We present, test, and extend a theoretical framework that connects disgust, a powerful basic human emotion, to political attitudes through psychological mechanisms designed to protect humans from disease. These mechanisms work outside of conscious awareness, and in modern environments, they can motivate individuals to avoid intergroup contact by opposing immigration. We report a meta-analysis of previous tests in the psychological sciences and conduct, for the first time, a series of tests in nationally representative samples collected in the United States and Denmark that integrate the role of disgust and the behavioral immune system into established models of emotional processing and political attitude formation. In doing so, we offer an explanation for why peaceful integration and interaction between ethnic majority and minorities is so hard to achieve.

Scholars have proposed two distinct explanations for why policies diffuse across American states: (1) policymakers learn by observing the experiences of nearby states, and (2) states seek a competitive economic advantage over other states. The most common empirical approach for studying interstate influence is modeling an indicator of a state's policy choice as a function of its neighbors' policies, with each neighbor weighted equally. This can appropriately specify one form of learning model, but it does not adequately test for interstate competition: when a policy diffuses due to competition, states' responses to other states vary depending on the size and location of specific populations. We illustrate with two substantive applications how geographic information systems (GIS) can be used to test for interstate competition. We find that lottery adoptions diffuse due to competition—rather than to learning—but find no evidence of competition in state choices about welfare benefits. Our empirical approach can also be applied to competition among nations and local jurisdictions.

“Naïve” Condorcet Jury Theorems automatically have “sophisticated” versions as corollaries. A Condorcet Jury Theorem is a result, pertaining to an election in which the agents have common preferences but diverse information, asserting that the outcome is better, on average, than the one that would be chosen by any particular individual. Sometimes there is the additional assertion that, as the population grows, the probability of an incorrect decision goes to zero. As a consequence of simple properties of common interest games, whenever “sincere” voting leads to the conclusions of the theorem, there are Nash equilibria with these properties. In symmetric environments the equilibria may be taken to be symmetric.

While United Nations peacekeeping missions were created to keep peace and perform post-conflict activities, since the end of the Cold War peacekeepers are more often deployed to active conflicts. Yet, we know little about their ability to manage ongoing violence. This article provides the first broad empirical examination of UN peacekeeping effectiveness in reducing battlefield violence in civil wars. We analyze how the number of UN peacekeeping personnel deployed influences the amount of battlefield deaths in all civil wars in Africa from 1992 to 2011. The analyses show that increasing numbers of armed military troops are associated with reduced battlefield deaths, while police and observers are not. Considering that the UN is often criticized for ineffectiveness, these results have important implications: if appropriately composed, UN peacekeeping missions reduce violent conflict.

Democratic theories that argue for expanding the scope and domain of democracy assume that democratic experiences will transform individuals in democratic ways. Individuals are likely to become more public-spirited, tolerant, knowledgeable, and self-reflective than they would otherwise be. This assumption depends on viewing the self as socially and discursively constituted, a view that contrasts with the standard liberal-democratic view of the self as prepolitically constituted and narrowly self-interested. The importance of the social and discursive view of the self is that it highlights how standard assumptions about the self help to justify limits to democratic participation. As now conceptualized, however, the transformational assumption does not meet standard objections to expanding democracy. I sketch an approach that distinguishes classes of interests according to their potentials for democratic transformation, and strengthens—by qualifying—transformative expectations in democratic theory.

Social scientists who use history as a laboratory for theory development use the work of historians to construct background narratives which can then be coded according to theoretically relevant categories. Yet, virtually no attention has been paid to how these historical monographs are to be chosen. On most periods and themes of interest available accounts differ, not only substantively but also with respect to the implicit theories and conceptual frameworks used to establish salience or produce commonsensical explanations. Unself-conscious use of historical monographs thus easily results in selection bias. Social scientists are bound to be more attracted to and convinced by accounts that accord with the expectations about events contained in the concepts they deploy and the theories they seek to test. Consideration of recent developments in historiographical theory supports the argument that responsible techniques for using historical sources are available, but they require understanding the extent to which patterns within historiography, rather than “History,” must be the direct focus of investigation and explanation. Such an approach has the added advantage of helping to generate historically based studies where observations or cases outnumber variables.

Much recent analysis of British politics has assumed, explicitly or implicitly, that constituency campaigns have no impact upon an electorate that draws on an increasingly nationalized media for its information. We employ data on constituency campaign spending to challenge this interpretation. Local party campaigners are rational in their use of funds, spending most in seats where the competition is close and least where there is little hope of winning. What is more, campaign spending is clearly associated with voting, increasing support for the spending party and decreasing support for its rivals. Contrary to the accepted wisdom, local campaign spending can result in important shifts in the vote. However, local campaigning seems to be of much more value to challengers than to incumbents.

The increased “legalization” embodied in the revised Dispute Settlement Procedure (DSP) of the World Trade Organization (WTO) is shown to be an institutional innovation that increases the opportunities for states to temporarily suspend their obligations in periods of unexpected, but heightened, domestic political pressure for protection. This increased flexibility in the system reduces per-period cooperation among states but also reduces the possibility that the regime may break down entirely. There is shown to be a trade-off between rigidity and stability in international institutional design in the face of unforeseen, but occasionally intense, domestic political pressure. In a model with a WTO that serves both an informational and adjudicatory role, it is established that agreements with DSPs are self-enforcing, are more stable, and are more acceptable to a wider variety of countries than agreements without DSPs. Evidence drawn from data on preferential trading agreements supports the key hypotheses.

This paper proposes a model that takes the dynamic agent-based analysis of policy-driven party competition into a multiparty environment. In this, voters continually review party support and switch parties to increase their expectations; parties continually readapt policy positions to the shifting affiliations of voters. Different algorithms for party adaptation are explored, including “Aggregator” (adapt party policy to the ideal policy positions of party supporters), Hunter (repeat policy moves that were rewarded; otherwise make random moves), Predator (move party policy toward the policy position of the largest party), and “Sticker” (never change party policy). Strong trends in the behavior of parties using different methods of adaptation are explored. The model is then applied in a series of experiments to the dynamics of a real party system, described in a published opinion poll time series. This paper reports first steps toward endogenizing key features of the process, including the birth and death of parties, internal party decision rules, and voter ideal points.

Revisionist accounts conclude that divided and unified government do not differ significantly in the production of “important” public policy. I argue instead that when one theoretically reclaims the concerns about party responsiveness and institutional features of American politics that have animated party government scholars, unified government is significantly more productive than divided government. Employing a range of measures of important legislative enactments in the postwar period, I find that unified government produces greater quantities of significant enactments and is more responsive to the public mood than is divided government. The evidence suggests that parties do, as party government theorists maintain, generate incentives to cooperation that help transcend some of the policymaking gaps created by the Constitution.

Political parties in the United States are usually regarded as too weak and decentralized, too much the prey of office-seeking politicians and special interests, to function effectively as programmatic., policy-effecting agents within the separation of powers. This has been taken as a serious flaw in the U.S. version of representative democracy, prompting cycles of proposed reform; criticisms of the existing set-up as a capitalistic sham; or alternative justifications of the system as pluralist rather than strictly party democracy. Our research challenges these assumptions by demonstrating the existence of strong links between postwar (1948–1985) election platforms and governmental outputs. Platforms' sentences, coded into one of 54 subject categories, are used as indicators of programmatic emphases and are related to corresponding federal expenditure shares. Resulting regression models demonstrate the full applicability of party mandate theory to the United States, and they operationalize its U.S. variants concretely.

Recent work across a wide range of issues in political economy as well as in American, comparative, and international politics tries to explain the inefficient use of power—revolutions, civil wars, high levels of public debt, international conflict, and costly policy insulation—in terms of commitment problems. This paper shows that a common mechanism is at work in a number of these diverse studies. This common mechanism provides a more general formulation of a type of commitment problem that can arise in many different substantive settings. The present analysis then formalizes this mechanism as an “inefficiency condition” that ensures that all of the equilibria of a stochastic game are inefficient. This condition has a natural substantive interpretation: Large, rapid changes in the actors' relative power (measured in terms of their minmax payoffs) may cause inefficiency.

Do informal institutions, rules, and norms created and enforced by social groups promote good local governance in environments of weak democratic or bureaucratic institutions? This question is difficult to answer because of challenges in defining and measuring informal institutions and identifying their causal effects. In the article, we investigate the effect of lineage groups, one of the most important vehicles of informal institutions in rural China, on local public goods expenditure. Using a panel dataset of 220 Chinese villages from 1986 to 2005, we find that village leaders from the two largest family clans in a village increased local public investment considerably. This association is stronger when the clans appeared to be more cohesive. We also find that clans helped local leaders overcome the collective action problem of financing public goods, but there is little evidence suggesting that they held local leaders accountable.

A theory of government formation in parliamentary systems is developed from a model incorporating policy-oriented parties with spatial preferences and a formation process in which parties are selected in sequence to attempt to form a government. A government is formed when the policy proposed by the party selected is sustained on a vote of confidence. The equilibria identify the government and the policy it will implement and depend on the configuration of preferences and on the government formation process. For example, in a political system with two large parties and one small party and in which one of the two large parties will be selected to attempt to form a government, the government will be formed by a large party with the support of the small party. The policy will reflect the preferences of the small party but will be closer to the ideal point of the large party.

Electoral-connection theories of legislative politics view bill cosponsorship as low-cost position taking by rational legislators who communicate with target audiences (e.g., constituents) external to the legislature. Legislative signaling games suggest a view of bill cosponsorship in which early cosponsors attempt to communicate to target audiences (e.g., the median voter) within the legislature. Using data from the 103rd U.S. House of Representatives, we show that the timing of legislators' cosponsorship decisions are more supportive of cosponsorship as intralegislative signaling than as extralegislative position taking. First, policy extremists on both sides of the political spectrum are more likely than moderates to be initial endorsers of legislative initiatives. Second, extremist-moderate differences diminish over the course of bill histories.

Building on the separation-of-powers approach in American politics, this article develops a new micro-level account of judicial decision-making in contexts where judges face institutional insecurity. Against conventional wisdom, I argue that under certain conditions the lack of judicial independence motivates judges to “strategically defect” against the government once it begins losing power. The result is a reverse legal–political cycle in which antigovernment decisions cluster at the end of weak governments. Original data on more than 7,500 individual decisions by Argentine Supreme Court justices (1976–1995) are used to test hypotheses about why, when, and in which types of cases judges are likely to engage in strategic defection. Consistent with the theory's predictions, the results of the analysis show a significant increase in antigovernment decisions occurring at the end of weak dictatorships and weak democratic governments. Examining subsets of decisions and controlling for several additional variables further corroborate the strategic account.

Europe is geographically divided on the issue of immigration. Large cities are the home of Cosmopolitan Europe, where immigration is viewed positively. Outside the large cities—and especially in the countryside—is Nationalist Europe, where immigration is a threat. This divide is well documented and much discussed, but there has been scant research on why people in large cities are more likely to have favorable opinions about immigration. Debates about geographic differences generally highlight two explanations: contextual or compositional effects. I evaluate the two with data from the European Social Survey, the Swiss Household Panel, and the German Socio-Economic Panel. Results support compositional effects and highlight the importance of (demographic and cultural) mechanisms that sort pro-immigration people into large cities. This has several implications for our understanding of societal divisions in Europe; most notably that geographic polarization is a second-order manifestation of deeper (demographic and cultural) divides.

Can positive social contact between members of antagonistic groups reduce prejudice and discrimination? Despite extensive research on social contact, observational studies are difficult to interpret because prejudiced people may select out of contact with out-group members. We overcome this problem by conducting an education-based, randomized field experiment—the Urban Youth Vocational Training program (UYVT)—with 849 randomly sampled Christian and Muslim young men in riot-prone Kaduna, Nigeria. After sixteen weeks of positive intergroup social contact, we find no changes in prejudice, but heterogeneous-class subjects discriminate significantly less against out-group members than subjects in homogeneous classes. We trace this finding to increased discrimination by homogeneous-class subjects compared to non-UYVT study participants, and we highlight potentially negative consequences of in-group social contact. By focusing on skill-building instead of peace messaging, our intervention minimizes reporting bias and offers strong experimental evidence that intergroup social contact can alter behavior in constructive ways, even amid violent conflict.

Scholarship on electoral turnout has long emphasized two main themes: explanations of nonvoting in terms of individual characteristics and in terms of contextual variables. These investigations have deeply enriched our understanding of electoral participation, but their limitations have also sensitized us to the remaining problems of explanation. Perusal of the work on American politics exposes a rather striking tendency in studies of participation to ignore, or soft pedal, the effects of active political mobilization. In this article we formulate two models of electoral turnout—socioeconomic and political mobilization—and apply them to aggregate data on voting in gubernatorial elections of 1978 and 1980. The socioeconomic model of turnout includes such influences as income, age, and educational attainment. To assess the effects of political mobilization, we have considered campaign spending, partisan competition, electoral margin, and the presence or absence of a simultaneous race for the United States Senate. Both of the models perform quite well individually, producing significant and meaningful coefficients and adequate fits. Yet in the final analysis we demonstrate that quite apart from major sources of variation in gubernatorial turnout—such as region and presidential versus nonpresidential years—the mobilizing influences of campaign activism and competitiveness have a strong impact on electoral participation; electoral law, i.e., closing date of registration, retains a small but significant effect on voting for governor; and socioeconomic characteristics, included in a fully specified model, have little to contribute independently to an explanation of electoral turnout. These findings are very much in the same vein as related cross-national investigations, which emphasize the crucial role of electoral law and political parties and downplay individual characteristics as determinants of electoral participation. On the basis of the research reported here, we argue that scholars need to pay more attention to political mobilization as an explanation of electoral turnout.