This study examines the effects of globalization, democratization, and partisanship on social spending in fourteen Latin American countries from 1973 to 1997, using a pooled time-series error-correction model. The authors examine three sets of issues. First, following debates in the literature on OECD countries, they want to know whether social spending has been encouraged or constrained by integration into global markets. Within this context, they examine the extent to which such outcomes might be influenced by two additional sets of domestic political and institutional factors discussed in work on developed countries: the electoral pressures of democratic institutions and whether or not popularly based governments are in power.

The authors show that trade integration has a consistently negative effect on aggregate social spending and that this is compounded by openness to capital markets. This is the strongest and most robust finding in the study. Neither democratic nor popularly based governments consistently affect overall social spending. The authors then disaggregate spending into social security transfers and expenditures on health and education. They find that popularly based governments tend to protect social security transfers, which tend toflowdisproportionately to their unionized constituencies; but they have a negative impact on health and education spending. Conversely, a shift to democracy leads to increases in health and education spending, which reaches a larger segment of the population. The authors conclude by emphasizing the contrasting political log-ics of the different types of social spending.

This article studies the relationship between cartels of politicians and systemic political corruption in a democratic setting. Some electoral systems, including open-list systems of proportional representation, encourage intraparty competition for office. The authors analyze the relationship between intraparty conflict in postwar Italy's dominant political party, the Christian Democrats, and charges of malfeasance against Christian Democratic members of the Chamber ofDeputies in the years between thefirstpostwar parliamentary elections of 1948 and the end of the XI legislature in 1994, when the electoral system was substantially modified. Suspected malfeasance is operationalized as requests by the judiciary to lift parliamentary immunity in order to proceed with an investigation of a member of the Chamber of Deputies.

Results show a significant statistical relationship between intraparty conflict and alleged corruption on the part of DC deputies starting in the early 1970s. These results are interpreted to mean that the dramatic levels of political corruption observed in Italy in recent decades were in part an outgrowth of the search for campaign funds by incumbent DC members of parliament in competition with other candidates from the same party. Electoral competition with other parties did not significantly affect the extent of charges of malfeasance against DC deputies. Using maps, the authors also provide preliminary evidence that Italian corruption did not spread from south to north in a process of cultural contagion, as is commonly believed. Instead, theyfind,the determinants of corruption appear to be endogenous to institutions of the postwar political system.

This article offers the first independent scholarly evaluation of the claims, forecasts, and causal inferences of the State Failure Task Force and its efforts to forecast when states will fail. State failure refers to the collapse of the authority of the central government to impose order, as in civil wars, revolutionary wars, genocides, politicides, and adverse or disruptive regime transitions. States that sponsor terrorism or allow it to be organized within their borders are all failed states. This task force, set up at the behest of Vice President Gore in 1994, has been led by a group of distinguished academics working as consultants to the U.S. CIA. State Failure Task Force reports and publications have received attention in the media, in academia, and from public decision makers. The article identifies several methodological errors in the task force work that cause its reported forecast probabilities of conflict to be too large, its causal inferences to be biased in unpredictable directions, and its claims of forecasting performance to be exaggerated. However, the article also finds that the task force has amassed the best and most carefully collected data on state failure to date, and the required corrections provided in this article, although very large in effect, are easy to implement. The article also demonstrates how to improve forecasting performance to levels significantly greater than even corrected versions of its models. Although the matter is still a highly uncertain endeavor, the authors are nevertheless able to offer the first accurate forecasts of state failure, along with procedures and results that may be of practical use in informing foreign policy decision making. The article also describes a number of strong empirical regularities that may help in ascertaining the causes of state failure.