The relationship between anxiety and investor behavior is well known enough to warrant its own aphorism: a “flight to safety.” We posit that anxiety alters the intensity of voters’ preference for the status quo, inducing a political flight to safety toward establishment candidates. Leveraging the outbreak of the novel coronavirus during the Democratic primary election of 2020, we identify a causal effect of the outbreak on voting, with Biden benefiting between 7 and 15 percentage points at Sanders’s expense. A survey experiment in which participants exposed to an anxiety-inducing prompt choose the less disruptive hypothetical candidate provides further evidence of our theorized flight to safety among US-based respondents. Evidence from 2020 French municipal and US House primary elections suggests a COVID-induced flight to safety generalizes to benefit mainstream candidates across a variety of settings. Our findings suggest an as-yet underappreciated preference for “safe” candidates in times of anxiety.

If perfectionism is understood as the state's non-neutral promotion of a valuable way of life, Confucian political theory, often pursued as a pluralist correction to global monism of liberal democracy, is ineluctably perfectionist. But how can Confucian perfectionism, committed to particular Confucian values, reconcile with the societal fact of value pluralism within the putative Confucian polity? This article argues that a potential tension between Confucian perfectionism and value pluralism can be avoided by making Confucian perfectionist goods the core elements of public reason with which citizens can justify their arguments to one another and by which the state can justifiably exercise its public authority to reasonable citizens who otherwise subscribe to various comprehensive doctrines. By defining a mode of Confucian perfectionism working through Confucian public reason broadly shared by citizens as public reason Confucianism, this article attempts to balance the Confucian polity's internal societal pluralism and the people's collective self-determination.

Career mobility is conceptualized in terms of the amount and bias of organizational, occupational, vertical and geographical movement. An operational measure is offered for the amount of mobility (not the bias) which permits comparative generalizations to be made about officials based on simple sampling procedures. For illustrative purposes, the amount of organizational mobility is measured for two samples of federal officials: David T. Stanley's sample (N = 557) of higher civil servants and a sample (N = 300) of foreign affairs officials. Several dichotomous background variables are included for both samples of officials including: age, rank, and education. Varying background characteristics is found to make only a small mobility difference for higher civil servants and a much greater difference for foreign affairs officials. Several speculations are offered to explain the political significance of the empirical findings, and a comparative typology of career mobility is developed.

Electoral accountability requires that voters have the ability to constrain the incumbent government’s policy-making power. We express the necessary conditions for this claim as an accountability identity in which the electoral system and the party system interact to shape the accountability of parliamentary governments. Data from 400 parliamentary elections between 1948 and 2012 show that electoral accountability is contingent on the party system’s bipolarity, for example, with parties arrayed in two distinct blocs. Proportional electoral systems achieve accountability as well as majoritarian ones when bipolarity is strong but not when it is weak. This is because bipolarity decreases the number of connected coalitions that incumbent parties can join to preserve their policy-making power. Our results underscore the limitations that party systems place on electoral reform and the benefits that bipolarity offers for clarifying voters’ choices and intensifying electoral competition.

We propose a simple game-theory model of single-member plurality electoral systems, two parties with unequal resources being the players. Strategies consist of allocations of resources among the n contests, and a party's payoff is the number of contests to which it has assigned more resources than the other party. Mixed strategies exist which are asymptotically optimal as n increases. Identifying a party's proportion of total resources with its total vote proportion, we predict that the swing ratio, or marginal seat proportion per vote proportion, is 2. This compares to empirical findings which range between 2 and 4, and to the hitherto unexplained cube law, which predicts 3. We suggest that the strategic problem modeled by this game accounts for the major part of the swing ratio effect. Factors which vary from system to system, such as proportion of hard-core support attached to parties, may amplify this effect.

Contemporary political behavior is often affected by historical legacies, but the specific mechanisms through which these legacies are transmitted are difficult to pin down. This paper argues that historical political conflicts can affect political behavior over several generations when they trigger an enduring organizational mobilization. It studies how the oppression of German Catholics in the nineteenth century led to a regionally differentiated mobilization of political Catholicism that still affects political support for the radical right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) today. Using newly collected data on historical oppression events, it shows that Catholic regions where oppression was intense saw greater mobilization of Catholic lay organizations than Catholic regions where oppression was milder and show lower support for the AfD today. The paper thus contributes to the literature on the historical determinants of political behavior as well as to the question of which regional context effects strengthen or weaken the radical right.

Women in Congress are highly effective legislators. Yet, if women are more likely than men to be interrupted during committee work, they may face a gender-related impediment. We examine speech patterns during more than 24,000 congressional committee hearings from 1994 to 2018 to determine whether women Members are more likely to be interrupted than men. We find that they are. This is especially true in Senate committees—where women are about 10% more likely to be interrupted. Furthermore, in hearings that discuss women’s issues, women are more than twice as likely to be interrupted than while discussing other issues. We see a similar pattern for rapid-fire “interruption clusters,” an aggressive form of interruption. We further consider a range of moderating factors, which yields little evidence that women change their communication strategy as they gain experience in Congress. We also find suggestive evidence that interruptions are driven by mixed-gender interactions.

Citizens of a representative democracy are twice removed from legislation. First, they do not deliberate and vote directly on legislation. Rather they elect assemblies that enact such legislation in their stead. Second, and less commonly remarked, citizens do not vote directly for assemblies. Rather they vote for individual candidates, with the candidates receiving the most votes elected. We examine the efficiency properties of these voting systems.

The application of several European Free Trade Association (EFTA) countries for membership in the Common Market (EEC) is viewed in Washington with great pleasure: the development of a United States of Europe is widely anticipated. Many observers have already calculated the combined manpower, economic resources, military power, etc. of the new union, and have pointed to the decisive advantage the United States, in coalition with this “third power,” will have over the Soviet Union. Even the fact that the EEC and EFTA, if completely merged, would have 13 members is not considered unlucky: after all, the United States itself evolved out of a union of 13. It may however, be premature to prepare a celebration for the birthday of the United States of Europe. The following theoretical excursion suggests that loading the EEC with new members may well reduce it to the level of a glorified customs union rather than forward it to a political federation. Moreover, I shall argue, political communities often unify not by increasing their membership, but in a dialectic fashion: two or more groups form; they appear to be moving in opposite directions until each is well integrated, then they are “synthesized” (not merged) in a superior union. That is, they form one encompassing union without dissolving the bonds that held together the units that composed a group before the larger unification. The earlier autonomous groups become sub-groups in one union, adjusting to the new over-riding bond without being fused into one group that knows no internal divisions.

This study offers an empirical description of the voting alignments that dominated the American Constitutional Convention as the delegates struggled to produce the final report of that historic assembly. Its conceptual roots are firmly planted in the theoretical traditions of Schattschneider on conflict and cleavage, and of Key, Burnham and Sundquist on critical realignment of the American party system. I demonstrate that dynamic processes analogous to Key's conception of “critical elections” at the macro-level of national politics can also be identified and analyzed at the micro-level of the constituent assembly. Therefore, I argue that one of the “mainsprings of American politics,” as Burnham calls the critical election phenomenon, permeates all levels of the American political system and not simply the national level of electoral mass politics. More specifically, this clear description of coalition alignment, operation and realignment in the Constitutional Convention, when informed and enlightened by the “critical realignment” model, greatly facilitates the more traditional discussion of debate, conflict and ultimate decision on the central issues before that body—representation, federalism, senatorial authority, and the nature of the executive in a republican government.

We examine the effect of electoral institutions on two important features of representation that are often studied separately: policy responsiveness and the quality of legislators. Theoretically, we show that while a proportional electoral system is better than a majoritarian one at representing popular preferences in some contexts, this advantage can come at the price of undermining the selection of good politicians. To empirically assess the relevance of this trade-off, we analyze an unusually controlled electoral reform in Switzerland early in the twentieth century. To account for endogeneity, we exploit variation in the intensive margin of the reform, which introduced proportional representation, based on administrative constraints and data on voter preferences. A difference-in-difference analysis finds that higher reform intensity increases the policy congruence between legislators and the electorate and reduces legislative effort. Contemporary evidence from the European Parliament supports this conclusion.

The border position of geography between the natural and the social sciences is fairly generally recognized. Concerned primarily with differences in the different areas of the world, geography studies both natural and cultural features. In some universities, it is included among the natural sciences, in others among the social sciences. In England and America, geographers have particularly cultivated that portion of their field which leads naturally into economics, i.e., economic geography. Much less attention has been paid to the relations with history, although various geographers and historians have studied what has variously been called historical geography or geographic history. Even less have geographers in the English-speaking countries concerned themselves with that portion of their subject which bears upon the political areas of the world. The territorial problems of the war and postwar period, however, stimulated activity in this field both in England and America, the most notable product of which is Bowman's The New World, consisting in large part of the materials gathered for the American Commission to the Peace Conference.

(Sartre to Camus): You blame the European proletariat because it has not publicly stigmatized the Soviets, but you also blame the European governments because they allow Spain into UNESCO; in this case I can see only one solution for you: the Galapagos Islands.

Vilfredo Pareto completed his Treatise on General Sociology in 1912, although it was not published till 1916. It is a vast work of one million words; sprawling, disorderly, and stuffed with minor masterpieces of often pointless erudition. The first three-quarters attacks the scientific status of practically all the various political and moral theories that have sought to pass themselves off as scientifically grounded and it is worth noting that even the most dedicated critics of Pareto have acknowledged the effectiveness of his onslaught. Among the positive contributions of the Treatise, five propositions stand out. First, Pareto affirms that social phenomena are not “caused” by any single factor but that all elements in society influence one another reciprocally. Secondly, social phenomena recur in cycles. Thirdly, the bulk of human behavior is not “logical” but only “logicalized”, or, as we should say today, not rational but merely rationalized. Fourthly, irrespective of constitutional forms, every society consists of the minority elite governing (leading?) the majority non-elite. Fifthly, parliamentary democracy, or to speak more accurately, “pluto-democracy”, is no exception: it comprises a governing elite of highly skilled operators who contrive to remain in power by persuasion and manipulation of the masses. Principally it is for the last three contentions that Pareto is today remembered, or, as I shall show, misremembered, as a “proto-fascist”.

This article presents an analysis of the strategic behavior of countries when there is imperfect verification of an arms control agreement. It provides a framework for determining whether an arms control agreement is desirable, shows which factors are needed for the agreement to be maintained in the absence of third-party enforcers, and develops propositions relating changes in verification capabilities to changes in the likelihood of cheating and the use of verification technology. These propositions yield several paradoxes of information (for example, the better the verification technology, the less often it will be employed). Since the analysis incorporates both simultaneous and sequential moves by the players, it provides new insights into other applied areas as well as game theory.

Since 1972, campaign spending by House incumbents has skyrocketed, particularly in those districts with marginal support for the incumbent's party. At the same time, parties in the House have become much more cohesive in the way they vote, producing more precise and informative party brands. We argue that these two phenomena are fundamentally linked. As parties have developed more precise reputations, incumbents in these districts must spend much more to attract voters in “marginal” districts, who would be willing to vote for a candidate with the particular incumbent's legislative record, but not the average member of his party. Increasingly precise party reputations provide voters with stronger priors that incumbents are just like the rest of their party, and incumbents in marginal districts must spend more to overcome these beliefs. We demonstrate this using a simple formal model and test it empirically using campaign-spending data from 1972 to 2008.

This article studies the consequences of strategic voting by outcome-oriented voters in elections under proportional representation (PR). I develop a model of elections under PR, in which voters choose among an arbitrary finite number of parties, and the policy outcome is determined in a postelection bargaining stage. I use a new solution concept, robust equilibrium, which greatly mitigates the well-known problem of indeterminate predictions in multicandidate competition. Applying the equilibrium concept to the model, I find that PR promotes representation of small parties in general, even when voters are strategic. However, the median voter plays a critical role in shaping policy outcomes, which reflects the majoritarian nature of parliamentary policy making rules. Thus, PR may not be incompatible with the majoritarian vision of representative democracy if voters’ main concern is policy outcomes.

For incumbents to be accountable for their issue stances, voters must sanction incumbents whose positions are “out of step” with their own. We test the electoral accountability of British legislators for their stance on Brexit. We find that there is very limited issue accountability. Individuals who disagreed with their representative’s stance on Brexit were 3 percentage points less likely to vote for them. The aggregate consequences of these individual effects are limited. A one-standard-deviation increase in the proportion of constituents agreeing with their incumbent’s Brexit stance is associated with an increase of 0.53 percentage points in incumbent vote share. These effects are one and a half times larger when the main challenger has a different Brexit stance to the incumbent. A follow-up survey of Members of Parliament (MPs) shows that MPs’ estimates of the effects of congruence are similar in magnitude. Our findings suggest that issue accountability is conditional in nature and limited in magnitude even for an issue such as Brexit, which should be maximally amenable to such effects.

Research from the United States and Europe suggests that affluent citizens enjoy considerably more policy influence than do average citizens and the poor. I examine the extent of unequal policy responsiveness in one of the countries that have gone farthest in reducing economic inequality and restricting money in politics: Norway. I use an original dataset on public opinion and public policy containing 603 specific issues over five decades (1966–2014). The results show that although policy is certainly skewed toward the preferences of the privileged, Norway stands out among previously studied cases for two reasons: (1) The preferences of the poor seem to have some sway on economic issues and (2) not all affluent citizens get their way: educational attainment appears to be the more important determinant. The Norwegian case suggests that influence need not be as dependent upon affluence as in the United States.

It is axiomatic that some supreme courts are more influential than others. A dictum by one judge may carry more weight than a decision by another. Anyone who has studied the opinions of our highest courts is constantly assigning values to them, and the combination of these impressions may determine the relative standing of these tribunals for that individual. That this process of appreciation or depreciation is usually unconscious, and frequently irrational, does not make the prestige which results from it any less real or less potent a factor.