Comparative Political Studies

PIP A new style of international migration, temporary and often illegal immigration in order to work, began to emerge after World War II. Many countries initiated immigration policies that gave the appearance of control, while their back doors remained open and, possibly, unclosable. In the US, it is slowly becoming obvious that foreign workers cannot be used as a temporary labor force at will. 2 usual theories of migration are the classical and the conflicts schools. The classical school presents migration as a rational, economic act that leads to economic adjustment between sending and receiving countries. The conflict school, often Marxist, views migration as an unequal process that leads to the inclusion of developing countries into the world capitalist system and to a widenin gap between rich and poor countries. The convergence of these 2 theories leads to the idea that although migration may be a survival strategy of individuals and households, it is also determined by a country's integration in the world economic system. The author reviews several books on immigration theory, which appreciate the complexity and worldwide character of migration; indicate that migration patterns are persistent; and support the view that migration is an economic, social, and political problem; and recommend that policies must be integrated and address the entire issue.

The article suggests that the massive transformation of the political system often referred to as “political development” is responsible for the movement from high to low birth-and death rates in national populations. The effect of the changing political system is independent of (and in addition to) the effects of socioeconomic changes previously presented in the theory of demographic demographic transition. The article reports first the nature of the systematic connection between change in the political system on the one hand and change in vital rates on the other. Second, it presents a new empirical measure of the capacity and effectiveness of whole political systems.

"Why is it so difficult for a liberal-democratic state to regulate immigration? Although control of a territory is part and parcel of the definition of state sovereignty, labor-importing countries have found it increasingly difficult to regulate the flow of noncitizens across their borders. This article seeks to address the difficulties of regulating immigration by focusing on the policy-making process and the interaction of politics and markets in France, one of the principal countries of immigration."

Until the important public dialog on 3rd World population issues began in the Soviet Uuion in 1965, ideological limitations and bureaucratic interests prevented policy makers from recognizing the existence of a world of national "population problem." Since then, freer discussions of the Soviet Union's surprising decline in birthrate and labor shortages have led to serious policy questions. Conflicting policy goals, however, have resulted in only modest pronatalist policies. The Soviet population problem is a result of interregional disparities in population growth rates between the highly urbanized Soviet European populations with low birth rates and the least urbanized Central Asians with dramatically higher birth rates. As a result, these essentially Muslim people will provide the only major increases in labor resources and an increasing percentage of Soviet armed forces recruits. Policy planners are thus faced with difficult options. Current policies stressing technological transfers from the west and greater labor productivity, however, are unlikely to solve further labor shortages and regional imbalances. Ultimately, nonEuropana regions will be in an improved bargaining position for more favorable nationwide economic policies and for a greater role in policy planning.

With the creation of EMU, European Welfare States have entered a new phase of development. The margins for manoeuvring public budgets have substantially decreased, while the unfolding of the four freedoms of movement within the EU have seriously weakened the traditional coercive monopoly of the state on actors and resources that are crucial for the stability of redistributive institutions. The article explores these issues adopting a Rokkanian perspective, i.e. building on Rokkan’s pioneering insights on the nexus between boundary building and internal structuring. The first part of the paper briefly presents the theoretical perspective. The second part sketches the development of national welfare institutions from their origin up to the early 1970s, discussing their implications in terms of boundary building and internal structuring. The third part describes the challenges that have emerged in the last couple of decades to the “social sovereignty†of the nation state: challenges that are largely linked to the process of European integration, but that are partly reinforced by endogenous developments as well. The final part offers some more speculative remarks of the potential de-structuring of the traditional architecture of social protection, with some hints at cross-national variations and possible developments at the EU level.

Political scientists for some time have questioned the value of party identification in the British context. The most popular objection has been that party identification appears to be less stable and less independent from the vote in Great Britain than in the United States. We attempt to demonstrate that the first objection is based on strong assumptions about how to deal with minor party identifiers and independents while the second can be disputed by showing that short-term forces, and not just measurement error, cause party identification and the vote to covary imperfectly. The analysis is carried out with the original Butler and Stokes data.

I present a model of the emergence and evolution of governance, conceived (narrowly) as the continuous resolution of dyadic conflicts by a third party. The model is comprised of three core elements: normative structure, dyadic contracting, and triadic dispute resolution. I demonstrate that a move to triadic dispute resolution leads the triadic dispute resolver to construct, and then to manage, specific causal relationships between exchange, conflict, and rules. Once established, triadic governance perpetuates a discourse about the rulefulness of individual behavior, and this discourse gradually penetrates and is absorbed into those repertoires of reasoning and action that constitute political agency. In this way, political life is judicialized. The model further predicts that, under certain specified conditions, the triad will constitute a crucial mechanism of (micro and macro) political change. I then illustrate the power of the model to explain judicialization and the dynamics of change in two very different political systems: the international trade regime and the French Fifth Republic. In the conclusion, I draw out the implications of the analysis for our understanding of the complex relationship between strategic behavior and social structure.

This paper estimates the risk preferences of cotton farmers in Southern Peru, using the results from a multiple-price-list lottery game. Assuming that preferences conform to two of the leading models of decision under risk--Expected Utility Theory (EUT) and Cumulative Prospect Theory (CPT)--we find strong evidence of moderate risk aversion. Once we include individual characteristics in the estimation of risk parameters, we observe that farmers use subjective nonlinear probability weighting, a behavior consistent with CPT. Interestingly, when we allow for preference heterogeneity via the estimation of mixture models--where the proportion of subjects who behave according to EUT or to CPT is endogenously determined--we find that the majority of farmers' choices are best explained by CPT. We further hypothesize that the multiple switching behavior observed in our sample can be explained by nonlinear probability weighting made in a context of large random calculation mistakes; the evidence found on this regard is mixed. Finally, we find that attaining higher education is the single most important individual characteristic correlated with risk preferences, a result that suggests a connection between cognitive abilities and behavior towards risk.

This article traces the evolution of two types of immigrant rights—alien rights and the right to citizenship—across three polities (the United States, Germany, and the European Union). It argues that the sources of rights expansion are mostly legal and domestic: Rights expansion originates in independent and activist courts, which mobilize domestic law (especially constitutional law) and domestic legitimatory discourses, often against restriction-minded, democratically accountable governments. The legal-domestic hypothesis is qualified and differentiated according to polity, migrant group, and type of immigrant right.

This article advances hypotheses linking specific European institutions to changes in agent preferences, with the objective to explore the pathways and mechanisms through which such shifts occur. Drawing on work in social psychology and communications research, the author develops a micro-, process-, and agency-based argument on the nature of social interaction within institutions. Empirically, he examines committees of the Council of Europe, the main European rights institution, asking whether the preferences/interests of social agents changed as they discussed and debated issues. Put differently, did they "go native" in Strasbourg? Theoretically, a series of scope conditions for when argumentative persuasion will be effective in "changing minds" is advanced. By thus defining clear domains of application, the article contributes to a central goal of this special issue: building bridges to other-rationalist, in this case-views on social interaction.

What political institutions improve property rights? Building on the work of North and Weingast (1989), this paper argues that institutional checks on policymaking discretion ("veto players") improve the property rights of investors regarding the value of the domestic currency. Veto players constrain the ability of policymakers to opportunistically pursue policy that may lead to a depreciated domestic currency. The study offers some of the first large-sample evidence that checks and balances institutions lower the risk of expropriation, using a direct measure of investors' revealed preferences as the dependent variable. In particular, evidence from 127 countries over the period 1975-2004 shows that the use of foreign currency as a store of value -- a common hedge against domestic currency depreciation -- decreases with the number of veto players in government. The findings are robust to multiple specifications, including instrumental variables models that exploit exogenous sources of institutional variation.

Theoretical reasoning disagrees about what type of bargaining system performs best. The authors have tested the explanatory power of three competing hypotheses: neoliberalism, corporatism, and the hump-shape hypothesis. All of these hypotheses lack empirical support due to two main shortcomings. First, they ignore that wage restraint raises three distinct types of collective-action problems. Second, they do not consider qualitative differences among the national bargaining systems (particularly the role of the state) that do not allow analysis to construct such ordinal rankings of bargaining coordination as adopted by all previous empirical studies. Proceeding from a revised hypothesis and new measures of national bargaining systems, the authors have found a nonlinear relationship between the bargaining system and economic performance in a way that economy-wide wage coordination is superior only when the bargaining system is able to make local bargaining comply with coordination activities.

The discussion focuses on the effects that changing forms of authoritarian rule and the growth of a bureaucratic state had on A gentine public policies during the 1930-1970 interval. Hitherto quite separate literatures are brought together in the examination of two different arguments. The first, drawn from the emerging literature on authoritarianism and corporatism in Latin America, suggests that the trends in Argentine public policies should have been interrupted whenever different types of authoritarian coalitions sequentially replaced each other in power. The second thesis, drawn primarily from research on Latin American bureaucracies and North American policy analyses, suggests that there is a need to disaggregate the coalition/policy linkage. It hypothesizes that four factors which developed at about the midpoint of the 1930-1970 period in Argentina—the growth of a large and well-entrenched public sector, limitations on the ability of political elites to press their policy demands, limitations on previously uncommitted resources, and the existence of a crisis of hegemony—should have increasingly constrained the policy-making importance of the coalitions and the leaders who represented them in the highest levels of government. Coalitions and elites should have been increasingly unable to direct and indirect policies in the ways which they preferred. Interrupted time-series analyses of seven policy series provided support for the constraints thesis. Coalitions and those who governed at the top were once important in Argentina as the authoritarian literature suggests. Coalition changes did not occur in a vacuum, however. Once the four state-related constraints developed, such shifts came to have only marginal impacts on the examined policy indicators.

European publics and politicians are concerned about big and growing governments. Such concern is not ill founded: Government size, measured as the ratio of government expenditures to gross domestic product, has marched upwards steadily since 1950 in the 12 European nations examined here. The present research represents an initial step toward solving the mystery of why these governments have grown. To begin, a modest theoretical framework for understanding government growth is advanced. Next, specific hypotheses of growth are fitted into the framework, and operationalized for empirical testing. Finally, statistical models to account for public sector expansion in each of the dozen nations over the 1950-1980 period are developed. The models suggest that a variety of forces have worked to enlarge European governments, with perhaps the most important being pressure for government assistance from groups disadvantaged by sour economic conditions.

This article links decisions and general descriptions of campaign issues and personalities. In so doing, it answers questions that have also been considered in other articles of this special issue. How much is support for the major British parties affected by underlying social processes and how much by deliberate party initiatives? To what extent is class the predominant division within British politics and to what extent is it being replaced by other cleavages and issues? How will the parties, new and old, be affected? And how should they respond? In tackling these questions the discussion utilizes new types of data and places results within a comparative framework.

Japanese elections are notorious for the money that flows between contributors, politicians, and voters. To date, however, nobody has estimated statistically the impact of this money on electoral outcomes. Students of American politics have discovered that this question is difficult to answer because, while performance may depend on spending, spending may also depend on expected performance - so that there is simultaneous causation to deal with. In this paper, we specify a two-stage least squares model that explains the vote shares of LDP candidates as a function of their own spending, spending by other candidates, and a battery of control variables. Interestingly, the multiple candidate nature of Japanese elections means that district-level demographic variables are largely unrelated to any particular LDP candidate's vote share, allowing us to use these variables to create instruments for campaign spending. Finally, in a necessarily tentative comparison, we find that the marginal dollar of campaign spending buys the spender a great deal more in Japan than is true in the U.S.

Across Western Europe, unions have increasingly engaged in staging general strikes against governments since 1980. This increase in general strikes is puzzling as it has occurred at the same time as economic strikes have been on the decline. We posit that theories developed to explain economic strikes hold little explanatory power in accounting for variation in general strikes across countries and over time. Instead, we develop a framework based on political variables, in particular, whether governments have included or excluded unions in framing policy reforms; the party position of the government; and the type of government. Our empirical analysis, based on a conditional fixed-effects logit estimation of 84 general strikes between 1980 and 2006, shows that union exclusion and the party position of the government can provide an initial explanation for the occurrence of general strikes.

One of the most significant developments in Latin American democracies since the beginning of the third wave of democratization is the rise to political prominence of outsider candidates in presidential elections. I use an original database of political outsiders in Latin America to examine the institutional factors that contribute to the emergence of political outsiders. Using a fixed effects variance decomposition (FEVD) model, I find that, in addition to the favorable conditions already identified in the literature—legitimacy crisis of traditional political parties and negative socioeconomic conditions—the rise of political outsiders is determined by institutional factors, such as nonconcurrent elections, compulsory voting rules, and reelection provisions.

Denmark and Norway have experienced significant political changes during the past three decades, changes that affect the constraints and opportunities organized interests are facing. Corporatist representation in the policy-making process has declined, and changes in executive-legislative relations have increased the power of parliaments. Organized interests are expected to adapt to these changing circumstances to maintain their political influence. This article shows how Danish and Norwegian interest groups have coped with the decline of corporatism and the revival of parliaments. Representation in corporatist policy-making committees and lobbying toward civil servants in government ministries have been supplemented and in some cases substituted by political lobbyism directed toward elected representatives in the parliament and the government. The analysis is based on panel data from several surveys carried out among nationwide interest groups in Denmark and Norway.

Are the policy failures of subnational officials reliably punished by voters, or do subnational elections instead pivot around national trends? This study attempts to shed new light on these questions by exploring subnational elections in the Argentine context. Building on a modified version of the referendum-voting model, our analysis suggests that the fate of candidates in both national and subnational elections is shaped by the performance of the incumbent presidential administration. At the same time, however, we also find evidence that voters respond to the policy choices of subnational governments, albeit in ways that attenuate, rather than strengthen, the nexus between policy responsibility and electoral accountability.

How do citizens in developing countries access public services? Scholars study this question by emphasizing the role of government, measuring government performance as household access to public services, such as clean water and sanitation. however, the authors argue that the state does not hold a monopoly on provision of such utilities: citizens in developing countries often turn to nonstate providers of basic utilities. In Mexico, the authors find that direct money transfers from migrants, known as remittances, are used to provide household access to public services. The statistical analysis across Mexico's 2,438 municipalities demonstrates that citizens improve their own access. The results also contribute new evidence to the literature on remittances and development by offering a micro-level explanation for how remittances affect both the availability and the source of basic utilities. The findings suggest that the measures scholars typically associate with government performance may in fact capture nonstate provision of basic utilities.

This article argues that researchers must broaden their definition of representation if they are to expand their understanding of electoral reform. The authors use the 1996 case of inter- and intraparty electoral reform in Israel to illustrate their claim. These reforms were designed either to enhance the circle of participation or to improve governability, without damaging representation. However, the type of representation that was supposed to be maintained by the reforms was different in each case. Party primaries were supposed to preserve representation as presence, whereas direct election of the prime minister was supposed to uphold the representation of ideas. The reformers did not perceive this distinction and felt that representation (defined as proportionality) would not be affected by both reforms. The result of the 1996 elections in Israel was that both reforms damaged representation, and both missed their targets.

The issue of presidential term limits is emerging as an important political norm on the African continent, but the effects of the third term debates on the institutionalization of the party systems have so far not been analyzed. We argue that the third presidential election represents ‘a window of opportunity’ for politicians aspiring for the top position, leading to party fragmentation (fissions) and party mergers (fusions). Politicians pursue an office seeking strategy, weakly connected to ideological or political priorities. We demonstrate that the combination of leadership centered parties, executive dominance, and the institutional rules for presidential elections, encourage turbulence in the party system in the context of the third democratic elections. We illustrate these processes with the case of the 2004 Malawian presidential and parliamentary elections. In Malawi, the third elections after the reintroduction of multiparty politics in 1994 led to a number of new party formations. After the elections, fusions of parties and coalitions among parties became alternative strategies for winning office. Thus, rather than having institutionalized over time, the Malawian party system appears to have fragmented.

A spate of work has demonstrated tensions between ethno-cultural diversity and social capital. Some have suggested that attachment to the nation can foster cross-group trust, particularly if this national self-definition is “civic” in character rather than “ethnic” (the Miller thesis). Similarly, others have argued that civic nations are less likely to suffer reduced social capital in response to increased diversity, as the sense of threat that typically emerges in ethnically diverse contexts will be mitigated (the Putnam thesis). The authors test these hypotheses on 27 countries using both contextual-level data and the latest wave of the European Values Study (2008). Though the evidence is mixed on civic nationalism, the authors find strong evidence that ethnic nationalism goes hand-in-hand with reduced social capital and that it increases the negative social impact of diversity. So although this study only partially confirms the benefits of civic nationalism, it clearly underlines the costs of its ethnic variety.

What role does the international system play in amplifying the impact of domestic social movements on social change? The Argentine human rights movement reached the international system through the projection of cognitive and affective information—persuasion. International response was facilitated by the international human rights regime, and transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) played a critical role. This challenge from above and below did have a clear impact on the target government and the development of broader mechanisms for the protection of human rights—even under the most severe conditions of repression and powerlessness.