Nested Political Coalitions : Nation, Regime, Program, Cabinet 9780313073861, 9780275973957

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NESTED POLITICAL COALITIONS

NESTED POLITICAL COALITIONS NATION, REGIME, PROGRAM, CABINET Terrence E. Cook

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cook, Terrence E., 1942– Nested political coalitions : nation, regime, program, cabinet / Terrence E. Cook. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–275–97395–6 (alk. paper)—ISBN 0–275–97396–4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Power (Social sciences) 2. Coalition (Social sciences) 3. Coalition governments. I. Title. JC330.C646 2002 306.2—dc21 2001032911 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright 䉷 2002 by Terrence E. Cook All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001032911 ISBN: 0–275–97395–6 0–275–97396–4 (pbk.) First published in 2002 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America TM

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Figures

vii

Preface

ix

1

Coalition Theory and Nested Coalitions

1

2

The Political Community Coalition: Supporters of the Principal Membership Unit

35

3

The Regime Coalition: Supporters of a Political Order

77

4

The Program Coalition: Supporters of a Common Agenda

107

5

The Cabinet or Executive Coalition: Supporters of the Leadership Team

151

Citations

195

Index

211

Figures

1.1

Possible Coalitions and Limiting Size

1.2

Conflicting Vantage Points on Coalition Principles

13

1.3

International Alliances and Domestic Political Coalitions

21

1.4

Four Normally Nested Coalitions

24

1.5

Coalitions Out of Coalitions

25

2.1

Evaluating Nationalism

59

3.1

Regime Support: Is it Deeply Learned or Self-Interestedly Chosen?

84

4.1 4.2

5

International Competitiveness as Influencing Domestic Economic Sector Political Coalitions

114

A Classification of Democratic Regime Types and Their Programmatic Decision-Making Styles

137

Preface

Coalitions are at the heart of politics, and this is a book about political coalitions. Broadly, political coalitions are collaborative poolings of resources better to attain common or compatible goals, usually somehow associated with public coercion, which claims by its very publicity to be legitimate. For a more elaborate definition, I like that of E. W. Kelley: By a coalition we mean a group of individuals or groups of individuals who: 1. agree to pursue a common and articulated goal; 2. pool their relevant resources in pursuit of this goal; 3. engage in conscious communication concerning the goal and the means of attaining it; 4. agree on the distribution of the payoff (benefits) received when obtaining the goal. (Kelley 1968, 62–63)

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita more simply defines a coalition as “a group of individuals (or group of groups) who share at least one goal and who agree to pool at least some of their resources in pursuit of that shared goal”(Bueno de Mesquita 1975, 3). Often this involves some curtailment of any competitions among them to compete better against other coalesced groups. Indeed, quite often it even means backgrounding some lingering enmities among themselves to foreground their shared enmity to some enemy or set of enemies. This book recommends the view that some very important coalitions are “nested,” and when applicable, the nesting often entails interactivity of distinctive forms or levels of coalition. There are many kinds of “nested” group identities, including the various

x

Preface

kinds of territorial political units in the world. Thus Guntram Herb and David Kaplan, editors of an anthology on that subject, have written: Although any discussion of national identity hinges on the level of the state, which assumes central importance given its exclusive claim to power, we are expressly interested in how national identity is negotiated within a hierarchy of geographical scales. These can extend above the state, such as an identity that encompasses a group of countries or a continental region, and below the state, such as a collection of localities and regions within countries. These spatial identities are roughly nested within one another, but each may have some claim on individual loyalties. Although quiescent at a particular point in time, both smaller and larger affiliations may flare up under any number of circumstances and thus threaten the status quo of the world political map. (Herb and Kaplan 1999, 4)

This book shares attention to the nation-state as a major focus of political loyalty, but it does not otherwise repeat their extensive attention to how the nation-state relates to other kinds of territorial identities, the subject of many studies of intergovernmental relations. Many of our territorially defined political identities may sit rather lightly on us. If I currently live in Whitman County, this county is by no means a political loyalty for me. My concern is rather to compare and contrast the more politically charged identities of cross-national importance that can be fruitfully regarded as political coalitions as defined. Only in passing discussing some international political coalitions, this book reviews four distinctive forms of such politically important domestic political coalitions, each of which often emerges as a subset that grows from the form of coalition that preceded it, assuming a nested system. In Chapters 2 through 5, I successively address the usually diminishing sets of supporters of (1) the political community; (2) the regime (the main rules of the game, as in a constitutional order); (3) the currently dominant program, as in a parliamentary legislative coalition; and (4) the top leadership team or cabinet. While analytically distinct and while manifesting some empirical differences relevant to coalition theory, these forms of coalition are interactive, each able to affect the others, especially the adjacent forms. Hence one must be aware of what George Tsebelis has called “nested games,” whereby good prediction of moves at one level in part supposes attention to the play at another level. The chances of arriving at equilibria can be interdependent. Unlike rational choice theorists, I do not enthrone utility-maximizing rationality as the only model of choice amid uncertainty. That model was patterned after the ideal world investor behavior in high-stakes decisions. In its ideal, one surveys the whole set of investment options, evaluating each option by the summed values of all possible outcomes, as discounted

Preface

xi

by (multiplied by) the perceived probability of occurrence. One perhaps takes the time for more elaborate search if investing a large sum of money, especially if it is your own. An alternative model, Herbert Simon’s “satisficing” or “bounded rationality,” seems to be derivative from real world consumer behavior. Pressed by time and informational deficiencies, one reviews serially a limited set of alternatives and chooses the first satisfactory option that looms into view, just as one may buy a box of breakfast cereal. Each model, the unbounded rationality of utility-maximizing and the bounded rationality of “satisficing,” may approximate distinctive aspects of our political behavior. But if focused on real behavior rather than the ideal, I would most often bet on the validity of Simon’s bounded rationality, even when a certain kind of political behavior is something like business investment. As a case in point, Tsebelis plausibly suggests that relatively stable institutional loyalties can be viewed as long-term “investment” strategies of boundedly rational political actors (Tsebelis 1990, esp. 93–103). Part of my argument is that distinctive forms of coalition normally interrelate. Although unanticipated and unintended consequences of choices may also make the coalition forms interactive, some of the interactivity arises from consciously intended action led by specific agents. Thus the then Czecho-slovakian prime minister Vaclav Klaus in 1993 apparently wanted the Slovaks to exit Czecho-slovakia, a major change in the political community, because it would enable his political program coalition to carry more easily its rapid privatization program. Yet it would then apply only to the economy of the Czech lands (Bohemia and Moravia), now constituting the Czech Republic (cf. Goldman 1999, 40). Some suggest that English Conservatives would like to see the secession of Scotland, since that would eliminate more Labour than Conservative voters and thus permit Conservatives to win most elections in what would remain of Great Britain. In Chapter 1, I first review some well-known propositions about parliamentary program coalition behavior as a standard by which to compare and contrast all four kinds of coalition herein addressed. This seems well advised in that parliamentary program coalitions have been the focus of the most clearly articulated propositions about coalition behavior. I then argue that thinking of coalitions as nested—not only as sets of people but also as fields on which their games are played—helps address important contributions to coalition theory. As noted, the major attention of this book goes to the four coalitions supporting country, constitution, course of action, and cabinet. Chapter 2 examines the political community coalition, most centrally concerned with what is called or perhaps miscalled the nation-state, and what ordinary people call their country. I do not address nomadic peoples who shifted their territory in their migrations or diaspora peoples not having any dominant hold on territory, such as Israel from 70 A.D. to 1948,

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or even now the Romany (Gypsies), Hmong, and 1 million of the 16 million Sikhs. A political community coalition accepts life together on a shared territory, its homeland, even if there are often residents on that territory who would prefer otherwise. The coalition of supporters normally aspire for it to be a kind of all-inclusive or grand coalition to defend the territory against any foreign enemies and often as well against any secessionist effort. In her fine study of the development of the British political community, Linda Colley persuasively argues that it was not so much the shared use of English that subdued enmities among English, Scots, Northern Irish, and Welsh. After all, many of the Welsh did not know English as Great Britain developed, even if now only a fifth of them speak any Welsh. Also, although most Irish increasingly learned English, they were not ultimately to remain part of the British political community. Rather, a common Protestantism was the focus of the unity that emerged and has lasted to our time. The English, Welsh, and initially the lowland Scots and their fellows transplanted to Northern Ireland defined themselves as a we against a they when commonly threatened by war: Time and time again, war with France brought Britons, whether they hailed from Wales or Scotland or England, into confrontation with an obviously hostile Other and encouraged them to define themselves collectively against it. They defined themselves as Protestants struggling for survival against the world’s foremost Catholic power. They defined themselves against the French as they imagined them to be, superstitious, militarist, decadent and unfree. And, increasingly as the wars went on, they defined themselves in contrast to the colonial peoples they conquered, peoples who were manifestly alien in terms of culture, religion and colour. (Colley 1992, 5)

The weak advance of Protestantism among some highland Scots, especially those swept up in Jacobite risings supported by Roman Catholic France down to the 1745 battle of Culloden, meant that only coercion kept some within the political community. But not even another go at coercion could keep the predominantly Roman Catholic counties of Ireland within Britain, and they left that political community in 1921. Historically, the main goal of the normal political community was the collective good of security. But a secondary goal, not always separable, often involved possible livelihood as linked to the fruits of the land as well as of commerce. Failure to attain such security or economic aims has often caused the end of a political community. For many of us now living in more settled circumstances, it may be difficult to view one’s “country” as a coalition, since we are socialized toward thinking of it as an end, not as a means. Patriotism! Our love for country is supposed to be unconditional, even if continuous approval of its policies is not.

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But the instrumental coalition aspect becomes more obvious to those attempting to form a nation-state transcending old enmities (as illustrated in Chapter 3 regarding Bosnia and Herzegovina). It also becomes clear to those trying to prevent a political community from flying apart. If the United States experienced that in the years just before the 1861–65 Civil War, the Canadians have awakened since the 1995 Que´bec referendum on Que´bec’s sovereignty (49.5 percent for, with nearly 93 percent turnout). Especially when states nevertheless break up, as illustrated in the 1990s by the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia (which had restored the hyphen shortly before its 1993 dissolution), and Ethiopia, any retrospect would recognize that those states had been coalitions after all. Prospectively, scholars in India may also be so aware, thinking of the Kashmiri Muslims, the Sikhs, the Nagas, and the disgruntled Indian Tamils wanting to aid Tamil minority separatists of Sri Lanka. I do not deny that some nonrational motives may be involved in a nationstate identity. Thus as if in oblivion of the raging secessionist civil war, Abraham Lincoln spoke of “mystic chords of memory” that supposedly made Americans one, whatever the views within the Confederacy. It just is not a question of national identity’s being all one thing or all the other, nonrational commitment or rational instrumentality. My purpose requires emphasis on the theoretical utility of looking at the more rationally instrumental coalition aspect. Whatever else it may become for us, our country is indeed a special type of coalition. It is like other coalitions in involving a pooling of resources—sometimes even our bodies for giving battle—in pursuit of some shared aims. Chapter 3 examines the regime coalition, which is usually a subset of the political community’s supporting coalition. Here few would doubt the presence of a political coalition. But once again, the coalition aspect is more vividly obvious to most people as political orders are either being newly created or falling apart. Because increasingly deceptive communications are tantamount to no communication at all, this last often looks like defection from the Prisoner’s Dilemma game. Chapter 4 looks at the more obvious program coalition, normally representative of larger publics, a set of political leaders who have come to an agreement on a policy agenda. In parliamentary political systems, this is also called the parliamentary or legislative coalition. But there are somewhat similar program coalitions in other democratic regimes, and in monarchical, military, counterrevolutionary (e.g., fascist), or revolutionary (e.g., Communist) regimes. As already noted, this level of coalition, especially within parliamentary democracies, has received the most attention and has been the focus of the main propositions of coalition theory, as reviewed briefly within Chapter 1. Chapter 5 completes the work by discussion of the leadership coalition,

xiv

Preface

often called the executive or cabinet coalition. Its distinctiveness is clear in that it is quite often formed after the parliamentary program coalition, and in that it sometimes changes when the parliamentary coalition remains basically the same, as when Conservative Members of Parliament (MPs) deserted Margaret Thatcher in favor of John Major in 1990. Also, even if votes of disciplined parliamentary majorities are typically unanimous for both coalitions, the cabinet coalition may often have a narrower real base of support. That is, it may not really be supported by disgruntled individual members of a majority coalition who think they deserved a place in the cabinet but did not get it. There is no concluding chapter, since the whole of the book is making the case for considering these four coalitions as a nested set, wherein one must ask how each coalition level interacts with the others. This basic theory sketch is meant to travel well across the range of compared political systems, even if specific political systems offer a range of variations at different times and places. The main objective is to have a theory of political coalitions that helps us to understand not only the events of history but what is happening in our daily newspapers. Often social science theory is at its best in backcasting, showing why past events were within the range of expectation. If further development permits better forecasting of events, coalition theory will take its place as part of the central core of a comparative political science. That would be supplemented by a baseline theory of standard political strategies and tactics in the way of manipulating institutional structures, arranging recruitment of leaders, and directly or indirectly influencing such leaders. Such theory would also recognize that the political game may change—with distinctive cooperative and competitive choices and consequences—under three distinctive rules climates, Machiavellian (opportunistic), Grotian (informal normed), or Kantian (formal normed), as I have argued elsewhere, in The Rise and Fall of Regimes (Cook 2000). I welcome suggestions for improved analysis of the four kinds of coalitions addressed. I can be readily reached by mail: Terrence Cook, Department of Political Science, Washington State University, Pullman, Washington, 99164–4880, or else via e-mail at [email protected].

1

Coalition Theory and Nested Coalitions

Politics, any politics, is an action conducted in common by some men against other men. —Jean-Paul Sartre, The Ghost of Stalin

While his friend Simone de Beauvoir would have reminded him that women, too, engage in coalition politics, Sartre correctly reminds us that often in politics we cooperate only to better compete. Indeed, we do so through a variety of kinds of coalitions. These in some respects may be similar to each other, even beyond the minimal definition of “coalition” suggested in the Preface. If we are to study coalitions across changing contexts of space and time, we should self-consciously reflect on how coalitions are similar and different. We may also want to reflect on the adequacy of some one choice model amid uncertainty to cover what we observe of actual coalition behavior. There is a spectrum of models that roughly moves from high caution to low: maximin, utility-maximizing, satisficing, minimax-regret, and maximax. For most choices, I have said in the Preface, I would bet on Herbert Simon’s satisficing, since it assumes that, as a result of the press of time, only a narrowed range of alternatives is examined, serially, and held against an aspiration threshold, such that the first “good enough” one that looms into view is chosen. Against a common dogma, chiefly espoused by the adherents of the rational choice school, I do not accept the view that all theory must build from the micro (small) to the meso (middling) to the macro (large) levels.

2

Nested Political Coalitions

They are mistaken if they think that other sciences, such as physics, developed that way. In any case, they are fooling themselves if they think that they already possess the invariably correct microlevel psychological assumptions in utility-maximizing rationality. Fortunately, just as physicists managed to do much good science long before emergence of string theory (which yet has many loose ends), political scientists do not need to have a settled “micropolitical” model of how individual agents think and choose before describing and in large part explaining important political patterns at the “mesopolitical” and even “macropolitical” levels of analysis. I have elsewhere offered a very macropolitical theory sketch of how political communities and their regimes come into being and fall apart (Cook 2000). In the present book, more focused on the mesopolitical theory level, I expand upon the kinds of coalition mechanisms involved. One should need no apology to take theory large. But many have recently urged the importance of “recontextualizing” our studies. For some this connotes avoidance of sweeping generalizations about large patterns of human behavior. One must, they say, return home from “abstractions” to more “concrete” actions within closely defined situations that are highly contingent. They quite often charge “megalomania” of those who may attempt larger generalization. They deny that this is useful or even possible, since all politics is ultimately rooted in local situations needing what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz called “thick descriptions” for a proper accounting. Among other things, he argued that only such analysis of the context may help us grasp the meaning of the action for the actors (Geertz, 1973; 1983). But while more broadly charging barrenness of the interpretive schools in social science (a judgment with which I largely concur), Mario Bunge points out that those who make such an argument are often vague on what they themselves “mean” by meaning. Further, we cannot really “know” most of the individuals who do the behaving. Even if we did know some of them, it might not help in predicting macrosocial facts. One paradox of prediction is that the behavior of a few individuals is harder to predict than the behavior of aggregates, as any physicist (Bunge’s original expertise) can tell you of the three-body problem. It is far easier to identify any patterns in large batches of behavior (Bunge 1996, 13–16). Turning things about, perhaps the true megalomania holds those geographic area specialists who dogmatically claim that the local politics of their special study is wholly unique. This may be exposed as an illusion by study of other cases. The country-case specialists also assert that those who have not immersed themselves in its detail for a lifetime cannot say anything about it. That is a too convenient way to dismiss rival accounts of what is going on in the specific context. While otherwise conceding many virtues in local specialized studies, some of us also see some vices in doing only that. Blinders may keep a horse on the normal track but prevent it from finding a better way. There can be

Coalition Theory and Nested Coalitions

3

some gains in recontextualizing by going large, not small. Sometimes only a general analysis can offer sound insight into particular cases. Also, smaller patterns can even be contingent upon larger ones, as Tsebelis regards much strategic/tactical choice (e.g., Tsebelis 1990) to be. My purposes here require this latter strategy of generalizing quite broadly. Within this chapter I first review the more general propositions about coalitions, propositions primarily drawn from parliamentary program coalition behavior. In this we have for at least several hundred cases the best metrics for such factors as the numbers of players (political parties), their relative strengths (votes in the electorate, seats in parliament), their ideological similarity or difference, the coalitions that actually form, and their durations, usually delimited by a change in the chief executive or in the party coalition sustaining that executive. In the second part I elaborate a view of four kinds of coalitions as normally nested. Recognizing such nesting is important in understanding or predicting some coalition behavior, that involving interactions. Although a few statements about coalition behavior or its results may apply to all of the coalition types to be examined, less generalized statements may apply only to the specific kind of coalition being examined. But let us turn to a brief summary of propositions about parliamentary coalition behavior. I: THEORY OF POLITICAL COALITIONS Although most of the propositions in coalition theory focus on parliamentary program coalitions, it may be helpful to review some of the better known principles as a critical standard to set against other kinds of coalitions. It helps in thinking through the propositions to imagine oneself as being a political party leader: First, one could be the formateur (“one who forms”), the leader of usually one of the stronger parties invited by the chief of state to attempt formation of a government. Or, if conditions are too uncertain to imagine a likely prime minister, one could as in Belgium be called the informateur (“one who becomes informed”). Second, one could also imagine being the leader of a usually weaker party approached by a formateur as a possible coalition partner, if any partner is needed to constitute a majority. The problem in predicting which coalitions will form arises because the abstractly possible coalition outcomes steeply rise with the number of factions or parties, the number of players (n). As William Riker noted, the figure is 2n if one includes the possibilities of no coalitions forming at all as well as a grand coalition of all factions or parties (Riker 1962, 35–36). Thus just 6 parties could have 64 coalition possibilities! In the real world, of course, most of the possible coalitions would somehow be unlikely, and this is so by principles we are about to explore. I briefly review some propositions that attempt to predict which coalitions will form. From the

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perspective of a party leader, one would usually want to be in a coalition that is (1) winning, (2) minimally so, (3) able to cover median policy space, (4) ideologically connected and closed, and (5) expected to pay off partners by the proportionality rule. Let us look at each proposition in turn. (1) To be in a winning coalition: If not anticipating any liability for the next election in being presently attached to an unpopular government, one normally prefers to be in a winning or majority coalition rather than in either a minority coalition or no coalition at all. By definition, a winning coalition can normally carry initiatives of one’s coalition partners, and a merely blocking coalition can merely veto initiatives of rivals. In its largest sense, a losing coalition can do neither. Coalitions by definition amount to poolings of resources better to attain aims, if not the same ones, then at least compatible ones, such as offices and policy goals. In a parliamentary coalition, the central resource ultimately consists in votes in parliament. Being in a minority coalition could occasionally secure some influence over policy, and sometimes even permit occupancy of some subcabinet or cabinet posts. But minority coalitions tend to have fewer policy victories and to be short-lived. There are many possible “winning coalitions” for a large number of parties (or 2n⫺1/2) normally including some that could include the same party as one of their members. In Figure 1.1, that space of the square A that excludes B includes formation of no coalition at all, as well as coalitions that are undersized (cannot muster a simple majority in parliament). (2) To favor a minimal and minimum winning coalition: Although coalitions aim to win, to secure control of government and thus dominate the making of policy, the more rewarding and stable ones allegedly prefer to have their coalition minimally winning. A minimally winning coalition is defined as one that musters a majority in parliament, but would become a losing coalition if any party were to leave it. That is to say, it has no redundant partner. As indicated in Figure 1.1, one is here shifting to a subset of a subset. That space of square B left out of square C consists in oversized coalitions. Present in William Gamson, who held that agents would prefer a lean, less costly winning coalition to maximize their expected benefit, this thesis was best developed by William Riker, who emphasized that having too many or unnecessary partners would reduce per capita benefits for the coalition members. To Riker, the avoidance of redundant partners requires not only a minimal coalition but a minimum one. The minimal and minimum would be the same if all parties that could enter a coalition offered the same number of seats, but they usually do not have equal weights. He defines minimum winning as not having any more votes than is necessary to clear the simple majority. Put otherwise, if a coalition could make a simple majority either by adding Party D (which has 25 seats) or Party E (which has 30 seats), the formateur, other considerations equal, would prefer Party D. But Riker

Coalition Theory and Nested Coalitions

5

Figure 1.1 Possible Coalitions and Limiting Size

conceded that his stated ideal conditions are not always present to yield the expected result : “In n-person, zero-sum games, where side-payments are permitted, where players are rational, and they have perfect information, only minimum winning coalitions occur” (Riker 1962, 32). Riker relaxed his language to apply his predictions more easily to the actual world: “In social situations similar to n-person, zero-sum games with sidepayments, participants create coalitions just as large as they believe will ensure winning and no larger” (Riker 1962, 47). Other factors equal, by principles (1) and (2) the maker of a coalition would not want to have it either undersize (a minority coalition, which

6

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would often fail to muster any ad hoc majority votes) or oversized (for this would require some payoff to the redundant partner, and even more of such payoff if the redundant partner were larger, reducing per capita benefits for the others). Taken in isolation from ideological compatibility, the size propositions (especially the Riker “minimum” restriction) have proved to be rather weak predictors of coalitions that actually formed in nine countries over many years (De Swaan 1970, 149–51). The real world of parliamentary democracies certainly casts up not only many minority governments but also many oversized coalition governments, sometimes a necessary outcome if they want to be winning at all. Thus in Austria, if there were only two large parties (the Socialists and the People’s Party, and a very small third party), during a long period of postwar history, one could have expected a possible oversized coalition of the two large ones, which for a long time shared power by a system called proporz (proportionality) (cf. Taylor and Laver 1973, 233). Riker fixed on a party’s proportionate share of the cabinet posts as the maximand, forgetting other considerations, especially in the way of policy. He had recognized that sometimes oversized or even grand coalitions were useful in winning through military bluff and bluster, intimidating a common enemy in circumstances of revolution. But he thought that grand coalitions were normally useless in the tamer parliamentary setting. They did not permit anyone to win something in zero-sum policy situations, wherein by definition the winnings of the winners equal the losings of the losers. But not all policy fits the zero-sum mold. Sometimes highly oversized and even grand coalitions are acceptable as offering greater chances of securing collective goods for the community. Instances include meeting the shared challenge of winning a war or of reconstructing the damage after. Or it may be to minimize mutually ruinous ethnic strife (as applicable to the history of Lebanon before the 1975 breakdown into civil war) or class conflict (applicable to the mentioned Social-Democrat and Austrian People’s coalitions in postwar Austria). At least in local governance, sometimes at the larger political community level as well, some peoples prefer to arrive at decisions by broadly shared consensus, not a combat to see who can win by a narrow majority. Riker admitted that imperfect information could also derail the minimal and minimum expectations: Among other plausible reasons to accept just a slightly oversized coalition of just one small party, it can offer to the formateur as well as prospective partners a margin of safety if uncertain of winning. It also offers a hedge against losing one’s majority as a result of either weak discipline of members of a party (they do not vote according to instructions of leaders) or wholesale exit of one of the parties (it defects to neutrality or to a rival coalition). Also, taking in a certain small party, even if redundant, may prevent its adherence to a rival coalition, especially

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7

in the next parliamentary election. Politics are not only building one’s own coalition but breaking the adversary’s. (3) To cover median positions in issue space: When stable winning coalitions are possible at all, their leaders tend to have “covered” the median position(s) in contextually salient issue space(s). A coalition that does not cover the median voter could be defeated by a rival coalition that does. Although others such as Duncan Black or Anthony Downs had earlier explored this normal political advantage of holding the center, the fullest exposition has been quite recently offered by Michael Laver and Kenneth Shepsle (Laver and Shepsle 1996). A very small party in the pivotal position at the median, tipping partners at either side into winning status, is especially likely to benefit in coalition payoffs of posts or policy. (4) To have connectedness and closure: Party leaders prefer partners with similar program aims, even if a smaller partner is available to meet the merely numerical principles of (1) and (2). Put otherwise, most of the more stable coalitions are “connected” (Axelrod’s term for being adjacent in Left–Right issue space) and “closed” (De Swaan’s term for not leaving out any party within the range covered). Although it is arguable that it does not easily apply to all politics (e.g., some state parties of India are hard to place), issue space is normally Left–Right ideological space, with the Left end favoring more socioeconomic equality, the Right not. Any specific program coalition can usually be described by one of five distinctive ranges or blocs: Left, center–Left, center, center–Right, or Right. As against an “unconnected” or “open coalition,” few observed coalitions unite “strange bedfellows” who are far apart or skip over one or more intermediaries. The relatively rare instances of coalitions of ideological opposites are often more against something than for any common program. They also tend to be short-lived (Axelrod 1970). De Swaan states it this way: “Actors strive to join coalitions of minimal ideological diversity, rather than to maximize payoffs in terms of cabinet portfolios” (De Swaan 1973, 74). De Swaan and Browne prefer to call the principle minimization of policy space. They set it against the Riker merely minimal size principle, a purely quantitative standard that anticipated distribution of cabinet portfolios as the only concern. Like Axelrod, De Swaan and Browne emphasize that a party leader would not want the strain of an overly broad field of issue space. To minimize that, the leader would prefer not to skip over some party within the span necessary to form a minimal winning coalition. Also, it would minimize conflict of interest if the leader were able to build the coalition with his or her own party at the center, or “pivotal position,” of the coalition. Sometimes these preferences would mean going oversize with a larger partner, if closer in ideological space. That could cause fewer practical problems than adding a smaller partner more distant in ideological space. This last could alienate copartisans or pose insuperable obstacles to negotiation of a coalition program. Yet that is not necessarily impossible,

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as attested by a 1973–77 strange bedfellow coalition of leftish and secular Labour and relatively conservative and historically clerical Fine Gael in Ireland, forced by the inability of either alone to defeat the more centrist Fianna Fa´il (Cohan 1982, 267). The coupling of the minimal size idea with connectedness or closure proved to be more predictive of which coalitions form than Riker’s merely numerical size principle taken of itself (De Swaan 1970, 1973; Taylor and Laver 1973; Browne 1973, esp. 65–75). (5) To expect proportional payoffs: The implicit principle of partners’ anticipated relative payoffs was stated by William Gamson under the rubric of the parity principle: “Any participant will expect others to demand from a coalition a share of the payoff proportional to the amount of resources which they contribute to a coalition” (Gamson 1961, 376). As measured by ministerial portfolios, this has empirically proved to be a very strong relationship: “The number of ministries received by partners in a governing coalition is indeed explained, almost on a one-to-one basis, by their contribution of parliament seats to that coalition” (Browne 1973, 56; also, Browne and Frendreis 1980). Gamson also theorized that the value of a coalition to a participant would be the value of the participants’ expected share in the payoff as discounted by (multiplied by) the perceived probability that the coalition would win. But he also believed that the proportionality payoff rule would also apply to less measurable policy, not just the cabinet posts addressed by Browne. With perfect information and confidence that the proportionality rule will be followed, if all coalition members maximized the expression r/R when r is any one member’s resources and R the summed resources of coalition members, the coalition would also have to be a minimally winning one, as in principle (2) (Hill 1973, 29–30). Hill notes that although most members are insistent on their fair share of payoffs of cabinet positions, any one member of a coalition could often be willing to forgo proportional rewards in policy if necessary to preserve the coalition (Hill 1973, 7). More broadly, if a winning coalition of parties is often observed to take literally all available cabinet positions, it may forgo taking all possible rewards in the way of policies, for a too greedy denial of at least occasional policy benefits to losing parties could threaten the future viability of the decision-making institution. The payoff principle, and possibly others, may not be symmetrical for the formateur and the party asked to join a coalition: The formateur may sometimes be happy to have a party join without getting a proportionate reward, but that would be regarded as unfair, and the shortchanged party leader would be too resentful to enter the coalition at all or to stay there very long. Perhaps because they are implicitly rules of thumb of boundedly rational party leaders, the preceding five principles become somewhat predictive of

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both (1) which coalitions get formed and (2) which ones, once formed, endure. The principles tend with modest success to predict which coalitions form from among those that are otherwise technically possible, a set that we have noted steeply rises with the number of parties. Sometimes the principles combine to make a unique prediction of the result. After the October 1999 election in Austria, which has 183 seats in its parliament, the results were as follows: Greens, 13.7 percent of the vote, 14 seats; Social Democrats, 32.5 percent of the vote, 65 seats; Austrian People’s Party, 26.9 percent of the vote, 52 seats; and Freedom Party, 26.9 percent of the vote, 52 seats. The coalition that eventually formed included only the Austrian People’s Party and the Freedom Party. Was it well predicted by the five principles of coalition theory? Yes. The coalition that formed was a winning one, which had 104 of the 183 seats in parliament, or 56.8 percent of the vote. Among possible winning coalitions, was this also both minimal and minimum? Yes, there was no way to form a coalition closer to a bare 50 percent plus 1. Nor was there any chance of excluding any party, since either the Austrian People’s Party or the Freedom Party could without coalition have formed at best a probably short-lived minority government. Did the coalition reflect connectedness and closure? Again the answer is yes, although another winning coalition with such connectedness and closure could have been a coalition of the Social Democrats and Austrian People’s Parties (but that coalition would not have been minimal or minimum). Did the coalition cover median issue spaces in Austria? Almost certainly. Did the coalition follow the rule of proportionality, at least in allocating cabinet posts? Once again yes, since the six cabinet slots given to the Freedom Party were at least nearly half of all posts, even if they did not get the chancellorship. Single-point predictions can sometimes be made in coalition theory, especially in coalitions in tripolar party or faction situations under an opportunistic rules climate, provided that the three players are not all roughly equal, when information about their relative powers alone would not yield a specific prediction. In all other cases, one would need only to know the relative powers of players A, B, and C (as less than, equal to, greater than) to predict the most likely coalition outcome among all possible arrays of their relative powers and the alternatives of no coalition, coalition of A and B against C, coalition of A and C against B, coalition of B and C against A, and grand coalition of all three, assuming that the players are rational and interested in their own well-being. Readers may put this into a matrix and see the logic for themselves (also, see Caplow 1968). Assuming a dangerous political context, I have left out the three cases when a pair could coalesce for some purpose clearly not involving any threat to the third player.

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But aside from some postdictive studies of war, it is rare for social science to make single-point predictions, looking rather for probabilistic predictions for classes of events. Often when unable to offer a one-point prediction, a theory could merely rule out an array of outcomes as implausible and suggest two or more plausible outcomes. Any validated reduction of the range of what could be expected is clear scientific gain. Perhaps some demand far too much of a coalition theory. More like meteorology than physics, political science can reasonably expect to miss many cases. Sometimes anomalous cases can awaken us to yet unrecognized predictors of what we are studying. Thus if tripolar contests are not as nasty as expected, it may be because they have entered a nicer rules climate: Under opportunistic rules two typically gang up against one (Caplow 1968). But when restrained by law, they could often mutually backscratch in a kind of grand coalition, as when in the United States the army, the navy and the air force support each other’s budget demands. Improved predictability of coalition formation perhaps requires exploration of other variables, such as past experience of agents with each other, leaving learned legacies of trust or distrust. Failures may in part arise because the principles are often considered in isolation from each other when combination gives better results, as illustrated by the linkage of limiting size with ideological connectedness and closure. Conceding the exception of oversize and even grand coalition in crises, Abram De Swaan otherwise found rather strong empirical confirmation in his nine-country study for this statement “Parliamentary majority coalitions tend to be closed along the policy scale and, in times of normalcy, of minimal range” (De Swaan 1970, 159). But missed cases may also be sought through recognition that often one of the principles, when applied to real world situations, limits the applicability of another. Thus if a coalition leader knows that a majority is a hopeless prospect, that he or she is merely leading a minority government coalition (sometimes quite literally a “caretaker” until a new election), it does not matter whether a coalition partner is more distant in ideological space, since one is unlikely to attempt passage of any major program, or one may pick up ad hoc support from anywhere on the Left–Right range for distinctive proposals. As already noted, a leader may prefer to go oversize with a coalition in order to take in the ideologically more similar partner rather than go with a smaller but numerically adequate partner that is more dissimilar, since that could make it impossible to agree on a program at all or could alienate his or her own party members. Such refinements of theory, recognizing when one principle bounds applicability of another, makes for a more complex theory, but it may better fit the real world. After all, the preceding principles of coalition behavior bristle with paradoxes: Thus, although a coalition always demands some pooling of your resources with hope of winning by principle (1), you would not want to

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contribute beyond the expected value of your share of the payoff, as in principle (5). Also, your share of the payoff by principle (5) depends on winning, and in the formation process, uncertainty of doing so could spur violation of principle (2) by leaning to oversize. Principle (2) implies a de facto unanimity rule for coalition decisions, but if Riker’s theory predicts highest stability for barely winning coalitions, that is the condition by definition in which any one coalition partner could destroy the coalition by defection. Your share of cabinet portfolios by principle (5) depends upon how many seats your party can win, and you are most likely to be in sharpest competition for voter support with the parties adjacent (just to your Left or just to your Right) in issue space. Thus a social democratic party, wanting votes of workers, is in some cases likely to compete with both a communist party to its Left and a more centrist liberal reform party to its Right. But those issue-space adjacent parties by principle (4) are also those with whom you are most likely to enter into a political coalition, sometimes even a preelectoral one. Yet sometimes an “extremist” party of the far Left, such as the Communists (or the far Right, perhaps neofascist) is unacceptable as a partner, forcing one to violate principle (2) in having to go undersize or oversize or violate (4) in having to extend the ideological range unduly to make a winning team. By principle (4) one prefers to be in a coalition of “birds of a feather,” but sometimes that can make it impossible to have that coalition satisfy principle (3), of covering medians, or it may lead into an oversize coalition if the party at the margin is a big one, violating principle (2). Thus Finland has experienced oversized Left coalitions, which nevertheless proved to be quite durable (Nyholm 1982, esp. 105–8). In any event, covering median positions in issue space can put a parliamentary leader in different loci, depending upon whether the referent is the electorate, the parliament tout court, the parliamentary majority coalition, or the cabinet coalition. This last point is elaborated later. In short, coalition theory posits a set of apparently reasonable predictive principles. But something as in Kenneth Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem for ideal principles of democracy, satisfying some of these principles can often frustrate satisfying the others (Arrow 1951). As the Chinese proverb holds, he who chases two rabbits catches neither. Indeed, chasing more than two rabbits at once almost assures failure to catch any. Chasing five rabbits may make it seem that one has fallen down Alice’s famous rabbit hole! But perhaps the metaphor wrongly posits the goal of “maximizing” the catching of one rabbit, when the real goal may be better described as the more feasible aim of keeping all five rabbits out of one’s kitchen garden. That is best achieved by a menacing lunge toward whatever rabbit currently most threatens one’s lettuce. Although one doubts that all actors, for example, the formateur and the party receiving a bid (as I have illustrated for the proportionality principle), would have the same preferences, it is at least conceivable that Charles

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Taylor and Michael Laver could be correct in suspecting that the criteria could be lexicographic, that is, clearly preference ordered, such that the higher criterion would eclipse any lower one, but cases of rough ties in evaluating possible coalitions could go to a lower-ranked criterion for resolution (Taylor and Laver 1973, 208). But I suspect a more complex pattern of how one principle may predict bounds on another. Further, I think most actors would vary weightings of the five coalition principles, not to “maximize” any one of them but rather the value of relevant outcomes considered as a whole. This would be like trying to get best value for a basket of goods, much as a multinational corporation thinks of global overall value rather than always maximizing profit in every one nation-state (Papandreou 1973a; 1973b). Literally, to maximize any narrow goal is, I think, the very definition of madness. When any one of the five coalition principles begins to become self-defeating of its main purpose, or when it does unacceptable damage to another kind of purpose addressed by another principle, it is time to back off from it. Behavior is surely irrational if either (1) completely random or (2) totally rigid. Neither course of behavior would make one an effective problem solver, and as the philosopher of science Karl Popper told us in even the title of his last book, “All life is problem solving.” Boundedly rational political actors do not act at random, but rather follow “rules of thumb” principles; neither do they act in rigidity. They know when to rein in those rules. There is a kind of higher or metarule of thumb that holds that any lesser rule of thumb should not be pursued to the point where it is either selfdefeating or unacceptably damaging to some other important goal. Intelligible trade-off considerations could account for many failed predictions of the five most prominent principles of coalition theory. Prediction can be improved by the sort of analysis offered in Figure 1.2, where I look at the coalition principles from the distinctive vantage points of a formateur, the leader of the coalition, and a lesser leader of but one of the coalition partners. To ally, one needs a yes on each side. If the five coalition principles are modestly successful in the prediction of formation of coalitions, it would seem that they could do better at forecasting of duration, especially when taken as complements to each other and when working with averages rather than discrete cases. Yet in practice few studies of coalition attributes cover as much as a third of the variance, almost surely because a variety of “random” events may shorten the life of a government (e.g., the leader dies or retires as a result of illness, a scandal occurs, a policy conspicuously fails, OPEC drives fuel prices through the roof, a recession sets in). Such bad news events become more probable with passage of time, which statistically predicts that continued government duration decreases with time. But time is not of itself the cause of a fall of a government, just the temporal window within which real

Figure 1.2 Conflicting Vantage Points on Coalition Principles

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causes do their work (Warwick and Easton 1992; also King, Alt, Burns and Laver 1990). Taken of themselves, the minimal and minimum size propositions are but weakly predictive of the coalitions that actually form. Riker expected that to the extent that agents had poor information. But among other possible problems, Riker explicitly assumed a zero-sum contest, in which by definition any winnings of winners equal the losings of the losers. That seems too strong for many domestic political contests, even if allocations of offices and taxation approximate that. Arguably, zero-sum contests better describe societies undergoing social revolution, but the even greater uncertainty of such a context may instead cause formation of more oversized coalitions. Riker’s minimal and minimum size principles do better in predicting coalition duration: Most research does show that both undersized (minority) coalition governments and clearly oversized ones lack the robustness of the minimally winnings ones (Dodd 1976). Other considerations equal (but our reference to “random” events concedes that they never are), the more of the stated coalition principles are satisfied, the longer a coalition is likely to last. At the ideal limit, imagine a coalition that is at once winning, minimal and minimum in it, able to cover median positions, ideologically connected, and proportional in its payoffs of cabinet posts and policy. Such a coalition (e.g., that of Austria after the October 1999 election) may not be that common, but when it is present, it should be expected on average to endure longer than coalitions lacking any or even all of such attributes. Finally, some predictive weakness in coalition theory may arise from failure to think of coalitions as usually nested, with the games on distinctive levels interactive in complex ways. Suggesting that is a main objective of this book, even if but a preliminary exploration. II: THE CONCEPT OF NESTED COALITIONS As noted in the Preface, one can conceive a kind of “nesting” of coalitions in the sense that smaller ones are built from within larger ones. To think of nesting not only as distinctive sets of people but also as fields on which political games are played offers an enlarged perspective on coalitions. At any level one may find equilibria, which are either stable or unstable. In the familiar example, a nested set of bowls offers us a stable equilibrium in that all but very large disturbances will find the bowls neatly resettled into each other. At their margins, they smoothly fit. But other kinds of nestings can be less stable, as when all yet living, a June bug is in the mouth of a frog that is in the mouth of a grass snake. Unstable equilibria, or where a small disturbance can readily make a large and lasting difference in pattern, may sometimes apply when one set of laws is contained within another, or when one political entity is contained within an-

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other. There are circumstances in which nested elements enter into major conflict and new instability. To some degree all equilibria are artifactual. We can make them stable by broadening the range of permissible fluctuation of the “same” system and by contracting the window of time. Alternatively, we can make them unstable by narrowing the window of permissible fluctuation or by enlarging the window of time. In the different sorts of coalitions examined later, one may see both periods of relatively stable equilibria and of unstable equilibria. As in economics, in political science one should avoid thinking that changing things are either always falling (or refalling) into equilibria or that they are always falling out of equilibria. Sometimes how and when one looks dominate what one will see. As at least episodic equilibria, the coalitions that I examine are similar in some ways: For one thing, they are alike in the denotative sense that leaving aside any collaboration against nature, any political coalition is an agreement of some to cooperate in order to compete better against some others. The cooperators pool or coordinate some of their resources so that they do not act in isolation, ineffectually, or even at cross-purposes but rather in coordination toward attainment of goals. Drawing from E´mile Durkheim’s The Division of Labor, one analyst noted that two agents can tend toward solidarity when they are (1) similar, in having such complementary goals, which can either be the same, sharable goal or different goals that are compatible; (2) different, in the sense that the differences permit each to supply what is lacking to the other. Thus one coalition partner may hold the advantage of larger numbers of voters, while another has the advantage of median issue location. In contrast, two agents tend to cleavage if (1) they have incompatible goals, such that they either want the same thing that cannot be shared at the same time or want distinctive goals that yet exclude each other; and (2) their differences are not complements, but only points on which to hang prejudices due to (1) (Brown 1965, 73–76). Such analysis can be applied to a pair of individuals or any paired aggregates of people, such as ethnic groups, political parties, or even states in the international system. Students of game theory, mostly in mathematics and in economics, have explored how those engaged in conflict may in one-shot plays sometimes arrive at equilibrium conditions that permit cooperation. They have also developed an evolutionary game theory subtype. Keeping within the formal definition of a specific game type, usually Prisoner’s Dilemma, this subtype looks at results from many rounds of play, over which one may apply a chosen set of parameters, or even allow some changes in strategy, and so on. Some game theorists may recognize even spontaneous change in games at some point, comparable to new speciation in evolutionary biology. I have elsewhere elaborated upon spontaneously transforming games in a

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grand theory of change in regimes (Cook 2000). But to extend the biological metaphor, perhaps we need to invent a transgenic or transformational game theory, thinking of how political agents can engineer exits from more self-destructive games (e.g., negative-sum or zero-sum) and get into more cooperative ones. Negotiators as well as students of negotiation, like Monsieur Jourdain in speaking prose, have already been into transformational games. They recognize, for example, that they must abandon the notion of unchanging individual preference orderings so common among game theorists (cf. Jervis 1986; Oye 1986). At least with respect to its members, a new coalition often involves transformations of more conflictual kinds of games into more cooperative ones. In a very bad case, actors may have been in a negative-sum game, wherein by definition the losings of the losers exceed any winnings of the winners. Thus one of two small parties in sharp competition for a few seats may by its negative attacks totally destroy the other party. Or, more plausibly, they may have been in some zero-sum game, in which by definition any winnings of the winners exactly equal the losings of the losers, as when two parties try to harvest votes from the same target constituency. Less conflictual is the mixed-motive Prisoner’s Dilemma game, wherein both could be better off by cooperation (not ratting on the partner in crime). But in the absence of any communication between the prisoners, for each the immediate advantage is to negotiate a reduction in the charge by testifying against the other. Even if they are past competitors for votes because adjacent in ideological space, an expectation of repeated interaction could help two parties coalesce, learn to trust each other against defection. In the impure coordination problem game, by definition, both sides want an agreement but disagree about such points as who bears what burdens and who gets what benefits. It is already apparent that coalescing parties typically solve this problem through the proportionality principle. The collaboration problem game by definition seeks some collective good, but just because if anyone gets it all do (it is not divisible or excludable), the problem is getting any contribution at all (this is called freeriding, or letting George or Georgina do it!). With too many free riders, the collective good may not be gotten by anyone. In parliamentary systems, party discipline (party leaders instruct their parliamentarians in voting) aims in part at solution of that problem. A more easily solved collective action problem involves a common pool resource (a run of fish, mountain meadow grass, or perhaps new voters in a democracy) supplied by nature. Because it is divisible and potentially excludable, and because those concerned may regard each other as having absolutely equal claims to access if not harvest, it can often be given a lasting solution in principles of equal sharing (Ostrom 1990).

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The pure coordination problem game is easiest to solve since all value agreement more than its terms. They can work matters out just by clearly communicating, as when parties arrange their conference time and place. In a rough way, one may rise through that list of games in developing a working coalition, just as one may descend through it in reverse order when such a coalition falls apart. Indeed, in contrast to the benign form of transformational game theory, a malign version would involve promotion of the more divisive kinds of games among coalitions of one’s adversaries. Internal games aside, the last remarks remind us that coalitions are also similar in that, barring natural catastrophes that sweep away all actors, they are usually ultimately destroyed by rival coalitions. The rival coalition is not always of the same type, as when an invading alliance of enemies sweeps away one, several, or all of our four types of domestic political coalition. The similarity of coalitions makes it possible to address common mechanisms, but one must no less speak of coalitions as in some ways distinctive, both across types and for any one type in different specific arrangements within a specific context. This only seems contradictory, for as noted by two biologists in another context, “Things are similar: this makes science possible. Things are different: this makes science necessary”(Levins and Lewontin 1985, 141). How do coalitions differ? I do not speak at length of all coalitions, primarily addressing the political community, regime, program, and leadership types and their subtypes. In this book I say little, for example, of coalitions that cross borders in interstate relations. Yet I will make a few passing remarks on them right now. International Coalitions Some coalitions transcend a single state, as in the looser alliances or even tighter coalitions that form in international relations. Usually these assume compatibility of aims and complementarity of capabilities. In one form, one state may coalesce with a part of an enemy state in order to subvert that state. Thus India’s fourth-century Arthashastra, attributed to Kautilya but perhaps of plural authorship at different times, recommends: “In all cases of strife among the members of an oligarchy, whether they arise by themselves or incited by assassins, the conqueror shall assist the weaker party with money and arms, make them fight the hostile group and urge them to kill their rivals”(Kautilya 1987, 522). Alternatively, a state may coalesce with other states taken as if unitary actors in classic realist vein. Such concerns Kautilya’s “mandala” theory, which envisions a circle with concentric bands. In the center is the favored state called the conqueror, the leader of which wants to add on conquered land. Just beyond it is a band of enemies, including the natural or principal

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enemy most fearing loss of land to the conqueror. Beyond the ring of likely enemies is a second band of states that could be plausible allies for the conqueror, since they could want to annex land taken from the backside of the enemy, when viewed from the standpoint of the conqueror. No threat at all to the conqueror’s territory (unless the principal enemy were wholly partitioned, thus giving them a common frontier), those in the second band constitute natural allies, readily offered generous slices of territory from the enemy’s backside. Costless to the conqueror, it obviously would weaken the enemy state, perhaps enough so that the conqueror could take a slice of territory from the near side of that state. But if the allies divide it all among them, they themselves become adjacent and hence enemies. Beyond the natural allies in the second band lies a third band of their enemies, followed by a fourth band of enemies to their enemies. When wishing to attack, the conqueror mobilizes assistance from the second band of states to weaken the target of his military march or to protect his rear when doing so. Or if the conqueror is in defensive mode, such alliances would merely weaken an attacking state by raising difficulties at that state’s flanks or rear. The friendly second band may in its turn mobilize the fourth band. Kautilya allows that this pattern may be complicated by the presence of either a “middle” state, which is adjacent and could by itself defeat either the conqueror or its principal enemy when they are divided, or a nonadjacent “neutral” state, which could defeat individually the conqueror, the enemy, or the “middle” state, too. In multipolar worlds in Machiavellian rules climates, for most states, the necessity of allies is offset by their treachery. Kautilya’s theory predicted some alliance behavior in the multipolar context of the 1930s: Thus Czechoslovakia, facing Hungarian claims on its territory from the south, allied in the Little Entente with two second-band states, Yugoslavia and Romania. Facing other demands by Germany on the northern fringe of Bohemia called the Sudetenland, it also allied with second-band France (1934) and Russia (1935), although neither chose to fight when needed in 1938. The Czechoslovakians seemed to do everything right, yet their history then went badly: Without a shot fired, Hitler took away the Sudetenland in 1938. In 1939 he invaded the rest of Bohemia and Moravia, and he set up a puppet state in the Slovak half of the country. Among other weaknesses, mandala theory seems of limited applicability outside a relatively disorganized multipolar international system. Mandala theory may give undue attention to geographic positioning and strictly territorial conquest rather than to more direct measures of consonances and conflicts of interest. Although Americans invaded Canada during the War of 1812, the United States and Canada have not been enemies since. Note also that the adjacent territory that mandala theory assumes to be hostile can also be the territory that modern

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nationalists could want to absorb, provided that ethnic similars reside on it. Mandala theory illustrates that much of international relations, even when extending to war, concerns coalition politics. But if Richard Rosecrance is right, making war to conquer territory is an obsolete activity, now chiefly pursued by lesser powers in the world. They have not developed the modern mind-intensive labor economic base typical among the most advanced nations, which also fully recognize that influence over global capital flows is now what matters most. Rosecrance, in my view understating the hegemonic role of the United States, correctly identifies the emergence of a kind of grand coalition of the great powers to keep unruly smaller powers in line. “Today an informal international concert or encompassing coalition exists among the great powers” (Rosecrance 1999, 102). He acknowledges that it is somewhat like the 19th-century Concert of Europe, which eventually foundered in emergence of ideological division between conservative and liberal powers (Rosecrance 1999, 97–103). In some ways international systems and party systems can be fruitfully analyzed in parallel, if alert for some differences, too, as when international alliances form against a common threat to security, which is not the normal motive of party coalitions. Yet in revolutionary contexts, sometimes domestic coalition partnerships may also be motivated by fear. Strange bedfellow coalitions seem more common in international relations than in domestic politics. There have been efforts to measure identities of subnational groups with a “feeling thermometer,” whereby respondents begin by assigning about 50 degrees to a group toward whom they feel about neutral and then grade other groups as either downward toward zero (distrust) or upward toward 100 degrees (highest trust). When applied to members of the same country, this has been shown to reveal respondent positivity bias, or reluctance to score any groups negatively. But this does not seem true of use of the same instrument on peoples of other nations, which are often rated over a larger range. A list of American ratings of 23 countries in 1978, 1982, and 1986 shows that such ratings responded closely to current friendliness or hostility in foreign relations as well as to degrees of cultural similarity (Americans consistently liked fellow anglophones such as the Canadians or British) (cf. Wiarda 1990, 73). Cultural likenesses aside, clearly identifications with foreign peoples can be highly contingent upon the current state of relations between a pair of states, and hence often unstable. Unfortunately soon allying himself with the Nazis, Carl Schmitt had argued in 1932 that we sort ourselves out as saliently similar and different, and then as friends or enemies, and it is this enmity that then creates a politics: “Every religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human

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beings effectively according to friend and enemy” (Schmitt 1976, 37). It can extend to interstate war and was soon to be expressed in a second world war. Alliance behavior varies considerably with variables of the strategic context, especially the international system and the rules climate. Fortunately for us all, the bipolar international system of the Cold War did not become a “tight” one that allied all world powers about the two poles on all matters over which fighting could occur. Even the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when John Kennedy thought the odds of nuclear war were one in three or even one in two, may not have really come close to war, since the Soviets were weak in missiles and had decided not to go to war even if Kennedy had invaded Cuba (Mueller 1989, 152–55). However, Soviet local commanders had been given discretion on use of tactical nuclear weapons. Toward the end of the U.S.A.–U.S.S.R. confrontation, Robert Gilpin noted that “in the closing decades of the twentieth century, economic, political, and ideological cleavages are not coalescing but running counter to each other” (Gilpin 1981, 238). But the Soviet Union in 1986–90 indicated that it would not repress East Europe, which soon ceased to be Communist in 1989–90. The Soviet Union itself fell apart in 1991. Resurgent nationalist identities led to many small wars in the former Soviet sphere of influence, as well as Yugoslavia. Before leaving the subject of international coalitions, I sketch some broad contrasts with domestic political coalitions in Figure 1.3. It is not surprising that often military allies are unreliable, not only in the sense that they may fail to go to the assistance of a partner but also in the sense that they often turn against a past or even present ally. But some of this is also true of domestic political coalitions, especially in contexts of domestic turbulence or civil war. As Machiavelli warned, it is always dangerous to conspire with anyone unless you know that he shares your motives. Domestic Political Coalitions As defined here, the political community coalition is the population that supports the principal membership unit. It can include not only those who fully support it (they would oppose its dismemberment or its absorption by another state) but more loosely those who at least acquiesce in its continuance, either because they see it as legitimate or because they lack any power to change conditions. Some earlier nations were nomadic, often permanently changing their primary place of residence (Armstrong 1982). When beyond nomadic tribes, the membership unit usually means the set of persons sharing a territory or homeland in interstate relations. The most common form of the principal membership unit today is called the nation-state, even if most of the world’s some 195 states do not neatly fit a “nation.” Most people

Figure 1.3 International Alliances and Domestic Political Coalitions

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simply call it their country, if understood as the land with its people rather than also its regime. The paramount aim of this political community coalition is security in interstate relations, but a secondary aim can be an economic trading sphere. The first aim is most obvious in cases when military alliances grow into political communities. Sometimes this is evident in the growth of a large monarchy by imposition on smaller princes, but it can also develop by wholly voluntary adherence of the parts of the new whole. I mentioned the example of Great Britain in my Preface; I examine the cases of Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the United States in the following chapter. But there I also show that most states have sprung from the disintegration of late modern empires, usually reflecting their administrative units. In addition to sharing a bounded residential location, often political community identities relate to one or more ethnonational bonds. Usually a subset of the political community coalition, the regime coalition is the set of persons associated with the political community who support the fundamental features of the political order, the basic rules of the game, the framework of government, or what is often called the constitution if one formally or informally exists. Again one could distinguish those who are full supporters and those who are mere acquiescents, often because no alternative seems implementable or workable. The main aim of this coalition is some kind of domestic political order—not just any order, but one that implicitly tends to favor the coalition partners and their specific purposes. Thus the regime coalition of “federalists” who supported the U.S. Constitution of 1787 wanted among other aims to curb economic powers of unruly state legislatures, to create a common market, and to have a coordinated trade negotiation policy toward the outside world. Quite soon these would show their division into two distinctive program coalitions, those of the Federalist and Democratic–Republican Parties. If political community coalitions often focus about one or more ethnonational identities, regime coalitions, when not consociational, often reflect stratal identities, sometimes disguised in distinctive religious identities, as observed by Hume, Tocqueville, Marx, Kautsky, or Weber. The program coalition is the set of people who unite around a common political agenda. Although program coalitions may relate to larger publics who identify with specific political factions or political parties, they tend to be most clearly expressed in a representative set of active political agents. Often a specific program coalition is in a governing position, able through a royal council, legislature, or other assembly, to work on implementation of its program. In parliamentary democracies, such coalitions are typically called legislative or parliamentary coalitions. Those concurring on a program and the principal coalition leader or formateur pledging loyalty to those commitments attempt to form a government. Members of a program coalition can reflect ethnic or stratal identities, but they often reveal regional or sectoral economic interests. That is, they share interests linked to

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their livelihoods: agriculture, manufacturing, commerce, government employment, and the like. When not including attention to features of the political community or the regime, the main aim of a program coalition thus typically consists of an economic program dwelling around regulatory, revenue, and budgetary questions. But domestic and international security policies as well as social status or symbolic concerns can also have much presence in a program coalition or common agenda. The leadership or cabinet coalition, which often crystalizes later and can sometimes change independently of the program coalition, is also known as the executive or portfolio coalition: Whereas it can be different in a direct-election presidential regime, in which leadership is selected by voters separately from members of parliament, it is often best viewed as a subset of the program coalition, even if both coalitions are expected to be supported by the unanimous votes of disciplined, coalesced party members. The price of breaking party discipline for individual legislators is normally future exclusion from any significant offices, if not even, in rare cases, denial of party support in any new parliamentary election. But whatever the outward show of unity, the coalition may be a subset that genuinely supports a specific allocation of cabinet portfolios, under the overall coalition leader (the parliamentary system chief executive, usually named prime minister, premier, or chancellor). Its responsibility is to placate the program or parliamentary coalition, to which it is ultimately answerable in a parliamentary democracy. But one can often discern even in nondemocratic regimes a distinction between the ruling coalition as a whole and that part which controls the current executive. I depict the preceding domestic political coalition forms in Figure 1.4, illustrating the concept that larger coalitions contain the smaller ones. If that figure best shows the concept of “nesting,” by in effect tugging upward at the smallest circle, one can offer the alternative illustration of Figure 1.5, which is more helpful in symbolizing the peaking out of political power. The second figure should help illustrate how the coalition “layers” may affect each other. Most of such impacts are through adjacent layers, as suggested by the linking arrows. The unequal sizes of ascending and descending arrows suggest my hypothesis that influences are asymmetric: The more basic coalition layers in the normal case usually cause greater constraints on what happens in the higher than vice versa. Before addressing at greater length in later chapters the kinds of coalitions briefly defined here, I broadly preview what will be said as we move through the coalitions in the numerical order of our Figure 1.4 as well as Figure 1.5. To start with, the coalitions normally develop in that sequence: Although some postmodernists like to speak of all identities as “constructed” or “constituted,” one must begin with a biological organism to have something there that can recognize a “self.” So one must begin with real world

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Figure 1.4 Four Normally Nested Coalitions

aggregates of peoples to bound them into smaller aggregations as well as coalitions that support them. One normally establishes a political community before bothering to define a regime. Then one normally needs a program coalition before forming its cabinet coalition. Again, in the sequence of political community, regime, program, and cabinet, we are moving from normally implicit coalitions (often not even recognized as coalitions until some partners attempt to leave them) to those that are more and more explicit (recognized by all as political coalitions). Put otherwise, unlike a nested set of Russian dolls (the matryoshka, or mampe¨wka), in which we see the smallest last, most tend to perceive the smallest coalition first, the largest perhaps not at all.

Figure 1.5 Coalitions Out of Coalitions

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Nested Political Coalitions

Further, as depicted in both Figures 1.4 and 1.5, each successive coalition type has a normally narrower base than that which preceded it, such that each may often be viewed as a subset of the prior set. One reason for the narrowing is that grand coalition, or a coalition including all major groups, becomes more difficult to implement and maintain across the series. That is, political agents may aim at and often achieve near grand coalition for the political community, but, apart from the consociational system as defined in the following, this often becomes increasingly elusive as one shifts to the regime coalition, the program coalition, and the leadership coalition. Two special cases do offer grand coalition at two or more levels. First, “consociational” democracies may pursue a grand coalition of ethnic “pillars” through all four levels, political community, regime, program, and leadership (Lijphart 1975; 1977; 1984). Second, a great national emergency such as war or reconstruction from war may rather briefly involve grand coalition governments, as in many European states during and just after World War II, but 1945–46 governments often included Communists, who were dropped with the outset of the Cold War about 1947. The other reason for the decreasing base is the increasing specificity of aims. Broadly, the political community coalition aims at power and security in interstate relations: When not aimed at conquest (a zero-sum contest with neighbors whose lands are coveted), it focuses on security against the threat of invasion, and so on, solving what is to fellow members of the political community a collaboration problem to attain this collective good. As mentioned earlier, a collaboration problem concerns an indivisible and nonexcludable collective good, such that if any enjoys it, all can get it. But most would like to “free ride” on the sacrifices of others to get it, and it often is not attained without added selective inducements for contributors or sanctions such as coercion of slackers. If you share in protection from foreign enemies, you must pay your share. Excepting the consociational regime, the regime coalition aims more at an internal political order. It normally offers not only political advantages but in part through them more protection and economic advantages to some strata or layers of society relative to others. During its initiation and again at its demise, the regime coalition problem may look more like a Prisoner’s Dilemma problem in which a common interest exists in cooperation, but because of poor communication and frequent deception, it is offset by an inclination to defect in order to secure a lesser private interest. If a regime has surmounted that distrust, the regime coalition typically works at managing its impure coordination problem, as by definition most want some kind of agreement on a frame of government (all but the anarchists want a political order) but have distinctive preferences among alternatives.

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The program coalition also has to manage impure coordination problems, expressible as the problem of attaining justice in normally contested public policies. It may yet give some attention to physical security but shifts much attention to group advantages in the way of economic (regulatory, revenue, budgetary) policies and status policies. Often getting into zerosum or even negative-sum conflicts with parties outside the coalition, a program coalition encounters sharp contests on many issue positions. To please some (e.g., those part of a parliamentary coalition) fully, one must displease others (any visible opposition factions or parties). Yet if one displeases too many others and too intensely, they may not only make themselves into a winning coalition and take power but sometimes threaten continuity of the regime or its underlying political community. Finally, the executive leadership or cabinet coalition not only has parceled out elements of the program to the parties or factions in the program coalition but now specifies which persons shall hold which cabinet portfolios, a very specific matter of status and perquisites for appointed individuals. In parliamentary coalition governments, once the portfolios are allocated to member parties, they select their persons for those cabinet slots. To the extent that the four levels of coalition have typically narrowing bases, it is virtually inevitable that some who may regard themselves as “friends” in the larger-based coalition regard themselves rather as “foes” in the smaller-based system. Indeed, if there were no neutrals to take into account, this would be logically inescapable. Hence agents who could be equally committed to the political community may be divided against each other on the regime, or if at one mind on the regime (largely true of older, stable states such as the United States), they may find themselves in opposed program or leadership coalitions. Excepting the special case of consociational societies that aim at unanimity of the ethnic pillars at all levels, as one moves toward the smaller set, pressures toward unanimity increase: In parliaments not unanimity but majority rule prevails, but unanimity is demanded among the coalesced majority parliamentary parties. Austria’s cabinets literally require unanimous votes, and other cabinets aim at “consensus” (but as part of the collective responsibility principle, cabinets almost anywhere present a public appearance of unanimity). By tradition, in Britain and elsewhere any member of the cabinet who wants to take a difference public is expected first to resign. In another angle, most of the influence of one kind of coalition (or of the agents who act in it) is delivered directly to the adjacent layer (as on the arrows linking layers in Figure 1.5), often only indirectly and more weakly on any more distant layer. However, as noted earlier, there is some asymmetry in that the more basic layers normally constrain conduct (as well as enable) those above more than do the less basic ones constrain conduct (or enable) those below. One layer of coalition may often be de-

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scribed as effectively giving a mix of prescriptions (mandates), permissions (options), and proscriptions (things forbidden) to an adjacent layer. Some Preliminary Notes on Coalition Stabilities In working up Figure 1.5, along the arrows showing direction of an influence, it is usually the nonchange of a lower layer that helps to stabilize the layer above. But working down Figure 1.5, change of a higher layer often permits more stability to a lower one, as when small changes in cabinets permit survival of a parliamentary majority (program) coalition, or when changes in parliamentary governments permit survival of the democratic regime. As Canadians well know, often adaptive changes in even regimes are necessary for the survival of the political community. Later chapters cite relevant studies that show that most often change in a higher layer tends to stabilize the lower. However, this is by no means a universal rule. It usually holds as long as such change either amounts to an accommodation of existing supporters or accommodates a demand for a bit more power by a group with the numbers, other resources, and so forth, to make that seem reasonable. Sometimes a significant change in the regime can build more unity in the political community. Yet not all changes in a higher layer have an immediate stabilizing effect on more basic layers. It can sometimes cut the other way: Certain sharp departures from existing practices may sometimes alienate a coalition partner, especially when confronting such a group with a major and abrupt loss of relative power. Thus in Nigeria in 1966, a coup against the democracy by junior (captain and major) officers was checked by higher officers, led by the Igbo major general Ironsi. But his change of the regime from democracy to military was followed by an attempt to change the regime further from federal to unitary. That was threatening to the northern, largely Islamic, Hausa–Fulani peoples, who even talked of secession. Instead, one of their most senior officers, Lt. Col. Yakabu Gowon, upset at too many Igbo appointments to higher officer ranks, made another coup, overthrowing Ironsi. Gowon rescinded the order to install a unitary regime. However, the new program– coalition change now caused the Igbo to secede from Nigeria as Biafra, to be followed by the 1967–70 civil war, which forced the Igbo back into the political community (cf. Aborisade and Mundt 1999, esp. 14–21). Similarly, only Montenegro, with a population of 600,000, and Serbia, with 10 million, remained in Yugoslavia when the former premier Milosˆovic´ proposed constitutional reforms in 2000. Serbs would certainly dominate if he amended the constitution to permit direct election of the president and make himself eligible for a new term (his first term of 1997– 2001 involved indirect election by parliament). They also opposed his wish

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to end formal equality (20 votes each) of the two provinces in the upper chamber of parliament. Whereas Milosˆovic´ was deposed in October 2000 after failing at election rigging, leaders of Montenegro continue to look for outside support for their secession. Even a sharp change in program and cabinet coalitions can be threatening to a regionally based group that lacks a blocking veto against new, adverse policy. During the period of post-Napoleonic Restoration in Europe, the Swiss in 1815 formed their Federal Pact, which was really a loose confederation of cantons with formidable trade barriers among themselves. The more conservative forces insisted that the pact could not be altered without unanimity of the cantons. After 1830 two kinds of largely Protestant liberals, radicals and moderates, became prominent in the majority of the cantons. They began demanding reforms such as free speech, expansions of the vote, and retrenchment of the Roman Catholic clergy from education. Contrary to the Federal Pact, such liberals of this movement called the Regeneration who had taken power in Aargau attempted to press some Protestant preferences on the Catholics. In 1841 they abolished eight Catholic convents linked to a failed Catholic armed rebellion. Lucerne correctly asserted its cantonal right by the Federal Pact to introduce Jesuits into its education. By 1845 seven conservative, Catholic-dominated cantons led by Lucerne, claiming legitimate self-defense but also arguably violating an article of the Federal Pact, secretly formed a confederation, the Sonderbund, within the larger Swiss confederation, defensive of cantonal sovereign equality. The central government Diet, dominated by liberals, voted revision of the Federal Pact and expulsion of the Jesuits. They chose in 1847 to repress the Catholic Sonderbund by main force; that was done with just over a hundred dead on both sides. The next year, the weak confederation was changed to a tighter federation (cf. Thu¨rer 1970, 97–111; Martin 1971, 203–24). But note here that at least this last change in the regime (modified in 1874 to permit referenda) ultimately preserved the Swiss political community. In a like case of adverse policy expectations triggering revolt, American southerners in 1860 anticipated empowerment of Lincoln’s new program coalition and its expected policies regarding slavery and tariffs adverse to the American South. Given failure much earlier to adopt John C. Calhoun’s constitutional ideas of nullification and plural presidency, which would have meant a regime assuring the South’s ability to block adverse policy, and given loss of a Senate majority to block new laws, this caused the South to secede. The 1861–65 U.S. Civil War by main force reconstituted the shattered political community. In sum, adaptive change in the higher layers of coalition normally tends to stabilize more basic layers. Yet if a higher level of coalition attempts to deal out a steep loss of power to some group, those threatened with the

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loss or actually experiencing it may defect from a lower-level coalition, threatening its stability. Turning to another matter, there is often more overall violence in the creation and maintenance of the more basic levels of coalition (even for democracies), since defection from the coalition may not be legal or actually allowed. Even democracies may sometimes coerce defectors from the political community (a secessionist movement) or from the regime (if a revolutionary insurrection). In fact by international law, any state’s sovereign right of “internal matters” includes the right to coerce secessionists; the Russians so argued as they repressed the secession of their province of Chechnya in 1999–2000. Yet such repressions must not cross a cusp to become genocide or crimes against humanity, such as that which led to a United Nations indictment of Milosˆovic´ for his severe “ethnic cleansing” repression of ethnic Albanians in Serbia’s Kosovo province, stopped by a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) bombing campaign. Democracies at least favor uncoerced consent in the higher levels, protecting in law defections from a cabinet or parliamentary coalition. Dictatorships more often use force against defectors from coalitions at all levels, perhaps explaining in part their greater overall domestic political violence (Rummel 1997). Perhaps in part because continued membership may be forced, but also because of deeper identity formations, the more basic levels of coalition tend on average to be more durable than the less basic-level ones. Whereas beginnings of some political communities are occasionally obscure, durations may often be directly measured. Long duration need not always entail stability, which cannot be directly observed or measured but only precariously inferred from such conditions as domestic political cleavage patterns, and so on. To cite Mario Bunge, “we cannot be sure that a system is in fact unstable unless we have a testable theory to explain why it is unstable” (Bunge 1996, 162). If often lasting hundreds of years, political communities typically succumb to defeat in wars. If on average lasting 20–30 years according to two studies cited in Chapter 3, regimes may also fall to wars but are also destroyed by economic stagnations that erode the regime coalition and bolster an internal antiregime coalition. Program and cabinet coalition durations are, at least for democracies, often better measured in months, one study found a median of 30 months’ duration. Among other indicators, anomalous relative sizes (e.g., leadership coalition exceeds program coalition, program coalition exceeds regime coalition, or regime coalition exceeds political community coalition) can forecast likely instability. Thus support for a governing team may be much larger than that for the regime, often indicating imminent change of regime. This

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was illustrated in Venezuela in 1999, when a highly popular new president quickly had a constitutional convention begin changes in the regime. Or again, after the failed KGB coup attempt in 1991, a coalition gathered about Boris Yeltsin was both antiregime and anti–political community, opposed to the continued existence of the Soviet Union. Although it is arguable that Yeltsin’s dissolution of the Soviet Union reflected opposition to the Communist apparatus, official polls showed in the Russian public a wish to maintain the Soviet Union as a political community. That did not happen. Instability is also predicted from presence of high eccentricity, a word originally connoting “off center.” In one form of eccentricity, the anomalous case, coalitions may leave the normal nesting suggested in Figure 1.4. But in the almost normal case, it refers to the inability of coalitions to cover all relevant median issue spaces. This last is not unexpected, because coalitions involve distinctive sets of persons. Hence a leader at the median of a leadership coalition may almost normally fail to be at the respective medians of the program coalition, the regime coalition, and the political community coalition. Although requiring more elaboration in the sequel, major eccentricity in this sense is a key predictor of major political change. If great ethical teachers such as Gautama and Aristotle taught that the middle way is best, a teaching that Kant would call a categorical judgment of value, one can also argue that the middle way is also best in what Kant calls a merely instrumental or means–ends judgment of value. Against opponents of moderation such as Machiavelli, if one wants the end of attaining and holding power under normal conditions, one is usually best advised to follow the means of positioning oneself at or near the median of a potentially winning coalition. On the face of it, many advantages accrue to the central position, whether in unidimensional political space (such as the familiar Left–Right spectrum) or in multidimensional policy space (sorted out by fields of policy, such as domestic security; international security; varying kinds of economic policy such as regulatory, revenue, or budgetary; or status and cultural). In the most abstract kind of argument, Duncan Black asked us to consider two factions or parties of single-peaked preference in one policy dimension. In a contest to be resolved by simple majority rule from a field of equal votes such as in a committee or a parliament, a stable majority tends to form that must include the median voter (Black 1958). Kadane added that in multidimensional space, a stable majority equilibrium is quite unlikely to form. Preference orderings are likely to cycle, especially if there are multiple factions or parties separable by dimension. Yet if a stable majority forms at all in such multidimensional issue space (more likely with single-peaked preference), it, too, includes median voters (Kadane 1972). The mathematics aside, the reason is intuitively self-evident: Any coali-

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tion that fails to include median voters could be defeated by a coalition that does. That rival coalition could be larger, if only by just one vote. Even more than their predecessors, Michael Laver and Kenneth Shepsle have strongly argued that leaders can find their advantage in covering “median” positions in issue space, in the literal sense of those positions that leave half of the reference group on each side (Laver and Shepsle 1996). They extend such arguments, offering more mathematical deduction, simulation, and some empirical testing, to confirm the advantages of covering median positions, whether in electorate, parliament, or within any unified parliamentary majority, for the logic of median theory would evidently extend to many sorts of coalition in which one could plausibly think of issue positions as spatially arrayed. If median positions have obvious advantages, why do we not find more leaders striving to be at the middle of the pack, and thereby stabilize political coalitions of any type? Although I do not deny the theoretical advantages stated by Laver and Shepsle, in practice it may be extremely difficult to attain and retain leadership by covering all relevant median positions. To explore some problems with the claimed advantages in covering medians, one must compare and contrast the types of coalitions, dwelling, as noted, on those that are normally “nested” and in some ways interdependent. If the political center (or median preference in various salient policy dimensions) has everything going for it, one would think that most parliamentary and cabinet coalitions would be center-tending to maximize chances of stable equilibrium. By extension, similar centrism would also stabilize the relatively implicit political coalitions behind a regime and the political community. In fact, we know that if some political communities last for centuries, others soon fall apart. Regimes rarely last centuries and average, as noted, at most a few decades. Whereas a few autocrats long hold their office, democratic executives on average last but a few years or have a median of only 30 months in democracies, by Bingham Powell’s account cited in Chapter 5. Many governments fail to survive even one year, not only in a parliamentary system such as Italy’s, but even in some military regimes such as Bolivia’s in one period of rapid turnovers of top leadership by coups d’e´tat. Instabilities of some coalitions are clearly pervasive. One reason is that there are multiple and usually distinctive medians in political community, regime coalition, program coalition, and leadership coalition, and it is virtually impossible for any leader simultaneously to hold them all. Being “centric” for one coalition means being “eccentric” for another, especially if the coalitions in some aspects fail to nest at all. This is why so many leaders not ruling by repression perforce turn to rhetoric to seek the seeming of centralities normally not attainable in being, for it is feasible for such varied figures as Oliver Cromwell or Yasir Arafat

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(who are discussed near the end of Chapter 5) to use rhetoric to seem rather than really be at the multiple median positions. Although apparently ending his political career as mayor of Oakland, California, the former governor of that state, Jerry Brown, once quipped, “A little vagueness goes a long way in this business.” True, but he once aspired to be president of the United States. Now that I have thus signaled some of my conclusions at the outset, the elaborated meaning and some defense of each statement unfold in due course. All that said, I now offer closer examination of the distinctive forms of political coalition listed on Figure 1.4 or Figure 1.5. I examine them in the normal sequence of their emergence: political community coalition, its regime coalition, its program coalition, and its leadership coalition.

2

The Political Community Coalition: Supporters of the Principal Membership Unit

The most instructive part of the annals of peoples, the histories of their establishments, is what is most lacking to us. —Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (Iv, iv)

In 1762 Rousseau lamented that the histories of most European nations were lost in a mythic past, and no new ones were arising. Yet since then much has been learned about the formation of the European peoples, and many new political communities have since arisen for our study. In any event, Rousseau imagined an ideal origin of a political community as a pooling of resources for mutual advantage under the direction of the general will: “Each member of the community gives himself to it, such as he currently finds himself, he and all his forces, in which his possessions form part”(Social Contract, I, ix). Although more and more human institutions may be created by conscious design, creation of a political community is not often such a self-conscious political act, in this respect departing from the definition of coalition offered by Kelley in my Preface. Although I concede that the consenting may be more diffuse, sometimes only by elites on distinctive territories, a political community may be regarded as a kind of coalition. It is most easily recognized as such primarily at its origin and then again at its demise. In its origin, interaction on shared purposes may create a sense of identity not previously present, and the identity often takes shape through enmity toward one or several other peoples. Sometimes we can see the painful

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struggle when the coalition is not yet nailed down, as in recent experience in Bosnia-Herzegovina, as reviewed in Chapter 3. In its demise, usually failure to attain those old purposes or to attain new ones may undermine the identity that had defined the political community. The coalition aspect of political community may be quite apparent to those trying to prevent an older institutionalization from flying apart, a well-warranted concern of Gorbachev in 1985–91. Such thinking would also have been recognized in recent years in Ethiopia, Georgia, Canada, and even Great Britain. I: PATHWAYS TO POLITICAL COMMUNITIES I address in this chapter and in Chapter 3 two forms of relatively implicit coalitions, those of the political community and its regime, before addressing in Chapters 4 and 5 the more explicit ones focused about program and leadership. I follow David Easton’s usage in defining the political community as the most salient political membership unit, especially in interstate relations, whereas a regime is its political order or framework of rule. I later split Easton’s third loyalty object of authorities into two distinctive phases of coalition involving particular politicians, namely, the program or parliamentary coalition and the cabinet or executive coalition (Easton 1965, 171–219). Although one should not press it too far, in some respects one may note this parallel: As the total population is to the political community coalition is to the regime coalition, so the parliament as a whole (and all represented voters behind them) is to the parliamentary majority (and their voters) is to the cabinet coalition, even if this last in parliamentary systems may show the same surface unanimity as the parliamentary or program coalition. On each side sets give rise to subsets, although the first series involves in part unmediated identities and the later ones mechanisms of representation. In the earliest political communities, argues John Armstrong, cultural and paternal genealogical boundaries of peoples mattered more than physical and territorial ones, something that would especially make sense for migratory peoples who are hunter–gatherers or pastoralists (Armstrong 1982). For civilized field agricultural societies, there is a bigger stake in firmly holding the territory, because of urban buildings, investments in infrastructure such as irrigation works, and the labor represented by the crops in the ground. This territorial focus becomes dominant over time, present in much of Europe by the Middle Ages even in areas previously occupied by nomadic peoples. Not precluding some mixed cases, as arguably true of Bismarck’s unification of Germany, a political community may have been originally formed by conquest, or it may be formed by explicit consent. Often what was

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originally conquest becomes a kind of implicit consent, or at least something more than mere acquiescence by local elites. But even that may not be irrevocable. Not even the longest lived political communities are supported by all of their residents. But the numbers of rejectionists can vary widely, from very few in the United States now (but very many during the 1861–65 Civil War) to large numbers in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Yet in either case only a subset of the political community’s whole membership constitutes the political community coalition, broadly defined as those who would (1) want to continue their individual membership in the political community; (2) usually want to discourage secessions, sometimes even by use of force; and (3) not want the community to become a dependency of, or perhaps become absorbed by, some other political community. Under the second head, I say sometimes, since there are known instances when secessionists were allowed to depart in peace, including Norway from Sweden in 1905, Iceland from Denmark in its 1904 home rule and nearly total independence in 1918, or the Slovak Republic from Czecho-slovakia at the outset of 1993. Granting that there may be a set of uncommitted persons falling between them, perhaps involving some in circumstances of poor communication who are even unaware of belonging to the political community that rules over them, one can recognize by the same criteria those who reject the political community. These may be any of three kinds of politically disloyal: (1) would-be political emigrants, (2) secessionists, and (3) those who favor complete subordination of their political community as a whole to another political community. Although most international migrants, like domestic ones, are merely economically motivated, moving from places of lower economic opportunity to higher, the first category consists of those who have primarily political motives for leaving the presently containing state. Not including those involuntarily deported (as illustrated by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his 1977 deportation from Russia), these can include any voluntary individual emigrants or would-be emigrants. But emigrations can sometimes be collective, too, as biblically illustrated by Moses’ leading the Jews out of Egypt. The second category of rejectionists want to make a collective exit and to take a slice of the territory along with them. With some exceptions such as the Nagorno-Karabakh Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan, normally secessionists would be compactly settled at the margin of an existing state’s territory. The third category of rejectionists concerns those who, although not turning to political emigration or secession, would want the whole of the present political community to become subordinated to a friendlier, outside power. In the past these often included religious minorities wanting the

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local community subordinated to a foreign religious leader of their creed or even to a state dominated by cobelievers. Thus many 17th-century Roman Catholics within largely Protestant England wanted papal authority restored or looked for their salvation from Catholic Spain or France. John Locke, in his Letter Concerning Toleration, was really thinking of them in saying that he would not tolerate religious expression by those owing allegiance to a foreign religious leader such as “the Mufti of Constantinople.” Later examples of such disloyals could include collaborationist figures such as Quisling in Norway or Tiso in Slovakia who subordinated their states to Hitler, or perhaps local Communists who helped Stalin consolidate control over East European states from the later 1940s. Tito’s Yugoslavia resisted and was ousted from the Communist International (Comintern) in 1948. Doubtless now many of the 25 million Russians left outside Russia (e.g., many in Latvia) after 1991 may long for restoration of something like the Soviet Union (cf. Laitin 1998). Expanding upon this last kind of rejectionism, note that if secessionists using illicit means may be severely punished for “sedition,” often here the even more heinous crime is called treason. One discerns the typically primary purpose of an original political community coalition in the way the U.S. Constitution defines treason in Article 3, Section 3, “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort”(cf. Duchacek 1986, 49–51). It is obvious in this look at emigrationists, secessionists, and incorporationists as rejectors of the political community coalition, that not all who are members of the political community belong to its supportive political community coalition. Whether its members came in by compulsion or by more or less free choice, members of a civilized political community consist of an aggregate of sets of persons defined in large part by territorial areas on which they persistently dwell. How do these aggregations arise? It is a mistake to look for a single pattern, but it would be equally wrong to doubt that patterns can be found among the distinctive forms. Political communities may emerge by (1) traditional accretion, (2) a mix of conquest and semipopular consent, (3) imperial breakdown, (4) breakdown of a nation-state, or (5) development out of an antecedent economic union. I briefly define each of these here, offering some elaborations later. Traditional Accretion Often states have historically arisen by conquest or a threat of conquest, sometimes also involving addition of territories through marital alliances. Note that in the latter case the consent would typically involve only the

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highest of noble families, not presupposing some larger public’s approval in any sense beyond mere acquiescence in something beyond their control. Cases here include the Inca empire, the Aztec empire, Tsarist Russia, Japan, Qin (Ch’in) China, Persia/Iran, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and France. Thus Japan emerged from a period of warlordism and civil war to enter a loose “coalition” unity under the 1640–1868 Tokugawa Shogunate or bakufu (military camp) government: “The principal power base of the Shogunate was a coalition of various self-governing and self-supporting han (fiefs) situated largely in the northern and eastern parts of the country. Other han, principally in the southern and western regions, were regarded by the bakufu as potentially less loyal, but were kept in check by a comprehensive set of restrictions designed to reduce to a minimum their physical capacity to challenge the bakufu” (Stockwin 1999, 13). Leaders within such peripheral provinces as Cho¯shu and Satsuma would eventually challenge and destroy the Tokugawa regime in 1868. But the political community of Japan survived, united by a shared fear of the Western powers. For at least the slower growths by accretion, one advantage is that ethnonational cultural unity may also develop within the boundaries, as I show later in the French case. A Mix of Coercion and Semipopular Consent Bismarck’s “blood and iron” involved some essentially consensual incorporations but also mobilization of coercion to incorporate the eastern principalities of Hanover, Hesse, and Nassau. In completing the building of the German political community, Bismarck left out the German-speaking Catholics of Austria, if including within his largely Lutheran domain Catholics in areas such as Bavaria or the city of Cologne. Germany’s birth as a political community was belated and belabored. As nicely reviewed by Bruce Cronin, the relevant region had been little more than several hundred principalities and statelets until Napoleon rationalized matters by trimming down their numbers. He also loosely gathered them into an organization called the Confederation of the Rhine. Prussia had been a member of the Holy Roman Empire, an office held by the Habsburgs for all but three years from 1438 to renunciation in 1804, which was followed by Napoleon’s 1806 abolition of the office. That freed the states of northern Germany to organize themselves without Habsburg consent, even if the Habsburg ruler continued as president of the post-Napoleonic German Confederation, created in 1815. In the mid-19th century, the Grossdeutsch or “Big Germany” idea was espoused by the more Catholic southern states of what would become Germany. They wanted to include Austria proper and at least Bohemia, which included many Austrians as well as Sudetenland Germans within its borders. They were otherwise willing to leave the rest of Austro-Hungary’s

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empire out of Germany. The total population of 36 million in that empire had included only 8 million Austrians along with 16 million Slavs, 5 million Hungarians (Magyars), 2 million Romanians, as well as other nationalities. However, the emperors never ardently supported the plan. They were more preoccupied with securing their dynastic authority and the prestige of the larger empire. Austria, through its presidency, had manipulated the German Confederation to humiliate Prussia, which held the vice-presidency. This had caused some bad blood, even if both monarchs professed friendship and commitment to “Big Germany” up to the 1866 Austro-Prussian War. The Kleindeutsch or “Small Germany” proposal had been supported by northern, more Lutheran Germans. They proposed to leave out of their vision of German borders both Austria proper (too Catholic) and Bohemia (too many Slavic Czechs). Some members of the Frankfurt Assembly in 1848 favored this plan, but the assembly also included representatives from southern German states and Austria. Ascendant in 1848, liberal germanophones were largely defeated by Prussia’s military in 1850. But they enjoyed some resurgence in 1859, inspired by the development of north Italian unity against Austria. Most Junkers, the noble landowners who dominated both high military officerships and bureaucratic positions in Prussia, were initially opposed to either Big Germany or Small Germany. Being mere Prussian patriots, they were filled with the memory of Frederick the Great, whose conquests had made their state. Such was initially the position of the Junker Otto von Bismarck, who became Prussian minister– president in 1862. But an 1848–52 conflict over Schleswig-Holstein returned in 1863, at a time when Prussia experienced political tensions between Kaiser Wilhelm and his parliament. With popular nationalistic fervor opposed to Denmark’s planned absorption of the local germanophones into Denmark, the germanophone states united behind military action. Defeated, Denmark ceded the territory to Prussia and Austria jointly. Whereas the monarchs wanted to set up in the region a new, independent prince, Augustenberg, Bismarck and most germanophone parliaments opposed that, favoring simple annexation of both provinces by Prussia. That offended Austria. When war finally ensued in 1866 between Prussia and Austria, Austria lost, not only because its troops used an inferior rifle but also because too many of them had been sent to repress a rising in Venetia. Bismarck now set up the North German Federation, becoming its first federal chancellor. He had shifted his rhetoric from Prussian to German nationalism, and he accepted universal male adult suffrage for the federation. Kaiser Wilhelm had reluctantly accepted the annexation of the Danish germanophone provinces, and he now accepted retakings of old Prussian territories in the east, while dethroning their legitimate princes. Already united by their shared enmities toward Denmark and Austria, Germans were further held together by their distrust of the French. Angered

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over Bismarck’s alliances with south German and hence more Catholic states, the French dictator Louis Bonaparte attacked and was defeated. The Franco-Prussian War in 1870, followed by annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, completed the unity of Germany, once antecedent military alliances with the four south German monarchies were replaced by incorporation in the single German state (cf. Cronin 1999, 97–121). Prussia excepted, Napoleon began the unification of Germany, but Bismarck finished it. Or at least he did that until the Austrian-born Adolf Hitler in 1938–39 added Austria as well as the Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia. Himself from Linz, Austria, Hitler was reviving against Bismarck’s Small Germany the old dream of Big Germany. This was more plausible after Austria had lost its largely Slavic empire after World War I. But loss of World War II forced Germany back into an even smaller Small Germany, including a division between West Germany and East Germany formally in place in 1949–90, when Germany reunited (on this cf. Leiby 1999). Conversion of a Military Alliance In an even more voluntary union, a political community may begin as essentially a military alliance. This was arguably so of the union of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland as a Protestant coalition, first against Spain, then against France, as in Linda Colley’s view cited in my Preface. In an even older case, the Swiss cantons began as a military alliance aimed against the Habsburgs in 1291, initially including the forest cantons of Uri, Schwyz, and Nidwalden, but soon adding Obwalden. The confederation would grow over time to 23 cantons (three of which were divided into 6 half-cantons, which add one federal counselor for each pair). In 1978 the Swiss carved a full francophone Jura canton out of the largely germanophone Berne canton. There were some conflicts between Protestant and Catholic cantons during the Thirty Years War (1618–48), and then again in the 1840s. But notwithstanding that religious difference and the presence of four linguisitc groups (German, French, Italian, and Romanx), Switzerland eventually emerged as a stable, federal constitutional regime, in 1848, revised in 1874. In another case, the Netherlands arose from the alliance of seven territories into the United Provinces, rebelling against Spain from 1568. The United Kingdom’s Sir William Temple, who had been an ambassador in the United Provinces, wrote the following description in 1673: “It cannot properly be styled a Commonwealth, but is rather a Confederacy of Seven Sovereign Provinces united together for their common and mutual defence, without any dependency upon the other”(Temple 1932, 56). There was some tension over whether informal leadership would fall on the grand

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pensionary of Holland (supporters were more willing to tolerate Catholics, avoid undue warring, and focus on trade) or rather on the principal military leader, the stadholder from the noble House of Orange (supporters were more militantly anti-Catholic, for some time wanting to conquer what became Catholic Belgium). But notwithstanding policy differences among supporters of the new political community, the United Provinces were effectively separated from Spain by 1608–9 and formalized as independent in 1648. Let us take another case, that of the United States of America. What was essentially a military alliance of 13 colonies was first linked in the Continental Congress to oppose the French and their Native American allies in the Seven Years War (1756–63). But the colonies shortly thereafter realigned the alliance in enmity toward the British over taxation of the colonists as linked to costs of that war. The bickering eventually culminated in shooting by 1775, followed by the 1776 Declaration of Independence and drafting of the Articles of Confederation, put effectively in force prior to ratification by 1781. Then the new, yet surviving Constitution was written in 1787 and ratified in 1789. We often forget that some of the founding generation leaders could not even think of their “country” except in terms of their home colony and then state, which claimed “sovereignty” during the Articles of Confederation, even if that document also announced a “perpetual union.” Those words shifted to “a more perfect union” in the preamble to the 1789 Constitution (Duchacek 1986, 134). Finally, one can cite the almost wholly consensual (but for the Papal States) union of Italian statelets, where I again follow analysis by Bruce Cronin. He denies Italian unity was caused by either a nonexistent linguistic unity (elites spoke French in the Piedmont, Spanish in the south) or their broadly shared Roman Catholicism. Cronin calls the Italian case, like the German one reviewed earlier, an “amalgamated security community.” Just as the Germans found unity by shared enmities toward neighbors, the Italians began their unity in military enmity to Austria. This was led by a reorientation of the Piedmont monarchs from primarily dynastic defenders of the House of Savoy (an identity that tipped them in favor of the AustroHungarians) to military allies of other north Italian states (Lombardy and Venetia) attempting to shake off the Austrian yoke. This posture cost them military defeats in 1848 and 1849. Yet it won for the Piedmont monarchy, counseled by Cavour, favor from the liberal central and south Italians of the 1848 risings, many of whom had fled to Piedmont when repressed elsewhere in Italy. By 1861 a limited union of states was based in Turin, capital of Piedmont. Once Modena and Tuscany (dynastically linked to Austria) and Garibaldi’s southern conquests of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies (dynastically linked to France) join in, the seat of Italian leadership is transferred to Rome. The full unification is attained of all seven Italian states by 1870, when the capital shifts to immortal Rome (Cronin 1999, 74–96).

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Whereas Cronin thinks “amalgamated security communities” are “anomalous” in that they involve a surrender of sovereignty to a new center, such formations may be a bit more common than he thinks. Perhaps this case supposes that some deepened sense of identity takes root before the common external security threat recedes, for the voluntary nature of entry into what was originally a military alliance may make it seem that exit will also be viewed as voluntary, as the American states seceding to form the Confederacy may have wrongly expected in 1860–61. Imperial Breakdown Although it is more convenient to elaborate the point later, the six largest of the late modern empires ruled wholly or partially just over 85 percent of the nation-states we have today. Whereas the three land empires (Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Russian) would eventually fall out largely by ethnically bounded units, the three sea empires (Spain, France, Great Britain) often left states with more artificial boundaries disregarding ethnic lines. In much of Latin America that only raises a problem with relatively weak indigenous peoples (especially in Central America and southern Mexico), but in Africa such colonial boundaries cut across some much larger ethnonational categories. Another problem is that many ethnics find themselves left outside their homelands, as true of some 25 million Great Russians after 1991, or the 27 million non–Great Russians who find themselves in Russia or elsewhere than their new homeland. Breakdown of Nation-States Other states result from successful secessions that further fragmented what had been regarded as nation-states: The ideal of a united India became, with much communal murder of Hindus and Muslims, India and Pakistan (1947), then Pakistan became Pakistan and Bangladesh (1971). In 1993 successful secessions separated Eritrea from Ethiopia, as well as the Slovak Republic from Czecho-slovakia. Secessions sometimes involve rather brutal, protracted warring, as in the case of Eritrea. Other problems can concern economic viability, as when the Slovak economy grew slowly for some years before finding its footing after 2000. Access to an adequate market sphere becomes arguably less of a problem with globalized free trade. Development from Antecedent Economic Merger Postcolonial political attempts to merge former colonies into larger politicoeconomic units have conspicuously failed: One could address the shattered dreams of Bolı´var in early 19th-century South America; more recent

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failures include the West Indies Federation (1957–64), the Central African Federation (1953–64), the Mali Federation (1959–60), the Malaysian Federation (in one form from 1948 but formalized 1963–65), and the United Arab Republic (UAR) (1958–61). Kaddafi’s Libya, perhaps like the UAR more focused on power in international relations, has also made gestures of unification with neighboring states. Bernard Lewis notes that, like Spanish Americans during the Napoleonic wars, many Arabs have long nurtured the idea that they should not properly be in separated nation-states but rather united in a larger Arab or Islamic federation. But these ideas have been receding (Lewis 1999). Echoing the language of Cronin, one could call a successful instance of economic union running into a political one an “amalgamated economic association.” This model is thus far applicable only to the yet emergent case of the European Union (EU). Note that the EU demands some assimilations of would-be members, not only to its basic economic legislation but also to its shared civil and human rights. One should note in passing that the seed of the European Union was a kind of “amalgamated security community” in that Paul Spaak created the Coal and Steel Community by 1951 with the intent that no future contest over the Rhineland’s coal and iron ore deposits could cause European war. A common market in the raw materials would make that pointless. The European Union is the important case to watch, since most advanced, but a number of other regional economic associations such as that created anew in 2001 in East Africa (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania) could eventually point toward political community as well. It usually makes sense to regard a political community as a coalition of packets of population tied to a distinctive territory. A political community typically has a territorial base, and should expect much economic–geographic variation across the average case. There are likely to be distinctive economic interests in recognizable regions, and the political community coalition can often be usefully regarded as a coalition of such regional economic interests, even if also at some times experiencing conflicts of interests among themselves. Often these local territories may correspond to ethnic concentrations, but sometimes they do not. Although obviously not necessarily mutually exclusive of antecedent political jurisdictions, the territorially defined sets may be ethnically distinctive. Thus many conquered ethnic homelands made up the Ottoman Empire. After the demise of that empire, nationalities living on distinctive homelands by consent of their leaders formed a union called Yugoslavia (meaning “South Slavs”) in 1919. Walker Connor has observed that most culturally distinctive peoples or ethnonational groups live on some distinctive homeland: “With but very rare exceptions, ethnonational groups populate distinct territories, as is evidenced by the fact that it has been possible

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to produce ethnic maps covering all sectors of the globe” (Connor 1994, 146). Whatever the origin of a political community, its makers often originally aimed primarily at their security in interstate relations by defining a shared, outer boundary and arranging for its defense. Although it cannot be denied that some of these communities later aggress against outsiders, usually not being conquered is the normal end in view. Perhaps as interstate security recedes from saliency, other concerns can become more prominent, such as the secondary collective aim in modern times of having an unfettered economic common market. That was enjoyed by Venetians at their peak during the later Renaissance, if prohibiting outside competition in Adriatic trade or even university credentialing to rival their University of Padua. Usually linked to economic aims, cultural survival can also sometimes become most salient. The beginning of a political community coalition can sometimes be a parlous enterprise. Recalling what I said of games in Chapter 1, at worst, sometimes potential partners had been in negative or zero-sum contests over territory, frequently expressed in wars (think of the two world wars preceding the European Union as an emergent political community). With threats of war receding, in a mixed motive Prisoner’s Dilemma game, each agent may now want to cooperate yet find a dominant strategic choice in defecting, taking a sure but lesser (suboptimal) benefit rather than a less certain but larger one of cooperating. In a one-shot coalition endeavor, any cooperation is unlikely. Yet with many rounds of indefinite interaction, the game may find solution in more cooperation as the better strategy. In fact, the Prisoner’s Dilemma game may then spontaneously transform to an impure coordination game or a collaboration game, if not a pure coordination game. By standard definition, in impure coordination, all want agreement but may differ regarding its distributions of burdens and benefits, or who gives what, who gets what. In parliamentary coalitions, impure coordination problems tend to settle out as the proportionality principle as addressed in Chapter 1. This expectation may roughly apply to political community coalitions, too. In common pool resource allocations, where a good from nature such as fish or mountain forage is divisible, equalizing access is often the rule when it is needed to prevent overuse of the resource. But in collaboration games, no one can be excluded from a share in the collective good because it is indivisible, nonexcludable (if anyone can enjoy it, everyone can). Here too many tend to “free ride” (let George or Georgina do it) on the sacrifices made by others, unless a system of public sanctions is arranged to prevent that. External security is a collective good. It is not a private or selective good, which by definition is both divisible and excludable. This is to say, a collective good is like a public park, open to all, not like a private garden,

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closed to all but the owners and those invited into their homes. As the political community aims at this collective good, it typically solves this problem by arranging that all, by means of taxation in kind or money, are if necessary publicly coerced to contribute financially to the security burden. Also, sometimes at least the young men among them may be compelled to offer their military service (modern Israel requires military service even of its women). Because it usually begins with the collective good of security in interstate relations, the political community coalition is made by those who aspire to have it be a true “grand coalition,” embraced by all major groups within its boundaries. Game theoretic and rational choice theorists like to say, “equilibrium is defined as a situation from which no actor has an incentive to deviate” (Tsebelis 1990, 28). That may work with a small set of agents, but it can rarely work with a large aggregate, in which some mavericks almost always want to deviate from the status quo. Hence the grand coalition often fails to be created at all. Or if created, it is not easily maintained. As noted earlier, when failure occurs we can more readily see that it was after all an attempt at coalition, a pooling of resources better to attain some common purpose. But as also noted, it is not always as selfconscious as it is in other political coalitions: The original instrumentality can become veiled by assiduously cultivated affective loyalty, that part of “love of country” that is focused on the land with its people rather than its regime. Rousseau carefully distinguished those objects of affection as pays, peuple, and patrie. Although a few sovereign entities of our time could be regarded as “citystates,” ranging in size from tiny Nauru (population 10,000), Kiribati (about 82,000), Tonga (106,000), to Singapore (nearly 3.5 million), the most salient political community now is quite misleadingly called the “nation-state” (although some are near Singapore’s population but have more land, such as Norway, population 4.4 million, these range in population up to China’s 1.6 billion people). I note again in passing that the European Union may become the first of several potential “region-states.”

II: WHY NATIONS AND NOT CITY-STATES OR IMPERIAL STATES? Civilized peoples have not always lived in nation-states, and one may ask why alternative political community forms have waned. Before extended comment on the nation-state, one may hence ask why city-states or loose leagues of them have failed to become for most of us our principal membership unit. Or why have small, feudal principalities largely disappeared? Then we will also ask why empires have broken apart.

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The Waning of City-States and Principalities: Too Small? For obvious reasons, the relatively small, usually migratory bands or larger tribal units within which even our prehominid ancestors existed would not do for more sedentary, field agriculture societies, which arose about ten thousand years ago. But there are abundant records of emergent city-states, usually market towns sustained by trade in food and fiber derived from agriculture, if also supplying artisans’ wares such as tools and pottery. Sometimes a set of city-states would arise in close proximity, quite typically engaged in recurrent but limited warring with each other, often in local balance of power configurations. These systems and the city-states within them could be quite stable, unless threatened by a much larger, often imperial power from without. With sufficient forewarning, city-states could sometimes league against such a common threat, as when the Greeks allied to ward off attacks by the Persian Empire. Between such common threats, however, they often fell anew into military competitions with each other, as most notable in the Greek case in the Peloponnesian War, 431–404 B.C. The consequent enmities often prevented effective common organization against a new threat. The Greeks were defeated first by the Macedonian Empire (at Chaeronea in 338 B.C.) and later by the Roman Empire (over Macedonian-led forces at Pydna, 168 B.C.). When facing local balance of power systems that fail to shift in time to grand coalition, expanding empires have often found conquest easy. A somewhat similar balance of power system arose among late medieval and Renaissance north Italian cities. They could ward off assertions of power by the Hohenstauffen German empire to the north, but they eventually experienced defeats by invading powers, whether a national monarch such as France’s Charles VIII or a Habsburg emperor. Even the relatively sheltered city-state of Venice, originally based on islands and mud flats, was eventually defeated by Napoleon Bonaparte, who after his defeat of nearby Austria in 1797 forced dissolution of the Venetian aristocratic republican regime by a mere threat of invasion. Because outside threats to an array of city-states are often irregular, it is unlikely that a league will be negotiated in a timely way or, if negotiated, maintained. In any event, the negotiations and implementations would require high transaction costs, in the sense developed for economic analysis by Ronald Coase and extended by Oliver Williamson. Transaction costs in business life can be especially high if those in a negotiation do not have a standard product or are sometimes opportunistic (cheat, deceive). Yet transaction costs can be steeply reduced by a turn to familiar rules, including mere rules of thumb as well as normative rules. In the most extended development, one leaves the competitive marketplace and forms a firm that involves internalized, cooperative planning, with minimal haggling in get-

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ting things done (Coase 1937; Williamson 1985). One can see comparable advantages for smaller units to forgo the trouble of negotiating alliances or even leagues and instead consolidate into one state. Such a larger, more permanent entity can often defend itself without any or many allies. Extending the economic parallel, there are also production costs in attaining security. In his account of the history of Venice, William McNeill says little of the inability of city-states in north Italy to league together for common defense but emphasizes other reasons for their failure: Once nearby larger states contained major cities, they could manage the logistics of feeding very large armies, which city-states found difficult to resist. Further, bigger states had greater resources for buying ever bigger cannons, which could blow away city-state fortifications. The city-states themselves could not afford enough big cannons to fight off such besiegers (McNeill 1974; 1989; see also Bouwsma 1968). A special case of successfully leagued city-states arose among the Swiss, however. Notwithstanding linguistic and even religious differences that must have raised transaction costs, the Swiss were aided by mountain redoubts to which they could retreat when their halberdiers and archers failed them on the plains or in the valleys. As the legend goes, the Swiss say that three cantons met on a specific meadow to pledge their unity in the year 1291. Now believed to be a myth is that the Swiss yet swore their military officers to loyalty on that very meadow at the outset of World War II (Herb 1999, 19, 26 n.5). But even the Swiss eventually would confederate and finally federate (1848). They now form just another nation-state, if unusual in their traditional armed neutrality in international relations as well as in their plural executive. At least in the past, one could say that the city-state has been an undersized coalition, falling short of being minimally winning with respect to the regional strategic climate of interstate competitions. It has not been historically strong against expansive empires, and in modern history it has often been harried by expanding nation-states as well. But for the anomalous patches of San Marino and the Vatican, all of the Italian city-states have been incorporated in the nation-state of Italy. The many German-speaking principalities, with the exceptions of Luxemburg and Lichtenstein, have been swallowed up by the present nation-states of Austria and Germany. As noted, some city-state sized primary membership units persist today, but we usually now call them microstates. Some are accidental island states, usually emancipated late in the decolonization process (Comoros, Nauru, Seychelles, Nauru, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, etc.). Others are barely disguised buffer zones on the borders of nation-states often historically at war, such as Andorra between France and Spain (which now jointly control its international security). The Comoros have been the target of externally initiated coups, as when a band of European mercenaries toppled the government by coup in 1978; no other microstate of our time seems to face

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any imminent military threat. Further, global reduction of trade barriers should also help make such entities more economically viable than in the past. Singapore, that was virtually pushed out of the Malaysian Federation in 1965, is a good example of a classical city-state that has been economically viable, even if neither it nor any other microstate could defend itself from a nation-state’s attack. Modern microstates depend on good diplomacy for their continued security, and it does not always suffice. Thus India took over the Portuguese colony of Goa in 1961 (incorporating it 1962). It eventually took over the mountain monarchy Sikkim, which had been a protectorate of Britain until 1950. As the new protector, India made the territory just another Indian state after a 1975 referendum. Empire States: Too Large? Another possible membership unit is the empire state, a very large state or macrostate. Historically, it normally subsumed many distinctive regionally dwelling ethnic groups, not always then self-conscious of their local cultural similarity. Many great empires (in Western Europe, especially Rome) have survived for at least several centuries. Quite obviously many were able to minimize transaction costs in adding security merely by imposing their will on surrounding territories. Although that did entail some production costs, large empires, at least before any economic decline ensues (e.g., late Rome, late Ottoman Empire), enjoyed economies of scale enabling them to field large armies and buy the more costly weapons of the day. William McNeill speaks of a set of militarily similar “gunpowder empires” that arose about the 15th–17th centuries (the Ottomans, the Mughals, the Qing, the Tokugawas). As noted, city walls of merely local powers could not resist their seige guns (McNeill 1989). The center of the Eastern Roman Empire since the eighth century, even Constantinople had fallen to specially cast Ottoman guns by 1453. Yet all true land empires as well as sea empires have by now fallen apart, leaving only some vestiges, such as China’s control of Tibet (not wanted by the natives) or Britain’s control of Gibraltar or the Falklands (in each case wanted by the natives). Why have empires vanished from recent history? One reason is apparent, that the material gains of new conquest are at some point offset by the costs of winning and holding the added territory, even if sectors of ruling elites may yet find personal advantages in doing so. Even if not literally limited by some geographic obstacle, the expansion may find itself entering a wasteland that is difficult to control, such as a trackless steppe filled with fierce horse warriors. These may eventually imitatively acquire the more advanced technologies of war from the empire that had been in conflict with them. Or the frontier may involve some rugged mountains or wilderness filled with rebellious tribes or bandit raid-

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ers. In another direction the empire may have had easy expansion against a balance of power system of numerous small states, or perhaps against just a pair of balanced, larger states that had exhausted each other in warring (as when the Byzantines and the Sassanid Persians wore each other down to the point of little resistance to invading Arab Muslim armies in the seventh century). But if economic and population growth encourage “lateral pressure” against other states, often an expansion eventually comes up against another stable or even expansive empire, and then the fighting begins in earnest (Choucri and North 1974). Also, as Ivo Duchecek notes, empires found it difficult to find the optimum between excessive centralization (inefficient administration) and dangerous decentralization: “The history of all great empires is full of examples of crises precipitated by provincial lords who used their territorial power for the purpose of capturing the central imperial authority or of successfully seceding from it” (Duchacek 1986, 61). Summing up, especially at the margin of the empire, acquiring and holding another territory, often in the form of a semiautonomous tributary power, often incurred costs that exceeded any benefit to the empire as a whole. The empire stops its expansion, before its eventual recession and ultimate collapse. Yet thinking only of land empires, even domestically the costs can become high to maintain internal security. As a very rough generalization, the greater the extension of empire, the more it encompasses the ethnically different, those distinctive from both the imperial core ethnicity and each other in language, religion, and so on. Most empires have been led by a specific ethnonational core group, and no empire ever offered equal treatment to all of its other ethnonational groups. Perhaps the last three great land empires at least tended to regard some peoples adjacent to the heartland as full members of their political community. Yet other peoples may be kept at arms’ length: Thus largely Muslim Bosnia-Herzegovina was but a protectorate of the Austro-Hungarians from the 1878 Berlin Congress until annexed in 1908. With the belated exception of the French claim that Algeria was fully part of metropolitan France, the metropoles of overseas empires did not regard the culturally very different subject peoples as fully part of their national political communities. The French imperial policy of cultural assimilation seemed egalitarian, but it really assumed the superiority of French culture over any other. If most empires had a core, imperial people at the top of the heap, they implicitly arrayed other ethnicities in a stratified system, even if sometimes modifying that by enlistment of collaborating and hence privileged elites from the local population. These lines of inequality often eventually become the lines of fracture of a weakening empire, often ground down by external warring. As Gaetano Mosca notes, it can be very risky for a multinational empire to open central state offices to any other than the core ethnicity,

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especially when those partially admitted ethnics have strong historical identities (Mosca 1939, 105–6). Often such second-tier ethnicities that had enjoyed some offices may only then demand more. They may lead rebellion, as when many Greeks and at least the Hashemite monarchy Arabs rebelled against Ottoman Turk hegemony, or when the Czechs and Magyars concerted with the victorious powers of World War I in the dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Overseas empires faced similar problems once they encountered national awakenings. In any case, the old advantage of having a captive market (yet the avowed aim of fascist imperialisms entering World War II) recedes with moves toward global free trade, especially in the later 20th century. The financial burdens of external and internal wars often force needs for more tax revenues, straining the economic capacity of the system. This exacerbated the decline of many land and sea empires. Ultimately, both land and sea empires become regarded by most apart from special interests as oversized, more liability than asset by the measures of external security or economic prosperity. Empires internally reduced per capita benefits for the core population by the necessity to share some benefits with allies of dependent territories, many of which get into the position of demanding that they get more and give much less. Especially when both states outside the empire and now would-be states within the empire have been levying war against the metropole, it becomes exhausted and lets its empire go. The 20th century opened with major land empires (Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian), but these have collapsed to be displaced by nationstates. The short-lived conquests of Hitler (1938–45) took the same path. The Russian empire in its final incarnation as the Soviet Union spectacularly collapsed in 1991. Analysis of state formation must be attentive to disintegrations as well as integrations, since they interrelate (cf. Cusack and Stoll 1990; Cederman 1997). As earlier noted, some nation-state political communities grow by accretion, gestating much of the sense of national identity before rather than after the state that completes its unification. Others are in large part the consequences of some external imposition. Thus European great powers meeting in Berlin in 1878 drew up boundaries for the former Balkans domain of the receding Ottoman Empire. They met again in Berlin in 1884–85 to confirm European overseas imperial turfs in Africa, unknowingly setting many of the future state boundaries of Africa. Coalesced victors at the ends of World Wars I and II similarly made key decisions defining European state borders. In retrospect, many leaders of states near empires in the past knew that they would either have to become subordinate to an empire or try to become one. Even in World War I, it is roughly true that, although for a time allied with the land empire of Russia, the states with sea empires defeated

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two of the three great land empires, dissolving both. Indeed, as late as the 1930s such national leaders as Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo believed that as an instrument for competition in the international environment, both economic and military, it was important to hold an empire. Yet after 1945 this ceased to be the reigning frame of mind, and empires increasingly seemed to be oversized dinosaurs for the new kinds of international competition. Yet some coalitions remain larger than the political community coalitions of our present, nonimperial states. Some would remind us of more informal “world leadership” or “hegemonic” systems. Core coalitions were based on the leading commercial sea power of the time, a role successively played by Venice, Portugal, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and now the United States. A world leadership cycle may play out to its end at just over a century (Modelski 1987a; 1987b). One writer speaks of core, semiperiphery, and periphery layers of the global politicoeconomic order (Wallerstein 1979; 1984). Empires may be gone, but an informal global political and economic stratification may yet exist, sometimes expressed in military actions often now led by the United States to discipline disorderly “rogue states” (as in actions against Grenada, Panama, Libya, Iraq, Yugoslavia). The Nation-State: Just Right? Although one cannot be certain about the future scale of the so-called nation-state, it is clear that it has eclipsed both city-states and empire states. It would be foolish to think that the nation-state, now ascendant in the world, always will be so; perhaps it is likely to be displaced by regionstates. But if nation-states are now the leading form of political community in the interstate system, where did they come from? Prior discussion already noted that it was in part from mergers of antecedent microstates but even more from the dismantling of empires. We saw too that there emerged increased costs of having an undersized political community as well as severe costs in keeping an oversized community. Of the roughly 195 independent states existing today, 85.1 percent had territories once wholly or substantially contained within the six largest of the late modern empires, three of them primarily of land (Ottoman, AustroHungarian, Russian) and three primarily overseas or naval empires (French, Spanish, British). Let us first examine the land empires that survived into the 20th century. The Ottoman Empire, already long receding from its 17th-century peak, died with defeat in World War I. Ignoring its occupancy of two fringes of today’s Russia as well as the emergent Palestinian state, 29 current states were once wholly or largely under Ottoman control. Aside from Turkey and Egypt, the Asian portions of the empire did not follow the more com-

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mon West European pattern of a state roughly coincident with a nationality. The Austro-Hungarian Empire never had overseas empires but held the Holy Roman Emperor’s office to 1804 and a large land empire until its military collapse in World War I. This empire of 36 million population had only 8 million Austrians, half the number of its Slavs (e.g., Bohemians, Moravians, Slovakians, and Slovenians), and about the same number of its combined Hungarians and Romanians, beyond other small nationalities. Broadly, this multinational empire fell apart into its major national groupings. What had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire, inclusive of parts of northwest Italy and pieces of Romania and Poland, partly or wholly occupied 10 of our present states, overlapping some cases with the Ottoman Empire. Apart from forgoing Finland, the Baltic countries, and Poland, the Tsarist Russian empire survived the death of the Tsarist regime. It even expanded under Stalin’s Soviet Union with reincorporation of the Baltic states and other territories. It would collapse in 1991, its member republics yielding 15 states, including the 3 Baltic states. Aside from its ownership of Alaska until it was sold in 1867 (for $7,200,000), the Russian empire once held 18 of our present states. Chechnya seceded after a 1994–96 military rebellion but was in 1999–2001 forcibly reincorporated into Russia. The French overseas empire, which, like the British, actually added new territories as League of Nations mandates after World War I, had retreated in part with the loss of mainland Canada after the Seven Years War, but its main unraveling primarily occurred after World War II. In vain it pretended that Algeria was part of metropolitan France; after long warring it relinquished it in 1962. Leaving out some short-lived conquests of Napoleon, the French empire at some time occupied all or major parts of 32 of our contemporary sovereign states. One of the largest overseas empires belonged to Spain, which had been merged with Portugal in 1580–1640. Spain hurt itself commercially with expulsion of unconverted Jews in 1492 and Moors in 1609. Spain, and Portugal too during the period of union, became mired in too many wars, including a protracted failed effort to repress the seceded United Provinces. The Napoleonic wars led to the defeat of Spain and consequent loss of many New World territories. These first found unity in enmity toward Spain, shifting later to enmities among each other and toward the United States. But Spain retained major colonies in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines until defeated by the United States in the 1898–99 Spanish American War. If one includes some Caribbean territories of the early Spanish empire later held by France or Great Britain, if one adds in Portugal and its colonies during the merger, Spanish imperial authority once ruled much or all of 48 of our contemporary states.

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The third largest overseas empire, that of Great Britain, began its dissolution with the formal cession in 1783 of the independence of the United States. But the breakup of the empire became accelerated after World War II, culminating in its exit from the merely leased territory of Hong Kong in 1997. Inclusive of Great Britain and trust territories granted by the League of Nations and the United Nations, 61 current nation-states were once wholly or partially under British imperial authority (which is 31.3 percent of all independent states). If we discount for cases when two of these empires took turns ruling the territory of one of our contemporary states, we can sum up by saying that 166 of our 195 current states, or 85.1 percent of them, were once wholly or partly ruled by only three land empires and three more overseas empires. The disintegration of empires permitted most of the states we have today. The two processes of mergers of antecedent microstates and dismantling of empire can relate, as so obviously true of Africa, where colonial administrations had combined microstates (“tribal” entities) in the late 19th century, only to abandon control of those aggregations in the latter half of the 20th century. To understand the risks of secessionism and border warring to African states, especially in the sub-Saharan region, one need only superimpose same-sized overhead maps of its ethnic communities and its current state boundaries. If disintegrations of empires in large part explain the origins of nationstates, one must examine the various mechanisms of integration of smaller units, whether artificially imposed by an imperial power or developing independently. The concept of ethnicity comes from the Greek ethnos, which suggested common descent (Connor 1994, 72). I use the term quite broadly to encompass distinctions that largely arise from parentage, such as race, language, or religion. Although often referenced to a larger grouping of antecedent ethnicities, the concept of nation comes from the Latin natio (“birth”) and similarly suggests a shared ancestry. Nations, writes Walker Connor, “are the largest human grouping characterized by a myth of common ancestry. The historical accuracy of the myth is irrelevant” (Connor 1994, 80). Or again, “Our answer, then, to that often asked question, ‘What is a nation?’ is that it is a group of people who feel that they are ancestrally related. It is the largest group that can command a person’s loyalty because of felt kinship ties” (Connor 1994, 202). Like the words capitalism and socialism, the concept of nationalism is of newer vintage. It was first witnessed in the late 18th century and not extensively used until well into the 19th century. The ideal of nationalism was nicely stated by Ernest Gellner as the political principle holding that “the political and national unit should be congruent” (Gellner 1983, 1–2). Put otherwise, the residential boundary around the homeland of a nation should be the state boundary of the political community. Hans Kohn had

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earlier noted that the ideal has in the past two centuries elicited much passion, for nationalism becomes “a state of mind, permeating the large majority of a people and claiming to permeate all its members,” which “recognizes the nation-state as the ideal form of political organization and the nationality as the source of creative cultural energy and of economic well-being” (Kohn 1944, 16). Approaching that ideal often involves either a scaling up or a scaling down of the territorial extent. If all culturally distinctive peoples or ethnicities were to be loosely called “nations,” there are by Bernard Nietschmann’s estimate some five thousand to eight thousand of them in the world (Nietschmann 1994). Since we yet have fewer than 200 nation-states, it is obvious enough that most ethnicities have failed to think of themselves as nations, and not all of those who do so have gotten their nation-state. Tilly, writing just as the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czecho-slovakia, and Eritrea were to split up to create many more states, adds this thought: “If all the peoples on behalf of whom someone has recently made a claim to separate statehood were actually to acquire their own territories, the world would splinter from its present 160-odd recognized states to thousands of statelike entities, most of them tiny and economically unviable” (Tilly 1990, 3). It is self-evident from the preceding that existing independent states of the international system perforce hold a variety of ethnicities, although many of these may tend to disappear in long-term acculturation. A rough coincidence of nation and state boundaries is comparatively rare, with such approximations as Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Portugal, or Japan. Put otherwise, most so-called nation-states are by no means of one ethnic group that takes itself to be a nation. Ignoring a few microstates such as Nauru and West Samoa, and already viewing Vietnam, Germany, and Korea as if single states, Walker Connor looked at 132 states as of 1971. He concluded that only 12 (9.1 percent) states were essentially homogeneous from an ethnic standpoint, and only 25 (18.9 percent) were 90 percent or more of one ethnicity, but with an important minority. Another 25 states (18.9 percent) were 75–89 percent of one ethnicity. The largest ethnic group was only 50–74 percent of the population in 31 (23.5 percent) states, and less than half in 39 cases (29.5 percent of all states) (Connor 1994, 29–30, 96; see also Niellson 1985). As I have noted, one would expect a rough correlation between larger scale of a state’s territory and increasing ethnic diversity. True, some of the larger and older states will have successfully used assimilation to expunge some previously distinctive ethnicities. Thus M. G. Smith: “Evidently, size alone is no good guide to the relative homogeneity of state populations. Continental and minuscule units are equally likely to be plural societies; while those units of moderate size, the first crop of nation-states to emerge from feudalism in Western Europe and to carve out foreign empires, began by forcibly incorporating such weaker groups at home as the Basques, Bret-

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ons, Catalans, Welsh, Scots, Irish, Flemings, Frisians and the like” (Smith 1986, 188). As if in confirmation, Immanuel Wallerstein further emphasizes the artificiality of the formation of national group consciousness: “The history of nationalisms, which are one of the salient forms of such consciousness, shows that everywhere that nationalist movements emerge, they create consciousness, they revive (even partially invent) languages, they coin names and emphasize customary practices that come to distinguish their group from other groups. They do this in the name of what is claimed to have always been there, but frequently (if not usually) they must stretch the interpretation of the historical evidence in ways that disinterested observers would consider partisan. This is true not only of the so-called “new” nations of the twentieth century but of the “old” nations as well. (Wallerstein 1986, 149)

Sometimes the most ardent assimilators not only discourage new immigration of an ethnically different group but try to drive out some ethnonationals they deem beyond possible assimilation. The governments of Turkey and Greece in the 1920s agreed to deport to each other their Greek Orthodox and Muslim minorities. More recently, Croatia forced an exodus of its Krajina Serbs, and the Serbs of Bosnia tried to oust Muslims from their areas of residential concentration, and the Serbs of Serbia in 1998– 99 attempted to push Albanian Kosovars from Kosovo province until countered by North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) armed forces. Albanian Kosovars have bullied Serbians, too. Aside from rare cases of ethnically homogeneous nation-states, often a state is best viewed as a coalition among at least some of its ethnicities, who often continue to reside in distinctive residential concentrations within its boundaries. Quite obviously, ethnic similarity is not always necessary for a political community coalition. Michael Keating notes that some nationalisms are rooted less in ethnic uniformity than in a shared civic identity (Keating 1996, 1–22). Presumably these would include ethnically diverse states such as Switzerland or India, only the first of which seems solidly united. India currently counts up to five secessionist movements, the most serious of which is that of Islamic Kashmiris. At least sharing the similarity of having a government and a set of state boundaries in common, perhaps the coalitions that constitute nation-states only seem more “natural” than others. Often extensive propaganda campaigns are involved in nurturing a national identity. A rich web of communications and memories of them seems essential to forge a national identity (Deutsch 1966). They must forget or at least forgive whatever once divided them, remember when they faced travails or triumphs together, and never forget how they are set apart from the others. Often the view of common ancestry is in large part mythological. Thus some francophone

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Que´bec nationalists have little or no French ancestry, just as many anglophone Dominion nationalists are not of British ancestry. Smaller ethnic identities may require coalescence, often aided by shared myths and charismatic leaders, to have enough strength to break free of a multiethnic state that may attempt non-violent assimilation or coercive repression against them (cf. Cederman 1997, esp. 151–212). This need not necessarily require a complete merger. Often only engaged at an elite rather than a popular level, a number of ethnic groups may coalesce against a preexisting political community. They may support one another in secession, or even in bringing down the central regime entirely, as in the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Far from always being a spontaneous process, getting many of a group to see themselves as a distinctive “nation,” to think that where they live should define an autonomous or even sovereign political community, and to hold that this should be a supreme political loyalty for all within the group it may take some effort. Beyond that, they need to add on regime, program, and cabinet coalitions. Only this community’s consent could legitimate its constitution, and some kind of additional consents could authorize a specific set of political leaders, who, at least in the late modern world, are normally supposed to share the defining traits of the nation. Rupert Emerson defined the nation as “the largest community, which when the chips are down, effectively commands men’s loyalty, overriding the claims both of lesser communities within it and those which cut across it or potentially enfold it within a still greater society” (Emerson 1960, 95– 96). Whatever else he may mean, clearly the “chips are down” when people fear that their lives are in danger, especially when from other, threatening groups. One need not deny some shared values other than a fear of the same enemy. Thus Anthony Smith: “A nation can . . . be defined as a named human population sharing an historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass, public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties” (Smith 1991, 14). What causes a certain nationalism to emerge as a will, or both a will and a capacity, to form a political community, an independent state? Many theories purporting to account for nationalism are a consequence of normative concerns, being loaded for or against a specific group being able to call itself a “nation,” or else loaded with respect to any claim for it to have a “state.” Or some may more generally condemn all nationalism as an intolerant, aggressive atavism or else see it rather as a defensible means for a persecuted group to escape domination (contrast McNeill 1986; Walzer 1992; 1997; cf. also Prager 1998). I do not belabor such claims, since this book aims at predictive empirical theory, not normative judgments. As also true of many empirical claims, often normative statements that purport to be about nationalism in general really apply to distinctive manifestations of nationalism. Nationalism, in short, can be sometimes beau-

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tiful and sometimes ugly, but we may never quite agree when it is the one or the other. We often find ourselves in the presence of essentially contested judgments. Not writing this book to attempt their resolution, I for what it is worth sketch in Figure 2.1 some possible resolutions of contrasting normative judgments. After that I return to the primarily empirical theory objective of this book. Often contrasting empirical explanations of “nationalism” only seem to be contradictory. The older, primordialist view looked upon nationalism as a very old, very persistent, natural and necessary growth, and as something that to its new members was given rather than chosen. Often analysts of this view regard nationalism not as a means for those so identified but as an end in itself. In contrast, constructivists see nationalism as far more accidental, even artificial, or certainly contingent on choices. Often regarded as if a creation of elites, nationalism may be viewed as arising quite recently and perhaps destined ultimately to disappear. These analysts often overlook the prior existence of ethnic identities that often get turned to nationalism. Yet some among this group are more likely to recognize the instrumentality of national identifications in coalition politics. Thus Breuilly argues that actual appearances of nationalism cannot be consistently reduced to something else, such as a cultural identity or some hidden kind of economic interest: “Rather, an effective nationalism develops where it makes political sense for an opposition to the government to claim to represent the nation against the present state” (Breuilly 1982, 382). Perhaps one finds here the old problem of the blind examiners of the elephant, each describing it too broadly from the point where his own hands lie on the beast. Apparently rival outlooks can be complementary rather than competitive. One needs to have prior materials for construction, but the result is not predetermined, and one can reconstruct, too (Laitin 1998, esp. 14). Differing views, such as primordial or modern, noninstrumental or instrumental, and the like, also have uneven applicability across the diverse range of known cases. Ernest Gellner wisely refused either extreme, the primordialist or the constructivist view of nationalism. He accented the need for recognized similarity seen in relation to complementary goals: “Nationalism is a political principle which maintains that similarity of culture is the basic social bond” (Gellner 1997, 3). Agreeing that true nationalism began in fairly recent history, Gellner, however, held that it was a consequence of industrial modernity, which weakened the hold of identities previously focused on one’s rank. If so, nationalism accompanies what To¨nnies called Gesellschaft (“society”) rather than Gemeinschaft (“community”). The premodern identities were in terms of distinctive subcultures rather than a more overarching,

Figure 2.1 Evaluating Nationalism

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shared vernacular culture with a literature for common access by the literate. Industrial society encouraged more occupational mobility, which presupposed generalized literacy. It also implied a more anonymous, impersonal society, and this paved the way for a new identity focused on shared culture such as language and/or religion in a given territory. Put otherwise, premodern, agrarian societies emphasized inequalities and differences, not what was similar about people. In fact, a high or literate culture often had been the preserve of a small minority of the population, who sometimes used among themselves a language not understood by the common people. Economic modernization broke down such boundaries between classes (as well as between the narrowly defined folk cultures of mountain valleys, etc.). Yet the cost was building up boundaries between nations. Most students of nationalism find vernacular language the most common kind of ethnic identification undergirding nationalism. Yet there are thousands of distinctive languages and dialects in the world and yet fewer than 200 nation-states (some of which embrace less than the language group, and some of which have more than one major language). Gellner held that a linguistic group must be large enough to support a modern or high culture, if need be by the conversion of an agrarian, usually illiterate folk culture. Gellner held that nationalism has become a need of modern economic life, not so much of capitalism as of industrialization in general: To get efficiency and economic growth, one needed to break down the differences blocking mobility across jobs. Such mobility requires not only modern literate culture (workers must read manuals) but also a large enough group sharing a language in its narrower sense to be able to sustain a modern educational system. Nationalists, he thought, were fooling themselves if they believed that their nation really grew directly out of some folk culture. For although nationalists may claim to defend diverse folk cultures, they help transform them into modern or high cultures (Gellner 1983, 123–24). Gellner summarized: “Nationalism is about entry to, participation in, identification with, a literate high culture which is co-extensive with an entire political unit and its total population, and which must be of this kind if it is to be compatible with the kind of division of labor, the type or mode of production, on which this society is based” (Gellner 1983, 95). If only because communication is important in modern economic roles, it will continue to be important in political life. Nationalism, thinks Gellner, only becomes explosive when it coincides with some class discontent, that is, some sharp barrier to human mobility, as was true in the colonial world when natives were not permitted full equality with Europeans in competing for civil service posts: “As the tidal wave of modernization sweeps the world, it makes sure that almost everyone, at some time or

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other, has cause to feel unjustly treated, and that he can identify the culprits as being of another ‘nation.’ If he can also identify enough of the victims as being of the same ‘nation’ as himself, a nationalism is born. It succeeds, and not all of them can, a nation is born” (Gellner 1983, 112). Ronald Rogowski, who distinguishes varied forms of nationalism, similarly notes that one of the more radical forms, which may challenge rule by an existing power elite or else turn to separation, arises when members of the group believe that they have been unfairly debarred from upward mobility and that they already hold, or at least can buy, all needed skills to rule. Often in forming a new nation, professionals are eliminating competitors for the new jobs that they make for themselves (Rogowski 1974; 1985). I could see some of that in having taught in 1993 graduate level international relations to a first generation of Slovak Republic diplomats at Comenius University in Bratislava. As a rational choice theorist, Rogowski emphasized that it is not “industrialization” but a real person who has needs. If one views nationalist enthusiasm as a product of individual choices, different individuals could accept a national identity through distinctive motives. Thus sometimes one may find primarily economic motives, which can change over time. The Norwegian manufacturing and mercantile interests favored Norwegian–Swedish unity (a merger effected by force after the Napoleonic wars ended with Denmark’s relinquishing Norway). But that was when they were successfully penetrating Swedish home markets. Norwegian business switched allegiance to Norwegian nationalism when Swedish policy shifted to protectionism favoring Swedish business. Now sharing the more popular viewpoint, business interests helped Norway become independent in 1905 (Kaartvedt 1980). In other cases, more immediately political motives may dominate nationalist strivings. Or they can be primarily cultural concerns, as when an ethnic group begins to feel overwhelmed by high immigration of those of another language. Benedict Anderson notes that nations are too large and anonymous to be real communities and are only “imaginary communities.” Premodern imaginary communities were often religious rather than secular, including the this-worldly form of cobelievers sometimes linked to a sacred (and often dead) language read by a minute minority. To Anderson, what focuses a national identity in a larger group of bourgeois (business people, professionals, and administrators) is what he calls a shared “print-language.” This is the vernacular of newspapers more than books read by the literate members of the group that comes to think of itself as a nation. In Europe, these print-languages replaced older administrative languages such as Latin and embraced and subsumed more parochial vernacular dialects. Modern newspapers and books were among the earliest standardized commodities,

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requiring a market of sufficient size. In a few places such as Hungary and Poland, the minimal size of readerships required inclusion of lesser nobles and gentry as well as bourgeois. Outside Europe, matters are more complex. Brazil formed a clear printlanguage imaginary community coinciding with literate Portuguese speakers in the New World. But in Spanish America the linguistic domain was more extensive than what would become the New World Hispanic states as we know them today. Frustrating efforts of Bolı´var to create a larger state, the print communities largely formed about the colonial administrative districts. Creoles within or without the local administrative apparatus had to visit the same administrative center to do their business, and they read the same newspaper(s) published there. They communicated to each other shared anger that Spain forbade trade among its colonies not routed through the metropole. That anger was intensified by the exclusion of even higher-status colonials from top administrative posts not only back in Spain but even in the colonies (before 1813, only 4 of 170 viceroys were creoles). I add that Spanish America ends up with more countries than there had been colonial vice-royalty jurisdictions. Sometimes related to geographic features such as a separating range of mountains or river, some secondary administrative cities also nucleated nations. Similar grievances over commercial policy and access to administrative offices operated in colonial Africa or Asia, where nations again formed about print-language communities as defined earlier, focused around imperial administrative units. Some African states even took the metropole vernacular as their main shared print-language. The models of Europe and the Americas thus became guides for later nationalisms, although these had to be more populist to the extent that enlarged literacy had perforce created larger print-language communities. In Siam, notes Charles Keyes, even as missionaries were trying to sort out the many linguistic groups in order to write vernacular scriptures for them, those native Thais attempting to build the modern state of Thailand rather deemphasized such differences, urging that all learn Thai (Keyes 1995, esp. 141, 145) Not all states settled on one print-language. In Europe, Anderson acknowledged, the Swiss had earlier formed divisive identities about Protestantism and Catholicism. But although about three-fourths of the Swiss speak German, they had to concede parity to French and Italian as part of their post-Napoleonic status as neutral among the great powers. The state of Israel recognizes Hebrew and Arabic as official languages, allowing some consideration for the Arab sixth of the population. Canada recognizes two official languages, English and French. India backed away from having Hindi become the ultimate, sole official language of India. That was widely opposed, especially in the south, where Hindi had been little used. Although English joins Hindi as broadly shared languages, India by 1985 officially recognized 15 languages (including English). Yet India has no fewer than

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845 distinctive languages and dialects (Duchacek 1986, 24)! Drawing upon his deepest knowledge of early Hindu Bengali-speaking nationalists, Chatterjee has suggested that the nationalisms of Asia as well as parts of Africa differed from Europe’s in putting a greater focus on religious similarity as the bond distinguishing a nation from both the colonial power and other local peoples. Sometimes the religious emphasis and its focus on preserving family mores caused men to be reluctant to extend literacy to women (Chatterjee 1993). Often rivalries over language, or over culture in some larger sense such as religion, link to economic chances in life, not just questions of status. But one should not underestimate equality of respect, or recognition, as a motive of national identity. Liah Greenfield writes, “National identity is, fundamentally, a matter of dignity. It gives people reasons to be proud” (Greenfield 1992, 487–88). Certainly background factors in the failed unity of Czechs and Slovaks included loss of the interwar fear of both Germany and Hungary, the end to Cold War vulnerability, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In noting this, Michael Kraus again reminds us, “States come into being, at least in part, in response to external dangers that unify peoples across class and ethnic boundaries” (Kraus 2000, 200). Yet one cannot ignore symbolics. The first summer after the Czech and Slovak Republics were separated, near Prague I asked an intelligent woman from Brno why people such as she from the Czech lands were so secular and why the Slovaks were so Catholic. “They are so primitive,” she sniffed. Along with other distinctions such as a slight difference of Slovak language and a less economically advanced economy, such refusal of respect, I think, encouraged Slovak nationalists. Yet some wanting respect for themselves may not accord it to other peoples, as when some Slovaks showed disrespect for their ethnonational minorities, the Romany (Gypsies) and the Magyars (Hungarians). Kenneth Hoover has bleakly noted, “Governments may not be able to make people love one another—indeed, they have often been rather better at helping people hate one another” (Hoover 1997, 52). Even when not mindful of it, Anne Norton writes, a people tends to define itself by its enemies. The irony is that they could divide even themselves if they treated all of the “different” as enemy (Norton 1988, 55–57). Within her interesting essay on “limininal” or frontier peoples, such as the frontier cowboys to other Americans or the bedouin in the Ottoman Empire, Norton shows that when it seems possible that they could secede, one rhetoric may be present: “Efforts to rhetorically establish the nationality of the frontiersmen, and their liminal status—that is, their significance as the line defining the state—prompt those nearest the center to portray the frontiersman as the national par excellence.” Yet once the frontier zone is fully controlled by the center, the rhetoric may shift toward the view of the liminals as “anti-national” (Norton 1988, 61, 63).

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As earlier noted, one may distinguish between the ethnic view of the nation and the civic one. The ethnic view traces to Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), and it influenced some of the theories of nationalism addressed earlier. The civic view arises from Ernest Renan (1823–92), emphasizing individual commitments in view of sharing a certain sort of state. In the first view the nation precedes the state, and in the second, the state precedes the nation. Germans distinguish between Kulturnation and Staatnation, or culture-nation and state-nation (Seymour, Couture, and Nielsen 1998, esp. 2–3, 23). Perhaps thinking of many former colonies of empires, John Armstrong asserted that “modern nations are more frequently the creations of states than the opposite” (Armstrong 1982, 129). Looking at nationalisms that have through either pattern found their states, some cases may better fit the cultural model (e.g., the Slovak Republic, Eritrea), others, the civic model (Switzerland, many states in Africa). Yet some cases such as the United States could be viewed as mixes of both. Arguably a mixed cultural–political–economic variable, nationalism in the past two centuries contributed to the aggregation of some political communities such as Germany and Italy and the disaggregation of others, such as the multinational Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian Empires (cf. Kaiser 1990, 308). Other local nationalisms may impede the effort to define and form a larger, shared identity to fit the expanding boundaries of the European Union or another possible region state. Only sometimes does a state almost nicely fit a nation, as in Sweden, which omits only a handful of Swedish speakers living on some Finnish islands. Most states contain all or parts of a number of ethnonational identities (or “tribes” when Europeans speak condescendingly of Africans or Asians in remote areas). At least one of these ethnonational groups (usually a minority) may wish more autonomy or even secession, although often more of the group may favor the former than the latter. Autonomy or even secession is perhaps supported by some outside state whose leaders may genuinely care for the minority because they are conationals. This is called irredentism, which in the original Italian means “the unredeemed ones,” referring to Italian speakers left outside the 1870 boundaries of national unification. In possibly irredentist mode, some Hungarian leaders talk of the Magyar minority within Slovakia as if a “smaller nation,” recommending more “autonomy” for them. Slovak political leaders felt threatened when some legislators within Hungary suggested that Slovakian Magyars should have the right to vote in Hungarian elections. In other cases an outside state may merely encourage a minority nationality in part to break up an enemy state’s coalition, as when India militarily helped the 1971 independence of Bangladesh from Pakistan. A stateless nation may have minority status in several states, as true of the now some 20 million Kurds in Iran, Iraq, and Turkey (cf. Duchacek 1971, 68–95). Both Iraq and Iran have sometimes incited rebellion of the other state’s

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Kurds, while repressing their own (MacDowell 1992). The Sikhs also sprawl across the frontiers of Pakistan and India (cf. Tatla 1999). I use France as a comparison standard throughout this book to illustrate each of the four main levels of nested political coalitions (again, political community, regime, program, leadership). France scaled up to become the modern nation-state of France, fashioned about the print-language originating in the vicinity of Paris, which, through the Capetians, furnished the unifying dynasty for France. After growing into its political community by what I have called traditional accretion, France shows substantial continuity in its political community since its late-medieval unification, as so nicely described by Norbert Elias (Elias 1994). Although France was unified in rule as well as courtly manners (whence the word courtesy) earlier, national consciousness reached most regions, at least in the more urban areas, with the French Revolution. But Eugen Weber claims that French national identity did not reach some of the more remote country villagers until the later 19th century (Weber 1976). Since then, aside from the special case of Vichy France in 1940–43, France has retained but one political community, even with some alterations of its margins, as in the de´ja vu loss and recovery of Alsace-Lorraine (1870–71, 1940; again in 1918, 1944–45). If there has been autonomist sentiment among Bretons, Occitans, Corsicans, and other local ethnicities, most of the French now want to remain with France, merci. III: LEAVING POLITICAL COMMUNITY COALITION? COUNTERING THE CAUSES OF EXIT TO MAINTAIN A POLITICAL COMMUNITY Most political communities that have vanished from history did so because conquered from without (although some of these, such as Poland, have revived after withdrawal of the foreign armies). But many also have failed as a result of division within. Recall that the political community coalition by definition includes not all persons who live within the political community but only those who support the continuation of the primary membership unit as well as their own belonging to it. Further, they would favor action to prevent its conquest from without, its submergence within some other political community, its dissolution, or its being split by a secession. Some states lack an active incorporatist or secessionist movement. Since surmounting the secession of the South in the Civil War, the United States lacks significant secessionism, notwithstanding very weak black separatist movements in the 1920s and again in the 1960s or the even weaker white racist separatists of 1980s focused on the Pacific Northwest. Such an integrated political community may find almost everyone in what could be regarded a special kind of grand coalition, the presence of which is not

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normally noticed. Such a political community grand coalition may surface at the level of political program or cabinet formation chiefly when the political community has been threatened by some crisis, such as an attack by a foreign enemy. Such were European wartime grand coalition (or national unity) governments against fascism, which, though briefly also used for postwar economic reconstruction, soon fell apart. After all, grand coalition is usually a strange bedfellow coalition, including partners who lack ideological “connection” or adjacency in Left–Right ideological space (Axelrod 1970). When it becomes not a question of merely being against something but of being for a certain line of policy, strange bedfellows typically part ways, looking for more compatible bedfellows. However one may describe De Gaulle’s Free France organization in its rivalry with Vichy, with liberation in 1944 virtually all French were in grand coalition into 1946, recovering from wartime defeat and striving to reconstitute a parliamentary regime. But once a crisis has been left behind, a government expression of a political community grand coalition normally returns to latency, a potential awaiting any new threat to national security. When there is no true grand coalition, some politically disgruntled indigenes may want out of the political community. As apparent from prior discussion of rejectionists, disloyals from the nation-state political community may choose among three variant options: (1) subordination, (2) emigration, and (3) secession. I discuss each in that order. As for the subordination option, the political community coalition excludes those who would like the state subordinated to, or even wholly absorbed by, some more inclusive unit, without retaining local autonomy. Austrian Nazis favoring the 1938 Anschluss or annexation into Germany illustrate one case. But often this disloyalty to the political community involves some dispersed ethnic minority, such as diehard Russians in Estonia or Latvia nostalgic for the vanished Soviet Union. Many newer nationstates are especially likely to compass such kinds of defectors from the political community coalition: Himself an ardent nationalist, the late Croatian president Franjo Tudjman held that even after his expulsion of the Krajina Serbs, 15–20 percent of the compassed population yet opposed his Croatian state (New York Times International, June 28, 1999, A-9) Emigration involves the exit of persons who take no territory along with them. As earlier noted, most international migration is economically rather than politically motivated, a move from an area of lower economic opportunity to a place of greater opportunity. Even when politically motivated, migrations can occur at a wholly individual level, as when a person chooses expatriation. This has become a serious question of choice for the some 25 million Great Russians not included in the boundaries of Russia, or the 27 million non–Great Russians finding themselves outside their homelands. If too many relocated to their “homelands,” it could be an economically disastrous event. Many Great Russians outside Russia are combining with

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non–Great Russians (e.g., Ukrainians outside Ukraine as well as Russia) who use Russian as their main language to forge a new identity of “Russians in the near abroad” to defend their shared interests, such as in having local Russian-language publications and education for their children (cf. Laitin 1998). Or emigrations may be collective, as when a whole ethnic group flees from a state. If such mass exits can be voluntary, they may sometimes be the result of fear or force, as in recent “ethnic cleansings” in Yugoslavian provinces. Only rarely do state leaders encourage exit of a group along with relevant territory, as when Singapore was virtually ejected from the Malay Federation, as a result of the political rivalry of the Malay leader Tunku Rahman with Singapore’s ethnically Chinese leader, Lee Kuan Yew (Connor 1994, 9). Although the Malays did not imitate the Burmese or Ugandans in deportation of their overseas Indian competitors who did better than their own ethnicity, they did effectively oust the predominantly Chinese and Indian Singapore population, leaving Malays plurality dominant in what remained. Secession differs in that a a whole group wanting to flee a political community takes their residential territory out with them. It often involves an ethnic minority that is compactly settled and adjacent to a border, such as Corsican nationalists in France or Que´bec separatists in Canada. Adopting the “realms” that both classical liberalism and Marxism recognize in the analysis of society, namely, the cultural, political, and economic, one may ask how each may contribute, often with complementarity, to a separatist movement. Although there are instances of secessionist movements that do not involve a cultural difference, most of those concerning the primary political community do so. A separatist movement, as earlier noted, supposes that the culturally different are compactly located rather than dispersed across the territory of an existing state. Also, with rare exceptions such as the present enclave of Armenian rebels within the territory of Azerbaijan (Nagorno-Karabakh has been in rebellion since 1988), this cultural area normally must be contiguous. Often it is not just one but several cultural differences that are mutually reinforcing and can be expressed as one rough boundary that could be drawn on a map. Thus a very modest linguistic difference, a larger difference in economic policy, and a major difference in religion marked what became the new boundary between the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic. Although cultural identities matter, there are many problems in cultural explanations as conceded even by their defenders (especially Eckstein 1992). Perhaps the biggest problem is that cultures may change so slowly that they are virtually constant, and constants cannot of themselves explain variation. To explain variation one must rather look at economic and political discontents. Recall the expected payoff or proportionality concept of William Gamson, addressed in Chapter 1. In the political community case,

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there are certain collective goods such as security and market access available to all groups. But when these are not endangered, agents may increasingly think more of divisible and excludable goods such as public offices or economic policy outputs, aware of differential allocation outcomes among ethnicities. They tend to defect from a coalition when there is no expectation of proportionality between what they give to it and what they get from it. “Fairness” may be an essentially contestable concept, since there are too many possible criteria that can often conflict. But if not always reasonably reduced to mere relative numbers of population categories, a sensed absence of fairness is alienating. Separatist ideas arise among those who expect to be disadvantaged by continued membership in the coalition. They may have come to see more threat in the current political community’s capital city than they do from any other country in their vicinity. Thus in 1947 the Muslims who formed East Pakistan on security concerns feared the Hindus of New Delhi most, and hence identified as Pakistanis. But by 1971 most of them rather felt more economically threatened by Karachi, hence identified as Bengalis, if Islamic ones, ready to leave Pakistan and constitute Bangladesh. Let us define politically advantaged as at minimum having more power than one has numbers within the political community, or at the maximal sense, of being literally dominant in the political system (able both to veto change adverse to one’s group and to carry one’s major preferences). Being politically disadvantaged could be defined as not having a veto to protect one’s group against change (unable to build a blocking coalition), and not having a share of public offices at the political community level proportionate to one’s numbers. One notes in passing that a very small ethnic minority is unlikely to expect a share of central government power proportionate to their numbers. Also, a fairly large ethnic minority, even if considerably short of half, may define parity as absolute equality with a second, majority ethnic minority (surely the view of many among the nearly 40 percent Catholic minority of Northern Ireland). Being economically advantaged could be more simply if crudely defined as having a group per capita income above the average, and disadvantaged as having a group per capita income below the average. In mapping of this pair of dichotomies they cross each other, creating the familiar two-by-two table, which I will not bother to supply. But it is instructive to look for secessionism in each of the four “cells” of (1) both politically and economically advantaged, (2) politically advantaged but economically disadvantaged, (3) politically disadvantaged but economically advantaged, and (4) both politically and economically disadvantaged. Consider Case (1) of an ethnic group that is at once politically advantaged and economically advantaged. Aside from a few alienated individuals, rejectionists do not normally spring from this cell. There is the anomalous case of Russia’s joining the secession from the Soviet Union in

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1991. Even then, its “secession” was largely due to Boris Yeltsin’s game as popularly elected president of Russia to undermine his rival, Mikhail Gorbachev, the indirectly elected president of the Soviet Union. Popular majorities within the Soviet Union as a whole (and, one guesses, especially so within Russia proper) did not favor dissolution of the Soviet Union. Like members of the Congress of People’s Deputies, they merely wanted the Soviet Union to become a more decentralized federation or even confederation. Gorbachev has since complained that Yeltsin played a double game, pretending in Moscow to collaborate on a new regime for the Soviet Union while at Minsk really aiming to destroy that political community: “The Russian President and his entourage thus sacrificed the Union for the sake of realizing their ardent desire to reign in the Kremlin” (Gorbachev 1995, 591–93, 650–51, 658). Next consider Case (2) of an ethnic group that is politically advantaged but economically disadvantaged. This, too, may yield a sparse set. A plausible case involves the Malays under the Federation of Malaysia. With Singapore in, 1963–65, the Malays risked defeat by a coalition of the Chinese with other, non-Malay ethnic groups. But with Singapore out after 1965, by force of their somewhat larger number, they could dominate the political system of the federation, which left the Malays 38.3 percent of the population and the Chinese only 35.9 percent (the rest consisted of Indians and other smaller ethnicities). Malays had been economically behind the Chinese and Indian components of the population. Along with some gains from political corruption, quota preferences thereafter helped the Malays catch up. In another Case (2) example, one could argue that Ukraine was, along with Russia, politically advantaged within the Soviet Union, having all– Soviet Union leadership posts nearly proportional to the presence of the Ukrainian population within the Soviet Union. However, the Ukrainians did not wield a veto over Soviet Union policy. They could not even block the military-KGB arrest of Gorbachev on their territory in the abortive 1991 coup. Also, economically the Ukrainians before 1991 were not far from the all–Soviet Union average, yet they had a considerably lower per capita income than the Great Russians. Malaysia and Ukraine aside, I do not know of other cases of a politically advantaged but economically disadvantaged ethnicity who turned to separatism. In Case (3) are ethnicities that are politically disadvantaged but economically advantaged. More peoples in this set do pursue separation. Any economic advantage does not placate a minority who believed that they could give less and/or get more with independence, or at least with high local autonomy. Consider some cases from the last half of the 20th century: Successful secessionists in 1991 alone include the Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians from the Soviet Union, as well as the relatively prospering Slovenians and Croatians as the first two ethnicities to exit from Yugosla-

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via. In 1993 Eritrea successfully left Ethiopia. Other cases, however, found would-be separatists unable to attain independence. Whereas the attempted secession of the Katanga from the Congo had a dubious mass base, one thinks of the relatively advanced Ibo-Ibibio peoples of Nigeria who tried secession in 1967. One also notes the long presence of unsuccessful separatist or autonomist striving among the now rather prosperous Basques and Catalans. Yet Basque industrialists oppose Basque separatism. Having looked at three of four cases, we have yet found rather few separatist movements. Most of such efforts arise from Case (4), politically disadvantaged and economically disadvantaged. This double burden could include a prospect of a presently lagging area’s becoming more economically advantaged, as when Scottish nationalists such as the actor Sean Connery surely eye the presently British North Sea oil wells. For several decades, there has been a separatist striving in Indonesia’s Aceh province at the northern tip of Sumatra. One wonders whether a vision of a bigger cut of oil revenues originating there may rival the ostensible motive of strict implementation of the Islamic law. Case (4) fits the successful postwar secessions of the Bengalis from Pakistan; of the Bosnians and Macedonians from Yugoslavia; of the Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Turkmens, Kyrgiz, and Tajiks from the former Soviet Union; of the Slovakians from Czecho-slovakia; of the East Pakistani Bengalis from Pakistan; and of the Timorese from Indonesia. The doubly disadvantaged Turks of Cyprus, by the aid of Turkish armed intervention in 1974, have claimed independence, but the future could involve some reunification with the Greek Cypriots, since they already cooperate on tourism and the like (Theophylactou 1995; Rotberg 1998). Case (4) also fits other separatist leanings that have not attained independence: the francophones of Que´bec; the Northern Ireland Catholics; the Welsh (Plaid Cymru) and the Scots of Great Britain; the Flemish of Belgium; the Bretons, Corsicans, and Occitans of France; the Nilotic peoples of the South Sudan; the Kurds of Turkey, Iraq, and Iran; the Baluchis of Pakistan; the Nagas of India; the Vale of Kashmir Muslims of India; the Tamils of Sri Lanka; the Tibetans of China; and the Moros (Muslims) of the Philippines. The main conclusion is this: A chief wellspring of separatism is the combination of being both politically disadvantaged and economically disadvantaged. But successful secession may only be feasible if the ethnic minority is territorially compact and normally at the border of the state it would leave. If military means are necessary, and the rejected political community has not been recently weakened by defeat in war, it may often help to have another state, sometimes irredentist, support the secessionists with money, supplies, or troops. The chief policy options of maintaining a political community coalition

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include (1) economic fairness, (2) cultural change, (3) constitutional change, or (4) main force. For each we can say that it is sometimes productive but sometimes unproductive or even counterproductive. Lacking knowledge as to why, we cannot yet predict that. From what we have just said, it follows that one means of preventing separatism is at least approximate economic “fair play” for all ethnicities, even if perfect “justice” may be beyond our capacity to know, let alone achieve. Recall again the proportionality principle in program coalitions: Political actors expect that relative givings will be proportionally reflected in the gettings, or, if there are but two groups, if their contributions are anywhere close to being equal, they may demand exactly equal gettings. Such expectations apparently apply in political community as well as regime coalitions. Some assume that having the same rule for all, everyone able to compete by it, is the true secret of social harmony and satisfaction for all ethnic groups, since it may be easier to agree on a procedure than on results. But those who talk that way have usually been rewarded more than, rather than less than, proportionally. Those who have been among the losers know that often an apparently equal rule or set of rules (procedure) may not really be equal in either the process or the produced outcomes. Sometimes even a relatively numerous ethnicity is below proportionality in its economic rewards, as I noted of the Malays in Malaysia. In any event, empirical evidence does not show that efforts at closing an income gap (e.g., the now seceded Slovakians, or the Flemish in Belgium) or even crossovers necessarily dampen a separatist movement. Although it is arguable that the Slovakians had been making more political than economic gains before their secession, a relative gain by the once lagging group does not always placate (Connor 1994, 47, 145–161). Regarding cultural options, those who would prevent a secession may make more protective concessions to the cultural minority, such as Canada has for its francophone minority. Taking the opposite path, they could attempt cultural assimilation. Acknowledging that some cultural assimilations of the past two centuries have proved incomplete (one thinks of France, for example), some believe that modern transportation, communications, and mobility will make it easier. Walker Connor notes that it may have become more difficult with “the advent of the age of nationalism and the propagation of the principle of self-determination of nations.” He adds: “The movement prior to the nineteenth century appears to have been toward assimilation into a number of larger nations, but since that time the movement appears to be toward the freezing of existing ethnic groups” (Connor 1994, 54). Although having conceded that some voluntary assimilation occurs when people migrate to a place where their culture is in the minority, Connor observes that sometimes forced assimilation policies backfire; he concludes, “Assimilation is apparently most apt to be achieved

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as an accidental by-product, not by design” (Connor 1994, 139). Planned assimilation was weakly attempted by the Japanese in their 1895–1945 occupation of Formosa (now Taiwan). More recently, the Turkish government has refused to its some 10 million Kurds cultural rights such as Kurdish language higher education or publications. After Turkey announced interest in joining the European Union, that organization warned in 1999 that acceptance would be unlikely if such intolerance continued. Although some repressions of a distinctive ethnicity have historically succeeded, like any other means of dealing with a separatist minority, this tactic can be counterproductive. Overly aggressive attacks on minority cultures can sometimes intensify the identities they seek to quash. Regarding constitutional change as an option, often would-be secesssionists can be placated with the lesser gift of more local autonomy, often the only aim of many. Thus in 1996 the Philippines apparently saved their political community by granting considerable autonomy to a four-province region heavily populated by Muslims, who had long been in armed rebellion. Indeed, a former rebel leader became the Muslim governor of the region. Yet a renegade group of diehards did not sign on, and they kidnapped tourists for ransoms in 2000. Another obvious risk of devolution of power is that more home rule can sometimes prove to be but a way station toward eventual independence. Some, anticipating that, turn to the opposite tactic of ending any autonomy previously granted. Ethnically Serbian, the former Yugoslav premier Slobodan Milosˆovic´ in 1989 revoked local autonomy of the Kosovo region of Serbia, fearing that the some 90 percent ethnic Albanian Kosovar population would exploit autonomy as a step toward independence and a possible merger with Albania. The irony is that his heavy hand in Kosovo by 1999 rather encouraged virtual secession, eventually aided by NATO forces opposing any “ethnic cleansing.” One can imagine success in encouraging trust by removing military repression as the way to prevent malcontents from seceding, as recently attempted by Colombia. But the last recourse against secession has usually been main force. Because they attempt to take territory as well as population from the previous political community, secessionists are often opposed with violence, at the risk of ruining the local economy and intensifying separatist sentiment. As Connor notes, notwithstanding leaders’ claimed commitment to the principle of self-determination of nations, it is not meant to apply from within their own states: “The methods by which governments have combated national movements have, in the main, been coercive” (Connor 1994, 23). Since 1850, unsuccessful secessionist cases have included the Confederate States of America (1861–65), the Katangese from the Congo (1960), Iboland (“Biafra”) from Nigeria (1967– 70), and the like. Successful secessions involving major violence have included Ireland (1921), Bangladesh (1971), and Eritrea (1993).

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But the Czechs and Slovaks, at least at the elite levels, mutually chose to abandon Czecho-slovakia (January 1, 1993). As noted in my Preface, the principal Czech leader, Vaclav Klaus, was if anything more eager to dissolve Czecho-slovakia than the Slovak leader, Vladimir Meciar, since Klaus wanted rapid marketization of the economy (Goldman 1999, 40). For their part, the Slovaks were disgruntled by the high inflation that followed an end to Communist era price controls. Averaged incomes had become nearly equal in the two sectors through the artifice of policy, which in the past had favored Slovak catch-up growth, largely through military manufacturing for the Warsaw Pact. But loss of those Warsaw Pact customers with the 1991 end of the Cold War meant that the Slovaks incurred an unemployment rate that was far above that of the Czech lands (in 1992, 10.3 percent compared to 2.6 percent), and they feared that Klaus’s policies could make that worse. The Czech economy has since slowed, while the Slovak economy is doing much better. The abortive 1991 KGB-military coup effort sought to prevent a more decentralized Soviet constitution, but it tipped events to complete dissolution of the Soviet Union. All 15 republics of the Soviet Union then seceded without any official violent attempt to retain them, in contrast to policy regarding the Russian province of Chechnya. Four of the six republics of Yugoslavia (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia) have seceded, with some violence in each case, if lagged in Macedonia. As I write, the rump state of Yugoslavia yet includes Serbia and Montenegro, but elected leaders of Montenegro seem inclined toward separation. Despite failure in Kosovo and elsewhere, the Serbs in 2000 turned to severe measures, hoping to head off the last good-bye, but the successor government of Kostunica in 2001 was reconciliatory. Active secessionists have in effect formed a coalition against the political community coalition, and it was even formally evident in the formation of the Confederate States of America near the outset of the American Civil War. Even when secessionists share a nationalism, Breuilly is correct in saying, “not all the members of the ‘nation’ take the same view of the matter; nationalism is usually a minority movement pursued against the indifference and frequently, hostility of the majority of the members of the ‘nation’ in whose name the nationalists act” (Breuilly 1982, 19). A successful secession often assumes some degree of unity among those in the territory involved but also the lack of a united will in the rest of the state to repress their effort. But often ethnonationals who had enjoyed majority status in the previous political community may dread becoming minorities in a seceded region. Que´bec lacks a united will to get out, with just under half so far voting for it in a referendum during the Trudeau administration (although results vary by question wordings, recent polls show a decline to about 40 percent support). But the rest of Canada would not unite behind any coercive effort

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to block exit by even a slender majority rule victory by Que´bec nationalists. Insisting upon negotiation of the terms of any exit, Canada’s Supreme Court has also ruled that repression cannot happen if Que´bec ever votes to leave Canada. The only plausible violence could concern native peoples of Que´bec seceding in their turn from northern Que´bec. Whereas new coalition creation can occur in parallel with old coalition destruction, breakdowns of political community coalitions usually involve transformations of more cooperative games into more conflictual ones. This can occur by change in the situation, change in the psychology of actors, or both. At the other levels of coalition as addressed later, many suggest that coalition breakdowns are comparable to Prisoner’s Dilemma’s falling into suboptimal mutual defections. In the real world, there are usually communications among partners but so much distrust that it can be worse than no talk at all. Listen to Gorbachev in 1991, speaking of his discovery that Yeltsin pretended to keep alive their joint project of reshaping Soviet federalism while really working to kill the U.S.S.R.: “Until recently I was not quite sure whether Yeltsin was playing a double game during all these months. I simply could not believe him to be capable of such perfidy” (Gorbachev 1995, 658). Political community coalition breakdown looks like defection in Prisoner’s Dilemma only if both sides retain some vision of advantages of continued political community, not present in the aforementioned case, apart from the anemic Commonwealth of Independent States that replaced the Soviet Union. Political communities are on average the most long-lived of the four kinds of political coalitions addressed in this book. Indeed, a few have had very long lives: Sparta claimed some eight hundred years (dying definitively in the aftermath of the Macedonian victory of Chaeronea, 338 B.C.) and Venice, over one thousand years (by mere threat of invasion in 1797, Napoleon extinguished the regime and then the political community). Other political communities have enjoyed recognizable continuity for at least hundreds of years. Officially favored historians may exaggerate the early formation, and they may say little of interruptions in periods of dissolution and reformation. Thus although the Chinese like to say that China was first unified in 221 B.C., they may say little of later periods of warlordism before reunification (see Cusack and Stoll 1990, 16). Political communities are more likely to be overthrown from without than from within, by war initiated outside rather than conflict arising within. But often internal conflict makes a political community more vulnerable to attack and even defeat from without. The division within may involve some class or other stratal conflict, at a brutal level in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, where during the 1975–79 Khmer Rouge rule, some 1.17 million Cambodians may have died by execution, starvation, or disease. But domestic class conflict is more likely to terminate a regime than the political

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community. The political community is more threatened by territorially expressed animosities, especially that assuming the form of secessionist effort. But except when a state is weakened from abroad by war, or from within by severe economic troubles, secessions are often unsuccessful, in part because they are often repressed, even by democracies. One reason why secessionists are often repressed is that if a state becomes too small, it may not survive in its strategic context. Unlike the other three kinds of coalition, normally the exit of a coalition “partner” cannot readily be made good by the accession of another partner of equal or greater resources. If there are no threatening neighbors, this motive in blocking secession may subside. But another reason for opposing a secession may be that other members of the political community anticipate economic losses. Thus permanent exit of the U.S. South would have deprived northern manufacturers and their workers of a market area. The exit of Katanga would have deprived the Congo of copper mines, or Biafran exit would have meant losses of Nigerian oil fields. Although placated with more home rule, as in the 1999 reopening of a Scottish parliament, Scottish nationalists surely want the North Sea oil fields. If those opposed to a secession have the will to prevent it, they often have the means, since they are often the majority of the political community. But although the non-Que´bec Canadians strongly outnumber those of Que´bec, they are themselves divided in that many (especially anglophone conservatives) are not willing to make the Meech Lake kinds of concessions that could be necessary to prevent Que´bec from leaving. Canada could remain viable as a military and economic player even with the absence of Que´bec. Both would presumably remain in the North American Free Trade area. Thus although all rational agents would tend to defect in a last round of Prisoner’s Dilemma with respect to the regime coalition, this may not apply to the political community coalition, since the remnant could remain viable in terms of international security and economic needs. To return to the principles of coalition theory, it is clear that the political community coalition is not always like a parliamentary program coalition. For one thing, in “connectedness and closure,” it gathers not those who are in the same ideological space but who are similar either by ethnic or by civic identity. If the coalition aims to be “winning” it is chiefly in terms of military defensibility of claimed territory. It does not normally aim to make territorial inclusions either “minimal” or “minimum” in any meaningful sense, but only perhaps optimal, neither too large (at present, the empires) or too small (at present, the city-state, if in a hostile locus). Either extreme could cause marginal “costs” to overrun any “benefits.” Usually a smaller rather than a larger territory would best preserve a linguistic group. But “optimal” size for national security may vary under changed conditions, and that optimum may not be the same for economic advantage, which could often be larger, if less so as the

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World Trade Organization lowers more trade barriers. One could say much the same for any meaningful optimality of the political community’s shape, or just how the boundaries get drawn. In any case such optima would change not only by situation but also by the reference set of people, such as for the aggregate membership of the political community or rather some subset of that membership. I would hold suspect any effort to look for an optimum of the various optima, since there may be no real commensurability, but only some forced one such as converting everything into either money terms or reports of subjective happiness. Regarding the other principles of coalition theory, perhaps politicians in more robust political communities do aim at “proportionality” of contributions and benefits to keep the coalition partners together. Also taking “median” positions on contested political community issues could prevent unduly offending any large segment, provided that various medians are not far apart. Severe blunders in security, economic, or even cultural policies could blow a country apart. Breuilly, who argues that nationalisms are usually political instruments that rise only within specific political conditions, has written, “Very broadly, a nationalist opposition can stand in one of three relationships to the existing state. It can seek to break away from it, to take it over and reform it, or to unite it with other states. I call these objectives separation, reform and unification” (Breuilly 1982, 11). I have addressed separation and unification, and the last use of a nationalist spirit to bring about reform points us toward regime and program coalitions, topics of the next two chapters. Is the concept of political community misleading, often with little traction beyond cases of shared enmity(ies) toward foreign states? As we turn to other coalitions with typically narrower bases, at least we can see that some of those who had been “friend” for purposes of political community identity become “rivals” for purposes of regime coalition or program coalition. Hence the remark of Howard Zinn: “Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex” (Zinn 1999, 10). Much depends, as John Dewey would say, on one’s “end-in-view.”

3

The Regime Coalition: Supporters of a Political Order

We must first assume a general axiom which is true of all constitutions—that the part of a state which wishes a constitution to continue must be stronger than the part which does not. —Aristotle, Politics, IV, xii, 1296b

Aristotle’s remark reminds us that, just as not all members of a political community are in its support coalition, so many members of the political community, and even members of its supporting coalition, may not support its current regime, its form of government. Any supporting regime coalition may be countered by one or more antiregime coalitions. Relative strengths, including any accessions of allies from abroad, may predict what could happen next. James Bryce puts it plainly: “The stability of any constitution depends not so much on its form as on the social and economic forces that stand behind and support it; and if the form of the constitution corresponds to the balance of these forces, their support maintains it unchanged” (Bryce 1901, 166). Note, however, that even if a regime for many may lack “legitimacy,” a felt sense of lawful rightness, they may not actively oppose it if they doubt that an alternative regime is both desirable and possible. Adam Przeworski gets this right: “What matters for the stability of any regime is not the legitimacy of this particular system of domination but the presence or absence of preferable alternatives” (Przeworski 1986, 51–52). Thus a desir-

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able alternative is really absent for likely regime opponents if they see no way to surmount the armed might of the present regime. When I speak of regime, I am bracketing aside the very broad, international relations usage, which can refer to virtually any rule-governed international cooperation. Rather, I here follow the narrower usage of David Easton, who defines the regime attached to a political community as its framework of rule, its basic political order consisting largely in rules of the political game (cf. Easton 1965, 172–219). Only some of such regimes follow the rule of law, in which case one could speak of a constitutional order. Political community variables may interact with regime variables, just as regime variables can interact with changeable program coalitions, as I show later. I first describe different types of regimes as related to coalition patterns. Since the ancient Greeks, classifications of regimes as ruled by the one, the few, or the many included two kinds of the second type of a minority regarding themselves as equals, the aristocracy (by root terms, “the best rule”) and the oligarchy (“the few rule,” usually understanding them as the mercantile rich). There is no clear case of aristocracy since the collapse of the Venetian regime in 1797. Addressing only the forms of regime important in more recent history, I distinguish seven types, arrayed in a rough order from the normally least politically egalitarian to the often most egalitarian. I also follow up my brief definitions of the regime types with thumbnail sketches of the more or less typical coalitions that may support them, at least when there is any typicality at all in recent historical experience: I: OPENLY NONDEMOCRATIC, USUALLY AUTOCRATIC REGIMES Openly nondemocratic regimes do not even pretend to permit political oppositions, at least at the national level of governance: i: Traditional Monarchies Leaving aside more elementary chieftaincies, traditional monarchies usually involved an autocrat selected from a hereditary dynasty ruling with support of a privileged rank of larger landowners. These often held that land either with strong, heritable titles with attached military obligations (feudalism) or with weaker, nonheritable titles contingent upon service in important centrally controlled administrative offices (patrimonialism). In addition to the support of the great landholders, such regimes were often supported by high clergy of the locally dominant religion. Such monarchies now survive primarily within the Islamic world.

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ii: Military Dictatorships Aside from some usurpation of monarchical authority through rebellions of palace guards, military dictatorships normally suppose large standing armies. Apart from ancient Macedonia and late republican and imperial Rome, as well as the Ottoman Empire in modern history, these were largely absent from Europe at late as 1600, if everywhere present by 1700 (Huntington 1968, 120–21). Although sometimes ruling with a junta or larger military council, a military dictator has usually also enjoyed support by great landed wealth, and sometimes by sectors of commercial–industrial wealth as well. But the immediate power base consists in supportive military units. These may have been motivated by issues specific to their interests (higher pay, better weaponry) or issues of more general concern (such as improved prosecution of an internal or external war). Often suspending any independent political parties, labor unions, or student organizations, this regime type has been most common in the less developed world, but rare under Communist rule. One case was the transitional Wojciech Jaruzelski military regime in Poland, which ruled under martial law in 1981–84 and then continued without valid title to the presidency until 1989. Ruth Leger Sivard reports that of all regimes in the less developed world, in 1960 only 26 percent were military, but by 1987 that rose to 56 percent (59 of 113 countries) and in 1992 remained at 55 percent (61 of 112 countries). Most of these regimes, 58 of them, practiced severe repression such as torture and murder of political enemies (Sivard 1987, 26–27; 1993, 22). Although military regimes became less numerous in the later 1990s, there are early indications that they may be coming back. iii: Counterrevolutionary Dictatorship Not necessarily arising from high military office, in a counterrevolutionary dictatorship an autocrat such as Mussolini or Hitler enjoys only partial support from the kinds of groups named in (i) or (ii), depending more directly upon economically stressed middle or lower-middle class elements such as farmers, shopowners, lower white collar employees, and the like. Late-onset industrialization with economic stagnation has tended to produce this kind of regime, often accompanied by a paranoid, xenophobic ideology. iv: Revolutionary Dictatorship Although including some nationalistic socialist leaders who are in some respects like (iii), revolutionary dictatorship leaders avoid any nostalgia for the past and speak more of an egalitarian future, as in Marxist–Leninist

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(Communist) regimes. If usually led by middle class intellectuals, this regime, unlike the counterrevolutionary type, depends more on propertyless rural and urban workers. II: LIBERAL DEMOCRACIES Liberal democracies are regimes that ostensibly permit legal oppositions in competitions of ideas and of candidates for public offices: i: Nominal Democracies Some “democratic” regimes may be so only in name, in that a kind of civilian coup d’e´tat has really occurred: No effective political opposition exists because of relocation of powers out of normally democratic institutions such as parliaments, or the rigging of elections, or restraint on free speech. Recent examples have included Peru (where in the year 2000 a firstround presidential election found 1.4 million more voters than there were eligibles, and President Fujimori sought an unconstitutional third term before emigrating to Japan under corruption accusations) and Yugoslavia (where Milosˆovic´ before losing office in October 2000 blocked freedom of the media, allegedly resorted to thugs against opponents, and in his last act falsified electoral returns). Many of the post-Communist regimes on the southern fringe of Russia, and some African regimes such as Kenya, are really semiautocratic states masquerading as democracies. ii: Mixed Presidential/Parliamentary or Parliamentary/ Presidential Yet a relatively rare type of government permitting legal oppositions, the presidential/parliamentary model has been found in Finland, post-1958 France, post-1991 Russia, and for a time Portugal. At least in the French case, it tended to be favored by more economically privileged groups fearing the more egalitarian democratic regimes such as the parliamentary Fourth Republic. Yet the regime, here including the Finnish and Russian cases, typically gains broader support at its origin because of some international crisis. Presidents with long fixed terms of office dominate high politics (foreign and security policy) but may, especially when facing a prime minister of the opposite political family (a time they call cohabitation) share much domestic policy formation with higher-turnover prime ministers, who must enjoy parliamentary support. In Finland after 1991, the president became popularly elected but lost the power of dissolution. Relative to chief executives in the pure presidential model, presidents in this case have much authority to legislate by decree. Although some would regard such a regime as not really very democratic, at least one analyst

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thinks this “mixed” regime may promote democratic stability even better than the parliamentary model (Sartori 1997). Whereas France, Russia, and Finland may be called presidentialparliamentary, other mixed models could rather be called parliamentarypresidential, suggesting more prominence of the parliamentary aspect, as in Switzerland (which has a plural presidency of seven persons serving fixed terms of four years, but many parliamentary features) or Israel (where since 1996 the prime minister is the chief executive but is elected for a four-year term, although mutual dissolution of the executive and parliament remains possible). iii: Presidential The legislative and executive branches are separately elected for fixed but usually different tenure terms and are in large part autonomous. The executive cannot dissolve Congress, and Congress cannot remove a president, unless through the highly demanding route of impeachment and conviction. The United States is the unique case among the economically advanced democracies; this democratic regime type is more common to the continental Americas (excepting parliamentary Canada) and Africa (when not under military dictators). Perhaps the regime tends to centrist policy and enjoys the support of those near the center of a normal curve, when that exists (the author did not find it in 1973 in Allende’s Chile). iv: Parliamentary In the most common type of democratic regime the chief executive (prime minister, premier, chancellor) is the leader of parliament, normally of a parliamentary majority party or coalition of parties, but often episodically ruling with only minority support. Normally parliament can bring down a government by voting no confidence, and the chief executive is also able to dissolve parliament to try new elections. Depending upon the governing program coalition, the regime can often be either more Left (if more supported by workers, labor unions) or more Right (if more supported by business, as in the heyday of Liberal Democratic dominance in Japan) than is common under most presidential regimes. Yet among the three democratic regimes, most analysts believe, the very changeability of democratic governments (Italy had 58 of them in 1945–2000) best preserves democratic regimes. This is elaborated in Chapters 4 and 5. The preceding classification will also be useful for later discussions of other kinds of coalitions. The regime as such is distinguished by David Easton from “the authorities” or actual officials in important offices (Easton 1965, 172–219). I address these later under my rubrics of the program or legislative coalition (in Chapter 4) and the cabinet or executive

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coalition (in Chapter 5). Especially in the case of the four forms of autocracy as well as the merely nominal democracies, one can roughly read what groups are in the regime coalition from the kinds of people who are in top offices close to the ruler; one can identify antiregime groups by asking what kinds of people are concealing their political leanings, fleeing into political exile, being held as political prisoners, or being politically executed. If my classification includes the main regime types of recent history, a fuller description of any regime would require expansion. It would include informal or unwritten rules of the game as well as the formal or “constitutional” questions. Thus in the Swiss seven-person presidency since 1959, by informal rules the linguistic groups are represented in rough proportion to their sizes, with four or five German speakers, one or two French speakers, and often one Italian. Also, religious identities are roughly reflected in the traditional 2:2:2:1 ratio of Social Democrats (seculars), Radical Democrats (Protestants and nonobservant Catholics), Christian Democrats (observant Catholics), and Swiss People’s Party (observant Protestants) (Lijphart 1999, 34–37). As for the substantive objects of such basic informal and formal rules, one could see them as providing basic rules regarding three “fields” of strategic/tactical political action that exhaust the ways of controlling the content of public policy, namely, (1) structures, putting powers where friends prevail, concerning what units exist, what powers they have, and so on, which may extend to the question of whether the regime subtype is unitary or federal; (2) recruitment, putting friends into offices of power, or how roles are filled with specific persons, and so forth, which among other points addresses hereditary, appointive, and elective modalities and the electoral systems of the latter; and (3) influence, putting friends’ preferences into the minds or at least the wills of authorities, or how political communications such as sensitive or persuasive messages can or cannot be created, delivered, and, for persuasive messages, reinforced (these main fields of political action are described in more detail in Cook 2000; 1991). Any abrupt and major change of a main regime type (the eight listed here) certainly constitutes a complete change in the regime, my main concern here. But some could prefer to define regime change to include lesser changes as well. Basic political structures are never neutral, which is to say that each regime type and its elaboration within a given context favors some groups over others. Put otherwise, the regime coalition tends to handicap at least some otherwise possible winning program coalitions such as addressed in the next chapter. This is not to deny that sometimes those who coalesce behind a regime may find that their own forms may eventually turn against them. Judgments may have been wrong from the outset, or else the original conditions of the basic framework of rule may have changed. But persistent losses under existing forms in time lead the group to change at least some

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aspects of its constitutional philosophy. This has obviously occurred in regard to relative valuations of the “branches” of U.S. federal government for the two main partisan tendencies throughout American history. Antiregime activists could of course include anarchists, who want a social order by mutualistic negotiation but no political order at all. But all other antiregime activists normally select among the kinds of regime change mentioned. The Sources of Regime Support Perhaps the members of a political community (or nation-state, country) could be sorted into five rough categories: (1) active supporters of the regime, quite willing to give it resources to sustain it against challengers; (2) more passive supporters of the regime, perhaps acquiescing only because they see no workable alternative; (3) any neutrals or wholly uncommitted, often including many apoliticals; (4) those who regard the regime and not merely its authorities with high distrust, who could possibly be mobilized in an antiregime coalition; and (5) active antiregime rejectionists, often disunited in a variety of rejectionist groups. If such categories work, how do individuals and sometimes virtually everyone in certain groups fall into them? One theory emphasizes longterm learning of very deeply held orientations; another accents more shortterm calculations of advantage. My own mind has been in migration from the former view toward the latter, but I would fault both theories for not giving primary attention to the often more robust group identities that can influence regime orientations as well as policy outlooks as addressed in Chapter 4. With no further attempt to adjudicate between the two rival theories, in Figure 3.1 I merely outline them in parallel and leave it to readers to decide between them, perhaps in part through reflection about my later discussions of regime coalition problems. Interactions of the Political Community with Regime Coalitions Do political community variables such as size of territory, size of population, or ethnic diversity of population, and the like, empirically impact regime variation? Although there has long been speculation, it remains largely inconclusive. Thus Montesquieu in 1748 believed that large extent of territory would tend to disfavor popular government and favor monarchy, if not despotism (The Spirit of the Laws, II, xvii, 6). Never favoring despotic rule, Rousseau in 1762 similarly maintained that larger population requires concentration of the executive: “The greater grows the state, the tighter should be the government, such that the number of leaders diminishes in proportion to increase of population” (Social Contract, III, ii).

Figure 3.1 Regime Support: Is it Deeply Learned or Self-Interestedly Chosen?

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Directly responding to Montesquieu by borrowing insights from David Hume, James Madison in Federalist #10 held that large-scale democracy could curb class-based factionalism on amounts of property, increasing economic diversity to shift most issues rather to rival kinds of property, such as agricultue, manufacturing, or commerce. Although surely correct in that prediction of cross-class economic interests, at least for the United States, Madison also believed that more religious diversity would add other crosscuts to neutralize cleavages over amounts of property. Often greater scale encompasses increasing ethnic diversity, as in the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, or Ottoman Empire. John Stuart Mill in 1860 asserted that the more local loyalties, the more likely despotic rule as the only feasible approach to amalgamation in early state building (Considerations on Representative Government, IV). Yet he must have realized that some autocrats rule by playing one ethnicity off against the other, contributing to increasing communal strife. Possibly because he himself was a Roman Catholic in largely Protestant England, Lord Acton argued that cultural distinctions could be harmonious and counterract undue concentration of executive power (Connor 1994, 5–7). Perhaps because of his Dutch background, where the population long divided into seculars, Protestants and Catholics, Arend Lijphart proposed a consociational democracy theory reviewed later that could be regarded as another response to Mill. More detailed descriptions of the attitudinal orientations of populations may be important. But dwelling only on the socialization of existing members of the political community distracts attention from other possible predictors of regime support. For one thing, shifts in either net natural increase (group fertilities less mortality) or in net migration (group immigrants less emigrants, including reverse migrants) could sometimes make a difference in support of either regime coalitions or program coalitions. Hence it is not surprising that policies affecting birth or birth control or else migration across national borders can be highly contested. Writing in the context of city-states, Aristotle noted that “the disproportionate increase of a part of the state is an occasion which leads to constitutional changes” (Politics, V, iii, 6). Rapid changes in stratal or ethnic group sizes can be destabilizing, and it may be argued that they are especially parlous in smaller states, as when in 1975 Lebanon fell into civil war in part because of the rapid increase of the Shi’a poor as well as resident Palestinian exiles. Sometimes a shift of the political community boundary can also change potential bases of regime or program coalitions. What happens to the political community and its supporting coalition can greatly impact other coalitions, including the regime coalition. There can be a strong tie between the political community coalition and its regime coalition. A change or nonchange of the one directly causes change or nonchange in the other. If failure of the political community coalition often

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produces collapse of the regime, less commonly failure of the regime coalition can cause a collapse of the political community. Most obviously, if the political community is incorporated by another state, its regime may be either abolished or converted into a limited, dependent relationship, as when European imperial powers made local chiefs their subordinates in a relationship of indirect rule. Apparently alone among the 15 political communities formed by the dissolution of the Soviet Union, many Belarusians would like to reintegrate with Russia, not preserving complete independence (Marples 1999). Or again, if a political community totally disintegrates, its regime coalition also falls, even if program and leadership coalitions could prolong a kind of life as usually ineffectual governments in exile. A sharply divided political community may also sometimes weaken a democratic regime, as Walker Connor notes in saying that governments threatened by them have turned to the harshest measures against the nationalists: “Multinational states have tended to become less democratic in response to the growing threat of nationalistic movements” (Connor 1994, 24). Normally, stability of both political community membership and the support coalition of that political community tends to stabilize the regime. But loss or accession of territory with attached population can conceivably threaten that. If accession of territory has not threatened the formerly West German regime, one could imagine some strains on the North Vietnamese regime from its 1975 incorporation of the South. If stability of a political community usually stabilizes its attached regime, stability of regime does not always lend stability to the linked political community. On the contrary, often efforts to salvage a political community encourage regime changes, sometimes by finding new supporting coalition members. One way is when the regime type shifts in a major way or even from one of the eight named categories into another. In the first case, after Perry’s “Opening of Japan,” in 1868 the rule of the Tokugawas was overthrown out of fear that Japan’s autonomy was in danger of being lost to unequal treaties, as had already burdened China. Allied with some nobles in Kyoto, leading samurai and others in some southern and western provinces united to oust the Tokugawa power in Edo (Tokyo). If they later were to recognize that they could not attain their object without some Westernization, the pattern was as follows: The Tokugawas were now being shown to be unfit to govern Japan, for they could not abide by their own ancestral laws, and failed to protect Japan from the encroachment of the “barbarians.” The Tokugawas fell, and the power of government was restored to the Emperor in 1868, because they were outbalanced by the coa-

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lition of anti-Tokugawa factions who rallied around the slogan, “Revere the Emperor; Expel the Barbarians.” It was argued that only through unification under the leadership of the Emperor could Japan rebuild her strength to repel the Western Powers. (Suganami 1984, 191)

If the Meiji Restoration in effect took power away from a military dictator, a fairly common case in the past few centuries has been a shift from democracy to military dictatorship. Also usually aiming to remove other contending groups from political activity, those supporting the new, military regime may claim that improved military repression is the only way to save the political community from a foreign attack on sovereignty or from a secessionist war generated within. Yet such a shift to military control may backfire, perhaps intensifying a separatist or autonomist movement, as when Francisco Franco’s seizure of power in Spain in 1936–39 encouraged Basque and Catalan discontents. Rather than concentrating political power, one could instead try to save a political community by some kind of deconcentration of power. One approach is to design a constitution that in effect institutionalizes a veto for every major group. Ancient and medieval European “mixed regime theory” favored a constitutional arrangement that conceded some democratic voice in at least one institution but blunted its dangers to elites by adding nondemocratic forms such as aristocracy or even monarchy. It tended to stabilize regimes as long as groups were content with the negative goal of not being harmed, but it is not as well suited to dealing with more positive demands of being helped (cf. Cook 1991, 76–79). Mixed regimes amounted to an arguably more apparent than real power sharing by classes, just as consociationalism is a more clearly real power sharing by ethnicities. Consociationalism involves a power sharing among the ethnic “pillars” at the center, securing consensus (unanimity) among leading elites of each group. The leading authority on this kind of regime and its associated norms has been Arend Lijphart (Lijphart, 1975, 1977, 1984, 1999). It does not always succeed in preventing a divided society from falling apart. The Czechs, although outnumbering the Slovaks about two to one, had allowed the Slovaks equal power at the federal level and also accepted devolution of all but foreign and financial matters to the Czech and Slovak Republics. They also accepted a symbolic hyphen to rename the country Czecho-slovakia. Increasingly after 1968, the country surely had adopted a consociational regime. Yet it had only three of nine conditions that Lijphart held help make consociationalism work. They did have geographically concentrated groups that could be federated, a small number of pillars or segments, and a small overall national population. But more important was what they lacked: “There was no strong tradition of elite accommodation and compromise; hardly any overarching loyalties to the federal system; no

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single external threat forcing the Czechs and Slovaks to unity; the Czechs possessed a stable two-thirds majority creating the predominant group. The alternative elites were not well-known and accustomed to each other; the socioeconomic differences between the two regions were large and rapidly widening” (Kopecky` 2000, 82, cf. also 71–72). Whereas at most a third of Slovaks (even fewer Czechs) favored the split, the top two leaders, Va´clav Klaus and Vladmir Mecˆiar, preferred to split, at most being responsive to much narrower coalitions. They remained prominent leaders in the two countries that were born, until Klaus was charged with keeping a secret corporate slush fund for political purposes and Mecˆiar was defeated in elections in 1998. As the Czecho-slovak case just showed, another deconcentration approach involves a major devolution of powers from the center to the provinces. That is, one turns from what may be a unitary state (one where provincial and local powers are at the discretion of the central government) to an extremely decentralized federalism or even bordering on a confederation. By conventional definition, in a federal system both the central government and provincial ones independently derive some exclusive authority from a constitution, which may also spell out their concurrent authority. Broadly, larger states tend to be federal, in part merely for effective administration. In a confederal state, the opposite of a unitary state, the central government is a creature of the provinces. Although there have been past cases, approximated in the American Articles of Confederation (in effect from 1776, but formally so only 1781–89), there are no true confederations in the world today. The repatriated Canadian constitution was adjusted toward more devolution of powers, responding not only to the demand of resource-rich western provinces but also to that of Que´bec separatism. It could have gone even further had the Meech Lake accords been ratified. Gorbachev similarly attempted to save the Soviet Union by making its constitutional federalism (which was really a farce in the more autocratic days of Stalin) more devolved. But that move was one trigger of the 1991 KGB-military coup attempt. That abortive move in turn inspired the move of Boris Yeltsin of Russia, Leonid Kravchuk of the Ukraine and Stanislau Shushkevich of Belarus simply to dissolve the Soviet Union December 7–8, 1991. It was replaced with the ineffectual Commonwealth of Independent States, which, although adding on the other post-Communist states of the former U.S.S.R., does not even amount to a confederation. Ukraine’s leader Kravchuk feared Russian hegemony through it. Formerly a republic of the Soviet Union but now an independent nationstate, Russia chose a federal constitution. But by the summer of 2000, Putin sought to weaken Russian republic governors, some of whom were interfering with tax flows to the center. He had the Duma override a Federal Council rejection of his plan to permit his dissolution of republic legisla-

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tures or even dismissal of any governor charged by the prosecutor-general with a serious crime. Another constitutional change aimed to remove regional leaders from that council, replacing them with appointees of republic governors approved by their legislatures. The Case of Bosnia-Herzegovina Both kinds of regime deconcentration are evident in the continuing problem of making a political community in Bosnia-Herzegovina (hereafter Bosnia). Bosnia’s story is an interesting case study of a failed grand coalition, unable to unite the three ethnic groups of Muslims, Serbs, and Croats into one state. Contrary to the myth of foreign correspondents (often from countries that were only very recent political communities), Bosnia is not a recent invention. It had the status of a political community even in medieval times. It was then a principality populated largely by a Slavic people. These were mostly Roman Catholics, strongly influenced by the presence of Franciscan monasteries. But the Ottoman Turks, carrying Islam with them, conquered Bosnia in 1463. Notwithstanding the measure of tolerance accorded by the millet system to non-Islamic religions with a sacred book, Roman Catholicism began to recede. The Bosnian Muslims would thereafter emerge. Contrary to legend, it is not true that Bosnian converts were Bogumil Orthodox (a Bulgarian heresy) who mass-converted to Islam out of resentment over their repression. But it is true that Bosnian Roman Catholics had been notorious for heresy, perhaps related to the Cathars of southern France and northern Italy. Unlike in Albania, where the Turks Islamicized the whole population by policy after a war with Venice, there was no imperial pressure on Bosnian Roman Catholics to become Muslim. Yet the Ottomans distrusted Roman Catholics more than Orthodox Catholics because the Roman Catholics were more likely to be linked to often hostile foreign powers such as Venice and Austria. But there were some advantages in conversion to Islam, such as exemptions from slavery and special taxes on non-Muslims. By the 17th century, Bosnian Muslims outnumbered Bosnian Christians. Whereas Muslims sometimes referred to themselves as “Turkish” (a label Bosnian Serbs use of them now), almost none was really such. They were ex–Roman Catholic Slavs who spoke Serbo-Croatian. Even Bosnian Muslims used different terms of real Turks. When eventually under Austro-Hungarian rule, they came to prefer self-designation as Muslims (Muslami). Unlike Croats and Serbs, Muslims yet tend to marry among themselves rather than intermarry with the other two groups, and they are more resistant to secularization. The Croatians were a distinctive Slavic group who had originated from the north Caucasus area, dwelling for a time in what is now southern

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Poland before migrating to their present concentration on the Adriatic. They became and remained Roman Catholic, especially because of the influence of the Venetian Empire and later of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Indeed, immigrants from Hungary or Austria eventually accepted the label Croatian, even if they were non-Slavic in ancestry. Many Croatians migrated into what would become the Yugoslav province of BosniaHerzegovina, where Tito, the leader of post–World War II Communist Yugoslavia, drew up boundary lines approximating the original Bosnian territory when yet under receding Ottoman rule and encroaching AustroHungarian sway. By the 18th century, the principal Bosnian cities of Sarejevo and Mostar had secured much home rule from the rapidly weakening Ottomans. Through the Congress of Berlin, the Austro-Hungarian Empire formally protected Bosnia in 1878 and in 1908 they annexed the province. Like the Croatians, the Serbs were a Slavic people who migrated from the north Caucasus, for a time dwelling in what is now the Czech Republic before moving to their present concentrations along the east side of Bosnia. Serbs intermarried with the Vlach, a mountain pastoralist people already there who had originated from the area where present-day Albania meets Serbia. The Vlach traditionally spoke a variant of Latin not unlike Romanian (the Romanians think of themselves as Vlach), but they also learned the Serbo-Croatian language and became primarily Orthodox Christian once immersed among Serbs. Many Bosnian Serbs have called themselves Vlach. The Serbs of Serbia proper were defeated by Turkish invaders in 1389. But although subjected to Ottoman rule, they largely persisted in their Orthodox Catholic Christianity. Many Serbs and Vlach were to migrate into areas of not only northern Croatia but also Bosnia. When independent, Serbians of Serbia became irredentist, wanting incorporation of Bosnian areas into a greater Serbian national political community. They charged the Muslim Bosnians with having persisted too long in loyalty to the Ottoman Empire, especially when the Serbs joined the Montenegrins in an 1876 war against the Turks. By arrangement, Montenegro was to annex Herzegovina, and the Serbs, the rest of the Bosnian territory. But the Serbs faced military reverses. Although lent diplomatic support by the Russians, who became their traditional ally, they had to acquiesce in continued Ottoman control of Bosnia. In recent times, Serbs in Bosnia have often intermarried with Croations, but not with Muslims. Yet historically, Muslim Bosnians felt closer to the Croatians than to the Serbs, in part because the Croatians have been less aggressive in making claims on Muslim Bosnian turf. After the Austro-Hungarian Empire replaced the Turks in Bosnia, Serbs chafed at their failure to win to greater Serbia the heavily Serb populated areas of Bosnia. In Sarejevo in 1914, Serbian nationalists sparked World War I by assassinating Austria’s archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

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On the losing side in World War I, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was shattered after 1918. Thereafter, the kingdom of Yugoslavia (“south Slavs”) emerges, with Bosnia one province of considerable autonomy. But the weakly identified Yugoslav political community was recurrently strained by ethnic rivalries, including the continuing Serbian claims on Bosnian territory. During this interwar period the Bosnians found allies in the Croatians. During World War II, the Germans made allies of the Ustasˇa, a fascist Croatian minority who practiced genocide against not only Serbs but also Jews and Romani (Gypsies). Many Serbs then enlisted in either nationalist (Chetnik) or largely Communist (Partisan) armies opposing the Nazis and the Ustasˇa, if also often fighting each other. At the end of World War II, the Communists under Marshall Tito (Josip Broz) dominated Yugoslavia. Tito was half Slovenian and half Croatian, but the Serbs tended to dominate what he created. Yet even they were displeased when he made autonomous areas out of two Serbia regions where Serbs lacked a majority (Vojvoidina and Kosovo). By 1948 Tito was asserting independence of Stalin’s Cominform, the successor to the Comintern or Communist International. He was surprised when Yugoslavia was ousted from the Comintern even while he was hosting its meeting in Belgrade. Tito soon abandoned central planning (the last Yugoslav plan weighed one and a half tons of paper!) and introduced a “self-management” version of socialism, emphasizing workers’ control of enterprises with 20 employees or more and making much use of market mechanisms. As in Communist Poland, most farmland remained privately held. The federation of Yugoslavia held together even after Tito’s death in 1980. But it had always been but a secondary identity for many. In the 1981 census, in the republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina only 7.9 percent called themselves “Yugoslav,” and these were mostly in the large cities (where the figure rose to 20–25 percent). Even the 7.9 percent all-Bosnia figure had steeply declined by 1991 to 5.5 percent when Yugoslavia was undergoing disintegration (Burg and Shoup 1999, 32, 42). Severe economic problems of uneven growth, nongrowth, unemployment, inflation, and foreign debt spun off most of the political community, intensifying commitments to more parochial identities (cf. Woodward 1996). As one observer notes, “historical accounts of the Bosnian war indicate that communal categories gained potency—especially with the Serbs and Croats—as Yugoslavia hurtled from economic to political disintegration” (Kumar 1997, 41). In imitation of what had been happening elsewhere in East Europe since 1989, secession in 1990–1991 began in Slovenia and extended to Croatia (the two most prosperous republics), and thereafter also involved Bosnia and Macedonia. The Yugoslav political community was reduced to a rump of Serbia and restive Montenegro.

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When the Slovenes and Croatians seceded, Bosnians did not attempt to block Yugoslav federal armed forces that passed through their territory in a failed military effort to prevent it. But the principal leader of the Bosnian Muslims, Alija Izetbegovic´, had taken the position that Bosnia could only remain in a Yugoslav federation or confederation if Croatia remained in as a counterweight to the Serbs. Since Croatia exited, Bosnia declared independence in 1990 after a Bosnian Serb walkout from the republic’s assembly. The Serbs also boycotted a republic referendum, which favored independence by a vote of 63 percent. It was supported most heavily by Muslims and Croats, since the Serbs had urged their group to boycott the vote. Bosnia was now independent within the borders established by Tito. The nationalistic breakup of Yugoslavia threatened to repeat itself within the most multinational of all Yugoslav provinces. By self-labeling, the division of the population of Bosnia is as follows: (1) Muslim: 43.7 percent, nationally identified: 43.7 percent; (2) Orthodox Christian: 17.5 percent, nationally identified as Serbian, 31.4 percent; and (3) Roman Catholic: 23 percent, nationally identified as Croatian, 17.3 percent (Burg and Shoup 1999, 27). Reportedly, the overall Yugoslav population had been about four-fifths secular, so most “religious” identification, especially among nonMuslims, is ancestral only. Even then, as the preceding figures suggest, many Bosnian Serbians apparently reject their Orthodox identity, and not all Catholics regard themselves as Croatian. But the main point is that the Bosnian Muslims did not by themselves constitute a majority. In this they were unlike all other former Yugoslav provinces, each of which had a majority ethnicity. Driven by fears, voters in the 1990 Bosnian parliamentary election favored the three nationality parties over the nonnationalist parties, whether liberal or socialist. The Bosnian leader attempted informal power sharing with the coalesced nationalist parties. By 1991 it was apparent that a threenationality power sharing was not working out. The Bosnian Serbs were quite forthrightly turning to the secession option. The leader of the Serbia and Montenegro rump of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosˆovic´, had direct talks with Croatia’s leader, Franjo Tudjman, about partitioning Bosnia between them, leaving just a Lesotho-like enclave for the Bosnian Muslims. Tudjman had been willing to keep Bosnian borders inviolate (i.e., not annex territory into a Greater Croatia) if the Serbs would agree to stay out (not annex Bosnian Serb domains into a Greater Serbia). But Milosˆovic´ would not renounce irredentist expansion. Among Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic´ had emerged as the principal leader, working closely with Milosˆovic´. On the other side, the Croatian and Muslim Bosnians had conflicts over local turf, which generated recurrent rounds of armed skirmishing between them, as well as wider conflict involving Croatia, in 1992–93. But eventually Croatia became militarily allied with the Bosnians against Serbia and

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its Bosnian-Serb allies. The Croatian leader Tudjman above all wanted to recapture Serb-occupied territory in northern Croatia. By 1992 Bosnia was convulsed with warring. An ill-advised general Western embargo on arms shipments to Yugoslavia really favored the Serbs, who had taken possession of most of the Yugoslav federation’s heavy weapons. Eventually they passed many of these on to Bosnian Serbs, once Milosˆovic´ decided to have Bosnian Serbs rather than Yugoslav troops do the fighting. During some often genocidal “ethnic cleansing” conflict, the United Nations, initially with too few soldiers, could neither effect order through a peacekeeping operation nor bring indicted war criminals (including Karadzic´) to the bar of international courts. But ethnic cleansing was ended in 1994–95, when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) became more directly involved. Also, the United States looked the other way as Iranian arms were supplied to the Bosnian Muslims. By 1994 the Bosnian Croats and Muslims federated, aimed against the Bosnian Serbs (another instance of the “amalgamated security community” concept of Chapter 2). Indeed, their federation within Bosnia was envisaged as eventually to be loosely federated to Croatia, too. In contexts of high political instability, or what could be called Machiavellian regional strategic climates, tripolar competitions tend to be duplicitous and nasty. They usually end up with two coalescing against the third, as happened here. That two weaker elements combine against the strongest is a conclusion of early tripolar theory, which argued that actors would prefer to be in coalitions that make them (1) winning and controlling, (2) winning but not controlling, and (3) not winning, in that order (Caplow 1956, 1959; Chertkoff 1967). Recall that 1991 threatened a Serb-Croat alliance to carve up Bosnia. In this case, each group coveted turf wanted by another, both out of security and economic motives. At that time, the three states were differently ranked on three resources: (1) land: where their group was a local majority within Bosnia proper, the relative strengths were Serbs⬎Muslims⬎Croats; (2) identified population: within all of BosniaHerzegovina: Muslims⬎Serbs⬎Croatians; (3) overall military capability: Serbs⬎Croatians⬎Muslims, when Bosnian Serbs and Croatians are backed by soldiers from Serbia and Croatia, or, if the outside states stayed out, Serbs⬎Muslims⬎Croatians. In terms of land, a coalition of Muslims and Croats was oversized; in terms of population, intermediate; but in terms of military capability in either situation of isolated or expanded war, a minimal and minimum winning coalition, which is that which finally formed. All efforts to negotiate peace focused on ideas of devolving extensive powers and applying ethnic group power sharing to the central government. But this moved through phases in definition of the lower-level units: The Vance–Owen plan envisioned 10 home ruled provinces, roughly following ethnic group settlement lines. Later attention shifted to a regime of

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three larger statelets, Croatian, Bosnian, and Serbian. As it finally turned out, however, the Croatians and Bosnians (chiefly in the center and western areas) loosely federated (if yet having distinctive sets of cantons under one or the other ethnicity) and were balanced off against a Serb Republic domain (in the northern and eastern regions). At each stage of talk, not surprisingly, each ethnic community sought to enlarge its own turf at the expense of either or both of the other communities. These three broad units were to exercise most governmental functions but leave foreign relations, the currency, major transportation, and communications to the weakened central government. At the center, a plural presidency would have three persons representing the three ethnicities, and a bicameral parliament would have five delegates from each of the three ethnicities in the upper house, the House of Peoples. The Muslim and Croat delegates would be elected by their respective ethnics serving in the MuslimCroat federation parliament. The lower chamber, the House of Representatives, has 42 members, 28 from the Muslim-Croat federation and 14 from the Serb republic, selected by direct election without stipulation as to ethnicity. Perhaps imitating a feature of the last apartheid constitution in South Africa, a Constitutional Court would define “vital interests” of each ethnic community, permitting when relevant any one president to veto action by the presidency. This would depart from the normal rule requiring twothirds vote, but the ideal of a consociational arrangement is unanimity (cf. Burg and Shoup 1999, 367–73). The military apparatuses remained separate, not put under a common executive command. This complex model of power sharing essentially aimed at an institutionalized veto for each ethnic group. It is a well-known means of permitting groups to block harm to themselves, but at the cost of hard bargaining to get any positive agreement on cooperation. If a minority can block action, the regime requires grand coalition at the government (parliament, executive) levels to get anything done. Yet by November 1999, the three ethnic presidents agreed to the creation of both a multiethnic peacekeeping force to supplement NATO’s continued presence and a border control to block terrorists and smugglers. They have also agreed to a common passport and creation of a staff to assist their joint presidency (The New York Times International, Nov. 16, 1999, p. A–3). It is puzzling why one should regard partitioning as a means to peace among ethnic communities. Thus although Britain sometimes used partitioning as a means of colonial divide and rule, in some instances of its retreat from empire it turned instead to what Radha Kumar has called “divide and quit.” Thus were the retreats from Ireland, India, Palestine, and, with a lag, Cyprus. It can mean not necessarily peace among the parts but rather renewed conflict between the ethnicities. Kumar sees little hope in the incomplete partition of Bosnia-Herzegovina. As examples of allegedly better progress such as Northern Ireland, Cyprus, and even Israel show,

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such mechanisms may only be useful when nationalist identities are weakening: “Ethnic nationalists came closest to agreeing on mechanisms for communal power sharing and representation in those regions where there was mounting public pressure against the isolation bred by partition and declining support for ethnic nationalists” (Kumar 1997, 136). That is, leaders are forced into moderation and compromise toward the other groups when their own followings are deserting them! The Bosnian warring had caused some 279,000 to be dead or missing (7 percent of the population), destroyed or damaged half the homes, and destroyed most economic infrastructure (Cousens 2001, 119). But notwithstanding a cease fire since November 1995, long years of efforts to create a grand coalition in Bosnia have been unavailing. The Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a political community presupposes grand coalition among the leaderships, if not also their peoples. Apart from a tenuous unity among Croats and Muslim political elites, that unity is not there. Here as elsewhere, power-sharing arrangements are often Janus-faced: Ostensibly aimed at formal integration, they may be ratifying and perpetuating de facto partitions (cf. Cousens 2001, 129, 142). One must usually have some sort of foundation in a stable political community to develop a stable regime coalition. It is far more difficult to build a house from the roof down. The Regimes of France In France, by contrast, they have found a reasonably stable foundation in the political community, but the regime superstructures have come and gone. France, ignoring the short-lived Vichy regime in southeastern France in 1940–43, has had but 1 political community for centuries. In contrast, from 1789 by one count it has had 15 distinctive regimes (listed in Noonan 1970, 20). Other analyses of France variously count 11–16 regimes from 1789 to present. Using the largest figure, including the yet-surviving Fifth Republic (33 years old in the year 2001), the mean regime duration in France in 1789–1999 was just over 13 years. Regime changes reflect the Left and Right political families of the French political culture. That has been commonly described as split between a parliamentary tradition and an administrative tradition. After Stendhal’s novel, someone has described that as the polarization between the “red” (rouge) and “black” (noire), or between those who lean toward anticlericalism and more democratic control through parliament and those who are more clerical and supportive of monarchical or other strong executive prerogatives. At times these may show antiregime elements at their extremes, as with the Communists on the Left and Maurras’s Action Franc¸aise on the Right in late 1930s France.

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If the French Third Republic died in the 1940 military defeat, the Fourth Republic died in a ragged sort of military coup, although involving National Assembly approval for investiture of De Gaulle in 1958. In this case, Nicholas Wahl argued, regime failure was due not to economic stagnation but rather to military and diplomatic wounds to nationalist pride in Indochina (1954), the Suez invasion (1956), and the then-ongoing tragedy of the Algerian war. The supportive regime coalition had clearly evaporated: “By a strange coincidence, the French Institute of Public Opinion asked a sample of Frenchmen in January 1958—only four months before the army revolt in Algiers—what they would do in the case of a military coup against the Republic. Only four percent replied that they would oppose the coup actively, while a majority flatly admitted that they would no nothing at all” (Wahl 1959, 20). Perhaps the “median” of most proregime coalitions would consist of any central position among those who reject either extreme. Against the grain of the somewhat polarized political culture as related to regime, centrists were especially dominant in the governments of the Third Republic (formally 1875–1940) and also had much weight in the Fourth Republic (1946–58). But can one imagine a median regime location? Although most would see Charles De Gaulle as having had “black” leanings, he once explained the Fifth Republic’s presidential-parliamentary design to Alain Peyrefitte, “What I have tried to do is to achieve a synthesis between the monarchy and the republic” (Ehrmann 1983, 17). In that, not unlike John Adams in the American founding, De Gaulle seems to have meant that he was self-consciously looking for the median, even if his Fifth Republic displaced pure parliamentarianism with the presidential-parliamentary hybrid, tilted in favor of the presidents elected for a fixed seven-year term, now to be reduced to five years. These presidents, directly elected since a 1962 referendum, can nominate or dismiss prime ministers or no more than once per year dissolve parliament to bring about new parliamentary elections. Thus in 1998, the Gaullist president Jacques Chirac dissolved parliament in hopes of strengthening fellow rightist Alain Juppe´, only to find electoral victory go rather to socialist Lionel Jospin, the prime minister expected to contest the presidency with Chirac in the year 2002. Whereas presidents seem to accord domestic policy autonomy to prime ministers of the opposite political family, they can be very strong leaders when working with a prime minister of their own side of the ideological spectrum. In the silence of the National Assembly, presidents can even legislate, subject to consent of the Senate. Whatever De Gaulle’s pretension of having sought a balance, note that the regime coalition base (and hence its median) could shift depending upon both the nature of the existing regime and the principal threat from an antiregime coalition: when from the extreme Left only, from both extremes (as in late 1930s France), or from the extreme Right only.

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Creation, Duration, and Death of an Established Regime As with births or deaths of many political communities, creations or destructions of regimes are often violent. Obliteration of a political community after external conquest quite obviously sweeps away its regime as well. Yet some victors in war permit the conquered political community to remain in being, while only the regime is changed (e.g., Japan at the end of World War II, once it adopted the so-called MacArthur Constitution). Yet just as some new political communities can form without violence, so may arise some regimes (or both at once, as illustrated by the Slovak Republic, 1993). The total breakup of the Soviet Union and the near total dismantling of Yugoslavia left 19 new political communities, most of which soon formed new constitutions as well. But political communities more often succumb to defeat in external war; voluntary incorporations or secessions are less common. Regimes, by contrast, more often fall to merely internal threats or uses of force, such as the rather common coups d’e´tat, fairly common political insurrections, or very uncommon social revolutions. Both ethnic and class conflict may be involved in the rise of antiregime coalitions. Ethnic Conflict Can Undermine a Regime A main threat to political communities from within is a shift to ethnic loyalties that surpass any political community loyalty. Not surprisingly, as our review of the Croat and Serb groups in Bosnia made clear, this can frustrate creation of a regime; yet it could potentially prevent its destruction, if well institutionalized as in the consociational model. Some regime coalitions may implicitly or even explicitly stratify ethnicities. Thus one could describe the Austro-Hungarian Empire as implicitly led by Austrians, with a second tier of germanized Bohemians and Magyars, and so on. The Ottoman Empire was dominated by the Ottoman Turks, with a second tier of Arabs. Although usually those near the top of its stratification are more ardent in support of a regime, leading actors of these second tiers by 1918 were both secessionist and antiregime. Consociational nation-state regimes may become vulnerable to the extent that ethnicities can be viewed as highly stratified, as apparent in Lebanon by 1975. Lebanon’s consociational regime had worked out a power sharing at the center among the various religious communities such as Maronite Christian, Orthodox Christian, Druze, Sunni Muslim, and Shi’a Muslim. But the weighting of assigned offices had not been adjusted to changes in population, such as the decline of the percentage of Lebanese who were Christian and rise of those who were Islamic. Nor had it considered that the growing poverty among the Shi’a Muslims would make them natural allies with the diaspora Palestinians, who created an informal coalition to

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challenge the status quo, often supported by Syria, while Israel found allies among Christians. Lebanon, having lost a consociational consensus, has found itself plunged into recurrent civil and other warring since (cf. Younis 1978). Unlike in the normal case, in the consociational regime the political community coalition of ethnicities is directly mapped into the regime coalition, and usually into the parliamentary and executive coalitions as well. Grand coalition is necessary at every level. That is to say, against the usual pattern, here stability above may also be essential to stability below: Failure of the cabinet coalition (as noted, power sharing among the leaderships of the ethnic pillars) may cause failure of the parliamentary coalition. These failures may run down to undermine the regime and even the political community. In other instances of tight interdependency of political community and regime, the ethnicities that must be coalesced may be fewer, perhaps only two. As I have heretofore noted, when two ethnicities are both fairly large, and if they think of themselves as independent “nations,” at some cusp they abandon the concept of literal proportionality to population, with the smaller one demanding complete equality. Consider the cases of Czechoslovakia and Cyprus. By late 1992, it was apparent that, notwithstanding restoration of the hyphen in the national name and other compromises, the Czecho-slovak political community would fall apart unless the federation (which had already developed parity of the Czechs and Slovaks in the upper house of parliament) were changed into a highly egalitarian confederation. The two principal leaders, Vaclav Klaus and Vladimir Mecˆiar, dominated talks exploring the possibility of devolving most central powers to the Czech and Slovak regional governments. That was attractive to Klaus, since he and many other Czechs wanted to accelerate marketization, whereas Mecˆiar and the Slovaks, facing more unemployment partly caused by loss of Soviet markets for military production, wanted a go-slow approach. The Slovaks had also long wanted full political parity with the Czechs for all central functions. Residual powers at the center would be led by 10 cabinet ministries, divided equally between the communities. But ultimately the two sides could not agree on the confederal regime. Klaus had balked at ascribing “sovereignty” to each regional government, and Mecˆiar demanded that the foreign and defense ministries be reserved to the Slovaks. Although polls showed that solid majorities of both Czechs and Slovaks wanted to retain their joint political community, a course also favored by the federation president, the playwrite Vaclav Havel, Klaus and Mecˆiar then agreed to let the Czecho-Slovak political coalition dissolve on January 1, 1993. It did so, and virtually no one familiar with the states expects any reunification (cf. Goldman 1999, esp. 1–56). The Cyprus case looks at a similar problem from another direction. The

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Cypriot political community collapsed into southern Greek–Cypriot and northern Turkic–Cypriot sectors after the Greek-dominated central government threatened enosis, or union of Cyprus with Greece. Viewing themselves as guardians of the welfare of the Turkic–Cypriot minority, the military government of Turkey chose to invade in 1974. Although about a fifth of the population, the Turks thereafter held about two-fifths of the island, which included many properties that had been owned by Greek– Cypriots. A quarter century of de facto separation ensued, although the Turkic–Cypriot government failed to secure diplomatic recognition except from Turkey and economically lagged behind the Greek–Cypriot sector of the island. By now, however, the two communities have begun much cooperation on economic issues, especially in promotion of tourism. In 1999 the two presidents convened to address settlements of old grievances and enlargement of cooperation, possibly including some renewed political links, since even limited reunification would permit mutual economic gains and improve the chances of Cyprus’s gaining future admission to the European Union, which already includes Greece but not Turkey. It is likely that any joint regime would have to approximate the egalitarian confederal model that had been unsuccessfully explored by Czecho-slovakia, although a federation cannot be ruled out (cf. Rotberg 1998; Theophylactu 1995). Both regime and antiregime coalitions are also often ethnic in African states. Apartheid South Africa explicitly stratified racial groups. Even some black-ruled African states have neglected Frantz Fanon’s warning against a centralizing, single-party regime of one ethnic group: “This tribalizing of the central authority, it is certain, encourages regionalist ideas and separatism. All the decentralizing tendencies spring up again and triumph, and the nation falls to pieces, broken in bits” (Fanon 1968, 183). The mostly Pashtun Taliban coalition in Afghanistan is another illustration, since many other, smaller ethnicities went into violent opposition to the regime, sometimes diehard defenders of distinctive turf (Gurr 2000, 14). Class Conflict Undermining Regimes When not troubled by ethnic divisiveness, a regime coalition is often threatened by class or nonethnic stratal loyalties, as perhaps implicit in the changing French regimes mentioned previously. Avoiding a forest of qualifications, especially concerning the uncertain alliance of some of the peasantry, the noire tradition quite clearly has had more appeal to the upper classes (nobility, higher Roman Catholic clergy, upper middle class, owning peasants); the rouge, to the lower ones (lower-middle class, nonowning peasants, working class). Marx (The Eighteenth Brumaire) and De Tocqueville (Recollections) offered rather similar three-class analyses of the 1848– 52 events in France, giving much attention to the wavering leanings of the

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middle class. Class may be now receding in France, as in so many other states showing diminishing influence on voting behavior. If many political communities last for hundreds of years, and if the Roman republic regime lasted 482 years (509 B.C.–27 B.C.), the life of most regimes constitute but a few tens. One study of regimes that died in the period 1800–1971 found that they averaged only 32 years, and the regimes yet surviving in 1971 averaged only 42 years (Gurr 1974; summarized in Gurr, Jaggers and Moore 1991, 71–72). Adding many newer and smaller nation-states, a more recent study reported average regime survival as only 15–20 years (Lane and Ersson 1994, 79–80). Although the disparity is least for a consociational arrangement, at least when it remains stable, a regime coalition, in the broadest sense including mere acquiescents, is normally narrower than the political community coalition that contains it. Although a small and diminishing minority of states have ethnically homogeneous populations, a political community coalition can often be described in terms of its ethnicities with their residential regional bases, leaving out of the coalition, as earlier noted, only those wanting politically motivated emigration, absorption of the political community within some larger political unit, or else secession. A regime coalition leaves out not only any integrationists or secessionists but also any antiregime factions who would want to remake the central government, as in moving it either toward far more political egalitarianism or else toward far less. Interclass strain, like strain among stratified ethnicities, is often caused by economic failure. Perhaps in premodern economies, where few expected to be better off than their parents, the principal threat apart from catastrophic harvest failures lay in an excessive degree of economic inequality. In medieval and early modern history, two excellent studies show, growing inequality could in part arise merely from long-term declines in real incomes of workers due to long waves of inflation caused by population increase. These waves culminated in much violence and regime change (Goldstone 1991; Fischer 1996). As for recent history, a study of 29 democracies did not find measures of economic inequality to be ultimately predictive of violent deaths, riots, or government instability. Any correlations in the expected direction tended to wash out when other variables were controlled (Powell 1982, 49–53). But if not for absolute levels of inequality, one wonders whether either the direction or the velocity of change yet matters. Most studies show that economic growth in time tends to reduce national measures of income inequality (yes, “trickle down” somehow happens, perhaps more as a result of rising labor shortages than of more generous welfare or other public policies). Obviously enough, nongrowth would remove that cause of reduced income inequality. While holding that just as nationalism has become

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central in modern ideals of political community, Ernest Gellner succinctly notes this of modern regimes: “Regimes are acceptable if they can, over a period, engender growth, and they lose their authority if they do not” (Gellner 1997, 25). Whether the regimes are nondemocratic or democratic, prolonged economic stagnation, if in the absence of a high per capita income, kills them, often mediated by some kind of tumult or violence. A study of Latin American regimes since World War II found that stagnation destroyed all military regimes within three years, if permitting half the democratic regimes to last five years or more. This was almost surely because disgruntled citizens could by elections peaceably try out another party team of politicians (Limongi and Przeworski 1993; cf. also Linz and Stepan 1996, 79; Haggard and Kaufman 1995, 75, 326; Gourevitch 1986). In contrast, successful growth not only stabilizes democratic regimes but at some threshold of higher development makes them historically indestructible, at least from internal causes. In contrast, the nondemocratic regimes that are more quickly vulnerable to nongrowth are also ultimately undermined by sustained growth, apparently because of reduction of the social tensions that made them seem necessary for social order (Przeworski et al. 1996). Preoccupied with the case of the breakdown of the Weimar Republic, many political scientists used to believe that proportional representation, by causing a multiparty system, causes unstable governments in parliamentary democracies. Unstable governments then cause the democratic regime itself to be threatened. Thus Robert Dahl had theorized: “In any country where competitive politics is accompanied by a highly fractionalized party system (which in a parliamentary system is likely also to produce a weak executive) the chances for a shift toward hegemonic regime are rather high” (Dahl 1971, 123). Much of that is now recognized as invalid. Proportional representation encourages multipartyism, or rather lets socially generated diversities find party expressions in politics. But multipartyism encourages higher vote turnouts and discourages political violence, and it does not cause more rioting unless it is accompanied by “extremist” or antisystem parties, who may act subversively against governments within parliament or may encourage extraparliamentary riots without. The presence of many parties, like the presence of the parliamentary rather than presidential form of democratic regime, apparently reduces violence because interests find representation through legitimate channels, and national executive leadership may be changed, when many want change, without a coup or revolution. Again, if multipartyism can accompany governmental instability, the effect is not due to multipartyism itself but to the contingent presence of extremist parties (Powell 1982, 64, 108, 122). A new consensus holds that ready change in governments does not undermine the democratic regime but on the contrary rather stabilizes it by making coups or rebellions less attractive. This apparently explains why

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parliamentary systems are more stable for democracies than are presidential systems (Linz 1978; Linz and Valenzuela 1994; Przeworski et al. 1996, esp. 387). But one must concede that presidentialism is more common in less developed Latin America as well as Africa, as Sartori would remind us (Sartori 1997, 83–140). A median in issue space, by definition, leaves half of the set on each side of itself. If often moderate positions could save a political community, so that may often be true of a regime. Thus median regime preferences would find the midway points of opinion in two dimensions: With respect to the distribution of opinion (mass or elite) the spatial distribution of powers, it would avoid either extreme: total devolution of powers or total centralization. With respect to the distribution of opinion on the functional distribution of powers in whatever remains of central government, it would lie midway between concentration of all authority in one political unit and the other extreme of dispersion of the powers among an indefinite number of units. As in saving a marriage, the three secrets of saving a regime by its own reforms may be compromise, compromise, compromise. Yet one may doubt that earlier liberalization of the regime would have saved the Austro-Hungarian Empire from its death in 1918, and it is not clear that it could have saved the Soviet Union in 1991. However, Gorbachev notes that official polls found that 75–85 percent of the U.S.S.R. population wanted to preserve that political community, if only 40 percent favored continuation of the Communist regime (Gorbachev 1996, 640, 646–47, 650–51). An expedited change in regime could conceivably have saved the political community. But if a regime is currently satisfactory, it can be stabilized by change in unpopular authorities, in Easton’s sense (as when Canadians ousted Mulroney in 1993). The same could be said for many nondemocratic regimes, where a change in a monarch or a military dictator has given some monarchical or military regimes a lease on life. Although qualified with respect to the consociational regime, recall my earlier comment that whereas a more basic layer of coalition normally stabilizes higher layers by nonchange, higher layers often stabilize lower layers by some sort of change. We often lack good evidence of regime support. Although strong survey findings leave little room for doubt, often the measures of polls are not always clear. The media often wrongly report the “plus or minus 5 percent” as if it were maximal error, when it is only the minimal error, the literally knowable random error that can be calculated from the size of sample relative to the population. But the other, nonrandom error is difficult to estimate, if it is virtually certain that there will be some and often much (Crespi 1988, 50–52). Among numerous other sources, nonrandom survey error may arise from respondents’ misreporting themselves, sometimes because a question is politically sensitive. Although “preference falsification”

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also occurs in liberal democracies, it is most extensive in repressive nondemocracies, from which we can expect future revolutionary surprises. Hence regime support or its absence in general publics may be more difficult to estimate in nondemocratic contexts. As Kuran has emphasized in his study of East European Communist collapse, many or most falsify their preferences when their real views may be subjected to repression. Only a minority of persons such as Vaclav Havel or Lech Walesa have an intense expressive need to live their truth: “Scores of dissident writers, including Havel and Solzhenitsyn, maintained for years that communism would collapse instantly if ever their fellow citizens stopped falsifying their political preferences” (Kuran 1995, 127, 247–88). But mass publics express some views only by what is, or is expected soon to become, prevailing opinion, for “public opinion may be very sensitive to signs that it is in flux” (Kuran 1995, 82; cf. also Lohmann 1994). They may bandwagon toward where they expect opinion to read an equilibrium. Not always led by fearless dissident leaders such as Havel or Walesa, absent in some Communist states, small events may trigger rapid revelations that many share the forbidden thoughts, and with growing numbers expressing them, dissent now seems safe. Opinion change thereafter becomes self-amplifying (Kuran 1995, 247–88, 297). Ruling Communist elites took polls but withheld most results. Even allowing some respondents’ concealment of their real views, polls should have permitted elites correct inference of their unpopularity. But Kuran notes in passing that even Radio Liberty people were surprised at East European events. That is strange, since their own exit polls (of nationals traveling outside the Iron Curtain) were showing by 1975–76 that even many Communist Party members rejected their home Communist regimes! When in 1989–91 top European Communist regime leaders looked behind them for their supporters, they often found almost no one there. Support bases had withered, not likely to be recovered with belated “median” reforms. The antiregime coalition (even if of many strange bedfellows) was now known to be vast. Sometimes a median stand can be politically nowhere, since it has not been adaptive to a deeper, broader kind of coalition base. As in breakups of political communities, the demise of regimes often looks like defection in Prisoner’s Dilemma: the defectors running from the regime coalition. Regime coalitions, like political community coalitions, can often be oversized, providing some margin for defection of some element as well as expulsion. Because of uncertainty in extraparliamentary or violent contests for power, often revolutionary leaders begin with an oversize coalition, but once firmly in power, they pare it back toward minimal, as when Hitler in 1934 repressed the S.A. (Sturmabteilung), or when Lenin in 1918 accepted alienation of Social Revolutionaries and in 1920–21 dumped the anarchists.

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Relative to political communities, often partners in regime coalitions can be viewed as replaceable. Indeed, some ruling groups have gotten added lease on life by replacing one exiting partner with another offering at least as good in the way of political resources. After returning to power in Argentina, Juan Peron largely abandoned the labor unionists in favor of overtures toward business, and so on. But sometimes regime coalitions are really close to minimal (no redundant partner) and minimum (prefer the smaller of two partners that could make it winning). The minimal winning can often be far less than a majority public support, since a minority can win to the extent that the oppositions are sharply divided against themselves. In this context, it merely means that the regime coalition is likely to mobilize about the same level of capabilities as any activated opposition. As in Riker’s theory, such a narrowly based coalition is especially likely to enjoy high per capita benefits from its coalition, but at the price of potential instability (not just exit of an irreplaceable partner, but sudden coalescence of divided opponents could bring the regime down). With a minimal winning regime coalition, the exit of any partner in the coalition leaves it exposed to defeat by a uniting opposition, unless that exit is made good by the accession of a new partner (sometimes from abroad) offering as much capability as would be lost. If no such replacement is likely in the given case, let us call the would-be defector not only crucial but irreplaceable. It is often said that defection returns to being the dominant strategy in the last round of an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. But in politics, for most observers it can be impossible to predict (from French pre´dire, to say in advance) the last round, except in the special cases when the system is being crushed by a foreign army or else by a victorious domestic insurrection, as when Mao in 1949 displaced the Chiang Kai-shek regime or when Castro in 1959 displaced the Batista regime. Short of such special cases, only an irreplaceable but secretly disloyal partner (which could be any partner in a minimal regime coalition) can know the last round: His own exit defines the last round. That is, the irreplaceable partner could literally name the precise moment of regime collapse, unless another irreplaceable partner were to exit first. But if there were two or more irreplaceable partners, they could act in concert, as when the Russian, Ukranian, and Belarusian republic leaders determined in 1991 to leave the Soviet Union, thereby triggering secession of all provinces. But assuming that irreplaceable partners are not acting in concert, the backward induction problem could loom, in that each could want to advance the timing of exit, if believing that they would be better off if they got out first. Whatever the pattern, an exit of but one irreplaceable partner tips the disintegration of the whole minimal regime coalition, since by definition they could now be defeated by a rival coalition, even if the exiting

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partner were at best from the regime standpoint to remain neutral rather than joining the most threatening rival coalition. Disunification of a regime coalition and unification of an adequate antiregime coalition mean the end of a regime. But as already apparent, often shifts in program and leadership coalitions, if timely, could save a regime, provided that such changes do not suggest a steep loss of power to a necessary partner in the existing regime coalition.

4

The Program Coalition: Supporters of a Common Agenda

In our own country, whichever it may be, the management of public affairs is in the hands of a minority of influential persons, to which management, willingly or unwillingly, the majority defer. —Gaetano Mosca, Elements of Political Science (The Ruling Class)

First writing these ideas in 1896 and revising them in 1923, Mosca was convinced that every political system, even a democracy, has a distinctive ruling class that ultimately makes most important political decisions. As I interpret him, this class, in the absence of an aristocratic regime, is smaller than the regime coalition and, especially if united rather than factionalized, is perhaps comparable to our present concern, the program coalition. As noted, coalition support bases normally shrink as one moves from the political community, to the regime, and now to the prevailing group united around a common program, a shared policy agenda. Put otherwise, of the set of persons who support a regime, there is normally a subset that also supports a specific programmatic line, at least taken as a whole. Although sometimes extending to party or faction positions on aspects of the political community or the regime, the substance of program concerns normally emphasizes measures related to the Hobbesian values of safety, gain, and reputation or (1) security, (2) economic, and (3) status policies, each of which may have an international as well as a domestic side. Abstractly considered, the program coalition problem, at least in its origination and maintenance, is largely an impure coordination problem: That

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is, all potential partners of a specific coalition would like to be in agreement, but they are not indifferent to the content of the agreement. The bargaining among factions or parties before or after an election or a violent seizure of power concerns in part who gives what, but it also concerns who gets what, in part in the way of policy preferences. But who gets what in the way of cabinet or subcabinet allocations is largely postponed in many primarily parliamentary democracies to the executive or cabinet coalition formation, as addressed in Chapter 5. Program coalition formation is affected by normally antecedent political community and regime coalitions. A full accounting of program coalitions should discuss in turn how these are impacted by (1) political community, (2) regime, and (3) social cleavages as channeled through any political restraints on the political expression of factions or parties. Each of these ultimately passes through what Chapter 1 called the main principles of parliamentary program coalition formation: the aims of being part of a coalition that is winning, minimally so, with coverage of median policy space, with connectedness and closure, and with proportionality of payoffs among partners. I: POLITICAL COMMUNITY AND COMMUNITY COALITION INTERACTIONS WITH PROGRAM COALITIONS The international structural situation of a state, for instance, the dominant rules climate, the international system, and the place of a state within it, can constrain policy choice. It is arguable that the same can be said for the nature of the political community, since its level of unity or disunity may impact both its will and its capacity to pursue foreign policy objectives. At least two authors, Cottam and Cottam, suggest that it makes a difference whether there is considerable national unity by means of an identity that is primary, not secondary to some lesser ethnic identity: “Authorities in nation states, thanks to the intensity of public commitment to the nation, will have the latitude to choose policy options that involve great risk and major sacrifices in the defense of the security, prestige, and level of influence exercised by the nation state in world affairs. But once mobilized, the citizens of a nation state will expect and demand success in achieving goals attached by the leadership to national defense and prestige.” In contrast are two kinds of political communities in which the larger community is a secondary identity to lesser ethnicities, whether in what they call the multiethnic nonnation state (the lesser identities are unable to secede, as in Tanzania or India) or the multinational state (the lesser identities can secede, as illustrated by the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia before their breakups). These “do not have the ability to mobilize public support for missions to enhance the country’s prestige when those missions call for significant

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sacrifices. These states are also very vulnerable to outside interferences because of the weakness of identity with the territorial community’s state and the willingness of domestic groups to look for and use leverage gained by external actors”(Cottam and Cottam 2001, 158, 239). However, these claims cannot be generally valid: Stalin surely had high foreign policy latitude, notwithstanding being head of a multinational state. Or, leading a nation state, Ehud Barak in 2001 yet had low negotiating latitude with the Palestinians. Turning to another matter, note that whether the boundaries of a nationstate grow larger, stay the same, or get smaller can make a difference for “median” issue positions within the overall public, the electorate, or actual voters. Either loss or addition of territory with population can have great impact. Should a community disintegrate into complete anarchy in the negative sense of its critics rather than the positive vision of its advocates, quite obviously there can be no central program coalition at all. There are real world instances in Africa. Somalia is an extreme case, but others may follow. A pessimistic journalist, Robert Kaplan, writes: “Though the French are working assiduously to preserve stability, the Ivory Coast faces a possibility worse than a coup: an anarchic implosion of criminal violence—an urbanized version of what has already happened in Somalia” (Kaplan 2000, 12). In Sierra Leone even outside peacekeeping forces have been murdered or disarmed by local forces. Many African states seem to fall prey to regional warlords, often getting most of their revenues from mineral, timber, or other resources in the areas concerned. They may not formally secede from the existing state but do so in everything but the name (Reno 1998). As discussed in Chapter two, a secession can make a difference in policy alignments. There may be a part of the political community, typically having a series of reinforcing attributes that can be drawn on a map, normally near one border, usually with some expectation of economic and military viability, that would like to secede (as true of many Kurds of Turkey, Iraq, and Iran right now). Some do secede, as heretofore noted, if only temporarily as in the case of the U.S. South in 1860–65 or Biafra’s exit from Nigeria in 1967–70. Both were reincorporated by main force. Often also exclusive about who can come in (as when Macedonia fears entry of more Albanian ethics), political communities have been especially likely to block exits of persons if they want to take some territory with them. But many secessions are permanent, as illustrated by the 1971 exit of Bangladesh from Pakistan, the 1993 exit of Slovaks from Czecho-slovakia, or the 1993 exit of Eritrea from Ethiopia. How do such exits affect program coalitions? Within the seceded region, they usually enlarge support for the relevant issue positions favored by secessionists. Thus public support for slavery and low tariffs was surely higher within the Confederacy than in the original United States. Viewed

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from the other side, secession usually diminishes support for those issues in the population of the remainder of the original state. The “median” positions on policy issues thus shift. Secession can also impact certain kinds of politically relevant resource distributions. The Slovak Republic’s exit was not favored by public opinion in either the Czech lands or Slovakia. It was carried out by elite actions led by two specific individuals. It permitted Vaclav Klaus a green light on privatization of state-owned firms on the Czech lands, since the Slovaks had favored a go slow approach. It also permitted the populist Vladimir Mecˆiar within the Slovak Republic to delay privatization, as well as to act repressively toward the minority Magyar as well as Romany (Gypsy) cultures. Economically it was followed by a tortoise and hare result, the Czech Republic’s leaping ahead but later slowing down, the laggard Slovak economy’s eventually doing better. A secession of Que´bec from Canada now seems less likely, since support levels have by most surveys contracted from nearly 50 percent to about 40 percent of the Que´bec electorate. But as a thought experiment, how would a secession of Que´bec impact what would remain of Canada? One could expect it to lessen francophone pressures to extend bilingualism, since over half of Canada’s French speakers live in Que´bec. It would also impact the political parties: The Progressive Conservatives, yet smarting from their near-mortal electoral defeat in 1993, would not be hurt, since they never had a large electorate within Que´bec. In 2000 many Progressive Conservatives abandoned their label to join forces with the western-based Reform Party in the Canadian Alliance. In the western provinces, especially British Columbia and Alberta, the Canadian Alliance could gain strength, even if part of the appeal to its core constituencies had been resistance to more concessions to the francophones. But the Liberal Party has enjoyed much support within Que´bec, including some francophones as well as anglophones, and it could be weakened at the Dominion level by the exit of Que´bec. When the de facto loss of Kosovo province in 1999 increased, by migration, the number of hypernationalist Serbs in what remains of Yugoslavia, it surprisingly caused the exit from Milosˆovic´’s parliamentary and cabinet coalitions of some hypernationalist parliamentarians, disgruntled over his acceptance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) demands after the bombing campaign against him. If loss of territory can affect program demand, an addition of territory and population can also shift median public opinion. This was well recognized in the antebellum period of American history, when the addition of either free or slave states to the union was expected to shift not only the balance in national public opinion but more importantly that in Congress, especially in the Senate. The 1990 reunification of Germany added about 16 million people, of whom 8 million were eligible voters. The easterners (“Ossies”) were not

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always different from the westerners (“Westies”), but even similar opinion could have distinctive causes: Thus xenophobia was about equal in the two regions, even if most foreign born workers were in the west. The relative scarcity of guest workers in the east was offset by higher anxiety about unemployment in that region. But on other matters, differences were glaring: For one, easterners were far more secular, having been long exposed in public education to Communist official atheism, not the Protestant or Catholic religious training provided even within the public schools of West Germany. A 1994 Politbarometer Study found that 67.1 percent of the easterners report themselves as nonreligious, compared to only 10.8 percent in the West (Dalton 1996, 191). This could quite obviously shift the median issue position on the West German practice of publicly subsidizing religious instruction. The religious third of easterners are more Protestant or less Catholic than in the West. Perhaps related to both religious identities and policy practice, East Germans on the abortion issue were far more prochoice than right-to-life. Also, with a far less developed economy, with greater anxiety about unemployment levels (in 2001 nearly 18 percent, over double that of the Westies), they were less environmentalist than were West Germans. All of this affected relative strength of political parties within the whole of united Germany. Moving roughly from Left to Right, adding the East rather unexpectedly aided the Green Party, which had in West Germany recently fallen below the 5 percent minimum threshold for representation in the Bundestag. The Greens, even if their environmental fervor was distrusted by Ossies, allied with the East German Alliance 90 roughly to double their strength. Accession of the East did little for the German Socialist Party (SPD), even if most Ossies had socialist leanings and three-fifths wanted to see the SPD dominant in the federal government. The reason was that East German leftists held fast to their regional interest Party of Democratic Socialism, the renamed, premerger German Communist Party (KPD). Chancellor Helmut Kohl quickly reincorporated the East, but that did not help his Christian Democrats, who had been slipping in electorate identifiers and voters, from about 40 percent to some 35 percent, in part because of campaign secret slush fund scandals. Adding the East Germans only briefly boosted the strength of the also waning liberals, the Free Democrats, perhaps because of the popularity of Kohl’s Free Democrat foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher. Once Genscher left office, Free Democrats quickly lost ground in the East, where marketization had produced severe dislocations. Russ Dalton, whose edited volume offers most of the preceding information, notes that even party voter bases were different in the western and eastern parts of the reunified Germany. In the west, the CDU appeals to the higher-income religious, whereas in the east, it appeals to largely secular members of the working class, the majority of whom

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there vote CDU. Similarly, the SPD attracts workers in the west, but in the east it appeals to middle-class elements (Dalton 1996, esp. 16, 186). Like analysis could be extended to the 1975 reunification of Vietnam, or to the potential reunification of Korea. Thus the Vietnamese Communist ruling elite were probably spurred toward their marketization reforms by the incorporation of South Vietnam. Other such shifts in public opinion within a political community may be due to politically unbalanced net migration or net natural increase (excess of births over deaths). Net migration is closely watched where it could quite quickly impact the political community. Thus Macedonia, which already had a border area citizenry of ethnic Albanians, has been fearful of permanent settlement of Albanian Kosovar refugees within its borders; some ethnic Albanians rebelled in 2001. A number of African states have difficulty in controlling immigrations. As noted earlier, even Aristotle was well aware of how uneven natural increase of population groups could cause instability. Such an impact became obvious in the case of growth of Lebanon’s lower-income Shi’a Islam population, a main cause along with Palestinian refugee presence (including the Palestine Liberation Organization up to 1982) of the 1975–76 breakdown of Lebanon’s consociational democracy. By whatever route they enter, new members of a political community can much affect public opinion as it may relate to support of program coalitions. Foreign policies toward original homelands are an obvious example. Generational turnover and new learning (resocialization) are also important in general public opinion change. Although it is difficult to foresee tipping points, the stability of public opinion tends to be a reasonable expectation in the short run but a most unreasonable assumption for the longer run. Thus in most economically advanced democracies, “class” (or socioeconomic status) has been weakening as a predictor of opinion and voting behavior. Sometimes opinion change of individuals can be hidden in aggregate measures of public opinion, when those shifting one way are roughly balanced by those shifting the other way. A change in the importance of issues can shift the salient identity of a “people” within an existing political community. An identity originally forged for security may shift to some other goal value, such as livelihood. Thus in 1947, many East Pakistanis (mostly Bengalis) chose to define themselves not by language but as Muslim, perceiving a security threat from even Bengali-speaking Hindus in the newly independent India. But feeling that they had been inequitably treated by West Pakistanis, they shifted to self-definition in part by the Bengali language, seeing their interest in more autonomy or even separation from Punjabi-dominated West Pakistan. In 1971 the East Pakistanis formed the new nation of Bangladesh with the assistance of Indian armed intervention. Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, largely because Saddam Hussein feared sub-

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version by Khomeini. Most Iraqis then chose to identify with Arabspeaking Iraq, and even Shiite Iraqis found that identity more attractive than identifying with Farsi-speaking but largely Shiite Iran. That is, they seemed to fear the Iranians more than the Baghdad government. But that devastating war stalemated in a de facto truce (the Iraqis claimed victory in winning two territorial concessions, even if they had to give them back to placate Iran during the Gulf War). Iran seemed less threatening. When at a later point Iraq had invaded Kuwait and then was ousted largely by U.S. armed forces in 1991, many Shiite Iraqis of the southern area (“marsh Arabs” in the contemptuous language of Saddam Hussein) in perhaps a mix of security and livelihood motives sought separation from Baghdad, and in northern Iraq, the Kurds sought autonomy as well. Because the United States could be expected to offer some sympathy (and eventually air cover), southern Iraqi Shiites and northern Kurds found it strategically plausible to seek their autonomy after the defeat of Iraq. Whereas the southerners were eventually repressed, the often divided Kurds of northern Iraq retained into 2001 an autonomy protected by the Gulf War victors’ imposition of a “no-fly zone” against Iraqi military aircraft. Ultimately even more basic social identities may also be subject to change. Anything instrumental is contingent, even if real while it remains useful. II: REGIME AND REGIME COALITION INTERACTIONS WITH PROGRAM COALITION Having suggested how political community variables may relate to program coalition formation, I now look at how the regime type or its supporting coalition may be influential. To some extent statements can be made about program coalitions that apply to all regime forms. Thus, leaving aside any program elements concerning the political community or the regime itself, the chief program fields concern security, economic, and status policies. Most policy preferences in such matters are anchored in political identities. Not surprisingly, core constituencies of a coalition roughly predict the coalition’s program or policy agenda, if “political parties try to minimize the strangeness of their bedfellows” (Axelrod 1997, 69). That may be subject to trade-off considerations, often including bargaining with oppositions or just enough policy concessions to non–coalition members to preserve a regime and political community. Thus the domestic or international security of favored groups matters more than that of disfavored ones. This can make foreign policy salient to the extent that those similar to a core constituency are threatened in some foreign setting, as when many American ethnic groups have special solicitude for coethnics in lands of ancestral or personal origin. In economic policy, agents tend to want minimal regulation or taxation of their key constituencies. Thus in tax policy, the French historian of fi-

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Figure 4.1 International Competitiveness as Influencing Domestic Economic Sector Political Coalitions

The author’s adaptation from Ronald Rogowski, Commerce and Coalitions: How Trade Affects Domestic Political Alignments. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989.

nance Gaston Je`ze observed that parties strive to shift the tax burden from their own supporters onto the supporters of rival parties. Yet agents often favor high budgetary expenditures benefiting their supporters, with roughly opposite preferences for noncoalition groups, especially if sharp rivals. Foreign policy may assume economic importance when it concerns an important flow of income, as in Rogowski’s suggestion of how international competitiveness affects domestic political coalitions as uniting either free trade sectors or protectionists. I illustrate that in my Figure 4.1 (Rogowski 1989). Finally, agents tend to favor a variety of policies that bolster the status— the social symbolic standing or prestige—of their core constituencies (designated holidays to honor their heroes, recognitions on public coinage, favorable attention in school texts, and the like). Perhaps public policies regarding religions are also largely of status concern, even if they can sometimes concern security and economic advantages as well.

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But the specific kind of regime can also affect program coalitions. As noted in Chapter 3, there presently exist eight main regime types, including these normally openly nondemocratic forms: (1) traditional monarchies, (2) military dictatorships, (3) counterrevolutionary dictatorships, and (4) revolutionary dictatorships; there are four more types which purport to be liberal democratic regimes, (5) merely nominal democracies, (6) mixed presidential–parliamentary, (7) presidential, and (8) parliamentary. III: NONDEMOCRATIC REGIMES AND THEIR PROGRAM COALITIONS Let us first examine program coalition problems in those regimes that quite openly prevent legal oppositions. Such regimes went into steep decline in the 1980s and 1990s, as democracies grew to 74 percent of all regimes (Karatnycky 1997). Traditional Monarchies and Program Coalitions A traditional monarchy involves the monarch in ruling, not merely reigning as under the constitutional monarchic form, which is usually a parliamentary popular regime in which the monarch serves in the more ceremonial role of chief of state rather than chief executive. Except when its leaders are accepting a transition to democracy, no form of autocratic or nondemocratic regime, including the merely nominal democracy, tolerates any real opposition program coalition. But if public oppositions are targets of repression, rulers may not succeed in preventing underground oppositions, which may even coalesce around their shared objection to the repression itself. The traditional monarchy almost defines the regime by the ruling dynasty and its current royal incumbent. Although the royal family is usually regarded as at the top of the heap, such regimes historically have emphasized a policy program of preserving social ranks or hierarchies, sometimes even specifying distinctive clothing or other consumption patterns for them. A traditional monarch, as earlier noted, has typically been pressed into coalition with other large landowners, any high priests, and sometimes any praetorian (palace-linked) military force as well. Often traditional monarchs who would war with neighboring monarchs in order to take some of their land would as readily unite with such monarchs when rebellious peasants tried to take land from them, usually easily repressing them because they failed to link up with peasants elsewhere. Ruling monarchies were most stable when middle classes were sparse. Merchants were sometimes sharply disesteemed as well as massively taxed, as in traditional Japan. Most traditional monarchs spurned further coalescence with merchants, at least before recent history, when the growing numbers of

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merchants, associated lawyers, and so on, forced some to change. Thus Portugal was a major exception; there the monarch was allied with merchants after the 1383–85 popular revolution (Fausto 1999, 2–3). Although permitted to praise the monarch, any lower classes were normally politically inactive, apart from occasional urban bread riots or ineffectual peasant rebellions. In a traditional monarchy, the regime coalition includes all who favor that form of rule, but a program coalition tends to have a narrower base. A program coalition can sometimes have a dynastic base, as when Marx, in his Eighteenth Brumaire, plausibly suggested that in mid-19th-century France competing Bourbon and Orle´aniste monarchists reflected coalitions focused, respectively, on landed estates and finance capital. Alternatively, even assuming commitment to the same dynasty, rival program coalitions may focus about just who is to rule as the monarch. That may predict specific policies as well as determine access to such perquisites as lands and attached peasants, offices, and special honors. Challenger coalitions may attempt to exclude the heir apparent, depose him, or sometimes even turn to assassination. Normally the effective coalition base of a traditional monarchy, if sometimes expressible in part in ethnic or other terms, is formed from within the upper class, sometimes reaching into the middle class. This is not to deny that often lower class members such as the peasantry may be mobilized to fight and die for their monarch, a fact that Oscar Wilde called the true tragedy of the French Revolution. But monarchies may be sorted a number of ways, perhaps most usefully by main rules in the inheritance of property and of the power of the royal office. One can imagine a two-bytwo table (not supplied) wherein property does or does not pass by primogeniture or inheritance of land by the “first born” (usually the son only) and where the crown does or does not pass by primogeniture, whether to the literal eldest son of the monogamous ruler or else usually to the eldest son of his designated chief queen in polygamous societies such as traditional China, where the principal queen was called the Empress (cf. Finer 1997, 483–84, 488). Polygamy tended to increase contested successions. Consider first systems in which both property and crown pass by primogeniture. This characterized most of feudal Europe (although property passed to the youngest son in Saxony, where the Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, was a hapless eldest son of a mine owner). It also characterized post-15th-century Russia and traditional Japan. Primogeniture in inheritance of land meant the accumulation of large and powerful aristocratic estates. Often their presence in the coalition meant pressures for not only a relatively decentralized regime concerning regulations, taxation, and so forth, but also a centralized program of war to expand the state’s territory, since added lands were likely to be parceled out among such coalition members (Kautsky 1982). Another high program priority was royal coordina-

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tion of the repression of peasant insurrections anywhere in the domain. Further, powerful nobles sought exemption from taxation, as in France (traditionally argued from the duty of nobles to provide their military service to the king), and shift of a high tax burden to the merchants and peasants. Primogeniture in inheritance of the crown removed ambiguity as to the lawful heir of a deceased or incapacitated monarch, reducing the importance of coalition formation prior to a succession. Yet the heir could sometimes lose the throne if the coalition did not include the majority of powerful lords. In the case of Japan, some of such lords (the daimyo) effectively usurped imperial power—if emperors retained symbolic authority—in the long sway of the Tokugawas (1603–1868). One feature distinctive to monarchical coalitions is extensive use of marriages as bonds of coalition, and this may apply either when primogeniture is followed or when the crown could be designated to royal family members other than the eldest son. It also had the side consequence, especially in regions of militant exogamy such as West Europe, of meaning that often a prince would have territories in scattered locales, lacking a compact or contiguous territorial sway. That quite obviously made it more difficult to defend all territory. In the second case, primogeniture could apply to inheritance of land but not to inheritance of the throne. This was true of Russia prior to the 15th century, when a throne could pass to a member of the royal family other than the eldest son, such as a brother or a younger son. The designated heir among the many princes of royal blood was called the grand prince. In the early history of the Muscovite dynasty the succession was, not surprisingly, often contested. As G. Edward Orchard describes it: In Muscovite history a standard pattern is replicated several times. A youthful grand prince succeeds to the throne, his accession contested by ambitious relatives. Things are held together by a powerful churchman and a handful of loyal boyars. Eventually the grand prince’s authority becomes established, usually aided by the grace and favor of the Tatar khan. The Muscovite territory continues to expand through piecemeal inheritances, acquisitions, purchases and conquests. (Orchard 1999, xv)

The boyars were the greatest noble families, eventually to be no more than 40–60 when Russia completed its expansion (Anderson 1974, 335). The ruling coalition is evident enough in Orchard’s statement, although he should note that Russian Orthodox clergy tended to have less weight than Roman Catholic clergy in the West. Also, sometimes a rival coalition succeeded, built around some other prince of the royal blood. Challengers would characteristically offer specific estates (both the land and attached peasants) or positions to secure needed allies. Unsuccessful rebels could be executed or blinded, or sometimes simply forgiven and effectively confined to their estates. If successful in a contest of arms, usurpers also did not

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always execute captured Tsars, sometimes imprisoning, blinding, or exiling them instead (Soloviev 1999). In the third case, no primogeniture held of land inheritance, but the throne was passed by primogeniture. Such was traditional China dating from the end of the feudalism (most decisively with the Legalist Qin Empire, 221 B.C.) to the fall of the Qing dynasty (1912). The fact that property was subdivided among all sons (alas, not daughters) meant that China would not easily develop great private estates that could finance armed forces and hence rival royal authority. Rather, under the centralized bureaucratic system called patrimonial, any large holdings were only used by those state officials granted them by the emperors. Under such “Oriental despotism,” the emperor was in effect the ultimate owner of all properties. Karl Wittfogel has argued that the backbone of the regime was the large bureaucracy required to supervise the irrigation works, but that required by the standing army was arguably more important (Wittfogel 1957). But small holdings abounded in China. Hence if any challenge arose to imperial power within China, when not led by a lower class person as in the fall of the Qin dynasty, it would often be led by a coalition of state officials, including military officers, Confucian scholar gentry, palace eunuchs, or sometimes even angry Buddhist monks. In the last case there was neither primogeniture in inheritance of land nor in the inheritance of a throne. This describes the traditional Islamic monarchy. The Ottoman system was patrimonial, as in China. Although it formally exempted Islamic religious endowments and effectively exempted homesites, vineyards, and orchards, all fields and grasslands belonged to the sultan, who could authorize use by others. Under the Islamic law (shari’a) in property succession each son inherits an equal share, and each daughter inherits a half-share (although in Ottoman law, if there were no male heirs, daughters had only life use of such property). As in classical China, here again property titles tended to be weak, in contrast to those in feudal Europe. Holding of property was eclipsed by official position or a kith/kin nexus in predicting influence over royal policy. But as in pre-15thcentury Muscovy, succession to the throne could be contested unless there was a clearly designated heir. In historical Islamic society, as in Saudi Arabia to this day, this was often a brother to the ruler. Recently, the dying King Hussein of Jordan belatedly shifted the designated heir from brother to son. If succession is parlous, it helps to have time to build your coalition in advance. Early in the Ottoman Empire, the designated heir would at ascension then remove possible rivals by having any of his many brothers from the harem strangled with a bowstring. Later Ottoman sultans more mercifully closely confined their brothers. None of the new states of the Americas chose to retain monarchy but for Brazil, as a result of the Portuguese royal family’s relocating there when Napoleon invaded Portugal in 1807. Brazil’s second and last king, Dom

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Pedro II, was deposed in 1889. If autocrats yet abound, hereditary monarchical rule has largely vanished from the world but for residual presence in parts of the Islamic regions as well as the small states of Lesotho and Tonga. Even Nepal permits oppositions today. As merchants, manufacturers, associated lawyers and accountants, and so on, grew in numbers and wealth, sometimes traditional monarchs would play them off against their other coalition partners to permit their more absolutist rule, freed of any class dependency and relying only on the state apparatus. By this view of Marx and Engels, traditional monarchs had the highest program autonomy during the age of royal absolutism. Although they also extend the model backward to Louis XIV, Marx and Engels called this “Bonapartism,” and saw it when landowners were arrayed against merchants (under Louis XIV or Napoleon, e.g.) and then again when the risen bourgeoisie was similarly counterbalanced by a rising proletariat (Louis Bonaparte’s reign as emperor in France, 1851–1870, was ended by his capture by Prussia in the Franco-Prussian War). By playing off top classes against each other, such rulers gained maximal autonomy in their program, even if Marx and Engels emphasized that they always came down on the side of property. Some later Marxists extended the Louis Bonaparte variant to explain fascist dictatorships of Mussolini and Hitler. But one well-informed critic, Perry Anderson, holds that royal absolutism conceded little to the bourgeoisie, if it helped by standardizing measures or reviving Roman civil law and providing less ambiguous property rights. Like more limited monarchy. it was yet based firmly on the aristocracy, if having added new elements such as a large standing army and more efficient central bureaucracy, especially in tax gathering. It also differed in more prolonged refusals to convene the Estates. Anderson summarizes, “Absolutism was essentially just this: a redeployed and recharged apparatus of feudal domination, designed to clamp the peasant masses back into their traditional social position—despite and against the gains they had won by the widespread commutation of dues. In other words, the Absolutist State was never an arbiter between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie . . . it was the new political carapace of a threatened nobility” (Anderson 1974, 18). In Russia, tsarist absolutism traditionally played off not bourgeoisie against aristocracy but big aristocrats (boyars) against smaller ones (Anderson 1974, 336 n.14). Whatever one may think of Bonapartist theory, eventually an even stronger middle class normally succeeds in either domesticating monarchs to a constitutionally narrowed role or, in default of that, simply displacing them. They often do this as in English history by adding to their coalition some disgruntled members of the nobility (e.g., Locke’s patron, the earl of Shaftesbury) as well as lower-middle class allies (cf. Ashcraft 1986). With reference to the principles of coalition theory, such monarchs could no longer “cover” socially median issue space, whereas a militarily strong op-

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position coalition could. Failure of program coalition here registers in failure of the monarchical regime coalition, no longer remediable by enlisting of support of a foreign monarchy. This rout of monarchies has continued to our time, when the last remaining ruling monarchs are primarily in the Islamic world, often weakly maintained in office by the domestic largesse permitted by oil wealth and by external military assistance from developed, oil-importing nations. As indicative of the Right-ward slant of the coalition base, a year 2000 International Labor Organization Report that such Islamic monarchies as Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates prohibit labor unions, and Bahrein and Qatar severely restrict them, which is not surprising. The shah of Iran was not a true hereditary monarch of a venerable dynasty, as he sought to imply by his belated and costly recoronation ceremony, since his father, Reza Khan, was a mere military officer who had made a coup d’e´tat in 1921 and deposed the last dynasty in 1925. The shah did not attempt to win coalition backing of large, ordinary landowners and the top clergy of the Shi’a Islamic faith, monasteries of which also held large bequests of land. He offended both groups in pushing a land reform program and generally favoring Westernization. Though he attempted to win the support of the military by massive expenditure on Western arms (largely American), when push came to shove the military did not stand behind him. He had lost support from the merchant class, the bazaaris, through tax policy, and the intelligentsia and students deserted him because of the repression carried out by the secret police (Savak) apparatus. In the last analysis, no one at all stood behind him when he was deposed in 1979 (cf. Bill 1988a, 1988b; Zonis 1991). Military Dictatorships and Program Coalitions If one may sort monarchies by rules of succession in property and power, there is no obvious structural approach to classification of military dictatorships. But they can be distinguished by their ascendant purposes in having made a coup, which may often predict their supportive coalition. Various classes of military dictatorships have been defined by others (e.g., Schmitter 1973; Nordlinger 1977; Decalo 1990; Deng and Zartman 1991; Remmer 1991). Among other subtypes are the barracks revolt over strictly military grievances, the caretaker intervention seeking only to establish order until an election, and the military regime of indefinite purpose and duration. Some of these last can be long-lived, as true of the essentially military regimes of Paraguay’s Alfredo Stroessner, who ruled for 35 years, 1954–89, or Indonesia’s General Suharto, who ruled for 32 years (1966– 98). In Nicaragua, the Somoza family dynasty ruled half a century up to the fall of Anastasio Somoza in 1979.

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In the 19th century, the typical Latin America military dictator was overtly supported by large landowners and the local Roman Catholic church hierarchy. But that was the model Samuel Huntington has called “oligarchical praetorianism,” often later followed by a more “radical praetorianism” aimed not at preservation of privileges of landlords and high clergy but rather at nationalism, reforms, and economic development. This was a shift to middle class reforms, in large part reflected in the middle class circumstances of the often lower rank (e.g., colonels, not top generals) officers who first made such coups. Yet after aiding middle class “breakthroughs,” Huntington adds, often later coups by the military in such states (e.g., Latin America, Turkey) again became conservative once lower class masses, especially if including the cities, were mobilized into politics. Now the military may split into “moderates” who see any coup as but a temporary dictatorship, as “guardians” of order and the basic institutions of society, and as “hard-liners,” who may see the military role as a more longterm veto group, sometimes displacing the moderates in a second round of coup d’e´tat. The military and intelligentsia are unlikely to coalesce successfully against the numerous peasantry (as some saw in Ataturk’s revolution in Turkey), and a coalescence of intelligentsia and peasants means a social revolution (as under Lenin or Mao). But a coalition of military and peasant may be reasonably stable, suggests Huntington, provided that the military bury their normal aversion to political parties and perhaps even sponsor one, thus helping develop institutions that can cope with mass participation without sinking into revolutionary chaos (Huntington 1968, 192–263). Yet the typical support basis of the military coup now is primarily military units, joined often by certain business sectors, sharing a common cause in removing leftist forces (students, journalists, labor union leaders, socialist party leaders) from political prominence (Schmitter 1973; Nordlinger 1977; Remmer 1991). Elsewhere, Francisco Franco, in prosecuting the Spanish Civil War, 1936–39, made a ramshackle coalition of many kinds of social elite groups, including even Carlist monarchists as well as a fringe of fascists in the Falange organization. Whereas Spanish coins long claimed that Franco was “Caudillo by the Grace of God,” the coalition’s common cause was preventing a socialist–Communist coalition government from taking power after a Left electoral victory (cf. Brennan 1943). The 1967 Greek coup anticipated a comparable electoral victory of the Left. The fall 1973 Chilean coup reacted to both a Left plurality win of the presidency and then a gain by the Left in the congressional election held earlier, in spring 1973. Relative to traditional monarchies, military regime coalitions suffer from grave informational deficiencies when coups are launched. Many would-be coups are launched with undersized coalitions, leaving the coup leaders exposed to repression and personal defeat (usually pardons or exile in Latin

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America, but often imprisonment or execution in Africa or Asia). It is difficult for coup planners to anticipate which commanders will mobilize their forces, especially across any divisions of army, navy, or air force. Coup makers who succeed in taking power may have the other problem of oversized coalition. This may be trimmed back once in power, since redundant partners (especially propertied elites who did not themselves make the coup) make too many demands on the military, sometimes beyond the goals of coup planners. The military are experts in coercive control, and often the central element of a program is more vigorous prosecution of an internal war (often much more violent, sometimes involving death squad operations as evident under Pinochet of Chile or Galtieri of Argentina). Or again, it may involve militant expansion of some old or new external war, as when General Musharraf overthrew the civilian government of Pakistan when it yielded to world community pressures to withdraw Pakistani regular armed forces from portions of Kashmir ruled by India. Often excepting military budgets, economic programs may involve austerity to curb inflation. Yet any immediate effect of nongrowth may defeat a military dictatorship faster than a democratic system. There is no known cross-national correlation of military rule with growth. But if a specific military regime should enjoy high growth, it may make military rule seem redundant to the extent that social tensions may abate. In contrast, growth has always favored stability for democratic regimes, and very high development seems to preserve them indefinitely (Przeworski, Alvarez, Cheibub, and Limongi 1996). As in Latin America, in Africa often military dictatorships effectively push from the political arena such groups as journalists, lawyers, students, or labor unionists. But once the military regime begins to falter, these come crowding back in (Decalo 1990; Deng and Zartman 1991). A rather common aim in Africa is to counter the central party government dominance of a rival ethnicity. As Edward Feit once quipped, African political parties were “the continuation of tribal warfare by other means” (Connor 1994, 65 n.65). In Nigeria such rivals are the Hausa of the north, the Yoruba of the west and northwest, and the Ibo-Ibibio (Igbo) peoples of the east, peoples who did not even know themselves as such a century ago. Although sometimes a junta may share authority, military regimes normally peak out in an autocrat. Speaking broadly, although there is an occasional progressive, reforming dictator, a populist with some appeal to small peasants or workers, most of such dictatorships have effectively based themselves on upper to middle class elements. Often the leader comes into power with pledges to offer greater security against some foreign enemy or a domestic rebellion. Also, such a leader may in Asia as well as Africa decry the corruption of the prior government and pledge (as did Musharraf in Pakistan, 1999) to get rid of governmental corruption, although often their military followings secretly intend to cut themselves into the gains,

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from which they had been largely excluded by civilian politicians or a distinctive set of the military. A military dictatorship always rests rather directly on elements of the armed forces with their own special interests. Normally most branches of the armed forces concur in wanting a greater overall military budget, but they may not agree on allocations of expenditure among such service units as paramilitary police, army, navy, and air force. One study of military coups concluded that a majority are primarily concerned with interests peculiar to the military rather than larger public policy (Thompson 1973). When a barracks revolt merely concerns pay, promotions, and so forth, it is less likely to have linked up with other elements of society to form a strong antiregime coalition. Although coups may sometimes involve a paramilitary police (as with Chile’s Carabineros in 1973, once the prior leader was shot for not going along), ordinary police forces are rarely involved in a coup effort. Even when the military gets beyond questions of military budgets or policy, motives may focus on an issue of primary military concern, such as disgruntlement over civilian command in the prosecution of a foreign war or suppression of a domestic rebellion. But if the military occasionally does concern itself with larger policy questions, it usually has been typically either center-Right or Right in leanings. Increasingly, would-be leaders of military coups may have to anticipate not only the domestic support coalition but also acquiescence or resistance by outside powers, such as a neighboring state or a regional association. Thus a recent coup in Haiti was reversed by Organization of American States authority, including American paratroops already in the air. External interventions are increasing in sub-Saharan Africa. Sometimes an essentially military regime may operate as what I call a nominal democracy, impeding effective oppositions in the media or in elections, or else large domains of public policy are effectively reserved for military decision. Often, with recent historical examples in Guatemala or in Pakistan prior to the 1999 coup, the military prefer to function as a perhaps unwanted silent partner of the civilian leadership, wielding an effective veto over any policy directions they may oppose. Counterrevolutionary Regime If the typical military regime asks little more than political quiescence, leaving alone those who leave politics alone, a modern counterrevolutionary regime may demand mass mobilization, asking severe prosecution of revolutionaries with international links, as when the fascists of Italy or Nazis of Germany rode anticommunism as well as xenophobia into power. Cross-border conquest rather than mere subversion of neighboring states may also go with a counterrevolutionary regime.

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As I use the term here, counterrevolutionary refers to a radicalism of the Right, in the common sense of the Right as defending more rather than less socioeconomic inequality. Often this involves an idealization of the past, including a more patriarchal family model. As a rough rule of thumb, a counterrevolutionary coalition upon taking power, sometimes after a pretense of concern with lower class interests, often ultimately narrows or shifts its coalition further Right. In contrast, a revolutionary coalition, for the most, ultimately shifts its coalition base further Left, cutting off any lower-middle or middle class party or movement affiliations used upon coming to power. As one form of counterrevolutionary ruling coalition, a fascist regime typically began with autonomous paramilitary units of its own, but it eventually included in the coalition base officers of some regular military units. Fascist regimes enjoyed sympathetic judiciaries and financial support from at least some large property owners, as well as many small contributions and votes from the middle, lower-middle, and even some working class elements of society (Griffin 1991). As with some military and revolutionary autocracies, such regimes may begin with oversize coalitions because of uncertainty of winning. Benito Mussolini had been a member of the Socialist Party before World War I, even the editor of its journal, Avanti, in 1912. But in 1914 he was expelled from the party because he advocated Italy’s quitting neutrality to fight the Central Powers in World War I. Like later followers, he apparently had nationalist zeal to win Austro-Hungarian territories populated by Italian nationals (the irredenta, or “unredeemed ones”). In the years just after the war, severe labor conflicts had arisen against both industrialists and agricultural landowners. But landowners of north Italy, hating socialist peasant unions, fearing squatters on their land, and loving fascist goon squads who thrashed union leaders, soon found themselves leading or supporting the Fascist movement organized by Mussolini. Not surprisingly, in 1921 Mussolini abandoned his earlier agrarian reform talk of breakup of large estates. But although membership of the Fascist Party included major upper and middle class elements (even near 60 percent if one includes university students), it also included about 40 percent workers, urban and agrarian. These probably included many demobilized soldiers with grievances against the Socialist Party (from which the Italian Communist Party would separate in 1921). Mussolini demanded power or he would take it. Out of nationalism and anti-Communism, most of the Italian establishment favored letting him take power, including “the monarchy, many large landowners and industrialists, much of the army and the Church, the more fervently reactionary, anti-socialist sections of the middle classes and even some right wing Liberals, such as Croce, who longed for an end to weak government” (Griffin 1991, 79). His threat aside, Mussolini in 1922 was by lawful process invited to assume the premiership, before any of his Fas-

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cist fighting squads marching toward Rome had arrived there. He formed a coalition government and secured votes of confidence. Whereas in the last free election of 1921 the Fascists got at most 15 percent of the vote, by 1924, because of favorable change in the electoral laws, fraudulent counting, low voter turnout, and intimidations of candidates, he was to have two-thirds of the voters and parliament behind him. The Communists and a then-divided Socialist Party fought each other too much to defeat fascism. In 1925–26, Mussolini eventually repressed not only political enemies such as Communists and socialists but all other parties, while also imposing press controls (Pollard 1998, 27–54). In 1926 he also weakened labor unions by prohibiting strikes, forcing disputes rather to be, if necessary, arbitrated by Labor Courts. For the most his program was always opportunistic, and he once reportedly quipped, “My program is simple. I want to govern.” If earlier calling for progessive taxation and worker control, by 1921 he was reassuring industrialists of his reliability. Against his early announcement in favor of republicanism, he did not abolish the Italian monarchy. Against 1919 expressions of anticlericalism and commitment to abolition of revenues of Roman Catholic bishops, by 1921 he was praising the church, and he would by 1929 even sign the Lateran Pacts between his state and the Vatican. Always much underrepresented relative to their major presence in the population, rural and urban workers tended to diminish as a percentage of party membership during Mussolini’s rule, even as membership rose from under 0.3 million in 1921 to 5 million by 1943 (Pollard 1998, 62). As Allied forces pushed upward from the south, Mussolini was repudiated by his own Grand Council of Fascism. As a last gambit, he pretended to reendorse a kind of socialism in north Italy. But by April 1945 he was caught and executed by Italian partisans when trying to flee with his mistress to Switzerland. Adolf Hitler shared Mussolini’s visceral distaste for communism as well as liberalism. Just before his ascent to power in 1933, he did not lay out a detailed program but simply repudiated the Weimar Republic legacy, saying, “Away with all illusions” (Bullock 1952, 235). Hitler’s voting and Nazi Party membership bases were primarily Lutheran middle class; typical voters were farmers, small town shopkeepers, urban civil servants, or bank clerks (Griffin 1991). The Nazi vote rose to a peak of 37 percent in 1932, the last really free election, although it reached 43.9 percent in the impaired election of 1933. Hitler entered power by coalescing with parties of the Right, until eventually he had them dissolve themselves, having already proscribed the Socialists and Communists (Bullock 1952, 168–241). Hitler was no socialist, notwithstanding using the label National Socialist. He had earlier worked with the Sturmabteilung (S.A.) (“storm detachment”), also known as the “Brown Shirts,” which became a very large organization of some 2.5 million, many of them working class. Some S.A. leaders such as the brothers Otto and Gregor Strasser as well as Gottfried

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Feder actually urged some socialist ideas. Yet even as early as 1930 Hitler said to Otto Strasser: “Do you think that I should be so mad as to destroy business life? Only if people fail to act in the interests of the nation, then— and then only—would the State intervene. But for that you do not need any expropriation, you do not need to give the workers the right to have a voice in the conduct of business” (Baynes 1969, Vol. 1, 111). By the time he took power, Hitler also had rejected other S.A. ideas such as confiscation of princely estates. In part because its men being trained in arms were exceeding its own, the military feared the S.A. and wanted it abolished. By 1934 Hitler was denouncing alleged sodomy and disloyalty to his person within the S.A. We do not know whether he took seriously the implausible accusations of Himmler and Goering that Ernst Ro¨hm planned a coup. During his night of long knives, aided by trucks provided by the army, Hitler summarily shot perhaps several hundred S.A. leaders (including Ernst Ro¨hm and Gregor Strasser, but not Otto Strasser, who slipped into exile and opposition). Those S.A. leaders just named had long known Hitler and perhaps were hated by him for never having been sycophantic toward him (Bullock 1952, 351). Hitler, thus winning much of the military to his coalition, thereafter subordinated the S.A.organization, but he maintained a subset of the S.A with more selective, upper class membership. This was the S.S., or Schutzstaffel or “protection squad,” nicknamed “Black Shirts.” Headed by Heinrich Himmler, who had frequent direct access to Hitler, it carried out genocide with considerable assistance of the armed forces as well as some local police forces. The S.S. survived until the fall of the Nazi regime. Why were fascist programs so recklessly aggressive in international relations? Taking the image of the behavior of a firm in the marketplace, many have noted that states forgo further imperial acquisitions when they can see that at the margin costs would exceed any possible benefit. Robert Gilpin adds that this could even require shrinking the empire as peoples at the extreme begin to imitate one’s military technologies successfully (Gilpin 1981). But Jack Snyder notes that what may be costly for the state as a whole could offer benefits to certain elite groups: “Narrow imperialist interests overcome their weakness and hijack national policy in two ways. First they gain control over national policy by joining in logrolled coalitions, trading favors so that each group gets what it wants most and costs are diffused to society through taxes imposed by the state” (Snyder 1991, 17). States that are undergoing late and rapid development tend to have both old and new elites present such demands to the same coalition. Like the coalition of the Kaiser just before World War I, interwar coalitions of Germany, Italy, and Japan thus had actors with differing aims in imperial expansion, and none of the aims could be repudiated without the exit of a necessary partner and hence failure of the coalition. Comparable to budget-

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busting logrolling in American public works bills, their imperial expansions ran to self-defeating excesses. Thus in Japan the navy wanted the oil and empire of the South Pacific, while the army for its glory wanted more conquest on the continent, including Manchuria and China proper. In the end Japan could conquer and hold neither region. Mussolini’s invading Greece and Hitler’s invading the Soviet Union were comparable errors of overreaching. But Spain’s Franco and Argentina’s Peron show that not all rightist coalitions overreach themselves in foreign adventures. Although beginning as an army officer, Juan Peron of Argentina was a populistic leader of meatpacking workers, and others, in the 1940s. Forced into exile by 1955, Peron would from Spain redefine his program as not national socialism but socialist nationalism (socialismo nac¸ional). When Peron triumphantly returned to Argentina in 1973, the author in Buenos Aires was by chance invited to ride with some leftist Peronist youths to see Peron at a suburban home. I was within the lead Jeep of a caravan of trucks filled with Peronist youths, at one point stopped dead by armed forces who menaced us with loud commands and provocative jabs of their rifles. My Argentine companions assured me that they always would use tear gas before shooting. Only later after walking to the house did I understand that the reason for stopping us was that the crowd was getting too massive at the destination, even climbing trees and breaking limbs to see the tired old man on the balcony better. Before leaving the Jeep to walk, I had seen V for victory gestures and heard loud cheers when wending through working class suburbs. In contrast, there were obscene gestures, turned backs, and nasty epithets in more upscale neighborhoods. Peron had obviously raised expectations of the lower classes. Yet once installed in power, within the year Peron betrayed the union leaders and student militants by shifting his coalition base decidedly Right. He even angered Argentine feminists by banning birth control pills because he wanted the Argentine population to grow to counter Brazil! He died in 1974. Although I have suggested close attention to real stands on socioeconomic inequalities, expecting the kind of opportunistic posturing so evident in Mussolini, Hitler, and Peron, one may ask whether there is always a clear line between counterrevolutionaries and revolutionaries. Thus many non-Communist yet one-party nationalistic or Third World revolutionaries emerged to power in the wake of decolonization in post–World War II Africa and Asia. They differed from Marxist–Leninists in their open nationalism, their defense of a permanent state (excepting only Muammar Kadafi of Libya, who argues otherwise in his Green Books), and their rejection of official atheism. Relative to Communists, they limit expropriations, aiming at properties of colonial authorities, mineral holdings of foreign corporations, or properties of some popularly disliked ethnic mi-

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nority, as in Idi Amin’s moves on Indian subcontinentals’ properties in Uganda or Robert Mugabe’s recent moves against white-owned farms in Zimbabwe. The Caribbean black revolutionary Frantz Fanon insisted that many of these nationalistic socialists were really pseudorevolutionaries, out for the enrichment of themselves, their kin, and at most their tribal group. Top leaders were just inserting themselves into the lucrative positions of corrupt intermediary links to world capitalism being abandoned by the Europeans. He acidly remarks, “The single party is the modern form of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, unmasked, unpainted, unscrupulous, and cynical” (Fanon 1968, 165). Although too conveniently overlooking some very significant differences, especially policies regarding unequal holdings of property, James Gregor has argued that many nationalistic revolutionaries look quite like fascists in many key turns of thought (Gregor 1974). The Ba’ath (“Resurrection”) Party single-party regime of Iraq includes in its program coalition only the center-Right side of the party, not the leftist side with links to Syria repudiated by Michel Aflaq (d. 1989), the founding ideologist. This Ba’ath coalition had been opposed to the richer Sunnis who had supported the earlier monarchy. It primarily appealed to humbler Sunnis and was led by family and friends from the Tikrit area. Saddam Hussein, if involving Iraq in the destructive Iranian and later Persian Gulf Wars, carried out a land reform, nationalized foreign owned oil resources, furthered industrialization, and has pushed literacy and education for women. He does have some popular following. But largely left out of the ruling coalition are the three-fifths of the Iraqi population who are Shi’a Islam, especially if religious, as well as Kurds and non-Islamic leftists. Often treating its enemies brutally, the Ba’ath killed at least eight hundred and possibly thousands of Iraqi Communists in 1963. Saddam is fascinated by biographies of Stalin, and he has been personally involved with torture and other repression, including the purge and shooting of a third of the members of the Ba’athist Council in 1979. While micromanaging the 1980– 88 war with Iran, Saddam not only gassed a village of Iraqi Kurds but often had his generals shot for failing to attain their assigned tasks (Aburish 2000). The “Islamic revolutionary” regimes are another ambivalent case, for the most key leaders such as Iran’s Ayatollah (Ruhollah) Khomeini hardly espouse really revolutionary policies with respect to the equality of the sexes. On the contrary, a primary aim seems to be prevention of any modernizing change in traditional Islamic specifications for the family, women’s roles, sexuality, and the like. Khomeini had accepted the Mujahedin, the so-called Islamic revolutionaries, in his initial coalition, but once in power he began imprisoning and then shooting them while his officials falsely claimed that they were pimps, prostitutes, gays, or lesbians. In the most extreme case, Afghanistan’s Taliban ruling coalition has prohibited women from obtaining schooling or working outside the home. Although many counterrevo-

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lutionary coalitions have included programs of cross-border military aggression, some in the Islamic revolutionary mode are more like revolutionary coalitions in often exporting their ruling model by internal subversions of foreign states. Perhaps fear of neo-Islamic fundamentalist militancy, even more than loss of an allied regime, is what led the former Soviet Union into its disastrous 1979–86 Afghanistan war. Revolutionary Regime Whatever actually happens in the political sphere, a regime can be called revolutionary only when it seriously strives for more equality in the socioeconomic sphere. Whatever the language used, often mere separations from a mother country, as in the final emancipation of the United States from Britain in 1783, do not constitute social revolutions. A social revolution for me entails some partial restratification of society, such that at least some categories that ranked high become low, and some that were low, become higher. Theda Skocpol offers this helpful definition: “Social revolutions are rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures; and they are accompanied and in part carried through by classbased revolts from below” (Skocpol 1979, 4). Among non-Communist cases, quite obviously the French Revolution qualified. So perhaps do the 20th-century Mexican (primarily 1910–20) and Bolivian (1952) revolutions. Leaving aside the so-called Afrocommunist regimes, where any Marxism–Leninism of leaders often seemed superficial, all of the states that at the high tide of communism became by leadership avowal Marxist– Leninist (Communist) experienced some social revolution. As with military dictatorships and counterrevolutionary regimes, some social revolutions take power with clearly oversized (but never grand) coalitions, historically often accepting allies from just to the Right of them, but they usually cut their coalitions back over time. In society undergoing social revolution, one can roughly gauge who is in the ruling coalition and who is with an antiregime coalition by asking what types of people are in high offices, getting out of prison, or returning from exile, and what kinds are pushed out of office, flee abroad, are put into prison, or face execution squads. The revolutionary program usually closely reflects the current coalition. Failure to attain some goals can shift the base. But as Mao noted, so can successful achievement of certain goals, when the agenda may move on to more radical aims, as in shifting from “national democratic” objectives to fully revolutionary ones. The core constituencies of a revolutionary regime coalition as well as its sometimes differing program coalition normally consist of a lower to middle class mass base, in addition to a usually leading segment of politically alienated intellectuals of higher class antecedents. But it is strikingly evident

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that as specific program questions approach implementation, the revolutionary leadership, even if unchanged at the top, may narrow the range of the coalition and shift its location in ideological space. Often this involves dropping partners from any fringe of the extreme Left as well as from the Right. The Puritan coalition of Oliver Cromwell may not have included household servants, but it did include small farmers and artisans as well as many of higher class standing. These groups roughly corresponded to a spectrum of religious opinions excluding the Quakers (who at that time primarily appealed to the lowest classes of the English Midlands) but inclusive of the more artisan class Baptists, small farmer separatist Congregatationalists, nonseparatist Congregationalists or Independents who could be gentry (like Cromwell himself) or small merchants, lowland Scot or large London merchant Presbyterians, and even some Anglicans, if winning but few of these last from the highest nobility. During the course of the revolution, however, many Baptists became alienated over suffrage limitation by property qualification. Were they really in Cromwell’s coalition if accepted as soldiers but not as voters? Principal leaders of the Levellers (repressed in 1643–44) such as Richard Overton or John Lilbourne were Baptists. To Cromwell’s Right, even many of the merchants or trade-oriented nobles who had earlier supported the cause also became alienated, especially after Cromwell first purged and eventually closed down the House of Commons, having already suspended the monarchy and House of Lords. Is it weakness of a leader that causes an ineffectual coalition or rather failing coalition that causes the weakness of a leader? In any event, when Cromwell died of natural causes, there was no solid coalition behind Cromwell’s succeeding son, Richard. Military leaders headed by General Monk led the restoration of the Stuart monarchy, much to the poet Puritan John Milton’s disgust. A somewhat similar narrowing of the coalition base occurred under N. Lenin, the revolutionary name of Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov (who never used Nikolai, contrary to many publications). Lenin was originally backed by a spectrum ranging from unskilled laborers to lower middle classes. His coalition did not include adherents to parties primarily supported by middle to upper classes, such as the Constitutional Democrats (Cadets). Although Leninists compromised with nationalism, they avoided liaisons with religious institutions, although some “liberation theology” Catholic priests would eventually emerge in Latin America. In a crude way, Lenin’s range was expressed in terms of anarchists appealing more to unskilled laborers, Bolsheviks appealing more to skilled industrial workers, Left-Mensheviks appealing to lower-middle to middle class professionals, and workers or smallholder peasant-based Left Social Revolutionaries. But Lenin’s dissolution of the elected Constituent Assembly in 1918 (where the Bolsheviks were in the minority) caused desertion of his coalition by most Left-

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Mensheviks and Left-Social Revolutionaries, soon followed as well by the relatively weak socialist anarchists, who were repressed in the Ukraine and on Kronstadt island by 1921 (cf. Voline 1974). With the conclusion of the 1918–21 civil war, Lenin banned not only all rival political parties or organizations but even factions within the Communist Party itself. That intolerance of even fellow Bolshevik oppositions later helped Stalin in both shifting and further narrowing his coalition. If the preceeding cases illustrate the shrinkage of program coalitions with shifting goals of leadership, the maneuvers of Josef Stalin (revolutionary name of Josip Djugashvili, d. 1953) illustrate tactical shifts. Even before Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin began his ascent to power, chiefly through leading roles within the Communist Party. He operated only within the residual ideological space occupied by Bolsheviks (Communists). Like many leaders who succeed in winning and holding power, he was able personally to cover median policy space at key junctures. Leaving aside preliminary maneuvers in which he allied himself with the moderately Left Gregor Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, he recast his coalition toward the Bolshevik Right, allying with Nikolai Bukharin and Alexsey Rykov in opposing Leon Trotsky’s cautionaries about the peasant enrichment under the New Economic Policy of 1921–28, which had restored much of the free market in agriculture. But once Trotskyists were defeated by the later 1920s, Stalin turned to a brutal and ultimately disastrous collectivization of agriculture in 1929–31. Trotsky by then had been forced into exile. Having already castigated Stalin in his Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky was writing a biography of Stalin when murdered in Mexico in 1940 by an apparent Stalinist agent. Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, and Rykov were executed in 1936–38 in the wake of Stalin’s “show trials” of Old Bolsheviks. They publically confessed to nonexistent crimes of betrayal of the revolution in hopes of saving close relatives and friends from Stalin’s executioners. Thus Bukharin’s wife and son survived, even if held for some time in a concentration camp. Stalin curbed the Trotskyist idea of militantly exporting the Russian revolution. But to the extent that a revolutionary regime sends either its armies or merely some guns and subversive messages abroad, it tends to elicit counterrevolutionary coalitions against it from outside. Research shows that revolutionary regimes are more often the attacked than the attackers (Halliday 1999, esp. 3, 15–16, 18–19). Whether or not externally militant, a Thermidorean reaction may shift the coalition partners as well as the program back toward the Right end of the political spectrum, as arguably present in China under Deng Xiaoping after Mao’s death in 1976 or in several installments in the Soviet Union (Khruschev’s “secret speech” in 1956, more decisively with Gorbachev’s ascent in 1985). Pro-Soviet Communist Parties were to experience special problems with

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coalitions in other states, especially when the Comintern (the Communist or Third International, which lasted 1919–43) vacillated between urging them to go it alone or else to coalesce with other political parties. In 1919– 21 the correct line was “united front from below.” That meant rejection of any coalition with ideologically neighboring parties. Instead, Communists were to win over to the Communists any labor unionists or working class voters who had been attached to the social democrats. In 1921–28 this correct line was switched to “united front from above,” whereby Communist parties abroad were to ally with other progressive parties. This led in 1927 to a slaughter of Chinese Communist cadres by Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang. Next came the new correct line in 1928–34 of avoiding any such coalition, even with the “social fascists” leading the social democratic parties. This framed the disaster of the electoral victory of the Nazis in Germany in 1933. In 1934–39 the line became “popular fronts” with all antifascist parties. But this culminated in the alienation of many Communists in the 1939 Nazi–Soviet nonaggression pact. Once the Soviet Union was invaded in 1941, the popular front line got back on track, and the Comintern was officially dissolved in 1943, although its arguably main function as an instrument of U.S.S.R. foreign policy was revived in the Cominform (Communist Information Bureau) of 1947–56 as well as the Soviet espionage agency, the KGB. In 1944–45, as the Soviet Red Army entered most of East Europe apart from Yugoslavia, there was a similar encouragement of “people’s democracies” in a sort of grand coalition of antifascist political parties. Broadly, the Communist parties of Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, East Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia began by accepting an apparent minority position, either standing apart or merged into a patriotic front. Eventually, by 1947–48 the Communists were clearly in the dominant position, aided by their cohesion and the presence of the Soviet army. The Cold War set in by 1947, and apart from Iceland, Finland, and episodically France, the Communist Party (CP) ceased to be an acceptable partner for European states not dominated by the Soviet armies. This was to remain true until the 1989–90 collapse of East European Communism (cf. Gilberg 1989, esp. 37–49, 66–78; Gati 1989). Some General Reflections on Nondemocratic or Extraparliamentary Ruling Coalitions Nondemocratic regimes do have coalitions that support the regime as such as well as a program agenda. Quite obviously the program coalition could not here be called a parliamentary one, since any legislative body may be either nonexistent or a rubber stamp in the kinds of regimes reviewed. If so, one cannot count the leanings of members of parliament to identify the locus and strength of a coalition. Thus if the former Soviet Union’s Supreme Soviet had some 30 percent women, this surely reflected

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the weakness of that institution, not the power of women, who were almost wholly absent from the Politburo. Perhaps any society has a more or less expectable development of a specific set of factions by a number of historical and accumulating cleavages, which earlier theory suggested could then congeal in a rather stable array (Lipset and Rokkan 1967). But if in democracies these often dichotomous cleavages over religion, the economy, the form of government, and so forth, become expressed as political parties, nondemocratic regimes often by direct authoritative order decide what the party system will be. This may quite often be no-party (parties are prohibited or suspended), one-party (that is, the party of the autocrat), or quite rarely two-party (as when Brazil’s last military junta tolerated two officially approved parties). But parties are apparatuses for contesting elections, and factional interests even in nondemocratic contexts find other ways of attempting to influence political decisions. Against “the myth of the monolith” under Communism, there were sharp factional conflicts, even if not well publicized at the time (Cohen 1985). I have suggested that antiregime elements can be identified by the kinds of people fleeing into exile or finding themselves in prison or before firing squads. One may add that before very recent politics of symbolic inclusiveness (e.g., President George Bush’s 2001 appointment of a cabinet of much diversity), those firmly in any kind of program coalition have been indicated by three sorts of attributes—ascriptive (who you are by birth), achievement (what you can do), or attitudinal (where you stand in terms of both personal loyalties and issues)—visible among the autocrat’s personal advisers or cabinet members. Nondemocratic regimes clearly want their program coalitions to be winning ones, having both personal and policy stakes in it. But the notion of aiming at only minimal winning is of itself (that is, when not conjoined to ideological range, as in De Swaan) only weakly predictive even in parliamentary politics. It appears even less predictive of extraparliamentary coalitions. Here one has no simple measure such as seats in parliament to recognize a bare majority, so perhaps minimal (no redundant partner) and minimum (no redundant seats) have no clear meanings. At most one could say that one’s coalition was undersized if one lost an armed struggle, or that it was oversized if it prevented coherent program implementation once in power. But when the regime is yet struggling to get into power, greater uncertainty of relative strengths of friends and their principal rival(s) leads many agents to favor oversize coalitions, even more than their fairly common occurrence in parliamentary politics. But as illustrated, oversize coalitions tend to be pared back once an extraparliamentary coalition has secured power. Are there ideological connectedness and closure? As in parliamentary coalitions, extraparliamentary ones also tend to unite those adjacent in Left–Right space without passing over a partner, and for the same reason,

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namely, that sharpened conflicts of interest would surface in a coalition that has spread itself over too much issue space. Yet in extraparliamentary politics one should expect more strange bedfellows, in part because a coalition tends to go oversize in view of uncertainty of winning. Another reason is that, however ideologically distant, two groups may ally only in the immediate common interest of defeating a presently ruling coalition. If that is successful, however, their own temporarily subordinated conflicts of interest return to salience. Do nondemocratic program coalitions strive to secure stability by covering median positions in issue space? If referenced to the general public, I doubt this, with the possible exception of some counterrevolutionary coalitions or those monarchical or military coalitions striving to be center– Right. Perhaps coercion can compensate for eccentricity (“off center”). There is less immediate fear of an opposition coalition’s covering median issue space if the authorities can repress any such effort. Some monarchical or military coalitions aim to embrace only the Right, just as some revolutionary coalitions embrace only the Left, even if both sets could tactically turn to the center as necessary to get into power or stay there if losing a grip on power. But the proposition claiming that if any stability is possible at all the coalition covers the median remains valid in that, if a coalition fails to cover median issue spaces it is more likely to fail to take power or to hold on to it, whenever any rival coalition is willing to cover medians and is able to marshal enough force to complement its numbers. Do nondemocratic coalitions expect payoffs proportioned to their contributions? Almost surely, yes. Those who give more to a coalition expect to get more of its benefits. But contributions in democratic politics usually consist in votes (or seats in parliament) or financial contributions, both of which are measurable, if not clearly commensurable. Extraparliamentary coalitions involve contributions that are often less measurable or commensurable, such as supplied soldiers or status. Greater uncertainty over values of contributions predicts more squabbles among coalition partners relative to those of parliamentary coalitions. Also, policy payoffs are quite difficult to estimate in either extraparliamentary or parliamentary settings, but numbers and importance of offices are measurable and roughly commensurable in both. IV. LIBERAL DEMOCRATIC REGIME PROGRAM COALITIONS I have noted that even democratic regimes may sometimes coercively oppose exit from a political community or regime coalition. Yet one way in which democratic program coalitions differ from autocratic ones is that one need not fear being murdered or given other severe punishment for refusing to join a program coalition or for leaving it later. That is, all really

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democratic regimes differ from nondemocratic types in making the joining or leaving of a program coalition wholly voluntary. In liberal democracies, too, the party system is not directly fixed by state fiat but is more subtly influenced by electoral laws that usually favor the stronger parties who enact them. Without getting into excessive detail, there is broad consensus that the more or less “natural” cleavage system of a society may be distinctively shaped by three main types of electoral laws: (1) plurality systems: usually with single member districts, victory goes to whoever has more votes than any other, even if less than a majority; these tend to favor, if not one-party dominance, two-party systems, although third, and so on, parties can survive if they have unusual local concentrations of strength; (2) majority systems: these require a second round if no simple majority is attained in the first. These also have a long-run leaning toward two-party systems due to coalitions in the second round, but they yet permit survival of multipartyism in the short run, as a result of viable candidacies in the first round; (3) proportional representation: various calculating formulae aim at dividing up the legislative seats of multimember districts in proportion to party votes (Lijphart with Aitkin 1994; Grofman and Lijphart 1986; Lijphart and Grofman 1984). Although a few liberal democracies such as Mexico or India have in the past been one-party dominant, only a minority of democracies are two-party and most are multiparty (in West Europe, the average number of effective parties is almost five). Cross-party coalitions hence are common. Another contrast is that if sometimes nondemocratic program coalitions are implicit, most democratic program coalitions are explicit. They are often negotiated and have more transparency. Even if talks sometimes occur behind closed doors, aside from some joint preelection strategies, there is public announcement of any firm results. Coalition agreements may sometimes even be formalized in a published pact uniting political parties. Also, even if some cheating can occur, the whole program coalition game normally occurs largely under limits of law, both constitutional and statutory, specifying outer limits of legitimate political competition. But a key contrast is that, even granting plausibility in Roberto Michels’s concept of the “Iron Law of Oligarchy,” there is often a more extensive direct popular role behind the party system that produces the coalitions of democracies. The active electorate, the actual voters, give rise to relative party strengths, just as mobilized fighters do for factions engaged in civil war. As already apparent, constitutional and statutory electoral rules may affect how voter preferences map to the national governing authorities. Hereafter largely ignoring the merely nominal democracies, one may in passing suggest that in addition to the three liberal democratic regime types (mixed, presidential, parliamentary), one could also distinguish the democratic regimes by three decision-making styles, as consociational, corporatist, and majoritarian. I illustrate the resulting nine possible cases in Figure

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4.2, citing some plausible examples, following Lijphart (Lijphart 1999). Whereas the majoritarian style is exclusive, a few regimes such as those of Switzerland and the Netherlands combine consociationalism and corporatism. I have previously addressed the consociational model, which supposes grand coalition among the leading elites of the ethnic pillars within a state, normally inclusive of the political community, regime, program, and cabinet coalitions. Any of the three types of democratic regimes would operate differently in program coalitions where consociationalism is high, since each ethnic group in effect has an institutionalized veto over most major policy choices. This is normally expected to stabilize a regime, but only if the ethnic pillars remain committed to the bargain. In 1997 the two ethnic pillars of Fiji, the majority native Fijians and the Indians, agreed to accept equal legislative representation, but a populist Fijian native recently attempted a ragged civilian coup to deny an Indian’s right to be chosen prime minister. The military restored order. If consociationalism catastrophically failed in Lebanon in 1975, it retains its importance in many democracies, recurrently finding new fields for application such as Bosnia or Northern Ireland. The term corporatism arises from the Latin corpore (“body”), and it regards society as less made up of individuals than of certain kinds of bodies or groupings. Philippe Schmitter offers a clear definition of corporatism as a system of interest representation in which the constituent units are organized into a limited number of singular, cumpulsory, noncompetitive, hierarchically ordered and functionally differentiated categories, recognized or licensed (if not created) by the state and granted a deliberate representation monopoly within their respective categories in exchange for observing certain controls on the selection of leaders and articulation of demands and supports. (Schmitter 1974, 93)

Unlike statist or fascist corporatism, whereby the state controls all social organizations from above (integrating previously separate organizations, controlling leadership selection, etc.), democratic corporatism seeks voluntary agreement of relevant bodies. Although also supposing a kind of grand coalition, the democratic corporatist style is normally far more limited in sway. Thus it does not extend to the other community, regime, or cabinet coalitions. Further, although some would see at least its spirit extending to other policy domains as well, it primarily applies only to one aspect of the program coalition. This is policy to get labor–management peace and to prevent inflation that could harm international competitiveness. In a tripolar cooperation, the “partners” of democratic corporatist grand coalition are not ethnic pillars but rather leading representatives of the economic sectors of (1) capital (peak associations of business owners

Figure 4.2 A Classification of Democratic Regime Types and Their Programmatic DecisionMaking Styles

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and managers), (2) labor (peak associations of labor and union leaders), and (3) consumers (represented by the government). For each affected industry, these partners negotiate wage increases for the next year, often expecting their “social contract” agreement to be ratified later by parliament. Most observers have judged it as on the whole moderately successful in minimizing strikes and inflation, while also helping balance budgets. Yet it did nothing to boost economic growth (e.g., Lehmbruch and Schmitter 1982; Schmitter 1989; Lijphart 1999, 263–70). But Peter Katzenstein noted that there were two variants of the democratic corporatist mode, one more prolabor (“social corporatism”) and the other more probusiness (“liberal corporatism”), as in Japan (Katzenstein 1985). By the 1990s it had grown apparent that, probably because of globalized tariff reductions and hence increased competition from firms using lower wage labor abroad, manufacturers in the “social corporatist” states of central and northern Europe were turning away from corporatist wage setting, even if the unions as well as social democratic governments wanted to retain it (Gobeyn 1993). If consociationalism is alive and well, democratic corporatism seems to be waning. The third democratic decision-making style, called pluralism or majoritarianism, accepts nonconsensual or adversarial resolutions of social conflict, if by ballots rather than bullets. It often results in a satisfied majority but often at least one, sometimes bitter, losing minority. As Arend Lijphart suggests, plurality electoral systems positively correlate with this decisionmaking style, whereby the winners may reap their payoffs with sparse concessions to the losers. But proportional representation (PR) electoral systems give expression in the party system to more of a society’s diversities and yield more cases of the consensual decision-making styles of consociationalism or corporatism, looking toward acceptance of public decisions even by minorities (Lijphart 1994). Although a plausible correlation, many PR system democracies such as Italy nevertheless lack signs of either consociationalism or corporatism. In passing, I find implausible the view that such decision-making styles are deeply rooted in political culture, because they are too readily subject to change. Under the stress of an internal or external threat that could cause the destruction of the political community, those who are otherwise pluralistically divided on other policy may close ranks, forming oversized or even grand coalitions, as did most democracies during World War II (cf. Budge and Herman 1978). Having addressed decisional styles of democratic systems, I turn now to distinctive types of regimes as these may impact program coalitions. Mixed Presidential–Parliamentary Regimes I forgo addressing merely nominal democracies and address in turn program coalition situations of the mixed, presidential, and parliamentary forms.

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In the hybrid presidential–parliamentary systems, program coalitions can take several forms. One may be simply like that of the pure parliamentary system, whereby the coalition extends from a prime minister to the parliamentary majority, but also concurs with the president. But if there is conflict, usually the president can override the prime minister, at least in the so-called high policy domain of national security policy as opposed to the low policy concerns of economic policy adjustments (regulatory, revenue, budgetary) variously affecting social groups. Setting aside the consociational case of Lebanon before the beginning of civil war in 1975, one early mixed form was found in Finland, where program coalitions were usually easily attained because of the long-term and admired tenure of President Uri Kekonnen, who seemed to cover median policy space. The Gaullist Fifth Republic beginning in 1958 normally found smooth sailing as long as presidents and prime ministers were of the same ideological family, that is, either of the Left or of the Right. Many analysts anticipated problems of program coherence during periods of “cohabitation” of a president of one family and a prime minister of the opposite. But experience has shown that the system proves workable to the extent that the president then retreats to high policy while the prime minister is given a freer hand in low policy. In Russia, President Yeltsin, with collaborating prime ministers such as Gaidar and Chernomyrdin, in 1991–92, implemented the main lines of privatizing state owned enterprises, auctioning off those with fewer than two hundred employees, and issuing to citizens vouchers on the larger enterprises, which were converted to shares of stock. But when combined with price deregulation, this program caused sharp economic dislocations and a searing inflation of some 3,000 percent, which gutted savings accounts and pensions. Yeltsin was then stymied by a Duma strange bedfellow coalition of Left and Right that blocked further extension of his centrist reform program. He next used unconstitutional but arguably popular military force to suppress the Russian Duma, which had been elected before the fall of the U.S.S.R. (Sakwa 1996, 116–30). Yeltsin then sponsored a new constitution that weakened parliamentary autonomy. In this 1993 constitution, a president can try to get a prime minister aligned with presidential views. Although the president appoints the prime minister, the majority of the Duma may reject up to three nominees in a row, after which the president can dissolve parliament and call new elections. The president has to accept a vote of no confidence and dismiss a government if it occurs within the first year of a parliament or within a half-year of a presidential election. Between those limits, a president has the option of rejecting the no confidence motion for up to three months and asking a second vote by the Duma. Should a second vote of no confidence ensue, the president can either dismiss the government or dissolve the parliament to have new elections. Presidents can remove a prime min-

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ister by simple dismissal, but a prime minister and parliament cannot remove the four-year term president without a demanding impeachment procedure similar to that of the U.S. system. Presidents vetoing a bill initiated by a prime minister can only be overridden by a two-thirds vote in both the Duma and the upper chamber, the Federation Council. This permits a presidential blocking coalition with just over a third support in one of the two chambers, as is true of the U.S. system. But unlike in the U.S. system, if presidentially initiated legislation is blocked by a Duma majority, a president can simply issue decrees that have the force of law, provided that they do not contravene the constitution or federal statutes. These presidential decrees constitutionally override any otherwise valid decrees by prime ministers. One wonders whether the mixed forms will continue to prove workable, even in possible cases in which one or both president and prime minister refuse to accept a de facto division of labor in program formation, such as in the high versus low policy distinction already mentioned. Another problem is that the two domains of policy are often interactive, posing likely conflicts on some matters. Presidential System Program Coalitions Curiously, the only economically advanced democracy with a pure presidential system has been the United States. A presidential system departs from the pattern of nested coalitions, except when a president is indirectly elected by the legislature, not by an electoral college or direct voting of the electorate. U.S. presidents, when not from a military background, typically have been either governors of states or U.S. senators, and hence, as often is also true of vice presidents, have some experience with moving legislative programs. The content of a presidential program can be read from a nomination acceptance speech (if different from the platform) or from annual State of the Union or other addresses thereafter. Although having to share policy initiation with the opposition party if it should control one or both of the houses of Congress, presidents eclipse most other actors such as their political appointees, presidential staffs, civil servants, and so on, in initiating the policy agenda, although nongovernmental interests, the media, or even academics may have had a background role (Kingdon 1995, 21–70). Presidents know that to get programs into law, they must build program coalitions in each house of Congress, and by indirection often in the Supreme Court as well, ideally without compromising so much that they offend their electoral coalition. As is well known, in the United States, Congress and the president are separately elected and for different but fixed terms. The president cannot dismiss a Congress for resisting presidential initiatives. Although the president can and does attempt to persuade voters to elect a politically friendly Congress, most presidents lose ground in midterm congressional elections.

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A Congress cannot remove a sitting president, short of a very demanding impeachment with conviction procedure (easily stopped by a minority blocking coalition of as few as a third plus one of senators). Thus Clinton was impeached but not convicted for lying under oath about a tawdry sexual affair. With mutual security of tenure, American presidents and members of Congress thus enjoy the advantage of independence from each other. But in carrying legislation, that also becomes a disadvantage, since a president cannot carry a bill without simple majorities of both houses, and a Congress cannot override a presidential veto without a two-thirds majority in each house. Note that blocking and carrying coalitions are distinctive, from each side. If Congress initiates a measure opposed by a president, a successful presidential blocking coalition requires only one-third plus one of one house to sustain a president’s veto constitutionally. Put otherwise, an extraordinary majority coalition of two-thirds of each house of Congress is required to override that veto. Yet excessive presidential vetoes of congressional initiatives could elicit congressional counterattacks on presidentially initiated bills. A presidentially led carrying coalition requires a majority of each house of Congress. When at least one house of Congress is dominated by the opposite party to that of a president, presidential legislative initiatives either are stymied or require much compromise with the opposition. Even if accounting for but a third of the whole congressional agenda, most important presidential legislative initiatives do get on the agenda, especially in the “honeymoon” period of a month or two just after a president first enters office. If about half of all presidential initiatives are defeated, it is largely because when the other party controls Congress, it halves the number of all presidential initiatives that get on the agenda (Edwards and Barrett 2000). Although American political parties have slack discipline (fail to follow the lead of their copartisan president), they do show some coherence (voting predicted by party), which has been rising. The separation of powers, especially if including a supreme court as in the United States, can complicate coalition formation, since coalitions in one arena can impact those in the others. An American president at distinctive stages may change coalitions: In the primary election, a presidential candidate tends to swing either Left (Democrat) or Right (Republican) to please the party activists who are most likely to vote. But in the general election, a candidate shifts to a center-Left location (if Democratic) or center-Right (if Republican). If successful in winning office, a president may sometimes stay at that location, especially when enjoying copartisan majorities in both houses of Congress. But if a president instead faces either uncertain majority supports in Congress (close division, perhaps with weak cohesion) or no regularized majorities at all, to secure ad hoc majorities for either program or Senate-only ratifications of appointments or treaties (especially in the latter case, in which a two-thirds majority is required), a

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president may have to seem to be at a centrist coalition position. That is, often a president requires some bipartisanship to carry matters. In 2000, the Democrat President, Bill Clinton, wanted to sponsor permanent most favored nation inclusion of China and boost China’s membership in the World Trade Organization, as already backed by the European Union. This was opposed by many labor unionists and environmentalists, normally core constituents for the Democrats. In winning a House vote, Clinton had to get more votes from the Republicans than he got from his own Democrats. A president, in initiating legislation, must anticipate possible failure in at least one house of Congress, or perhaps later in the Supreme Court. When relevant on rulings of constitutionality, presidents also would want effective working majorities on the Supreme Court but are limited in normally making only one to four appointments during the course of one or two terms of office. Michael Ebeid’s continuing research has found that some presidents are successful in making appointments who vote in conformity to the presidential ideology. But many fail because of flawed information, especially when a nominee lacks a track record in lower federal judicial office. Surprisingly, being appointed not by the same president but only by the same presidential party does not make a measurable difference on the votes of justices. Passage of time may mean either that justices change their views on the old issues or that new issues may arise. Also, I suspect that sometimes uncertain Senate support could produce more centrist justices, whatever the party of the appointing president. In invalidating an action by either the president or the Congress, the court may have to anticipate some possible punitive reactions, such as restricted court budgets, legislatively trimmed court jurisdiction, or the like. Decision rules in institutions, ideological distributions within and between the institutions, and other perceptions of attitudes may make a difference in all such game playing. Thus if the court thinks that Congress was just grandstanding on some popular issue, playing symbolic politics before an electorate, it may be more willing to rule an act unconstitutional. For its part, Congress may react to a court invalidation by revising or replacing the original legislation to get around the court. In a rare case, such as enactment of the 18-year-old voting policy, it turned to successful constitutional amendment. Among the democracies, the presidential form is both less common and arguably less stable. Arend Lijphart, referring to Colombia and Venezuela as “borderline cases” as a result of their lowered Freedom House rankings caused by violence and corruption, writes, “It seems significant that there are merely five presidential systems among the thirty-six long-term democracies as of 1996 and that two of these are borderline cases of democracy” (Lijphart 1999, 52 n.1). Regimes of institutionalized vetoes, which work well when people have only the negative aim of not being harmed, may not work so well when they have more positive aims of being helped.

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Parliamentary Democracy Program Coalitions Perhaps political parties in a democratic regime may have shifting goals at different phases of the life of coalition, as suggested by Bueno de Mesquita: During the coalition formation stage, each party’s primary concern is to gain membership in a winning coalition. During the maintenance stage, parties are concerned with influencing the decision-rules used to distribute the coalition’s benefits. When coalitions enter the termination stage, parties are again concerned with optimizing the point at which their benefits give them a disproportionately large advantage over their putative allies. (Bueno de Mesquita 1975, 89)

In a parliamentary democracy, a majority government may be formed by one party (where the coalition may be among its recognizable factions, sometimes quite explicitly, as in the long period of Liberal Democratic sway in Japan). More often, it involves a coalition across parties. The program coalition consists of those members of parliament who agree to form a government, normally at least concurring on which party (or parties) shall do so, and normally also who will serve as the overall leader (prime minister, premier, chancellor). This coalition is important in any required investiture or later censure or confidence motions, often linked to important legislation. In contrast, the cabinet coalition, addressed in Chapter 5, determines portfolio distributions to coalesced factions or parties and ultimately ratifies the specific persons who become ministers, at least beyond any precommitments necessary to patch together the parliamentary coalition. Whereas a presidential system does not require a president to have a clear program and show a capacity to pass laws, both become important to a prime minister in a parliamentary coalition. The party preferences of voters are important in relative party strengths. What is the source of party identifications? As shown by Lipset and Rokkan, the historically developed cleavage pattern is the primary determinant of a party system, the number of parties and their relative strengths (Lipset and Rokkan 1967). Religious or other ethnic cleavages may have importance here, just as in political community and regime coalitions. But whereas economic stratal (by class or ethnicity) identities are often more important in understanding regime coalitions, often cross-cutting economic sectoral (or occupational) interest identities tend to gain importance in political parties and parliamentary coalitions formed of them (cf. Gourevitch 1986; Rogowski 1989). Yet if party programs speak to such identities, their policy commitments may be less than clear, as Flanagan notes: “Parties, because they are large and internally diverse organizations, may not be able

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to adopt distinct pointlike positions; their ‘positions’ may be quite blurry and vague, more like a band or cloud of points” (Flanagan 1998, 141). Assuming that there is no artificial fixation of the number of lawful parties by political decree, the secondary influences of an electoral system can affect the party system and electoral outcomes: In an ideal electoral system (which many would see as proportional representation with fairly large multimember constituencies) the distribution of partisan preferences among voters is approximately mirrored in the popular house. Multipartyism encourages higher voter turnout, provided that it can be seen to relate to selection of the chief executive (unlike in Switzerland, where the effect is blunted by a plural executive body, as discussed in Chapter 5, with rotation of the chair role among the parties). Whereas high turnouts correlate with less political violence and regime change, they are associated with higher turnover of governments (Powell 1982, 26–27). One argument for the advantage of covering the median is that opinion quite often forms a normal distribution about the center, which often can favor a status quo. As Aristotle long ago argued, this is more likely in public opinion when there is a large middle class to anchor such center-tending opinion. Usually quickened by commerce, economic development tends to produce a large middle class, since most studies have shown that growth has historically tended to flatten income disparities. Hence the classic illustration of society as a broad-based pyramid becomes better presented as a diamond-shaped distribution, with relatively few rich or poor flanking the larger middle class. Yet income distribution studies suggest some reversal of pattern toward higher income inequalities from the 1980s in both Britain and the United States. Pollsters may find some who may be anti–political community or antiregime, in this respect departing from the concept of nested coalition theory. But in most contexts, public opinion majorities on issues represent subsets of regime supporters. Not all issues may have median positions, as illustrated by some either–or sorts of issues, especially moralistic ones of high stability, such as the question of legalization of marijuana (cf. Converse 1972). Yet sometimes even apparently moralistic issues do have some middling positions that can be teased out, as in the case of policy regarding abortion (Yankelovich 1991, 24–37). Our pollsters do not look for the medians that politicians could want to cover. In any event, the medians of the general public as sounded by surveys may not be the medians of the active electorate as tested in voting. Gourevitch notes that a would-be governing party “must find ways of balancing the competing claims of its core constituency and of its broader social majority” (Gourevitch 1986, 195). The disparity is likely to increase when voting turnouts are low. Not public opinion, but only actual voters, shape which political parties get how much representation in the legislature. In France, which uses a majority system that saves multiparty-

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ism by the first round, voter turnouts in 1958–76 averaged 70 percent (Powell 1982, 14). Many of the older democracies have shown some declines in turnout. Anthony Downs explored the advantages of parties’ competing before center-tending electorates to crowd that center (Downs 1957). To the extent that general public opinion of the relevant political community tends to the center, there tends to emerge at least one party that is strong (able to make or break governments), is of considerable size (which bolsters bargaining power), and tends to be centrist (Laver and Shepsle 1996, 90–119, 184–92). This party may sometimes of itself form a minimal and minimum winning coalition, as long true of the Swedish Social Democrats. Laver and Shepsle define a very strong party as not needing any coalition partners at all to form or maintain a government. In a strong party, there is no majority preferred position not covered by its ideal (Laver and Shepsle 1996, 120). Even a merely strong party (one thinks of the Center Party in Finland, or, before its demise, of the Christian Democrats of Italy) must be part of winning coalitions. Parties that are not large or near the center cannot form winning coalitions against it. In the two-party system, often specific voters could favor a party not because it is exactly at the median, but because it is at least on the right side of the issue or issues (their side). But usually both parties closely contest the center, as Anthony Downs emphasized. As I have heard the Seattle pollster Stuart Elway describe the U.S. case, when the Democrats go too far Left with their presidential candidate, or when the Republicans go too far Right, the voters bunched near the center in effect shout, “Yoo-hoo! We are not way over there; we are right here!” But party activists, as earlier suggested, tend to be less centric. Let us now assume that through proportional representation, the electorate support for parties is roughly mirrored in relative strengths of parties in parliament. Not necessarily the median in the general public, at least the median of the voters approximates the median position for the plenum of parliament. Yet that median may not be the same as that of the winning party or coalition of partners unless opinion is in a normal curve and the coalition that forms is fully centrist (not center-Left or center-Right). But whether in that special case or in any other cases, Laver and Shepsle with good reason predict that if any stable governments form at all, they include the median positions on most or all of the salient issues. Failure to do so would permit formation of a larger coalition against them. As noted, parliamentary governments are more unstable if there are large extremist, usually antisystem parties. More basically, this may be due to unsolved problems for many of the public or the electorate, their discontents channeled through such parties. But less basically, instability of governments may also be due in part to the tendency of extreme parties to sabotage governments from within parliament or else to initiate extralegal antigovernment riots from outside.

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Stability may plausibly decline with descent through a rough spectrum of types of parliamentary coalitions. Single-party majority, coalition majority, and minority governments are increasingly less durable: (1) Singleparty majority coalitions can often last the life of a parliament, endangered only by loss of party discipline, especially in the extreme case of an open split in the ruling party; (2) the majority coalition can be durable if members of the coalesced parties are well disciplined, if they are ideologically adjacent (“connected”), if the coalition is not unduly oversized, and if no issue that can split the coalition arises; also, they may be vulnerable to actions by outsider antisystem parties, perhaps less from actions within parliament than from instigation of riots; and finally (3) minority governments, especially if not of a single party but a coalition, tend to be least durable, although some can limp along with ad hoc outside party support on specific issues or else function as mere caretakers, which normally do not deal with issues—that is, stay with the status quo—while awaiting formation of a majority or else new elections (cf. Powell 1982, 133–51). But mere caretaker minority governments seem rare according to a newer study. Adopting a broad definition of government change, including not only a change in the prime minister but even just a change in the parties in coalition or a change in their majority or minority status, Kaare Strom not surprisingly found mean durations in months were 30.0 for majority party, 17.7 for majority coalition, 14.1 for an informal minority government, and 13.2 for one with a formal agreement (Strom 1990, 116). Lijphart found that when single-party majority governments (which were not by his data any more durable than coalition governments) were not in place, minimal winning coalitions emerged in 39.3 percent of the cases; oversized ones, in 33.4 percent; and minority, in 27.3 percent (Lijphart 1999, 64, 98). If often short-lived, Strom shows, minority governments are quite common occurrences, 30–40 percent of the parliamentary governments observed. Although the study of Lijphart just cited found a bit fewer, Strom cites five different studies of many coalitions showing a range of 30.7 percent to 37.2 percent of the minority type. His own study of European parliamentary democracies found 35.1 percent (Strom 1990, 8, 59). Very few of such minority governments are “caretaker governments,” understood as openly committed to making no legislative initiatives until either a majority emerges or a new parliamentary election is held. Also, very few are formal minority governments, whereby other parties by pact commit themselves to offering external support. In short, most minority governments are open to policy change and survive only by informal, external support. In way of explanation, Strom argues that sometimes a party has reasons for not wanting a cabinet portfolio, preferring to remain out of a government even if invited, as when anticipating an adverse impact on its future

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electoral chances. Whatever the motive, the party leader may be primarily attentive to making some gain in policy concessions from a minority government, a quid pro quo for abstaining from voting in motions of censure. The party may also support the minority government on specific legislative items, sometimes including those not of special interest to the leader. Not necessarily mutually exclusive, the leadership of the minority government may also be reluctant to add another member, if only because it would dilute any benefits attainable as long as the government survived. As for more general circumstances, it was cabinet stability (low changes in premiers or parties represented in portfolios) that predicted more minority governments, not cabinet instability. For whatever reasons, perhaps in part cultural, minority governments were much more likely in certain countries such as Canada, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden (Strom 1990, 62–63). Lijphart would no doubt note that those named systems are of consensual styles rather than majoritarian. Many observed political coalitions are also oversized (not minimal or minimum), often as a result of uncertainty of voting prowess when coalitions are forged before an election or of the accident of size of the adjacent party at the more feasible end when minimal connected range coalitions in De Swaan’s model form after elections. Agents could go slightly oversize in parliamentary settings if uncertain whether they can win or hold power, fearing defections of some party in a multiparty coalition or of some individual members of parliament should party discipline break down. Flanagan found that in Canadian politics, addition of a third party to parliament tended to increase the oversize coalitions, but oversize coalitions, as Riker would have expected, tended to be short-lived in either oneparty rule or coalition governments (Flanagan 1998, 74–92). Redundant partners entail costs at the time of payoffs. A small but crucial swing party for a minimal winning coalition may sometimes demand and get a bit more than proportionality by Gamson’s rule, as illustrated by the religious parties of Israel. But another kind of cost can arise in coalition of too many tiny parties. Although empirical support seems sparse, Leiserson plausibly emphasized that leaders of coalitions could worry less about what happens to payoffs than about the bargaining costs. Other factors equal, they would favor coalitions with fewer members, as is reminiscent of what I noted in Chapter 2 of the Coase–Williamson transaction costs theory as related to optimal size of political community coalition. Thus Leiserson: “If there are, say, ten actors, and the size of the winning coalitions ranges from three to seven actors, then there will be a very strong tendency for the coalition with three members to form. The reason for this tendency, briefly, is that the members of the smaller coalition will prefer to form it, since negotiations and bargaining are easier to complete, and a coalition is easier to hold tighter, other things equal, with fewer parties” (Leiserson 1970, 90). Taking a real dive at five or more, the relative du-

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ration of parliamentary governments (defined by continuity of leader and party base) declined as the number of parties in the coalition rose, thus: one party (4.6 years), two (3.3 years), three (3.0 years), four (2.4 years), and five (less than 1.0 year) (Blondel 1982, 115). During the long sway of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in Japan, roughly 1955–93, the electoral system had permitted voter preference by a single nontransferable vote in plural constituencies. This made it rational for LDP candidates to compete against each other and look for patrons in it, thereby giving rise to factions (varying from four to eight in number). The factions, like the independent parties in coalition party governments elsewhere, made governments short-lived and made it unlikely that many prime ministers would articulate a clear agenda or be able to act on it during the average tenure in that office of only about 21⁄2 years (cabinet members averaged even less than 1 year!). This shifted much power to the senior or permanent civil servants, who served as vice-ministers in ministries (Elgie 1995, 135–61). A partial shift to awarding some parliamentary seats by plurality voting sought to remedy the problem, but this course has raised other dissatisfactions. Recall that connectedness, or adjacency in ideological space, helps a coalition take form and endure, because the less distance in ideological space, the less conflict of interest among partners. That means fewer obstacles in negotiation of platform, in implementation, or in coalition maintenance. Hence, even if the numbers of political parties winning seats in parliament steeply increases the possible coalitions that could form, possible partners are not equiprobable, since some partners would be programmatically quite incompatible. Size and connectedness can interrelate: Oversized coalitions tend to include strange bedfellows, those quite distant in ideological space, and strange bedfellow coalitions tend to be largely negative (against something in common, but unable to agree on any positive program) as well as episodic. During periods of high ideological polarization, such as that in Europe between the wars, government instability is more likely to involve minority governments. In periods of low ideological polarization, such instability is more likely due to oversize coalitions, often arising from the uncertainty of a fractionalized and unstable party system (Dodd 1972, 181). Concurring that purely quantitative theories of coalition formation have done less well than those that incorporate attention to ideological compatibility of partners (De Swaan minimal range theory, or Axelrod minimal connected), Lijphart wisely warns that if place in ideological space is defined only by program statements or parliamentary votes there is no problem, but one could court circularity if one let actual involvements in coalition governments influence judgments of locus in ideological space (Lijphart 1999, 97). Note again, however, that even if a minimal, winning, and connected

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parliamentary coalition “covers” median issue positions within the parliament, those need not necessarily be the same as those of either the electorate or the larger public. Apart from electoral system or turnout distortions, the disparity can also arise through opinion change, in the electorate, in members of parliament, or in divergent change of both. The disparity may come into view should new elections occur or should nonelectoral forms of participation erupt upon the scene prior to any new elections. Laver and Shepsle recognize that lost equilibrium in a government can be due to a variety of unanticipated and hence unplanned-for “shocks,” such as a weakening of the party (split of the party or fusion of rivals, defections of individuals, losses in by-elections); change in party issue positions, often due to a newly emerged issue, especially if not related to position on older issues; or loss of perceived invulnerability as in loss of a key leader. But in a computer simulation, governments were more robust to such shocks less by presence of strong parties in the coalition than by absence of uncovered dimension-by-dimension medians that rival parties could occupy. In other words, governments tend to be weaker if they lean to either end of issue dimensions, leaving the median positions to rivals. The most vulnerable governments held no median issue positions at all (Laver and Shepsle 1996, esp. 195–216). One could add that in a normalcurve electorate, the largest party can be expected to cover the median (indeed, truistically always cover it if there are only two parties), but this is far less likely when an electorate is polarized. Some change can be exogenous to the society, as illustrated by external economic shocks. Other change may be due to new agendas or new political actors. Yet other change may be caused by shifts caused by interactive choices of existing actors. Only in the unreal world of economic analysis are “preferences” taken as exogenous, as unchanging. Opinions change, sometimes as a result of the political process itself. Parties may rightly regard opinion as alterable by their efforts. As Kuran notes, “Neoclassical economics tends to consider preferences autonomous. Political theories in the neoclassical tradition thus posit it that parties compete by tailoring their agendas to fixed voter preferences. In reality, of course, parties also try to shape what voters want” (Kuran 1995, 175). But the capacity of elites to shape opinion may be exaggerated. Direct experience of the world and horizontal communications among people may run contrary to what they are by planned, top-down socialization expected to think or want. Regardless of public opinion distribution, a formateur may often look to be in a kind of middle in the coalition range. Abram De Swaan, although not finding it helpful in empirically predicting which coalitions form, notes the plausibility that a political party leader would prefer a “pivotal” or “swing” position in a coalition, roughly balancing coalition allies on each side. One holds the pivotal location if the votes to your Left and to your Right, when subtracted from each other, leave a number between your own

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votes and zero. In this location one could have more leverage and make a policy win by support of only your party and either the Left or the Right flank of the coalition. An unfortunate consequence of that, however, is that the “pivotal” party leader most likely to head the coalition is also the most unpredictable as to policy stand. This is a practical problem for voters and a theoretical conundrum for any democratic theory asking for responsiveness to electorates (De Swaan 1970, xx, 89–90, 285–86, 290–93). But De Swaan perhaps wrongly thinks that the leader must go to either one of two extremes on policy, rather than, as median theorists usually hold, shade and shave the policy stance toward a fuzzy in-between. A special uncertainty problem for newly emergent, post-Communist democracies is that party lack of discipline may be compounded with problems of unstable voter and even parliamentary party bases. David Olson describes these party systems as typically multiparty (even with majority or plurality, in some cases), with floating voter bases and weak party member bases, parliament-based, often personalistic or cadre in form, and highly protean (fissions and fusions become common, especially as elections draw close). He cites D. Zajc’s estimate that in East Central Europe, for example, members of parliament may defect from their party by up to 20– 30 percent over the course of the life of a parliament (Olson 1998, 13–14). Let us return to the relevance of Prisoner’s Dilemma to coalition gaming. In the case of the parliamentary coalition, often the notion of lack of communication is no longer relevant, since would-be partners do much negotiation in many cases. But it often becomes relevant when the parties threaten exit from the coalition. The absence of clear communication is far more likely among not so much the supporters as the would-be opponents of a leading regime faction in a military or revolutionary coalition. Often it could be fatal to have it leaked that one intends possible exit from such a coalition. Again unlike in the political community coalition, as in the case of the regime coalition usually there may be envisioned replaceable partners for any exiting element. To the extent that this is so, no one can predict the collapse of the ruling coalition. But here again, if there is at least one irreplaceable partner, and especially if there is only one, that partner could predict the downfall of the coalition. One can confidently predict what one can wholly control.

5

The Cabinet or Executive Coalition: Supporters of the Leadership Team

In the government each member is first himself, then magistrate, and then citizen, a gradation directly opposite to that which the social order requires. —Rousseau, The Social Contract, I, iii

In his ideal political system, Rousseau wanted every citizen to subordinate his or her particular will or interest to the more general will or interest. In the actual world, he admitted, that is precisely reversed, as self-interests are put before common ones, and agents would exempt themselves from general rules they would impose upon others. To Rousseau, this becomes most dangerous if present in top political leaders of a community, who should be subordinating personal concerns (such as being reelected to office or building a personal fortune) or even special interest concerns of their core constituency to the good of the community as a whole. As one moves through levels of coalition, a diminishing base of actual support can be seen in many political systems. Rousseau, by chance, was at one time secretary for the French ambassador to the Venetian Republic. Venice was then an aristocratic system that lasted from the lower Middle Ages to 1797. During most of that history, most Venetians (if not also many resident aliens) supported their political community. But one supposes that only a subset of these were enthusiastic for the regime, which disfranchised most Venetians. Once the Venetian commune ceased to assemble, the regime excluded from participation even nonnoble propertied

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males. But the regime was surely supported by some 5 percent of Venetians. Although excluding any who enjoyed an income from an ecclesiastical benefice, these were all nobles who could attend the Great Council. They had to be male and age 25 or older (if younger they had to pay a special fee) and had fathers and usually grandfathers who had been eligible to attend. Meeting once weekly on Sunday, the Great Council was too large to deliberate effectively on policy. A subset of some three hundred nobles, the “summoned ones” (called pregadi) could attend the Senate, which met almost daily to talk of policy. These were the real ruling class. Some delegates from the Senate (the junta, or giunta) also served on the Council of Ten. This smaller group, initiated in an emergency in 1310 but made permanent by 1334, really made Venetian policy. It was comparable to what we now call a cabinet. Yet primary power within the Council of Ten lay with a knot of senior members of very distinguished aristocratic families. These “old men” (vecchi) were to dominate as a kind of effective inner cabinet executive until successfully opposed by often more youthful nobles (the giovani) in the 1580s. Although a life-term doge of Venice symbolically topped off the pyramid of power, the Council of Ten kept in that slot a rather weak person, who was prohibited from conducting independent diplomatic activity (cf. McNeill 1974; Bousma 1968). Perhaps with the Venetian case in mind, the Italian Gaetano Mosca and Italian–Swiss Roberto Michels in the early 20th century elaborated their respective theories of the “ruling class” and “iron law of oligarchy.” This chapter addresses similar peaks of power in executive cabinet or council of ministers authority, in which any emergent program coalition completes itself by agreement on the leadership for its coordination in practical rule. Political recruitment involves “screenings” that may include formal and informal criteria of three sorts: (1) ascriptive (who you are, literally or virtually by birth), (2) achievement (what you can do, as by various measures of competence such as education, exams, experience, or more direct measures of effectiveness), and (3) attitudinal (where you stand, including not only program commitments but also personal loyalty). Broadly, these screenings intensify with increasing importance of public offices, and many cabinet offices have high importance by such measures as their scope of autonomous decision control or use as stepping stones toward the peak office of national chief executive. Most cabinets or councils of ministers share common problems of (1) somehow “representing” less the whole of the political community than the core constituencies of the program coalition and (2) furnishing competent leadership in ruling on its behalf. The first problem concerns three senses of how people may be understood as “re-presented.” The first sense, which I call responsibility repre-

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sentation, is mere legality, which links to the term legitimacy, whereby one is representative if merely the responsible official under existing law, often an easy criterion to meet. The second sense concerns representation as some kind of “responsiveness” to the needs or articulated demands of relevant groups, which has far more possible variants. The third sense is what Hanna Pitkin called social representation, meaning that a cabinet would represent to the extent that its class, religious, and other attributes somehow mirrored those of core constituencies, if not the population as a whole (cf. Pitkin 1967). I call it representativeness as reflectiveness. If choices among possible senses of representation and fulfillment of their requirements were not daunting enough, the second problem confronting a cabinet is effective ruling, which adds among other considerations possession of all needed skills to coordinate the program coalition and implement its program. Often, as in Venice, an informal, inner cabinet may really perform this task. But highly co-optative systems tend to nepotism and gerontocracy. As I suggested near the outset of Chapter 4, I doubt that the unity or disunity of the political community has much plausible influence on chief executive decision making in foreign policy. It is arguable that what does constrain or make possible executive choices in both foreign and domestic policy is less the nature of the community coalition than the coalition behind the regime, as that affects the program coalition. Sometimes unity or disunity in the regime and program coalitions can quite directly influence the ruliness or unruliness at the cabinet level, affecting the will and capacity of the chief executive to lead effectively. Decisive leaders usually are confident of their support bases in program and regime coalitions. Often indecisive leadership reflects doubts of the leader regarding where followers would follow, or indeed, the more painful thought that there may be no followers at all. Hence I outline this discussion of cabinet coalitions and top leadership in terms of background regime types as these may have influenced program coalitions. I. CABINET COALITIONS BY REGIME TYPES I below examine each of the main regime types and discuss special features of its cabinet politics. Traditional Monarchy Cabinet Coalitions A traditional monarch needed to select assistants who were loyal not only to the monarchy but also to his (or sometimes her) person. For the feudal or semifeudal monarchical regime, power was often so decentralized that there were no real ministries to be administered by ministers. Hence

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there may have been at the center little but a small advisory royal council (or perhaps various councils for distinctive purposes). Often practical skills, even literacy, were in short supply, such that some medieval European kings had to make use of high Roman Catholic clergy, even as commanders on the battlefield (where most carried maces rather than swords, since clergy by an old doctrine were to leave the sword and spilling of blood to others). But in modern history, ministries of war, finance, trade, and the like, soon emerged. A distinctive problem in the feudal form of the monarchical regime was the need to placate powerful nobles, who had economic and military resources of their own. Sometimes they were willing to serve in ministerial capacity, as true of many low-income Junkers in modern Prussia. But often such nobles would sponsor substitutes for themselves. These could be agents of the nobles rather than of the monarch. Any insult to such an agent could be taken as an affront to the honor of the baron, who could coalesce with other disgruntled elites in rebellion. But reflecting core constituencies of powerful nobles or high clergy did little to mirror society as a whole, because it was socially unrepresentative. Another problem for many monarchies, especially if on an imperial scale, arises in allowing some ministerial positions to give representation to certain privileged ethnic groups (such as germanized Czechs and Magyars in the Austro-Hungarian case) beyond a core ethnicity. In modernity one may have more or less to represent in the reflectivity sense the higher bourgeoisie as well, if not in ministries at least in high offices linked to them. Both Karl Marx, as a cautionary, and Vilfredo Pareto, as an apparent prescription, in the 19th century emphasized that the key to late monarchical regime stability was “circulation of elites,” that is, co-opting of top talents from nonnoble classes or noncore ethnicities. The idea is that a kind of representation of such groups heads off potential disaffection from the regime. Pareto, argues Bottomore, believed that the higher the circulation of individuals the lower the other kind of circulation, replacement of whole ruling groups. But he notes that a clear exception was the caste system of India, which excluded either kind of circulation (Bottomore 1993, 35, 38– 39). Co-optation of individuals from beneath the ruling group may offer many needed skills for effective governance. In much of Europe often such experts of bourgeois origins bought their offices, which were inheritable subject to a fee. These were the “merit” nobles, as distinct from blue-blood nobles (the French distinguished them as the noblesse de robe [“nobility of the robe,” especially from service as prosecutors or judges at court] as opposed to the noblesse d’epe´e, “nobility of the sword”). To recruit bourgeois to high offices risked offending nobles or clergy who had to make way for them. Also, the newly represented could in large part as a consequence of such service perceive that they themselves could com-

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petently fill all high offices, such that the hereditary monarch as well as top nobles could be pushed out of power. Although allied with some provincial nobles disgruntled by centralizing royal absolutism, merit nobles were among the Fronde rebels of 17th-century France. The Ottoman Turks long sought to minimize the risk by their system of janissaries, or Islamicized Baltic Christian boys who were the sultan’s slaves. These could not only be warriors but rise to even the highest administrative office, grand vizier to the sultan. But grand viziers sometimes became threatening and would then be decapitated and their fortunes confiscated. More general risings of the janissaries, long corrupted to permit entry of sons of janissaries or even ordinary Muslim youths, led to the eventual abolition of the order in 1826. The liberals Montesquieu and Voltaire were of the French merit nobility. The Russian Communist revolutionary Lenin could by the same principle as a university student sign himself, Nobleman Vladimir Ulyanov. But even when little of such representation is accorded, as noted in the last chapter for creoles in vice royalties in colonial Hispanic America, such subversive self-confidence could arise even from lesser administrative service, perhaps even in the private sector. Another problem of royal councils, shared by cabinets of other regimes, is that selection of their members did not usually mean an end of coalition politics, with its usual tools of backbiting, slanders, or leaked information. Top courtiers could intrigue in rival groups to win as yet uncommitted royal support on policy, or they could sometimes conspire against the very tenure of the reigning monarch. Military Dictatorships In the military dictatorship regime, normally the planners of a successful coup, as in Gamson’s theory, proportionally pay off the units of the armed services that support them. As suggested by the analysis of Amos Perlmutter, the program coalition of a military dictatorship depends upon the goals of its leaders (Perlmutter 1981). But this may affect the likely cabinet coalition. Military regimes are often called praetorian, adopting the name of the ancient Roman imperial guard, often involved in usurpations of power. A military regime may be what Perlmutter calls an arbitrator praetorianism, which may keep some distance from power, sometimes ruling indirectly through civilian politicians in existing offices or attempting such indirect rule through a military party. Often, it seems, an arbitrator praetorianism looks to “fix” one thing and intends, once done, to restore power to civilians quickly. If the problem primarily concerns barracks grievances, such as improving pay, the planners of the coup may not need any nonmilitary coalition allies. But if they aim at restoring constitutionality, correcting corruption, or achieving some similar goal affecting many, they may want

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to ally with whatever “sound” elements exist within civilian interest groups, political parties, and other organizations. In the first case forming a cabinet is almost irrelevant, and in the latter case, the cabinet may be primarily military but with a sprinkling of civilians, involving more of these to the extent that there is clear coalition with some preexisting civilian political forces. In each respect like the military of Indonesia, the Turkish military abhors separatism, communism, and neo-Islamic religious fundamentalism. By all accounts, Turkish military interventions are typically of the arbitrator mode, as when focusing on their self-image as guardian of internal security against terrorists of either Left or Right. Or they claim defense of the constitution against improper maneuvers by the civilian government party leaders. Offering strongly supportive detail, one analyst suggests that the Turkish military interventions are distinctive in purpose and are also tactically distinctive in any coalitions with nonmilitary forces: Frequently they look for allies at the opposite end of the political spectrum from that which they have purged, and the political coalitions which they construct may therefore differ sharply from one intervention to another, even if some of the soldiers involved are the same in either case. In 1960, when the Democrats were deprived of power, the military regime sought allies on the left, among the Republicans, the youth associations, and the trade unions. In 1971, when the soldiers struck at the left (including both trade unions and youth associations), they cooperated with liberal politicians. In 1980, they imprisoned extremists of both left and right, while at the same time purging centrist groups; as a result they had no natural political allies, and instead built up clientelist networks of a new kind at many levels. (Karakartal 1985, 54)

But again referring to Perlmutter, in contrast to the arbitrator praetorianism another kind of military regime rather aims at a “ruling praetorianism,” normally involving the dictator and top associates in a direct rule. This often means having broader program goals and intending a protracted hold on power. Although it may begin with some civilian allies, it often finds it convenient to drop them and have the military rule with but selected individual, civilian specialists. Or again, if preparing its exit from power with a regime transition to democracy, such a regime may reverse that course and reintroduce representatives of civilian political forces for the transition. But whereas a ruling praetorianism thus may or may not want coalition with civilian parties and others, Perlmutter notes that any coalition to oust a ruling praetorian regime literally must have such allies (Perlmutter 1981, 22, 199–203). Chiefly focused on ruling praetorianisms, one can distinguish military regimes by the degree of concentration of power in the dictator. Perlmutter distinguishes three degrees.

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The first is the autocratic style, which can run into a personalistic tyranny in which the cabinet is but a gang of sycophantic cronies, as under Idi Amin in Uganda prior to his 1979 ouster. In a second form, the military regime may be oligarchic, in the classic sense of shared rule by the few, as in some Latin American countries where power is collegially shared with a junta. The last two military dictatorships of Argentina, in 1966–73 and 1976–82, found it convenient to use the junta form in order to share power across the army, navy, and air force. Third, the regime may be corporatistic, whether in the patrimonial mode of Anastasio Somoza’s Nicaragua (1937–79) or in the more institutional form such as in the later phases of the last military regimes in Brazil (from 1964 to a phase-out for Congress by 1986 and restored democratic presidency in 1989) or in Chile (1973–90). In the last form a mixed military– civilian cabinet is important, since it attempts to include co-opted representatives of approved social organizations, if often bypassing top preregime civilian party leaders (cf. O’Donnell 1973). But even when in the corporatistic mode, military officers may then dominate cabinet slots of the “high politics” of international and domestic security, leaving social and economic ministries to civilians. Except when the military are of what Samuel Huntington called the breakthrough coup mode of opposing a hated regime, such as an obsolete traditional monarchy or a liberal democracy fallen into economic doldrums or political corruption, the military is usually lacking in broadly sensed legitimacy. Hence it fails at the outset by the responsibility measure of representation. Also, since the military quite often closes down activities of political parties or many political interest groups such as labor unions or student associations, often recessing any parliament as well, they are not likely to do well by responsiveness measures of representation apart from any involving the military themselves. Nor do they do well by reflectiveness or the mirroring of social characteristics, not surprisingly in that the military dictatorship in any of its forms sharply narrows the field of political participants, at least when compared with a liberal democratic regime. Not always does a coup circle or its later junta include even the whole of the armed forces. Thus the Greek army colonels who ruled in 1967–74 never really included the navy or air force as full partners, and the navy by 1973 displayed its traditional loyalty to the monarchy, which was hence terminated by the colonels. Even if a junta includes all services at top tier ranks, it may fail to give representation to more junior officers. As for ethnic group representation, fear of separatism may exacerbate it when the military purge the group from its ranks, as when the Turkish military in 2000 expelled many Kurds as well as Islamic fundamentalists. The grand coalition of ethnicities supposed in consociationalism may be almost impossible under a military regime, since the representation of

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groups in officer ranks is likely to diverge from their presence in the population. In one case, a minority may be overrepresented. Under colonialism, Perlmutter notes, colonial authorities, for obvious reasons, often preferred any native recruits to the military to be disproportionately from local ethnic minorities such as the Sikhs and Muslims in British Raj India (Perlmutter 1981, 12). Whatever the advantage for colonial control, this can cause tensions later under independence, perhaps encouraging separation of Pakistan in 1947 or the yet continuing Sikh separatism in India’s Punjab. In Rwanda and Burundi, the minority (about 15 percent in Rwanda, 12 percent in Burundi) Tutsis dominate the military (and hence military regimes) and the majority Hutus (85–86 percent) dominate society (and hence democratic regimes). In the opposite case, an ethnic minority can sometimes be underrepresented in military leadership. If a ruling praetorian regime cuts out all civilian political leaders, there can be nonobvious consequences: When the dictator Ayub Khan of Pakistan put only military officers and higher bureaucrats in key cabinet slots, the result was a steep decline of representation of East Pakistan’s Bengalis, who had been sparse in such roles. Surely this spurred the secession of East Pakistan (Rizvi 1985, 212). Consider the Siyaad Baare military dictatorship of Somalia: The Somalis, who formed their independent nation in 1960, share not only a common religion (Sunni Islam) but also other shared acculturation linked to the desert life of herding camels and other animals. A watery sense of all-Somali nationalism can surface on some issues such as the desirability of incorporating irredenta—the Somalis primarily resident in the Ogaaden of Ethiopia (which defeated an attempt at secession) or in northern reaches of Kenya. As David Laitin puts it, “although ridden with internal fission and clannish factionalism, the Somalis nevertheless are drawn together by highly emotive supra tribal bonds of nationhood” (Laitin 1987, 68). The strongest identity is one’s clan, since it offers the chief guarantee of protection and economic welfare. Beginning independence as a democracy, Somalia had a massive proliferation of political parties, many of which were in part defined in terms of the clans. The democratic regime sought to depoliticize bureaucratic appointments with a meritocratic system, but initial use of English in exams clearly favored the northern groups, leading to a shift to Somali in the exams. The cabinet positions were allocated as if it were a grand coalition of all clans, but this did not save the regime from a military takeover. The Barre military government abandoned parity among clans in cabinet appointments, favoring the three clans of Siyaad himself and wholly leaving out three clans. But he faced economic troubles (Barre pretended to a kind of “Afrocommunism” before reversing to free enterprise after the Soviet Union failed to offer expected military aid). Somalia also experienced a

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disastrous defeat in the Ogaaden war. Barre was deposed and Somalia degenerated into regional clan warlordism. This again offers us an instructive case of interactions among levels of political coalition: Baare’s imprudent choices in cabinet coalition may have for a time given him some weight with his program coalition, but it ultimately contributed to failure of the political community. Not even external intervention by the United States, after mass starvation linked to warring between the clans, could put Humpty Dumpty back together again. As Christopher Clapham and George Philip note, problems of both military unit and social representation under military regimes are sometimes addressed by a two-tier system of smaller junta and larger military council: The classic military junta, characteristic of fairly highly institutionalized militaries or veto regimes, seeks to reconcile the interests of major institutional sections of the military, usually army, navy and air force. The military council, usually larger than the junta and composed of junior or middle-level officers, seeks to contain the danger provoked by junior officers’ coups which take the dangerously fragmenting form of challenges to the existing command hierarchy. . . . Councils of this kind are also very commonly used . . . to contain ethnic differences by including representatives from each of the major ethnic or regional groups. (Clapham and Philip 1985, 20)

Yet any division of powers offers potential recognition of incompatible aims: The junta and larger council can come into conflict. The military are but part of the public bureaucracy, specialists in armed defense of the state from its external or internal enemies. To the extent that there is an absence or atrophy of any hereditary nobility, and to the extent that the military offend all civilian party leaders by repressing political parties, military cabinets usually require inclusion in top offices of many civilian administrative experts, or technocrats. Although such technocrats could readily serve them for personal rewards, they may put the interests of nonmilitary groups or even their own ahead of the aims of the military leader. Also, some of the technocrats could readily change the kind of regime they would serve. One recalls that the French diplomatic “expert” Charles Talleyrand could almost indifferently serve the Bourbons, the revolutionary republic, or the military usurper Napoleon Bonaparte. But the main problem for effective governance of a military-dominated cabinet is that, just as a child given a hammer may think everything needs pounding, the military seem too likely to turn to their coercive apparatus to the neglect of talk or diplomatic and negotiating skills. One concedes some exceptional military officers who could mediate at least some conflicts (one thinks of Alejandro Lanusse in Argentina, Ayub Khan in Pakistan, and Jaroslav Jaruzelski in Poland). But relative to democracies, military

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regimes have both more domestic political violence and more warring (Rummel 1997). Notwithstanding special problems in governance, military tenures can sometimes be far longer than those typical of democratic leaders. Largely through effective repression, long holds on power may be secured by a Chiang Kai-shek (1925/26–75, or about 50 years), Francisco Franco (1936–75, or 39 years), Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua (strongarming by 1933–34, but president 1937–79, or for 42 years), Alfredo Stroessner of Paraguay (1954–89, or 35 years), Mobutu of Zaire/Congo (1961–97, or 36 years), or Suharto of Indonesia (1965–98, or 33 years). Aside from the fact that most military dictators do not have such tenacity, for a merely stable executive, few would want to pay common costs in imprisonments, tortures, assassinations, and executions, often with much corruption as well. Counterrevolutionary Cabinet Coalitions Recall that this sort of a regime, comparable to Hitler’s Germany or Mussolini’s Italy, is not really egalitarian. It attempts to divert revolutionary emphasis on class conflicts toward other enemies, especially ethnic or cultural “outsiders” claimed to subvert national unity or even to disrupt family unity by departing from patriarchal norms. Its ethos evokes an idealized (mythologized) past, before recent military reverses, economic dislocations, or socialist/Communist challenges. It appeals to a fearful middle class, not satisfied with the performance of the existing regime. The counterrevolutionary movement often begins with some criticism of both any old nobility and any new political party leaders, and its typical male chauvinism makes it most unlikely that any women would have a cabinet office. Since the movement often originates in nonstate paramilitary forces (fighting squads, often uniformed), when strong enough it can raise distrust among regular army officers. All of that tends to narrow possible ministerial choices to previously unknown, male arrivistes, people of prior obscurity, distinguished by little but for their unquestioning loyalty to a counterrevolutionary leader such as Mussolini or Hitler. Regarding concepts of representation, a counterrevolutionary cabinet is quite unlikely to mirror the society. It may need to work into public legitimacy and provide at best a dubious test of responsiveness in surveyed public opinion or plebiscites, since possible oppositions are quickly silenced. Yet inconsistently with the late 1940s and 1950s theory of “totalitarianism,” fascist cabinets were filled with rivalries for influence among ministries or lesser agencies, in the Nazi case even over primacy in conducting of genocide. Yet projects of foreign conquest often made a Mussolini or Hitler reluctant to grant much autonomy to cabinet ministers. Hitler

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stopped convening cabinet meetings in the late 1930s and only occasionally took counsel with individual members. He left many of his cabinet ministers, even the pompous Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, increasingly out of his inner circle. This inner cabinet included for a time Hermann Goering, minister of air and president of the Reichstag, and after 1942 Albert Speer, minister of armaments production. Another key figure was Heinrich Himmler, minister of the interior and head of the SS. He was eventually eclipsed by the Nazi Party minister Martin Bormann, who supervised the gauleiters and served as Hitler’s chief of staff. Another central figure with more continuity was Joseph Goebels, Hitler’s minister of public enlightenment and propaganda and gauleiter of Berlin. Hitler appointed Goebels his successor as chancellor just before he, then Goebels, committed suicide. If Hitler shared some administrative authority with such trusted top lieutenants, he ultimately made his own decisions on the most important policy questions. As Allied armies closed in on Berlin, Goering and Himmler took their own initiatives in attempting to negotiate a separate surrender with the Western states, even then being quickly replaced by an angry Hitler (Bullock 1952). Mussolini had a long grip on power in Italy, 1922–45, or 23 years, if holding only the northern region in his last years, when Allied armies had invaded the south. Mussolini began by making much use of prior experience in his Council of Ministers but shifted to more personal rule in time. His Grand Council of Fascism (by 1928 formally integrated with the state) was supposed to be the peak authority, but Mussolini did not even consult it in making such key decisions as the 1929 Lateran Pacts with the Vatican, the 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, or the very ill-fated choice in 1940 to declare war on France and Britain (Pollard 1998, 57). Like many military dictatorships, often blundering into disastrous wars, many counterrevolutionary governments with their regimes have fallen from outside military defeat. That has not happened with Saddam Hussein of Iraq, who, like Mussolini or Hitler, was involved in torture or execution of many Communists. As described by the well-informed Saı¨d Aburish, Hussein had humble village origins but worked his way to power through party offices, aided in his rise by two older military relatives, including his stepfather, General Ahmad Hassan Al Bakr, who led the 1963 overthrow and execution of Karim Kassem (who was judged insufficiently committed to Arab unity). Bakr remained formally president until his 1979 succession by Hussein, who had accumulated other party and government offices and effectively governed even before 1979. Top power is in large part closely held by family and friends, largely from the Tikrit area. Saddam has made much use of his relatives, including not only the stepfather mentioned but halfbrothers, father-in-law, and brothers-in-law. He has shared power less and less with Ba’ath Party or government organs. In 1982 Saddam took his minister of health out of a cabinet meeting and personally shot him. This

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was not, as some reported, because the minister had suggested that he yield power again to Bakr to negotiate a peace with Iran but because the minister had taken a bribe from the supplier of defective medical supplies to the Iraqi army (Aburish 2000, 208–9). Saddam apparently intends to pass on power to his younger son, Qussay, not to his mentally slower and psychopathic older son, Udday. The drunken Udday murdered a man for introducing his widower father to a second wife. Saddam pardoned him for the crime. Revolutionary Regime Bureaucratic infighting rivalries, ultimately closed in resolution by a top leader, pervaded most Communist governments. In form, the Auguste Blanqui phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat” meant to say that any government was some kind of class dictatorship, as would be Blanqui’s advocating putschist seizure of power by the working class. Blanqui, seldom able to remain out of prison, was an unlikely prospect for dictatorship in the other sense. Unfortunately adopting the Blanqui phrase, Marx and Engels thus did not have in mind any dictatorship in the sense of autocracy, as some who should know better quite wrongly believe even now (Bueno de Mesquita 2000, 90). Marx and Engels explicitly expected their “dictatorship of the proletariat,” the transitional state to eventual statelessness in a higher phase of socialism, to be like the 1871 Paris Commune. During its few months of life before repression by the liberals led from Versailles by Thiers, the Commune government rejected separation of powers and centered all power in a popular representative assembly. There was no outstanding leader, let alone “dictator” in the narrow sense. The Communards, who, in the view of Marx and Engels, kept even legislators under close popular control, did not want a strong executive; nor did they want a judiciary with merely “sham independence” from a ruling class (for details, cf. Tucker 1978, 618–52). Marx (d. 1883) and Engels (d. 1895) did not invent or anticipate the elite membership, highly centralized Communist Party, which was a creation by N. Lenin (d. 1924) in the opening years of the 20th century. One complication of Communist governments from the first installment of communism in Russia in November 1917 was the development of a Communist Party hierarchy roughly paralleling the state, with the companion doctrine that the Party had “hegemony” over state organs. Stalin became the top party chief, or the general secretary, the title used by all other Communist states and usually identifying the top leader, except in Maoist China. Dominating the Soviet Union in 1925–53, Stalin headed up and usually worked with the cabinet-sized Politburo or policy bureau of the Communist Party, which was supposedly answerable to the legislature-sized Central Committee, in turn nominally answerable to the occasional Party Congress. The

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Politburo normally dominated a Communist regime, not the state cabinet, the Council of Ministers. Mao Zedong’s leadership in the Chinese Communist Party had many setbacks, especially when his rural-based Red Army was overruled by the Shanghai-based central party organs, often disastrously responsive to the Stalin-dominated Communist International (Comintern), as in 1931–34. But a decade later, Mao was China’s almost uncontested supreme leader. Mao’s autocracy was distinctive only in label in being ultimately based on his role as chair of the Standing Committee of the Central Committee. He also took the role of chief of state, or president. When Mao took control of most of China in 1949, with the faithful Zhou Enlai as head of government, the premier, there was at first a coalition of 14 political parties, not unlike Stalin’s East European “people’s democracies” as addressed in Chapter 4. Of 24 cabinet ministers, 11 were non-Communist (Terrill 1999, 228). Mao’s initial “New Democracy” program was limited, less proletarian than populist in appeal, involving only marriage reform permitting choice of spouse and then a land reform that took some 40 percent of cultivated land from large landowners and redistributed it among some 60 percent of the Chinese peasantry. If Mao let the peasantry deal ruthlessly with landlords, his Communist apparatus took a more direct role in repressing “reactionaries” in the cities. Mao later conceded that in 1950–52 about 800,000 Chinese may have been killed, some of whom should not have been. In a new burst of revolutionary zeal, in 1956–57 Mao urged, “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend,” only to close down such free speech when it was apparent that much of it was sharp criticism of Communist rule. Some even urged toleration of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, whose militarily defeated leaders had retreated to Taiwan in 1949. The Hungarian insurrection of 1956 was also sobering for Mao, and he feared that a reformer such as Imre Nagy could threaten his own power. In yet another change, the Great Leap Forward was launched by Mao in 1958–59 with disastrous result and was sharply opposed by Mao’s top generals such as Peng Dehua and Zhu De. The attempt at rapid socialist industrialization in part by backyard steel furnaces merely wasted resources, but the turn to collectivization of agriculture, especially in the initially massive “peoples’ communes” embracing many villages and much territory, may have caused some 30 million to starve. After this disaster, in 1959 Mao relinquished the chief of state role to a fellow Hunanese Communist of long familiarity, Liu Shaoqi. Although not now having any state office, Mao continued to attempt domination of public policy through his role as chair of the Standing Committee of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. But by 1966, having once described himself as center-Left in the Party, he began yet another “struggle” campaign, the Great Proletarian Cultural

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Revolution, with the view that state president and designated heir as party leader Liu, along with Deng Xiaoping, the general secretary of the Party, led rightist “capitalist roaders” opposed to him. This almost anarchic movement of Red Guard youths waving their little red books of Mao quotations was destructive of more lives as well as Chinese cultural artifacts, but it was successful in the limited sense of permitting Mao to demote Liu as well as Deng. Yet when the Red Guards seemed to get out of hand, even attacking Foreign Minister Chen Yi, Mao stepped in against “ultraleftist” excess. To guide and then to rein in the often destructive Red Guards, Mao turned to the People’s Liberation Army. Sycophantic Lin Biao was ascendant among the officers as defense minister and was soon named in the Communist Party constitution as Mao’s deputy chair and by implication the new designated heir as party leader. But however adulatory of Mao, Lin failed to adapt when Mao changed his 1960–65 view that the Soviet Union and United States were equally threatening to the new line of 1965, holding that the U.S.S.R. was much more so. The Russian-orchestrated invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the armed clashes of the Russians and Chinese on the Amur–Ussuri border in 1969 confirmed Mao’s new view. If Lin urged Mao to reassume the role of chief of state he had abandoned to Liu in 1959, it appeared that he really was trying to get that vacated title for himself. Although military officers favorable to Lin had been taken into the Party Congress, the Central Committee and even the Politburo, Lin’s star peaked about 1969, and Mao as well as Premier Zhou Enlai began to nibble at Lin’s power bases. Although it is not clear that Lin himself was a plotter, Lin’s young second wife and also his son, the deputy commander of the Chinese air force, were certainly involved in a clumsy plot to have Lin take power by a military coup d’e´tat. But many in the military, especially the important regional military commanders, opposed Lin. Hence the plot went badly. Lin died in 1971 in a mysterious Chinese airforce–owned Trident plane crash in Mongolia when apparently trying to flee to the safety of the U.S.S.R. An enlarged opening to the United States was consolidated by Kissinger and Nixon in 1971–72. During the ensuing years, there was no replacement of Lin as sole deputy chair of the Communist Party. Rather, five deputies were appointed. Premier Zhou Enlai was long quite literally displayed in public as Mao’s right-hand man. He was now orally designated heir by Mao, but Zhou became an unlikely successor once known to have incurred multiple abdominal cancers. In 1973–74 Deng Xiaoping, whom the regional military commanders had never wanted demoted, was restored to power in time to inform 9 of 11 of these commanders that they had to accept a change of their command. In a public appearance, Deng replaced Zhou in a seat at Mao’s right. Yet when Zhou died of cancer in early 1976, Deng lost centrist leverage for his own succession. Mao once again shifted

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Left and criticized Deng as unable to understand class struggle. He now made the somewhat Left Hua Guofeng the new premier as well as vicechair of the Communist Party. Deng was again stripped of his offices, but for mere membership in the Communist Party. But upon Mao’s own death of congestive heart failure and Lou Gehrig’s disease in later 1976, Mao’s estranged wife, Jiang Qing, led the rather unpopular ultra-Left group dubbed by rivals the “Gang of Four” in an attempt to take power, which was easily defeated. In the aftermath, Hua lost influence and Deng was restored to leadership, now without any major rival such as Zhou or Mao. Deng apparently vindicated Mao’s view that he could be a “capitalist roader” when he led restoration of elements of the market and restored peasant proprietorships, even while resisting any early turn to political democratization of China. The 1989 repression of the Tiananmen demonstrators made that clear. Deng would himself die in 1996 (Terrill 1999). Even now among the handful of surviving Communist regimes, it is not the current prime minister, Xu Ronghiu, but rather the general secretary and state president Ziang Zemin (a former mayor of Shanghai) who makes top policy choices. He is expected to remain party chief until retiring in 2002, and also state president, until 2003, perhaps hoping to lead without formal office thereafter, as true of his predecessor, Deng Xiaoping. Like Stalin, Mao sometimes subordinated program aspirations to personal retention of power when recommending state cabinet appointments. Official cults of leadership tended to arise about many Communist regime autocrats, even if they, like fascist autocrats, often made counterproductive as well as morally objectionable decisions. Failures in satisfying the three broad criteria of representativeness as well as securing economic growth brought down most Communist regimes through internal defections, even by many Communist Party members, during 1989–91. In China, intellectuals may sharply criticize their regime sotto voce, as the author found in traveling through central China in 1991, and eventual liberalization of the polity is likely to follow the existing liberalization of the economy. In 2001, the Communist Party was opened to capitalist members. Now speaking of all four forms of nonliberal democratic regimes, a problem likely to arise is that the top leadership may not want to step down for fear of persecution later for violations of human rights (extending sometimes even to genocide) committed during their tenure. Alternatives have included exile or some arrangement of amnesty or immunity from successors. In Greece, the military dictator Papadopoulos attempted to convert his regime to a mixed presidential–parliamentary mode in 1973–74, but he was overthrown by his own hard-line head of the guard, General Ionnides, who himself had to step down after attempting assassination of Cyprus’s president Makarios and causing the invasion of Cyprus by Turkey. As an instance of immunity, upon leaving the presidency of Chile, the

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dictator Pinochet had himself made senator-for-life, assuring himself through that role immunity from possible prosecution for some five thousand deaths or disappearances during or after his 1973 coup d’e´tat. Only alleged ill health shielded him from possible prosecution in Spain or elsewhere when he was detained by the British authorities after seeking medical care there. Pinochet was legally challenged again when he slipped back home in 2000, where the Chilean Supreme Court ruled against his immunity. He seemed headed for trial in February 2001, notwithstanding medical problems but legal ploys caused an indefinite delay. Deterring tyranny, securing justice against fallen tyrants, and restoring democracy can be in tension, and no obvious solutions suggest themselves. Presidential–Parliamentary Cabinet Coalitions Bypassing merely nominal democracies, such as Yugoslavia under Milosˆovic´, where media were gagged and opponents physically attacked, I now address the mixed presidential–parliamentary democracy. In the French Fifth Republic, the first three presidents, Charles De Gaulle, Georges Pompidou, and Vale´ry Giscard d’Estaing, wanted to lead policy formation, not just in foreign and defense matters but even in domestic economic and other policy. Constitutionally chairs of the Council of Ministers, they liked to overshadow prime ministers at these cabinet meetings, even when these did not really involve collective decision making as in Britain but were largely used just to ratify policy already worked out by negotiation. When the center-rightist president Giscard d’Estaing lacked sufficient votes from rightist parliamentarians, he would sometimes turn to radicals or socialists on his Left. When facing down policy conflict with prime minister Jacques Chirac, he frequently convened ministerial councils to counter the cabinet committees of Chirac. When parliamentary majorities were from their own political family of the Right, presidents were actively involved in picking prime ministers and dismissing them if they exercised too much autonomy. Unlike the situation of the chief of state in pure parliamentary systems, who merely designate a formateur or prospective prime minister, they even wanted to pick or at least exercise a veto over other cabinet member choices, if always constrained by what would fly before parliament (Suleiman 1980). This dual executive system has its special problem when the fixed term president and variable term prime minister are not only of different parties but even of opposite political family: when one is of the Left, the other, of the Right. Periods of so-called cohabitation have caused presidents to be less overbearing, to accept the “natural” figure for prime minister, and to concede to the prime minister much more voice on at least domestic policy and on choices of ministers to implement it. Yet presidents such as Franc¸ois Mitterrand (of the socialist Left, elected in 1981 and reelected 1988) and

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Jacques Chirac (the Gaullist Right, elected in 1995) have insisted on their leadership over high policy issues of defense and foreign affairs. Finland, which had long been substantially parliamentary in domestic policy but had entrusted foreign policy to a directly elected president, found that the distinction failed in their 1992 decision to join the European Union (Nousiainen 1996, 125). Since the French constitution lacks clarity, one must expect future tensions in working out the informal norms for periods of cohabitation. Even when both figures are of the same political family, there may be tensions: Socialist Mitterand in 1981 conceded four cabinet posts to the in fact unnecessary Communist Party coalition partner, which resigned the government in 1984. To improve democratic responsiveness and to minimize periods of cohabitation, top leaders (President Chirac signed on after the socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin, became committed) favored reducing the directly elected (since 1962) presidential term from seven years to five. Threefourths of the French public favored it and by referendum made it binding for the 2002 election, but new legislation would schedule parliamentary elections just before presidential. It will be recalled that I am using France as a continuing case study comparing the four kinds of coalitions reviewed in this book. France, I earlier noted, has had but 1 political community but 11–16 distinctive regimes from 1789. But often having up to 8–10 political parties (or high party “fractionalization”), usually including some antisystem ones of Left and Right extremes, France has had far more changes of governments. Alone, the Third Republic (formally in effect in 1875–1940) had 94 governments, with 44 different premiers. True, most of such governments were centrist, as they were to be under the more ideologically polarized Fourth Republic (1946–58), which had a total of 24 governments. Blondel, offering that figure, notes, “On the average, governments fell every six to seven months in the Fourth Republic as in the last years of the Third” (Blondel 1974, 49). Counting one more government, Suleiman notes: “Between 1946 and 1958, twenty-five governments were formed and of the fifteen prime ministers who led them only two (Henri Queille and Guy Mollet) lasted more than a year” (Suleiman 1980, 96). Dodd, who looks at the Third Republic only from 1918 but at the whole life of the Fourth Republic, notes that the “cabinets averaged approximately nine and one-half months” (Dodd 1972, 5). Immobilisme, or no movement on policy, pervaded both the Third and Fourth Republics, with both dominated by what Duverger called the “swamp” of ideological centrism and executive instability (Duverger 1964). The pure parliamentary systems of postwar Italy and Japan, especially when yet under the sway of a highly factionalized dominant party (the Christian Democrats in the former, the Liberal Democrats in the latter), have suffered from similar instability of government and lack of firm policy agendas.

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Under France’s Fifth Republic, which instituted the presidential–parliamentary hybrid (1958 to present), governments have been more stable. This is in part because presidents formally control nominations and dismissals of prime ministers, and as noted they may extend such dominance to other cabinet ministers when governments are of their own political family. presidents also have the power of parliamentary dissolution, if exercisable only once in a year. Another perhaps stabilizing cause is the previously noted constitutional requirement that any members of parliament who become ministers must resign their seats, even if by the tradition called the cumul (accumulation) they may continue to hold lesser public offices such as mayor of a commune.1 The hybrid system adopted by post-Communist Russia has had a shorter presidential term of only four years. In contrast to the French move to cut theirs back from seven to five years, president Vladimir Putin would like to lengthen the Russian 4-year presidential term to seven years. As in the French Fifth Republic, Russia constitutionally requires cabinet ministers to resign from any seat in parliament. But the Russians go further in also requiring them to quit any other government or private job, unless it is in “teaching, scientific or other creative activity.” Although some have seen it as necessary to prevent anarchy, others see hints of Tsarist absolutism in Putin’s taking steps in summer 2000 to curtail powers of the often resistant Russian republics by acquiring a presidential power to dismiss a governor or mayor. Russia is also setting up seven large regions, with decision makers more amenable to Putin. Presidential Cabinet Coalitions A presidential system, I noted in Chapter 4, departs from my central concept of nested coalitions in that the legislative branch does not select the executive, except when the national legislature freely elects an executive for a fixed term (sometimes preferred as the semidemocratic gesture of military governments). But the legislative branch has no such role when an electoral college is closely linked to the voters (as in the United States) or when a president is directly elected by the voters. We may first look at how presidential cabinets may operate under a consociational regime, which, one may recall, aims at unanimity among leading elites of the ethnic “pillars” of society. Put otherwise, in the strongest form, any one pillar can veto any policy change judged adverse to its interests. The Swiss have a bicameral legislature (the Federal Assembly). Each house can block legislation. The popular chamber, the National Council (Nationalrat), is directly elected by the voters, and an upper chamber, the Council of States (Sta¨nderat), has two members from each Swiss canton and one from each half-canton. The Federal Assembly and the executive,

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the Federal Council (Bundesrat), are independent in that neither can overthrow the other. But the members of the Council of States every four years nominate the seven members of this plural executive body, subject to rejection by the National Council. Selection of the Federal Councillors follows informal rules of proportionality: Although no canton is to have more than one, the cantons of Zurich, Berne, and Vaud normally can count on getting one, and all other cantons can expect sometimes to have a councillor. If that in part assures representation for the residentially concentrated German, French, and Italian linguistic groups, there is also a tradition that two of the seven councillors (or 28.6 percent) are Christian Democrats, normally meaning that Catholics get some representation, if less than their presence (42 percent) in the Swiss population. The councillors also proportionally represent the other political parties, thus assuring that business, farm, and labor sectors have voice. Yet each councillor is required to resign any formal office with a party or interest group, thus offering an appearance of transcending original partisanships. The seven Federal Councillors have four-year terms but can be indefinitely returned, and in the past many became old hands with some 10 or 11 years in the Federal Council. The presidency and vicepresidency are annually rotated among them, but these offices have largely ceremonial functions, since decisions by the executive body are made behind closed doors in a collegial way, aiming at consensus. An eighth person, the federal chancellor, is elected to a four-year term by the Federal Assembly to counsel the seven councillors and to coordinate the ministries. But the federal chancellor is limited to advice and a merely advisory vote. Collegium voting seems to be perfunctory, since much federal power is devolved to the ministerial level. Each of the seven councillors heads up one of the seven ministries, while being deputy in another. Since 1947 the ministries are required to consult in a neocorporatist way not only affected cantons but the main interest groups of the Swiss society (like the Swiss, the Dutch conjoin consociational and corporatist styles). Their decisions are also overshadowed less by the bicameral parliament than by the threat of a popular initiative or referendum on some contested issue. Thus the Swiss executive, because it consists of seven persons rather than one, has a means of covering median issue positions not available to a single executive who is not ruling collegially. The Swiss in effect aim at the executive level to have a grand coalition rather than a minimal winning one (Baylis 1989, 2–44). Leaving plural consociational presidency aside, in a single incumbent presidential system such as the United States, normally presidents may apolitically appoint thousands of persons such as military officers. Perhaps anticipating the need for competence, as in the Bureau of the Budget, or else the need for many cross-party legislative coalitions, they usually include many of the other major party even in more ostensibly “political” roles,

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especially when not involving federal judicial appointments, cabinet offices, or politically sensitive media relations or advisory roles of the Office of the White House. Whereas most presidential appointments (nearly all cabinet choices) receive routine Senate approval, this is less likely for judicial offices, if even then a challenged nominee is more likely to be withdrawn by the president than actually rejected. A scan of tables of presidential appointments to federal district judgeships and circuit court judgeships suggests that a rough average of about nine in ten are copartisans, a proportion that could, one guesses, be among Supreme Court justices. Judges do make public policy, and hence more partisan screening applies. The reluctance to include judicial appointees of the other party may also reflect that judges serve “on good behavior,” or usually for life, whereas even cabinet secretaries average (as in parliamentary Great Britain, one may note) only two years in a specific slot (cf. King and Ragsdale 1988, 201–2, 235, 238–39). Also, unlike, say, a third-tier level appointee in a cabinet department or in the Executive Office of the president, a judge’s decisions are not generally subject to revocation by an immediate superior. If parliamentary system cabinets, especially in multiparty coalition governments, have sometimes leaned toward an unwieldy two dozen or even more (as in Canada), the U.S. presidential cabinet remains just over a dozen, and each department is closely watched. Emphasizing that the U.S. presidency is less an individual than an institution, King and Ragsdale comment on the Executive Office of the president, “presidents could not control the cabinet departments, so they increased the size of the EOP. Because the EOP was itself too big and too diverse to control, succeeding presidents expanded the White House Office” (King and Ragsdale 1988, 204). When not in some national crisis such as a war, presidents at most select for cabinet heads but a token member or two from outside their own political party. By an implicit rule, cabinet selections of copartisans roughly represent the various core program constituencies of the party. Under the separation of powers system, as well known, the president and cabinet members are not permitted to hold seats in Congress, even if many may have originated there. Also, many cabinet members are from private business, law, universities, or other backgrounds. Relative to most parliamentary systems, often personal loyalties can crowd out practical experience in presidential cabinet appointments. Europeans living under parliamentary systems would be amazed at how much in the United States prior personal ties relatively crowd out parliamentary experience, party organization leadership, and even professional civil service (cf. Katz 1996, esp. 204–13). Yet an American president has considerable freedom to “balance” cabinet selections by sex, ethnicity, region, and so on. Nevertheless, the U.S. presidential system long underrepresented women, African-Americans, and

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Hispanics, notwithstanding the electoral importance of those constituencies, with the ethnic minorities mentioned especially vital to the Democratic Party. But change is happening, and even the Republican George Bush, Jr., included much diversity in his cabinet. In presidential systems such as the United States, the fixed but unequal terms of both members of Congress and the president mean that whereas party cohesion (voting the same way) may be significant in some matters (highest in selecting leaderships of a house of Congress), party discipline (following directives of the party leader, who may often be the president) may be weak. Not only members of Congress but even cabinet heads may resist presidential leadership. Resistant cabinet ministers may not follow the British practice of resigning from the cabinet before publicly airing differences with the executive. Yet as already apparent from discussion in Chapter 4, presidents have less difficulty in forming their cabinets than in securing legislative coalitions. Except when there has occurred a realigning election, in which one party assumes extended dominance in both presidential and congressional elections, legislative coalitions are often worked out in an ad hoc and often cross-party form throughout a presidential tenure, if making most headway during a “honeymoon” phase of the first year and making least near the end of a president’s term of office. Parliamentary System Cabinet Coalitions Unlike in most presidential regimes, in pure parliamentary systems we can literally extend the concept of “nested coalitions” all the way into cabinets, especially in the British model, in which the parliamentary majority selects a cabinet out of its own ranks. Recapitulating, the program or parliamentary coalition can be defined to include the following: (1) if not a single-party majority government, the concurrence of a set of parties to form a government, usually including concurrence on a leader; (2) their concurrence on at least broad aspects of their program, in Belgium even spelling this out in a long document; and, less centrally, (3) sometimes any necessary precommitments of portfolios to secure (1) and (2). The cabinet coalition completes government formation by adding everything else: (1) It primarily allocates portfolios among the coalesced parties (or even among factions within a single-party majority government), normally following the Gamson rule of proportionality to parliamentary votes contributed to the coalition (rather than to popular votes, when different), when possible respecting special program interests, (2) by extension, it involves the selection of specific persons to fill the party or faction allotted portfolios, (3) moving beyond any all-coalition program commitments, it normally entails consent to any policy residuals entrusted to specific min-

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istries. Whereas the actual personnel in cabinet slots may be much changed, as long as the program coalition remains in power, the cabinet coalition exists in default of any repudiation by the parliamentary party base. Usually the parliamentary or program coalition is decided before (sometimes long before) the details of the cabinet coalition. The French Fourth Republic attempted (unsuccessfully) to stop all precommitment “merchandizing” of portfolios by requiring a second investiture vote for the cabinet coalition. The relative autonomy of the two coalitions is also clear in that, once formed, they need not always change together. Just as a political community coalition may remain unchanged while regime coalitions change, so a parliamentary majority or program coalition may often remain unchanged while the cabinet coalition changes. Alternatively, at least the prime ministerial portion of the program coalition may be changed without much change in anything else, including the cabinet. Of the French Fourth Republic, Petry writes: “A change of government did not necessarily mean a change of the ministerial team, parliamentary majority, or political orientation. It was more like a new crystallization of the same parliamentary majority around a new group of ministers that included few newcomers, and that proposed a program in which only the order of priorities was changed” (Petry 1996, 133). There has been similar continuity or at least recurrence of ministerial personnel for many of the 58 governments of Italy over the years 1945–2000, even if old faces often appeared at new office windows. Parliamentary system cabinets presuppose decisions as to what ministries exist, how many there are, and the possible presence, beyond the prime minister, of any cabinet seats not supervising a ministry, such as the British Chancellor for the Duchy of Lancaster. Unlike in Japan, where cabinet ministries are embedded in law, normally British prime ministers could reshape ministries as they please. Yet most prime ministers rather yield to a kind of institutional inertia. The higheststatus ministries are not necessarily those with big budgets but those with a longer history (Rose 1987). Having too few ministries, such as a dozen or fewer, may mean too much bureaucracy for one minister to handle, while unduly limiting channels for interest group access. However, more than two dozen ministries may be too many, since this may force too many conflicts upward for resolution, yet make impracticable full cabinet deliberations about conflicts or anything else. By impressionistic evidence rather than solid comparative data, it is often asserted that in polities that tend to coalitions of many political parties, there is some tendency to expand the size of the cabinet, creating more ministries to be allocated. But even in the absence of many parties in coalition, as Canada shows, cabinets can grow large, and the size may help

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facilitate some social reflectivity representativeness for religion, region, and so forth. In coalitions involving many parties, unless some of these are built around such social attributes, perhaps comparable reflectivity representation may put more of the burden on the chief executive’s own party or faction of the party, since it is unable (as we note later) to control selection of persons for the ministries entrusted to coalition partners. In pure parliamentary systems such as Great Britain, executive decisions may be made at many levels: If not at the civil service level, most likely for “administrative” more than policy matters, these can include the ministry, a usually interministerial cabinet committee, the full cabinet, a relatively formal partial cabinet, an informal inner cabinet, or the prime minister almost alone. Some deliberations and decisions, such as those involving very sensitive information concerning state security, may involve only the prime minister, perhaps adding the home secretary or the foreign secretary, depending upon whether the matter involves domestic or international security concerns. Many policy decisions involving conflict among ministries, when not resolved by cabinet committees (many of which are not chaired by the prime minister), are made by the cabinet collectively, although full British cabinet meetings have declined to about 40 per year, as more gets done at the cabinet committee level (Burch and Holliday 1996, 44–45). By British tradition, a show of collegial rule or cabinet solidarity is deemed imperative, if often violated by anonymous leaks to the press. Often by such devices as avoiding formal votes, which are also rare in most other European parliamentary system cabinets (apart from those in Norway, the Netherlands, Ireland, and Finland), prime ministers may try to maintain cabinet unity (on the scarcity of voting, cf. Thie´bault 1993, 84). But even in Britain, whatever the unusual case of the wartime prime minister Lloyd George, who kept his cabinet behind him when he was abandoned by the parliamentary majority, few prime ministers would steamroll a cabinet, since the move could be counterproductive. There are many historical instances when British cabinets successfully rebelled against a policy favored by their own leader: “A prime minister who habitually ignored the Cabinet, who behaves as if Prime Ministerial government were a reality—such a Prime Minister could rapidly come to grief” (Walker 1970, 91–95; but contrast Crossman 1963). When the Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher pushed a welfare “poll tax,” which would have absurdly charged the owner of a hut as much as the owner of a mansion, her own parliamentary party forced her resignation. If British prime ministers do not often change the names or numbers of ministries, they have exercised a free hand in demoting or reassigning the persons assigned to the ministries. Strong dominance of a prime minister in parliamentary systems usually supposes that a single party has won majority control, which typically means unity of both government and party

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leadership in the prime minister. This is unlikely except in a substantially two-party context, which is rare among parliamentary systems. As Lijphart puts it, “it is the disciplined two-party system rather than the parliamentary system that gives rise to executive dominance. In multiparty parliamentary systems, cabinets—which are often coalition cabinets—tend to be less dominant” (Lijphart 1999, 10–12; cf. also Blondel and Mu¨ller-Rommel 1993). Baylis suggests that it is useful to distinguish leadership styles as at the extremes of a continuum either “monocratic” or “collegial.” Like Lijphart, Baylis believes that if one party has a strong majority, unity and discipline in a parliamentary system may tend more to the monocratic extreme. Big parties tend really to be coalitions within themselves. If a strongly dominant party consists in distinctive factions that must be placated, as in long periods of postwar Italian and Japanese history, it also tends to be collegial. When one party dominates governments, as did Italy’s Christian Democrats in 1945–93 or Japan’s Liberal Democrats in 1955–93, strong and disciplined party factions may constrain the leader, while weakening allparliamentary party discipline. Such factions were due to use of proportional representation systems not dominated by party lists, permitting within-party candidate competitions for voter preference at the constituency level (cf. Elgie 1955, 135–90). Although the Japanese (at a lower level, and with later reconsideration) and Italians (from 1993 to 1994 aiming at three-fourths of seats) have introduced some plurality voting for parliamentary seats in hopes of reducing their party factions and party numbers, not even plurality voting assures the existence of just two parties, especially when some “third” parties enjoy local concentrations of their voters, as in Canada. It is true, however, that the British Labour or Conservative Parties, winning only plurality victories among the voters, often win single-party majorities in parliament, as a result of the distorting effect of single-member district plurality voting (cf. Elgie 1995, 33). At least in the Westminster model, parties usually assure that their leading people have safe seats, since these become prime ministers or other important cabinet ministers. In the British model, the normal pathway to cabinet office consists in being an ordinary member of Parliament (MP), a parliamentary secretary, a subcabinet secretary (selected by interaction of the senior minister and the prime minister), and then cabinet minister. One must already hold a parliamentary seat or else acquire one. It is rare for someone to be selected for a cabinet ministry before he or she has acquired a seat, and the experience of the 1964–66 minister of technology, Frank Cousins, suggests that such a person will be brutally treated by the opposition during question time (Heady 1974, 89, 107). However, this requirement of a parliamentary seat is less followed on the European continent, and the Dutch and Norwegians even require members of Parliament to resign their seats upon taking portfolios, as in the mixed presidential–par-

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liamentary French and Russian systems. Not surprisingly, this tends as in the hybrid French system to produce cabinets with fewer parliamentarian and more civil service specialist backgrounds. In coalition governments, especially when the senior partner does not dominate by its size, as already apparent from Chapter 4, the more parties are necessary to form a majority, the more the program must be either entrusted to specific partners or testily negotiated among the partners. Not surprisingly, the duration of governments (if defined as continuity of both prime minister and the party base) declines as the number of parties grows, in one study taking a sharp turn downward to less than a year when at five or more (Blondel 1982, 115). In multiparty coalition governments, any dominance of the prime minister recedes once ministries are allocated by the proportionality principle among partners, which were often party factions for past Italian Christian Democratic governments, sometimes even factions opposed to the prime minister (Elgie 1995, 177–79). Coalition cabinets of many and roughly equal parties tend to more collegiality in decision making and also expect more equal sharing of cabinet posts, sometimes joined in this by a somewhat smaller party that is crucial (cf. Baylis 1989, 62, 89). Whatever the formal role of the coalition leader in ratifying ministerial choices, when these are outside his or her own party or faction, they are really picked by the coalition partners. Sometimes not only the parliamentary party but also the extraparliamentary party organization through its executive (especially in Left parties) also cuts into the game of saying just who is in specific ministries of the coalition government. Indeed, in some systems such as that in Finland, these nonparliamentarian party officers may even appoint themselves (Nousiainen 1996, 115). Only rarely would a junior coalition party accept a veto of their first preference by the prime minister or by another junior party of the coalition. Thus Elgie writes of Germany, “One of the unwritten rules of German coalition politics has been that Chancellors have to accept the ministerial nominations of their coalition partners” (Elgie 1995, 92–93). Or again, Strom states of Norway, “prime ministers in coalition cabinets have had no opportunity to select the members representing other parties.” Also, “Prime Ministers in such governments have been more constrained in their ability to check ministers representing a different party” (Strom 1994, 42–43, 54). Even more vividly, Olsen had noted that Norwegian prime ministers sometimes learn of “their” appointee from the newspapers. Although later struggling in vain against this process, Prime Minister Nordli once quipped, “If you cannot get the ones you love, you have to love the ones you get” (Olsen 1980, 218). If not otherwise negotiated at the program coalition level, this system also assumes ministerial leadership over the relevant domain of policy. In Germany, “the ministerial principle” more formally requires chancellors to

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abstain from meddling in internal departmental administration. Yet chancellors often resort to mediation to avoid recourse to “the cabinet principle” for resolution of inevitable conflicts between departments (Elgie 1995, 84–86). Recapitulating, in coalition governments prime ministers cannot control appointments of all ministers and cannot control certain low- to mediumlevel policy decisions made by the uncontrolled appointees. But even in Sweden when under virtual single-party governments of the well-disciplined Social Democrats (sometimes aided by a few Communist parliamentarians), prime ministers often gave a rather free hand to ministers within their domain (Larson 1994, 175). The irony in all this is that when prime ministers could most want control, when in coalition governments, they are least likely to get it (heading up a diverse coalition cabinet may be like herding cats). But when they have a high capacity to control (as in Sweden’s factionless single-party Socialist governments), they have least will to do so, since their hand-picked copartisans in cabinet slots would make policy choices pretty much as they would (herding cats is no problem when all go for lutefisk). Payoffs to coalition partners of unequal weights, or seats in parliament, are expected to be proportional. But one cannot measure payoffs in terms of policy outputs as easily as one can measure numbers and even statuses of cabinet posts. But whereas office-holding may have its own rewards (salaries, prestige) for individuals, cabinet positions can be taken as a surrogate measure. Thus Browne observes, “Insofar as parties controlling ministries are responsible for specific policy outputs (policymaking in specific issue areas), they are in a position to shape the content of governmental legislative proposals to suit their own policy goals. In addition, control over policy in specific areas also gives parties bargaining capital to trade with parties controlling other issue areas” (Browne 1973, 50). Testing Gamson’s proportionality proposition, Browne strongly confirmed the close linkage of seats won with ministries allotted, at a .926 correlation (Browne 1973, 54–56). Nonobviously, any slight departure favored the small coalition partners with bonus seats, but primarily in coalitions with few parties. Allowing that sometimes the small party may be a “pivotal partner,” Browne suggests that the main reason for bonus seats is that they are too slight to impact policy otherwise. Alternatively, I suggest, small partners, already normally denied the prime ministership, often are given less important cabinet posts, so deserve an extra one. I concede exceptions, as when the Green Party in 1999 supplied the foreign minister to a German coalition government dominated by the Social Democrats. Another contributing reason may be that the largest parties, enjoying more absolute benefits, can afford to take a tad less in the way of relative rewards, and this theory has some empirical support in other contexts (for sources, cf. Hill 1973, 20).

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In part, Laver and Shepsle hold, one remains the parliamentary and cabinet coalition leader by parceling out the most desired posts to the partners (again, recognized factions of the dominant single party or various parties in a multiparty coalition) making up the minimal winning and connected parliamentary coalition. Notwithstanding the parliamentary convention of cabinet collective responsibility, normally cabinet heads, as already noted, expect to get considerable discretion over policy formation in their cabinet domains. In coalition governments, this may chiefly involve lower to middling importance issues, as long as they are not sensitive to other ministries and the parties that control them. If they are important and sensitive, they must be either kept off the agenda or else carefully negotiated among the partners (cf. Nousianen 1996). But this can be prickly, in part explaining why on average coalitions of many parties produce governments of shorter lives. Laver and Shepsle write, “In order to select a government in a manner compatible with their respective policy objectives, parties entertain common-knowledge policy forecasts about what each minister will do if he or she holds a specific government portfolio” (Laver and Shepsle 1993, 431–32; cf. also Laver and Shepsle 1994; Dodd 1976). A specific party in a multiparty coalition, for example, is expected to have a special interest in a policy area, and, if the party is large enough, its leaders may demand that they get the appropriate ministerial post. Yet the will and capacity of the overall coalition leader to give that post may be constrained by some inconsistent goals, perhaps of other coalition partners. It is simpler if coalesced parties are few. After the 1999 election in Austria, the Freedom Party, then led by Jo¨rg Haider, got slightly more popular votes than did the Austrian People’s Party. Haider acquiesced in his party’s receiving such important posts as foreign minister and minister of the interior, letting the People’s Party have the chancellorship in the person of Wolfgang Schu¨ssel. The Freedom Party got the two posts most connected with immigration, and xenophobic demands for restricted entry of foreigners were a main appeal for its electorate. Schu¨ssel was almost certainly closer to the median issue position for the coalition, as well as being closer to the medians for the parliament as a whole as well as the Austrian electorate. Also, by resource weightings, whereas the Freedom Party had exactly equal seats in parliament, the People’s Party had more overall social prestige or respectability. Haider had made controversial remarks that sounded sympathetic to the World War II era Nazis. Hence, while he remained governor of his state, Carinthia, he decided to remain out of the cabinet himself and later resigned as head of the Freedom Party in order to bolster its respectability. Many nations, including all 14 other members of the European Community as well as Israel, had announced diplomatic boycotts of Austria, which may in part explain why the Freedom Party’s popularity eroded later. As for the People’s Party, which had lost some

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votes to the Freedom Party, it is clear that they preferred the possible scandal of coalescing with the extreme Right because a centrist coalition with the larger Social Democrats (SDs) would have meant that the SDs would have dominated both policy formation and the chancellorship. That is, Schu¨ssel could not have been chancellor if he had taken the other coalition option. In Israel a 1999 election produced a center-Left victory led by Ehud Barak (of One Israel, a spinoff from Labor). But it was months before that program coalition added its cabinet coalition. During the labored negotiations, the hawkish war hero General Ariel Sharon, speaking for the rightist Likud, rejected any role in the necessary coalition government if he did not get the foreign ministry. Barak’s intended peace initiatives made that demand unacceptable. Sharon and Likud lacked the strength to make impossible any coalition that excluded them. Doing just that, Barak then formed a seven-party strange bedfellow majority coalition. This included the more peace-oriented Shas, a party of the Sephardic Hebrew Orthodox that was most intense in support of publicly subsidized yeshiva education. On many issues, 10 Arab parliamentarians were also expected to support Barak, if they refrained from voting confidence because not offered any portfolios in the initial cabinet (Barak talked of a later expansion of the cabinet). Not surprisingly, this strange bedfellow coalition fell apart by summer 2000. The secular Left social democrats withdrew because regulations were not attached to state subsidies of yeshiva schools. Several other parties on Barak’s Right, including Shas, later withdrew over allegedly excessive concessions of Barak to the Palestinians in peace negotiations. Barak, who had enjoyed a fixed tenure of office (an Israeli departure from parliamentary government now being abandoned), fended off one vote of no confidence, but his minority government eventually failed. To the extent of concentration of power in a prime minister, parliamentary systems elsewhere can encounter especially severe difficulties in working out consociational policy arrangements. In part this becomes more difficult to the extent that voters become less loyal to their party pillar or the demands of the pillars are not merely negative (not being harmed) but increasingly positive (wanting some policy to help their group). To see how such problems may affect the cabinet level, consider the case of the newly independent Bosnia in 1990–92. The election in 1990 yielded the result that the nonnationalist parties, the liberals and the socialists (exCommunists), won fewer votes than the nationalist (or pillar) parties. The nonnationalists hence could not form a winning coalition among themselves, and, given absence of any move to form a grand coalition including all political parties, they were regarded as unnecessary partners by the nationalist parties. Rather, a coalition maker of the Muslim pillar sought to put together a minimal winning coalition consisting of the three nationalist parties of Muslims, Croats, and Serbs. Even the top three offices were care-

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fully allocated to placate each group: a Muslim getting the presidency, a Croat getting the prime ministership, and a Serb, president of the National Assembly. But by 1991 the Serbs had opted out of this consociational arrangement, boycotting the parliament and turning all of their energies toward creating home rule in regions of Bosnia dominated by Serbs. This soon erupted into warfare, culminating in presence of foreign peacekeeping forces and an as yet inconclusive “cantonization” of Bosnia, as noted in my Chapter 2 (Burg and Shoup 1999, 52–56). The nexus of program and cabinet coalitions may be complex. Any major change in the parliamentary coalition, with or without new elections, normally makes necessary some adaptative change in the executive coalition. But the reverse need not be true. Indeed, frequent cabinet reshuffles, like more occasional changes in the prime minister, may be helpful in stabilizing a weakening parliamentary coalition party base, provided that cabinet changes do not alienate a necessary and irreplaceable partner. Although in a single-party government the parliamentarians are expected to act as one in tests of confidence, even the British now note some weakening of party discipline. If coalition government parliamentarians could also think of themselves as standing or falling together, often one party can conceive of itself as standing even better in an alternative coalition. It becomes a game among leaders of party factions (in some single-party dominant cases) or parties (in the multiparty coalition) either to keep or to abandon their program and cabinet coalition commitments. Thus in a multiparty majority coalition, they may want revised decisions concerning which parties obtain portfolios, how many, and of what importance, as well as distribution of portfolios within any one party, especially if a large one (cf. Laver and Shepsle 1994, 8). If in parliament as a whole a coalesced parliamentary majority has the acknowledged right to form a government, de facto exercise of that right goes to what could be viewed as a majority within that majority, even if strong party discipline could furnish outwardly unanimous formal votes in parliament, as in any investiture of a new government or in a later vote of confidence. But surface unanimity may be deceiving. A minority of parliamentarians within a governing party or coalition may be secretly disgruntled, especially if unhappy about not getting an added post. In Britain by one count, some 20 cabinet slots, 60 subcabinet posts, and some three dozen unpaid parliamentary secretary jobs could extend prime ministerial patronage to less than half of the MPs of a bare majority government (Rose 1980, 5). Party leaders must also anticipate possible rebuke on policy by majorities within their parliamentary party caucuses, or in cases such as Belgium or Italy from rather strong extraparliamentary party organizations. Hence the prime minister must choose as if seeking at least simple majority approvals, whether within a single-party majority or across a set of coalition partners, considered severally. If a cabinet coalition involves a

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multiplicity of majorities on specifics of government, we have moved once more toward more exclusivity in the coalition base, a smaller set of coalesced persons, even if undergirded by the normally successively larger program, regime, and political community coalitions. This narrowing of base is not surprising whenever one moves to more divisible and excludable goods, or more personal privilege. A recent, highly popular American TV program, “Survivor,” showed that even before a month of hardships on a small Pacific island, an often nasty coalition politics concerning privileges arose. This became especially intense when the original 16 were reduced to the last handful of aspirants to the single, ultimate prize of $1 million. In such acute competitions for scarce goods, humans are not unlike chimpanzees, who also form what look like political coalitions regarding access to food or sex (De Waal 1989). Beyond any economic advantages of leadership, power does yield heightened status, a fungible resource that can secure other goods. As fat and frumpy Henry Kissinger famously (and hopefully?) quipped, “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” Must the leader remain true to the coalition’s program? The coalition theorist William Riker argued that whereas a principal (a leader with much freedom to choose goals) may have multiple motives and yield to very human impulses such as to be charitable or kind, a fiduciary agent (one legally bound to a goal of another) often cannot do this. A trustee must not be charitable with another’s funds, and a military officer cannot forgo an opportunity to kill armed enemies in war. Hence Riker assumes that often being rational in pursuit of a maximand would govern a coalition leader, who is a fiduciary agent (Riker 1962, 23–28). However, I doubt that any coalition leader aims at maximizing one thing, a course that could be the very definition of madness (think of Casanova, Ahab, Scrooge McDuck). Any leader really has to juggle a number of aims, such as not only winning now but winning in the future, and in winning, allocating the policy concessions, cabinet portfolios, lesser patronage, and any other available goods. Parliamentary system parties initially select their top leader in various ways, such as by caucuses of parliamentary parties only or by conventions. The British Conservatives have left it to the parliamentary party, whereas Labour has used a complex electoral college of parliamentarians (including the European parliament contingent), affiliated trade unions, constituency organizations, and even socialist clubs. In Canada’s conventions, if a number of trial votes fail to find a majority, the weaker candidates are successively dropped off. As in other matters, the rules of political institutions pare away options to permit decisive choice, which could be unstable even in some cases when preferences are stable (Riker 1982). In noting that votes could cycle (yield different results with different sequencing of voting) in cases of more than two options and more than two voters, Flanagan notes that institutions permit equilibria to form: “Political institutions act like

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filters for removing options and like funnels for directing choices into binary alternatives and single dimensions so that equilibria nominally supported by majorities can emerge” (Flanagan 1998, 124). But he goes on to show, quite soundly, that strategic behavior within the constraints of institutional rules can also make a difference. More than a program coalition, a cabinet coalition, expressed through specific cabinet members, can tend to get quite personal. A chief executive may experience not only policy dissent but personal frictions with key cabinet members, many of whom are old acquaintances, sometimes old enemies. Further, especially in British-style parliamentary systems, most cabinet members have long held and yet hold their seats in parliament, and they have their own base of power, which could make them challengers for the top office. Although the cabinet coalition must ultimately hold the confidence of the parliamentary majority, another coalition (or at least a cabal) could form within it, sometimes replacing the leader. One angry parliamentary party caucus may be enough. II. COALITION LEADERSHIP: PROBLEMS IN THEORY AND PRACTICE Having reviewed cabinets, I now address the overall coalition leader and what is required to enter and hold the top leadership position. Broad Problems of the Middle Way If one wants to play king of the hill, one should want to straddle its top. Laver and Shepsle hold that the leader of any stable cabinet coalition would normally have covered any and all salient issue medians within the parliamentary majority set. Otherwise, another contender, by covering even one median position, could possibly form a winning coalition. A cabinet coalition can find a stable equilibrium only if no actor has both the will and the capacity to bring it down (Laver and Shepsle 1996, 61). Once it is formed, the convention of collective cabinet responsibility requires that, whatever the squabbles in the cabinet room over policy or ministerial jurisdictions, they are to keep a united front in public. If any cabinet members go public with their differences rather than quietly resigning (if they take it public first, they are then usually sacked), it often is a signal that the cabinet coalition is breaking down. That danger is minimized if the leader covers medians in issue space.2 Leaders often do, at least with reference to their immediate support base. Thus Rose notes of Britain: “Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson, and James Callaghan achieved leadership as mediators between different wings of the Labour Party. Harold Macmillan and Sir Alec Douglas-Home became Prime Ministers because each was broadly acceptable in the Conservative Party, unlike their chief competitor, R. A. Butler”

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(Rose 1980, 4). Even a nondemocratic national leader may try to hold the center, as when Stalin or Mao would play off the Communist Party Left against the Right, or vice versa, depending upon the principal threat of the moment. Thus Ross Terrill speaks of Mao: “Tactically Mao always preferred—quite apart from the strength of his convictions on questions of principle—to occupy a middle position on the Politburo’s spectrum. From it he could lurch to left or right, in accord with the swirl of dialectics or his own whim” (Terrill 1999, 408). But to recall a brief discussion in Chapter 1, note again that, unless there are a bell-shaped distribution of preference and a fully centrist coalition, the median of a cabinet coalition may not match the median for a parliamentary majority. Nor is it likely to line up with the median for parliament as whole. Much the same could be said of the median of a cabinet-sized Politburo in a ruling Communist Party relative to the median for the parliament-sized party Central Committee majority or for the Central Committee as a whole. It is even less likely that the median for a democratic cabinet coalition will match that for the actual voters in the last election or for the larger public right now. Especially when accelerated by protracted wars, public opinion often drifts away from incumbent leaders, and, through the actual voters, this registers in presidential party losses in U.S. midterm elections or in a British prime minister’s erosion in by-elections. Being “eccentric” in its original sense of being off-center is virtually inescapable. Much of the tension in political gaming, I think, arises from such normally expected disparities of issue space medians of such distinctive sets of people. Conditions can be worse if another sort of median favors selection of a chief executive even further from the mentioned medians. If one thinks of a parliamentary majority only as a set of abstractly equal voters, one forgets that often the median issue line is not the same as the median resource contribution line. In a presidential system such as that of the United States, a presidential aspirant and eventual candidate may be more likely to have diverged from the median policy position of the party toward the median resource position, which is often different if there are important political resources beyond equal votes. Campaign contributions are a vital resource in many democratic systems such as that in the United States. Within a parliament, perhaps the greater weight of public popularity, personal prestige, oratorical skill, and so on, among some parliamentarians is skewed away from the median issue line. In passing, in extraparliamentary politics, the relevant nonvoting resources may consist in yet other things, such as mobilization of more trained soldiers or of the same number with better weapons. In either parliamentary or extraparliamentary coalitions, when the issue and resource medians can be roughly defined and seen to diverge, the best prediction is selection of a leader from among notables found in the space

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between them, as if compromising the two kinds of medians, although the compromise could lean more in favor of the resource median to the extent that resources are crucial to winning. This leadership selection line would best predict which politician gets the nod. Leaving aside other possible causes of shifts, the resulting leadership selection line would be likely to remain the same only in the unlikely possibility that, first, any exits from the cabinet coalition are “balanced.” Thus if the leader were near the center, this supposes that roughly equal numbers (with regard to issue medians) or resources (when not reducible to votes only) would make uncompensated exits from the Left and from the Right. Second, any accessions to the coalition would have to be balanced: The leadership selection line would shift either if a Right element entered without being counterbalanced by an entry from the Left or if a Left element entered without a counterbalancing entry from the Right. Any leader who fails to monitor unbalancing exits or entries may encounter a serious rival closer to any new leadership selection line. However, if a winning coalition’s policies have any consequences at all, they unequally impact the capabilities of coalition members. This may be especially true of systems undergoing considerable change. Minxin Pei, to my mind one of the best commentators on the transitions from Communism, notes that most marketizations involve major shifts from the state sectors to the social sector, even if often ex-apparatchiki of the state have been able to lease or buy many of the resources to become the new entrepreneurs. Although they thus may be bought off in favor of marketization, sometimes they may resist further democratizations for fear of exposure of their corruption (Pei 1994, 22–23, 68–69, 111–12). But other kinds of resource shifts occur as well. Pei speaks of a broad coalition for regime change: The success or failure of such a transition depends largely on a stable balance of power among the diverse groups and coalition partners. A sudden shift of power balance weakens some groups’ positions while strengthening others’ and helping to radicalize their demands. In a previously closed system undergoing a simultaneous transition . . . , political and economic resources are being constantly shifted from one group to another. Even under the most ideal circumstances, the gains by different groups from the reform tend to be unequal, making it impossible to maintain a balance of power among the diverse partners in the coalition. (Pei 1994, 36)

Part of sustaining support may lie in more extended kinds of noncabinet patronage, which may be budgetarily constrained. World Bank pressures can fall on many states, forcing many indebted sub-Saharan African and other nations to slash public payrolls. The less one can offer coalition partners benefits of salaried offices, the more pressures would exist to make payoffs in terms of policy concessions or participation in the take from

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corruption. It is difficult to please supporters, especially in Africa: A study of 485 postcolonial African leaders up to 1991 found that chances were 59.4 percent of exile, imprisonment, or death as a consequence of officeholding (Wiseman 1993). Recapitulating, entries and exits of elements from a coalition can cause shifts in both median issue lines and median resource lines, hence shift the locus of the leadership selection line as roughly defined previously. Exits may include mere individuals breaking party discipline (historically weak for many parties in France), factions of a party defecting, or even whole parliamentary party contingents from a multiparty majority coalition. In any case, a chief executive requires fast action either to restore such departed partners or to find new ones somewhere. Sometimes this may require fresh, always costly commitments of posts, policy concessions, or other payoffs, not excluding bribes or like illicit gains. Instability of nondemocratic regimes becomes worrisome only when conditions degenerate into everyday violence. But as much or more violence may accompany stability under some autocrats. Unlike some extraparliamentary coalitions, the democratic executive does not as such resort to coercion to preserve intact a program coalition or a cabinet coalition, since defection is always a legal right. How should we evaluate high instability of democratic governments as earlier noted of the French Third and Fourth Republics or of Italy since World War II? Sartori wisely reminds us that instability of democratic regimes may be always deplorable, but the same is not necessarily so of instability of their governments. After all, some governments prolong their hold on office by merely doing nothing. Duration in office is not a measure of good performance (Sartori 1997, 113–14). The virtual impossibility of holding the center in all of the varied meanings reviewed should help us to understand why the median hold on office for national chief executives in 29 democracies was found by Bingham Powell to be only 30 months, or just 21⁄2 years (Powell 1982, 26–27). Also, whereas development or modernization increased the stability of democratic regimes, he found that it somewhat reduced the average executive tenure on office, a bit below the mean of 30 months (Powell 1982, 30–31). Further, high voting turnouts predicted more governmental (but not regime) instability, causing a median chief executive incumbency of only 22 months, compared to the median mentioned for his full set of 29 democracies of 30 months. But high turnouts predicted lower political disorder, as measured by deaths in political violence (Powell 1982, 26–27). Perhaps governmental instability is less consequence than cause of high turnouts, making it seem more likely that the election could make a difference. Smooth change of unpopular chief executives within democracies seems to shield the democratic regime from attack, a protection more easily attained with the parliamentary than the fixed-tenure presidential form.

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Many chief executives attempt to stabilize their own hold on power by either preserving supportive cabinet or parliamentary coalitions or changing them if the existing arrays would subvert their personal hold on power. Such adjustments in base must usually accompany changes not only in allocation of posts but also in policy or nonpolicy side payments of various sorts, often including a share of corruption. But especially in relatively open democracies, formal as well as informal rules of the game may limit what they can do without securing consent from those affected. Any chief executive not resorting to repression, wanting to chase medians to secure consent, must know that sometimes medians are not there, or cannot be accurately read, or often move. Also, medians referenced to different sets of people are normally inconsistent with each other. That the medians have much independence from a leader’s choices may largely explain why, short of recourse to force, leaders may have a difficult time holding the leadership position they have entered. Leaders only lead because they have followers, because they can please some core constituencies. And if they are appointing a cabinet, they usually choose people who are themselves leaders with followers. To remain in power they must deploy skilled rhetorical arts or respect some virtual coalition imperatives. The Rhetoric of Politics If meeting medians is elusive in reality, it may be attained through rhetoric, through the cultivation of a seeming. Whenever theories, especially of the rational choice variety, make it seem impossible for people to do what they actually do, such as vote, participate in collective action, or successfully lead a government, we know that some important factor is missing from the theories. Since even parliamentary chief executives sometimes hold power for more than a few years, what is missing here? Let us cite Ts’ao Hsu¨eh-Ch’in, author of a great Chinese novel, The Dream of the Red Chamber: When seeming is taken as being, being becomes seeming. When nothing is taken for something, something becomes nothing.

Would-be or actual political leaders often make turns to rhetorical obfuscation, to the kind of “vagueness” cited in my Preface from Jerry Brown. This may be politik, perhaps especially where factions or parties are many, issue domains abound, and the structural restraints on political choice are shifting. David Hume’s caustic comments on the English Puritan leader Oliver

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Cromwell offer a case in point: “All accounts agree in ascribing to Cromwell a tiresome, dark, unintelligible elocution, even when he had no intention to disguise his meaning: yet no man’s actions were ever, in such a variety of difficult incidents, more decisive and judicious.” Elaborating, “The sagacity of his actions, and the absurdity of his discourse, form the most prodigious contrast that ever was known. The collection of all his speeches, letters, sermons, (for he also wrote sermons), would make a great curiosity, and . . . might justly pass for one of the most nonsensical books in the world” (A History of England, V, lxi; undated edition, pp. 452, 476). Accounts by Cromwell’s contemporaries note that he often showed more fervor than clarity. Yet he usually showed what side he was on, namely, the Puritan or more popular party of Pym and Hamden. Here is an excerpt from his first parliamentary speech, that of the short-lived parliament convened in 1628:

Manwaring who by censure of the last Parliament for his sermons was disabled from holding any ecclesiastical dignity in the church, and confessed the justice of that censure, was nevertheless, by this same bishop’s means, preferred to a rich living. If these be the steps to preferment, what may we not expect? Dr. Beard told me some time ago that one Dr. Alablaster, in a sermon at Paul’s Cross, had preached flat popery. Dr. Beard was to rehearse Alablaster’s sermon at the Spittle, but Dr. Neale, Bishop of Winchester, sent for him and charged him as his diocesan to preach nothing contrary to Dr. Alabaster’s sermon. He went to Dr. Felton, Bishop of Ely, who charge him as a minister to oppose it, which Dr. Beard did; but he was then sent for by Dr. Neale, and was exceedingly irate for what he had done. (Abbott 1937, 61–62)

Huh? Cromwell’s later speeches were little better. His first speech in the 1640 parliament again showed that he distrusted bishops, so at least he was consistent there. What has changed, of course, is that Cromwell’s contemporary equivalents hire “flacks” or “spin doctors” to make it seem that they are saying clear things, even when they are not. Also, with electronic media, more sophistication is now required to “narrowcast” different messages to different audiences, at least in public address. Cromwell’s more recent equivalent may be Yasser Arafat, the main leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). He has always remained near the shifting center of his coalitions or has had the knack of appearing to be there. Yasser means “easygoing,” a nickname from his youth. In his young manhood he gave himself a new name of an Islamic hero, Abu Ammer, which Palestianians use. Born in 1929, Arafat has long struggled on behalf of the Arab Palestinian cause. Far from being easygoing, he has taken high risks to his life, is incorruptible, sleeps little, takes no vacations, does not shave because shaving takes too much time, and does not drink.

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In these acts, he fits the model Mazlish called “the ascetic revolutionary” (Mazlish 1976). Arafat’s fellow Palestinian Saı¨d Aburish notes that although Arafat has some virtues, such as being a hard worker, courageous, and collected during crises, Arafat has never been an especially good speaker, because he is repetitious and often obscure. Yet he could somehow convey the effect desired: “Arafat has always been proud of his manipulatory abilities and was determined to continue to be all things to all Arab leaders” (Aburish 1998, 86). The choice of words recalls Balthassar Gracian’s central maxim in his The Art of Worldly Wisdom, “Be all things to all people.” Consider the similar take on Arafat by an Israeli, Danny Rubinstein: The history of his ideological positions over the years toward the Arab states looks like that of a man for all seasons. He is an orthodox Muslim and conservative statesman to the Saudis. To the revolutionary regimes he presents himself as a knight of the secular and democratic state. He has also been considered a fanatic Muslim and it was on the basis of his connections with the Muslim Brotherhood that he was first arrested in 1954 in Egypt. Yet, he is also a socialist and prominent member of the Socialist International. No less close than his connection with fundamentalist Islamic regimes from Iran to Sudan are his strong ties with communist regimes of the former USSR, China, Cuba, Vietnam, and the former Czechoslovakia, with whom he has showed an ideological affinity, “a partnership of revolutionaries.” (Rubinstein 1995, 34)

Often in danger of losing either his life or his leadership of the PLO, Arafat has been quick to adapt to circumstances, usually backing away from a position when very strong opposition arises, as it has two or three times within the PLO (Rubinstein 1995, 81–82). Cromwell and Arafat aside, more routine democratic politicians yet know the advantages of obfuscation and flexibility. In the United States, Bruce Babbitt seared a political rival with the remark, “the versatility of his convictions astounds me.” In Canada, the Reform Party leader Preston Manning slid away from the view that his party was right-wing, even if both the party’s voters and outsiders saw it that way. Manning tried to sound as if he covered the whole Left–Right spectrum in what he called his “ideologically balanced” party with “a strong social conscience and program as well as a strong commitment to market principles and freedom of enterprise.” In a very Canadian metaphor, he compared his party to three hockey forwards, Right (free enterprise), center (populism), and Left (social concern). Yet such rhetoric netted the party very few voters from the Left or center. Manning’s voting base was clearly Right-wing, in large part taken from the weakened Progressive Conservative Party (Flanagan 1998, 148–49). Indeed, eventually the two parties merged in the Canadian Alliance. A coalition of the Left or the coalition of the Right finds itself handi-

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capped in electoral rhetoric by any obvious exclusion of the center as well as the other side. Indeed, often a party of the moderate Left may be handicapped by opponents’ rhetorical identification of it with an antiregime or revolutionary Left, as in the classic red-baiting faced by social democratic parties. Similarly, a party toward the Right is sometimes handicapped by allegations of links to monarchism or fascism. Only a party spanning the center has much purchase on seeming all things to all people. Yet not even Cromwell could make it seem that his son, Richard, was fit to succeed him. One may doubt that Arafat could pass on his charisma to a son (by a Christian wife 34 years younger than he). Nor could Jerry Brown make it seem that he was really presidential timber, apparently ending his political career as mayor of Oakland, California. Even the art of seeming may be difficult in political life, especially when the world of being is always there to find one out. The coalition analyst Abram De Swaan similarly reached the conclusion that political leaders must be skilled practitioners of rhetoric: Politicians must, of necessity, create at least the semblance of support from voters whose individual tastes may diverge widely among one another and from the policy proposed. Therefore policies must appear to be many things to many people and so must politicians. This necessitates an ambiguity of language that evokes multiple meanings with every statement. Political language eludes any simple-minded classification and must be understood on the basis of its function, the aggregation of divergent and perhaps inconsistent preferences that need not always be manifest or even conscious. That is the politician’s art and its understanding requires skills of interpretation and analysis that cannot be laid down in operational rules. (De Swaan 1973, 299–300)

Note that he also shares my doubt that “maximizing” premises are good predictors in political choice. The television interviewer Ted Koppel vividly described former president Bill Clinton’s rhetorical arts. To him, Clinton was “the master of evasion. He sees traps before they’re sprung, listens to himself, and edits himself as he goes along. If he makes a mistake, he’ll sense in your language that you’ve caught it, then detour and say, ‘Let me explain that more clearly.’ He’s the best I’ve ever seen.” Epilogue, or Of Leadership Autonomy Versus Coalition Imperatives This book has suggested the advantages of thinking of politics of any state as a set of coalitions with typically diminishing bases, which ultimately reach an apex in a national chief executive. Political scientists, I think, must concede the importance of national political leaders but avoid even in our undergraduate lectures the journalistic tendency to an extreme personaliz-

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ing of all politics. The word autonomy is from Greek roots meaning “selfrule,” and there surely is some autonomy in anything alive. But against asserting too much of it, we should be put on our guard when we recognize that the leaders themselves tend in their memoirs to emphasize their autonomy only in matters that turned out well, emphasizing rather the relentless constraints about them when events have gone badly. Before announcing his noncandidacy for the presidency after his coalition unraveled and no policy seemed to work, U.S. president Lyndon Johnson offered a curious image of his felt powerlessnesss: Johnson dreamed a recurring dream of impotence. He dreamed that he was lying in bed in the Red Room of the White House, paralyzed from the neck down, listening to his aides in the next room quarreling over the division of power. He could hear them but could not speak to them. Waking from his sleep after such a dream, the President would make his way through the empty corridors of the White House to the place where Woodrow Wilson’s portrait hung. It soothed him to touch Wilson’s portrait, for Wilson had been paralyzed and now was dead but Johnson was still alive and active. In the morning the fears would return—of paralysis of the body, paralysis of his presidency. And soon he would quit. (Burns 1978, 423)

In their memoirs if not earlier, some of the worst leaders attribute to themselves all achievements associated with their tenure, even those of subordinates, and ascribe failings to almost anyone around them, including their subordinates. Those who emphasize high autonomy of leaders in leading tend to resort to implicit strategies: For one, they may focus only on politicians at the top of the heap (and internationally, on leaders of a great power or even the hegemonic state, such as the United States now) rather than on leaders who are even more obviously constrained at lower levels. Once focused on the top, they dwell only on leaders of unusually long incumbency or those who have been in office during a great crisis or change, not the far more numerous national chief executives who had a brief grip on power or who lived in boring times. Far from being able to shake the world, average democratic chief executives cannot hang on to their own seats for much over two years. Blondel correctly notes that the biographical literature is misleading, since biographers “concentrate their attention on exceptional leaders rather than on ordinary or even average ones” (Blondel 1987, 121). Above all, the leadership-is-everything school fails to ask how the existing leaders got into their roles, and what they have had to do to stay there. If analysts took a longer view than a day-to-day accounting, they would be aware of the path dependency of results, that other equilibria (i.e., other persons settled into leader roles) would have been possible or may become likely tomorrow. Leaders, to repeat the obvious, do not lead without having followings,

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those who back them with crucial resources such as warriors, money, or votes. In most hierarchical organizations, if some begin by being useful to those just below them, people rise to the top because they happened at the right junctures to be useful to those above them, those who dominate such selections. Whatever the details of political recruitment systems, crossnationally they look as if they had been co-optative, as if those already at the top and accumulating many socially advantaging attributes (male, middle-aged, dominant ethnic, etc.) have controlled the rise of others to the last stepping stones before national leadership. Even if one speaks of a popularly elected leader, would-be leaders surely must pander to public opinion more than they produce it. If his acquaintance Claude Helve´tius claimed that “it is the powerful who rule opinion,” Jean-Jacques Rousseau retorted that it is more true to say that “they are themselves her first slave.” A leader gathers and maintains a coalition in part by noting what is wanted and making campaign promises and credible attempts to keep them: “Campaign promises do not affect the agenda simply because they were made. Rather, they are important because some significant part of the politician’s electoral coalition remembers the promise and attempts to hold him to it . . .” (Kingdon 1995, 63). One concedes unusual cases in which the leader is more popular than parliament, or even has a coalition base larger than that sustaining the regime. But as illustrated by Gaullism in 1958 or the landslide electoral following of Hugo Cha´vez in Venezuela in 1999, this often suggests less that the leader has persuasive power than that public opinion, quite independently, has largely defected from the prior regime. To the extent that coalition principles such as those outlined in Chapter 1 help predict behavior, this is, I think, because they distill what is instrumentally rational for those who would be leaders. Rational? If not in some narrowly ideal investor sense (the source of utility-maximizing rationality), then it may be in some more permissive sense, such as that implicitly modeled on consumer berhavior (Herbert Simon’s idea of bounded rationality). If one wants to lead a winning coalition, one should not want to be poorly informed of one’s circumstances, yet not foolishly wait until the facts are all in (they never are). If one finds oneself among a weak minority, one must either switch identity to a stronger force or else look for coalition partners. If one loses a necessary partner, one has to recruit another to fill the void. If, contrary to Riker, one may not always limit coalescing to a minimal and minimum winning size, it is not just because one’s information is inaccurate but often because other coalition imperatives may be more pressing. Getting and keeping power in most cases literally require being recognized as located near median issue positions, which some rival could otherwise occupy to defeat you. If you cannot do that with any security, you may, like many a military dictator or counterrevolutionary, make that possible by, say, pushing the Left side of the political spectrum out of the

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political arena, just as a revolutionary may push the Right offstage. Or if you cannot literally park yourself on all relevant medians, you need good rhetoric to make it seem as if it is so. If not merely forming a short-lived coalition to oppose something, one wants to avoid a coalition with partners that sprawl across more issue space than is needed to win, since strange bedfellows fight too much or may readily defect in favor of other partners. To hold your coalition together, you literally must allocate to each necessary partner a share of cabinet posts proportionate to its contribution. One may add that a parliamentary chief executive may have the legal right to dismiss any cabinet minister but would be a fool to sack someone when it would alienate a necessary coalition partner closely identified with that minister. In another form of proportionality, it is usually imperative to make some policy concessions to even a small but necessary coalition partner, as one analyst notes of the past West German practice at cabinet meetings, obviously thinking primarily of the Free Democrats in coalition with either the Christian Democrats or the Social Democrats: “One of the informal rules that guides discussion is that the smaller coalition partner is not to be outvoted on points defined as essential by him” (Mayntz 1980, 156). In short, most leaders who are at all successful in politics recognize such maxims as almost coalition imperatives. Those who do not may quickly lose office, especially if not turning to main force to stay in power. Once in office, leaders thus continue as leaders by accepting major constraints in choice. As Blondel notes, to assess the overall impact of a leader we must form difficult judgments about a leader’s goals, the obstacles to attaining such goals, and the specific contribution of the leader to overcoming those obstacles (Blondel 1987, 80–121). Although also critical of assertions that some national leader is a “puppet” of hidden, more powerful figures (as is sometimes true, as noted of the doge of Venice at the start of this chapter), we must beware of confusing mere activity linked to some goal with autonomy in that behavior or in the goal’s attainment. When one thinks of the autonomy of the leader of a parliamentary and executive coalition, one thinks of a zone of permissions, that is, the space remaining once one recognizes what a leader must do and must not do, not only by law but by what is necessary to prevent ineffectiveness or even removal from office. Followers cut them some slack, but beyond certain limits, they may turn against them and follow someone else. A critical analysis of the leadership-is-everything thesis would recognize conditions when coalition partners dominate leadership (continued incumbency, range of freedom in program, even choices of ministers) rather than leaders’ dominating coalition partners and the program of the coalition (see relevant discussions in Blondel and Cotta 1996). Sometimes leaders do have a relatively free hand, especially to the extent of division among their followers, but extreme division also means that leaders themselves may be highly vulnerable to being displaced by a rival

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coalition. Sometimes underlying divisions cut more deeply and can even bring down a regime or its political community. Often it is claimed that a strong, long-tenured leader is all that holds everything together. That was said of such leaders as Nasser in Egypt, Nehru in India, or Tito in Yugoslavia. Egypt and India have thus far managed to retain their regimes and political communities, long after their named leaders are gone, if India admittedly faces severe challenges. In the case of Tito, his death in 1979 was not instantly followed by dissolution, which happened over a decade later. Even when Tito was yet in office, one could argue, it was not Tito who held all things together but rather the undergirding coalitions that then held together that kept Tito in office. In sum, whereas it is sometimes useful to analyze politics as if leaders constitute their sustaining coalitions, as if they hoist themselves into their elevated stations, it is even more useful to ask how multiple layers of coalesced people create and maintain the leaders, lifting them up and sometimes unceremoniously dumping them down again. Coalitions are at the heart of any practiced politics, and understanding them is therefore central to any science of politics. If this book has provoked some thought about an interesting subject, it has, I think, done its work. NOTES 1. Beyond their belated acquisition of the vote (1945), I wonder whether the cumul in part explains the relatively low access of French women to higher public. By keeping their feet on the lower rungs of the ladder even when they have gone higher, men deprive women of entry-level elective offices. Only when women hold more of such offices than do men could they tip the cumul to their own advantage. New regional government seats are assigned by proportional representation, which, although usually favorable to women, especially with the party list system, has permitted representation for the extreme Right. In a surprise vote in 1999, the maledominated National Assembly and Senate overwhelmingly voted a constitutional amendment permitting mandated parity of the sexes in public offices. One wonders how this will play out. 2. Of all possible coalitions that could form from a specific party system, suggests Stefano Bartolini, what can be called the coalition potential of a specific party is in large part a function of its merely numerical size or dominance as related to the degree of party system fragmentation. But after adding a dimension of Left–Right spatial location, its potential may also vary with its proximity to the median issue space among returned members of parliament, or historically sensed notions of which parties are connected (adjacent) in ideological space. The actual “governmental power” of a party would be zero if it remained solely in opposition, always voting against government initiatives, but it would have some weight if either its abstention or its ad hoc supportive vote would be necessary to a minority government’s survival. But its power would be higher if drawn within a government, weighted by the status of that government in parliament, increasing in value as one moves from multiparty minority to single-party minority, oversized coalition, min-

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imal winning coalition, and single-party majority. Also, within a government, one’s party power would increase with size relative to partners, as in junior role, equal role, or leading role. By the proportionality rule, more numerous and important cabinet portfolios should be weighted by duration of incumbencies within them. Combining all but this last into a single rank, low to high rank order power situation yields a scale ranging from 0 to 13: 1 for necessary abstention favoring a minority cabinet, 2 for necessary external support for a minority cabinet, 3 for junior partner in multiparty minority coalition, and so on (see Bartolini 1998, 52– 54). Bartolini adds that a party’s coalition potential that is higher than actual governmental power may suggest primarily idiosyncratic or short-term variables such as the low cohesion of a party, its pushing of unbargainable program demands, or its lack of legitimacy. I would add the obvious, that often any illegitimacy concerns challenges to very basic aspects of the system, such as its political community, its regime, or its defense of private property in the means of production. Further, one could add irascibility or volatility of a party leader as another likely distortion of normally expected governmental power.

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Index

Afghanistan, 100, 128 Africa, 54, 64, 100, 109, 112, 123, 158–59. See also Eritrea; Nigeria Alliances, international, 17–20 Anarchists, 83 Anderson, Benedict, 61–63 Anderson, Perry, 119 Arab unity, 44 Arafat, Yasser, 186–87 Argentina, 122, 127, 157 Aristotle, 77, 86, 112 Assimilation, 71–72 Austria, 6, 9, 27, 48, 66, 177–78 Austro-Hungarian empire, 39–41, 43, 50–51, 53, 92, 98 Axelrod, Robert, 7, 113 Azerbaijan, 67 Bangladesh, 43, 64, 68, 70, 72, 112 Bismarck, Otto von, 39–41 Black, Duncan, 31 Blondel, Jean, 191 Bonapartism, 119 Bosnia-Herzegovina, 37, 90–96, 178– 79 Bounded rationality. See Rationality

Brazil, 62, 118, 157 Brown, Roger, 15 Bueno de Mesquita, Bruce, ix, 143 Burundi, 158 Business owners, 136–38 Cabinet coalition, xiii-xiv, 23, 27, 151– 81 Cambodia, 74 Canada, xii, 18, 36, 56–57, 62, 70, 73– 75, 89, 110 Caplow, Arthur, 9 Chile, 122–23, 157, 165–66 China, 39, 74, 131. See also Monarchic regime coalition; Revolutionary regime and coalition ‘‘Circulation of elites,’’ 154 City-states, 47–49 Class and class conflict, 78–80, 82, 86, 88, 98, 100–101, 112, 115–16, 121, 124 Clinton, Bill, 188 Closure. See Connectedness Coalitions, general, ix-x, 1–33; distinction of carrying and blocking forms, 140–41. See also Cabinet coalition;

212 Political community coalition; Program coalitions; Regime coalition Coase, Ronald, and transaction costs, 47–48, 147 Collaboration problems, 16, 26, 45 Colombia, 142 Communism, 11, 22, 119, 130, 131, 154, 162, 163–65. See also Cabinet coalition; Program coalitions; Revolutionary regime and coalition; Russia; Stalin, Joseph; Soviet Union Confederal system, defined, 89 Congo, 70, 72, 75 Connectedness, 7, 148 Connor, Walker, 44, 54, 71–72, 86–87 Consociationalism, 26, 27, 86, 88–89, 98–99, 136, 157–58, 168–69 Coordination problem, impure, 16–17, 26–27, 68, 71, 76 Corporatism, 136–38 Counterrevolutionary cabinet coalitions, 160–62; defined, 79; program coalition, 123–29; regime coalition, 79 Country. See City States; Empires; Nationalism; Nation-state; Political community coalition Croatia, 56, 66, 69, 90–94 Cromwell, Oliver, 130, 185–86 Cronin, Bruce, 39–41, 42–43 Cyprus, 70, 95, 99–100, 165 Czechoslovakia, or Czecho-slovakia, xi, 18, 37, 43, 63–64, 67, 73, 88– 89, 99, 110 Czech Republic. See Czechoslovakia

Democracy: basic regime forms (or merely nominal, presidentialparliamentary, presidential, and parliamentary), 80–83; decisional styles (of the last three) which really tolerate oppositions, 134–50 Demography, and regime support, 86, 98–99 Denmark, 37, 40 De Swaan, Abram, 6, 7, 10 Development, economic, 59–60. See

Index also Economic variables and impact on coalitions Dictatorship of the proletariat in Marx and Engels, 162 Duration of coalitions, 14; averages by types, 30, 74, 101, 146–48, 167–68, 175 Easton, David, 78, 81 Eckstein, Harry, 84–85 Economic variables and impact on coalitions, 68–70, 101–2, 114, 122, 144, 149 Electoral systems, 135, 138, 144–45 Emigration, 37, 66–67, 112 Empires, 43, 49–54 Enemies, 17–20, 27, 63 Environmentalism, 111 Equilibria, 14–15 Eritrea, 43, 64, 70, 72 Ethnicity: defined, 54; impact of ethnic identities on political community coalition, 91–96. See also Consociationalism European Union as potential region state, 44 Executive coalition. See Cabinet coalition Fairness. See Coordination problem, impure; Proportionality principle Fanon, Frantz, 100, 128 Fascism. See Counterrevolutionary Federalism, defined, 89; consociational variant, 89 Fiji, 136 Finland, 11, 139, 175 Formateur: defined, 3; and role, 6, 13 France: and its cabinet coalitions, 166– 68, 172; and its empire, 43, 53; its political community coalition, 39, 65– 66; its program or legislative coalitions, 117, 119, 139; its regime coalition, 96–97, 119, 129 Free trade and protectionism, 49, 51, 75–76, 114 Friends. See Enemies

Index Game theory, and game types, 15–17 Gamson, William, 8 Geertz, Cllifford, 2 Gellner, Ernst, 54, 58–61 Georgia, 36 Germany, 36, 39–41, 48, 59, 110–12, 125–26, 160–61, 175 Goals of political actors, 12, 26–27, 61, 112, 113–15, 120, 180, 190–91 Grand coalition, 3, 6, 26, 46, 65–66, 90, 96, 98–99, 136 Great Britain, xi-xii, xiv, 36, 41, 43, 52, 54, 173–74 Greece, 56, 157, 165 Haiti, 123 Herb, Guntram, x High politcs vs. low politics, 80 Hill, Paul T., 8 Hitler, Adolf, 41, 51–52, 125–26, 160– 61 Hmong, xii Hungary, 62, 64 Huntington, Samuel, 121 Hussein, Saddam. See Iraq Iceland, 37, 55 Ideologies as partly instrumental, 7. See also Median issue space Identities, xi-xii, 22, 43, 112. See also Cabinet coalition; Political community coalition; Program coalitions; Regime coalition India, xiii, 43, 49, 56, 62–63, 95, 112, 122, 158 Indonesia, 120, 156 International coalition. See Alliances Iran, 39, 64–65, 112–13, 120, 128 Iraq, 64–65, 112–13, 128, 161–62 Ireland, xii, 7–8, 72, 95 “Iron law of oligarchy” of Roberto Michels, 152 Irredentism: defined, 64; illustrated, 124 Islamic monarchy, 118 Islamic revolutionary, 128–29 Israel, 62, 95, 178

213 Issue space, left and right. See Median issue space Italy, 42–43, 64, 124–25, 161 Japan, 39, 55, 87–88, 115–17, 126– 27, 148, 172, 174 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 189 Justice. See Coordination problem, impure; Proportionality principle Kautilya, Vishnugupta, 17–19 Kelley, E. W., ix Korea, 112 Kosovo, 72, 110 Kurds, 64, 70, 72, 109, 157 Labor unions, 79, 120, 125, 136–38, 156 Language, relation to nationalism, 60– 63, 149 Laver, Michael, 8, 32 Leadership coalition. See Cabinet coalition Leadership problems, 153, 182–92. See also Median issue space Learning, 84–85, 112 Lebanon, 86, 98–99, 112, 139 Legislative coalition. See Program coalitions Legitimacy, 77 Leiserson, Michael, 147–48 Lenin, N., 130, 162 Lijphart, Arend, 148. See also Consociationalism Macedonia, 109, 112 Machiavelli, 18, 31 Madison, James, 86 Malaysia, 69 Mandala theory. See Kautilya, Vishnugupta Manning, Preston, 187 Mao Zedong, 163–65 Marx, Karl, 22, 119, 154, 162 Maximizing in choice, 12 Median issue space: in leadership coalitions, 181–82, 185–88; meaning, 7; problems in holding it, 31–33;

214 in program coalitions, 144–45, 148– 50; in regimes, 97–103, 119–20 Merit nobility, 154–55 Mexico, 129 Michels, Roberto. See “Iron law of oligarchy” Migration, 86, 112 Military alliances. See Alliances Military regime and regime coalition, 79; and cabinet coalition, 155–60; and program coalitions, 120–23 Mill, John Stuart, 86 Minimal winning coalition, 4–5, 105– 6, 133–34, 147 Minimum coalition, 4–5 Minority government, 4, 6, 146–47 Mixed regime theory, 88 Modelski, George, 52 Monarchic regime coalition, 78; and cabinet coalitions, 153–55; and its program coalitions, 115–20 Montenegro, 28–29, 73 Montesquieu, 83 Mosca, Gaetano, and concept of ruling class, 107, 152 Mussolini, Benito, 52, 124–25, 161 Nationalism: defined, 54; explained, 52– 65; evaluated, 57–59 Nation-state. See Political community coalition Natural increase, 86 Negative-sum game, 16, 45 Nepal, 119 Nested coalitions, concept and meaning, ix–x, 14–33 Netherlands, 41–42, 52 Nicaragua, 120, 157 Nigeria, 28, 72, 75, 109, 122 Nominal democracy: defined, 80; further explained, 135, 166 Norway, 37, 46, 55, 175 Ottoman Empire, 43–44, 51–53, 79, 90, 98, 118 Pakistan, 43, 68, 112, 122, 158 Paraguay, 120

Index Parity principle. See Proportionality principle Parliamentary coalition. See Program coalitions Parliamentary regime, 81; and cabinet coalition, 23, 171–81; and program coalition, 143–50; and regime coalition, 102–3 Pei, Minxin, 183 Perlmutter, Amos, 155. See also Military regime and regime coalition Peron, Juan, 127 Peru, 80 Philippines, 72 Pivotal position in coalitions, 149–50 Poland, 62, 79 Political community coalition, defined, xi–xiii, 37, 65; elaborations, 20, 22, 26, 35–76 Political parties, 79, 102, 133, 135, 138, 143 Political party discipline, 141, 150, 171, 179 Political recruitment, the screening criteria, 152 Portugal, 52–53, 55, 116 Powell, G. Bingham, 144, 146, 184 Power, 28, 77, 192–93 n.2 Prediction in politics, xiv, 1–2, 9–10, 150 Presidential-parliamentary regime and regime coalition, 80–81; and its cabinet coalitions, and uncertain link to stability of democracy, 184–85; its program coalitions, 134–40 Presidential regime and coalition, 81; and cabinet coalition, 168–71; and lower stability of democracy than under the parliamentary regime, 184– 85; and program coalition, 140–42 Primogeniture, 116–18 Print-language and nationalism. See Anderson, Benedict; Language Prisoner’s Dilemma, xiii, 15–16, 45, 74–75, 104–5, 150 Problem-solving, 12 Program coalitions, xiii, 3–14, 22–23, 27, 107–50

Index Proportionality principle, 8, 108, 134, 147, 155, 176 Przeworski, Adam, 77 Public opinion, 112, 145, 182, 190. See also Median issue space Putnam, Robert, 84 Que´bec, xiii, 56–57, 110. See also Canada Rationality, unbounded or bounded, x– xi, 1, 8–9, 12, 190–91 Regime, defined, 36, 78 Regime coalition, xiii, 22, 26, 82, 129 Regime duration, 101, 142 Region-states, 52 Regime support, 77–78, 83–84, 103–4 Regime types, 78–83; the liberal democratic regimes subtyped by decisional styles, 137 Religion, xii, 22, 37–39, 41–42, 63, 90– 93, 98–99, 111, 113, 118, 125, 130, 178 Representation, as Responsibility, Responsiveness, or Reflectiveness, 152– 53 Revolutionary regime and coalition, 79– 80; and cabinet coalition, 162–66; and program coalition, 129–32 Rhetoric, importance in leadership, 32– 33, 185–88 Riker, William, 3–7, 14, 180 Rogowski, Ronald, 61, 84–85, 114 Romany or Gypsies, xiii Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 35, 83, 151, 190 Rules climates, xiv Ruling class, 107 Russia: as empire, 43, 53; as postCommunist state, 89, 116–18, 139– 40, 168. See also Soviet Union Sartori, Giovanni, 184 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1 Schmitt, Carl, 19–20 Science, Social, xiv. See also Prediction in politics Scotland, xi–xii, 41, 70

215 Secession: causes of, 67–70; consequences of, 109–10; defined, 37, 67; evaluation, 57–59; possible preventive measures, 70–76 Serbia, 28–29, 72, 91–93 Shepsle, Kenneth, 7, 149 Sierra Leone, 109 Sikhs, xii, 65, 158 Simon, Herbert. See Rationality Singapore, 46, 67, 69 Skocpol, Theda, 129 Slovak Republic. See Czechoslovakia Slovenia, 69 Snyder, Jack, 126 Social revolution, defined, 129 Solidarity of any group, 15 Somalia, 109, 158–59 South Africa, 100 Soviet Union, 53, 69–70, 73, 89, 98, 103 Spain, 43, 53, 88 Stability and duration of coalitions, 28, 30–31; of governments, 30; of regimes, 30, 102–3; 184–85 Stalin, Joseph, 92, 109, 131, 162–63 Strange bedfellows: defined, 7; illustrations of, 66, 104, 134, 148 Sweden, 37, 55, 64 Switzerland, 29, 48, 62, 64, 82, 168– 69

Territory and alliances, 44. See also Political community coalition Thailand, 62 Thatcher, Margaret, xiv Theory by micro, meso or macro levels, 1–2 Transaction costs: of city-state leagues, 47; of empires, 47–50; of numerous parties in a coalition, 147–48 Transformational or transgenic game theory. See Game theory Tripolar systems, 9–10, 94 Trotsky, Leon, 131 Tsebelis, George, x-xi, 3 Turkey, 56, 59, 156–57, 165, 172. See also Ottoman Empire

216 Uganda, 127–28, 157 Ukraine, 69 United States, its political community formation, 22, 42; of cabinet coalition, 169–71; of program coalition, 140–42; its regime, 81, 83; its secession and Civil War, xiii, 29, 37, 109–10 Utility-maximizing or unbounded rationality. See Rationality

Index Vietnam, 112 Violence. See Wars or other violence Wars or other violence, 30, 36–43, 45, 91–92, 98, 112–13, 122, 126–27, 129, 159–60 Weber, Max, 22 Women in politics, 111, 116–18, 127– 29, 160, 192 n.1 World leadership or hegemony, 52 Yugoslavia, 44, 73, 80, 92, 98

Venezuela, 142 Venice, 52

Zero-sum conflicts, 6, 14, 16, 27, 45 Zimbabwe, 127–28

About the Author TERRENCE E. COOK is Professor of Political Science, Washington State University, Pullman, WA.