abstract: Economic globalization is widely believed to cause the policies of left-and right-wing parties to converge. The authors argue that globalization can have an even more profound impact on partisan politics, fully reversing the positions of left and right parties. This article demonstrates that financial globalization transforms party positions in one important policy area: the degree of exchange rate overvaluation or undervaluation. At low levels of capital mobility, left-wing parties are more likely to overvalue the exchange rate than are right-wing parties because doing so redistributes income from capital to labor. As capital mobility rises, overvalued exchange rates become costlier for workers but more attractive to firms. Accordingly, right-wing parties maintain more overvalued exchange rates than do left parties at high levels of capital mobility. Analyses of time-series cross-sectional data support these hypotheses. The results indicate that globalization can have transformative effects on the relationship between partisanship and economic policy.

abstract: Many states, nongovernmental organizations, and philanthropists use soft power to achieve their political goals. However, we know little about which countries these actors target. The author argues that given the large number of potential targets and the high costs of conducting influence campaigns abroad, soft power entrepreneurs strategically direct their efforts toward those countries in which their campaigns have the best chance of making a difference. The author expects that campaigns predominantly target liberal democracies, since the free exchange of ideas and opinions is likely to generate the intended admiration and attraction. To test this argument, the author draws on hand-coded attendance data from one of the most prestigious exchange programs during the Cold War: Henry Kissinger’s International Seminar (1952–1968). Results from numerous tests reveal that liberal democratic countries were more heavily targeted by Kissinger’s program than were nonliberal countries. Together, the article shows how (non)state actors strategically influence foreign intellectuals to forge international alliances.

abstract: How does foreign military training shape civil-military relations in recipient states? Existing works have mostly analyzed aggregate indicators of foreign training but paid little attention to the content to which soldiers are exposed. Also, studies have often fallen prey to coupism, thereby ignoring the more subtle ways by which soldiers can influence politics. In this article, the authors disaggregate foreign military training to assess how different course types influence military involvement in politics. They argue that soldiers exert higher levels of political influence when they receive domestically oriented training. Empirically, the authors leverage the wide-ranging dissemination of counterinsurgency training after the Cuban Revolution. They analyze original data on 22,000 course attendances at the School of the Americas to show that counterinsurgency courses increased soldiers' influence over politics, whereas training in conventional warfare stabilized civilian control. Their findings have implications for understanding why and when soldiers capture political institutions and dictate policies.

abstract: When do public services privatize, and when do they remain in the public's hands? The authors argue that one explanation lies in a counterintuitive coalition: labor and management. Unlike industrial relations in the private sector, those in the public sector are not necessarily antagonistic. When the interests of public sector workers and managers—the latter defined as those with supervisory responsibilities—are aligned, public services are less likely to privatize. Conversely, when the interests of workers and managers are not aligned, privatization is more likely. To test and substantiate this theory, the authors deploy a most-similar systems comparison of three case studies, focusing on efforts to privatize public passenger rail in the United States, United Kingdom, and New Zealand at the onset of the privatization era in the 1980s and 1990s. This article hence contributes to the study of state privatization, cross-class coalitions, and public sector reform in affluent economies.

abstract: The rise of economic inequality and right-wing populism in the last three decades has produced a lively debate about the relationship between democracy and advanced capitalism. A prominent view is that the troubles are rooted in the growing power of global capital and the rich, first reflected in the broad sweep of neoliberal reforms in the 1980s and '90s. This view is a story about capitalism subverting democracy. This piece instead argues that it was democracy that transformed capitalism, and that this transformation laid the foundation for unprecedented prosperity. Yet it also unleashed inequalizing economic and political dynamics that are now proving difficult to reverse.

abstract: Social scientists should be more deliberate in how they define and measure government efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The authors highlight key distinctions among three dimensions of climate policy: the commitments made by governments, the actions that governments take, and the outcomes they produce. In turn, the authors detail the challenges of measuring these dimensions, and discuss the tradeoffs of alternative measurement strategies, including how well they meet the accepted standards for measurement validity. The authors also identify promising avenues for further research.

abstract: Reviewing the debate on why governments have failed to compensate low- and middle-income citizens for rising income inequality, this essay argues for a perspective that integrates demand-side and supply-side considerations and treats income bias in policy responsiveness as variable across countries and over time.

abstract: In this article, the authors discuss and analyze how regime type and state capacity shape the abilities and incentives of political leaders to respond to covid-19. They suggest that a complementary relationship exists between democracy and state capacity, both in terms of mitigating the adverse consequences of the pandemic, such as deaths, and the honest reporting of these consequences. Using a recent global data set on officially reported covid-19 deaths and estimated deaths based on excess mortality, the authors present evidence that supports different implications from their argument. Empirically, democracies have much higher officially reported death tolls than do autocracies, a result driven by underreporting in autocracies. In high-capacity states, democracies have fewer covid-19 deaths than do autocracies. State capacity generally seems to mitigate both deaths and underreporting, but these relationships are stronger in democracies. Countries that combine democracy with high state capacity experience fewer covid-19 deaths and provide more accurate tolls of the pandemic’s consequences.

The rise of economic inequality and right-wing populism in the last three decades has produced a lively debate about the relationship between democracy and advanced capitalism. A prominent view is that the troubles are rooted in the growing power of global capital and the rich, first reflected in the broad sweep of neoliberal reforms in the 1980s and ’90s. This view is a story about capitalism subverting democracy. This piece instead argues that it was democracy that transformed capitalism, and that this transformation laid the foundation for unprecedented prosperity. Yet it also unleashed inequalizing economic and political dynamics that are now proving difficult to reverse.

abstract: The authors develop a perspective of locally embedded welfare state development to explain how relatively weak national political actors can, nonetheless, shape national policy over time by pursuing local reforms. Empirically, the authors assess their argument by using municipality-level representative shares, data on noncontributory pension reforms, roll-call votes from parliament, and archival material from early twentieth-century Norway, in which several local governments introduced noncontributory old-age pensions before Norway adopted a national scheme. The authors show, first, how nationally underrepresented but highly institutionalized socialist parties with geographically concentrated support introduced local pensions. Over time, these parties thus shaped the possibility space for national reform, effectively locking the national policy agenda into a pension system preferred by the socialists—namely, noncontributory pensions. Citing high municipality-debt pressures in their constituencies, bourgeois politicians from districts with local pensions eventually supported and promoted national-level pension reform. This support, in turn, spurred the cross-class alliance required to establish a national noncontributory pension system.