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Abstract
This review article leverages Isabela Mares' Protecting the Ballot: How First-Wave Democracies Ended Electoral Corruption as a jumping off point to consider how to construct a dialogue between scholars of contemporary electoral malfeasance and historical political economists. It makes two main points. First, because both scholars of history and of the contemporary world are usually engaged in mixed-method case study research, both grapple with issues of case generalizability and external validity. This produces a naturally shared research agenda, although one that has largely gone unrecognized. Generalizability would be improved if both groups mapped their cases onto larger distributions of the phenomenon of interest. Second, the very substantial differences between party systems of first-wave and recent democratizers suggest that political elites will support reforms aimed at improving election integrity differently across the two periods. Contemporary electoral competition is unlikely to naturally give rise to the emergence of programmatic politics, instead locking parties into clientelism and various types of election malfeasance. I discuss what might be required for politicians today to support reforms aimed at curbing election malfeasance, and when the shift to programmatic politics becomes in the political interests of elected officials.

Italy's 1992 elections marked the end of political dominance by Christian Democracy (DC). The conventional account of the collapse of the DC's vote to less than 30% focuses on the breakup of the Soviet Union, which is said to have freed Catholic voters to switch to new regionalist protest parties. The author documents that this argument is empirically inadequate. Evidence shows that electoral districts more exposed to international trade were where the DC lost larger vote shares and where the Northern League received more support. These findings corroborate that social groups linked to small firms in the north and center whose products were exported throughout Europe underwent electoral realignment in response to the economic opportunities offered by the 1991 Maastricht Treaty. The author argues that DC was not credible in providing national macroeconomic policies that would have allowed Italy to partake fully of the opportunities offered by European economic integration.

This article examines the relationship between the legislature and the public administration in postwar Italy (understood as the period from about 1948 through 1994). Italian public administration is normally chacterized as badly designed and inefficient, and government performance is usually classed as poor. I argue by contrast that bureaucratic inefficiency, excessive legislation and widespread bureaucratic corruption were features of Italian public administration that were deliberately designed by legislators and intended to enhance the re-election prospects for incumbents by providing them with opportunities for extensive constituency service. The underlying incentives stemmed from the candidates' search for the personal vote, essential for retaining public office. Differences in the laws regulating the financing of political campaigns explain why excessive bureaucratization in the Italian context also resulted in extensive political corruption. (British Journal of Political Science / FUB)

In "Replication, Replication," Gary King convincingly argues that publications by political scientists should adhere to what he calls a replication standard. Although King's article explicitly embraces qualitative as well as quantitative research, the policy statement that he suggests editors and reviewers of books and journals endorse exclusively imposes standards on studies based on quantitative research. Qualitative work is treated in a simple sentence and one that enforces no standards: "Authors of works relying upon qualitative data are encouraged (but not required) to submit a comparable footnote that would facilitate replication where feasible."

I test two theories of the political processes of trade unions. The first argues that wage moderation depends on a centralized labor movement. The second contends that, institutional conditions permitting, unions' coordination of bargaining strategies is sufficient. Coordination is most likely to he achieved when there are small number of unions that do not compete for members, that is, when union monopoly is high. Important empirical anomalies may be resolved by analyzing the effects of union centralization and monopoly separately, rather than combining them into a composite index of corporatism. Reanalyzing comparative data from Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development countries between 1963 and 1985 largely corroborates the hypothesis that monopoly is more important than either centralization or composite indices of corporatism for national economic performance. The conceptual rationale underlying indices of corporatism should be reexamined.

A rational choice perspective ground this analysis of why trade unions, confronted with firms equally intransigent in their commitments to work-force reductions, sometimes actively resist job loss & at other times passively acquiesce. Case studies of British Leyland & Fiat automobile plants reveal that unions at the former acquiesced, whereas those at the latter resisted mass work-force reductions in 1980. As the literatures on corporatism & on contemporary industrial relations both describe Italian & British labor relations as antagonistic, they fail to anticipate the different outcomes for these two cases. It is argued here that the outcomes may be understood as products of the rational calculations that union leaders make within the constraints of labor market institutions. Specifically, union responses to the threat of large-scale work-force reductions vary with the presence or absence of seniority-based mechanisms for allocating job loss. 1 Figure, 68 References. Adapted from the source document.