Comparative Political Studies

To assess corporatist interest intermediation as a mechanism of social control in Venezuela and Mexico, we compare the political attitudes and behavior of workers exposed to corporatist controls to those of other workers. Specifically, the politicization of workers who belong to unions dominated by hegemonic political parties is compared to that of workers affiliated with “autonomous unions” and to that of nonunionized workers. Using survey data collected in 1979 and 1980, it is found that workers who belong to official unions are not more likely to be system supportive than other workers. This pattern holds in both regime settings and for both strategic and nonstrategic industries. We discuss the implications that these findings have on the renegotiation of incorporative bargains between labor movements and hegemonic parties.

Findings from a study of environmentalists in Shizuoka Prefecture and Spokane County, Washington, suggest that there are two basic types of environmental activists in Japan. In contrast to their U.S. counterparts, most Japanese environmentalists can be characterized as less concerned about environmental preservation, natural resource scarcities, and the dangers of rampant science and technology. However, the most active and knowledgeable among them are very much like the vanguard environmentalists found in the United States. The ability of Japanese environmentalist leaders to mobilize rank-and-file members is explained in terms of the victim compensation (versus preservation of nature) orientation of Japanese environmentalism and environmental law, plus the localistic character of Japanese politics.

Over the last five years, military authoritarian regimes broke down consistently throughout Latin America. The return to democratic government has had less to do with the internal political situation in these countries than with the economic crises faced by the military regimes. The military regimes collapsed primarily because of the external debt crisis that emerged in the early 1980s. There were two characteristic patterns in the macroeconomic policy of the military authoritarian systems. According to one pattern, the regimes attempted to maintain growth rates through reflation, which led to chronic trade deficits that had to be covered through continuous reserve inflows. Alternatively, particularly in the Southern Cone, the regimes attempted disinflation through the heterodox strategy of underdevaluation of exchange rates. Although this slowed inflation, this was achieved only at the cost of serious balance of payments disequilibrium and a decrease in external competitiveness, which limited the ability to service foreign debt. The net result was that at the time of the global recession of the early 1980, the regimes were forced to apply restrictive policies that were associated with substantial output losses. The domestic recessions in turn largely destroyed the military's claims to political legitimacy.

The civil war in El Salvador has produced, on the one hand, a struggle between the existing regime and a coalition of insurgent military and political organizations and, on the other hand, a struggle within the regime between the landed oligarchy and the reform-minded politicians of the Christian Democratic Party. This article presents a theoretical analysis of the political impact of the PDC's land reform program of 1980. The emergence of revolution is explained as the erosion of clientelist political structures that resulted from the rapid population growth and the shift to export agriculture over the course of the last century. Within this analytical framework, a model is derived to specify the relationships among land reform, oligarchic repression, insurgent violence, and the level of popular support for the regime. It is hypothesized that levels of support for the regime will be greatest in those political subdivisions in which land reform has been implemented and in which death squad violence had been curbed, and that this relationship should be strongest and most stable when the reforms create peasant cooperatives rather than individual smallholdings.

Mancur Olson has theorized recently that interest groups and “distributional coalitions” are a major factor in the rise and decline of nations. He argues that the tendencies of these organizations to multiply and to support distributive policies lead to economic and political stalemate, particularly in the most stable, democratic societies in which pluralism has its greatest scope. The bulk of evidence for Olson's theory comes from the industrialized world; in this article I test three of its propositions against the experience of seven stable liberal democracies in the developing world. The theory predicts that with time such societies will reduce investment for the sake of consumption, will expand their public sectors, and will grow slowly in economic terms. Economic trends in the sample countries fail to confirm the first two propositions but offer tentative support for the third.