Annual Review of Political Science - Volume 21, 2018

Empirical legitimacy, defined as social acceptance of the right to rule, constitutes a key condition for effective governance in areas of limited statehood. Most work on legitimacy, however, is state centric and has exclusively focused on the state as the governance actor of interest. We argue that understanding the legitimacy of external and nonstate actors is essential for analyzing governance in areas of limited statehood. Moreover, subnational variations in legitimacy matter. While most studies of the legitimacy of governance actors have focused on the macroregional and national levels, a governance actor may enjoy high legitimacy in one part of a country but be considered illegitimate in other parts. Finally, the multiple sources and consequences of empirical legitimacy in areas of limited statehood have to be analyzed in greater depth. There is no single source of legitimacy, nor is there a single guaranteed consequence of legitimacy.

A profusion of recent research has focused on historical legacies as key to understanding contemporary outcomes. We review this body of research, analyzing both the comparative-historical analysis (CHA) and modern political economy (MPE) research traditions as applied to the study of communism, imperialism, and authoritarianism. We restrict our focus to the sizeable subset of arguments that meets a relatively strict definition of legacies, i.e., arguments that locate the roots of present-day outcomes in causal factors operative during an extinct political order. For all their differences, the CHA and MPE approaches both face the challenges of convincingly identifying the sources of historical persistence and of reckoning with alternative channels of causation. We find that mechanisms of persistence in legacy research generally belong to one of three main categories. While both traditions acknowledge the role of institutions in historical persistence, CHA research tends to emphasize the lasting power of coalitions, whereas work in MPE often argues for the persistence of cognitions. We argue that, at their best, CHA and MPE approaches yield complementary insights. Further progress in legacy research will benefit from greater cross-fertilization across research traditions and deeper recognition of commonalities across communist, imperialist, and authoritarian regimes.

Despite the increasing popularity of comparative work on other-regarding preferences, the implications of different models of altruism are not always fully understood. This article analyzes different theoretical approaches to altruism and explores what empirical conclusions we should draw from them, paying particular attention to models of redistribution preferences where inequality explicitly triggers other-regarding motives for redistribution. While the main contribution of this article is to clarify the conclusions of these models, we also illustrate the importance of their distinct implications by analyzing Western European data to compare among them. We draw on individual-level data from the European Social Survey fielded between September 2002 and December 2013.

Radicalization is a process of escalation from nonviolent to increasingly violent repertoires of action that develops through a complex set of interactions unfolding over time. Looking at radicalization mainly through the lenses of a relational approach, this article suggests that social movement studies allow us to bridge structural and agentic explanations in an analysis of the impact of political opportunities and organizational resources, as well as framing, in explaining forms of action and inaction. Available political opportunities influence the reactions of political actors in general to movement demands, thus affecting social movements’ strategic choices. Moreover, the availability (or lack) of material and symbolic resources affects the choice of radical repertoire. Finally, organizational resources and contextual opportunities are framed differently by social movement actors, in some cases facilitating radicalization. At the individual level, different paths of radicalization are singled out.

The question of what responsibilities members of one generation have to later generations raises complex theoretical questions and is also of considerable practical importance. In this article, I introduce the practical issues at stake (Section 1), then explore the methodological issues surrounding how to think about intergenerational justice (Section 2), before evaluating competing normative frameworks (Sections 3–7). I conclude with a discussion of the practical challenges facing the realization of justice to future generations (Section 8).

Normative theorists of corruption have developed an institutional conception that is distinct from both the individualist approaches focused on quid pro quo exchanges and other institutional approaches found in the literature on developing societies. These theorists emphasize the close connection between patterns of corruption and the legitimate functions of institutions. The corruption benefits the institution while undermining it. Reforms therefore should be directed toward finding alternatives for the functions the corruption serves. Also, institutional corruption does not require that its perpetrators have corrupt motives, and it is not limited to political institutions. This review examines four leading theories and discusses criticisms of their approach. A tripartite framework for analyzing the elements of institutional corruption is proposed. Although the theories are useful for distinguishing institutional corruption from the more familiar forms of individual corruption, they could be enriched by giving greater attention to the work on individual corruption in its structural forms in developing societies.

Negotiation is a central activity in international affairs, but it tends to be studied indirectly through particular cases. Considering it as a subject in itself brings out some important principles. The general literature on negotiation falls into five categories: advice from practitioners, studies of particular cases or contexts, statistical tests of data, psychological theories with experiments, and game theory models. Each approach complements the others, but there has been too little interaction among them. Game models, in particular, are important for the international context, which involves more planning and more experienced actors. They resist the generalizations to which other approaches are prone, often showing that whether a move is well-advised or mistaken depends on some easy-to-overlook detail.