bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Effect of Origanum vulgare L. Essential Oil on Growth and Lipid Profile of Yarrowia lipolytica Cultivated on Glycerol‐Based Media
Authors: Chatzifragkou Afroditi , Petrou Ioanna , Gardeli Chryssavgi , Komaitis Michael , Papanikolaou Seraphim
Published: June 2011

Aim of the present study was to identify the chemical composition of Origanum vulgare L. essential oil and to investigate its effect on the biochemical behavior of the yeast Yarrowia lipolytica. Twenty‐three compounds were identified by GC–MS analysis, representing the 92.3% (w/w) of the total essential oil of the plant. Carvacrol (56.3%) and thymol (16.4%) were the major components. Additionally, shake‐flask cultivations of Y. lipolytica were performed, with various essential oil additions (0.05–2 mL/L of medium) on glycerol‐based media. Growth was affected even at low concentrations (0.05 mL/L), while in higher essential oil concentrations, strong inhibition phenomena were observed. A tolerance‐threshold concentration for the strain was hence established at 0.15 mL/L of oil. Furthermore, the presence of the essential oil in the culture medium resulted in changes in the composition of the intra‐cellular lipids of the yeast. Specifically, oil addition to nitrogen‐limited cultures to a level >0.15 mL/L caused a substantial increase in the percentage of saturated fatty acids (C16:0 and C18:0) in the lipid composition of the yeast Y. lipolytica.
Alcohol‐induced neuronal death in central extended amygdala and pyriform cortex during the postnatal period of the rat
Authors: Balaszczuk V. , Bender C. , Pereno G.L. , Beltramino C.A.
Published: June 2011

Mothers who consume alcohol during pregnancy may cause a neurotoxic syndrome defined as fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) in their offspring. This disorder is characterized by reduction in brain size, cognitive deficits and emotional/social disturbances. These alterations are thought to be caused by an alcohol‐induced increase in apoptosis during neurodevelopment. Little is known about neuroapoptosis in the central extended amygdala and the pyriform cortex, which are key structures in emotional/social behaviors. The goal of this study was to determine the vulnerability of neuroapoptotic alcohol effects in those areas. Rats were administered alcohol (2.5 g/kg s.c. at 0 and 2 h) or saline on postnatal day (PND) 7, 15 and 20. The Amino‐cupric‐silver technique was used to evaluate neurodegeneration and immunohistochemistry to detect activated caspases 3–8 and 9 at 2 h, 4, 6, 8, 12 and 24 h after drug administration. We measured blood alcohol levels each hour, from 2 to 8 h post second administration of alcohol in each of the ages studied. Results showed alcohol induced apoptotic neurodegeneration in the central extended amygdala on PND 7 and 15, and pyriform cortex on PND 7, 15 and 20. These structures showed activation of caspase 3 and 9 but not of caspase 8 suggesting that alcohol‐induced apoptosis could occur by the intrinsic pathway. The pharmacokinetic differences between ages did not associate with the neurodegeneration age dependence. In conclusion, these limbic areas are damaged by alcohol, and each one has their own window of vulnerability during the postnatal period. The possible implications in emotional/social features in FASD are discussed.
Hippocampal cell loss after an anterior and posterior anastomotic vein occlusion model in rats
Authors: Aydın Keramettin , Çokluk Cengiz , Ayas Bülent , Önger Mehmet Emin , Keskin İlknur , Özyasar Ali , Aslan Hüseyin , Kaplan Süleyman
Published: June 2011

Estimation of the cell number after cortical venous ischemia/infarction induced by anterior and posterior anastomotic veins occlusion in a rat model is very important. Twenty male Sprague‐Dawley rats were used in this experiment. Small burr‐holes were made over the anterior (the crossing point of the line drawn from the posterior border of the orbital rim and the line drawn along the para‐midline to the superior sagittal suture) and posterior (just inferior point of the posterior ending of the zygomatic arch) anastomotic veins. Bipolar coagulation technique and micro‐scissor were used to sacrifice the venous vessels after final inspection and description. Specimens were evaluated by histopathological and unbiased stereological methods for microscopic evaluation and volumetric analysis, respectively. Significant cell loss was seen in the pyramidal and granule cells of the cornu ammonis and dentate gyrus of the hippocampus after venous ischemia. Cell loss was also pronounced when seen in the histological examination. The present results suggest that the sacrifice of anterior and posterior anastomotic veins can be used as an experimental rat model in the evaluation of pyramidal and granule cell loss in the hippocampus that often assesses the neural damage inflicted by this intervention.
Electrokinetic locomotion due to reaction-induced charge auto-electrophoresis
Authors: MORAN JEFFREY L. , POSNER JONATHAN D.
Published: June 2011

Mitchell originally proposed that an asymmetric ion flux across an organism's membrane could generate electric fields that drive locomotion. Although this locomotion mechanism was later rejected for some species of bacteria, engineered Janus particles have been realized that can swim due to ion fluxes generated by asymmetric electrochemical reactions. Here we present governing equations, scaling analyses and numerical simulations that describe the motion of bimetallic rod-shaped motors in hydrogen peroxide solutions due to reaction-induced charge auto-electrophoresis. The coupled Poisson–Nernst–Planck–Stokes equations are numerically solved using Frumkin-corrected Butler–Volmer equations to represent electrochemical reactions at the rod surface. Our simulations show strong agreement with the scaling analysis and experiments. The analysis shows that electrokinetic locomotion results from electro-osmotic fluid slip around the nanomotor surface. The electroviscous flow is driven by electrical body forces which are generated from a coupling of a reaction-induced dipolar charge density distribution and the electric field it creates. The magnitude of the electroviscous velocity increases quadratically with the surface reaction rate for an uncharged motor, and linearly when the motor supports a finite surface charge.
The spatial distribution of gyrotactic swimming micro-organisms in laminar flow fields
Authors: BEARON R. N. , HAZEL A. L. , THORN G. J.
Published: June 2011

We compare the results of two-dimensional, biased random walk models of individual swimming micro-organisms with advection–diffusion models for the whole population. In particular, we consider the influence of the local flow environment (gyrotaxis) on the resulting motion. In unidirectional flows, the results of the individual and population models are generally in good agreement, even in flows in which the cells can experience a range of shear environments, and both models successfully predict the phenomena of gravitactic focusing. Numerical results are also compared with asymptotic expressions for weak and strong shear. Discrepancies between the models arise in two cases: (i) when reflective boundary conditions change the orientation distribution in the random walk model from that predicted by the long-term asymptotics used to derive the advection–diffusion model; (ii) when the spatial and temporal scales are not large enough for the advection–diffusion model to apply. We also use a simple two-dimensional flow containing a variety of flow regimes to explore what happens when there are localized regions in which the generalized Taylor dispersion theory used in the derivation of the population model does not apply. For spherical cells, we find good agreement between the models outside the ‘break-down’ regions, but comparison of the results within these regions is complicated by the presence of nearby boundaries and their influence on the random walk model. In contrast, for rod-shaped cells which are reorientated by both vorticity and strain, we see qualitatively different spatial patterns between individual and advection–diffusion models even in the absence of gyrotaxis, because cells are advected between regions of differing rates of strain.
The Roman Garden
Authors: Lawson James
Published: June 2011

Aman's character is judged not merely by his public services and his political views but also by his private life and individual interests. Similarly the history of a nation is to be read not only in its military exploits, its constitutional experiments, its art and literature, but also in the social habits and predominant interests of its citizens. Just as a garden mirrors the character of its owner, so the gardens of a nation reflect the character and the degree of advancement of the State. It is no coincidence that the popular garden of the Roman Republic was the simple kitchen garden, while under the Empire pretentious landscape gardens were the vogue. The vitalizing energy of the Republic found an outlet in the productive vegetable plot: the elaborate but sterile gardens of the Empire were symbolic of incipient decay.

Until the first century b.c. almost all Roman gardens were cottage gardens. Their plan and culture were governed solely by practical needs. From them the mistress of the house used to replenish her larder and medicine-chest and adorn the family shrine with flowers. Pliny the Elder reminds the luxury-seeking populace of a later date that in the past at Rome a garden was the poor man's estate: it was the only market he had from which to provide himself with food. The prime function of a garden was to make its owner self-sufficient. This self-sufficiency was more easy of attainment in ancient Italy than in more northerly countries, for the diet of the Romans consisted, for the most part, of salads.
Kadomtsev–Petviashvili equation for acoustic wave in quantum pair plasmas
Authors: MAHMOOD S. , AKHTAR N. , KHAN S. A.
Published: June 2011

The Kadomtsev–Petviashvili equation is derived for two-dimensional propagations of electrostatic solitons in unmagnetized dense pair-plasmas. The reductive perturbation method is employed and two-dimensional electrostatic potential hump structures are obtained. The conditions for a stable two-dimensional solitary structure are discussed using energy consideration method. The numerical results are also presented by considering the parameters for the outer layers of white dwarfs/neutron stars.
The Religious Roots of Modern International Relations
Authors: Philpott Daniel
Published: June 2011

The Protestant Reformation was a crucial spring of modern international relations. Had it lever occurred, a system of sovereign states would not have arrived, at least not in the form or at he time that it did at the Peace of Westphalia. This is the counterfactual the author seeks to sustain. He first advances an elaborated but qualified defense of the conventional wisdom that Westphalia is the origin of modern international relations. He then accounts for how Protestant deas exerted influence through transforming identities and exercising social power. Structural heories, emphasizing changes in material power, are skeptical of this account. The author roots lis empirical defense of ideas in the strong correlation between Reformation crises and polities' interests in Westphalia. A description of the historical causal pathways running from ideas to political interest then follows. Germany and France are brought as cases to illustrate two of these pathways. Finally, the author shows the evidentiary weakness of alternative structural material explanations.
Reality Check: Revising Theories of International Politics in Response to the End of the Cold War
Authors: Wohlforth William C.
Published: June 2011

The end of the cold war has produced a sustained debate on international relations theory. Some scholars argue that the unexpected and unexpectedly peaceful demise of the post-World War II international order undermines the entire research agenda of the subfield; others maintain that it warrants an adjustment of the balance between theories or theoretical traditions; and still others hold that it has little or no relevance to theory. This essay reviews the debate in light of the new evidence that has accumulated over the past five years. It finds that because scholars rarely make the empirical implications of their arguments explicit, the cascade of new information concerning the event cannot advance the debate. However, the natural focus provided by a sudden and unexpected event of seminal importance and the outpouring of new data suggest the possibility of empirically driven progress in one's understanding of change in world politics. The article concludes with guidelines designed to increase the likelihood of such progress by clarifying the debate in advance of new releases of primary data.
Political Capital: Mexican Financial Policy under Salinas
Authors: Kessler Timothy P.
Published: June 2011

Market reform is advocated in developing countries to improve economic efficiency and prevent privileged groups from obtaining rents from the policy-making process. Yet this prescription fails to address the complex political process that governments are likely to confront when moving toward the market. This study shows how political considerations during President Salinas's administration distorted economic reform in Mexico.

During the 1990s Mexican finance policy contradicted the government's declared neoliberal principles. While the banks were reprivatized and deregulated, they were also given a high degree of protection from competition, enabling the new owners to charge excessive interest rates. In addition, the government artificially inflated the value of the currency through exchange-rate intervention. These contradictory policies are best understood as a coherent political response to the electoral vulnerability of the ruling party (PRl) at the end of the 1980s. When viable political opposition threatened the PRl's ability to maintain power, it responded by using financial policies to distribute economic benefits to social groups, particularly business, the middle class, and the poor, whose support was critical for electoral victory.
Political Instability And Economic Performance: Evidence from Revolutionary Mexico
Authors: Haber Stephen , Razo Armando
Published: June 2011

What is the relationship between political instability and economic growth? This article examines this question using insights from the new institutional economics applied to a canonical case: revolutionary Mexico. The authors argue that investment and growth during and after the revolution were less affected by political instability than one might predict based on the extant theoretical and empirical literature. They find that while investor expectations, output, and productivity were sensitive to the interdiction of factor and product markets during the years of intense revolutionary violence (1914–17), the periods of political instability before (1910–13) and afterward (1918–34) had relatively minor effects on investor confidence, investments in new plant and equipment, rates of entry and exit by firms, industrial structure, and productivity growth.
Internal War: Causes and Cures
Authors: David Steven R.
Published: June 2011

Since the end of the cold war internal conflicts have received unprecedented attention. Of special interest has been the effort of neorealists to employ an approach traditionally used to explain interstate conflict to make internal war understandable. While neorealism has been useful in explaining the behavior of groups in anarchic conditions, it is inadequate in explaining internal wars occurring in states that retain a strong government and that stem from motives other than power and security. Neorealism also does little to explain how anarchy is created in the first place and what can be done to restore central control. Another approach offers “bad leaders” as a proximate cause of internal war. There is much to this explanation, but more work needs to be done in understanding just what makes leaders “bad” and whether leaders have the latitude to be “good.” Finally, the diverse nature of internal wars has frustrated efforts to develop an overall means of settling them. At a point in which armed conflict has become almost exclusively an internal affair, useful generalizations for causes and cures remain elusive.
Why Liberal States Accept Unwanted Immigration
Authors: Joppke Christian
Published: June 2011

This article explores why liberal states accept unwanted immigration, discussing the cases of illegal immigration in the United States and family immigration in Europe. Rejecting the diagnosis of state sovereignty undermined by globalization, the author argues that self-limited sovereignty explains why states accept unwanted immigration. One aspect of self-limited sovereignty is a political process under the sway of interest-group politics (“client politics,” as Gary Freeman says). The logic of client politics explains why the United States accepts illegal immigration. The case of family immigration in Europe suggests two further aspects of self-limited sovereignty: legal-constitutional constraints on the executive, and moral obligations toward historically particular immigrant groups. However, these legal and moral constraints are unevenly distributed across Europe, partially reflecting the different logics of guest worker and postcolonial immigration regimes.
The Constructive Turn in International Relations Theory
Authors: Checkel Jeffrey T.
Published: June 2011

In recent years, constructivist thinking about global politics has brought a breath of fresh auto international relations. By exploring questions of identity and interest, constructivist scholars have articulated an important corrective to the methodological individualism and materialism that have come to dominate much of IR. As the books under review indicate, constructivism has also succeeded in demonstrating its empirical value—documenting a new and important causal role for norms and social structure in global politics. Theoretically, however, the approach remains underspecified. In particular, constructivists typically fail to explain the origins of such structures, how they change over time, how their effects vary cross nationally, or the mechanisms through which they constitute states and individuals. Missing is the substantive theory and attention to agency that will provide answers to such puzzles, as well as ensure the development of a productive research program.
After Neoliberalism: The Politics of Reregulation in Mexico
Authors: Snyder Richard
Published: June 2011

Neoliberal economic reforms, rather than unleashing market forces, can result in new institutions for market governance. By vacating institutionalized policy domains, neoliberal reforms can trigger two-step reregulation processes, as first, political entrepreneurs launch projects to build support coalitions by reregulating markets, and second, societal groups respond to these projects by mobilizing to influence the terms of reregulation. Depending on the strengths and strategies of politicians and societal groups, reregulation processes result in varied institutions for market governance. The article develops this argument by analyzing how neoliberal reforms in Mexico led to the construction of distinct institutions for market governance across four states (Chiapas, Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Puebla). The findings from Mexico highlight the importance of moving beyond the questions of why developing countries choose neoliberal policies and how they implement them. Students of the political economy of development should shift their attention instead to understanding the kinds of new institutions that replace those destroyed or displaced by neoliberal reforms.
Distributional Coalitions and the Politics of Economic Reform in Latin America
Authors: Schamis Hector E.
Published: June 2011

For much of the discipline of economics, a closed economy is seen as the result of efforts of distributional coalitions and rent seekers to maintain sector-specific protections. Accordingly, economic liberalization is explained by the policy consistency of uncompromising reform elites. Students of the politics of economic adjustment in the developing world, in turn, have argued that reform programs concentrate costs in the present and disperse benefits in the future. Hence, losers are prepared to engage in collective action, whereas prospective winners, facing uncertainty about payoffs, remain disorganized. They thus posit the cohesiveness and insularity of policymakers as the main variable for explaining successful reform. Both economists and political scientists, therefore, adopt a collective action approach that overlooks how groups organizein supportof liberalization.

In the recent Latin American experience, however, these reforms have preserved market reserves for firms that provided vital political support to, and often colluded with, policymaking elites. This setting has thus reproduced incentives for rent-seeking behavior, even in the presence of comprehensive liberalization. This evidence supports two interrelated theoretical claims. First, distributional coalitions may proliferate when the state withdraws from the economy, not only when it intervenes. Second, interest-based variables retain explanatory power in political economy—which state autonomy arguments disregard—irrespective of whether the economy is closed or open—which neoclassical perspectives overlook. To highlight the centrality of interest groups favoring marketization, therefore, the article suggests modifications to the dominant theories of collective action and the literature on the politics of economic adjustment.
Economic Roots of Civil Wars and Revolutions in the Contemporary World
Authors: Boix Carles
Published: June 2011

To explain the distribution of civil wars, guerrilla warfare, and revolutionary outbreaks, the literature on modern political violence has shifted, broadly speaking, from a modernization perspective that emphasized the role of material conflict and of grievances to a more recent research program that stresses the geographical and organizational opportunities that insurgents may have to engage in violence. Drawing on those lines of inquiry equally, this article offers an integrated analytical model that considers both the motives and the opportunities of states and rebels. Civil wars, guerrillas, and revolutionary outbreaks are seen as a result of the nature and distribution of wealth in each country. Systematic and organized violent conflicts are most likely in economies where inequality is high and wealth is mostly immobile, that is, in societies where those worse off would benefit substantially from expropriating all assets. Violence is conditional on the mobilizational and organizational capacity of challengers and on the state capacity to control its territory. The theory is tested on data on civil wars from 1850 to 1999 for the whole world and on data on guerrilla warfare and revolutionary episodes spanning the years from 1919 to 1997 across all countries.
The Rise of Ethnopopulism in Latin America
Authors: Madrid Raúl L.
Published: June 2011

Latin America had long been the one region in the world without major ethnic parties, but in recent years a couple of inclusive ethnic parties have registered important electoral victories. A substantial literature maintains that ethnic parties win by mobilizing their base through exclusionary ethnic appeals, but this article argues that such appeals are unlikely to be successful in regions such as Latin America, where ethnic polarization is low and ethnic identification is fluid and multiple. In these areas, inclusive strategies are more likely to be successful. Indeed, some parties, which the author refers to as ethnopopulist parties, have won votes from diverse ethnic constituencies by moderating their discourse, forming cross-ethnic alliances, and formulating a broad populist appeal. This article focuses on the most successful ethnopopulist party to date, the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) in Bolivia. It shows how the MAS used an inclusive ethnic appeal and classical populist strategies to fuse traditional populist constituencies—politically disenchanted urban mestizos with nationalist and statist views—to its rural, largely indigenous base. The article also examines the extent to which these arguments can account for the varying performance of other parties in the region.
Mobilizing International Norms: Domestic Actors, Immigrants, and the Japanese State
Authors: Gurowitz Amy
Published: June 2011

In recent years immigrant rights have increasingly been examined in an international context. An important theme in these discussions has been the question of whether, and if so how, states are constrained in developing immigrant and immigration policies. Some scholars argue that states are constrained by international human rights standards, while others, skeptical of this position, focus on a wide range of arguments at the domestic level of analysis. The skeptics are right that those asserting the impact of international human rights standards on immigrant policy have not demonstrated their importance domestically. International norms and standards do not diffuse automatically or consistently across states, and there has been too little detailed process tracing to illustrate the mechanisms of norm diffusion and therefore to move beyond correlation. To do so requires attention to the domestic actors who mobilize international norms and to the specific domestic circumstances in which they operate. This article examines a hard case by studying the impact of international human rights standards on policies toward Koreans and more recent migrant workers in Japan. In this case international norms matter. But they do not matter in a mysterious or automatic way. Domestic actors use international norms in context-specific environments to back up and make arguments for which they have few domestic resources. This is not a story of international versus domestic politics, nor is it a story about a paralyzed state. State actors are actively involved in the process of integrating international standards domestically, and the author examines how those standards work their way into the political process.
Old Political Rationalities and New Democracies: Compromise and Confrontation in Hungary and Poland
Authors: Seleny Anna
Published: June 2011

Studies of democratic consolidation tend to highlight the same factors previously used to explain countries' transitional dynamics. Yet one cannot properly understand success or failure in democratic consolidation—much less discern significant qualitative differences among consolidated democracies—by focusing exclusively on formal institutions, modes of transition, incentive structures, or exogenous factors. Close inspection of two newly consolidated democracies—Poland and Hungary—shows that despite radically altered institutional arrangements, legal structures, and political-economic incentives, the most important determinants of the models of democracy emerging today derive from pretransition conceptual frames and informal political settlements. Specifically, the core conflicts between ruling elites and society in communist Poland and Hungary, as well as the patterns of political accommodation that evolved in the management of those conflicts, continue to structure the political agenda and order debate in both countries. In Poland overlapping ethical-ideological cleavages and failures of political accommodation under the ancien regime have resulted in a confrontational-pluralist model of democracy. In contrast, Hungary's compromise-corporatist model stems from early informal accommodation between the party-state and society that recast most conflicts as “economic” in nature. These long-standing conflicts and political patterns explain striking contemporary differences in social mobilization, party competition, and constitutional development. The article concludes with a discussion of how these models are likely to shape each country's prospects for sustained governability and increased democratic legitimacy.
Geographic Diffusion and the Transformation of the Postcommunist World
Authors: Kopstein Jeffrey S. , Reilly David A.
Published: June 2011

Since the collapse of communism the states of postcommunist Europe and Asia have defined for themselves, and have had defined for them, two primary tasks: the construction of viable market economies and the establishment of working institutions of representative democracy. The variation in political and economic outcomes in the postcommunist space makes it, without question, the most diverse “region” in the world. What explains the variation? All of the big winners of postcommunism share the trait of being geographically close to the former border of the noncommunist world. Even controlling for cultural differences, historical legacies, and paths of extrication, the spatial effect remains consistent and strong across the universe of postcommunist cases. This suggests the spatially dependent nature of the diffusion of norms, resources, and institutions that are necessary to the construction of political democracies and market economies in the postcommunist era. The authors develop and adduce evidence for the spatial dependence hypothesis, test it against rival hypotheses, and illustrate the relationships at work through three theoretically important case studies.
Not with One Voice: An Explanation of Intragroup Variation in Nationalist Sentiment
Authors: Gorenburg Dmitry
Published: June 2011

Support for nationalism among minorities in multiethnic countries has received a great deal of scholarly attention in recent years. Few of these studies, however, have delved into the social bases of support for nationalism within a particular ethnic group. Scholars who study nationalism usually assume that support for nationalism among the members of an ethnic group is either randomly distributed or identical for all members of the group. Both assumptions are implausible. This article seeks to show that support for nationalism among members of an ethnic group is neither constant nor random. Furthermore, it argues that the extent to which members of social subgroups within the ethnic group come to support nationalism is predictable and is based on a particular sequence of mobilization. This sequence depends on the extent to which members of each subgroup possess a sense of common collective identity and on the strength of their social ties with those who are at the forefront of the mobilization effort. Both of these factors in turn depend largely on the extent to which state institutions promote ethnic identification among the minority population and create links that increase the density of intragroup social ties. Ethnic institutions are thus the key factor in explaining the sequence by which social groups within an ethnic minority population come to support nationalism.
Why do Formal Amendments Fail?: An Institutional Design Analysis
Authors: Manfredi Christopher P. , Lusztig Michael
Published: June 2011

Given the increasing importance of constitutional modification in Eastern Europe, Latin America, South Africa, Europe, and Australia, it is imperative to study systemically the conditions under which formal constitutional amendments are likely to fail. In this paper, the authors isolate conditions whereby the instrumental objectives of participants in the politics of constitutional modification threaten to overload the institutional capacity of the amending process. The proximate cause of amendment process overload is indeterminacy regarding the redistributive impact of the proposed change. Redistributive indeterminacy is a function of a rigid amending process, an institutional structure that encourages a large number of constitutional players and amendments which provide broad scope for judicial interpretation. The authors isolate two critical factors: the intensity of mass and elite preferences surrounding constitutional proposals and die structure of the amending process itself. They next trace mese factors back to institutional variables to create a model to explain and predict constitutional failure in a range of contexts. Finally, they apply the model to highly visible recent constitutional failures in the United States and Canada.
Mobilization, Social Networks, and Turnout: Evidence from Japan
Authors: Cox Gary W. , Rosenbluth Frances M. , Thies Michael F.
Published: June 2011

The strategic elites model of turnout argues that elites mobilize more when the probability of their effort deciding the electoral outcome is greater. Although the literature assumes that this probability depends solely on how close the election is, logically it depends jointly on how many votes are needed to affect the outcome (closeness)andon how many additional votes elite efforts are likely to garner (vote yield). Because the vote yield of mobilizational effort varies with the social capital of the district that elites face, the level of elite mobilizational effort (hence turnout) should dependinteractivelyon closeness and social capital. The authors test their predictions using datafromJapanese lower house elections for the years 1967–90. Japan is an interesting test case both because its (former) electoral system differs from that for which the model was first developed and because the literature clearly stresses the role of elite mobilization through social networks but does not examine the particular hypotheses advanced here.
Introduction
Authors: Bienen Henry S.
Published: June 2011

MY personal collection of World Politics begins with the January 1957 issue: volume 9, number 2. It skips to October 1964 and is complete from then on. When I left Princeton to become Northwestern University's fifteenth president, I gave away most of my professional library, envisioning all too accurately the demands of a new life. I never considered parting with any copies of World Politics, however. Perhaps in part this sense of possession came from sentiment arising from my long and happy association with this journal. I think, however, that it stemmed mostly from a recognition that World Politics has been the leading journal of international affairs and comparative studies from its founding until now.
Lijphart, Lakatos, and Consociationalism
Authors: Lustick Ian S.
Published: June 2011

Arend Lijphart's 1969 article on consociational democracy was a compelling critique of prevailing theories of democratic stability and the launching pad for one of the most widely regarded research programs in contemporary comparative politics. However, Lijphart and others who adopted consociational approaches encountered severe logical, theoretical, and empirical criticisms of their work. The success of the program and its apparent imperviousness to many of these attacks has been remarkable. Lijphart s primary response was to abandon standard norms of social science in favor of an “impressionistic” approach that protected the attractiveness and wide applicability of the theory at the cost of precision and scholarly rigor. The overall trajectory of the consociationalist research program is explained with reference to a shift from early- to late-Lakatosian commitments—from insisting on corroboration for one's theories through repeated encounters with evidence to a late-Lakatosian stance that expects the political and rhetorical skills of scholars operating on behalf of their research program to be more significant than evidence or theoretical coherence.
Paradigms Revisited Productionism, Globality, and Postmodernity in Comparative Politics
Authors: Janos Andrew C.
Published: June 2011

Inspired by a seminal essay of Albert O. Hirschman, as well as by the ongoing debate on the empirical foundations of social science, this article “revisits” (1) the paradigm concept popularized by T. S. Kuhn in the 1960s and (2) the relationship between probabilistic and “possibilistic” modes of theorizing that has acquired renewed relevance in comparative politics mainly with respect to recent theories of democratization and development. It does so by reviewing three major paradigm crises in modern political science: the shift from the Aristotelianpollsto the social “system,” the refocusing of political explanations from the social to the global environment, and the contemporary attempts to reevaluate the role of technology in political change. The review takes stock of the record of the discipline of comparative politics, of opportunities provided by paradigm shifts, seized upon or missed by the discipline. It also allows one to seek a more even balance between the potential utility and limitations of the paradigm concept, while at the same time pointing to the perils of divorcing the art of the possible from the laws of probability.
The Modernization of Factionalism in Chinese Politics
Authors: Dittmer Lowell , Wu Yu-Shan
Published: June 2011

The informal dimension has always been important in Chinese politics, due to a traditional bias against legalism and favoring the sentimentalization of personal qualities. We contend that it remains so still, albeit in altered form. Rather than being oriented solely to personal or in-group security, factionalism in the context of the more secure bureaucratic environment of the reform era has come to embrace policy goals and material interests as well. Thus, informal politics proliferates, and factional fortunes tend tofluctuateaccording to the patterns of China's political business cycle.

In the post-Mao era the radical reformers led by Deng Xiaoping have favored rapid growth, even at the expense of stability. The conservatives surrounding Chen Yun consider stability the paramount goal, believing that it should override considerations of growth. The synchronization of reform and business cycles, plus the appearance of periodic social movements whenever the growth rate slumps, makes reformers and conservatives vulnerable to charges of mismanaging the economy for their respective policy preferences. As long as the business, reform, and movement cycles coincide, wide policyfluctuationsdriven by a politics of blame are inevitable.
Explaining the Decline of European Social Democracy: The Role of Structural Economic Change
Authors: Pontusson Jonas
Published: June 2011

Using a number of different quantitative measures, this article demonstrates that variations in the degree of social democratic decline in nine European countries can be viewed in large measure as a product of two structural economic changes: (1) the shift to smaller units of production; and (2) the growth of private nonindustrial employment. The article explores several causal arguments linking these variables to social democratic decline, and it marshals Swedish and British time-series data to show that the distribution of manufacturing employment by production unit helps explain both the rise and the decline of social democracy.
Models of Iranian Politics, the Road to the Islamic Revolution, and the Challenge of Civil Society
Authors: Kazemi Farhad
Published: June 2011

This essay reviews six recent books on modern Iranian politics. It suggests that Iranian politics can be analyzed from the perspective of four basic traditions and models: monarchical, liberal nationalist, religious, and leftist. Each model abstracts the essential elements of the political system and demonstrates the dominance of a certain perspective. The first three of these models have been implemented in post—World War II Iran, and even the left has had an impact. The essay concludes by stating that current Iranian domestic politics can be better understood by paying attention to five enduring features: historical continuity of the nation-state, steady increase in state power, persistence of patrimonialism, intense interaction between domestic and foreign policies particularly as it relates to control over oil, and the vitality of civil society even under the Islamic Republic.
Beyond Product Cycles and Flying Geese: Regionalization, Hierarchy, and the Industrialization of East Asia
Authors: Bernard Mitchell , Ravenhill John
Published: June 2011

Product cycle theory as expressed in the analogy of flying geese has become a widely accepted way of conceptualizing industrial diffusion across East Asia. As the product cycle is repeated for increasingly sophisticated products, so, it is argued, the development trajectory of Japan will be replicated in a succession of sectors and countries. This approach fails, however, to capture the complexities of the contemporary regionalization of industrial production. East Asian industrial production should not be seen as a tightly coupled process in which the rise of national economies parallels successive product cycles. Rather than Japan's development trajectory being replicated in country after country, industrial diffusion has been characterized by shifting hierarchical networks of production and partial diffusion into diverse politicoeconomic contexts at differing historical junctures. It has also resulted in a triangulation of the region's trade patterns that has generated large imbalances in trade both within the region and between the region and the United States.
State Power, Institutional Change, and the Politics of Privatization in Russia
Authors: McFaul Michael
Published: June 2011

This article reviews recent events in Russia and demonstrates that future progress in developing private property rights will require not only sound economic policies but also more robust state institutions capable of carrying out economic transformation. In January 1992 Russia's first postcommunist government launched a comprehensive economic program to transform the Soviet command system into a market economy. Privatization constituted one of the key components of this program. Two years later, however, privatization in Russia had failed to create real private property rights. By the summer of 1993 insiders had acquired majority shares in two-thirds of Russia's privatized and privatizing firms, state subsidies accounted for 22 percent of Russia's GNP, little if any restructuring had taken place within enterprises, and few market institutions had been created. Progress toward creating private property rights in Russia was impeded by the particular constellation of political institutions in place after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The set of political institutions comprising the first postcommunist Russian state was not capable of either dismantling Soviet institutions governing property rights or creating or supporting new market-based economic institutions regarding private property.
Processes of Dyadic Choice for war and Peace
Authors: Russett Bruce
Published: June 2011

This essay reviews three recent books on foreign policy decision making. Collectively, they sharply modify conventional realist analysis by emphasizing the possibility of choice, the necessity of analyzing relationships at the level of a dyad of states rather than at the level of either individual states or the entire international system, and the cognitive processes by which choices are made. But their substantial challenge to realism falls short of the next step necessary, namely, more fully developing a theory of how domestic political processes affect the choice of whether to use military force.
Much Ado About Ideas: The Cognitive Factor in Economic Policy
Authors: Jacobsen John Kurt
Published: June 2011

This article examines recent works that investigate how ideas acquire influence over economic policy choice. The revival of interest in the “material power of ideas” stems from discontent with the inability of rational interest-based models to explain particular policy outcomes, except by resorting to auxiliary assumptions. The works under review primarily apply “ideas approaches” as supplementary analytical devices to clarify the dynamics of policy choices. These studies succeed in illuminating the interpenetration of interests and ideas in order to plumb the problematic variability of interest formation and the degree of public influence over economic policy parameters. The bolder thesis that ideas have a force of their own (independent of all interests) is, however, misconceived and unproved.
The Enigma of Nationalism
Authors: Tamir Yael
Published: June 2011

This article reviews three recently published books: Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, Liah Greenfeld's Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, and Anthony D. Smith's National Identity. It examines these books in search of clues that explain the enigma of nationalism: What are the sources of the mysterious vitality of nationalism? Why does nationalism provide the most compelling identity myth in the modern world? Why can it motivate individuals more than any other political force? This inquiry reveals an irony attendant upon the study of nationalism: the more we learn about the emergence of nationalism, the less credible is the nationalist pretense that nations are natural, continuous communities of fate. Yet it is precisely this image of nationalism that nurtures the unique power of nationalism. The power of nationalism thus seems to be embedded in self-deception.
The State of the (European) Union: From the Single Market to Maastricht, from Singular Events to General Theories
Authors: Anderson Jeffrey J.
Published: June 2011

This review article examines four recent volumes on the European Union, each of which takes as its substantive and theoretical starting point the relaunching of the European Community in the mid-1980s around the single market initiative. Taken together, they provide a comprehensive account of the momentous events leading up to the Maastricht summit. They also present an accurate reflection of the current state of the subfield. Their basic research agenda, a continuation of traditional approaches in Community studies, revolves around the “big bangs” of integration and the conventional models of neofunctionalism and intergovemmentalism. This scholarly continuity generates unwelcome consequences for the selection of research puzzles and for the robustness and reach of the findings. As a remedy, several strategies—some methodological, others theoretical—are outlined for generating new insights into the growing complexity of the European Union.
Reassessing the Three Waves of Democratization
Authors: Doorenspleet Renske
Published: June 2011

Since the publication of Samuel Huntington's 1991 study of democratization, scholars have come to take for granted the notion that the spread of democracy has come in waves. Although Huntington's work has clearly proved to be an influential study, this article suggests that his analysis is far from compelling. There are two problems embodied in the work. The first is largely conceptual. Huntington's analysis fails to provide a clear and meaningful distinction between democratic and authoritarian regimes because it focuses primarily on what Dahl had defined in 1971 as the dimension of competition and pays insufficient attention to the equally important dimension of inclusion. The second problem is more empirical. Huntington has estimated the incidence of transitions to democracy in terms of thepercentagesof world states involved. Since the denominator in this equation, that is, the number of states in the world, is far from constant, this measure can be misleading. This article proposes solutions to both of these problems, and this new approach leads to conclusions that are quite different from Huntington's.

The new findings are important not only because they suggest a somewhat altered sequencing and a more accurate count of democratization waves but also because they cast real doubt on the appropriateness of the wave metaphor. As the reverse waves are not really apparent from these data, these results therefore also indicate that future studies should be cautious in comparing, explaining, and forecasting different “waves” of democratization.