Using data from the European Social Survey (2002–14), this article explores the effect of union membership on support for redistribution. The authors hypothesize that the wage-bargaining practices of unions promote egalitarian distributive norms, which lead union members to support redistribution, and that this effect is strongest among high-wage workers. Consistent with the authors’ expectations, the empirical analysis shows that the solidarity effect of union membership is strongest when unions encompass a very large share of the labor force or primarily organize low-wage workers. The authors also show that low-wage workers have become a significantly less important union constituency in many European countries over the time period covered by the analysis.

In recent years there has been a renewal of interest in the liberal tradition in international thought, with particular attention being paid to liberal conceptions of international distributive justice. This article describes and criticizes three different approaches to international distributive justice represented in the recent literature: (1) social liberalism, which takes the nation-state as basic and argues for international transfers to the extent necessary to sustain just domestic institutions; (2) laisser-faire liberalism, which, in its redistributivist variant, aims to rectify injustices arising from the unequal appropriation of natural resources; and (3) cosmopolitan liberalism, which takes each individual's interests as equally deserving of concern in the design of global (and sectional) institutions.

A number of influential studies in political science argue that important economic policy changes in the rich democracies since the mid-1970s were caused by the introduction of new economic ideas. This article claims that while experts exert strong influence over the selection of policy instruments, their influence over the formulation of policy objectives is much weaker. In the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, the predominance of Keynesianism in Austria and Denmark did not lead Austrian and Danish governments to maintain low unemployment longer than Sweden, where Keynesianism was less strong. But it did lead them to regard fiscal policy as an instrument that can be used to control the level of activity in the economy, while their Swedish counterparts relied instead on exchange rate and monetary policy.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Why and how do institutions strengthen? This article offers an explanation of institutional strength based on the study of participatory institutions. Combining the insights of historical institutionalism and participatory democracy literatures, the authors propose an endogenous theory of participation and argue that the strength of participatory institutions depends on the historic process of their creation and the subsequent political incorporation of the mobilized groups that bring them about. The authors comparatively study prior consultation in Bolivia and Ecuador since its inception in the 1990s. This institution is highly relevant in Latin America, particularly as countries in the region intensify the extraction of nonrenewable resources. The article shows that different paths of political incorporation of the groups mobilized for institutional adoption were consequential to the resulting institutional strength. The findings shed light on the tensions between participatory democracy and resource extraction in Latin America and have important implications for the study of participatory and political institutions worldwide.

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.

Although there is now a wealth of scholarship concerning the onset, duration, and termination of civil wars, there is not nearly as much empirical research by political scientists on the potential for postconflict democratization in countries that have been the site of civil wars. This relative scholarly neglect of post–civil war democratization stands in contrast to the efforts and resources that other actors—foreign ministries, international and nongovernmental organizations, and members of civil society—have invested in attempting to help construct democracy in postconflict states such as Indonesia, Liberia, and Uganda.

Using data on bilateral trade flows from both before and after World War II, this article examines the impact of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade on trade between its members and on the system of interwar trade blocs. It shows that the distribution of the benefits produced by the GATT was much more highly skewed than conventional wisdom assumes. The article also shows that the gold, Commonwealth, Reichsmark, and exchange-control blocs exerted positive and significant effects on trade after 1945. The authors attribute these effects to the bargaining protocol that governed successive rounds of GATT negotiations, the signature element of the postwar trade regime.

While a large literature suggests an important role for political parties in development, this article is the first attempt to layout and test a comprehensive theory connecting parties to economic growth. The authors argue that strong parties broaden the constituencies to which policymakers respond and help politicians solve coordination problems. These features help to ensure better economic management, public services, and political stability. And this, in turn, enhances economic growth. Drawing on a novel measure of party strength from the Varieties of Democracy data set, the authors test this theory on data drawn from more than 150 countries observed annually from 1901–2010. They identify a sizeable effect that is robust to various specifications, estimators, and samples. The effect operates in both democracies and autocracies, and is fairly stable across regions and time periods.

The authors argue that the effects of economic globalization on social democratic parties in Western Europe are conditional on the position of the median voter. If the median is far enough to the right, such parties will adopt business-friendly policies because they are required to win office. Only when the median is relatively far to the left will globalization constrain social democratic parties, forcing them to adopt policies further to the right in order to retain credibility. It is on this basis the authors argue that empirical studies are misspecified unless they include an interaction between measures of globalization and the position of the median. In addition to presenting formal theoretical arguments, the article reports empirical findings from fifteen countries in the period from 1973 to 2002 that support the conclusion that the effects of globalization are indeed contingent on the median. The authors find that the effects of globalization are significant for social democratic parties only in circumstances in which the median is relatively far to the left.

The Protestant Reformation was a crucial spring of modern international relations. Had it lever occurred, a system of sovereign states would not have arrived, at least not in the form or at he time that it did at the Peace of Westphalia. This is the counterfactual the author seeks to sustain. He first advances an elaborated but qualified defense of the conventional wisdom that Westphalia is the origin of modern international relations. He then accounts for how Protestant deas exerted influence through transforming identities and exercising social power. Structural heories, emphasizing changes in material power, are skeptical of this account. The author roots lis empirical defense of ideas in the strong correlation between Reformation crises and polities' interests in Westphalia. A description of the historical causal pathways running from ideas to political interest then follows. Germany and France are brought as cases to illustrate two of these pathways. Finally, the author shows the evidentiary weakness of alternative structural material explanations.

Well-governed countries are more likely to make use of foreign aid for the purposes of economic development and poverty alleviation. Therefore, if aid agencies are providing funds for the sake of development, these countries should receive more aid and categorically different types of aid as compared with poorly governed countries. In poorly governed countries aid should be given in forms that allow for less discretion. Using an original data set of all World Bank projects from 1996 to 2002, the author distinguishes programmatic projects from investment projects and national from subnational investment projects. If the World Bank allows more discretion in well-governed countries, then it will choose to provide programmatic and national aid for these recipients. The author presents evidence that the World Bank provides a larger proportion of national investment lending in better-governed countries. With regard to programmatic lending, he finds mixed evidence. Among counties eligible for International Development Association (IDA) aid, good governance surprisingly is associated with a lower proportion of programmatic aid, whereas for International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) borrowers, good governance is associated with a higher proportion. The author subjects these results to a number of robustness checks. Although he confirms the existing result in the literature that the World Bank provides larger overall amounts of aid to better-governed countries, his examination of the disaggregated data leads to questioning whether both lending wings of the World Bank are designing aid programs in the most prodevelopment way possible.

As a vehicle for the growing association of southern nationalists and Marxists, dependency theory is an important part of the history of our times, something much more than a school of academic writing. Whatever the varieties of analysis existing within this school (and there are many), a major historiographie shortcoming is common to most of its literature: having grasped the Hegelian insight that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, dependencistas exaggerate the point, making the mistake of refusing any autonomy, any specificity to the parts (southern countries) independently of their membership in the whole (the imperialist system established by the North). A better approach to the study of the place of the South in the international system is to emphasize the variety of state structures present there with their different abilities to mobilize forces internally and translate this into international rank. Southern advances are more substantial than many realize; the essay concludes that southerners should pay more attention to the real room for initiative and maneuver they have, but which dependency theory systematically overlooks. Most of the illustrative examples concern India, the Ottoman Empire, and Latin America before World War I.

When and why have employers supported the development of institutions of social insurance that provide benefits to workers during various employment-related risks? The analysis developed in this article challenges the dominant explanations of welfare state development, which are premised on the assumption that business opposes social insurance. The article examines the conditions under which self-interested, profit-maximizing firms support the introduction of a new social policy, and it specifies the most significant variables explaining the variation in employers' social policy preferences. The model is tested in three political episodes of welfare state development in France and Germany, using policy documents submitted by various employers' associations to bureaucratic and parliamentary commissions.