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Before 2005, most states of India only gave sons the legal right to inherit their parents’ ancestral land. However, five states in India had legal reforms giving daughters the same inheritance rights as sons. This article examines the impact of these reforms on female child mortality and fertility. A model shows that if parents desire to maximize their bequest per son, then giving daughters inheritance rights increases the cost of daughters, causing parents to reduce investment in their daughters’ health or decrease fertility. A difference-in-difference analysis shows that the reforms caused an increase in female child mortality but had no effect on fertility rates.

The socialist-era danwei lives on in contemporary, ever-reforming China. Ironically, the processes of reform helped to enable the perpetuation of the traditional danwei’s paternalistic practices by concentrating monopoly power in selected, partially market-listed, centrally owned enterprise groups. The Tarim Oilfield Company is an outstanding example of this balancing act between socialist and market structures—a neo-danwei. This article maps these structures using detailed ethnographic data gathered over two years working in the company. Multiple subjective viewpoints show that distinctions between different categories of employee are crucial to maintaining the danwei in the midst of marketization. Like the socialist-era danwei, the oil company produces dependency and constrains social mobility. Yet, amidst glorification of open competition and individual achievement, the desire to enter a danwei is as strong as ever. The certainty of danwei life is highly valued; stability becomes a status symbol.

Despite a growing literature on peasant protest in contemporary China, we know little about why some protests are more sustained, disruptive and violent—in a word, militant—than others and thus pose a more serious challenge to the political order. The influential concept of “rightful resistance” cannot explain protest militancy, because it only applies to civil protest. This article studies a case of unusually militant peasant protest in Qizong, Hunan. The protest became militant because the peasants rallied around well-educated and fearless leaders and established a layered and encompassing protest organization. Empowered by central policies on lowering taxes and fees on the peasants (the so-called “peasant burden”) and the Confucian norm of subsistence, the peasants successfully mobilized for drastic reduction of the burden. Local government could not contain the protest, having lost its moral authority and lacking the resources either to suppress it or to make sufficient concessions.

In recent decades, developing countries around the world have undergone dual transitions to democracy and more open markets. Such reforms often have coincided with the retrenchment of state-sponsored social insurance, even as unemployment, crime, and informality have risen. This article examines how insecurity associated with lack of adequate protection against the risks of income loss and violent crime affects patterns of political engagement in Brazil. Although it is often assumed that insecurity is mobilizing, analysis of an original household survey reveals that those lacking the means to ensure against livelihood risks are systematically more likely to forbear from active political participation. Insecurity and poverty, moreover, reveal divergent effects on political participation, wherein it is not the poorest, but rather the most insecure citizens who are most likely to forbear from active citizenship. Emerging democracies thus may be more deeply riven by cleavages of insecurity than by income when...

The fraction of the population over age sixty-five in many developed countries is projected to rise, in some cases sharply, in coming decades. This has drawn growing interest to research on the health and economic circumstances of individuals as they age. Many individuals are retiring from paid work, yet they are living longer than ever. Their well-being is shaped by their past decisions such as their saving behavior, as well as by current and future economic conditions, health status, medical innovations, and a rapidly evolving landscape of policy incentives and supports. The contributions to Insights in the Economics of Aging uncover how financial, physical, and emotional well-being are integrally related. The authors consider the interactions between financial circumstances in later life, such as household savings and home ownership, physical circumstances such as health and disability, and emotional well-being, including happiness and mental health.

Data are available on homicide trends and patterns for 235 countries from six continents from 1950 to 2010. Recent rates range from fewer than 0.5 victim per 100,000 population to 80 and regionally from around one in Scandinavia to around 30 in Central America. Countries that share cultural, political, and social traditions usually have similar crime trends. In Western countries, lethal violence increased in the 1960s through the early 1990s, followed by declines. Elsewhere, trends may have been different as a result of local political configurations and social developments. In eastern Europe, the development of crime was affected by political turmoil after the fall of the Soviet Union and in several Latin American and Caribbean countries by unstable political conditions and the drug industry. Homicide is not decreasing in parts of the Americas and the Caribbean. Cross-sectional analyses confirm the interdependency of lethal violence with socioeconomic and political factors. The level of lethal vi...

Over the past decade the idea that Europe experienced a centuries-long decline in homicide, interrupted by recurrent surges and at different speeds in different parts of the continent, became widely acknowledged. So far explanations have relied mostly on anecdotal evidence, usually broadly relying on Norbert Elias’s theory of the “civilizing process.” One major general theory of large-scale fluctuations in homicide rates, self-control theory, offers a wide range of hypotheses that can be tested with rigorous quantitative analyses. A number of macro-level indicators for societal efforts to promote civility, self-discipline, and long-sightedness have been examined and appear to be strongly associated with fluctuations in homicide rates over the past six centuries.

This paper examines campaigns in two US social movements, an African American unionization struggle in the 1960s and 1970s, and a recent environmental justice campaign in a Latina/o community. These and the larger movements of which they are a part have been movements of the most economically precarious sectors of the population and have also been historically reliable sources of hope and inclusive regimes of economic and civic value. These regimes manifest in everyday ways that participants in these campaigns construct economic value and in how they link that economic value to their claims for full civic membership. I develop the concept of economic citizenship—namely, that clashes over economic values and social worth are double stranded and mutually constituting. That is, economic regimes of value (capitalist and otherwise) are key to constituting social worth and civic belonging, and notions of civic worthiness in turn constitute economic value.

Economic concepts have a double status. They are elaborated for scientific purposes, but they are also used in the real world, especially by decision makers. In this paper I focus on the latter aspect and address the question of the uses of these concepts in welfare reform. I base my reflections on the case of the renewal of welfare-control policy in France. Findings from ethnographic fieldwork on the daily practices of welfare control provide the occasion to confront the economic vulgate of welfare reform with the actual situations of welfare recipients and ground a critical evaluation of the effect of reforms inspired by this vulgate. By doing so I propose a basis for a socioanthropological critique of the political implications of economic concepts.

Over the last two decades, rapid urban expansion building on landgrabs has become ubiquitous in China. The pursuit of urban-centered economic growth has created crises of land deprivation and rural identity in Chinese rural society. Land-related protests have become the focal point of movements for the protection of Chinese farmers’ rights. Drawing on ethnographic materials concerning a series of influential protests over landgrabs in Wukan village, this paper presents a critical rethinking of the economy and an examination of how the restoration of villagers’ collective identity has led to communal resistance that has successfully reclaimed governing power and social order, sowing the seed of hope for a better life. A revitalized and reinvented clan system organized around extended kinship networks has played a critical role in reconstituting the collective identity of villagers. The Wukan events constitute the first steps in an ambitious project to turn around farmers’ subordinate and vulnerable role wi...

The distribution of the common law was conditioned by a colonial strategy sensitive to the colonies’ level of endowments, exhibiting a more effective implantation of the legal system in initially sparsely populated territories with a temperate climate. This translates into a negative relationship of precolonial population density and settler mortality with legal outcomes for common-law countries. By contrast, the implantation of the French civil law was not systematically influenced by initial conditions, which is reflected in the lack of such a relationship for this legal family. The common law does not generally lead to legal outcomes superior to those provided by the French civil law when precolonial population density and/or settler mortality are high. The form of colonial rule in British colonies is found to mediate between precolonial endowments and postcolonial legal outcomes. Postprint

In this article I explore how financialization works among the poor, based on the case of a group of migrants living in Barcelona’s urban periphery, who were granted mortgages during the climactic years of the Spanish housing boom (2004–2007). I argue that the hopes and values that underpin relations of reciprocity among the disadvantaged are transformed as they start accessing home ownership via predatory loans. Undeniably, forms of financial exploitation are rooted in and depend on a high degree of commodification. However, people tend to deal with the abstract logics of accumulation that underpin their domination through concrete interpersonal relations framed by moral values and mutual obligations.

This essay examines the long-standing Malagasy role of vadimbazaha, a word that literally means “the spouse of a European.” Malagasy women have historically aspired to this role to gain status and wealth as intermediaries who link social networks, enabling the flow of wealth, people, and opportunities among families. Prior generations of vadimbazaha stayed in Madagascar. Today, in the context of economic hardship, women seek European men and migrate to France. Their goal is to use their position in France to build a life-sustaining flow of resources back to Madagascar. Women achieve this goal by managing their French husbands’ and Malagasy kin’s horizons of expectation with respect to race, gender, kinship, and reputation. Understanding vadimbazaha’s economic practice requires attending to their ability to manage the meanings associated with their sexual, reproductive, and caring labor as much as the money they earn through low-wage labor and remittances.

This article examines the potential for remittances to aggravate or mitigate corruption in recipient states. Unlike previous research that posits unidirectional effects, I emphasize how governments’ and migrants’ incentives interact in the domestic political environment and argue that both outcomes are possible. Aggravating effects are most likely in closed regimes because governments require smaller winning coalitions and may be more likely to view remittances as an opportunity to increase political patronage. Moreover, the costs of political activity are higher for remittance recipients in authoritarian regimes, and their probability of influencing corruption is lower. Mitigating effects are most likely in open regimes. Democratic institutions require larger coalitions while lowering the costs of participation. Since remittances’ effects vary with political institutions, I test whether other less observable characteristics also influence how remittances influence corruption. Empirical analyses of panel ...

Long before behavioral economists began to combine economic theory with discoveries from psychology, environmentalists were nudging and framing and pushing their cause through psychological interventions. These interventions appear to have changed behavior by altering beliefs, norms, and preferences. However, because psychological interventions are often coarse, they have also resulted in inadvertent, offsetting side effects. This article discusses the interactions between environmental preference-making and economics, and then it examines three areas of environmental interest —electric cars, recycling, and local conservation efforts—where psychological interventions have created strong, widespread, and simple environmental views. However, in all three cases, simple environmental rules of thumb can lead to significant adverse environmental side effects. Local environmentalism, for example, may increase carbon emissions by pushing development from low emission areas, like coastal California, to high-emission areas elsewhere in the United States. I conclude with a discussion of a fourth issue: how economic analysis of the political supply of ideas can be helpful in understanding the remarkable disparity of views concerning climate change. (JEL: D00, Q5)

Every year, thousands of refugees are forced to leave their countries of origin and are hosted by their neighboring countries. However, very little is known about the impact of these refugees on the local economy and its inhabitants. Based on a hypothesis formulated during a two-month iterative field research, a theoretical framework is used to understand how the refugee inflow would affect the good and labour markets of the local economy. We then test the theoretical predictions regarding the potential winners and losers among the refugee-hosting population, using household panel data collected in the region of Kagera in Tanzania. Our identification strategy exploits both time and spatial variations in the way households traced between 1991 and 2004 have been affected by the refugee inflows originating from Burundi (1993) and Rwanda (1994). Our results show that local hosts do not necessarily suffer from the refugee presence. Net economic benefits could even emerge provided a sufficient mass of refugees is gathered. Furthermore, the economic benefits appear to be unevenly distributed among the refugeehosting population. Agricultural workers are likely to suffer the most from an increase in competition on the labor markets and the surging prices of several goods. On the contrary, non-agricultural workers and self-employed farmers are in a better position to benefit from such a refugee inflow. We also conjecture that the welfare deterioration experienced by those involved into business could be explained a selection effect resulting from the reported entry of larger-scale entrepreneurs from other regions.

This article examines the long-term impact of Ujamaa villigization on peri-urban areas of Kinondoni District, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. President Julius K. Nyerere’s aim had been to initiate an agrarian social reformation, introducing modern technological innovations and social services to a predominantly rural population while tapping into existing perspectives congruent with his view of “traditional” African society. But the implementation of this policy in Dar es Salaam’s periphery resulted in outcomes that were in many ways opposite to Nyerere’s ideals and counterintuitively served as a catalyst for the expansion of the city into its peri-urban hinterland. The article also explores the concept of tamaa, or envy, which former villagers associate with attitudes and outlooks brought about by urban living. Tamaa is often invoked as a way of understanding the emergence of an informal land market that led to the transfer of land from Ujamaa villagers to urbanites of upcountry origins.

Though climate change is a global process, current discussions emphasize its local impacts. A review of media representations, public opinion polls, international organization documents, and scientific reports shows that global attention to climate change is distributed unevenly, with the impacts of climate change seen as an urgent concern in some places and less pressing in others. This uneven attention, or specificity, is linked to issues of selectivity (the inclusion of some cases and exclusion of others), historicity (the long temporal depth of the pathways to inclusion or exclusion), and consequentiality (the effects of this specificity on claims of responsibility for climate change). These issues are explored through a historical examination of four cases—two (the Arctic, low-lying islands) strongly engaged with climate change frameworks, and two (mountains, deserts) closely associated with other frameworks of sustainable development rather than climate change. For all four regions, the 1960s and 19...

In the past two decades, the number of grass-roots NGOs in China has grown dramatically, yet most scholarship on Chinese civil society has had little to say about the resources on which they rely for survival. This article presents the first large-scale study of these groups and their resources. We compare 263 NGOs across issue areas (including HIV, education, the environment and labor rights) and regions (Beijing, Guangdong and Yunnan). We find that these groups are tapping into high levels of human resources—volunteers, boards of directors and informal government ties—even without official government approval for their activities. We also detail their sources of funding, revealing a diverse support system with clear regional and issue-based biases. Taken together, our findings form a baseline for understanding China’s grass-roots NGOs and point out new research questions that have yet to be addressed in the civil society literature.

A consensus crisis is characterized by challenges to the state’s managerial capacity, a critical need for civil society’s services, a general agreement on priorities and goals, and the state’s efforts to construct a morally respectable image. These features amplify the structural conditions favorable for relatively amicable state–society interactions. Existing studies of social response to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake focus on state–society relations, but neglect the role of situations. I argue that the earthquake is an example of a consensus crisis, which provided civil associations with a situational opening of political opportunity.

Analyzing oppositional social movements in the context of municipal immigration ordinances, the authors examine whether the explanatory power of resource mobilization, political process, and strain theories of social movements' impact on policy outcomes differs when considering proactive as opposed to reactive movements. The adoption of pro-immigrant (proactive) ordinances was facilitated by the presence of immigrant community organizations and of sympathetic local political allies. The adoption of anti-immigrant (reactive) ordinances was influenced by structural social changes, such as rapid increases in the local Latino population, that were framed as threats. The study also finds that pro-immigrant protest events can influence policy in two ways, contributing both to the passage of pro-immigrant ordinances in the locality where protests occur and also inhibiting the passage of anti-immigrant ordinances in neighboring cities.

Does economic inequality influence citizens’ support for democracy? Political economy theory suggests that in a country with high inequality, the majority of the population will support democracy as a potential mechanism for redistribution. Much of the survey and area-studies literature, by contrast, suggests that inequality generates political disillusion and regime dissatisfaction. To clarify this disagreement, we distinguish between prospective versus retrospective evaluations as well as between egocentric versus sociotropic evaluations. We test the resulting hypotheses in a multilevel analysis conducted in 40 democracies. We find that citizens are retrospective and sociotropic, meaning that higher levels of economic inequality reduce support for democracy amongst all social classes. We also find a small prospective egocentric effect, in that the reduction in democratic support in highly unequal countries is slightly less severe amongst the poor, suggesting they believe that democracy might increase fu...

Recent studies argue that cultural and political-economic shifts have led to a sea change in penal regimes among modern Western societies, resulting in more punitive social policies in general and a trend toward higher incarceration rates in particular. This is a special case of a wider argument that globalization has led to a decline in state autonomy and convergence on a market-based model of economic and social policy. This thesis has been challenged by the empirical literature on welfare states, which finds persistent cross-national diversity in institutional structures, policies, and patterns of inequality. Focusing on incarceration rates as the outcome of interest, this study evaluates these arguments by applying a Bayesian change-point model to four decades of data from 15 countries. Results show that a regime shift did occur but that incarceration rates increased mainly among countries with unregulated labor markets, decentralized polities, or weak labor unions. Profound institutional differences ...

Does living in close proximity to members of other ethnic groups make people more or less tolerant of ethnic differences? How does the interaction between local electoral competition and ethnic demography affect tolerance? This article examines these questions by combining survey data with new measures of local ethnic composition and political competition in Kenya. People living in ethnically diverse areas report higher levels of interethnic trust, while residentially segregated people are less trusting of members of other ethnic groups. There is little evidence that local electoral competition decreases tolerance even in ethnically diverse areas. This article has important implications for the study of the political and economic consequences of ethnic diversity and suggests that even in developing countries, where resource conflict, along ethnic lines, is acute and sometimes violent, sharing neighborhoods with members of different ethnic groups may lead to tolerance.

The right to health and life is firmly established in the industrialized world, and advanced age is no longer a reason to deny medical treatment. Yet scarce and expensive medical resources, changing demographics, and expanding societal demands reveal how that right is more controversial than ever before. The case of kidney transplantation in the United States is a quintessential example of a broad health equity predicament in which the potential for greater longevity brings with it the problems of fairness and equity. As those over 70 and 80 come to constitute more of the “public” in aging societies, how then are nations to reconstitute the practice of fairness and the idea of public good? This essay examines this quandary by describing the potentiality we assign to kidneys, older persons, and the organ supply itself and by exploring the effects of that potentiality in three realms: schemes for fairness in the US organ transplant distribution system, living donation from younger to older persons, and the ...

This article introduces a racialized conflict theory to explain how racial divisions structure welfare state development in the absence of de jure discrimination. The author explains the effect of racial divisions on policy outcomes as the result of the attitudinal, cultural, and political spillover effects of prevailing conflicts in a social field. Using a paired-case comparison and analysis of multiple data sources, the author applies this theory to analyze Georgia’s and Alabama’s surprisingly divergent welfare reforms in the 1990s. Results support the racialized conflict theory and suggest important revisions to prevailing theories about the sociopolitical effects of contemporary racial divides.

This article estimates trends in the poverty rates in Wisconsin for the overall population, for children, and for the elderly between 2008 and 2010, using an alternative poverty measure. Our measure is similar to the federally implemented Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) but customized to reflect the place-specific needs and resources of Wisconsin. Unlike the official poverty measure, the Wisconsin Poverty Measure (WPM) considers tax credits and noncash benefits and adjusts for work-related and medical care expenses and relative living costs statewide and across substate regions. Using the American Community Survey and Wisconsin administrative data, the WPM shows essentially no change in state poverty rates between 2008 and 2009 and a decline between 2009 and 2010, although state poverty levels calculated via the official measure continued to increase between 2008 and 2010. We discuss the policy implications of results and how the WPM compares to the SPM and other local poverty measures.

How does redistributive policy affect the survival of authoritarian regimes? I argue that redistributive policy in favor of cities, while temporarily reducing urban grievances, in the long-run undermines regime survival by inducing urban concentration. I test the argument using cross-national city population, urban bias, and nondemocratic regime survival data in the post-WWII period. The results show that urban concentration is dangerous for dictators principally by promoting collective action, that urban bias induces urban concentration, and that urban bias represents a Faustian bargain with short-term benefits overwhelmed by long-term costs.

Does the removal of salient external threats foster democratization? Recent research proposes an affirmative answer but either fails to examine democratization at the monadic level, to consider small-scale democratization, or to account for factors known to influence the democratization process. The current study addresses this deficit by (re)examining democratization during the period 1919–2006. The findings suggest a strong relationship between border settlement and democratization. A state that settles all of its interstate borders democratizes; any outstanding unsettled borders, however, prevent significant democratization. Furthermore, although border settlement contributes to democratization, it does not significantly affect democratic regime change. This empirical evidence cumulatively specifies a more precise relationship between external threat and democratization than previous work and thereby contributes directly to the recent debate between the territorial and democratic peace theories. It als...

Hereditary economic inequality is unknown among mobile foragers, but hereditary class distinctions between elites and commoners exist in some sedentary foraging societies. With agriculture, such stratification tends to become more pronounced. We develop a model to explain the associations among productivity, population, property rights, and inequality. Using Malthusian dynamics, we show that regional productivity growth leads to enclosure of the best sites first, creating inequality between insiders and outsiders. Hereditary elite and commoner classes subsequently arise at the best sites. Food consumption becomes more unequal and commoners become poorer. These predictions are consistent with a wide range of archaeological evidence.

Building on a recent analysis of total factor productivity growth in African agriculture, this paper revisits the political economy underpinnings of policies affecting agriculture. We examine the effect of institutional change on the productivity performance of African agriculture. Our central finding is that institutional change in the form of competitive presidential elections has played an important role in driving a resurgence of productivity growth. The emergence of electoral competition in Africa changed policymakers’ incentives, resulting in both sectoral and macroeconomic policy reforms favorable to agriculture, following decade of policy discrimination against agriculture. These reforms, to varying degrees, contributed to an acceleration of productivity growth in African agriculture.

We offer an account of civil conflict contagion in which we argue that in peaceful neighborhoods autocracies that provide an opportunity for legal participation in domestic politics—via elected legislatures—are able to offset violent demands for change from domestic opposition groups. We add, however, the expectation that these openings in the political institutions of the country are insufficient to appease renewed opposition demands in autocracies located in conflict-ridden neighborhoods. We suggest that this is because of the threat of externalities from nearby conflicts, as well as the likelihood that domestic opposition groups will emulate violent examples set overseas. Thus, conflict contagion affects autocracies with legislatures that reside in neighborhoods with ongoing civil conflicts. We test this claim via multivariate probit analyses in which conflict onset is a function of institutional design at the country level and conflict within the neighborhood. These analyses offer support for our test...

I want to take one paragraph from the second chapter (Social debt, silent gift) from Clara Han’s compelling account of the braiding of care and violence in postPinochet neoliberal Chile and work out its implications for anthropology with regard to questions of social suffering, poverty, and how we may understand the pursuit of the good. The paragraph that occurs on page seventy-nine goes as follows: Later, when I asked Paloma who her friends were in the poblacion, she said to me, “Friends? I don’t have any friends. Susana is my friend. We share our intimacies. Friends are few, neighbors are many.” Indeed, such a sentiment was echoed to me by many women in La Pincoya. Only upon meditation upon the boundary between neighbors and friends did I begin to realize that the crucial difference between inhabiting friendship and neighborliness lay not in the perceptive ability of catching those signs of critical moments, such as the cry of Paloma’s hungry child, but in how that catching would be or could be addressed. To follow Han’s thought here it is necessary to step into the streets and houses that she describes in such depth and ask, what does she mean by “critical moments”? Understanding the critical moments in the life of a family requires that we shift scales and ask how economic precariousness is produced in the lives of the poor through the transformations in economic policy. As Han argues, the successive democratic governments in Chile continued with the “growth with equity” model of the Pinochet regime that was consistent with a neoliberal vision. This economic model had particularly perilous effects on the poor with its flexible labor regimes, shifts from permanent to temporary labor contracts, and easy availability of credit cards with high interest rates and punishing schedules of repayment. Though various successive governments recognized a social debt to the poor, welfare programs were decentralized with technologies of verification by social workers

Why are some challenges to the territorial unity of democratic states more tractable than others? The literature has focused on numerous explanatory factors, including the impact of institutional reforms and government policies implemented in response to subnational mobilization and the ethnic identity of subnational groups. Building on the insights of a large literature on the political consequences of religious mobilization, this article analyzes a new dataset on the trajectory of 181 subnational political organizations active in India between 1952 and 2002. The article shows that demands for autonomy or secession put forward by religious organizations are likely to prove much more resilient over time than identical demands advanced by nonreligious organizations. The analysis has important implications for the study of secessionism and ethnic politics in general.

Does democracy affect basic service delivery? If yes, who benefits, and which elements of democracy matter - enfranchisement, the liberalization of political organization, or both? In 1994, 19 million South Africans gained the right to vote. The previously banned African National Congress was elected promising “a better life for all”. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we exploit heterogeneity in the share of newly enfranchised voters across municipalities to evaluate how franchise extension affected household electrification. Our unique dataset combines nightlight satellite imagery, geo-referenced census data, and municipal election results from the 1990s. We include covariates, run placebo regressions, and examine contiguous census tracts. We find that enfranchisement increased electrification. In parts of the country where municipalities lacked distribution capacity, the national electricity company prioritized core constituencies of the ANC. The effect of democratization on basic services depends on the national government’s ability to influence distribution at the local level.

This article explores the conditions under which political modernization leads to nation building, to the politicization of ethnic cleavages, or to populism by modeling these three outcomes as more or less encompassing exchange relationships between state elites, counterelites, and the population. Actors seek coalitions that grant them the most advantageous exchange of taxation against public goods and of military support against political participation. Modeling historical data on the distribution of these resources in France and the Ottoman Empire from 1500 to 1900 shows that nation building results from strong state centralization and well-established civil societies; ethnic closure, from weak state capacity and civil societies; and populism, from medium centralization and weak civil societies. The results are consistent with French and Ottoman political histories of the 18th and 19th centuries.

This article examines how globalization, government ideology, and their interaction have shaped income distribution in 59 developing countries from 1975 to 2005. Using pooled time-series data analysis, the results show that globalization, measured by trade flows and foreign direct investment, has significantly expanded income inequality in developing countries. However, countries with leftist government parties and chief executives have experienced significantly smaller income gaps and even moderated the income inequality from increasing world market integration. The results in this article suggest that the traditional role of government ideology for income redistribution, drawn from the experiences of advanced countries, is applicable to the developing world as well. Rather than being diminished by the integration of international markets, the influence of government ideology will continue to play a key role in shaping the outcomes of globalization.

Theories of corruption suggest that higher levels of transparency are necessarily associated with lower levels of corruption. Yet in highly hierarchical societies in which the gulf between government officials and the most underprivileged members of society is very wide, this relationship may not hold. In this paper, I test the link between transparency and corruption by means of a field experiment. I ask how effective recourse to a freedom-of-information law is in comparison to bribery for both slum dwellers and middle-class individuals in India as they apply for basic public services. I demonstrate that applicants who make use of the freedom-of-information law attain almost the same rate of success as those who bribe. Recourse to a freedom-of-information law comes close to erasing class differences; that is, it results in comparable processing times for slum dwellers and middle-class individuals.

The empirical terrorism literature has largely overlooked interstate relations when evaluating predictors of international terrorist attacks, opting to focus on state, group, or individual-level factors to explain patterns of terrorism using analytical methods that are limited to either the origin or target of the attack. In this piece we argue that this is both incongruous with the larger conflict literature and limiting in terms of theoretical impact. Terrorism is more accurately considered a component of conflictual relations between two states generally hostile towards each other, which necessitates an examination of both states. We demonstrate, by conducting a series of negative binomial regression estimates using politically-relevant directed dyads, that interstate rivalries are highly robust, positive predictors of international terrorism. We use two different rivalry measures – Klein, Goertz and Diehl (2006) and Rasler and Thompson (2006) – and find that interstate rivalries, regardless of operationalization, explain a greater degree of variation in patterns of terrorism than do established significant predictors such as regime type, regime capacity to project force, or population.

Does democracy improve the quality of life for its citizens? Scholars have long assumed that it does, but recent research has called this orthodoxy into question. This article reviews this body of work, develops a series of causal pathways through which democracy might improve social welfare, and tests two hypotheses: (a) that a country’s level of democracy in a given year affects its level of human development and (b) that its stock of democracy over the past century affects its level of human development. Using infant mortality rates as a core measure of human development, we conduct a series of time-series—cross-national statistical tests of these two hypotheses. We find only slight evidence for the first proposition, but substantial support for the second. Thus, we argue that the best way to think about the relationship between democracy and development is as a time-dependent, historical phenomenon.

The Wire is set in a modern American city shaped by economic restructuring and fundamental demographic change that led to widespread job loss and the depopulation of inner-city neighborhoods.1 While the series can be viewed as an account of the systemic failure of political, economic, and social institutions in Baltimore in particular, the fundamental principles depicted in The Wire certainly parallel changing conditions in other cities, especially older industrial cities in the Northeast and Midwest. Indeed, it is for this reason that The Wire captures the attention of social scientists concerned with a comprehensive understanding of urban inequality, poverty, and race in American cities. In providing a sophisticated depiction of systemic urban inequality, The Wire investigates how key aspects of inequality are interrelated. It offers an in-depth examination of the decline of urban labor markets, crime and incarceration, the failure of the education system in low-income communities, and the inability of political institutions to serve the interests of the urban poor. A central theme of The Wire and a fundamental principle of scholarship on urban inequality is that political, social, and economic factors reinforce each other to produce profound disadvantage for the urban poor. By highlighting these connections, The Wire sheds light on the per

What accounts for differences in the extent of nationalist sentiments across countries and over time? One prominent argument is that greater economic inequality prompts states to generate more nationalism as a diversion that discourages their citizens from recognizing economic inequality and mobilizing against it. Several other theories, however, propose different relationships between economic inequality and nationalism. This article provides a first empirical test of whether and how economic inequality is related to nationalism. Multilevel analyses using survey data on nationalist sentiments in countries around the world over a quarter century and data on economic inequality from the Standardized World Income Inequality Database provide powerful support for the diversionary theory of nationalism. This finding is an important contribution to our understanding of nationalism as well as of the political consequences of economic inequality.