G OVERNMENTS organize police forces and armies to protect their citizens, build schools and hospitals to educate and care for them, and provide financial assistance for the old and unemployed. But governments also kill, torture, and imprison their citizens. This dark side of government knows no geographic, economic, ideological, or political boundary. In the Middle East, for example, Iraq has morbidly placed a "welcome" doormat at the entrance to its torture chamber-a place where prisoners are burned with cigarettes and electric hot plates, where electric shocks are administered to them, and where they are hanged from the ceiling. In Central America, the government of Guatemala tolerates the torture and killing of three church workers who were assisting refugees. In Africa, the Cameroons allows eight prisoners to die of malnutrition; South Africa, through its policy of apartheid, systematically violates the rights of its non white citizens. In Asia, Burmese army units operating in Karen state use local civilians as minesweepers. In Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union confines dissenters to psychiatric hospitals. In. Western Europe, the residents of Northern Ireland are subjected to trials that fail to conform to international standards, and civilians are shot by the security forces. 1 The list goes on. Unfortunately, this type of governmental behavior is-even in the late 20th century-a dismal characteristic of contemporary politics. Most of the world's countries hold some "prisoners of conscience" or detain po-* The order of the authors' names was randomly selected to reflect equal contributions to the research effort. An earlier version of this research was presented at the 1987 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. We would like to thank Professors Hank Jenkins-Smith and Philip Roeder of the University of New Mexico and Professor Ken Koehler of Iowa State University for their helpful comments and suggestions on this research. Thanks are also due to the Faculty Leave Program at Iowa State for supporting a portion of this research. ' These illustrations are taken from Amnesty International Report 1985, describing human rights conditions in 1984.

Corporate political activity is usually operationalized and analyzed as financial contributions to candidates or political parties through political action committees (PACs). Very little attention has been paid to other dimensions, such as lobbying, in a systematic way. On a theoretical level we address the issue of how to conceive of PAC contributions, lobbying, and other corporate activities, such as charitable giving, in terms of the strategic behavior of corporations and the implications of “foreignness” for the different types of corporate political activity. On an empirical level we examine the political activities of Fortune 500 firms, along with an oversampling of U.S. affiliates of large foreign investors for the 1987–88 election cycle.

This article introduces the global Pro-Government Militias Database (PGMD). Despite the devastating record of some pro-government groups, there has been little research on why these forces form, under what conditions they are most likely to act, and how they affect the risk of internal conflict, repression, and state fragility. From events in the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Sudan, or Syria and the countries of the Arab Spring we know that pro-government militias operate in a variety of contexts. They are often linked with extreme violence and disregard for the laws of war. Yet research, notably quantitative research, lags behind events. In this article we give an overview of the PGMD, a new global dataset that identifies pro-government militias from 1981 to 2007. The information on pro-government militias (PGMs) is presented in a relational data structure, which allows researchers to browse and download different versions of the dataset and access over 3,500 sources that informed the coding. The database shows the wide proliferation and diffusion of these groups. We identify 332 PGMs and specify how they are linked to government, for example via the governing political party, individual leaders, or the military. The dataset captures the type of affiliation of the groups to the government by distinguishing between informal and semi-official militias. It identifies, among others, membership characteristics and the types of groups they target. These data are likely to be relevant to research on state strength and state failure, the dynamics of conflict, including security sector reform, demobilization and reintegration, as well as work on human rights and the interactions between different state and non-state actors. To illustrate uses of the data, we include the PGM data in a standard model of armed conflict and find that such groups increase the risk of civil war.

Since Mancur Olson's Logic of Collective Action (1965), it is impossible for political scientists to conceive of political participation without reference to his powerful argument linking numbers of participants, public goods, and participatory outcomes. What is puzzling is the poor empirical support for this argument in the domain where it should work best, namely explaining business political activity. Olson thought his arguments principally applicable to economic groups, and for the empirical development of his arguments Olson drew heavily on business interests, the most active segment of the interest group community. We explore these arguments with business political activities data by examining the statistical performance of various measures of market structure in determining business political activity, and find little empirical support. We do offer an alternative basis for business behavior lodged in both private and collective goods that preserves business rationality and also helps explain not only the amount of business political participation but the modes of business participation.

Whereas research on corporate lobbying in the USA has produced a set of robust findings, less is known about the determinants of business political action in other policy arenas and beyond the nation-state. In particular, we do not know how well the standard profit-seeking model of firm political activity travels. The article examines this issue with an analysis of business lobbying in the EU that reflects tactical adaptation to lobbying at the supranational level. Using data on 2000 large companies, we show that a modified profit-seeking model of corporate political behaviour is generalizable to corporate lobbying in Brussels. By contrast, theories emphasizing nationally distinct types of interest intermediation find little support in the data.