What do comparativists have to gain by reading recent work on China? In this article, I focus specifically on the ways in which scholarship on China can contribute to the task of theory building in comparative politics. I identify two areas that could reap particularly high benefits from considering scholarship on China—comparative political development and the political behavior of development—and I discuss some of the specific contributions that China scholarship can make to building comparative theory in these areas.
Politicians’ dual responsibilities to respect their party and also be responsive to their constituents is surprisingly lacking in studies of representation. How do politicians—especially those who function in strong-party systems—individually respond to their constituents’ preferences? We make use of an original, large-scale survey of politicians and the recent success of the Sweden Democrats in the elections in Sweden to show that important adaptation takes place within the party structure. Individual politicians are responsive to signals about voters’ preferences, and they act on these signals by internally lobbying their party leaders to change the party’s positions in the direction of their constituents’ preferences. These results provide a rationale for why niche parties invest in elections even if they are unlikely to enter government: Their electoral successes can cause change in other parties. The results also add a new angle to the discussion of how anti-immigration parties affect mainstream parties, a hotly debated issue in many advanced democracies.
One of the obstacles to democratic development is the reluctance of political leaders to leave office. This article argues that alongside democratic constraints and accountability, leaders’ career concern—specifically, the possibility of post-tenure careers—is an important factor behind their rotation in office. While literature exists about leaders’ exit and fate, we lack a systematic understanding of their careers and whether former rulers retire, remain in politics, or pursue civil service, business, international, or non-profit careers after leaving office. Drawing on the new data on the prior- and post-tenure occupations of leaders from 1960 to 2010, the article explains how democracy, personal background, and the economy influence what ex-leaders can do, and why. In turn, over time the post-tenure careers of prior rulers may strengthen the precedent behind the institutional routinization of the rotation in office norm—an important component of democratic consolidation.
Traditional accounts of clientelism typically focused on patron–client relations with minimal scope for citizen autonomy. Despite the heightened agency of many contemporary citizens, most studies continue to depict clientelism as a phenomenon that is firmly under elite control. The prevailing tendency is to view clientelism as a top-down process in which machines target citizens with offers of material benefits. Without denying the importance of elites, we emphasize the role of citizen demands in clientelism. Citizens often approach machines of their own volition to ask for help and may vote for a competitor if requests are unfulfilled. In response to these citizens, machines often engage in what we call "request fulfilling." Interviews with citizens and politicians, coupled with cross-national survey data from Africa and Latin America, suggest the importance of this phenomenon. In addition, Argentine survey data in studies by Stokes and Nichter are better explained by request fulfilling than alternative explanations.
This article explains legislators’ support for electoral reforms reducing electoral irregularities and protecting voters’ autonomy at the ballot box in Britain and Germany in the late 19th century. We argue that the main political cleavage over the adoption of new legislation to limit illicit electoral practices pitted politicians able to take advantage of opportunities for vote buying and intimidation against those who could not do so because of unfavorable political and economic conditions in their district. We examine the political, partisan, and economic factors accounting for candidates’ ability to engage in electoral irregularities and show that, in both countries, resource-constrained candidates were more likely to support the introduction of electoral reforms. Because the primary illicit electoral practice differs across these two cases—vote buying in Britain and economic intimidation in Germany—some of the political and economic factors accounting for legislators’ support for reform differ across these cases.
Because insurgent group formation typically occurs in secrecy and in poorly monitored areas, the empirical record on conflicts’ start is spare and systematically omits rebels who fail before committing substantial violence. This article argues that this presents a fundamental challenge for the study of conflict onset and demonstrates the theoretical and empirical problems it causes in studying a controversial relationship: how ethnicity influences armed conflicts’ start. Unusual evidence on all armed groups that formed in Uganda since 1986 indicates that ethnic mobilization was unimportant to the initial formation of rebel groups—but mattered after nascent groups had already formed. Contrasting evidence from Uganda with a prominent argument that ethnic marginalization induces rebellion shows why lack of evidence about how insurgencies begin can lead to broader inferential pitfalls.
What motivates authoritarian regimes to crack down on corruption? We argue that just as partisan competition in democracies tends to politicize corruption, authoritarian leaders may exploit anticorruption campaigns to target rivals’ power networks during internal power struggles for consolidating their power base. We apply this theoretical framework to provincial leadership turnover in China and test it using an anticorruption data set. We find that intraelite power competition, captured by the informal power configuration of government incumbents and their predecessors, can increase investigations of corrupt senior officials by up to 20%. The intensity of anticorruption propaganda exhibits a similar pattern. The findings indicate that informal politics can propel strong anticorruption drives in countries without democratically accountable institutions, although these drives tend to be selective, arbitrary, and factionally biased.
Can subnational elections contribute to democratization? In autocracies that hold competitive elections at multiple levels of government, subnational executive offices provide opposition parties with access to resources, increase their visibility among voters, and let them gain experience in government. This allows opposition parties to use subnational executives as "springboards" from which to increase their electoral support in future races, and predicts that their electoral support should follow a diffusion process, that is, a party’s electoral performance in municipality m at time t should be better if that party already governs some of m’s neighbors since t – 1. I evaluate this claim with data from municipal-level elections in Mexico between 1984 and 2000. Consistent with the fact that the Partido Acción Nacional (National Action Party, PAN) followed an explicit strategy of party-building from below but the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (Party of the Democratic Revolution, PRD) did not, the results indicate that diffusion effects contributed to the growth of the former but not the latter.
What explains the emergence of vigilante organizations? Throughout the world, vigilantes emerge to illegally punish perceived criminals, often leading to serious consequences. However, the literature presents partial and conflicting explanations for this phenomenon. This article argues that local economic inequality creates a situation ripe for vigilante organizations. Inequality creates demand for vigilantism because poorer citizens feel relatively deprived of security compared with wealthier neighbors who have advantages regarding private and public security. In addition, inequality suggests a patron-and-worker distribution of labor, and this is ideal for organizing a particular type of group, the patron-funded vigilante group. Empirical tests use original data on the 2013 wave of Mexican vigilante organizations, present in 13 of Mexico’s 32 federal entities. Municipal-level income inequality is robustly associated with organized vigilantism. Less support is found for competing explanations.
Poor public service provision and government accountability is commonplace in low-income countries. Although mobile phone–based platforms have emerged to allow constituents to report service deficiencies to government officials, they have been plagued by low citizen participation. We question whether low participation may root in low political efficacy to politically participate. In the context of a text message–reporting platform in Uganda, we investigate the impact of adding efficacy-boosting language to mobilization texts—(a) citizen name personalization and (b) politician encouragement—on citizens’ willingness to report service deficiencies to politicians via text messages. Both treatments, designed to increase internal and external efficacy, respectively, have a large, positive effect on participation. The results are driven by traditionally less internally efficacious constituents (females) and less externally efficacious constituents (those represented by opposition party members), respectively.
Why do voters in electoral autocracies vote for opposition parties that are co-opted by the government? The logic of electoral accountability should lead constituents to vote such parties out, and parties, knowing this, should never agree to be co-opted. Yet there is evidence that constituents often do not sanction opposition parties for failing to prevent the government from consolidating power. Standard accountability models suggest that this accountability failure is due to the parties having developed good reputations. This article develops a formal theory that offers a novel explanation for accountability failures specific to electoral autocracies. The theory shows how a consolidation of power by an authoritarian regime, increasing its ability to punish opposition politicians, can lead citizens not to vote opposition parties out of office even after seeing them fail to prevent a consolidation of power.
Setting the political agenda is a critical and usually powerful aspect of policy making. However, the ability to set the agenda, without any significant decision-making powers, can undermine this influence, leaving a technical agenda setter without substantive political influence. This research examines the difference between technical and political agenda setting through an analysis of the policy impact of the Commission of the European Union (EU). Using two newly developed databases on Commission policy priorities and all adopted EU legislation, as well as the Decision Making in the European Union (DEU II) dataset, we investigate the ability of the Commission to shape EU legislative outcomes to reflect its policy preferences between 2000 and 2011. Our analyses highlight the comparative weakness of the Commission’s policy influence, despite its formal monopoly of legislative initiation. In this way, we argue for a need to carefully differentiate between technical and political agenda setters when evaluating the policy influence of different political actors.
The literature on nationalism and civil war provides compelling evidence that territory is highly identity-relevant and strongly associated with conflict. However, it remains unclear which territorial characteristics determine this process, and how groups demanding self-determination differ from their counterparts not seeking greater rights. I argue that groups claim self-rule if they assign symbolic relevance to their land in contrast to material or strategic value, due to the positive effect of symbolic attachments on group cohesion. I present new data on the value of territory and self-determination demands, and propose a new and comprehensive measure of symbolic territory. The findings reveal that variation in symbolic value shows a considerably stronger association with self-determination demands than material and strategic territory. This highlights new research avenues investigating the role of territorial value in subnational conflicts, as well as the systematic differences in conflict behavior between groups demanding self-rule and non-disputants.
This article provides a new perspective on the impact of elections on violent political instability in ethnically divided states. A number of scholars argue that elections may provoke large-scale violence in ethnically divided states. In this article, we theorize that elections have a pacifying effect in the most ethnically fractionalized countries as they reduce endemic uncertainty and encourage coalition building, lowering the rate at which electoral losers discount the future. Probit regressions using cross-national data for the period 1960-2010 support the notion that instability onsets are less likely in ethnically fractionalized states during election periods, and especially in the year after a national election.
This article explores the coalitional success of mass-mobilizing, reformist parties once they achieve power. Why are some of these parties more successful than others at managing the potentially conflicting interests of their diverse social bases? We argue that organizational strategies adopted early on matter greatly. The nature of the party’s core constituency, together with the linkage strategies undertaken by party leaders in crafting a coalition of support, shapes a party’s ability to maintain that coalition over time. When coalitional partners are intensively rather than extensively integrated, they are more likely to compromise over policy disagreements rather than defect when defection becomes attractive. We develop this theory by comparing the evolution of two Bolivian parties: the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement and the Movement Toward Socialism. Against conventional explanations that are overly dependent upon structural factors, our argument stresses the impact of strategic choices in shaping a party’s ability to maintain its coalition.
Global attitudes involving homosexuality are changing rapidly. Tolerance toward lesbian and gay relationships has increased in almost every continent. More often than not, younger people have been at the forefront of this change. In this article, we explore explanations for this cross-national phenomenon. Specifically, we test to see whether contextual factors, those that allow lesbian women and gay men to freely express themselves or to gain cultural representation in the media, have driven this transformation. The results show that inter-cohort effects, or more liberal attitudes among younger people, are related to the pervasiveness of a nation’s mass media and to the presence of press freedom. This research suggests a strong link between increasing mass support for minority rights and the factors that encourage and allow minorities to express their viewpoints to others. These findings have broad implications, in that they help us understand the growing global acceptance around gay rights.
The relationship between international linkages and the nature and survival of political regimes has gained increasing attention in recent years, but remains one that is poorly understood. In this article, we make three central contributions to our understanding of international linkage politics and autocratic regime survival. First, we introduce and develop the concept of "autocratic linkage," and highlight its importance for understanding the international politics of autocratic survival. Second, we use event history analysis to demonstrate that autocratic linkage has a systematic effect on the duration of authoritarian regimes. Finally, we complement our quantitative analysis with a focused comparison of autocratic linkage politics in the Middle East. We show that variation in Saudi Arabian support for autocratic incumbents in the wake of the Arab Spring protests can be explained in significant part by variation in linkage relationships.
Given the methodological sophistication of the debate over the "political resource curse"—the purported negative relationship between natural resource wealth (in particular oil wealth) and democracy—it is surprising that scholars have not paid more attention to the basic statistical issue of how to deal with missing data. This article highlights the problems caused by the most common strategy for analyzing missing data in the political resource curse literature—listwise deletion—and investigates how addressing such problems through the best-practice technique of multiple imputation affects empirical results. I find that multiple imputation causes the results of a number of influential recent studies to converge on a key common finding: A political resource curse does exist, but only since the widespread nationalization of petroleum industries in the 1970s. This striking finding suggests that much of the controversy over the political resource curse has been caused by a neglect of missing-data issues.
The politics of economic crises brings distributive economic conflict to the fore of national political debates. How policy should be used to transfer resources between citizens becomes a central political question, and the answers chosen often influence the trajectory of policy for a generation. This context provides an ideal setting for evaluating the importance of self-interest and other-regarding preferences in shaping public opinion about economic policy. This article investigates whether self-centered inequity aversion along with self-interest influences individual tax policy opinions. We conduct original survey experiments in France and the United States, and provide evidence that individuals care about both how policy alternatives affect their own interests and how they influence the welfare of others relative to themselves.
Recent studies on the subnational resource curse contend that subnational rentier units suffer from the same nondemocratic tendency as their national counterparts. However, subnational rentier states worldwide exhibit contrasting political outcomes. Why are some subnational rentier units politically competitive whereas others are not? This article argues that rent-sharing regimes—the fiscal institutions for sharing resource revenues among levels of government—condition political competitiveness at the provincial level. Using novel time-series cross-sectional data on Argentina, a case with several hydrocarbon-rich units with exogenously created rent-sharing regimes, I show that oil creates negative political effects at the provincial level only when these institutions do not share—or share minor amounts of—rents with municipal governments. Conversely, political competition emerges when rent-sharing regimes distribute rents to municipal governments, as this shrinks large provincial budgets, allows municipalities to deliver public and private goods, and gives municipal politicians fiscal independence from provincial governments.
Given the widespread interest in political solutions to the current problems associated with immigration, we need to have an accurate understanding of existing policies in a cross-national perspective. To explain the coming into being and effectiveness of these policies, researchers have recently started to quantify immigration and citizenship policies and built databases across time and a large number of countries. These indices are likely to reconnect political science research with a field from which it has long been disconnected in terms of theories and methodology—the sub-field of migration and citizenship research. This special issue brings together scholars from North America and Europe who have been at the forefront of index-building and have started to employ these indices in empirical research.
African democracies are increasingly urban. While ethnicity is generally correlated with vote choice, recent research suggests there may be less ethnic voting in cities. But I show that voting for ethnically affiliated parties is as common in some neighborhoods in urban Ghana as in rural areas, while virtually non-existent in other neighborhoods elsewhere within the same city. This intra-urban variation is not explained by differences in the salience of ethnic identities or other individual-level characteristics of voters themselves. Instead, it is influenced by the diversity and wealth of the local neighborhoods in which parties and voters interact. These neighborhood characteristics change otherwise similar voters’ expectations of the benefits they will receive from an ethnically affiliated party when living in different places, producing intra-urban differences in the importance of ethnicity for vote choice.
This article examines how foreign direct investment (FDI) affects the likelihood of authoritarian leaders’ political survival. We argue that FDI reduces the likelihood of experiencing political challenges from elites. We present two mechanisms for this claim. First, the host governments of authoritarian regimes can use FDI for long-term private good provision, so that FDI helps them to appease elite dissents and to buy off potential elite challengers. Second, FDI mitigates a commitment problem between elites and authoritarian leadership by creating an FDI-related distributional coalition, which in turn makes political defections costly to both parties. Our empirical tests using various two-stage estimators show that FDI significantly decreases the likelihood of elite-driven authoritarian leadership failure and coup attempt.
Paradoxically, many dictators agree to institutionalized succession rules even though these rules could regulate their removal from office. This study shows that succession rules, like other pseudo-democratic institutions in authoritarian regimes, provide survival benefits for dictators. Specifically, they protect dictators from coup attempts because they reduce elites’ incentives to try to grab power preemptively via forceful means. By assuaging the ambition of some elites who have more to gain with patience than with plotting, institutionalized succession rules hamper coordination efforts among coup plotters, which ultimately reduce a leader’s risk of confronting coups. Based on a variety of statistical models, including instrumental variables regression that addresses potential endogeneity between succession rules and coup attempts, the empirical evidence supports the authors’ hypothesis that institutions governing leadership succession reduce the likelihood that dictators confront coups. This study clarifies one of the ways in which institutions in dictatorships help autocratic leaders survive.
In 2015, Comparative Political Studies embarked on a landmark pilot study in research transparency in the social sciences. The editors issued an open call for submissions of manuscripts that contained no mention of their actual results, incentivizing reviewers to evaluate manuscripts based on their theoretical contributions, research designs, and analysis plans. The three papers in this special issue are the result of this process that began with 19 submissions. In this article, we describe the rationale for this pilot, expressly articulating the practices of preregistration and results-free review. We document the process of carrying out the special issue with a discussion of the three accepted papers, and critically evaluate the role of both preregistration and results-free review. Our main conclusions are that results-free review encourages much greater attention to theory and research design, but that it raises thorny problems about how to anticipate and interpret null findings. We also observe that as currently practiced, results-free review has a particular affinity with experimental and cross-case methodologies. Our lack of submissions from scholars using qualitative or interpretivist research suggests limitations to the widespread use of results-free review.
This article examines strategies for immigrants to improve integration by exploring the relationship between occupational choice and assimilation. I ask whether immigrant-origin individuals will be viewed as better representatives of the nation when employed in occupations that reflect national identity. I examine this question with data from original surveys in France, Germany, and the United States. Results suggest that native and immigrant-origin individuals in occupations that reflect national identity are more likely to be seen as ideal representatives of the nation. Yet, the benefits of an occupation that reflects national identity are fairly minor for immigrant-origin individuals in France and Germany and roughly one third the size of the benefit for native-origin individuals. In comparison, native and immigrant-origin individuals in the United States have the same increase in likelihood of being seen as ideal representatives of the nation. These findings have implications for our understanding of immigrant integration and national identity.
One of the biggest puzzles of China’s reform era is how the government was able to implement a stunning enterprise restructuring program amid widespread worker protests. While most existing explanations focus on government repression, concessions, and other policies to reduce workers’ incentives to protest, this article argues that the government’s mastery in undermining the trust and solidarity among workers played an essential role in the success of the restructuring. In particular, the state helped to promote exclusionary power structures and elitist attitudes among workers. Consequently, labor protests during restructuring were typically insider-dominated, and rank-and-file workers were often believed to lack the capacity or qualities to play an important role in collective actions. Exclusionary elitism discouraged ordinary workers’ participation and alienated protest activists from the communities. The article examines the conditions and mechanisms for exclusionary elitism to develop among state workers.
What explains variation in the role of religion in ethnic conflict? Although conflict involving religion is often more violent and longer lasting than other forms of conflict, to date little research has examined the factors explaining the relevance of religion to conflict mobilization. Adopting a rational choice approach, I argue that religion is more likely to be a salient component of conflict when an ethnic group’s religious leaders face local incentives to compete over adherents. I test this approach using a multi-method research design that combines statistical analysis of original time-series data on the salience of religion in conflict with qualitative evidence drawn from the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Both types of analyses support the notion that competition among religious leaders can serve as a precursor to the mobilization of religious sentiment in conflict, which in turn exerts a tremendous influence on the intensity and duration of conflict.
In this article, we first test theories on immigrant rights across 29 countries from Europe, Africa, the Middle East, East Asia, Oceania, and the Americas, using our Indicators of Citizenship Rights for Immigrants (ICRI) data set. We focus on trajectories of nationhood and current institutional features to explain cross-national difference. We find that former colonial powers, former colonies that developed as settler countries, as well as democracies have been more likely to extend rights to immigrants. Strikingly, once we account for involvement in colonialism, we find no difference between supposedly "civic-nationalist" early nation-states and supposedly "ethnic-nationalist" latecomer nations, refuting a widely held belief in the literature on citizenship. We find no effect of a country’s degree of political globalization. We replicate these findings on a sample of 35 mainly European countries, using the migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX).
In light of gender disparities in political involvement, extant research has examined mechanisms for incorporating ordinary women into politics. We complement this literature by exploring the effect of an overlooked institution theorized to promote political equality by maximizing voter turnout: compulsory voting. We theorize that in enforced compulsory voting systems, women are more likely to receive and seek information about electoral choices than their counterparts in voluntary voting systems. Consequently, compulsory voting helps narrow the gender gap beyond voting by creating opportunities and motivations for women to engage with the electoral process and its main actors. Our multilevel analysis based on cross-national survey data lends strong support to our hypotheses. Countries with enforced mandatory voting laws display a much smaller gender gap not only in voting, but also in several other forms of electoral engagement, including political party information, campaign attentiveness, party attachment, and campaign participation.
Activist groups face a number of strategic challenges when pursuing social change. Among the most important is selecting the appropriate target for protest activity. Yet, scholars have typically focused on dissident–government interactions, rather than the entire range of potential targets. Why, then, do dissidents choose to target the state rather than other social actors such as firms, rival ethnic groups, the press, and so on? We argue that dissident target choice is shaped by the interaction of dissident demands and regime characteristics. When the state is highly central in generating particular grievances, dissidents will be more likely to target the state; however, this also depends on the degree of state responsiveness to opposition movements. We highlight how state control over the economy shapes economic protest, how democracy conditions political protest, and how ethnic discrimination discourages anti-state protest. The results of our quantitative analysis of protest events in Africa and Latin America demonstrate that there is an interactive effect between contextual features of the state and the specific demands of activists.
What is the relationship between ballot reforms and electoral malpractice? This article contributes to the growing comparative politics literature on the causes of election fraud in democratizing countries using the case of the 19th-century United States. We examine the adoption of the Australian ballot and disenfranchisement laws, and estimate their effects on multiple types of election fraud. Using a new measure of fraud in elections to the House of Representatives from 1860 to 1930, we find that the Australian ballot and disenfranchisement measures reduced vote-buying and voter intimidation. However, we further find that the Australian ballot had an "iatrogenic effect" of increasing registration and ballot fraud. Voting secrecy therefore led to substitution of one illicit electoral tactic for another.
This article introduces a collection of papers that explore two understudied but critical questions of enduring concern for the study of democratization. Was the secret ballot driven by the same forces that drove the rise of democracy more generally? Did the secret ballot end electoral fraud, or was its effect merely endogenous to economic modernization more generally? This article provides historical context for the rise of the secret ballot, systematizing some of the complexities and ambiguities of the concept of the "secret ballot" itself. Second, we summarize the approach and some of the main findings of the papers in the volume, offering an outline of the broader lessons that emerge from the papers. Finally, we reflect upon the significance of a historical study of the secret ballot for technological and institutional reforms for contemporary democracy.
We argue that courts may increase their autonomy and effectiveness by persuading governmental actors, who have powers over the societal impact of judicial decisions, of the legal quality of their rulings. This view combines a strategic perspective on judicial decision making with a conception of persuasion that allows courts to widen their zone of discretion. We support our argument with data from the European Union, where we find that the Court of Justice improves its legal justifications—by embedding its decisions in case law—when it faces a more adverse political environment. Our findings suggest both that the limits of judicial independence are set largely by political preferences, and that legal rhetoric may be an opportunity for courts to extend their room for maneuver. They also indicate that political audiences may indirectly influence the development of case law, by triggering courts to engage in precedent.
Do public images of state leaders affect individuals’ political attitudes and behaviors? If so, why do they have that effect and among whom? Authoritarian iconography could increase compliance with and support for the state via three causal mechanisms: legitimacy, self-interest, and coercion. This article uses a laboratory experiment in the United Arab Emirates to evaluate the effect of public images of state leaders on individuals’ compliance with and support for an authoritarian regime. Using a pre-registered research design, it finds no meaningful evidence that authoritarian iconography increases political compliance or support for the Emirati regime. Although these null results may be due to a number of factors, the findings have important implications for the future research agenda on how and why authoritarian leaders use political culture to maintain power.
Ideological congruence is an important and popular measure of the quality of political representation. The closer the match between the preferences of the public and those of elected elites, the better representative democracy is thought to function. Relatively little attention has been paid, however, to the effects of ideological congruence on political judgment. We address this gap by examining whether citizens use egocentric or sociotropic judgments of congruence to evaluate democratic performance. Using a variety of congruence measures, we find that citizens are unmoved by sociotropic congruence; however, our analyses provide clear evidence that egocentric congruence boosts citizen satisfaction, especially among political sophisticates. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for the study of ideological congruence and political representation.
A growing body of scholarship on the political and economic subordination of women in the Muslim world has argued that widespread patriarchal attitudes toward women’s roles in public life can be ameliorated by offering progressive reinterpretations of Islamic scriptures. In this article, we explore this hypothesis with a large-scale survey experiment conducted among adult Egyptians in late 2013. In the study, a subset of respondents were exposed to an argument in favor of women’s political equality that was grounded in the Qur’ān, Islam’s holiest text. We found that this group was significantly more willing to express approval of female political leadership than those exposed to a non-religious argument in favor of women’s eligibility for political leadership. A further analysis of conditional treatment effects suggests that the religious justification for female political leadership was more likely to elicit agreement among less educated and less pious respondents, and when delivered by women and targeted at men. Our findings suggest that Islamic discourse, so often used to justify the political exclusion of women, can also be used to help empower them.
Face-to-face interviews constitute a social interaction between interviewer and respondent, and in the African context, social interactions are strongly shaped by ethnicity. Yet research using African survey data typically fails to account for the effect of shared ethnicity on survey responses. We find that respondents give systematically different answers to coethnic and noncoethnic interviewers across surveys in 14 African countries, but with significant variation in the degree of bias across question types and types of noncoethnic dyads, with the largest effects occurring where both the respondent and interviewer are members of ethnic groups with a history of political competition and conflict, and where the respondent or interviewer shares an ethnicity with the head of state. Our findings have practical implications for consumers of African survey data and underscore the context dependence of the social interaction that constitutes the survey experience.
How do electoral incentives affect the counterterrorism policies chosen by reelection-seeking incumbents? This article tests the argument that governments alter their choice of security strategies as elections approach to signal competence to potential voters. Which policy they select should depend on the intended audience of the signal. Governments seeking support from their partisan base should select different policies than those courting the support of moderates. Using data on Israel-West Bank checkpoint closures and casualties in the Palestinian territories between 2000 and 2013, I find evidence that Israeli governments manipulate security strategies in the run-up to elections in a manner consistent with an attempt to attract support from core voters. As elections approach, left governments become more dovish on security, while right governments become more hawkish. The relationship between partisanship and policy choice raises concerns that electoral incentives may induce democratic governments to select inefficient or suboptimal security strategies around election time.
Many studies highlight the critical roles of political parties in enhancing autocratic durability, mainly emphasizing mechanisms related to elite cohesion. The role of a mass party organization in stabilizing autocracies, though well recognized, has received relatively less emphasis. This article argues that the import of mass organization on autocratic durability is likely to vary with autocratic regime type and be greatest in competitive authoritarian regimes. I then exploit unusual survey data and an original data set containing information on 18,037 regime-affiliated "Communal Councils" to examine the effects of a regime-affiliated mass organization on the incumbent vote in Venezuela. The formation of Communal Councils exerted a large effect on incumbent support but the strength of this effect varied depending on whether Councils were located in communities receiving high levels of material resources. These findings suggest that mass organization can greatly enhance competitive authoritarian durability but must be backed by patronage to be effective.
To enhance government accountability, reformers have advocated strengthening institutions of "horizontal accountability," particularly auditing institutions that can punish lawbreaking elected officials. Yet, these institutions differ in their willingness to punish corrupt politicians, which is often attributed to variation in their degree of independence from the political branches. Taking advantage of a randomized natural experiment embedded in Brazil’s State Audit Courts, we study how variation in the appointment mechanisms for choosing auditors affects political accountability. We show that auditors appointed under few constraints by elected officials punish lawbreaking politicians—particularly co-partisans—at lower rates than bureaucrats insulated from political influence. In addition, we find that even when executives are heavily constrained in their appointment of auditors by meritocratic and professional requirements, auditors still exhibit a pro-politician bias in decision making. Our results suggest that removing bias requires a level of insulation from politics rare among institutions of horizontal accountability.
Responsiveness is a central quality of representative democracy. During the past decades, a number of innovative studies have advanced our knowledge about actual responsiveness processes. However, research on the consequences that follow from responsiveness has lagged behind and forms the subject of this special issue. Our introduction identifies a range of conceptual issues that arise as we focus attention on citizens’ reactions to the ways in which politicians relate to public sentiments between elections.
This article revisits and seeks to challenge one of the most powerful hypotheses in the political economy scholarship: the supposedly negative relationship between ethnic diversity and public goods provision. We suggest that the relative lack of attention to politics and history makes much of this literature vulnerable to endogeneity problems. In response, we develop a state-centered approach that brings time and temporality to the analytical foreground. This approach addresses issues of reverse causality and spuriousness by examining how different historical trajectories of nation-state formation, and the state strategies and capabilities to provide public goods associated with each, might have shaped both contemporary diversity and public goods provision. Bringing in politics and history and putting the analytical focus on the state also allows the article to open up the debate around how distinct manifestations of politicized ethnicity might influence state provision of public goods.
This article examines the impact of the secret ballot on the market for votes at parliamentary elections in the 19th-century United Kingdom. I use a formal model of an exchange between a candidate and a voter to predict the impact of the secret ballot on bribe prices, the marginal effect campaign spending on candidates’ electoral prospects, and election turnout. I test these predictions against original data on bribe prices and campaign expenditures at over 500 parliamentary elections. The results are consistent with the argument that the secret ballot induced British parliamentary candidates to divert their campaign spending away from vote-buying and toward turnout-buying. These results point to the adaptability of political actors in the face of institutional changes.
In diverse societies, individuals tend to trust coethnics more than non-coethnics. I argue that identification with a territorially defined nation, common to all ethnic groups, reduces the degree to which trust is ethnically bounded. I conduct a "lab-in-the-field" experiment at the intersection of national and ethnic boundaries in Malawi, which measures strength of national identification, experimentally manipulates national identity salience, and measures trust behaviorally. I find that shared nationality is a robust predictor of trust, equal in magnitude to the impact of shared ethnicity. Furthermore, national identification moderates the degree to which trust is limited to coethnics: While weak national identifiers trust coethnics more than non-coethnics, strong national identifiers are blind to ethnicity. Experimentally increasing national identity salience also eliminates the coethnic trust advantage among weak nationalists. These results offer micro-level evidence that a strong and salient national identity can diminish ethnic barriers to trust in diverse societies.
The secret ballot is one of the cornerstones of democracy. We contend that the historical process of modernization caused the switch from open to secret ballot with the underlying mechanism being that income growth, urbanization, and rising education standards undermined vote markets. We undertake event history studies of ballot reform in Western Europe and the U.S. states during the 19th and 20th centuries to establish that modernization was systematically related to ballot reform. We study electoral turnout before and after ballot reform among the U.S. states and British parliamentary constituencies to substantiate the hypothesis that modernization reduced the volume of trade in the vote market.
This article explains coup activity in democracies by adapting insights from the literature on commitment problems and framing coup around the threats leaders and potential coup plotters pose to each other. I claim democratic constraints on executive power inhibit a leader’s ability to repress threats from political rivals. Though this decreases motivations for coup attempts, it also makes democracies more vulnerable should a coup attempt occur. Consequently, democratic constraints on executive power do not reduce the frequency of coup attempts, but coups attempted against democracies are much more likely to succeed. Using several data sets of coup activity and democratic constraints, I find significant differences in coup activity in democracies and non-democracies. Relative to civilian non-democracies, democracies are about half as likely to use coup-related repression, but they face a similar frequency of coup attempts. Plots against democracies are nearly twice as likely to succeed.
A large body of aggregate-level work shows that government policies do indeed respond to citizen preferences. But whether citizens recognize that government is responsive is another question entirely. Indeed, a prior question is whether or not citizens value responsiveness in the way that academic research assumes they should in the first place. Using comparative data from the European Social Survey, this article examines how citizens see government responsiveness. We show that several key assumptions of the aggregate-level literature are met at the individual level. But we also present results that show that attitudes toward representation and responsiveness are colored, sometimes in quite surprising ways, by winner–loser effects. In a finding that stands in some contrast to the normative literature on the topic, we show that these sorts of short-term attitudes help shape preferences for models of representation. In particular, we show that the distinction between delegates and trustees is a conceptual distinction that has limits in helping us to understand citizen preferences for representation.
Existing theory associates ethnolinguistic diversity with a host of negative outcomes. This article analyzes the puzzle of Ghana, the 12th most diverse state globally, yet among the most peaceful, democratic, and developed African states. It argues the position of post-independence political elites within ethno-demographic structures helps explain why some diverse African states pursued broad nation-building public goods, mitigating the political salience of diversity. Diversity encouraged provision of social goods with broad-based support in states with a modest plurality—not large enough to dominate, but without proximately sized ethnic groups—especially for leaders from a minority. Comparative historical analysis of Ghana is expanded with abbreviated case studies on Guinea, Togo, and Kenya.
Are political parties willing to partially forgo their office and policy goals to maximize their coalition governance capacities? Multiparty governments are plagued with preference heterogeneity and uncertainty about policy outcomes. In this article, we argue that parties choose to make a strategic allocation of portfolios to curb delegation perils. They use portfolios with jurisdiction overlaps to shadow each other at the ministerial level. We define a wary partners’ situation when different parties control the portfolios that form a jurisdiction combination. We test this hypothesis for 12 West European parliamentary democracies since 1945. Our contribution conjugates a Monte Carlo simulation, which estimates whether real-world distribution differs significantly from expected allocation under nonstrategic behavior, with in-depth interviews with more than 40 former ministers. Results show that wary partners are used extensively as coalition governance mechanisms, particularly because of their capacity to curb information asymmetries and to avoid interministerial gridlock.
Diversity has been blamed for poor public goods provision in a number of different contexts. It is associated with reduced spending on services, meager rates of tax collection, and poor policies. I argue in this article, however, that in semidemocratic or authoritarian countries, where political parties are weak, diversity can be an important source of electoral competition, leading to better services. In diverse communities where multiple identity groups are politically mobilized, candidates are forced to seek the support of voters outside of their group, who are more likely to vote based on qualifications than on group affiliation, resulting in better public officials who provide superior services. Moreover, I find internal group fragmentation to be important in understanding the impact of heterogeneity on public goods provision: Candidates in areas where only one identity group is politically mobilized but where that group is politically fragmented will also seek votes from other groups within the community similar to candidates in locations with "multigroup" mobilization, leading to improved public goods provision. These arguments are confirmed through the analysis of tribal mobilization and public goods across Jordan’s municipalities.
The cost of ruling effect on electoral support is well established. That is, governing parties tend to lose vote share the longer they are in power. Although we know this to be true, we do not know why it happens. This research examines whether the cost of ruling results at least in part from the tendency for governing parties to shift policy further away from the average voter. It first considers differences in political institutions and how they might influence cost of ruling owing to policy drift, and then tests the hypothesis focusing on U.S. presidential elections, which is an unfavorable case to find such an effect. Results confirm a clear cost of ruling effect in these elections and demonstrate that policy misrepresentation is an important mechanism. That is, the policy liberalism of presidents from different parties diverges over time as their tenure in the White House increases, and the degree to which it does matters for the presidential vote. Policy is not the only thing that matters, and other factors, in particular the economy, are more powerful. From the point of view of electoral accountability, however, the results do provide good news, as they indicate that substantive representation is important to voters. Elections are not simply games of musical chairs.
There is a rich body of theorizing on the diffusion of democracy across space and time. There is also an emerging scholarship on authoritarian diffusion. The dynamics of the interaction between external democratic and autocratic diffusion processes and their effects on national and sub-national political regime outcomes have received scant attention in the literature. Do democratic diffusion processes help counter external authoritarian influences? And, in contexts where external diffusion of democratic influences is weak, do we observe greater susceptibility to diffusion from regional autocracies that might in turn reinforce authoritarian practices and institutions in "recipient" states? To address these questions, we perform analysis of data from two original under-utilized data sets—a data set on the European Union (EU) aid to Russia’s regions and a data set with statistics on trade among post-Soviet states. We find that EU aid has the effect of countering external authoritarian influences that work through Soviet-era inter-regional economic ties.
How does civil society mobilize citizens in an authoritarian state that forbids organizations from coordinating collective contention? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in underground labor organizations in China, this article theorizes a tactical innovation—disguised collective action—that lowers the cost of organizing contention under repression. Instead of forming organizations to facilitate collective action, organizations enable citizens to better contend as individuals. Departing from processes captured by the "dynamics of contention" framework, organizations act as unconventional mobilizing structures by coaching aggrieved citizens to make individual rights claims without engaging in perilous collective protests. Through a hidden pedagogical process, claimants are coached to deploy a repertoire of atomized actions that targets the bureaucratic mandate to maintain social stability and also appeals to officials’ moral authority. When effective, disguised collective action can secure concessions for participants while allowing activists to strike a middle ground between challenging authorities and organizational survival.
What effect does variation in dual citizenship policies of both sending and receiving societies have on bilateral migration flow? Employing a modified gravity model, we use a new dual citizenship database to examine the effects of allowance within 14 Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) receiving states and more than 100 sending states between 1980 and 2006. We show that dual-citizenship-allowing sending states experience significantly more migration than dual-citizenship-forbidding sending states. We also find a significant increase in migration flow in receiving states that allow for dual citizenship, consistent with previous research. Finally, interaction effects reveal highest flow between sending and receiving states allowing dual citizenship and lowest flow between forbidding sending states and allowing receiving states. These findings emphasize the importance of citizenship policy contexts of countries of origin in influencing a migrant’s decision to move. They also suggest that migrants are rational and informed, valuing the "goods" of citizenship—from political rights to security of status and mobility—in both origin and destination states.
This article explores the origins of local governance in postcolonial contexts. Focusing on migrant communities in the Indonesian island of Java and the networks of elite political and economic relations that emerged under colonial rule, I develop a theory of social exclusion and competition that specifies the conditions under which trading minorities will forge cooperative relations with local political elites in the absence of well-functioning property rights institutions. These informal relationships under colonial rule affect contemporary economic governance. To clarify the importance of social exclusion rather than other factors that may differentiate colonial districts with large Chinese populations, I exploit variation in the settlement patterns of Chinese and Arab trading minorities in Java, which played comparable roles in the island’s colonial economy but faced different degrees of social exclusion. These findings contribute to recent work on colonialism and development, ethnicity and informal institutions, and the origins of democratic performance.
There is broad agreement that states seeking to nationalize their minority populations require both capacity and intent. We argue that political opportunity is also important through a focus on Poland’s policy toward its Ukrainian minority during the first half of the twentieth century. The shift from international norms protecting minority group rights in the interwar period to the defense of individual human rights during the immediate postwar era gave Polish state elites new and devastating tools with which to create a Polish nation-state. Through forced expulsions, internal deportation, and the cultural homogenization of the public sphere, all practices that had been unfeasible during the interwar group rights era, Polish state elites denied Ukrainians sufficient means to perpetuate their culture. The postwar process was relatively quick and almost always brutal.
Can politicians facilitate citizen acceptance of unwelcome policy decisions by acting responsively during the decision-making process? We suggest a framework to analyze the responsiveness–acceptance connection and report findings from two studies designed for that purpose. First, we ran a survey experiment to examine how exogenously induced responsiveness actions affect reactions to a policy decision. Second, we conducted a case study to see how results hold up in a real-world setting. We find that responsiveness actions are rewarded provided that citizens are convinced that politicians have paid attention to their wishes and views. Responsiveness actions that signal willingness to communicate ("to listen" and "to explain") are more effective than the action to follow majority opinion ("to adapt"). However, the responsiveness–acceptance connection is sensitive to perceptual bias; policy losers are hard pressed to accept that politicians have indeed acted responsively.
This article assesses the apparent effect of political multiculturalism on tolerance of Muslim accommodation among native-born majority members. Our principle goal is in understanding how public opinion on religious accommodation varies as a function of both federal multicultural policy, on one hand, and more deeply rooted notions of political culture, on the other. We do so by examining responses to a pair of survey experiments embedded in surveys conducted in Canada and the United States. The experiments allow us to convincingly demonstrate "Muslim exceptionalism." Contextual comparisons across multicultural policy regimes (Canada and the United States) and within them but across distinct political cultures (Quebec vs. English Canada) lend credence to a fairly subdued role for policy and a much larger one for political culture. These effects are, we argue and show, strongly moderated by support for multiculturalism at the individual-level.
This article examines the determinants of immigration policy toward low-skilled workers across 13 relatively wealthy autocracies after World War II. I argue that authoritarian immigration policy is a consequence of an autocrat’s redistributive policy. As the distribution of resource rents in rentier autocracies reduces the incentive of domestic labor to enter the labor force, rentier states rely on migrant workers to meet the demand for low-skilled labor. Autocrats without resource rents, however, lack capacity for redistribution, so they use policies that provide people with wages in exchange for their labor while restricting immigration. Using a policy index that measures the extent to which low-skilled migrant workers can get into a country in a given year, I find strong evidence for this argument across 13 autocracies in the post-World War II era.
Whether elected representatives should be responsive to the wishes of the majority of citizens has been an issue often discussed from a normative perspective. This article shifts the focus by looking at the determinants of support for responsiveness among citizens. Its core argument is that attitudes toward responsiveness vary systematically depending on the policy gains an individual can expect from a government that is responsive to the preferences of the majority of citizens. The analysis of data from the European Social Survey and 21 countries confirms these expectations. Individuals whose ideological stances are reflected well by the incumbent government are less favorable to the idea that governments should be responsive to the preferences of the majority, while one’s proximity to the ideological location of the median citizen increases the odds of support for majority responsiveness. Our findings are stable across a large variety of European democracies.
In this article, we use an experimental survey design to explore how the tactical choices of social movements affect public opinion about whether the government should negotiate with the movement and the bargains that should be struck once negotiations begin. In doing so, we test competing theories about how we should expect the use of tactics with varying degrees of extremeness—including demonstrations, occupations, and bombings—to influence public opinion. We find that respondents are less likely to think the government should negotiate with organizations that use the tactic of bombing when compared with demonstrations or occupations. However, depending on the outcome variable and baseline category used in the analysis, we find mixed support for whether respondents think organizations that use bombings should receive less once negotiations begin. The results of this article are generally consistent with the theoretical and policy-based arguments centering around how governments should not negotiate with organizations that engage in violent activity commonly associated with terrorist organizations.
Are governments responsive to public preferences when legislating in international organizations? This article demonstrates that governments respond to domestic public opinion even when acting at the international level. Specifically, we examine conflict in the European Union’s primary legislative body, the Council of the European Union (EU). We argue that domestic electoral incentives compel governments to react to public opinion. Analyzing a unique data set on all legislative decisions adopted in the Council since 1999, we show that governments are more likely to oppose legislative proposals that extend the level and scope of EU authority when their domestic electorates are skeptical about the EU. We also find that governments are more responsive when the issue of European integration is salient in domestic party politics. Our findings demonstrate that governments can use the international stage to signal their responsiveness to public concerns and that such signals resonate in the domestic political debate.
In authoritarian regimes, seemingly liberal reforms are often poorly implemented in practice. However, this study argues that even weak quasi-democratic institutions can offer resources to political activists. Formal institutions of participation offer politically anodyne frames for activism, allowing activists to distance themselves from political taboos. Weak institutions also allow activists to engineer institutional failures that in turn fuel legal and media-based campaigns. Evidence comes from the effects of China’s 2008 Open Government Information reform. A national field audit finds that local governments satisfy just 14% of citizen requests for basic information. Yet case studies show how Chinese activists exploited the same institution to extract concessions from government agencies and pursue policy change in disparate issue areas. These findings highlight the importance of looking beyond policy implementation to understand the effects of authoritarian institutions on political accountability.
This article argues that variation in public good provision is determined by the salience of demographic and economic regionalism, conceptualized as the presence of multiple large population centers and distinct economic units within a single country’s borders. Two mechanisms—divergent public good preferences and regional self-sufficiency—underpin this relationship. Evidence of these mechanisms as central to low public good provision is found in case studies of Ecuador and Colombia, two countries that score high on standard measures of ethnic diversity and that saw little public good provision during the first century after independence. A region-wide examination of post-independence South America and an investigation of change over time in Venezuela provide further support for the claim that regionalism affects public good provision. A plausible case for this aspect of geography as a cause of low public good provision poses a challenge to the scholarship attributing it to ethnic diversity.
Why are some countries more linguistically homogeneous than others? We posit that the international environment in which a state develops partially determines the extent of its linguistic commonality and national cohesion. Specifically, the presence of an external threat of territorial conquest or externally supported secession leads governing elites to have stronger incentives to pursue nation-building strategies to generate national cohesion, often leading to the cultivation of a common national language through mass schooling. Comparing cases with similar levels of initial linguistic heterogeneity, state capacity, and development, but in different international environments, we find that states that did not face external threats to their territorial integrity were more likely to outsource education and other tools for constructing identity to missionaries or other groups, or not to invest in assimilation at all, leading to higher ethnic heterogeneity. States developing in high threat environments were more likely to invest in nation-building strategies to homogenize their populations.
Political rights provided to immigrants by host countries have received much attention in the literature. Less attention, however, has been paid to the extension of extraterritorial rights by home countries. In this article, I focus on a common type of right provided by home countries to their expatriates—the right of dual citizenship. Dual citizenship rights, I argue, help home countries leverage the financial and human resources of their diasporas, encouraging both remittances and return migration. I test this argument using migrant surveys performed in six host countries and find that migrants from homelands that extend dual citizenship are more likely to both remit and express a desire to return home. The micro finding regarding remittances is confirmed using aggregate panel data for a large sample of homelands over the period 1980-2009. The results point to the importance of political rights and policies as extended by the migrant’s homeland.
What is the legacy of Japanese colonial rule in East Asia? In this article, I use a geographic regression discontinuity design to examine of the long-run effects of Japanese rule over northern China. I find that the Japanese colonization of northern China had a positive long-run effect on state institutions—with persistent increases in schooling, health, and bureaucratic density. I also find suggestive evidence that colonization led to increases in wealth, as measured by census data and nighttime luminosity. The positive legacy of Japanese colonization in northern China suggests that intense state building efforts can pay long-run dividends, even in the context of a brutal and extractive regime.
Existing research has shown that highly diverse countries tend to provide less public goods. This article argues, by contrast, that the relationship is spurious: both contemporary ethnic heterogeneity and low public goods provision represent legacies of a weakly developed state capacity inherited from the past. Classical theories of state formation are then tested to show that favorable topography and climate, high population densities, as well as a history of warfare are conducive to state formation. Using an instrumental variable approach, I show that previous ethnic diversity is not consistently an impediment to the formation of indigenous states and thus to contemporary public goods provision. Empirically, this article uses three different measurements of public goods provision and data on pre-colonial levels of state formation in Asia and Africa to test these various hypotheses.
An increasing number of scholars have established that authoritarian regimes employ quasi-democratic institutions as part of their efforts to retain power. However, we know little about the potential variation among institutions providing citizens with opportunities for voice and the conditions under which such institutions are true channels of responsiveness. In this article, we develop and test the concept of "receptivity," that is, whether autocrats are willing to incorporate citizen preferences into policy, using a list experiment of 1,377 provincial-and city-level leaders in China. Contrary to expectation, we find that leaders are similarly receptive to citizen suggestions obtained through either formal institutions or the Internet unless they perceive antagonism between the state and citizens, in which case receptivity to input from the Internet declines, while receptivity to formal institutions remains unchanged. Our findings show that whether quasi-democratic institutions are mere window dressing or true channels of responsiveness depends on the perceived quality of state–society relations.
A new electoral design for subnational congress elections in China allows me to investigate the informational utility of authoritarian elections. Authoritarian regimes are notoriously bad at solving the moral hazard problem in the voter’s agency relationship with politicians. Borrowing from the literature on political selection, I theorize that authoritarian elections can nonetheless solve the adverse selection problem: Chinese voters can use their electoral power to select "good types," with personal qualities that signal they will reliably represent local interests. I analyze original data from a survey of 4,071 Chinese local congressmen and women, including voter nominees and communist party nominees. I find that voters do in fact overcome coordination difficulties to nominate and elect "good types." In contacting politicians about local problems after the elections, however, voters hedge their bets by contacting regime insiders too. At these very local levels, congressional representation by means of political selection co-exists with communist party nominating and veto power in the electoral process.
Consultative authoritarianism challenges existing conceptions of nondemocratic governance. Citizen participation channels are designed to improve policymaking and increase feelings of regime responsiveness, but how successful are these limited reforms in stemming pressure for broader change? The article develops a new theoretical lens to explain how common citizens perceive the introduction of partially liberalizing reforms and tests the implications using an original survey experiment of Chinese netizens. Respondents randomly exposed to the National People’s Congress’ (NPC) new online participation portals show greater satisfaction with the regime and feelings of government responsiveness, but these effects are limited to less educated, politically excluded citizens.
Acknowledging the role played by character valence issues in affecting parties’ fortunes, several recent papers have investigated the possible intentional use of such issues in electoral contests. A corollary of this line of research has focused on identifying conditions under which parties are expected to invest more in valence campaigning. In this article, we focus on the role played by parties’ relative ideological positions in a multiparty setting. We identify the existence of an inverse relationship between the distance of a party from its ideologically adjacent competitors and its incentive to campaign on character valence issues. However, the extent of this relationship can be conditional on institutional and electoral factors. We test these hypotheses by focusing on the emphasis a party places in its electoral manifestos on the specific character valence issue of corruption. Statistical results largely confirm our hypotheses.
Political scientists have developed important new ideas for using spatial diagrams to enhance quantitative research. Yet the potential uses of diagrams for qualitative research have not been explored systematically. We begin to correct this omission by showing how set diagrams can facilitate the application of qualitative methods and improve the presentation of qualitative findings. Set diagrams can be used in conjunction with a wide range of qualitative methodologies, including process tracing, concept formation, counterfactual analysis, sequence elaboration, and qualitative comparative analysis. We illustrate the utility of set diagrams by drawing on substantive examples of qualitative research in the fields of international relations and comparative politics.
Foreign portfolio stock investors (FPSIs) often attach political criteria to their investment choices, sometimes in the hope of pressuring policymakers in boycotted markets to adjust their policies. This article asks when the decision to not invest in foreign stock markets for political reasons catalyzes policy change in those countries. Unlike investors in government bonds that target state interests directly, FPSIs directly target the interests of the shareholders and managers of publicly listed firms. I argue that FPSI’s policymaking influence is limited by their ability to damage shareholders’ and managers’ interests and by those shareholders’ and managers’ ability to affect policy change. I test my theory with a quantitative analysis of a uniquely well-suited data set of policy reactions to CalPERS’ Permissible Equity Markets Policy. The results conform to my theoretical expectations.
What explains the success and failure of radical right parties over time and across countries? This article presents a new theory of the radical right that emphasizes its reactive nature and views it as backlash against the political successes of minorities and concessions extracted on their behalf. Unlike approaches that focus on competition between the extreme and mainstream parties, the theory stresses the dynamics between radical right and non-proximate parties that promote minority rights. Most notably, it derives the salience of identity issues in party politics from the polarization of the party system. The theory is tested with a new party-election-level dataset covering all post-communist democracies over the past 20 years. The results provide strong support for the theory and show that the rise and fall of radical right parties is shaped by the politics of minority accommodation.
Giovanni Sartori once described African party systems as "formless." Our contribution challenges this view in an era of resurgent multipartism that swept through the subcontinent in the early 1990s and continues until today. The article brings together contemporary research on African party systems with the wider disciplinary literature on party system institutionalization. Using a data set including all continuous election sequences in Africa from 1950 to 2008, we find that Africa has some of the most volatile party systems ever recorded and yet, tremendous diversity across regimes. We test the relative impact of political institutions, economic performance, the history of party system development, and social cleavage structure on party system institutionalization in Africa. We find that its party systems have been shaped by a set of factors unique to the subcontinent, but some of the general global patterns of party system development hold true in Africa as well.
Why do groups want to secede and where is demand for self-determination most likely to arise? We argue self-determination demand is moderated by the projected economic costs of policy autonomy. The trade-off between income and sovereignty implies that, other things being equal, richer regions are more likely to demand more autonomy. This trade-off suggests that relative regional income is a key predictor of autonomy demands. We show evidence of this using new data collected at the level of second-tier administrative sub-divisions in 48 decentralized countries. Consistent with a demand-and-supply model of self-determination, we find that levels of policy autonomy are positively correlated with relative regional income, regional population share, natural resource endowment, and regional inter-personal inequality. Ethnically distinct regions have lower sovereignty, which could explain higher levels of conflict in these regions, but this association is conditional on controlling for the interactive effects between ethnic distinctiveness and regional inter-personal inequality.
Studies on retrospective voting argue that voters under presidentialism tend to assign co-responsibility for the president’s performance to her party in congressional elections. However, it is not uncommon for presidential parties to distance themselves from an unpopular president or for opposition parties to cooperate with a popular president. In doing so, parties can signal to voters that they side with a popular (or against an unpopular) president. Yet little is known about whether this strategic behavior has electoral payoffs. This study proposes a popularity-response model, where parties’ electoral outcomes are a product of how they respond to public opinion on the president. I hypothesize that parties defecting from an unpopular president (or cooperating with a popular president) minimize electoral losses and obtain a further electoral boost. Analysis using an original dataset coding issue congruence between presidents and parties prior to 35 elections in 18 Latin American countries supports this claim.
This article analyzes the relationship between collective protest and social spending in Latin America from 1970 to 2007. I argue that under democracy, organized labor is in a better position relative to other groups in society to obtain social policy concessions as a consequence of their collective action efforts. Labor insiders mobilize around specific demands, and labor strikes carry significant economic and political costs on governments. In contrast, other groups in society rarely protest around specific social policy issues and are more often subject to successful demobilization tactics from political leaders. Results from an error correction model (ECM) show that in democracies, collective protest has differentiated effects on social spending. While strikes have a strong positive long-term effect on social security and welfare spending, none of the different forms of collective protest affect education or health spending. Importantly, I also find evidence of a deterrent effect of mass protests in democratic regimes; cutbacks in human capital spending are less likely as peaceful large-scale demonstrations increase.
The question of how to explain policy change has led to important academic debate over the past two decades. This article challenges explanations regarding veto players (VPs), arguing that interest groups (IGs) sometimes play a more decisive role than VPs —depending on the degree of organization and mobilization of such groups. The comparative analysis of judicial reforms in Italy, Belgium, and France shows the conditions under which IGs—understood here as legal professions—matter in the lawmaking process. Ceteris paribus, the more cohesive and legitimate an IG, the more likely it is to influence lawmaking regardless of the VP configuration. Analyses of legislative and policy change should therefore consider not only institutional and partisan actors but also the role of social group and IG in this process.
Case studies suggest that ethnic groups with autonomous institutional arrangements are more prone to secede, but other evidence indicates that autonomy reduces the likelihood of secession. To address this debate, we disaggregate their autonomy status into three categories—currently autonomous, never autonomous, and lost autonomy—and then unpack how each shapes the logic of collective action. We argue groups that were never autonomous are unlikely to mobilize due to a lack of collective action capacity, whereas currently autonomous groups may have the capacity but often lack the motivation. Most important, groups that have lost autonomy often possess both strong incentives and the capacity to pursue secession, which facilitates collective action. Moreover, autonomy retraction weakens the government’s ability to make future credible commitments to redress grievances. We test these conjectures with data on the autonomous status and separatist behavior of 324 groups in more than 100 countries from 1960 to 2000. Our analysis shows clear empirical results regarding the relationship between autonomy status and separatism. Most notably, we find that formerly autonomous groups are the most likely to secede, and that both currently autonomous and never autonomous groups are much less likely.
Political preferences are multi-dimensional, covering topics like redistribution, immigration, and abortion. But what accounts for people’s political preferences? We argue that an individual’s work experiences on the job play an important part in shaping attitudes. In a process of generalization and transposition, people apply the kinds of reasoning, heuristics, and problem-solving techniques they learn and use at work in all realms of life. In this article, we briefly discuss the dimensionality of the political preference space and then explicate our account that links work experiences with attitudes. We use European Social Survey data to establish correlations between work experiences and attitudes and find evidence that is consistent with our account.
This article presents robust findings for the positive effect of corruption on the risk of ethnic civil war, using binary time-series-cross-section data that cover 87 to 121 countries (per year) between 1984 and 2007. Following a grievance-based explanation of violent intrastate conflict, we argue that corruption increases the risk of large-scale ethnic violence, as it creates distortions in the political decision-making process which lead to a deepening of political and economic inequalities between different ethnic groups. The positive effect of corruption on the risk of ethnic civil war is robust to various model specifications, including the interaction between corruption and natural resource wealth.
Although the concept of valence figures in many studies of voting behavior, very few have investigated its sources. In this article, we address this deficiency by assessing the extent to which individual valence assessments are affected by the left–right policy distance between parties and respondents as well as by their locations relative to the center of the left-right spectrum. Using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, we find very widespread support for both hypotheses. Correcting for differential item functioning (DIF) reveals that, although respondents tend to over-estimate the distance to ‘opposite-side’ parties, these misperceptions do not account for our findings. Indeed, with DIF corrected, most surveys reveal tendencies not only for opposite-side parties to be given lower valence scores in general, but also for policy distance to be counted more heavily against them. The article concludes with a discussion of possible sources of this bilateral structuring of valence assessments.
This article analyzes the effect of parties’ election statements on voter perceptions of party policy positions. It reveals robust evidence that campaign policy announcements do influence party images: As a result of the campaign, party policy brands shift in the direction of the platform. Hence, it challenges the conclusion in Adams, Ezrow, and Somer-Topcu that voters do not adjust their perception of parties’ positions to campaign statements. This article makes a key contribution to our understanding of elections, as it provides empirical evidence that election campaigns are useful for voters to identify changes in parties’ policy preferences. It also opens avenues for further research that the results in Adams et al. had discouraged from, such as analyses of the factors that explain variation in the relevance of campaign statements.
Scholars of electoral politics have long argued that the size of a party system is jointly determined by social diversity and district magnitude. However, no clear consensus exists regarding the best operationalization of the diversity of a society. Furthermore, the relationship between diversity and electoral rules, on one hand, and the effective number of parties, on the other hand, has never been tested at the level of the electoral district in a cross-national comparative context. This article aims to fill both holes and introduces the concept of cross-district diversity. I argue that the extent of cross-district diversity in a country exerts a substantial qualifying impact on the relationship between district-level diversity and the effective number of parties. Support for this finding emerges from a multilevel regression analysis that includes thousands of electoral districts in a diverse set of 29 democracies.
Excessive fiscal spending is commonly cited as a root of the current European debt crisis. This article suggests, like others, that the rise of competitiveness imbalances contributing to national imbalances in total borrowing is a better explanation for systemic differences toward Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) countries’ exposure to market speculation. We identify one driver of this divergence: a country’s capacity to limit sheltered sector wage growth, relative to wage growth in the manufacturing sector. Corporatist institutions that linked sectoral wage developments together in the surplus countries provided those with a comparative wage advantage vis-à-vis EMU’s debtor nations, which helps explain why the EMU core has emerged relatively unscathed from market speculation during the crisis despite the poor fiscal performance of some of the core countries during EMU’s early years. Using a panel regression analysis, we demonstrate that rising differentials between public and manufacturing sector wage growth, and wage-governance institutions that weakly coordinate exposed and sheltered sectors, are significantly correlated with export decline. We also find that weak-governance institutions are significantly associated with more prominent export decline inside as opposed to outside a monetary union.
In response to growing demographic diversity, European countries have selectively implemented political multiculturalism, a set of policies that seek to redefine prevailing conceptions of national identity. We explore the consequences of such policies for mass political support. Applying multi-level modeling to the 2002 and 2010 waves of the European Social Survey and analyzing multiple dependent variables including trust in regime institutions and assessments of the government of the day and the political system’s performance, we show that the extensive adoption of multicultural policies magnifies the degree to which hostility to immigration is negatively associated with political support. This finding, robust to multiple specifications, is corroborated using European Values Survey data. It underscores how policies that challenge citizens’ conceptions of national identity strengthen the link between opposition to immigration and political discontent, furnishing ongoing opportunities for rightist fringe parties to capitalize on anti-immigrant sentiment among the politically alienated.
This article seeks to account for the variation in the trajectory of conflict in the context of peripheral civil wars by emphasizing the importance of rebel-population ties. In examining the trajectory of peripheral civil wars, it expands the range of outcomes traditionally examined in the literature. The empirical validity of the theoretical argument is tested using a new data set of 166 rebel groups involved in 58 peripheral insurgencies between 1960 and 2010. I trace social embeddedness of rebel groups to pre-war political processes and institutions. Rebel groups are coded on six characteristics to create a 7-point rebel-type scale as a measure of their embeddedness in the population. The results provide support to the argument that the social embeddedness of a rebel group exercises a significant effect on the trajectory of peripheral civil wars. However, the substantive effect of embeddedness on some outcomes is more pronounced than on others.
In this study, we evaluate how voter polarization and the level of partisanship influence electoral outcomes. We show that when the level of partisanship is low, the polarization of voter preferences translates into popular support for extreme parties. In contrast, longstanding attachments to mainstream (moderate) parties dampen the relationship between voter polarization and support for extreme parties. The implication of these findings is that the lack of voter attachment to parties contributes to extreme party competition, while strong attachment can help reduce party extremism even if electorates are polarized.
I address the question "when do peasants on collectively owned land demand private titles?" by analyzing a land titling program in Mexico. I argue Mexico’s "punishment regime" in the 20th century influences the capacity of peasants to invest in a private title in the 21st century. Where commercial farmers were more powerful, the state issued fewer land grants to peasants and invested in public goods to capture electoral support from commercial farmers. Fewer peasants received land in these areas, but those who did had access to public goods that reduced socioeconomic marginalization and increased their capacity to invest in a private title. Using a technique called causal mediation analysis, I show that a higher percentage of arable land granted to the peasant sector during the 20th century directly reduces the likelihood of land privatization in the 21st century, and indirectly reduces privatization through farm productivity and human development levels.
A large body of scholarship has asserted that inequalities in the distribution of fixed assets act as a barrier to democratic transitions. This article proposes a theoretical and empirical amendment of this finding, by arguing that employment conditions in the countryside, rather than inequalities in the distribution of fixed assets affected electoral outcomes in societies characterized by high levels of rural inequality. Using empirical evidence from the Prussian districts of Imperial Germany during the period between 1871 and 1912, we show that relative labor market shortages of agricultural workers affected electoral outcomes under conditions of an imperfect protection of electoral secrecy. Shortages of agricultural workers reduced the electoral strength of conservative politicians and increased the willingness of rural voters to "take electoral risks" and vote for the opposition Social Democratic Party. Labor shortages also affect preferences of individual legislators over the reform of electoral institutions. We find that politicians in districts experiencing high levels of labor shortage, and thus, higher costs of electoral intimidation are more willing to support changes in electoral rules that increase the protection of electoral secrecy. In theoretical terms, our findings contribute to the literature linking rural inequality and democratization, by demonstrating the importance of labor scarcity as a source of political cleavages over electoral reforms.
We evaluate the role of a new type of democratic institution, participatory budgeting (PB), for improving citizens’ well-being. Participatory institutions are said to enhance governance, citizens’ empowerment, and the quality of democracy, creating a virtuous cycle to improve the poor’s well-being. Drawing from an original database of Brazil’s largest cities over the last 20 years, we assess whether adopting PB programs influences several indicators of well-being inputs, processes, and outcomes. We find PB programs are strongly associated with increases in health care spending, increases in civil society organizations, and decreases in infant mortality rates. This connection strengthens dramatically as PB programs remain in place over longer time frames. Furthermore, PB’s connection to well-being strengthens in the hand of mayors from the nationally powerful, ideologically and electorally motivated Workers’ Party. Our argument directly addresses debates on democracy and well-being and has powerful implications for participation, governance, and economic development.
The sudden and perhaps unexpected appearance of populist parties in the 1990s shows no sign of immediately vanishing. The lion’s share of the research on populism has focused on defining populism, on the causes for its rise and continued success, and more recently on its influence on government and on public policy. Less research has, however, been conducted on measuring populist attitudes among voters. In this article, we seek to fill this gap by measuring populist attitudes and to investigate whether these attitudes can be linked with party preferences. We distinguish three political attitudes: (1) populist attitudes, (2) pluralist attitudes, and (3) elitist attitudes. We devise a measurement of these attitudes and explore their validity by way of using a principal component analysis on a representative Dutch data set (N = 600). We indeed find three statistically separate scales of political attitudes. We further validated the scales by testing whether they are linked to party preferences and find that voters who score high on the populist scale have a significantly higher preference for the Dutch populist parties, the Party for Freedom, and the Socialist Party.
We examine how veto players and the government’s valuation of political control of economic activity affect the likelihood of privatization. When the government ascribes a high value to political control, veto players impede privatization because they would have to be compensated for their losses. When the value of political control is low, the government prefers to privatize enterprises that become difficult to control with multiple veto players. We test the theory against data on energy privatizations in developing countries, 1988-2008. Oil prices offer a quantitative measure of the government’s valuation of controlling the energy sector. When oil prices are high, the government has a keen interest in controlling the energy sector. Accordingly, additional veto players reduce (increase) the likelihood of privatization in times of high (low) oil prices. Beyond illuminating the politics of privatization, the results inform debates on the role of veto players in government policy.
In 1936, while Sweden gave birth to one of the most peaceful solutions to class conflict (i.e., the neo-corporatist welfare state), Spain gave birth to one of the most violent outcomes of class conflict: the Spanish Civil War. Why did the political and socio-economic elites choose collaboration in Sweden and violent confrontation in Spain? This article underlines an overlooked intervening factor: the organization of the bureaucracy. In the late 19th century, semi-authoritarian Sweden created a meritocratic autonomous bureaucracy. In contrast, Spain—where executive and administrative positions were frequently accountable to parliamentary dynamics—built a patronage-based administration. The result was that the ruling Swedish Left could not offer public offices to core supporters and had to restrict its policies to satisfy the (more collaborationist) demands of its "policy-seekers," while the ruling Spanish Left, thanks to the ample margin of maneuver it enjoyed to appoint and promote state officials, could satisfy the (more confrontational) demands of its "office-seekers."
Why do pro-democracy protests emerge in some countries at certain periods of time and not others? Pro-democracy protests, I argue, are more likely to arise when the economy is not performing well and people blame the autocratic nature of their regime for the economy, than when the economy is performing well, or when people do not blame the nature of their regime for the poor state of the economy. People are more likely to associate the economy with the nature of their regime, I further argue, in election periods, particularly when people are unable to remove the incumbent government from power through elections. My argument is supported by a statistical analysis of pro-democracy protests in 158 countries between 2006 and 2011, showing that not only is the economy an important factor explaining the emergence of pro-democracy protests, but that other factors commonly thought to affect these protests, including technologies like cell phones and the Internet, are not.
Is there a resource curse? Some scholars argue that resource income is associated with slower transitions to democracy; others contend that the negative effects of resources are conditional on factors such as institutional quality. To test these competing hypotheses, this article exploits the price spike caused by the 1973 oil embargo, which transformed several countries with latent oil industries into resource-reliant states. Our quasi-experimental research design allows for better identification of causation than the associational approaches common in the literature. We use the method of synthetic controls to compare the political development of states that received resource-derived revenue with how these states would have behaved in a counterfactual world without such revenue. We find that there is little evidence that a resource curse systematically prevents democratization or that institutional quality alone determines outcomes. Nevertheless, resource income meaningfully affects outcomes and even contributes to democratization in some instances.
Often, one or more of the parties participating in an election refuse to comply with the announced results and frequently resort to extra-legal strategies to dispute electoral outcomes. Such protests frequently turn violent, occasionally with major repercussions for political stability and the process of democratization. But, why do some political parties use legal avenues to reject electoral outcomes whereas others go outside of the established legal routes? Based on the original data from new democracies in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union from 1990 to 2009, I show that political parties are more likely to reject electoral outcomes using extra-legal means when election-related institutions have been changed prior to an election. This study demonstrates the importance of accounting for pre-election day factors when analyzing post-electoral disputes. It also contributes to the literature by presenting a new conceptual framework for studying electoral compliance.
Many scholars have argued that partisan differences have disappeared since the 1980s because of the ever-increasing economic globalization and the deepening of European integration. Using a new primary data set on public ownership that contains detailed information on privatization in 20 countries between 1980 and 2007, we test these claims empirically in relation to state ownership. We pay special attention to the question of whether changes in the international political economy, notably globalization and different aspects of European integration, condition partisan politics. Our empirical findings suggest that political parties have continued to significantly shape national privatization trajectories in line with the classic partisan hypothesis. While partisan differences are somewhat reduced by the liberalizing and market-building efforts of the European Union, globalization does not condition partisan effects. Moreover, the run-up to the European Monetary Union even seems to have reinforced partisan differences.
What are the dynamics of distributive politics in a setting of multiparty competition? Existing studies on the allocation of resources across multiple electoral districts focus primarily on a setting of two-party competition and consider only the core versus swing district hypotheses. This framework does not correspond to the actual electoral setting in many countries and ignores valuable information furnished by a context of multiparty competition. Compared with two-party elections, multiparty elections provide more information about the underlying distribution of the ideological preferences of voters in a district; this information could be utilized by the incumbent party to maximize electoral returns. In this article, I argue that a setting of multiparty competition presents incentives to the incumbent party to channel disproportionately more resources to districts with an ideologically close challenger. Systematic evidence from the Conditional Cash Transfer program spending in 878 districts of Turkey from 2005 to 2008 supports this hypothesis.
A considerable debate precludes drawing conclusions about oil’s effect on democracy. This article challenges this stalemate by significantly expanding the scope of the previous research and using meta-regression analysis to examine the integrated results of extant scholarship. While the results suggest a nontrivial negative association between oil and democracy across the globe, they also indicate a notable variation in this relationship across world regions and institutional contexts. A conditioning effect of institutions may lie more in a broader set of economic and political institutions, less so in previous political regime, but not in institutions associated with British colonial past. Finally, while oil does not seem to impede democracy by retarding two key channels of modernization—income and urbanization—it may have an indirect negative effect on democracy through its adverse impact on education.
Electoral gender quotas have become the subject of a growing literature in comparative politics, with the potential to affect how scholars study a wide range of electoral and representative processes. Yet, debates have emerged over how to define and categorize these policies, with implications for the ability to compare cases and draw broader conclusions about their impact in countries around the globe. Reviewing these perspectives, this article draws on work on concept formation to propose a pragmatic approach, focused on matching typologies to research questions. It emphasizes the advantages of this solution for promoting cumulative research and concludes with some thoughts for future research on gender quotas and comparative politics.
The persistence of policy switches—whereby presidents renege on campaign promises shortly after winning elections—30 years after Latin America’s redemocratization defies established notions of democratic representation, and poses a puzzle to analysts and voters alike. In this article, I advance current explanations for switches, by arguing they can only be understood in the context of currency booms and crises, typical of Latin American economies after their reintegration into world finance in the 1970s. To test my propositions empirically, I examine elections held in the region between 1978 and 2006 and find evidence consistent with the claim that switches are more likely to occur in periods of dollar scarcity, when the need to attract financial capital to the economy pushes leftist presidents into adopting policies opposed to the programs they announced during campaign.
This article analyzes the use of vetoes in multiparty presidential systems. It suggests that the nature of executive-legislative bargaining is fundamentally altered when multiple parties compose the legislature and when presidential veto prerogatives are extended to incorporate partial (line-item) vetoes. Using a data set that includes all bills passed by the Argentine Congress in the past 25 years, we estimate veto occurrence under different scenarios. Our findings are at odds with received expectations: whether the President holds a majority in Congress or not fails to explain variations in the likelihood of vetoes. Instead, the level of significance of legislation is relevant for predicting vetoes, with landmark legislation being more likely to be vetoed regardless of levels of support for the president in Congress. In addition, partial vetoes become the preferred alternative when confronting legislation initiated by the president herself.
Parties can choose to concentrate on topics which other parties cover relatively little. In such cases, they have a programmatic niche profile compared with their mainstream rivals. We argue that parties should be more likely to switch between a niche and a mainstream profile in response to unsatisfactory electoral results. However, these vote-seeking incentives to change salience profiles should have greater influence on parties that are small, young, and/or in opposition. Such parties will find it easier and more attractive to change their salience profiles. We use a measure of niche profiles based on manifesto coding and test our hypotheses in 22 countries with a transition model. For niche-to-mainstream transitions in party profiles, the results confirm our expectations, but vote-seeking incentives do not lead mainstream parties to shift to a niche profile. The results of this article have implications for our understanding of the dynamics of party competition in multiparty systems.
Patterns of military violence against civilians vary considerably, between conflicts and within them. This article explores why some combatants are more likely than others to engage in violence against civilians, focusing on a particular subset of such violence, violence that is not planned or authorized by military superiors, termed opportunistic violence. In a sample of Israeli combat soldiers from the Second Intifada, opportunistic violence was found to be strongly associated with duration of deployment among civilians. Long deployments erode social and moral norms, raising the likelihood that combatants will act opportunistically. However, the relationship between deployment duration and opportunistic violence was moderated by unit structure, such that long deployments were more likely to cause opportunistic violence in units with weak command structures. These findings suggest that the deleterious effects of long deployments are not inevitable but can be limited to a large extent through well-functioning structures of command and discipline.
In recent decades, business interests became protagonists of welfare retrenchment in many countries. In contrast, Austria’s national business organization, the WKÖ (Wirtschaftskammer Österreich), defended welfare programs and social partnership against government initiatives to dismantle them. Drawing on interviews and media reports, this article analyzes the reasons for this deviation, focusing on reforms in two fields: (a) public pensions and (b) social insurance administration. The article suggests that the institutional setup of interest representation in Austria explains this stance better than alternative explanations that focus on competitive advantages. The article identifies compulsory membership, equal voting rights, and encompassing organization as the relevant features of the institutional setup. These features shaped the WKÖ’s social policy attitudes in two ways: first, by ensuring a strong role for small firms, and second, by reducing the vulnerability of the organization to discontented minorities. The findings point to the importance of organizational structures in shaping associational policy preferences.
How does political ambition affect strategies of cooperation in Congress? What activities do legislators develop with their peers to maximize their career goals? One of the main collaborative activities in a legislature, cosponsorship, has been widely analyzed in the literature as a position taking device. However, most findings have been restricted to environments where ambition is static (i.e., legislators pursuing permanent reelection), which restricts de facto the variety of causes and implications of legislative cooperation. I analyze patterns of cosponsorship as a function of ambition in a multilevel setting where legislators praise subnational executive positions more than a seat in the House. Through the analysis of about 48,000 bills introduced in the Argentine Congress between 1983 and 2007 and the development of a map of political careers, I follow a social networks approach to unfold different patterns of legislative cooperation. Findings show that patterns of cooperation among prospective gubernatorial candidates are strongly positive, while similar effects are not observed at the municipal level.
How much leeway did governments have in designing bank bailouts and deciding on the height of intervention during the 2007-2009 financial crisis? By analyzing the variety of bailouts in Europe and North America, we will show that the strategies governments use to cope with the instability of financial markets does not depend on economic conditions alone. Rather, they take root in the institutional and political setting of each country and vary in particular according to the different types of business–government relations banks were able to entertain with public decision makers. Still, "crony capitalism" accounts overstate the role of bank lobbying. With four case studies of the Irish, Danish, British, and French bank bailout, we show that countries with close one-on-one relationships between policy makers and bank management tended to develop unbalanced bailout packages, while countries where banks negotiated collectively developed solutions with a greater burden-sharing from private institutions.
Regional trade agreements (RTAs) all over the world share many of the same institutional features—from dispute-settlement mechanisms to legalized language to escape clauses—and espouse many of the same goals. But many of those features are unimplemented in different contexts across the world. Many observers have pointed to an "implementation gap" in RTAs—most of which promise much but deliver relatively little—but offer no explanation for this gap. I argue that this is explained by domestic capacity. In countries where the rule of law is weak and infrastructure is insufficient—and particularly when those elements interact—it is difficult to implement trade agreements. This article utilizes expert survey data to demonstrate that member states with poor infrastructure and little respect for the rule of law are unable to carry out the obligations they agree to in their trade agreements. Domestic capacity—both physical and institutional—can explain the implementation gap between what agreements promise and what they deliver, as well as the variation in the economic performance of these RTAs.
The claim that oil wealth tends to block democratic transitions has recently been challenged by Haber and Menaldo, who use historical data going back to 1800 and conclude there is no "resource curse." We revisit their data and models, and show they might be correct for the period before the 1970s, but since about 1980, there has been a pronounced resource curse. We argue that oil wealth only became a hindrance to democratic transitions after the transformative events of the 1970s, which enabled developing country governments to capture the oil rents that were previously siphoned off by foreign-owned firms. We also explain why the Haber–Menaldo study failed to identify this: partly because the authors draw invalid inferences from their data and partly because they assume that the relationship between oil wealth and democracy has not changed for the past 200 years.
Previous studies of electoral participation in Latin America have focused on the political and institutional factors that influence country differences in the aggregate level of turnout. This article provides a theoretical and empirical examination of the individual-level factors that have an impact on citizens’ propensity to vote. We test three theoretical perspectives that have been used to explain electoral participation in industrialized democracies (voters’ resources, voters’ motivations, and mobilization networks). Using a series of logistic and hierarchical models, we demonstrate that the demographic characteristics of voters (age and education) and citizens’ insertion in mobilizing networks (civic organizations and the working place) are strong predictors of electoral participation in Latin America. Our analysis also confirms the importance of contextual and institutional variables to explain turnout in the region.
How does the institutional context affect government responses to fiscal austerity? Despite the "institutional turn" in political science, we still possess an incomplete understanding of the relationship between a core aspect of the institutional setting of countries—namely institutional fragmentation—and the policy consequences of fiscal pressure. The article advances research on this question by integrating theories on the blame-avoidance effect of institutional fragmentation with theories on the effect of party constituencies on social policies. The result is a set of novel hypotheses about the conditional effects of institutional fragmentation that are tested empirically on quantitative time series data on unemployment protection from 17 advanced democracies. The analyses show that institutional fragmentation is an important determinant of government responses to fiscal austerity, but the effect depends on the partisan composition of the government.
This article investigates whether and how gender shapes access to elite political networks, using the case of Argentina, the first country in the world to adopt a national-level quota law in 1991. Quotas have significantly improved women’s access to elected office, without altering either the gendered hierarchies or gendered power networks that govern political advancement. We find that while men and women elected to the national congress have considerable political experience, men are more likely to have held executive office, particularly posts that provide access to resources that sustain clientelism. We further find that female legislators are less likely to be married and have children than male legislators, indicating that women’s domestic responsibilities circumscribe their political careers.
Previous empirical research has found evidence suggesting that the character-based valence attributes of parties, such as competence and integrity, can have notable effects of levels of electoral support (Clark, 2009; Mondak, 1995). A related strand of literature analyzes the importance of parties’ policy positions. In this study, we bring together research on valence and party dispersion to examine whether the ideological dispersion of parties in a party system mediates the electoral impact of valence. We perform empirical analyses covering nine Western European countries over the period 1976 to 2003, and test the hypothesis that when parties are more ideologically proximate to the mean voter position, character-based valence attributes will be of greater significance in determining parties’ electoral fortunes. Surprisingly, we find no support for this hypothesis. Instead, our analyses suggest that the more ideologically dispersed parties are, the more likely it is that character-based valence attributes will affect parties’ vote shares.
This study attempts to contribute to the growing debate over democratic accountability by focusing on the electoral impact of natural disasters and economic crises in the Caribbean. Although largely ignored by political science, the polities in the region share a long history of democratic governance as well as extreme vulnerability to adverse weather conditions and global economic fluctuations. The Caribbean thus offers unusually fertile opportunities for research on the capacity of voters to make rational electoral decisions. Two key questions are addressed. First, to what extent do citizens of the Caribbean punish incumbents for exogenous economic and climatic shocks? Second, what factors, if any, help to insulate democratic leaders from blame for conditions largely outside their control? Contrary to recent research on natural disasters and economic downturns in other contexts, the analysis provides no evidence that voting in the Caribbean has been characterized by systematic attribution errors or electoral myopia. The pattern of citizen attribution of responsibility to policy makers, however, has varied significantly with national independence and political scale.
To understand the limitations of discrete regime type data for studying authoritarianism, I scrutinize three regime type data sets provided by Cheibub, Gandhi, and Vreeland, Hadenius and Teorell, and Geddes. The political narratives of Nicaragua, Colombia, and Brazil show that the different data sets on regime type lend themselves to concept stretching and misuse, which threatens measurement validity. In an extension of Fjelde’s analysis of civil conflict onset, I demonstrate that interchangeably using the data sets leads to divergent predictions, it is sensitive to outliers, and the data ignore certain institutions. The critique expounds on special issues with discrete data on regime type so that scholars make more informed choices and are better able to compare results. The mixed-methods assessment of discrete data on regime type demonstrates the importance of proper concept formation in theory testing. Maximizing the impact of such data requires the scholar to make more theoretically informed choices.
Over the past decade, leftist presidents in Latin America have sought to recentralize authority by reversing the decentralizing reforms that swept the region in the 1980s and 1990s. This article explains why subnational opposition elites were able to resist recentralization in Bolivia, but not in Venezuela or Ecuador. I argue that opposition mayors and governors increase the chance of success against the president if they can transcend their interelite policy struggles with him and mobilize average citizens against recentralization. In Bolivia, the concentration of subnational opposition victories in eastern lowland departments, which share a common regional identity and dense organizational networks, enabled governors to enlist societal support in defense of decentralization, ultimately forcing compromise upon the president. In Ecuador and Venezuela in contrast, the diffusion of opposition jurisdictions foreclosed the possibility of encouraging societal opposition through appeals to common regional identities, allowing presidents to proceed with recentralization unchecked.
Early studies of electoral behavior proposed that party identification could be negative as well as positive. Over time, though, the concept became mostly understood as a positive construct. The few studies that took negative identification into account tended to portray it as a marginal factor that went "hand-in-hand" with positive preferences. Recent scholarship in psychology reaffirms, however, that negative evaluations are not simply the bipolar opposite of positive ones. This article considers negative party identification from this standpoint, and evaluates its impact in recent national elections in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. Our findings highlight the autonomous power of negative partisanship. They indicate as well that ideology has an influence on positive and negative partisan identification.
As an emerging federal system, the European Union (EU) divides decision-making powers between multiple levels of government. Yet little is known about how EU citizens attribute responsibility to the EU. In particular, do people hold the EU, rather than national governments, responsible for different policy outcomes, some of which are primarily decided at the EU level? This article investigates the extent to which institutional differences and individual biases influence citizens’ attribution of responsibility in the EU. We rely on unique survey data collected in all 27 EU member states to explore how citizens attribute responsibility across five different policy areas. Using a multilevel model of responsibility judgments, our findings show that while citizens’ evaluations correspond to the institutional context, group-serving biases, related to support for the EU, have a more important role in shaping attributions of responsibility in the EU.
Scholars have long argued that political participation is determined by institutional context. Within the voter turnout literature, the impact of various institutional structures has been demonstrated in numerous studies. Curiously, a similar context-driven research agenda exploring the correlates of nonelectoral participation (NEP) has not received the same attention. This study addresses this lacuna by testing a political opportunity structure (POS) model of citizen activism across 24 old and new democracies using International Social Survey Programme 2004: Citizenship (ISSP 2004) data. Using a multilevel modeling approach, this study tests a competition versus consensus conception of how decentralized institutions determine NEP. This research demonstrates that states with more competitive veto points operating through systems of horizontal and territorial decentralization increase individual NEP. In addition, it interacts with social mobilization networks to promote greater citizen activism: Institutional context counts only when citizens are mobilized.
This article considers how partisanship conditions attitudes toward corruption. Stirred by the puzzle of why corruption does not seem to have the electoral consequences we would expect, it explores whether party supporters are more tolerant toward corruption cases when they affect their own party. The partisan-bias hypothesis is confirmed by a survey experiment carried out in Spain, a country where a number of corruption scandals have been recently visible. The results show that the same offense is judged differently depending on whether the responsible politician is a member of the respondent’s party, of unknown partisan affiliation, or of a rival party. Furthermore, the degree of partisan bias depends on political sophistication. This suggests that although partisanship may induce tolerance to same-party corruption practices, the partisan bias disappears when political awareness is high.
Despite the frequent occurrence of election boycotts, there are few studies available in the scholarly literature concerning their effectiveness, particularly as a strategy of opposition parties seeking to bring about the end of electoral authoritarian governments. This article uses an original data set with global coverage of hybrid regimes from 1981 to 2006, and uses event-history analysis to determine the efficacy of boycotts in national elections among other risk factors thought to undermine hybrid regimes. This article also takes a preliminary look at democratization outcomes following boycotted and contested elections in hybrid regimes. The core findings are that boycotts hasten the electoral defeat of hybrid regimes without much risk of destabilizing the electoral process, but ultimately do not lead to increased competition in successor regimes.
We develop a model of immigrant political action that connects individual motivations to become politically involved with the context in which participation takes place. The article posits that opinion climates in the form of hostility or openness toward immigrants shape the opportunity structure for immigrant political engagement by contributing to the social costs and political benefits of participation. We argue that friendly opinion climates toward immigrants enable political action among immigrants, and facilitate the politicization of political discontent. Using survey data from the European Social Survey (ESS) 2002 to 2010 in 25 European democracies, our analyses reveal that more positive opinion climates—at the level of countries and regions—increase immigrant political engagement, especially among immigrants dissatisfied with the political system. However, this effect is limited to uninstitutionalized political action, as opinion climates have no observable impact on participation in institutionalized politics.
We investigate how particular configurations of national parliaments affect the dynamics of political decentralization in parliamentary democracies. Recent research has emphasized the impact of structural determinants on levels of decentralization across countries. However, we argue that decentralization processes are endogenous to legislative bargaining by political parties. Our main hypothesis is that, ceteris paribus, the greater the legislative bargaining power of parties with decentralization demands, the more likely decentralization reforms are to occur. For that purpose, we calculate an index of the parliamentary salience of decentralization that reflects the distribution of parties’ preferences for decentralization weighted by their bargaining power. We test our hypotheses with dynamic models for 19 parliamentary democracies using Comparative Manifesto Project data and the Regional Authority Index. We demonstrate that the dynamics of decentralization are crucially shaped by the configuration of national legislatures, although this only seems to affect the self-rule dimension of decentralization rather than shared rule.
The article offers a systematic analysis of the comparative trajectory of international democratic change. In particular, it focuses on the resulting convergence or divergence of political systems, borrowing from the literatures on institutional change and policy convergence. To this end, political-institutional data in line with Arend Lijphart’s (1999, 2012) empirical theory of democracy for 24 developed democracies between 1945 and 2010 are analyzed. Heteroscedastic multilevel models allow for directly modeling the development of the variance of types of democracy over time, revealing information about convergence, and adding substantial explanations. The findings indicate that there has been a trend away from extreme types of democracy in single cases, but no unconditional trend of convergence can be observed. However, there are conditional processes of convergence. In particular, economic globalization and the domestic veto structure interactively influence democratic convergence.
Political parties seek information about public preferences to determine how much they need to change their policies as elections approach. We argue that opposition parties can use European parliamentary election results to inform themselves about public preferences. When opposition parties lose votes at the European level, they can use this information to infer that public opinion has shifted away from the party and change their national policy strategies. We also argue that not all European elections are the same and that parties should be more responsive to those European elections that are more informative about public preferences. Empirical results from 14 European Union (EU) member countries show that opposition parties use European election results and change their positions (a) when the turnout levels between national and European elections are similar and (b) when the European election is close in time to the upcoming national election.
Little is known about the political repercussions of banking crises despite the extensive literature on the link between economic performance and political outcomes. We develop a theory of how clarity of responsibility affects incumbent party survival patterns in 89 democracies between 1975 and 2005. Our results are robust to modeling strategies that include hazard models with shared frailties to account for country-specific factors that affect incumbent survival. We find that globalization weakens the accountability link between politicians and voters. Incumbents in countries with open capital accounts are much more likely to survive a banking crisis than incumbents in closed economies. We do not find conclusive evidence that divided governments or those with multiple veto players enjoy higher survival rates after banking crises; in fact, the opposite seems to be true. We conclude with a discussion of the paradoxical relationship that openness brings to incumbents: greater exposure to foreign shocks and reduced electoral punishment for banking crises.
This article takes a novel approach to the question of how bicameralism matters by asking not how it shapes policy outcomes, but rather how it shapes political parties. Bicameralism uniquely challenges political parties because party leaders have few tools for disciplining copartisans in separate legislative chambers. As long as party members do not share identical policy preferences, or strategic contexts across chambers differ, copartisan cohorts in each chamber are likely to favor distinct policy positions. To the extent that parties value clear, consistent party labels, it is in their best interests to find ways to keep intraparty disagreements out of the public eye. We argue that parties in bicameral systems do this by centralizing candidate selection, so that members in both chambers are accountable to the same master. We test our argument using data from 66 political parties in 11 advanced parliamentary democracies.
This article systematically assesses whether open political competition ends the coup trap. We use an original data set of coup reports, electoral competition, and socioeconomic data spanning the 20th century in 18 Latin American countries. Our models, which are robust to multiple-comparison tests, generate support for a central claim: While recent experience with military coups increases the risk of incumbents being overthrown, the establishment of open political competition ends cycles of political instability. The risk of being overthrown consequently declines with time for presidents in noncompetitive systems, but remains stable—and, on average, substantially lower—in competitive polities. Coups do not vary with levels of development or of inequality, economic growth rates, or the legislative powers of the presidency.
In this article, we address the question of whether the policy statements of political parties with regard to migration affect the link between individual anti-immigrant sentiment and support for redistributive policies. While the effect of political parties "playing the race card" is well documented and repeatedly discussed in the American context, it has received little attention in comparative studies. We test our measurements of issue-salience with regard to migration and welfare-related matters by conducting multilevel models for a sample of 14 European countries. We also control for the potential effects of the countries’ welfare regimes—which is so far the most prominent contextual variable. Our results strongly indicate a moderating party-effect: The more parties accentuate crucial migration issues, the less general support there is for welfare programs by native anti-immigrant groups. In contrast, we find no effect of the repeatedly discussed welfare regime on this relationship, once controlled for party statements.
Extant research suggests that democracy fosters capital account liberalization in developing countries. Yet the data reveal that there exists substantial variation in the extent of capital account openness across democracies in the developing world. When do democratic governments in developing states liberalize their capital account policies? We hypothesize that the market concentration of domestic private banks has a positive effect on capital account liberalization, but only when the degree of electoral particularism in these states is sufficiently high. Specifically, we claim that highly market-concentrated private banks have interests and the capacity to lobby elected politicians to liberalize capital account transactions. We then argue that politicians in particularistic democracies will respond to such lobbying pressure by dismantling capital controls as they have political incentives to cater to the interests of powerful bankers. Statistical results from a comprehensive data set provide robust support for our main hypothesis.
This article examines the conditions under which different kinds of parties resort to negative campaigning in three Western European countries: the Netherlands, Britain, and Germany in the period between 1980 and 2006. Data were collected for 27 parties, participating in 23 elections, yielding a total of 129 cases. The study uses a cross-nested multilevel model to estimate the effects of party characteristics as well as the electoral context in which these parties operate. It contributes to the state of the art on negative campaigning in two ways. First, being the first comparative and across-time study on negative campaigning, it compares negative campaigning across 23 elections, which is more than in any other study so far. It therefore contributes to the development of a more general theory on this type of campaign strategy. Second, it is the first study outside the American context to empirically estimate the effect of the electoral context on the use of negative campaigning. The results show that party characteristics are much more important than the electoral context in explaining when parties go negative.
Social movement scholars have struggled with the question how abstract political opportunities affect activists without much knowledge of politics. We argue that the relationship between institutional opportunities and mobilization may take the form of trickle-down politics. In this view, activists are affected by political opportunities indirectly through the changes that political developments bring about in the immediate setting of protest. The political climate determines the distance between general public opinion and activists’ view on society. The smaller this distance, the more likely it becomes that activists receive positive feedback, which results in further mobilization. We investigate how activists are influenced by bystander responses that are evoked by the wider political context. Statistical models indeed indicate that spatiotemporal fluctuations in political opportunities and public sentiments are translated into mobilization after activists receive feedback from bystanders. This suggests that bystander responses play a crucial role in linking political opportunities to mobilization.
Can democracy consolidate in electoral systems without power alternations? Using public attitude data collected by the Afrobarometer in 16 sub-Saharan African countries (2005-2006), as well as country-level variables, this study examines how alternations in power that result from electoral contests affect mass perceptions of democratic durability. By examining durability, we shift the focus from individuals’ own preferences and attitudes regarding democracy to their perceptions about the degree of societal commitment to a democratic regime. Multilevel analysis finds that a lack of alternation among power holders undermines popular confidence that democracy, weak as it may be, will endure. Moreover, the gap in perceptions of democratic durability between the political majority and the minority narrows considerably in systems where one or more alternations have occurred.
Why does personal income taxation (PIT) remain relatively low in many developing countries despite a period of democratic advancement and rapid economic growth? This stylized fact is hard to reconcile with standard political economy models of taxation that expect democratic regimes to bring about redistribution in countries that suffer from high inequality. This article argues that the details of political institutions are key to understand why PIT remains low in many developing and unequal countries. In particular, we show how legislative malapportionment may prevent the use of personal income taxes as a major revenue source by skewing the distribution of political power across groups. Malapportionment is usually not exogenous but the result of design by those with political power at the transition or reform moment. As such, it depends on the structure of political and economic power in society. Based on a sample of more than 50 countries between 1990 and 2007, this article finds that (a) countries with historically more unequal distributions of wealth and income tend to systematically present higher levels of legislative malapportionment and (b) higher levels of malapportionment are associated with lower shares of personal income taxes in GDP.
This article updates and describes a widely used data set on democracy. Covering 1800–2007 and 219 countries, it represents the most comprehensive dichotomous measure of democracy currently available. We argue that our measure’s distinguishing features—a concrete, dichotomous coding and a long time span—are of critical value to empirical work on democracy. Inspired by Robert Dahl, we define a country as democratic if it satisfies conditions for both contestation and participation. Specifically, democracies feature political leaders chosen through free and fair elections and satisfy a threshold value of suffrage. After comparing our coding to that of other popular measures, we illustrate how democracy’s predictive factors have evolved since 1800. In particular, we show that economic modernization variables have steadily declined in their correlation with democracy over time.
The dominant theoretical approaches in the comparative political economy of the welfare state provide alternative accounts for why some governments spend more on social policies than others. In the first, poor voters seek to increase their current income by taxing the rich, and social policy serves to redistribute income from the rich to the poor. In the second account, voters seek social insurance against future job loss, and social policy serves as an insurance mechanism rather than a redistributive one. Both of these accounts share the assumption that voters can clearly distinguish between the redistributive and insurance elements of public policy and, therefore, that individual-level characteristics (income, labor market risks) systematically shape preferences over social policy. Our goal is to examine the soundness of that behavioral assumption. We do so with a laboratory experiment that involves economic production, voting on taxation and fiscal transfers. We treat subjects with social policies that vary in their level of redistribution and insurance to examine how this impacts their preferred tax rate. We complement the experimental evidence with data from original survey questions that assess voters’ knowledge of the distributive characteristics of different social policies in the U.S. Evidence from both settings suggest only marginal support for behavioral underpinnings of the standard insurance model, particularly as the empirical setting more closely approximates the real world.
This article challenges the long-standing emphasis in the developmental state literature on the powerful pilot agency as an essential component of industrialization. Although a pilot agency may be able to facilitate growth in mature industries, we argue that policy makers seeking to promote rapid innovation-based competition must instead rely on continuous, radical policy innovation. We argue that this kind of experimentation is more likely to occur at the periphery of the public sector, in agencies with few hard resources and limited political prestige. In addition to providing a novel interpretation of how states enter new, high-technology markets, we explain why some successful countries become less innovative over time. As agencies successfully introduce radical policy innovations, their higher profile exposes them to greater political interference and reduces their entrepreneurial capacity. The argument is supported by within-case analysis of two historically low-technology economies that successfully promoted rapid innovation-based growth, Finland and Israel.
Under what conditions do citizens connect concerns about corruption to their evaluations of sitting executives? In contrast to conventional scholarship positing a direct, negative relationship between corruption and political support, we build on a small but suggestive body of research to argue that this relationship is conditional on economic context. We test this claim with national survey data collected in 19 presidential systems as part of the AmericasBarometer 2010 study. Using both fixed effects ordinary least squares and hierarchical linear regression analyses, we show that individuals facing bad (good) collective economic conditions apply a higher (lower) penalty to presidential approval for perceived political corruption. This result holds across both an individual-level indicator of national economic assessment and a regional economic measure; we further test, and find less substantial results for, the moderating influence of personal economic conditions on the political toll of corruption perceptions.
This article explains the puzzling finding that postcommunist citizens living in countries with higher quality institutions have lower levels of political trust and participation. Why do political trust and participation not follow the quality of democratic institutions? I argue that in postcommunist Europe vibrant and robust political competition has stifled trust and, in turn, participation. Using multilevel data, I show that the polities that experienced vibrant political competition in their electoral arenas also witnessed the highest levels of disillusionment with political parties and, consequently, with the political system. Decades of monopolization of the electoral arena by communist parties left Eastern Europeans ill prepared to appreciate vigorous political competition, which, depending on its intensity, tended to depress trust in political parties as an institution and, consequently, stifled political participation.
Numerous studies have found that proportional electoral rules significantly increase women’s representation in national parliaments relative to majoritarian and mixed rules. These studies, however, suffer from serious methodological problems including the endogeneity of electoral laws, poor measures of cultural variables, and neglect of time trends. This article attempts to produce more accurate estimates of the effect of electoral rules on women’s representation by using within-country comparisons of electoral rule changes and bicameral systems as well as matching methods. The main finding is that the effect of electoral laws is not as strong as in previous studies and varies across cases. The policy implication is that changes in electoral laws may not provide a quick and consistent fix to the problem of low women’s representation.
Why and how do class cleavages become politicized in party systems? The recent tenure of left governments in South America has seen the party system realigned along the class cleavage in Venezuela but not in Brazil or Chile. This article argues that different approaches to expanding social protection—"mobilizational" in Venezuela and "technocratic" in Brazil and Chile—explain divergent outcomes. Mobilizational policies incentivized social organization among beneficiaries and allowed for linkages between these organizations and left parties, facilitating credit claiming and recruitment by the left. Technocratic policies targeted atomized beneficiaries with no room for partisan involvement, making credit claiming and recruitment difficult. Case-based evidence illustrates these mechanisms whereas survey analysis using genetic matching confirms that mobilizational and technocratic programs exerted strikingly different effects on support for left parties. The broader contribution is to theorize a new form of class-based political mobilization in Latin America, also being implemented in other countries.
Political parties not only aggregate the policy preferences of their supporters, but also have the ability to shape those preferences. Experimental evidence demonstrates that, when parties stake out positions on policy issues, partisans become more likely to adopt these positions, whether out of blind loyalty or because they infer that party endorsements signal options consistent with their interests or values. It is equally clear, however, that partisans do not always follow their party’s lead. The authors investigate the impact of three party-level traits on partisan cue taking: longevity, incumbency, and ideological clarity. As parties age, voters may become more certain of both the party’s reputation and their own allegiance. Governing parties must take action and respond to events, increasing the likelihood of compromise and failure, and therefore may dilute their reputation and disappoint followers. Incumbency aside, some parties exhibit greater ambiguity in their ideological position than other parties, undermining voter certainty about the meaning of cues. The authors test these hypotheses with experiments conducted in three multiparty democracies (Poland, Hungary, and Great Britain). They find that partisans more strongly follow their party’s lead when that party is older, in the opposition, or has developed a more consistent ideological image. However, the impact of longevity vanishes when the other factors are taken into account. Underscoring the importance of voter (un)certainty, ideologically coherent opposition parties have the greatest capacity to shape the policy views of followers.
This article examines the relationship among a country’s democratic experience, its level of economic development, and the prevalence of clientelistic and programmatic modes of democratic accountability. In contrast to the commonly accepted wisdom that clientelistic politics will decrease monotonically as a country’s economy develops and its democracy consolidates, the authors argue theoretically and demonstrate empirically that clientelism tends in fact to increase as a country moves from low to intermediate levels of democracy and development. They also uncover preliminary evidence that a history of regime instability may have independent consequences on the prevalence of one or the other linkage mechanism. Finally, the results suggest that a country’s level of economic development and exposure to the international economy are more consistent predictors of programmatic effort and coherence than are measures of a country’s regime type.
Democracy forces political elites to compete for power in elections, but it also often presses them to share power after the electoral dust has settled. At times these powersharing arrangements prove so encompassing as to make a mockery of putative partisan differences, and even to wipe out political opposition entirely by bringing every significant party into a "party cartel." Such promiscuous powersharing arrangements undermine representation by loosening parties’ commitments to their core constituents, and threaten accountability by limiting voters’ capacity to remove parties from power via the ballot box. In the otherwise deeply disparate cases of Indonesia and Bolivia, the origins of promiscuous powersharing can be traced to similar periods of high political uncertainty surrounding crisis-wracked transitions to democracy. Party elites coped with the uncertainties of transition and crisis by sharing executive power across the country’s most salient political cleavages. These arrangements forged an elitist equilibrium grounded in informal norms and networks, allowing collusive democracy to outlast the uncertain crisis conditions in which it was forged. Yet they have ultimately proven self-undermining by triggering distinctive popular backlashes, returning both countries to the political uncertainty that promiscuous powersharing was initially intended to alleviate.
Although democratic regimes in Latin America since the early 1980s have been surprisingly durable, party systems in much of the region continue to experience very high levels of electoral instability. A critical juncture approach to institutional change suggests that variation in party system stability is related to the impact of market liberalization in the 1980s and 1990s on the programmatic alignment—or dealignment—of partisan competition. Market reforms that were adopted by conservative leaders and opposed by a major leftist rival aligned party systems programmatically, allowing societal opposition to be channeled into institutionalized forms of competition that were highly stable in the postadjustment era. By contrast, bait-and-switch reforms adopted by populist or leftist leaders were programmatically dealigning for party systems, leaving them vulnerable to highly destabilizing reactive sequences in the aftermath to the reform process—including mass social protests, the demise of historic conservative parties, and the outflanking of traditional populist or leftist parties by more radical, anti-neoliberal outsiders. The political dynamics of market-based economic adjustment thus heavily conditioned the ways in which party systems would process the postadjustment revival of populist and leftist alternatives in the region.
Recent welfare reforms across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have sought to make social policies more "employment friendly." Although "old" social policies of the Golden Age (namely, unemployment protection and old-age security, which were typically geared toward the male breadwinner model) were subject to comprehensive retrenchment, "new" social policies, especially family policies facilitating work–family reconciliation and female employment participation, experienced substantial expansion. Following the Swedish "pioneer," strong male breadwinner countries have expanded employment-oriented family policies since the late 1990s. Against the case of early family policy expansion in Sweden (typically associated with social democracy and an organized women’s movement), they examine whether the drivers of employment-oriented family policy have changed since the end of the Golden Age. The authors highlight party competition as key political driver in policy expansion in "latecomer" countries, whereas postindustrialization (in particular the rise of the new social risk of work–family conflicts, as well as wider changes in the skills profile and needs of postindustrial economies) provides the functional underpinnings for these policies.
Previous analyses of African politics have mistaken parties’ dearth of position taking on issues as an absence of substantive electoral debate. The authors demonstrate that political parties tackle substantive issues during African elections, but generally voice them through valence appeals rather than by staking out distinct positions. The authors theorize that uncertainty, coupled with the single-party heritage and the elite dominance of African electoral politics, leads parties to employ valence discourse in their national election campaigns. With evidence from 950 newspaper articles during seven election cycles in African countries, the authors show that politicians predominantly use valence discourse when discussing political issues in the period approaching elections. They find tentative evidence that opposition actors are more likely to take positions than incumbents, and that civil society is more likely to raise position issues than political parties. This contribution aims to enrich the debate on electoral issues in Africa, but also draw greater attention to the potential impact of valence discourse on party systems in a comparative context.
Declining youth participation in conventional forms of politics has become a central theme for academics and policy makers and has often been viewed as marking a crisis in citizenship. Yet there is overwhelming evidence to show that young people are not apathetic. They have their own views and engage in "politics" (more broadly understood) in a wide variety of ways that have relevance to their everyday lives. The following article compares and contrasts the civic and political engagement of young people both within and among the United States, Britain, and Germany. The core arguments are that the forms of engagement practiced by young people are heavily structured in favor of highly educated and well-off citizens and that young people as a group have increasingly been marginalized from electoral politics. However, the different experiences across the three countries give scholars a clearer idea of how these problems might be overcome.
This article lays out a theoretical framework for understanding the effects of political uncertainty on party development and strategies of mobilization and competition. Defining uncertainty as the imprecision with which political actors are able to predict future interactions, the authors identify three types of political uncertainty: regime uncertainty, economic uncertainty, and institutional uncertainty. They argue that political uncertainty is particularly high among developing democracies, contributing to puzzling empirical patterns of party development and competition in these contexts. Taking into account the role of uncertainty in the strategic decision making of party elites will help scholars better understand the differences between parties in advanced and developing democracies. But it can also help scholars understand the less dramatic differences between parties even within advanced democracies. The authors’ theoretical framework can be applied broadly since uncertainty informs the strategic choices of a much wider range of political actors.
This is a multination study of military disobedience in the face of presidential orders to suppress civilian uprisings. Rather than coercively manipulating the government or seizing power themselves, these insubordinate armies prefer to remain quartered. To determine why, the authors draw on rational, ideational, and structural analytical perspectives on military behavior. The study deploys a qualitative case study method of analysis, identifying seven positive cases (disobedience) and then contrasting those with three negative cases (obedience) to discern whether there is a collection of causal agents that can discriminate between these sets. It finds that disobedience grows out of material grievances, stronger affiliation with public as opposed to government interests, rejection of internal public order roles, illegalities, and splits within the services.
Investigating the recent direct action campaigns against genetically modified crops in France and the United Kingdom, the authors set out to understand how contrasting judicial systems and cultures affect the way that activists choose to commit ostensibly illegal actions and how they negotiate the trade-offs between effectiveness and public accountability. The authors find evidence that prosecution outcomes across different judicial systems are consistent and relatively predictable and consequently argue that the concept of a "judicial opportunity structure" is useful for developing scholars’ understanding of social movement trajectories. The authors also find that these differential judicial opportunities cannot adequately account for the tactical choices made by activists with respect to the staging of covert or overt direct action; rather, explanations of tactical choice are better accounted for by movement ideas, cultures, and traditions.