The organization of Japan's Liberal Democratic Party, arguably the most successful political party in the democratic world (1955-1993; 1994-2009), has rarely been studied as a factor in its success, or in its sudden loss of power in 2009. This paper uses an historical institutional approach to...

Tocqueville's discovery of a muscular, participatory citizenship in the United States is well known, as is his argument that such citizenship is vital to the success of democracy. This has been a source of both self-congratulation and anxiety among Americans, the anxiety stemming from worries...

Historical legacies, particularly imperial tutelage and religion, have featured prominently in recent scholarship on political regime variations in post-communist settings, challenging earlier temporally proximate explanations. The overlap between tutelage, geography, and religion has...

In this essay, I develop an alternative explanation of British policy in the 1930s. I argue that it was Hitler's legitimation strategies that undercut British balancing, and led to a policy of appeasement. As Hitler mounted his program of expansion and aggression, he justified Germany's actions...

Through new commentaries on the polemical Confucian classic, the Rituals of Zhou, Southern Song (1127-1279) political thinkers redefined good government through a fundamental re-interpretation of the ancient classics. They changed the constitutional schemes in the Rituals of Zhou and formulated...

Political institutions must have some level of public support in order to operate effectively, and this is especially true in a democratic regime (Baum 2003; Carp & Stidham 2001, 2004; Franklin & Kosaki 1995; Marshall 1989). The courts are especially dependent upon the public viewing their actions as...

According to theories of African politics, African states predicate their legitimacy on the promise of distributing services to the populace. This paper analyzes what happens when a new set of actors – non-governmental organizations (NGOs) – steps between state and society to deliver health...

Few transformations have been as important in American political history as the incorporation of African Americans into the Democratic Party coalition over the course of the 1930s-60s and the embrace of racial conservatism on the part of many Republicans. This paper, which is part of a broader...

Can the republican concern with non-domination transcend its traditional narrow confines of the nation-state and be vested in transnational entities and/or agencies? In answering this question, many contemporary theorists point to the development of certain neo-republican modes and orders within...

Recent research treats foreign aid and oil revenue as similar non-tax resources that hurt the prospects of democratization. Building on theories of state finance and democratization, this paper examines one avenue through which these resources affect democratization: government spending during...