Mothers' pensions were the first explicit welfare benefits established outside of poor relief in the United States. Contrary to established wisdom in political science, their enabling statutes spread very quickly across most states in the 1910s, with smaller, nonindustrial states often in the vanguard. Previous research concerning the predictors of state-level policy innovations has focused on a small subset of possible explanatory variables, typically economic or electoral conditions. We operationalize and test hypotheses about the influence of economic conditions, culture and ideology, electoral politics, governmental institutions and prior public policies, and the role of business, labor, and women's voluntary groups on the priority of state enactments. Our findings indicate that widespread federations of women's voluntary groups exerted a powerful influence on mothers' pension enactments even before most American women had the right to vote. We demonstrate the value to empirical political science of theories and variables referring to gender and women's politics.

We examine the relationship between military expenditures and economic growth in the United States from 1948 to 1990, in order to gauge the potential peace dividend. Our main results suggest that military spending is a significant drain on the economy. We then examine the implications of a restructured international system for U.S. military expenditures and their resultant impact on economic growth in the 1990s. Simulations of Democratic and Republican proposals for cuts in defense spending suggest increases in economic output of between 2.5% and 4.5% over the period 1993–96.

The Tiebout model of competition in the local market for public goods is an important and controversial theory. The current debate revolves around the apparent disparity between macro empirical studies that show greater efficiency in the supply of public goods in polycentric regions compared to consolidated ones and micro evidence of widespread citizen-consumer ignorance, which has been used to argue that individual actions cannot plausibly lead to efficiency-enhancing competition between local governments. We argue that competitive markets can be driven by a subset of informed consumers who shop around between alternate suppliers and produce pressure for competitive outcomes from which all consumers benefit. Using data from a survey of over five hundred households, we analyze the role of these marginal citizen-consumers and incorporate the costs of information gathering and the strategic interests of local governments into the competitive market model.

How does migration affect the security of advanced industrial states, and how does the security environment shape the way states deal with international migration? Migration rests at the nexus of three dimensions of security, including geopolitical interests, material production, and internal security. I argue that migration policy is an integral instrument of state grand strategy in this context, and that examining levels of threat on each facet of security at a given point in time can largely explain variation in policy. I test a series of hypotheses drawn from this security framework using a case-study method that examines policy development in four advanced industrial states, including the United States, Germany, France, and Great Britain in the period 1945–present.

Globalization and automation have contributed to deindustrialization and the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs, yielding important electoral implications across advanced democracies. Coupling insights from economic voting and social identity theory, we consider how different groups in society may construe manufacturing job losses in contrasting ways. We argue that deindustrialization threatens dominant group status, leading some white voters in affected localities to favor candidates they believe will address economic distress and defend racial hierarchy. Examining three US presidential elections, we find white voters were more likely to vote for Republican challengers where manufacturing layoffs were high, whereas Black voters in hard-hit localities were more likely to vote for Democrats. In survey data, white respondents, in contrast to people of color, associated local manufacturing job losses with obstacles to individual upward mobility and with broader American economic decline. Group-based identities help explain divergent political reactions to common economic shocks.

Most applications of spatial modeling to the problem of electoral competition are pessimistic regarding the prospects for candidate equilibrium in more than one policy dimension. Probabilistic models of the vote, however, increase the likelihood of equilibrium. We expand the probabilistic model to include measured nonissue variables, thereby representing the general multivariate model of behavioral research. For this model we offer a general candidate equilibrium solution and illustrate with some simulations based on 1988 National Election Study data. The more complicated one's model of voters' motivations, the greater appears to be the chance of locating a candidate equilibrium position in policy space.

Institutional legitimacy is perhaps the most important political capital courts possess. Many believe, however, that the legitimacy of elected state courts is being threatened by the rise of politicized judicial election campaigns and the breakdown of judicial impartiality. Three features of such campaigns, the argument goes, are dangerous to the perceived impartiality of courts: campaign contributions, attack ads, and policy pronouncements by candidates for judicial office. By means of an experimental vignette embedded in a representative survey, I investigate whether these factors in fact compromise the legitimacy of courts. The survey data indicate that campaign contributions and attack ads do indeed lead to a diminution of legitimacy, in courts just as in legislatures. However, policy pronouncements, even those promising to make decisions in certain ways, have no impact whatsoever on the legitimacy of courts and judges. These results are strongly reinforced by the experiment's ability to compare the effects of these campaign factors across institutions (a state Supreme Court and a state legislature). Thus, this analysis demonstrates that legitimacy is not obdurate and that campaign activity can indeed deplete the reservoir of goodwill courts typically enjoy, even if the culprit is not the free-speech rights the U.S. Supreme Court announced in 2002.

I provide a formal theory of government for a political system characterized by a proportional representation electoral system, a parliamentary government that exercises collective responsibility, and a government formation process. Political parties are assumed to be policy-oriented and to serve the interests of those who vote for them. Parties choose policy platforms that determine their representation in parliament; and given that representation, the parties bargain over the government to be formed and the policies that government will implement. The model yields equilibria with the property that parties choose dispersed policy positions. Thus, electoral incentives in proportional representation parliamentary systems need not lead to policy convergence. The theory provides predictions of party locations such as those developed in the manifesto project.

The effect of electoral mobilization upon the decay of political institutions is examined with reference to the stability of aggregate voting patterns in Western Europe. Historical time series are studied empirically to test predictions derived from a formal model. The conclusion is that demobilization of groups, rather than mobilization of new voters, threatens the stability of electoral institutions. It is argued that electoral mobilization is a process through which political institutions preserve stability of social relations.

The idea of the public sphere, of an institutionalized arena of discursive interaction, is central to democratic theory and practice. The modern age has, however, witnessed the erosion of a public realm distinct from the state and the market. In response to this erosion, public realm theory, notably the work of Arendt and Habermas, attempts to theorize the minimal conditions necessary for a discursive realm free of structural coercion or manipulation. The resulting normative conception of the public sphere has come under sharp attack by postmodern theorists, including Foucault, Lyotard, and Baudrillard, who question the basic presuppositions of public realm theory. I examine their objections and show how the public realm theory of Arendt can be viewed as motivated by concerns similar to the postmoderns'. Against Habermas, I argue that Arendt's public realm theory is less concerned with the question of legitimation than with the theorization of an agonistic political subjectivity.

Dispute resolution institutions facilitate agreements and preserve the peace whenever property rights are imperfect. In weak states, strengthening formal institutions can take decades, and so state and aid interventions also try to shape informal practices and norms governing disputes. Their goal is to improve bargaining and commitment, thus limiting disputes and violence. Mass education campaigns that promote alternative dispute resolution (ADR) are common examples of these interventions. We studied the short-term impacts of one such campaign in Liberia, where property disputes are endemic. Residents of 86 of 246 towns randomly received training in ADR practices and norms; this training reached 15% of adults. One year later, treated towns had higher resolution of land disputes and lower violence. Impacts spilled over to untrained residents. We also saw unintended consequences: more extrajudicial punishment and (weakly) more nonviolent disagreements. Results imply that mass education can change high-stakes behaviors, and improving informal bargaining and enforcement behavior can promote order in weak states.

Despite the explosive increase in the research program on government growth in recent years, little work has been done on government growth disaggregated to the subnational level. I examine the empirical validity of five competing models of government growth for the fifty U.S. states from 1945 to 1984: Wagner's Law, fiscal illusion, party control, bureau voting, and intergovernmental grant. Government size is defined in terms of state government spending as a proportion of total state economic output, with separate implicit price deflators being employed for the public and private sectors. Based on a longitudinal test of these competing models, the analysis uncovers strong empirical support for the bureau voting and intergovernmental grant models, moderately weak support for the Wagner's Law model, and virtually no support for the fiscal illusion and party control explanations. These findings have important implications for the study of government growth in general and, more specifically, in the states.

To paint a fuller picture of economic voters, we combine personal income records with a representative election survey. We examine three central topics in the economic voting literature: pocketbook versus sociotropic voting, the effects of partisanship on economic evaluations, and voter myopia. First, we show that voters who appear in survey data to be voting based on the national economy are, in fact, voting equally on the basis of their personal financial conditions. Second, there is strong evidence of both partisan bias and economic information in economic evaluations, but personal economic data is required to separate the two. Third, although in experiments and aggregate historical data recent economic conditions appear to drive vote choice, we find no evidence of myopia when we examine actual personal economic data.

What explains online radicalization and support for ISIS in the West? Over the past few years, thousands of individuals have radicalized by consuming extremist content online, many of whom eventually traveled overseas to join the Islamic State. This study examines whether anti-Muslim hostility might drive pro-ISIS radicalization in Western Europe. Using new geo-referenced data on the online behavior of thousands of Islamic State sympathizers in France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Belgium, I study whether the intensity of anti-Muslim hostility at the local level is linked to pro-ISIS radicalization on Twitter. The results show that local-level measures of anti-Muslim animosity correlate significantly and substantively with indicators of online radicalization, including posting tweets sympathizing with ISIS, describing life in ISIS-controlled territories, and discussing foreign fighters. High-frequency data surrounding events that stir support for ISIS—terrorist attacks, propaganda releases, and anti-Muslim protests—show the same pattern.

This article examines two key political beliefs of high level American federal executives: their views on the role of government in providing social services and their views regarding inequities in political representation. Data were collected in 1970 through open-ended interviews with a sample of 126 political appointees and supergrade career civil servants in the domestic agencies. Both of the beliefs analyzed were pertinent to the efforts of the Nixon administration to reorder national priorities and policies. The evidence in the paper establishes differences in the outlooks of administrators depending on agency, job status, and party affiliation. Agency and party affiliation are particularly important variables, and their joint effects on the beliefs examined are substantial. Democratic administrators in the social service agenoies were the most liberal and Republicans in the non-social service agencies the most conservative. Our data document a career bureaucracy with very little Republican representation and a social service bureaucracy dominated by administrators ideologically hostile to many of the directions pursued by the Nixon administration in the realm of social policy. The article closes with a discussion of the implications of our findings for future conflicts between the elected executive and the bureaucracy.

How do electoral incentives affect legislative organization? Through an analysis of Japan's mixed-member electoral system, we demonstrate that legislative organization is strongly influenced not only by the individual legislators reelection incentives but also by their interest in their party gaining power and maintaining a strong party label. Electorally vulnerable legislators are given choice legislative positions to enhance their prospects at the polls, whereas (potential) party leaders disproportionately receive posts with greater influence on the party's overall reputation. Members of Parliament elected from proportional representation (PR) lists and in single member districts also receive different types of posts, reflecting their distinct electoral incentives. Even small variations in electoral rules can have important consequences for legislative organization. In contrast to Germany's compensatory mixed-member system, Japan's parallel system (combined with a “best loser” or “zombie” provision) generates incentives for the party to allocate posts relating to the distribution of particularistic goods to those elected in PR.

This article explores two dimensions of public evaluations of presidential candidates on the basis open-ended survey questions from 1952 to 1980. The first dimension looks at whether citizens evaluate candidates on the basis of policies, performance, or strictly candidate attributes; the second examines the time perspective of these assessments, that is, whether they are retrospective or prospective. It is found that incumbents have been judged primarily on the basis of retrospective performance, challengers on prospective policy, and candidates running in nonincumbent races on prospective performance. Throughout the period from 1952 to 1980 both policy and performance considerations have become increasingly related to the vote. Except for 1964, performance has outweighed policy as a predictor of the vote, with an emphasis on retrospective evaluations whenever a incumbent runs for reelection and on prospective assessments in nonincumbent races. The 1964 case provides the best example of a policy mandate, with the 1972 election also fitting the pattern to a lesser degree. The data for the 1980 election, however, fail to support the claim of a mandate for Reagan's policy stands.

Why do political actors undertake reforms that constrain their own discretion? We argue that uncertainty generated by political competition is a major driver of such reforms, and test this argument using subnational data on Mexican states’ adoption of state-level access to information (ATI) laws. Examining data from 31 Mexican states plus the Federal District, we find that more politically competitive states passed ATI laws more rapidly, even taking into account the party in power, levels of corruption, civil society, and other factors. The fine-grained nature of our data, reflecting the staggered timing of elections, inauguration dates, and dates of passage, allows us to distinguish between different theoretical mechanisms. We find the greatest evidence in favor of an insurance mechanism, by which incumbent parties who face uncertainty over future political control seek to ensure access to government information, and means of monitoring incumbents, in the future in case they lose power.

Even though voters can have complex preferences over multiple candidates or parties, all extant electoral systems provide political representation based solely or primarily on voters' first preferences. I present a new concept of proportional representation that takes account of voters' preferences over the full list of alternatives—fully proportional representation (FPR)—and schemes for its implementation. I outline a “pure” FPR scheme, but because this scheme would have several undesirable features when used by real voters, I also discuss modifications that account for these difficulties. Although there are a variety of interpretations of the role played by voting in democracy, several can be shown to suggest FPR as a normative ideal. Fully proportional representation provides us with new ways to conceptualize existing electoral systems, a new standard against which alternative systems can be evaluated, and several feasible alternatives for approximating this new ideal.

A critical element of decision making is the timing of choices political actors make; often when a decision is made is as critical as the decision itself. We posit a dynamic model of strategic position announcement based on signaling theories of legislative politics. We suggest that members who receive clear signals from constituents, interest groups, and policy leaders will announce their positions earlier. Those with conflicting signals will seek more information, delaying their announcement. We test several expectations by examining data on when members of the House of Representatives announced their positions on the North American Free Trade Agreement. We also contrast the timing model with a vote model, and find that there are meaningful differences between the factors influencing the timing of position announcements and vote choice. Our research allows analysts to interpret the process leading up to the House action and the end state of that process.