Given the recent court rulings against racial gerrymandering, the effect of multimember district elections on minority representation is an important issue. We present a model of voting in double-member district elections with two majority candidates and one minority candidate and consider the voting equilibria under straight and cumulative voting. In straight voting, while an equilibrium always exists in which the two majority candidates are expected to win the two seats, minority candidates may be elected. In cumulative voting, minority candidate wins are also possible in equilibrium but are less likely when minority voters prefer one majority candidate over another. We then present experimental evidence showing that minority candidates win significantly more seats in cumulative than in straight voting elections. When minority voters perceive a substantial difference between the majority candidates, however, they are more likely to split their votes between the minority and majority candidates, winning fewer seats.

The research reported in this article involved tests of a model by which voting decisions can be explained and predicted. Data for the tests came from surveys conducted in five presidential elections by the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan. Predictions made in terms of the model show it to be a good basis both for predicting the division of the vote and for predicting the votes of individual voters. Extensive analyses of incorrect predictions suggest them to be in great part the sort of errors one would expect, were voters arriving at their voting decisions in the manner described by the model. The validity of the model has implications of importance for practical politics, political history, and political theory.

Britain under the government of Prime Minister Thatcher provides a unique opportunity to probe the effects of both war and macroeconomic performance on government popularity. Monthly ratings for Thatcher and Conservative-party support (June 1979 to July 1985) are examined by way of Box-Tiao intervention models. The model that best captures the impact of the Falklands War of 1982 is of the gradual-temporary variety: popularity gains accrued through the three-month war shrink in a geometric fashion. Nevertheless, they prove to be worth over five percentage points for the Conservative party a year later, in the 1983 election. Macroeconomic performance, meanwhile, is found to have an asymmetric effect on government popularity, with unemployment strongly significant but inflation not significant at all. Apparently, the British public is punishing failure (on employment) while letting success (on inflation) go unrewarded. Qualifications of the positive effect of war and the negative effect of macroeconomic performance are suggested.

The relationship between welfare benefit levels and the residential choices of the poor raises two issues for federalism in the United States. Do state benefit levels affect the residential choices of the poor? Do residential choices of the poor affect the level at which a state sets its benefit levels? Empirical studies have seldom studied the interconnection between these two issues. This research estimates simultaneously the mutual effects of welfare benefits and poverty rates while controlling for other economic and political variables. When benefit levels become high, the size of the poverty population increases. Conversely, when poverty rates become high, benefit levels are cut. The findings are consistent with the claim that state-determined benefit levels distort policy and residential choices.

A large-scale randomized experiment conducted during the 2012 French presidential and parliamentary elections shows that voter registration requirements have significant effects on turnout, resulting in unequal participation. We assigned 20,500 apartments to one control or six treatment groups that received canvassing visits providing either information about registration or help to register at home. While both types of visits increased registration, home registration visits had a higher impact than information-only visits, indicating that both information costs and administrative barriers impede registration. Home registration did not reduce turnout among those who would have registered anyway. On the contrary, citizens registered due to the visits became more interested in and knowledgeable about the elections as a result of being able to participate in them, and 93% voted at least once in 2012. The results suggest that easing registration requirements could substantially enhance political participation and interest while improving representation of all groups.

Research on civil war mobilization emphasizes armed group recruitment tactics and individual motivations to fight, but does not explore how individuals come to perceive the threat involved in civil war. Drawing on eight months of fieldwork with participants and nonparticipants in the Georgian-Abkhaz war of 1992–93, this article argues that social structures, within which individuals are embedded, provide access to information critical for mobilization decisions by collectively framing threat. Threat framing filters from national through local leadership, to be consolidated and acted on within quotidian networks. Depending on how the threat is perceived—whether toward the self or the collectivity at its different levels—individuals adopt self- to other-regarding roles, from fleeing to fighting on behalf of the collectivity, even if it is a weaker actor in the war. This analysis sheds light on how the social framing of threat shapes mobilization trajectories and how normative and instrumental motivations interact in civil war.

This study explores the hypothesis that voting in response to economic problems is policy-oriented: voters concerned about unemployment ore predicted to give greater support to Democratic candidates, while those concerned about inflation are predicted to vote more Republican. In light of evidence from previous research, this study investigates the electoral effects of inflation and unemployment as (1) problems directly experienced by the individual, and (2) problems deemed serious for the nation as a whole. Support is strongest for the unemployment side of the hypothesis. Voters personally affected by unemployment gave a modest boost to Democratic candidates in virtually every election. And in years of high unemployment the large percentage of voters who fell it was a serious national problem voted heavily Democratic as well. This study concludes by discussing the important implications these findings have for our understanding of how economic conditions influence voting behavior in American national elections.

Remittances are a significant source of foreign exchange for developing economies. I argue that remittances, due to their compensation and insurance functions, will increase the general income level and economic security of recipients, thereby reducing their perceived income risk. Over time, this will dampen demand from recipients for government taxation and social insurance. Therefore, I expect increases in income remitted to an economy to result in reduced levels of social welfare transfers at the macro-level. This dynamic can help us to understand spending patterns in developing democracies, and the absence of demand for social security transfers in countries with high levels of inequality and economic insecurity. I test this argument with a sample of 18 Latin American states, over the period 1990 to 2009, and subject the central causal mechanism to a battery of statistical tests. The results of these tests provide strong support for this argument.

This article provides a new methodology to predict armed conflict by using newspaper text. Through machine learning, vast quantities of newspaper text are reduced to interpretable topics. These topics are then used in panel regressions to predict the onset of conflict. We propose the use of the within-country variation of these topics to predict the timing of conflict. This allows us to avoid the tendency of predicting conflict only in countries where it occurred before. We show that the within-country variation of topics is a good predictor of conflict and becomes particularly useful when risk in previously peaceful countries arises. Two aspects seem to be responsible for these features. Topics provide depth because they consist of changing, long lists of terms that make them able to capture the changing context of conflict. At the same time, topics provide width because they are summaries of the full text, including stabilizing factors.

We study the effect of social embeddedness on voter turnout by investigating the role of information about other voters' decisions. We do so in a participation game, in which we distinguish between early and late voters. Each late voter is told about one early voter's turnout decision. Cases are distinguished where the voters are allies (support the same group) or adversaries (with opposing preferences) and where they are uncertain about each other's preferences. Our experimental results show that the social embeddedness matters: this information increases aggregate turnout by approximately 50%. The largest effect is observed for allies. Early voters strategically try to use their first mover position and late voters respond to this.

Conventional wisdom holds that higher turnout favors Democrats. Previous studies of this hypothesis rely on presidential and House elections or on survey data, but senatorial and gubernatorial elections offer better conditions for directly testing turnout effects in U.S. politics. In a comprehensive analysis of these statewide elections since 1928, we find that the conventional theory was true outside the South through 1964, but since 1965 the overall relationship between turnout and partisan outcomes has been insignificant. Even before the mid-1960s, the turnout effect outside the South was strongest in Republican states and insignificant or negative in heavily Democratic states. A similar but weaker pattern obtains after 1964. In the South, which we analyze only since 1966, higher turnout helped Republicans until 1990, but in 1990–94 the effect became pro-Democratic. The conventional theory cannot account for these complex patterns, but they are impressively consistent with DeNardo's (1980) theory.

The president's party consistently loses partisan control of state legislatures in midterm elections, a pattern similar to the loss of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in midterms. This study examines presidential coattails as a possible explanation of these losses. Aggregate state legislative election outcomes between 1944 and 1984 in 41 states are examined. The analysis indicates that the president's party gains seats in presidential elections in proportion to the presidential vote in a state, and subsequently loses seats in midterm elections also in proportion to the prior presidential vote in the state. The presidential coattail and the midterm repercussion effects are evident even when gubernatorial coattail effects are introduced, but are fairly modest in states lacking competitive parties.

Despite the diminished importance of partisanship, greater split-ticket voting, and a growth in Senate campaign spending, a party's presidential vote in the states remains positively related to its Senate vote in recent elections. We investigate to what extent presidential coattails are responsible for this association. State election returns for Senate and presidential contests are examined in presidential election years from 1972 to 1988. The analysis indicates that (1) presidential coattails exert a modest but significant influence on the Senate vote, probably affecting the election outcomes in twelve cases, and (2) partisanship remains a significant linkage between presidential and Senate elections.

Federalism, when it has not been ignored altogether in normative political theory, has typically been analyzed in terms that fail to match the institution as it exists in the world. Federations are made up of provinces that are too few, too large, too rigid, too constitutionally entrenched, and too tied to ethnocultural identity to match theories based on competitive federalism, Tiebout sorting, democratic self-government, or subsidiarity. A relatively neglected tradition in liberal thought, based on a separation of loyalties and identifiable in Montesquieu, Publius, Constant, Tocqueville, and Acton, however, holds more promise. If the purpose of federalism is to compensate for worrisome tendencies toward centralization, then it is desirable that the provinces large enough to have political power be stable and entrenched and be able to engender loyalty from their citizens, such as the loyalty felt to ethnoculturally specific provinces. Separation of loyalty theories and the bulwark theories of which they are a subset match up with federalism as it exists in the world.

States routinely justify their policies in interstate forums, and this reason-giving seems to serve a legitimating function. But how could this be? For Habermas and other global public sphere theorists, the exchange of reasons oriented toward understanding—communicative action—is central to public sphere governance, where political power is held accountable to those affected. But most global public sphere theory considers communicative action only among nonstate actors. Indeed, anarchy is a hard case for public spheres. The normative potential of communicative action rests on its instability: only where consensus can be undone by better reasons, through argument, can we say speakers are holding one another accountable to reason. But argument means disagreement, and especially in anarchy disagreement can mean violence. Domestically, the state backstops argument to prevent violence. Internationally, I propose that international society and publicity function similarly. Public talk can mitigate the security dilemma and enable interstate communicative action. Viewing multilateral diplomacy as a legitimation process makes sense of the intuition that interstate talk matters, while tempering a potentially aggressive cosmopolitanism.

We used a quasi-experimental research design to study the extent of motivational crowding in a recent sustainable development intervention in northern India. The project provided participants with both private and communal material benefits to enhance their incomes, and environmental and social information to inculcate pro-environmental motivations. We compared changes in reported motivations of participants for conserving forest resources, before and after project implementation, with changes in reported motivations of matched nonparticipants. We found that villagers who received private economic benefits were more likely to change from an environmental to an economic motivation for forest protection, whereas those who engaged in communal activities related to the project were less likely to change from an environmental to an economic motivation. These results, which indicate a substantial but conditional degree of motivational crowding, clarify the relationships between institutional change, incentives, and motivations and have important implications for the design of sustainable development interventions.

This article presents a theory of corruption which unifies the moral, political, economic and social causes and patterns of corruption in one theoretical framework. The theory is constructed from the scattered insights about the “corruption of the body politic,” building in particular upon the work of five theorists–Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli and Rousseau. Corruption is defined as the moral incapacity of citizens to make reasonably disinterested commitments to actions, symbols and institutions which benefit the substantive common welfare. This extensive demise of loyalty to the commonwealth comes from the interaction of human nature with systematic inequality of wealth, power and status. The corruption of the polity results in certain identifiable patterns of political conflict and competition. The central feature of these patterns is the emergence of quasi-governmental factions and an increasingly polarized class system. The politics of the factions leads to an undermining of the efficacy of the basic political structures of the society and the emergence of systematic corruption in all aspects of political life. The theory advanced in this article identifies several crucial prescriptions to stave off the tendency towards corruption. Among these are an extension of maximum substantive participation by all citizens in all aspects of political life and a stringent control over all sources of great or permanent inequality in the polity.

Like Rachel, Jacob's beloved but still childless bride, who asked herself and the Lord each morning, “Am I?,” or “Can I?,” so presidents of this Association on these annual occasions intermittently ask, “Are we a science?,” or “Can we become one?” My predecessor, David Truman, raised this question last September applying some of the notions of Thomas Kuhn in his recent book on scientific revolutions. I shall be following in Truman's footsteps, repeating much that he said but viewing the development of the profession from a somewhat different perspective and intellectual history. My comments will be organized around three assertions.

First, there was a coherent theoretical formulation in the American political theory of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Second, the development of professional political science in the United States from the turn of the century until well into the 1950's was carried on largely in terms of this paradigm, to use Kuhn's term. The most significant and characteristic theoretical speculation and research during these decades produced anomalous findings which cumulatively shook its validity.

Third, in the last decade or two the elements of a new, more surely scientific paradigm seem to be manifesting themselves rapidly. The core concept of this new approach is that of the political system.

The assumption that individual preferences, or attitudes, are fixed and exogenously determined is central to many studies of political and economic institutions, such as markets and elections. We present a Bayesian model of adaptive preferences and empirical evidence consistent with that model to argue that preferences are not always exogenous and fixed. The changing relationships between partisanship and preferences on civil rights issues between 1956 and 1964 and on the Vietnam War issue between 1968 and 1972 coincide with significant changes in the major parties' positions on these issues, suggesting that preferences are endogenous to the electoral process. We conclude with a discussion of the positive and normative implications of endogenous preferences.

This essay criticizes the ideal of consensual decision as it appears in liberal political theory. A historical survey begins with Locke's view of consent, its criticism and extension by 19th century figures such as Godwin, Calhoun, and Mill, its reappearance in the guise of economic efficiency within the works of Wicksell or Buchanan and Tullock and as moral autonomy in Wolff's Defense of Anarchy. The paper offers a structural account of political decision making in which vulnerability to the authority of others seems inescapable and in which neither unanimity nor a universal right of consent is possible. On this telling, consensual decision is logically unattainable and misdirects constitutional theory.