In the late 1980s, populist labor parties, which had advanced protectionism and state intervention in the postwar period, implemented market-oriented reforms in Argentina, Mexico, and Venezuela. In all three countries, market reforms hurt their union allies. The interaction between allied unions and governing labor parties, however, varied across countries and across sectors within the same country. While some unions endorsed neoliberal reforms, others rejected them despite their long-term alliance with governing parties. While some unions obtained concessions, others failed to do so.

This article argues that the incentives created by partisan loyalties, partisan competition, and union competition explain these interactions. Partisan loyalty results from the long-term affiliation of unions with a political party. Partisan competition takes place among union leaders affiliated with different political parties for the control of unions. Union competition occurs in diverse national and sectoral contexts among labor organizations for the representation of the same workers. Loyalty derived from a long-term affiliation with the incumbent party facilitates collaboration between labor unions and the government. Yet, if partisan competition makes loyal union leaders afraid of being replaced by activists affiliated with the opposition parties, their incentives for militancy increase as a way of showing their responsiveness to the rank and file hurt by market reforms. Union competition for the representation of the same workers makes coordination more difficult, thereby weakening unions and making them less likely to obtain concessions from the government despite their partisan loyalty. The article presents empirical evidence from eighteen cases, including national confederations and individual unions in five economic sectors in Argentina, Mexico, and Venezuela to test this theory.

Many classic works of political economy have identified capital and labor as the champions of democratization during the first wave of transition. By contrast, this article argues for the contingent nature of capital and labor's support for democracy, especially in the context of late development. The article offers a theory of democratic contingency, proposing that a few variables, namely, state dependence, aristocratic privilege, and social fear account for much of the variation found in class support for democratization both across and within cases. Conditions associated with late development make capital and labor especially prone to diffidence about democratization. But such diffidence is subject to change, especially under the impact of international economic integration, poverty-reducing social welfare policies, and economic growth that is widely shared. Case material from Korea, Indonesia, Mexico, Zambia, Brazil, Tunisia and other countries is offered as evidence.

The Protestant Reformation was a crucial spring of modern international relations. Had it lever occurred, a system of sovereign states would not have arrived, at least not in the form or at he time that it did at the Peace of Westphalia. This is the counterfactual the author seeks to sustain. He first advances an elaborated but qualified defense of the conventional wisdom that Westphalia is the origin of modern international relations. He then accounts for how Protestant deas exerted influence through transforming identities and exercising social power. Structural heories, emphasizing changes in material power, are skeptical of this account. The author roots lis empirical defense of ideas in the strong correlation between Reformation crises and polities' interests in Westphalia. A description of the historical causal pathways running from ideas to political interest then follows. Germany and France are brought as cases to illustrate two of these pathways. Finally, the author shows the evidentiary weakness of alternative structural material explanations.

Works in political culture have employed a variety of approaches with different assumptions and methodologies. Commentary on the field, however, generally fails to take account of these differences or to assess the merits of the different approaches. Recent works that typify five different approaches are evaluated in terms of the ways that they conceptualize preference formation and the linkage between preferences and cultural norms. The tendency in most approaches to conflate preferences and norms points to the need for further theoretical development.