Comparative Political Studies

Max Weber's theory of leadership authority has deeply influenced theories of political parties, but Weber's concept of charisma is often used indiscriminately to refer to all kinds of personalist leadership. What is more, Weber's tripartite typology of traditional, charismatic and rational-legal authority neglects a form of leadership often found in major contemporary political parties. This article formulates a differentiated typology and conceptualization of personalism, and theorizes an important but heretofore poorly understood form of political organization: the non-charismatic personalist political party. The leaders of such parties embody great personal authority within their organizations and often serve as symbols around which their parties can rally. But they are anything but prophets. Their authority arises not from an ability to inspire or transform their followers but rather from the skill to mediate conflicts within the party.

By the late 1980s the Colombian constitution had come under severe pressure for reform as the population shifted markedly from a rural to an urban majority. The president had repeatedly tried to provide policy to court the median Colombian voter, who was urban. The congress was strongly tied to rural interests. Congress consistently thwarted presidential efforts at policy reform. Different presidents again and again proposed constitutional reform as a way of achieving eventual policy aims, only to have the proposed reforms soundly rejected in the legislature. The Colombian congress solely possessed the authority to make constitutional revisions. This article tells the story of how this institutional impasse was overcome. In the wake of severe social strife and conflict a national referendum on constitutional reform was passed by popular vote and upheld by judicial action. This article argues that such constitutional conflict might only be overcome through extraconstitutional—although still democratic—means.

In an attempt to build on and refine Putnam's thesis that participation in associations produces better democracy, this article seeks to determine two things. First, are his findings replicable in Central America? Second, is participation in all forms of associations equally generative of democracy, as Putnam suggests? In this study, Putnam's thesis is tested with survey samples drawn from all of the six Spanish-speaking countries in Central America. The author finds that although participation in community improvement associations is a consistent predictor of democratic behavior at an individual level, participation in other kinds of associations is not.

This article explores the relationship between international integration and domestic inequality in the developed countries in the mid-1980s and early 1990s. The analysis examines two major modes of integration, trade and direct investment, disaggregating each by economic sector and distinguishing between imports and exports, and inbound and outbound flows and stocks. In measuring income inequality, extensive use is made of micro-data sets that have recently become available through the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), which provides much more detailed and comparable data on income inequality than has heretofore been the case. In particular, LIS data can be aggregated at the level of economic sector, and permit the comparison of pre- and post-government income. The study finds few significant relationships between either trade or investment and sectoral income distribution. The overall conclusion is that economic globalization is not a critically important factor in explaining recent trends in income inequality in the Western world.