This paper introduces a new methodology to examine the empirical relationship

between democracy and economic growth. Democratic institutions are assumed to affect growth through a series of channels. We specify and estimate a full system of equations determining growth and the channel variables. Results suggest that democracy fosters growth by improving the accumulation of human capital and, less robustly, by lowering income inequality. On the other hand, democracy hinders growth by reducing the rate of physical capital accumulation and, less robustly, by raising the ratio of government consumption to GDP. Once all of these indirect effects are accounted for, the overall effect of democracy on economic growth is moderately negative. Our results indicate that democratic institutions are responsive to the demands of the poor by expanding access to education and lowering income inequality, but do so at the expense of physical capital accumulation.

A decade after the collapse of communism, Russia still lacks a robust party system. Most institutions of the state are immune from party influence. However parties play a central role in the lower house of parliament, the State Duma. Why? Why have parties been successful in organizing and influencing the work of the State Duma but enjoyed only very limited success elsewhere? This article argues that parties in Russia are weak in general because the most powerful politicians in Russia have made choices to make them weak. Cultural, historical, and socioeconomic factors play a role in impeding party emergence, but individual decisions--especially decisions about institutional design--are the more proximate and more salient causes of poor party development. The privileged position of parties in the State Duma also resulted from individual choices, but those choices had unintended consequences that did not represent the preferences of the most powerful.

The March 2000 presidential election was an important milestone in the democratic development of Taiwan, with the Kuomintang turned out of power after five decades of control and replaced by the Democratic Progressive Party.

This book address the effects that Taiwan's democratic development and the March 2000 election will have on policy in the region. In addition to analyzing trends and changes in Taiwan's politics and the outcome of the March 2000 election, the chapters also discuss the international implications of Taiwan's democratic evolution for a variety of issues, including political, economic and security relations on both sides of the Taiwan strait; Japan's foreign policy in the region; U.S. foreign policy in the region; and peace and security in Southeast Asia. The challenges and prospects for continued democratic consolidation and the implications and lessons for the PRC and Southeast Asia are also explored.

Over the several hundred years during which the rules of sovereignty including non-intervention and the exclusion of external authority have been widely understood, state control could never be taken for granted. States could never isolate themselves from the external environment. Globalization and intrusive international norms are old, not new, phenomena. Some aspects of the contemporary environment are uniquethe number of transnational nongovernmental organizations has grown dramatically, international organizations are more prominent; cyber crime could not exist without cyber space. These developments challenge state control. A loss of control can precipitate a crisis of authority, but even a crisis of authority is only a necessary but not a sufficient condition for developing new authority structures. New rules could emerge in an evolutionary way as a result of trial and error by rational but myopic actors. But these arrangements, for instance international policing, are likely to coexist with rather than to supplant conventional sovereign structures. Sovereigntys resilience is, if nothing else, a reflection of its tolerance for alternatives.

For almost two centuries, Americans expected that their public schools would cultivate the personal, moral, and social development of individual students, create citizens, and bind diverse groups into one nation. Since the 1980s, however, a new generation of school reformers has been intent on using schools to solve the nations economic problems. An economic justification for public schoolsequipping students with marketable skills to help the nation compete in a global, information-based workplaceoverwhelmed other historically accepted purposes for tax-supported public schools.

Private sector management has become the model for public school systems as schools and districts are downsized, restructured, and outsourced. Recent reform proposals have called for government-funded vouchers to send children to private schools, the creation of self-governing charter schools, the contracting of schools to private entrepreneurs, and the partnerships with the business community in promoting new information technologies. But if there is a shared national purpose for education, should it be oriented only toward enhancing the countrys economic success? Is everything public for sale? Are the interests of individuals or selected groups overwhelming the common good that the founders of tax-supported public schools so fervently sought?

This volume explores the ongoing debates about what constitutes the common good in American public education, assessing the long-standing tensions between shared purposes and individual interests in schooling. It shows how recent school reform efforts, driven by economic concerns, have worsened the conflict between the legitimate interests of individuals and society as a whole, and demonstrates that reconstructing the common good envisioned by the founders of public education in the United States remains essential and unfinished work.

New theories and theory-based methodological approaches have found their way into Comparative Education - just as into Comparative Social Science more generally - in increasing number in the recent past. The essays of this volume express and critically discuss quite a range of these positions such as, inter alia, the theory of self-organizing social systems and the morphogenetic approach; the theory of long waves in economic development and world-systems analysis; historical sociology and the sociology of knowledge; as well as critical hermeneutics and post-modernist theorizing. With reference to such theories and approaches, the chapters - written by scholars from Europe, the U.S.A., Australia and New Zealand - outline alternative research agendas for the comparative study of the social and educational fabric of the modern world. In so doing, they also expound frames of reference for re-considering the intellectual shaping, or Discourse Formation, of Comparative Education as a field of study.