This essay demonstrates that Niccolò Machiavelli’s political thought addresses the deficiencies of two opposite poles of contemporary democratic theory: As do formal or minimalist approaches, he specifies electoral mechanisms for elite control; and similar to substantive or civic culture approaches, he encourages more direct and robust modes of popular participation. On these grounds, I cull from Machiavelli’s Discourses a theory of democracy in which the populace selects the elites who will hold office but also constantly patrols them through extraelectoral institutions and practices, such as the tribunes of the people, public accusations, and popular appeals. Machiavelli adds to these institutional features of popular government an important cultural dimension: The people should despise and mistrust elites, and they should actively confront the injustice that elite governing inevitably entails. Finally, I explore the ramifications of this theory for debates over elite accountability in contemporary democratic theory.

This paper provides a partial test of the widely-held assumption that preference primaries are the most representative element of the presidential nominating system. It notes that the average voting turnout in presidential primaries is only 39 per cent, compared with 69 per cent in the same states' ensuing general elections. The representative quality of these electorates is examined with data from sample surveys of the 1968 New Hampshire and Wisconsin primaries. A comparison of the primary participants with non-participants among each party's identifiers shows, first, that presidential primary electorates are demographically unrepresentative of their nonvoting fellow partisans in age, education, income, and social status. Second, primary participants have no more intense party identifications than do non-participants. Third, participants hold issue positions more strongly than nonparticipants do, and on some issues they even hold positions contrary to those of nonparticipants. Finally, both of the Democratic primaries overrepresented Johnson sentiment and underrepresented McCarthy and Kennedy sentiment. The author concludes that the preference primaries' claim to be the most representative element of the presidential nominating system may not be warranted, especially if and when the national conventions are reformed along lines such as those laid down by the McGovern-Fraser Commission. In any case, 1972 offers a unique opportunity to study the comparative representativeness of local, state, and national party conventions and the preference primaries.

A prerequisite for the durability of authoritarian regimes as well as their effective governance is the regime’s ability to gather reliable information about the actions of lower-tier officials. Allowing public participation in the form of online complaints is one approach authoritarian regimes have taken to improve monitoring of lower-tier officials. In this paper, we gain rare access to internal communications between a monitoring agency and upper-level officials in China. We show that citizen grievances posted publicly online that contain complaints of corruption are systematically concealed from upper-level authorities when they implicate lower-tier officials or associates connected to lower-tier officials through patronage ties. Information manipulation occurs primarily through omission of wrongdoing rather than censorship or falsification, suggesting that even in the digital age, in a highly determined and capable regime where reports of corruption are actively and publicly voiced, monitoring the behavior of regime agents remains a challenge.

This article examines the role that democratic organizations play in fostering political activism in America. Activists make democracy work by attending meetings, engaging others, trying to make their voice heard, and participating in myriad other ways. Yet, we still need a deeper understanding of what role organizations play in cultivating that activism. The article presents data from three field experiments showing that creating a relational organizational context makes targets more likely to sign petitions, recruit others, and attend meetings. The article argues that civic organizations can have a powerful impact on activism. In doing so, it introduces a new set of variables related to organizational context to consider in understanding the sources of participation. The article thus extends a burgeoning body of experimental research on the social bases of voter turnout by examining not only voting but other forms of activism that are increasingly common modes of citizen involvement in the twenty-first century.

Political scientists want to do good. They want to expand knowledge about political life, but also they wish to use knowledge for political reform. Usually this means desiring to promote “democratization.” Historically democracy and political science have tended to develop together. In modest ways political science can contribute to the emergence of democracy. Political reform succeeds best if it occurs incrementally, in the spirit of “one soul at a time.”

This paper concerns the relationship between voters and corrupt politicians. An explanation is suggested for why voters would discount even credible information that a candidate is corrupt. Then the results of an experiment designed to test a necessary condition in this explanation are reported. The principal implication of this exploratory study is that corrupt elected officials are immune from electoral reprisal because voters rather easily trade off the information that a candidate is corrupt in return for other things they value in the candidate.

This paper examines the theory of political legitimacy through the framework of psychological learning theory and the theory of cognitive dissonance. The concepts of primary and secondary reinforcement in cases of learning permit a general understanding of the growth of positive affect toward a political system. Cognitive dissonance theory allows us to understand how this general positive affect built up by a regime's actions produces the sub-set of attitudes called political legitimacy. In order to build a theory of political legitimacy on these foundations, it is necessary to conceive of government policy-making as a case of producing successful learning throughout a population.

The diffuse, largely irrational nature of political legitimacy has made it difficult for political scientists to handle the concept systematically. That systems are or are not “legitimate” has been asserted numerous times, though often the precise definition of legitimacy employed has been at best vague and the indices of legitimacy unclearly stated. This paper attempts to meet the problem by setting forth a theory and a set of implicit indices of political legitimacy. After the general model has been explicated, I will specify several problems in the manipulation of political legitimacy. Finally, I will look at the relationship of governmental structure to these problems.

Before consideration of the model two preliminary tasks must be performed: a definition of legitimacy and justification for discussing it. We may define political legitimacy as the quality of “oughtness” that is perceived by the public to inhere in a political regime.

The “level of conceptualization” index, introduced by Campbell et al. (1960), is commonly used to measure ideological awareness and sophistication among the electorate. Unfortunately, the validity and reliability of the original measure were never sufficiently examined. This article examines the level of conceptualization measures of Field and Anderson (1969) and Nie, Verba and Petrocik (1976). It reaches two major conclusions: (1) the measures under examination are neither reliable nor valid measures of the level of conceptualization construct; and (2) the measures reflect the rhetoric of contemporary political discourse rather than the actual process of political evaluation. These conclusions call into doubt the validity and reliability of the original measure of The American Voter.

To document human rights, monitoring organizations establish a standard of accountability, or a baseline set of expectations that states ought to meet in order to be considered respectful of human rights. If the standard of accountability has meaningfully changed, then the categorized variables from human rights documents will mask real improvements. Cingranelli and Filippov question whether the standard of accountability is changing and whether data on mass killings are part of the same underlying conceptual process of repression as other abuses. These claims are used to justify alternative models, showing no improvement in human rights. However, by focusing on the coding process, the authors misunderstand that the standard of accountability is about how monitoring organizations produce documents in the first place and not how academics use published documents to create data. Simulations and latent variables that model time in a substantively meaningful way validate the conclusion that human rights are improving.

Existing theories of labor protest depend on independent organizations representing workers. However, in many countries most workers are either not organized at all or are in labor unions intended for control, not representation. This is particularly the case in partially liberalized or hybrid regimes where, despite the introduction of electoral competition, autonomous, democratic organizations representing labor are not well developed. Yet such workers do protest. Drawing on an original new dataset from one hybrid regime, post-Communist Russia, I develop a theory of labor protest and of the institutional mechanisms used by elites to influence it. Instead of being a function of union membership or characteristics of the information environment, as the existing literature would have it, protest occurs when it is in the interest of powerful elements of the elite, or when economic conditions are truly desperate.

I want to sketch a line of reasoning about politics, a way of looking at politics. Every point of view must stand on its own legs; it is not something that can be proved. An analysis is a way of looking at something, a way of seeing something we could not see before we made it. We adopt a point of view because it is suggestive and persuasive in its own inner logic.

More specifically, I want to examine politics as a strategic concept. The concept of political strategy is itself a point of view loaded with implications for the study of politics.

Strategy is the heart of politics, as it is of war.

What are the implications of the concept? Any strategy of politics assumes that there is something that we can do about politics, that we have choices, and that what we think and do and want makes a difference. It assumes that we have something to talk about and that what we think and say and do is likely to have consequences. Without these conditions there can be no political strategy.

Although audio archives are available for a number of political institutions, the data they provide receive scant attention from researchers. Yet, audio data offer important insights, including information about speakers’ emotional states. Using one of the largest collections of natural audio ever compiled—74,158 Congressional floor speeches—we introduce a novel measure of legislators’ emotional intensity: small changes in vocal pitch that are difficult for speakers to control. Applying our measure to MCs’ floor speeches about women, we show that female MCs speak with greater emotional intensity when talking about women as compared with both their male colleagues and their speech on other topics. Our two supplementary analyses suggest that increased vocal pitch is consistent with legislators’ broader issue commitments, and that emotionally intense speech may affect other lawmakers’ behavior. More generally, by demonstrating the utility of audio-as-data approaches, our work highlights a new way of studying political speech.

Realism has been the dominant paradigm in the study of international conflict. Within this paradigm, two leading alternative approaches have been deterrence theory and structural realism. We test the relative explanatory power of these two theoretical approaches on the escalation of deterrence encounters among great powers from 1816 to 1984. We derive a set of hypotheses from each model, operationalize them for systematic empirical analysis, and test the hypotheses on 97 cases of great-power deterrence encounters by means of probit analysis. The results are that the hypotheses derived from deterrence theory receive considerable support, whereas none of the hypotheses derived from structural realism are supported.

Legislators' beliefs, preferences, and intentions are communicated in committees and legislatures through debates, the proposal of bills and amendments, and the recording of votes. Because such information is typically distributed asymmetrically within any group of decision makers, legislators have incentives to reveal or conceal private information strategically and thus manipulate the collective decision-making process in their favor. In consequence, any committee decision may in the end reflect only the interests of a minority. We address a problem of sharing information through debate in an endogenous, agenda-setting, collective-choice process. The model is game theoretic and we find in the equilibrium to the game that at least some legislators have incentives to conceal private information. Consequently, the final committee decision can be “incoherent” by failing to reflect the preferences of all committee members fully. Additionally, we characterize the subset of legislators with any incentive to conceal data.

This paper presents new causal estimates of incarceration’s effect on voting, using administrative data on criminal sentencing and voter turnout. I use the random case assignment process of a major county court system as a source of exogenous variation in the sentencing of misdemeanor cases. Focusing on misdemeanor defendants allows for generalization to a large population, as such cases are very common. Among first-time misdemeanor defendants, I find evidence that receiving a short jail sentence decreases voting in the next election by several percentage points. Results differ starkly by race. White defendants show no demobilization, while Black defendants show substantial turnout decreases due to jail time. Evidence from pre-arrest voter histories suggest that this difference could be due to racial differences in exposure to arrest. These results paint a picture of large-scale, racially-disparate voter demobilization in the wake of incarceration.

How does democracy work to improve well-being? In this article, we disentangle the component parts of democratic practice—elections, civic participation, expansion of social provisioning, local administrative capacity—to identify their relationship with well-being. We draw from the citizenship debates to argue that democratic practices allow citizens to gain access to a wide range of rights, which then serve as the foundation for improving social well-being. Our analysis of an original dataset covering over 5,550 Brazilian municipalities from 2006 to 2013 demonstrates that competitive elections alone do not explain variation in infant mortality rates, one outcome associated with well-being. We move beyond elections to show how participatory institutions, social programs, and local state capacity can interact to buttress one another and reduce infant mortality rates. It is important to note that these relationships are independent of local economic growth, which also influences infant mortality. The result of our thorough analysis offers a new understanding of how different aspects of democracy work together to improve a key feature of human development.

We reassess the debate over Soviet citizen politics in the USSR during the Brezhnev era. We argue the need for a more complex model of citizen participation in the USSR before Gorbachev if we are to have an accurate baseline for evaluating changes in regime-society relations. We examine the connections between individual attitudes and individual behavior and show that political participation under the “old regime” was not nearly as one-dimensional and devoid of effect as many previous researchers (and current Soviet leaders) have described it. Many forms of political participation in the Soviet Union before Gorbachev did not fit the stereotype of a psychologically disengaged citizenry driven to participate only by coercion, a desire to conform, or a quest for particularized benefits from public officials.

I suggest a new explanation of cross-national differences in unionization rates: the size of the labor force. Size matters because the gains unions are able to achieve in collective bargaining depend on the proportion of substitutable workers who are organized, while the costs of organizing depend in part on the absolute number to be recruited. The comparison of the costs and benefits of organizing new workers yields the conclusion that unions in larger labor markets will accept lower levels of unionization. Statistical analysis of cross-national differences in unionization rates among advanced industrial societies in the late 1970s indicates that the size of the labor force and the cumulative participation of leftist parties in government explain most of the variance.

Under what conditions does state expansion into limited statehood areas improve perceptions of state authority? Although previous work emphasizes identity or institutional sources of state legitimacy, I argue that relationships between state agents and citizens drive positive attitude formation, because these relationships provide information and facilitate social bonds. Moreover, when state agents and citizens share demographic characteristics, perceptional effects may improve. Finally, citizens finding procedural interactions between state agents and citizens unfair may adopt negative views about the state. I test these three propositions by randomizing household visits by male or female police officers in rural Liberia. These visits facilitated relationship building, leading to improved perceptions of police; shared demographic characteristics between police and citizens did not strengthen this effect. Perceptions of unfairness in the randomization led to negative opinions about police. The results imply that relationship building between state agents and citizens is an important part of state building.

We augment the survey-based studies of attitudes toward feminism with comparative, contextual perspectives emphasizing the importance of social structure and culture. In doing so, we are able to assess the relative merits of two very different structural theories. Most researchers implicitly assume a simple linear effect of social context on attitudes. On the other hand, some early works on American conservatism suggest to us that status discontent may be a better explanation. We explicate these two approaches and derive a series of testable hypotheses for each. We then examine the validity of these theories utilizing data from nine European nations.