Our understanding of the impact of party conventions on opinion regarding presidential candidates is based largely on aggregate-level analysis. Extant individual-level investigation has been limited by the assumption that conventions are monolithic information events that exercise uniform effects. Using panel data, we show for the first time that conventions exercise two independent effects, which can counteract or reinforce each other depending on individual characteristics and information consumption. First, we demonstrate how exposure to speeches exercises a persuasive effect that benefits the convening candidate, even when partisanship is controlled. Second, we demonstrate how conventions exercise an atmospheric effect that activates general partisan bias. We find that observed postconvention changes are attributable to the combination of these separate but simultaneous effects. We also explore how individual partisanship conditions speech effects and find evidence that partisanship influences the decision to listen but is unlikely to influence the impact of a message already heard.
Government representation of public opinion is a central component of democracy. Previous studies have documented a robust congruence between aggregated public opinion and public policies in the American states. However, an equally important question for evaluating the quality of democracy is "Who does government respond to when formulating public policies?" I investigate differential policy representation based on citizens’ household incomes and find that citizens with low incomes receive little substantive political representation (compared with more affluent citizens) in the policy decisions made by their state governments. This unequal policy representation occurs for both the general liberalism of state policies and on specific social issues like the death penalty and abortion. These findings suggest that examining the variation in political inequality across the 50 states can help scholars to better understand and explain "unequal democracy" in the United States.
We investigate the links between 527s and other political organizations through the employment histories of 527 staff. We find that 527s are highly central to modern political party networks and are in positions to facilitate coordination within a party and to employ key party personnel. Furthermore, we find important differences between the networks charted out by the two major parties. The Republican Party, the majority party during the period under study, had a more hierarchical network than the Democratic Party did.
This article examines citizens who combine liberalism on one of two major issue dimensions with conservatism on the other, assessing whether they are less politically engaged than "consistent" liberals and conservatives and whether this relationship has strengthened over time with elite polarization. It also explores the contributions of cross-pressures, partisanship, and alienation to contemporary ideological differences in political engagement. This article departs from most existing research by defining ideology two dimensionally. Using the 1984-2008 American National Election Studies, it finds that culturally conservative, economically liberal Americans and to a lesser extent culturally liberal, economically conservative Americans are less engaged in elections than "consistent" liberals and conservatives. Different factors explain these differences with liberals and conservatives, but cross-pressures do not demobilize either "two-dimensional ideologue." Over time, the increased involvement of liberals and conservatives has produced a growing ideological gap in political engagement.
What explains policy outcomes? Using a data set containing the actions and assessments of 776 lobbyists working closely on 77 policy proposals, combined with newly collected data on each proposal, I show that the intensity of lobbying against a proposal is a powerful predictor of the likelihood that the proposal is adopted in Congress or a federal agency. This negative lobbying is more effective than positive lobbying: it takes 3.5 lobbyists working for a new proposal to counteract the effect of just one lobbyist against it. Negative lobbying is a more important predictor of the policy outcome than the level of conflict, the preference of the majority of lobbyists, and differences in interest group resources. Several institutional factors—presidential support for the measure, congressional polarization, and whether the proposal was initiated by a federal agency—are found to affect policy outcomes, but only presidential support matters more than negative lobbying.
Do law clerks influence the decisions made by justices on the U.S. Supreme Court? Although numerous studies of law clerk influence exist, none has controlled for alternative factors that lead a justice to behave in a particular way even absent the actions of the law clerk. Turning to the Court’s agenda-setting stage, we draw from archival materials contained in the private papers of Justice Harry A. Blackmun to address this precise issue. Our results suggest that once a justice’s initial voting inclinations in a case are controlled for, the ability of a law clerk to systematically alter a justice’s vote is conditioned on the quality of the petition, the direction of the clerk’s recommendation, and the ideological closeness of the pool clerk and voting justice. Given the closeness of many agenda-setting votes, we suggest that clerk influence could be the determining factor in whether a case is granted review by the Court.
Do the social pressures individuals encounter from the political environments they reside in affect the stability of their partisanship? Are some citizens able to insulate themselves from such pressure through the composition of their discussion networks? While partisanship is widely regarded as stable, I consider whether it is influenced by such factors. I use panel data from the 1992-1996 and 2000-2004 American National Election Studies to address this, constructing a measure of partisan context at the county level. I find that those residing in a partisan minority county are more likely to change their party identification and that as the degree of incongruence rises, individuals become increasingly likely to change their identification across panel waves. These findings demonstrate the powerful effect of contextual social forces on an otherwise stable and enduring attachment such as partisanship and suggest that partisan socialization is a process that extends beyond an individual’s childhood.
This article explores how interest groups decide policy positions through case studies of three organizations’ shifting stances on the issue of immigration. In all three cases, the AFL-CIO, the Sierra Club, and the Christian Coalition, issue positions are signaling mechanisms central to the construction of an organizational identity. Leadership considers the message the stance on a policy issue sends to potential constituents and allies. Organizational agendas are one tool used by leaders to craft new narratives about what the group stands for, who the group represents, and who belongs. Key determinants of leaderships’ calculation over redrawing the boundaries of inclusion and representation and what signal an issue stance will convey includes organizational strength and a reading of a shifting political terrain. An evolutionary metaphor, instead of a rational actor model, is better suited to understand this critical component of interest group behavior, agenda setting.
This article examines the link between elections and the representational behavior of senators by considering whether ideological congruence with state preferences impacts vote shares on Election Day. We advance the literature on electoral accountability by proposing a more refined theoretical and empirical assessment of congruence with constituent preferences. Additionally, our analysis focuses on the effect of divergence in the Senate, which has been subject to significantly less attention than the House, and examines all elections to the upper chamber involving incumbents from 1960-2004. We find that measures of ideological divergence that are conditioned on the underlying ideological preferences of state constituencies significantly improve on existing measures, and that senators who are out of step with their state do in fact suffer at the polls.
This article advances a bounded rationality approach to account for a fundamental challenge in the study of voting behavior; finding a model that allows voters to be driven by both affective partisan attachments and rational issue considerations. Voters choose candidates they feel will perform best on the issues, but on the issues about which they care most, and on the issues as they see them. Party identification acts as the crucial bound on individual rationality, canalizing attention to issues either owned by or successfully leased by their own party and biasing expectations of issue handling. My empirical analysis of the 2008 presidential election shows the recession was a powerful predictor of defection, but rather than valence—was the economy better or worse—what mattered was the level of importance an individual placed on the economy.
Governors are generally the best-known figures in state politics. They have many roles, including service as political leaders in their states. One aspect of this role is the promotion of their favored policies and electoral candidates. We examine why governors endorse candidates for state-level office using data from partisan and nonpartisan state supreme court elections from 1999 to 2008. We examine both decisions to endorse and whether endorsements influence electoral results. Our findings indicate that a governor’s decision to endorse a candidate is the product of pragmatic considerations and executive resources. We also conclude that governors’ endorsements have a significant effect on electoral outcomes.
The literature on state constitutional amendments remains undeveloped despite recent activity in the area of same-sex marriage policy. Previous studies have assumed that the adoption of state constitutional amendments is governed by routine policy considerations, but there are strong theoretical reasons for expecting attributes of state institutions also to affect adoption. In this study, I compare institutional and policy explanations for the enactment of state constitutional amendments prohibiting same-sex marriage. Although I expect routine policy considerations to affect the adoption of amendments, I also expect adoption to be influenced by attributes of state institutions, in particular, the capacity of state high courts to produce decisions favoring marriage equality. Using event history analysis, I find that the initial consideration of amendments is driven by policy considerations but that adoption is also guided by institutional considerations, such as the professionalization of state high courts.
Spouses who talk about politics with each other have long been considered aberrant cases of political discussion because of the frequency of their interaction and the high levels of agreement between them. Using the 1996 Indianapolis-St. Louis Election Study, we challenge these assumptions. We find that compared with other types of discussion dyads, married dyads are no more likely to agree about a host of policy issues, even though they do talk about them more frequently. In addition, we find even when spouses do agree about their presidential vote choice more often, they do not perceive this agreement to exist. These findings indicate that within the microfoundations of married political behavior, spouses may experience less political variety because of the frequency of their interaction, but this does not necessarily mean they experience lower levels of disagreement.
Many spatial theories of policymaking in the context of a system of checks and balances require the estimation of ideal points which are comparable across institutions. This analysis evaluates comparisons between the president, Senate, and House. For applications which presume that legislators change their positions over time, the most commonly used estimates impose too many restrictions on the ideal points. I consider an alternative approach to creating a common scale by using interest groups (American Conservative Union [ACU] and Americans for Democratic Action [ADA]) as reference actors and incorporating "bridge votes," roll calls on which the House and Senate vote on identical text. The analysis demonstrates this approach can produce comparable estimates across time and chamber.
There has been significant scholarly research on judicial decision making and bureaucratic control but little research on bureaucrats who perform a judicial function, namely, administrative law judges. In this article, we analyze the influences on the decisions of administrative law judges (ALJs) from 1991 to 2006. Using ordered logit, we examine the influence of policy preference and hierarchical and political constraint. We find that ALJs are comparable to Federal District Court judges in that they use ideology in their rulings, are also subject to hierarchical control by higher courts, and that they are constrained by separation of powers influences.
Interstate compacts are an increasingly important policy tool available to states, one that allows them to tackle regional and national issues. What effect does policy activity at the federal level have on state participation in interstate compacts? Drawing on theories of functional federalism, the authors explore the possibility that a state’s response to federal activism varies across policy domains. For economic policy the authors hypothesize that federal activism causes an increase in compact participation, as states attempt to defend themselves against federal intrusion. In other policy areas the authors expect that states are more likely to enter into compacts during periods of relative federal inactivity. Results from a set of event-count models generally support these hypotheses. The study findings suggest that states may sometimes use interstate compacts as a mechanism to resist federal incursion but that this is just one facet of a more complex pattern of intergovernmental policy adjustment.
The popularity of congressional caucuses is puzzling, given the dominance of political parties and rules that specifically limit caucuses’ resources. Yet modern caucuses offer legislators the unique advantage of complete discretion over their membership decisions, which allows legislators to tailor their memberships to their district. As a result, caucus membership is an important means of constituency representation. Using original data from the 108th Congress, this article examines the House caucus system and legislators’ membership in all 441caucuses. There is strong evidence that legislators’ decisions about caucus membership reflect their constituents even when controlling for party, committee, electoral security, and seniority. Legislators from heterogeneous districts belong to numerous caucuses, which allows them to represent the multiple interests in their constituency. In addition, legislators are more likely to belong to caucuses that address specific issues relevant to constituents.
To what extent did the extensive flooding caused by Hurricane Katrina affect voter participation in the 2006 mayoral election? This article uses voting record data from 20 election cycles, GIS-coded flood-depth data, and census data to examine the voting behavior of registered voters in New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina. We use a variety of statistical techniques, primarily propensity score matching methods, to examine how flooding affected mayoral turnout. We find that flooding decreased participation, but registered voters who experienced more than 6 ft of flooding were more likely to participate in the election than those who experienced less flooding. This finding confirms that increasing the cost of voting decreases turnout and suggests several mechanisms motivating an expressive component of voting behavior. Our results indicate there is a complex relationship between participation and the costs and benefits of turnout. Our findings about the characteristics of the voters who participated in the mayoral election provide insights into the scope of change for the political landscape of New Orleans.
Latino voters comprise a growing segment of the voting electorate, yet their levels of participation in elections lags behind the general population and even other ethnic and racial groups. Recent experimental studies have found mobilization efforts directed at the Latino electorate to boost electoral turnout in federal, state, and local elections. Over the past two decades, campaign organizations and operatives have been increasingly relying on the use of Spanish-language appeals to mobilize Latinos. Surprisingly, the impact of language use in targeting Latino voters has, for the most part, eluded scholarly inquiry. We conduct a randomized field experiment in which Latino voters were randomly exposed to a mobilization message in either English or Spanish. It is, to the best of our knowledge, the first randomized experiment to present a direct test between English- and Spanish-language appeals. The experiment was conducted in the context of a special election that took place in February 2009 to fill a vacancy on the New York City Council for District 21, located in Queens. The results from our field experiment suggest that both Spanish- and English-language mobilization have the capacity to boost Latino turnout. That said, English-language appeals were effective across the board for Latinos in our sample, whereas Spanish-language outreach was only effective among low-propensity voters and participants whose primary language was Spanish.
Dale and Strauss’s (DS) noticeable reminder theory (NRT) of voter mobilization posits that mobilization efforts that are highly noticeable and salient to potential voters, even if impersonal, can be successful. In an innovative experimental design, DS show that text messages substantially boost turnout, challenging previous claims that social connectedness is the key to increasing participation. We replicate DS’s research design and extend it in two key ways. First, whereas the treatment in DS’s experiment was a "warm" text message combined with contact, we test NRT more cleanly by examining the effect of "cold" text messages that are completely devoid of auxiliary interaction. Second, we test an implication of NRT that habitual voters should exhibit the largest treatment effects in lower salience elections whereas casual voters should exhibit the largest treatment effects in higher salience elections. Via these two extensions, we find support for NRT.
Under the acclimation effect view, recent appointees to the Court modify their behavior in systematic ways early in their tenure as opposed to their later decisional tendencies. Similarly, many studies have examined the chief justice’s unique behavior.This study blends these two rich strands and explores whether chief justices demonstrate an acclimation effect, such that their behavior changes systematically through time. Using more than a century of Court data, this study examines whether new chief justices’ concurrence and dissent rates decline and whether they write fewer individual opinions gradually. I find that the chief justice’s position serves to create an incentive structure that is uniquely associated with declining rates of specially concurring and dissenting votes in certain cases. Also, new chief justices pen fewer special concurrences and dissents in some policy areas. My results hence imply that the chief justice experiences unique acclimation effects in learning to marshal the Court.
The authors examine how institutional context affects political decision making in Congress by investigating party leaders’ agenda construction strategies and members’ roll-call participation across regular and lame-duck sessions in the pre-Twentieth Amendment House (1877-1933). The authors find evidence to suggest that party leaders pursued relatively more partisan agendas in lame-duck sessions and did so successfully. Next, we investigate the effects such agendas had on roll-call participation. The authors find that returning (reelected) members significantly decreased their abstention levels, while departing (defeated and retiring) members significantly increased their abstention levels. Yet the authors also find that departing members could be drawn to participate on certain types of roll-call votes even in the face of strong incentives to shirk. Party leaders rely on the generally higher levels of participation by returning members as well as the selective participation of departing members to overcome "participatory agency loss" and pass surprisingly partisan lame-duck agendas.
Recent scholarship has outlined and debated theories of a culture war taking place within the United States, with religious traditionalists pitted against nonorthodox religious believers and nonbelievers. Some scholars and commentators contend that the American Left has contributed to this culture war through its hostility toward Americans of faith. This theory, which I call the Irreverent Left thesis, purports that such hostility has caused religious traditionalists to abandon the Democratic Party for the Republican Party, leading to Republican victories in national politics. This article examines whether the Left has become more hostile to religion. Using content analysis of American Left publications— The Nation, In These Times, and Mother Jones— I examine the attitudes of progressive elites from 1977 to 2000. Findings indicate that although the American Left has become more hostile toward religious faith, this hostility is more likely a result of the shifting partisan loyalties than a cause.
We discuss a method for improving causal inferences called "Coarsened Exact Matching" (CEM), and the new "Monotonic Imbalance Bounding" (MIB) class of matching methods from which CEM is derived. We summarize what is known about CEM and MIB, derive and illustrate several new desirable statistical properties of CEM, and then propose a variety of useful extensions. We show that CEM possesses a wide range of statistical properties not available in most other matching methods but is at the same time exceptionally easy to comprehend and use. We focus on the connection between theoretical properties and practical applications. We also make available easy-to-use open source software for R, Stata, and SPSS that implement all our suggestions.
This paper proposes entropy balancing, a data preprocessing method to achieve covariate balance in observational studies with binary treatments. Entropy balancing relies on a maximum entropy reweighting scheme that calibrates unit weights so that the reweighted treatment and control group satisfy a potentially large set of prespecified balance conditions that incorporate information about known sample moments. Entropy balancing thereby exactly adjusts inequalities in representation with respect to the first, second, and possibly higher moments of the covariate distributions. These balance improvements can reduce model dependence for the subsequent estimation of treatment effects. The method assures that balance improves on all covariate moments included in the reweighting. It also obviates the need for continual balance checking and iterative searching over propensity score models that may stochastically balance the covariate moments. We demonstrate the use of entropy balancing with Monte Carlo simulations and empirical applications.
The validity of empirical research often relies upon the accuracy of self-reported behavior and beliefs. Yet eliciting truthful answers in surveys is challenging, especially when studying sensitive issues such as racial prejudice, corruption, and support for militant groups. List experiments have attracted much attention recently as a potential solution to this measurement problem. Many researchers, however, have used a simple difference-in-means estimator, which prevents the efficient examination of multivariate relationships between respondents' characteristics and their responses to sensitive items. Moreover, no systematic means exists to investigate the role of underlying assumptions. We fill these gaps by developing a set of new statistical methods for list experiments. We identify the commonly invoked assumptions, propose new multivariate regression estimators, and develop methods to detect and adjust for potential violations of key assumptions. For empirical illustration, we analyze list experiments concerning racial prejudice. Open-source software is made available to implement the proposed methodology.
The Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) provides the only time series of estimated party policy positions in political science and has been extensively used in a wide variety of applications. Recent work (e.g., Benoit, Laver, and Mikhaylov 2009; Klingemann et al. 2006) focuses on nonsystematic sources of error in these estimates that arise from the text generation process. Our concern here, by contrast, is with error that arises during the text coding process since nearly all manifestos are coded only once by a single coder. First, we discuss reliability and misclassification in the context of hand-coded content analysis methods. Second, we report results of a coding experiment that used trained human coders to code sample manifestos provided by the CMP, allowing us to estimate the reliability of both coders and coding categories. Third, we compare our test codings to the published CMP "gold standard" codings of the test documents to assess accuracy and produce empirical estimates of a misclassification matrix for each coding category. Finally, we demonstrate the effect of coding misclassification on the CMP's most widely used index, its left–right scale. Our findings indicate that misclassification is a serious and systemic problem with the current CMP data set and coding process, suggesting the CMP scheme should be significantly simplified to address reliability issues.
Social scientists spend considerable energy constructing typologies and discussing their roles in measurement. Less discussed is the role of typologies in evaluating and revising theoretical arguments. We argue that unsupervised machine learning tools can be profitably applied to the development and testing of theory-based typologies. We review recent advances in mixture models as applied to cluster analysis and argue that these tools are particularly important in the social sciences where it is common to claim that high-dimensional objects group together in meaningful clusters. Model-based clustering (MBC) grounds analysis in probability theory, permitting the evaluation of uncertainty and application of information-based model selection tools. We show that the MBC approach forces analysts to consider dimensionality problems that more traditional clustering tools obscure. We apply MBC to the "varieties of capitalism," a typology receiving significant attention in political science and economic sociology. We find weak and conflicting evidence for the theory's expected grouping. We therefore caution against the current practice of including typology-derived dummy variables in regression and case-comparison research designs.
The Cox proportional hazards model is ubiquitous in time-to-event studies of political processes. Plausible deviations from correct specification and operationalization caused by problems such as measurement error or omitted variables can produce substantial bias when the Cox model is estimated by conventional partial likelihood maximization (PLM). One alternative is an iteratively reweighted robust (IRR) estimator, which can reduce this bias. However, the utility of IRR is limited by the fact that there is currently no method for determining whether PLM or IRR is more appropriate for a particular sample of data. Here, we develop and evaluate a novel test for selecting between the two estimators. Then, we apply the test to political science data. We demonstrate that PLM and IRR can each be optimal, that our test is effective in choosing between them, and that substantive conclusions can depend on which one is used.
Political scientists have long been interested in citizens' support level for such actors as ethnic minorities, militant groups, and authoritarian regimes. Attempts to use direct questioning in surveys, however, have largely yielded unreliable measures of these attitudes as they are contaminated by social desirability bias and high nonresponse rates. In this paper, we develop a statistical methodology to analyze endorsement experiments, which recently have been proposed as a possible solution to this measurement problem. The commonly used statistical methods are problematic because they cannot properly combine responses across multiple policy questions, the design feature of a typical endorsement experiment. We overcome this limitation by using item response theory to estimate support levels on the same scale as the ideal points of respondents. We also show how to extend our model to incorporate a hierarchical structure of data in order to uncover spatial variation of support while recouping the loss of statistical efficiency due to indirect questioning. We illustrate the proposed methodology by applying it to measure political support for Islamist militant groups in Pakistan. Simulation studies suggest that the proposed Bayesian model yields estimates with reasonable levels of bias and statistical power. Finally, we offer several practical suggestions for improving the design and analysis of endorsement experiments.
Following David Lee's pioneering work, numerous scholars have applied the regression discontinuity (RD) design to popular elections. Contrary to the assumptions of RD, however, we show that bare winners and bare losers in U.S. House elections (1942–2008) differ markedly on pretreatment covariates. Bare winners possess large ex ante financial, experience, and incumbency advantages over their opponents and are usually the candidates predicted to win by Congressional Quarterly's pre-election ratings. Covariate imbalance actually worsens in the closest House elections. National partisan tides help explain these patterns. Previous works have missed this imbalance because they rely excessively on model-based extrapolation. We present evidence suggesting that sorting in close House elections is due mainly to activities on or before Election Day rather than postelection recounts or other manipulation. The sorting is so strong that it is impossible to achieve covariate balance between matched treated and control observations, making covariate adjustment a dubious enterprise. Although RD is problematic for postwar House elections, this example does highlight the design's advantages over alternatives: RD's assumptions are clear and weaker than model-based alternatives, and their implications are empirically testable.
In this paper, we introduce an innovative method to diagnose electoral fraud using vote counts. Specifically, we use synthetic data to develop and train a fraud detection prototype. We employ a naive Bayes classifier as our learning algorithm and rely on digital analysis to identify the features that are most informative about class distinctions. To evaluate the detection capability of the classifier, we use authentic data drawn from a novel data set of district-level vote counts in the province of Buenos Aires (Argentina) between 1931 and 1941, a period with a checkered history of fraud. Our results corroborate the validity of our approach: The elections considered to be irregular (legitimate) by most historical accounts are unambiguously classified as fraudulent (clean) by the learner. More generally, our findings demonstrate the feasibility of generating and using synthetic data for training and testing an electoral fraud detection system.
The study of Latino public opinion has renewed interest in the relationship between language and survey response. However, extant research generally relies on statistical methods that cannot distinguish between two related yet distinct types of language effects in Latino surveys: (1) differences in attitude and (2) differences in measures of attitude. The former reflects varied levels of a latent attitude between English and Spanish interviewees. The latter—formally known as Differential Item Functioning (DIF)—refers to linguistic differences in the interpretation of survey items, which lead Latino respondents to misreport their level of attitude. This paper proposes Multiple Indicators Multiple Causes models to decouple these two types of language effects. Using this modeling framework, I examine language differences in measures of subjective and factual political attitudes from the Latino National Survey (2006). I find that the language of interview systematically colors Latinos’ interpretation of survey items, even after controlling for measurement error and individual differences in the latent variable being assessed. I then show through an applied analysis how ignoring language DIF can yield misleading inferences about hypothesized relationships between variables. Together, these findings highlight a need for greater theoretical work on the psychological origins of language effects in multilingual political surveys.
Measures of constituency preferences are of vital importance for the study of political representation and other research areas. Yet, such measures are often difficult to obtain. Previous survey-based estimates frequently lack precision and coverage due to small samples, rely on questionable assumptions or require detailed auxiliary information about the constituencies' population characteristics. We propose an alternative Bayesian hierarchical approach that exploits minimal geographic information readily available from digitalized constituency maps. If at hand, social background data are easily integrated. To validate the method, we use national polls and district-level results from the 2009 German Bundestag election, an empirical case for which detailed structural information is missing.
Researchers in comparative research are increasingly relying on individual level data to test theories involving unobservable constructs like attitudes and preferences. Estimation is carried out using large-scale cross-national survey data providing responses from individuals living in widely varying contexts. This strategy rests on the assumption of equivalence, that is, no systematic distortion in response behavior of individuals from different countries exists. However, this assumption is frequently violated with rather grave consequences for comparability and interpretation. I present a multilevel mixture ordinal item response model with item bias effects that is able to establish equivalence. It corrects for systematic measurement error induced by unobserved country heterogeneity, and it allows for the simultaneous estimation of structural parameters of interest.
Spatial statistical methods in political science provide a tool to deal with spatial and other forms of interdependence in observational data. In this article, I derive a statistical model from a game of impure public goods provision. The resulting strategic autoregressive model (StratAM) allows the researcher to systematically explore the sources of free-riding behavior in the provision of public goods. The StratAM model is tightly related to the well-known spatial autoregressive (SAR) model and can be estimated in a maximum likelihood framework. I demonstrate the use of the StratAM model by analyzing free riding in the provision of foreign aid. Indicators of developmental needs and good governance strongly increase free-riding during the 1990s. Free-riding patterns in the 2000s are more similar to Cold War patterns.
This paper extends models of micro- and macropartisanship in two ways. It first develops a model of individual partisanship that accommodates changes in partisan utilities. Achen's Bayesian partisan updating is a special case of our model. This more general micromodel is then aggregated to create a model of macropartisanship. This macromodel is a more general version of the models of macropartisanship estimated by various authors. The less restricted version incorporates possible individual and temporal heterogeneity. We present an example using real data that offers a possible way to estimate the parameters in the full aggregate model.
The proliferation of elections in even those states that are arguably anything but democratic has given rise to a focused interest on developing methods for detecting fraud in the official statistics of a state's election returns. Among these efforts are those that employ Benford's Law, with the most common application being an attempt to proclaim some election or another fraud free or replete with fraud. This essay, however, argues that, despite its apparent utility in looking at other phenomena, Benford's Law is problematical at best as a forensic tool when applied to elections. Looking at simulations designed to model both fair and fraudulent contests as well as data drawn from elections we know, on the basis of other investigations, were either permeated by fraud or unlikely to have experienced any measurable malfeasance, we find that conformity with and deviations from Benford's Law follow no pattern. It is not simply that the Law occasionally judges a fraudulent election fair or a fair election fraudulent. Its "success rate" either way is essentially equivalent to a toss of a coin, thereby rendering it problematical at best as a forensic tool and wholly misleading at worst.
"Benford's Law and the Detection of Election Fraud" raises doubts about whether a test based on the mean of the second significant digit of vote counts equals 4.187 is useful as a test for the occurrence of election fraud. The paper mistakenly associates such a test with Benford's Law, considers a simulation exercise that has no apparent relevance for any actual election, applies the test to inappropriate levels of aggregation, and ignores existing analysis of recent elections in Russia. If tests based on the second significant digit of precinct-level vote counts are diagnostic of election fraud, the tests need to use expectations that take into account the features of ordinary elections, such as strategic actions. Whether the tests are useful for detecting fraud remains an open question, but approaching this question requires an approach more nuanced and tied to careful analysis of real election data than one sees in the discussed paper.
Our goal in this paper is to provide a formal explanation for how within-unit causal process information (i.e., data on posttreatment variables and partial information on posttreatment counterfactuals) can help to inform causal inferences relating to total effects—the overall effect of an explanatory variable on an outcome variable. The basic idea is that, in many applications, researchers may be able to make more plausible causal assumptions conditional on the value of a posttreatment variable than they would be able to do unconditionally. As data become available on a posttreatment variable, these conditional causal assumptions become active and information about the effect of interest is gained. This approach is most beneficial in situations where it is implausible to assume that treatment assignment is conditionally ignorable. We illustrate the approach with an example of estimating the effect of election day registration on turnout.
The similarity of states’ foreign policy positions is a standard variable in the dyadic analysis of international relations. Recent studies routinely rely on Signorino and Ritter's (1999, Tau-b or not tau-b: Measuring the similarity of foreign policy positions. International Studies Quarterly 43:115–44) S to assess the similarity of foreign policy ties. However, S neglects two fundamental characteristics of the international state system: foreign policy ties are relatively rare and individual states differ in their innate propensity to form such ties. I propose two chance-corrected agreement indices, Scott's (1955, Reliability of content analysis: The case of nominal scale coding. The Public Opinion Quarterly 19:321–5) and Cohen's (1960, A coefficient of agreement for nominal scales. Educational and Psychological Measurement 20:37–46) , as viable alternatives. Both indices adjust the dyadic similarity score for a large number of common absent ties. Cohen's also takes into account differences in individual dyad members’ total number of ties. The resulting similarity scores have stronger face validity than S. A comparison of their empirical distributions and a replication of Gartzke's (2007, The capitalist peace. American Journal of Political Science 51:166–91) study of the ‘Capitalist Peace’ indicate that the different types of measures are not substitutable.
The Shapley-Owen value (SOV, Owen and Shapley 1989, Optimal location of candidates in ideological space. International Journal of Game Theory 125–42), a generalization of the Shapley-Shubik value applicable to spatial voting games, is an important concept in that it takes us away from a priori concepts of power to notions of power that are directly tied to the ideological proximity of actors. SOVs can also be used to locate the spatial analogue to the Copeland winner, the strong point, the point with smallest win-set, which is a plausible solution concept for games without cores. However, for spatial voting games with many voters, until recently, it was too computationally difficult to calculate SOVs, and thus, it was impossible to find the strong point analytically. After reviewing the properties of the SOV, such as the result proven by Shapley and Owen that size of win sets increases with the square of distance as we move away from the strong point along any ray, we offer a computer algorithm for computing SOVs that can readily find such values even for legislatures the size of the U.S. House of Representatives or the Russian Duma. We use these values to identify the strong point and show its location with respect to the uncovered set, for several of the U.S. congresses analyzed in Bianco, Jeliazkov, and Sened (2004, The limits of legislative actions: Determining the set of enactable outcomes given legislators preferences. Political Analysis 12:256–76) and for several sessions of the Russian Duma. We then look at many of the experimental committee voting games previously analyzed by Bianco et al. (2006, A theory waiting to be discovered and used: A reanalysis of canonical experiments on majority-rule decision making. Journal of Politics 68:838–51) and show how outcomes in these games tend to be points with small win sets located near to the strong point. We also consider how SOVs can be applied to a lobbying game in a committee of the U.S. Senate.
Efforts to find empirical evidence that campaign money impacts policymaking choices have offered scant support for interest group influence. A possible explanation is that the hypothesis that those receiving campaign monies should adjust their policy choices to favor their donor requires the untenable assumption that interest groups and legislators can implement contracts. We develop a new, alternative, model in which legislators and interest groups cannot engage in any form of contracting, and legislators care about both the policy and fundraising implications of their policy choices. In our model, an interest group gives only to those it believes shares its policy preferences. Nonetheless, we show that the group’s giving impacts incumbent policy choices. Importantly, when groups ideologically match, the relationship between actual contributions and bias is not straightforward. As long as a group is uncertain about a member’s primitive policy preference, it can influence her policymaking even when it contributes to her challenger or abstains from giving altogether.
The empirical study of spatial issue voting has experienced a resurgence in recent years due to advances in data collection and research design. Grynaviski and Corrigan make several important contributions to this literature. In this note, we comment on one of Grynaviski and Corrigan’s recommendations—to not include a main effect for issue importance when estimating models assessing the interactive relationship between importance and policy proximity. According to the authors, including the main importance term is incorrect because it is not necessary in representing a scale-invariant functional form under some assumptions and is insufficient under others. In deriving their reduced-form expression, the authors produce a model that is unintuitive and inappropriate for most data. Moreover, the restrictions Grynaviski and Corrigan impose on their model can produce perverse empirical predictions. We show that a model including main effect terms for importance is indeed scale invariant and that inclusion of the main importance term is necessary for scale invariance with respect to partial utility functions.
Lewis and Schultz (2003) develop a statistical signaling model to deal with international conflicts or bargaining situations in which states have private information about their payoffs. They claim that they can confirm that there always exists a unique equilibrium in their model. In this paper, I show that Lewis and Schultz's claim is not true and their model admits multiple equilibria under some parameter settings. Monte Carlo analysis shows that when there are multiple equilibria, the parameter estimates may not converge to their true values even if the number of observations increases.
This article reviews the history of Public Opinion Quarterly from 1972 through 1986, with brief discursions on its prehistory at Princeton and Columbia universities and some reflections on its present and future.
Attempting to look systematically at the limited term of one editor is a little like trying to interpret the univariate results of a single survey item when there are no other items with which to compare it and few other variables to which it might relate. Rather than attempting that impossible task, this essay reflects briefly on what indicators there are for how POQ was used during my seven years as editor; more importantly, on the articles published in those years that are memorable in one way or another to the editor; and most importantly, on how my addition of Poll Reviews as a new section of the journal reinforced the importance of the connection, but also the distinction, between survey results and public opinion.
In POQ’s early years, survey data appeared only occasionally in articles and a focus on methodology was even less common. Today, by contrast, it is rare to find a POQ article that is not based on survey data, and many social scientists think of the journal as the leading forum for research on survey methodology. This sea change would have surprised the journal's founders and seems far from inevitable. An account of how and why the change occurred must answer at least two questions. First, what led a journal whose mandate was the study of public opinion in its widest sense to publish analyses based almost exclusively on sample surveys? Second, given the concentration on survey research, what led to an emphasis on methodology? This article focuses on the second question by examining the balance between substance and method over the journal's three-quarters of a century. It considers four kinds of evidence: the papers published in POQ; the POQ papers that have been the most influential; the POQ editors; and the authors who have appeared most often in POQ.
This article takes note of trends shaping public opinion research at the turn of the twenty-first century, as reflected in the pages of Public Opinion Quarterly. Three trends in particular are discussed: (a) refinement in understanding the nature of the survey response; (b) concerns over changes in communication technologies, and the challenges and opportunities they present to opinion research; and (c) worries about the quality of mass opinion, and especially the ways it might be shaped by subtly persuasive processes such as attitude priming.
This article, prepared for the 75th-anniversary issue of Public Opinion Quarterly, observes some trends in the articles published in the journal from 2002 to 2008 and examines marked shifts brought about by changes in academic publishing. Methodological publication trends include a major focus on nonresponse in sample surveys and mode of survey administration. Trends in substantive articles include a focus on homosexuality and gay rights, on public opinion–policy linkage, and on historical analysis of public opinion. Changes in publishing led to fully electronic manuscript processing and publication, space for supplementary content, and a fully accessible electronic archive containing all issues of the journal. These developments and a new AAPOR-publisher relationship enable POQ to better fulfill its mission to advance the field of public opinion research.
Although survey research is a young field relative to many scientific domains, it has already experienced three distinct stages of development. In the first era (1930–1960), the founders of the field invented the basic components of the design of data collection and the tools to produce the statistical information from surveys. As they were inventing the method, they were also building the institutions that conduct surveys in the private, academic, and government sectors. The second era (1960–1990) witnessed a vast growth in the use of the survey method. This growth was aided by the needs of the U.S. federal government to monitor the effects of investments in human and physical infrastructure, the growth of the quantitative social sciences, and the use of quantitative information to study consumer behaviors. The third era (1990 and forward) witnessed the declines in survey participation rates, the growth of alternative modes of data collection, the weakening of sampling frames, and the growth of continuously produced process data from digital systems in all sectors, but especially those emanating from the Internet. Throughout each era, survey research methods adapted to changes in society and exploited new technologies when they proved valuable to the field.
The twentieth century saw a dramatic change in the way information was generated as probability sampling replaced full enumeration. We examine some key events of the past and issues being addressed today to gain perspective on the requirements that might steer changes in the direction of survey sampling in the future. The potential for online Web panels and other methods that do not use probability sampling are considered. Finally, we conclude with some thoughts on how the future of survey sampling might be shaped by unpredictable factors.
This article reviews recent trends in modes of survey data collection, with a view to speculating on the future of survey modes. I discuss the development of the idea of modes, review the many dimensions of mode, briefly review some of the research on mode differences, discuss recent developments in mixed mode surveys, and offer some thoughts on the likely future of modes of survey data collection.
We begin with a look back at the field to identify themes of recent research that we expect to continue to occupy researchers in the future. As part of this overview, we characterize the themes and topics examined in research about measurement and survey questions published in Public Opinion Quarterly in the past decade. We then characterize the field more broadly by highlighting topics that we expect to continue or to grow in importance, including the relationship between survey questions and the total survey error perspective, cognitive versus interactional approaches, interviewing practices, mode and technology, visual aspects of question design, and culture. Considering avenues for future research, we advocate for a decision-oriented framework for thinking about survey questions and their characteristics. The approach we propose distinguishes among various aspects of question characteristics, including question topic, question type and response dimension, conceptualization and operationalization of the target object, question structure, question form, response categories, question implementation, and question wording. Thinking about question characteristics more systematically would allow study designs to take into account relationships among these characteristics and identify gaps in current knowledge.
Public opinion polls have long played an important role in the study and conduct of elections. In this essay, I outline the evolution of polling as used for three different functions in U.S. presidential elections: forecasting election outcomes, understanding voter behavior, and planning campaign strategy. Since the introduction of scientific polling in the 1936 election, technology has altered the way polls are used by the media, public, candidates, and scholars. Today, polls and surveys remain vital to electoral behavior and our understanding of it, but they are being increasingly supplemented or replaced by alternate measures and methods.
Public Opinion Quarterly at its outset focused heavily on the influences on public opinion, predicated on the assumption of its strong impact on politics and policymaking. Has this assumption been borne out? This essay reviews the research on the influence of American public opinion on policymaking that began to use survey data first to examine the legislative representation and then national-level and state-level policies. POQ’s assumption has been confirmed by a substantial connection, overall, between public opinion and policymaking in the United States. Although this general finding is striking, there are limits to what we can conclude from it about American democracy. This raises important questions for future research and in ongoing debates about major issues before the nation, for which the public holds its leaders accountable.
Three central themes that have persisted throughout the history of research on communication and public opinion are examined in light of past, present, and future research. These themes include (1) ongoing concerns surrounding the political diversity of the communication environment; (2) selective exposure to political communication; and (3) the interrelationship between mass and interpersonal political communication. We explore the importance of these themes with an emphasis on how technological changes have made them, if anything, more relevant today than they were when first identified as central concerns of the discipline.
Despite initial optimism, gender mainstreaming often turns into a formalistic exercise whilst losing sight of its broader goal of promoting gender equality. This article suggests that a problem is gender mainstreaming's largely undefined goal, combined with a rational logic underpinning its implementation. We apply a typology distinguishing substantive, procedural, and combined gender-mainstreaming initiatives to analyze Belgian gender-mainstreaming policies since 1995. Our findings suggest an evolution from more procedural to more combined mainstreaming policies. The rationalist perception underlying gender mainstreaming, in combination with the absence of a gender equality policy objective, turns gender mainstreaming into a formal exercise.
Why did Poland pursue policies that retraditionalized the gender regime during the preaccession period (1997–2004), particularly at a time when the European Union (EU) had the greatest power to promote its gender equality agenda? I argue that opposition to the EU's gender equality agenda is a new chapter in the backlash against socialist-era gender policy. The reinscription of women workers as a privileged category of social assistance over mothers at the core of the EU agenda led Polish policy-makers to develop policies promoting mothers rather than women workers as the socially worthy category of protection. Such outcomes point to the ongoing salience of an antisocialist ideological backlash to the future of gender equality legislation, and fundamentally call into question the transformative power of Europe when it comes to gender regimes.
In 2010, fifteen years after the Beijing declaration on women's rights, the UN Commission on the Status of Women met to review progress in gender mainstreaming. Reports on gender equality by member states revealed differences in the degree of change achieved in this period, while highlighting common barriers to gender mainstreaming. The same barriers have long been identified by academics and activists, but prove remarkably resistant to strategies to address gender inequalities. This paper reviews approaches to gender mainstreaming in the context of health policy, and suggests that a model of the obstacles to gender mainstreaming, which identifies barriers as essentially pragmatic, conceptual, or political in origin, might enable a more explicit discussion of the factors underlying this resistance and the ways in which they might be challenged.
The expansion of employment-centered family policies of the Grand Coalition in Germany came with some surprise, as Christian Democrats have traditionally been strongly committed to the male breadwinner model and corresponding family policies. This article investigates why Christian Democrats (though with some inconsistencies) promoted "social-democratic" family policies guided by the adult worker rather than by the male breadwinner model. Illuminating the politics of recent family policy reforms, the electoral rationale for this modernization of family policy, the role of political entrepreneurship, and intraparty political conflicts over the new policy paradigm are discussed.
The authors examine the politics of caregiving for identity to enrich scholarship about power. They report on a qualitative study with Aboriginal mothers who parent in the wake of the Canadian Indian residential schools (IRS). Just as this system disrupted familial caregiving to assimilate Aboriginal Peoples, data show some mothers now strive to organize their caregiving in ways that serve decolonization and community empowerment. Building on their expertise, the authors argue that counter-colonial family policy investments to support such caregiving should factor in any just compensation for the IRS system if its population, and not just individual, costs are to be redressed.
This paper examines the development of employment-oriented family policy in Germany and Japan, two countries united by conservative welfare legacies and very low birthrates, through a close analysis of discourse. Why have recent reforms in Germany moved well beyond those in Japan despite remarkably similar "human capital" discourses? The relative strength of interpretative patterns—in this case, discursive patterns that successfully frame family policy reform as an economic imperative—and the role of employers are identified as critical explanatory factors. Further comparative attention is called to the role of the state as a guarantor of new family policy entitlements.
Population decline in modern day Russia is alarmingly steep: Russia loses approximately 750 thousand people each year. To combat population decline, the Russian government instituted aggressive pro-natalist policies. The paper evaluates the capacity of new policies to change women's reproductive behavior using a socio-institutionalist theoretical framework, which analyzes the gendered interaction between the states, the labor market, and family. The paper arrives to a disappointing conclusion that while efforts to improve fertility are quite aggressive, new policies do not challenge gendered hierarchies neither in public nor in private spheres, which will further depress fertility rates of Russian women.
This article uses childcare as a case study to test the impact of ideas that embody a traditional understanding of gender relations in relation to childcare. Conservative ideas regard increasing female labor market participation as a cause of decreasing fertility on the functioning of a set of general policies to increase fertility rates. It looks into the Polish and Turkish contexts for empirical evidence. The Polish context shows a highly institutionalized system of family policies in contrast to almost unessential institutions in Turkey. Formally, the labor market participation of women is much lower in Turkey than in Poland. Yet, given the size of the informal market in Turkey, women's labor participation is obviously higher than what appears in the statistics. Bearing in mind this divergence, the article suggests Poland and Turkey as two typologies for studying population politics in contexts where socially conservative ideas regarding gender remain paramount. We qualify ideas as conservative if they enforce a traditional understanding of gender relations in care-giving and underline women's role in the labor market as an element of declining fertility. In order to delineate ideational impact, this article looks into how ideas (a) supplant and (b) substitute formal institutions. Therefore, we argue that there are two mechanisms pertaining to the dominance of conservative conventions: conservative ideas may either supplant the institutional impact on family policies, or substitute them thanks to a superior reasoning which societies assign to them. Furthermore, conservative conventions prevail alongside women's customary unpaid work as care-givers regardless of the level of their formal workforce participation. We propose as our major findings for the literature of population politics that ideas, as ubiquitous belief systems, are more powerful than institutions since they provide what is perceived as legitimate, acceptable, and good for the societies under study. In the end, irrespective of the presence of institutions, socially conservative ideas prevail.
Drawing on frame theory, this paper examines how policy entrepreneurs within the Swedish Trade Union Confederation Landsorganisationen i Sverige (LO) embarked on a campaign to extend an exclusively class-based solidarity frame along gender lines. In the process, LO's identity was modified. Once the new solidarity frame had been accepted, it was operationalized in the collective bargaining process through the creation of a "women's pot"—i.e., a wage supplement given to female employees, or female-dominated sectors, to counter gender-based pay discrimination. Nevertheless, the new frame has yet to meet with success in the wage-bargaining arena, as LO faces problems of intra-union coordination in an unfavorable institutional context.
"Post-neoliberalism" or "after neoliberalism"' is a term that is associated with forms of governance that emerged in the mid-late 1990s with the Third Way and social investment states in the UK, Canada, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. The post-neoliberal state combines features of both neoliberal and social-democratic welfare policies; significantly, it has introduced changes in areas conventionally noted by feminist scholars as having bearing on the lives of women, such as, in public-funded childcare, and women-centered approaches to governance. The core question posed in this paper is: is the post-neoliberal state also a feminist one? Based on a critical review of recent literature, the analysis focuses on the gender implications of post-neoliberal policies in four domains of society and polity: production–reproduction, the public–private, political participation, and the machinery of the state. The paper argues that whilst gains made by some women in these domains are noteworthy, the more fundamental ramifications of the post-neoliberal state are in the changing landscape of gender relations in these countries.
This study develops a conceptual framework with a capabilities and agency approach for analyzing work–life balance (WLB) applied in two societies (Hungary and Sweden), which have different working time regimes, levels of precarious employment, and gender equality discourses and norms. Inspired by Amartya Sen, we present a model illustrating how agency freedom for WLB depends on multiple resources at the individual, work organizational, institutional, and normative/societal levels. Using a unique qualitative survey conducted in two cities, Budapest and Stockholm, we analyze how mothers and fathers subjectively experience the tensions between family and work demands, and their possibilities for alternative choices (agency freedom). We find similarities in these tensions involving time pressure and time poverty, cutting across gender and education. Our Hungarian parents, nevertheless, experience greater agency inequalities for WLB, which reflect weaker institutional resources (conversion factors) as well as cultural/societal norms that act as constraints for WLB claims in the workplace and household. Our study reveals that Swedish parents, both men and women, express a strong sense of entitlement to exercise rights to care.
We apply Sen's capability approach to evaluate the capabilities of Slovenian parents to reconcile paid work and family in the context of the transition to a market economy. We examine how different levels of capabilities together affect the work–life balance (WLB) of employed parents. We combine both quantitative and qualitative methodological approaches. The results of our quantitative and qualitative research show that increased precariousness of employment and intensification of work create gaps between the legal and normative possibilities for successful reconciliation strategies and actual use of such arrangements in Slovenia. The existing social policies and the acceptance of gender equality in the sphere of paid work enhance capabilities for reconciliation of paid work and parenthood, whereas the intensification of working lives, the dominance of paid work over other parts of life, and the acceptance of gender inequalities in parental and household responsibilities limit parents’ capabilities to achieve WLB.
Good jobs can generate capabilities that allow employees to avoid tensions between work and family/home. Following the conceptual framework of Amartya Sen, we examine how job-related demands and resources are related to the level of interference, as well as satisfaction with managing work and home in Spanish and German employees, using three different large-scale European surveys: European Quality of Life Survey and two waves of the European Social Survey. We find that long working hours systematically increase tensions between work and home, as do time pressure, job-related stress, and working hard. Job control or autonomy at work, which is hypothesized to expand individuals' capabilities and agency, tends to increase work–home interference rather than alleviate it. Family responsibilities and household demands do not seem relevant to the tensions employees experience at the work–home interface. This also holds true for women, which is a surprising result in view of the "double burden" hypothesis. Employed mothers in Germany and Spain are a select group of women, as combining employment with raising children in conservative–corporatist and conservative–familialist states may be particularly problematic. Thus while the institutional contexts of Germany and Spain curtail women's ability to reconcile employment and parenthood, the mothers (and fathers) who are employed do not experience significantly higher levels of work–family/home tensions than nonparents.
We draw on Sen's capabilities approach to advance the debate about choice and constraint in relation to part-time work. We argue that it is important to go beyond a state-level comparison and focus on the policy implemented by employers at the organizational level. We use a European survey to identify which employers permit their employees to make individual-level adjustments between full-time and part-time working, and the firm-level characteristics associated with operating such a policy. The analysis reveals that employer policy varies markedly across countries and within countries and we argue that this is an important social conversion factor which shapes the capability which an individual employee has to adjust their hours between full time and part time at their place of work. State policy clearly matters, but firm-level characteristics and other situational features also impact on the social conversion factors which shape an individual's working-time capability. The sector, establishment size, presence of a trade union, gender and skill composition of the workforce all had a significant influence on whether employers permitted individual-level working-time adjustments. The firm's organizational working-time practices and culture toward safeguarding work–life balance had an additional and independent effect, as did broader aspects of working-time scheduling in place.
Managers are key actors shaping employees’ capabilities to utilize work–life policies. However, most research on managers’ implementation of these policies has been conducted in liberal welfare states and ignores the impact of institutional context. In this study, we situate managers within specific workplace and national layers of context. We investigated how managers in financial organizations in the Netherlands, UK, and Slovenia talk about the utilization of work–life policies. Managers’ discourses stressed disruption and dependency considerations in these case studies, as in the US research. However, a further management discourse of the moral case or right thing to do also emerged. The lack of resources for replacing staff on leave creates disruption and reduces managers capability to support the use of work–life policies, even when they are statutory or if managers are inclined be supportive (dependency or moral argument). This is likely to impact on parents' capabilities.
When something goes awry in a governmental agency, a frequent claim is that appointed political heads are incompetent. If true, what explains this in a separation of powers system where the executive nominates and the legislature approves? Our analysis provides a rationale and conditions for rational incompetence. Specifically, we present a model in which a President nominates and the Senate confirms or rejects an appointee. Besides choosing a nominee’s ideology, the President can determine competence, with less competence meaning more policy outcome variance. Interestingly, without assuming that political actors are inherently risk takers, we identify conditions generating what Goemans and Fey (2009) have labeled institutionally-induced risk taking, where both the President and the relevant filibuster pivot propose and approve an incompetent administrator in equilibrium. Reasons for incompetence go beyond pure loyalty or patronage, and our model corresponds to contemporary cases of seemingly incompetent administration.
We develop a model of electoral accountability with primaries. Prior to the general election, the supporters of each of two parties decide which candidates to nominate. We show that supporters suffer from a fundamental tension: while they want politicians who will faithfully implement the party’s agenda in office, they need politicians who can win elections. Accountability to supporters fails when supporters fear that by punishing or rewarding their incumbent for her loyalty or lack thereof, they unintentionally increase the electoral prospects of the opposing party. Therefore, accountability decreases with the importance that supporters assign to the elections, and it breaks down in two cases. First, a popular incumbent safely defects as she knows she will be re-nominated. Second, an unpopular incumbent defects because she knows she will be dismissed even if she follows the party line. These behaviors are labeled impunity and damnation, respectively, and are illustrated with case studies.
A model of political information processing drawn from the studies of political behavior and psychology is applied to the emergence of cooperation observed in classic repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) game experiments. The results show that the model can robustly account for the learning of cooperation observed in the experiments when players are aware of the strategic nature of the game and make choices over immediate actions. In effect, basic psychological learning mechanisms, well-established in political behavior and psychology research, together tend to lead players to learn to cooperate over time under quite general conditions. In particular, the evaluative affect players develop towards choice objects and a belief learning that weighs an actually obtained outcome more than a forgone outcome play a central role in these processes.
Since Hardin first formulated the tragedy of the commons, researchers have described various ways that commons problems are solved, all based on the model of individual rationality. Invariably, these institutional solutions involve creating some system of property rights. We formulate an alternative model, one not founded on property rights but on decision-making around so-called vector payoffs. The model is formalized and an existence proof provided. The new model is shown to be effective in explaining some anomalous results (e.g., unanticipated cooperation) in the experimental games literature that run counter to the rational model. We then use the case of the buffalo commons to illustrate how the new model affords alternative explanations for examples like the rise and fall of the buffalo herds in the Great Plains. We find the vector payoff model to complement, though not displace, that of individual rationality.
Many scholars show that institutions help citizens with their political decisions. However, real-world contexts contain multiple institutions that are imposed together. Thus, I develop a theory and experimental test of the conditions under which combinations of two institutions induce citizens to trust a speaker’s statements and make better decisions than when only one institution is present. The theoretical model demonstrates that a second institution typically should not alter a speaker’s propensity to make truthful statements, nor subjects’ decisions to trust those statements. The experimental results reveal important departures from such rational behavior. Specifically, a second institution makes subjects more willing to trust the already mostly truthful statements they receive, which enables them to make better decisions than when only one institution is imposed upon the speaker. These findings suggest lessons about the conditions under which institutions can increase trust and improve decision making in political, legal, and economic contexts.
The protests associated with the 2011 Arab Spring represent a serious and sustained challenge to autocratic rule in the Middle East. Under what conditions will Arab protest movements translate into a full-fledged ‘fourth wave’ of democratization? We argue that questions about the commitment of Islamic political opposition to democracy beyond a country’s first free election may hinder Middle Eastern democratization. We extend Przeworski’s canonical model of political liberalization as described in Democracy and the Market (1991) and find that transition to democracy is only possible under two conditions. First, uncertainty regarding the preferences of key elite actors is a necessary condition for democratic transition. Second, the repressive capacity of the state must lie above a minimum threshold. Given these conditions, democracy can occur when two types of political actors meet – regime liberalizers who prefer democracy to a narrowed dictatorship, and civil society elite who honor democratic principles. While a series of influential studies have argued that authoritarian elites block democratic transition because of their fear of the economic redistributive preferences of the median voter, this study suggests that regime liberalizers in the Middle East suspect political openings could become a vehicle for Islamists to seize power through free elections only to deny the median voter another chance to express their will.
It is well-known that events influence the standing of the governing parties. Still, important questions remain unanswered: Which characteristics are necessary for an event to have an impact? Why should voters care about events and which role does the mass media play? How are other influences on government popularity affected by the occurrence of events? To answer these questions a model of German government popularity containing the economic situation and events, selected by addressed criteria, will be advanced and tested by means of time-series regression. The results show that events have an impact on government popularity and are able to repress real-world influences. This effect is rather short-lived and does not cover all events which are normally perceived as influential.
This article examines the moderating role of human values on agenda-setting effects, which refer to the influence of news coverage on defining the public agenda. The results of two studies—a content analysis of Canadian newspapers matched with a representative survey panel of Canadian voters, in addition to an experiment with college students—find support for the hypothesis that agenda-setting effects are stronger when the topics in the news agenda are consistent with individuals’ values. Individuals with materialist values exhibited larger agenda-setting effects for materialist issues than for postmaterialist issues, whereas postmaterialist individuals exhibited larger agenda-setting effects for postmaterialist issues than for materialist issues. These findings bring new evidence to debates on the psychological process of agenda setting and the ability of individuals to resist news media influence.
Total survey error (TSE) is a very valuable paradigm for describing and improving surveys, but it can be improved. First, either TSE needs to be limited to covering just instances of differences between true and measured values or TSE should be rechristened as total survey measurement variation (TSMV) if other forms of measurement-related variation are to be included. Second, the TSE/TSMV typology needs to be as detailed and comprehensive as possible. Third, TSE needs to be thought of as heavily involving the interaction of error components and the concept of comparison error should be used to extend TSE to cover multiple survey types. Fourth, the minimizing of TSE is an important goal in survey research and the TSE paradigm can be used as both an applied application and a research agenda to achieve that goal. Finally, TSE has both individual and aggregate components and an absolute and situational aspect. The role of each of these needs to be kept in mind.
Campaign priming is generally assumed to function through the activation of memory content. By focusing on specific issues or issue aspects, campaigns render corresponding cognitive concepts more accessible and hence influence which concepts are likely to be used in subsequent evaluation processes. Thus, priming is mainly understood as a cognitive process. In the present study we investigate the impact of campaign-induced emotions on opinion formation. We argue that emotions may activate cognitive content which may in turn influence political judgments. Our analyses support the hypothesis that political campaigns may influence public opinion not only through cognitive priming but also through affective priming.
This article tests three different hypotheses regarding the political motivations for federal financial disbursements (the "swing" hypothesis, the "reward" hypothesis, and the "appeasement" hypothesis) using the case of Ethiopia following the 2005 parliamentary elections. Using an original data set on financial disbursements, election results, and social, economic, and demographic data from the level of the administrative districts and the election constituencies in Ethiopia, it is found that the appeasement hypothesis best explains federal disbursements. Further, it is suggested that these disbursement patterns directly affected the outcome of the subsequent 2010 parliamentary election.
Policy diffusion studies often invoke explanations that draw on the directional pressures for emulation, whether top-down, horizontal, or bottom-up. This article develops a theoretical framework that accounts for the multidirectional features of diffusion, including sub-national, cross-national, and international mechanisms, through the illustrative case of Brazil’s federal adoption of Bolsa Escola (School Grant Program), a conditional cash transfer program that preceded the internationally acclaimed poverty alleviation program called Bolsa Família (Family Grant Program). Using process tracing, I argue that bottom-up pressures, including professional norms and intergovernmental competition, were key for policy emulation. Cross-national competition had little effect on decision-making. Finally, top-down processes, including norms and financing, reinforced adoption decisions and ensured these programs would endure.
Variation in the behavior and preferences of subnational governments is one of the areas that remain poorly understood by students of comparative decentralization and federalism. Yet, evidence suggests that this variation plays an important role in shaping intergovernmental relations. Ecuador provides an especially interesting case for systematically exploring variation in the behavior of municipalities. Rather than establishing a uniform division of competences between levels of government, the 1998 constitution called on subnational governments to apply for policy responsibilities. Using an original data set, our analysis demonstrates that, in addition to national-level incentives, municipal-level political variables—such as the government’s support base and linkages to civil society—have a strong and significant impact on the behavior of local governments.
Scholars recognize a worldwide increase in decentralization as well as the prevalence of multilevel governance in Europe. This article examines the advantages and disadvantages that meso-level institutions present for women’s political representation in three European Union member-states that are decentralized, unitary states. Using the framework of the triangle of women’s empowerment, we ask whether women are represented in meso-level legislatures, women’s policy agencies, and women’s movements in Italy, Spain, and Poland. We find that gains in meso-level legislatures are slow, but meso-level women’s policy agencies and movements provide important access for women to politics. Like scholars studying women and federalism, we conclude that decentralized institutions in unitary states offer both opportunities for and impediments to feminist policy and activism.
Lieske has recently developed a new measure of state culture that appears to be a much better predictor of state performance than other commonly used measures including per capita income, Sharkansky’s index of Elazar’s typology, and Hero’s index of racial and ethnic diversity. Here, we show why uni- and multi-dimensional reductions of Elazar’s and Lieske’s typologies and other measures do not predict and explain the variation in representative indicators of state performance nearly as well. To lay the groundwork for a more rigorous understanding of state culture, and to integrate it with the work of Hero on diversity and Putnam on social capital, we also develop and test an evolutionary theory that draws on Marger’s theory of ethnic competition and Vanhanen’s theory of ethnic nepotism.
This article aims to understand autonomism as an ideology of territorial order and institutional design. In particular, I ask whether the theory and practice of autonomism is consonant with federalist principles. "Autonomism" is a normative term that advocates the use of autonomist principles, and it has an intricate relationship with federalism, but is generally distinct from it. Autonomists are wary of federalism because they believe it has homogenizing and uniformizing tendencies. Autonomism as an ideology of territorial order and institutional design exhibits a number of clear anti-federalist stances, but yet it is based on the general federalist principle that multiple levels of government can lead to better governance in multinational states. To this complex anti-federalist and federalist hybrid stance, autonomism adds a nuanced anti-secessionism stance.
This study, based on a statewide survey of local officials in Florida, examines the degree to which vertical and horizontal roadblocks to interlocal cooperation persist well after the 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina mega-disasters. Respondents evaluate the degree to which vertical constraints (state and federal mandates) and horizontal constraints (political tensions and competition for funding; incompatible communication equipment and inconsistent information-sharing; and local cost-sharing complexities and training and personnel qualification differences) still deter collaboration. Incompatible communication equipment is the most cited barrier, followed by the rules and legal complexities inherent in state and federal mandates and interlocal cost-sharing agreements. Today, local EM officials judge horizontally generated deterrents to collaboration to be nearly equal to vertically imposed roadblocks. Perceptions differ significantly by jurisdiction, population size, MSA location, and position.
This article introduces the themes of children’s rights and citizenship and surveys the authors’ contributions to this volume of The Annals. The volume marks the 20th anniversary of the United Nations General Assembly’s adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). As the most widely ratified of all human rights covenants, adoption of the CRC represents a landmark achievement in the history of childhood. Yet there remains a noticeable gap in its implementation. The United States has not ratified the CRC. The contributions to this volume take the CRC as a starting point along the path of achieving functional citizenship for children. Issues of child protection, political maturity, deliberative democracy, and intergenerational nondomination are covered. Several examples of empirical research on children’s participation in social and political matters are provided. Recommendations are made to advance the case of child citizenship over the near term. This includes the need to urge the United States to ratify the CRC.
The United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) was a by-product of international commitments to human rights, but its history lies in the complex and contradictory developments of the twentieth century, when elevated expectations regarding the welfare of children confronted the realities of war. In the late nineteenth century, material conditions and reform efforts redefined the lives of children in the Western world and created new sentiments about childhood and investments in children’s progress. World Wars I and II exposed children’s acute vulnerability and the myth of inevitable progress. After each of these wars, defining what was owed to children and how best to meet their needs was part of larger international negotiations regarding power and prestige. Throughout this period, the involvement of women, a new Swedish presence in international diplomacy, and the growing role of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) affected what would become a rearticulation of child welfare and protection and a more active commitment to children’s rights.
This article discusses the author’s concept of multigenerational citizenship, arguing that for citizenship to be relevant for children, there needs to be a more flexible and relational approach to citizenship. Tom Paine’s theories are expanded upon, by examining the increasing acceptance, by both international and regional fora in both political and human rights, of a child’s autonomy in bringing complaints to a human rights body. The article examines the recent developments in the move toward establishing a complaints mechanism under the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and argues that this is an important element of international child citizenship. The article also examines the progress made in national courts toward child citizenship, which has helped to change the international consensus on providing an international remedy for breaches of child citizenship rights. The article compares the growing acceptance of children as international citizens by the European Court of Human Rights and under the specially designed African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child’s complaints mechanism. Because of all these developments, the author rejects the assumption that regeneration is needed to reenergize the international social movement for children as citizens, arguing that such pessimism is an oversimplification of both the achievements and failures of the CRC.
After 20 years of implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), it is increasingly clear that states bear the responsibility to promote, guarantee, respect, and fulfill the realization of children’s rights by all members of the national and international communities. An initial emphasis on legal reforms to adapt national law to the CRC—absolutely necessary but not sufficient—needs to give space to changes in other important areas of public action: economic policy and financing; social policy and administration; and public participation, including that of children. Enforcement and justiciability of rights need to be addressed today to face questions about public policy, systems, and institutions in the long term. The evolution of social policies in Latin America and the Caribbean, from neoliberal policies to systems of social protection, illustrates that only a comprehensive and equity-based view of social and economic policy, underpinned by the four principles of children’s rights (nondiscrimination, best interests of the child, survival and development, and the right to be heard), will satisfy the requirements for implementation of the CRC.
This article explores the ideas behind the promise of citizenship to children in Brazil. The human rights of children has become a very important issue in Brazil. This has been especially true since the inclusion of Article 227 in the 1988 Constitution referring to children’s rights and the approval of the Statute on the Child and the Adolescent in 1990, less than a year after the ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). The article examines the changing discourse connected to what was promised and what the law actually accomplished. The conclusion focuses on some of the most relevant improvements affecting children’s lives and some of the remaining challenges Brazilians face in the attempt to keep the promises made in the Constitution and the statute.
This article discusses the significance of the United States’ ratification of the CRC, concluding that even if the treaty is not self-executing, ratification would make a major difference. It would enable the United States to better promote children’s rights abroad, and it would push the United States to develop its domestic law in dramatically new directions that empower children. The CRC provides children with powerful affirmative rights and imposes reciprocal duties on nation-states. It provides rights to participate, including rights to be heard and to make decisions on personal and political matters; rights to receive important benefits, including health, support, and education; rights to protection against maltreatment; and rights to nurturing parental care. All this contrasts with U.S. law’s negative rights tradition, its emphasis on parental rights, limited recognition of children’s rights, and related restriction of state power to protect children. U.S. ratification could have a positive impact, particularly in connection with parental relationship rights and related maltreatment issues. However, there is also a risk of negative impact, given the problematic CRC provisions on international and transracial adoption. The solution is ratification with a reservation regarding Articles 20 and 21.
The rights that the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) enumerates include the rights to (1) an adequate standard of living, (2) an education directed toward the development of the child’s fullest potential, (3) the highest attainable standard of health, and (4) the child’s own cultural identity and use of his or her own language. The CRC states that these rights shall be ensured regardless of various statuses of children, including race, ethnic origin, national origin, and language. This article presents a statistical baseline for assessing the diversity of children in the United States with regard to these statuses, presents results for statistical indicators of well-being for children distinguished by these statuses, and discusses public policies to reduce inequalities relevant to these rights.
The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) emphasizes the importance of the temporal dimension of childhood and children’s need for special protection. Such protection is necessary because of their susceptibility to domination, especially intergenerational domination. The same is true for past and future generations, where such domination includes the domination of and by the current generation of children, especially around intergenerational, public goods important for a good human life. Such an account of intergenerational justice captures the focus of the CRC’s Preamble on improving the quality of the lives of children.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) justifiably emphasizes welfare over participation rights of children for two reasons. First, children are by nature an at-risk population. Second, democratic citizenship rights require a minimal bundle of cognitive and emotional capacity—which may be called "political maturity"—that children, again by nature, lack. However, the CRC goes too far in prioritizing welfare over participation, again for two reasons. First, millions of children have their basic welfare needs met, and second, participation would be useful in cultivating the very political maturity that citizens need. In this article, the author argues that participatory institutions should be designed to further the interests of children, cultivate their political maturity, and mitigate the harm that giving power to the politically immature might cause. The author discusses three institutional designs that might achieve this result (fractional voting, national electoral constituencies, and political spending accounts) and discusses how federalism might also help to implement these designs.
This article explores notions of the "child as citizen" and "children’s citizenship" in the context of possibilities and promises for the rights of children that are laid out in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. It poses the question, Can "children’s citizenship" ever be fully accomplished for and/or by children? The article begins with an examination of contemporary theories of citizenship and considers the grounds for children’s citizenship in the light of the ways in which "childhood" is culturally, socially, economically, and politically constructed in different societies. It suggests that in social investment states, such as the United Kingdom, the contemporary cultural politics of childhood mean that children’s citizenship remains ambiguous. What is needed, the article suggests, is a greater understanding at the local level of how children’s experiences as members of society unfold. Thus, taking England as a case study, and drawing on some empirical research with children’s experiences in children’s hospitals, the article illustrates the ways in which adults’ ideas about childhood limit children’s agency and actions, thereby denying them status as citizens.
This article is based on the assumption that the right to vote in national elections is not an essential dimension of citizenship for early adolescents as long as adolescents’ other competencies and attitudes are nurtured in their everyday settings. The article addresses the issue of children or early adolescents and their political and civic participation from three perspectives. First, it examines how human rights and action in community settings have been viewed across the several decades in which political socialization research has been conducted. The idea of emergent participatory citizenship for young adolescents is introduced. Second, the authors examine findings from survey research to determine whether the socialization and developmental experiences of the majority of early adolescents entering the twenty-first century have resulted in attitudes and skills appropriate to being full citizens. The third section examines studies using qualitative methodologies—observations and interviews—to show how the spaces for adolescents to exercise participatory and deliberative capabilities can be enhanced.
American 16- and 17-year-olds ought to be allowed to vote in state and national elections. This claim rests upon a line of argument that begins with an exegesis of legal and philosophical notions of citizenship that identify core qualities of citizenship: membership, concern for rights, and participation in society. Each of these qualities is present in rudimentary form in childhood and adolescence. Analyses of national survey data demonstrate that by 16 years of age—but not before— American adolescents manifest levels of development in each quality of citizenship that are approximately the same as those apparent in young American adults who are allowed to vote. The lack of relevant differences in capacities for citizenship between 16- and 17-year-olds and those legally enfranchised makes current laws arbitrary, denying those younger than age 18 the right to vote. Awarding voting rights to 16- and 17-year-olds is important, given the changing age demographics in the country, which have resulted in the growing block of older voters displacing the interests of younger Americans in the political arena. Finally, the authors critically examine claims that adolescents are neither neurologically nor socially mature enough to vote responsibly and conclude that empirical evidence and fairness suggest that 16- and 17-year-olds ought to be awarded the vote.
Given the host of tragic events that children experience, it is often compelling for well-intended adults to respond in a protective and charitable fashion. The child rights approach asks for more. Building on their collective experiences in the developmental and social sciences, the authors present in roughly chronological fashion a synopsis of the theoretical explorations and scientific evaluation that completes a framework to advance the status of children as citizens. The recognition of the agency and capability of a child and the dynamic and enduring source of socialization from and social integration within the community are fundamental to this project. The participatory rights enshrined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child serve as an impetus and inspiration to this project, the Young Citizens Program. What began with small-scale deliberative groups in Chicago matured into a cluster randomized controlled trial in northern Tanzania.
This article explains several core aspects of the experience of the Omar Dengo Foundation of Costa Rica in the development of the Deliberative Capabilities in School Age Children project, a set of citizenship education programs based on the conception of children as citizens and on a particular conception of the role of digital technologies in the promotion of children’s high-order skills. It analyzes the outcomes of the program designed for elementary schools and presents the lessons learned in the process of scaling up the initiative from its inception as a pilot to its implementation as a regular after-school program within the Costa Rican National Program of Educational Informatics.
What impact, if any, do ethnic federalism and the geographic concentration of ethnic minorities have on the political incorporation of minorities in democracies with single-member district elections? Many studies on ethnic voting in the United States have examined the impact of majority-minority districts on the turnout of minority voters and the election of minority candidates. However, few studies have explored the effects of similar institutions in other countries. The authors address this issue by applying insights on ethnic voting from the American politics literature to Russia’s 1995 parliamentary election. They use multilevel regression models and census and electoral data that are disaggregated at the subdistrict (raion) level to systematically assess whether ethnic federalism and majority-minority districts increase the vote share of minority candidates and encourage the turnout of minority voters. The findings suggest that district-level characteristics—specifically, majority-minority districts—are more important than ethnic federalism for promoting minority representation in Russia.
This article asks whether alleged partisan policy convergence has eradicated differences in relation to privatization of delivery of welfare state services. The study utilizes a novel methodological approach—numerous intrastate comparisons set in a consilience research framework—to assess the extent of convergence and its underlying reasons. It explores the partisan politics of school privatization of delivery across five countries that differ in their position on the left–right continuum: England, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, and Sweden. Privatization of delivery in health care was selected as a secondary policy domain. Analysis of within-country variation in both domains indicates that there remain significant differences between left and right across all countries. The right tends to set the privatization agenda, and the left is more reluctant than the right to privatize delivery of services. This difference in approach is related to the disparate influence that public and private program constituencies have over left and right parties.
In this article the authors study delegation problems within multiparty coalition governments. They argue that coalition parties can use the committee system to "shadow" the ministers of their partners; that is, they can appoint committee chairs from other governing parties, who will then be well placed to monitor and/or check the actions of the corresponding ministers. The authors analyze which ministers should be shadowed if governing parties seek to minimize the aggregate policy losses they suffer as the result of ministers pursuing their own parties’ interests rather than the coalition’s. Based on data from 19 mostly European parliamentary democracies, the authors find that the greater the policy disagreement between a minister’s party and its partners, the more likely the minister is to be shadowed.
Over the past decades, (mostly) private actors have been providing the public good of cross-national political data in a decentralized, uncoordinated, and unregulated fashion. They have been successful in generating an incessant supply of data. However, the success of current practices of data production has been masking severe structural limitations: the systematic undersupply of data and the systematic inefficiency of data generation. Both problems derive from disciplinary coordination failures ("measurer’s dilemmas"). On one hand, private data producers have been unable to coordinate the cross-national collection of two broad categories of data: political data produced by national governments (e.g., election results) and factual data that are not observable from the outside of national political systems but require access to domestic sources of information (e.g., protest events). On the other hand, private data producers have been unable to construct regulatory frameworks that would reduce persistent inefficiencies in data collection: data privatization, data opacity, and data incompatibility. To resolve these structural problems, the scholarly community will need to mobilize established collective actors, above all, their professional associations.
This article looks at developments in Eastern European civil society (as measured by the participation in organisations) and how this has changed between 1995 and 2005 using the World Values Survey. There are comparisons with Western Europe on the one hand and the United States on the other, which show that although civic participation of this kind has declined in the United States, it remains stable in Europe, including at a low level in Eastern Europe. Surprisingly, there seemed to be little differences between countries that had joined the European Union and those that had not. The article considers reasons for this continued weakness of civil society in Eastern Europe.
Cost-utility analyses use the quality-adjusted life-year (QALY) as a measure of health benefit. Normally, they treat every QALY gain equally, that is, attach the same weight (or value) to each QALY gained. However, it appears that this practice does not reflect the distributional preferences of the general public nor of health care professionals. Maximizing the QALY gain from a given budget is not the only aim in priority setting. This article presents a study into such distributional preferences of general practitioners (GPs) for prioritization at the patient level in Hungary. Given the special position GPs have in many health care systems, including the Hungarian, more knowledge of their preferences is important. The authors used a discrete choice experiment to study these preferences, focusing on factors related to the characteristics of the patients, the disease, and treatment effects. Results show that the most important factors influencing the GPs’ decision were the age of the patient, the mortality of the disease, the impact of the disease on patients’ quality of life, and the potential for the full restoration of the previous health status. The treatment of patients without comorbidities was preferred to that of patients with comorbidities. Importantly, these preferences in GPs may steer the actual distribution of health care.
This article analyses the dissolution of the extreme right Workers’ Party by the Czech courts in 2010. It situates the case in the historical development of party closures by militant democracy on Czech territory and explains why the Workers’ Party was the first party to be dissolved in the Czech Republic after the fall of the Communist regime. It also describes the legislative framework in contemporary Czech law for the dissolution of political parties. It details the political and legal repercussions of the ruling and the wider discussions it provoked, not only in political and expert circles but also among the general public. Given the fact that the case was taken to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, the European dimension of the dissolution of the Workers’ Party is also analysed.
This article analyzes the impact of party strategies on the issue structure, and consequently the dimensional structure, of party systems across Europe. Conceptualizing political competition in two dimensions (economic left-right and social traditionalism versus liberalism), the authors demonstrate that political parties in both Eastern and Western Europe contest the issue composition of political space. The authors argue that large, mainstream parties are invested in the dimensional status quo, preferring to compete on the primary dimension by emphasizing economic issues. Systematically disadvantaged niche parties, conversely, prefer to compete along a secondary dimension by stressing social issues. Adopting such a strategy enables niche parties to divert voter attention and challenge the structure of conflict between the major partisan competitors. The authors test these propositions using the 2006 iteration of the Chapel Hill Expert Surveys on Party Positions. Findings indicate that while the structure of political conflict in Eastern versus Western Europe could not be more different, the logic with which parties compete in their respective systems is the same. The authors conclude that political competition is primarily a struggle over dimensionality; it does not merely occur along issue dimensions but also over their content.
The political integration of ethnic minorities is one of the most challenging tasks facing the countries of post-communist Europe. The roads to their political representation in the mainstream political process are numerous and diverse. The EU accession of the Central and East European countries has expanded the scope of the political participation of minorities by adding an electoral process at the regional level: the elections for members of the European Parliament. This article presents a comparative study of the ways in which EU-level electoral processes affect the scope and quality of minority representation on the example of the participation of ethnic political parties in Bulgaria and Romania in the 2007 and 2009 electoral cycles of the European Parliament.
Ukraine’s judicial system is still shackled by its Soviet past. Despite gaining independence in 1991, it is not surprising that this new sovereign state could not usher in overnight a new judicial system firmly based on the rule of law and the separation of powers. The author assesses current reform efforts in the Ukrainian justice sector in light of several European Union and Council of Europe recommendations for further steps in the constitutional development of Ukraine. Key reforms are analysed including the implications of the "small justice reform" of 2002 and the draft law on the judiciary and the status of judges. As Ukraine does not have an explicit strategy on Justice and Home Affairs, which makes any such analysis of recent justice reforms more difficult, its obligations in this area under several EU-Ukraine treaties and joint projects will be analysed.
This article uses the analytical framework of "Europeanization" to assess whether and how EU conditionality has led to change in Albania’s migration policy. The analysis focuses on a specific but crucial aspect of migration policy: the readmission of irregular migrants. The examination of change in Albanian readmission policy demonstrates that the country has not only accepted the legal obligation to take back its citizens residing illegally in the EU and nationals of other countries who had reached the EU via Albania. It has also created the institutional and procedural conditions for implementation of those legal obligations, and statistical data demonstrate that Albania is accepting all the illegal immigrants returned by the EU member states. The article shows that this policy change took place after the EU made Albania’s progress towards accession conditional on compliance in this policy area. In addition to establishing the temporal covariation of EU pressure and domestic change, this work will explore the causal mechanism linking the two variables by examining the motivation of the actors involved in policy change. Thus, the analysis will identify the domestic factors that make possible the EU impact. This article demonstrates the crucial importance of gate-keeping in ensuring compliance. The control by the EU of access to each stage of the preaccession process is such a powerful motivating instrument that it can outweigh very high domestic costs and lead to developments in the aspirant country that are solely in the interest of the EU.
In recent years, increased European Union interest in its eastern "neighborhood" has been hailed as a possible solution of the Transnistrian frozen conflict. The fall of the communist authoritarian regime of Chisinau and the internal crisis of the Smirnov regime in Tiraspol also modified the conditions of the nineteen-year conflict. However, the European involvement in Moldova is perceived by the Kremlin as an intrusion in its own domaine réservé. Moreover, the 2008 war in South Ossetia illustrates Russia’s return to the early 1990s policy of overt instrumentalization of the post-Soviet frozen conflicts. This volatile situation is analyzed in order to predict the future evolution of the Transnistrian conflict in the larger context of the developing regional rivalry between Brussels and Moscow.
However obsolete it may appear in the environment of the post-1989 Czech Republic, dissident activity has left its imprint on Czech society and politics. In Czech foreign policy, there is something like a dissident tradition, which dissidents themselves seem to uphold. In the Czech foreign policy process, there exists an explicit mechanism that has incorporated the dissident tradition, which, in quite a few cases, has affected policy outcomes. The introduction of the dissident tradition into Czech foreign policy was facilitated by the dissidents’ great concern for foreign policy and for human rights issues, and, in particular, for human rights issues outside the Czech Republic. We present evidence that dissidents have been concerned with foreign policy and with human rights issues by analyzing the membership of parliamentary committees of both chambers of the Parliament as well as the dissidents’ activities in the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies. Significantly, when activities tied to the dissident tradition emerge in the Parliament, the initiators of such activities are always (although not exclusively) dissidents; the opponents, always nondissidents.
Over the past decade, public opinion surveys have shown that Croats are deeply dissatisfied with their health care system and asses it to be one of the most important issues. However, health care hardly makes it into any political discourse in Croatia. This study analyzes the results of a public opinion survey conducted before the 2007 parliamentary elections to find out what the public sentiment on health care performance in Croatia is and to analyze the reasons why health care is not addressed by political actors. Evidence suggests that while health care is the most salient issue today, the public often understands it poorly. Thus, in a political environment of competing issues, and given the complexity of tacking health care in the policy arena, politicians strategically avoid discussing the issue.
After the fall of communism in 1989–1991, Poland and Ukraine could have become partners in international, economic, and cultural fields. Yet despite many positive achievements, the contemporary Polish-Ukrainian cooperation did not fully develop. Among many reasons that slow down the Polish-Ukrainian rapprochement, historical memories seem to be especially detrimental. The remembrances of World War II are the most destructive. Both Poles and Ukrainians understand that the only way to change this situation is to study and discuss the common history. A list of works on Polish-Ukrainian relations during World War II is long. Yet most of these publications offer broad pictures and present Polish-Ukrainian relations in general or in particular regions, such as Volhynia (Wolyn) or Eastern Galicia. This microstudy, devoted to the town of Boryslav (Boryslaw) in the years 1939 to 1945, tries to show how the conflicts were born, how they became embedded in human memory, and, finally, how they were transformed into historical stereotypes. The text concentrates on the crucial moments of World War II in Boryslav and describes how Poles and Ukrainians reacted differently to the consecutive challenges and how these various reactions shaped their relationship. The article ends with a conclusion that the five years of the war tore apart the Poles and Ukrainians of Boryslav and the post-1945 iron Polish-Soviet border divided the both sides and created a situation in which World War II attitudes froze for a long time.
This article provides a new interpretation of Hannah Arendt’s critical analysis of the ‘perplexities of the Rights of Man’ by drawing attention to its overlooked methodological orientations, especially its ‘aporetic’ nature. Arendt’s critique is aporetic as it centres on the paradoxes of human rights and analyses them by putting into practice a mode of inquiry that she associates with Socrates. The article challenges the conventional understanding of aporia as a paralysing impasse and suggests that aporetic thinking can create possibilities of rethinking key concepts especially in times of crises. To make this point, I respond to Jacques Rancière’s criticism that the paradoxes introduced by Arendt paralyse thinking and doom human rights to an inevitable destiny of failure. I argue that, precisely because of its aporetic nature, Arendt’s critique attends to possibilities of rethinking and reinventing human rights, as can be seen in her articulation of ‘a right to have rights’.
This article explores the relationship between terror, power and the rule of law. First, tracing Burke's use of the term terror back to ancient Greek usage, I argue that being terrified is incommensurable with the experience of acting together with others. In this way, terror and power are distinct. However, most acts of terror aim to terrify some people while inoculating others from terror. Witnesses to the terror of others may feel empowered by the destruction of the power of others. Second, the rule of law and terror seem incommensurable because causing terror often involves violating the law. However, modern political thought is founded on the idea that the law itself ought to be terrifying. That the terror of non-state actors appears random and the terror of the law has hardly been noticed in recent commentary on terrorism indicate that the rule of law produces an interesting audience effect. In order to sustain power and legitimacy while practising terror, governments use the rule of law to divide audiences up into terrified criminals and innocent witnesses. The practice of terror as an ‘open secret’ also produces similar audience effects. Finally, despite these connections between power, terror and the rule of law, I argue that terror is always technically out of power, even when practised by states. Terror is the true weapon of the weak because it always admits a failure to foster human connections with certain people and groups. Nonviolence is a weapon of the weak in the sense that it instantiates new, unencumbered power.
There is a wide consensus that politics should not be considered as an end in itself, being instead instrumentally valuable, provided it is capable of producing good outcomes, however defined. Even when some intrinsic value is accorded to politics, it is thought to be dependent on some broader instrumental character. I shall argue for the reverse: that politics ought to be considered autotelic, and that the very possibility of any good outcomes depends on that. I will begin with a brief summary of how deep and widespread this rejection of the autotelic character of politics is. Then, mainly drawing on Arendt, I shall argue for a restatement of the question, which will clarify why and how a meaningful and coherent concept of politics should be autotelic. Eventually, I will sketch some of the implications for normative political theory.
In the comparative research we present here as the introduction to a set of case studies, we first assess the quality of democratic procedures, content and outcomes in eight countries in the Asia-Pacific region on the basis of quantitative and qualitative data. Second, we investigate whether, to what extent, and how democratic qualities relate to one another. These investigations are carried out by applying an analytical framework that we developed elsewhere. In contrast to our previous empirical findings demonstrating that all the qualities go hand in hand, that participation and competition are the main determinants of democratic qualities, and that the democratic qualities form a funnel of causality, the present study suggests a different set of conclusions. In the Asia-Pacific region, the democratic qualities are weakly related to one another, do not form a funnel of causality, and participation and competition are not the main drivers of democratic quality. The data presented in the empirical section of the paper claim the existence of an Asia-Pacific exceptionalism. By carefully examining the cases included in our sample, we provide a detailed explanation for why, at least as far as democratic qualities are concerned, the Asia-Pacific region may be exceptional and unique. We reach the conclusion that responsiveness could be achieved by a transition from a rule by law – often coupled with the prominence of patronage, patrimonialist practices and privileges for the elite – to a proper rule of law.
This article, forming part of this volume’s effort to map the qualities of democracy in Asia, describes Thailand (as of mid-2011) as a formal democracy devoid of each of the ‘qualities’ that promote democracy’s full realization. Aside from offering an overall descriptive assessment, the article seeks to explain the relationship between the various qualities of democracy observed in Thailand over the past decade. While Thaksin Shinawatra’s tenure in office (2001–2006) offers a compelling illustration for the proposition that ‘not all good things go together,’ virtually every dimension of the ‘goodness’ or ‘quality’ of Thailand’s democracy has experienced a generalized decline since Thaksin’s ousting in 2006.
Democracy in the Philippines is a paradox. It was the first country in the region to topple authoritarian rule. Signs of a vibrant democracy are extensive: high voter turnout, civic engagement, institutional arrangements that theoretically promote accountability and safeguard rights and liberties. Yet the flaws in the democratic process are also extensive: elite dominance, institutional weakness, and widespread abuse of public office, which suggest true representation is largely illusory. Concerns about the quality of democracy have become central to political discourse in the Philippines, as seen in debates about constitutional reform and the hopes associated with the election of reform candidate Benigno Aquino III as president in 2010. This analysis examines how oligarchic structures and dysfunctional institutions threaten the emergence of true democracy in the Philippines.
This article examines the quality of democracy in Cambodia, arguing that Cambodian democracy since its inception in 1993 has evolved from unstructured competitive authoritarianism toward an authoritarianism characterized by the presence of a stable hegemonic party system wherein the minimum criteria for democracy have been severely curtailed. Although the quality of democracy has declined, the regime’s legitimacy has risen, due mainly to sustained economic growth and political stability, and increased patronage-based development. Economic performance-based legitimacy has become path-dependent; without growth the ruling party’s legitimacy might be called into question. Given the current political, social, economic and international contexts that favor economic growth with political stability, Cambodia will sustain a dominant party authoritarian regime with limited quality of democracy.
The qualities of democracy in Fiji are strongly influenced by ethnic divisions and indigenous sources of power and legitimacy in society. Periods of constitutional democracy interrupted by successive coups garnering conflicting support suggest that a more stable Fijian democracy requires a delicate balance of tribal, religious, ethnic and military interests. Successful democratic and governance reform requires the inclusive deliberation of all major groups in civil and political society, and not merely one that purports to represent all. Only by improving the qualities of democracy in Fiji will Fijian politics emerge from its cycle of coups and offer a more stable form of government.
Koreans have worked hard to improve the quality of their democracy. They have promoted the rule of law, accountability, control of corruption, freedom, and responsiveness, and made an effort to make government more effective. They are also committed to economic freedom. In relation to the rule of law, significant attention has been devoted to reducing terrorism and violence, making government more effective, and enhancing regulatory quality. However, with regard to accountability, control of corruption, and transparency, Korea has still a long way to go. The analysis of democratization and improvements in the quality of democracy to date suggest that Korea has adapted to the changing economic environment and is sustaining its economic growth. This has been accompanied by social and economic polarization and a consequent demand for more and better welfare services.
Over the last decade, a growing number of students of democracy have sought to develop means of framing and assessing the quality of democracy and identifying ways to improve the quality of democratic governance. In this article, we review the recent efforts to conceptualize and measure quality of democracy by way of introducing a comprehensive method for measuring some essential properties of liberal democracy. Next, we present an empirical assessment of the quality of democracy in Taiwan based on the sub-dimensions formulated by Morlino – specifically, rule of law, accountability, participation, competition, freedom, equality, and responsiveness. We find that in the areas of accountability, participation, and freedom, Taiwan has made considerable progress. However, Taiwan’s young democracy still has room for improvement in the areas of the rule of law, equality, and responsiveness.
This article examines two seemingly opposed modes of place-making, urban sprawl and historic preservation, and their relationship to memory. The author contends that urban sprawl creates a landscape of either willful or accidental amnesia, where the powers of place are neutralized by ignoring them or removing them from history. Historic preservation, however, can have equally depoliticizing effects by conjuring up peculiar, selective, or even wholly imaginary pasts. Despite their apparent opposition, both practices often work against a meaningful understanding of the relationship between identity, memory, and place. Rather than accept the false choice between amnesia and nostalgia, the author advocates for an ethos of what Walter Benjamin calls "porosity" in creating, maintaining, and evaluating the vitality of our urban spaces.
The authors explore whether the federal courts act as countermajoritarian institutions by investigating the influence of public mood on decision making in the U.S. Courts of Appeals from 1961 to 2002. The results indicate that public opinion affects courts of appeals decision making indirectly through judicial replacements and institutional constrains from Congress, but the authors fail to uncover evidence that courts of appeals judges respond directly to changes in public opinion. They conclude that, absent membership turnover in the circuit or in Congress, the courts of appeals are not responsive to the will of the public.
How do organized interests respond to their opponents’ advocacy activities in a policy venue? Utilizing data on amicus curiae filings at the U.S. Supreme Court, the author estimates vector error correction and vector autoregression models that allow him test whether interests respond, in a dynamic sense, to the efforts of the "other side." The author capitalizes on the temporal sequencing of variation in advocacy activity to gain leverage on the causal connection between the behaviors of opposing sets of interests and provides a richer portrait of the dynamics of interest representation in a policy venue. The results reveal that organized interests respond positively to the advocacy activities of their opponents by exhibiting both short-term counteraction and long-term countermobilization, implying that over the long run, interest representation at the Court is responsive and perhaps balanced.
