We assess the factors affecting national administrative rationalization in the context of the current worldwide movement for governance reforms. Focusing on indicators of corruption control, the rule of law, bureaucratic effectiveness, and investment openness, we conduct cross-national and longitudinal analyses for the period 1985-2002. First, we find a modest overall expansion of rationalization in countries worldwide, with the most substantial changes occurring in developing countries and previously communist countries. Change is mostly on the specific indicator of investment openness. Second, we find that national change tends to reflect links with global society - expanded trade, the penetration of scientific logics, and embeddedness in world organizational activity play prominent roles. We conclude, then, that the rationalization of national governance, as with a good many other dimensions of modernization, is not simply or principally a consequence of endogenous national development or social complexity. Rather, it directly reflects international trade, and institutional linkages with wider rationalizing movements in the current context of a neoliberal world polity.

This paper asks (a) why and how institutions change; (b) how does an institution persist in a changing environment and (c) how do processes that it unleashes lead to its own demise. The paper shows that the game theoretic notion of self-enforcing equilibrium and the historical institutionalist focus on process are both inadequate to answer these questions. Building on a game theoretic foundation, but responding to the critique of it by historical institutionalists, the paper introduces the concepts of quasi-parameters and self--reinforcement. With these concepts, and building on repeated game theory, a dynamic approach to institutions is offered, one that can account for endogenous change (and stability) of institutions. Contextual accounts of formal governing institutions in early modern Europe and the informal institution of cleavage structure in the contemporary world provide illustrations of the approach.

This paper presents an institution - the Community Responsibility System (CRS) - which presents a missing link in our understanding of market development. The CRS fostered market expansion throughout pre-modern Europe by providing the contract enforcement required for impersonal exchange characterized by separation between the quid and the quo over time and space. It supported market expansion because it did not entail the high marginal cost of establishing new exchange relationships based on a reputation mechanism or the high fixed cost associated with establishing an effective centralized legal system. Merchant communes, motivated by concern over their collective reputations, utilized their local and partial intra-community legal institutions to discipline members who cheated in inter-community exchange and to create the organizational infrastructure required for anonymous merchants to credibly reveal their identities. The CRS endogenously declined as the trade it fostered undermined its self-enforceability. Depending on the prevailing political conditions, it was gradually replaced by a centralized legal system based on personal (rather than collective) legal responsibility and supported by the state. This institutional dynamic supports the view that long-distance trade impacts economic growth through its influence on intra-state institutional development.

A recurring theme in the sociology of education is that schooling produces citizenship or a sense of membership in the nation-state. Much of the literature on civic education explores this theme, either lamenting school failures in this arena or fearing that hyper-successful schools will create massive conformity. Different though these perspectives are they share the premise that schooling is designed to produce national citizens with the national heritage and the nation-state as the crucial and bounded referential standards. This premise is challenged by the development of the human rights movement and its more recent human rights education focus. Human rights has emerged as an influential discourse and this discourse is changing from a solely legal to a broader human rights education focus. Civic education, once the central curricular area for teaching national citizenship, now teaches global citizenship and incorporates a rights discourse that extend beyond national borders.

This volume centers on the movement toward global legal standards, an increasingly recognized dimension of the quest to improve the rule of law. Although the drive to make law uniform across disparate political jurisdictions has a rich and imposing history, the contemporary enterprise to enact and enforce standard legal norms and procedures in fields as diverse as the law of companies, financial regulation, labor, constitutional dimensions of trade disputes resolution, environment and criminal procedure is clearly a growth industry. On the surface, the primary question posed by explaining this push toward standardization is why standard setting is emerging as a more prominent mechanism through which legal uniformity is pursued. There are numerous traditional and contemporary modes of extending the law across polities, among which the recent trend toward standardization commands particular attention. But just below the surface lie two related questions posed by the multiple movements toward legal homogenization.

Suicide attacks occur in the context of a conflict between warring groups, supported by an organization and sometimes even by families and communities which proudly sacrifice their children. Their design and planning, the construction of weapons and associated equipment, the recruitment of trainers and attackers, and the actual execution all occur within a group engaged in a conflict. Understanding the use of suicide attacks as a tactic of war requires understanding all the factors identified in the study of diplomacy and military strategy - military capability of the warring parties, terrain, payoffs and costs, etc. But that is not enough. Understanding suicide attacks also requires heightened attentiveness to support among the general population, for suicide attacks would not long endure without popular support. Understanding the social climate is thus a key ingredient in understanding suicide attacks.

The rule of law is a concept much in use to identify what is missing in many countries. It is a widespread and frequently repeated truism that the world in general, and the developing world in particular, needs "the rule of law." Most people do not have a very precise idea of what they mean when they invoke the rule of law. The reference is rich in historical and doctrinal connotations and therefore suggestive of meaning that is, however, hard to pin down.

Morally and analytically, there is no more vexing phenomenon than the persistence of mass poverty. Over the past half-century, remarkable gains have been made in reducing infant mortality, extending life expectancy, raising levels of income and education, reducing the incidence of severe diseases-and even effectively eliminating a few diseases (USAID, 2003). Huge investments of intellectual analysis, empirical research, and development assistance have been invested in the quest to eliminate, or at least dramatically reduce, absolute poverty, which leaves an individual left to survive on less than $2, or even $1, per day. Yet absolute poverty persists on a mass scale throughout much of what has been termed-unfortunately, rather "euphemistically"-the "developing" world. Why?