Although turmoil characterized both the Middle East and East Asia in the two decades following World War II, the two regions looked dramatically different at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Since 1965 the incidence of interstate wars and militarized conflicts has been nearly five times higher in the Middle East, as was their severity, including the use of ballistic missiles and chemical weapons. By contrast, declining militarized conflict and rising intraregional cooperation has replaced earlier patterns in East Asia. There are no systematic efforts explaining this contrast between Bella Levantina and an evolving Pax Asiatica. This article traces these diverging paths to competing domestic models of political survival. East Asian leaders pivoted their political control on economic performance and integration in the global economy, whereas Middle East leaders relied on inward-looking self-sufficiency, state and military entrepreneurship, and a related brand of nationalism. I examine permissive and catalytic conditions explaining the models' emergence; their respective intended and unintended effects on states, military, and authoritarian institutions; and their implications for regional conflict. The final section distills conceptual and methodological conclusions.

Sequential voting takes place when some voters make choices with knowledge of earlier decisions in the same election. Historically, voting in U.S. presidential primaries is sequential, but recent primaries have been “front-loaded” into the early weeks of the season. We explore sequential voting in drawn-out primaries and simultaneous voting in front-loaded ones theoretically and use laboratory elections to examine our predictions empirically. We find evidence that in sequential voting later voters can use early outcomes to infer information about candidates and make choices that better reflect their preferences. The ability of later voters to infer information increases with higher levels of risk aversion and information provided on early outcomes. We discover that when a moderate candidate is largely unknown, information aggregation in sequential voting can increase the probability s/he will win, which supports the contention of policymakers that sequential voting can lead to different electoral outcomes.

Bipolar systems are inherently more stable than multipolar configurations of power, Kenneth Waltz argues. His empirical justification for this conclusion relies on the multipolar systems that preceded the two world wars and the bipolar Cold War. The weakness of Waltz's argument is the small number of cases and the failure to consider alternative explanations for different levels of war in the three periods. In another historical period of both multi- and bipolarity—Europe from 1495 to 1559—I have found that polarity cannot account for the constant level of instability across a change in polarity in the system. Instead, the offense-defense balance, which includes the technical military balance, the cumulativity of power resources, and strategic beliefs, explains instability in the period. Drawing on this alternative theory, I reassess the high level of stability associated with the Cold War and speculate on the level of stability we can expect in the post-Cold War period.

Party activists face a coordination problem: a critical mass—a barrier to coordination—must advocate a single policy alternative if the party is to succeed. The need for direction is the degree to which the merits of the alternatives respond to the underlying fundamentals of the party's environment. An individual's ability to assess the fundamentals is his sense of direction. These three factors—the barriers to coordination, the need for direction, and an individual's sense of direction—combine to form an index of both the desirability and the feasibility of leadership. We offer insights into Michels' Iron Law: a sovereign party conference gives way to leadership by an individual or oligarchy if and only if the leadership index is sufficiently high. Leadership enhances the clarity of intraparty communication, but weakens the response of policy choices to the party's environment. Our model can also be applied to the coordination problems faced by instrumental voters in plurality-rule elections, and so relates to the psychological effect of Duverger's Law.

How does democracy emerge from authoritarian rule? Certain influential theories contend that incumbents deliberately choose to share or surrender power. They do so to prevent revolution, motivate citizens to fight wars, incentivize governments to provide public goods, outbid elite rivals, or limit factional violence. Examining the history of all democratizations since 1800, I show that such deliberate-choice arguments may help explain up to about one-third of the cases. In more than two-thirds, the evidence suggests that democratization occurred not because incumbents chose it but because, while trying to prevent it, they made mistakes that weakened their hold on power. Rather than being granted by farsighted elites or forced on them by the rise of new classes, democracy appears to have spread most often because of incumbents’ missteps that triggered previously latent factors.

When elites mobilize supporters according to different cleavages, or when individuals realign themselves along new identity lines, do their political preferences change? Scholars have focused predominantly on the size of potential coalitions that leaders construct, to the exclusion of other changes that might occur when one or another identity type is made salient. In this article, I argue that changes in the salience of ethnicity and religion in Africa are associated with variation in policy preferences at the individual level. I test this claim empirically using data from a framing experiment in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. By randomly assigning participants to either a religious or an ethno-linguistic context, I show that group members primed to ethnicity prioritize club goods, the access to which is a function of where they live. Otherwise identical individuals primed to religion prioritize behavioral policies and moral probity. These findings are explained by the geographic boundedness of ethnic groups and the geographic expansiveness of (world) religions in the study area.

Not so long ago, political scientists were enthusiastically proclaiming that political socialization was a growth stock. But interest in the subfield has slackened, and the bull market has turned bearish. This article argues that a central cause of this recent scholarly neglect is a lack of theoretical confidence. Political socialization has been branded as less worthy of study largely because it is difficult to study and to understand in the absence of an explicit psychological model of learning. A strong theoretical rationale must be developed to return the subfield to its deserved place of priority. Such an endeavor is also Justified by the new popularity of the Piagetian model, which is inappropriate for understanding political learning because it emphasizes the foremost growth of logical operations and the individual as the prime motivating force. Another model, that of L. S. Vygotsky, is more useful, incorporating many of Piaget's insights without his unrealistic expectations. I outline Vygotsky's cognitive-developmental model, indicate its applicability to the small body of defensible research on the process of political learning, and conclude with a research agenda suggested by the model.

Malapportionment of seats in bicameral legislatures, it is widely argued, confers disproportionate benefits to overrepresented jurisdictions. Ample empirical research has documented that unequal representation produces unequal distribution of government expenditures in bicameral legislatures. The theoretical foundations for this empirical pattern are weak. It is commonly asserted that this stems from unequal voting power per se. Using a noncooperative bargaining game based on the closed-rule, infinite-horizon model of Baron and Ferejohn (1989), we assess the conditions under which unequal representation in a bicameral legislature may lead to unequal division of public expenditures. Two sets of results are derived. First, when bills originate in the House and the Senate considers the bill under a closed rule, the equilibrium expected payoffs of all House members are, surprisingly, equal. Second, we show that small-state biases can emerge when (1) there are supermajority rules in the malapportioned chamber, (2) the Senate initiates bills, which produces maldistributed proposal probabilities, and (3) the distributive goods are “lumpy.”We thank seminar participants at New York University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the 2002 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association for helpful comments. James Snyder and Michael Ting gratefully acknowledge the financial support of National Science Foundation Grant SES-0079035. Stephen Ansolabehere gratefully acknowledges the support of the Carnegie Corporation under the Carnegie Scholars program. This paper was written while Michael Ting was at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and he thanks the Department of Political Science there for their support.

In this reply to Jane Mansbridge's “Clarifying the Concept of Representation” in this issue (American Political Science Review 2011). I argue that our main disagreements are conceptual, and are traceable to the attempt to treat the concept of representation as a “single highly complex concept” as Hanna Pitkin once put it. Instead, I argue, it would be more useful to develop the various concepts that emphasize the underlying forms of representation. Against the view that empirical regularity should guide concept formation, I suggest that the failure to find instances of the cases I conceptualize is not itself a reason to reject them. Instead, I argue in favor of concepts that emphasize one side or other of a relationship, rather than treating both sides simultaneously, defending the view that “promissory” and “anticipatory” may usefully describe the activity of “representing” but ought to emphasize only one side of the representative–voter relationship. I also explain why adding substantive accounts of representation to any of Mansbridge's modifying concepts dilutes their practical value. I conclude by indicating the importance of developing concepts that stretch beyond the democratic contexts that feature prominently in her response.

We examine the role of incumbent fundraising in deterring strong challengers. We construct a signaling model in which incumbents can use fundraising strategically to ward off quality challengers. We show, however, that only under very limited circumstances will there be an observable relationship between fundraising and challenger quality. Therefore, previous empirical tests for deterrence have systematically underestimated the effects of fundraising in decreasing electoral competition. Our analysis also suggests that by making fundraising easily observable, Federal Election Commission regulations may encourage candidates to overinvest time and resources accumulating large war chests instead of governing.

Between 1898 and 1918, voters in 20 American states adopted constitutional amendments granting citizens the power of the initiative. The embrace of direct democracy by voters invites inquiry into why some state legislatures opted to delegate to citizens the power of the initiative, while others did not. Drawing on an original data set, this article uses Event History Analysis hazard models to explain the puzzle of why legislatures might devolve institutional power to citizens. Our longitudinal, macrolevel analysis of socioeconomic and political forces reveals that political considerations—interparty legislative competition, party organizational strength, and third parties—are the most powerful predictors of a legislature's decision to refer the initiative to the ballot. Although several of our findings comport with the conventional wisdom explaining the adoption of the initiative during the Progressive Era, others are surprising, offering us new theoretical insights into why and when legislative bodies might be willing to divest themselves of their institutional power.

My intention is to consider political science as a discipline and as a profession in relation to the impact of the physical and biological sciences and of engineering upon the life of man. I propose to inquire into the possible reconciliation of man's mastery over Nature with freedom, the overriding goal of policy in our body politic.

In the interest of concreteness I shall have something to say about past and potential applications of science in three areas: armament, production, and evolution.

It is trite to acknowledge that for years we have lived in the afterglow of a mushroom cloud and in the midst of an arms race of unprecedented gravity. Here I shall support a proposition that may at first evoke some incredulous exclamations. The proposition is that our intellectual tools have been sufficiently sharp to enable political scientists to make a largely correct appraisal of the consequences of unconventional weapons for world politics.

This paper investigates party use of seniority systems to allocate nominations for elected and appointed offices. Such systems, which can regulate party members’ access to offices at multiple levels of their careers, are defined by two main rules or norms: an incumbent re-nomination norm and a seniority progression norm. Using comprehensive electoral and candidate data from Norwegian local and national elections from 1945 to 2019, we find systematic patterns consistent with these two norms. Our work illuminates an institutional aspect of candidate selection that the current literature has ignored while noting some of the important consequences of seniority-based nominations for party cohesion and stability.

This research is designed to generalize a referendum voting model and investigate its ability to account for the aggregate outcomes of elections for the House, Senate, governorships, and upper and lower chambers of state legislatures. Our analysis shows that these outcomes are influenced by the same systematic short- and long-term forces. In addition to this common referendum structure, the analysis reveals that there is a common response to random shocks, a subtle form of interdependence found in systems of seemingly unrelated regressions.

Debate persists on whether voters hold politicians accountable for corruption. Numerous experiments have examined whether informing voters about corrupt acts of politicians decreases their vote share. Meta-analysis demonstrates that corrupt candidates are punished by zero percentage points across field experiments, but approximately 32 points in survey experiments. I argue this discrepancy arises due to methodological differences. Small effects in field experiments may stem partially from weak treatments and noncompliance, and large effects in survey experiments are likely from social desirability bias and the lower and hypothetical nature of costs. Conjoint experiments introduce hypothetical costly trade-offs, but it may be best to interpret results in terms of realistic sets of characteristics rather than marginal effects of particular characteristics. These results suggest that survey experiments may provide point estimates that are not representative of real-world voting behavior. However, field experimental estimates may also not recover the “true” effects due to design decisions and limitations.

Political science, like other fields of social inquiry, has had an enduring interest in questions of stability and change. This interest—until now principally expressed in studies of the rise and fall of institutions—has lately been focused increasingly upon individual and group behavior, in a search for the influences that hold men to their political beliefs and affiliations or cause them to shift about. Such influences are important not only for the study of voting and party membership, but for haute politique as well—for the great and dramatic questions surrounding political loyalty, conformity, deviation, apostasy, and other states of membership or disaffiliation. Although the research reported below concentrates on the former, it is our hope that it may also cast light upon the latter. It is concerned specifically with primary groups—those small, face-to-face, solidary, informal and enduring coteries that we commonly experience as family, friendship and occupational peer groups.

Recent campaigns have demonstrated the importance of dynamic elements in affecting the selection of presidential nominees. This paper develops a mathematical model to analyze these dynamics. The heart of the model is the assumed relationship between the ability to acquire resources and success in primaries and caucuses. The expenditure of resources leads to greater electoral success, while greater electoral success (in particular, exceeding expectations in a primary or caucus) leads to greater resource-gathering capabilities. A difference equation model of these relationships is proposed. I prove that any campaign of this form is necessarily unstable, which implies that most candidates will be “winnowed out” necessarily, while only a very few, but at least one candidate, will necessarily “have momentum.” This result is true whether there are two or many contenders. However, I also argue that the larger the number of candidates, the stronger the dynamic forces, and thus the more rapid the “winnowing out” process.

We propose and test a theory of opportunities that explains the conditions in which economic status affects support for racial and ethnic group interests among African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans. Using data from a 2001 Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard University national survey, our analysis finds that, for all minority groups, the effect of economic status on support for group interests is mediated by the socioeconomic experiences of individuals. Intergroup differences therefore result from varying experiences and perceptions of discrimination among minority groups rather than from group-specific theoretical processes. Compared to Latinos and Asian Americans, African Americans are least responsive to changes in economic circumstances because they are on the whole more pessimistic about their life prospects and more likely to encounter discrimination. But we find in general that, among those minority individuals who perceive equal opportunity and experience less discrimination, higher economic status often leads to a reduced emphasis on race and ethnicity. These results demonstrate that the incorporation of a minority group into American society depends not only on the actions of group members but also on the fair treatment of that group by the majority population.

“La politique de toutes les puissances est dans leur géographie,” conceded the man whose famous retort, “Circonstances? Moi, je fais les circonstances,” indicates his contempt for any agency but the human will as the arbiter of human destiny. But since the Red Sea parted for Moses and the sun obligingly paused for Joshua, the human will has been unable to recapture the control over topography and climate exhibited by those forceful gentlemen, and it is probably safe to say that it was by Russian geography rather than by men that the diminutive Corsican was finally defeated. If he is still living, there is at Waterloo even today a loyal guide who asserts with unshakable conviction that neither genius nor skill but a swampy ditch gave that victory to Wellington.

Unfortunately for the political scientist with a fondness for simplification, but fortunately for the statesman striving to overcome the geographic handicaps of his country, neither does the entire foreign policy of a country lie in geography, nor does any part of that policy lie entirely in geography. The factors that condition the policy of states are many; they are permanent and temporary, obvious and hidden; they include, apart from the geographic factor, population density, the economic structure of the country, the ethnic composition of the people, the form of government, and the complexes and pet prejudices of foreign ministers; and it is their simultaneous action and interaction that create the complex phenomenon known as “foreign policy.”