...

Abstract: This article investigates the structural causes of ethnic rebellion among the indigenous populations of Latin America. It aims to fill three important gaps in the current understanding of ethnic vi...

Abstract: Scholars have long recognized the importance of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) as an active court and an engine of European integration. Few, however, have peered inside the black box of the institution to look at the individuals who do the work or to analyze the ECJ as an organization. Law clerks at the ECJ, called referendaires, are drawn from the ranks of lawyers, legal academics, legal administrators, and judges. They provide valuable legal and linguistic expertise, ease the workload of their members, participate in oral and written interactions between cabinets, and provide continuity as members rapidly change. Although they have more power than their counterparts in the United States Supreme Court, they are not the puppeteers of the members, but their agents. Focusing on the purported unchecked power of clerks distracts us from examining the important institutional consequences of changes in workload or an expansion of members.

Abstract: This article emphasizes comparative politics research that combines the tools and theories of economics, primarily microeconomics, with the tools and theories of political science. It traces and as...

Abstract: Economic voting literature has shown that voters hold governments responsible for the state of the economy. Election studies have also found that voters punish governing parties that divert from their campaign promises and move their policy positions. These bodies of literature cannot convincingly explain the repeated reelection of the Socialist Party, which passed supply-side economic measures at odds with campaign promises and its traditional ideology. Furthermore, the party succeeded in gaining reelection regardless of the state of the economy and despite consistently high unemployment. In this article, it is argued that to better understand the repeated electoral success of the Socialist Party, three additional factors have to be taken into account: the party system, compensatory policies, and internal party politics. These factors allowed the Spanish Socialist Party to build an electoral support coalition based on lower classes, rural voters, and voters dependent on state-subsidized income.

Abstract: This article analyzes why it is that China, an authoritarian political system, has managed to generate more popular support for the reform process than India, a democracy. The authors argue that when local politicians and bureaucrats are more supportive of the reform process, there is likely to be greater popular support for economic reform. Local political elite may be more supportive of reform in an authoritarian than in a democratic system because the level of local elite support for the reform process is influenced by the incentives faced by local elite. In China, institutional reform changed the incentives faced by local elite, whereas in India, reforms have not been accompanied by institutional changes that would encourage local elite to support reform to the same extent as in China. The argument is based on local elite and mass surveys conducted in China and India in 1990 and 1996, respectively. A logit model, controlling for a variety of alternative explanations, provides evidence that local elite...

Abstract: This research examines the positive influence of democracy and economic liberalism on citizens' quality of life (QOL). The statistical analysis relies on extreme-bounds analysis, the Tobit-maximum likelihood estimator, and robust two-stage least squares to test this hypothesis. The relationship between democracy and QOL is a parabolic inverted U-shaped curve, so that democracy first enhances QOL and over time it hampers it. On the other hand, QOL strengthens democracy. QOL suffers from a market economy in middle-income countries. Openness to trade enhances QOL everywhere but sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. A market economy consolidates democracy everywhere else but sub-Saharan Africa. Openness enhances democracy around the globe, except in Latin America and the Middle East. Economic development and QOL exhibit a reciprocal normal U-shaped curve, whereas democracy and economic development are linearly dependent. These contradictory results cast some doubt on the pursuit of both democracy and a libe...

Abstract: This work addresses the political attitudes and participation of informal sector workers in Mexico. Conventional wisdom leads to the expectation that informal sector workers would have lower levels of system-supportive political attitudes and lower levels of political participation. This article, using data from 514 surveys conducted in Mexico in 1997, examines the relationship between informal sector employment and system-supportive political attitudes and participation by comparing informal and formal sector workers. Analysis here shows that for those attitudes and forms of participation in which informal sector workers differ, they are likely to have more supportive attitudes toward the state and to participate in politics at a higher level than their formal sector counterparts.

Abstract: This article explores the relative influence of policy sectors, political institutions, and urban contexts on the operation of contemporary governance. The research compared the membership, structure, governing capacity, and change of local economic development and secondary education policy networks in four cities: Lille and Rennes in France and Leeds and Southampton in the United Kingdom. The main finding is that the type of policy sector mediates the impact of political institutions. There are strong differences between French and British education policy networks but similarities between the economic policy networks. There is variation by city in economic development networks but much less in secondary education. The implication of the findings is that some sectors, such as economic development, tend to be similar across nation-states and permit subnational variation, whereas others retain strong country differences and maintain intrastate uniformity, a finding that is consistent with the longevity of...

Abstract: One striking difference between the fields of comparative politics and international relations concerns the relative proportion of theory versus empirical detail. In international relations, theories are organized around the distribution of power, strategic interaction, and the role of institutions, law, and morality. Comparative politics, by contrast, starts from the assumption that the anarchy problem has been solved and that domestic polities are hierarchies of norms and authority. Whereas the distribution of domestic interests remains central, the role of institutions increases and that of power declines—not absolutely but relative to the international realm. Comparative politics, as a field, is different in another way that is more central to this special issue. This difference has to do with its attention to specific countries and place. The articles in this issue struggle with the tension between the generality of theory and explanatory accuracy that must make concessions to time and place. All of the authors want to offer generalizations that are more than summaries of what they have observed, but they want to do so without distorting particular cases. This attention to detail and explanatory accuracy has sometimes meant that comparativists do not depart far from their cases (in the worst case, they do not compare). The division of labor in comparative politics is highly specialized and organized along country or regional lines rather than theoretically, as in American politics, where scholarship limits itself to the explanation of variation within a single country. Barriers to entry into the field of comparative politics are supplied by requirements to know specific languages, histories, cultures, and institutions rather than by the need to master quantitative analysis or formal methods (which is not to say that there are no comparative scholars who are quite skilled at one or both). This division of

Abstract: The field of comparative political behavior has experienced an ironic course of development. Over the past generation, the field has generated a dramatic increase in the knowledge about how people think about politics, become politically engaged, and make their political decisions. Empirical data on citizen attitudes are now available on a near global scale. However, this increase in knowledge has occurred as the processes and structures of contemporary politics are transforming citizen politics. Thus, although more is known about contemporary electorates, the behavior of the public has become more complex and individualistic, which limits the ability to explain the behavior with the most common models. This article documents the expansion of this knowledge in several areas—political culture, political cognition, voting behavior, and political participation—and discusses the current research challenges facing the field.