Discontent theories of rebellion postulate that politicized discontent will have a strong independent effect on individuals' potential to participate in rebellious political action. Expected utility theories postulate that participation in rebellious action is motivated by expectation of reward and that discontent is relevant at most only insofar as individuals expect that collective action can be successful and that their participation is important to that end. We test these theories with data from a national sample and a sample of students at a protest-prone university in Peru, a country with significant objective conditions of discontent and a high incidence of rebellious political conflict. The results provide no evidence for the discontent models but strong support for the expected utility models. The potential for participation in rebellious political action proves to be a function primarily of discontent weighted by the expectancy of the action's success and the perceived importance of personal participation. Private social and normative rewards and costs also are relevant—but to a lesser extent—for the individual's calculation of the expected utility of participation.

Moser analyzes the cooperation procedure using a model that assumes (1) one dimension and (2) complete information. I show that because of these two restrictive assumptions and his misunderstanding of the strategic implications of Article 189a(1) of the Maastricht Treaty (an article also present in the Single European Act and the Treaty of Rome), Moser's conclusions are mistaken. In particular, his predicted outcomes are incorrect, and his major institutional prediction (that the European Parliament plays no role in decision making except in the second round of the cooperation procedure) is contradicted by thousands of parliamentary amendments, the major part of which are accepted in the first round.

A generally accepted interpretation of American politics today is associated with the “theory of electoral accountability.” The salient features of this theory are well known. The thesis was initially shaped in Schumpeter's classic work on democracy, and since has been elaborated by a generation of scholars. The elaboration, especially where grounded in empirical studies, has established (1) that the public, being largely apathetic about political matters and in any case ill-informed regarding public issues, cannot provide the necessary and sufficient conditions for the maintenance of democratic procedures; (2) that a liberal political and social elite are committed to the preservation of democratic forms, at least more committed than the average citizen; therefore, (3) what maintains the democratic tradition is not extensive public participation in political policy-making, but, instead, competition among elites whose behavior is regulated by periodic review procedures. Competition among elites and review by citizens of political leaders are provided by elections. Thus elections hold political leaders accountable to non-leaders.

Writers associated with this general position have recently come under scholarly attack. The critique, directed at the first two assertions, can be reviewed briefly: although true that the public is not well-informed politically and is not actively engaged in political life, this is not to be attributed to the inherent traits of citizens so much as to the structure of political opportunities in the United States. Moreover, although true that research has detected among political leaders a greater commitment to democratic procedures than is the case for the ordinary citizen, this commitment is to procedures in which only the leaders participate.

Variations in second ballot abstention and blank and invalid ballot rates (over the cross-section of French election districts) are examined for all four legislative elections of the French Fifth Republic. Analysis was conducted primarily through a heuristic decision-making model and a spatial model developed from the theories of Riker, McKelvey, and Ordeshook, and Davis, Hinich, and Ordeshook.

Abstentions appear to be primarily influenced by long-term factors and the competitiveness of the contest. Blank ballots appear to be primarily dependent upon short-term factors, especially nonvoting from the alienation that results when a candidate present on the first ballot is not present on the second. The alienation model and the heuristic model, though partly collinear, make independent contributions to the explanation of the blank ballot variance.

In “The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” Robert Pape (2003) presents an analysis of his suicide terrorism data. He uses the data to draw inferences about how territorial occupation and religious extremism affect the decision of terrorist groups to use suicide tactics. We show that the data are incapable of supporting Pape's conclusions because he “samples on the dependent variable.”—The data only contain cases in which suicide terror is used. We construct bounds (Manski, 1995) on the quantities relevant to Pape's hypotheses and show exactly how little can be learned about the relevant statistical associations from the data produced by Pape's research design.

There is a long-standing concern in organization theory with the effect of conflict on search. This article uses a computer model of organizational decision making to demonstrate an effect called “search-enhancing conflict”: organizational decision-making performance when there are conflicting subgoals may be better than it would be if all subunits evaluated alternatives in terms of a single organizational goal.

The leading explanation for the underrepresentation of women in American politics is that women are less likely to run for office than men, but scholars have given less attention in recent years to the gender makeup of the pipeline to elected office. We examine the gendered pipeline to power across three potential candidate pools: lower-level officeholders, those named in newspapers as likely candidates, and lawyers who made political contributions. We find some evidence that women are less likely to seek elected office; however, the dearth of women in the pipeline plays a much greater role in the lack of women candidates. For the gender disparity in candidates to close, women have to be far more likely to run for office than men, particularly on the Republican side. Our results highlight the need to consider the gendered pipeline to power alongside rates of entry in studies of women’s underrepresentation.

Previous research finds that House majority members and members in the president's party garner additional federal spending in their districts. Using federal spending data in individual districts, we implement two research designs to distinguish elected officials enacting policies that benefit like-minded voters—the party in the electorate—from those that benefit same-party elected officials—the party in government. We find robust evidence that presidential partisanship is associated with large differences in spending correlated with voter preferences, but little evidence that presidents favor areas represented by their party in the House. By contrast, control of the House is associated with differences in spending by voter preferences and with modest increases in spending in districts held by members of the majority. These findings have important implications for understanding presidential influence, as well as the role of parties in the House and in coordinating between elected branches.

Alvarez, Garrett and Lange (1991) used cross-national panel data on the Organization for Economic Coordination and Development nations to show that countries with left governments and encompassing labor movements enjoyed superior economic performance. Here we show that the standard errors reported in that article are incorrect. Reestimation of the model using ordinary least squares and robust standard errors upholds the major finding of Alvarez, Garrett and Lange, regarding the political and institutional causes of economic growth but leaves the findings for unemployment and inflation open to question. We show that the model used by Alvarez, Garrett and Lange, feasible generalized least squares, cannot produce standard errors when the number of countries analyzed exceeds the length of the time period under analysis. Also, we argue that ordinary least squares with robust standard errors is superior to feasible generalized least squares for typical cross-national panel studies.

Since the language of political inquiry seems to be inescapably metaphorical, the question necessarily arises as to how metaphors of various types, including models, enter into the composition and expression of political knowledge. The solutions that have been most influential in contemporary political science can be called the verificationist and constitutivist views of political metaphor. While both views contain important elements of truth, there are fundamental difficulties in each that require the search for a more satisfactory view. An alternative view of metaphor and political knowledge is developed by reference to four main problems: Why is political speech metaphorical? How do metaphors make political things manifest? How are political metaphors tested? and Are metaphors indispensable to political expression and political knowledge?

Combating climate change requires large economic adjustments with significant distributional implications. To build coalitions of support, scholars and policy makers propose compensating individuals who will bear decarbonization’s costs. What are the determinants of public opinion regarding climate compensation and investment? We theorize that climate policy vulnerability and climate change vulnerability induce support for distinct types of climate policy. Fielding original surveys in the United States and India, we show that people who reside in coal-producing regions prefer compensation for lost jobs. The general public privileges diffuse redistribution mechanisms and investments, discounting compensation to targeted groups. Those who are both physically and economically vulnerable have cross-cutting preferences. Nevertheless, there is considerable support across our samples for policies that compensate different coalitions of climate-vulnerable citizens, in line with theories of “just energy” transition and embedded liberalism. We trace the distinctive compensatory preferences of fossil fuel communities to a logic of shared community identities.

Recent years have witnessed growing controversy over the “wisdom of the multitude.” As epistemic critics drawing on vast empirical evidence have cast doubt on the political competence of ordinary citizens, epistemic democrats have offered a defense of democracy grounded largely in analogies and formal results. So far, I argue, the critics have been more convincing. Nevertheless, democracy can be defended on instrumental grounds, and this article demonstrates an alternative approach. Instead of implausibly upholding the epistemic reliability of average voters, I observe that competitive elections, universal suffrage, and discretionary state power disable certain potent mechanisms of elite entrenchment. By reserving particular forms of power for the multitude of ordinary citizens, they make democratic states more resistant to dangerous forms of capture than non-democratic alternatives. My approach thus offers a robust defense of electoral democracy, yet cautions against expecting too much from it—motivating a thicker conception of democracy, writ large.

Party-driven and religion-driven models of opinion change posit that individuals revise their positions on culture war issues to ensure consonance with political and religious predispositions. By contrast, models of issue-driven change propose that public opinion on cultural controversies lead people to revise their partisan and religious orientations. Using data from four panel studies covering the period 1992–2012, we pit the party- and religion-based theories of opinion change against the issue-based model of change. Consistent with the standard view, party and religion constrain culture war opinion. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, but consistent with our novel theory, opinions on culture war issues lead people to revise their partisan affinities and religious orientations. Our results imply that culture war attitudes function as foundational elements in the political and religious belief systems of ordinary citizens that match and sometimes exceed partisan and religious predispositions in terms of motivating power.

The destruction of the space shuttle Challenger was a tremendous blow to American space policy. To what extent was this loss the result of organizational factors at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration? To discuss this question analytically, we need a theory of organizational reliability and agency behavior. Martin Landau's work on redundancy and administrative performance provides a good starting point for such an effort. Expanding on Landau's work, I formulate a more comprehensive theory of organizational reliability that incorporates both type I and type II errors. These principles are then applied in a study of NASA and its administrative behavior before and after the Challenger accident.

Political science has mirrored the political culture even as it has explained it, and at critical times the gendering of political science has left it unprepared to explain notable changes in political life. Here, we examine political science as a gendered institution across three critical time periods: the founding era of the discipline, the 1970s and 1980s, and the present. For each period, we assess the presence, position, and experiences of women in the profession; the norms of gender within the discipline; and the way political science deals with women and gender as subject matter. In general, the position of women in the discipline has improved dramatically over the course of the discipline's first century, and gender-related research has become more institutionalized. Nevertheless, political science has not yet developed a full appreciation of gender as an analytical construct.

Useful studies of Canadian political parties are available, and doubtless others will be soon. I am not trying to add another specifically Canadian study nor even to contribute new information helpful in understanding Canada. Instead I want to use what is known about Canadian parties in order to change the comparative perspective in which we ordinarily view American parties. More particularly I am attempting to put in a new light the well-worn view of the uncohesive and nonresponsible character of American parties in contrast to British parties. The Canadian party system, itself so often described as an Anglo-American hybrid, may help explain why American parties differ from Britain's.

One of the current controversies within international relations deals with the “stability” of bipolar as opposed to multipolar stratifications of world power. Morton Kaplan, in codifying the views of classical balance of power theorists, advances the view that multipolar systems are more stable than bipolar systems. Kenneth Waltz, sagely pointing to the relatively peaceful international arena since World War II, argues that a bipolar distribution of power can guarantee world stability. Many a priori arguments have been presented to buttress the Kaplan and Waltz hypotheses. In one of the most elaborate such formulations, the “interaction opportunity” hypothesis of Karl Deutsch and J. David Singer, the presence of stabilizing crosscutting alliances is postulated to be most likely within multipolar systems, which in turn are a function of the number of major powers and members of a system. In an attempt to bring the two opposing strands of theory into a larger framework, Richard Rosecrance more recently has suggested that bipolarity and multipolarity may each have their peculiar costs and benefits. Bipolarity, according to Rosecrance, is distinguished by (1) an absence of “peripheries,” such as areas for colonial expansion or neutral powers to woo; (2) all international behavior is highly politicized; (3) there are many crises; (4) changes in power confrontations are either significant or trivial, with no intervening shades of gray; (5) each pole is dominated by major powers highly motivated to expand their domains, willing even to incur brinksmanlike situations and hostility spirals; (6) no detente is possible. Multipolarity, on the other hand, is hypothesized to have (1) more interaction opportunities and thus less preoccupation (or obsession) with any one set of states; (2) fewer arms races; (3) more international conflicts; (4) the outcomes of international conflicts are harder to predict in advance; (5) changes in power confrontations have ambiguous consequences for the overall distribution of power. Rosecrance, therefore, urges a “bi-multipolar” arrangement that would combine the best features of both alternatives. The empirical questions and intriguing hypotheses so eloquently raised by Kaplan, Waltz, Deutsch, Singer, and Rosecrance have remained largely unexamined, however.

The Trump presidency generated concern about democratic backsliding and renewed interest in measuring the national democratic performance of the United States. However, the US has a decentralized form of federalism that administers democratic institutions at the state level. Using 51 indicators of electoral democracy from 2000 to 2018, I develop a measure of subnational democratic performance, the State Democracy Index. I then test theories of democratic expansion and backsliding based in party competition, polarization, demographic change, and the group interests of national party coalitions. Difference-in-differences results suggest a minimal role for all factors except Republican control of state government, which dramatically reduces states’ democratic performance during this period. This result calls into question theories focused on changes within states. The racial, geographic, and economic incentives of groups in national party coalitions may instead determine the health of democracy in the states.