Suchergebnisse

MY personal collection of World Politics begins with the January 1957 issue: volume 9, number 2. It skips to October 1964 and is complete from then on. When I left Princeton to become Northwestern University's fifteenth president, I gave away most of my professional library, envisioning all too accurately the demands of a new life. I never considered parting with any copies of World Politics, however. Perhaps in part this sense of possession came from sentiment arising from my long and happy association with this journal. I think, however, that it stemmed mostly from a recognition that World Politics has been the leading journal of international affairs and comparative studies from its founding until now.

IMF conditionality is seldom so important that it dominates all other considerations for political stability. IMF stabilization programs often shift benefits from one group to another. They expose elites to charges of selling the sovereignty of their countries. The imposition of IMF conditions, particularly subsidy cuts, may lead to sharp outbreaks of civil disorder. Nonetheless, the IMF provides resources that make adjustment easier and thus may lessen the chances of political instability for a country. IMF programs are seldom implemented fully as negotiated, and the penalties for partial compliance are not great. Debtor countries have more flexibility in imposing austerity measures, and the economic constraints are less binding than often assumed. The very availability of alternatives to IMF programs results in internal divisions because some favor debt repudiation and others oppose it. Groups now contend over solutions to the debt problems of their countries.

With this article we hope to add something new to explanations for violence within polities. We examine the consequences of time in power for political violence. We are interested in the length of time a leader is in power and the time when political violence occurs. We start with a simple hypothesis: the longer a leader is in power, the less likely it is that there will be occurrences of large-scale political violence. We are not aware of any theories of violence that have taken account of leadership duration. We do not argue below that leadership duration and the timing of violence explain all variation in violent political outcomes. Rather, it is our assertion that theories of violence have ignored an important factor: the length of time that a leader has been in power. Throughout the analyses presented in this article we have found a relationship between the number of years a leader has been in power and the probability and volume of political violence that the nation that they are governing is likely to experience. As the length of a leader's time in power increases, the probability of political violence declines. This relationship has been demonstrated to be significant in both statistical and substantive terms in a number of different statistical settings that make a variety of assumptions about the quality of the data we are working with and the underlying relationships we are investigating.

To determine whether the relationship between large-scale intrastate violence & duration of leader's time in power is modified by different types of large-scale violence, Charles Taylor & David Jodice's (1983 [see abstracts 84c00352 & 84c00353]) data on political violence & riots, 1950-1982, & country-specific data from Facts on File (multiple years) were analyzed. Binomial logistic regression analyses show that, as the length of a leader's time in power increases, the probability of political violence declines. Multinomial logistic regression analyses of different types of large-scale violence indicate that, as the length of a leader's time in power increases, the chances of high-casualty insurgency from below & civil war -- but not violence from above -- decline. 6 Tables, 1 Figure. Adapted from the source document.

Examines the relationship between the length of time a leader is in power and the time when large-scale intrastate violence occurs; includes insurgency, civil war, and violence directed by government or by the leader, 1950-82.