This article investigates the politics of change in coordinated market econo\mies, and explores why some countries (well known for their highly cooperative arrangements) manage to sustain coordination when adjusting to economic transformation, while others fail. The authors argue that the broad category of “coordinated market economies” subsumes different types of cooperative engagement: macrocorporatut forms of coordination are characterized by national-level institutions for fostering cooperation and feature a strong role for the state, while forms of coordination associated with enterprise cooperation more typically occur at the level of sector or regional institutions and are often privately controlled. Although these diverse forms of coordination once appeared quite similar and functioned as structural equivalents, they now have radically different capacities for self-adjustment.

The role of the state is at the heart of the divergence among European coordinated countries. A large public sector affects the political dynamics behind collective outcomes, through its impact both on the state's construction of its own policy interests and on private actors' goals. Although a large public sector has typically been written off as an inevitable drag on the economy, it can provide state actors with a crucial political tool for shoring up coordination in a postindustrial economy. The authors use the cases of Denmark and Germany to illustrate how uncontroversially coordinated market economies have evolved along two sharply divergent paths in the past two decades and to reflect on broader questions of stability and change in coordinated market economies. The two countries diverge most acutely with respect to the balance of power between state and society; indeed, the Danish state—far from being a constraint on adjustment (a central truism in neoliberal thought)—plays the role of facilitator in economic adjustment, policy change, and continued coordination.

Textbook accounts of the Anglo-French trade agreement of 1860 argue that it heralded the beginning of a liberal trading order. This alleged success holds much interest from a modern policy point of view, for it rested on bilateral negotiations and most-favored-nation clauses. With the help of new data on international trade (the RICardo database), the authors provide empirical evidence and find that the treaty and subsequent network of MFN trade agreements coincided with the end of a period of unilateral liberalization across the world. They also find that it did not contribute to expanding trade at all. This is contrary to a deeply rooted belief among economists, economic historians, and political scientists. The authors draw a number of policy lessons that run counter to the conventional wisdom and raise skepticism toward the ability of bilateralism and MFN arrangements to promote trade liberalization.

The author argues that to understand the relationship between partisan government and equality two fundamental things need to be done: separate the effects of partisanship on policy and of policy on the economy; and assess the influence of government partisanship once the mediating role of corporatism is accounted for. The main goal of this article is to explore the relationship between government partisanship, policy, and inequality at the lower half of the wage distribution. The analysis is motivated by a puzzling finding in previous work: the absence of government partisanship effects on earnings inequality. The author focuses on the role of three different policies: government employment, the generosity of the welfare state, and minimum wages. The results show that government employment is a most significant determinant of inequality (although it is affected by left government only when corporatism is low). They also demonstrate that welfare state generosity does not affect inequality and, in turn, is not associated with left government. Finally, they reveal that the effect of government partisanship on minimum wages and of minimum wages on inequality is completely conditional on the levels of corporatism (these effects are only present when corporatism is low). The author explains why specific policies do or do not affect earnings inequality and also why corporatism mitigates or magnifies the influence of government partisanship. By explicitly exploring the determinants of policy and earnings inequality, the article represents an important contribution to our understanding of how governments can promote redistribution.

The likely endogeneity between democracy and trade is addressed with an instrumental variables strategy in this article about whether international trade fosters democracy. The authors use a measure of natural openness to obtain estimates of the causal impact of openness on democratization in three separate samples spanning the last 130 years. A positive impact of openness on democracy is apparent in the data over the long run. The post–World War II results suggest that with a rise in trade with other countries equal to a one standard deviation increase, countries such as Indonesia, Russia, and Venezuela could eventually become as democratic as the U.S., Great Britain, or France. There is some variation in the impact of openness by region that may be because trade seems to have a positive impact only when the capital-to-labor ratio is sufficiently high. This is consistent with the idea that openness promotes democracy when it strengthens the economic fortunes of the middle class.

By pressuring governments to hold democratic elections and by becoming directly involved in the electoral process through technical assistance and funding or as election monitors, international actors now play a visible role in domestic elections and other democratic processes throughout the developing world. Although scholars have documented several macrolevel relationships between international-level variables and movement toward democracy, there has been little attention paid to the microlevel effects of international involvement in the democratization process. This article examines the effects of international election observation as a prominent form of international involvement in domestic elections and exploits a natural experiment in order to test whether international observers reduce election fraud. Using data from the 2003 presidential elections in Armenia, the article demonstrates that although observers may not eliminate election fraud, they can reduce election-day fraud at the polling stations they visit. The unusual advantage of experiment-like conditions for this study offers unique causal evidence that international actors can have direct, measurable effects on the level of election-day fraud and, by extension, on the democratization process.

Higher education policy has been subject to considerable reform in OECD states over the past two decades. Some states have introduced tuition fees, others have massively increased public funding for higher education, and still others remain in stasis, retaining the elitist model with which they began the postwar era. This article develops the argument that higher education policy in the OECD is driven by a set of partisan choices within a trilemma between the level of enrollment, the degree of subsidization, and the overall public cost of higher education. The author develops a formal model of the micromechanisms underlying movements within this trilemma, noting the importance of partisan politics, existing enrollment, tax structure, and access. These propositions are tested statistically on a sample of twenty-two OECD countries and through case histories of higher education reform in England, Sweden, and Germany.

Why do some Muslim women adopt fundamentalist Islamic value systems that promote gender-based inequalities while others do not? This article considers the economic determinants of fundamentalist beliefs in the Muslim world, as women look to either marriage or employment to achieve financial security. Using cross-national public opinion data from eighteen countries with significant Muslim populations, the authors apply a latent class model to characterize respondents according to their views on gender norms, political Islam, and personal religiosity. Among women, lack of economic opportunity is a stronger predictor of fundamentalist belief systems than socioeconomic class. Cross-nationally, fundamentalism among women is most prevalent in poor countries and in those with a large male-female wage gap. These findings have important implications for the promotion of women's rights, the rise of political Islam, and the development of democracy in the Muslim world.

To explain the distribution of civil wars, guerrilla warfare, and revolutionary outbreaks, the literature on modern political violence has shifted, broadly speaking, from a modernization perspective that emphasized the role of material conflict and of grievances to a more recent research program that stresses the geographical and organizational opportunities that insurgents may have to engage in violence. Drawing on those lines of inquiry equally, this article offers an integrated analytical model that considers both the motives and the opportunities of states and rebels. Civil wars, guerrillas, and revolutionary outbreaks are seen as a result of the nature and distribution of wealth in each country. Systematic and organized violent conflicts are most likely in economies where inequality is high and wealth is mostly immobile, that is, in societies where those worse off would benefit substantially from expropriating all assets. Violence is conditional on the mobilizational and organizational capacity of challengers and on the state capacity to control its territory. The theory is tested on data on civil wars from 1850 to 1999 for the whole world and on data on guerrilla warfare and revolutionary episodes spanning the years from 1919 to 1997 across all countries.

Although research in the advanced industrial nations has identified a supportive link between an expanded public sector role and economic openness, studies of the developing world have been much less sanguine about the possibilities of broader state intervention in the context of economic liberalization. The authors investigate the possibility that governments in Latin America may “embed” economic openness in a broader public sector effort. They find that while several countries have moved toward an orthodox neoliberal model with minimal state interventions, other Latin American governments have maintained a broader public sector presence on the supply side of the economy while pursuing deep liberalization. They call the latter strategy “embedded neoliberalism,” to distinguish it from the more egalitarian ambitions of postwar embedded liberalism. Cross-sectional time-series analysis reveals that embedded neoliberal strategies in Latin America have grown out of a legacy of advanced import-substitution industrialization and have been promoted by nonleft governments, except in cases where labor is very strong. The orthodox neoliberal model, by contrast, has emerged where postwar industrial development was attenuated and where labor unions were weakened considerably by the debt crisis.

Two major questions are seldom addressed in the literature on Islamism and opposition social movements more generally: (1) what explains the relative success or failure of Islamist groups in mobilizing a social base and (2) what role do Islamist ideas play in attracting support. Islamist movements vary significantly in their origins, leadership, ideas, and strategies. In answering these important questions, this article offers three main propositions: that under certain conditions, Islamism can emerge as a powerful idea that generates social appeal; that to be successful, Islamist organizations must develop a local Islamist ideology that suits the local social base, rather than tie themselves to a global Islamist agenda,; and that in authoritarian contexts, especially where open mobilization is forbidden, inclusive informal social networks are an essential mechanism for spreading Islamist ideas and protecting group members. Nonetheless, there are limitations to an Islamist movements ability to grow and bring about political change. The article contributes to an understanding of Islamism and, more broadly, to an understanding of why and how opposition movements emerge and mobilize under authoritarian regimes. The article develops these propositions in a comparative examination of three Islamist groups active in the Central Asian and south Caucasus regions of the former Soviet Union (FSU): Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami (HT), the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan (IRP), and the Islamic Party of Azerbaijan (IPA).

This article investigates the coalitional bases of authoritarian rule to explain striking variation in adjustment policy to the Asian Financial Crisis in Indonesia and Malaysia. Given currency depreciation with financial sector fragility, holders of mobile assets prefer to maintain an open capital account, while owners of fixed assets and labor favor restrictions of capital mobility to facilitate expansionary macroeconomic policies. Differences in adjustment policy across the two countries reflect differences in the political coalitions supporting the authoritarian regimes. These findings illuminate the nature of political conflict during financial crises and show how a nuanced view of the coalitions supporting authoritarian rule can yield powerful insights into the political economy of authoritarianism and economic adjustment in a global economy.

Recent cross-national studies have returned their attention to the structural determinants of political regimes, highlighting in particular the factor of “landholding inequality” as a decisive barrier to democratization. This article provides thefirstsystematic test of such hypotheses at the microlevel and proposes a new account of authoritarianism's durability by examining the crucial case of pre-World War I Prussia. The article analyzes the results of a roll-call vote on a watershed piece of legislation that was defeated on the eve of World War I-legislation that would have democratized suffrage rules in Germany's largest state. When examined systematically, this historically and theoretically important vote reveals two surprising lessons: first, landholding inequality undercuts the prospects of democratization even holding income inequality constant. Second, the nature of elite competition and electoral considerations, shaped by the institutional configuration of nondemocratic regimes, can also thwart democratization, even when socioeconomic conditions may appear to make a society ripe for regime change.

Existing literature emphasizes the disorganizing or weakening effects of economic liberalization on civil society, whereby free-market policies are said to demobilize and depoliticize collective actors. The article evaluates the effects of economic liberalization on large-scale societal mobilizations across seventeen Latin American countries for the period 1970–2000. The article further tests the effects of economic liberalization on individual political participation across sixteen Latin American countries for the period 1980–2000. In contrast to the atomization literature, this article provides strong evidence that economic liberalization leads to greater levels of societal mobilization in the context of free-market democratization. The article also demonstrates that economic liberalization does not induce a decline in political participation. Collectively, these results cast doubt on the theoretical underpinnings and empirical findings presented in Kurtz (2004).

Latin America had long been the one region in the world without major ethnic parties, but in recent years a couple of inclusive ethnic parties have registered important electoral victories. A substantial literature maintains that ethnic parties win by mobilizing their base through exclusionary ethnic appeals, but this article argues that such appeals are unlikely to be successful in regions such as Latin America, where ethnic polarization is low and ethnic identification is fluid and multiple. In these areas, inclusive strategies are more likely to be successful. Indeed, some parties, which the author refers to as ethnopopulist parties, have won votes from diverse ethnic constituencies by moderating their discourse, forming cross-ethnic alliances, and formulating a broad populist appeal. This article focuses on the most successful ethnopopulist party to date, the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) in Bolivia. It shows how the MAS used an inclusive ethnic appeal and classical populist strategies to fuse traditional populist constituencies—politically disenchanted urban mestizos with nationalist and statist views—to its rural, largely indigenous base. The article also examines the extent to which these arguments can account for the varying performance of other parties in the region.

Going beyond historical and rational choice institutionalism, this article elaborates the core of a new theory that can account for the discontinuous, disproportionate, and frequently wave like-nature of institutional change. Cognitive-psychological findings on shifts in actors' propensity for assuming risk help explain why periods of institutional stasis can be followed by dramatic breakthroughs as actors eventually respond to a growing problem load with efforts at bold transformation. And insights on boundedly rational learning explain why solutions to these problems often occur as emulation of other countries' innovations and experiences. The new approach, which elucidates both the demand and the supply side of institutional change, is illustrated through an analysis of the transformation of developmental states, welfare states, and political regimes.

Studies of religion and politics have begun to force their way into the mainstream of the discipline thanks to their increasing methodological sophistication and theoretical ambition in addition to the push of real-world events. In comparative politics, puzzle-driven structured comparison has yielded new insights into the rationality of religious behavior, the weight of path dependence in shaping religious values, and the play of socioeconomic factors in shaping religion's vitality. In international relations, recognition of the importance of religious identities and values in the play of international affairs has spelled an advance over realist caricatures that long discounted ideas as epiphenomenal and focused on the quest for wealth and power as the sole driver of international politics. But notable lacunae remain. The comparative subfield still needs to reckon with the noninstrumental aspect of religious behavior, the power of religion as an independent variable, and the differential appeal, persuasiveness, and political salience of religious ideas over time. The IR subfield must move beyond “paradigm wars” focused on whether religion matters in international politics in favor of more empirically grounded, structured comparison to illuminate when and why religion matters in international affairs.

This article examines the significant contributions of recent research on immigration and integration in Europe and North America and highlights the potential of such research to influence the social sciences. The first part of the article advances a framework for analyzing four types of scholarship and then applies that framework to the study of immigration and integration. Type 1 scholarship develops theoretical or conceptual insights for scholars within a subfield, type 2 tests or refines theories that are specific to a particular dimension of the subfield, type 3 imports broader comparative or social scientific concepts to reshape the study of a topic within a subfield, and type 4 uses evidence from a subfield to develop theoretical tools that can be applied more broadly in the social sciences. The second part of the article reviews four books that highlight the empirical frontiers of immigration and integration research. Each book tends to epitomize one of the four types of scholarship, but together they demonstrate the possibility of making contributions on multiple registers. The article concludes by suggesting promising frontiers within the immigration and integration subfield and by defining the concept of a comparative politics of identity and sketching out its terrain. Since immigration and integration researchers are centrally interested in the role of identity in politics, they have the potential to be pivotal in advancing this new arena of inquiry.

Recent events in Europe and Latin America have triggered serious debate over federalism. In response, political scientists have turned to the new institutionalism literature in the attempt to understand both the causes and the consequences of federal institutions. Continuing a long tradition in the scholarship on federalism, each of the books under review defines the term differently, reflecting a lack of conceptual agreement that may complicate the development of more robust theories.

Despite these conceptual differences, and their focus on very different time periods, the four books under review are alike in the emphasis they place on bargaining between national and subnational politicians. While this interest in bargaining clearly demonstrates the continuing impact of William Riker's work, much of the new research challenges parts of the Rikerian framework. As a measure of their quality, these four books will significantly shape the course of the emerging literature on comparative federalism, but future work should pay greater attention to interests, ideas, and international factors.

The establishment of constitutional review in transitional and nondemocratic regimes has drawn attention to courts in nondemocratic states. Typically, authoritarian leaders treat law and courts in an instrumental fashion and try to keep judges dependent and responsive to their desires. The three books under review reveal the sophisticated ways that this is achieved, including the development ofjudicial bureaucracies and the cultivation of apolitical judges, and how the empowerment ofjudges tends to produce power that is contingent and easily withdrawn. The leaders of established authoritarian regimes do empower judges, if only to gain legitimacy for the regime and keep its officials accountable, but sometimes at a cost to judicial independence. The mixture of independence, power, and accountability ofjudges in authoritarian states differs from what is found in democratic ones, and informal practices often determine the meaning of judicial power. These patterns have serious consequences for legal transition.