Regression analysis in comparative research suffers from two distinct problems of statistical inference. First, because the data constitute all the available observations from a population, conventional inference based on the long-run behavior of a repeatable data mechanism is not appropriate. Second, the small and collinear data sets of comparative research yield imprecise estimates of the effects of explanatory variables. We describe a Bayesian approach to statistical inference that provides a unified solution to these two problems. This approach is illustrated in a comparative analysis of unionization.

State interventions against organized criminal groups (OCGs) sometimes work to improve security, but often exacerbate violence. To understand why, this article offers a theory about criminal governance in five types of criminal regimes—Insurgent, Bandit, Symbiotic, Predatory, and Split. These differ according to whether criminal groups confront or collude with state actors, abuse or cooperate with the community, and hold a monopoly or contest territory with rival OCGs. Police interventions in these criminal regimes pose different challenges and are associated with markedly different local security outcomes. We provide evidence of this theory by using a multimethod research design combining quasi-experimental statistical analyses, automated text analysis, extensive qualitative research, and a large-N survey in the context of Rio de Janeiro’s “Pacifying Police Units” (UPPs), which sought to reclaim control of the favelas from criminal organizations.

The so-called “paradox of voting” is a major anomaly for rational choice theories of elections. If voting is costly and citizens are rational, then in large electrorates the expected turnout would be small, for if many people voted the chance of anyone being pivotal would be too small to make the act worthwhile. Yet many people do vote, even in large national elections. To address this puzzle we construct a model of adaptive rationality: Citizens learn by simple trial and error, repeating satisfactory actions and avoiding unsatisfactory ones. (Their aspiration levels, which code current payoffs as satisfactory or unsatisfactory, are also endogenous, themselves adjusting to experience.) Our main result is that agents who adapt in this manner turn out in substantial numbers even in large electorates and even if voting is costly for everyone.Standard conceptions of rational behavior do not explain why anyone bothers to vote in a mass election…. [Turnout is] the paradox that ate rational choice theory.

Fiorina (1990, 334)We would like to thank Stephen Ansolabehere, Sorin Antohi, Glenn Ellison, Dedre Gentner, Sunil Kumar, David Laitin, Tze Lai, Arthur Lupia, Elijah Millgram, Lincoln Moses, Scott Page, Tom Palfrey, John Patty, Paul Pfleiderer, Adam Simon, Joel Sobel, Carole Uhlaner, three anonymous referees, and the participants in the Political Economics seminar at the GSB, the Stanford–CalTech workshop, the UNC American Politics Research Group, the UCLA conference on Cognition, Emotion, and Rational Choice, panels at the Annual Meetings of the MPSA and the APSA, the Agent 2000 Workshop, the Seventh Annual Wallis Conference, the CMU–Pitt Colloquium Series, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences seminar series for their helpful comments. This paper was written while Ting was at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and he thanks UNC's Department of Political Science for its support. It was revised while Bendor was a Fellow at the CASBS, and he is grateful for the Center's financial and intellectual support.

This article evaluates the effect of territorial autonomy on the outbreak of internal conflict by analyzing ethnic groups around the world since WWII. Shedding new light on an ongoing debate, we argue that the critics have overstated the case against autonomy policies. Our evidence indicates that decentralization has a significant conflict-preventing effect where there is no prior conflict history. In postconflict settings, however, granting autonomy can still be helpful in combination with central power sharing arrangements. Yet, on its own, postconflict autonomy concessions may be too little, too late. Accounting for endogeneity, we also instrument for autonomy in postcolonial states by exploiting that French, as opposed to British, colonial rule rarely relied on decentralized governance. This identification strategy suggests that naïve analysis tends to underestimate the pacifying influence of decentralization.

Comparative electoral research suggests that issue voting has increased and that the ability of social cleavages to account for voting patterns in most advanced industrial democracies has declined. In Israel, only the first of these generalizations holds. The capacity of social cleavages to structure the vote has been maintained along with our overall ability to explain the vote. Based on longitudinal analysis of electoral cleavages between 1969 and 1996 and on an analysis of the 1996 election, we argue that this pattern is driven by issues involving identity dilemmas that have become increasingly important in structuring the vote. Such dilemmas amalgamate policy issues and social allegiances, while reinforcing existing cleavage structures. Focusing on the 1996 election we probe the meanings of internal and external collective identity concerns in Israeli politics, their considerable overlap, and their translation into political choices.

For the last quarter century public-law studies have been dominated by “political jurisprudence,” which tries to understand law as a product of political forces. Critics claim this outlook, as now articulated, has generated fragmented empirical work disconnected from larger normative issues. This essay uses recent “institutionalist” or “structuralist” perspectives, based on critiques of pluralist political science and both Marxist and functionalist sociology, to propose a political approach to public law studies that can avoid such criticisms. If both empirical and normative public-law scholars took as their central concern the “dialectic of meaningful actions and structural determinants” and recast their research in several specified ways, they might be better able to describe the role of normative ideas in law and to achieve a broader empirical agenda that could ground and inform normative debates.

It is widely believed that rents from windfall revenue undermine accountability. An enduring explanation is that windfalls free leaders from the need to tax, producing a quiescent population. Yet, there is little direct evidence of how windfalls and taxes affect citizen political action. I use novel revenue and information experiments to examine whether and why windfalls (compared to taxes) affect how citizens participate in politics. The experiments were embedded in a public awareness campaign conducted with 1,863 citizens in Indonesia. The results—from an original survey and postcard campaign—indicate that the tax treatment increased monitoring and anti-incumbent political action. Yet, when given spending information, citizens in the windfall treatment cared just as much about misused revenue as those in the tax treatment. The findings have important implications for understanding not only how revenue affects citizen political behavior but also how people acquire and process information on government spending.

Military mobilization simultaneously sinks costs, because it must be paid for regardless of the outcome, and ties hands, because it increases the probability of winning should war occur. Existing studies neglect this dualism and cannot explain signaling behavior and tacit bargaining well. I present a formal model that incorporates both functions and shows that many existing conclusions about crisis escalation have to be qualified. Contrary to models with either pure sunk costs or tying-hands signaling, bluffing is possible in equilibrium. General monotonicity results that relate the probability of war to an informed player's expected payoff from fighting do not extend to this environment with its endogenous distribution of power. Peace may involve higher military allocations than war. Rational deterrence models also assume that a commitment either does or does not exist. Extending these, I show how the military instrument can create commitments and investigate the difficulties with communicating them.

The notion that at-large elections for city council seats are discriminatory toward blacks has recently been attacked as empirically invalid. Recent studies have reached conflicting conclusions as to whether electoral arrangements or socioeconomic factors are the major influence on how proportionately blacks are represented. This article addresses this issue, using a regression-based analysis in which proportionality is treated as a relationship across cities with electoral structure as a specifying variable. Socioeconomic variables found to be important in other studies are included. The results support the traditional notion and suggest that the electoral structure begins to have a discernible impact on the level of black representation once the black population reaches 10 percent of the total municipal population. While one socioeconomic variable, the relative income of the city's black population, is found to affect the election of blacks, its impact is greater than that of the electoral structure only when the black population is less than 15 percent.

We examine the determinants of change in state government indebtedness from 1961 through 1989 using a pooled time series cross-sectional analysis. The analysis reveals that debt is primarily a function of economic conditions reflecting both the need to borrow and the capacity of states to repay debt. However, political factors such as culture, partisan competition, and electoral cycles also affect state debt. We also find very weak evidence that tax and expenditure limitations, ironically, may increase state indebtedness, while constitutional debt limitations have no effect upon slowing the growth of state debt.

Parties in pluralist democracies face numerous contentious issues, but most models of electoral competition assume a simple, often one-dimensional structure. We develop a new, inherently multidimensional model of party strategy in which parties compete by emphasizing policy issues. Issue emphasis is informed by two distinct goals: mobilizing the party's core voters and broadening the support base. Accommodating these goals dissolves the position-valence dichotomy through a focus on policies that unite the party internally while also attracting support from the electorate at large. We define issue yield as the capacity of an issue to reconcile these criteria, and then operationalize it as a simple index. Results of multilevel regressions combining population survey data and party manifesto scores from the 2009 European Election Study demonstrate that issue yield governs party strategy across different political contexts.

Using borders and alliances as indicators of opportunity and willingness, respectively, we test the relationship between these and the diffusion of war during the 1816–1965 period. The impact of borders and alliances, individually and in combination, on the growth of ongoing war through “infectious” diffusion is shown through the comparison of baseline cases to cases where states at peace were exposed to various “treatments” comprised of warring border nations or warring alliance partners. The findings indicate that the probability of war diffusion is substantially increased as opportunities and willingness increase, particularly when such geographic and political factors are combined. The applicability of the opportunity and willingness framework to the study of war and diffusion is expanded and confirmed.

We address a well-known but infrequently discussed problem in the quantitative study of international conflict: Despite immense data collections, prestigious journals, and sophisticated analyses, empirical findings in the literature on international conflict are often unsatisfying. Many statistical results change from article to article and specification to specification. Accurate forecasts are nonexistent. In this article we offer a conjecture about one source of this problem: The causes of conflict, theorized to be important but often found to be small or ephemeral, are indeed tiny for the vast majority of dyads, but they are large, stable, and replicable wherever the ex ante probability of conflict is large. This simple idea has an unexpectedly rich array of observable implications, all consistent with the literature. We directly test our conjecture by formulating a statistical model that includes its critical features. Our approach, a version of a “neural network” model, uncovers some interesting structural features of international conflict and, as one evaluative measure, forecasts substantially better than any previous effort. Moreover, this improvement comes at little cost, and it is easy to evaluate whether the model is a statistical improvement over the simpler models commonly used.

Understanding the dynamics of policy distribution requires an appreciation of federal grant programs that have achieved a prominent place in nearly all areas of domestic policy. The theoretical literature on distributive politics, however, focuses almost exclusively on a centralized, top-down view of policy distribution. By examining the role of presidents, legislators, and bureaucrats, scholars have ignored participants who have become key actors in the distribution of federal expenditures—the recipient jurisdictions. This analysis of the allocation patterns under six federal programs shows that local governments exert important influences on the distribution of federal grants and that the distributional patterns and their determinants vary over time. The analysis also points out the importance of disaggregation by focusing on programs and recipient jurisdictions, as opposed to total federal expenditures and regions, states, or congressional districts.

We measure the extent to which military spending policy reflects public opinion, while controlling for other reasonable influences on policy. We use survey data as an indicator of aggregate public opinion on military spending and find evidence that changes in public opinion consistently exert an effect on changes in military spending. The influence of public opinion is less important than either Soviet military spending or the gap between U.S. and Soviet military spending and more important than the deficit and the balance of Soviet conflict/cooperation with the United States. We also examine the hypothesis that public opinion does not influence the government but that the government systematically manipulates public opinion. We find no evidence to support this hypothesis.

Although Gandhi is often taken to be an exemplary moral idealist in politics, this article seeks to demonstrate that Gandhian nonviolence is premised on a form of political realism, specifically a contextual, consequentialist, and moral-psychological analysis of a political world understood to be marked by inherent tendencies toward conflict, domination, and violence. By treating nonviolence as the essential analog and correlative response to a realist theory of politics, one can better register the novelty of satyagraha (nonviolent action) as a practical orientation in politics as opposed to a moral proposition, ethical stance, or standard of judgment. The singularity of satyagraha lays in its self-limiting character as a form of political action that seeks to constrain the negative consequences of politics while working toward progressive social and political reform. Gandhian nonviolence thereby points toward a transformational realism that need not begin and end in conservatism, moral equivocation, or pure instrumentalism.

Political science is a discipline in constant danger of fragmentation because of the centrifugal pulls of our subfields and the contradictions in our scientific and humanistic traditions. We are, however, periodically brought together by the need to respond to major developments that are reshaping the political universe. We are today confronted with a unifying challenge in the crisis of authoritarianism that is undermining the legitimacy of all types of authoritarian systems throughout the world, including the Marxist-Leninist regimes. The crisis will not necessarily produce democracies, but rather a variety of part-free, part-authoritarian systems which do not conform to our classical typologies. Although the crisis of authoritarianism stems from profound social, economic, and cultural trends, the outcome in each case will be decided by political responses. Political science, therefore, has the responsibility to lead intellectually other social sciences in analyzing the fundamental change in political life that involves the clash between individual political cultures and the world culture of modernization.

We investigate whether political institutions can promote attachment to the state in multiethnic societies. Building on literatures on nationalism, democratization, and conflict resolution, we discuss the importance of attachment, understood as a psychological identification with, and pride in, the state. We construct a model of state attachment, specifying the individual-, group-, and state-level conditions that foster it. Then, using cross-national survey data from 51 multiethnic states, we show that, in general, ethnic minorities manifest less attachment to the states in which they reside than do majorities. Combining the survey data with minority group attributes and country-level attributes, we show that the attachment of minorities varies importantly across groups and countries. Our central finding is that federalism and proportional electoral systems—two highly touted solutions to ethnic divisions—have at best mixed effects. These results have implications for state-building and democratic consolidation in ethnically heterogeneous states.