The status of international law and transnational legal agreements with respect to the sovereignty claims of liberal democracies has become a highly contentious theoretical and political issue. Although recent European discussions focus on global constitutionalism, there is increasing reticence on the part of many that prospects of a world constitution are neither desirable nor salutary. This article more closely considers criticisms of these legal transformations by distinguishing the nationalist from democratic sovereigntiste positions, and both, from diagnoses that see the universalization of human rights norms either as the Trojan horse of a global empire or as neocolonialist intentions to assert imperial control over the world. These critics ignore “the jurisgenerativity of law.” Although democratic sovereigntistes are wrong in minimizing how human rights norms improve democratic self-rule; global constitutionalists are also wrong in minimizing the extent to which cosmopolitan norms require local contextualization, interpretation, and vernacularization by self-governing peoples.

This article examines the logic underlying standard formulations of the interparty competition hypothesis in the comparative state policy literature, suggests a reformulation which provides some new insights into the conditions under which we might expect state policies to change as a result of party characteristics, and undertakes an initial test of the reformulation.

I develop two propositions. The first is that party systems which divide the electorate along economic class lines will generate more generous welfare policies than party systems which do not so organize the electorate. The second is that within states with class-based electoral systems, change in welfare policy will be positively related to the degree to which the party or faction with lower- and working-class support gains control of government.

I analyze welfare policies of selected American states for the period 1938 to 1970. My analysis suggests that (1) the class basis of electoral politics does influence state welfare policies and (2) parties and factions which differ in their constituency bases produce different types of policies when they are in control of government.

Putnam's (1988) conjecture that negotiators can benefit from their domestic constraints implies that they may want to impose domestic constraints on themselves by granting veto power to an agent. I show that a negotiator's decision to employ an agent as veto player depends on the kinds of information available to the foreign country and the alignment of preferences between the negotiator and the agent. When the foreign country has incomplete information about the negotiator's preferences and the negotiator has preferences too divergent from those of the agent, the negotiator will not give veto power to the agent. However, this applies only to an agent with extreme preferences, and a surprisingly large number of agent types will receive veto power. The attractiveness of the agent veto to the negotiator is in part due to its informational effect. By granting veto power to an agent, the negotiator can transmit more information to the foreign country and capture informational gains that would be lost in the absence of the agent veto.

Max Weber has often been criticized for advocating a wertfrei, ethically neutral approach in the social sciences and for thereby denying to man, in the words of Leo Strauss, “any science, empirical or rational, any knowledge, scientific or philosophic, of the true value system.” On the other hand, Carl Friedrich points out that Weber's “ideal-type analysis led him to introduce value judgments into his discussion of such issues as bureaucracy.” There is some justification for both these criticisms. Indeed, a characteristic of Weber's work is that it can be and has been subjected to opposite criticisms, not only in this respect but also in others. Historians object to his disregard for the specific historical conditions under which the social phenomena he analyzes have taken place, which sometimes leads him to combine historical events that occurred centuries apart into a conception of a social system. Sociologists, in contrast, accuse him of being preoccupied with interpreting unique historical constellations, such as Western capitalism, instead of studying recurrent social phenomena which make it possible to develop testable generalizations about social structures. His methodology is attacked as being neo-Kantian, but his concept of Verstehen is decried as implying an intuitionist method. While his theories are most frequently cited in contradistinction to those of Marx, they have also been described as basically similar to Marx's.

Most research suggests that the mass public knows very little about the Supreme Court and, consequently, that decisions do not affect attitudes toward the Court. I argue that where there is sufficient access to information about Court cases and when the issues are perceived as important, people pay attention and use this information in their evaluation of the Court. The research is based on a series of two-wave panel studies that examine the effect of Supreme Court cases in the local communities where the controversies began. The results show that a substantial number of residents heard about the Court's decision and subsequently changed their evaluation of the Supreme Court, especially those who live in the immediate community. The results suggest that we need to consider other circumstances in which people hear about and care about Supreme Court decisions.

Although incomplete information is recognized to be an essential feature of crises, game-theoretic formulations have not generally modeled this explicitly. This paper models a mutually assured destruction (MAD) crisis as a game of sequential bargaining with incomplete information, sufficiently simple that its equibria may be found. These provide better game-theoretic foundations for the notions of resolve and critical risk and their role in crises and also make it possible to compare the bargaining dynamics of this model with those of descriptively richer, but incompletely specified models, revealing several inconsistencies: several analyses of MAD conclude that the state with the greatest resolve in this contest of resolve will prevail. Many models based on critical risks suggest that a state is less likely to escalate, the greater its adversary's resolve. In our model, however, the state with the weakest resolve sometimes prevails, and some states prove more likely to escalate if their adversaries' resolve is greater.

One-dimensional spatial models have come to inform much theorizing and research on the U.S. Supreme Court. However, we argue that judicial preferences vary considerably across areas of the law, and that limitations in our ability to measure those preferences have constrained the set of questions scholars pursue. We introduce a new approach, which makes use of information about substantive similarity among cases, to estimate judicial preferences that vary across substantive legal issues and over time. We show that a model allowing preferences to vary over substantive issues as well as over time is a significantly better predictor of judicial behavior than one that only allows preferences to vary over time. We find that judicial preferences are not reducible to simple left-right ideology and, as a consequence, there is substantial variation in the identity of the median justice across areas of the law during all periods of the modern court. These results suggest a need to reconsider empirical and theoretical research that hinges on the existence of a single pivotal median justice.

Comparative political economy offers a wealth of hypotheses connecting decentralization to improved public service delivery. In recent years, influential formal and experimental work has begun to question the underlying theory and empirical analyses of previous findings. At the same time, many countries have grown dissatisfied with the results of their decentralization efforts and have begun to reverse them. Vietnam is particularly intriguing because of the unique way in which it designed its recentralization, piloting a removal of elected people's councils in 99 districts across the country and stratifying the selection by region, type of province, and urban versus rural setting. We take advantage of the opportunity provided by this quasi experiment to test the core hypotheses regarding the decision to shift administrative and fiscal authority to local governments. We find that recentralization significantly improved public service delivery in areas important to central policy-makers, especially in transportation, healthcare, and communications.

Political scientists usually assume that physical environment helps determine political behavior. They would not, for example, expect a homogeneous political culture in a country sharply divided by mountains. Also, extreme variations in physical environment, such as droughts and floods, have been traditionally considered bad omens for governments. However, very little empirical research has been done on the relationship between natural disasters and attitudes toward government for three reasons. First, political activity seems more determined by social environment than physical. Also, since the individual is influenced by a greater number of social factors than physical factors, the former are more accessible for study and comparison. Finally, it is especially difficult to examine the effect of natural disasters, for they are rather uncommon and unpredictable. This research gap is unfortunate, since such catastrophes place great stress upon the social framework and thus test the adaptive capabilities of the political system.

Despite the rapid growth of online political advertising, the vast majority of scholarship on political advertising relies exclusively on evidence from candidates’ television advertisements. The relatively low cost of creating and deploying online advertisements and the ability to target online advertisements more precisely may broaden the set of candidates who advertise and allow candidates to craft messages to more narrow audiences than on television. Drawing on data from the newly released Facebook Ad Library API and television data from the Wesleyan Media Project, we find that a much broader set of candidates advertises on Facebook than television, particularly in down-ballot races. We then examine within-candidate variation in the strategic use and content of advertising on television relative to Facebook for all federal, statewide, and state legislative candidates in the 2018 election. Among candidates who use both advertising media, Facebook advertising occurs earlier in the campaign, is less negative, less issue focused, and more partisan than television advertising.

The 2007 U.S. Attorney firing scandal raised the specter of political bias in the prosecution of officials under federal corruption laws. Has prosecutorial discretion been employed to persecute enemies or shield allies? To answer this question, I develop a model of the interaction between officials contemplating corruption and a prosecutor deciding whether to pursue cases against them. Biased prosecutors will be willing to file weaker cases against political opponents than against allies. Consequently, the model anticipates that in the presence of partisan bias, sentences of prosecuted opponents will tend to be lower than those of co-partisans. Employing newly collected data on public corruption prosecutions, I find evidence of partisan bias under both Bush (II) and Clinton Justice Departments. However, additional evidence suggests that these results may understate the extent of bias under Bush, while overstating it under Clinton.

General deterrence, unlike immediate deterrence, has rarely been analyzed in a systematic comparative manner. We outline a research design for doing so, by studying the circumstances under which, in a set of enduring rivalries, challengers are likely to initiate militarized disputes. We indicate the conceptual and operational steps necessary to make and empirically compare predictions stemming from three often-competing theoretical frameworks: rational deterrence, a general model of rational conflict initiation, and a cognitive psychological model of behavior emphasizing risk orientation and misperception. The results of probit analysis on a pooled time series of enduring rivalries since 1945 provide support for hypotheses from each of the different theoretical models.

Scholars studying congressional committees have noted the potential for members to seek membership on particular committees, leading to bias. Underpinning this line of scholarship is what might be termed a theory of comparative committee statics, characterized by a cross-sectional empirical approach. We present a new approach that focuses on the dynamics of jurisdictional control. By following a series of issues through the committee hearing process, we show that there is indeed significant issue bias in particular committee venues. However, we also find that new committees often claim jurisdiction over issues as they are redefined in the political process. The degree of jurisdictional monopoly enjoyed by different committees has been overlooked in the literature on this topic in spite of its importance in determining the nature of representation of interests in Congress.

Cooperation helps states realize mutual gains, but mistrust and disagreements over institutional design inhibit cooperation. This article develops a network explanation for how states achieve cooperation in the face of persistent coordination and collaboration problems. The analysis focuses on bilateral cooperation agreements, a vast body of treaties spanning multiple issue areas. Bilateral agreements constitute an evolving network of cooperative ties. This network defines the strategic environment in which states bargain over new agreements, endogenously influencing subsequent bilateral endeavors by revealing strategically valuable information about states’ trustworthiness and preferences over institutional design, while also generating externalities that incentivize bilateral partnerships. Inferential network analysis shows that states are more likely to create bilateral agreements if they (1) share agreements with common third parties, (2) accede to more agreements in general, and/or (3) share important exogenous characteristics with current bilateral partners. These network dynamics drive bilateral cooperation in everything from commodities to cultural exchange to fisheries.

Despite the hopes of the civil rights movement, researchers have found that the election of African Americans to office has not greatly improved the well-being of the black community. This study focuses on the white community, however, and finds that black leadership can have a profound effect. Under black mayors there is positive change in the white vote and in the racial sentiments expressed by members of the white electorate. Although white Republicans seem largely immune to the effects of black incumbency, for Democrats and independents an experience with a black mayoralty tends to decrease racial tension, increase racial sympathy, and increase support of black leadership.

Perception of discrepancy between optimum level of achievement with respect to desired values and actual level of achievement is a concept that has figured importantly in explanations of collective violence and its subset, political violence (approval of and readiness to engage in behaviors which constitute progressively greater challenge to a political regime). Hypotheses about relationships between a number of static and dynamic achievement discrepancy constructs (labeled “relative gratification,” and built from a variant of the Cantril Self-Anchoring scale) are tested. The achievement discrepancy constructs generally show only a weak degree of association with potential for political violence. However, measures of shift over time in discrepancy show an unexpected and intriguing relationship with potential for political violence: individuals who perceive negative change and individuals who perceive positive change show the highest potential for political violence, while individuals who perceive no change show the lowest potential for political violence; and this V-Curve relationship persists in the presence of various control variables. Moreover, absolute magnitude of shift in discrepancy from present to future shows a moderate degree of correlation with potential for political violence, and makes an independent contribution to a linear additive model. The data base is a sample of a population in which instances of political violence have been relatively frequent in the past.

Numerous explanations of the tax revolt have been offered since California's adoption of Proposition 13 in 1978. Unfortunately, many of these explanations remain untested or have been tested inappropriately, and the explanations are often jumbled together in a fashion that precludes theoretical clarity. We extract eight explanations from the literature, each of which assumes that the tax revolt is a systematic national phenomenon that is a function of individual-level social, economic, and political factors. Having tested these explanations by means of a discriminant analysis of data from the 1978 American National Election Study, we find little empirical corroboration for any of them. This leads us to consider two alternative research programs, one of which interprets the tax revolt within a symbolic politics framework.

It has been said that technological and economic development lead ultimately to the decline of communal conflict, and that the emergence of new kinds of socio-economic roles and identities undercuts the organizational bases upon which communal (that is, “racial,” “ethnic,” “religious,” or “tribal”) politics rests. In the past decade, several scholars working in culturally plural societies have challenged this conventional view. They have suggested that communalism may in fact be a persistent feature of social change, and that the dichotomous traditionmodernity models which have often guided our empirical investigations have obscured this theoretical alternative and thereby produced false expectations concerning the direction of change. This paper attempts to synthesize the various elements of this emerging theoretical perspective through the formulation of several propositions which link modernization to communalism. While our discussion will draw primarily upon the Nigerian experience for illustrative material, the propositions are intended to be applicable across societies.

“Communalism,” in this paper, refers to the political assertiveness of groups which have three distinguishing characteristics: first, their membership is comprised of persons who share in a common culture and identity and, to use Karl Deutsch's term, a “complementarity of communication;” second, they encompass the full range of demographic (age and sex) divisions within the wider society and provide “for a network of groups and institutions extending throughout the individual's entire life cycle;” and, third, like the wider society in which they exist, they tend to be differentiated by wealth, status, and power.

This article presents a dynamic theory of parliamentary governments that incorporates attributes of the institutional system in a country, exogenous events that shape parliamentary and electoral opportunities, and the strategies of the government and the opposition as structured by institutions and preferences. The dynamics are investigated in an infinitely repeated game in which events in the form of shocks to income or government resources occur and the government responds with a legislative proposal that is subject to a confidence or censure procedure and may lead to government continuation, reorganization, or dissolution. With a majority confidence procedure, governments are stable, and if parties are politically patient, voting cohesion within the government is high. A censure motion initiated by the opposition can result in voluntary dissolution of government, and the approach of required elections increases the likelihood of dissolution. If the events represent fluctuations in aggregate income, governnment dissolution occurs in good times for the government leader and bad times for the other parties.

A new revolution is under way in American political science. The last revolution—behavioralism—has scarcely been completed before it has been overtaken by the increasing social and political crises of our time. The weight of these crises is being felt within our discipline in the form of a new conflict in the throes of which we now find ourselves. This new and latest challenge is directed against a developing behavioral orthodoxy. This challenge I shall call the post-behavioral revolution.

The initial impulse of this revolution is just being felt. Its battle cries are relevance and action. Its objects of criticism are the disciplines, the professions, and the universities. It is still too young to be described definitively. Yet we cannot treat it as a passing phenomenon, as a kind of accident of history that will somehow fade away and leave us very much as we were before. Rather it appears to be a specific and important episode in the history of our discipline, if not in all of the social sciences. It behooves us to examine this revolution closely for its possible place in the continuing evolution of political science. Does it represent a threat to the discipline, one that will divert us from our long history in the search for reliable understanding of politics? Or is it just one more change that will enhance our capacity to find such knowledge?