【正文】
es, but has a relatively low level of stockmarket capitalization, it may face greater pressures for fiscal and moary tightening. And if a country relies on a varied menu of financial inflows, as most do, asset holders will express diverse preferences over public policy. Untangling the various financialmarket influences on government policy making is clearly a long term research project. This article, which focuses on the political determinants of equity investors’ behavior, plements similar analyses of sovereign bond markets and foreign direct investment. Once we understand how investors in each market react to government policies and institutions, we can then advance to a broader analysis of the impact of financial markets—along with domestic institutions, interest groups, and other factors—on government policy making and institutional design. Stockmarket performance is increasingly a target of analysis by political scientists, because equity investors may be highly sensitive to the effects of certain government policies and institutions on their investments. Equity investments are generally very liquid, and the time horizons of equity investors are often relatively short. As a result, changes in government policies can trigger a swift response by investors. Government policies that enhance investor confidence—either directly, by providing shareholder protections and ease of exit, or indirectly, by expanding the economy and improving corporate earnings—will be rewarded by higher stock prices and market valuations. On the other hand, investors can quickly withdraw their funds if governments choose marketunfriendly policies, thereby generating downward pressure on stock prices and valuations. Stock markets, in short, are a valuable indicator of financial actors’ preferences over government institutions and policy outes. A fitting alternative measure of performance is the ratio of the stock price to pany earnings—or, in other words, the price that equity investors are willing to pay for an expected stream of profits. As with stock prices, these ratios reflect investors’ expectations about future earnings, but they also signal investors’ preferences over timevarying government policy and largely invariant political institutions. Because of the latter, crossnational variation in P ? E ratios persists even when national stock markets are hit simultaneously by global price shocks. The extant literature on the linkages between globalization and domestic politics has paid scant attention to the diverse ways in which countries are integrated into the world economy. By assuming that financial markets impose a unified influence on government policies, prior studie