Updated Study Guide for CPS final

TERMS - Polyarchy

Term used by Dahl (1971) to refer to democracies in the real world - those governments with high levels of contestation and inclusiveness - which are striving for democracy. Under this view, democracy is an ideal type definition which cannot be achieved, with polyarchy being the real world manifestation of it.

NATURAL RESOURCES - Ross, Michael L. "Review: The Political Economy of the Resource Curse." World Politics 51, no. 2 (January 1999): 297-322. [CORE]

The evidence of the resource curse seems fairly abundant but its mechanism is still unclear - ""Three-quarters of the states in sub- Saharan Africa and two-thirds of those in Latin America, the Caribbean, North Africa, and the Middle East still depend on primary commodities for at least half of their export income." (298) Broadly the explanations for the resource curse fall into three categories: cognitive explanations (which claim that resource booms produce a type of short-sightedness among policymakers [there is little overall support for this outlook]), societal explanations (which argue that resource exports tend to empower sectors, classes, or interest groups that favor growth-impeding policies, especially via the empowerment of client networks or interest groups [although illustrations of this thesis are usually limited to the same five cases: South Korea, Taiwan, Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil]), and state-centered explanations (which argue that resource booms tend to weaken state institutions, especially its ability to extract and deploy resources or resist the demands of interest groups/rent seekers [however, the proof of this concept with case studies is again, limited, and sometimes the arguments are so complicated and overlapping - as with Karl - that they are impossible to test]). Two other explanations that can be added to this is one focusing on state-owned enterprises in developing states, and one focused on the inability to enforce property rights within resource dependent regimes. The three dominant economic explanations for the resource curse have focused on long-term primary commodity prices on global markets, price fluctuations in resource markets, and the loss of investment in other important industries and aspects of the economy. All of these explanations have proven limited when addressed more carefully however. This turns the attention to governments, and why they fail to successfully manage resources and mediate potential harms. The two explored explanations for the resource curse that seem promising are: (1) the existence of state owned enterprises to manage natural resources, which are often huge resource sucks and which have also tended to decrease budget constraints within the government, leading to fiscal laxity and high levels of corruption. And (2) the resource curse undermines the ability to protect property rights. This can be explained in two ways - first, resource curses may be caused by a failure of property rights since they make the development of any other kind of industry incredibly difficult but resources are constantly available and thus become the default. Second, where the rule of law is weak, criminal gangs and militias gaining rents from the resources are more likely, which makes extortion, monopoly rents, and extralegal rent seeking all more likely - "The result would be a violent form of the resource curse, in which the rise of resource industries indirectly leads to further destabilization of property rights and hence the decline of non resource industries" (321)

POPULISM - Panizza, Francisco. Populism and the Mirror of Democracy. London: Verso, 2005. [EXTRA]

The analytical core of populism has three elements - a mode of identification, a process of naming, and a dimension of politics. Here, populism is a view of the sovereign people in an antagonistic relationship with the established order - with ideas of 'the people' being constructed by the movement "Populist parties emerge out of a failure of existing social and political institutions to confine and regulate political subjects into a relatively stable social order" - it seeks to redefine the unsatisfying terms of political discourse Populism can both mobilize a people who already have an identity and feel marginalized or it can create an identity of the people in light of the failures of governance where it before didn't exist (an awakening of identity). Thus, populism stems from dislocation in the political order and failure of representation resulting from periods of upheaval, be they economic, social, political, or cultural. Examples include hyperinflation or crises of civil society (seen with the Shining Path and Fujimori) or the discrediting of existing political parties (seen with Hugo Chavez) or with changes in social composition via organization or globalization, or changes in political communication liek the rise of the radio Populism is specifically a breakdown of order that exacerbates the gap between the leaders and the led - populism tries to bridge this gap 'The People' in populism are a diverse and flexible term, but it almost always entails those who feel left out Populism relies on a highly homogenous people always fighting against a heterogeneous 'other' threatening them Populism is usually distinctly defined by the relationship between a leader and his followers, with populism simultaneously dspoliticizing and hyperpoliticisng social relations and the leader thus usually existing 'beyond' politics. Thus, often under populism the personal and the politica become increases melded into a coherent one Populism both embodies the antagonism of politics and circumvents the reality of politics with its focus on an illusory unified people Populism embraces politics view of constantly striving for the inclusion of the excluded while subverting the role of the institutions in the protection of democracy The inability to have a fully unified people requires limits to popular sovereignty that populism tries to subvert - the dynamic of general will vs. constitutionalism Populism thus doesn't fully subvert or promote democracy but holds up a mirror to it and reveals both its true beauties and glaring imperfections.

POPULISM - Linda Bos, Wouter van der Brug, and Claes H. de Vreese, "An Experimental Test of the Impact of Style and Rhetoric on the Perception of Right-Wing Populist and Mainstream Party Leaders," Acta Politica 48, no. 2 (2013): 192-208. [CORE]

The effects of populist communications strategies vary between lower-educated and more politically-cynical people, with such people being more susceptible to populist appeals, when measured using a large-N experimental sample of Dutch voters. This study focuses on two key communication strategies of populist leaders - populist rhetoric (which is focused on anti-establishment appeal, anti-elitism, and celebration of the heartland) and populist style (which is more easily adopted by mainstream politicians and which involved portraying oneself as a reluctant politician steeped in ordinariness and working to prevent the corruption of the community you love). This study tests is populist rhetoric and/or populist style have an impact on the lower-education and the more politically cynical, who have often been theorized to be more susceptible to populism because of greater levels of economic insecurity, less exposure to a 'tolerance building education,' more desire to see 'common-men politician', and more distrust of the political establishment. The experiment was run via presenting respondents with news items about different political leaders (one right wing, one left wing), where populist rhetoric and style were present or not present, and asking them to assess the legitimacy of the politicians. The findings were: (1) populist tools decreased the legitimacy of the left-wing politician for most participants, but had no impact on the legitimacy of the right-win leader, (2) lower-educated voters were more likely to see the right-wing leader as more legitimate after using populist tools, (3) highly-cynical voters were more likely to see the right-wing leader as more legitimate after using populist tools. "The results show that using a populist style does positively affect the perceived legitimacy of right-wing populist party leaders, but only for the lower educated, the politically cynical and the less politically efficacious." (204) These effects, however, were only seen for populist style and not populist rhetoric.

PARTIES - Herbert Kitschelt, "Linkages Between Citizens and Politicians in Democratic Polities," Comparative Political Studies 33, no. 6 (August 2000): 845-79. [CORE]

The focus in the parties literature has been overwhelmingly on programmatic party linkages, but this oversimplifies the types of linkages parties have. Parties are typically seen as either aiding collective action (by pooling resources and information for candidates) or social choice (by making political decision making, ideology formation, and accountability much easier for voters as information misers). Different types of parties result from if such parties succeed at solving none, one, or both of the issues of collective action and social choice. When neither collective action nor social choice is addressed, leaders are likely to rely on charismatic authority with little policy coherence. When politicians address social choice, but not collective action it leads to legislative caucuses and factions (which are limited to competitive oligarchies with restrictive suffrage). When politicians address collective action but not social choice, this leads to clientelism, either through the rich buying special interest or partie buying votes via a reciprocal exchange of goods. It is only when parties build on both that programmatic linkages become possible. However, this should not lead to the conclusion that clientelism is personalistic in a way programmatism isn't or that clientelism undercuts accountability - since clientelistic governance can create very strong levels of accountability and responsiveness. In general though, these forms of party linkages are mutually exclusive with one another. Within the literature, there are five dominant theoretical frameworks that explain this different linkages: 1) socioeconomic modernization (which argues programmatism will naturally arise out of development); 2) State formation and political democratization (which argues the timing of democratization relative to state industrialization and professionalization effects how parties mobilize voters); 3) Democratic Institutions (which argues electoral laws and executive-legislative arrangements are key for party formations, with presidentialism promoting clientelism); 4) political economy and democratic linkages (access to large nationalized/regulated industries by the state increase the odds of clientelism); 5) Political ideology and ethnocultural cleavages (strong ethnocultural divisions lend themselves to clientelism and club goods). Finally, it is worth noting th clientelism may serve as an alternative to the welfare state for less developed economies and as a means of appeasing citizens over high levels of inequality.

POPULISM - Mudde, Cas. "Three Decades of Populist Radical Right Parties in Western Europe: So What?" European Journal of Political Research 52, no. 1 (January 2013): 1-19. [EXTRA]

The populist radical right parties (PRRP) are the most successful party family in post-war Europe. Overall, however, this article shows that the effects of these parties are limited to immigration, and even there they serve as catalysts and not initiators, being neither necessary nor sufficient for stricter immigration regulations However PRRPs may be poised for increased success in the future because of the tabloidization of political discourse, the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, and the learning curve of PRRPs Still, even if PRRPs succeeded in mainstream politics, they are unlikely to completely transform the system since they are a 'pathological normalcy' of the system which strive to radicalize mainstream values but not introduce fundamentally new ones PRRPs shared ideology includes (at a minimum) nativism, authoritarianism, and populism PRRPs haven't been particularly successful in entering parliaments across Europe, with only a 50% hit rate - what's more, a government formed with PRRPs is especially rare, happening only 8 out of 200 times since 1980, although the trend does seem to be going upward The effect of PRRPs can be assessed along four metrics: people, parties, policies, and polities People - rightward shifts in policy views in Europe seem to have predated the rise of populism and associations with immigration are volatile. In general, the data on PRRPs causing a shift in views on immigration are mixed - Evidence of increased Euro-skepticism and political apathy being tied to PRRPs is mixed too Parties - the presence of a PRRP does not seem necessary for mainstream right parties adopting more extreme immigration stances. However, there is evidence of more and more mainstream parties adopting populist rhetoric, of a 'soft' populism Policies - European policies have become more authoritarian since the 1980s and PRRPs may have pushed them some in this direction Polity: PPRPs haven't affected the polity of Western Europe, an unsurprising fact given their support of popular sovereignty and majoritarian rule -- although they do oppose liberal democracy One key influence of PRRPs is redefining the 'people' in democracy as ethnically homogenous - but they have merely been a catalyst for this change in a population already highly resentful over immigration - a movement the moderate right has increasingly latched on to throughout Europe, often independent of PRRPs PRRPs are purifiers, not profits - they don't introduce new issues but just argue for more extreme positions on existing ones.

PRES & PAR - Samuels, David J. and Matthew S. Shugart. Presidents, Parties, and Prime Ministers: How the Separation of Powers Affects Party Organization and Behavior. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. [CORE]

The separation of powers in a presidential system allows for an electoral divergence between their legislative and executive voter basis, in a way that is impossible in parliamentary systems. Thus, parties and party politics differ substantially under different constitutional formats, with presidential systems leading to 'presidentialized' political parties. Presidential parties have separate origin (they face competing incentives in the electoral arena) and separate survival (they both have fixed, but variant terms), both of which undermine incentives for party cohesion and decrease unified leadership. This undermines a party's ability to delegate and enforce coordinated action. In contrast, parliamentarized parties avoid these issues because they have cohesive electoral and accountability processes. Presidentialized parties will rarely occur in parliamentary systems, and vice-versa. Prominent examples of presidentialized parties are Lula de Silva's success as a presidential candidate in Brazil, in spite of his parties failure in congressional elections, and Margaret Thatcher's ouster as Prime Minister in the United Kingdom, in spite of her success in the electorate.

TERMS - Clientelistic Party Linkages

There are clientelist linkages, which rely on high levels of institutional capacity but low levels of ideological coherence. Here, parties "invest in administrative-technical infrastructure but not in modes of interest aggregation and program formation... [creating] bonds with their following through direct, personal, and typically material side payments." As Kitschelt outlines, these party linkages can function either through a rent-seeking mechanism, whereby rich individuals purchase influence through campaign contributions, or via a goods-distribution mechanism, where a wider variety of benefits are distributed to voters in exchange for votes (Kitschelt [2000], 849). Either way, the need to monitor commitments and exchanges ensures clientelism relies on a high level of institutional capacity, while the focus on material exchanges limits ideological coherence (K&K, 1458).

TERMS - Identitarian Party Linkages

There are identitarian linkages, which rely on low levels of institutional capacity but high levels of ideological coherence. This form of party linkage fits within the model of 'social-identity' formulated by both Lupu (2013) and Achen and Bartles (2016). Under this framework, voters form attachments to parties, not based on clear understandings of their policy platforms, but instead based on how parties serve to uphold their salient identities and the associated identitarian ideals - usually within societies with clear "ethnic, racial, occupational, [or] religious" divisions/hierarchies that parties can organize to protect (Achen and Bartles, 299). In this context, parties have a simple organizational task, since their constituencies are already delineated by salient markers of a voter's identity. However, they have to adopt clear messaging that appeals to these markers and programs that promise to promote the social ideals of these groups.

PRES & PAR - Lijphart, Arend. Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. [EXTRA]

There are three key differences between presidential and parliamentary systems: (1) parliamentary systems have a PM and cabinet dependent on the legislature and always subject to removal by the legislature whereas presidents are elected to fixed terms and independent of the legislature, (2) Presidents are popularly elected and PMs are elected by the legislature, (3) parliamentarism has collective and collegial executives while presidentialism has one-person, non-collegial ones. Almost all of the democracies considered in this book (a total of 36) between 1945 and 2010 fit into either pure presidential system of pure parliamentary ones, as defined by whether the executive is selected by voters, is dependent on legislative confidence, and is collegial or unitary. There are some semi-presidential system, which can be classified by asking who is th real head of government, the PM or the president? - The most complicated cases are France and Finland, with both essentially alternating between presidentialism and parliamentarism depending on which party controls the legislature and which the presidency. Some scholars point to separation of powers, the inability to dissolve the legislature, and the lack of dual executive (like a monarchy) as key features of presidential systems - but all 3 have significant exceptions on both sides of the typology and prove inessential in classifying the systems. There is no autonomic relationship between presidentialism and parliamentarism and the balance of power between the executive and legislature - both have examples of government on either ends of the extreme. Presidents derive their power from (1) the constitution, (2) their parties, (3) their popular mandate The balance of power between legislators and executives can be measured by cabinet stability in parliamentary systems (although this is not a measure of government effectiveness as many assume), with longer cabinets implying more executive strength. Measuring the strength of the executive in harder in presidential systems but overall there doesn't seem to be much of a difference in executive power between the two systems One party cabinets with minimally winning coalitions in the legislature increase the odds of executive dominance by decreasing the discretion of the party in the legislature because of the small margin of victory Multi-party cabinets have much shorter average duration in comparison, meaning a decrease in executive dominance Many modern democracies still have politically infeebled but culturally and symbolically important monarchies.

POPULISM - Akkerman, Agnes, Cas Mudde, and Andrej Zaslove. "How Populist Are the People? Measuring Populist Attitudes in Voters." Comparative Political Studies 47, no. 9 (August 2014): 1324-53. [EXTRA]

There are three political attitudes that can be linked to party preferences - (1) populist attitudes, (2) pluralist attitudes, (3) elitist attitudes. These are successful predictors of political party support. Populism is a thin-centered ideology whose manifestation relies a great deal on context - as seen in the gap between the left-wing, economic and inclusive populism of latin America and the right-wing, economic and exclusive populism of Europe The definition used here is populism as a thin-centered ideology of a society split into homenous and antagonistic groups - a pure people and corrupt elite, and which argues for the expression of the general will of the people The negative poles of populism are pluralism (compromise and minority rights) and elitism (which reverses poplisms view of elites and the people) This study used a survey in the Netherlands to test operationalizations of populism, pluralism, and elitism with questions aimed at capturing populism though support for the sovereignty of the people and a manichean distinction between elites and the people, with pluralism being operationalized as an openness to compromise and diversity, and elitism as support for elite rule and leadership These factors proved highly effective at mapping these different political views onto society Both populist and elitist share many views because they are polar sides of a coin - like distrust of politicians These measures also predicted popular support of Dutch poplist parties very successfully - with some parties attracting both populists and elitists alike (perhaps because of populist messages with charismatic leaders) Those who don't vote are more likely to possess strong populist attitudes All of this proves populism can be measured individually in a coherent and robust manner Right wing populism was more exclusionary and left wing populism more inclusive

PRES & PAR - Elgie, Robert. "From Linz to Tsebelis: Three Waves of Presidential/Parliamentary Studies?" Democratization 12, no. 1 (2005): 106-22. [CORE]

There have been three waves of thinking within the field of presidentialism and parliamentarism: the first wave began with Linz's seminal article in 1990 and focused on the impact of regime type on the success of democracy; the second wave began shortly after Linz's article and added additional explanatory variables (like party systems and leadership powers) to additional outcome variables (like the quality of governance, not just its longevity); the third wave focuses less directly on presidentialism and parliamentarism, and instead integrates these systems into broader social science frameworks like the 'principle/agent' framework and the focus on 'veto' players. Wave 1 is epitomized by Linz, Wave 2 by Mainwaring, Wave 3 by Tsebelis and Strom.

PARTIES - Gonzalez-Octanos, Ezequiel, et. al. "Vote Buying and Social Desirability Bias: Experimental Evidence from Nicaragua." American Journal of Political Science 59, no. 1 (January 2012): 202-17. [EXTRA]

There is a gap between qualitative findings on vote buying in Latin America (which show it as rampant) and quantitative ones (which show it as largely absent). This study addresses this gap using a survey-based list experiment after the 2007 Nicaragua municipal elections. This technique shows that 24% of registered voters in Nicaragua were offered a gift/service for a vote but that only 2% reported it when directly askes. This bias is nonrandom, meaning it invalidates traditional measures of vote buying. Vote buying seems bad for democracy since it shortens time horizons on public policy (creating development and poverty traps), inverts the rationale of vertical accountability by making voters, not politicians, subject to monitoring, and by decreasing competitive politics when public funds are used. Beyond showing that vote buying is vastly underreported, this study also shows that campaigns succeed at targeting individuals for gifts who had the least faith in a secret ballot and most concern they were being monitored, which means that these parties succeeded at circumventing commitment problems and commitment problems Nicaragua is a country with a highly corrupt democratic system, which means there is frequent vote buying, but also a country with a strong grassroots political culture, which means that there should be more stigma around actual vote buying The targeting of vote buying seems to support a focus on undecided/slight-opposition voters, and not on party's core base There was no evidence of a relationship between income and vote-buying but this may be because income is so low across the board in Nicaragua Proximity to state sponsored community organizations also increases vote buying because they provided an infrastructure of surveillance for politicians

AUTHORITARIANISM - Smith, Benjamin. "Life of the Party: The Origins of Regime Breakdown and Persistence under Single-Party Rule." World Politics 57, no. 3 (2005): 421-51. [EXTRA]

This article explores the origins and long term durability of single-party rule - it argues the fiscal and political constraints parties face at their inception create long-lasting trajectories. Elites that face organized opposition from highly institutionalized social groups like mass-mobilizing parties or foreign/colonial armies and which have little of no access to rent sources are likely to respond to these constraints by building party institutions to mobilize their own constituency. In contrast, elites facing little opposition and enjoying plentiful access to rents face no forces moves and don't build party institutions. These choices have a huge impact on elite's abilities to weather crises later on and thus the antecedent conditions of party formation can predict which autocratic regimes will endure through waves of democratization Single party regimes are capable of having very long life spans (as seen in Mexico) and exist in a wide variety of conditions - but, a key issue in analysis of what allows some to survive longer than others is that many approaches treat parties as prior variables. The economic conditions of a country, its levels of foreign support, and variations in repressiveness all seem to fail as explanatory factors. This article explores 4 cases: Indonesia, the Philippines, Guinea Bissau, and Tanzania to test its hypothesis. The key to single party longevity are the fiscal and political challenges that shape elite incentives around how broad/deep they build their parties Elites facing the most strenuous fiscal and political crises will heavily invest in institutions and coalition building which will create robust institutions and the ability to withstand crises - those with few fiscal/political issues will build shallow coalitions and institutions prone to collapse and reliant on rents to survive These early party institutions then create long-term political trajectories since strong parties allow a better management of competing incentives and thus avoid a long-term build up of grievances. Thus, the first years of a party are essential for setting the tone for its future. Here, the cases of Indonesia (1967-71) and Tanzania (1954-62) represent successful party building, while the Philippines (1978-82) and Guinea Bissau (1970-74) are failed party attempts. This model of early party formation helps explain the quick collapse of single party rule in East Europe in the 1990s.

PARTIES - Tavits, Margit. "The Development of Stable Party Support: Electoral Dynamics in Post-Communist Europe." American Journal of Political Science 49, no. 2 (April 2005): 283-96. [EXTRA]

This article looks at pooled time-series cross-section data on election results from 15 East European democracies to analyze what conditions help stable patterns of party support emerge - it finds that (1) right after a regime change, election volatility increases but then the trend reverses after democracy has endured about a decade, (2) ethnic cleavages have no affect on stability while social cleavages affect electoral stability only during economic downturns, (3) both institutional and economic performance influence the stability of party support, but the affect of economic performance decreases over time when democracies mature. Still party linkages are essential for bridging the divide between society and the state and accounting for diverse interests and thus succeeding at creating them is key to stable democracies and good regimes Indeed, good party linkages effect the likelihood of resorting to populism an the quality of party policy production Electoral volatility is here defined by the size of changes in vote share for individual parties across consecutive elections. Party system volatility in East Europe is remarkably high, compared to both Latin America and Western Europe. Institutionally, we should expect volatility to increase with (1) an increase in the number of parties, since majorities are harder to construct and vote switching is easier with less difference between the parties (2) decrease with older parties with strong roots in society, and (3) decrease with ideological polarization which decreases th desire to switch parties Economically, increased economic volatility should increase incumbent punishing and decrease party loyalty, leading to more party volatility with a bad economy and less with a good economy Finally, more clearly delineated social cleavage should decrease party volatility with religion, ethnicity, and urban.rural divides being salient cleavages in Eastern Europe, class being less so. The regressions show significant effects for the number of parties and the mean district magnitude and ideological polarization and GDP/inflation + rural/urban divides and a curvilinear relationship with volatility over time and a declining relationship between volatility and economics as time goes on and an increase in rural/urban salience as inflation increases. The lack of ethnic cleavages as relevant factors is spurising. This implies class may be a more salient political predictor in the future and that society attempts to decrease the salience of ethnicity may have succeeded. The other key finding of this article is that party volatility follows a curvilinear trend, having high levels of volatility at first and then more stability after around 11 years, supported by good institutions and economic factors and appeals to relevant social cleavages.

POPULISM - Italo Colantone and Piero Stanig, "The Trade Origins of Economic Nationalism: Import Competition and Voting Behavior in Western Europe," American Journal of Political Science 62, no. 4 (October, 2018): 936-53. [CORE]

This article looks at the impact of globalization on electoral outcomes in 15 western countries between 1988-2007, specifically looking at exposure to Chinese imports within regions. It finds that at the district level, strong import shocks lead to (1) more support for nationalist and isolationist parties, (2) an increased support for radical-right parties, (3) a general shift rightward of the electorate. These effects are sociotropic in these communities. Thus, it would seem that globalization is a key source of nationalism and far-right populist throughout democracies in Europe and the U.S., with economic nationalism being an alternative to trade liberalism and redistribution that instead focuses on the exclusion of 'outsiders' and ousting of corrupt elites. Globalization also limits the appeal of lef-twing parties because higher capital mobility, declining tax revenues, and more liberalized state economies are all antithetical to left-wing populist solutions, which primarily depend on redistribution and the extension of social welfarism. This leaves economic nationalism, coupled with protectionism and lower taxes, as a more appealing model for those left behind by globalism. Further, the insecurity caused by the losses of globalism lend themselves more to ethnocentrism and anti-minority sentiments, which make the multiculturalism of the left less appealing. "Electorates tilt in a more protectionist and isolationist direction when exposed to stronger shocks... [further] in response to the import shock, the electorate tends to abandon mainstream social-democratic parties and favor parties that propose economic nationalism... Overall, this body of empirical evidence points to a general shift towards nationlist, isolationist, and conservative policy platforms in response to the import shock." (C&S2 - 945)

POPULISM - Wuttke, Alexander, Christian Schimpf, and Harald Schoen. "When the Whole is Greater than the Sum of Its Parts: On the Conceptualization and Measurement of Populist Attitudes and Other Multidimensional Constructs." American Political Science Review 114, no. 2 (2000): 356-74. [EXTRA]

This article seeks to address definitional shortcomings for individual level populism - Many now agree populism is a multi-dimensional construct. However, there is a constant gap between theoretical understandings of populism and its application in real world studies, limiting the validity of these findings. Using different operationalization of multidimensional concepts leads to substantive differences in findings - current approaches to populism fail to account for it as a multidimensional concept with non-interchangeable components Most definitions of populism are ideational and focus on it as a thin-centered ideology with multiple key components or sub-dimensions including anti-elitism But measurements for populism often just focus on certain of these dimensions which decreases concept differentiation. Populism can thus better be operationalized as a concept with necessary and sufficient components that can be confirmed only through the simultaneous presence of its constituent parts. Each component is jointly necessary for the terms validity, with three common ones being (1) anti-elitism, (2) support for popular sovereignty, (3) a Manichian outlook (the struggle between good and evil) This makes studies with average constitutive components of populism (the Bollen approach to statistical analysis) especially problematic - this undermines the key view of populism as an attitudinal syndrome with multiple constitutive parts. The new approach focuses on the constituent parts of populism not the causes of the phenomenon, but aspects of its core identity 0- this can be better achieved using non-compensatory concepts with either dichotomous or continuous dimensions This article does analysis of three different conceptualization of populism and finds they produce widely disparate results Indeed, thBollen approach overestimates populism by including people who don't hold all 3 essential attitudes for a concept This shows support for populism is likely less widespread than believed since it represents a coherent set of ideas [It seems this article focuses too little on the importance of populist political movements, which need not have ideologically consistent supporters, and instead on populist beliefs on an individual level]

AUTHORITARIANISM - Larry Diamond and Leonard Morlino, "The Quality of Democracy: An Overview," Journal of Democracy 15, no. 4 (October 2004): 20-31 [CORE]

This essay aims to outline key definitional aspects of the quality of democracy - overall, there are eight major aspects that impact the quality of democracy: freedom (access to political, civil, and socioeconomic rights), rule of law (fair and consistent treatment by an independent jury and via clear and well established laws), vertical accountability (the ability to hold leaders to account for their actions), responsiveness (the degree to which citizens are satisfied with their government and see it as legitimate), equality (equal access to the same rights and protections by all citizens and groups), participation (the right of all adults to participate - especially to vote - in their democracy), competition (regular and fair competition between a variety of political parties), and horizontal accountability (the ability of state institutions to check each other and counterbalance each other). These elements overlap and are interdependent. At a minimum, democracy involves universal suffrance; recurring, free, competitive, and fair elections; more than one serious political party; and alternative sources of information. With this base line, the quality of democracy can be defined via the procedures of democracy (rule of law, participation, horizontal accountability and vertical accountability), its substance (respect for civil and political freedoms and pursuit of equality), or its responsiveness (its ability to aggregate citizen demands into government action). The rule of law is the base upon which every other dimension of democratic quality rests - it is not something that can be bought or forced via training. "the linkages among the different elements of democracy are so densely interactive and overlapping that it is sometimes difficult to know where one dimension ends and another begins" - Thus, a democracy failing in one of these regards is likely failing in others too. "A high-quality democracy thus does not rate infinitely high on every measure of democratic quality, but instead represents a balancing of virtues that lie in tension."

POPULISM - Mudde, Cas, and Cristobal Kaltwasser. Populism in Europe and the Americas: Threat or Corrective for Democracy? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. [EXTRA]

This volume primarily looks at the intersection between populism and liberal democracy There are definitions that focus on populism as a political movement, uniting multiple classes behind a charismatic leader There are definitions that view it as a political style characterized as a certain means of linking to the public, especially via less structured and more opportunistic links (a la Peter Mair) There are definitions that are discursive and focus on populism as a means of confronting hegemony via a discursive construction of opposing power bases in the elites and the people (most seen in the works of Laclau) But these definitions all deal with issues of conceptual traveling or conceptual stretching - Thus, we should define populism as a thin-centered ideology which separates homogenous and antagonistic groups of the pure people from the corrupted elite, and embraces the view that the general will of the people should be expressed and that this is a manichean struggle - This means populism is above all a form of moral politics. Populism has three central concepts - the people, the elites, and the general will - and it has two opposites in elitism and pluralism. This account for both supply and demand factors There are three key conceptions of democracy relevant to populism - Democracy, Radical Democracy, and Liberal Democracy Democracy: a combination of popular sovereignty and majority rule - this is largely a method of conducting populics and focuses on the procedure - it can be direct or indirect, liberal or illiberal Liberal Democracy - defined in Dahl's terms as an interaction between inclusiveness and competitiveness Radical Democracy - A more conflictual model of democracy where adversaries fight for a better order in denunciation of oppressive power relations Populism can be both corrective and threat to democracy - it is essentially democratic but ambivalent to liberal democracy - The conflict between populism and liberal democracy is because of the contradiction of promises of majority rule and the simultaneous protection of minority rights via the law. Populism also subordinates the checks and balances of liberal democracy to the ideal of the general will, making populism hostile to pluralism and minority protections that subvert that will Democracy generates aspiration, which when not satisfied lead to discontent that is fertile ground for populism Democracy's quality can be assessed in three regards: procedure, content, and result. Populism can be an aid or a hindrance to all of these factors. Overall, populism should strengthen political participation but weaken contestation and constitutional protections, and undermine the tenuous balance between popular will and constitutionalism To determine when populism has positive and negative effects we can look at a 2x2 matrix with populism in opposition (weak) or in government (strong) and democracy as unconsolidated (weak) or consolidated (strong) For populism in opposition in a consolidated democracy, the populists should have only small and polistive effects (as seen in Belgium) For populism in opposition in unconsolidated democracies, populism will be a corrective and will aid democratic reforms (as seen in Mexico) For populism in government in consolidated democracies, populism will have moderate negative effects (limited by strong institutions) which will vary depending on popular support for their efforts (as seen in Austria) For populism in government in unconsolidated democracies, populism will have strong negative effect with politician and threats to democratic institutions (as seen in Peru) A key issue for populism is not trying to give power to the people but HOW the people are defined Populists often exploit poor results in a democratic regime and argue for a modification of democratic procedures - mainly limits on the expression of the general will Populist parties in opposition often succeed at reshifting popular and political discourse on their key issue areas, giving voice o the otherwise marginalized As seen with Fujimori, populism may be more dangerous to democracy in the confines of presidential systems

PARTIES - Alan Ware, Political Parties and Party Systems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). [CORE]

This work defines parties as institutions that (a) seek influence in a state, often by attempting to occupy positions in government and (b) usually consists of more than a single interest in the society and so to some degree attempts to 'aggregate interests.' - This definition focuses on the centrality of the state as the center of political activity, notes that being in government is usually important for influence, shows parties as non-exclusive to libaral democracies, makes it possible to distinguish parties from pressure groups (most of the time), and avoids the misleading assertion that parties are necessarily united by shared principles and opinions Party systems are distinct from parties, and constitute patterns of competition and cooperation between the different parties in that system... as important as competition is the cooperation - formal, informal, and implicit - that is part of any party system. Studies of parties have been split into three realms - the sociological (which focuses on the social phenomena that undergird any political phenomenon), the institutional (which claims political competition is mediated by the institutions it exists within), and the competitive (which sees competition as the only important motivator for parties interacting as self-interested agents in a free market for votes). "Parties arose from two sources: (1) from within an existing legislature (as in the case of the British Conservatives), and (2) by the mobilization of social groups and classes that had no representation in such legislatures and which sought to defend their own interests (one example being that of the British Labour party)." - Here the rise of mass franchise was essential in the formation of the first major parties in both the U.S. and Europe

PARTIES - Octavio Amorim Neto and Gary Cox, "Electoral Institutions, Cleavage Structures, and the Number of Parties," American Journal of Political Science 41, no. 1 (January, 1997): 149-74. [CORE]

What determines the number of parties that compete in a polity? This paper argues that approaches that focus on election laws that structure coalitional incentives, and approaches that focus on preexisting social cleavages can be combined. It presents the hypothesis that "The effective number of parties in a polity should be a multiplicative rather than an additive function of the permissiveness of the electoral system and the heterogeneity of the society." "The effective number of elective or legislative parties in a polity can be thought of as the end product of a series of decisions by various agents that serve to reduce a large number of social differences, or cleavages, to a smaller number of party-defining cleavages.4 There are three broad stages to consider in this process of reduction: the translation of social cleavages into partisan preferences; the translation of partisan preferences into votes; and the translation of votes into seats." (NC - 152) Many institutionalist models of parties ignore the fact that party formation is a key step in understanding the shape parties take in society. "A polity will have many parties only if it both has many cleavages and has a permissive enough electoral system to allow political entrepreneurs to base separate parties on these cleavages. Or, to turn the formulation around, a polity can have few parties either because it has no need for many (few cleavages) or poor opportunities to create many (a strong electoral system). If these claims are true, they would rule out models in which the number of parties depends only on the cleavage structure, or only on the electoral system, or only on an additive combination of these two considerations." (NC - 155) Interactive regressions confirm that: the effective number of parties appears to depend on the product of social heterogeneity and electoral permissiveness, rather than being an additive function of these two factors" (166-7) "In particular, elections that are both held under more permissive rules (runoff rather than plurality) and occur in more diverse societies (with a larger effective number of ethnic groups) are those that tend to have the largest fields of contestants for the presidency." (167)

PARTIES - Jana Morgan, Bankrupt Representation and Party System Collapse (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011). [CORE]

What led Venezuela's party system to collapse, despite strong development and oil wealth? What allows some party systems to survive challenges while others collapse from them? These are driving questions for this work, which focuses on party system collapse. Party system collapse has major consequences for democracy by undermining the accountability, interest aggregation, and governability inherently vested in parties within democracies. This book argues parties will collapse when they fail to fulfill their primary role in democracy - linking society to the state. This happens when a party system faces challenges to its core linkage strategies and when institutional and environmental constraints limit its ability to appropriately respond to such challenges. The result is a decline in linkage followed by collapse. In contrast, those systems that survive lack either systematic threats to their linkage profile, or institutional constraints on their response to those threats. Parties adopt three major strategies in responding to threats to linkage: programmatic appeals, interest incorporation, and clientelism. The mixture of these make up a party's linkage profile. This book focuses in particular Venezuela, where strong party linkages existed prior to 1980, but where it declined thereafter because parties became frozen by the competing demands of state-led growth and international pressures toward neoliberalism. This combined with an ideological convergence between the parties created by inter party agreements limited party responsiveness to the crises and discredited the entire party system. As the social structure of Venezuela changed due to economic challenges in the 1990s, parties remained based on the old social structures of the country and thus failed to adapt. Meanwhile, declining economic prosperity limited the ability of parties to resort to clientelism or patronage. Thus, by 1998, programmatic representation, interest incorporation, and clientelism were all failing. In the wake of this failure, Hugo Chavez rose to power. Party systems can change without collapsing - either through system-maintaining changes or system-transforming changes. Here, party collapse can be understood as system-transforming change combined with party deterioration and decay. ""The cases that fully satisfy the definition of collapse are detailed in table 2.3. They are Bolivia (2005), Colombia (2002), Italy (1994), and Venezuela (1998)." (Morgan - 29) "Different linkage profiles are placed at risk by distinct kinds of challenges. For instance, a party that utilizes policy-based appeals to attract supporters would not necessarily be affected by changes in the size of the electorate, whereas a party dependent on clientelism would be seriously threatened by exponential growth in the number of voters" (47) Programmatic linkages fail when parties don't adapt to policy failures or respond to crises and leave voters without good policy choices. This can be worsened by international constraints. Incorporation based linkages can fail when social identities are transformed and reshaped or the relationship between different social classes is (especially if neglected groups suddenly gain power). Clientelistic linkages fail when demand can no longer be satisfied (whether it's because of economic crisis, bureaucratic professionalization, or growing population) and government performance is otherwise low.

POPULISM - Hawkins, Kirk A., and Cristobal Kaltwasser. "What the (Ideational) Study of Populism Can Teach Us, and What It Can't." Swiss Political Science Review 23, no. 4 (2017): 526-42. [EXTRA]

A more scientific approach to defining and operationalizing populism based on ideation highlights three key things: (1) populism isn't new and isn't necessarily stronger today, (2) populist ideas exist at the level of the individual voter and influence political behavior, (3) populism has both positive and negative consequences for democracy. However, the current ideational approach to studying populism also has three key shortcomings: (1) it fails to understand other political ideas and how they interact with populism, (2) it lacks a theory about the different organizational modes pursued by populists, (3) it inadequately theorizes about the impact of populism on party systems. Populism is not new and the great recession serves as a poor causal variable for it - The view of populism as new is, in part, due to a long understanding of it in a 'exceptionalist' mindset in political science For a long time, populism has been identified with shortcoming of democracy the world over Both the supply side and demand side of populism matter - Populist attitudes are real and can dictate support for populist parties. An important driver of the populist right is views on immigration (and not redistribution) Populism rarely travels along and usually coexists with other ideas and ideological framework - Mudde has argued that the key uniting framework of modern populism is Nativism The ideational approach to populism highlighted here focuses on a Manichean and moral distinction between the pure people and the corrupt elites - but charismatic leadership and organizational resources also matter for populist success Populism shows that normative motivations can drive voting as much as economic-rationalist ones. Mainly, populism arises out of a feeling that democratic actors have failed to fulfill their halfo the bargain and have privileged some citizens over others.

POPULISM - Marc F. Plattner, "Populism, Pluralism, and Liberal Democracy," Journal of Democracy 21, no. 1 (January 2010): 81-92. [CORE]

Although support for modern democracy is very high, support for its specific manifestation within each country is much lower, with political discontent increasingly widespread. Democracy is not just majoritarianism, but also the protection of minority rights and adherence to rule of law, as manifested in the ideal of liberal democracy. Thus, there is a tension in democracy between the empowerment of the people and the check on their liberties in the name of protecting minority rights and the law. This means increasing majoritarianism is not a salve for democracy, but a corruption of it. This compromise in liberal democracy ensures majorities in democracies consistently feel partly thwarted by the political system, and minorities partly neglected. Populism results when this balance of interests falls on the majority side through a sudden increase in power, and the majority seeks to increase control via excessive democratization. In contrast, pluralism results when power falls to the minority side and self-government is undermined, along with social cohesion. Under this view, both populism and pluralism are latent concepts always somewhat present in democracy, it is just their accentuation that proves to be problematic. Under this view, populism is a view of democracy not wedded to liberalism or constitutionalism. It favors the will of the people over a corrupted elite, but wants to enact this will with as few checks and delays as possible (which leaves individual rights and procedural 'niceties' left behind). This lends itself to ideas of the 'people' that are exclusionary, and thus to nativism and hostility to immigration. Thus, populism is often a threat to democracy, but sometimes a corrective when democracy moves too far away from the people. The other pole of populism is pluralism, which focuses on the maintenance of cultural heterogeneity and diversity and the protection of minority interests. This can be a threat to democracy if it undermines the ability to form a coherent body politic. These two tendencies - pluralism and populism - are inherently at odds with each other, and thus in most functional democracies end up cancelling each other out.

PARTIES - Herbert Kitschelt and Daniel M. Kselman - "Economic Development, Democratic Experience, and Political Parties' Linkage Strategies," Comparative Political Studies 46, no. 11 (2012): 1453-84. [CORE]

Clientelism tends to increase, not decrease, as countries move from low to intermediate levels of development and democratization. Thus, there is a curvilinear relationship with economic development and clientelism Less developed countries are more likely to face high levels of political uncertainty, which will make both clientelistic, and especially programmatic linkages difficult to credibly maintain. Programmatic appeals require ex-post credibility because the benefits are delayed and indirect and thus require a faith in the capacity of the party to implement them once in office. This is true, only to a slightly lesser degree, for clientelism, which requires mechanisms and monitoring and enforcement for the exchange of political support for material benefits, which requires an extensive organizational infrastructure in turn. Clientelism is feasible with medium-term time horizons, programmatism only with long-term ones. Younger Democracies are more likely to face institutional and regime change, as well as greater levels of party system volatility, all of which make ex-post credibility either for clientelism or programmatism incredibly difficult, not to mention the development of clear policy platforms. Lower levels of economic development also make the focus on small-scale and short term material benefits more appealing because of the focus on day-to-day subsistence, as well as because of the instability inherent to regimes in volatile economic systems. What's more, higher levels of economic volatility correspond with higher reliance on outside intervention, which lowers the capacity to have autonomy over policy making, limiting party commitment. In this context, one-shot clientelism coupled with strategies grounded in things like charisma or ethnicity are likely to be the most successful. But as development happens, long-term economic progress will be easier to tie promises of the state too, the state bureaucracy will offer more employment options, and sudden shocks will be less debilitating, making full scale clientelism more feasible. As a country become highly developed both supply and demand will shift toward programmatism, with voters having transcended the need for short term material exchanges through clientelism and increasingly in search of the state level stability produced via programmatism, like a social security net. Finally, if a country has experiences more transitions in regime type, it is more likely to default to clientelism over programmatism.

AUTHORITARIANISM - Juan J. Linz, Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2000). [CORE]

Democracy is the 'negative pole' of all non-democracies, and can be distinguished from authoritarianism, totalitarianism, sultanism, and racial democracy in turn. Here, sultanistic regimes can be defined as regimes with arbitrary and tyrannical rule exercised by an individual and his clients with the help a praetorian guard, with the aim of the state being private instead of public. Racial democracy can be defined as dual societies, with one sector of society imposing its rule on another, while allowing its own members to participate in democratic rule making - there is thus a paradox of democracy combined with racial domination. Meanwhile, authoritarian and totalitarian regimes are scored on their degree/type of political pluralism, and the degree to which such regimes are based on political apathy/demobilization and limited controlled mobilizations. A country can be defined as a democracy when "it allows the free formulation of political preferences, through the use of basic freedoms of association, information, and communication, for the purpose of free competition between leaders to validate at regular intervals by nonviolent means their claim to rule" - restrictions on rights, on minorities, on party competition, and on regular transitions all disqualify a country from being democratic. It is very rare for nondemocracies and quasi-democracies to succeed in transforming into democracies, meaning the line between non-democracy and democracy is fairly rigid one that is usually not crossed through slow change but only via violent breaks. A regime is totalitarian if it has a clear ideology, a simple mass party/mobilization organization, and concentrated power in an individual and/or a small group of collaborators without any form of peaceful accountability. - In totalitarian regimes, "citizens participation in and active mobilization for political and collective social tasks is encouraged, demanded, rewarded, and challenged through the party system" In contrast, authoritarian regimes have pluralistic (not monistic) centers of power, a depoliticized population, and a multitude of 'mentalities' instead of a central ideology.

POPULISM - Peter Mair, "Populist Democracy vs. Party Democracy," in Democracies and the Populist Challenge, ed Yves Meny, et. al, 81-97 (Blackingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). [CORE]

Democracy requires a balance between the people and the constitution - but there is a growing fear that the constitution and the formal structures of government are overpowering the people within modern democracies. This is reflected in growing discontent and declining participation in politics throughout Europe, and government's increasing bureaucratization and depoliticization. Normally, the political party plays the essential role of binding the constitutional side of democratic governance with the popular side. Parties were mediators between the voters nad government, and served to aggregate interests and distribute resources. But political parties are in decline in much of the west. This is caused by (a) a change in party identity, with the previous dividing lines of parties (especially around class) fading in the modern era, (b) a change in the function of parties, with the mass institutionalization of democracy in europe meaning parties are no longer needed for voter mobilization or interest articulation (which can be handled by the media), but instead primarily needed to act as procedural filters on the political process, helping with recruitment, filtering of candidates, and organizing of legislature. Thus, populism arises as an alternative to parties used to link an undifferentiated and depoliticized electorate with a neutral and non-partisan government. Populism can take two forms - it can be a form of protest (a resistance to a political elite that seems increasingly out of touch with the people they are supposed to represent), or a form of linkage (a tool for democracy in a system where parties are no longer prominent and thus representation is lacking. Populism as a form of linkage involves (1) partyless democracy where partyness no longer serve representative needs and competition between them no longer represents political interests, (2) appeals that are directed to the people writ large and not particular groups of voters, (3) and a government that serves the national popular interest rather than sectional interests. Populism as a form of linkage will arise out of indifference to democracy, populism as a form of protest out of distrust of democracy. Thus, populist democracy can most simply defined in its current form as 'popular democracy without parties' This process is seen in New Labour in Britain, where the appeal of the party was to the people writ large, with increased reliance on plebiscitarian techniques, and the party acted as the government write large. The 'new way' was meant to overcome traditional party divisions

PARTIES - Dix, Robert H. "Democratization and the Institutionalization of Latin American Political Parties." Comparative Political Studies 24, no. 4 (January 1992): 488-511. [EXTRA]

Democracy spread throughout a wide portion of Latin and Central America in the last three decades of the 20th century but there is still much doubt about if many of these democracies will succeed in consolidating. This will largely depend on their political parties since parties are essential for organizing public leadership, structuring electoral choice and competition, framing policy alternatives, and mobilizing mass involvement in politics. This article uses measures of adaptability, complexity, autonomy, and coherence (a la Huntington) to measure party institutionalization in Latin America between 1960 and 1980. Democratic consolidation is not guaranteed with institutionalized parties and their presence doesn't ensure stability either, but they still significantly increase the potential for democracies survival. There are four criterion of party institutionalization from Huntington: (1) adaptability- the ability of apathy to endure, measured by its age, its ability to have multiple generation of leaders, and its ability to switch from governance to opposition - by all 3 measures, Latin American parties have more adaptability in the 1980s than the 1960s; (2) Complexity - the multifaceted and multi-functional nature of parties, measured by if parties center on an individual, and if they have a high number of subunits differentiated from each other - in both regards most parties have generally become more complex in the 1980s compared to the 1960s; (3) Autonomy - the degree to which parties exist independent of other social grouping, measured by its aggregation of multiple group interests instead of reliance on family/class/clan ties - in this regard latin American parties have widely gotten more autonomous and thus more 'catch-all' over the measured period; (4) Coherence - a measure of party systems that looks at the number of parties in a system and their degree of competition equality - by this measure fractionalization largely decreased and coherence largely increased for Latin America over the measured period. Thus, measures of party institutionalization along adaptability, complexity, autonomy, and coherence, although not universally so, generally showed support for increased odds of democratic consolidation in Latin America after the 1980s. There tends to be a need for party institutionalization to keep pace with popular mobilization, which means that high levels of social mobilization but only modest party institutionalization may be dangerous for Latin America.

AUTHORITARIANISM - Andreas Schedler, "Elections Without Democracy: The Menu of Manipulation," Journal of Democracy 13, no. 2 (April, 2002): 36-50 [CORE]

Elections are just as often a form of authoritarian control as of democratic governance - especially since the third wave of democratizations, many electoral authoritarian regimes have arisen which hold elections and feign at democratic legitimacy while yielding no political control. This article presents a four fold typology that captures most of the variation in regime types - electoral democracy, electoral authoritarianism, liberal democracy, and closed authoritarianism. Electoral democracies have successful and fair elections, but lack the markers of democracy beyond that like rule of law, democratic constitutionalism, political accountability, and bureaucratic integrity (which liberal democracies have). Similarly, electoral authoritarianism hold elections but with no genuine threat to their dictatorial power, while closed authoritarianism holds no elections at all. A key distinction between electoral democracy and authoritarianism is the idea of social choice under conditions of freedom and equality - there are seven conditions needed for regular elections to be democratic: 1) empowerment - they allow citizens to exercise their power; 2) freedom of supply - there are multiple alternatives to chose from; 3) freedom of demand - the ability to form opinions off of freely available information; 4) inclusion - universal suffrage; 5) insulation - secret ballots shielded from outside pressure; 6) integrity - votes are counted completely and neutrally and weighed equally; 7) irreversibility - the winners assume office and can complete their terms. Authoritarian regimes can attack any of the 7 links in this chain to undermine the electoral process all together. Indeed, each and every one of these processes is subject to interference by authoritarians in different ways. Electoral authoritarian regimes make up ⅔ of all autocracies and are the most common regime type in the world. Their different forms are affected by the internal balance between their military, citizenry, and the international community.

PRES & PAR - Linz, Juan L. "The Perils of Presidentialism." Journal of Democracy 1, no. 1 (Winter 1990): 51-69. [CORE]

Parliamentarism is, on balance, more conducive to stable democracy than presidentialism. There are a variety of issues inherent to presidentialism: 1) the president acts as both head of state and chief executive, which makes the head of state a politically polarizing figure, not a uniting one; 2) both the president and the legislature have competing democratic mandates; 3) the fixed terms of office make it difficult to adjust to bad governance and make presidentialism excessively rigid; 4) the direct election of presidents combined with their fixed terms both lend themselves to populist thinking within the office, and make losses to feel more high-stakes for political opponents; 5) the gap between the symbolic authority endowed to the president, and the limits on their authority created by the other branches, encourage presidents to resort to extra-constitutionalism to fulfill their mandates. The benefits of parliamentarianism are well demonstrated with the democratic transition in Spain.

PARTIES - John H. Aldrich, Why Parties: The Origin and Transformation of Political Parties in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). [CORE]

Parties are an essential aspect of working democracies. Elections allow voters to hold individual politicians accountable, but political decisions are only ever made collectively. Thus, parties serve as a means of reconciling this discrepancy by aggregating political accountability and policy goals into large groups. This book argues that political parties are the creation of politicians, who see the parties as key towards achieving their goals. This will only happen within the electoral, legislative, and executive institutional context that creates incentives for the creation of such parties. Finally, this book argues that historical settings matter for party development, both in terms of whether they are the only means of mass mobilization (compared to parties just starting today) and because of institutional path dependencies that set in after parties are established. Previously popular views of parties have seen them as diverse coalitions serving to aggregate many varied interests into a collective of shared political goals; have focused on the 'responsible party thesis,' arguing that parties exist as idealized vehicles for policy commitments and policy development both in and out of office, giving voters a choice in their governance; and have finally focused on them as vehicles of competition always aimed at winning elections and functioning within a high competitive system that resembles a free market. This paper offers an argument that combines this views, arguing that politicians create and lead parties not just to win office, but to take action once in office, and that this choice is shaped by the historical context of the institutions they act within Political parties are lead by politicians and fueled by the resources of donators and volunteers. Voters are not part of parties, but instead are the 'consumers' that parties target for votes. The rational choice account of party formation argued for here claims that parties help solve problems that existent institutions otherwise can't solve, which fall into three categories: (1) the problem of ambition and elective office seeking - parties serve to regulate the competition for office which inevitably will have greater demand (politicians) than supply (offices); (2) the problem of making decisions for the party and for the polity - parties thus solve collective choice problems among politicians and give them a means of uniting policy goals and maintaining majorities; (3) the problem of collective action - winning office requires mobilizing voters and parties help both increase awareness of candidates, turn out voters, and provide access to resources. Thus, parties are tools of politicians to help them win more - and once parties are created its pretty impossible to function without them.

PARTIES - Kuenzi, Michelle, and Gina Lambright. "Party Systems and Democratic Consolidation in Africa's Electoral Regimes." Party Politics 11, no. 4 (July 2005): 423-46. [EXTRA]

Parties are necessary for democracy and institutionalized partes for consolidated democracy - They simplify political choice, educate voters, entrench democratic norms, and aggregate interests. This article looks at the effect of 3 party systems characteristics - legislative volatility, the average age of parties, the effective number of parliamentary parties - and how they impact the level of democracy in 33 African countries. The results show that more stable party system (with a larger average age of parties) and more competitive party systems (with a large number of effective parties) are associated with stronger democracy There are three main hypothesis that are explored: (H1) Many have argued a large number of parties decreases the effectiveness of party systems by decreasing clarity of responsibility and increasing the challenges of coalition building and polarization, while others see an increase in parties as increasing choice for voter and the number of interests getting representation, especially in more divided societies. Because of the uniquely damaging legacy of party rule in Africa, this article argues that an increase in the number of parties should lead to increased feelings of political participation and increased space for political aspirants to compete for office while also mediating the extremely high levels of ethnocultural diversity in Africa or ethnic identity being especially important for deining group interests. Thus allowing more parties is likely to decrease feeling of grievance. (H2) higher party volatility decreases the effect of parties because it decreases loyalty by voters, long time-horizons by parties, and the build up of experience. Still, volatility can invigorate stagnant democratic systems early on and this can aid democracies, a relationship that will disappear with time. (H3) Older parties are also more likely to have strong and stable roots in society with more routinized competition and representation. This paper uses OLD regressions to test these theories - most African countries have a relatively low number of effective parties (an average of 2.36) but high levels of legislative volatility, and a mean age for parties with at least 10% of seats of 21.5 years (compared to over 50 years in Latin America). The results support H1 and H3 but not H2, with older parties and a higher number of parties increasing democratization levels, but volatility being insignificant Meanwhile, levels of democracy increase with development are unaffected by ethnicity. These results held for both polity and freedom house measures of democracy There does seem to be a negative relationship between the age of parties and the number of parties, implying more stable party roots also = less democratic competition.

PRES & PAR - Carey, John M. "Competing Principals, Political Institutions, and Party Unity in Legislative Voting." American Journal of Political Science 51, no. 1 (January 2007): 92-107. [CORE]

Parties in parliamentary systems tend to be more unified when they win a majority, and tend to lose less because of disunity. In contrast, parties in presidential systems tend to see no boost in floor unity and no gain in cohesion when they win the presidency. This is because when there is more than one actor (principal) who controls resources that can influence legislator's votes within a party, the party is more likely to become divided. The separation of powers within presidentialism leads to multiple, competing actors influencing a party, whereas the unity of parliamentary systems avoids this problem. Further, separate direct elections for the presidency creates paths for political success outside the typical realm of party discipline.

PARTIES - Slater, Dan, and Erica Simmons. "Coping By Colluding." Comparative Political Studies 46, no. 11 (November 2013): 1366-93. [EXTRA]

Parties often have to enter into power sharing agreements after victory - but when this takes the form of 'promiscuous power sharing' where every significant party is brought into a party cartel, these arrangements undermine representation by decreasing party commitments to their core constituencies and decreasing accountability by limiting a voter's ability to remove a party via the ballot box - in both Indonesia and Bolivia, promiscuous power sharing arose out of periods of high political uncertainty in a crises heavy transition to democracy, leading elites to cope with uncertainty by sharing executive power across the countries salient cleavages Promiscuous power sharing thus aims at political stabilization via the creation of large elite networks and equilibriums to create collusive democracy in spire of crises - In indonesia it overcame religious divides, in Bolivia, class ones. But it eventually proves self-undermining, only reigniting crises by undermining popular representation and accountability and triggering public backlashes that increase political uncertainty again. While powersharing may at first seem like a natural part of democracy, often aimed at reconciliation and better governance, when it is all encompassing it undermined both representation and accountability. A full party cartel alienates party opposition to government while both decreasing incentives for good governance and representation but also making removal via elections impossible. Power sharing also decreases the consistency of party brands, a la Lupu. Thus, in a variety of ways it decreases vertical accountability. Full cartelization was seen in Indonesia's party system. But even where promiscuous power sharing doesn't reach the level of full cartelization - as in Bolivia - it decreases the ability to remove a party from office. Either way, the consequence of power sharing is 'collusive democracy' which increases the odds of destabilizing popular back-lashes because it relies on a vertically exclusive elite equilibrium grounded in collusive norms and networks that elites come to see as appropriate for democracy. In both Bolivia and Indonesia, power sharing which initially succeeded, eventually triggered popular and populist backlashes that undermined the equilibrium of rule. Indeed, collusive democracy uniquely lends itself to populism because it requires breaking out of the existing party system and norms to correct the government, as seen in Bolivia. Both countries first turned to such approaches to handle crisis-ridden transitions to democracy from dictatorships. In Indonesia, it eventually lead to the demise of parliamentarism and increased voter misalignment, in Bolivia, to the rise of a populist leader and executive domineering This supports the Lupu and Reidl focus on uncertainty as key to democratic institutions since both countries were facing regime, economic, and institutional uncertainty. Further, both Indonesia and Bolivia's collusive democracy was aided by the fact that their presidents were elected by parliament, leading to increasing elite control over the government.

PARTIES - Noam Lupu, "Party Brands and Partisanship: Theory with Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Argentina," American Journal of Political Science 57, no. 1 (January 2013): 49-64. [CORE]

Partisanship is part of a social identity, but because the program (and thus identity) of parties change, the levels of support for parties can change as well. This fits within a branding model of partisanship, whereby people categorize themselves into identity groups they think they resemble, and will support parties that align with these identities. When parties have clear identity boundaries, these attachments will be strong, but when party identities are more fluid or weaker, the attachments will be more tepid. In this paper, this theory is tested by presenting voters in Argentina with a survey about party brands. The survey presented voters with either: a list of parties and logos (the baseline); a list of parties, logos, and party platforms (which was supposed to increase a sense of brands); a list of party alliances and coalitions (which was supposed to muddle a sense of party brends); and a mix and match treatment with all the information (which was supposed to cancel out the effects). The surveys were found to impact party identity in the expected ways. This shows that party brands are learned over time and party attachment is based on these brands. When the brands are seen as undermined or changing, attachments can change too. This is most true for younger voters, with less calcified views of party identities

PARTIES - Scott Mainwaring and Mariano Torcal, "Party System Institutionalization and Party System Theory after the Third Wave of Democratization," in The Handbook of Party Politics, ed. Richard Katz and William Crotty: 204-27 (London: Sage Publications, 2005). [CORE]

Party system institutionalization - defined by the stability of interparty competition, the legitimacy of parties, and the depth of party roots (anchoring) in society - is key for understanding party systems. Institutionalization leads to established, clear, stable, and widely accepted expectations about behavior, practice, and organization within the party system. The main parties and actors are stable in institutionalized systems. Systems can also de-institutionalize as seen in Italy in the 1990s, and institutionalization is a spectrum not a binary. In general, pre-1978 democracies are far more institutionalized than post-1978 ones. This is because for pre-1978 democracies, parties were essential for the political organization of society, whereas post-1978 parties built on pre-existing identities and were able to use TV and popular media to build coalitions outside of party structures. This manifests in two empirical regularities: in post-1978 democracies, lower levels of anchoring (i.e. more volatility) by parties leads to less programmatic appeals by parties and lower levels of ideological linkage; and without programmatic parties, candidates tend to appeal to voters through more personalistic means (which are fundamentally juxtaposed to institutionalized parties). The consequence of both of these is that low levels of institutionalization is bad for electoral accountability, and that such systems are more vulnerable to anti-party politicians rising to power like Hugo Chavez. Low levels of institutionalization are bad for both democratic stability and democratic accountability.

POPULISM - Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser, "The Ambivalence of Populism: Threat and Corrective for Democracy," Democratization 19, no. 2 (April 2012): 184-208. [CORE]

Populism can both be a threat and a corrective to democracy. In particular, when looking at Dahl's conception of democracy, populism can be thought of as a threat to the democratic notion of public contestation (because it defines any opposition to itself as opposition to the people and the general will) but a corrective to the democratic notion of inclusiveness (because it includes groups left out of governance and disadvantaged by the status quo - this is seen in Latin America). The view of populism as a democratic corrective focuses on its efforts to give voices to groups otherwise left out of politics and to force elites to change their policies to match popular demands. This fits more within a radical conception of democracy than a liberal one. Liberal views of populism see it as a democratic pathology that arises in specific political and economic contexts and thus is a reaction to 'malfunctioning' democratic rule. This is seen most predominantly in more structuralist arguments about the rise of populism in Latin America. But this argument is also applied to modern Europe and the idea of 'modernization losers' and increasingly unrepresentative political parties. Some in this view argue that the supply side factors don't matter for populism, since they are universal, and that all that matters is if/when demand arises within a country. {I think this last sentence is maybe a persuasive view}. Under this view, populism tried to bypass traditional democracy via the empowerment of the people. This view, however, overlooks the idea that the people are the fundamental basis of political power within a democracy and have a right to set new boundaries when power isn't serving them. Radical views of populism, in contrast, see it as essential to democracy, not a pathology. Here, if the establishments of government are failing in their representation, this leads to an aggregation of demands by the public which then are integrated into governance via populism, which pits the people and their demands versus a demonized 'establishment' and looks to replace that establishment. "In this view, populism is the normative ideal of a radical democratic project which tries to aggregate different demands" (191) The minimal approach to populism (the one advocated for here) sees it as a form of democratic ambivalence. This sees the interaction between populism and democracy as contingent and not clear cut, and relies on Weyland's definition of populism (see up above). Under this view, populism in Europe is a way to fill the chasm that is growing between the governed and governors, and is neither good nor bad but a natural reaction to declining representation in governance. Parties in Europe are increasingly failing to engage with ordinary citizens, as seen with declining turnout, party membership, and growing voter volatility.

POPULISM - Mudde, Cas. "Fighting the System? Populist Radical Right Parties and Party System Change." Party Politics 20, no. 2 (March 2014): 217-26. [EXTRA]

Populist radical right parties have not fundamentally changed the party system in Europe even though they are the only new successful party family to emerge in Europe since WWII and their keystone issues of immigration is becoming more important This article assesses the nature of party systems, especially their mechanical dimensions (the directionality of the interactions between the relevant parties) - it doesn't look at ideology because that fits into party competition The populist radical right rose after the 1980s and shares a core ideology of (at least) a combination of nativism, authoritarianism, and populism While these parties still have limited success, the trend points upward in that they were in no national government in the 1980s and by the 2000s were in 7 majority and 3 minority governments. Still, these gains are limited and the individual parties themselves tend to rise and fall quickly Party systems are defined by the interactions of parties, not party characteristics There is little evidence of populist-radical-right parties (PRRPs) changing the number of relevant parties in the system Parties have become more ideologically polarized - with PRRPs opposed to liberal democracy - in at least 5 nations (Austria, Denmark, Italy, Holland, and Switzerland) Austria and Switzerland are the only two clear examples of PRRPs radicalizing the mainstream right and polarizing the political system as a result - however, the overall effect of PRRPs in Europe is small PRRPs have caused little change in the 'pillarization' of politics, which has been devolving since the 1980s When PRRPs do rarely succeed they often lose issue ownership as mainstream parties converge on parts of their platform and their rhetoric, forcing PRRPs to adjust strategy PRRPs have lead to bipolarized party systems with opposing left-right blocks in ten countries, with only France, Denmark, and Italy (3 out of 16) having both a bipolar system and strong PRRPs Thus, PRRPs may have changed the ideology and identity of some parties, but have done little to change the systemic interaction between relevant parties within countries. This article has focused only on PRRPs though and not right-wing populism in general, which could bias the results One important way PRRPs could impact party interactions overlooked in this article is by forcing issues onto the political agenda that would otherwise be ignored (like immigration) and thus changing the terms of the political debate

NATURAL RESOURCES - Fearon, James D. "Civil War & the Current International System." Daedalus 146, no. 4 (Fall 2017): 18-30. [CORE]

"The colonial powers built state apparatuses in their colonies primarily to facilitate cash crop and natural resource extraction via a capital city, a few roads, and a port where possible. Administration often barely extended to rural peripheries. With the backstop of imperial militaries removed by decolonization, the option to try to use force to capture political control either at the center of a new state or in a region became more attractive for ambitious or abused would-be rebel groups." (23) "Post independence leaders have-most of the time successfully-used state revenues and offices to buy supporting coalitions, reducing the risk of coup attempts and rebellions. But positive shocks to the relative strength of potential rebels versus a central government sometimes occur. These shocks create windows of opportunity to try to seize power or at least get an armed organization over a threshold of military viability against what are often chronically weak government forces." (23-4) "For example, the collapse of the Gaddafi regime in Libya in 2011 led to a flow of arms and fighters to northern Mali, providing a positive shock to insurgent capabilities that, in combination with postcoup weakness of the government in Bamako, made for civil war onset." (24)

NATURAL RESOURCES - Lessing, Benjamin. "Logics of Violence in Criminal War." Journal of Conflict Resolution 59, no. 8 (2015): 1486-1516. [CORE]

'Criminal war' led by cartels may be the new dominant form of war, with Mexico's drug war claiming up to 16,000 lives a year. But such conflicts are also seen in large scale conflicts in both Colombia (1984-93) and Brazil (1985-Present). But these wars need to be meaningfully distinguished from civil war. Cartels don't fight states to conquer territory or resources, but merely to constrain state behavior and influence policy outcomes. This approach is even more interesting in the sense that engaging in violence with the state usually produces more repression from the state, with no real possibility of decisive victory. Here, the model of cartel violence as a means of state coercion and constraint is key. In this context, there is no goal of decisive victory, but instead just a constant state of coercive violence driven by two logics: violent lobbying and violent corruption. Violent Lobbying: Here, cartels target political leaders in order to induce change in de jure policy (the example is Pablo Escobar's all-out war on the state between 1984 and 1991). This is an approach that is prone to free riding, and so it is more likely when cartels are cooperating in a state. It is also an approach that is limited to times where there is a viable piece of de jure policy that can conceivably be changed or revoked. Violent Corruption: Here, cartels target enforcement argents in order to intimidate them and reduce the pierce of bribes (captured in the phrase the bullet of the bribe under Escobar). This is an approach that is less prone to free riding and so is more common during turn wars These techniques are distinct from turf wars which are inter-cartel and involve competitive signaling between rivals, attempts to gain valuable resources, and attacks in rival territory intended to attract law enforcement. Turf wars are ubiquitous is all aspects of the drug trade and a constant of illegal trafficking. Turf wars can prompt violent corruption, however. These techniques instead pertain to cartel-state violence, which is far rarer than turf wars since it involves weathering a sustained conflict with the state, and thus can only happen with well armed and equipped cartels Turf wars follow a similar logic of conquest to insurgency, in that they take place in weakly institutionalized settings with the use of violence to appropriate mutually prized territory as a form of bargaining and power enhancement. Criminal war is unique in the sense that the repression of competing cartels is usually a benefit to other cartels, whereas this isn't true in insurgencies. Further, while rebel groups often right over resource rents that can be controlled by the state ('rivalrous goods' of value to both sides), cartel violence fights over drug profits that can't be legitimately captured by them and neither sides loss is necessarily the other sides gain. What's more, these wars are never fully resolved since the eradication of a viable drug trade is nonexistent in history - instead, states can merely aim at successful containment and management

TERMS - Thick vs. Thin Conceptions of Democracy

A thick conception of democracy is one that includes several variables and seeks to categorise nation-states as being different shades of democracies, or non-democracies. POLITY IV is the classic example, as it codes each country in the world on a scale of -10 to 10 based on how democratic they are. A thin conception of democracy seeks to categorise countries dichotomously; as democracy, or not, with typically fewer variables considered in its definition. Alvarez et al. (1996) and Przeworski et al. (2000) are both classic examples of this; in both assessments, countries are either democracies, or dictatorships

PARTIES - Stokes, Susan. "Political Parties and Democracy." Annual Review of Political Science 2, no. 1 (June 1999): 243-67. [EXTRA]

Although parties are present in all modern democracies, the role they play and the benefits they provide are still hotly contested. Normative theorists see parties as promoting partial interests and extreme views, while positive theorists see them as creating links between the people and the government Parties are not part of the formal structure of democracy and are largely unregulated by government laws, but they are seen to have arised out of their organizational necessity (a la Aldrich) - Still, the exact causes that led to either elites of citizens creating parties remain unclear There is also a divide over whether the number of parties is a product of social cleavages or institutional factors - sociological cleavages often suffer in trying to explain why one set of cleavages prevailed over another, while institutional approaches do better in explaining 'How many parties' then 'what kind of parties' Meanwhile, still others view party loyalty as a product of identity, much like religion, and others see it as a rationalist approach that (a la Downs) weighs issue positions. Here, the evidence that non-centrist parties tend to take more radical party positions while campaigning gives credit to a view of parties as signaling world views to voters. Many competing theories of parties can be sorted into a 2x2 matrix depending on if the party objectives are winning office or pursuing policies, and if the internal structure is unified or divided. Spacial theory (a la Downs) assumes unified parties aimed at winning office. Views of ideological parties see them as unified but driven by policy goals as well as winning office Overlapping generations theories see parties as composed of disparite and divided individuals who are held responsible to voters by the party apparatus and, thus, aim at implementing successful policy - this view functions through future office holders, who will want to check extreme and divergent attitudes by current office holders to avoid alienating voters Incumbent hegemony theories see parties as divided and simply seeking office, with party members choosing extreme positions to signal their ideological distinction in safe districts, which leads to a decrease in the appeal and representation of the median voter outside of highly partisan districts. Curvilinear disparity models also focus on divided parties aimed at winning and decreasing representation, but argue this results from party activists with more extreme views constantly lobbying parties to move their position away from median voters, which is what party leaders want to aim at to win office Both curvilinear disparity and incumbent hegemony models, therefore, see parties as a hindrance to representation, not an aid to it. Spacial theory fails in that it predicts a convergence of policy positions, whereas almost all the evidence shows a divergence instead. Thus, overlapping generation (with its focus on future candidate), incumbent hegemony (with its focus on incumbent interest) and curvilinear disparity (with its focus on leaders and activists) present the three most persuasive models - More research is needed to distinguish these models and combinations of them may be the most fruitful. All of this shows, however, that the connection between parties and increased representation is anything but settled.

PARTIES - Mozaffar, Shaheen, and James R. Scarrit. "The Puzzle of African Party Systems." Party Politics 11, no. 4 (July 2005): 399-421. [EXTRA]

African party systems are characterized by two puzzling features - low fragmentation and high volatility. This article documents this phenomenon and then presents a strategic choice explanation for it based on the history of authoritarianism in much of Africa. As the argument goes, political restrictions under authoritarianism produced severe information deficits concerning electoral mobilization, strategic coordination, and collective action problems (all of which are usually necessary for party formation and coalition building). Consequently, political actors in emerging democracies created parties that relied on presidential elections and ethno-political cleavages to coordinate their fragmented power bases into coalitions. This led to the entry of a large number of short lived political parties, which increased volatility and then the electoral dominance of a few large parties, leading to decreased levels of party system fragmentation This article views parties as solutions to the collective action dilemma for office seekers, acting within the electoral structures of their system. African parties tend to have low levels of fragmentation, low levels of executive and legislative competitiveness, and high levels of disproportionality - this seems to imply democratization and party system institutionalization produces dominant parties able to win elections overwhelmingly, meaning dominant party systems predominate, become more common as African democracies get older. Africa's high levels of volatility are not unique for new democracies. What is unique is that this volatility is coupled with low fragmentation. The explanation for this puzzle involves a strategic choice and institutional legacy account that builds on Mozzafar et al.'s explanation that focuses on the interaction effect of distinct magnitude and ethno political divisions. Strategic choice explanations of parties claim parties emerge as solutions to two collective action and strategic coordination issues: (1) social choice amongst political actors over competing policy imperatives, (2) strategic coordination of voters and candidates over votes in big elections. Thus, once formed, parties persist because they help organize and advance competing and uncoordinated interests. Lipset and Rokkan (1967) offer a sociological view of party formation that says parties formed in response to social changes in Europe but then froze in a certain formation because they benefited politicians and voters alike. But both strategic choice and sociological explanations overlook the importance of institutions in shaping political parties. An explanation of the African puzzle is best tackled by a combination of institutional and strategic choice outlooks. Thus, in Africa, the institutional legacies of authoritarianism led to extreme information deficits for parties which increased issues around strategic coordination and collective action, leading parties to resort to alternative mechanisms to resolving such problems. Mainly, presidentialism and ethnicity. Information deficits led to a plethora of small-scale and short-lived attempts at party formation. There thus developed dominant parties in interaction with many second and third tier parties. Ethnicity helps overcome information shortcoming because it creates pre-delineated groups with marked identities and unique interests and the capacity for collective action. High ethno-cultural fragmentation leads to decreased fragmentation of parties because it encourages either a high number of tiny parties which then collapse or a bigger umbrella party system that creates cross-ethnicity coalitions. Presidentialism tied into this system because its national nature and over saturation of candidates lends it to constructing minimum winning coalitions out of many small blocks of ethnic voters behind singular and low-odds presidential candidates.

DEMOCRACY - Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe Schmitter, "Transitions From Authoritarian Rule," in Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions About Uncertain Democracies, ed. Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe Schmitter, 15-36 (Baltiomre, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). [CORE]

Authoritarian regimes in the post-1945 world have a legitimation problem - whereas they could justify themselves after WWI as an alternative to the economically failing democracies of the world, today they lack normative support and thus can only bill themselves as 'building' towards democracy or lie about the extent of their democracy - this opens a space for their actual critique and eventual reform. In this context, we can think about hard-liners and soft-liners within authoritarian regimes. Hard-liners are those who genuinely believe that authoritarianism is the best form of government and who will likely continue to think this way even after democratization. Soft-liners are those who see a need for electoral legitimacy for the regime and thus are open to democratic reforms. Both groups have divisions within their ranks, and while hard liners are likely to be dominant early in an authoritarian regime, the need for an eventual transition towards less oppressive governance will create space for soft-liners. All authoritarian transitions result from divisions within the regime itself, and largely stem from two phenomena - a defeat in international war (especially if it's to a democracy), or a mass mobilization of people at home. Transitions are also more likely during times of regime failure when dissatisfaction is high and the impetus for mobilization plentiful - in contrast, while times of stability make a transition more seemly, they also make opposition to reform easier and cohesion within governance more likely. Once democratization has begun, there is a constant fear by liberalizers that it will be cut short by a coup - this leads them to 'play coup poker,' where liberalizers try to get the opposition out of the government to play by the rules during the transition through the threat of a return to authoritarianism if they do not, but the threat of the coup undermines these efforts since a crackdown would mean both the soft-liners and opposition would be punished equally, which incentivises a full buy-in to democratization by the soft-liners to avoid any kind of coup - thus, those who threaten a coup early on are those working against it later in the transition. The citizenry has to be mobilized for any transition, and thus there is an inverted U of citizen involvement during democratization, with citizens oppressed and forced out of involvement at first, and then hyper mobilized for the transition, and then voluntarily less involved once living in a free society. It is right when mobilization is highest that the threat of a coup and a reinforced authoritarianism are also highest, and thus when both soft-liners and opposition alike have to gamble by doubling down on democratization. Because authoritarianism requires extreme repression, the transition away from it will often require reconciliation and golden parachutes for those involved so there aren't strong incentives for coups and resistance by those fearing a reckoning over their past acts (even if this feels unjust) - ideally a regime would persecute the worst wrong doers while leaving the military apparatus feeling safe. A key aspect of transitioning to democracy is getting the army to accepts a role subservient to the government - something that's very difficult when they are used to being leading figures. Thus, the importance and entrenchment of the military in politics and oppression is a key factor in determining the ease of democratization. New democracies should be very careful not to alienate of threaten the military, while also placing them below civilian elected officials

DEMOCRACY - Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens. Capitalism Development & Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. [EXTRA]

Capitalism and democracy have long been seen as complementary phenomena but the relationship between the two si complicated It still holds true that almost no agrarian societies are democracies and almost all consolidated democracies are capitalist This book works to reconcile quantitative and qualitative approaches to the study of democracy to get a more cohesive theory - the findings support a positive and robust association between democracy and capitalism This book employs a 'political economy' perspective that focuses on actors with power grounded in control of resources and who use force to try to vie for such control - it views democracy as a matter of power, with power relations being the most determinant factor in determining whether a democracy can emerge, stabilize, and maintain itself. There are three relevant aspects of these power relations - (1) the power of the classes relative to each other, (2) the strength and autonomy of the state apparatus and its relationship with civil society, and (3) the impact of transnational power relations on class and state-society relations. Here, the focus is on class conditions which structure interests and power in society and which exhibit certain tendencies in the struggle for democracy This book argues classes can act on collective class interests, and that both large landlords and the middle class will oppose suffrage extension to the working class, which is seen as a threat to their interests - It is instead the urban working class which is the biggest proponent of democratization because it promises increased power and inclusion in the policy and because the urban working class can self-organize in a way the other lower classes can't. In such a context, the middle class would support increased suffrage for themselves, but whether they promoted it for the working class depended on the relative power of the classes and the class coalitions that formed as a result. Here, class power is related to the organizational density of civil society, which goes beyond just industrialization but which is aided by the urbanization, communication, and organizational amongst the working and middle classes that capitalist development allows Dense civil society is also better able to counterbalance the state, whose coercive capacity and rules for collective decision making are important considerations in the development of democracy along with the place of the state in international power relations Capitalism thus advances democracy by empowering the working and middle class relative to elites The working class have consistently agitated for democracy and the landed elites have consistently opposed it since it threatens their workforce, while the middle class often wants democracy for themselves but no further. If the middle and upper classes feel acutely threatened by democracy, they are more likely to oppose democracy and attempt to undermine it. The middle class would support working class democratization only so far as (1) they were faced with intransigent elites and (2) they didn't feel too threatened by working class visions of democracy. When the agricultural class was based in large concentrated land holdings, it was less likely to organize to support democracy. Thus, when the working class and its allies were relatively weak, when the state was stronger than civil society, or where the state had high levels of economic and geo-political dependence, it made democracy hard because class power didn't concentrate for those most in favor of democratization. Parties were key here because they both helped mobilize the classes for their political goals, but could also set radical agendas more likely to scare away the middle and upper classes Still, once democracy emerged, parties were key for protecting upper and middle class interests and thus decreasing their odds of resorting to authoritarianism.

NATURAL RESOURCES - Collier, Paul, and Anke Hoeffler, "Greed and Grievance in Civil War." Oxford Economic Papers 56, no. 4 (October 2004): 563-95. [CORE]

Civil war is now more common than any other war type. In measuring the occurrence of war we need to account for both motive and opportunity - with this article arguing that opportunity is more important than considerations of motive. This paper focuses on the initiation of conflict and not its duration. It defines civil war as more than 1000 battle deaths a year with more than 5% of those deaths within rebel groups and the government. Political science approaches to civil war have largely focused on grievance (inequality, political rights identity), while economic approaches have mostly focused on opportunity and viability (the greed hypothesis). Both the grievance and opportunity models find some analytical support. There is strong and robust statistical evidence that natural resource exports and strong diasporas within a community fuel civil war, while levels of repression and democracy also seem important under the grievance framework. Overall however, the opportunity model does much better explaining civil war than the grievance one. Crucially, primary commodity exports being at about 33% of GDP leads to a 22x higher chance of civil war than for a country with no such exports. This relationship decreases if export rates are higher or lower. This is likely because primary commodity exports help finance wars via extraction, making rebellion more feasible and attractive. This explanation seems more supported than one focused on declines in the quality of government caused by the presence of natural resources - "Possibly if natural resources are sufficiently abundant, as in Saudi Arabia, the government may be so well-financed that rebellion is militarily infeasible. This offsetting effect may make the net effect of natural resources non-monotonic" (565-7) The other key factor favoring civil wars are large diasporas and dynamics of racial domination. All of this shows opportunity is more important in civil war than political grievance.

NATURAL RESOURCES - Frankel, Jeffrey A. "The Natural Resource Curse: A Survey." NBER Working Papers Series 15836 (March 2010): 3-36. [CORE]

Countries rich in oil and natural resource consistently fail to grow as rapidly as those without - a phenomenon known as the Natural Resource Curse. - "Many African countries such as Angola, Nigeria, Sudan, and the Congo are rich in oil, diamonds, or other minerals, and yet their peoples continue to experience low per capita income and low quality of life." Overall, there are six arguments about how this process could function. (1) Commodity prices on world markets should change in the long-run - some here argue that natural resource prices are inelastic, and thus will decline relative to income over time; others argue that supply for natural resources is fixed and thus their value will increase over time. Overall, evidence on both sides of this argument is fairly weak. (2) Natural resources may crowd out other sectors of growth like manufacturing - it would seem that specializing in oil exports decreases the need to have manufactured exports, which decreases incentives for industrialization. (3) world prices on energy and other commodities can be volatile - this argument says that the volatility of energy and resource prices (not their long term trends) are what make them harmful for growth, since volatile prices make investments and stable capital stocks much more difficult, and can lead to accidental over-investment. (4) high wealth in government institutions may decrease the need for the rule of law or strong systems of taxation needed for good governance - resource rich countries seem to have less of an interest in promoting equality and less of an interest in taxation than non-resource rich ones. This is a thesis supported by Engerman and Skoloff as it applies to the Americas. Further, authors have consistently found a relationship between oil wealth/natural resource wealth and more sustainable authoritarianism, along with weaker systems of taxation. (5) natural resources may lend themselves to armed conflict - the availability of a valuable resource that has no capital mobility makes the incentive for violent seizure of it more likely, and increases the odds of war. (6) changes in commodity prices could create macroeconomic instability via high spending and unnecessary costs - the methods of economic growth can have endogenous effects on macro and microeconomic policies and institutions, such as financial markets, income redistribution, social safety nets, property rules, and tax systems. Indeed, it is well documented that fiscal policy tends to be procyclical in resource heavy countries, leading to over-spending in upcycles and forced cuts in down-cycles. This is especially problematic when up-cycles lead to the creation of public sector jobs that are hard to cut in down-cycles. This article concludes that mineral wealth can be a double edged sword conveying both benefits and costs but not necessitating economic and/or political underdevelopment.

DEMOCRACY - Jose Cheibub, Jeniffer Gandhi, and James Raymond Vreeland "Democracy and Dictatorship Revisited," Public Choice 143, no. 1 (April 2010): 67-101. [CORE]

From Abstract: "We argue that differences across regime measures must be taken seriously and that they should be evaluated in terms of whether they (1) serve to address important research questions, (2) can be interpreted meaningfully, and (3) are reproducible. We argue that existing measures of democracy are not interchangeable and that the choice of measure should be guided by its theoretical and empirical underpinnings" Democracies can be defined as regimes in which governmental offices (both the executive and legislature) are filled as a consequence of contested elections, with a viable opposition that has a chance of winning office. This entails: 1) Ex ante uncertainty - the outcome of the election is not known before it takes place, 2) Ex post irreversibility - the winner of the electoral contest actually takes office, 3) Repeatability - elections that meet the first two criteria occur at regular and known intervals. Thus a regime is a democracy if: 1) the chief executive is chosen by popular election (directly or indirectly), 2) the legislature is popularly elected, 3) there is more than one party competing for election, 4) alternation in power takes place under identical rules to those that brought the incumbent to office. There are two main ways of measuring democracy - Freedom House (FH) Scores and POLITY Scores. These differ in three ways: 1) Their conception of democracy: While this article focuses on institutions within democracy, both POLITY and FH scores include some measure of the outcome of their operation, with FH including metrics of 'freedom' and 'democracy' and POLITY looking at the strength of the executive - but these authors argue such normative views of democracy are harmful as metrics of democracy 2) Their Coding and Aggregation Rules - this article argues that there are four rules for something to be a democracy (listed above), all all of these conditions need to be met for something to qualify. FH varies in its coding from year to year and codes in a very subjective way, aggregating a variety of metrics into an arbitrary total score. Similarly POLITY has unclear rules that often overlap (lie measure of violence and competition), and its data is neither clearly ordinal or categorical. 3) Their type of measurement - Further, while FH and POLITY rely on polychotomous classification of regimes, more dichotomous ones avoid vagueness and uncertainty about what qualifies as a democracy. Types of democracies - A democracy can be parliamentary, semi-presidential, and presidential - it is presidential if the government is not responsible to the legislative assembly, it is parliamentary if it is responsible to the legislative assembly but lacks a head of state elected to a fixed term of office, and mixed if it is both responsible to the legislative assembly and has a head of state in a fixed and elected term of office. Types of Dictatorships - dictatorships can be assessed by what their leading coalition is made up of (and thus, consequently, where their main threat of overthrowal comes from) - a monarchy has an inner sanctum of family and kin networks along with consultative councils; a military dictatorship has an inner sanctum made up of the military and service branches; a civilian dictator has an inner sanctum that is made up of a regime party which is more involved in broader society. The variety of measures used to classify and quantify democracy have huge consequences in the findings of studies that rely on them - with many findings being obviated by changing measurements

RACE - King, Desmond, Patrick Le Gales, and Tomasso Vitale. "Assimilation, Security, and Borders in the Member States." In Reconfiguring European States in Crisis, edited by Desmond King and Patrick Le Gales, 428-46. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. [EXTRA]

Incoming immigrants in Europe are confined to specific neighborhoods and pockets of housing - they are thus increasingly disaffected, alienated, and willing to embrace extremism (especially 18-30 year old males). In contrast, the U.S. and Canada have been much more successful at integrating and assimilating immigrants. Immigration was not a prominent part of Europe managing its borders and nation states until the early 20th century, an issue growing more and more salient to conceptions of the state in modern Europe. Here, the U.S. and Canada are models of immigrant integration, which contrast starkly with Europe's. Many European countries, like Germany, make citizenship and employment difficult for migrants. France and the UK see similar levels of discrimination and segregation amongst immigrant communitites. This leads many in these populations feeling alienated from the European nation state and more willing to resort to political radicalism. This is, at root, a failure of European assimilation. Indeed, many European nations have settlement processes that support the formation of enclaves and the ghettoization of neighborhoods which limits cross-cultural contact. This leaves these populations especially vulnerable to radicalization There is a conflict between European views of the secular state and the need to accommodate the Islamic culture of incoming migrants. Still, the constitutional challenges presented by their communities have, in many ways, been overblown. Hostility between Muslim and Non-Muslim communitites has still been high and racil/religious opposition to the diversification of traditionally white christian states has been abudnant. Overall, Europe lacks the cultural image of being 'nations of immigrants' and thus is unprepared for growing immigration. The EU has become a means of collective immigration control and enforcement in Europe. This system functions under the Dublin Regime, which controls border activities and asylum for member states. States increasingly look to limit benefits and rights to migrants as a way of re-asserting autonomy over migration policy Huge inflows of migrants have also put stress on the open border concept in the EU - migrants are only coming in more and more numbers and this is increasingly stressing both European cooperation and their respect of migrant rights, which are violated by mass detention and surveillance These factors compound into growing pressure for nationalist governance and xenophobia throughout Europe All of this has increased the militarization of European border and challenges to European unity

TERMS - Authoritarianism

Linz (2000) - authoritarian and totalitarian regimes are scored on their degree/type of political pluralism, and the degree to which such regimes are based on political apathy/demobilization and limited controlled mobilizations. Authoritarian regimes have pluralistic (not monistic) centers of power, a depoliticized population, and a multitude of 'mentalities' instead of a central ideology.

TERMS - Horizontal Accountability

O'Donnell (2004) - All democracies have three types of accountability - 1) vertical electoral accountability from elections, 2) societal accountability, exercised by interest groups and individuals mobilizing for their interests and making demands on the state for redress and accountability, 3) horizontal accountability, when properly authorized state institutions act to prevent, redress, or punish the presumably illegal actions (or in-actions) of public officials - the first form of accountability is required for democracy, the second two vary significantly. O'Donnell (1999) - There are two forms of failures of horizontal accountability: encroachment - the unlawful encroachment by one state agency on the authority of another; and corruption - the unlawful advantages public officials obtain for themselves and their families. Democracies with vertical accountability but little republicanism or liberalism often have checks on corruption (via electoral transparency) but not on encroachment.

PRES & PAR - Stepan, Alfred, and Cindy Skach. "Constitutional Frameworks and Democratic Consolidation: Parliamentarianism versus Presidentialism." World Politics 46, no. 1 (October 1993): 1-22. [EXTRA]

Studies of democracy increasingly recognize the importance of institutions and constitutional frameworks, beyond just economic and social conditions - Constitutions create the system of incentives and organizations that structure many of the realities of democratic life. All democracies fit into one of three categories - presidentialism, parliamentarism, and semi-presidentialism. This paper focuses on contrasting pure presidentialism with pure parliamentarism, both of which have two necessary and sufficient characteristics. Pure parliamentarism is a system of mutual dependence with (1) the chief executive being supported by and subject to removed by a majority of the legislature, and (2) the executive being able to dissolve the legislature and call for elections. Pure presidentialism is a system of mutual independence where (1) the legislature and (2) the executive both have fixed electoral mandates and their own sources of legitimacy. Pure parliamentarism started as the dominant system but pure presidentialism is increasingly popular. This article argues that parliamentary democracy is better suited to increasing the freedom needed to aid economic and social restructuring for new democracies, with much data showing that pure parliamentarism is a much better predictor of long-term consolidation than pure presidentialism. Consolidated parliamentary and semi-presidential systems have more effective parties on average then presidentialism, which averages just 2.6 effective parties, showing presidentialism may be less well suited for highly economically, socially, or ethnically divided societies needing multipartite representation. Looking at the worlds democracies between 1973-1989, parliamentary democracies had a rate of survival more than 3 times (61% compared with 20%) the rate of survival for presidential democracy, with presidential democracies 2 times more likely to experience a military coup. For decolonizing nations between 1945-79, not a single presidential democracy survived, while 36% of parliamentary democracies survived - even when controlling for British colonialism Parliamentary democracies succeed at creating legislative majorities far more between 1977-887, creating one 83% of the time compared to 48% for presidential democracies. Parliamentary democracies also have ministers return to government at almost 3 times the rate that they o in presidential democracies, with parliamentary ministers also serving 2 times longer. Thus, parliamentary democracy functions on a system of mutual dependence which creates incentives for increased coalitional majorities, decreased impasses, and decreased executive discretion, while the presidential system of mutual independence decreases incentives for coalitions, increases impasses and increases executive discretion, leading to more coups and gridlock. Many new countries chose presidentialism because it offers a strong executive, but this is cancelled out by the endemic gridlock and lack of coalitions, whereas parliamentary systems ensure more effective governance via the mutual dependence of executive and legislature. Parliamentary democracy decreases the odds of a coup because it can't form without a fair degree of support and because it can easily be reformed/removed when confidence is lost in it - in contrast, presidentialism fixed and mutually independent mandates prevent such fixes so increase the odds of a coup in response to dridlock. Presidential democracy is also prone to populism because of the gap between the presidential mandate and lack of legislature control - presidentialism also proves far less compatible with multipartism because of the president's control of the cabinet, which makes it a dangerous approach for divided societies. Presidentialism also decreases levels of freedom in government for new societies because fixed terms make it hard to quickly adjust to often rapidly shifting political needs. Presidential cabinets are so much more unstable because presidents have to constantly be reshuffling them to get fleeting majorities on policy issues. Thus, parliamentary democracy has all of the following advantages: increased ability to form a majority, increased ability trule in multiparty settings, decreased incentive for the executive stretching constitutional limits, an increased ability remove an executive who does so, decreased susceptibility to coups, an increased tendency to create long government careers, and an increase in freedom in responding to changing political contexts for young democracies.

DEMOCRACY - Coppedge, Michael, et al. "Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy: A New Approach." Perspectives on Politics 9, no. 2 (March 2011): 247-67. [EXTRA]

Successfully conceptualizing and measuring democracy is very important for political science. This article argues for a new approach to such a challenge, which is historical, multidimensional, disaggregated, and transparent. This approach may increase specificity and aid research around the concept of democracy like the consequences of regime type There are six key issues that dog current conceptualization and measurements of democracy: definition, precision, coverage and sources, coding, aggregation, and validity/reliability of results Definition - democracy, despite much dispute over its dimensions, is universally agreed to include rule by the people and sovereignty - yet beyond this, conceptions of democracy in existing measures are highly diverse and contested Precision - many current indices are insensitive to degrees an gradation in the quality of democracy across countries and times, which is a problem for binary indices but also gradient ones, which often use arbitrary criteria and clustered gradings Coverage and scores - many indices are limited in either temporal or country coverage, and use imperfect data for scoring Coding - Many indices lack clear and concrete coding criteria, even when experts are used Aggregation - democracy is a multi-faceted concept so all indices wrestle with aggregation, with different approaches creating very different results Validity and reliability tests - few indices have validity/reliability tests and this leads to large and aggregating errors going undetected This article aims, not to replace indices, but to create a new set of indicators that adds new perspective This new approach aims to (1) extend indicators back through modern history wherever possible, (2) to introduce a multidimensional measure of democracy, (3) to collect information about democracy at a highly disaggregated level and (4) to propose a strategy of data collection and presentation to increase precision, validity, transparency, and validity for indicators The need to focus on history more is because most indices are prospective and not retrospective, ignoring past trends 6 key models of democracy seem recurrent in the literature - electoral (focused on competition in elections and democratic procedures), liberal (focused on civil liberties, rule of law, horizontal accountability, and minority rights), majoritarian (focused on will of the majority), participatory (with a focus on direct democracy, voting, an forms of citizen engagement), deliberative (with a focus on decision making processes) and egalitarian (which focuses on the goal of political equality). These are partially complementary and partially conflictual. Weighing these different approaches is a good multi-dimensional approach to democracy This article also lists out 33 more micro level conceptions and indicators that fit within these 6 broad frameworks A number of institutional experts and area experts are needed to validate coding on indexes, with citations and notation included and a chance for open participation and comment from the wider community in a continual improvement process All of this would have a huge number of benefits, including decreasing aggregation issues, increasing consensus, increasing precision, and increasing measurement options.

RACE - Stepan, Alfred, and Juan Linz. "Comparative Perspectives on Inequality and the Quality of Democracy in the United States." Perspectives on Politics 9, no. 4 (December 2011): 841-855. [CORE]

The U.S. is (and has consistently been) uniquely unequal for a developed democracy. This is because of a mixture of five factors that make the U.S. political system majority constraining and thus equalizing reform especially hard to pass: 1) the unique number of veto players in the U.S. (four), which limits the capacity for status-quo shifting policies. Very few other countries have more than two veto players. 2) the structure of the Senate, which is deeply malapportioned 3) the disproportionate power of the Senate (aided by the filibuster, its appointment powers, and veto power over House bills), 4) the 10th Amendment's reservation of rights to the states, 5) the difficulty of the U.S. system of constitutional amendments. The process of racial disenfranchisement in the south was sanctioned by law (state constitutions) and uniquely enforced through the consistent and systematic inaction of the federal government. Even today, the U.S. remains unique is how unequal it is in almost all regards. The massive impediments to effective policy change in the U.S. is reflected in its deficiency welfare programs. This is in spite of the massive demand for inequality reducing measures in the U.S. public. U.S. federalism increases this problem by decreasing the federal government's prerogative on key social programs and fuelling a race to the bottom on corporate tax rates (and thus state revenues).

NATURAL RESOURCES - Chaundhry, Kiren Aziz. The Price of Wealth: Economies and Institutions in the Middle East. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. [EXTRA]

The post 1970 oil boom helped create massive interdependence in the Middle East which precipitated a decline in violence, but this was followed by a major decline in the regional economy and shifting of ties with the 1980s price drop on oil and the Gulf War. This all meant the 1970-2000 period was a highly volatile and transformative period for the Middle East even though almost no regime transitions tooks place. This book focuses on the impact of the exogenous shocks of the 1970s and 1980s on the domestic political systems of Yemen and Saudi Arabia, which both rely especially heavily on labor remittances and oil. Both Yemen and Saudi Arabia had similar starts. There were states without colonial legacies which used the first three quarters of the 20th century to build a central state bureaucracy and national market. But the oil boom lead both states to fundamentally reshape their bureaucracies, dismantling tax and regulatory systems restructuring their finances around oil revenues and labor remittances Then, the 1980s bust led to a breakdown of these systems and new conflict over who would redesign governing institutions and national markets. The crises undermined Saudi oil wealth and Yemeni labor remittances from foreign workers. The Yemeni government responded with massive reforms to increase the administrative capacity of the state (while choking the private sector), while Suadi Arabian elites blocked any such long-term reforms There are three main arguments of this book: (1) institutional origins and change have different mechanisms during periods of immersion in the international economy compared to isolation, (2) the mechanisms with which international forces shape domestic institutions vary based on the form of a state's integration in the global economy and broad sea change in the global economy, (3) we need to disaggregate and separately analyze different types of capital flows and their interactions with different elements of the state to appreciate the different impact of the global economy on institutional change. The creation of institutions is a necessarily conflictual process, with the destruction of opposing organizational structures The international economy asserted wildly different pressures during the capital abundant 1970s (boom) and capital scarce 1980s (bust) States succeeded at mediating the effect of the global economy in the 1970s but in the 1980s these tools broke down or were abandoned. This made it harder to address the collective needs of society Oil encourages a centralized and autonomous state, while labor remittances are too widely dispersed to easily control. Meanwhile, high levels of aid encourage strong state capacities to manage the inflow Oil wealthy states have administrations exclusively aimed at the allocation of revenue, not its appropriation and have the ability to largely structure social divisions in society via their redistributive capacity Similarly, foreign remittances decrease the needs of communities to rely on the government for the provision of some goods When institutions are formed prior to large capital flows, they are more likely to be able to effectively handle them Saudi Arabia and Yemen are similar in all regards besides the source of control for their capital flows (remittances vs. oil) and both reflect the challenges of institution building in the international economy Both states early built centralized administrations and national markets via contested state building Then, the 1970s boom fundamentally reshaped these institutions, but the vast wealth and gains made such changes feel bening and not conflictual. In Saudi Arabia this led to the reaction of a bureaucracy capable of redistributing centralized oil revenue. In Yemen, to a government able to collect dispersed revenues from millions of labor remittances. But decreased tax administration is highly detrimental to a government because it undermines key bureaucratic functions and decreases state knowledge of its citizens and society and decreases the need for powerful state bureaucracies to have any accountability to their citizens The top-down nature of oil revenues eliminated much of Saudi Arabia's social sphere while the bottom-up nature of remittances allowed strong local institutions in Yemen. The autonomy between businesses and the state in Yemen allowed the government to respond with taxation in the 1980s bust, while the strong control of rents by the government in Saudi Arabia created too many vested interest to effectively tax people or change the government much.

PRES & PAR - Horowitz, Donald. "Presidents vs. Parliaments: Comparing Democratic Systems." Journal of Democracy 1, no. 4 (1990): 73-9. [EXTRA]

This article critiques Linz's arguments about the instability of Presidentialism on four grounds: 1) they are based on regionally skewed and highly selected samples focused on Latin America, 2) they rest on a mechanistic and charicatured view of the presidency, 3) they assume a particular system for electing presidents which isn't necessarily the best system, and 4) they ignore the functions a separately elected president can play in a divided society. There is much evidence of parliamentary instability and fits of authoritarianism in post-colonial Asia and Africa, with authors like Lewis noting that many African states have turned to Presidentialism to mitigate societal divisions since more fragmented parties under parliamentarism had led some factions to dominate the state leading to civil conflict, as seen in Nigeria. There is also much evidence of presidentialism as a moderating force in countries like Chile and the United States, which Linz simply dismisses as aberrations. Linz's depiction of the presidency as rigid and zero-su is a straw man, overlooking the common features of coalitions in presidential democracies and cooperation between the legislature and the presidency. There is a contraction between Linz's argument of gridlock between branches of the presidency and the winner-takes-all nature of the presidential system. There is also no necessity to a president being elected via a plurality FPTP system - Thus, LInz's analysis is colored by improper electoral assumptions. As the electoral systems in Nigeria and Sri Lanka show, there are many other, far more sophisticated forms of presidential elections that can be explicitly aimed at mediation and managing competing interests in a highly divided society, as seen in ranked-choice-voting. The rigid fixed terms, weak cabinets, and prospect of abuses of power Linz feared are all insubstantial in practice since presidents very rarely have to be removed on such short terms and both presidential and parliamentary systems have been prone to abuses of power, especially with hegemonic parties. Thus, parliamentarism is just as vulnerable to deep cleavages and instability as presidential systems - Linz doesn't dislike presidentialism but plurality elections and adversary models of democracy, and both are just as present in the westminster system.

DEMOCRACY - Philippe Schmitter, "The Influence of the International Context Upon the Choice of National Institutions and Policies in Neo-Democracies," in The International Dimensions of Democratization: Europe and the Americas, ed. Laurence Whitehead, 26-50 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). [CORE]

This article adds a condition to Whitehead's argument that IR influences democratization via coercion, control, and consent, noting that conditionality is also an essential aspect of this relationship. These four dimensions can be mapped onto a matrix divided by the basis of action (whether it is coerced or voluntary) and the number of actors (which is either unilateral or multilateral). Unilateral coerced democratization can be classed as control, unilateral voluntary democratization can be classed as contagion, multilateral coerced democratization can be classed as conditionality, and multilateral voluntary democratization can be classed as consent. Conditionality can be defined as the deliberate use of coercion (via attaching specific conditions on the distribution of benefits to recipient countries) on the part of multilateral institutions (like the IMF and EU) These concepts can be linked together via four different hypotheses explaining the link between IR and democratization: 1) Inverted Kantianism - the argument that interconnected and globalized trade leads to exchanges between citizens that increase their demand for democracy (with the key example being Ostpolitik between West and East Germany). However, the lack of democratization in countries in Latin America that have long traded with the U.S., and the lack of interconnectedness by Eastern European countries when they democratized seems to repudiate this theory. Still, it may be argued that while goods can be controlled, the flow of media and information across borders makes democracy far more appealing for the people of the world (although the effect of this, as seen in Latin America, is again limited). 2) Events - major unforeseen events in both domestic and international relations can force regime change and cause democratization - this is seen in war, in decolonization, and in the collapse of the USSR. 3) Waves - the evidence of temporal clustering in the emergence of democracies is clear and strong, with the current and fourth wave being by far the most global and extensive - this could be contributed to the spread of ideas and contagion alone, or it could be contributed to consent with the growth and increased legitimacy of international and non-governmental organizations dedicated to democratization. 4) Stages. Phases, and Sequences - Democratization is started by a quick transition but then only maintained via a long consolidation - it would seem international intervention is more influential in the process of consolidation than transition (in part because of the speed of the transition, and because once the transition is over the avenues of influence are much more clear). This leads to conditionality, as international organizations use the fulfillment of political goals as a stipulation for a country receiving aid, credit, or other international goods. This can both help politicians argue their hands are tied in adhering to democratic norms and encourage a focus on democratization. We see conditionality more and more as the importance of groups like the EU grows. Meanwhile, the collapse of the USSR means that these conditions are often the only conditions for entering the international scene.

AUTHORITARIANISM - Kenneth F. Greene, Why Dominant Parties Lose: Mexico's Democratization in Comparative Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). [CORE]

This party explores what contributes to the rise, maintenance, and fall, of single-party authoritarianism (defined as systems with meaningful, but manifestly unfair, elections)- the main focus is on the PRI in Mexico, which ruled from 1929 to 2000 in spite of regular elections with competition from opposition parties. The key to understanding dominant party equilibriums is resource endowments - this book argues that dominant parties remain control via two key advantages - the incumbents resource advantages, and the incumbents ability to raise costs of participation for the opposition. These resource advantages are created via control over the public sector and politicization of the public democracy, which allows the diversion of public goods towards campaign ends. "Dramatic resource advantages allow the incumbent to outspend on campaigns, deploy legions of canvassers, and, most importantly, to supplement policy appeals with patronage goods that bias voters in their favor." Such resource advantages are easier the more that state-owned businesses control the economy (meaning privatization, in turn, limits incumbent financing and that economic and political monopolies are mutually reinforcing). What's more, dominant parties punish candidates who affiliate with opponents by forcing them to forgo material advantages and fruitful careers - thus, partially all career oriented politicians join dominant parties, leaving only strong ideologues to form opposition parties. The consequence is that opposition parties are more ideologically extreme, less in touch with the common people, and thus less able to amass significant support. What's more, such parties lack patronage resources to build up voter bases, lack the capital for clear marketing and strong volunteer networks, and lack the resources for strong national coordination, all of which reinforces their fringe and extreme positions. The PRI in Mexico dominated via the tilted resource field created by their control of the state, facing only fleeting opposition by ideological extreme parties. It wasn't until state control over the economy decreased and patronage networks for the PRI disappeared that other parties began to make gains, especially when these parties began to moderate themselves. This helps explain why opposition parties still exist in single party systems - because they are formed by ideologues on the outskirts of the political system, acting on principle. States have three mechanisms for controlling opposition parties - fraud, resource advantages, and repression of the opposition - all of these work in tandem to push opposition parties to the extreme via limited opportunities for legitimate competition (although fraud is expensive, risky in that it can undermine legitimacy, and unnecessary with resource advantages, meaning it is only a tool of last resort). It is only when opposition parties transform into catch-all parties that they threaten this system. Because dominant parties want to win large and consistent majorities, they will typically be centrist parties that try to have a wide spanning appeal Thus, the three main pillars of this theory are: 1) opposition parties in dominant-party systems should be niche oriented, even when there are incentives to be catchall; 2) this ideological polarity among opposition parties will decrease effective cooperation between them; 3) the incumbent party should have dramatic resource advantages that give it a tilted playing field in electoral competition, and which is only threatened when such resources dry up. These pillars are affirmed in four case studies - Taiwan (a Dominant Party Authoritarian Regime [DPAR] where the dominant party [KMT] was ousted from power after its resource base diminished following privatization in the 1990s, allowing otherwise extreme opposition parties to rise to power and moderate); Malaysia (a DPAR where the dominant party [UMNO] maintained a grip on power and resources by resisting liberalization in the 1990s and selectively repressing opposition by the already ideologically extreme opposition); Japan (a Dominant Party Democratic Regime [DPDR] which maintained party dominance for the LDP through huge resource advantages [especially via the control of the state bureaucracy an clientelistic relationships with private industry]); and Italy (a DPDR which saw the dominant party (DC) lose power after its mass public patronage scheme was disrupted by high inefficiency and corruption caused over such mass distribution of political appointments as political cutbacks). "Despite the predictions of existing theory, 16 countries on four continents had dominant parties during the 20th century and, by century's end, 11 had transformed into fully competitive democracies with turnover." (297)

DEMOCRACY - Olson, Mancur. "Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development." American Political Science Review 87, no. 3 (September, 1993): 567-76. [EXTRA]

Under anarchy, government act as 'roving bandits' with no incentives for investment or production but only for looting, while dictatorships establish 'stationary bandits' who monopolize theft via taxation. Secure autocrats have an interest in their domain which leads to investing in a peaceful order and public goods which increase productivity. When time horizons are short for leaders, however, they confiscate at unsustainable levels, meaning the uncertainty of authoritarianism leads to poor economic performance, while democracy, which extends time horizons, is favorable to systems of long-term production like property and contract rights. The starting point for this theory is that no society can work satisfactorily without a peaceful order and public goods Since peaceful order is a net benefit it should naturally arise, but collective action and free rider problems prevent it from doing so in large societies. The key, then, to creating such peaceful order and cooperation is the creation of a stationary bandit who gains via taxation and has an incentive to increase productivity in order to aid taxation and to prevent others from plundering his region. Thus, monopolizing theft is a means of peaceable order. Thus, government arise out of the rational self-interest of those with the greatest capacity for violence who then legitimate themselves via theories of diving right, social contract, and voluntary choice and citizens but into this since both they and the bandit benefit from the new order of things The problem is that autocrats have an incentive to extract the maximum total amount from society. Thus, they tax right up to the level that it would undermine incentives to work altogether. Democracy helps resolve this, for although democratic leaders may have just as perverse of incentives as dictators, democratic leaders compete to represent majorities and thus have less incentive to maximize extraction since much of that extraction comes from the majorities and because such extraction decreases national income, meaning the majorities optimal tax rate is lower. The larger the group that has a controlling stake in the government, the lower the tax rate (which makes small parties and interest groups dangerous) Growth also requires investment and contract/property rights which require long time horizons, which are more likely in democracies which have courts and rule of law, than in authoritarianism - This partially explains the incentive for dynastic inheritance for monarchies because it extends the time horizon Indeed, the conditions needed to ensure long term investment are almost identical to those for democracy Collective action prevents the people from initiating democracy, so what leads to it? It stands to reason that democracies arise when those coming to power are stopped from forming an authoritarian government. Which means democracies arise from accidents of history that produce intratable stalemates over the control of a government and when such groups are intermixed and not autonomous (which would just lead to splintering of new governments). Thus, a failure of domination and segregation = democratization.

PARTIES - Seawright, Jason. Party-System Collapse: The Roots of Crisis in Peru and Venezuela. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. [EXTRA]

Up until the 1990s, Venezuela had a highly institutionalized party system, but after 1993 it began to decline and collapsed, culminating in the rise of Hugo Chavez. Peru, similarly, saw party system collapse in the 1980s, with the rise of Fujimori. This fits within a broader pattern of extreme electoral volatility throughout Latin America - but in spite of this volatility, full on collapse remained rare in the region in the 1980s and 199s, limited to Peru and Venezuela. What explains this wehn most theory says party linkages should mostly be durable and long lasting? Class based explanations for party system collapse - promoted by Roberts and Cameron - fail because there are no strong class differences in data on the propensity to vote against traditional parties during these processes; similarly, economic based theories that focus on retrospective voting following periods of economic decline fail because those with the highest level economic suffering weren't at the center of anti-party movement, anti-party coalitions were economic diverse, and many countries had economic crises without party collapse. Instead, this article presents an argument about ideology and feelings of poor representation, with leftists who felt that parties were unresponsive to their demands driving collapse in venezuela and center-right voters doing the same in Peru, with these phenomy being worsened by levels of corruption that increased popular outrage and alienation from the government. A coherent theory of party system collapse must integrate explanations both for why voters abandon traditional parties and why parties are unable to adjust to these defections and prevent them. Thus, we need to account for both changes in supply and demand. On the demand/voter side, this book argue voters abandon parties because corruption scandals erode patterns of party identification and because poor ideological representation (for the left in Venezuela + center-right in Peru) then provides a motive to turn to outside candidates Party system collapse is rare because changing parties is risky - it risks electing poorly chosen officials (adverse selection) and wasting one's vote - party collapse thus requires an extreme phenomenon that causes a wide swath of voters to suddenly become much more risk acceptant and unlikely to just not vote - Put in other words, voters need a strong stimulus that encourages rebellion/exit and not expressions of voice or loyalty. Here, emotion should be a key driver, especially anger which increases risk acceptance and rejection of old party loyalties, along with anxiety which leads to increased seeking of new information and option - these emotions are likely to arise when there are large and persistent high-level corruption scandals, which decrease voter loyalty and when those scandals are combined with high levels of anger at the failure of existing parties to represent important constituencies in society. Thus, voters will embrace outsiders when insiders are seen as corrupt (a party-level issue which will decrease linkages) and when they are seen as ideologically distant from them (a system-level issue which will increase voting for outsiders), leading to anger. Such collapse, when fueled by ideologically middle-ground voters, may be more dramatic since the rebelling voters don't naturally fit into existing ideological divisions in society. On the supply/party side, parties fail to adjust and crack-down on corruption and fail to increase representation, in part, because when there are multiple party leaders with different bases of support for each of the major parties, it leads to fractured adjustments and divided elites. Parties were also limited by a constrained activist base which led to ideological homogeneity (and thus stagnation) among elites, as well as low levels of flexibility in party decision making processes which made adaptation and evaluation difficult. Such low levels of flexibility were caused by a lack of successful party outreach and a high level of patronage goods within the party apparatus. {A failure of coordination and ossification} Both the demand and supply side factors outlined above are necessary for party system collapse.

DEMOCRACY - Ziblatt, Daniel. Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. [EXTRA]

While dramatic collapses of authoritarian regimes are exciting, they are a poor basis for long term democratization - understanding democratization requires taking a long-view towards the process, and this reveals two patterns: (1) moments of breakthrough are often punctuated moments on a long path of democratization, with changes accumulating over time in a self-reinforcing process that becomes harder and harder to dislodge. These are the 'settled paths of democratization' (2) some countries instead experience unsettled paths of democratization with breakthroughs often preceded or followed by breakdown or backsliding, making long-term democracy elusive. But what differentiates these two trends? There are thus important differences between year-to-year fluctuations in democracy levels and moments of uprising, and the long term trends of democratization, which makes looking at a long-term vantage point all the more important This book focuses on the importance of elite buy-in for democracy. The need for opponents of democracy to feel secure in it This book focuses on the tumultuous era of democratization and backsliding in Europe from 1848-1950 The 'settled democracy' pathway was taken by Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norward, Sweden, and Denmark, with democracy gradually developing in all these countries between 1848 and 1950 with little backsliding and few coups or constitutional breakdowns The 'unsettled democracy' path was taken by Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, and France during this period, with democratization more drawn out and more prone to periodic collapse and backsliding, all of the way into the post-WWII era This book takes a very long run view of democratization that encompasses long periods of authoritarianism, as seen in Italy between 1845 and 1950 European democracy is often seen as a product of industrialization, middle-class demands, working-class demands, or elite acquiescence. But modernization theories are economically deterministic, middle class theories overlook the often anti-democartic stances of the bourgeois, and working class theories fail to account for anomalies like the UK and Germany Thus, this book focuses on an elite centric theory which argues that elite support based on reassurances that their interests will be protected and countermajoritarian checks will be in place is essential to avoiding destabilization in democratic transitions Thus, institutions like unelected upper chambers and councils, federalism, and an insulated military, all help assuage elites and thus ensure stable democracy via accomodation. This means majoritarianism must be tempered for successful democratization But this theory still has some holes, since many counter-majoritarian institutions existed in countries with both settled and unsettled democratization - It also overlooks that elites are not cohesive and it was often political parties representing subsets of these elites that had to be assuaged. Thus, the focus needs to be on those parties as the 'carriers' of elite interests. This leads to the proposition that, regardless of levels of socioeconomic development or the structure of institutions, conservative political parties representing old regime elites were the key shapers of democratization. When parties were well organized and institutionalized for elites, it lowered the 'costs of toleration' for democracy and made it less threatening, while a lack of such parties made democracy highly threatening and thus unstable. This thesis is demonstrated throughout the book by Britain's success and Germany's failure at creating strong conservative parties.

PARTIES - Randall, Vicky, and Lars Svasand. "Party Institutionalization in New Democracies." Party Politics 8, no. 1 (January 2002): 5-29. [EXTRA]

While parties are largely seen as essential to democartic governance, the qualities that make them so are unclear - still much emphasis has been put on party institutionalization. But discussion of institutionalization on both the party and party system level have all too often been limited to the developed world. Party institutionalization and party system institutionalization are neither the same thing, nor necessarily congruent phenomena. This article focuses on these two phenomena in the context of democratic competition and with the aim of consolidation (so excluding Mexico's PRI). Party system institutionalization involves an internal dimension, which is: continuity among party alternatives (which increases accountability) and an attitudinal view, with parties accepting each other as legitimate competitors. Further, institutionalized party systems involve an external dimension, which is: that they require a support network from the state but autonomy from state control, and that citizens have to be trusting of parties as part of the electoral process and as institutions. Party system institutionalization is not synonymous with party institutionalization, but will support it broadly since it helps create an environment of more stable party support and high levels of legitimacy. But there are two areas where party system institutionalization can clash with party institutionalization: (1) Unevenness - often, some parties (usually those with ties to past authoritarian regimes) will institutionalize much earlier than other parties, which can lead to uneven resource distribution and limit institutionalization for other parties because the playing field is uneven (this is seen in much of Africa) - this results in many social sectors being left out of representation and will decrease trust in the government and its policy effectiveness; (2) parties often develop identities with exclusive ethnic or cultural groupings (which again is seen frequently in Africa) and which severely limits the extent of party competition since specific parties gain monopolies over specific groups, with little overlap. This means parties can become entrenched and institutionalized while also harming overall party competition and representation - Thus, in both regards, party institutionalization and party system institutionalization can be separate and countervailing phenomena. Huntington defined institutionalization along the lines of adaptability, complexity, autonomy, and coherence, but existing definitions of institutionalization have suffered by failing to identify what the relationship between the different indicators is To understand party institutionalization it is useful to look at both internal developments (within the party) and external ones (the party's relationship with society), within both of which there can be structural elements, and attitudinal elements. This leads to a 2x2 matrix. The structural aspect of the internal dimension is systemness (which means the increased scope, density, and regularity of the interaction that constitute the party structure, with certain levels of regularity and routine in the conventions driving party behavior), the attitudinal aspect of the internal dimension is value infusion (the extent to which party actos and supporters develop a commitment to the party that transcends self-interest and succeeds at creating its own descriptive culture and value system), the structural aspect of the external dimension is autonomy (a measure of a party's independence in its decision making capacity), and the attitudinal aspect of the external dimension is reification (the extent to which the party's existence is established in the public imagination). These four factors - systemness, value infusion, autonomy, and reification - all coexist but their relative weighting and importance in different contexts varies a great deal, and there is no inevitably linear aspect of their development protecting from de-institutionalization In the developing world, levels of systemness are impacted by the nature of party origins, their funding, the role of party leaders vs. party organizations, the role of factions within the party, and the role of clientelism The level of value infusion is impacted by a party's relationship to its popular base and levels of clientelism For autonomy, access to and control by external sponsors is an essential factor Reification depends on party longevity, party access to communication and media, its organizational strength, and its symbolic representation.

POPULISM - Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, "Trump, Brexit, and the Rise of Populism: Economic Have-Nots and Cultural Backlash," HKS Faculty Research Working Paper Series (September, 2016). [CORE]

While the dominant thesis on the rise of populism has focused on economic insecurity, cultural insecurity and backlash provides a more convincing framework for explaining the phenomenon. Populism is expanding massively through Europe right now - "Across Europe, as we will demonstrate, their average share of the vote in national and European parliamentary elections has more than doubled since the 1960s, from around 5.1% to 13.2%, at the expense of center parties.3 During the same era, their share of seats has tripled, from 3.8% to 12.8%." (2) Most explanations of populism can be grouped into demand side arguments - focused on public opinion - supply side arguments - focused on party strategies - and institutionalist arguments - focused on the electoral and constitutional rules of the game. This article focuses on the demand side, and argues that populism is the result of a broader backlash to progressive cultural change that rebukes the post-materialist revolution from the 1970s, as seen in the concentration of populist sentiments among older, white, undereducated, and religious men whose 'traditional' values are the most likely to feel displaced and whose traditional privilege and status is most likely to feel threatened. Immigration is likely to play into this by making societies feel increasingly multicultural and with fluctuating values. When measuring the cultural values associated with this backlash (anti-immigrant attitudes, mistrust of global and national governance, support for authoritarian values, and left-right ideological self placement), all of them were strongly and consistently related to populist support. In contrast, measures of economic inequality and deprivation - which focuses on the impact of globalization, and would predict high levels of populist support amongst unskilled workers, the unemployed, those without college degrees, and those most exposed to immigration - prove inconsistent in predicting populist support levels This cultural backlash thesis is supported by the increased focus on cultural issues within party politics int he US and Europe, and declining prominence of class as a predictor of partisanship.

NATURAL RESOURCES - Smith, Benjamin. Hard Times in the Lands of Plenty: Oil Politics in Iran and Indonesia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011. [CORE]

Why do some oil rich regimes survive boom and bust related political shocks, while others collapse during them? The key to answering this question is assessing when a country gained access to oil as a major export. When rulers got access to oil rents impacts how those rulers utilize those rents. Here, a crucial issue is the timing on the initiation of 'late development', which is the set of policies used by the state to explicitly nurture private sector capital and labor, and the use of interventionist policies like the creation of state-owned industrial enterprises and state-granted monopolies. Late development also includes industrialization, and is generally a process of 'catch-up' used by governments in need of modernization. If oil-riches are discovered after the process of late development, then rulers will have built robust coalitions and state institutions to manage the difficult process of late development, which includes both massive revenue collection and social control. In contrast, when oil-riches are discovered before the process of late development, leaders can rely on patronage and wealth to fulfill the process without building strong coalitions, and need not rely on creating strong (and difficult) institutions for local control. Thus, the access to resources provided at the onset of late development affects the options available to leaders when revenue shortages and political challenges result from oil busts and booms. Countries that managed to develop good coalitions and strong institutions prior to discovering oil wealth will manage these crises much better. This is seen in the contrast between protests in Iran in the 1970s (which brought down the regime) and those in Indonesia in the 1970s (which Suharto's New Order was able to weather). Indonesia had succeeded and developing state institutions, especially the ability to tax, prior to the introduction of oil wealth, while Iran had failed to do so and thus lacked tools of social control or fiscal rebalancing. This is a representative example of how oil wealth can either bolster or undermine state institutions. The key factor for oil is thus how rulers succeed at incorporating it into their domestic political economy - "Oil export revenues are not like taxes or conditional foreign aid because, in nearly all cases, they accrue directly to the state and are highly flexible or discretionary. Because no process of accountability structures their use, oil revenues are a tremendous political resource that, in most exporting countries, finds its way into the hands of a very few individuals in mostly authoritarian regimes." (7) This can be a damning process if there are not strong coalitions or institutions within a state, or a strengthening one if there are, which allow oil wealth to be filtered through pre-existing strong political structures. "All else being equal, oil wealth tends to produce regimes that are more rather than less durable, and regimes in oil-rich countries face significantly lower risk of collapse than those in oil-poor countries. I also find that sub-regime change indicators of political instability—political protests and civil conflict—occur at signifi- cantly lower levels in states dependent on oil exports." (10) "The most important conclusion to emerge from this book is that the presence of oil wealth cannot be determinative on its own—how and, most important, when it is introduced is critical." (14) -- "This finding—that late-arriving oil can bolster a carefully built coalition in an authoritarian regime—has gloomy implications for those interested in democracy promotion and consolidation. In essence, it predicts long life spans for some of the most visible dictatorships in the developing world" (193-4)

NATURAL RESOURCES - Hertog, Steffen. "Deying the Resource Curse: Explaining Successful State-Owned Enterprises in Rentier States." World Politics 62, no. 2 (April 2010): 261-301. [CORE]

Why have some gulf governments been able to create highly-successful state-owned-enterprises (SOEs)? Two factors help explain this: the absence of a populist-mobilizational history, and substantive regime autonomy in economic policy-making. SOEs are usually seen as huge resource drains and sucks on countries, especially countries that are heavily reliant on resource rents. However, many of these corporations in the gulf have been particularly successful, in stark contrast to the SOEs in Algeria, Indonesia, Iran, Libya, Nigeria, and Venezuela, which have mostly produced white elephants and have been huge wastes of resources. SOEs succeed, this article argues, when they are relatively autonomous in their daily functions, insulated from political and bureaucratic predation, and function with a coherent set of high-level principles within the political regime. The conditions needed for this to occur are: 1) a lack of populist-mobilizational history of economic development, and 2) substantial decisional autonomy of the regime leadership from interest groups within the state and society. SOE management that allows large interference by the state turns the SOEs into political tools used for employment, rent seeking, regional development, and other considerations, all of which cripple the companies and leads to huge losses for the government which are floated because the SOEs are seen as too important to be allowed to fail - "in all six non-Gulf cases SOEs are unprofitable, are overstaffed, suffer from corruption, lack managerial autonomy, are politicized, carry huge social overhead, and often cannot set their prices freely." Gulf SOEs have been uniquely autonomous of the state bureaucracy, decreasing opportunities for corruption and allowing for managerial autonomy. This decreases excessive obligations and rent-seeking within them. A key variable is economic populism - the use of economic resources to mobilize support from what are perceived as previously marginalized classes, newly recruited as a support base for the regime, which gives economic policy a strong redistributional component and thus assumes state resources as part of the nation-building exercise (whether it is through the funding of social programs, the redistribution of profits, or the creation of employment). These kids of movements have directly undermined the autonomy and efficiency of SOEs and have instead redirected them for political goals. This process has taken place in Algeria, Iran, Libya, and Venezuela. Gulf SOEs, have, in contrast, been highly hierarchical, pro-business, and politically conservative, with any state distribution being separated from their operations. But what explains Nigeria and Indonesia's SOE failure, where populist mobilization is also lacking? Or the failure of Kuwait's SOE? Here regime autonomy and freedom from state and social interest groups in the central factor. Gulf SOEs lack government interference and are free from a strong civil society with organized interest groups. Thus, Gulf monarchies are highly stable because they can balance regime based patronage with highly efficient centers for growth, in a strictly hierarchical state, while the one democratically inclined country in the Gulf, Kuwait, has suffered from the lack of autonomy and hierarchy in its SOE.

TERMS - Charismatic Party Linkages

there are personalist linkages, which have low levels of both institutional development and ideological coherence. Here, voters support politicians based on "personality characteristics of candidates, devoid of programmatic or ideological content." As such, party development and coherence tend to be weak and tenuous (M&T, 204-5, 216). As Roberts notes, politicians who rely on the appeal of their personalities try to "disarticulate political programs" that would be polarizing or decrease their appeal (Roberts, 29-30). Consequently, personalist linkages undermine parties as effective tools of representation and accountability, since there are no coherent methods of evaluating purely charismatic leadership (M&T).

DEMOCRACY - Robert Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971). [CORE]

A key condition for democracy is a continuing 'responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens, considered as political equals.' - But the word democracy is an ideal type for a government this is completely or almost completely responsive to all of its citizens, which allows all citizens to be unimpaired in 1) formulating preferences, 2) signifying those preferences to each other and the government through individual/collective action, 3) having their preferences equally weighed by the government. This includes eight guarantees that must be met for these conditions to be true: 1) freedom to form and join organizations, 2) freedom of expression, 3) the right to vote, 4) eligibility for public office, 5) right of political leaders to compete for support and compete for votes, 6) alternative sources of information, 7) free and fair elections, 8) institutions for making government policies dependent on votes and other expression of preference. These eight preferences constitute two somewhat different theoretical dimensions of democratization: 1) contestation (how government enables opposition, public contestation, and political competition), 2) inclusiveness (how much the population can participate in controlling and contesting the government). Both of these are necessary to some extent for democracy, and either alone is not sufficient for democracy. These two dimensions can create a matrix by which we can think of four different regime types: a closed hegemony (low inclusiveness, low contestation), a competitive oligarchy (low inclusiveness but high contestation), an inclusive hegemony (high inclusiveness and low contestation), a polyarchy (high inclusiveness and high contestation). Polyarchy is the term for real world regimes attempting to approximate the ideal type of democracy - "Polyarchies, then, may be thought of as relatively (but incompletely) democratized regimes, or, to put it in another way, polyarchies are regimes that have been substantially popularized and liberalized, that is, highly inclusive and extensively open to public contestation." - Democracy is the idea, polyarchy the practice. The move towards polyarchy leads to more individuals and organized groups in opposition to the government and contestation of it - this leads incumbents to fear conflict with, and displacement by, these groups (and vice versa for the groups), which further leads both to seek to deny the other opportunities for power and participation. This phenomenon leads to three axioms about governments tolerating opposition: 1) the likelihood a government will tolerate opposition increases as the costs of toleration decrease; 2) the likelihood a government will tolerate opposition increases as the costs of suppression also increase; 3) the more the costs of suppression exceed the costs of toleration, the greater the chance for a competitive regime.

RACE - Hajnal, Zoltan and Jeremy Horowitz. "Racial Winners and Losers in American Party Politics." American Political Science Association 12, no. 1 (March, 2014): 100-18. [CORE]

A key question is if the strong racial divide in U.S. politics translates to different outcomes for Republican and Democratic presidential administrations. Overall, Democratic presidencies are associated with significantly higher levels of well being for racial minorities in the U.S. (with Black Americans, in particular, benefiting from Democratic administrations under measures of income levels, poverty levels, the unemployment rate, and criminal justice issues). Crucially, these periods of well-being don't seem to come at the cost of white Americans, who also fare well under Democratic administrations (although less so than Republican ones). These results also show the unique influence of the presidency (and its partisan orientation) on the prevalence of racial inequality in the U.S. "If Democrats had been in power over the entire period we examine, much of America's racial inequality may well have been erased." (102) These results hold even with a wide variety of robustness checks, including differences in economic growth between the regimes.

DEMOCRACY - Guillermo O'Donnell, "Why the Rule of Law Matters," Journal of Democracy 15, no. 4 (January, 2004): 32-46. [CORE]

A true democracy requires a democratic rule of law that ensures "political rights, civil liberties, and mechanisms of accountability which in turn affirm the political equality of all citizens and constrain potential abuses of state power." - The rule of law is thus linked with many of the pillars of democracy, and is essential for protecting those pillars A minimal definition of the rule of law is "that whatever law exists is written down and publicly promulgated by an appropriate authority before the events meant to be regulated by it, and is fairly applied by relevant state institutions including the judiciary" - The law must be fair and must be equally applied if it is to be the rule of law and not rule by law. Within civil or common law the legal system aims at, but never achieves completeness, and no one is above the law - further, the legal system is in service of a greater social order that defines, specifies, and makes predictable human interactions An entire state must submit to the law for there to be the rule of law- this law must 1) uphold political rights, freedoms, and guarantees of democracy, 2) uphold civil rights for everyone, 3) establish networks of responsibility and accountability for both public and private agents of all power levels, ensuring their ability to be held in check by controls. All democracies have three types of accountability - 1) vertical electoral accountability from elections, 2) societal accountability, exercised by interest groups and individuals mobilizing for their interests and making demands on the state for redress and accountability, 3) horizontal accountability, when properly authorized state institutions act to prevent, redress, or punish the presumably illegal actions (or inactions) of public officials - the first form of accountability is required for democracy, the second two vary significantly Another key factor is the effectiveness of the legal system at bringing beneficial order to social relations - something that is aided by the authority conveyed by many overlapping and equally accountable institutions Citizens are never subjects but instead the basis of the power upon which they are judged There are many areas in which the rule of law can falter - these include flaws in the existing law; flaws in the application of the law; flaws in the relations between state agencies and ordinary citizens; flaws in access to the judiciary and to fair process; and flaws due to sheer lawlessness. The objective measures of the rule of law can be found across five dimensions of democratic states (each dimension is expanded on in the article): the legal system, the state and government, the courts and auxiliary institutions; the social context; and civil and human rights.

TERMS - Cultural/Social Framework (Race)

Cultural/Social Frameworks This framework isolates recent social and cultural change as the mechanism for growing racial tensions in the United States and Europe. Prominent strands of this argument include: 1) Massive demographic changes caused by immigration (especially in Europe) have led to an increased sense of crisis surrounding national cultures, which sparks support for right-wing parties and xenophobia (Hainmueller and Hopkins, 2014) (Ivarsflaten, 2008). 2) Sudden changes in the demographic makeup of an individual's neighborhood or a sense that immigrants aren't assimilating to local culture can trigger a sense of anxiety in individuals (Hainmueller and Hopkins, 2014). 3) Older generations have a backlash to post-materialism expressed in a desire to defend the national culture (Inglehart and Norris, 2017). Counter-Arguments: Arguments focused on cultural outlooks about immigrants suffer from endogeneity problems (Hainmueller and Hopkins, 2014). This argument seems to be more applicable to immigration in Europe than the Black-White divide in the U.S.

RACE - Ford, Robert Anothony, and Matthew J. Goodwin. Revolt on the Right: Explaining Support for the Radical Right in Britain. London: Routledge, 2014. [EXTRA]

British politics is typically dominated by the Conservatives, Labour, and Liberal-Democrats, but the UK Independence Party (UKIP) has proven uniquely capable of challenging this status quo. UKIP started as an extreme fringe party with very little support, but by 2013 they were winning consistent popular support under the leadership of Forage. UKIP originally prospered in the more experimental European elections and took longer to succeed in parliamentary ones. By 2009, UKIP and the BNP (British National Party - a far more right wing, nationalist, authoritarian, and white supremacist alternative to UKIP) were winning ¼ of voters in spite of Britain traditionally being seen as resilient ot the radical right, although both declined again after that until UKIP surged after 2013 UKIP gains power by giving a voice to groups who feel written out of British Politics - Particularly older, less-skilled, less-education, working class citizens hit especially hard by recent cultural and economic changes. They are the 'left-behind', who used to be central to British politics but now are increasingly marginalized by a growing middle class. Before UKIP they responded with an abandonment of politics, but now their energy is channeled into the far right in UKIP UKIP also reflects a new set of concerns for voters which were before left out of politics - importantly, UKIP is uniquely opposed to multiculturalism and immigration creating a 'new' threatening and alien society, as led by the focus of older, less-educated, less skilled and more economically insecure voters Thus, UKIPs rise is a result of Britain's typical parties failing to address deep-rooted and long-burning social and political conflicts in their society, with labour and conservatives both focusing on winning over a cosmopolitan middle class UKIP has managed to build a successful party, against all odds, by uniting this cross-partisan coalition of left-behind working class voters.

NATURAL RESOURCES - Sachs, Jeffrey, and Andrew Warner. Natural Resource Abundance and Economic Growth. Cambridge: Natural Bureau of Economic Research, 1995. [EXTRA]

Countries with a high ratio of natural resource exports to GDP tend to have lower growth rates - a fact that holds true even after controlling for per-capita income, trade policy (i.e. openness to the global economy), government efficiency, investment rates, and other potential confounding variables like inequality. This is found with a model of 97 countries between 1970-1989 Part of what contributes to the resource curse is that decreased transport costs mean resource poor countries can easily supplement their resource shortcoming via imports, as seen with Japan Political arguments for the resource curse focus on a 'feeding frenzy' of rents leading to poor institutions and investments in the public - Meanwhile, economic theories focus on tradeoffs to manufacturing investment and increased volatility in global markets which decreases skill accumulation and linkages related to manufacturing and industry In the Dutch disease model, an economy has three sectors - a tradeable natural resource sector, a tradeable manufacturing sector, and a non-tradable sector. A higher resource endowment increases demand for non-tradable goods and thus decreases labor and capital for manufacturing, meaning manufacturing will shrink in resource booms. The only two countries that seem to have significantly bucked the resource curse trend were Malaysia and Mauritius, which both relied on extremely open economies and fuel export led growth, and both developed manufacturing sectors This paper hypothesizes that the link between resources and decreased growth is because such resources lead to increased rent - seeking and corruption and decreased bureaucratic efficiency. But the evidence is weak, suggesting this is not the root of the resource curse. Another theory that gets more support is a U shaped relationship to trade openness with moderate resource wealth leading to protectionism to try to avoid the dutch disease and develope manufacturing, which stunts the economy, while very resource rich countries avoid this problem because they never feel the need to invest in manufacturing at all. Thus, it may be the impact of resources on trade openness that is key, via a dynamic similar to dutch disease This affirms the importance of the natural resource-manufacturing tradeoff

DEMOCRACY - Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (London: Allen & Unwin, 1947). [CORE]

Democracy can be defined as "that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people's vote." There are seven reasons that this definition of democracy is preferable to one that focuses on the decision making power and process of citizens: 1) It provides an efficient and reasonable criterion by which to distinguish democratic government from non-democratic ones (definitions that focus on carrying out the will of the people for the good of the people can apply to effective autocracies too) 2) This theory leaves more room for recognizing the vital fact of leadership - this means we can account for 'manufactured will' amongst the electorate as well 3) This theory does not overlook genuine group-wise volitions - rather this theory shows these volitions as they are, movements that wait to be called to life by political leaders who turn them into political factors - collective group volitions are activated by leaders 4) This theory can be usefully compared to competition in the economic sphere - it thinks of democracy as a mode of political struggle nad competition via elections 5) This theory clarifies the relationship between democracy and individual freedom - democracy need not bring more individual freedom, but the competition for votes requires a higher freedom of discussion and press at a minimum 6) The primary function of the electoral is not just making the government, but evicting it - thus, the only control the electorate has over their representatives is the ability to not elect them. 7) This theory sheds light on the difference between will by the majority of the people and will by the people in the whole, since the former is only a poor approximation for the latter - "the principle of democracy... merely means that the reins of government should be handed to those who command more support than do any of the competing individuals or teams."

DEMOCRACY - Phillip Schmitter and Terry Lynn Karl, "What Democracy Is... and Is Not," Journal of Democracy 2, no. 3 (1991): 75-88. [CORE]

Democracy does not consist of a single unique set of institutions, but is a diverse number of practices that produce a variety set of effects. Democracy can be defined as a system of governance in which rulers are held accountable for their actions in the public realm by citizens, acting indirectly through the competition and cooperation of their elected representatives. A regime or system of governance is the patterns that determine access to public office, the characteristics of the actors admitted to such access, the strategies that actors use to gain access, and the rules that dictate publicly binding decisions - such systems must be institutionalized by written law and a written constitution. These rules and forms are all bundled together and can then be labelled a democracy or subdivided into other subtypes A democracy consists of the following 6 components: 1) the public realm (the collective norms and choices that or binding of society and backed by state coercion - these are relaxed in liberal democracies [which may err on the side of too little control] and extended in social-democracies [which may err on the side of too much]); 2) citizens (only democracies have citizens, and increasingly democracies require universal, fair, and egalitarian standards of citizenship); 3) competition (competition via faction is seen as a necessary evil of democracy, with parties vying for voters and providing them aggregated policy alternatives through free, regular, and fair elections); 4) majority rule (this should include protections for minority rights via means like a bill of rights, federalism, or consociationalism); 5) cooperation (the voluntary making of collective decisions that are binding on the whole and the respect of those decisions by adversaries and fellow democratic competitors - this functions most effectively through civil society which gives the state a means of resolving conflict and controlling behavior without the use of force, and serves as a means of improving the quality of citizens); 6) representatives (as democracies continue to grow in size, and their bureaucratic capacity grows with them, the need to balance this ability with the proper representation of elected officials is essential - building up this robust representation takes time, and cannot be rushed). Procedures that make democracy possible: first and foremost are restriction on its own government and strict adherence to the rule of law - otherwise, there are nine procedural conditions for a democracy to exist (building on Dahl's work): 1) control over government decision about policy is constitutionally vested in elected officials, 2) elected officials are chosen in frequent and fair elections, 3) practically all adults have the right to vote, 4) practically all adults can run for office, 5) citizens have a right to express themselves politically without danger of punishment, 6) citizens have a right to seek alternative sources of information, which are protected by the law, 7) citizens can form independent associations or organizations like interest groups, 8) popularly elected official are able to exercise their constitutional powers without being overridden by unelected officials (whether officially or informally), 9) the polity must be self-governing and free from outside restraints. Finally, democracies must have actors who accept defeat and don't try to bar their competition from fair democratic participation and who respect the outcome of opposition leadership when fairly elected - this is what Dahl called the 'democratic bargain.' This bargain must function within the accepted rules of the political game, and which takes time to develop. How democracies differ - There are 11 dimensions along which democracies can differ without becoming more or less democratic: 1) consensus (the amount of agreement among citizens), 2) participation (how active the citizenry is), 3) access (how equally the government weighs different preferences), 4) responsiveness (leaders don't always follow their citizens, but can be held to account), 5) majority rule (not everything has to be approved by election), 6) parliamentary sovereignty (the legislature may not be the final authority in the law), 7) party government (how parties are organized) , 8) pluralism (the multiplicity of voluntaristic groups in society), 9) federalism (the levels of autonomy within the system of government) , 10) presidentialism (there may not be a singular and nationally elected executive), 11) checks and balances (branches of government need not be balanced against each other). What democracy is not - there are four key things democracies aren't - 1) they aren't necessarily more economically efficient than other regimes, 2) they aren't necessarily more administratively efficient than other regimes, 3) they aren't likely to be more orderly, consensual, stable or governable than autocracies, but instead open to contestation, 4) they will have more open societies, but not necessarily more open economies.

DEMOCRACY - Juan L. Linz, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Crises, Breakdown, and Reequilibration (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). [CORE]

Democracy entails "the freedom to create political parties and to conduct free and honest elections at regular intervals without excluding any effective political office from direct or indirect electoral accountability" - Democratic regimes allow for the legal and equal opportunity to express opinions and be protected from the state's interference of those opinions No regime breaks down simply because of bad founding conditions - they require certain political processes after their founding to breakdown - "The hypothesis here is that all the regimes under study had a reasonable chance at survival, but that certain characteristics and actions of relevant actors - institutions as well as individuals - decreased the probability of such development" "We feel that the structural characteristics of societies - their actual and latent conflicts - constitute a series of opportunities and constraints for the social and political actors, both men and institutions, that can lead to one or another outcome. We shall start from the assumption that those actors have certain choices that can increase or decrease the probability of the persistence and stability of a regime. Undoubtedly, the resulting actions or events tend to have a cumulative and reinforcing effect that increases or decreases the probability of survival of democratic politics." The level of support and legitimacy given to social, economic, and political systems within a country will dictate how stable that country is and how in danger its democracy may be in the long run - the more support for the social order and economic/political apparatus, the better.

DEMOCRACY - Giovanni Capoccia and Daniel Ziblatt, "The Historical Turn in Democratization Studies: A New Research Agenda for Europe and Beyond," Comparative Political Studies 43, no. 8-9 (Aug., 2010): 931-68. [CORE]

Democracy is not an all at once transition but a slow and drawn out development that advances in fits and stops with crises and results from conflict across a variety of social nexuses like class, religion, and ethnicity. Parties in particular, however, have been essential for the emergence of democracy in Europe. Modern studies of democracy suffer from numerous pitfalls, including an assumption that democratization functions the same across a variety of unique state contexts (and doesn't have multiple causal pathways, which are shaped, in part, by the history and learned experiences of past democratization movements); a lack of focus on microfoundations which highlight the importance of strategic interactions (and, in particular, parties, and their incentives for political success) to the rise of democracy; and finally, a resort to circular causality around the correlates of democratization and democracy itself, which ignore how complicated and drawn out a process democratization is and how important historical path dependencies and critical junctures can be. Thus, this article argues for an approach to the study of democracy focused on the establishment of institutional arrangements following episodes of institutional change and build upon them. There are three major trends that have also been overlooked in current studies of democracy: 1) the importance of non-class factors in democratization, including religion, church-state relations, and ethnicity, which all were important in shaping identity beyond thinking about class; 2) the role of ideas and ideational transfer in molding democartic institutions, which makes both the adoption of models from other national contexts more appealing, and a normative focus on 'iconic events' (like the French Revolution or Fall of the Berlin Wall) in making decisions about institutions more understandable; and 3) the autonomous role played by political parties in the development of democracy in Europe, which shows how parties aggregated a variety of competing interests and concerns to shape European democracies through their incentives to incorporate social change for their own good

DEMOCRACY - Nancy Bormeo, "On Democratic Backsliding," Journal of Democracy 27, no. 1 (2016): 5-19. [CORE]

Democratic backsliding falls into six categories, which have varied over time. Whereas open-ended coups d'etat were common before the Cold War, they are now outnumbered by promissory coups. Similarly executive coups are being replaced by executive aggrandizement, and election-day fraud is being overtaken by long-term strategic harassment and manipulation. When backsliding is dramatic and sudden, it leads to breakdown and authoritarianism, when it is slower it often leads to quasi-democratic hybrid systems. Since the cold war, old forms of backsliding have becoming increasingly uncommon since the Cold War - classic coups are increasingly rare, and even when they happen they are increasingly unsuccessful, executive coups or 'self-coups' are also less common, and election day fraud and clear malpractice has declined significantly since 1990. In contrast, backsliding has taken a more subtle and nuanced form in recently years - to begin with, promissory coups, which frame the ouster of the government as a defense of democracy, and promise to hold elections in the near future, have become 85% more common since 1990, and have proven highly effective tools at consolidating authoritarianism while never actually holding elections; executive aggandiaement is also increasingly common, whereby executives slowly chip away at checks to their power and often increase their mandate via legal means like referenda or legislative support - an approach often coupled with popular policy enactments in order to decrease public resistance; finally, election manipulation has become far more strategic, with subtle forms of election rule changes, limits to voter registration, and 'tiltings of the playing field' limiting fair competition in ways that are harder to call out and check. These forms of authoritarianism are harder to check because they are both less overt and more likely to be backed by popular support. These trends are in part a result of the promotion of democracy internationally which has made a country appearing to be a democracy increasingly essential, meanwhile the rise of executive aggrandizement is a rational response to the growing polarization of politics in many parts of the world, which necessitates more decisive executive action to avoid gridlock.

TERMS - Economic/Self-Interest Framework (Race)

Economic/Self-Interest Frameworks This framework argues that economic change and self-interest are the essential factors in driving opposition to immigration and racial polarization over recent years. Prominent arguments within this framework are: 1) Opposition to immigration is caused by concerns about competition for wages, especially among low-skill workers (See works cited in Hainmueller and Hopkins, 2014) 2) Rising levels of economic inequality lead to a growing sense of insecurity, which drives greater numbers of people to support populist right-wing parties (Inglehart and Norris, 2017) 3) Import shocks caused by globalization lead people to support right-wing populism more frequently (Calantone and Stanig, 2018). Counter-Arguments: Some states, like South Africa, have maintained racial discrimination despite it leading to massive economic costs (Marx, 1993). It may be cultural prejudice and violence against immigrants that drives them into a suboptimal economic context (Dancygier and Laitin, 2014). There seems to be little empirical support for the view that economic self-interest or industry employment are the primary predictors of support for populist / xenophobic parties (Hainmueller and Hopkins, 2014).

NATURAL RESOURCES - Le Billion, Philippe. "Angola's Political Economy of War: The Role of Oil and Diamonds, 1975-2000." African Affairs 100, no. 398 (2001): 55-80. [EXTRA]

How much did oil and diamonds contribute to Angola's history of civil war? Looking at the regional boundaries formed by the two main parties, the MLPA and UNITA, there was a clear focus in the guidance and financing of military strategies on gaining access to those resources. Thus, the expropriation of natural resources was key to motivating and sustaining the conflict, and in undermining the legitimacy of the sitting government and the economy by giving it no reason to form linkages with society or develope administration capacity or diversified industry What's more, sucha process was propped up by trade with industrialized countries, with international corporations and powers isolated from the impact of their actions and enabling the strategies of belligerents. Thus, while geopolitical factors at the end of the cold war, opposition to colonialism, the use of identity politics, and the action of individual leaders all aided Angola's conflict, natural resource wealth was essential to its initiation and maintenance. This fits a broader trend of resources fueling civil war and decreasing economic mobilization and legitimacy in government with poor society-state linkages and an easy incentive for wanting government control. Diamonds and oil have created a violent political economy in Angola which rewards politico-military leaders and punishes the populace. The sudden withdrawal of portugese governance in Angola made a reliance on oil wealth almost unavoidable. Oil makes up 80% of government revenue in Angola and yet functions as an industry almost completely isolated from the people Oil rent is almost never used on public expenditures or to expand the economy but instead only funds elites Oil was used to minimize threats to the government because it is inaccessible and offshore and this helped fuel its fighting force Meanwhile, diamonds have been key to funding opposition forces throughout Angola, keeping the conflict's hopes alive Diamond's have been purchased, and Angola's trade supported by, major international corporations. Oil has also helped the government gain access to consistent financing from abroad and oil companies keep purchasing Some corporations, like Elf, have even aided in arms deals for the government and rebels.

DEMOCRACY - Jose Cheibub, et. all, "What Makes Democracies Endure?" Journal of Democracy 7, no. 1 (1996): 39-55. [CORE]

If a country is to maintain a democracy it needs the following conditions: democracy, affluence, growth with moderate inflation, declining inequality, a favorable international climate, political learning and parliamentary institutions; This findinging is based on counting instances of survival and death of political regimes in 135 countries between 1950 and 1990. 1) Democracy - the idea that development under authoritarianism can segue into democratization lacks any evidentiary support. Indeed, levels of development are poor predictors of democratic transitions writ large. 2) Affluence - However, wealth is a very good predictor of a democracies ability to survive, with richer democracies having far better odds of surviving (with $1000 in per capita income corresponding to 8.5 years of life, compared to 100 years for $4000 in per capita income). The more economically developed a democracy, the more stable, full stop. Indeed, at a certain level of wealth, no democracy has ever failed. 3) Growth with Moderate Inflation - poor countries can maintain democracy if they have growth with moderate inflation. In contrast, economic downturns are dangerous for poor democracies, leading to a 1 in 4 chance of regime change. 4) Declining Inequality - having shrinking inequality also makes the predicted length of a regime much longer. 5) A Favorable International Climate - the international conditions surrounding a democracy predict its survival better than development - the more democracies there are in a region, and the more there are in the world, the more likely democracy is likely to survive in a new context 6) Political Learning - having a history of democracy and democratic collapse decreases the odds of a democracy surviving because the lessons of how to overthrow a democracy last longer than the lessons of how to build one. 7) Parliamentary Institutions - the higher levels of gridlock and instability within presidential systems (especially multipartite presidential systems) makes them more prone to collapse, with parliamentary democracies lasting over 50 years longer than presidential ones, even when controlling for income and development levels - the prevalence of presidentialism can likely be explained by its relationship with military rule (22 / 28 regimes emerging from military dictatorships chose presidentialism) A key conclusion from all of this is that poverty, especially low growth poverty and high inequality poverty, is a trap that makes democratization almost impossible - this can be partially checked by good institutions, but not wholly.

RACE - Dancygier, Rafaela M., and David Laitin. "Immigration into Europe: Economic Discrimination, Violence, and Public Policy." The Annual Review of Political Science 17 (2014): 43-64. [CORE]

Immigrants can be excluded from the labor market and subject to more animus if the initial reactions to them are more severe (and violent) and thus they are more likely to form into enclaves. Thus, initial reactions to immigrants shape their integration into the community and economy, which shape native responses to them. Citizenship status and demographic makeup may be key to the response of nations to immigration influxes. Native prejudice and other factors lead to the exclusion of immigrants from labor markets to create forced suboptimal returns and net costs to the economy - a trend that is especially concerning with immigration levels still rising. There may be a strong overlap between economic and political explanations for opposition to immigrants. For one, rising levels of immigration may lead to increased concerns about immigration by locals, which can lead to cultural 'statistical' stereotypes when immigrants invest less in human capital accumulation during economic downturns. Immigrants gaining economic advantages and being economically rooted can also be prevented by immigrant-native violence and immigrant-state (i.e. police) violence. This violence will encourage immigrants to self-segregate and stick within their ethnic enclaves, which will exclude them from the labor market more, and only reinforce fears and stereotypes. It is thus hard to tell whether the economically excluded donkey proceeds the culturally biased cart, or vice versa. Still, it would seem that discrimination leads immigrants to take a different approach to market integration and to self-isolate in ethnic enclaves, which subsequently shapes native reactions against them. Granting citizenship status to immigrants helps them with economic and cultural assimilation by increasing the ease of integration into the workforce. The more diverse an immigrant population is within a country, the less likely it is to form enclaves and thus the less threatening it is likely to seem to the public.

PARTIES - Stokes, Susan. "Political Clientelism." In The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics, edited by Carles Boix and Susan Stokes, 604-627. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. [EXTRA]

It is commonly argued that clientelism decreases economic development by undermining investments in public goods and creating an interest in maintaining poverty and dependence, that it undermined democracy by making votes a matter of requests and not policy priorities, and that it enables dictators by allowing a staging of election that stifle competition and real vote choices. This article investigates these claims. Clientelism is defined here as the proffering of material goods in return for election support based only on the criterion: did you/will you vote for me - Such proffering can take the form of benefits or threats (as seen in Singapore's housing threats to non-voters) This is distinguishable from pork-barrel politics or programmatic redistributive politics in that these approaches redistribute resources from non-beneficiaries to beneficiaries, but within the class of beneficiaries, the goods are supplied to the whole class with no exclusions, whereas clientelism has a quid pro quo aspect to it since the goods are conditioned on upholding a side of the bargain. We will expect such ties to be more prevalent in societies with widespread poverty and a relatively weak and ineffective state apparatus Patronage and vote buying can be thought of as subclasses of clientelism - vote buying entails a more narrow exchange of goods just for a person's vote and not their political support more broadly whereas patronage is proffering of public resources (typically, employment) by office holders for electoral support. Importantly, patronage relies on holding office and holding a public monopoly, which often means it significantly impairs judging an incumbent's electoral popularity. There is a seeming paradox in clientelism in that it creates a voluntary and yet exploitative relationship between parties with dispirit power levels and yet in spite of its exploitative nature they prove remarkably resilient - Early explanations for this focused on the norm of reciprocity, while other focused ont he fear of losing benefits as the key factor maintaining the relationship. Both of these factors (gratitude and fear) can act in tandem. Clientelism always deals with commitment issues, since the voter cannot vote for the party after receiving the goods, or a party can fail to deliver patronage after getting voters - This leads to different strategies for the two actors since parties have to balance the V (votes) they get for the distribution of R (rewards), while voters ideally want rewards and no vote commitment, but vary their strategy depending on their ideology and when the awards are provided. But this game is influenced by the fact that it is embedded in social networks, which increase information flows and in that it is iterated over multiple elections. This, thus, resembles a prisoners dilemma with both sides preferring a trade of votes for goods but both worried about the other defecting, which only leads to the desired result because it is iterated and thus allows for the grim-trigger strategy where a defection is punished by hteo ther party in all future games, meaning a one-time defection is disincentivized by a permanent loss of future goods. This leads to four hypotheses: (1) the greater the ability of parties to observe voters, the more likely vote buying is; (2) the closer the vote comes to being anonymous, the less likely vote buying is; (3) the closer parties are ideologically the more likely vote buying is; (4) the more valuable the reward to the voter, the more likely vote buying is. Clientelism reverses the assumed logic of party democracy in that it entails party's holding voters accountable not vice versa. Clientelism will also only be aimed at voters whose vote can't be counted on, in one direction or the other, without resources - Thus, resources will be focused on the persuadable and undecided. Evidence for such strategic targeting is largely positive, with examples coming both from Fujimori in Peru and the PRI in Mexico, but some examples of discontinuous trends elsewhere Clientelism is very strongly (if not universally) linked to lower levels of economic development - explanations for this focus on the poor getting more value from a handout and also being more risk averse so preferring immediate handouts - Others argue the key variable is inequality, which makes paying for clientelism more manageable and a reciprocal relationship where clientelism suppresses economic development. Clientelism is antithetical to highly personalistic politics because it relies on a huge network of decentralized brokers, and not charisma to turn out the vote Clientelism is hindered by professionalized bureaucracies, but such bureaucracies can be abused and corrupted (Pakistan) and it is aided by non-secret ballots/party ballots

TERMS - Integrated Framework (Race)

Integrated Frameworks These arguments seek to integrate aspects of the social, economic, and political in explaining rising levels of racial polarization. The most prominent examples of this are the work of Gest (2016) and Gest, Reny, and Mayer (2018), which argue that a confluence of changing demographics, economic decline, and political displacement have led to feelings of marginalization and deprivation among lower-class whites, who feel their status in society declining in comparison to its historical norms. This subsequently provides a strong impetus for supporting nativist and populist right-wing parties. Counter-Arguments: Ideas like 'nostalgic deprivation' are very hard to capture and empirically prove (Gest, Reny, Mayer). These frameworks may lack some of the parsimony of other theories, and are harder to apply across cases.

NATURAL RESOURCES - Rudra, Nita, and Nathan Jensen. "Globalization and the Politics of Natural Resources." Comparative Political Studies 44, no. 6 (June 2011): 639-61. [EXTRA]

International factors like trade, migration and foreign investment impact the way natural resources influence a county, especially with demand for global resources quickly increasing with globalization Many of the resource rich developing countries in the world have become more open to the global economy and more open to international capital flows. Globalization has also increased the mobility of labor. International market pressures affect how states govern natural resources but this affect varies by country and context - Overall, however, globalization seems to be placing demand on natural resources that often outstrip their environmental capacity and how nations handle this will impact their future Hypothesis 1: Existing research seems to imply that globalization will increase the effective management of natural resource supplies. This is because globalization increases the returns of labor in resource rich countries which is the factor they are best endowed to supply, and consequently it creates growth well tailored to these economies that can then spill over into other industries Hypothesis 2: However, this increased efficiency may just enrich elites and increase ineuqliaty. Thus, gains from globalization may be conditional on institutional quality and checks on state competence / political accountability The findings of this work suggest that hypothesis one is false - globalization doesn't increase the efficiency of the management of Natural resources or the protection of the rule of law, and increased trade increase the reneging on contracts In contrast, there is fairly strong support for Hypothesis 2, with support for the view that domestic institutions related to transparency and accountability - including rule of law, redistribution, and government investment in human capital all condition the effect of globalization on natural resources This is because: 1) Globalization increases capital flows and demand for resources so decreases incentives for adhering to the rule of law for elites because investment is so bountiful the repercussions for doing so are limited 2) Globalization also hinders democratization because it allows labor-scarce resource-rich countries to import labor which decreases accountability to much of the population in these countries, who aren't citizens, while they also increase the risk of revolt and thus lead leaders to 'hunker down' on authoritarianism 3) Increased trade revenue also increases the ability of elites to buy off political opponents and opposition groups (seen in Mexico and Kenya) Only in countries with lots of investment in human capital can globalization led resource wealth create sustained economic growth.

NATURAL RESOURCES - Haber, Stephen, and Victor Monaldo. "Do Natural Resources Fuel Authoritarianism? A Reappraisal of the Resource Curse." American Political Science Review 105, no. 1 (February 2011): 1-26. [EXTRA]

Large N panel-sets looking at the resource curse are a poor strategy for estimating its effect because it is an endogenous variable and thus there may be country-specific and time invariant omitted variables. Instead, this article focuses on time series data on a country-to-country basis. These approaches show that not only is there no evidence of a resource curse, but there may actually be a resource blessing. The focus on comparing resource rich and poor countries is ill suited to the study of natural resources which require long time horizons and clear counterfactuals. You need to account for country variant confounders Crucially, natural resources are not exogenous but impacted by things like local legal and cultural institutions - for example, weak states are more likely to search for resources to compensate for their weakness, meaning that many states with natural resources had weak institutions pre-dating the discovery of these resources. Thus, we need to account for time invariant and country specific factors to accurately assess the impact of natural resources This paper constructs time series data for 168 countries between 1800-2006 (compared to most data sets which are limites to 1970 onwards) All of this data shows almost no sign of a resource cure - the only relationships that are found are positive ones 19 of 53 states studied seemed to have been blessed by resources, while 6 transitioned to democracy and 7 already were and remained democracy Mexico's resource supply diminished after 1924 but they saw a decrease in quality of governance after that, contrary to resource curse theory, while its resource exports are now increasing in spite of it having a stable and functional democracy Countries that show gains after resource booms outnumber those showing declines by more than 2 to 1 Those countries that remained authoritarian after resource discovery like in the Middle East seemed to have had little prospect of democratization anyhow There is very little evidence of any kind of consistent relationship between resource dependence and polity scores These results hold not just on a country-to-country basis but in aggregated panel data too These results again hold when the data is truncated into low and high income countries and when it is limited to only the period after 1963.

TERMS - One-Party Rule

Magaloni and Kricheli (2010) - There are two types of one party regimes - single-party regimes (which proscribe opposition parties' participation in elections) and dominant party regimes (which permit the opposition to compete in multiparty elections that usually do not allow alternation in political power). One party regimes now make up 57% of authoritarian regimes and 33% of global regimes. One party rule has two key advantages - a bargaining function, which allows mediation with elites, and a mobilizing function, which allows for the mobilization of the populace. This roughly corresponds with Schedler's (2002)definition of electoral authoritarianism, which are regimes that "hold elections and feign at democratic legitimacy while yielding no political control." It also corresponds with Levitsky and Way's (2010) Definition of Competitive Authoritarianism, which are electoral systems functioning on a fundamentally uneven playing field - where competition is real but unfair.

NATURAL RESOURCES - Humphreys, Macartan, Jeffrey D. Sachs, and Joseph E. Stiglitz. "What is the Problem with Natural Resource Wealth." In Escaping the Resource Curse, edited by Macartan Humphreys, 1-20. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. [CORE]

Natural resource wealth can lead to high levels of corruption, with the rents created via the resources funnelled into insulating elites, sometimes via militias, other times vias decreased transparency {which can be linked to increased instability in authoritarian regimes via the literature on competitive authoritarianism} The redirection of resources from natural resource wealth to a corrupt elite can create high levels of grievance among the populous, increasing the odds of dissent. Oil wealth increases the odds of civil war by increasing the incentives of non-state actors (and other states) to try to take hold of the immense wealth produced by the state {this can be linked to Smith's argument about how resource wealth often decreases the need to make bureaucratic linkages which would allow more extensive control over populations}.

TERMS - Rule of Law

O'Donnell (2004) - A true democracy requires a democratic rule of law that ensures "political rights, civil liberties, and mechanisms of accountability which in turn affirm the political equality of all citizens and constrain potential abuses of state power." - The rule of law is thus linked with many of the pillars of democracy, and is essential for protecting those pillars. A minimal definition of the rule of law is "that whatever law exists is written down and publicly promulgated by an appropriate authority before the events meant to be regulated by it, and is fairly applied by relevant state institutions including the judiciary" - The law must be fair and must be equally applied if it is to be the rule of law and not rule by law.

RACE - Tesler, Micahel. "The Spillover of Racialization into Health Care: How President Obama Polarized Public Opinion by Racial Attitudes and Race." American Journal of Political Science 56, no. 3 (July 2012): 690-704 [EXTRA]

Obama's strong association with health care has led to racial spillover on the issue, where it has become polarized along racial lines. Racial opinions on health care were much more polarized in 2004 then decades before and much more polarized when the policies were associated with Obama then with Clinton. Racial divides on Health Care are 20% higher under Obama than Clinton. The racialization of political issues is rather straight forwards on race-targeted policies like Affirmative action - but less explicitly racial issues polarize along race when communication increasingly associates race with those policies (as seen with thinking on Welfare in the 1980s). Racial cues and the identity of thought leaders are key in shaping mass opinion about issues (as seen with Evangelical support for Bush during the Iraq War). This means Obama's race always being at the forefront of his public figure (in spite of his efforts to downplay it) lead more and more issues to be associated with race and thus polarized along those lines. This leads to the spillover of racialization. This is seen in the change in racialized support for health care under Obama.

PARTIES - Bleck, Jaimie, and Nicolas Van de Walle. "Valence Issues in African Elections." Comparative Political Studies 46, no. 11 (November 2013): 1394-1421. [EXTRA]

Past works have claimed that the lack of position taken by African parties on key policy issues is proof of an absence of substantive debate. This article argues, in contrast, that African parties do tackle substantive issues during elections, but generally voice them through valence appeals rather than staking out distinctive positions. This article theorizes this is because high levels of uncertainty coupled with the single-party heritage and elite domination of African electoral politics leads politicians and parties to focus on valence issues during their campaigns. Evidence from 950 newspaper articles leading up to 7 elections for president, congress, and governorships confirm that most parties focus on valence discourse, and that opposition candidates and civil society are more likely to raise specific policy stances than incumbents. The reliance on valence discourse shows African parties do not just focus solely on clientelist or ethnic appeals but genuinely try to discuss and debate the issues that matter to citizens, if only in valence terms. Parties shy away from positions that go beyond valence because of high levels of uncertainty. Organizational uncertainty, since many of the parties are young and lack resources or experience while facing constantly shifting alliances, and systematic uncertainty, facing the potential for regime change, changes in the democratic rules, or other shifts in the polity. The fact that such uncertainty drives a focus on promises that may easier to fulfill in valence issues is confirmed by the findings that civil society actors - who face less risk and uncertainty because they don't have to worry about alliances or elections - often adopts specific issue stances, and opposition actors - who are less risk averse in the hopes of gaining office - are also more likely to adopts specific issue stances. There are three key levels of uncertainty that lead parties to embrace valence issues in Africa: uncertainty about institutional stability/reversibility, uncertainty about constituent preferences, and uncertainty about credible commitments. When your future alliances and pacts are unclear and party switching is common and many elites want to bandwagon on dominant parties, when citizens viewpoints are uncertain, when party coordination on issues is difficult, and when it's hard to ensure you can deliver on your promises, vlance positions are much more appealing than specific issue stances This uncertainty is reinforced by histories of post-independence single-party rule and authoritarianism, which lent themselves to valence issues, especially after political actors largely coalesced around the anti-colonial agenda.

RACE - Inglehart, Ronald, and Pippa Norris. "Trump and the Populist Authoritarian Parties: The Silent Revolution in Reverse." American Political Science Association 15, no. 2 (June 2017): 443-454. [CORE]

People support populist-authoritarian movements because of a cultural backlash against the post-materialism of the late 20th century, but support for these groups have been growing so much recently because of the growing insecurity among white workers caused by stagnating wages, the decline of manufacturing, and the rise of economic inequality. This was sparked, in part, by the post-materialist diversion of politics away from economic issues. The post-materialist change was caused by the growing levels of security amongst the post-WWII generation, which lead to a shift in values and priorities (in a largely liberal direction) compared to those raised in insecurity prior to WWII who are more prone to authoritarianism. There are two key questions for the rise of populism - 1) what motivates people to support populist far-right movements? 2) why is populist far-right support so much higher today than it was several decades ago in high-income countries? This paper argues that the answer to the first question is largely driven by the cultural backlash fueled by the rise of post-materialism after WWII, while the second question is answered by the growing levels of income inequality and economic insecurity (coupled with rising immigration) that faces working class whites in Europe and the U.S., which has reversed feelings of security and thus paused the decline in materialist and authoritarian sentiments throughout the West. Thus, growing economic insecurity and demographic change is fueling cultural insecurity, which is at the root of populism. Postmaterialism was 'its own gravedigger' in the sense that the rise of post-materialism lead the left to shift its voting base to the middle class and highly educated, and largely abandon the sentiments of the working class of issues of economics and immigration. This lead to a xenophobic and authoritarian backlash by those who worried their 'values' were being left behind, with cultural issues increasingly defining politics instead of economic ones. Consequently, less and less focus was placed on issues of redistribution and less being done to address inequality on both the right and left, which made economic inequality and the deprivation it causes only more salient for the far-right and more likely to be funnelled into nativism. Grading populist support along economic variable reveals little, but grading it along 'five cultural factors' "such as anti-immigrant attitudes and authoritarian values", such values were highly predictive of support (446)

POPULISM - Kurt Weyland, "Clarifying a Contested Concept: Populism in the Study of Latin America," Comparative Politics 34, no. 1 (October 2001): 1-22. [CORE]

Populism is a contested concept within political science. There are three different forms of definitions in political science: cumulative ones (which combine the attributes of all definitions and say all attributes must be present), additive ones (which combine elements from definitions and say at least one must be present), and redefinitive ones (which work to reconceptualize the concept via a synthesis of the existing works). Early cumulative theories of populism focused on Latin American experiences and often linked populism to different stages of development and transitions to modernity - thus populism was part of a broader historical process and one associated with the rise of mass participation in politics. But this outlook was quickly discredited in the 1980s and 1990s with the populism arising in contexts that otherwise didn't fit this developmental model. This has led to increased debate over definitions of populism, with many focusing on minimalist, classical conceptions as a better alternative. This approach focuses on the central domains of populism, and not on its historical development based on class or economics. Instead, it focuses on a political definition of populism, seeing populism as a system of 'domination, not distribution.' Under this view, the key goal of populist leaders is to win and exercise power, and the economic and social policies they pursue are simply products of this goal. Thus, populism is a political strategy which is deployed by a political actor to help win and exercise power. Political power can come from individuals, informal groupings, or formal organizations, and can be based on either numbers (votes, mass support) or special weight (economic power or military power). Populism is thus a political strategy by an individual leader based on support from a mass of followers, where that support is fluid and unorganized. Thus, populists rely on otherwise unorganized masses for continued support and to bail them out when they fail. Thus, populism is often seen via the following process: "A charismatic leader wins broad, diffuse, yet intense support from such a largely unorganized mass by "representing" people who feel excluded or marginalized from national political life and by promising to rescue them from crises, threats, and enemies. The leader appeals to the people for help in his heroic effort to regenerate the nation, combat the privileged groups and their special interests, and transform the "'corrupt" established institutions." The fluid and unstable nature of populist basis make them rely on high levels of charisma. Leaders often turn to institutionalize this relationship through a party, which can then in turn limit populism via the institutionalization of the party and its ability to check its leader. If populism fails to develope institutionalized support, it will fail. If it succeeds at developing institutionalized support, it will transform into something else. Thus populism is always transitory.

TERMS - Political/Partisan Framework (Race)

Political/Partisan Frameworks This framework argues that the key factors leading to growing racial polarization and support for the rights are political institutions and coalitions. It can broadly be divided into two different strains of argumentation: Political institutions: Some scholars argue that deeply flawed political institutions help perpetuate racial inequality by undermining majority governance (Stepan and Linz, 2011). Meanwhile, other scholars argue that racial ideologies are crafted by the state in an attempt to resolve conflicts over the nation and allow for political stability (Marx, 1993). Political parties: Other scholars argue that unique aspects of the partisan makeup of a country are crucial for understanding their levels of racial division (King and Smith, 2015), (Hajnal and Horowitz, 2014). Counter-Arguments: While these theories work well for countries with long histories of racial inequality like the U.S., they are less useful for countries that are only recently seeing a rise in racial tensions and identities (like much of Western Europe). These theories struggle to explain why countries with constant institutions (like the U.S.) may have seen such a prominent rise in racial polarization over the past couple of decades.

DEMOCRACY - Boix, Carles, and Susan Stokes. "Endogenous Democratization." World Politics 55, no. 4 (July 2003): 517-49. [EXTRA]

Przeworski and Limongi's work critiqued the view that democratization is tied to wealth - instead showing that development doesn't lead to democratization but just decreases the odds of democratized states falling into authoritarianism This article argues the endogenous democratization theories (with growth leading to democracy) are valid, and critiques Przeworski and Limongi as failing to show why conditions that isolate democracy from collapse don't also promote democracy writ large This view is supported by an empirical analysis which shows that development in poor and middle income countries increases the probability of democracy for both exogenous and endogenous reasons (both encouraging a transitions and decreasing the odds of collapse afterwards) - the endogenous effects is even more pronounced when the sample size is expanded to West Europe pre-1950, a result that remains highly robust even with the introduction of many new controls The theory developed in this paper argues that rising income makes democracy increasingly appealing compared to dictatorship for both regimes starting as democracies (unconsolidated) and starting as dictatorships - This is supported by the fact that the data shows that few dictatorships become wealth and then turn to democracy, a reality Przeworski and Limongi use to support their thesis, but which is actually because development already turned many of these countries into democracies before they reached a high income threshold. Because they transition on the path to becoming high income, it makes being high income look unassociated with democratization. This hypothesis is strongly supported by Przeworski and Limongi's data. Few dictatorships remain at high income levels because development already caused most to democratize, with wealth increasing the odds of democratization. This is further confirmed by the fact that Przeworski and Limongi suffer from a sampling bias since, by starting at 1950 they exclude the democratization of most of the world's wealthy countries. When you fix this, wealth is strongly related to democracy. This effect is moderated as countries become very wealthy. All these results hold even when accounting for many potential omitted variables. The reason increased wealth may encourage democratization is because development increases the wealth of the median voter and thus increases income equality within a country, and the more equal income is, the less redistribution is a threat to the wealth of the rich. This makes the rich more willing to countenance democracy. Thus, the key variable is levels of income equality. The data support the view of inequality and rural poverty as key factors for democracy.

RACE - Ivarsflaten, Elisabeth. "What United Right-Wing Populists in Western Europe? Re-Examining Frievance Mobilization Models in Seven Successful Cases." Comparative Political Studies 41, no. 1 (January 2008): 3-23. [CORE]

Public grievances are crucial for the rise of new political movements, but the mechanisms for such grievances leading to the rise of right-wing populists are disputed. While some right-wing populist parties utilize economic grievances (a feeling of growing insecurity and anger of globalization), or grievances over political disillusionment (a feeling of lost sovereignty and bloated/corrupt governments), the single uniting focus of all successful right-wing populist parties are grievances over immigration. These findings are done looking at data from the European Social Survey and party platforms from 2002-3 across all right-wing parties in Europe. Grievances are essential for mobilizing new support for parties within a political system, and thus identifying which grievances are isolated by parties as important provides clear perspective on what unites the far right in Europe. This study looks at far rights parties in Austria, Flanders, Belgium, Switzerland, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, and Norway. Overall, economic grievances gave no mobilization advantages to the populist right, along with issues over distrust of the EU or opposition to environmental regulation. All of these issues were more successfully mobilized by major right wing parties on the left and right. Meanwhile, "no populist right party was successful without mobilizing grievances over the immigration crisis better than all major parties of the left and right" (14) Indeed, overall, immigration policy preferences are a "close to perfect predictor of not voting for the populist right" - this is because those with liberal immigration policy preferences have "close to a zero probability of voting for the populist right" (15-7) - "For voters with very restrictive immi- gration policy preferences, the probability of voting for the populist right is somewhere between 15% and 20%." (17)

RACE - Fields, Barabara Jeanne. "Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America." New Left Review 181, (1990): 95-118. [CORE]

Race is an ideology in the United States that still structures much of society - it provides the map through which the terrain of daily social life is navigated. This ideology was largely a result of the efforts by America's founders and settlers to reconcile the idea of political equality with the system of slavery, a reality itself stemming from the different treatment of European immigrants (who came voluntarily and brought with them established concepts of rights, which gave them a 'residuum of power,' and who had fixed terms of labor) and African immigrants (who came involuntarily and lacked the historical protections of Europeans, and had indefinite terms of labor). This ideology took a while to develop however, and was only enshrined once it was clearly incentivised by the economics of labor, the resistance of subjugation by European servants, their ability to resettle and establish independent economic lives in the lands of the west, and consequently established systems of law and custom that helped protect white rights in opposition to black rights (a legal edifice in part erected in response to Bacon's rebellion). All of this led to the construction of race as a result of economic incentives, creating an ideological road map for the navigation of daily life and privileges, which then became assumed as a natural part of the social world This ideology became the necessary supplement to the exercise of force over Black Americans in the United States because it forces racial subjugation into a subject of routine, constantly enforced and reinforced through daily actions that reenact the hierarchies it purports are natural and just. "Race explained why some people could rightly be denied what others took for granted: namely, liberty, supposedly a self-evident gift of nature's God. But there was nothing to explain until most people could, in fact, take liberty for granted—as the indentured servants and disfranchised freedmen of colonial America could not." (114) - Thus the creation of strong established political rights and the growth of the political community in the U.S. was the root cause of the creation of racial identity there

DEMOCRACY - Weyland, Kurt Gerhard. Making Waves: Democratic Contention in Europe and Latin America since the Revolutions of 1848. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. [EXTRA]

Regime change can trigger a snowball effect or regime change in neighboring states, as seen in events like 1848. But while such waves of democratization happened at breakneck speeds in the 1800s, they have gotten more and more gradual into the 20th century, with the third wave of democratization taking decades in spite of increasing communication capacity. But while the speed of such changes have decreased, their levels of success have substantially increased, showing an inverse relationship. This study seeks to understand why slower spreads correspond with higher success by looking at three waves of democratization in 1848, 1917-19, and the 1970s and 1980s in Latin America. It seeks to answer what causes regime change and what drives it across borders by focusing on the structures of modernization and globalization. This book explains the spread of regimes via (1) bounded rationality with people focusing too much attention on dramatic events, and (2) organizational development, like the spread of mass parties and broad interest associations The heuristics of availability (over-estimating the significance of common events) and representativeness ) which uses similarness to draw excessively firm conclusions from small samples) are key here. Seeing other governments have regime change leads to rash conclusions about your own ability to do so, as seen in 1848. But the growth of mass parties has slowed this process because it decreased individual decision making and increased access to information - Mass organizations have leaders entrenched in institutions and thus with more information and context, which decreases a reliance on heuristics and increases strategy. The result is much slower but more successful challenges to regimes. This is seen with union and party leaders careful use of the opportunity o the Bolshevik revolution in post-WWI europe, which was wielded to facilitate democratization in Austria and Germany Mass organizations also changes the stimuli needed for regime change because they allowed for collective action without reliance on sudden protests or revolutionary upheavals - Now, pressure and mass mobilization can be applied over a long period of time, which made waiting for the right moment and slowly pressing for change a much more viable strategy. But this is less exciting and thus far less likely to cause a contagious effect, especially as more and more models of change proliferated. Mass organizations also helped clarify and solidify the local constellation of politics and power, making political judgements easier. This book focuses on political regime contention, which exists within the confines of the political system and is not violent or revolutionary in nature.

NATURAL RESOURCES - Fearon, James D., and David D. Laitin. "Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War." American Political Science Review 97, no. 1 (February 2003): 75-90. [CORE]

Religion and ethnicity are poor predictors of a country's risk for civil war, as are its levels of discrimination or democracy. Instead, countries are more likely to have civil war if their contexts favor insurgency (i.e. if they are financially and bureaucratically weak, politically unstable, with rough terrain, and with large populations). The rise in civil wars is not because of the end of the Cold War but instead because of a steadily growing trend since WWII, with wars ending at a slower rate than the rate at which new ones pop up. The features of broad antagonisms are too common to dictate when civil wars break out - instead, the key is the opportunity / feasibility of staging such resistance Here, primary resource exports don't matter much beyond their effect on state administrative, military, and policing capacity, which are the key factors in affecting insurgent success (this capacity can meaningfully be proxied by per capita income, which reflects levels of development and stability within the government and thus is a very good predictor of civil war). Insurgency is defined here are technological and military conflict characterized by small lightly armed bands practicing guerilla warfare from rural bases. Land resource wealth (like cocoa or diamonds) should aid insurgency by providing high-value, low-weight goods to finance insurgency. And oil should aid it by decreasing the quality of government and its bureaucratic capacity. However, overall, the primary commodity levels in a country won't aid insurgency since most primary commodities are very hard to export without a strong government apparatus.

NATURAL RESOURCES - Collier, Paul, et. al. "Managing Resource Revenues in Developing Economies." OxCarre Research Paper 15 (2009): 1-38. [EXTRA]

Revenues from natural resources are both intrinsically temporary (because they come from a depleting stock) and highly volatives. This means increases in consumption based on resource wealth are undesirable because they may become unsustainable when that wealth decreases. This leads many to encourage saving resource revenues But natural resources can be used to fund critical investments like public goods, education, and infrastructure. Thus, natural resources are a chance to make key investments for developing countries not on high growth paths. One key is investing oil wealth in more sustainable assets to deal with problems of decreasing supplies. These assets should be focused on internal investments to increase capital, and not foreign investments. If these kinds of investments are made locally, it can create sustainable high growth and consumption levels. This assurance of future growth also means a government should encourage higher consumption now. Investments in key capital assets like infrastructure and human capital can't be imported from abroad Thus, the key focus should be on increasing domestic investments (both public and private) and thus increasing consumption via higher economic growth To deal with resource price volatility, the government can create sovereign liquidity funds (SLFs) which help level out expenditures at a consistent rate in spite of short term fluctuations. SLFs need to be quite large to succeed. The effect of resource wealth varies with the quality of governance. States can escape the cure with good institutions and increased trade, and well developed financial systems. The issue is that the level of governance needed to avoid the resource curse is beyond that in many developing states. Evidence shows savings (and thus, investment) rates in resource rich countries to be very very low.

TERMS - Rentier States

Ross (2004) - Rentier states are states which rely to a significant degree on foreign rents to supply government revenues, which leads to a reliance on rents that decreases administrative capacity, taxation, and government accountability in ways that harm economic prospects for such states. These 'rentier' effects function via three mechanisms: (1) the taxation mechanism (decreased taxation = decreased administration and accountability), (2) the spending mechanism (increased patronage spending - decreased demands for institutional change in democratization), and (3) the group formation mechanism (increased spending by the government used to limit non-vertical social relations that could be mobilized for democracy and limits the growth of civil institutions key for democratization)

TERMS - Dutch Disease

Sachs and Warner (1995) - "In the Dutch disease model, an economy has three sectors - a tradeable natural resource sector, a tradeable manufacturing sector, and a non-tradable sector. A higher resource endowment increases demand for non-tradable goods and thus decreases labor and capital for manufacturing, meaning manufacturing will shrink in resource booms." Frankel (2010) - "The Dutch Disease, resulting from a commodity boom, entails real appreciation of the currency and increased government spending, both of which expand nontraded goods and service sectors such as housing and render uncompetitive non-commodity export sectors such as manufactures. If and when world commodity prices go back down, adjustment is difficult due to the legacy of bloated government spending and debt and a shrunken manufacturing sector."

NATURAL RESOURCES - Hertog, Steffen. Princes, Brokers, and Bureaucrats: Oil and the State in Saudi Arabia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. [EXTRA]

Saudi Arabia's movement towards modernization and development has been a mix of success and failures with lingering corruption This does not fit within the common understandings of the rentier state, with Saudi Arabia proving far more complicated in reality. This is because much of the literature on the rentier state lacks discussion of a causal mechanism. But we need to turn to causal mechanisms to explain why rentier theory applies to Saudia Arabia sometimes but not others This book shifts the analysis to a meso/micro lense, looking at specific instigations, groups, and social networks. It argues that elite decision making is central to shaping the state early in state building - Oil increases the menu of options available to elites which often results in a wide diversity of outcome within one state. The highly centralized nature of Saudia Arabia's government has decreased the viability of social groups and increased social fragmentation The state has also made a great number of commitments with its resources to regime clients, which has decreased autonomy over oil spending - This huge number of clients helps to pacity society, but also proves an immovable force limiting bureaucracy and day-to-day governance This means policy reforms that stretch across many networks and institutions are very difficult, while those that affect only a few organizational players are easier - Thus, collective reform is difficult whereas small scale ones are easy Thus, oil wealth initially gives much leeway to actors and elits, but eventually becomes ossifying as society accumulates many many micro-level distributional obligations that are hard to reverse Saudi Arabia confirms the view of oil increasing the power of the state and decreasing the power of social groups Thus, the rentier effect functions, not via a decrease in taxation but via the bloating and ossifying of a bureaucracy, with rents and employment as patronage, which both decrease effective rule and increase limits on governance and poor governance This means that the key issue is segmented clientelism, which both places vertical links over horizontal ones and incumbers good administration. However, this issue can be avoided with savvy decision making by elites early on in the regimes formation process

RACE - Hainmueller, Jens, and Daniel J. Hopkins. "Public Attitudes Toward Immigration." The Annual Review of Political Science 17 (2014): 225-49. [CORE]

Self-interest/economic explanations for rising xenophobia fare far more poorly than explanations that focus on overarching and symbolic concerns about shifts in a nation's culture and society, often propelled by ethnocentrism and perceptions around assimilation. Where economics does have an effect on voters, it is through national anxiety about the state of the economy and not individual self-interest. Opposition to immigration on the far right is not well correlated with economic circumstances, and instead seems to be motivated by sociotropic concerns about the cultural impacts of immigration writ large, with a specific concern about threats to national identity. This thesis gains much more support than ones that focus on pocket-book concerns and the idea that immigrants will shift resource distribution away from people and thus cause animus out of self-interest. Peoples level of support for immigration don't seem to vary based on how much the immigrants skill levels overlap with their own - further proof of culture and values being the driving force behind these trends. Meanwhile, sociotropic assessments of the economy and cultural concerns like those surrounding language acquisition and ethnic homogeneity are very strong predictors of immigration views. Opposition to immigration can also be triggered by particularly salient events. There is mixed evidence on if personal exposure to immigrants, or changing sizes of immigrant groups within one's own community, is related to opposition to them

RACE - King, Desmond, and Rogers Smith. "'Without Regard to Race:' Critical Ideational Development in Modern American Politics." The Journal of Politics 76, no. 4 (October 2014): 958-971. [CORE]

The conservative coalition in the U.S. has succeeded over the past decades, where the progressive coalition has faltered, because of the successful 'critical ideational development' (a special kind of critical juncture) by the G.O.P. of repurposing 'color-blind' rhetoric for the maintenance of racial inequality. This outlook has allowed for a strong and cohesive coalition for Republicans (combining libertarianism with racial conservatism) that has spilled over into other policy areas, whereas Democrats have lacked a similar unifying ideology, and have been divided over the question of race-conscious policies and material equality. "Color-blind advocates proved far more effective than race-conscious ones in associating their policies with imagery that gave their positions broad appeal" (960) Ideational innovation occurs only insofar as (1) political ideas succeed in resonating with ingrained identities and interests, (2) these ideas frequently repurpose old ideas for new ends, (3) ideational reforms occurs via the the forming of advocacy coalitions via 'coordinative discourse among political leaders' and through the creation of mass support via 'communicative discourses', (4) the reformulation of ideas is aided by common cultural images associated with established identities. - all of this allows ideational innovation to slowly reshape coalitions and political landscapes. Color Blindness in the 1960s was only one of many strategies pursued by the left in the goal of creating racial equality - it was a brick in the wall of progress But republicans seized on colorblindness as a way of making racial conservatism seem alligned with the civil rights movement and a 'post-racial' world - and allowed issues like states rights to be disassociated with segregation - This focus on excluding racial quotas snowballed into a focus on excluding all racially conscious policies all together, under the guise of 'true' equality - All of this empowered a conservative movement with a deep opposition of any recognition of racial inequality or difference, supported through the language of colorblindness Meanwhile, a liberal coalition based around race consciousness and material equality between the races was harder to coalesce, as many saw attempts at explicitly equalization as only temporary solutions and not compatible with long term American ideals. Republicans were advantaged by the great simplicity of color-blind rhetoric compared to the complicated nature of race conscious solutions and their nuances. Further, color-blindness fits within a broader philosophical outlook among republicans embracing the ethos of personal responsibility. This has helped push race out of the mainstream of American political contestation

NATURAL RESOURCES - Dunning, Thad. Crude Democracy: Natural Resource Wealth and Political Regimes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. [EXTRA]

The conventional understanding is that oil undermines democracy through the rentier state model of decreased tax capacity and decreased state administration or involvement in society or through the increased levels of repression it allows This book argues that resource wealth can contribute to both authoritarianism and democracy in different contexts. Indeed, in Latin America, resource wealth is positively, not negatively, related to rates of democracy Natural resources tend to be rent producing, capital intensive, geographically and economically concentrated (lacking linkages), and a substantial source of revenue for the government. Consequently, they majorly impact public spending and revenue generation Most importantly, resource rents decrease the need to rely on taxation by creating alternative means to revenue extraction This book builds on a model of democracy as a conflict between poor democratic majorities and rich authoritarian elites. Under this theory, a key to democratization is whether elites feel the costs.risks of a coup are more or less than those of democracy. The key 2 factors affecting this decision for elites are the allocation of rents and the rates of taxation set under a democracy. A desire to control the distribution of rents is likely to increase the odds of a coup and a fear of redistributive taxation may increase the odds of a coup The key here is that resource rents can reduce fears of redistribution and the costs of taxation for elites - resources both decrease the redistributive costs of democracy today and decrease the chances of future regimes desistributing Thus, resource wealth decreases the costs of living under democracy for elites and thus decreases incentives for coups. There are therefore competing interests between resource booms increasing the value of coups and control of rents, and resource booms decreasing the costs of democracy and fears of redistribution because giving to the poor is funded by rents, not taxes This logic applies just as well to the process of democratization as to incentives for coups under democracies A key assumption behind this framework is that democracy empowers voters who are poor relative to the median income and thus democracy should be redistributive towards their interests Among rentier states, resource-dependent states will tend to have an equal (if muted) private sector, leading to less conflict over redistributionary claims and decreased concern about them and thus increased authoritarianism, while non-resource-dependent states will have more developed and thus more unique private sectors, increasing the importance of redistributive questions and thus increasing the democratic effect of natural resources Thus, inequality in the private sector (i.e. independent of rents) strengthens democratizing effects of resources because it makes resources' mediation-effect on redistribution more salient and important The statistical models of this book provide strong support for this theoretical model focused on resource dependence and inequality and this model is confirmed by case studies of Venezuela, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Botswana

TERMS - Natural Resource Curse

The frequent phenomenon of countries with abundant access to natural resources having lower levels of growth and development (Frankel, 2010)

RACE - Marx, Anthony W. "Race-Making and the Nation-State." World Politics 48, no. 2 (January 1996): 180-208. [CORE]

The U.S., South Africa, and Brazil all started with similar racial divisions and histories of slavery. In both the U.S. and South Africa, attempts to build the nation state after the civil war and Boer War led to efforts by the government to appease a divided (and armed) white population - forcing a strategy of white unification via black degradation. In contrast, Brazil lacked such a strong division and a dominant threat of force from one of its racial groups, and had no civil war to end slavery, so was able to avoid the racial construction of their nation and instead embrace and ethos of racial diversity (with remaining inequality). Ironically, however, it was the institutional aspect of discrimination that allowed for the racial solidarity needed to resist it in the U.S. and South Africa. Referring to the post conflict equilibriums - "Agreement on a racially defined "other" as a common enemy defined and encouraged white unity. Thus, the same issue of race that had exacerbated prior conflict was used to heal it, as racial domination gradually transformed a potential triadic conflict among white factions and blacks into a more manageable dyadic form of "white over black"" (182) - Thus, the reinforcement of norms of 'racial domination' and of unified racial identity were a means of "reinforcing and consolidating the nation state" for both the U.S. and South Africa The unintended effect of the racial domination in both the U.S. and South Africa was a promotion of black protest which eventually destabilized the state and forced reform, meanwhile, Brazil faced no such threat from strongly segregationist policies and racial conflict was avoided (even if other forms of inequality were rampant). Economic propositions for the end of discrimination fall short because they fail to explain how South Africa maintained aparthied for decades after it became a signficant source of pressure on their international trade relationships and businesses after 1948, the state pursued apartheid despite the tremendous cost of regulation and the manifold inefficiencies. Throughout, white workers' demands for privilege were met" (189-90) Similarly, labor movements in the U.S. were willing to sacrifice the benefits of stronger advocacy for maintained racial segregation, showing that cultural and political distinctions, not economic benefits, were at the heart of discrimination. The origins of the different racial responses in these three states came from the bargains of the states in trying to keep the nation together after emancipation / faced with a free black population. Once coalitions were formed around white-alliances at the cost of black subjugation, it created path dependencies of racial domination difficult to break with without concerted social opposition

NATURAL RESOURCES - De Soysa, Indra, and Eric Neumayer. "Resource Wealth and the Risk of Civil War Onset: Results from a New Dataset of Natural Resource Rents, 1970-1999." Conflict Management and Peace Science 24, (2007): 201-18. [CORE]

The greed hypothesis of civil war via natural resources (Collier and Hoefler) would predict that there is a curvilinear relationship between the two, with some resources encouraging rebellion but massive resource supplies allowing the state to more successfully suppress it. On the other hand, the institutional / state-capacity model of resource wealth (Fearon and Laitin) would predict a linear relationship between resource wealth and the odds of conflict onset, since resources are seen as undermining state institutions, and that effect should only worsen with more resources. This paper finds evidence of natural resource wealth increasing the odds of civil war, with the evidence pointing to energy resources leading to war via their negative impact on state capacity (and not rebel looting incentives). This result only holds if civil war is defined as 25 battle deaths a year, not the more conventional 1000+. There is also no curvilinear trend as Collier and Hoefler predict, and the effects are primarily seen with fossil fuels, not minerals. Resource access may also explain rates of criminal war within countries (especially when resources as lootable and highly valuable on the international market), and it may also be useful in explaining levels of international intervention, which can often be destabilizing (especially as it related to oil in the Cold War)

AUTHORITARIANISM - Eva Bellin, "The Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Exceptionalism in Comparative Perspective," Comparative Politics 36, no. 2 (2004): 139-57 [CORE]

The key question for this article is why the Middle East and North Africa have been so singularly resistant to democratization? There are five common explanations for this phenomenon: 1) Civil society is weak and an ineffective champion of democracy in this region; 2) the economy is state controlled which makes it ahrd for autonomous powers to counter the state; 3) poverty, illiteracy, and inequality are rampant which makes cohesion by the masses difficult and support for democracy by elites fleeting; 4) the region is geographically isolated from democracy's epicenter; 5) the culture of Islam distinguished the region and makes it inhospitable to democracy. But these approaches focus on the wrong question - the question isn't why democracy never consolidated in this region, but why it was never even initiated in the first place, which is what makes the region unique. The key factor in repressing any attempts at democracy is the power of the state, since a strong, coherent, and effective state apparatus has an almost insurmountable power - thus, what makes the ME and NA unique is not their lack of prerequisites for democracy but the robustness of the authoritarianism in the region and the capacity of the state's coercive apparatus to suppress democratic initiatives. It is important to note here that the capacity and will of a state are two different things. There are four key variables that determine how robust a state's coercive apparatus is: 1) A state's coercive apparatus is more robust when it has better fiscal health; 2) a state's coercive apparatus is more robust when it successfully maintains international support networks; 3) a state's coercive apparatus is more robust when it is less institutionalized (in the sense that institutionalization makes the military more rule-governed, predictable, and meritocratic [and often as a result more open to reform]); 4) a state's coercive apparatus is more robust when it has to face lower amounts of popular mobilization. The ME and NA rank highly in all four of these measures of state coercive capacity. First, few of these states have faced economic collapse, and export revenues have allowed for protected funds for security apparatuses. Second, the region ha unique levels of international support because the region profited massively from the competition of the Cold War via patronage from both superpowers, something that continued with the U.S. after the Cold War. Third, most militaries in the region are patrimonial and poorly institutionalized, which makes them less open to reform. Fourth, popular mobilization in the region remains weak, with few cross-class coalitions, since liberalization is historically identified with colonialism in the region and because there is an ideologically rich alternative to liberal democracy in Islamist ideology. And fifth, there exists a credible threat that motivates states in building up their security apparatus and trying to ensure their coercive strength remains uninhibited, in the form of Israel.

DEMOCRACY - Laurence Whitehead, "Three International Dimensions of Democratization," in The International Dimensions of Democratization: Europe and the Americas, ed. Laurence Whitehead, 1-24 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). [CORE]

The international context surrounding democratization is often overlooked, in spite of the fact that the vast majority of the world's democracies stem from the era of the Cold War, WWII, and decolonization There are three main headings under which international influence aid democratization: 1) Contagion - This is the most simplified and least explanatory of the headings and focuses merely on the fact that democracy tends to cluster in certain geographic areas, showing a phenomenon of contagion from one country to another that is remarkably powerful in predicting the place of states. This would seem to stem from the fact that the expectations of citizens, and choice of governments, is highly influenced by the experience of neighbors. This stems in part from the high level of success associated with the worlds leading democracies in the US, Japan, and Western Europe. 2) Control - This view democratization as something carefully administered and implemented from abroad, which the key example of the U.S. trying to stem the spread of castro-ism in central america and their efforts to ensure non-Soviet regimes in decolonized states (although their record in either case is far from perfect) - still, "almost ⅔ of the democracies of the world exist because of acts of imposition or intervention from without" - this helps explain the contagion phenomenon via international realms of influence and intervention from different states (areas under U.S. influence saw the spread of democracy since such democracy was key to U.S. legitimacy, areas under Soviet influence the spread of autocracy). Further, for European powers, democratization was seen as a means of de-escalation and self-protection during decolonization processes. 3) Consent - But what do domestic actors and groups think of such democratization - while there is international pressure for democratization, successful democratic regimes require positive support and involvement from civil and political society. While this is a more inherently domestic process, it is influenced by international considerations in four ways: 1) territorial limits, which often require negotiation and international mediation when being formed and thus promote processes of popular consent, 2) international structures of consent - where regional blocs of successful democratic states provide support and incorporation for democratizing neighbors, incentivizing their democratic growth, as seen in the EU, 3) National democratic actors - early on in democratization processes, international actors can provide legitimacy to democratic factions within polities, but eventually have to withdraw to give them the necessary autonomy to function, and 4) international demonstration effects - which is the fact that international demonstrations of democracy deeply influence popular preferences for their own government, and that there has been a massive spread in the desire for a free life associated with democracies All of this serves to show that democratization is impossible in a purely 'domestic' sense in the modern world. Any explanation not focused on early Europe and the U.S. that ignored issues of control over sovereignty misses a huge amount of explanatory power. The most famous example of this is Eastern Germany's move towards democratizations, which was deeply international. Democratization, further, is a very slow and drawn out process often relying on international support and subject to backsliding - this process includes the transition to a new form of governance itself; the institutional design of the new 'rules of the game'; the social foundations of political, civil and economic support for the new regime; the creation of norms that dictate acceptable action (and which are especially shaped by international thinking); and popular sovereignty, whereby the people are entrusted with their own institutions - thus, in almost every way, democratization is a both domestic and international phenomenon.

NATURAL RESOURCES - Luong, Pauline Jones, and Erika Weinthal. "Prelude to the Resource Curse." Comparative Political Studies 34, no. 4 (May 2001): 367-99. [EXTRA]

The strategic choices a state makes in the first stage of resource development are very consequential for the long-term impacts of such resources. This article uses the Soviet Union's collapse to test this question since it created a number of new major oil and gas producing states like Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. These states started with an almost identical baseline of resource values and wealth but pursued very different approaches to the development of those resources, with Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan maintaining full state control of their resources and Kazakhstan completely privatizing them, and the Russian Federation and Azerbaijan taking a middle course between these two. This article argues the key for understanding these divergent approaches are the domestic constraints leaders face when they first discover or gain authority over resources. Particularly, the (1) availability of alternative sources of export revenue, and (2) levels of political contestation, determine such approach by determining both the level of resource wealth leaders have in the status quo and the costs they will continue to incur to appease and defect opponents State responses to resources and initial development them can be measured along two lines - the method of ownership (public or private) and the degree/form of international participation The more options a state has for acquiring revenue beyond natural resources, the more flexibility it will have Political and economic incentives often run counter to each other and so a choice that seems economically irrational can be politically rational The key driver for a state's decision making on resources is the self-interest of elites who want to stay in power and who are sovereignty maximizers (with privatization = a decrease in sovereign control over resources) Elites are threatened when the amount of resources they control (R) decreases in proportion to the contestation that they face (C), since this constraints elites and forces them to generate more resources to repress/defeat opponents R will be determined by if a state can develop an export commodity without foreign capital, whether there is an export market for that commodity, and if export of the commodity can provide a large share of revenue in the status quo C will determine how many resources the government needs to deploy to stay in power, and is affected by if there are cleavage structures in society that can also dispense patronage, if there are political parties of movements in support of that structure, and if those parties/movements have made demands for more resources When C is large and R is small early in a state's formation, leaders are limited by the need to immediately increase R - Thus, this creates a 2x2 matrix, with high-R, low-C states having lots of flexibility and thus the capacity to nationalize and slowly develope resources, while low-R, high-C states have to generate revenues immediately to maintain control and so they opt to privatize their energy sector with international control, with mixed of R and C leading to mixed strategies of nationalized resources with some international involvement (low-R, low-C) or to privatize extensively but limit international involvement (high-R, high-C). These models fit the post-Soviet experience, with Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan being examples of high-R, low-C equilibriums, Azerbaijan being a low-C and Low-R equilibrium, Russia being a high-R and high-C equilibrium, and Kazakhstan being a high-C and low-R equilibrium This thesis also seems to hold for 1920s Iran and 1950s Libya as high-C, low-R examples, with both privatizing and with Nigeria as a low-C low R equilibrium in the 1970s, and Venezuela as a high-R and low-C one. All of this points to a bit of a paradox, which is that those states that are most constrained in the short run are forced to opt for the least optimal strategy in the short run (privatization) which may actually be the best strategy in the long run because it avoids the resource curse. Relying on resources as an easy salve to contestation thus may doom state institutions in the long run (many parallels to the smith hypothesis on Indonesia and Iran).

NATURAL RESOURCES - Barma, Naazneen. Rents to Riches? The Political Economy of Natural Resource Led Development. Washington: World Bank, 2011. [EXTRA]

The resource curse - on not just growth but good governance, social capital, and conflict avoidance - is a robust reality, with elites often funneling resource rents into private consumption instead of public goods This volume focuses on highlighting the political economy and incentives behind resource wealth in order to decrease its effects By improving transparency and efficiency in the process of extraction, taxation, and investment, states can significantly curtail the resource curse The key factor of the resource curse is institutional development and the ability to form effective and credible and transparent public institutions This process is captured by the 'value chain' of natural resource management, which goes from (1) sector organization and awarding contracts, through (2) regulation and monitoring operation, (3) collecting taxes and royalties, (4) revenue distribution and public investment management, and (5) implementing sustainable development policies. This chain provides a key framework for evaluating where issues can arise in resource management and how resources can be successfully managed. The link between poor governance and resources riches can run both ways, with poor governments relying more on such resources and such resources making poor governments The two key issues that arise from the value chain focus are (1) how effectively a government generates and captures rents from extractive institutions, and (2) how the government spends the resource wealth and is it invested in sustainable economic growth. The two key institutional factors shaping these outcomes are: (1) the credibility of intertemporal commitments within the government and (2) levels of political inclusiveness in the state-society pact and how much non-elite interests enter government decision making These two factors create a 2x2 matrix of government types - Highly inclusive and credible governments are 'programmatic pluralist' systems and are most likely to channel resources into public gains, government with low inclusivity and credibility have 'patrimonial rule' and are most likely to use resource rents exclusively for private gains, inclusive but low credibility governments have 'clientelist pluralism' with extensive clientelism and particularist goods and little horizontal accountability, and highly accountable but lowly inclusive governments have 'hegemonic government' with private elite goods balanced with some particularist public goods. This Matrix provides an analytical basis for understanding how best to intervene in reforming different governments Some interventions aim at increasing time horizons via more rule-based systems of extraction, some on mobilizing stakeholders to cooperate on resource management and increase public inclusiveness Resource rich states are particularly vulnerable to short time horizons and a focus on private wealth over public goods because of the unique features of resource wealth which are: (1) finite in nature, (2) yield super normal profits that the state has some sovereign right to, (3) are prone to volatile and exogenous price changes and (4) are subject to long time frames and unique ownership structures in developing rent systems Oil is unique from minerals because it is easier ot tax, often geographically isolated (off-shore), and easier to measure the size of and long term viability of It is important to conceptually distinguish resource endowments from resource dependence, as resource dependence is not just a factor of endowments but also the viability of other industries Different approach to the extraction of, and investment of, resource rents lead to increased development, spirals of decreasing development, or suboptimal equilibriums with flat development The paradoxes of resource management are that rule of law is necessary for good resource extraction and yet many government undermine it for continued leverage, good taxation administration is necessary for flexible budgets but resource wealth forgoes the incentive for it, and resource wealth provides the resources for vast public investment but such limits are instead often earmarked for exploiting The two key factors outlined here are 'extraction' and 'investment' The key interaction of resource rich states is the state-society-development triangle, with the state-developer relationship key for extraction, and the state-society one key for investment

PARTIES - Kruezer, Marcus, and Vello Pettai. "Patterns of Political Instability: Affiliation Patterns of Politicians and Voters in Post-Communist Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania." Studies in Comparative International Development 38, no. 2 (2003): 76-98. [EXTRA]

The transformation of post-community party systems has been driven in party by changing organizational loyalties of politicians who pursue a wide range of organizational strategies such as party fusions, fissions, start-ups, and inter party switching. When these strategies are examined in combination with voter's electoral preferences, the seeming instability of the post-communist party system reveals distinct patterns of political change. There have historically been two schools of thought around the causes of party institutionalization - bottom-up views, focused on socioeconomic cleavages and top-down views focused on historical contingencies and strategic action. This work works to bring these two school of thought together. The idea that Eastern Europe lacks a stable party system ignored that even volatile systems can follow clear patterns of change. Party systems are built off of how politicians shift their organizational loyalties and how voters align with parties. There are five forms of possible affiliation available to politicians in developing their careers: (1) staying put - remaining affiliated with one's current party, (2) party switching - when politicians reaffiliate to another existing party, ith both exit and entry parties existing prior to switching, (3) fusion - when a majority of members from two or more parties merge to form a totally new party which integrates the other party organizations, adopts a new name, and agrees on a single party leader, (4) fission - when a minority group of politicians breaks away from an established party to form a new party or when an individual breaks away to run as an independent, (5) starting up - when previously unaffiliated individuals create a brand new party with no mobility between exit and entry parties, usually emerging from social movements or interest groups. Election affiliation strategies for voters vary based on sever key choices: (1) they can re-vote for the same party as last time, (2) they can switch to another already existing party, (3)(4) and (5), they can opt for a fusion, fission, or start-up party, (6) they can spoil their ballot, (7) they abstain. The first option = durable alignment, the second option = realignment, the third-fifth options = dealignment. The interaction between politician's affiliation shifts and voter's electoral shifts leads to a matrix with 10 options, the five for different politician's affiliations, and 2 for voters who can have a preference change, or have no preference change. These 10 categories can be grouped into 3 general patterns - alignment, realignment, and dealignment Alignment patterns portend the consolidation of party systems with little change in voter or politician preferences - realignment patters apply to consolidated party systems undergoing restructuring or new proto-party systems moving toward consolidation, and can happen with parties staying put but voters changing preferences or with both switching or with voters staying put but politicians switching - Finally, dealignment patterns represent the deconsolidation of established party systems or continued lack of consolidation of transitional party systems and is caused by fusion, fission (regardless of voter preferences) or startups with voter preference changes. An example of alignment is frozen European parties (politicians stay put and voters have no preference change), and example of realignment is the shift of the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s (parties stay-put, voters have preference changes), an example of dealignment is Burlosconi in Italy or Hitler in Germany (party start-up and voter preference change). This typology much better captures the nature of party change in post-communist Europe Only 57% of politicians 'stayput' between any given election in post-communist states, showing a lack of stability in party brands, but movement between options isn't random, with realignment being consistently preferred and prioritized over dealignment This combination of top-down party system transformation and bottom-up party system change shows regularities in political instability just as much as in stability.

TERMS - Democracy

The two most common definitions are the procedural ones - the first outlined by Shumpeter (1947) as "that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people's vote." and the second outlined by Dahl (1971) including the two dimensions of 1) contestation (how government enables opposition, public contestation, and political competition), 2) inclusiveness (how much the population can participate in controlling and contesting the government). However, the definitional literature on this term is obviously very vast and half the works from this week are just about defining it.

RACE - Joppke, Christian. "Transformation of Immigrant Integration: Civic Integration and Antidiscrimination in the Netherlands, France, and Germany." World Politics 59, no. 2 (January 2007): 243-73. [EXTRA]

The typical classification of European immigration systems as multicultural (The Netherlands), Assimilationist (France), or segregationist (Germany) is a flawed one. Instead, immigration policy throughout Europe has been evolving in response to a new elite-support for immigration and Europeanization. There has been a convergence on immigration policies across Holland, France, and Germany across issues of civic integration and antidiscrimination policies. Since the 1990s, there has been an ideational embrace of new immigrants in Europe, combined with an institutional shift to immigration being managed by Europe instead of the nation-state. This means there is a European level embrace of migration contrasting with a state-level distaste over it This embrace of immigration is in part driven by the demographic decline facing Europe Europeanization is aiding this embrace of immigration both through new legal framework for the settlement of immigrants and through a process of cultural standardization' across the continent This new dynamic on immigration is captured via two policies - civic integration and antidiscrimination, which, while complementary in some regards, also function under contesting logics. Civic integration treats migrants as individuals responsible for their own assimilation, whereas anti-discrimination depicts them as members of socially victimized groups. Civic integration kicks off the immigratino process and discards group identity and anti-discrimination closes off the immigration process and embraces group identity This reflects a two-way logic of integration whereby migrants must first change and then their receiving societies must change in turn. This fits within a view of liberalism with a heavy focus on duties instead of rights The Netherlands has focused heavily on civic integration with the use of 'integration tests' - this focus on integration has then been used as a guise to limiting immigration all together France has followed Holland's lead in increasingly promoting integration efforts for migrants and the requirement of proof of such integration for immigrants to get visas, much like in Holland. Germany similarly adopted a slightly less stringent version of the dutch focus on forced integration Anti-discrimination policy, in turn, aims at those who are 'no longer immigrants' but who are still held back by discrimination Anti-discrimination policy was spearheaded by the European Race Directive, which is based on U.S. civil rights law The Dutch embraced these policies fairly easily, but saw strong resistance to affirmative action efforts France embraced anti-discrimination laws while integrating them into a state that explicitly refuses to recognize race Germany lacks any cultural drive or demand for anti-discimrination and there was widespread nad successful resistance to anti-discrimination laws Efforts at integrating and repressing migrants aren't racist or nationalist, but fit within the logic of liberalism, with illiberal means being used to assure the liberal goals of social integration, progress, and decreasing the costs of welfare This is realized in the European policy of 'social-inclusion,' which forces migrants to integrate into society, with no focus on equality between groups but only on decreasing the harms to the states - Antidiscrimination laws only coexist with forced integration There is thus a paradox between the oppressive 'negative liberty' of forced integration and equality of the 'positive liberty' of anti-discrimination laws

RACE - Gest, Justin. The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2016. [CORE]

The white working class in both the U.S. and U.K. are suffering from a sense of marginalization and deprivation, caused by the gap between their expectations of social and political status, and the reality of that status during an era of globalization, demographic shifts, and political realignment. This is reflected in the rise of post-traumatic cities throughout the U.S. and the U.K., where the sense of deprivation and status loss for the working class white population is especially severe. There are dominant narratives of white working class resentment that focus on economics (the decline of manufacturing and effects of globalization) on morality (whites clinging to the unfair advantages of their race, especially the white working class), or on demographics (the decline in racial homogeneity in both Europe and the U.S. since WWII). The establishment of white privilege throughout history has made such privileges 'the natural order of things' and makes disturbances to it feel like an unfair denial. This feeling of being demoted from the center of a country's economy, society, and politics, leads to resentment expressed as populism. "white working class people are consumed by their loss of social and political status in social hierarchies, particularly in relation to immigrant and minority reference groups. Their politics are motivated and pervaded by a nostalgia that reveres, and seeks to reinstate, a bygone era." (16)

NATURAL RESOURCES - Humphreys, Macartan. "Natural Resources, Conflict, and Conflict Resolution." Journal of Conflict Resolution 49, no. 4 (August, 2005): 508-537. [CORE]

There are 6 possible mechanisms to explain the link between primary commodity exports and civil war: (1) greedy rebels (natural resources increase the value of rebellion and the belief in its potential viability), (2) greedy outsiders (natural resources create an incentive for third parties to foster conflict), (3) grievance (natural resources create increased inequality, volatility, migration, and corruption, all of which increase citizens sense of grievance and odds of rebelling), (4) feasibility (natural resources can help fund rebellions when they pop up), (5) weak states (natural resources decrease the administrative and bureaucratic capacity needed by states to control their citizens), and (6) sparse networks (natural resources lead to the underdevelopment of local industries and modernization, which decreases social and state linkages and thus makes managing conflict more difficult). Illegal goods can help fuel civil war by providing rebels with independent sources of revenue within the state that are difficult to expropriate or prevent Neighbors can fuel civil war when it redirects resources and exports through their state and thus they benefit significantly from the conflict (as seen in the case of Senegal). There is strong evidence for the sparse networks theory found in the data, whereby primary commodity exports stunt the growth of other industries and thus decrease doscietal linkages and accountability. There is also evidence that it is current production of oil and not future reserves that impact rates of civil war. This lends support to arguments focused on weak state structures or grievances (although it is hard to distinguish between the two). Weak states seem to be deeply affected by oil wealth in a way strong states aren't Primary commodity exports are risky, even beyond endowments in things like oil and diamonds - agricultural exports matter too to the extent they create sparse linkages in the economy.

DEMOCRACY - Linz, Juan, and Alfred C. Stepan. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe. London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. [EXTRA]

There are five intersecting arenas that affect if a state becomes consolidated or not - a lively civil society, a relatively autonomous political society, a rule of law, a usable state, and an economic society One especially important variable for democratic transitions and consolidation is the relationship between state, nation, and democratization - known as stateness - which highlights the essential aspect of sovereignty and citizenship for a state to become democratic. The interaction between the logic of stat-building and nation-building is key here A democratic transition is defined here as when agreement is reached about the political procedures to produce an elected government, when a government comes to power that is a direct result of a free and popular vote, when that government de facto has the authority to generate new policies, and when the executive, legislature, and judiciary don't have to share power with other bodies de jure Meanwhile democratic consolidation includes behavioral, attitudinal, and constitutional dimensions which makes democracy the 'only game in town' This happens behaviorally when no group is significantly aimed at overthrowing democracy anymore, attitudinally when a strong majority sees democracy as the most appropriate approach to governance, and constitutionally when conflict is regularly and habitually resolves via established laws, procedures, and institutions The five arenas of consolidation then come into play, with one important base line condition which is that democracy is a form of state government and thus a democracy can't be consolidated if it isn't first a state. Thus, there must be both a state and a coherent body of citizens who identify with that state and don't want to leave it or create a new one (a nation). The five other conditions for consolidation are: (1) a civil society that is lively and where self-organized groups, movements, and individuals articulate values, from associations, and advance interests independent of the state. There social movements and civil associations serve to counterbalance the state, but civil society also includes citizens in their individual capacity; (2) a political society, which entails the arena where the polity arranges itself for the legitimate right to public office, which includes parties, elections, political leadership and legislatures. This should exist as distinct but complementary to civil society; (3) the rule of law, which must be respected and upheld by all actors, the government, and the state, and which must embody the spirit of constitutionalism with its self-binding procedures of governance and strong legal structure, (4) an effective state bureaucracy with the capacity to command, regulate, and extract in order to uphold its monopoly on force and use of taxation, (5) economic society, which requires a lack of either a completely command economy or pure market economy, but instead an effective set of institutions and norms which mediate between the state and the market so that property and market autonomy exist but without going completely unregulated since effective markets require state regulation and laws, since even the best markets fail at times and need correcting, and since all government need to provide public goods to adjust for inequality to survive These five aspects show democracy as an interacting system of counterbalances and mutual support In many states, issues over democracy are intractable from conflict over what should actually constitute the polity Stateness problems - arising over competing conceptions of borders and citizenship - can crucially undermine democratization States are essential for providing the capacities (monopolies on uses of force, taxation, the rule of law) essential to democracy A key issue is that most states start off with low levels of nation-state congruity and building nations requires a fundamentally different focus than building democracies. Whether a single nation is created or not, questions of stateness and legitimacy and the bounds of citizenship need to be resolved for democracy to be viable. All of this shows (1) the more pluralistic a society, the harder democratization is, (2) multicultural societies need considerable political and democratic norms and parties and institutions, (3) the processes of dealing with stateness are often incompatible with democratization, since it requires centralization and suppression of difference and some level of exclusion Multi-national democracy is only possible with high levels of inclusion and equality When other highly militant or seperatist nations exist within a state, democracy is highly unlikely

DEMOCRACY - Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). [CORE]

There are four main paths of political development - 1) from non-democracy to democracy via gradual consolidation and development (seen in the UK, with the process of industrialization and the growth of the middle class), 2) from non-democracy to democracy with intermittent collapses and attempts at re-establishing democracy (as seen with Argentina, where threatened elites have constantly undermined efforts at reform to aid the working class), 3) stable non-democracy caused by success as creating a relatively egalitarian and prosperous society (as seen in Singapore, where the state used industrialization to gain dominating control over thestate), and 4) stable non-democracy caused by the maintenance of extreme inequality and exploitation and the use of violence to suppress movements towards equality (as seen in apartheid South Africa, where exploitative economies were maintained via mass systems of oppression that became self-sustaining). The argument of this work starts from a conception of a two-tiered society - with the rich on one end, opposed to redistribution, and the poor on the other, in favor of redistribution, making it an inherently conflictual relationship. Democracy will arise depending on the interaction of these social groups in their attempts to gain influence and power. This relationship can then be imposed onto a view of democracy as a regime that aims to benefit the majority of the populace, and non-democracy as a regime that aims to benefit the elites. This conflict between elites and the people is over two forms of power - de-facto power (natural power derived from brute force or sheer advantages) and de-jure power (power via the law and politics). Institutions are the means by which groups protect their current power for the future. The masses usually have de-facto power because of their mere size, but are unable to utilize it because of collective action problems and institutions that stratify the power of the elites. But when the masses are able to mobilize around their defacto power, elites will seek to make concessions around institutions and de jure power (such as expanded franchise) in order to placate them and their redistributive demands. Thus, democracy arises when elites make concessions around political power to avoid revolutionary threats from the people, and when those concessions are then enshrined in institutions. There is strong evidence that democratization has historically occurred when there are high levels of social conflict and the threat of revolution. Democracy will sustain itself when elites don't fear about sudden losses of de facto power and feel the need to solidify their power through violent acts (like coups) - such fear is most likely with sudden political shifts that seem threatening, such as the government moving too far left too quickly. There are, overall, seven different factors that help make democracy both more likely and more sustainable once it arises : 1) civil society - which organizes the masses and focuses their power; 2) shocks and crises - which can mobilize the masses but also enable elites for a coup; 3) sources of income and compositions of wealth - with landed elites having more stable income and thus being less susceptible to challenges and more resistant to democratization; 4) political institutions - with better checks on majoritarianism making democracy more palatable for elites; 5) inter-group identity - higher inequality increases the odds of mass mobilization but also increases the stakes of redistribution for elites, meaning it encourages rapid but fleeting democratization, with medium levels of inequality being ideal for sustained democratization; 6) the middle class - which can help fuel democratization by giving more power to the masses and lessen its threat to elites by giving the masses less interest in redistribution; 7) globalization - which makes capital flight easier and thus redistribution less threatening for elites (as long as wealth isn't based on large natural endowments or land within the country) - further, globalization makes repression more costly because it undermines trade

DEMOCRACY - Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 1967). [CORE]

There are three routes to modernity: 1) a bourgeois revolution - this was the route taken by England, France, and the U.K. and combines capitalism with parliamentary democracy after a series of revolutions; 2) a conservative revolution - this was the route taken by Germany and Japan, and is also capitalist but with a strong revolutionary surge that passes through reactionary political forms culminating in fascism; 3) a peasant revolution - this is the route taken by communist nations and which involves revolutions originating among the peasants. "These stages are successive and historical and thus the steps taken by one country change the dimensions of the problem for the next country that takes the same or similar steps" Democracy aims (imperfectly) at doing three things: 1) checking arbitrary rulers, 2) replacing arbitrary rulers with just and rational ones, 3) allowing the population to participate in the making of rules Certain pre-industrial contexts are more favorable to democratization than others - in particular, Western Feudalism was far more favorable to democracy - in contrast, royal absolutism systems that have managed to survive for long periods of time are ill suited for modernization and democratization Key conditions for a democracy include an aristocracy with some balance between itself and the crown and the capacity for autonomous action, as well as the rise of a bourgeois revolution - when countries don't have an emergent bourgeois, it makes democracy (as in Russia and Germany) very difficult, since the articroacy becomes too powerful and can suppress democratization. Indeed, a key predictor of democratization is how the aristocracy of a country responded to the need for more taxes - if they did so by pursuing commercial gains (as in England, or partially in France) this was highly favorable to democracy, if they did so by relying more on serfdom on traditional extractive institutions (as in Eastern Europe) this was highly unfavorable to democracy and much more favorable for mass peasant revolts and insuent communism - similarly, where the landed upper class held down the labor force on the land in a stymied industrialization, it opened the door for fascism. Thus, there were three key factors that encouraged democratization: 1) the relationships of the landed upper classes to the monarchy, 2) their response to the requirements of production for the market, 2) the relationship between the landed upper class and town dwellers (i.e. the bourgeoisie), who can band together to overthrow autocratic rule to protect elite political interests and bourgeoisie economic and cultural ones - this combines for the following four step road map for democratization: 1) The development of a balance to avoid too strong a crown or too independent a landed aristocracy; 2) A turn toward an appropriate form of commercial agriculture, either on the part of the aristocracy or the peasantry; 3) The weakening of the landed aristocracy; 4) The prevention of an aristocratic-bourgeois coalition against the peasants and workers; 5) A revolutionary break from the past. These developments depended heavily on the 'taming of the agrarian sector' - "indeed, the English experience tempts one to say that getting rid of agriculture as a major social activity is one prerequisite for successful democracy. The political hegemony of the landed upper class had to be broken or transformed." -- Peasants had to become farmers producing for markets and the landed upper class either had to be subsumed within the commercial class or discarded by revolution

DEMOCRACY - Ben Ansell and David Samuels, Inequality and Democratization: An Elite Competition Approach (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). [CORE]

There is a common perception that democratization always favors redistribution because it empowers the poor who represent the median voter, who will always want to take over property for their own good (this is known as redistributivist theories) - but this is misbased, and democratization is actually favorable to property rights because it promotes a stable rule of law and accountability. In this sense, the rise of democracy is about fear of the autocratic state, and not fear of the poor. Historically, unequal countries have tended to democratize earlier than equal ones. This book argues this is because democratization happens primarily when politically enfranchised, but rising economic groups, seek to rein in the power of autocratic elites with the ability to expropriate their income and assets. Thus, democracy arises out of a clash between existing elites (and their political power, but declining economic power) and a rising properitied middle class (and their political exclusion, but growing economic influence). Thus, property and democracy are very compatible, and taxation is what motivates representation. An important implication of this theory is that high levels of land inequality will stimy democracy because they will limit the ability of a middle class to rise up, while high levels of income inequality will usually result from the growth of the middle class, and will actually encourage the emergence of democracy because this groups is excluded from governance. Under this theory, the median voter is typically politically inert because they are far poorer than the middle class and lack the influence to effectuate democratization, unlike the rich middle class. Indeed, there is strong evidence that pre-industrial societies have very low levels of inequality because of the vast size of the peasantry, while industrializing societies more prone to democratization have much higher income inequality because of the success of the middle class. Thus, growing income inequality, when it follows economic development, facilitates regime change. An example of this phenomenon is China and the UK in the 1950s - China had low inequality because of its concentrated poverty, while the UK had high inequality because of industrialization, but it was the UK that democratized and China that sank into autocracy. In the 1800s, late democratizers (or non-democratizers) like Germany, Russia, Peru, Chile, and Java all had low levels of inequality which lends support to this thesis.

PRES & PAR - Svolik, Milan. "Authoritarian Reversals and Democratic Consolidation." American Political Science Review 102, no. 2 (May 2008): 153-68. [CORE]

There is a difference between democratic regimes that survive because they are consolidated, and ones that survive because of favorable circumstances, even though they are unconsolidated. By distinguishing between these two types of regimes, you can gain better insight into what helps a regime consolidate versus what simply helps it survive even when unconsolidated. Svolik finds that the stability of unconsolidated regimes is dependent only on economic recessions. In contrast, the odds that a regime consolidates is based on its economic development, whether it is presidential or parliamentary, and whether it has a military authoritarian past. Those regimes with lower levels of development, a presidential system, and/or a military authoritarian past are less likely to consolidate than others. Presidentialism in particular has a negative effect on consolidation because it is more susceptible to the factors that lead to democratic reversals (mainly, economic recessions).

RACE - Leiken, Robert S. "Europe's Angry Muslims." Foreign Affairs 4, no. 84 (August 2005): 120-35. [EXTRA]

There is a growing issue of homegrown islamic radicalism throughout Europe - Mulsim immigration has been increasing in Europe since the end of World War II and such migrants now make up between 15% and 20% of the population. What's more, this population is expected to double by 2025 in Europe - These migrants have been largely alienated and isolated in a Europe unaccustomed to immigration and largely hostile ot ethnic change - the result is ethnic enclaves with strong cultural identities, limited economic prospects and growing resentment. Thus, much of Europe's migrant community embraces a radical rejection of the West as they face citizenship in name only, coupled with social, economic, and political isolation. These enclaves are isolated and angry and out of the reach of European states and populations. Similarly, this discrimination against migrants is self-reinforcing since it leads to growing resentment against immigration by white Europeans and ancreased nationalist and xenophobic backlash. This is happening even in countries which pride themselves on acceptance, like the Netherlands Many islamist militant in Europe have thus been born and raised in these states There are two types of jihadists in Western Europe, outsiders (incoming migrants with existing radicalism) and insiders (alienated citizens born and raised in Europe but rejected by their states) These jihadists have found increased motivation for attacks following the U.S. invasion of Iraq - Europe has reponded with an increased focus on policing as opposed to the creation of a war on terrorism like in the U.S., although support for increased surveillance is growing Increased islamic extremism is testing post-WWII cross border cooperation and religious/ethnic toleration throughout Europe, with a declining support for multiculturalism Immigration is thus stressing the values of the liberal state and cultural norms throughout Europe and new programs of assimilation are needed to address this.

NATURAL RESOURCES - Jensen, Nathan, and Leonard Wantchekon. "Resource Wealth and Political Regimes in Africa." Comparative Political Studies 37, no. 7 (September 2004): 816-41. [EXTRA]

There is a robust and negative relationship between the presence of significant natural resources and the level of democracy in Africa. This is because resources partially determine not only democratic transitions but also levels of democratic consolidations. The only context where resource rich countries have become democratic is where they have introduced strong mechanisms of vertical and horizontal accountability within the state. Resource rich countries examined here include Algeria, Nigeria, Libya, Gabon, Cameroon, and Zaire. Meanwhile, resource poor countries that have been democratized include Madagascar, Benin, Mali, and Senegal. Executive discretion over resource distribution is a key factor here, with high discretion both causing more democratic breakdown and more endurance by authoritarian regimes. The four key empirical findings of this work are that natural resource rich states are (1) more likely to be authoritarian, (2) have higher levels of government spending, (3) have worse governance, (4) have been more likely to suffer a breakdown of democracy after the Cold War. The key mechanism behind this link focuses on the fact that natural resources increase competition for control of the state's democratic systems, where natural resource access leads distribution of those resources to drive political systems. Thus, the focus is not on ideology. Authoritarian systems with resource access can use these resources to shore up support and consolidate power. This exact process of increasing resource revenues leading to a more centralized and repressive government is seen in Nigeria from 1960-1980 The use of resource revenues to fund consolidations of power and increase dependence on rents is seen everywhere from Guinea to the Congo to Botswana to Zambia Resource rents make demcoratic consolidation more difficult in governments with low levels of accountability because they allow ruling coalitions to allocate rents as a means of ensuring political support. A process of resource imbalance that will create an undefeatable incumbency advantage and encourage one-party dominance (this was seen in Botswana) This leaves instability as the only viable means of political competition for opposition parties. Thus, the more incumbents control resource distribution, the more likely the resource curse is to set in. When opposition resistance is limited to violence, it also increases the odds of the government pre-empting this with an autocratic consolidation of power Thus, resources: (1) allow authoritarian government and ruling coalitions to consolidate public support and their hold on power, making consolidation difficult, (2) create an incumbency adangage which encourages violence and pre-emptive suppression by the competitors in the political environments The data shows natural resources lead to increased authoritarianism, increased government consumption, decreases in measure of quality of governance - especially as it relates to accountability, the rule of law and corruption, and increased likelihood of democratic backsliding after a transition in the 3rd wave of democracy

NATURAL RESOURCES - Ross, Michael L. "What Have We Learned About the Resource Curse?" Annual Review of Political Science 18, (2015): 239-59. [EXTRA]

There is robust evidence that oil wealth harms regimes in three ways: (1) it increases the durability of authoritarian regimes, (2) it increases certain forms of corruption, and (3) it helps trigger violent conflict in low/middle income countries. These effects are generally agreed to be conditional and limited in scope, although these exact limits are contested An inherent challenge in studies of the resource curse are issues of transparency, limits to measurement, and limits to data beyond bare bones figures Resources like agriculture and minerals are less and less associated with the resource curse, while oil is increasingly so Arguments about endogeneity like those of Haber and Monaldo overlook that there is little evidence that poor governance or authoritarianism leads to more oil discovery, with many studies showing just the opposite in fact, with bad political conditions leading to less oil exploration and extraction, no more. There is robust evidence that the greater a country's oil income is the less likely it is to transition to democracy - no country with more oil/gas income than Mexico has ever democratized since 1960. Overall, this seems to be because oil wealth strengthens the ability of the government to resist transitions to democracy The effect of oil wealth on democracies is mixed and unclear but they seem to aid incumbents at a minimum. The effect of oil wealth on democracy seems to have only kicked in after the 1970s, when many oil rich states nationalized their industries and increased control of the rents (another critique of the Haber and Monaldo focus on 1800) This view is supported by Anderson and Ross, who show that the Haber and Monaldo effect is cancelled out if the focus is 1980 onwards Evidence for the rentier state hypothesis (which is well defined in this article) is mixed within the literature. Another critique of Haber and Monaldo is that high levels of resource wealth may have different effects than changes in levels of resource wealth, in a parallel to differences between short term volatility effects and long-terms levels effects. There is also strong evidence that oil wealth decreases the institutional quality of states. This is partly because it limits administrative development and taxation and shortens government planning / time-horizons, limiting long term projects - Either way there seems to be a robust connection between oil wealth and corruption levels. Natural resources are also conditionally linked to civil war and this relationship goes beyond just oil to mineral and even agricultural resources like cocoa and timber too. This relationship also appears to be U shaped, with enough resources allowing a government to subvert civil war The location of resources matters for their impact on civil war. The more accessible things are (i.e. not offshore or isolated) the higher the odds of conflict. The civil war link is also stronger in regions with strong ethnic identities and enclaves The state-capacity link to civil war is undermined by the fact that only on-shore oil wealth is associated with civil war.

POPULISM - Cas Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). [CORE]

There is a long lasting issue within the literature in populism on reconciling the individual level support for populism and the national trends it represents (the ecological fallacy). A clearer conception of the supply and demand side aspects of populism is needed. Macro-level explanations have focused on modernization (although isolating when globalism began, what it entails, how it can explain regional variation in populism, and why only some of the 'losers' of modernization vote for populists is very difficult), crises (which is again a difficult concept to isolate and evidence of responses to economic or 'trust' crises so far being mixed at best), ethinc backlash (but again, evidence is mixed here, with rates of immigration not being especially strongly related to populist voting), and authoritarian legacy (which fails to explain the lack of populism in some post-communist countries and the excess of it in some democratic ones). Micro-level explanations have focused on individual attitudes and personalities, with common explanations being populist radical right attitudes (which is an endogenous argument mostly based on correlation, and which fails to explain why some non-extreme-right people vote populist and vice versa - although there is strong support for personal support of nativism as a key driver of populism), and having high political resentment or insecurity (although evidence that economic insecurity or fears about crime fuel populism is limited). Overall, the electorate that votes for the far right tends to be fairly diverse, and these parties seem to draw votes from both protest voters and genuine supporters. So what explains why some populist parties fail and others succeed? A key aspect of supply side factors for populist parties are the external supply-side factors, which are the Political Opportunity Structures (POS) that parties exist within. These POS's include the institutional, political, cultural, and media context of party competition which explain party success. Institutional Context: Populist parties are limited by the political system they function within, with first-past-the-post and two-tier majority systems leading to runoffs and two-candidate races that limit the appeal of extreme populist candidates. In contrast, systems of proportional representation are more favorable to populism. Political context: the interaction between the populist radical right and other parties in the system is important for their success since it dictates how much room for growth there is. When existing parties have declining legitimacy, increasing volatility, or decreasing programmatic appeals to popular sentiments, populist parties are more likely to succeed. When the majors parties converge, it tends to help populist parties too. Issue ownership is also key, with the potential for populist party issues to be subsumed by mainstream conservative parties, like with Thatcher in the UK. Cultural context: some countries (like the Balkans) seem to have political cultures that are open to the expression of nativist views, while others (like Germany and Poland) have strong stigmas surrounding radical right politics dating from the Holocaust. Especially important here is the issue of stigmatization, because it decreases the willingness of politicians to invest their careers in the party and will decrease public support for it, both of which are self-reinforcing. In contrast, countries with strong nativist political cultures will support the rise of the populist right. The Media: the media can be highly critical of the radical right, but need not be, and in countries where there is a more mainstream radical right media, populist issues will likely become subsumed by mainstream conservative parties. The media can also give populists an advantage since media coverage tends to skew towards the extreme and shocking. Internal supply side factors are also key to populist party success - these factors are: 1) Party ideology: it is damaging to be linked to the ideology of past extreme right parties in Europe, but the effect of ideology varies depending on the country's context. 2) Party leadership: party leadership is both external (electoral success) and internal (institutional and organizational success). Good populist parties usually need charismatic leaders and strong institutions to support them, but these things are rarely compatible since charisma is antithetical to institutionalization, and thus leaders can't be tamed. 3) Party organization: this is especially important for sustaining party success after a breakthrough - many populist parties suffer from extreme disorganization. Those that succeed have a grass-roots basis and local strongholds. There tends to be high levels of ideological conflict within the ranks of populist parties however (not all are ideologues) In general, those things that tend to help party breakthrough tend to limit party longevity.

PARTIES - Kitschelt, Herbert, and Steven Wilkinson. "Citizen-Politician Linkages: An Introduction." In Patrons, Clients, and Policies: Patterns of Democratic Accountability and Political Competition, edited by Herbert Kitschelt and Steven Wilkinson, 1-40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2007. [EXTRA]

There is an increased need to focus on the patterns and forms of linkages between parties, politicians, and citizens - the dominant model for this has been the Downsian 'responsible party government' model. While this model is valid sometimes, it ignores the frequency of patronage based party-voter linkages that exist in many contexts, including highly developed democracies. These links target material inducements to voters to buy votes - here, accountability isn't based on the success of the party's performance, but the success of its transaction with citizens. Studying these linkages is key as new democracies in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe increasingly fail to fit within programmatic party models. Further, clientelism seems to be a robust form of linkage even in advanced industrial democracies like Japan and Italy. Finally, such linkage systems have a huge effect on international efforts at economic liberalization since patronage based systems are strongly opposed to decreasing the size of the state. This article takes a developmentalist perspective on explaining clientelistic linkages, along with a focus on the competitiveness of democratic elections. This leads to a framework where levels of competitiveness and development interact with each other as mechanisms. Clientelism can exist only if two conditions are in place: (1) cognitive conditions - which ensure knowledge of the other sides matovations and payoffs in the exchange, and (2) motivational conditions, which entail voluntary compliance of constituencies with clientelist exchanges. Clientelism requires a vast organizational capacity for mobilizing resources, monitoring compliance, and facilitating exchanges - the formation of these organizations is thus slow and drawn out with carefully constructed systems of incentives and collective action. Programmatic linkages require slightly less organizational capacity because there is much less monitoring, but much higher ideological coherence. There are 3 central elements of clientelism - (1) contingent direct exchanges (the conditionality of the exchange is key in contrast to programmatism), (2) predictability (i.e. a lack of free-riding or opportunism), (3) monitoring. In contrast, programmatism relies on non-contingent, indirect exchanges with uncertainty about voting and lack of monitoring Valence goods cannot be contingent and targeted and thus cannot be the basis for clientelism - while club goods can be either clientelist or programmatic When voting patterns aren't predicted easily and electoral conduct is inelastic, programmatism will be more effective than clientelism Non-secret ballots, measures of public commitment, and continuous exchanges which create expectations of appropriate behavior, all help with monitoring Clientelism is a strategic linkage strategy (like programmatism) which needs to be differentiated from non-strategic linkages like identitarianism and charisma There are two factors that lead to the choice of clientelism compared to programmatism (although neither is suitable to new democracies): (1) Economic development is a good predictor of linkage type, with more affluent democracies more likely to use programmatism and poorer dems to sue clientelism - since increased development leads to less need to immediate goods (demands changes) and increased mobility which makes monitoring harder and supplying goods more expansive (supply changes). The exception to this, however, is that ethnic cleavages with existing association networks can maintain clientelism even with development (2) The other good predictor of clientelism is party competition - more competitive elections with more undecided voters makes buying those votes much more expensive than appealing programmatically. Thus, more competition over more voters in a developed state = more programmatism, while increased competition in undeveloped countries can be managed by vote buying which is still cheap, so = more clientelism. The higher the competition however, the more likely clientelism will get priced out. Ethnic groups tend to lend themselves to competition for clientelistic goods since they are naturally aggregated interest groups and because ethnic bonds with clientelistic parties are likely to be particularly strong and enforceable - making the link between thenic diversity and clientelism very strong. Control over the public economy, like market regulations, market advantages, and contracts can lend themselves to clientelism, especially if these forms of highly politicized political-economy governance existed prior to the introduction of mass politics (as seen in the fascest regimes of Italy and Japan) - if there are either short term or passing or a complete lack of military threats, both of which incentivise wealth extraction over strong economic development policies, when there aren't emergent and tech reliant sectors of the economy that require efficient fiscal policy, and when there are high levels of ethnocultural mobilization since dense ethnic networks makes nurturing clientelist loyalties via politicized economic governance more attractive. A politicized economy may create a vicious cycle of clientelism by repressing economic growth via decreased efficiency and property rights and it may decrease political competition as industries become more tied to certain parties offering kickbacks Electoral institutions don't seem to determine linkage strategies - when conditions are favorable, politicians find a way. The four key factors for explaining linkage strategies are therefore: (1) econ development, (2) political economy, (3) levels of party competition, (4) patterns of ethnic diversity.

DEMOCRACY - Svolik, Milan W. "Which Democracies Will Last? Coups, Incumbent Takeovers, and the Dynamic of Democratic Consolidation." British Journal of Political Science 45, no. 4 (October 2015): 715-38. [EXTRA]

This article develops a change-point model of democratic consolidation that sees it as a latent quality to be inferred rather than measured directly - it argues consolidation occurs when a large, durable, and statistically significant decrease in the risk of breakdowns occurs at a well defined point in a democracy's lifetime. When this mechanism is applied to analysis on coups and incumbent takeovers it shows that consolidation decreases risks of coups but not incumbent takeovers, meaning distinct mechanisms leave governments vulnerable to these types of breakdowns. Consolidation has historically been thought of as either an accumulation of certain qualities or a decrease in the probability of collapse. The first approach is flawed because the qualities that define consolidation aren't widely agreed on, the second because it sets a redline of consolidation that just assumes occurrence (like the 2-turnover test) This paper's conception of consolidation starts with the view that all democracies are born transitional with a high chance of breakdown and that from there it can (1) revert to dictatorship (which is observed), (2) consolidate, or (3) survive but not consolidate, with a remaining high chance of reversal. The issue is the difference between 2 and 3 can't be observed. This approach identifies consolidation as a phenomenon in the data - with a large and durable decrease in the risk of authoritarianism at a clear point in time This usually happens between year 17 and 20 for a democracy, with a decrease in risk of breakdowns from 1 in 33 to 1 in 200 - This will happen to about one in three democracies, showing that other tests of consolidation are likely too optimistic Using this framework, statistical analysis shows high levels of economic development decreases risks of authoritarianism, while authoritarian neighbors or a military authoritarian past, or an economic recession all increase it. The only one of these that remains a strong risk factor post-consolidation is low levels of economic development This paper also looks at the different form of common authoritarian reversals - military coups, government subversion by an incumbent, or civil war - and shows that the occurrence, timing, and determinants of consolidation vary across these disparate forms of breakdown. 91% of breakdowns are coups or incumbent takeovers, and this paper finds that while the risk of coups almost wholly disappears after consolidation, incumbent takeovers remain a risk, meaning consolidation may not protect against them Military coups and incumbent takeovers also differ in their determinants, with authoritarian neighbors increasing the risk of coups, fuel exports and presidentialism increasing the odds of incumbent takeovers, and a past of military rule increasing the risk of coups and decreasing the risk of incumbent takeovers. Thus, these two factors should be analytically distinct when examining the causes of democratic collapse and weaknesses of consolidation.

PARTIES - Hicken, Allen and Erik Martinez Kuhonta. "Shadows From the Past: Party System Institutionalization in Asia." Comparative Political Studies 44, no. 5 (May, 2011): 572-97. [EXTRA]

This article explains levels of party system institutionalization in Asia by testing data against several hypotheses in the literature - it makes three substantive findings: (1) historical legacies, especially in the period immediately following WWII, were crucial for the development of institutionalized party systems and are still a key variable in affecting current levels of party-system institutionalization, (2) a significant number of institutionalized party systems have historical legacies rooted in authoritarianism, either as former authoritarian parties or semi-democartic regimes, (3) because authoritarianism has played an important role in the origins of institutionalized party systems, institutionalization needs to be separated from the concept of democracy. Institutionalization of parties is a key factor for tempering and channeling social demands and thus ensuring effective governance. Institutionalization of parties increases the viability of programmatic linkages while a lack of it increases reliance on clientelism or charisma to maintain support. Party systems are institutionalized when competition is consistent, stable and predictable, while individual parties are when they have cohesive and ideological organizations. Thus, this view can be seen in general coherence with Huntington's definition of party institutionalization as including adaptability, coherence, complexity, and autonomy, along with Mainwaring and Scully's definition of party system institutionalization as including the stability of the rules and nature of interparty competition, parties having stable roots in society, legitimacy of the electoral process and parties, and cohesive, autonomous, and disciplined parties. However, this article mediates this approach by distinguishing insitutiolization from democratization, which need not go together as seen in Mexico, Taiwan, and Singapore, and also in its focus on the presence of historical authoritarian institutionalized parties, which now serve as the anchor for emerging demcoratic institutionalized party systems and semi-democratic systems. Thus, this article shows historical roots matter for institutionalization and for a number of Asian party systems with institutionalized parties, the roots of these parties are in former authoritarian parties, showing institutionalization and democratization are not synonymous and studies of institutionalization need to go beyond democracies. Parties in Asia have very high levels of electoral volatility - The results from Asia support the view that volatility decreases with time, but this trend only holds at the macro level, not when cases as broken down individually The effect of authoritarianism on party institutionalization decreases the longer the authoritarian regime survived, showing that some level of coercion can help institutionalize parties, but that longer running authoritarian regimes may be destabilizing. Thailand and Malaysia had shorter authoritarian regimes and now have more stable parties, while the Philippines had a longer period of authoritarianism and now very high levels of volatility. The effects of ethnicity on Asian parties is very limited This study finds no clear support for institutionalization being linked to the passage of time, or electoral institutions, or government type, or social cleavages. Instead, the clearest effect is past institutionalization carries over to current institutionalization and all countries with high institutionalization had such systems arise closely after the end of WWII, showing historical path dependencies in Asia. But more uniquely, this article argues authoritarian antecedents can be especially important for institutionalization, even if its at the cost of coercion and repressing opposition parties, showing that the coercion of authoritarian regimes is key to making strong parties, and not necessarily democratic contexts. Authoritarianism can benefit opposition parties too when some competition is allowed (even if it is limited) since strong hegemonic parties require disciplined and cohesive opposition if they are to survive, traits that can carry over to a more democratic system if competition is opened up, as in Taiwan.

PARTIES - Tavits, Margit. "Party Systems in the Making: The Emergence and Success of New Parties in New Democracies." British Journal of Political Science 38, no. 1 (January 2008): 113-33. [EXTRA]

This article explores what motivates new parties to enter the electoral arena in new democracies. Looking at data from legislative elections in 15 East European countries, it shows new party entry is more likely when the cost of entry is low, the benefit of office is high, and the perceived level of electoral viability is high (i.e. parties don't yet have reputations for electoral viability). Support for new parties increases with disappointment at existing parties. Further, while the number of parties will decrease as democracies age, there is no unidirectional pattern over time. New parties constantly entering polities decreases the ability to consolidate, the quality of representation, and the predictability of policies. This is especially relevant to Eastern Europe where parties have appeared at rates much higher than in Western Europe. This theory outlines four key factors for new parties: (1) the costs of launching parties and winning seats are low, (2) when the benefits of holding political office are high, (3) when parties have not yet established reputations for electoral viability, (4) when voters are disappointed by both the representation and performance of existing parties. Over time, new party reputations should become established and the number of entrants should decrease. Pooled, cross-sectional time-series data of all national legislative elections since regime transitions in 15 countries in Eastern Europe confirm all of these findings. The key determinant of party costs are electoral institutions which effect how easy it is to register a party and how easy it is to win a seat The key factor for the benefits of office are access to spoils, influence on policy, and the ability use parties to run for the presidency Finally, party viability is determined by electoral history, which when shallow or highly volatile, leaves a great deal of room for new entrants. These conditions will decrease over time, however, as electoral histories get deeper and parties establish their reputations, which should decrease new entrants. These factors have to be interacted with voter disappointment to carry weight, however, with voter disappointment being reflected in economic conditions, increased levels of turnout, the marginalization of ethinc minorities, or direct and obvious instances of policy failure by the government. Voters supporting new parties should decrease over time as voter coordination over viable parties increases and as reputations become more established. The duration of democracy has a significant and consistent effect on decreasing the number of new parties, but only on decreasing entries, not decreasing voter openness to them, which is instead curvilinear.

NATURAL RESOURCES - Smith, Benjamin. "Oil Wealth and Regime Survival in the Developing World, 1960-1999." American Journal of Political Science 48, no. 2 (April 2004): 232-246. [CORE]

This article uses time-series data from 107 developing states between 1960 and 1999 to test the effects of oil wealth on regime failure, political protest, and civil war - " I find that oil wealth is robustly associated with increased regime durability, even when controlling for repression, and with lower likelihoods of civil war and antistate protest. I also find that neither the boom nor bust periods exerted any significant effect on regime durability in the states most dependent on exports, even while those states saw more protests during the bust. In short, oil wealth has generally increased the durability of regimes, and repression does not account for this effect." (232) "I suggest that the persistence of authoritarian regimes in oil-rich states long after the bust of the 1980s—after access to patronage rents had dropped off dramatically—suggests that leaders in many of these states invested their windfall revenues in building state institutions and political organizations that could carry them through hard times." (232) - Thus the focus on repression by authoritarian regimes is misplaced. Theories about oil states can be divided into the three R's - rentier states, repression, and rent-seeking. The rentier state thesis argues that resource rich state are able to chanel resources from oils into redistribution, but lack strong bureaucratic capacities or state institutions for gaining revenues, and also lack any kind of incentive for public representation because of the lack of taxation. This will lead to weakness during bust period in the global economy when state resources dry up. The repression thesis, promoted by Ross and Bellin, argues tha oil revenues make it possible for regimes to invest in repressive apparatuses to undermine social opposition - Ross finds that oil wealth is correlated with military spending and authoritarianism {worth checking - 2001 article} and Bellin finds that oil rents help these countries avoid international pressure and interventions. The rent-seeking thesis argues that oil revenues create incentives for potential levels and state-breakers via the attractive set of spoils available for the taking, and also increase the odds of social conflict because of the resentment over inequality resulting from the distribution of such rents. The findings of this analysis are that oil-rich states are stable, not prone to war, not prone to protest, and not particularly repressive (although oil wealth is negatively related to democracy) - they are also not very vulnerable to booms and busts. "Oil wealth only exerts a significant negative effect on the intensity of civil war in a given year in the model that includes a five-year rather than one-year lagged dependent variable. This finding contradicts the "oil-as-spoils" thesis in which greater re- source wealth is held to provide an incentive for rebels to launch rebellion aimed at seizing production facilities." (240) "One plausible conclusion from this finding is that repression is behind the lower levels of protest in oil-rich states, especially since democracy ap- pears to increase relative levels of protest. To investigate the independent effects of repression, I replaced democ- racy's quadratic with the dummy for highly authoritarian regimes and reestimated the models. Highly authoritarian regimes actually experienced considerably higher levels of protest than did others, and repression lowered the ex- pected number of protests. However, it did not reduce the effect of oil wealth. In any case, it appears that mechanisms other than repression drive the relative respite from protest that oil-rich states enjoy." (241)

NATURAL RESOURCES - Smith, Benjamin. "Oil Wealth and Regime Survival in the Developing World, 1960-1999." American Journal of Political Science 48, no. 2 (April 2004): 232-246. [CORE]

This article uses time-series data from 107 developing states between 1960 and 1999 to test the effects of oil wealth on regime failure, political protest, and civil war - " I find that oil wealth is robustly associated with increased regime durability, even when controlling for repression, and with lower likelihoods of civil war and antistate protest. I also find that neither the boom nor bust periods exerted any significant effect on regime durability in the states most dependent on exports, even while those states saw more protests during the bust. In short, oil wealth has generally increased the durability of regimes, and repression does not account for this effect." (232) "I suggest that the persistence of authoritarian regimes in oil-rich states long after the bust of the 1980s—after access to patronage rents had dropped off dramatically—suggests that leaders in many of these states invested their windfall revenues in building state institutions and political organizations that could carry them through hard times." (232) - Thus the focus on repression by authoritarian regimes is misplaced. Theories about oil states can be divided into the three R's - rentier states, repression, and rent-seeking. The rentier state thesis argues that resource rich state are able to chanel resources from oils into redistribution, but lack strong bureaucratic capacities or state institutions for gaining revenues, and also lack any kind of incentive for public representation because of the lack of taxation. This will lead to weakness during bust period in the global economy when state resources dry up. The repression thesis, promoted by Ross and Bellin, argues tha oil revenues make it possible for regimes to invest in repressive apparatuses to undermine social opposition - Ross finds that oil wealth is correlated with military spending and authoritarianism {worth checking - 2001 article} and Bellin finds that oil rents help these countries avoid international pressure and interventions. The rent-seeking thesis argues that oil revenues create incentives for potential levels and state-breakers via the attractive set of spoils available for the taking, and also increase the odds of social conflict because of the resentment over inequality resulting from the distribution of such rents. The findings of this analysis are that oil-rich states are stable, not prone to war, not prone to protest, and not particularly repressive (although oil wealth is negatively related to democracy) - they are also not very vulnerable to booms and busts. "Oil wealth only exerts a significant negative effect on the intensity of civil war in a given year in the model that includes a five-year rather than one-year lagged dependent variable. This finding contradicts the "oil-as-spoils" thesis in which greater re- source wealth is held to provide an incentive for rebels to launch rebellion aimed at seizing production facilities." (240) "One plausible conclusion from this finding is that repression is behind the lower levels of protest in oil-rich states, especially since democracy appears to increase relative levels of protest. To investigate the independent effects of repression, I replaced democ- racy's quadratic with the dummy for highly authoritarian regimes and reestimated the models. Highly authoritarian regimes actually experienced considerably higher levels of protest than did others, and repression lowered the ex- pected number of protests. However, it did not reduce the effect of oil wealth. In any case, it appears that mechanisms other than repression drive the relative respite from protest that oil-rich states enjoy." (241)

NATURAL RESOURCES - Lewis, Peter. Growing Apart: Oil, Politics, and Economic Change in Indonesia and Nigeria. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. [EXTRA]

This book aims to illustrate the sources of institutional variation and economic change looking at two similar cases: Nigeria and Indonesia. Both Nigeria and Indonesia experienced transitions to democracy after long dictatorships in the late 1990s - both are still beset by weak institutions and economic stability but are trying to maintain democracy in a highly diverse society. Despite these intense similarities today, between 1960-1990 these two countries were widely divergent, with Indonesia experiencing rapid growth, stability, and global integration, and Nigeria facing little growth, marginality, poverty, and political volatility. Explanations for these 2 country's fates focus on the interests arrayed around their economic policy making and the nature of their institutional development. They have different capacities to forge alliances with economic actors and foster capital formation, since economic growth relies on credible commitments, secure property rights, and contract protections, all of which are provided by governments. Thus, Indonesia grew under the New Order because it created credible commitments to private economic sectors, but these institutions were enforced by authoritarianism and proved brittle, leading to their fracture when faced with external and internal pressures in the 1990s - Once these institutions collapsed, credibility disappeared and economic disarray and distrust proliferated In Nigeria, social divisions and political conditions have hindered trust with private capital, with businesses instead gravitating towards diffuse rent seeking, with constant political instability also leading to institutional decay and social polarization anathema to good economic development The conclusions drawn from these cases are: (1) states with weak formal institutions may provisionally achieve substantial economic growth - in other words, government early in their development without a strong rule of law can compensate with commitment devices and informal guarantees, but this can only be a short term solution without long term institutional development. This is seen with Indonesia, where Suharto aided temporary trust but failed at building long term institutions; (2) political rent seeking and corruption have varying effects on economic performance - These practices are usually bad for the economy but need not be and can be good if centralized, coordinated, and regulated instead of anarchic and dispersed. Good policy and discipline can make even illicit capital useful. Indonesia started as well coordinated and then spiraled out of control, while Nigeria's has always been anarchic; (3) systems with few formal checks on leaders can increase credibility with a devolution of policy authority and use of institutional lock-in mechanisms, where executives may be feared to have too much arbitrary power. This was seen under Suharto in Indonesia; (4) Developmental leadership is favored by particular sets of political challenges and opportunities - institutions and structural factors can't explain everything, incentives and strategies also matter - Here, indonesia looks like a stationary bandit and Nigeria like a roving one; (5) developmental states rest upon an organizational basis for elite coordination - good institutions require a reconciling of elite interests; (6) in diverse societies, inclusive alliances between the state and private producers are needed for sustained development, with governments striking a careful balance between aiding producers and the public at large. Thus, the center of this analysis is stable and credible commitments to private economic actors which are needed for investment and growth. The state must create institutions and trust. The success of state-private capital relations then has spill-over effects for a wide variety of policy successes for the government Three factors affect a developmental regime - the nature of leadership, the composition of social coalitions, and regional setting - In other words, you need (1) good growth oriented and long-time horizon leaders and elites united out of common concerns in the interest of overcoming challenges and threatened, (2) you need a good distributional order so large swaths of societ don't feel excluded, and (3) the choices, growth, and conditions of a government's neighbors which can create 'neighborhood effects' caused by idea spillover and social/economic linkages, along with regional reputations to investors Indonesia is a story of effective state management that deteriorated, Nigeria of consistently ineffective management.

DEMOCRACY - Lipset, Seymour Martin. "Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy." American Political Science Review 53, no. 1 (March 1959): 69-105. [EXTRA]

This paper examines the social and behavioral prerequisites for democracies existence and stability The variables identified here are interrelated and statistically supported but need not be universally applicable - the existence of a deviant cases doesn't disprove their value no more than the existence of rich socialists shows it as an ideology unrelated to economic status Democracy is defined here as a political system which supplies regular constitutional opportunities for changing government officials - a social mechanism to resolve issues of societal decision making between conflicting interest group which permits the largest possible part of the population to influence these decisions via their ability to select elected officials This implies three conditions to democracy: (1) a political formula - a system of beliefs legitimizing democratic institutions; (2) one set of political leaders in office; (3) one or more sets of leaders out of office acting as legitimate opposition There are 2 principal complex characteristics of social systems that impact stable democracies: (1) economic development, (2) legitimacy There are four aspects of economic development: industrialization, wealth, urbanization, and education - and there are two aspects of legitimacy: valuing institutions for themselves, and considering them right and proper. Unique historical contingencies in countries can undermine these conditions or allow for democracy even in their absence Countries are ranked into four categories based on their electoral history - stable democracies, unstable democracies, unstable dictatorships, and stable dictatorships Average levels of wealth, industrialization, urbanization and education are much higher for democracies than non-democracies Education levels are strongly related to how much people support democratic ideals and tolerance and diversity - It seems that while education is not sufficient for democracy, it comes close to being necessary for it. The four factors of modernization need to develop in tandem to aid democracy - unbalanced modernization (as seen in Egypt) is unlikely to be a great help - Modernization is needed for long political time-horizons The poor are more likely to revolt and a growing middle class is more likely to mitigate and mediate politics Increasing inequality is bad for democracies because it decreases view of the lower classes for elites and increase fears of redistribution with alternation in governance It is also necessary to have robust civil society connections to balance the power of the state, which modernization aids. But democracies also require a sense of legitimacy, a means of reducing political cleavages, and n effectiveness in fulfilling its functions Crises of legitimacy arise when sharp cleavages emerge around the proper structuring of society and are most likely when (1) major groups are denied access to a political system early in a transition, or (2) the status of major conservative institutions are threatened during the period of structural change (even if their power is decreasing) The importance of maintaining status for conservative institutions is seen in the maintenance of monarchies in many democracies Legitimacy of institutions is reflected in a 'secular political culture' which ritualizes and celebrates (holidays) democratic practices Thus, country's stability can be measured along 2 axes - effectiveness and legitimacy, with both being high in stable democracies; It is better to be high in legitimacy and low in effectiveness than vice versa Finally, issues of resolving social cleavages (around church, citizenship, and income inequality) are key. Weltanschauung politics are politics defined by globalizing and uncompromising ideologies and are anathema to democracy because their isolate believers from compromise. Democracy is thus enhanced when most people have many cross-cutting politically relevant affiliations - from this it follows 2-party systems are better than multi-party ones, FPTP is better than proportional representation, and federalism is better than unitarianism, since all of these create more cross cutting identities. This isn't true where federalism corresponds with relevant divisions in identity like race.

NATURAL RESOURCES - Ross, Michael L. "Does Oil Hinder Democracy." World Politics 35, no. 325 (2001): 325-61. [EXTRA]

This paper uses pooled time-series, cross-national data from 113 states between 1971 and 1997 to explore the impact of oil on democracy and see if it is geographically isolated to the middle east or applies more broadly and see if the effect is limited to oil or also occurs with other resources like minerals There are three possible mechanisms to link oil to decreasing levels of democracy - a rentier effect )low taxes and reduced accountability), a repression effect (increased funding for internal security), and a modernization effect (oil limits needed social and cultural changes). Rentier states are states which rely to a significant degree on foreign rents to supply government revenues, which leads to a reliance on rents that decreases administrative capacity, taxation, and government accountability in ways that harm economic prospects for such states. These 'rentier' effects function via three mechanisms: (1) the taxation mechanism (decreased taxation = decreased administration and accountability), (2) the spending mechanism (increased patronage spending - decreased demands for institutional change in democratization), and (3) the group formation mechanism (increased spending by the government used to limit non-vertical social relations that could be mobilized for democracy and limits the growth of civil institutions key for democratization) The repression hypothesis could function via either government self-interest or government responses to increased grievances in regions with high numbers of natural resources, especially if these regions have ethnic or religious minority populations Both oil and minerals seem to affect levels of democratization and the effect seems to be stronger for oil-poor countries than oil-rich ones - a finding consistent with the view that oil has a limited effect on developed democracies. Further, this finding doesn't seem to be caused by other primary commodity exports and is not limited to the Middle East or small states Resources also seem to be related to decreases in tax revenue, with tax revenue corresponding well with democracy and the results also support a relationship to increased patronage spending and decreases in social groups, all of which confirm the rentier state hypothesis Resources also seem to be linked to higher levels of military spending (but only oil, not minerals) Resources support modernization theories focused on a lack of occupational specialization, but no other mechanism Thus, oil does hinder democracy, the influence is not limited to the Middle East, this argument can be applied to minerals too, and it can be linked strongly with rentier and repression effects and partially with modernization effects.

DEMOCRACY - Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). [CORE]

This study uses a procedural definition of democracy, defining it, as Schumpeter does, as 'the selection of leaders through competitive elections by the people they govern.' This definition can be combined with a view of democracy involving the dimensions of contestation and inclusion outlined by Dahl. Normative and idealistic views of democracy shouldn't be part of defining it. Democracy has spread through the world in waves, in three discrete periods where there was a massive growth in democratization and liberalization, followed by a reversal of such democratization. The first wave was from 1827-1926, and was started by the U.S. and French revolutions and eventually encompassed Switzerland, the UK, Italy, Argentina and others. This was followed by the first reversal from 1922-1942, with the huge spread of authoritarianism and totalitarianism between the World Wars, especially in the most newly established of the democracies from the first wave. The second wave was from 1943-1962 and included the Allied occupation of Europe and Asia and the process of decolonization in much of the world. This was followed, from 1958-1975, by the second reversal, which was most clearly seen in Latin America with a huge peak in authoritarian governance, but also echoed in Asia and Africa, where recently decolonizing states often fell to authoritarianism - this was the most extreme of the reversals with over 38 governments resulting from coups. The third wave started in 1974 with the Portuguese revolution and encompassed over 30 countries throughout Europe, Latin America, and Asia - it culminated in the collapse of the USSR Despite this two steps forward, one back approach, it is still important to distinguish democracies from dictatorships for four key reasons: 1) democracies are closely associated with individual freedoms, which are a positive social value; 2) while democracies can be unruly, they are rarely violent and change is usually incremental and non-revolutionary; 3) democracies don't historically fight wars against each other which means more democracies denote more international peace; 4) U.S. foreign policy and influence in particular is tied to the spread of democracy and its dominance within the global system.

RACE - Tesler, Michael. Post-Racial or Most-Racial? Race and Politics in the Obama Era. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016. [EXTRA]

Throughout most of his presidency, Barack obama explicitly refused to discuss issues of race This book claims mass politics has become more polarized around race since Obama was elected - he thus helped share in a 'most-racial' period of extreme racial polarization between liberals and conservatives, in spite of widespread hope that his presidency marked the beginning of a post-racial period. The key mechanism here is that the Obama era made racial evaluations more prominent for political assessments in the United States - A process of 'racialization' that happened in spite of Obama's best efforts to avoid it. Racial attitudes were already important political predictors in 2008, but Obama's election led racial consideration to spill over into the broader political environment, with all political factors being increasingly viewed through the prism of race because Democratic politics were inseparable from Obama's race. Indeed, racial attitudes towards black Americans and Muslims were very strong predictors of support for Obama through 2012 and beyond, and these views spilled over into a wide number of policy opinions, especially health care What's more, racial opinions are more emotionally charged than other ones, leading to an increased virulence of debate around policy issues that became increasingly racialized in the U.S. This racial polarization spread into races beyond the presidency, impacting congressional voting as well - this increased the emotional stakes of congressional outcomes and decreased the chance for bipartisan cooperation for Obama Party identity, especially for poorly-educated whites, was strongly linked with racial identity after 2008 Views of 'whites' also increasingly predicted non-white voting patterns in 2012 and beyond as Republicanism became increasingly associated with white identity Obama's presidency made it hard to disassociate political issues from him and him from Race - this lead to the spillover of racialization - Here, media coverage of politics proves essential to linking policy associations to race. This is in large part because group identity is a key predictor of political support across a variety of contexts. While past presidents lead to partisan polarization on a number of issues, Obama led to uniquely racial polarization. Democrats and Republicans have increasingly separate realities on issues of race after the Obama presidency.

DEMOCRACY - Collier, David. "Overview of the Bureaucratic-Authoritarian Model." In The New Authoritarianism in Latin America, edited by David Collier: 19-32 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). [EXTRA]

What explains authoritarianism in the more developed countries of Latin America, since modernization theory fails here? Many argue it is a post-poplist response to early populist mobilizations to ISI. This argument is most prominently promoted by O'Donnell. O'Donnell classified political systems by: (1) the structure of the regime, (2) the composition of the coalitions, and (3) the content of public policies, especially as they relate to redistribution. All three can be distinguished as either incorporating or excluding. This leads to a formulation of three types of political systems: (1) oligarchic, with limited competition and policy oriented around elites, (2) populist, which vary in competitiveness but are highly incorporating and frequently resort to economic nationalism, (3) bureaucratic-authoritarianism, which are exclusionary and non-democratic regimes with dominant central coalitions and which limit political participation. O'Donnell sees changes between systems as caused by political tensions and changes in social structures produced by industrialization, which is tied to changes in the absolute size of the modern sector. This process moves through three steps - (1) industrialization, which starts with consumer goods and moves to capital ones, (2) increased public activation of the popular sector, and (3) growth of technocratic occupational roles in the public and private bureaucracies Different political systems are enabled by different balances between the classes created by industrialization, with early industrialization encouraging populism but the capital demands of late industrialization requiring liberal policies and post-populist politics that create bureaucratic-authoritarianism. The popular sector will be mobilized by early industrialization and then oppose late industrial reforms, leading to gridlock and polarization and political crises. The rise of technocrats with modernization leads to decreased tolerance of political instability and thus support for authoritarianism in the tumult of popular response to late industrialization Thus, early industry and public participation lead to populism, but then the demands of late industrialization require liberalized markets and technocrats, which the people will oppose and which will lead to political conflict that technocrats resolve via authoritarianism, with this process playing out in the 1960s and 1970s across Latin America Consequently, such countries become 'denationalized' as they increasingly focus policy on recruiting foreign capital. Stability will depend on how well this change can be balanced with the demands of local businessmen and entrepreneurs.

NATURAL RESOURCES - Karl, Terry Lynn. The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and Petro-States. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. [CORE]

What explains the challenges of translating oil wealth into successful development? Here, institutional development is as, if not more important, than economic conditions. Economics shape institutions, and are shaped by them, and thus there is constant interaction between economic development and social and political factors. "Briefly stated, my general argument is as follows. Commodity-led growth induces changes in prevailing notions of property rights, the relative power of interest groups and organizations, and the role and character of the state vis-a-vis the market. These institutional changes subsequently define the revenue basis of the state, especially its tax structure. How these states collect and distribute taxes, in turn, creates incentives that pervasively influence the organization of political and economic life and shapes government preferences with respect to public policies. In this manner, long-term efficiency in the allocation of resources is either helped or hindered, and the diverse development trajectories of nations are initiated, modified, and sustained." (7) Here, the key argument is that the economic and political conditions within a country impact the range of choice available to policy makers, which then limits future choices and options. Choices are thus embedded in institutions and historical contexts. This often leads to very rigid institutions of decision making that are highly resistant to change. It matters is a state relies on taxes for revenue or the sale of a primary good or another means (like foreign aid) - "these different sources of revenues, whatever their relative economic merits or social import, have a powerful (and quite different) impact on the state's institutional development and its abilities to employ personnel, subsidize social and economic programs, create new organizations, and direct the activities of private interests." (13) Many developing states rely on the sale of primary exports commodities and the collection of foreign loans and aid as opposed to any form of internal taxation - ""The consequence... is the absence of the coherent and highly institutionalized central bureaucracies that Eurocentric perspectives almost inevitably assume as points of departure." (13) There are three key actors within a society - the state (the permanent organizational structure binding collective choices in a given area), the regime (the process of choosing and determining the crucial actors within the state and where legitimate decisions come from), and the government (the actors within that regime, like politicians and military personnel, who occupy such positions at any given time). Revenue sources most distinctly impact the jurisdiction (score and degree) and authority (ability to penetrate society) of the state. ""Different sources of revenues from commodities have distinctive impacts on the scale of the state, its degree of centralization and decentralization, the coherence of public bureaucracies, the types of organizations adopted, the patterns of policymaking, and even its symbolic images." Oil rich states and mining rich states have incredibly high and concentrated levels of wealth, and corresponding resistance to any kind of restructuring of the state apparatus as more and more people become reliant on it for resource rents. Choices for the use of natural resources profits in such countries thus become highly limited by their history of resource based development.

PARTIES - Weitz-Shapiro, Rebecca. "What Wins Votes: Why Some Politicians Opt Out of Clientelism." American Journal of Political Science 56, no. 3 (2012): 568-83. [EXTRA]

When clientelism is rampant, why do some politicians chose to opt out of it? This article argues that answer lies in the electoral costs of clientelism - Clientelism decreases support from non-poor constituents even when it generates votes among the poor. With this view in mind, clientelism can be modeled via the interaction between political competition and poverty. When political competition is high and poverty is also high, clientelism is viable. But when competition is high but poverty is low, clientelism will decline. Theory: Because clientelism is a vote getting strategy aimed at the poor, non-poor voters are likely to punish politicians who engage in it. Thus, the alliance of clientelism should vary depending on two factors: a politicians security in office and the share of the population that is non-poor. Looking at data from over 120 Argentinian municipalities, it is confirmed that increases in competitiveness or decreases in poverty alone do not account for politicians opting out of clientelism. It is only when a large opposition presence is coupled with a sizable middle class that clientelism declines. The distinction between private and public goods can be misleading for clientelism since public goods (like building a hospital) can be clientelistic, and private goods (like food stamps) can be non-clientelistic. This article operationalizes clientelism as a local executives involvement in selecting beneficiaries for a food distribution program in Argentina (the PNSA). Higher levels of competition is frequently associated with improved governance outcomes, but not necessarily less clientelism. But clientelism is almost universally associated with increased poverty. Thus, this article argues it is the interaction between these variables that is key. Along with the costs of clientelism for non-recipients (i.e. the non-poor middle class), these groups will oppose clientelism for taking resources from public goods, skipping over their demographic for benefits, for decreasing the quality of government, and on broader moral/normative grounds. Poor voters might share these concerns but the conditionality of key benefits on their votes overshadows them. Politicians in high competition, high poverty contexts put a premium on clientelism's gained votes, politicians in a low poverty and low competition context feel secure so don't worry about the costs of clientelism, but politicians in a high competition and low poverty context will avoid clientelism These results are robust to measures of levels of accountability and civic community via levels of education and radio coverage.

RACE - Gest, Justin, Tyler Reny, and Jeremy Mayer. "Roots of the Radical Right: Nostalgic Deprivation in the United States and Britain." Comparative Political Studies 51, no. 13 (2018): 1694-1719. [CORE]

White conservatives in the U.S. and U.K. are more prone to support the 'Radical Right' because of their sense of nostalgic deprivation: the gap in their perceptions between their current status and their historical status. This aligns with the view of whiteness as a valuable set of privileges, assumption, and assets in its own right (Cheryl Harris). This paper uses surveys to measure people's levels of support for sentiments of nostalgic deprivation, and then the predictive power of those sentiments for support for the Radical Right. Nostalgic deprivation can be understood in economic terms (inequality), political terms (disempowerment) or social terms (stigmatization or value change) - all of which tie into the expectations of whiteness (and the privileges it entails) for those living in the U.S. and Europe. "Nearly six in 10 White adults in both the United States and Britain feel that they have lost political power." (1703) Meanwhile, every measure of senses of social, political, and economic deprivation made conservative voters more likely to support the radical right.

TERMS - Semi-Presidential/Hybrid Regimes

A mix of presidential and parliamentary regime types - They contain both a popularly elected chief executive—the head of state—and an executive that is "...subject to the confidence of the legislature"—the head of government. (Shugart 2008, p. 349). This can take the form of Premier-Presidentialism, where the legislature retains exclusive authority over the survival of the executive, which emerges from its ranks, and where popularly elected executive may only dissolve the legislature, triggering elections. (Shugar & Carey, 1992). It can also take the form of Presidential-Parliamentary systems, where a popularly elected executive selects members of cabinet who are then confirmed or rejected by the legislative majority. The survival of the cabinet is therefore dependent on both the confidence of the legislative majority and the head of state, making this closer to a pure presidential system than a parliamentary regime

POPULISM - Margaret Canovan, "Taking Politics to the People: Populism as the Ideology of Democracy," in Democracies and the Populist Challenge, ed Yves Meny, et. al, 25-43 (Blackingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). [CORE]

Democracy is riven by the paradox that, because it cannot possibly represent all of the interests of those it claims to, it relies on ideology in order to communicate its politics to the people, even though such ideology is systematically misleading. Thus, to bring the people into democratic politics, politics has to be obscured by ideology and thus made less transparent. Ideology bridges the gap between politics and the people by giving people a mental road map with which to conceptualize political life. This manifests in populism, because while democratic politics functions on the basis of inclusion, representation, mediation, and contestation, it is portrayed in a way that shows politics as a universalistic representation of the voice of an authentic and unified people (a misleading view that is nonetheless necessary, and which promotes populism). Populists argue that politics needs to be returned to the control of the people, which taps into the central ideology of democracy. Further, the view of the 'people' within a democracy inherently lends itself to a conception of 'us' and 'them', both in the distinction between the people and elites and between the nation and outsiders. In this way, populism appeals to the most basic and simplistic understanding of democracy, as seen in the idea of referendums. "Thus, the heart of populist protest is the nature of democracy itself, and the contradiction that lie at its heart - the gap between bringing the people into politics and taking politics to the people. Populism makes all of this coherent by making the people a bounded and clearly defined entity with a coherent set of interests and a direct stake in the control of the government." (42-3)

AUTHORITARIANISM - Brownlee, Jason. Authoritarianism in an Age of Democratization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. [EXTRA]

Despite initial doubts, partially liberalized authoritarian regimes have proven both possible and durable with over 5 dozen regimes taking such an approach - this article focuses on what makes authoritarianism durable and resilient to the 3rd wave of democratization. Social-structural variables to explain authoritarianism were originally rejected for being too deterministic but have recently been validated, with those countries lacking the 'pre-conditions' for transitions rarely succeeding at doing so. These theories argue (a la Lipset) that durable regimes (either authoritarian or democratic) should be expected to transition only rarely, with unstable regimes being far more likely to transform, but with all more likely to stay in their current category. This proves broadly true. Indeed, studies of recent democratization that have focused exclusively on social change as an explanatory variable have suffered for not accounting for the degree to which regimes have been highly structure by past experiences and conditions which shows a strong connection between early regime types and recent outcomes. Thus, both micro-social and macro-institutional approaches are essential. In this context, structural factors resemble tectonic shifts only observable from afar and over long periods of time while micro factors are individual earthquakes. Structural factors explain which regimes should be most durable and agentic explanations help explain what happens in moments of flux when the structures of polities are unusually open to contestation. Hybrid regimes have grown after the 3rd wave, with 44 states adopting guises of democracy under continued autocracy between 1975-2000. Explanations focusing on institutions as the link between past conditions and modern movements are key here - single-party authoritarianism seems to be more stable than either military authoritarianism or personalistic leaders, highlighting which types of authoritarianism should be most prone to transitions to democracy it is the type of institution that matters however, and not the presence or absence of elections (single-party regimes are the most durable even without multipartite elections) Thus, elections seem to have little effect on regime chang,e being symptoms but not cases. The key to single-party survival seems to be its levels of elite cohesion, which will be the decisive factor whether there are elections or not. Parties allow regimes to consolidate a cohesive coalition of elites while repressing representative governance. This is because parties help channel elite ambitions and create long-term commitments and security which allows elite cooperation There are 4 regimes studied here - Iran, Malaysia, Egypt, and the Philippines For all four of the cases, the factors that determined regime outcomes were: (1) Early elite conflict, which shaped early party formation (the period of regime formation is key for determining how strong institutions are), (2) party institutions, which then shaped the durability of democracy, and (3) levels of political confrontation when/if faced with institutional decline or elite defection. This is simplified into three steps - regime formation, institutional legacies, and regime outcomes. Robust parties arise from efforts at coopting and suppressing rival elites and containing alternative political movements with popular bases. When elite rivalries persist and challenger movements maintain popular support, then parties will be weak and limited. These early institutional legacies have long-lasting effects on the ability to maintain elite cohesion and resist democratization. Parties create contexts where disputes transcend the immediate problem of allocating resource by extending influence horizontally and temporally and mediating changes in power dynamics caused by generational change or economic shifts - parties are thus key in curbing leaders' ambitions and binding together political coalitions and adjudicating competition for high-level posts Parties allow for a mediation of disputes and coordination of collective actions - they manage competition for power and competition in power - all of this creates sustainable systems of elite coherence and alliance which is self-reinforcing because it creates a sense of collective security via the party apparatus. Further, extended time horizons lead to better policy making and governance which allows for even more stable elite buy-in. Weak parties worsen conflict however by creating a clear organizational context for factional divisions and grievances. The absence of parties also increases the odds of elite defection and seeking allies with opposition, which undermines authoritarian longevity. Since no good system exits for mediating distrust and competing ambitions, elite defections then open political systems up to moment of intense flux and this creates a window for regime change (and democratization).

PRES & PAR - Power, Timothy and Mark Gasiorowski. "Institutional Design and Democratic Consolidation in the Third World." Comparative Political Studies 30, no. 2 (April 1997): 123-55. [CORE]

Existing studies which argue that presidentialism is more unstable than parliamentarism (such as Linz's, Mainwaring's, and Stepan and Skach's work) suffer from selection bias issues in their data sets. This article aims to avoid those shortfalls by looking at third world countries and excluding micro-states. This data shows far less support for the thesis that presidentialism is inherently unstable, less support for the idea that multiparty presidentialism is unstable, and more support for the idea that multipartism provides representation to more diverse societies and is more sustainable.

AUTHORITARIANISM - Thomas Pepinsky, "Economic Crisis and the Breakdown of Authoritarian Regimes: Indonesia and Malaysia in Comparative Perspective," (New York: Cambridge University Press: 2009). [CORE]

In the 1990s debt crises, Indonesia reformed, embraced democracy and liberalization, whereas Malaysia remained insular and resisted democratization and liberalization. This book explores the root of that divergence, and argues that the political coalitions within each country (and whether those coalitions hold fixed, mobile, or both forms of capital) was key to the approach it took to economic collapse. When regimes are united they will always choose policy that protects the interests of their supporters in times of crisis and this will allow a consolidation of support around the regime, but when regimes are divided, it can lead to muddled responses to the economic crisis and a political crisis as a result. - "When supporters have mutually incompatible preferences over adjustment policies, adjustment policies appear incoherent, and political coalitions are fundamentally unsustainable. When preferences are compatible, regimes adopt their supporters' favored policies, crush their opponents, and survive." (2-3) Soeharto's New Order regime in Indonesia was divided between a variety of groups with contradictory preferences and capital holdings (both mobile and fixed capital), which made cohesive policy impossible and led to regime collapse. Whereas Malaysia's regime was cohesive and had similar capital investments, and thus the regime was able to take a coherent reform approach that allowed it to maintain strong support and power. Thus, the key to stability in regimes is the ability of the regime to provide favorable policies to its support groups during times of protest (4) A key assumption behind this argument is that a regime's supporters will abandon their support without material incentives to maintain it. Thus, in times of economic crisis, managing the interests of their coalition is the key concern of authoritarian regimes. Ideology is only peripheral is the support such a regime will receive. Instead, what is key is the policy approach the regime takes when faced with a twin crises of currency devaluation and systemic insolvency in banking. This approach clashes with the 'crisis' approach taken by Greene in that Greene focuses on when resources run out for regimes, whereas here the focus is on how coalition make different demands that are either achievable or incompatible for rulers during times of crisis This approach emphasis the economic foundations of authoritarian rule and how that rule is rooted in the economic interests of their coalitions and the policies they take to uphold those interests

TERMS - Presidentialism

Linz (199) - "In presidential systems an executive with considerable constitutional powers-generally including full control of the composition of the cabinet and administration-is directly elected by the people for a fixed term and is independent of parliamentary votes of confidence. He is not only the holder of executive power but also the symbolic head of state and can be removed between elections only by the drastic step of impeachment." (Linz - 52) Shugart - A pure presidential system is defined as (1) the executive is popularly elected and serves as 'chief executive,' (2) the terms of the legislature and executive are fixed and not subject to mutual confidence, and (3) the president names and directs the cabinet and has some law-making ability.

TERMS - Totalitarianism

Linz (2000) - A regime is totalitarian if it has a clear ideology, a simple mass party/mobilization organization, and concentrated power in an individual and/or a small group of collaborators without any form of peaceful accountability. - In totalitarian regimes, "citizens participation in and active mobilization for political and collective social tasks is encouraged, demanded, rewarded, and challenged through the party system"

TERMS - Party System Collapse

Morgan (2011) - parties will collapse when they fail to fulfill their primary role in democracy - linking society to the state. This happens when a party system faces challenges to its core linkage strategies and when institutional and environmental constraints limit its ability to appropriately respond to such challenges. The result is a decline in linkage followed by collapse. In contrast, those systems that survive lack either systematic threats to their linkage profile, or institutional constraints on their response to those threats.

TERMS - Pluralism

Often identified as the negative pole of populism, it focuses on "the maintenance of cultural heterogeneity and diversity and the protection of minority interests. This can be a threat to democracy if it undermines the ability to form a coherent body politic." - Plattner (2010).

POPULISM - Roberts, Kenneth M. "Party-Society Linkages and Democratic Representation in Latin America." Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 27, no. 53 (January 2002): 9-34. [EXTRA]

Party linkage in Latin America is shifting from programmatic linkages to ones based on brokerage. This means parties are less attached to social constituencies and more individualized and contingent in their association Talk of a crisis of representation in Latin America is overblown - it is more a shift in representation. Understanding this requires looking at parties linkages to society and individuals more so than levels of party competition. The modern landscape of market relations, mass media, and globalization is poorly suited for programmati linkages in Latin America, which were developed in the era of ISI. Indeed, individualized linkages are increasingly well suited to a society dominated by market individualism and depoliticization Parties - and stable ones at that - are a necessary evil in modern democracy, with a failure of party linkages being associated with a failure of democracy writ large. Thus, it is key to understand the different forms of linkages. Party-society linkages can vary in terms of their levels of association (individual or collective) and their level of contingency (long-lasting party linkages, or contingent and short lived ones with free shopping for parties) This understanding leads to a typology of five types of linkages, which are exhaustive but not mutually exclusive: (1) political brokerage and patron-clientelism - an exchange of selective material benefits for political support, with parties requiring vertical organization for the distribution of goods but not horizontal organization for popular mobilization - loyalty is maintained via the exchange of goods; (2) Encapsulating linkages - mass based organizational structures with participatory modes of affiliation - giving the masses direct involvement in the political process beyond voting, with a focus on mass groups helping to organize civil society for the party, wit the party often providing social services in turn - these parties are most often seen in leftist parties with ties to the labor movement; (3) programmatic linkages - where loyalties are based on ideology and general programmatic commitments, which ideologically differentiate parties; (4) personalistic linkages and charismatic bonds - with voters attracted to the leadership qualities of a dominant personality, leading to limited and ephemeral party organization; (5) Marketing linkages - by definition contingent and temporary with voters giving conditional support to parties based on specific policy stances or performance in office, with elections as one-off affairs, leading to professionalized and streamlines parties and individualized appeals, reliant on the use of mass media and focus groups. There are three trends in contemporary Latin American party politics: (1) a shift from collective to individualized association, (2) a shift from mass to elite-based organizational forms, (3) a shift from fixed and durable bands to fluid and contingent ones -- This has lead to looser party-society bonds, less institutionalized representation, and a professionalization of the political arena The encapsulating and programmatic linkages of the era of ISIS had been created in response to mass urbanization and industrialization and competing models of state development - but the collapse of competing economic models beyond liberalism undermined programmatism, and lead to more economizing political techniques like marketing, while market liberalization and globalization disaggregated many of the labor movements behind encapsulating party linkages, with private society replacing the role many parties used to fill - meanwhile, mass media and modern marketing has decreased party incentives to rely on strong linkages instead of professionalized marketing ones. This decrease in party linkages has lent itself to an increase in populism as politicians need less party organization for mass mobilization Brokerage ties are aided by the windfall of privatization, increasing inequality, and a decrease in state supplies of public goods, all of which increase supply and demand - thus it serves to replace the social function of the state Less institutionalized linkages can lead to more isolated political elites, less accountability for politicians, and less representation / organization of civil society.

TERMS - Party System Institutionalization

Party system institutionalization - defined by the stability of interparty competition, the legitimacy of parties, and the depth of party roots (anchoring) in society - is key for understanding party systems. Institutionalization leads to established, clear, stable, and widely accepted expectations about behavior, practice, and organization within the party system. (Mainwaring & Torcal, 2006). Four factors were particularly important for explaining the level of institutionalization, including adaptability, coherence, complexity, and autonomy (Huntington, 2006)

PARTIES - Kenneth Roberts, Changing Course in Latin America: Party Systems in the Neoliberal Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). [CORE]

Party systems in Latin America have been highly volatile over the past decades, especially after the party readjustments caused by market liberalization in the 1990s after a long period of state protectionism and import substitution, and the subsequent left-ward shift that followed in response. This book argues that the political stability of modern latin American countries was a product of their political alignments during the market-oriented transitions of the 1980s and 1990s, and that this impacted the nature of leftist parties that rose up in response. Under this view, the 1990s transition was a critical juncture essential in shaping modern political outcomes and calls for social welfare in Latin American countries. ""Divergent outcomes, I argue, were shaped by three basic causal factors or independent variables: (1) the character of national party systems during the era of state-led development; (2) the depth and duration of economic crises during the transition to neoliberalism; and (3) the political orientation of leading market reformers and their opponents in each country. This third factor largely deter- mined whether structural adjustment would align or de-align party systems along a left-right axis of programmatic competition." (Roberts - 5) "Market reforms that were led by conservative, pro-business par- ties or leaders, and consistently opposed by a major party of the left, aligned party systems programmatically. Such reform alignments channeled societal dissent against market orthodoxy toward moderate and institutionalized par- ties of the left, stabilizing partisan competition in the post-adjustment era. Alternatively, reforms that were imposed by labor-based populist or center- left parties de-aligned party systems programmatically, leaving opponents of the reform process without effective representation in established institutions. Such opposition was thus channeled into anti-systemic forms of social and electoral protest that spawned new populist or leftist movements, with highly destabilizing consequences for party systems in the post-adjustment era." (Roberts - 6) A sudden switch by the left from import substitution to liberalism lead to 'bait and switch' politics that weakened party brands and decreased party loyalties and thus harmed competition by making it harder for parties to link societal interests to meaningful programmatic alternatives. Stable partisanship relies on strong linkages to voters and strong cleavages between parties - the 1990s critical juncture undermined both for leftist parties in charge. Further "In some countries, party systems were reconfigured by the rise of a mass- based, labor-mobilizing populist or leftist party with organic linkages to workers (and sometimes peasant) movements during the statist era. In others, elite- controlled parties remained electorally dominant and incorporated lower classes primarily through vertical patron-client linkages. These "elitist" and "labor- mobilizing" (LM) party systems were embedded in distinct developmental matrices or "varieties of capitalism" (Hall and Soskice 2001), with more extensive lower-class organization and more ambitious state-led development typically being associated with the LM cases.... These characteristics created a formidable and highly destabilizing set of adjustment burdens for LM party systems during the transition to neoliberalism - in particular, the political costs of severe and often prolonged economic crises, the social dislocations attendant to market restructuring, the discrediting of statist policies and interventionist practices that historically pro- vided parties with programmatic linkages to labor and popular constituencies, and the demise of mass-based organizational models in both civil and political society." (Roberts, 7-8) Programmatism is more likely to create strong class identities, clientelism more likely to blur them. The lack of party loyalty in Latin America leads to campaigning over valence issues. Further, the failure of parties leads politicians to rely more on charismatic and populist appeals to create reliable basis of support, since parties fail to provide these and are distrusted by voters.

POPULISM - Kenneth Roberts, "Market Reform, Programmatic (De)alignment, and Party System Stability in Latin America," Comparative Political Studies 46, no. 11 (2012): 1422-1452. [CORE]

Party volatility in Latin America can be linked to the critical juncture of market liberalization in the 1980s and 1990s, as countries transitioned from import substitution industrialization (ISI). Market reforms that were adopted by conservstive leaders allowed leftist parties an opportunity to coherently oppose them, and strengthened the party system. But market reforms that were adopted by liberal leaders lead to a decline in clear party identities (dealignment) and programmatic distinctions, which decreased voter allegiance and led to the rise of radical left counter movements heavily steeped in charismatic and populist leadership. "In some countries, neoliberal critical junctures aligned party systems programmatically, stabilizing the electorate and providing institutional channels for the articulation of societal dissent from market orthodoxy. In much of the region, however, these critical junctures dealigned party systems by generating uncertainty about parties' programmatic commitments. This uncertainty eroded programmatic linkages between parties and voters and channeled dissent into anti-system forms of social and political protest." (Roberts - 1424) Different types of parties were better able to weather the transition to neoliberalism as well, with parties more reliant on labor-mobilization and mass-based participation on the left having a harder time incorporating market reforms into their system, compared with more elitist parties with top-down and clientelistic links to patrons. Parties require coherent and stable policy platforms to recruit stable voting basis, and it was precisely the process of liberalization that made such consistency for left leaning parties impossible. Ironically, it was left leaning parties that often had the biggest advantage in liberalizing because right-wing parties were more likely to face significant opposition from the left. There are thus three broadly differentiable trends that occured because of the critical juncture of market liberalization in Latin America - there were a) junctures that helped align party systems programmatically (which happened when conservatives lead the reforms and liberals resisted it - this was seen in Brazil, Chile, and the Dominican Republic), b) junctures that helped dis-align party systems (which happened where liberals lead the reforms and conservatives were in the opposition - this was seen in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela), and c) junctures that had a neutral effect on party systems (where conservatives lead the reforms and no strong party on the left existed to offer opposition - this is seen in Colombia, Guatemala, and Panama). In dealigned party systems, support for new parties surged to massive levels after dealignment.

POPULISM - Cas Mudde and Critobal Rovira Kaltwasser, "Populism," in The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, ed. Michael Freeden and Marc Sears, 493-512 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). [CORE]

Populism can be defined as a 'thin-centered ideology' which focuses on a distinction between 'the pure people' and a 'corrupt elite,' and advocates for the protection of popular sovereignty at all costs. Historically, the literature has identified three types of populism: (1) agrarian populism, seen in Russian and the U.S. at the turn of the nineteenth century, (2) socio-economic populism, which is seen in Latin America in the mid-twentieth century, (3) xenophobic populism, which is seen in Europe in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Populism is best defined as an 'ideational approach to politics.' - Populism is a 'thin-centered' ideology pitting the people versus elites and promoting the expression of the general will. It is thin-centered because it severs itself from wide ideational contexts and "offers neither complex nor comprehensive answers to the political questions that societies generate" - thus, populism attaches itself to, and is assimilated into, other 'ideological families.' "This means that populism can take very different shapes, which are contingent on the ways in which the core concepts of populism—the people, the elite, and the general will—appear to be related to other concepts, forming interpretative paths that might be more or less appealing for different societies." (498) This means that populism rarely exists in a 'pure' form, but instead is always manifesting itself in combinations with other concepts that allow it to better survive. The negative pole of populism can be either elitism (which sees society and divided between elites and the masses and believes the elites and inherently more fit to rule) or pluralism (which views society as highly diverse and with overlapping views and belief systems, and believes good politics works to compromise and find consensus from these myriad views). All ideologies have core and peripheral concepts to them. Populism has three core concepts (1) the people - a very vague term that can refer to the people as sovereign (a base for political power), the common people (a unified and noble mass with coherent values and traditions), and the people as a nation (which captures the unique founding myths and cultures of whole political communities that set them apart from others, usually with a distinction between those who belong to this community, and those who do not). (2) the elites - elites are morally distinguished from the people in populism, since they are corrupt and the people are pure. The elites are usually defined on the basis of power, they are usually defined as an economic class with 'special interests,' and they are often defined in a national sense that distinguishes them from the people not just morally but ethnically. (3) the general will - this is where populists gain their legitimacy: from the pure, ultimate, and incontestable authority of the people within a democracy, which gives such leaders an unimpeachable sense of legitimacy and places any threat to populism as a threat to democracy itself. This lends itself to the promotion of measures of direct democracy like plebiscite and referendums. This idea of the general will also creates an image of a cohesive mass of people, which stigmatizes any views or groups that fits outside of this 'general will.' Populism can be combined in various ways with democracy, nationalism, and gender. (1) Democracy - populism relies on democratic legitimacy to support itself, by promoting a supposedly suppressed general will. Thus, populism is usually essentially democratic but opposed to liberal nationalism since it opposes any limits on the will of the people, whether these limits come from existing laws or in the name of protecting minorities. (2) Nationalism - populism can be but need not be linked with nationalism, although the recently nativist populism of Europe is especially nationalist in nature. (3) Gender - populism is often machismo in nature and is often supported primarily by men.

PARTIES - Brambor, Thomas, William Roberts Clark, and Matt Golder. "Are African Party Systems Different?" Electoral Studies 26, no. 2 (2007): 315-23. [EXTRA]

Recent findings by Mozaffar et. al. have claimed African party systems are different than those elsewhere - but these findings are riddled with methodological errors. This paper disputes such claims and shows that, when these errors are adjusted for, African parties responded to institutional and sociological factors like district size and ethnic fragmentation just like parties everywhere. Mozaffar's findings indicate district size and ethinc fragmentation decrease the number of parties, contrary to such factors increasing the number of parties in every other context. The key flaw with this finding is that it (1) doesn't include all the constitutive terms, (2) interprets constitutive terms as unconditional marginal effects, (3) fails to calculate marginal effects and standard errors over a sufficient range of their modifying variables EtHnic fragmentation should theoretically lead to a higher number of parties because of appeals to more groups, especially when that fragmentation is couples with geographic isolation and permissive districting. The results support this finding much more than Mozzafar's. These effects are cancelled out by highly non-permissive electoral systems like single member districts. When errors in the data are corrected for all of the effects Mozzaafar identifies either disappear or reverse themselves.

POPULISM - Italo Colantone and Piero Stanig, "Global Competition and Brexit," American Political Science Review 112, no. 2 (2018): 201-218. [CORE]

Support for Brexit was higher in regions of Britain hit harder by economic globalization. This paper traces this phenomenon to surging imports from China over the past three decades causing a divergence in economic performance between different regions of the country. Those exposed to this shock have seen a decline in industry and employment. Thus, the 'losers' of globalization are left feeling displaced by this import shock and respond with support for more populist measures. The impact of such import shocks, more importantly, is sociotropic, not purely personal and economic (pocket-book), with people in affected regions responding similarly. Further, individual attitudes towards immigration are systematically worsened by the import shock, while not being systematically related to the actual levels of immigraiton within a region - pointing to sociotropic feelings of economic distress as a driving cause animus towards immigrants. There are three mechanisms through which the import shock may have increased support for Brexit - (1) the vote for Brexit could have been an anti-incumbent vote, with the 'losers' of globalization sending a message to the incumbent government and expressing their discontent with the government's approach through a generalized opposition to them; (2) a vote for Brexit can be seen as protectionist backlash by voters aware of globalization's role in their economic decline and thus seeking to 'take back control' of their economy; (3) a vote for Brexit could be tied ot immigration, with areas more concerned about immigration (perhaps because of economic decline) being more likely to support it. This findings of this paper support import shocks as decisive in the referendum, showing that if they hadn't happened the results would have been likely reversed. The results are further both highly statistically and substantively significant. Meanwhile, the inflow of immigrants within a region is a poor predictor of support for Brexit. Thus, 'globalization without compensation' should be key to understanding populism in the West right now - "The inability of governments to set up effective compensation policies for the "left behind" of globalization might have led to a crisis of embedded liberalism, breeding isolationism and neo nationalism." (217)

AUTHORITARIANISM - Dan Slater, Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). [CORE]

The central question behind authoritarianism is why elites are prone to act collectively in some political systems more than others? The ability of an authoritarian regime to survive and succeed is completely dependent on 'elite collective action.' Different levels of elite coordination correspond with different levels of contentious politics within a state, which is a key determinant of what kind of state emerges. The key thesis of this book is that consistent contentious politics with the populous help make elites feel threatened and encourages them to coalesce around the construction of a more powerful state that can better protect them - when a wide range of elites feel threatened in their property, privileges, and persons by contentious politics, they form pacts and support institutional bullworks against popular resistance. Thus, collective fear among elites driven by 'permanent and difficult' threats to their power and safety are an essential feature in creating good institutions in authoritarian states. This is the process of ordering power, whereby coalesced elites can create effective systems of state control and development. "As an especially sturdy foundation for elite collective action, protection pacts facilitate the formation of powerful states, well-organized parties, cohesive militaries, and durable authoritarian regimes - all at the same time." (6) Elites are the key issue in most authoritarian regimes, and figuring how to tame them is the essential question - while monetary incentives can be important in this end, they can also be fleeting - thus collective and shared fear is a much more effective mechanism. The variations in type and timing of contentious politics within a state are thus key determinants of its success. The two key factors that make the type of contentious politics more likely to result in cohesion among elites are if it 1) is seen as endemic and not episodic and 2) is seen as involving unmanageable levels of mass mobilization (this is most likely with class conflicts in urban areas that exacerbate communal tensions, since class conflict is most likely to result in redistributive demands which are feared by all elite equally). The key factor that makes the timing of contentious politics more likely to result in elite cohesion is if its onset is prior to an effort to creat an authoritarian leviathan - since if it is before, it can be used as an impetus for creating effective state institutions, whereas if it is after, such a focus on strengthening the state will be harder to justify. Strong coalitions for a state are made up of four groups - 1) state officials (including the military and police), 2) economic elites, 3) the middle class, and 4) communal elites (such as religious figure heads). Having all of these elites in a cohesive coalition allows for the creation of durable institutions that allow elites to coordinate behavior and express their interests (like bureaucracies, parties, and militaries). Without such a cohesive ruling apparatus, the state is likely to fail. "If a regime is founded in the absence of endemic and unmanageable conflict, it can never become a protection pact - any subsequent conflicts will as likely turn elites against the incumbent regime for its failure to provide protection as it will incite them to seek collective shelter under its continuance. But the inverse does not hold true. A regime born as a protection pact may gradually lose its protective logic as the threats of yesterday fade into the distant past." (19) - in contexts where protective pacts have faded, well enforced norms of action within regimes and remaining institutions can help maintain the government This thesis is demonstrated in southeast Asia, where Malaysia and Singapore succeeded at creating elite cohesion around opposition to a Chinese ethnic lower class, resulting in successful states (a case of domination); where Thailand, The Philippines, and Vietnam faced intermittent and manageable threats to elites which lead to 'flimsy' state institutions and little elite cohesion (a case of fragmentation); and where Burma and Indonesia faced regional rebellions, which enabled the states military instead of elite coalitions and thus lead to the building of militarized state (a case of militarization).

AUTHORITARIANISM - McFaul, Michael. "The Fourth Wave of Democracy and Dictatorship: Noncooperative Transitions in the Post-Communist World." World Politics 54, no. 2 (2002): 212-44. [EXTRA]

The collapse of the USSR and emergence of democracy in some post-communist regimes but not others is a perfect test of the causes of democracy - these transitions are so different from those of the 1970s and 1980s that they shouldn't be grouped together at all but instead referred to as a fourth wave of both democratization and dictatorship. Contrary to theories of democratization which argue an equal balance of power between parties lead to the creation of power sharing democracies, the post-communist period shows that unequal distribution of power was determinative, with the ideological orientation of the most powerful party determining the type of regime to emerge. Thus, democracy emerged where democrats enjoyed a clear power advantage and chose to hegemonically institute democratic institutions. Conversely, countries where dictators had decisive power advantages remained dictatorships. In those countries without a clear power balance, the result was protracted contestation creating unconsolidated, unstable, and partial democracies and authoritarian regimes. Thus, this paper rejects the cooperative model of democratic development based on balances compromise and applied to other historical periods, instead promoting a non-cooperative model focused on dominant players Common theories of democratization focus on the formation of pacts of like minded interests, with the protection of the middle class and elite property concerns, mediation and compromise over institutions, and a limited role for the masses or radicals - Thus, the focus is on stalemate forcing compromise between competing groups. Authors like Prezoworski argue uncertainty over the distribution of power is most likely to create power sharing institutions that are mutually beneficial. The common themes in these theories are: (1) negotiation, (2) crafting and the division of goods, (3) compromise. But this model doesn't fit the post-communist context, where revolutionary transitions to democracy have been most successful and balanced/stalemated ones the most unstable. Instead, it has been uncompromising pursuits of successful democratic models that has worked. Indeed, post-communist transitions lacked limits on the agenda of change, the division of goods/outcomes, the demobilization of the masses. And any semblance of a balance of power with democracy instead being imposed on elites by revolutionary masses. Indeed, the stalemate model of democracy seems to have little success outside of the the 3rd wave cases - Thus, the key factors in this model is a normative commitment to democracy be leaders powerful enough to impose it on the polity at a moment of transition Example of full democracies in Eastern Europe = Croatia / Poland; full dictatorships = Bealrus, Kazakhstan; Partial-Democracies: Ukraine, Albania. There are some exception to this model, which are caused by 2 factors: (1) disputed borders, which lead to conflict and less odds of democratization, as seen in Georgia, and (2) ties to the West, especially geographic ones, which could overcome poor conditions for democratization as seen in Romania

TERMS - Rational Choice Model of Party Formation

The rational choice account of party formation argued for here claims that parties help solve problems that existent institutions otherwise can't solve, which fall into three categories: (1) the problem of ambition and elective office seeking - parties serve to regulate the competition for office which inevitably will have greater demand (politicians) than supply (offices); (2) the problem of making decisions for the party and for the polity - parties thus solve collective choice problems among politicians and give them a means of uniting policy goals and maintaining majorities; (3) the problem of collective action - winning office requires mobilizing voters and parties help both increase awareness of candidates, turn out voters, and provide access to resources. (Aldrich, 1995)

AUTHORITARIANISM - Milan W. Svolik, The Politics of Authoritarian Rule (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). [CORE]

There are two conflicts fundamental to authoritarian politics - the problem of authoritarian control, which is conflict between those who rule and those who are ruled; and the problem of authoritarian power-sharing, which is conflict between those who rule and those they share power with. Historically, the vast majority of dictators (271 out of 303) have been removed via other regime insiders, and not popular uprisings. Two factors fundamentally shape how dictators try to address these issues: 1) dictators inherently lack an independent authority with the power to enforce agreements among political actors; 2) violence is an ever-present and ultimate arbiter of conflicts in authoritarian politics. Thus, authoritarianism is defined by issues in controlling issues with power-sharing the popular discontent within the "dismal conditions" of authoritarian politics. Resistance to a dictator is difficult because it is such a high risk environment - this interaction between dictators and power-sharers takes two forms: (1) contested autocracy, with a balance between dictator and allies, with the allies capable of threatening rebellion, and (2) established autocracy, with dictators acquiring so much power they can no longer be credibly threatened by their allies. The secrecy and lack of transparency within elite circles increases their instability, which is an important incentive in the creation of parties and other formal decision making bodies (like politburos) - these institutions can alleviate 'monitoring problems' associated with authoritarian power sharing in two important ways - by establishing formal rules and decision making protocol which increase transparency and the exchange of information, and by decreasing the odds of unnecessary escalation via misperceptions. This process is seen in the apparatus of the Communist party of China. Such institutions only work if consistently reinforced and backed by credible threats of force. The masses can also pose a threat to dictators, and can usually be handled either via repression or co-optation. Here, repression is the far more risky strategy because it relies on a very strong military and security apparatus to succeed, which then poses a new threat to the regime in its own right. Thus, dictators have to carefully balance the need for a repressive capacity and the need to keep the military from gaining too much power or leverage. Still, repression is often cheaper and simpler than co-optation, and thus often defaulted to. Parties can be an effective tool of co-optation and power sharing for regimes for regimes. Such parties usually require (1) a hierarchical assignment of services and benefits (whereby members have to 'serve their time' before getting access to benefits), (2) political control over appointments, and (3) selective recruitment and repression (which exploits natural career aspirations to foster a stake in the regime). The need to manage both the public and power sharing helps explain the rise of hybrid regimes - "many nominally democratic institu-tions - especially legislatures, parties, and even some elections - serve distinctively authoritarian ends: They help dictators resolve the problems of power-sharing and control. Whereas legislatures serve to represent the diversity of political interests in democracies, their role in dictatorships is to enhance the stability of authoritarian power-sharing by alleviating commitment and monitoring problems among authoritarian elites. Whereas parties in democracies coordinate the political activities of like-minded citizens, regime parties under dictatorship serve to co-opt the most capable and opportunistic among the masses in order to strengthen the regime." (12-3) All of this means that parties contribute to the longevity and stability of authoritarian regimes, allowing them to survive 2-3 times longer. "Rather than fora for political exchange, authoritarian parties are better thought of as incentive structures that encourage sunk political investment by their members" (163) - This co-optation via sunken costs applies to both elites and the public and is aimed at those already ideologically in support of the party, since they are the easiest to co-opt. The conflicts inherent within authoritarianism are impossible to perfectly manage with institutions because commitments can always be backed out of and violence is always a latent threat

POPULISM - Weyland, Kurt. "Neopopulism and Neoliberalism in Latin America: Unexpected Affinities." Studies in Comparative International Development 31, no. 3 (1996): 3-31. [EXTRA]

This article seeks to explain the surprising convergence between political populism and economic liberalism in Latin America - Both neopopulism and neoliberalism seek mass support from an unorganized people, while marginalizing autonomous organizations of the better-off and attacking political elites. Both fit a top-down, state-centered strategy of wielding power. Neopopulists also appeal to some of the benefits of neoliberalism for the poor of Latin America in alleviating the financial crisis, and has imposed high costs on the apparatus of populism. Menem in Argentina, Collor de Mello in Brazil, and Fujimori in Peru are all examples of the fusion of neopopulism and neoliberalism in Latin America - This is inspire of early theorists arguing populism was only possible with mass redistributive state apparatuses More recent theories have focused on the 'bait and switch' tactic by politicians. But this ignores the continued reliance on populist mechanisms even after these leaders took office - A view of populism and liberalism as compatible is more useful Populism is here defined as having three attributes - a personal leader appealing to a heterogenous mass of followers, the leader raches such followers via a quasi-personal manner bypassing intermediary organizations, and if the leader builds organizations of mobilization they remain personalized and uninstitutionalized - this view of populism varies based on which mass of the people is targeted by it, with neopopulism focusing on the urban informal sector and rural poor Economic liberalism is defined as the predominance of the market as the main means of resource allocation. This paper argues neopopulism and neoliberalism have formed alliances in countries where expansionary, fiscally irresponsible policies created hyperinflationary crises. Neopopulism and neoliberalism indeed rely on surprisingly similar logics Populism rose in Latin America on the back of noninstitutionalized parties and economic crises leading to widespread deprivations - neopopulism in particular appealed to the informal urban / rural sectors left out of a labor based state in the past Populism faced a crises in the 1980s, with hyperinflation undermining the redistribution it relied upon - but leaders like Fujimori found a way of reconciling austerity with populism This approach took advantage of the key overlaps between populism and liberalism - they are both anti-organizational (populism in a majoritarian sense, liberalism in an individualistic one), both appeal to people who feel left out by rejecting structures that seem to violate norms of freedom and fairness, both attack an established political class, both rely on top-down reform reliant on strong leaders that strengthens the apex of the state (while removing checks and balances), both harm organized groups (like unions) in civil society, and both appealed to the 'losers' of ISI (the urban informal sector and rural poor) In short, populism targets elites and organized groups as politically corrupt and neoliberalism targets them as rent-seekers and inefficiencies limiting entrepreneurship.

PARTIES - Cox, Gary W. Making Votes Count: Strategic Coordination in the World's Electoral Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. [EXTRA]

This book focuses on the process of strategic coordination in executive and legislative elections Successful strategic coordination decreases the number of competitors, but this also entails a selection of which candidates will survive and this can have key policy effects. Thus, coordination has both a reductive and a redistributive effect, reducing the number of candidates and redistributing votes to some and not others. The reductive effect is most evident when coordination succeeds and the redistributive effect is most evident when coordination fails. There are three main variables that determine the nature of the coordination system: (1) electoral institutions, (2) political motivations, (3) public expectation. Electoral institutions, as seen with Duverger's law - set out the context of the coordination game that elites and voters must play, but the preferences of elites and mass actors matter too and whether actros with similar ideologies are more focused on policy differences (which encourages divisions) or on electoral success (which encouraged coordination). Finally, expectation about the actions of other party/candidate voters and freedom information (polling_ on voter preferences impact the feasibility of coordination. Expectation about the reasonable number of candidates in a systems create a supply and demand equilibrium much like a market but this will only be true so far as information about expectation is fully available - Equilibrium dynamics are thus central to party dynamics. When electoral institutions are clear, politicians are aimed at winning seats, and knowledge about different actors votes is precise, coordination should be easy and successful. The necessity of coordination only implies an upper bound on the number of competitors within an electoral system. Duverger's law states that simply majority single ballot systems (i.e. simple plurality rule) favors the two-party system, while Duverger's hypothesis states that the simple majority system with 2nd ballots and PR favors multipartism - this book tests these proposals at the district level in terms of effective number of candidates, not nationally at the effective number of parties. There has been intense opposition to Duverger's law because it resembles institutional determinism which ignores social cleavage structures. This book explores whether such sociological and institutionalist views of party competition can be integrated together. Sociological explanations argue the number of cleavages within a society will impact the number of parties - this view should be compatible with a view that says election rules also matter - as seen by the fact that the number of parties competing for upper and lower chambers of congresses often varies if the two chambers have different electoral rules and as seen in contexts where a concentrated social group in a country allows multipartism to thrive even under plurality elections by giving other parties regional strongholds (as seen in Canada) There are thus three key stages of party formation when sociological and institutional views are integrated tougher - (1) translation social cleavages into partisan preferences, (2) translating partisan preferences into votes, (3) translating votes into seats. Thus, there is a translation of possible parties to launched parties, of launched parties to known parties, or known parties to voted for parties, and of voted for parties to seat-winning parties. Typically the first 2 stages rely more on relevant social cleavages and funding, the second 2 on electoral mechanisms. At the district level, post-entry context, Duverger's law is caused by both strategic contributing by elites to only viable candidates at the start of the race, and strategic voting by voters (especially when elites fail to coordinate) - these two mechanisms should function in all voting systems, even PR ones, to put an upper bound on the number of possible candidates The equilibrium number of candidates for a system can be determined by how many candidates could expect to have a serious chance of winning the sear (which is usually 1 more than the number of seats) but this effect can be mediated by social factors and by voters motivations and voters expectations Because the rise of a new party requires many voters defecting together it is a classic case of a coordination problem - without coordination, people's votes don't count. When coordination succeeds therefore, there is a decrease in the number of parties, both because of elite coordination in contribution and voter coordination at the voting booth. When coordination fails, the maladroit find themselves underrepresented. This book shows that institutionally rational voters with rational expectations should lead to Duverger equilibriums, which is set by an upper bound on acceptable competitors but not an exact number of parties, which leaves more space for social cleavages impacting the number of parties below that upper bound. Legislature link together in parties over the district level to solve the coordination problem (a la Aldrich) - this is impacted by how closely linked executive elections are with legislative elections since when they are closely linked the upper bound on executive elections is likely to effect the number of parties for legislative elections Coordination problems can aid dominant party systems.

TERMS - Branding Model of Partisanship

This is a model of party loyalty whereby people categorize themselves into identity groups they think they resemble, and will support parties that align with these identities. When parties have clear identity boundaries, these attachments will be strong, but when party identities are more fluid or weaker, the attachments will be more tepid.

PARTIES - Noam Lupu and Rachel Beatty Riedl, "Political Parties and Uncertainty in Developing Democracies," Comparative Political Studies 46, no. 11 (2012): 1339-1365. [CORE]

Uncertainty - the imprecision with which political actors are able to predict future interactions - affects party systems, especially in developing democracies, and is expressed through regime uncertainty, economic uncertainty, or institutional uncertainty. This is essential to understanding the volatility and weak programmatic appeals of parties in much of the developing world. New democracies with weaker institutional legacies face high levels of institutional uncertainty and more consistent threats of democratic reversals, and subsequently the parties within these democracies change their strategic calculations in formulating party platforms. This uncertainty can be regime uncertainty (a fear of authoritarian reversals, which undermines faith in the longevity of political institutions), economic uncertainty (the instability of developing economies placed within a broader global economy and subject to the influence of international actors), and institutional uncertainty (where a disconnect between formal and informal norms and institutions can lead to uncertainty about which prevails in different contexts, and where a lack of party reputations decreases the costs of reneging on commitments). This uncertainty can lead parties to form more flexible organizations reliant on less programmatic mobilization apparatuses (like clientelism), and can also lead to them to rely on flexibility to respond to quickly changing economic conditions. In both cases, higher uncertainty leads to a higher need for party flexibility which leads to less institutionalization. Further, a fear of future reversals placed a higher emphasis on immediate political gains (and their resultant access to resources) as opposed to sustainable voting blocks that promise access in an uncertain future. This is worrisome because the parties that develop early on may prove sticky to democratic norms in the future.

AUTHORITARIANISM - Robert Mattes and Michael Bratton, "Learning About Democracy in Africa: Awareness, Performance, and Experience," American Journal of Political Science 51, no. 1 (January 2007): 192-217. [CORE]

"Conventional views of African politics imply that Africans' political opinions are based either on enduring cultural values or their positions in the social structure. In contrast, we argue that Africans form attitudes to democracy based upon what they learn about what it is and does. This learning hypothesis is tested against competing cultural, institutional, and structural theories to explain citizens' demand for democracy (legitimation) and their perceived supply of democracy (institutionalization) with data from 12 Afrobarometer attitude surveys conducted between 1999 and 2001. A multilevel model that specifies and estimates the impacts of both individual- and national-level factors provides evidence of learning from three different sources. First, people learn about the content of democracy through cognitive awareness of public affairs. Second, people learn about the consequences of democracy through direct experience of the performance of governments and (to a lesser extent) the economy. Finally, people draw lessons about democracy from national political legacies." "In sum, democracy has a low probability of breakdown where two conditions are met, namely that large ma- jorities of citizens demand democracy as their preferred political regime, and judge that their leaders have internal- ized and follow democracy's institutional rules. Aggregate indicators of the popular demand for democracy and mass perceptions of its supply (as well as trends in these indica- tors over time) should therefore provide insight into the prospects for the consolidation of democracy." "Democracy enjoys a significant base of popular support in the 12 African countries surveyed circa 2000. More than two out of three citizens (70%) say that they prefer democracy to other forms of government." - But many are still willing to tolerate forms of authoritarianism (58%) The key factor shaping African views of democracy is their own experiences and learning concerning the regimes content and consequences. This helps understand how democracies can becomes consolidated in Africa, since consolidation occurs only when "all significant elites and an overwhelming proportion of citizens see democracy as 'the only game in town.'" this article argues that "democracy has a low probability of breakdown where two conditions are met, namely that large majorities of citizens demand democracy as their preferred political regime, and judge that their leaders have internationalized and followed democracy's rules" (193) This article argues that people form opinions about democracy based on short-, medium-, and long-term experiences about what democracy is and what it does, as opposed to stemming from deep values and orientations. this article argues that thinking about democracy in Africa is shaped by three things: 1) accounts of the delivery of political goods and the prevailing economic conditions, 2) learning about democracy by drawing lessons from comparisons with previous authoritarian regimes or even from the longer political legacy of the postcolonial period, 3) and by developing intrinsic attachments to democracy that are quite independent of any consideration of performance

TERMS - Parliamentarism

"A parliamentary regime in the strict sense is one in which the only democratically legitimate institution is parliament; in such a regime, the government's authority is completely dependent upon parliamentary confidence." (Linz - 52) Shugart - Pure parliamentarism is defined as (1) executive authority in the PM and cabinet arises from the legislature, and (2) the executive is at all times subject to dismissal via a vote of no confidence.

TERMS - Populism

A highly contested term, but the main definition used is the one by Mudde and Kaltwasser (2008) - Populism can be defined as a 'thin-centered ideology' which focuses on a distinction between 'the pure people' and a 'corrupt elite,' and advocates for the protection of popular sovereignty at all costs. This means that populism rarely exists in a 'pure' form, but instead is always manifesting itself in combinations with other concepts that allow it to better survive.

AUTHORITARIANISM - Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010) [CORE]

Although the Third Wave saw democracy spread all over the world, its institutions were often set up to be highly skewed in order to maintain authoritarianism - the competition was 'real, but unfair' - in these competitive authoritarian regimes. Among these regimes, there are two key factors that determined if they eventually democratized or not: 1) ties to the west, with strong economic/political/social ties and cross-border flows (of goods, capital, people, or information) increasing the odds of democratization, and 2) the strength of governing party and state organizations, with weaker governing structures leading to higher odds of collapse. What distinguishes competitive authoritarian regimes from democratic ones is how level the playing field is between incumbents and the opposition. These regimes allow real opposition and competition, they just limit the comparative advantage of that competition contrasted with the incumbents. Here, elections are competitive but not fully free and fair, civil liberties are nominally guaranteed and partially respected, and the playing field is tiled via the abuse of state institutions, and limits to the oppositions' ability to organize. The three key tools of tiling the playing field are: 1) disparate access to resources; 2) disparate access to the media; 3) disparate access to the law. Competitive authoritarianism is a post-Cold War phenomenon, with governments trying to appeal to U.S. notions of democracy in order to gain access to its resources. Thus, "formal democratic institutions" allowed countries to position themselves "favorable in the international contest for scarce development resources." Usually, competitive authoritarian regimes failed to democratize - 15 out of 35 cases democratized, while 20 either transitioned to new forms of authoritarianism or maintained their competitive authoritarian regime. There are three steps to the argument made here: 1) Where links to the west were strong, competitive authoritarian regimes democratized because they were highly supervised; 2) where links were low, state and government structures were key, with organized and cohesive structures decreasing threats to the regime and collapse; 3) the state's vulnerability to western democratizing pressure was often decisive, meaning those states that had an ability to blunt such pressure often survived for longer. Thus, high-linkage = democratization, low-linkage and low-organization = collapse, low-linkage and high-organization = maintenance. Coalitions in competitive regimes are often the most rational means of opposition parties maintaining access to the resources needed to survive. There are two key elements of international influence on competitive authoritarian regimes: 1) western leverage (a country's vulnerability to external democratizing pressure and bargaining power with the west - this is often insufficient on its own to force democratization); 2) linkages to the west (the density of political, economic, social and organizational ties to the west, and its cross-border flow of goods, capital, services, people, and information). linkage increases the democratizing impact of leverage in 3 different ways: 1) it improved external monitoring by increasing information flows, 2) linkage increases the odds Western states will actually use their leverage for democratization, 3) linkage increases the domestic impact of international pressure by increasing internal pressure and opposition - meaning abuse triggers far more resistance because people realize what is at stake. The two key factors for internal organizational capacity are the state and the party - both of which can be measured in terms of scope and cohesion- "whereas strong states help coerce and suppress opposition and permanent movements for change, strong parties allow incumbents to manage intra-elite conflict, mobilize support, and gain legitimacy through elections"

PARTIES - Hug, Simon. Altering Party Systems: Strategic Behavior and the Emergence of New Political Parties in Western Democracies. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. [EXTRA]

New parties are important phenomena because they: (1) sometimes replace established parties and significantly modify the party system, (2) can significantly impact party competition even when not long-term successful, (3) groups considering forming new parties force ideological adaptation by major parties. This book explores the emergence of new parties as an interaction between existing parties and groups considering party formation, set within structural environments defined by election laws, ballot access restriction, the structure of the government, etc. Existing literature on the topic points to neglected issue areas, economic issues, ad institutionalized constraints impacting new parties. But existing studies have focused too much on epiphenomenal waves of new party formation and not the overall phenomenon and have been inconsistent in considering institutional factors. The focus of this study in only on stable democratic systems, not on new democratic systems 0 meaning both stable institutions and parties already exist To understand the function of new parties a coherent theoretical model is needed. New issue areas are not along sufficient for the formation of new parties - there also have to be political and institutional facilitators. The interaction between existing parties and groups contemplating forming new parties fits within a game-theoretic model with new groups wanting established parties to adopt their programs and respond to their demands, and parties having to integrate these demands while satisfying their base. Thus, this model has 2 actors - the potential new party and the established party - with established parties also facing the challenge of successfully understanding how many voters they stand to gain/lose on a neglected issue and how likely a new party movement is to last, with established parties being at a disadvantage in assessing this information compared to the new party. The game theory thus follows the following logic - a potential new party makes a demand which is either high or low, then the established part has to decide whether to accept or reject the demand but with limited information on how strong the new party is. If they do reject the demand, the potential new party decides weather or not to actually form a new party The costs associated with the new party will vary depending on how strong it is and how high its demands, with high demands by weak parties the most costly and low demands by strong parties the least costly. Meanwhile, costs to established parties come in the form of either accepting a demand (with accepting low ones being the lowest cost) or in fighting the new party( with fighting a strong party being the highest cost). Because accepting low demands is always the lowest cost option, the key variable is if established parties accept high demands, which depends crucially on their access to information about how strong a new party actually is - if it seems likely it is strong, even high demands will be accepted. Thus, strong potential new parties will always make high demands and weak ones will gamble sometimes on bluffing if they think they can be mistaken as strong This leads to 3 outcomes: if there is perfect information or strong challengers are very likely, no new parties will form - if there is uncertainty and strong challengers are less likely/weak challenger not credible, only strong new parties will form - and when there is uncertainty and strong challengers are less likely but weak challengers are credible, strong and weak new parties will form. Thus, there are 3 key variables on new party formation: (1) the prior belief of facing a strong challenge, (2) the credibility of weak new challengers, (3) the likelihood that the established party will reject a high demand This leads to five key implications: (1) the number of unresolved political issues should impact the number of potential new parties, (2) the costs of new party has to face decreases the number of new challengers, (3) if important demands are accepted by established parties and this yields large benefits to the potential new parties, the number of challengers will increase, (4) new parties increase when the cost of fighting a challenger are high, (5) new parties will increase proportional to the benefits they can expect from electoral participation.

TERMS - Party De-aligment

Concept explored by Kenneth Roberts (2012), whereby party identities become less clearly delineated and detached from their linkages to citizens (as seen with the liberalization of economies by left-leaning parties in Latin American in the 1990s) and this leads to declining party loyalty and faith in existing parties, and thus increased resort to extreme parties and charismatic leaders, reflected in populism.

PRES & PAR - Strom, Kaare. "Parliamentary Democracy and Delegation." In Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies, edited by Kaare Strom, 55-98. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. [EXTRA]

Delegation is a universal of democracy and stems from 3 imperatives for citizens - namely, problems in (1) capacity - personnel and resource restraints which limit decision making (most notably time), (2) competence - a faith in the increased ability of properly selected representatives and other bureaucrats, (3) social choice and collective action problems, since delegation rids of some of the tissues of mass decision making. This view of delegation creates a principle-agent model with those authorized to make political decisions (principals) designating others to act in their name and place (agents) - This view relies on a number of assumptions: (1) the political community is given and bounded, (2) the preferences of principals and agents are exogenously given (formation isn't considered), (3) all principals and agents act rationally on the information available to them, (4) principals face information sacrifice and information is critical, (5) politics is hierarchical with principal preferences being privileged (e.g. agents only provide options for principals to chose from). There are inset limits on representation in most democracies, like the protections of liberal democracy and other constitutional commitments to minority protections - office holders are thus both constrained and common-agents (representing the polity as a whole, not just some voters) Principal-agent relations risk agency problems, where agents act in ways that go against the preference of principals - this can especially happen when there are information asymmetries or hidden information, which limits the monitoring of agents. This can lead to issues of adverse selection (picking the 'wrong' agents), and moral hazard (agents having incentives to take observable actions contrary to principal's interests). These instances of misbehavior by agents commonly take the form of (1) policy divergence - differences in policy preferences, (2) leisure-shirking - agents preferring leisure over policy, and (3) rent-seeking. These can be checked via the mechanisms of accountability whereby agents are obliged to act on the behalf of principals and can be awarded or punished for their success at doing so - This implies 2 rights for principals - the right to demand information ad the capacity to impose sanctions. There are 3 forms of sanctions (1) vetos/blocking, which amend agent decisions, (2) removal of the agent, (3) imposing penalties Some agent accountability can go into the agent selection process via screening, contract design, and institutional checks - these are ex-ante checks. Ex-post accountability after agent selection relies on access to information about the agents. Elections are both ex-ante and ex-post checks. The 2 key mechanisms of accountability are competition (allowing deauthorization of agents) and constraint (offering penalties) - parliamentary regimes tend to rely more on competition (ex-ante accountability) and presidential regimes tend to rely more on constraint (ex-post accountability). The machine of delegation in parliamentarism has four steps: voters to elected reps, elected reps to the executive and cabinet, the executive and cabinet to individual cabinet ministers, and ministers to civil servants. This is an ideal chain of delegation because each link has a single principle delegating to a single agent and each agent is accountable to one principal - it looks like an hourglass with many citizens being funneled into a PM and cabinet which then funnels to civil servants - this is also the embodiment of hierarchical governance set ups Presidential delegation is much more complicated with checks and balances creating overlapping and competing principal agent relations - this ia plurarchy set up These 2 systems of delegation can be measured on 2 institutional feature: indirect delegation with few agents being directly accountable to citizens in parliamentarism while more are directly accountable in presidentialism) and singularity (with parliamentarism having singular principal-agent relations and presidentialism have competing and overlapping ones) The long and singular chain of delegation in parliamentarism increases the chances of agency losses and singularity decreases competition as a check on such loss. Thus, parliamentary democracy relies heavily on ex-ante control, sorting agents and subjecting them to centralized authority via party governance. Therefore, parliamentary systems rely on centralized, cohesive, policy oriented parties for political accountability. Voters select parties from an intense public competition and endow them with an almost complete monopoly of government power. Such parties provide extensive screening of agents, since PMs, cabinet members, etc. have to survive the party gauntlet, but party control drops off in the more meritocratic and non-partisan civil services. This requires parties being (1) the central mechanism of political success for politicians (a la Aldrich) and (2) being effective information economizers who ensure continued support from voters, and (3) having electoral systems that translate votes to representation effectively. The confidence vote and dissolution power are two mechanisms that give parties immense power within parliamentary systems. Thus, parliamentarism focuses heavily on parties and internal selection for accountability but has little ex-post oversight after delegation. In contrast, Presidential systems typically have multiple principals and external checks (like constitutional courts). This lack of ex-post accountability in parliamentary systems is increased by PM control of hte election dates and because the governing party has a monopoly on power and thus little incentive for internal sanctions Party cohesion has been decreasing in parliamentary systems as proportional representation has led to multiparty instead of 2 party systems, since multiparty parliamentarism has less cabinet cohesion and less effective enforcement mechanisms, with election fates being murkier in multiparty coalitions - multi party rule also clouds party identities and party control of the government, which decreases voter links to parties (a la Lupu) Many parliamentary systems also have increase checks on the ruling government, taking the form of partitions (dividing principals, as in federalism) and checks (as in judicial review) Modeling principal-agent relations in presidential and parliamentary systems show parliamentary systems are more prone to agency loss and policy divergence than presidential systems - this is because the monopolistic agenda control in parliamentary systems leads to more instances of radical agents (aka party platforms) having significant party sway Constrained systems may show more bias, whether presidential or parliamentary, because the constraining elites (like courts) may have significant differences in preferences from average voters. The party system, competitive focus, and ex-ante accountability of parliamentary systems all decrease the odds of leisure shirking. Rent seeking is most likely in political systems with (1) a generous public sector, (2) few alternative opportunities for social advancement, and (3) ineffective constraints on the ability of politicians to use their offices for personal gain. Hidden information (not fully knowing your agents) lends to adverse selection issues, while hidden action (agents acting unobserved) leads to moral hazard problems Moral hazard will be worse the larger the size of political rents, the greater the politicians discretion, the weaker the oversight, and the longer the terms of office. Adverse selection and moral hazard can occur along every link of the chain of delegation in parliamentary systems. If the key challenges of a political system is adverse selection, the ex-ante system of checks in parliamentary systems give them advantages, if the key concern is moral hazard, the more robust ex-pose checks in presidential systems are preferable. While parties in parliamentary systems offer many advantages in increasing alignment, screening, and information access, such systems are disadvantageous in terms of increasing policy divergency, increasing agency loss, and decreasing transparency. A long chain of delegation with singular principal-agent relations is only as strong as its weakest link. Thus, the more complex, overlapping, and checked systems of presidential democracy increase policy stability, credibility, and transparency because of increased information requirements in overlapping interactions, and because policy bargaining is more public in presidential systems.

PRES & PAR - Cheibub, Jose Antonio, Zachary Elkins, and Tom Ginsburg. "Beyond Presidentialism and Parliamentarism." British Journal of Political Science 44, no. 3 (July 2014): 515-44. [EXTRA]

Despite the predominance of the president/parliament distinction, there is a great deal of heterogeneity between these categories and with semi-presidentialism, meaning this distinction may be a faulty one. The results from this article show that knowing where and when a country's constitution was written is more useful for predicting the powers of the executive and legislature then whether it is presidential or parliamentary. Most approaches to categorization require the objects under study to share a set of finite definitional properties which are both necessary and sufficient - all definitions need some form of family resemblance without spillover into other categories. The president/parliament distinction not only is taken as valid but also determinative of things like regime stability, party systems, ethnic conflict, etc. This article examines 6 features of constitutional design across 401 constitutions between 1789 and 2006 to test the presidential/parliamentary/semi-presidential classification The overall findings show a high level of heterogeneity between the categories, with some discernible trends - notably, parliamentary governance is the least coherent of the 3 and semi-presidentialism the most coherent, being about equidistant from presidentialism and parliamentarism. Here, semi-presidentialism meets the Elgie definition of being a popularly elected fixed term president existing along side a prime minister and cabinet responsible to parliament.. One distinction between presidentialism and parliamentarism is th degree ot which the executive is dependent on the legislature (in terms of both survival and origin); another is that parliamentary systems maintain tight control of the legislative agenda whereas presidential ones more often relinquish it but retain veto power, which is unique to the presidency; another is that presidents control their cabinet while the legislature controls parliamentary cabinets, with semi-presidentialism falling somewhere in between; another is presidents rely on checks and balances between branches of government while parliaments rely on convergence of government interests; another is that presidential systems tend ot have presidential emergency powers, while parliamentary systems retain those powers for the whole sovereign. Thus, parliamentary systems should have: (1) strong executive control of the legislative agenda, (2) weak executive veto powers, (3) strong executive decree powers, (4) weak emergency provisions, (5) weak executive involvement in cabinet management, and (6) under developed oversight mechanisms. Presidentialism should have weak control of the legislative agenda, strong veto powers, weak decree powers, strong emergency provisions, control of the cabinet, and strong oversight. And semi-presidentialism should represent a middle ground between these two. Just a cursory look at constitutions in the world, like those of Afghanistan, Ukraine, Australia, and Brazil shows that these categorizations seem to lack real world coherence. Looking at constitutional designs, this paper tests government on the key attributes listed above. The results show some temporal distinction but very little cohesion across all 6 dimensions of executive-legislative relations. Post-WWII constitutions show far more internal coherence than pre-WWII ones, even though parliamentary systems are highly heterogeneous in all time periods - other good predictors of presidentialism and parliamentarism are the region the constitution was written in (evidence of contagion effects) and the past constitutions of that country (evidence of institutional path dependencies) and the century they were written in (evidence of historical contingencies).

AUTHORITARIANISM - Bellin, Eva. "Reconsidering the Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Lessons from the Arab Spring." Comparative Politics 44, no. 2 (202): 127-49. [EXTRA]

Does the Arab Spring mean consideration about the robustness of authoritarianism in the Middle East need to be reconsidered? The original article by Bellin focused on the robustness of authoritarianism in the Middle East which gave states a strong coercive apparatus capable of, and willing to, suppress democratic initiatives - this stemmed from (1) the fiscal health of the coercive apparatus aided by access to oil, (2) the maintenance of institutional support networks, (3) the low level of institutionalization of the coercive apparatus, and (4) the low level of popular mobilization to confront the coercive apparatus. Factors 1 and 2 are key to the capacity to repress, factors 3 and 4 to the will to suppress The Arab spring has confirmed the paramount place of a states coercive apparatus in maintaining authoritarianism, since the key to all such protests was the willingness of the military to defect or shoot protestors, with both Egypt and Tunisia seeing military defection. In the country where the military didn't defect (Bahrain) uprisings were suppressed, and in those where the military was divided (Libya) the result was civil war. Many regimes also succeeded at avoiding popular uprisings all together like Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Algeria, due to a combination of government buy-outs (Saudi Arabia), social exhaustion from civil war (Algeria), aor successful cooptation of elites (Morocco) The key question of military defection came down to an issue of will and not capacity. 2 Factors are key in affecting military will to shoot protestors - the institutional character of the military, and the level of social mobilization. Almost all militaries see themselves as having 3 key missions: defending ht country, maintaining security and order, and looking out for the military's institutional interests (which include its internal cohesion, image and prestige, and economic interests). Using military force against civilians challenges all of the military's imperatives since it can decrease their prestige, can undermine safety if the crowds are peaceful, and can decrease the military's internal coherence, discipline, and morale, especially if the crowds seem representative of the nation, and resemble the soldiers themselves. The larger the popular mobilization the higher the cost of repression, both reputationally and in resources The more institutionalized the military (and less patrimonial) the more it will have an identity unique from the regime and thus the more willing it will be to defect, whereas personalized militaries with rampant corruption can't survive without their regimes Both the Tunisian and Egyptian militaries were largely institutionalized (although Egypt's had more ties to the regime) - In Bahrain, the protestors were seen as 'others' because they were shia. And in Libyathe military was divided along society's tribal lines. What has been far more surprising about the Arab Spring has been the levels of social mobilization which were completely unprecedented in the MIddle East - there were four factors that made this social mobilization possible: long-standing grievances (over repression, corruption, and economic hardship), an emotional trigger (outrage over the self-immolation of the fruit vendor and the use of lethal force to put down protests), a sense of impunity (a cascade effect of growing protests decreasing the costs of association with the protests, along with growing knowledge that the military wouldn't shoot), and social media / television (which enabled collective action long suppressed by the state) These four factors can't predict where protests did and didn't arise in the Middle east and are neither necessary nor sufficient to explain the Arab Spring - this is largely because of the sheer power of Contagion and the demonstration effect in the Arab Spring, showing the importance of timing and cross-crass phenomeno in explaining political concepts.

PARTIES - Shaheen Mazaffer, James Scarritt, and Glen Galaich, "Electoral Institutions, Ethnopolitical Cleavages, and Party Systems in Africa's Emerging Democracies," The American Political Science Review 97, no. 3 (August 2003): 379-90. [CORE]

Ethnopolitical cleavages affect party formation - with ethnopolitical fragmentation leading to fewer parties and ethnopolitical concentration leading to more, while both interact with the other electoral institutions in place within a country. This article draws on a data analysis of party systems within modern Africa to argue that social cleavages and electoral institutions are not mutually exclusive determinants of party systems. It draws on a constructivist view of ethnic identity, focuses on the interaction of ethnopolitical cleavages with the social, economic, and political circumstances it exists within - showing that ethnic groups can be constructed depending on the costs of group incorporation and the costs of sustaining group solidarity against competing loyalties. Ethnicity, like electoral systems, can serve as a structure for information and strategic coordination, and they are appealing mechanisms for doing so in developing democracies where other institutions of coordination and information spreading are lacking. Because high levels of ethnic fragmentation makes concentrated ethnic appeals unlikely to yield major electoral victories, large levels of fragmentation encourage a lower number of parties, which encompass wide spanning ethnic coalitions. This can be counteracted by very concentrated ethnic populations that form clear voting blocks in regions, although this is less common. These trends interact with both the district magnitude in an area (which shapes the size of coalitions needed to win majorities) and if there are presidential elections (which often become a means of lesser Presidential candidates wielding their influence for patronage returns for their constituencies). All of this interacts with the constructivist nature of ethnic coalitions too, which consequently tend to be rather fragmentary and flexible, except where highly concentrated. All of this results in an electoral systems with a paradoxical mix of high levels of volatility and low levels of party fragmentation. The overall stability of these coalitions however bodes well for African democracy.

PRES & PAR - Mainwaring, Scott. "Presidentialism, Multipartism, and Democracy: The Difficult Combination." Comparative Political Studies 26, no. 2 (July 1993): 198-228. [CORE]

It is the combination of multipartism and presidentialism that makes presidential democracies more volatile. While presidential systems do suffer from an inability to handle major crises, higher odds of gridlock, and a tendency towards individualism and populism because of direct popular elections, these alone do not explain its instability. Multipartism, specifically, is dangerous in presidential systems because, in contrast to parliamentary systems, presidential ones don't have the tools for dealing with legislative deadlock, which is more likely when there are more than two parties. Further, two party systems help keep ideologically radical parties out of the system via higher barriers of entry - meaning multiparty systems are more likely to suffer from such radicalism. Finally, presidential systems lack the tools needed to maintain coalitions because of the differences in cabinet assignments, legislative support, and term limits, all of which leave the president with more unstable policy coalitions.

AUTHORITARIANISM - Guillermo O'Donnell, "Horizontal Accountability in New Democracies," in The Self-Restraining State: Power and Accountability in New Democracies, ed. Andreas Schedler, Larry Diamond, and Mark Plattner (Boulder: Lynee Reinner, 1999) [CORE]

Many countries in Latin America and Eastern Europe have polyarchies that have weak of intermittent horizontal accountability - there are free and fair elections with an open exchange of ideas (vertical accountability) - but inchoate party systems, poorly defined public policy, sudden policy reversals, and fears of government corruption all limit the effectiveness of democracy. Polyarchies are a combination of three historical currents - democracy, liberalism, and republicanism, which all clash and coexist with each other. Democracy involves the procedures of free choice and association seen in elections, liberalism the idea that some rights should not be encroached upon by any power, republicanism the idea that there is a civic obligation to discharge public duties and serve the public interest when in government roles. All three of these need to be balanced for democracy to be successful and the rule of law stable, and too much of any one of them is problematic (excessive liberalism is laissez-faire oligarchic rule, excessive democracy is majoritarianism, and excessive republicanism is paternalistic rule by elites.) The mixing of these three currents leads to a wide variety of democracies in the world. Part of the problem is that many new democracies, like those in Latin America, have inherited a ready made legal and constitutional structure for democracies but have implemented that structure without the underlying normative expectations and modes of action that are needed to make them efficacious. Specifically, there is often a lack of horizontal accountability, whereby state institutions consistently check themselves and uphold their obligations to the public good and the rule of law. Indeed, it is often seen as a regular part of democracy for public officials to personally benefit from their posts. This tendency also shows itself in executives trying to enact their mandate by bypassing the restraints of the state - Thus, the 'good conscience' of trying to uphold the public mandate leads the executive to wholly disregard liberal and republican constraints and try to eliminate any checks to its power. There are two forms of failures of horizontal accountability: encroachment - the unlawful encroachment by one state agency on the authority of another; and corruption - the unlawful advantages public officials obtain for themselves and their families. Democracies with vertical accountability but little republicanism or liberalism often have checks on corruption (via electoral transparency) but not on encroachment.

PRES & PAR - Chaisty, Paul, Nic Cheeseman, and Timothy Power. Coalitional Presidentialism in Comparative Perspective: Minority Presidents in Multiparty Systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. [CORE]

Minority presidentialism is becoming an increasingly predominant form of government, both because presidentialism is increasing, and the number of parties within presidential systems is increasing. This increase in parties is in part a result of the democratization process, as dominant/authoritarian parties lose their monopolies over power. Further, although minority governments offer several disadvantages for presidents, they have access to five distinct 'tools' that can be used to manage coalitions: 1) control over agenda-setting, 2) control over cabinet positions, 3) control over party powers, 3) control over the budgetary process, 5) control over more informal exchanges of favors. The use of these tools however is often highly personalized and ad hoc within each presidential regime, with minority presidents acting as cost-minimizers aiming to maximize returns from the use of their toolbox.

Terms - Multipartism

Multiparty presidential democracies - where a presidential democracy has more than two dominant parties that consistently compete for and win votes - are identified by Mainwaring (1993) as especially dangerous towards democracy because they increase the odds of polarization and deadlock and decrease the odds of coalition building.

AUTHORITARIANISM - Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan Way. "Not Just What, But When (And How): Comparative-Historical Approaches to Authoritarian Durability." In Advances in Comparative-Historical Analysis, edited by James Mahoney and Katleen Ann Thelen, 97-115. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015 [EXTRA]

Much of the research of authoritarianism has looked to outline a universal range of factors or 'constant causes' that contribute to authoritarian stability, like resource rents, stable parties, and economic conditions. But these institutional and economic variables are moderated by historical and contextual ones, such as when and how such regimes emerge and consolidates. These factors are key in the durability of such regimes. Founding legacies have a great effect but this effect is neither fixed nor static, instead sometimes acting as a bounded determinant of regime success with its effects fading over time, and other times as dynamic determinants that trigger regime strengthening sequences over time. Historical causation highlights the path dependencies of early regime decisions. Events at a regimes foundation engender institutional or coalitional configurations that become self-reinforcing. This is seen in explanations of why some party-based authoritarian regimes are so much more durable than others, with authors arguing parties that stem from rebellion or liberation conflicts create strong colations aided by us-them distinctions and a sense of linked fate, while origins in conflict also enhance a ruling party's repressive capacity. Meanwhile, non-revolutionary parties had weaker ties and relied more on patronage. Thus, robust party-based authoritarianism is the result of historical phenomena that leaders have little control over - a view in line wit the work of Pepinski. Timing and sequencing are also important in these historical analyses. This is seen in the works of Smith on oil wealth in Iran and Indonesia, and the effect of resource discoveries on the quality of institutional development and coalition building as seen in the work of Slater, where elites bond together to oppose revolutionary threats early in the state formation process, and consequently formed good capacity. Such historical accounts must deal with the question of how and why such initial conditions persist (and when they break down). This article identifies three types of regime legacy - (1) static legacies - which are self-perpetuating and stable without an exogenous shock, (2) bounded legacies which degraded overtime and allowed authoritarian breakdown without exogenous shocks, and (3) dynamic legacies, which trigger chains of events that strengthen regimes over time and that potentially allow them to survive inspire of exogenous sources of change. Static legacies are captured in the stable party equilibriums of eastern Europe discussed by Brownlee or in Herb's account of dynastic monarchies in the middle east, both of which stabilize elite competition and lengthen time horizons. Bounded legacies are seen with O'Donnell's explanation of bureaucratic authoritarianism in Latin America which collapsed when the threat of the popular sector waned or by the fading of the revolutionary-cohesion holding together party coalitions caused by generational change as outlined by Levitsky and Way. Dynamic legacies can take 2 forms - self-reinforcing sequences, where founding conditions create a positive feedback loop that strengthens regimes over time, seen with Slater's dynamic of early elite cohesion creating a tax infrastructure that then strengthens the state, the party and its coercive capacity, or with Greene's study of reinforcing party advantages in Mexico; and second, reactive-sequences, where events trigger a reaction-counter-reaction cycle that proves transformative as seen with popular mobilization of elite resistance in CentralAmerica creating robust and reactionary authoritarian states. Thus, various contexts can lead to departures from institutional legacies, as highlighted by Slater in the disappearance of threats to elites.

PRES & PAR - Shugart, Matthew S. "Comparative Executive-Legislative Relations." In The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions, edited by R.A.W. Rhodes, Sarah Binder, and Bert Rockman, 345-63. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. [EXTRA]

Parliamentary and presidential systems differ in how they structure the relations of the executive and the legislative branch. Parliamentary systems have a hierarchical structure, where institutions derive their authority from the legislature, while presidential systems have a transactional structure, with the government branches deriving their authority independent of one another. Thus, the key difference between the two is that parliamentary systems have an executive subordinated to the legislature which can terminate its authority, and presidential systems have an independently elected and autonomous executive. All democratic governments trade off between these hierarchical and transactional relations of the executive and legislature, with many hybrid forms incorporating elements of both into semi-presidentialism. This model fits the classical models of presidentialism and parliamentarism in the UK and US, but also still works for the new multi-party parliamentary systems in Europe under PR The philosophical underpinnings of transactional structures are based on a desire to check competing ambitions in government a la Madison and Montesquieu. Thus, presidential systems set up the electorate, legislature, and executive in opposition to each other while they exist in a straight ascending line in parliamentary systems. These ideal forms are often muddied in actual practice, however, with multi-party parliamentary systems decreasing the direct hierarchical nature of the legislature and cabinet relationship and with many presidential systems lacking the independent legislative hierarchy seen in the United States. These shifts still exist within the spectrum of hierarchy and transactionalism, however. Pure parliamentarism is defined as (1) executive authority in the PM and cabinet arises from the legislature, and (2) the executive is at all times subject to dismissal via a vote of no confidence. A pure presidential system is defined as (1) the executive is popularly elected and serves as 'chief executive,' (2) the terms of the legislature and executive are fixed and not subject to mutual confidence, and (3) the president names and directs the cabinet and has some law-making ability. The key difference between the 2 then is the question of the origin and survival of executive and legislative authority. Semi-presidentialism can then be defined as having: (1) a popularly elected president, (2) the president has consideration constitutional authority, and (3) there also exists a PM and cabinet subject to the confidence of the legislature. Geography is practically destiny for a country's constitution type - parliamentarism dominates the EU, presidentialism dominates the Americas. The level of hierarchy vs. transactionalism in parliamentary systems depends on if they're majoritarian (hierarchical) or multiparty (transactional). The more hierarchical a parliamentary system, the strong the concentration of power can be - in multiparty systems however, there is an inherent degree of transactionalism between the parties to form coalitions. Presidential systems have an executive and legislature with separate origins and survival and yet which require cooperation to pass legislation, making it inherently transactional. The executive and legislature will diverge from each other depending on how constituents get represented in the electoral process. If the divergence between executive and legislative preferences is extreme it can lead to a breakdown of transactions and anarchic rule by fiat - this is also likely in new governments when legislatures are weakly institutionalized. When conflict between presidents and legislatures is high, but the president still have some support in the legislature, giving some cabinet control to the legislature can help increase compromise - presidents thus strategically use cabinet appointment as a means of navigating the challenges of coordination. Semi-presidentialism is proliferating and is quite diverse in its practices - they can be divided into premier presidential systems (with the PM and cabinet exclusively accountable to parliament) or presidential-parliamentary systems (with the PM and Cabinet dually accountable to the president and parliament). Parlies are especially essential for creating the transparency, bargaining, and organization needed to make either presidentialism or parliamentarism work.

PARTIES - Herbert Kitschelt, Kirk A. Hawkins, Guillermo Rosas, and Elizabeth Zechmeister, "Patterns of Programmatic Party Competition in Latin America," in Latin American Party Systems, ed. Herbert Kitschelt, 14-58 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). [CORE]

Parties are a key aspect of democratic accountability and effect the ability of political systems to be responsive to the public throughout Latin America. A key aspect of parties is their ability to resolve coordination and collective action problems amongst politicians. These parties can then become programmatically structures if they compete for citizens' support via differing policy packages and implement valence goods (as opposed to club goods [somewhat targeted] or clientelistic goods [highly targeted]) upon obtaining office. In this model, parties serve as the agents within a principal-agent relationship with voters. If all parties do this it leads to programmatic party structuration (PPS) within the party system. There are many other forms of party linkages with voters (including linkages based on descriptive collective identities, on clientelistic benefits, and on charismatic leadership), but programmatic linkages represent an important normative baseline of how parties are supposed to function in highly functional democracies since they allow for the highest level of government responsiveness and long-term planning. Further, party institutionalization is important for increasing programmatic party platforms and citizen-politician linkages - since both are difficult without the collective action, long-term time horizons, and ideological distillation created by parties, along with the ability of institutionalized parties to give voters a sense of who, and what, they are voting for. This kind of institutionalization can be dangerous if it ossifies a party, or leaves them with an inability to adapt, but is otherwise a key aspect of democratic development. This institutionalization is both possible and real, despite some scholars' views of it as an ideal type. Voters will embrace programmatic parties when voting for them become a low-cost affair - and this will only happen when political actors have the capability to create programmatic parties (material and cognitive resources, with the demand and capacity to supply clientelistic goods decreasing with affluence), the opportunity to create such linkages (through iterated election cycles over long periods of time which allow for adaptive learning shielded from shocks), and when both actors and voters understand the political stakes behind successful partisan alignments. These conditions are more likely in politically centralized, professionalized, and free market societies. They also require politicians to clearly communicate about, deliver on, and achieve performance through their policies. All of this plays out in Latin America, where countries that adopted import substitution industrialization (ISI) tended to develop inclusive welfare states for urban masses, but exclusive ones for rural populations - this helped develop a clear political divide with high stakes that facilitated institutionalized party formation that survived the collapse of ISI.

PRES & PAR - Cheibub, Jose Antonio. Presidentialism, Parliamentarism, and Democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. [CORE]

Presidentialism is more unstable than parliamentarism, but this is not because of intrinsic features of presidential democracies. There is no strong relationship between any of the characteristics of presidentialism and their eventually collapse. Presidential systems don't undermine the incentives for coalition building because minority parties can still gain from the policies produced by coalitions in presidential systems, even if excluded from office. This is affirmed by the fact that minority and coalitions governments are frequent occurrences in successful presidential systems. Instead, presidentialism is more prone to collapse because it has been adopted in countries inherently more prone to democratic collapse in the first place - those countries that were previously ruled by military dictatorships. It is this nexus between militarism and presidentialism that causes its instability, nothing else. And this nexus arises more out of the historical coincidence of when presidential democracies arose in the Cold War than out of any inherent feature of presidential regimes that appeal to military leaders.

PARTIES - Herbert Kitshelt, "The Formation of Party Systems in East Central Europe," Politics & Society 20, no. 1 (March 1992): 7-50. [CORE]

The nature of the party system will be shaped by the constitutional structures they function within - but early on, political actors will not fully understand these institutional constraints and incentives, and thus early parties will not act in equilibrium. When looking at post-communist party formation, this article argues that institutions initially had little impact on the party system and party strategies, and instead "the economic institutions and resources that the deceased communist systems bequeathed to the democratic successor regimes" were the key shapers of political interest. There are three central dimensions that shape political cleavages within a society - "(1) rules specifying who is a player admitted to the institutions, (2) rules of the game players are expected to follow, and (3) the assets players are endowed with in order to participate in the game." (11) - Thus, the three defining problems of electoral politics are issues of citizenship, procedures of participation, and resource distribution This leads to a division between authoritarian and libertarian political models. More authoritarian democracies favor narrow democracy with hierarchical decision making, while more libertarian one's favor a broad scope of participation, social justice, and redistributed wealth. Libertarian models will advocate for more inclusive definitions of citizenship, which will increase more uncertainty into the distribution of political power. They will argue for more participatory input, which will increase uncertainty over the distributive payoffs of political participation and the distribution of wealth. In contrast, authoritarian party systems will prefer the maintenance of the status quo. Thus, in eastern europe, where the status quo was a non-market society, those who advocated for market liberalization also advocated for broader cosmopolitanism and inclusive politics. This is in direct contrast to western parties where the right defends free markets and the left tries to regulate them. This work argues that increased economic development increases voter preferences for libertarian and participatory claims, because more development leads to more affluence, free time, political sophistication, education, and individualism, all of which decrease the threat of changes to the status quo. In less developed economies, in contrast, the security of authoritarian forms of politics, with hierarchical models of decision making and protection of the status quo is preferred. Thus "Where economic development is relatively advanced (especially in the Czech federation of Czechoslovakia), more parties will concentrate on the market-libertarian end of the competitive space. Where industrialization is less advanced, more parties will be clustered around nonmarket-authoritarian ('populist') positions. Thus Hungary, Poland, and Bulgaria, as well as Slovakia, Slovenia, or Croatia at the subnational level, are likely to generate strong parties that are further located toward the authoritarian/nonmarket segment of the competitive space. At the nonmarket/authoritarian extreme, we encounter Romania and Albania and, at the subnational level, Serbia and other southern provinces of Yugoslavia." (20) The more authoritarian a country's politics are, the more likely it is to rely on particularist nationalism for legitimacy. Support for liberal politics in post-communist regimes will be shaped, "not [by] their past location in the collapsing socialist economy but [by] their ability to convert the resources and capabilities that they controlled under the old regime into new resources and capabilities in what they expect to become the new socioeconomic regime. My guiding hypothesis is that those individuals and groups who are confident that they will succeed in converting their assets into valuable resources in a capitalist market society will support parties with liberatiran-promarket outlooks." (24) Thus you can map opposition to liberalization based on the distribution of skills in a post-communist country's workforce. More authoritarian parties are more likely to be clientelistic too because they cater to the economically insecure.

AUTHORITARIANISM - Whitehead, Laurence. "On Citizen Security." In Democratization: Theory and Experience, edited by Laurence Whitehead, 165-85. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. [EXTRA]

The security of the average citizen is often takes as a presupposition for successful democracy - classic rule of law entails the protection of individual rights, but via all citizens submitting to constraints which they agree to only resist via democratic efforts to change them - good citizens thus practice self-restraint Many have theorized this self-restraint is complemented by democracy which imports choice and deliberation on individuals, which increases respect for justice, rule of law, and equality of opportunity. This self control is necessary because not even the best of judicial systems can handle issues of justice beyond a small part of the population, meaning everyone else has to self-adhere to the rule of law while lacking its constant enforcement. Some argue that self-restraint is essential to democracy and that the state's role of fulfilling its obligation to protect the security of citizens includes the need to allow for their deliberation and civil society to create norms of self-limitation and civility. Democratic theory often has citizen security lurking in the background, as something assumed as opposed to something constituted and constructed - indeed, in many authoritarian regimes with weak rule of law and citizenship protection, or with civil war, the idea of citizen security is wholly lacking. Thus, how citizenship security is constructed when it is such a foundational aspect of both citizenship and democracy is a key question Citizenship security requires the input and say of citizens themselves in a fully functioning democracy. There is a huge gap between theory and practice here however, since in most competitive electoral regimes citizen security falls significantly short of theoretical implications - many states fail to provide security all together, whether because of incomplete control of their territory or separate enclaves like cartels or militias. There is also an important distinction between if citizens see their security as a problem for government or of government. Overall, however, there is no clear line of where citizen security must be protected and maintained for democratic governments and none revealed by looking at the main consolidated democracies of the world - it is a muddied concept. There are many intermittent cases of citizen security and here the 2 key issues are perceptions and expectations - i.e. what people see as their rightful entitlement to security based on past experience and comparative views of other democracies. Across Latin America, there is widespread dissatisfaction with government protection of security in new democracies - countries like Brazil struggle to uphold citizen security, countries like El Salvador are destabilized by their instability to do so, while countries like Costa Rica have widely succeeded at protecting citizen security. Brazil's constitution shows how language on citizen security can be coupled with practices that negate such rhetoric and decrease the rationale for the existence of the regime. This is seen in the policing of racism - "in summary, the realities of ordinary life in democratic Brazil constantly challenge the assumptions of liberal theory concerning citizenship and citizen security" - Thus, any understanding of democratization including security needs to increase a long-term view of adjustments for these failings. Indeed, failures of citizen security are reflected all over the world, in the perception of many of the world's democratic citizens - a key aspect of this isn't just experiences of insecurity but expectations, since El Savador shows a low baseline can change a great deal

AUTHORITARIANISM - Collier, David, and Steven Levitsky. "Democracy with Adjectives: Conceptual Innovation in Comparative Research." World Politics 49, no. 3 (1997): 430-51. [EXTRA]

The third wave of democratization created many new governments that are not fully autocratic or democratic - scholars have responded by trying to increase analytic differentiation while not creating concept stretching, leading to the application of 'democracy' to inappropriate contexts via 'democracy with adjectives,' with diminished subtypes of democracy filling in for actual conceptual clarity The most commonly accepted definitions of democracy are procedural ones with minimal lists of necessary attributes. This usually entails fully contested elections with full suffrage and without fraud, combined with protections of civil liberties including freedom of speech, assembly, and association, with some including the need to have the effective power to govern. Sartori's ladder of concepts shows that differentiation of a concept is aided by adding defining attributes to the definition and thus limiting the number of cases it applies to - this is seen in 'classical sub-types' of democracy,' which are subtypes that are differentiated versions of full democracy like parliamentary democracy or federal democracy The issues is when these subtypes apply not just to full democracy but to different degree of democracy because this stretches useful conception of the term - Sartori's approach to avoiding such stretching is to move up the ladder from the level of democracy to the level of regime - but most scholars avoid this because it reduces conceptual clarity and instead try to circle the square by simply adding adjective to democracy This leads to diminished subtypes, which are not a full democratic subtype and which differentiate from democracy by identifying both the attributes of democracy that are missing and the attributes that are present. Usually it is just a single element of democracy missing with definitions generally applying to cases of full suffrage, full contestation, civil liberties, or effective power to govern Thus, the key question is if the conceptual clarity gained by such subtypes is worth the potential muddying of the term democracy As more cases of democracy are analyzed some look to add new necessary conditions to democracy's definition to help distinguish cases that fit the definition but which seem to be undemocratic - this is 'precissing' the definition - this is seen in adding the 'effective power to govern' to definition of democracy to adjust for government with outsized military influence. Others have argued democracy should itself be seen as a subtype within an overarching concept like democratic states - this allows more modification of the term democracy without feeling like you're abandoning the overarching concept Thus the 5 subtypes of conceptual clarification are: (1) classical subtypes, (2) conceptions of regime type, (3) diminished subtypes, (4) precised definitions, (5) shifting the overall concept. All of these can be valid if done carefully.

PRES & PAR - Maeda, Ko. "Two Modes of Democratic Breakdown: A Competing Risks Analysis of Democratic Durability." Journal of Politics 72, no. 4 (October 2010): 1129-43. [EXTRA]

There are two modes of democratic breakdown currently undifferentiated in the literature - where a democratic government is toppled by a force outside of the government (as in a military coup) and where a democratically elected leader suspends democratic processes. This article examines the effects of economic and institutional factors on a state's risk of experiencing these 2 forms of breakdown. Looking at 135 democratic periods between 1950 and 2004 it seems lower economic development/growth increases the risk of military coup, and presidentialism increases the odds of democratic leaders ending the democratic process. The economy's tie to authoritarianism is a subject of debate but it is widely accepted that economic development democracy lead to very low odds of break down Democracies ended from forces beyond the government (like coups - a la pinochet) can be labeled 'exogenous termination' and those ended from forces within the government (a la Fujimori) can be labeled 'endogenous termination.' Endogenous terminations have so far ben far less studied than exogenous ones, even though 40% of democratic terminations were endogenous between 1950-2004. There is a strong link between economic conditions and military coups, in part because poor conditions signify decreased support for the government and decreasing belief in the legitimacy of its rule and a decreasing ability of the government to oppose the military and buy it off. In contrast, economic conditions shouldn't support endogenous termination because is is the government responsible for the poor economic situation that is replacing itself. Endogenous coups are very risky and can threaten triggering exogenous ones, and thus where party mechanisms are well developed to insulate a leader's power they are unlikely to resort to them. The dilemma for incumbents with a bad economies is they have a high chance of losing in elections but low popularity which means they have low odds of getting support for termination. Thus, high levels of economic development should decrease the risk of exogenous termination but not impact the risk of endogenous termination. Linz argues that presidentialism should increase instability via the issues of (1) Dual legitimacy and deadlock, (2) rigidity via fixed terms, (3) winner-takes-all elections. More recent works like those of Cheibub question if presidentialism increases the risk of democratic breakdown, but these arguments combine exogenous nad endogenous terminations which likely skew the results. Cheibub's results on presidential and parliamentary coalitions being just as likely don't hold up on second glance, with presidential coalitions being 14% less likely than parliamentary ones, with presidential governments also having up to 19% les legislative success than pure systems, with presidential success rates remaining abysmal even with full control of the legislature. Under this view of presidentialism, presidents will increase the odds of exogenous termination only if the confrontation between the president and opposition parties is bad enough to disillusion people with democracy, with no major link being substantiated between presidentialism and coups. In contrast, presidential systems do increase the odds of endogenous termination because of increased deadlock which frustrates the president and increases the odds of resorting to extra-constitutionalism, especially with a president's view of their outsized mandate The statistical results of regressions in this paper strongly corroborate all of the findings - Presidential democracies are 11.75% more likely to be endogenously terminated than parliamentary democracies.

AUTHORITARIANISM - Beatriz Magaloni and Ruth Kricheli, "Political Order and One-Party Rule," Annual Review of Political Science, no. 13 (2010): 123-43 [CORE]

There has been a recent and massive increase in the prevalence of one-party autocracies in the world, which have now become the most common form of authoritarianism. There are two types of one party regimes - single-party regimes (which proscribe opposition parties' participation in elections) and dominant party regimes (which permit the opposition to compete in multiparty elections that usually do not allow alternation in political power). One party regimes now make up 57% of authoritarian regimes and 33% of global regimes. They also last longer than other types of dictatorships, have fewer coups, better security, and higher growth rates. One party regimes have two key advantages over other authoritarian regimes: 1) a bargaining function, whereby the party helps dictators bargain with elites and minimize potential threats to stability - this functions through three potential mechanism: (a) psuedodemocratic institutions allow autocrats to give voice to different groups in society, bargain with opponents, and make policy concessions, decreasing stress on institutions, (b) partis can allow dictators to effectively and efficiently distribute rents and economic incentives, and (c) parties can allow dictators to make credible commitments to power sharing, which placates elites who expect to gain benefits through the institutionalization of the party and who can use the party to punish the dictator, and which gives the dictator a means of gathering information on opposition to their rule; 2) a mobilizing function, whereby the party helps dictators mobilize mass support - here, the party can (a) be an effective means of distributing rents and economic goods to citizens, creating a "market of privileges that are allocated based on degrees of loyalty" and where disloyal citizens are punished via economic exclusion, (b) be an effective means of gauging public opinion towards the party and displaying public support for them, reinforcing the image of party invincibility, and (c) be an effective means of reducing coups by increasing the number of people with something to lose from a regime change, and giving the government the ability to mobilize citizens in support if a coup seems likely. There are two important challenges to the current literature on one party rule - 1) the functionalist challenge, which argues that the current literature fails at explaining why dictators rely on parties instead of other institutional features that could serve the same function; 2) the endogeneity challenge, which points out that autocrats might use ruling parties under certain conditions, which also effect regime survival prospects, meaning that correlations between one party rule and political/economic performance is a mistaken one. Responding to these challenges make it necessary to look at the origins of one-party systems - here, there are four historical pathways - 1) the military, which military autocrats create parties to mobilize the masses and counterbalance threats; 2) anarchy, where one-party systems are established after periods of war or civil disunity; 3) from democracy, where a democracy collapses into a single party system; and 4) from another form of one party rule, where liberalization or anti-liberalization lead to modifications of existing regimes Looking at a vast survey of one-party regimes, this article comes to three conclusions: 1) one-party dictatorships are frequently established in the ruins of other dictatorships, 2) the transitions from one dictatorship to another are the most common type of regime transition, and 3) one party regimes are the least likely to transform to democracy after their collapse The rise of one party autocracies after the Cold War may be because the end of the Cold War required states to show some degree of democratization, both the appease the U.S. and to be given access to the global economy. All dictators are faced with the guns versus votes dilemma, whereby bestowing too much power on either the military or the population makes him vulnerable to resistance by either.

POPULISM - Kirk Hawkins, Scott Riding, Cas Mudde, "Measuring Populist Attitudes," Political Concepts 55 (January 2012): 1-34. [CORE]

This paper uses survey data from the United States (both nationwide and in Utah) to try to identify what kinds of people hold populist attitudes. It finds that populist views are rather common across the country, and correlate strongly with individual-level attributes like ideology, partisanship, education, wealth, immigration views, and gender. This supports the view of populist attitudes as a "latent disposition activated by political context." (2) Here, populism is seen as a 'thin-centered' ideology, meaning it is a set of ideas and not a material phenomenon (standing in opposition to pluralism), that is represents a number of basic assumptions about the world that can be latched on to other platforms and programmatic views, and that it should not just be reduced to a certain personality type (although some citizens may be in environments that render populism more meaningful and may be more disposed to it in the first place). The questions asked in the surveys used in this study were 4 used to measure populist outlooks and 3 used to measure pluralist outlooks, and four used to measure support for elite lead and/or unchecked systems of governance, with people ranking each of the statements on a scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree For both surveys it was found that the "bulk of respondents agree (strongly or mildly) with all four populism questions... Thus, the affinity for populist discourse seems to be quite high across both Utah and the United States as a whole." This is coupled with a support of pluralism however. Overall, conservatives are more populist than liberals (particularly strong conservatives), the less-educated are more populist than the more-educated, the lower income are more populist than the higher income, partisan identities don't affect populist tendencies, and those more opposed to immigration and more populist than those more open to it. Populism didn't seem to vary by age or gender. In general, the ideologically more radical, more conservative, more third-party, poorer, less-educated, and more xenophobic are the most likely to be populist.

TERMS - Programmatic Party Linkages

there are programmatic party linkages, which have high levels of institutional capacity, and high levels of ideological coherence. In many ways, programmatic linkages are the ideal type of party linkages, since they facilitate systems of accountability and policy production more directly than other forms of linkages (Kitschelt et. all, 21). As Kitschelt and Kselman outline, programmatic linkages rely on "non-contingent exchanges" whereby politicians provide policy packages to "constituency categories... but without parties targeting the benefits only to their voters." (Kitschelt and Kselman [K&K], 1454). In this context, it is the success of policy delivery, and the ideological appeal of policy platforms, that dictates whether voters continue to support parties once in office (Kitschelt et. all, 15-6). Although programmatic party linkages are difficult to arrive at, Mainwaring and Torcal note that they tend to be resilient once established (M&T, 211).