Showing papers in "Comparative politics in 1991"

The Logic of the Developmental State@@@Asia's Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization@@@The Political Economy of the New Asian Industrialism@@@MITI and the Japanese Miracle@@@Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization

Abstract: Published originally in 1990 to critical acclaim, Robert Wade's Governing the Market quickly established itself as a standard in contemporary political economy. In it, Wade challenged claims both of those who saw the East Asian story as a vindication of free market principles and of those who attributed the success of Taiwan and other countries to government intervention. Instead, Wade turned attention to the way allocation decisions were divided between markets and public administration and the synergy between them. Now, in a new introduction to this paperback edition, Wade reviews the debate about industrial policy in East and Southeast Asia and chronicles the changing fortunes of these economies over the 1990s. He extends the original argument to explain the boom of the first half of the decade and the crash of the second, stressing the links between corporations, banks, governments, international capital markets, and the International Monetary Fund. From this, Wade goes on to outline a new agenda for national and international development policy.

The Structure of Political Opportunities and Peasant Mobilization in Central America

Abstract: The literature on the determinants of popular mobilization and social movements is rich with theoretical insights concerning the role of a variety of factors, from the generation of grievances by changing socioeconomic structures to the assistance of outside agents to the mobilization of resources. The crucial conditioning role of political systems themselves, however, has been too often understated or even ignored, whether the object of study has been urban movements in industrialized democracies' or peasant movements in the Third World.2 Even when scholars have recently attempted to address this deficiency, their efforts remain unsystematic. The intention of this project is, first, to elaborate a thorough conceptualization of the linkage between popular mobilization and the political system and, second, to demonstrate its utility through an explanation of the comparative mobilization of the peasantry in the five countries of Central America during the period from 1960 to 1984. The forms of peasant and government action and the resulting consequences for the peasantry have varied widely throughout Central America.3 The conceptual framework elaborated here should make clear why this has been so.

Politicians, Parties, and Electoral Systems: Brazil in Comparative Perspective

Abstract: This paper looks at the political consequences and the political origins of the Brazilian electoral system. This system has several unusual features that grant politicians nonpareil autonomy with respect to their parties. These features include a system of proportional representation that uses an open list and a mechanism known as the candidato nato, which allows politicians to get on the ticket despite the opposition of the party leadership. As a result, the electoral system reinforces the individualistic behavior of politicians and has contributed to undermining efforts to build more effective parties. Notwithstanding their frequent laments about the weakness of parties, Brazilian politicians have consistently opted for electoral systems that undermine parties. They have done so because they perceived measures that could strengthen parties as authoritarian, and also in response to their fears that executives would otherwise be able to control them ruthlessly. The extreme party weakness and individualistic patterns of representation that are reinforced by this electoral system have sustained an elitist polity.

The Politics of Central Bank Independence

Abstract: Central banks have become key institutions in the process of economic policymaking. Typically, their responsibilities include serving as lender of last resort, as financial agent for the government, and, most important, as bankers' bank in charge of monetary policy. Although virtually all countries now have central banks, significant differences exist in the relationships between central banks and their governments. Most governments have placed their central banks directly under political control; others have granted their central banks greater autonomy, that is, the authority to act independently from the instructions of the government. The significance of central bank independence arises because of the different policy preferences of politicians and central banks.' Compared to politicians, central bankers tend to be more concerned with the risks of inflation. Their conservative ethos has been attributed

The Political Dimensions of Corruption Cleanups A Framework for Analysis

Abstract: Political corruption has been a pervasive and persistent phenomenon throughout history. It is found today in diverse degrees and forms in all types of political systems. The subject has long been of interest to philosophers, historians, and social scientists, but discussion has intensified significantly since the mid 1960s with the study of modernization and development. There are relatively few efforts, however, to systematically study cleanups, that is, government-announced campaigns to curb or eliminate corruption. The intent of this essay is to provide a conceptual framework in which we can examine cleanups within and across states. We begin with a synthesis of the abundant work on corruption and an examination of the tangential literature on cleanups. We conclude with several generalizations about the political aspects of cleanups, particularly their political contexts, stimuli, objectives, strategies, and consequences. These generalizations are derived primarily from a survey of twenty-five Middle Eastern and North African states covering a seventeen year period to confirm tentatively the empirical relevance of our propositions. Case examples from elsewhere are cited to illustrate the applicability of our propositions outside the Middle East, although further confirmation awaits more thorough investigation from other regions.

Reconceptualizing Latin American Authoritarianism in the 1970s: From Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism to Neoconservatism

Abstract: On March 24, 1976, a military coup took place in Argentina. At the outset, it did not seem very different from previous authoritarian experiments which had marked the country's unstable political history. As time went by, however, this new regime revealed its exceptionally coercive nature: political activity was banned, strike rights were withdrawn, and the military intervened in hundreds of labor unions, all this along with policies that made market economics the prime objective of the policymakers. This regime, however, was not unique. On September 11, 1973, a military coup had occurred in Chile. In contrast to Argentina, the event was quite unprecedented. Chile had been one of the most solid democracies in Latin America, highly institutionalized and politically stable. Its open system had even allowed something that would have been routine in western Europe but was unique to Latin America: a socialist coalition intent on implementing structural transformations by means of democratic procedures came to power in 1970. After the breakdown, General Pinochet also made coercion a central component of his regime: the national soccer stadium was transformed into a concentration camp. His political economy, like the Argentine one, was also built around neo-laissez-faire principles. Also in 1973, the Uruguayan military, for the first time in that country's modern history, took power. Against a democratic tradition as profound as Chile's, this event did not leave Uruguayan society untouched. A ban on political parties and labor unions, the dismantling of the structure of welfare services (the oldest and most powerful in Latin America), and a repressive campaign, lower in terms of disappearances than in Argentina and Chile but higher in per capita imprisonment, were the means of a thorough social transformation. Why was the repressive character of these regimes so harsh? Why did these governments not incorporate, as the previous military experiments of Argentina and Brazil in the 1960s had, any kind of collective representation in order to coopt potential opposition? Why did these regimes so severely punish important business sectors through inflexible monetarist economic policies?' Why were labor organizations dismantled and repressed when, particularly in Argentina, they were explicitly against socialism and even confronted urban guerrillas? Why did the new rulers see a need to privatize public goods and services, especially when in Chile this produced an acute regression in the distribution of income in one of the most socially balanced countries in the region? Why, after being staunch defenders and promoters of corporatist forms of social organization, did the armed forces in the course of the 1970s radically shift their orientation and design a social order in which collective life would be regulated solely by market relations?

Labor and the Limits of the Welfare State: The Politics of Intraclass Conflict and Cross-Class Alliances in Sweden and West Germany

Abstract: Does control of state power by the left always help it strengthen working class organization? Does social democracy's progress, measured by welfare state development, necessarily help reinforce the unity of its organized constituency?' If not, and if in fact the economics and politics of the growing welfare state were to divide the working class, would the resulting disunity and decentralization of labor organizations always impair allied left-wing political parties?2 Conflicts within Swedish and West German labor about the costs of the welfare state in the 1980s, analyzed here in historical perspective, suggest some answers. Recent Swedish and German politics show that the large and growing welfare state tends to divide organized labor, its core organizational constituency. But events also show this very division can provide the opportunity for a realignment of political forces enabling the left to regain or maintain political power though it loses forward momentum as a transformative force. The evidence and argument presented here about these events suggest that the organizational pillars of the welfare state, social democratic labor unions and parties, are likely to impose limits on the welfare state. They are likely to do so in conflict with themselves, and in alliance with outside interests. In the tradition of Max Weber, capitalism's anxious intellectuals like Joseph Schumpeter repeatedly ask whether in the long run capitalism can maintain its political, institutional, and ideological defenses in the era of the democratic welfare state.3 Even before coming to fruition, reform movements in the Soviet bloc have stirred worries among conservatives that dissipating fear of communism will weaken right-wing solidarity against state encroachments. However, contrasting analyses of the contradictions of the welfare state, like the following, show capitalism to be more robust and likely to outlive those who see only progressive cultural and political decay.4 Labor's intraclass conflict, a source of capitalism's political vitality (and one of the mechanisms confining the welfare state), is curiously missing in studies of the capitalist political economy. This observation holds especially for the study of "class compromises" between the left and capitalist accommodationists that bring labor into government and policymaking. One school sympathetic to social democracy tends to depict labor, when it is successful, as an undifferentiated and unified bloc. Incentives for compromise with capital are specified as collective or broadly beneficial payoffs (growth, low unemployment, special programs) for the generalized short-run sacrifices of wage restraint.5 Capital, often depicted as comparatively divided and politically disadvantaged, is motivated to release political power in class compromises with labor for similarly undifferentiated and therefore weakly

Turning to Terror: The Conditions under Which Political Parties Turn to Terrorist Activities

Abstract: At first view political parties and terrorist groups would seem to have little in common with one another.' For a long time parties have been celebrated, if not always by voters then certainly among political scientists, as indispensable components of a democratic political order, as institutions that afford the means by which economic and social differences in society may be resolved peacefully. Terrorist groups, by contrast, are regarded as organizations whose use of violence is intended to circumvent or destroy the democratic political process. At times leaders of terrorist groups even exhibit some sensitivity for the higher regard in which political parties are held. Thus, spokesmen for the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) movement in Peru deny that Shining Path is the correct name of their organization. The bourgeois press may call it Shining Path, but its spokesmen prefer their organization to be known as the Communist Party of Peru.2 In addition to their choice of strategies, one peaceful, the other violent, and the reputations they enjoy among those committed to the principles of democratic government, there are other obvious ways in which parties and terrorist groups seem to differ. Structurally, the latter are thought to be small clandestine bands whose adherents do everything they can to evade public notice until such time as they are prepared to carry out an operation. On the other hand, political parties are conceived as large and often bureaucratized organizations which perform their various tasks in full public view with an eye to mobilizing voters and winning elections. Ostensibly parties and terrorist groups would seem to share at least one thing in common: a commitment to the achievement of some political goal or public purpose. Yet, though few observers would deny that parties are political organizations par excellence, a good deal of the analysis to which terrorist groups have been subjected has challenged the authenticity of their public purposes. In some instances, observers have sought to depoliticize terrorist groups by emphasizing the private psychological needs of their members. Beginning with such figures as Dostoevski and Lombroso in the nineteenth century and continuing into the 1980s, there has been a tendency to see terrorist groups less as political organizations than as mental asylums whose public slogans disguise their inmates psychopathologies.3 Other analysts have achieved the same result by reporting instances when terrorist groups have deteriorated into or have developed links with criminal gangs whose armed struggles have more to do with pecuniary considerations than politics.4 Even the circumstances surrounding the emergence of modern terrorism over the last third of the nineteenth century provide reasons for rejecting any commonality between parties and

The Evolution of Protracted Ethnic Conflict: Group Dominance and Political Underdevelopment in Northern Ireland and Lebanon

Abstract: Political scientists have long recognized that conflict and the efforts to resolve it are at the heart of politics, and much ink has been spilled in attempts to explain it. In the literature of comparative politics, the reemergence of ethnonationalism in the last twenty years has raised particular questions about the sources of ethnically based conflict. Even more recently, international relations scholars have asked why "protracted" conflicts' are so much more difficult to resolve than the more manageable ethnic divisions addressed by consociational theorists. Protracted conflicts take a very different form from their milder cousins. They are bloody (the violence often involving paramilitary organizations); they signal the loss of authority and eventual breakdown of governing institutions; and they trigger a fragmentation of public opinion, the growth of radical counterelites, and the evolution of a centrifugal political system. Moreover, protracted conflicts tend to be intractable, since resolving them requires warring ethnic groups to make concessions they can not contemplate while under threat.

Center-Periphery Relations and Ethnic Conflict in Pakistan: Sindhis, Muhajirs, and Punjabis

Abstract: Ethnic conflict can be analyzed in terms of "center-periphery" relations only where ethnic groups are concentrated geographically. It would seem redundant to employ the concept in application to vertical intergroup relations in the same location where social class or "ethclass" will suffice.1 "Peripherality" has been defined by Stein Rokkan as the subordination of a group to the authority of a geographical center or core upon which the periphery is dependent "with little control over its fate and possessing minimal resources for the defense of its distinctiveness against outside pressures."2 The key characteristics of peripheries, he summarizes, are distance, difference, and dependence in at least one of the three domains of behavior: political decision making, cultural standardization, and economic life. The concept is reminiscent of Jeffrey Ross' distinction between "minority" and "ethnicity" except that Ross defines the latter as exactly the type of group which controls at least its own naming or definition.3

Niger: Anatomy of a Neotraditional Corporatist State

Abstract: The apparent failure of competitive party politics to take root in much of contemporary Africa has not curtailed efforts by military regimes to extend popular participation. Curiously, current scholarship does not adequately reflect the range of such initiatives.' While analysts periodically look for liberalizing trends in Africa's soldier states and are primed to consider the prospects for a return to civilian rule,2 few have examined participatory institutions under indeterminate military tutelage.3 Indeed, the literature reflects a tendency to assume that officers who tarry in government regard the modem bureaucratic army as a paragon for the organization of society as a whole.4 There is growing evidence to suggest, however, that in the future Africa's military rulers will have greater recourse to corporatist models of state-society relations as they seek to avoid a return to the barracks. Why this is so and what characteristics these structural alternatives are likely to assume are central questions addressed in this essay. Following a brief typology of corporatist systems, my purpose here is to relate the installation of corporatist modes of representation and policymaking in Africa to the quest for effectiveness and legitimacy by regimes faced with a crisis of governance which is inseparable from the international context of capitalism. This proposition will be developed more fully in a case study of neotraditional corporatism in Niger. Distinctions among several frequently occurring varieties of corporatism establish the parameters for elaborating the special case of neotraditional corporatism, a mode of governance that draws heavily on indigenous cultural patterns of authority, interest aggregation, and leader-follower relations as prime sources of legitimation. By examining Niger's recent experience with participation fostered through a five-tier hierarchy of development councils, we shall see how a corporatist-style representational system was installed by the military rulers in a two-step process. First the system was presented as transitional; it served to draw civilian constituencies into preparations for a return to constitutional government. Then, when Niger's domestic economy began wrenching from the shocks of a precipitous decline in the price and market for uranium, the existence of these purportedly transitional participatory structures preempted the formation of class-based parties or pluralist political alternatives. The. final section of our analysis, which links the onset of a crisis in Niger's political economy of development with the new politics of participation, explores the regime's recourse to corporatist intermediaries in the implementation of structural and policy reforms. Following a discussion that highlights the interactive relationship between economic policy dilemmas and the problems of governance, we conclude with a few theoretical and empirical observations about neotraditional corporatism and regime legitimation in Niger.

Loyalty, Voice, and Quasi-Exit: Israel as a Case Study of Proliferating Alternative Politics

Abstract: Until around the time of World War II, political science tended to focus almost exclusively on institutional or "traditional" modes of political activity. Legislation, public law, the interrelationship and inner dynamics of the branches of government, and similar elements were the central foci of the discipline. This is not to say that what later came to be known as extraparliamentary activity did not have any place in the work of earlier political scientists; political philosophers, theorists, and of course propagandists all discussed such phenomena as political violence and revolution. However, in the main this area of the field remained a disciplinary backwater, and in most cases when it was addressed, the perspective was mostly of a situation gone terribly wrong. As a result of the (merely perceived?) dramatic increase in unconventional political activity around the globe in the post-World War II era, and due to some methodological factors related to the discipline of political science,2 the age of "political conflict/ extraparliamentary behavior" was ushered in as a recognized subdiscipline. From the mid 1950s until 1980, some 2,400 scholarly articles, in addition to hundreds of full-length books, were published, as Zimmermann found.3 The amount of work devoted to the field does not seem to have diminished in the 1980s.

A Rational Choice Approach to Political Regionalism

Abstract: Regionalist movements in peripheries have more limited goals than independence movements. Movements of the first kind typically stop short of outright independence and support instead some kind of decentralization of territorial power. Individuals who support independence should have transitive and monotonic preferences.' They prefer independence to decentralization to the status quo. Regionalist preferences are nonmonotonic. They prefer decentralization to the status quo, but they also prefer the status quo to independence and decentralization to independence. This is so because, for regionalists, the balance of risks/costs and benefits under independence is too unfavorable to warrant support for statehood. Regionalists want to improve their position within existing institutional arrangements between center and periphery without losing completely those components of center-periphery relationships which they value. This accounts for their preference ordering. The preferences of regionalists are interesting because they are mixed. One part of the preference relation is nationalist: decentralization is preferred to the status quo. But another part is nonnationalist because the status quo is preferred to independence. Their preferences are mixed, neither nationalist nor nonnationalist. Both of the latter have a single issue structure. Precisely because regionalist preferences are mixed, they do not have a single-issue structure. This is so despite the fact that all three preferences are single-peaked when the dimension along which alternatives are arrayed represents a nationalist (or nonnationalist) single-issue structure. A mixed preference therefore suggests the presence of some tension between conflicting subsets of an individual's interests and identities. Stated in this fashion, the problem is to determine, first of all, in what ways specific actors in the periphery benefit from center-periphery relations. Second, it is necessary to determine in what ways actors would like to change the relationship to their advantage. Third, we need to understand why regionalism might be considered as a strategy in seeking change. Finally, it should be ascertained why the limits inherent in regionalism are accepted by actors: what benefits from center-periphery relations are still available; how and why are these not threatened by regionalist politics? It is hoped that this introduction specifies a little more precisely what is interesting about political regionalism. Regionalism is not simply a distinctive pattern of national politics, such as support for politics of the right or left within a particular spatial area. This approach neglects what is essential in my approach to political regionalism: the support for territorial decentralization. I have also distinguished between regionalists and supporters of independence. It is not uncommon, for example, to see discussions of "ethnic mobilization" or "ethnic collective action" with little attention paid to the issue structures of specific movements.2 However, individuals who support independence and those who support decentralization are different kinds of nationalists. Their positions differ, not simply by

Working Class Strategies in the Transition to Democracy in Brazil

Abstract: The Brazilian labor movement played an instrumental role in the demise of Brazil's authoritarian regime. As one of the few highly organized and institutionalized social actors in Brazil in the late 1970s, the labor movement led massive strikes, demonstrations, and rallies protesting the military government's policies and demanding a return to democracy.' This article examines how organized labor in Brazil articulated and defended its interests in the period of political reconstruction and democratization. How did the labor movement act? Why did it act as it did? And what are the consequences for the labor movement and the consolidation of democracy? To study these questions, this article applies two approaches derived from the literature on transitions to democracy: the "coup poker" and "multilayered chess game" analogies. While both approaches are useful in establishing broad parameters for analysis of the strategies available to labor movements and the impact of those strategies on such movements and the emerging democratic system, I show with the Brazilian case that they ignore several motivating factors and possible outcomes of those strategies. And, in analyzing the Brazilian case, I suggest that, although certain political, economic, and organizational constraints on the working class are greater during political transitions than under a stable democratic regime, the labor movement's strategies and the results of those strategies are very similar during both periods.

Value Structures in a Developed Socialist System: The Case of Czechoslovakia

Abstract: All socialist governments come to power promising that they will bring about a new, fairer organization of society. If these governments are Marxist-Leninist in orientation, they claim to have an outline according to which society is to be reorganized. Among the assumptions of this outline is that the basic values of the new system conflict with those of the old, that many of the old values must be eliminated and new ones instilled if a new order of affairs is to be achieved. Without such changes, it is not possible to move to higher stages of social organization. The creation of a "new socialist citizen" has therefore been a high priority of socialist regimes since the first came to power in Russia in 1917. This article explores the ways in which the values of citizens of one European Communist political system, Czechoslovakia, resemble those prescribed for citizens of the new socialist order. The article will use the concept of political culture for its theoretical structure, but it is not intended to cover all aspects of this concept. Instead, the emphasis will be on values and value structures-why they are important, how they developed in Communist countries, and to what extent actual value structures in one country resemble those deemed appropriate to the new socialist citizen.

The Politics of Industrial Restructuring: Transnational Firms’ Search for Flexible Production in the Mexican Automobile Industry

Abstract: The emergence of a highly competitive world automobile industry and the internationalization of automotive production in the 1970s and 1980s intensified transnational firms’ search for new corporate alliances, innovative production technologies, and more flexible labor relations. The global transformation of automotive manufacturing has produced broad challenges for workers because in many countries the process of industrial restructuring has resulted in lower employment levels, reduced wages and fringe benefits, and other economic disruptions. Moreover, in their drive to achieve higher levels of production efficiency and quality control, many US and West European automobile companies have also re-examined the long dominant Fordist—Taylorist model of workplace organization in which relatively unskilled workers perform repetitive, narrowly defined tasks in a hierarchically organized, fragmented (assembly line) work process dedicated to the mass production of standardized products.1

The Political Impasse in South Africa and Northern Ireland: A Comparative Perspective

Abstract: At first sight, it might seem that there are too many basic differences between South Africa and Northern Ireland in respect to the nature, type, and complexity of the two societies' divisions, the scale of inequality among the different communities, and the essential elements of their constitutional arrangements and status to make comparison between the two worthwhile. In particular, whereas the population of South Africa in mid 1987 was estimated to be just over 35 million, with Africans constituting 74.7 percent of the total, whites 14.0 percent, Coloureds 8.7 percent, and Asians 2.6 percent, Catholics constituted 40 percent of Northern Ireland's population of 1,575,000 in mid 1987.1 It is nonetheless the case that comparison between South Africa and Northern Ireland is commonplace in both societies. Segregation, discrimination, political violence, and emergency security measures provide the points of similarity between the two societies that are most frequently referred to. However, for the most part, the comparisons have tended to be superficial and polemical rather than analytical, especially in Northern Ireland. Academic literature systematically comparing the two societies is relatively sparse.2 Another feature of the comparisons made between the two societies that might be seen as indicating the limitations of a comparative perspective is its asymmetry. Comparisons that seem appropriate in South Africa tend to have little political resonance in Northern Ireland and vice versa. It is unusual for a comparison made in one society to be referred to in the other. The principal exception to this is an offer Balthazar Johannes Vorster made as minister of justice to the opposition when introducing the General Law Amendment Bill in South Africa's House of Assembly in 1963 that he "would be willing to exchange all the legislation of that sort for one clause of the Northern Ireland Special Powers Act.'"3 (Vorster probably had the following clause of the Northern Ireland Special Powers Act in mind. "If any person does any act of such a nature as to be calculated to be prejudicial to the preservation of the peace or the maintenance of order and not specifically provided for in the regulations, he shall be deemed to be guilty of an offence against the regulations.'"4) Vorster's remark was taken up by the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland in their campaign for the repeal of the act. For example, in 1968 one of the leaders of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association described the Special Powers Act as "the envy of the fascist government in South Africa."5 Despite the act's replacement by less far-reaching emergency legislation, Republicans in Northern Ireland, that is to say, those nationalists who support the use of physical force to end the British presence in Ireland, still refer to the remark to bolster their portrayal of

Democratic Socialism in Comparative Perspective

Abstract: This paper deals with the way that political parties rooted in the Marxist tradition accommodate themselves to the institutions of representative democracy, in both developed and undeveloped countries. It aims at providing some explanation of that process from a comparative perspective. The paper considers both successful (western Europe) and unsuccessful (Chile) democratic socialist experiences, while exploring the prospects for a new democratic socialism in Chile.

State Structures and the Politics of Union Registration in Postrevolutionary Mexico

Abstract: uniformly enforced controls on their organization and activities than are higher status groups.2 Limitations on sociopolitical pluralism can thus bias the political process in authoritarian regimes against the participation of mass actors by restricting lower class groups' access to the organizational resources necessary to overcome participatory disadvantages resulting from lower socioeconomic status. This participation bias may be particularly severe in those (frequently military-dominated) authoritarian regimes that seek the forcible demobilization and control of such popular sector groups as urban and rural workers. Restrictions on interest representation can also increase the relative importance of organization as a political resource. Where sociopolitical groups can not legally form without the approval of state administrative authorities, officially sanctioned organizations enjoy a privileged position as the only legitimate channels for the articulation of politically relevant demands. At least in principle, these organizations can use their favored position to advance their own membership size, material advantage, and political power. Established organizations might also resist the official recognition of new groups if this threatens their claim to the representation of certain sectors. In this way the internal political dynamics of an authoritarian regime can reinforce the effectiveness of formal limitations on sociopolitical

Race, Nation, and Class Based Ideologies of Recent Opposition in South Africa

Abstract: Differing tendencies within South Africa's internal opposition have long disputed the implications and relative salience of race, nation, and class for the oppressed. Activists' competing claims for the priority of any one or set of these concepts are often defended as the appropriate response to specific economic conditions or state policies. However, the applicability of race, nation, or class depends not only on such shifting material conditions, but also on how these subjective categories of social relations are defined. Analysis of the meanings and the strategic implications of these central concepts can assist us in understanding the differences among tendencies and the overall development of recent South African internal opposition. Concepts of race, nation, and class have been central to activists' interpretations and responses to South African oppression. An opposition tendency's definitions of and priority among these concepts are indicative of its ideology, for each of these concepts implies a potential constituency, long-term goals, and a repertoire of preferred strategy. For example, South African activists who have focused more on race have often excluded whites from the

Industrial Structure, Coalition Politics, and Economic Policy: The Rise and Decline of the French Popular Front

Abstract: The coming to power of the Popular Front in 1936 was a momentous, if short-lived, event in French political history. For the first time in France, the government was in the hands of a Socialist-led coalition, in which even the Communists played a supporting role. The Popular Front was formed in 1934 in response to the strengthening of the French extreme right, the threat of German Nazism, and the lingering Depression. In 1936, the movement acquired larger than life proportions. For some, this was the eve of a long-awaited revolution; for others, it was a monumental threat to French society. The coalition was, however, more fragile than its original show of strength suggested. In June 1937, the