The Prisoner's Dilemma game, Rousseau's image of the Stag Hunt, and the concept of a security dilemma have all been used to support the argument that much international conflict is the result of anarchy at the global level rather than the aggressive intentions of governments. This article argues that the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Stag Hunt are usually inadequate models of the problem they have been used to illuminate, and that a security dilemma as commonly defined need not have the implications that are ascribed to it. It also argues that developing more adequate models of the general problem of enforcing agreements in a condition of anarchy will help us to understand better why international cooperation is more easily achieved in some areas than in others.

We compare the behavior of voters under simultaneous and sequential voting rules when voting is costly and information is incomplete. In many political institutions, ranging from small committees to mass elections, voting is sequential, which allows some voters to know the choices of earlier voters. For a stylized model, we generate a variety of predictions about the relative efficiency and participation equity of these two systems, which we test using controlled laboratory experiments. Most of the qualitative predictions are supported by the data, but there are significant departures from the predicted equilibrium strategies, in both the sequential and the simultaneous voting games. We find a tradeoff between information aggregation, efficiency, and equity in sequential voting: a sequential voting rule aggregates information better than simultaneous voting and is more efficient in some information environments, but sequential voting is inequitable because early voters bear more participation costs.

While we know much about what differentiates the conflict behavior of democracies from autocracies, we know relatively little about why some democracies are more belligerent than others. In contrast to existing studies, I argue that it is public opinion and not institutions that drives these differences. All democratic leaders have an incentive to take public opinion into account, but public opinion is not the same everywhere. Individuals’ attitudes towards war are shaped by core beliefs about revenge, which vary across countries. Leaders with more vengeful populations will be more likely to initiate conflicts because they generate popular support for war more effectively. Using retention of capital punishment as a proxy for broad endorsement of revenge, I find that democracies that have retained the death penalty for longer periods of time are significantly more likely to initiate conflicts. This research has important implications for existing theories of democracy and war.

I take up the question of political identity as the continuity of a community across time. In particular, I examine what it means to think of a political community as the subject of attribution across generations, that is, what is meant when it is made the bearer of responsibility for the past and a custodian of the future. In doing that, I focus on identity, memory, and responsibility and discuss that cluster of concepts using as an illustrative example the idea of constitutional patriotism and its relationship to the past.

The paper focuses on the learning of legislative norms on the part of freshman members elected to the United States House of Representatives in November, 1968. Since a research interest in learning is a longitudinal concern, a two-page panel design was employed, the first set of interviews conducted in late January and February of 1969 and the second set the following May. As the concept of a norm involves the notion of shared expectations, a sample of the nonfreshman members of the 91st Congress was also interviewed.

The main finding of the paper is that the amount of norm learning was surprisingly low; it appeared that freshmen largely knew the general House norms prior to entering Congress. And the extent of attitude change toward the norms once in office was minimal. Freshmen and nonfreshmen generally expressed similar attitudes toward the norms. Support for the norm of apprenticeship was found to be weak, suggesting the need to revise the traditional image of the freshman representative.

Why do poor people often vote against their material interests? This article extends the study of this global paradox to the non-Western world by considering how it manifests within India, the world's biggest democracy. Arguments derived from studies of advanced democracies (such as values voting) or of poor polities (such as patronage and ethnic appeals) fail to explain this important phenomenon. Instead, I outline a novel strategy predicated on an electoral division of labor enabling elite parties to recruit the poor while retaining the rich. Recruitment is outsourced to nonparty affiliates that provide basic services to appeal to poor communities. Such outsourcing permits the party to maintain programmatic linkages to its elite core. Empirically, I test this argument with qualitative and quantitative evidence, including a survey of more than 9,000 voters. Theoretically, I argue that this approach is best suited to elite parties with thick organizations, typically those linked to religious social movements.

Do citizens respond to policy-based information signals about government performance? Using multiple big datasets—which link for the first time large-scale school administrative records and individual validated voting behavior—I show that citizens react to exogenous school failure signals provided by No Child Left Behind. These signals cause a noticeable increase in turnout in local school board elections and increase the competitiveness of these races. Additionally, I present evidence that school failure signals cause citizens to vote with their feet by exiting failing schools, suggesting that exit plays an underexplored role in democratic accountability. However, performance signals elicit a response unequally, with failure primarily mobilizing high propensity citizens and encouraging exit among those who are white, affluent, and more likely to vote. Hence, while performance signals spur a response, they do so only for a select few, leaving many others behind.

There is a great deal of political activity which can be explained adequately only by taking account of the personal characteristics of the actors involved. The more intimate the vantage, the more detailed the perspective, the greater the likelihood that political actors will loom as full-blown individuals influenced by all of the peculiar strengths and weaknesses to which the species homo sapiens is subject, in addition to being role-players, creatures of situation, members of a culture, and possessors of social characteristics such as occupation, class, sex, and age.

To a non-social scientist the observation that individuals are important in politics would seem trite. Undergraduates, until they have been trained to think in terms of impersonal categories of explanation, readily make assertions about the psychology of political actors in their explanations of politics. So do journalists. Why is it that most political scientists are reluctant to deal explicitly with psychological matters (apart from using a variety of rather impersonal psychological constructs such as “party identification,” “sense of political efficacy,” and the like)? Why is political psychology not a systematically developed subdivision of political science, occupying the skill and energy of a substantial number of scholars?

The consequences of veto power in committees is analyzed using the approach of noncooperative bargaining theory. It is first shown that in equilibrium nonveto players do not share in the benefits gained by the decision making of the committee, that is, in every equilibrium outcome of the bargaining game, nonveto players earn zero. Some measures for reducing the excessive power of veto members in committees are analyzed. Specifically, I study the effects of imposing a deadline on negotiations and of expanding the committee by increasing the number of nonveto players. Quantitative results are given for the case of the UN Security Council.

Systematic study of changes in support for the U.S. Supreme Court across time has not been undertaken. Armed with a time series of observations from 1966 through 1984, I provide a description of the ebb and flow of public esteem for the Court. Then I outline and test several plausible propositions about the dynamics of support. Statistical analyses compel the conclusion that apart from a relatively constant core of support, increases in judicial activism, inflation, and solicitude for the rights of the accused decreased confidence in the Court; the events surrounding Watergate and increases in presidential popularity and the public salience of the Court brought about increased popular esteem for the high bench. Previous scholars, based on cross-sections of individuals, have emphasized the public's ignorance of and disinterest in the Supreme Court and judicial policy making. The responsiveness of public support for the Court in the aggregate to political events and shifts in the behavior of the justices stands in stark contrast to the conventional image of United States citizenry as singularly out of touch with and unmoved by the Supreme Court.

I examine the relationship between interest group hard money contributions and legislators' attention to policy analysis in U.S. congressional committees. I argue that groups tend to contribute to members who have a high capacity to develop effective policies and legislation. Consequently, over the long term, contributions create incentives for members of Congress to enhance their analytical capacity for policymaking. Using data from hearings on the Medicare program and latent variable modeling techniques, I demonstrate that members who have a higher latent analytical policymaking capacity tend to attract more contributions and at the same time tend to engage in analytical discourse in committee hearings. In addition, members with higher analytical capacity tend to disengage from discussions of the symbolic aspects of policies that are of interest to constituents. The results help shed new light on debates over campaign finance reform regarding the normative value of hard money contributions.

Aaron Wildavsky has argued that it is theoretically more useful to think of political preferences as rooted in political culture than to entertain alternative bases such as schemas or ideologies. In the APSA presidential address in which he made his case, Wildavsky also advocated a program of research on political cultures, and welcomed “challenges and improvements.” David Laitin accepts the invitation; he variously takes issue with Wildavsky's concept of political culture.

How to restore citizens’ trust and cooperation with the police in the wake of civil war? We report results from an experimental evaluation of the Liberian National Police’s (LNP) “Confidence Patrols” program, which deployed teams of newly retrained, better-equipped police officers on recurring patrols to rural communities across three Liberian counties over a period of 14 months. We find that the program increased knowledge of the police and Liberian law, enhanced security of property rights, and reduced the incidence of some types of crime, notably simple assault and domestic violence. The program did not, however, improve trust in the police, courts, or government more generally. We also observe higher rates of crime reporting in treatment communities, concentrated almost entirely among those who were disadvantaged under prevailing customary mechanisms of dispute resolution. We consider implications of these findings for post-conflict policing in Liberia and weak and war-torn states more generally.

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has organized hundreds of disruptive protests in American cities since 2013 (Garza 2014; Harris 2015; Taylor 2016). The movement has garnered considerable attention from the U.S. media and is well recognized by the U.S. public (Horowitz and Livingston 2016; Neal 2017). Social movement scholars suggest that such robust mobilizations are typically predicated on clear social movement frames (Benford and Snow 2000; Snow et al. 1986). Tillery (2019b) has identified several distinct message frames within the social media communications of BLM activists. In this paper, we use a survey experiment to test the effect of three of these frames—Black Nationalist, Feminist, and LGBTQ+ Rights—on the mobilization of African Americans. We find that exposure to these frames generates differential effects on respondents’ willingness to support, trust, canvass, and write representatives about the Black Lives Matter movement. These findings raise new questions about the deployment of intersectional messaging strategies within movements for racial justice.

This article presents a model of arms expenditures and arms accumulation for the Soviet Union and United States from 1952 through 1978. It argues that contemporary superpowers do not react solely to the military budgets of one another in assessing the potential threat against which they must allocate military resources, i.e., in deciding upon the military budget. Rather, they respond primary to the relative balance of strategic and conventional military forces. A continuous time model of this process is developed and estimated. If one examines only the budgets of these two nations, it would appear that no race is occurring; rather, the Soviets are simply increasing their arms expenditures irrespective of what the United States does. However, when one examines the relative stocks of military capabilities, it appears that the USSR is racing to catch up to the United States. Finally, the dynamics governing arms competition between the United States and the USSR appear to be undergoing marked change.

Realism is both a scientific research program and, more traditionally, a political philosophy. All realists share a pessimistic worldview that posits perpetual struggle among groups for security, prestige, and power and that denies the capacity of human reason to create a world of peace and harmony. Recent research by so-called neotraditional realists does not disconfirm Waltz's balancing proposition. Instead, these works have tended to add unit-level variables in order to transform Waltz's theory of international politics into one of foreign policy. The question is not whether states balance or bandwagon—history clearly shows that they do both—but rather under what conditions states choose one strategy or the other.

Much of the literature of policy analysis and public administration is dominated by incremental and “divisible goods” paradigms. Policy is assumed to be a process of marginal and adjustive decision making in which benefits are dispensed piecemeal—proportionate to prevailing distributions of power or publicized need. This essay asserts the existence of a class of nonincremental, indivisible policy pursuits for which the analytical weaponry of political science is largely inappropriate. Such policies display a distinctive set of political and administrative characteristics. These characteristics are explained and examined in connection with manned space exploration policy. An assessment is offered of the challenges posed by nonincremental policy to contemporary outlooks in political science.

The Keating Five case exemplifies a form of a political corruption that is increasingly common in contemporary politics but frequently neglected in contemporary political science. I focus on this form by developing a concept of mediated corruption, which links the acts of individual officials to effects on the democratic process. Unlike conventional corruption, mediated corruption does not require that the public official act with a corrupt motive or that either public officials or citizens receive improper benefits. The concept of mediated corruption provides not only a more coherent account of the case of the Keating Five but also a more fruitful way of reuniting the concepts of systematic corruption in traditional political theory with the concepts of individual corruption in contemporary social science.

This analysis shows, in contrast to previously published work, that a divisive primary hurts a senatorial candidate's chances for success in the general election. The relationship between divisiveness and lack of success continues to hold when incumbency and state party orientations are controlled. This relationship has an important implication regarding representation. The fact that divisive primaries do hurt strengthens the representation of weak and minor state parties in the U.S. Senate.

The authors elaborate a model of electoral competition for a fixed number of seats in a legislature. The novel feature of this model is that candidates (or parties) not only choose spatial locations as platforms but also determine whether to enter the contest at all. In most previous spatial models, the set of candidates is specified exogenously. Here, however, the spatial positions and the set of candidates are determined endogenously. An equilibrium in this context is defined and results are proved, suggesting that entry may disrupt spatial equilibria. Finally, the authors compare their treatment of spatial competition with entry to that of Palfrey.