The first edition of Comparing Democracies was a landmark text, providing students with a thematic introduction to the global study of elections and voting. In this major new edition the world's leading international scholars have again produced an indispensable guide and up-to-date review of the whole field. Each of the chapters (the majority of which are completely new) provide a broad theoretical and comparative understanding of all the key topics associated with the elections including electoral and party systems, voter choice and turnout, campaign communications, and the new politics of direct democracy. This Second Edition will remain essential reading for students and lecturers of elections and voting behaviour, comparative politics, parties, and democracy.

President George W. Bush has demonstrated impressive flexibility in reshaping his approach to foreign policy to deal with the new international challenges brought to the fore by the terrorist attacks.

Before Sept. 11, President Bush embraced a humble mission for the United States in the world. This country, he believed, had to "preserve the peace" by seeking to maintain the basic balance of power between nations. Now, Bush has abandoned the preservation of the old system. Instead, he seeks to change it by promoting liberty, freedom and eventual democracy in countries ruled by autocrats.

In doing so, Bush lines up next to "idealists" or "liberals" such as Ronald Reagan, Woodrow Wilson and Immanuel Kant, and implicitly distances himself from realists focused solely on the balance of power such as Richard Nixon, Thucydides and his own father, the 41st president.

In a second remarkable change, Bush has become a supporter, at least rhetorically, of nation building. Before Sept. 11, the Bush administration derided nation building as a Clinton-era distraction from the more important issues in international politics. Now, Bush has clearly identified the connection between rebuilding the failed state of Afghanistan and American national security interests. If Congress approves his proposals, Bush will be the author of the greatest increase in the American foreign aid budget since John F. Kennedy's presidency.

Third, the Bush administration before Sept. 11 expressed disdain for multilateral institutions. But in his speech this month before the United Nations, Bush outlined an ambitious proposal for revitalizing the United Nations and American cooperation with this most important multilateral institution.

To be credible, President Bush needs to do more to demonstrate his commitment to the promotion of democracy, nation building and multilateralism. Bush must show that he wants to see political reform in Saudi Arabia as well as in Iraq. Words about promoting liberty ring hollow if they apply only to some people.

To show seriousness on nation building, Bush should press for increases in the peacekeeping forces in Afghanistan. Those working to rebuild Afghanistan unanimously complain that the lack of security throughout the country is the No. 1 impediment to their work.

To make credible his pledge to reinvigorate the United Nations and other multilateral institutions, the president should complement his pledge to enforce U.N. resolutions on Iraq with a rededication of American participation in other international regimes. Bush could start with the ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, an agreement that American officials helped craft.

Because many are suspicious of the president's recent embrace of democracy promotion, nation building and multilateralism, he must demonstrate a sustained commitment to his new foreign policy strategy.

If Bush has shown a willingness to consider new ideas about foreign policy, his critics -- both at home and abroad -- have demonstrated amazing conservatism. In a reversal of positions, those most opposed to Bush's new approach to foreign policy now seek to "preserve the peace" by defending the status quo. The core flaw in this is the assumption that the old international system was working. It was not.

Before Sept. 11, the United Nations had failed to enforce its own resolutions on Iraq. If the "international community" cannot act to execute its will when dealing with such grave issues as the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, then it has no credibility on anything.

The international community is ineffective in dealing with despotism, poverty and human rights violations because it seeks to preserve state sovereignty above all else. Fifty years ago, this was a progressive idea, which brought about the end of colonialism. Today, it is a regressive idea, which preserves the sovereignty of dictators who defy international law, denying the sovereignty of their people.

It is odd to hear the international community invoked so often as the defender of high ideals and then see representatives from Iraq in the U.N. General Assembly. Should the United States really be a member of the same organization that includes Saddam Hussein? Eventually, autocracy should go the way of slavery and colonialism as simply unacceptable.

To be effective, the international community and the United States need each other. U.N. Security Council resolutions can only be enforced if the United States helps to enforce them. The United Nations can only assist in the building of new states or prevent the destruction of vulnerable regimes if the United States participates, and vice-versa. The international community has no army and no economy, but even the mighty and rich United States can't afford to remake the world alone. For an effective partnership, change has to come from both sides.

Michael McFaul is an associate professor of political science and Hoover Fellow at Stanford University and a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Many countries have adopted the form of democracy with little of its substance. This makes the task of classifying regimes more difficult, but also more important.

Appendices to article available at link below.

What went wrong in Russias decade-old post-communist transition? A group of leading young scholars answer this question by offering assessments of five crucial political arenas during the Yeltsin era: elections, executive-legislative relations, interactions between the central state and the regions, economic reforms, and civil-military relations. All of the contributors recognize that adverse historical legacies have complicated Russian democratization. They challenge structural explanations that emphasize constraints of the pre-existing system, however, and concentrate instead on the importance of elite decisions and institution-building. The authors agree that elites failure to develop robust political institutions has been a central problem of Russias post-communist transition. The weakness of the state and its institutions has contributed to a number of serious problems threatening democratic consolidation. These include the tensions between the executive and the legislature, the frail infrastructure for successful market reform, and the absence of proper civilian control over the armed forces.

Drawn from outstanding articles published in the Journal of Democracy, The Global Divergence of Democracies follows the enthusiastically received earlier volume, The Global Resurgence of Democracy.

The tremendous momentum of democratic expansion that characterized the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s has drawn to a halt. Significantly, this halt has not yet been followed by a "reverse wave"of democratic breakdowns, and democracy remains unchallenged as a global model and ideal of governance. The values of freedom, human rights, and popular sovereignty have continued to gain strength in the world. The first section of The Global Divergence of Democracies presents a few outstanding examples of the accumulating body of argument and evidence in favor of the universality of democratic principles and their basic compatibility with diverse religious and cultural traditions.

Nonetheless, in practice, the performance of the world's newer democracies has become increasingly varied, a trend reflected in the title of this volume: The Global Divergence of Democracies. The divergence in the quality or depth of democracy is matched by a parallel divergence in progress toward the consolidation of democracy. The second section of this volume is devoted to the hotly contested debate among leading scholars of comparative democracy of the utility and meaning of the concept of consolidation.

A third section examines some of the key building blocks of successful democracy, including political party systems, elections, federalism, the rule of law, a market economy, an independent judiciary, and civilian control of the military. The volume concludes with a series of appraisals of the divergent paths that democracy is taking both among and within various regions of the world, as well as in such key countries as Russia and China. With contributions by more than thirty of the world's leading scholars of democracy, this volume presents the most comprehensive assessment available of the state of democracy in the world at the beginning of the new millennium.

The authoritarian Chinese regimes governing Taiwan, Mainland China, and Hong Kong allowed limited electoral competition during the last half century. In Taiwan that process evolved over more than three decades before leading to the formation of an opposition party under martial law in late September 1986 and the blossoming of full democracy In March 2000 when that opposition party replaced the ruling party. In Mainland China and Hong Kong, limited electoral competition has only evolved over the last fifteen years or so. This volume examines why and how limited electoral competition developed in Greater China.

The editors use a typology and different concepts to analyse how the political centre in these three Chinese societies historically interacted with society and how different regime change took place. Their analysis attributes Taiwan's robust electoral competition under martial law to political breakthroughs in the political, ideological, economic, and organizational marketplaces. Without similar political breakthroughs in Mainland China and Hong Kong, their limited electoral processes are not likely to lead to the election of one or more opposition parties in Mainland China and the direct election of a Hong Kong governor and parliament.

These two authoritarian regimes have adopted different institutions, or rules, to limit electoral competition. Moreover, different changes have been taking place in their political, ideological, economic, and organizational marketplaces than occurred in Taiwan. Therefore, whether these two Chinese societies can mimic the Taiwan democratization path remains problematic. Only the passage of time will reveal whether their limited electoral competitive processes can transform into full democracy.

The first-ever encyclopedic examination of elections and electoral concepts worldwide. Written by a distinguished international team of scholars.

Elections are of fundamental importance in countries around the world, especially as democracy continues to spread. As more and more of the world's people are winning the right to select their leaders in free and competitive elections, many elections are poorly understood by the electorate, as well as by the world at large and electoral institutions vary greatly from country to country.

The International Encyclopedia of Elections is the first and only definitive work to survey elections in independent nations and describe the varied systems and processes in clear language understandable to any interested reader. The encyclopedia will be most useful to undergraduate and graduate students, journalists, political activists, and scholars seeking information outside their specialties or their own countries.

Written in clear, concise language by 70 international scholars in the field, the volume contains more than 150 articles (from Absentee voting to Women: Enfranchisement) ranging in length from a few hundred to several thousand words. The encyclopedia covers each of the more than 170 countries that have held direct elections or national referendums in this decade.

The first product of the Carnegie Moscow Center's research on the 1999 Duma elections. It includes an analysis of the political situation and allignment of electoral forces on the eve of the elections, descriptions of the campaigns and policy platforms of the main electoral associations and blocs, and analysis of the electorate's fluctuating political preferences. Separate chapters are devoted to the electoral campaigns in the following regions: Saint Petersburg, Altai and Stavropol Krais, and the Samara and Tverskoi regions.