Conventional models of the politics of economic reform tend to be based on an assumption about the costs and benefits of reform, known informally as the J-curve. Reforms are expected to make things worse before they get better. This presents a classic time inconsistency dilemma for reformist governments forced to demand severe sacrifices from the public in the short term for the mere promise of future gains. In response, political economy models of the reform process have tended to stress the importance of insulating governments from the pressures of the short-term losers until a sufficient constituency of winners has been created with a stake in supporting and enhancing the reforms.

Based on evidence from the postcommunist transitions, this article suggests that the most serious political obstacles to the process of economic reform have come not from the short-term losers but from the shortterm winners. Groups that gain substantial rents from the early distortions of a partially reformed economy have a stake in maintaining a partial reform equilibrium that generates high private gains, but at a considerable social cost. In these countries, the main political challenge has been, not to marginalize the losers, but to restrain the winners. This explains the paradoxical outcome of the postcommunist transitions: that political systems which are more inclusive of the losers have been able to adopt and sustain more comprehensive economic reforms than states insulated from popular pressures.

MY personal collection of World Politics begins with the January 1957 issue: volume 9, number 2. It skips to October 1964 and is complete from then on. When I left Princeton to become Northwestern University's fifteenth president, I gave away most of my professional library, envisioning all too accurately the demands of a new life. I never considered parting with any copies of World Politics, however. Perhaps in part this sense of possession came from sentiment arising from my long and happy association with this journal. I think, however, that it stemmed mostly from a recognition that World Politics has been the leading journal of international affairs and comparative studies from its founding until now.

This article presents an analysis of the postindustrial economy from a political economy perspective. It identifies a set of specific distributional trade-offs associated with the new role played by the services sector as the chief source of employment growth in advanced democracies over the last three decades. It is argued that three core policy objectives—budgetary restraint, wage equality, and expansion of employment—constitute a political “trilemma” that allows only two of the goals to be successfully pursued at the same time. Using a combination of statistical and caseoriented analysis, the authors demonstrate the political and economic salience of the trilemma, the distributional tensions inherent in each strategy to cope with it, and the political-institutional constraints under which these strategies are chosen.

Recent political and economic transformations in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe have brought about a renewed interest in the incentives and capabilities of different types of political regimes to implement policies that are deemed necessary for economic development, in particular, policies aimed at increasing tax revenue. One central question is whether democracies can collect as much in taxes as dictatorships. This article addresses this question by examining whether regime type, classified as democracy or dictatorship, has a causal impact on a government's capacity to mobilize resources through taxation. On the basis of data gathered for 108 countries for the period between 1970 and 1990, the article concludes that observed differences across countries regarding the level of taxes collected by the government are not due to the fact that some are under a democracy and others under a dictatorship. Concerns about the inability of democratic regimes to collect taxes are, therefore, unfounded.

Political science attends to causes and consequences of war but only fitfully welcomes study of its conduct, because few grasp how much the dynamics of combat shape politics. Bernard Brodie called for development of strategic studies on the model of the discipline of economics, because neither the military nor academia treated the subject rigorously. His call was answered in the early cold war, with mixed results. Theories about nuclear deterrence burgeoned while empirical studies of war lagged. The late—cold war impasse in nuclear strategy, rooted in NATO doctrine, shifted attention to conventional military operations and empirically grounded theory. Since the cold war, research on general theoretical questions about war and peace has been prospering, but education in military matters has been eroding. Interdisciplinary strategic studies integrate political and military elements of international conflict, but there is no recognized discipline of military science; military analysis is smuggled into political science and history departments, where it is resisted by calls to conceptualize security broadly or focus on purely theoretical work. If serious military studies are squeezed out of universities, there will be no qualified civilian analysts to provide independent expertise in policy and budget debates, and decisions on war and peace will be made irresponsibly by uninformed civilians or by the professional military alone.

Russia's recent experience fighting inflation—dramatic success in 1995–96 after repeated failures in 1992–94—poses a challenge for existing theories of the politics of macroeconomic stabilization. Monthly inflation rates fell to close to zero despite a deeply unpopular president distracted by heart disease, a government penetrated by economic lobbies, a far-from-independent central bank, a parliament dominated by opposition factions, a lively election season, and the fiscal pressures of “fighting a regional war. The article reviews this experience, shows its incompatibility with existing political economy theories, and proposes an explanation with implications for other reforming regimes. Success was achieved by offering previous beneficiaries from inflation—major commercial banks and subsidized sectors—other sources of government-protected rents that did not increase the money supply. Even when expropriating powerful rent seekers is politically infeasible, it is sometimes possible to trade them less-inflationary rents for ones that are more inflationary.

The article reconstructs and explains the patterns of collective protest in four Central European countries: former East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia during the early phases of democratic consolidation (1989–93). The method of event analysis of protest behavior is employed. Content analysis of six major newspapers in each country provides empirical evidence. The examination of data reveals striking contrasts in the magnitude and forms of protests. In each country the policies of the new democratic regimes were contested by different groups and organizations, employing different repertoires of contention. The authors consider propositions derived from four theoretical traditions—relative deprivation, instrumental institutionalism, historical- cultural institutionalism, and resource mobilization theory—to determine which provides the best explanation for the patterns observed in the data set. Three main conclusions are reached. First, the levels of "objective" or "subjective" deprivation are unrelated to the magnitude and various features of protest, which are best explained by a combination of institutional and resource mobilization theories. Second, democratic consolidation is not necessarily threatened by a high magnitude of protest, since the two seem to be unrelated. Third, if the demands of collective protest are moderate and the methods routinized, then protest may contribute to the robustness of a new democracy.

Given the increasing importance of constitutional modification in Eastern Europe, Latin America, South Africa, Europe, and Australia, it is imperative to study systemically the conditions under which formal constitutional amendments are likely to fail. In this paper, the authors isolate conditions whereby the instrumental objectives of participants in the politics of constitutional modification threaten to overload the institutional capacity of the amending process. The proximate cause of amendment process overload is indeterminacy regarding the redistributive impact of the proposed change. Redistributive indeterminacy is a function of a rigid amending process, an institutional structure that encourages a large number of constitutional players and amendments which provide broad scope for judicial interpretation. The authors isolate two critical factors: the intensity of mass and elite preferences surrounding constitutional proposals and die structure of the amending process itself. They next trace mese factors back to institutional variables to create a model to explain and predict constitutional failure in a range of contexts. Finally, they apply the model to highly visible recent constitutional failures in the United States and Canada.

Research on the less industrialized regions of the world has undergone major changes in terms of theoretical rigor, methodological sophistication, and the diversification of analytical approaches since the publication of Samuel P. Huntingdon's essay, “Political Development and Political Decay,” in World Politics in 1965. Yet more than three decades later, comparativists are rediscovering political institutions, highlighting the originality of Huntington's scholarly contribution. The resurgence of institutional analysis has redirected attention to the potential variability of political outcomes in the face of sweeping global currents, generated important theoretical insights, and created new bases for dialogue across disparate research traditions. Nevertheless, the horizons of institutional research need to be broadened to address the challenges posed by international influences, two-way interactions between politics and society, and institutional fluidity.

Two channels of political control allow elected politicians to influence monetary policy. First, political threats to the status, structure, or very existence of the central bank may force central bankers to comply with politically motivated demands on monetary policy. Second, politicians may use their powers of appointment to ensure diat central bank appointees share their electoral and party-political goals. This paper derives the monetary policy outcomes obtained as a function of me degree of central bank independence (zero, partial, or full) and central bankers' types (partisans or technocrats).

Based on a case study of the 1957 and 1992 institutional changes to the German central banking system and a regression analysis covering the period in between, the author argues that the formal independence of the system is protected by its embeddedness in the institutions of German federalism and by the federalist components of its decentralized organizational structure. The behavioral independence of the German central bank fluctuates over time with the party control of federalist veto points. The Bundesbank is staffed with nonpartisan technocrats who are partially insulated from political pressures.

This article explores why liberal states accept unwanted immigration, discussing the cases of illegal immigration in the United States and family immigration in Europe. Rejecting the diagnosis of state sovereignty undermined by globalization, the author argues that self-limited sovereignty explains why states accept unwanted immigration. One aspect of self-limited sovereignty is a political process under the sway of interest-group politics (“client politics,” as Gary Freeman says). The logic of client politics explains why the United States accepts illegal immigration. The case of family immigration in Europe suggests two further aspects of self-limited sovereignty: legal-constitutional constraints on the executive, and moral obligations toward historically particular immigrant groups. However, these legal and moral constraints are unevenly distributed across Europe, partially reflecting the different logics of guest worker and postcolonial immigration regimes.

Variation in the need for military and political support from military allies affects the degree to which foreign economic policies will discriminate in favor of military allies and against adversaries and other countries. Powers in need of such support will pursue discriminatory foreign economic policies in order to change the configuration of domestic interests to favor not only closer economic relations but also closer political relations. By strengthening domestic support for an alliance, policymakers make it more difficult for their allies to renege on alliance commitments. Stronger political relations in turn reinforce the deterrent effect of the alliance. Because the net strategic benefits from closer relations in their case are lower, powers that can go it alone without support from allies will refrain from discriminatory policies. Shifts in strategic need make it possible to explain variation in the links between security considerations and foreign economic policies within alliances over time and also across alliances. British grand strategy in the 1930s illustrates how shifts in strategic need influence the degree to which foreign economic policies discriminate in favor of potential military allies.

This review article identifies five research themes in the study of international environmental politics. Among them, the research on regime effectiveness and on transnational networks has the greatest potential for becoming a driving force in the search for new avenues in the analysis of international relations. Although at the moment less is known about regime consequences and the role of transnational networks in international environmental politics than about regime formation, the former two have recently produced research questions and strategies that seem to be promising. However, the study of regime effectiveness and transnational networks requires more sophisticated research strategies in order to realize its full potential. Although the concept of causal mechanisms used in this research strand seems to be an extremely innovative and promising approach, it needs to be developed in more detail and backed up by comparative designs.

This study explores the donor side of debates revolving around the proper role of foreign assistance as a foreign policy tool, by empirically testing for the aid determinants of four industrial democracies: France, Japan, Sweden, and the United States. A pooled cross-sectional time-series design is employed to assess the impacts of six sets of variables on aidflowsto thirty-six African states during the 1980s. Three sets of these variables—humanitarian need, strategic importance, and economic potential—are constructed using data traditionally employed in empirical foreign aid studies. Three additional sets of variables—cultural similarity, ideological stance, and region—are constructed from data that regional specialists consider to be important in the foreign aid equation. Although no two cases are alike, one can nevertheless draw some tentative conclusions about the nature of the foreign aid regime of the final cold war decade of the 1980s on the basis of several cross-national patterns. In short, the results (1) contradict rhetorical statements of northern policymakers who claim that foreign aid serves as an altruistic foreign policy tool designed to relieve humanitarian suffering; (2) confirm the expected importance of strategic and ideological factors in a foreign aid regime heavily influenced by the cold war; and (3) underscore the importance of economic, particularly trade, interests in northern aid calculations.

The strategic elites model of turnout argues that elites mobilize more when the probability of their effort deciding the electoral outcome is greater. Although the literature assumes that this probability depends solely on how close the election is, logically it depends jointly on how many votes are needed to affect the outcome (closeness) and on how many additional votes elite efforts are likely to garner (vote yield). Because the vote yield of mobilizational effort varies with the social capital of the district that elites face, the level of elite mobilizational effort (hence turnout) should depend interactively on closeness and social capital. The authors test their predictions using datafromJapanese lower house elections for the years 1967–90. Japan is an interesting test case both because its (former) electoral system differs from that for which the model was first developed and because the literature clearly stresses the role of elite mobilization through social networks but does not examine the particular hypotheses advanced here.

The economic logic of the current international economy does not predict the “eclipse of the state”. Economic globalization does restrict state power, but transnational capital needs capable states as much or more than does domestically oriented business. National success in the current global political economy has been associated not with minimal states but with states that are capable, active, and engaged. Pressure for eclipse flows from the conjunction between transnational economic forces and the political hegemony of an Anglo-American ideology that, in J. P. Nettl's words, “simply leaves no room for any valid notion of the state”. Even this combination of economic and political pressure is unlikely to eclipse the state, but it is likely to put public institutions on the defensive, eclipsing any possibility of the “embedded liberalism” described by John Ruggie. A “leaner, meaner” state is the likely outcome. The possibility of a more progressive alternative outcome would depend in part on whether current zero-sum visions of the relation between the state and civil society can be replaced by a more synergistic view.

In recent years, constructivist thinking about global politics has brought a breath of fresh auto international relations. By exploring questions of identity and interest, constructivist scholars have articulated an important corrective to the methodological individualism and materialism that have come to dominate much of IR. As the books under review indicate, constructivism has also succeeded in demonstrating its empirical value—documenting a new and important causal role for norms and social structure in global politics. Theoretically, however, the approach remains underspecified. In particular, constructivists typically fail to explain the origins of such structures, how they change over time, how their effects vary cross nationally, or the mechanisms through which they constitute states and individuals. Missing is the substantive theory and attention to agency that will provide answers to such puzzles, as well as ensure the development of a productive research program.

The end of the cold war has produced a sustained debate on international relations theory. Some scholars argue that the unexpected and unexpectedly peaceful demise of the post-World War II international order undermines the entire research agenda of the subfield; others maintain that it warrants an adjustment of the balance between theories or theoretical traditions; and still others hold that it has little or no relevance to theory. This essay reviews the debate in light of the new evidence that has accumulated over the past five years. It finds that because scholars rarely make the empirical implications of their arguments explicit, the cascade of new information concerning the event cannot advance the debate. However, the natural focus provided by a sudden and unexpected event of seminal importance and the outpouring of new data suggest the possibility of empirically driven progress in one's understanding of change in world politics. The article concludes with guidelines designed to increase the likelihood of such progress by clarifying the debate in advance of new releases of primary data.

Arend Lijphart's 1969 article on consociational democracy was a compelling critique of prevailing theories of democratic stability and the launching pad for one of the most widely regarded research programs in contemporary comparative politics. However, Lijphart and others who adopted consociational approaches encountered severe logical, theoretical, and empirical criticisms of their work. The success of the program and its apparent imperviousness to many of these attacks has been remarkable. Lijphart s primary response was to abandon standard norms of social science in favor of an “impressionistic” approach that protected the attractiveness and wide applicability of the theory at the cost of precision and scholarly rigor. The overall trajectory of the consociationalist research program is explained with reference to a shift from early- to late-Lakatosian commitments—from insisting on corroboration for one's theories through repeated encounters with evidence to a late-Lakatosian stance that expects the political and rhetorical skills of scholars operating on behalf of their research program to be more significant than evidence or theoretical coherence.

Almost none of the conditions that, according to the latest research, favor democratic durability were present in Western Europe between the world wars. Yet only four Western European states became dictatorships during this period, whereas the others remained democratic despite economic crisis, an unhelpful international system, and the lure of nondemocratic alternatives. Several recent works offer new explanations for this pattern of interwar outcomes. Insofar as these works analyze the entire universe of Western European cases, they represent an important methodological advance. However, they remain too wedded to a class-coalitional framework to provide both a parsimonious and a historically accurate account of why democracy collapsed in some states but not in others. This article proposes an alternative explanatory framework that focuses on how political parties can shape association life in such a way as to support or undermine democracy.