Lobbying is a potential source of corruption but is also a valuable source of information for policy-makers. We analyze a game-theoretic model that shows how the threat of corruption affects the incentives of noncorrupt politicians to enlist the help of lobbyists to make more informed decisions. Politicians face a dilemma because voters cannot always tell whether a politician allows access to lobbyists to solicit corruption or to seek information. Thus, a noncorrupt politician may deny access to lobbyists to signal that she is noncorrupt even though doing so impedes her ability to make good policy. This signaling may decrease the welfare of the voters depending on the value of the lost policy information relative to the value of screening out corrupt politicians.

Theories of regime-society relations in Communist states stress the central role of coercion in maintaining political control. Based on a survey of Soviet emigrants, we examine whether Soviet citizens are deterred from nonconformity by the punitive actions of the KGB (individual deterrence), a perception of the KGB's coercive potential (general deterrence), or mistrust of other people. We find that few respondents were directly coerced by the KGB (and those who were had engaged in the most serious kinds of nonconformity); that those who had punitive contacts with the KGB in the past were not deterred from subsequent nonconformity; that the KGB's competent image was a general deterrent; and that trust in other people facilitated both nonconformist and compliant political activism. Those who came of political age under Khrushchev and Brezhnev were more likely to be involved in both kinds of activism than those who came of age under Stalin.

In this article I present a formal model of relative deprivation and demonstrate its implications concerning the relationship between inequality and political instability. The model, which is based on assumptions similar to those of Nagel (1974), implies that the relationship of instability to inequality can be either curvilinear, as Nagel found, or linear, as Russett (1964) found, although under different conditions. In both cases the model implies that reducing inequality reduces the level of relative deprivation, thereby enhancing the prospect for political stability. However, changes in the tendency of individuals to compare their lot with that of others can also substantially affect the level of relative deprivation in a society.

Existing research largely ignores Black support for punitive policies that target group members, even as this support challenges expectations of in-group favoritism and group solidarity. The current research fills this gap by leveraging a familiar concept: “the politics of respectability.” Building on historical and qualitative accounts of this worldview, which focuses on the behavior of group members, I develop a social psychological framework to understand how identity-based concerns motivate Black support for punishment that targets members of their racial group. I also develop a novel measure of respectability–the Respectability Politics Scale. Findings demonstrate that adherents of respectability feel more ashamed about the public view of their racial group, endorse more negative racial stereotypes, and feel relatively less close to other Black people. They are also more likely to support a range of punitive policies that target group members, including restrictive dress code policies, tough-on-crime policies, and paternalistic welfare policies.

Across advanced economies, affordable housing shortages are pushing low-income voters out of cities. Left governments frequently exacerbate these shortages by eliminating public housing. Why does the Left pursue policies that displace its voters? We argue that the Left’s long-term rebalancing towards the middle class and away from an increasingly stigmatized “underclass” has significantly attenuated the trade-offs inherent in reducing affordable housing. Focusing on the UK, we demonstrate that by alienating low-income voters politically and reshuffling them across districts, housing crises have significant costs for Labour. Yet, drawing on interviews, we show that displacement is nonetheless compatible with electoral interests: the displaced make room for richer voters whom politicians believe will also support Labour. A quantitative analysis of Greater London’s 32 local authorities and 624 wards further documents trends in line with coalitional rebalancing. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that electoral foundations are key to understanding housing crises and gentrification.

Does physical surveillance hinder or foster antiregime resistance? A common view holds that surveillance prevents resistance by providing regimes with high-quality intelligence on dissident networks and by instilling fear in citizens. We contrast this view using formerly classified data from Communist Poland. We find that communities exposed to secret police officers were more likely to organize protests but also engaged in less sabotage. To ensure that the relationship is causal, we use an instrumental variable strategy, which exploits the exogenous assignment of Catholic “spy priests” to local communities. To trace the underlying mechanisms, we draw on qualitative interviews and archival sources. We document that Poland’s comprehensive use of surveillance created widespread anger as well as an incentive for citizens to reveal their true loyalties, thus facilitating antiregime collective action. Once on the streets, protesters refrained from sabotage to signal their political motivation to bystanders and authorities alike.

Most forced migrants around the world are displaced within the Global South. We study whether and how de jure policies on forced displacement affect where forced migrants flee in the developing world. Recent evidence from the Global North suggests migrants gravitate toward liberal policy environments. However, existing analyses expect de jure policies to have little effect in the developing world, given strong presumptions that policy enforcement is poor and policy knowledge is low. Using original data on de jure displacement policies for 92 developing countries and interviews with 126 refugees and policy makers, we document a robust association between liberal de jure policies and forced migrant flows. Gravitation toward liberal environments is conditional on factors that facilitate the diffusion of policy knowledge, such as transnational ethnic kin. Policies for free movement, services, and livelihoods are especially attractive. Utility-maximizing models of migrant decision making must take de jure policy provisions into account.

The stability of the American two-party system is examined from 1866 until 1980. Following the approach of Stokes and Iversen (1962), restoring forces are posited for presidential elections, but restraining forces also are suggested for congressional elections, leading to an equilibrium between the two in elections to the House. Points of maximum restoration in presidential elections are derived using autocorrelations, and these points suggest a pattern of second-term Republican victories every 28 years beginning in 1872.

Equilibrium properties of the American two-party system lead to the twin criteria of representation and restraint in multiparty cabinet coalitions in order to achieve cabinet durabilities on the order of those found in two-party systems. Minimum entropy-minimum winning coalitions satisfy these criteria. Cabinet durabilities on the order of two-party systems can be achieved by means of a 44-55 percentage of the legislative seats won by the first party in a multiparty system.

To explore systematic differences in economic reasoning and what might account for them, we investigate how sociocultural conditions affect transitions to market economies in the West African country of Benin. We probe the importance of several factors: basic economic norms, utility maximization behavior, individual-level personal capital, and individual-level social capital. The evidence, based on experiments embedded in an opinion survey, indicates that Beninese citizens widely share commitments to the basic foundations of economic interaction, e.g., property rights. The nature of social capital varies across cultural and political contexts and accounts for cross-contextual variation in the costs associated with cooperative behavior and in utility maximization behavior.

This paper employs a field experiment in single-party–ruled Vietnam to test whether providing a broad-based representative sample of firms the opportunity to comment on draft regulations increases their subsequent compliance. We find three main outcomes of this treatment. First, treated firms exhibited greater improvement in their views of government’s regulatory authority. Second, these firms were more likely to allow government-affiliated auditors to examine their factories. Third, treated firms demonstrated greater compliance on the factory floor. Access and compliance were not explained by the receipt of advance information about the regulation’s requirements, and none of the three outcomes required that firms offer substantive comments.

We disagree that our correspondence (Elman and Elman 1995) regarding Schroeder (1994) supports Vasquez's (1997) verdict that the neorealist scientific research program is degenerating. We argue that Vasquez's conclusion is based on a misstatement of the Lakatosian criteria of appraisal and a mistaken conflation of the neorealist research program with the proposition that balancing is a common foreign policy. We do, however, welcome Vasquez's attempt to apply Lakatosian metatheory to international relations theory, and we hope that this conversation will encourage others to follow his lead.

Bernard Lewis once grappled with the question “What is a Turk?” and finally put forward, virtually as part of the definition, the “sentiment of Turkish identity”—simply thinking of oneself as a Turk. Now the course of world history is being much affected by people who on occasion speak of themselves collectively as “Africans.” How important to the definition of an African in politics is the quality of thinking of oneself as an African?

In many respects, Melville Herskovits has maintained, Africa is a geographical fiction. “It is thought of as a separate entity and regarded as a unit to the degree that the map is invested with an authority imposed on it by the map makers.” The argument here is presumably that climatically the range in Africa is from arid deserts to tropical forests; ethnically, from the Khoisan to the Semites; linguistically from Amharic to Kidigo. What have all these in common apart from the tyrann y of the map maker?

One possible answer is that they have a negative common element: they are alike one to another to the extent that they are collectively different from anything in the outside world. It is perhaps this question-begging assumption which makes President Nkrumah of Ghana insist that “Africa is not, and can never be an extension of Europe.” That argument was used against the notion that Algeria was part of France, and it continues to be used against Portuguese “integration” of Angola and Mozambique. In a televised New York debate with Jacques Soustelle when the future of “French” Algeria was still in question, Ghana's Ambassador Alex Quaison-Sackey employed the argument not merely as a variant formulation of the thesis that “Algeria had to be independent of France” but as a piece of evidence in support of that thesis.

To answer questions about the origins and outcomes of collective action, political scientists increasingly turn to datasets with social network information culled from online sources. However, a fundamental question of external validity remains untested: are the relationships measured between a person and her online peers informative of the kind of offline, “real-world” relationships to which network theories typically speak? This article offers the first direct comparison of the nature and consequences of online and offline social ties, using data collected via a novel network elicitation technique in an experimental setting. We document strong, robust similarity between online and offline relationships. This parity is not driven by shared identity of online and offline ties, but a shared nature of relationships in both domains. Our results affirm that online social tie data offer great promise for testing long-standing theories in the social sciences about the role of social networks.

Campaigns regularly dispatch activists to contact voters. Much research considers these conversations’ effects on voters, but we know little about their influence on the implementing activists—an important population given the outsized influence politically active Americans wield. We argue personal persuasion campaigns can reduce affective polarization among the implementing activists by creating opportunities for perspective-getting. We report unique data from three real-world campaigns wherein activists attempted to persuade voters who had opposing viewpoints: two campaigns about a politicized issue (immigration) and a third about the 2020 presidential election. All campaigns trained activists to persuade voters through in-depth, two-way conversations. In preregistered studies, we find that these efforts reduced affective polarization among implementing activists, with reductions large enough to reverse over a decade’s increase in affective polarization. Qualitative responses are consistent with these conversations producing perspective-getting, which reduced animosity by humanizing and individuating out-partisans. We discuss implications for theories of prejudice reduction.

Most models of agenda control examine dyadic relations—for example, those between a committee and the floor of a legislature. Such relations, however, are always embedded in a larger context, namely, a political environment composed of voters and interest groups. In this paper we model agenda setters (a legislative committee) as decision makers with limited cognitive abilities who adjust over time to their larger political environment. The legislators' policy positions are endogenous, reflecting the relative strengths of voters wielding the district-specific resource of votes and of interest groups wielding the transferable resource of money. The resulting outcomes indicate that neoclassical models of voting and pluralist models of group influence have each told part of the story. When only votes matter, our boundedly rational agents grope toward equilibria close to those of neoclassical models; however, when mobile resources matter as well, the outcomes depart systematically from those of previous models. In particular, interest groups can make themselves worse off by capturing the committee. The results suggest that agenda control is less powerful than conventionally believed and point toward conditions shaping its effectiveness—conditions highlighting the distinctive contributions of pluralist and neoclassical thinking to a broader theory of political institutions.

The model presented here assumes that nations initiate conflict to change the international status quo across one or more issues to an outcome they prefer. Their preferences for different issue outcomes are represented by a classical spatial utility function. International coalitions are formed both to enhance the chance of a successful challenge and to counter existing challenges. Disputes are modeled as periods of competition between two coalitions through the recruitment of additional members, erosion of support for the opposing coalition and escalation of the crisis. The two-nation model is analyzed in detail, and the existence of the core for the resulting game is proved. The two main conclusions of the two-nation model are that nations have a general incentive to exaggerate their issue positions in disputes and that the possibility of issue trades enhances the likelihood of compromise.

In a recent article (“The Paradox of Not Voting: A Decision Theoretic Analysis,” APSR, 68 [June, 1974], 525–536) John Ferejohn and Morris Fiorina suggest that a (potential) voter may be rational in deciding whether to vote and yet not use the expected-utility calculus introduced for this purpose by Downs and Tullock and extended by Riker and Ordeshook. The authors suggest that a rational voter, in deciding whether to vote, may use the minimax regret criterion due to the late L. J. Savage. Define the regret of an Act A as the difference, if the true state of nature were known (in advance), between the best expected payoff that could be obtained and the expected payoff that would be obtained by act A. Then the minimax regret criterion requires the decision maker to act in such a way as to minimize the maximum regret that he can suffer.

They also discuss the fact that the minimax regret criterion does not require the voter to supply any (objective or subjective) estimates of the probabilities associated with the various outcomes of the election. Thus they feel that it is an attractive criterion for decision making under “uncertainty” as opposed to decision making under “risk.”

In committee deliberation, requiring a unanimous vote intuitively provides the strongest incentives for actors to share fully their opinions and private information. It is also believed that full revelation of (decision-relevant) information occurs when personal biases are made clear before deliberation. However, recent literature suggests that both intuitions are flawed. Austen-Smith and Feddersen propose a model in which the unanimity rule performs worse than other rules in promoting fully revealing deliberation, and uncertainty about individuals' preferences promotes full sharing of information. We extend this work by incorporating the possibility that individuals may provide verifiable evidence for their private information. Under this circumstance, we demonstrate that Austen-Smith and Feddersen's results are reversed. First, a unanimous voting rule performs better than any other, as unanimity is the only rule that always promotes fully revealing deliberation. Second, under fairly general conditions, uncertainty about individuals' preferences prevents full sharing of information.

If one compares the literature on American government and politics with that which concerns continental Europe, it is quite evident that the two fields of study in the last decades have proceeded on somewhat different assumptions as to the scope and methods of political science. This divergence is of relatively recent origin. Before World War I a substantial number of leading American students in this field had their training in European centers of learning, and brought back with them the rich tradition of European historical, philosophical, and legal scholarship.

With noteworthy exceptions the study of continental European political institutions still tends to be dominated by this historical, philosophical, and legal emphasis. The continuity of scholarship in the continental European area has been broken by the two world wars, by totalitarian regimes, by enemy occupation, and by the persistence of internal antagonism and cleavages. With the exception of a few years in the 1920's, the entire era since World War I has been one of catastrophe or the atmosphere of catastrophe in which scientific inquiry and the renewal of the scientific cadres could be carried on only for short periods, under the greatest handicaps, and with inadequate resources.