Comparative Politics

Political backlash against immigrant minorities and restrictive immigration policies have increased in western Europe. Most explanations of the adoption of restrictions on immigration have focused on ethnic competition for material resources and on national political factors. An alternative theory of political mobilization and restrictive policy changes argues that pressure from subnational politicians and social movement organizations and signals from dramatic antiimmigrant events such as riots lead national elites to infer that public interest in antiimmigration policies is intense enough to justify a break with liberal policies. This theory is tested against four cases in Britain and Germany, where the hypothesized processes are observed despite very different socioeconomic and political-institutional contexts.

Burundi and Rwanda are small East African countries with almost identical economic, social, and political features. Both have also experienced regular, extreme massive violence. Yet the processes leading to violence and the nature of the violence-genocide in Rwanda and civil war in Burundi-are very different. The article discusses the divergent historical processes that led to violence in Burundi and Rwanda and the individual motives that brought people to kill their innocent neighbors.

As ethnic diversity rises across Europe, the Left faces a trade-off between incorporating new minorities while retaining support from settled, working-class voters. Focusing on the Labour Party's selection of Muslims and employing a dataset containing over 42,000 local election candidates in England, this article argues that inclusion is less likely where core voters are most concerned about the representation of Muslims' material and religious interests: economically deprived areas with sizable Muslim populations. It shows that in these areas Muslim candidates underperform at the polls and Labour Parties are less likely to choose Muslim candidates here as a result. Selection thus varies based on the economic and cultural threats that Muslim representation poses to the Left's core constituency. These findings contribute to our understanding of the forces that shape ethnic minority political incorporation across contexts.

As populations age, governments in many countries are considering social security privatization. This policy experiment first became politically viable in Latin America. It threatens to reduce benefits for traditionally powerful constituencies and thus generates fierce political opposition from labor, pensioners, and professional groups with a stake in the old system. This article explores pluralist and institutionalist explanations of the divergent paths of social security reform in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. The degree to which political institutions provided interest groups with opportunities to act as veto players was a fundamental determinant of policy outcomes.

Much of the literature on African politics still centers on the "glorious" period of the nationalist era; this paper is no exception. This paper is based on the supposition that further analysis of the politics of the nationalist era is appropriate because, it contends. there has been a lack of understanding of several of its essential features. The paper will reexamine rural politics in the nationalist period and will do so by isolating for discussion a relatively autonomous rural political agenda: a set of issues indigenous to the countryside that led to political protest by village dwellers. In so doing, it will focus primarily upon economic issues. These issues deserve treatment not only because they have been underplayed in the literature thus far, but also because they did not go away with the end of colonial rule. The political energies which they unleashed in the nationalist era therefore remain to be tapped in the present, with serious implications for the politics of contemporary Africa.

Major hypotheses concerning conditions conducive to the breakdown or survival of democratic regimes in sixteen European states in the interwar period are tested in a systematic comparative manner on the basis of Boolean methods. These hypotheses take into account a wide variety of socioeconomic, social structural, political cultural, and institutional factors, as well as specific historical sequences and other dynamic and actor-related effects. The tests clearly exhibit the respective strengths and weaknesses and remaining contradictions of the various approaches. They provide a first ''pruning'' of some of the more important aspects of empirical democratic theory which can be conducted in a ''quasi-experimental'' design. The findings point to further modifications and applications elsewhere, including some consequences for contemporary developments.

Accountability in legislative representation implies that candidates communicate to voters what they will do if elected, that information about actions once in office is available to constituents, that representatives are responsive to the preferences and demands of constituents, and that they are punished for lack of responsiveness. There is an inherent tension between party discipline and responsiveness by individual legislators to their constituents. A number of recent institutional reforms in Latin America have sought to increase individual responsiveness and accountability of legislators, even at the expense of party discipline. The most important of these are reforms that put in place mixed electoral systems combining single-member districts with proportional representation, and the adoption of public voting in legislatures. This paper draws on interviews with legislators and staff in Mexico, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Venezuela, as well as surveys of legislators in ...

Since the 1980s, Mexico has transformed its social protection system through the partial retrenchment of contributory social insurance and the expansion of noncontributory social assistance. By comparing social insurance and social assistance policies under Presidents Salinas (1988-1994), Zedillo (1994-2000), and Fox (2000-2006), these apparently contradictory patterns of welfare change can be explained. Economic and political liberalization created pressure for policy change and shifted the political capacity of domestic political actors, while existing welfare institutions shaped the politics of welfare. As a result, new social assistance institutions were layered alongside reformed social insurance institutions, which reflected changes in the economic and political context.

Examination of abortion policy in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina allows for control of religion, level of development, and (with the exception of Italy) democratic history. Woman's right to choose to control her body is measured not only by laws on abortion but also by interpretation, access, and policy outcomes to determine how well countries have dealt with reproductive health and abortion in practice. There are three groups with distinct levels of reproductive rights and policies. Public opinion and women's social, economic, and political position do not explain this variation. Rather, the key factors are, first, class divisions and the differential mobilization of the Catholic church and feminists and, second, their relative influence on right and left politicians and the executive.

In this paper we consider the uses political scientists have made of agent-based modeling (ABM) and the challenges associated with designing research at differing levels of complexity. We propose a typology of ABM research designs—investigating abstractions, testing theories comprised of ensembles of simple variables, or implementing virtualizations of complex situations. Our illustrations are drawn from work done on problems pertaining to the evolution of collective identities and norms and to their contribution to collective action. By increasing the visibility of research design questions and clarifying the choices and opportunities associated with them, we seek to expand the scope of responsible methodological uses of ABM techniques and render the increasing variety of that work accessible to wider audiences.

The accountability of state institutions and rulers is a defining feature of democracy. The police form a key state institution that is targeted for reforms to improve its accountability. The surprising case of increased police accountability in Bogotá, Colombia demonstrates the importance of the political strategy of lateral reform, which successfully mitigated obstacles to police accountability to the state and society. Lateral reform is a sequence of policies that strategically alter the societal context in which reforms take place to increase public support for and participation in reform processes over time. This strategy may strengthen the hand of politicians seeking to increase the accountability of recalcitrant state institutions.

The current theoretical debate about the heightened role of Latin American technocrats centers on their autonomy from other sociopolitical actors, especially their political superiors, international financial institutions, and business interests. Assessment of the independence técnicos wield, based on an in-depth analysis of the work of economic experts in Colombia and Peru, shows that a "technocratic autonomy" perspective best accounts for the activity of experts in these countries. Two crucial factors that explain this autonomy are technocrats' use of expertise to enhance and maintain their influence and the mutual balance among powerful stakeholders who prefer technocratic independence to control of economic policy by a competing actor.

Small firms in the Portuguese pharmacy sector have adjusted remarkably well to regional economic integration, in contrast to the response of other small retailers to the challenges of political and economic liberalization. It is possible for old sectors of small firms to adjust to globalization and preserve individual ownership through an extended politics of sectoral defense. Key strategic elements and institutional preconditions make this politics possible. The article draws on field research on the pharmacy and food retail sectors in Portugal and theoretical analyses on neocorporatism, the third Italy, and varieties of capitalism.

The relationship among economic contexts, political institutions, and the dynamics of national policymaking can be examined through an analysis of contemporary French and German labor market reform. Economic austerity and the failure of earlier policymaking models have led to qualitative shifts in the incentives facing governments and interest groups. These shifts have produced new bargaining patterns—"competitive interventionism" in France and "conflictual corporatism" in Germany—within formal institutional stability. These changes have implications for understanding national models of capitalism and institutional change and require rethinking the relationship between formal institutions and the dynamics of bargaining across economic and historical contexts.

Comparative democratization scholars have devoted almost no attention to how property rights regimes shape the dynamics of electoral competition. This oversight is particularly problematic in African studies. In sub-Saharan Africa the absence or weakness of secure property rights regimes in the countryside can have powerful consequences for multiparty dynamics. Land can become a patronage resource in ways that ignite destabilizing redistributive conflicts and threaten minority rights. By ignoring the design and character of underlying property regimes—or by assuming that the rules governing property are fixed, neutral, or essentially liberal in character—analysts have overlooked a fundamental source of illiberalism in many of Africa's multiparty systems. Côte d'Ivoire, where land politics have contributed to system-wide political breakdown, serves as a case in point.

In emerging African democracies, why do judiciaries experience high levels of government interference in some contexts and not in others? Original research conducted in five commonwealth African countries reveals that conventional strategic approaches do not effectively account for patterns of executive interference with the courts in the African cases. An alternative theoretical framework, focusing on the extent to which leaders face acute personal insecurities and the extent to which the courts represent a threat to power holders, proves more effective.

The processes surrounding the elaboration of democracy in Muslim societies can be examined via a comparative consideration of three West African countries: Senegal, Mali, and Niger. Departing from analyses that ask whether democracy can be established in Muslim societies, the key question is how the democratic question is framed and discussed in such religious contexts. The launching of African democratic experiments in the 1990s provoked significant negotiation and discussion both within religious society and between religious groups and the secular elite about the desired substance of democracy. These processes have gradually empowered Muslim majorities to challenge and nuance the agenda presented at the transitions, but this is a direct outcome of the democratic process itself.

If elections and civil liberties are the principal institutionalized mechanisms of democratic governance, and if naked coercion is the centerpiece of hard authoritarianism, what allows a soft authoritarian system to survive? The cement of soft authoritarian rule is the ability of elites to frame the political debate, thereby defining the political agenda and channeling political outcomes. The contrast between the strengthening of soft authoritarianism in Kazakhstan and the erosion of soft authoritarianism in Kyrgyzstan shows that soft authoritarianism is effective when it succeeds in making good use of the state's means of persuasion, although coercion remains a part of the ruling elite's arsenal. This perspective implies a need to conceptualize soft authoritarian rule in dynamic, rather than static, terms.

Despite decades of economic and political liberalization in Latin America, corporate governance among large domestic firms shows remarkable continuity along many dimensions. Most of the largest firms, or business groups, are still widely diversified, closely held, and family controlled. These continuities challenge most theorizing on corporate governance in developed countries and on globalization more generally. A better way to explain stability is to focus on persistent incentives for and advantages of group governance. The core incentives derive largely from endemic volatility and shallow stock markets. Once formed, groups benefits from preferential access to capital, information, and policy. Complementarities among family control, concentrated ownership, and multisectoral diversification further bolster business group resilience.

Following the series of leftist victories in Latin America, scholars have focused on explaining how the left reached power but have overlooked the study of the left in government. Why have Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela adopted statist economic policies, while Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay have adhered to market orthodoxy? Three accounts—executive strength, drastic economic crises, and rentier state theory—are insufficient. Instead, differences in party system institutionalization best explain variation in economic policies. Institutionalized party systems make it more likely that leftist governments conduct piecemeal reforms, while inchoate party systems are conducive to significant economic transformations. This view is illustrated with cross-national evidence and case studies of Chile and Venezuela.

Democratic attitudes toward regimes consist of at least two types of attitudes: liberal and delegative. The notions that delegative democratic attitudes exist and affect institutional confidence are evident in Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. Salvadorans and Nicaraguans with delegative attitudes give greater support to the judiciary and legislature than persons with liberal democratic and authoritarian attitudes. No such difference exists in the institutional assessments of Costa Ricans. In new democracies, the institutional support expressed by delegative democratic persons cannot be reliably interpreted as support for the judiciary or the legislature because delegative support reflects support for the regime rather than for the institution.

The many interrupted presidencies in third wave Latin American democracies are changing presidential regimes and to some extent reduce the perils of presidentialism in the region. The twenty cases of presidential interruptions demonstrate that Latin American presidentialism is becoming more flexible by adopting equivalents of such parliamentary procedures as no confidence votes and early elections. Linz argued that the independent survival and origin of the executive and legislative branches are the source of two major perils of presidentialism: rigidity and dual democratic legitimacy. Premature removals of presidents mitigate rigidity and reduce the perils of presidentialism.

When and why can constitution-making processes be expected to produce an institutional framework that formally serves constitutionalism? Based on a simple and general typology of constituent processes that captures their legal/political character and dynamic nature, constitution-making processes controlled by one cohesive and organized political group (unilateral) can be distinguished from processes controlled by at least two different political groups (multilateral). A sample of eighteen Latin American countries from 1945 to 2005 shows that multilateral constitution making tends to establish institutional frameworks consistent with constitutionalism.

Recent books by Carles Boix and by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson provide bold theoretical arguments about how economic inequality can undermine the survival of democracy. Many of their key assumptions, however, are called into question by existing research on "third wave" Latin American democracies. There is little evidence that the poor are more likely to vote for higher taxes or for left parties, and survey research does not indicate that poor people are more likely to think the distribution of income is unfair. More sustained examination of American democracy by Larry M. Bartels reaches parallel conclusions. A more careful examination of political economy assumptions about the relationship between actors' objective economic circumstances and their perceived interests and behavior is needed.

Why do Latin American countries exhibit stark differences in their ability to protect citizens from falling into poverty? Analysis of poverty levels measured by ECLAC in eighteen countries shows that political factors—including the democratic record, long-term weight of left-of-center parties in the legislature, and investment in human capital—are significant and substantively important detenninants of poverty. These findings contribute to the growing literature that emphasizes the importance of regime form, parties, and policies for a variety of outcomes in Latin America, despite the weaknesses of democracy and the pathologies of some parties and party systems in the region.

How do military forces respond (or not respond) to mass protests during moments of constitutional crisis, when civilian opposition movements attempt to force elected officials from power before the end of their terms of office? Even in democracies, militaries deliberate about whether to obey orders to repress the opposition, balancing the costs of repression—the likelihood that they will face prosecution for human rights abuses or experience internal schisms—against the cost of disobeying the executive. The dominant strategy for militaries during moments of crisis is quartering—remaining confined to the barracks—and refusing to take sides. This finding is confirmed by contrasting military actions during three constitutional crises in Latin America—Argentina in 2001, Venezuela in 2002, and Bolivia in 2003.

As Latin America has moved leftward, why have the governments of Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay pursued moderate, gradual change, whereas their counterparts in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador have proceeded with considerable economic and political radicalism? Comparative analysis and case studies of Brazil and Bolivia indicate that backlash against market reform and the differential strength of party institutions do not satisfactorily explain this striking difference. Instead, natural resource rents and commodity booms and busts play a crucial role. The unearned windfalls produced by bonanzas inspire risk-acceptance among political leaders and common citizens, which can prompt ideological radicalism and political confrontation. This argument, based on a novel, cognitive-psychological microfoundation, contributes to theories of the rentier state and the "resource curse."

Latin American countries pursue a variety of reforms to reduce and prevent violent crime, ranging from new penal codes to restructured police forces. The most promising and popular approach to crime reduction is community-oriented policing which, in contrast to most forms of traditional policing, seeks to empower citizens by building police-community partnerships. Similar reforms in two cities in Brazil and four in Honduras show that community policing will be most effective where executive and security officials engage with social groups, either through direct contact with civil society or through state institutions that address the concerns of highly violent poor areas.

This article identifies and proposes a framework to explain the responses of Latin America's Roman Catholic churches to a new strategic dilemma posed by religious and political pluralism. Because the church's goals of defending institutional interests, evangelizing, promoting public morality, and grounding public policy in Catholic social teaching cut across existing political cleavages, church leaders must make strategic choices about which to emphasize in their messages to the faithful, investment of pastoral resources, and alliances. The article presents a typology of episcopal responses based on Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and Mexico and explains strategic choices by the church's capacity to mobilize civil society, its degree of religious hegemony, and the ideological orientations of Catholics.

Immigration and its challenge to national identities are unleashing political conflict throughout the world. Three of the founders of modern comparative politics—Samuel Huntington, Aristide Zolberg, and Jerry Hough—analyze this conflict in studies of the United States. Their books are exemplary. Although all are American, they each view America with a foreigner's eye. They bring America back in to comparative analysis, not as a data point for cross-sectional statistical testing, but as a country study, in the best area studies tradition. Still, these books would have benefited from greater analytic rigor, as well as adoption of a cultural equilibrium model to analyze the dynamics between immigrants and dominant social groups, suggested by Hough but not fully realized.

France's policies toward its Muslim population are exceptionally restrictive compared to other western European states. The dominant combative secularist ideology, which aims to eliminate religion from the public sphere, is a major reason for French exceptionalism. Combative secularism is the result of historical ideological conflicts between anticlerical republicans and clerical monarchists and the victory of the former over the latter. Recently, combative secularists allied with opponents of immigrants and Islam to legislate the ban on wearing headscarves in public schools. Pluralistic secularists, who would allow the public visibility of religion, were unable to impede this policy.

The events of the Arab Spring have suggested the necessity of rethinking the logic of authoritarian persistence in the Arab world. However, the internal variation in regime collapse and survival observed in the region confirms earlier analyses that the comportment of the coercive apparatus, especially its varying will to repress, is pivotal to determining the durability of the authoritarian regimes. At the same time, the trajectory of the Arab Spring highlights an empirical novelty for the Arab world, namely, the manifestation ofhuge, cross-class, popular protest in the name of political change, as well as a new factor that abetted the materialization of this phenomenon—the spread of social media. The latter will no doubt be a game changer for the longevity of authoritarian regimes worldwide from now on.

Comparative scholarship conceives of party systems nationally. This has created a situation of conceptual and measurement incompleteness in the study of party systems. The effects of subnational variations in party competition on national politics and the quality of democracy cannot be understood if subnational party systems continue to be erased from the theoretical mapping of party politics. The concept of “federalized party systems” denotes systems composed of national and subnational party subsystems. Its value for the comparative and longitudinal study of party politics can be demonstrated through an analysis of Argentina's federalized party system.

Initial scholarly exuberance over the global spread of bills of rights and judicial review has given way to a spate of studies that bemoan the trend as fundamentally antidemocratic. This review offers an empirically informed critique of these new, more skeptical studies. It highlights ways in which selection and tenure rules for high court judges vary across cases, describes a number of institutional mechanisms designed to mitigate judicial supremacy in different countries, and offers examples of the ways that some new constitutionalist countries have sought to facilitate popular access to courts and to charge courts with protecting popular interests. More comparative work on the effects of this variation on political practice and policy outcomes would be welcome.

How have Mexico's community-based democratic institutions, known as Usos y Costumbres (UyC) or Uses and Customs systems, affected local and national politics? Although informal UyC practices exist throughout Mexico, the state of Oaxaca formally changed its electoral codes in 1995 to legalize UyC. Statistical analysis of national election results shows that Oaxacan municipalities that formally adopted UyC systems thereafter experienced higher first-place party margins and higher levels of abstention compared to non-UyC systems. That these systems helped local leaders engineer election outcomes while reducing participation, even in national elections, undermines arguments about their democratic benefits. UyC rules appear to help preserve local authoritarian enclaves, with negative consequences for national democracy.

Mexico's Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI), a former electoral authoritarian party, obligated its federal deputy candidates to campaign actively for elections that were almost impossible to lose. Canvassing under electoral authoritarian conditions allowed the hegemonic party to gather information on its local leaders and citizens and to distribute selective, excludable resources to mobilize voters. The PRI's deputy candidates were forced to manage, organize, and run their own campaigns in "candidate-managed" campaigns. Despite large margins of victory, the PRI had to deal with significant district variation in electoral popularity, while the corporatist sectors had far less coverage than once believed.

Three related arguments can be made about the autonomy drives that have gathered strength in the last decade in the most economically vibrant subnational regions in Bolivia and Ecuador. First, based on analysis of the actions and actors associated with each, these phenomena are classifiable as "conservative autonomy movements." Second, the disjuncture between the concentration of political power in national capitals and economic power in vibrant subnational regions explains why these movements emerged in Bolivia and Ecuador but not elsewhere in Latin America and why they have emerged now and not earlier in each country. Third, the mobilizing structures that these twin movements draw on, as well as the framing choices that each has made, account for the greater strength of the autonomy movement in Bolivia.

Recent findings on radical right parties indicate that their organizational structure is an important variable in their electoral performance. However, they do not explain variation in party organization. The legacies of previous far right organization, particularly from the postwar period, strongly influence the ability of radical right parties to build strong organizations. In Flanders, where far right political parties and organizations persisted after World War II and possessed some political and social legitimacy, radical right parties possessed a structural backbone. In Wallonia, where the far right was decimated after the war and consisted only of fringe elements, radical right parties were unable to build functioning party organizations. More attention should be paid to historical legacies and organizational factors in explaining the trajectories of radical right parties in Europe.

A puzzling aspect of the 1992-95 Bosnian war—the intra-Muslim civil war in northwestern Bosnia—can highlight the role of local elites in capturing important interaction effects between micro-level economic incentives and macro-level ethnic cleavages in civil wars. During civil wars where the broader conflict is cast in macro-ethnic terms, economic incentives can still seriously affect intragroup behavior. Ethnic group unity can be undermined by the presence of charismatic local elites who can guarantee the survival of their local constituents, while providing access to micro-level economic payoffs.

Brazilian presidents have expanded the authority of the Supreme Court since democratization to improve governance and facilitate the policy pursuits of electoral winners. This conclusion contradicts insurance theories of judicial reform, which argue that incumbents promote judicial power when they foresee an electoral defeat in order to constrain future majorities. In contrast, analysis of judicial reform in Brazil suggests that powerful courts are not antithetical to the interests of elected governments, and that even politicians who expect to remain in office may find it beneficial to support and promote independent judicial authority. As observed in Brazil, a court that is institutionally subject to politics may provide incumbents with benefits that exceed the costs usually associated with judicial review.

How and where do participatory institutions contribute to the deepening of democracy? Substantial variation in the outcomes produced by participatory institutions is best explained by the incentives of elected governments to delegate authority and the capacity of civil society organizations to use contentious politics in and outside of these institutions. In eight cases of Brazil's participatory budgeting program, two municipalities produced strong results; two other municipalities produced failed programs; and four municipalities produced mixed, somewhat contradictory results. Failed programs can have a pernicious effect on efforts to deepen democracy, while the most successful programs improve the quality of local democratic processes.

Two views on the impact of church-state relations on civil society draw competing conclusions. According to the first view, state support of religion encourages faith-based social capital by providing vital resources for religious organizations. In contrast, the competing view holds that state support of religion crowds out religious civic engagement, as responsibilities are transferred from citizens to the state. Based on a sample of twenty-four European countries and combining a wide range of church-state indicators with survey data, it is evident that state support of religion does not foster faith-based social capital. Rather, overwhelming evidence shows that government involvement in religion weakens religious membership, volunteering, and donations.

Historically, faith-based organizations made important contributions in the field of social provision, but with the advent of the modern welfare state their role diminished dramatically. Why has there been renewed interest in the United States and Britain in publicly funded faith-based social provision. Despite significant differences between the two countries, their governments have endorsed strikingly similar faith-based initiatives that have institutionalized the relationship between the state and faith-based organizations. The emergence of faith-based initiatives is one component of welfare state restructuring, more specifically, a response to the growing problem of minority social exclusion in urban areas.

Throughout the Middle East, Islamists, leftists, and other ideological streams are forming coalitions in opposition to their authoritarian regimes. Yet little research has been conducted on the conditions under which these cross-ideological coalitions fail or succeed. Three cases of successful coalition building and one case of failed coalition building in Jordan indicate that cross-ideological coalitions are initiated in the context of external threat and facilitated by organizational forms that ensure the members gain or maintain their ability to pursue their independent goals. Most important, in contrast to other studies, these cases show that the plentifulness of recruits impedes cooperation. Rather than alleviating competition, an abundance of potential recruits increases competition and hinders cross-ideological cooperation.

Secularism and liberalism are often perceived as interlinked and associated with the process of modernization and liberal democracy. Studies of Israel, however, cast doubts on this linkage as antiliberal and ethnocentric attitudes remain entrenched. Secular practices, religious beliefs, and religious practices can coexist within a bricolage of beliefs and behaviors. Secular practices related to everyday life are not necessarily related to a deeper belief system and values associated with liberalism; the commercialization of the Israeli public sphere does not significantly change existing nonliberal perceptions and the structure of Israel as a nonliberal democracy. Secularism and liberalism can develop separately, and the secularization of the public sphere does not necessarily entail a commitment to religious freedom, to toleration associated with liberalism, and, consequently, to liberal democracy.

Governments in postcommunist Europe are not slaves to their institutions, unable to extend their time in office beyond the constraints imposed by their institutional arrangement. Cabinet duration is tied to performance in office, characterized by economic success. Duration models show that governments in postcommunist Europe are similar to those in western Europe, even though some states lack party institutionalization and strong partisan attachments. Institutional arrangements, including the effective number of parties in government and the type of government, combine with economic performance to affect the survival rates of postcommunist governments.

Views on contemporary Russian politics can be divided into two broad groups. The failed democratization school asserts that the transition in Russia is over and that the country has failed to establish the rudiments of a liberal democracy. The democratic evolutionist approach insists that the system remains fluid and dynamic and that the undoubted shortcomings in the quality of Russia's postcommunist regime can be resolved within the framework of the existing constitutional order. Key issues for future research include problems of class and economic power and their relationship to the political order, diverse forms of elite aggregation and competition, the interaction of geopolitics and democratization, and long-term problems of national and state development.

The split in the Turkish Islamist movement in 1999 between radicals and moderates and the massive electoral victory of the moderate AKP in 2002 gave rise to two major and contrasting explanations for this moderation. Either the movement had not changed because its members had retained their original religious orientations while outwardly pretending to be moderate, or they had finally become assimilated into the secularist system and had truly accepted democratic and secularist values. Yet the fact was that AKP members were neither pretending, nor were they assimilated. They were still pursuing the same interests that had played a major role in their support for the Islamist movement in the first place: their class interests.