This article examines how government policies affect ethnic relations by comparing outcomes across two nearby districts, one in Kenya and one in Tanzania, using colonial-era boundary placement as a “natural experiment.” Despite similar geography and historical legacies, governments in Kenya and Tanzania have followed radically different language, education, and local institutional policies, with Tanzania consistently pursuing more serious nation building. The evidence suggests that nation building has allowed diverse communities in rural Tanzania to achieve considerably better local public goods outcomes than diverse communities in Kenya. To illustrate, while Kenyan communities at mean levels of diversity have 25 percent less local school funding than homogeneous communities on average, the comparable figure in the Tanzanian district is near zero. The Kenya-Tanzania comparison provides empirical evidence that serious reforms can ameliorate social divisions and suggests that nation-building should take a place on policy agendas, especially in Africa.

Federal states in which component regions are invested with distinct ethnic content are more likely to collapse when they contain a core ethnic region, a single ethnic region enjoying pronounced superiority in population. Dividing a dominant group into multiple federal regions reduces these dangers. A study of world casesfindsthat all ethnofederal states that have collapsed have possessed core ethnic regions. Thus, ethnofederalism, so long as it is instituted without a core ethnic region, may represent a viable way of avoiding the most deadly forms of conflict while maintaining state unity in ethnically divided countries.

Standards have become one of the most important nontariff barriers to trade, especially national product standards that specify design or performance characteristics of manufactured goods. Divergent national standards often inhibit trade, whereas regional and international standards increasingly serve as instruments of trade liberalization. Consequently, the setting of international standards—seemingly technical and apolitical—is rapidly becoming an issue of economic and political salience. But who sets international standards? Who wins, who loses? This article offers a fresh analytical approach to the study of international standards, which the authors call the institutional complementarities approach. It builds on insights from realism and the “Battle of the Sexes” coordination game but emphasizes complementarities of historically conditioned standardization systems at the national level with the institutional structure of standardization at the international level. It posits that, after controlling for other factors that influence involvement in international standardization, differences in institutional complementarities play a critical though largely accidental role in placing firms from different countries or regions in a first- or second-mover position when standardization becomes global. The authors illustrate the insightfulness of this approach through statistical analyses of the first scientific set of data on standards use and standardization, collected by the authors through an international online survey.

Peacekeeping is perhaps the international community's most important tool for maintaining peace in the aftermath of war. Its practice has evolved significantly in the past ten or fifteen years as it has been used increasingly in civil wars. However, traditional peacekeeping between states is not well understood. Its operation is undertheorized and its effects undertested. This article explores the causal mechanisms through which peacekeepers keep peace and examines its empirical effects after interstate wars. To take the endogeneity of peacekeeping into account, it also examines where peacekeepers tend to be deployed. Duration analysis shows that, all else equal, peacekeeping significantly increases the chances that peace will last. Peacekeepers can help adversaries to maintain peace by making surprise attack more difficult, by reducing uncertainty about enemy intentions, and by preventing and controlling accidents and incidents that can spiral back to war.

Why has the rate of expansion of postcommunist state administrations varied so widely among countries that are at comparable stages of economic transition, have similar formal institutions, and have been equally exposed to the dynamics of EU integration? Based on a close comparison of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, the author argues that the critical factor in postcommunist state building is the robustness of party competition. The legacy of communism creates strong pressures for patronage politics, which swells the administration, but it is party competition that determines whether the predisposition to patronage politics in fact becomes the practice of patronage politics. The number of state administrative personnel has expanded significantly more in countries where party system development has stalled, and party competition has failed to constrain the party(ies) of government.

Fixed exchange rates implemented to increase credibility and attract foreign investment, or as an alternative approach to stabilization in high inflation economies, have been shown to be successful in expanding economic activity and correcting inflation in the short term but often lead to undesirable outcomes in the medium to long term. Although there is a wealth of literature documenting the boom-bust cycles associated with the adoption of a nominal anchor, no adequate explanation has been proffered as to governments repeatedly choosing policies that are self-defeating. The authors address this question with a political economy explanation based on the notion of a self-interested government for which short-term stabilization is attractive in the face of incentives posed by the electoral cycle. If the election coincides with the boom phase of an exchange rate—based stabilization, incumbent governments increase the likelihood of gaining reelection, and the bust phase will develop, if at all, only after the contest. The authors thus suggest a modified version of the traditional political business cycle. From the standpoint of a self-interested office-seeking government, exchange rate—based stabilizations can make good political sense. Empirical results based on an analysis of eighteen Latin American countries from 1970 to 1999 support the insights of the argument: movements towards a more fixed exchange rate are greater than three times more likely in a preelection period than in other stages of the electoral cycle.

Despite a sophisticated understanding of the impact of electoral institutions on macrolevel political behavior, little is known about the relationship between these institutions and microlevel legislative behavior. This article reviews existing claims about this relationship and develops a model for predicting how electoral institutions affect the relationship between parliamentarians and their party principals in the context of the European Parliament. The European Parliament is an ideal laboratory for investigating these effects, because in each European Union member state, different institutions are used to elect Members of European Parliament (MEPs). The results of this model, tested on four hundred thousand individual MEP vote decisions, show that candidate-centered electoral systems (such as open-list proportional representation or single-transferable-vote systems) and decentralized candidate-selection rules produce parliamentarians independent from their party principals. By contrast, party-centered electoral systems (such as closed-list proportional representation systems) and centralized candidate-selection rules produce parliamentarians beholden to the parties that fight elections and choose candidates: in the case of the European Parliament, the national parties.

The authors tested five novel hypotheses derived from the selectorate theory of war with data for up to about 140 states and spanning the years 1816–1993. The hypotheses point to subtle differences in selection effects across regime types that should operate during crises that fall short of war and also during wars. Leaders who rely on a large coalition (such as democrats) to remain in office are shown to be more selective than their small-coalition counterparts in their willingness to fight wars when the odds of victory are not overwhelming. They are also more selective than their small-coalition counterparts in their willingness to take part in disputes that fall short of war when the odds are not exceptionally favorable. However, they are less selective about this form of participation than they are about war. Small-coalition leaders show no such selectivity in their preparedness to engage in disputes short of war or in war as a function of their odds of victory. These results hold whether the odds of victory are assessed continuously or whether they are based on a specific threshold. The authors also find, in keeping with the selectorate theory, that if a war fails to resolve quickly, democrats try harder than autocrats to win. And when the war is over, democrats demobilize much more slowly than autocrats.

In the past three decades governments around the world have lowered barriers to international capital flows. This movement is widely attributed to the forces of globalization, as developed nations moved toward relative convergence on international financial openness. Yet developing nations with much to gain from openness to foreign investment moved only hesitantly and inconsistently in this direction. Analysis of two decades of capital account liberalization in Latin America and the OECD reveals that nations in Latin America with weaker domestic financial sectors face higher risks of transitional dislocations following liberalization and move less aggressively toward openness. In the OECD, by contrast, financial weakness is associated with greater movements toward capital account opening, as transitional costs are lower and governments are better equipped to ameliorate them. Examination of the transitional costs of liberalization thus helps to explain how market pressures may impede, rather than promote, market-oriented reform in Latin America.

This article examines obstacles to economic reform in Ukraine's transition to a market-based economy. Existing explanations for failures of reform in postcommunist states privilege societal actors, as in the case of Przeworski's J-curve, or state actors acting in a private, rent-seeking capacity, as in Hellman's partial reform equilibrium. Other explanations focus on weak state capacity. However, there is evidence to suggest that some groups of individuals who stall or halt market reforms may do so in their capacity as state actors. Their resistance to reform may be sub rosa: state actors may comply with formal institutional requirements of reform even as they seek to preserve the status quo. This tendency is evident in the privatization of land, the focus of this article. This article proposes an explanation for reform failures which suggests that some resistance to economic liberalization may derive from the efforts of state actors to protect the public good.

This article contributes to the growing literature on the role that domestic political institutions play in mediating globalization pressures by arguing that the capital tax constraints arising from international economic integration are the most severe for countries with majoritarian political institutions. In doing so, the author solves a tax puzzle that challenges conventional thinking about how institutions condition the relationship between economic globalization and domestic politics. He presents a formal, game-theoretic model to sharpen the basic logic of his argument and then tests some of the model's predictions empirically using both quantitative and qualitative evidence.

This article argues that clans, informal organizations based on kin and fictive kin ties, are political actors that have a profound impact on the nature of posttransitional regimes and the potential for regime durability. The article first develops the concept of “clan” conceptually. It then develops several propositions about clan politics and explores them empirically in the context of the post-Soviet Central Asian cases. These cases suggest the limits of the prevailing transitions and institutionalist approaches; these theories cannot explain regime transition in the Central Asian cases because they focus on the formal level and ignore the crucial informal actors—clans—and the informal politics that shape these cases. The distinct mode of transition, new regime institutions, and leadership and elite ideologies evident at the formal level have a very short-term effect; withinfiveyears, these cases converge toward a pattern of informal, clan-based politics. By contrast, this article draws upon the insights of the early literature on political development as well as the state-society literature to develop an alternative framework for explaining the dynamic between clans and the regime. Clan networks and clan deals penetrate and transform the formal regime in several ways—by clan-based appointments and patronage, by stripping state assets to feed one's clan network, and by crowding out other mechanisms of representation. As they undermine formal institutions, clans create an informal regime best understood as “clan politics.”

Scholars have usually understood the problem of democratic consolidation in terms of the creation of mechanisms that make possible the avoidance of populist excesses, polarized conflicts, or authoritarian corporatist inclusion that undermined free politics in much of postwar Latin America. This article makes the case that, under contemporary liberal economic conditions, the nature of the challenge for democratization has changed in important ways. Earlier problems of polarization had their roots in the long-present statist patterns of economic organization. By contrast, under free-market conditions, democratic consolidation faces a largely distinct set of challenges: the underarticulation of societal interests, pervasive social atomization, and socially uneven political quiescence founded in collective action problems. These can combine to undermine the efficacy of democratic representation and, consequently, regime legitimacy. The article utilizes data from the Latin American region since the 1970s on development, economic reform, and individual and collective political participation to show the effects of a changing state-economy relationship on the consolidation of democratic politics.

The debates of the 1990s over the causes of and responses to substate conflict were significant and wide ranging; there is now a sizable literature on ethnic conflict and civil war. But this literature makes few connections to long traditions of scholarly theorizing about collective violence in political science and in allied fields. This article examines two recent books by Mark Beissinger and Ashutosh Varshney that help turn mainstream theorizing about mass violence back toward its roots in problems of social order, state-society relations, and group mobilization. They break down the intellectual wall that has grown up between the study of something called “ethnic” or “nationalist conflict” and a long line of work on collective action in political sociology and cognate disciplines. These books are part of a new micropolitical turn in the field:a concern with uncovering the precise mechanisms by which individuals and groups go about trading in the benefits of stability for the inherently risky behavior associated with mass killing. The final section of the article assesses what such a turn might mean for research methods and theory making in comparative politics and international relations as a whole.

This article reviews the literature on postcommunist parties, which, by applying old Westernbased theories to a new and very different context, makes two important contributions to comparative politics. First, the literature stresses the importance of long-term and short-term historical legacies for the institutionalization of parties and electoral alignments; in trying to incorporate such legacies, it offers refinements to works on path dependency and political development. Second, the literature highlights the underinstitutionalization of postcommunist parties and thereby offers new insights—particularly on the party switching of electoral candidates—for studying the formation and consolidation of political parties.

A recent wave of deep empirical research provides a solid basis for a comparative reassessment of the role of coalitions in the politics of market reform in Latin America in the 1990s. This research confirms earlier findings that interest groups and distributional coalitions were not major protagonists in either antireform or proreform coalitions. The new research goes further empirically into analyzing the origins of interests, especially business interests, and finds them to be much more ambiguous and dynamic than assumed in earlier studies. Consequendy, other factors, especially organizations and the evolving macroeconomic context, were stronger influences on preferences regarding reform. Given the relative weakness of interest group coalitions, the article provides a typology and preliminary analysis of other kinds of coalitions—electoral, legislative, and policy—that have become more central to reform politics. These other types of coalitions still require further theoretical elaboration and empirical investigation in order to determine how they can best be deployed to illuminate reform politics.

Scholars have usually understood the problem of democratic consolidation in terms of the creation of mechanisms that make possible the avoidance of populist excesses, polarized conflicts, or authoritarian corporatist inclusion that undermined free politics in much of postwar Latin America. This article makes the case that, under contemporary liberal economic conditions, the nature of the challenge for democratization has changed in important ways. Earlier problems of polarization had their roots in the long-present statist patterns of economic organization. By contrast, under free-market conditions, democratic consolidation faces a largely distinct set of challenges: the underarticulation of societal interests, pervasive social atomization, and socially uneven political quiescence founded in collective action problems. These can combine to undermine the efficacy of democratic representation and, consequently, regime legitimacy. The article utilizes data from the Latin American region since the 1970s on development, economic reform, and individual and collective political participation to show the effects of a changing state-economy relationship on the consolidation of democratic politics.