The informal dimension has always been important in Chinese politics, due to a traditional bias against legalism and favoring the sentimentalization of personal qualities. We contend that it remains so still, albeit in altered form. Rather than being oriented solely to personal or in-group security, factionalism in the context of the more secure bureaucratic environment of the reform era has come to embrace policy goals and material interests as well. Thus, informal politics proliferates, and factional fortunes tend tofluctuateaccording to the patterns of China's political business cycle.

In the post-Mao era the radical reformers led by Deng Xiaoping have favored rapid growth, even at the expense of stability. The conservatives surrounding Chen Yun consider stability the paramount goal, believing that it should override considerations of growth. The synchronization of reform and business cycles, plus the appearance of periodic social movements whenever the growth rate slumps, makes reformers and conservatives vulnerable to charges of mismanaging the economy for their respective policy preferences. As long as the business, reform, and movement cycles coincide, wide policyfluctuationsdriven by a politics of blame are inevitable.

Product cycle theory as expressed in the analogy of flying geese has become a widely accepted way of conceptualizing industrial diffusion across East Asia. As the product cycle is repeated for increasingly sophisticated products, so, it is argued, the development trajectory of Japan will be replicated in a succession of sectors and countries. This approach fails, however, to capture the complexities of the contemporary regionalization of industrial production. East Asian industrial production should not be seen as a tightly coupled process in which the rise of national economies parallels successive product cycles. Rather than Japan's development trajectory being replicated in country after country, industrial diffusion has been characterized by shifting hierarchical networks of production and partial diffusion into diverse politicoeconomic contexts at differing historical junctures. It has also resulted in a triangulation of the region's trade patterns that has generated large imbalances in trade both within the region and between the region and the United States.

Allison's Model III (governmental or bureaucratic politics) suggests that state policies reflect the parochial concerns of intragovernmental “players in positions” and the relative power of these players. This article offers a critical test. It examines a policy area—U.S. decisions on the composition of naval forces—in which we would, a priori, expect bureaucratic politics to have a maximum effect and which participants, observers, and scholars have routinely described as critically influenced by bureaucratic politics. This article employs statistical methods to assess whether outcomes have indeed been affected by the parochial priorities and perceptions of individuals who, because of their relative power and the rules of the game, have dominated the relevant bureaucratic action-channels. Contrary to the expectations of the bureaucratic politics literature—indeed, contrary to the reports of firsthand observers and the actors involved—bureaucratic politics do not seem to have mattered: knowledge of bureaucratic interests and power does not permit us to predict outcomes. The article then proceeds to suggest an alternative model of state behavior that does provide significant explanatory power: the article demonstrates that shifts in force posture can be modeled as a function of ideas and images rather than of interests. This gives rise to speculation that in explaining American foreign and security policy the name of the game is not, as Allison suggests, politics, but the competition of ideas for intellectual hegemony.

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOS) both lobby states and work within and across societies to advance their interests. These latter efforts are generally ignored by students of world politics because they do not directly involve governments. A study of transnational environmental activist groups (TEAGs) such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and World Wildlife Fund demonstrates that NGO societal efforts indeed shape widespread behavior throughout the world. TEAGs work through transnational social, economic, and cultural networks to shift standards of good conduct, change corporate practices, and empower local communities. This type of practice involves “world civic politics.” That is, TEAGs influence widespread behavior by politicizing global civil society—that slice of collective life which exists above the individual and below the state yet across national boundaries. This article examines the activity of world civic politics as practiced by environmental activists and evaluates its relevance for the study of NGOs and world politics in general.

Using a number of different quantitative measures, this article demonstrates that variations in the degree of social democratic decline in nine European countries can be viewed in large measure as a product of two structural economic changes: (1) the shift to smaller units of production; and (2) the growth of private nonindustrial employment. The article explores several causal arguments linking these variables to social democratic decline, and it marshals Swedish and British time-series data to show that the distribution of manufacturing employment by production unit helps explain both the rise and the decline of social democracy.

Most comparative studies of public strategies for competitiveness focus on the links between public agencies and industrial sectors. This paper argues that the professions—or knowledge-bearing elites—that animate these organizational links are equally significant. For public policies to promote technological advance, the visions and self-images of knowledge-bearing elites are particularly important. By examining administrative and technical elites in France and Germany in the 1980s, the paper identifies characteristics that enable these elites to implement policy in some cases but not in others. France's “state-created” elites were well positioned to initiate and implement large technology projects, such as digitizing the telecommunications network. By contrast, Germany's state-recognized elites were better positioned to facilitate framework-oriented programs aimed at the diffusion of new technologies throughout industry. The linkages between administrative and technical elites also explain why French policymakers had difficulty adapting policy to changing circumstances over time, whereas German policymakers managed in many cases to learn more from previous policy experiences and to adapt subsequent initiatives accordingly.

This article analyzes the dynamics of turnout and the political impact of five cycles of protest, consisting of forty-two mass demonstrations that occurred on Mondays in Leipzig over the period 1989–91. These demonstrations are interpreted as an informational cascade that publicly revealed some of the previously hidden information about the malign nature of the East German communist regime. Once this information became publicly available, the viability of the regime was undermined. The Monday demonstrations subsequently died a slow death as their informational role declined.

This article reviews recent events in Russia and demonstrates that future progress in developing private property rights will require not only sound economic policies but also more robust state institutions capable of carrying out economic transformation. In January 1992 Russia's first postcommunist government launched a comprehensive economic program to transform the Soviet command system into a market economy. Privatization constituted one of the key components of this program. Two years later, however, privatization in Russia had failed to create real private property rights. By the summer of 1993 insiders had acquired majority shares in two-thirds of Russia's privatized and privatizing firms, state subsidies accounted for 22 percent of Russia's GNP, little if any restructuring had taken place within enterprises, and few market institutions had been created. Progress toward creating private property rights in Russia was impeded by the particular constellation of political institutions in place after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The set of political institutions comprising the first postcommunist Russian state was not capable of either dismantling Soviet institutions governing property rights or creating or supporting new market-based economic institutions regarding private property.

This article argues that it is a fallacy to regard “social citizenship” as granting social rights equivalent to civil rights and suffrage. The argument is based partly upon a textual analysis showing that in formulating his influential “trinity” of citizenship, T. H. Marshall obfuscated differences between the distributional logic of redistributive policy and political and civil rights. The second part of the argument is based upon an empirical discussion of how social citizenship arguments have been applied to create comprehensive social reform.

The Scandinavian welfare states play a central role in the discussion as examples of the inclu-sionary benefits of social citizenship. Three instances of welfare state expansion are discussed: the passage of legislation establishing flat-rate retirement benefits, the institution of supplementary earnings-related retirement benefits, and feminist mobilization in the 1980s for a “woman-friendly” welfare state. It is shown that claims to social citizenship are used by out-groups to demand inclusion in electoral coalitions aiming at welfare state expansion.

The article concludes that social citizenship is inextricably linked to redistributive political conflict between in-groups and out-groups and depends upon state capacity to raise revenues and to police entitlement. A key difference between social rights and political and civil rights is that consumption of the former hinges on both the consent of the community and the willingness of others to pay for such consumption, while consumption of the latter does not impose direct costs upon others.

The argument in this essay can be reduced to the following form: the better a planning system is in terms of central planning techniques, the less likely it is to depart from central planning. The author proposes an information approach to explain why China launched economic reforms at a relatively earlier stage of development than did the Soviet Union. The claim is twofold regarding the connections between initiation of reform and information flows in China and in the Soviet Union. First, all else being equal, a bureaucracy better informed about economic conditions is more likely to pursue realistic economic objectives and its policies are less likely to induce macroeconomic instability. To the extent that macroeconomic instability activates a search for alternatives to the status quo, including reforms, a bureaucracy with better information-collection capabilities is less likely to initiate such a search and therefore less likely to initiate reforms.

Second, policymakers choose between reforms and the strengthening of central planning as alternative solutions to the status quo. The choice of one solution over another depends on their relative costs. Again, all else being equal, the higher the costs of strengthening central planning (or reform), the more likely is reform (or strengthening of central planning) to be chosen. This essay focuses on one aspect of these costs—the costs of information provision.

This article argues that the problems identified in the literature on public choice should critically affect our research on public opinion and our understanding of the impact of public opinion on foreign policy. While a robust literature has emerged around social choice issues in political science, there has been remarkably little appreciation for these problems in the literature on public opinion in general and on public opinion and foreign policy in particular. The potential importance of social choice problems for understanding the nature and role of public opinion in foreign policy making is demonstrated through an examination of American public attitudes about military intervention abroad. In particular, drawing on several common descriptions of the underlying dimensionality of public attitudes on major foreign policy issues, it is shown that there may be important intransitivities in the ordering of public preferences at the aggregate level on policy choices such as those considered by American decision makers in the period leading up to the Gulf War. Without new approaches to public-opinion polling that take these problems into consideration, it will be difficult to make credible claims about the role of public opinion in theforeignpolicy process.

A two-stage Asymmetric Escalation Game is developed to explore the connection between stage credibility and deterrence stability. There are two players in the model: Challenger and Defender. Challenger may initiate or not. If Challenger initiates, Defender may do nothing, respond in kind, or escalate; Challenger may then escalate or counterescalate, and so on. Each player is uncertain about the other's intentions at the final stage of the game. Escalation represents a choice that both players believe is qualitatively different from other available responses. Thus the model applies to any situation in which Defender may respond by crossing a threshold, thereby inducing a (psychologically) distinct level of conflict.

The Perfect Bayesian Equilibria are identified and interpreted, and inferences are drawn about the viability of limited war options and various competing flexible response deployment policies. In general, the model reveals that substrategic deployments add little to overall deterrence stability. Under certain relatively rare conditions, a policy called no-first-use in the super power context offers Defender advantages that might conceivably warrant the deployment stance associated with it. But a war fighting deployment never benefits Defender. Within the confines of the model, therefore, limited or substrategic wars are possible but unlikely.

This article synthesizes significant findings of theoretical and empirical research on the third wave of democratization. It addresses a number of central questions. What changes have been taking place in the study of democracy and democratization over the past two decades? How have the concepts of democracy and democratization been redefined for a new generation of scholars oriented to action and advice? What developments in the measurement of the two concepts have been stimulated by the quickening pace of democratization? What has been learned about the dynamics of democratization itself? What mixes of democratic institutions and rules offer the “best” prospect for democratic consolidation? What kinds of strategies and tactics have been prescribed for encouraging democratic reforms in those countries that remain nondemocratic? What are the prospects for the third wave of democratization?

This essay reviews three recent books on foreign policy decision making. Collectively, they sharply modify conventional realist analysis by emphasizing the possibility of choice, the necessity of analyzing relationships at the level of a dyad of states rather than at the level of either individual states or the entire international system, and the cognitive processes by which choices are made. But their substantial challenge to realism falls short of the next step necessary, namely, more fully developing a theory of how domestic political processes affect the choice of whether to use military force.

This essay reviews six recent books on modern Iranian politics. It suggests that Iranian politics can be analyzed from the perspective of four basic traditions and models: monarchical, liberal nationalist, religious, and leftist. Each model abstracts the essential elements of the political system and demonstrates the dominance of a certain perspective. The first three of these models have been implemented in post—World War II Iran, and even the left has had an impact. The essay concludes by stating that current Iranian domestic politics can be better understood by paying attention to five enduring features: historical continuity of the nation-state, steady increase in state power, persistence of patrimonialism, intense interaction between domestic and foreign policies particularly as it relates to control over oil, and the vitality of civil society even under the Islamic Republic.

This article reviews three recently published books: Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, Liah Greenfeld's Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, and Anthony D. Smith's National Identity. It examines these books in search of clues that explain the enigma of nationalism: What are the sources of the mysterious vitality of nationalism? Why does nationalism provide the most compelling identity myth in the modern world? Why can it motivate individuals more than any other political force? This inquiry reveals an irony attendant upon the study of nationalism: the more we learn about the emergence of nationalism, the less credible is the nationalist pretense that nations are natural, continuous communities of fate. Yet it is precisely this image of nationalism that nurtures the unique power of nationalism. The power of nationalism thus seems to be embedded in self-deception.

Economic sanctions have long occupied the attention of both scholars and policy makers. Despite the widespread use of sanctions, many observers have concluded that the inherent problems associated with imposing sanctions involving multiple senders substantially limit their effectiveness. This article reviews two books that analyze the factors that influence cooperation among senders of multilateral sanctions. These books indicate that international institutions can do much to promote cooperation of this sort. However, this essay argues that the extent to which international institutions facilitate cooperation among senders of sanctions is likely to depend on the domestic politics of members, the type of institution being used for this purpose, the nature of the strategy being pursued, and the distribution of power among members. Although these books make significant contributions to our understanding of the factors that promote cooperation among senders of multilateral sanctions, they examine the factors that promote the effectiveness of sanctions in only a peripheral manner. One potential influence on the effectiveness of sanctions that are organized by an international institution, however, is the likelihood that the institution will be captured by member states or by interest groups within them. Additional research that investigates the conditions under which international institutions are likely to be captured and the implications of institutional capture for their performance may therefore prove useful to scholars of international relations and economic statecraft.

This review article examines four recent volumes on the European Union, each of which takes as its substantive and theoretical starting point the relaunching of the European Community in the mid-1980s around the single market initiative. Taken together, they provide a comprehensive account of the momentous events leading up to the Maastricht summit. They also present an accurate reflection of the current state of the subfield. Their basic research agenda, a continuation of traditional approaches in Community studies, revolves around the “big bangs” of integration and the conventional models of neofunctionalism and intergovemmentalism. This scholarly continuity generates unwelcome consequences for the selection of research puzzles and for the robustness and reach of the findings. As a remedy, several strategies—some methodological, others theoretical—are outlined for generating new insights into the growing complexity of the European Union.

This article examines recent works that investigate how ideas acquire influence over economic policy choice. The revival of interest in the “material power of ideas” stems from discontent with the inability of rational interest-based models to explain particular policy outcomes, except by resorting to auxiliary assumptions. The works under review primarily apply “ideas approaches” as supplementary analytical devices to clarify the dynamics of policy choices. These studies succeed in illuminating the interpenetration of interests and ideas in order to plumb the problematic variability of interest formation and the degree of public influence over economic policy parameters. The bolder thesis that ideas have a force of their own (independent of all interests) is, however, misconceived and unproved.