The categorization of states according to size has long been a part of world politics. Rothstein notes, for example, that the formalization of the categories of great and small powers occurred as a result of the signing of the Treaty of Chaumont in 1817. Recently, the concept of size has received an increasing amount of attention as a factor affecting foreign policy. One manifestation of this is the renewed interest in die foreign policy behavior of small states. In his pre-theory of foreign policy, Rosenau includes size as one of three “genotypic” variables assumed to exert a major influence on foreign policy. In addition, empirical studies have shown size to be an important factor underlying variations in the international behavior of nation-states.

The recent wave of democratic transitions has stimulated scholarly interest in a previously undeveloped area of study: comparative presidentialism. Comparative presidentialism seeks to define variant types of presidentialism that have emerged from transition processes, to identify the conditions that shape institutional choice and to understand more clearly the causal relationship between institutional choice and democratic regime outcomes. Using the postcommunist transitions, this paper contributes to the emerging comparative presidentialism literature by suggesting a revision to the argument that presidentialism leads to failed democratic transitions. The paper focuses attention away from the institutional rules of the game and toward the actors who actually make the institutional choice. Three postcommunist cases, distinguished by their different regime outcomes, are compared: Russia, Uzbekistan, and Estonia.

Earlier institutionalist studies in Chinese politics have shown how conservatives and local bureaucrats took advantage of institutional designs in the Leninist system of the People's Republic of China to delay and undermine the implementation of reforms. There has been less discussion of how reformers adapted their strategies to existing institutional constraints to overcome the opposition of conservatives. Using the implementation process of the Organic Law of the Village Committees, this article describes how the reformers adapted to the Chinese institutional setting to promote political reform over opposition at the elite and local levels.

As the case of the village elections shows, the reformers in China designed a strategy to promote reform incrementally. Each step along the way was arranged to appear to be a natural response to the interaction between the initial reform policy and unforeseen consequences brought about by the previous policy. In this process, reformers deliberately manipulated a crucial variable—time—to bring about gradual change in the important actor, that is, the peasants, from spectators into participants, and thereby to change the balance of power between proponents and opponents of the reform. Other political players were also carefully enfranchised at different stages of the implementation process to help reformers in their struggle against conservatives.

The literature on civil society in postcommunist regimes highlights its weakness as compared with civil society in other democracies. In this article the authors make a general argument on how different patterns of antecedent dictatorship affect the development of civil society across a range of democracies. They examine the slow emergence of two behaviors associated with a robust civil society—participation in organizational life and in protest—and explain variation across countries as a function of regime history. They draw their individual-level data from the World Values Survey and analyze the behavior of over forty-one thousand citizens from forty-two democracies. Using methods of hierarchical linear modeling to control for both national-level and individual-level factors, the authors find that different types of dictatorship and variation in their duration produce different negative legacies for the development of civil society.

Empirical analyses of deterrence have paid insufficient attention to the validity and reliability of the data used to test the central propositions of theories of deterrence. This article examines two prominent studies of immediate extended deterrence that do not deal adequately with the problems inherent in constructing a valid data set for quantitative analysis. The problems are particularly acute in the testing of theories of deterrence because of the difficulties in identifying cases of deterrence success and of inferring the intentions of would-be challengers. Our analysis explores these problems and suggests ways of testing theories of deterrence that can reduce the threats to valid inference.

There is a strong scholarly consensus that domestic revolutions create conditions ripe for international conflict. Traditionally scholars have treated revolutions as events, after which there is a period of time during which international conflict is more likely. Yet some states experience significant international conflict only during and in the immediate aftermath of a revolution, whereas other states continue to engage in conflict for many years and even decades afterward. This article seeks to explain the persistence of conflict for some but not all revolutionary states by differentiating the concept of revolutionary leaders from that of revolutions as events, both theoretically and empirically. The author shows that existing theories linking revolution to international conflict underemphasize an important mechanism through which revolution leads to conflict: by selecting conflict-prone leaders through the dynamics of revolutionary politics. He argues that revolutionary politics allow leaders with certain characteristics, including high risk tolerance and strong political ambition to alter the status quo, to obtain executive office because individuals without these characteristics generally do not succeed in leading revolutions. Having obtained power, revolutionary leaders have aggressive preferences that make their states more likely than nonrevolutionary states to instigate international conflict.

This article reviews the literature on the “smart sanctions” approach developed in the late 1990s in response to the failure of conventional sanctions and questions the efficacy of this instrument. Smart sanctions modify the conventional sanctions tool by targeting the culpable political elites by means of arms embargoes, financial sanctions, and travel restrictions and by cushioning vulnerable groups (children, women, the infirm, and the elderly) by exempting specified commodities such as food and medical supplies from embargoes. This two-pronged sanctions approach is designed to hit the real perpetrators directly and spare potential innocent victims, thus leading to the speedier change of sanctionee behavior. Although the special design of smart sanctions may seem logically compelling and politically attractive, this article argues that the numerous operational problems involved, combined with the intricacies of the political processes of the UN Security Council, will make a smart sanctions regime difficult to establish and enforce effectively.

Most theories that seek to explain democratization look to changes in the economy as the precursor to significant political liberalization, locating the main causal factor in either severe economic crisis or rapid economic growth. In the Chinese context, by contrast, the Communist Party has extricated itself from the socialist social contract with the urban working class without losing its grip on political power. Moreover, China has maintained a rapid pace of economic growth for over twenty-five years without significant political liberalization. Comparative analysis of China's post-1978 reform policies yields insights both across types of socialist transition, comparing China with Eastern Europe and Russia, and across time, comparing China with other high-growth East Asian economies. A key factor in China's ability to reform the economy without sacrificing political control is the timing and sequencing of its foreign direct investment (FDl) liberalization. There are two key variables that are important to this comparative analysis: China's pattern of ownership diversification and China's mode of integration into the global economy. The article relates these two variables to the success of economic change without political liberalization, in particular, how FDI liberalization has affected relations between workers and the ruling Communist Party. “Reform and openness” in this context resulted in a strengthened Chinese state, a weakened civil society (especially labor), and a delay in political liberalization.

Many scholars claim that democracy improves population health. The prevailing explanation for this is that democratic regimes distribute health-promoting resources more widely than autocratic regimes. The central contention of this article is that democracies also have a significant pro-health effect regardless of public redistributive policies. After establishing the theoretical plausibility of the nondistributive effect, a panel of 153 countries for the years 1972 to 2000 is used to examine the relationship between extent of democratic experience and life expectancy. The authors find that democratic governance continues to have a salutary effect on population health even when controls are introduced for the distribution of health-enhancing resources. Data for fifty autocratic countries for the years 1994 to 2007 are then used to examine whether media freedom—independent of government responsiveness—has a positive impact on life expectancy.

The knowledge economy, deindustrialization, and the decline of Fordism have undermined the economic complementarities that once existed between skilled and semiskilled workers. The result has everywhere been a decline in coordinated wage bargaining and unionization and a notable rise in labor market inequality. Yet, the political responses have been very different across advanced democracies. While labor markets for part-time and temporary employment have been deregulated across the board, some countries have compensated losers through increased cash transfers and active labor market programs and others have allowed inequality and insider-outsider divisions to grow deeper. The article argues that the divergent government responses reflect differences in underlying electoral coalitions, and that these in turn mirror the structure of party and electoral systems. The authors support their argument with evidence for government responses to economic shocks in the period 1980 to 2010.

The concept of political culture embraces some of the most basic, perennially fascinating concerns in behavioral political science; because of certain ambiguities in its theoretical formulation, however, there has been a tendency for the term to grow fuzzy with continued use. Its connection with related concepts, such as political psychology, political structure, and political language, has remained unclear, with the result that political culture has been difficult to isolate as an independent variable. Thus it has come to occupy a position on the periphery of politics, and is usually presumed to reinforce the status quo.

This paper re-examines previous formulations of the concept and proposes a theoretical synthesis. The analytical framework is derived from semiological theory, a branch of science specifically designed for the analysis of meanings. The central variable is the political symbol. By analyzing the interactions of political symbols within a comprehensive semiological framework, the traditional concerns of political culture can be accommodated in a more precise and systematic way.

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.

Analysis of the process of democratization should focus not on socioeconomic change, but on the origin and development of political opposition and on the structure of political bargaining between the regime and its challengers. The recent democratic breakthrough in Taiwan is attributable to the capabilities of the political opposition in agenda setting, the shifting of bargaining arenas, and the creation of incentives for the reformist leaders of the regime to play the game. Democratization in Taiwan will continue because the ruling party has been able to maintain its dominant position in new political frameworks.

The author contends that the difference between so-called factual and counterfactual arguments is greatly exaggerated; it is one of degree, not of kind. Both arguments ultimately rest on the quality of their assumptions, the chain of logic linking causes to outcomes, and their consistency with available evidence. He critiques two recent historical works that make extensive use of counterfactuals and finds them seriously deficient in method and argument. He then reviews the criteria for counterfactual experimentation proposed by social scientists who have addressed this problem and finds many of their criteria unrealistic and overly restrictive. The methods of counterfactual experimentation need to be commensurate with the purposes for which it is used. The author discusses three uses for counterfactual arguments and thought experiments and proposes eight criteria appropriate to plausible-world counterfactuals.

This essay addresses the question, “Why do different democracies pursue different public policies?” through an examination of taxation policy in the United States, Sweden, and Britain. The essay demonstrates how the different decision-making structures found in these three democracies (characterized as pluralist, corporatist, and party government systems, respectively) bias each polity toward different types of policy outcomes. The key argument is that institutional structures are the context in which political actors must necessarily define their policy preferences and determine their strategic objectives. Institutional structures thus provide a central link between individual choice behavior and macro policy outcomes.

The relation between stability and the distribution of power is an important and long-debated problem in international relations theory. The balance-of-powcr school argues that an even distribution of power is more stable, while the preponderance-of-power school argues that a preponderance of power is more stable. Empirical efforts to estimate this relation have yielded contradictory results. This essay examines the relation between stability and the distribution of power in an infinite-horizon game-theoretic model in which two states are bargaining about revising the international status quo. The states make offers and counteroffers until they reach a mutually acceptable settlement or until one of them becomes so pessimistic about the prospects of reaching an agreement that it uses force to impose a new settlement. The equilibrium of the game contradicts the expectations of both schools and offers an explanation for the conflicting empirical estimates. In the model stability is greatest when the status quo distribution of benefits reflects the expected distribution of benefits that the use of force would impose.

The idea that interest groups may play a significant role in Communist politics has, until recently, not been seriously entertained either by Western political scientists or by Soviet legal specialists. The concept of “totalitarianism” that has dominated the analysis of communism in the West has seemed to preclude the possibility that interest groups could challenge or affect the single ruling party as the fount of all power. The uniqueness of a totalitarian system has been deemed to lie in the very totality of its political power, excluding, as it were by definition, any area of autonomous behavior by groups other than the state or party, and still more, preventing serious influence by them on the process of decision-making. Marxist theorists, starting from different presuppositions, have assumed that the single ruling party, the organization of the working class, best knew the “real” interests of the people as a whole, and have denied the possibility of fundamental conflicts of interest within the working class, or between it and associated friendly classes such as the peasantry. Within the ruling party itself, groups or factions opposing the leadership have not been admitted in theory or permitted in practice.

Open conflict between presidents and prime ministers has become a familiar phenomenon throughout East Central Europe since the fall of communism. While individual personalities and the particular constellations of issues in each country have helped shape individual conflicts, this article seeks to account for them in more fundamental structural terms and to place them in the context of current debates over the relative virtues of presidentialism and parliamentarism. There is a discrepancy between the prestige and popularity of presidents and their modest formal powers; prime ministers, by contrast, enjoy considerable formal power but only limited legitimacy. Since the distribution of authority in newly constituted democracies is ambiguous and fluid, with no established conventions and understandings defining precisely the boundaries among key institutions, presidents seek to utilize the ambiguity to convert their assets of prestige into “real” power over policy, while prime ministers resist what they see as incursions into their areas of responsibility. The article explores the strengths and weaknesses of each side, the terrain of struggle, the tactics employed, the political outcomes to date, and the implications for political consolidation and the future distribution of executive authority in the region's states.

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.

Previous research has documented only a modest success rate for imposed sanctions. By contrast, the success rate is higher in cases that are settled at the threat stage. In this article, the authors provide new insights about the circumstances under which sanctions cause behavioral change only after being imposed. First, the target must initially underestimate the impact of sanctions, miscalculate the sender's determination to impose them, or wrongly believe that sanctions will be imposed and maintained whether it yields or not. Second, the target's misperceptions must be corrected after sanctions are imposed. A game-theoretical model with incomplete information is used to develop and clarify the argument.