After the devastation of World War II, Germany and Japan built national capitalist institutions that were remarkably successful in terms of national reconstruction and international competitiveness. Yet both "miracles" have since faltered, allowing U.S. capital and its institutional forms to establish global dominance. National varieties of capitalism are now under intense pressure to converge to the U.S. model. Kozo Yamamura and Wolfgang Streeck have gathered an international group of authors to examine the likelihood of convergence to determine whether the global forces of Anglo-American capitalism will give rise to a single, homogeneous capitalist system. The chapters in this volume approach this question from five directions: international integration, technological innovation, labor relations and production systems, financial regimes and corporate governance, and domestic politics.

In their introduction, Yamamura and Streeck summarize the crises of performance and confidence that have beset German and Japanese capitalism and revived the question of competitive convergence. The editors ask whether the two countries, confronted with the political and economic exigencies of technological revolution and economic internationalization, must abandon their distinctive institutions and the competitive advantages these have yielded in the past, or whether they can adapt and retain such institutions, thereby preserving the social cohesion and economic competitiveness of their societies.

Over the course of the last century, political scientists have been moved by two principal purposes. First, they have sought to understand and explain political phenomena in a way that is both theoretically and empirically grounded. Second, they have analyzed matters of enduring public interest, whether in terms of public policy and political action, fidelity between principle and practice in the organization and conduct of government, or the conditions of freedom, whether of citizens or of states. Many of the central advances made in the field have been prompted by a desire to improve both the quality and our understanding of political life. Nowhere is this tendency more apparent than in research on American politics, a field in which concerns for the public interest have stimulated various important insights.

This volume systematically analyzes the major developments within the broad field of American politics over the past three decades. Each chapter is composed of a core paper that addresses the major puzzles, conversations, and debates that have attended major areas of concern and inquiry within the discipline. These papers examine and evaluate the intellectual evolution and natural history of major areas of political inquiry and chart particularly promising trajectories, puzzles, and concerns for future work. Each core paper is accompanied by a set of shorter commentaries that engage the issues it takes up, thus contributing to an ongoing and lively dialogue among key figures in the field.

This paper assesses Pan Wei's proposal for a 'consultative rule of law system' for China, finding it a potentially important step along the path of political reform. China urgently needs political reform to deal with the rapidly mounting problems of corruption, abuse of power, financial scandals, rising crime and inequality, and declining legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party. A rule of law, with an independent judiciary and other autonomous institutions of horizontal accountability, is vital if China is to rein in these problems and deliver better, fairer, more transparent and effective governance. However, Pan Wei's proposed system goes only part of the way toward addressing the deficiencies of governance in China, and is therefore best viewed as a transitional framework. To work, horizontal accountability must be supplemented with and reinforced by vertical account ability, through competitive elections, which give local officials an incentive to serve the public good and enable bad officials to be removed by the people. Ultimately, I argue, China can only achieve adequate and enduring political accountability by moving toward democracy. Among the other issues addressed in the paper are the architecture and appointment of a system of horizontal accountability for China; the role of the Communist Party (or its successor hegemon) in a 'rule of law' system; and the timing and phasing of the transition to a rule of law.

Reprinted in Suisheng Zhao, ed., Debating Political Reform in China: Rule of Law vs. Democratization, 2006.

Islam and Democracy in the Middle East provides a comprehensive assessment of the origins and staying power of Middle East autocracies, as well as a sober account of the struggles of state reformers and opposition forces to promote civil liberties, competitive elections, and a pluralistic vision of Islam. Drawing on the insights of some twenty-five leading Western and Middle Eastern scholars, the book highlights the dualistic and often contradictory nature of political liberalization. As the case studies of Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, and Yemen suggest, political liberalization -- as managed by the state -- not only opens new spaces for debate and criticism, but is also used as a deliberate tactic to avoid genuine democratization. In several chapters on Iran, the authors analyze the benefits and costs of limited reform. There, the electoral successes of President Mohammad Khatami and his reformist allies inspired a new generation but have not as yet undermined the clerical establishment's power. By contrast, in Turkey a party with Islamist roots is moving a discredited system beyond decades of conflict and paralysis, following a stunning election victory in 2002.

Turkey's experience highlights the critical role of political Islam as a force for change. While acknowledging the enduring attraction of radical Islam throughout the Arab world, the concluding chapters carefully assess the recent efforts of Muslim civil society activists and intellectuals to promote a liberal Islamic alternative. Their struggles to affirm the compatibility of Islam and pluralistic democracy face daunting challenges, not least of which is the persistent efforts of many Arab rulers to limit the influence of all advocates of democracy, secular or religious.

We provide new measures of ethnic, linguistic and religious fractionalization for about 190 countries. These measures are more comprehensive than those previously used in the economics literaturer and we compare our new variables with those previously used. We also revisit the question of the effects of ethnic, linguistic and religious heterogeneity on the quality of institutions and growth.

The basic argument of this article is that the globalization perspective in all of its variations (and there are many) exaggerates the amount of change in the contemporary global system. States are for the most part exactly what they have always been, the most important actors in the modern international system -- which is not to argue that they are now, or have ever been, immune to influence from other actors or that they have ever been able to fully control economic or other kinds of transactions. The hyperglobalist argument -- which sees states as fundamentally outmoded, incapable of carrying on the basic functions of governance -- is wrong. Transformationist arguments are also for the most part incorrect, but here it is necessary to distinguish among different kinds of claims, which are obfuscated by the emphasis on complexity, interconnectedness and multiple actors.

When Terry Karl and I were searching for the most generic definition of “modern representative political democracy,” we hit upon the concept of accountability. We wanted a definition that was not dependent upon a specific institution or set of institutions, that was not uniquely liberal or excessively defensive in its presumptions, that was neither exclusively procedural nor substantive in its content, and that could travel well across world cultural regions. None of those in widespread use in the burgeoning literature on democratization fit our, admittedly demanding, bill of particulars, especially not the so-called Schumpeterian definition or the many versions derived from it. All of these focused too single-mindedly on the regular conduct of elections that (allegedly) offered citizens a choice between alternative set of rulers (with no attention to the relations of citizens and rulers leading up to the holding of such presumably “free and fair” elections or to those prevailing after such episodic events). Indeed, many of the more theoretically inclined scholars who relied on such a definition seemed embarrassed in doing so and excused themselves by arguing that, even though elections are not the only manifestation of democracy, they were easy to measure (even to dichotomize!) and/or that alternative, so-called substantive definitions of “it” were subject to partisan manipulation. Terry and I were all too aware that some accountability; indeed, it gives them greater legitimacy when they have to act against immediate popular opinion.

South Korea (Korea hereafter) and Taiwan are widely recognized as the two most successful third-wave democracies in Asia (Chu, Diamond, and Shin, 2001; Diamond and Plattner, 1998; Shin and Lee, 2003). For more than a decade, these two new democracies have regularly held free and competitive elections at all levels of their respective governments. Both nationally and locally, citizens choose the heads of the executive branches and the members of the legislatures thorough regularly scheduled electoral contests. Unlike many countries in the region, moreover, the two countries have peacefully transferred power to opposition parties, the Millennium Democratic Party in Korea and the Democratic Progressive Party in Taiwan. Accordingly, there is little doubt that the political regimes of Korea and Taiwan fully meet the democratic principle of popular sovereignty featuring free and fair elections, universal adult suffrage, and multiparty competition. Nonetheless, little is known about how well their current regimes meet other important principles of liberal democracy and uphold its basic values such as freedom, equality, and justice.

While the Third Wave of Democracy swept through many African countries in the 1990s, South Africa and Ghana stand out as two of the continent’s real success stories politically. Beginning in the late 1980s, South Africa’s leaders successfully steered the country out of the shadow of apparently irreconcilable conflict and unavoidable racial or ethnic civil war to create a common nation. Since 1994, they have negotiated two democratic constitutions, and held four successful nation-wide elections for national and local government. South Africa’s Constitution has become the darling of liberals and social democrats the world over because of its inclusion of an extensive set of political and socio- economic rights.ii Starting in 1993, Ghana has enjoyed ten years of democratic, constitutional rule, holding three successful multi-party elections (with the third producing a peaceful electoral turnover).

Equality points to one of the critical dimensions along which the quality of democracy varies. 1 What is at stake is political equality, not equality in everything human beings have reason to value, nor equality in the most important structures of social inequality – in class, status, and power. However, political equality is intertwined with, and profoundly shaped by these structures. Political equality is affected by social and economic inequality in two broad ways: dominant groups can use their social and economic power resources more or less directly in the political sphere, and they can shape the views, values, and preferences of subordinate groups by virtue of their status and their influence on education, cultural production, and mass communication, exerting “cultural hegemony”. Political equality will be extremely limited unless these effects of social and economic equality are substantially contained.