Does control of patronage jobs significantly increase a political party's chances of winning elections in U.S. states? We employ a differences-in-differences design, exploiting the considerable variation in the dates that different states adopted civil service reforms. Our evidence suggests that political parties in U.S. states were able to use state-level patronage to increase the probability of maintaining control of state legislatures and statewide elective offices. We also find that an “entrenched” party, in power for a longer time, can use patronage more effectively. We consider several alternative hypotheses that might plausibly account for the patterns in the data, but find no evidence to support them.

Building a strong autocratic state requires stability in ruler-elite relations. From this perspective the absence of a successor is problematic, as the elite have few incentives to remain loyal if the autocrat cannot reward them for their loyalty after his death. However, an appointed successor has both the capacity and the motive to challenge the autocrat. We argue that a succession based on primogeniture solves the dilemma, by providing the regime with a successor who can afford to wait to inherit the throne peacefully. We test our hypothesis on a dataset covering 961 monarchs ruling 42 European states between 1000 and 1800, and show that fewer monarchs were deposed in states practicing primogeniture than in states practicing alternative succession orders. A similar pattern persists in the world's remaining absolute monarchies. Primogeniture also contributed to building strong states: In 1801 all European monarchies had adopted primogeniture or succumbed to foreign enemies.

In an article previously published by the APSR, Carrubba, Gabel, and Hankla claim that the decision making of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has been constrained—systematically—by the threat of override on the part of member state governments, acting collectively, and by the threat of noncompliance on the part of any single state. They also purport to have found strong evidence in favor of intergovernmentalist, but not neofunctionalist, integration theory. On the basis of analysis of the same data, we demonstrate that the threat of override is not credible and that the legal system is activated, rather than paralyzed, by noncompliance. Moreover, when member state governments did move to nullify the effects of controversial ECJ rulings, they failed to constrain the court, which continued down paths cleared by the prior rulings. Finally, in a head-to-head showdown between intergovernmentalism and neofunctionalism, the latter wins in a landslide.

Spatial models of party competition constitute a recent and incrementally developing literature which seeks to explore the relationships between citizens' decisions and candidates' strategies. Despite the mathematical and deductive rigor of this approach, it is only now that political scientists can begin to see the incorporation of those considerations which less formal analyses identify as salient, and perhaps crucial, features of election contests.

One such consideration concerns the candidates' objectives. Specifically, spatial analysis often confuses the distinction between candidates who maximize votes and candidates who maximize plurality. Downs and Garvey, for example, assume explicitly that candidates maximize votes, though plurality maximization is clearly the assumption which Garvey actually employs, while Downs frequently assumes that vote maximization, plurality maximization, and the goal of winning are equivalent. Downs, nevertheless, attempts to disentangle these objectives, observing that plurality maximization is the appropriate objective for candidates in a single-member district, while vote maximization is appropriate in proportional representation systems with many parties. All subsequent spatial analysis research, however, assumes either implicitly or explicitly that candidates maximize plurality. If Downs is correct, therefore, this research may not be relevant for a general understanding of electoral competition in diverse constitutional or historical circumstances. The question then is whether those strategies that maximize votes differ from those strategies that maximize plurality.

This article is aimed at integrating two kinds of analysis of legislators' calculations of advantage. We assume that legislators operate in two arenas, in the legislative arena itself, where their calculations of advantage concern simply their effectiveness in voting (Farquharson), and in the electoral arena, where their calculations concern the rewards for their position-taking as well as their effectiveness (Fenno). Our analysis is introduced by an interpretation of voting on the Powell amendment, 1956, when some legislators apparently voted strategically and others, equally able to do so, still did not. We then develop an expected utility model of voting that accounts for such divergent choices in terms of legislators' individual beliefs about the distribution of opinions in the legislature (Farquharson) and in their constituencies (Fenno). We conclude with an analysis of the Nash equilibria of choices to vote strategically or nonstrategically.

Increasingly, it is said that the main determinants of electoral outcomes are class, ethnicity, and religion and that local political organizations occupy only marginal roles in national elections. I assess the effects of local party organizations in the presidential election of 1989 in Brazil. Given the long hiatus in competitive politics, the absence of any parties linked to the country's previous democratic experience, and the weakness of citizen identification with political parties, Brazil should be a textbook example of the collapse of local political organizations. The presidential candidates, however, acted as if party endorsements mattered, and in the context of Brazilian politics, it was rational for municipal mayors to trade blocs of votes for future local benefits. Applying a series of increasingly complex models to the vote shares of the leading candidates, I show that all candidates did significantly better in municipalities where the mayor represented their party. I also show that spatial factors affect the tactics of local politicians, and I distinguish charismatic from purely organizational components of support.

The empirical literature on the control of bureaus notes that politicians have difficulty observing bureaucratic output, but this insight is rarely represented informal models. To analyze how bureaus use this uncertainty strategically, we develop a model of expertise-based agenda control, building on the Niskanen (1971) and Miller and Moe (1983) tradition. We show that under some plausible conditions, bureaus will underestimate the benefits, and overestimate the costs, of their programs. In the model, politicians are neither passive nor omniscient: they anticipate the bureau's strategic behavior and establish a monitoring system to counteract it. This possibility of detection changes the bureau's behavior: even imperfect monitoring reduces the bureau's deception of the legislature, whether or not the legislature's demand for the bureau's services is concealed. Moreover, uncertainty by itself matters: if the legislature makes it harder for a risk-averse bureau chief to predict demand or penalty, the bureau will restrain its deception.

With the 1970 passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), federal regulation reached the American workplace. Given the newness of the legislation, any firm conclusion on its effectiveness seems premature. However, there is ample evidence on federal safety regulation of a specific workplace: the coal mine. The federal government has been directly involved in coal mining safety for over 35 years, operating under three major pieces of legislation, enacted in 1941, 1952, and 1969. Opposing opinions regarding the effect of this legislation can be grouped into three categories: radical, reactionary, and reformer. A multiple interrupted time-series analysis indicates that, in fact, the 1941 and 1969 regulations significantly reduced the fatality rate in coal mining. Certain conditions seem related to the effectiveness of this safety legislation: birth order, provisions, enforcement, target population, and goals. The first two conditions would appear to work for the success of the OSHA, the latter three conditions to work against it.

This paper describes how the contributions that different groups make to a party's total strength can be specified by breaking down each contribution into its three components—size, turnout, and loyalty. Through the use of survey data on reported vote rather than party identification, the voting coalitions of the Democrats and Republicans are analyzed. By means of examples of selected groups, the actual magnitude of these contributions and their components are presented for each of the last five presidential elections. Major attention is given to a group-by-group evaluation of the generally accepted view that the Democrats are a coalition of diverse overlapping minorities including the poor, Blacks, union members, Catholics and Jews, Southerners, city dwellers and perhaps the young; and the view that the Republicans have appeal for the corresponding non-minorities. The empirical results show which aspects of these views are valid and which are not. Some implications for the party system as well as the strategic considerations inherent in this approach are also discussed.

We develop and explicate a game-theoretic model in which repeated play, incomplete information, and reputation are major elements. A significant advance of this model is the way it represents cooperation under incomplete information among rational actors of different sizes. The model is used to formalize certain aspects of the “theory of hegemonic stability.” It shows that the “dilemma” or “limits” of hegemonic stability look like natural attributes of games where reputation is involved, unifying both “benevolent” and “coercive” strands of hegemony theory. An example, drawn from recent developments in the Organization of Petroleum-exporting Countries, shows how our model of reputation guides the study of hegemonic regime construction. We conclude by comparing the nature of cooperative behavior under conditions of complete and incomplete information.

The paper addresses itself to two questions left underdeveloped in the literature on representative-constituent relations. First, what does the representative see when he or she sees a constituency? Second, what consequences do these perceptions have for his or her behavior? The paper reverses the normal Washington-oriented view of representative-constituent relations and approaches both questions by examining the representative in his or her constituency. The paper's observations are drawn from the author's travels with seventeen U.S. House members while they were working in their districts. Member perceptions of their constituency are divided into the geographical, the reelection, the primary and the personal constituencies. Attention is then given to the home style of House members. Home style is treated as an amalgam of three elements – allocation of resources, presentation of self, explanation of Washington activity. An effort is made to relate home style to the various perceived constituencies. Some observations are made relating constituency-oriented research to the existing literature on representation.

Mancur Olson's model of economic growth has attracted great attention as a theoretical account of how interest groups influence the rate of economic growth over time. Moreover, the model appears to have received strong empirical support in Olson's tests employing U.S. state data. However, the specification of the Olson construct in these tests is insufficiently attentive to the complex causal chain implicit in Olson's argument, inadequately accounts for precisely how interest groups matter, and employs a static research design that obfuscates the cause-and-effect relationships posited by the model. We review these issues and develop a more complete specification of the Olson model. The respecified model is then tested using U.S. state data for the period of the late 1970s and early 1980s using new measures of interest-group influence.

Previous research has emphasized corporate lobbying as a pathway through which businesses influence government policy. This article examines a less-studied mode of influence: private regulation, defined as voluntary efforts by firms to restrain their own behavior. We argue that firms can use modest private regulations as a political strategy to preempt more stringent public regulations. To test this hypothesis, we administered experiments to three groups that demand environmental regulations: voters, activists, and government officials. Our experiments revealed how each group responded to voluntary environmental programs (VEPs) by firms. Relatively modest VEPs dissuaded all three groups from seeking more draconian government regulations, a finding with important implications for social welfare. We observed these effects most strongly when all companies within an industry joined the voluntary effort. Our study documents an understudied source of corporate power, while also exposing the limits of private regulation as a strategy for influencing government policy.

Cohesive government-versus-opposition voting is a robust empirical regularity in Westminster democracies. Using new data from the modern Scottish Parliament, we show that this pattern cannot be explained by similarity of preferences within or between the government and opposition ranks. We look at differences in the way that parties operate in Westminster and Holyrood, and use roll call records to show that the observed behavior is unlikely to be determined by preferences on any underlying issue dimension. Using a simple variant of the agenda-setting model—in which members of parliament can commit to their voting strategies—we show that the procedural rules for reaching collective decisions in Westminster systems can explain this phenomenon: in the equilibrium, on some bills, members of the opposition vote against the government irrespective of the proposal. Such strategic opposition can reinforce government cohesiveness and have a moderating effect on policy outcomes. We introduce new data from the House of Lords, the Welsh Assembly, and the Northern Ireland Assembly to distinguish our claims from competing accounts of the data.

Several authors have observed a decline in the number of competitive congressional districts during the past two decades. Various explanations have been proposed for this change. Among these are theories attributing major causal significance to changing methods of drawing district boundaries, and increasing control of campaign resources by incumbents. These theories are examined critically and arguments are advanced for their rejection. The principal cause of the decline of competition for congressional seats appears to rest on a change in individual voting behavior.

This paper characterizes behavior with “noisy” decision making for models of political interaction characterized by simultaneous binary decisions. Applications include: voting participation games, candidate entry, the volunteer's dilemma, and collective action problems with a contribution threshold. A simple graphical device is used to derive comparative statics and other theoretical properties of a “quantal response” equilibrium, and the resulting predictions are compared with Nash equilibria that arise in the limiting case of no noise. Many anomalous data patterns in laboratory experiments based on these games can be explained in this manner.

Approval voting is being promoted as “the election reform of the 20th century” (Brams, 1980, p. 105), and indeed if voters' preferences are dichotomous, approval voting has some remarkable qualities: it is uniquely strategy-proof, a candidate wins if and only if he is a Condorcet winner, and voters have simple strategies that are at once sincere and sophisticated. However, all of these results depend on the existence of dichotomous preferences, a contrived and empirically unlikely assumption. Here I show that these virtues of approval voting are replaced by some rather undesirable features under more plausible assumptions. More fundamentally, rather than promoting “honest” behavior, as is sometimes implied, the existence of multiple sincere strategies almost begs voters to behave strategically. I also examine sophisticated approval voting and show that in the general case it need not pick a Condorcet alternative. Ironically, there is a condition under which Condorcet winners may always be picked, but for this to occur, voters sometimes have to vote for candidates of whom they disapprove.

Many bemoan divided government and the consequent deadlock of democracy. The logic of The Federalist arguably defends it, in ways heretofore unappreciated, by appeal to a least-common-denominator definition of the “public interest.” That quasi-Federalist logic is explored, and alternative political structures are assessed against the public interest criterion to which it appeals. Another and more defensible notion of the public interest is introduced, and its very different political styles, institutions, and policies are adduced.

I model sequential decisions over multiple interconnected propositions and investigate path-dependence in such decisions. The propositions and their interconnections are represented in propositional logic. A sequential decision process is path-dependent if its outcome depends on the order in which the propositions are considered. Assuming that earlier decisions constrain later ones, I prove three main results: First, certain rationality violations by the decision-making agent—individual or group—are necessary and sufficient for path-dependence. Second, under some conditions, path-dependence is unavoidable in decisions made by groups. Third, path-dependence makes decisions vulnerable to strategic agenda setting and strategic voting. I also discuss escape routes from path-dependence. My results are relevant to discussions on collective consistency and reason-based decision-making, focusing not only on outcomes, but also on underlying reasons, beliefs, and constraints.

Modern realism claims that the fear that others will enjoy relatively greater benefits frequently impedes international cooperation. Recent articles in this Review by Duncan Snidal and Robert Powell modeled conditions under which the impact of relative gains varied. Joseph Grieco criticizes Snidal's model as based on assumptions that allow him to avoid, rather than confront, the realist arguments. He also argues that Powell's model, while constructive, ignores important additional sources of sensitivity to relative gains. In response, Powell discusses the value of alternative assumptions about preferences and constraints in international relations. Snidal defends his analysis and presents an additional proof to support the independence of his central result—the diminishing impact of relative gains with increasing numbers of states—from assumptions of concern to Grieco. Both responders emphasize their work as contributing to a contextually rich theory of international politics that builds on elements of both realism and neo-liberalism.