Authoritarian leaders maintain their grip on power primarily through preventive repression, routinely exercised by specialized security agencies with the aim of preventing any opponents from organizing and threatening their power. We develop a formal model to analyze the moral hazard problems inherent in the principal-agent relationship between rulers and their security agents in charge of preventive repression. The model distinguishes two types of moral hazard: “politics,” through which the security agents can exert political influence to increase their payoff by decreasing the ruler’s rents from power, and “corruption,” through which the agents can increase their payoff by engaging in rent-seeking activities that do not decrease the ruler’s rents from power. The surprising conclusion is that both the ruler and the security agent are better off when the only moral hazard problem available is politics rather than when the agent can choose between politics and corruption. We also show that the equilibrium probability of ruler’s survival in power is higher when politics is the only moral hazard available to the agent. These findings lead to our central conclusion that opportunities for corruption undermine authoritarian rule by distorting the incentives of the security agencies tasked with preventing potential threats to an authoritarian ruler’s grip on power.

Domestic opposition to violent, escalatory national policies during international crises has long been considered an important factor influencing the foreign policy behavior of nations. Yet the explicit theoretical linkages between domestic opposition and crisis choices have not been investigated. To provide these linkages, we set out an extensive form game of sequential decisions leading to the various consequences of crises together with their attendant costs and benefits. Our findings indicate that an antagonist's beliefs about domestic opposition are not particularly effective levers to manipulate in crises when a peaceful resolution is the goal.

Several scholars within the public law field of political science have compiled data on differences in the backgrounds of American judges, but without attempting to correlate these characteristics with differences in the decisions of the judges. Other scholars have compiled data on the different decisional tendencies of American judges, but again without correlating these tendencies with differences in the backgrounds of the judiciary.

The first purpose of this paper is to explore the empirical relationships between one background characteristic and fifteen areas of judicial decision-making. Political party affiliation was chosen as the one background characteristic because it is of particular interest to political scientists, and is an especially useful indicator for predicting how judges on bipartisan appellate courts will divide when they do not agree. The second purpose is to explore empirically the effectiveness of three judicial reforms (judicial appointment, non-partisan ballot, and long term of office) which are frequently advocated as means of decreasing partisan influences in judicial decisions.

In making review decisions, Supreme Court justices are predisposed to support underdogs and upperdogs. disproportionately but, also, are motivated to hide any "bias" that may be at work in determining votes.

In balancing these two values, justices may be expected to vote their "bias" more frequently (1) when that vote will determine outcome, and (2) when the "bias" will be harder to detect. The latter goal may be served by voting the "bias" more frequently in close cases and less frequently otherwise.

In an analysis of the voting patterns of five justices in the decade 1947–56, I found that two liberal and two conservative justices conformed to these expectations. A fifth, or control justice, defined as neither liberal nor conservative, did not pattern his votes in the manner predicted for liberals and conservatives. This relationship held when four projected intervening variables were controlled individually and collectively.

This symposium features three critiques of Gabriel Almonds argument—by Eric A. Nordlinger of Brown University, Theodore J. Lowi of Cornell University, and Sergio Fabbrini of the University of Trento.

Beck, King, and Zeng (2000) offer both a sweeping critique of the quantitative security studies field and a bold new direction for future research. Despite important strengths in their work, we take issue with three aspects of their research: (1) the substance of the logit model they compare to their neural network, (2) the standards they use for assessing forecasts, and (3) the theoretical and model-building implications of the nonparametric approach represented by neural networks. We replicate and extend their analysis by estimating a more complete logit model and comparing it both to a neural network and to a linear discriminant analysis. Our work reveals that neural networks do not perform substantially better than either the logit or the linear discriminant estimators. Given this result, we argue that more traditional approaches should be relied upon due to their enhanced ability to test hypotheses.

To resolve the paradoxical finding that economic conditions and presidential popularity powerfully relate to quadrennial movement in the House vote, but explain little individual voting variation, Jacobson and Kernell have advanced their “strategic politicians” model of midterm elections. Purportedly, the early-year political environment helps determine how many of a party's strong potential contenders risk challenging incumbents; voters in turn respond to the quality of candidates before them in November, and thus indirectly reward the party favored by this early-year environment. Despite its current prominence, however, the theory does not stand up to empirical investigation. A time-series equation of midterm outcomes regressed on early-year national conditions does not fare particularly well when contrasted with comparable equations assuming direct-effects voting. Furthermore, challenger quality has only a weak influence on individual voters—subordinate, in fact, to the effects of economic attitudes and presidential evaluations.

T his article highlights a gap between a great deal of constitutional theory and a great deal of the practice of democratic constitution-making. Drawing on data from democratic national and state constitutions, we challenge the consensus among constitutional theorists that a central purpose of constitutionalism is the entrenchment (the fortification against future change) of broad principles. The empirical reality is that the majority of democratic constitutions today are subject to frequent revision, and are therefore ill-equipped to facilitate the entrenchment of their contents. To explore the logic of these unentrenched documents, we identify the historical periods in which different geographic regions moved away from highly entrenched constitutions, and we examine the political contexts of these transformations. We find that, in each context, constitution-makers were attempting to limit the discretion of constitutional interpreters and implementers by drafting highly specific texts and by updating them in response to continually changing circumstances.

This study focuses on A. Lawrence Lowell's classic thesis that a parliamentary democracy must possess a majority party system if durable cabinets are to exist. The argument of this study is that majority party government is not essential to cabinet durability. Rather, in line with the British analyst W. L. Middleton as well as more contemporary game-theoreticians, the critical factor is held to be the coalitional status of the cabinet: (1) cabinets of minimum winning status should be durable; as cabinets depart from minimum winning status, cabinet durability decreases; (2) the coalitional status of the cabinet that forms is partially a product of party system fractionalization, instability, and polarization. Hypotheses derived from the theory are tested with data drawn from 17 Western parliamentary democracies, from 1918 to 1940 and from 1945 to 1970. The findings generally support the theory. A key to durable government is the minimum winning status of the cabinet. Minimum winning cabinets are possible in multiparty and majority party systems.

This paper presents estimates of the probability that the occurrence of the Paradox of Voting, commonly known as Arrow's Paradox, will prevent the selection of a majority issue when odd-sized committees of m judges vote upon n issues. The estimates, obtained through computer simulation of the voting process, indicate that the probability of such an intransitive social ordering is lower than the ratio of intransitive outcomes to all outcomes.

Many of the arguments in political theory and welfare economics dealing with the paradox (e.g., Downs, 1957; Black, 1958; Schubert, 1960) seem to have implicitly assumed that since the paradox exists, its likelihood of occurrence is very close to 1. The results in this paper may call for a re-examination of these positions.

In 2008 we published an article finding evidence for political constraints on European Court of Justice (ECJ) decision making. Stone Sweet and Brunell (this issue) argue that our theoretical foundations are fundamentally flawed and that our empirical evidence supports neofunctionalism over intergovernmentalism “in a landslide.” We respectfully disagree with Stone Sweet and Brunell regarding both their conclusions about our theoretical arguments and what the empirical evidence demonstrates. We use this response to clarify our argument and to draw a clearer contrast between our and their perspective on the role the ECJ plays in European integration. Finally, we reevaluate their neofunctionalist hypotheses. Ultimately, we do not find support in the data for Stone Sweet and Brunell's empirical claims.

Research has shown that emotions matter in politics, but we know less about when and why politicians use emotive rhetoric in the legislative arena. This article argues that emotive rhetoric is one of the tools politicians can use strategically to appeal to voters. Consequently, we expect that legislators are more likely to use emotive rhetoric in debates that have a large general audience. Our analysis covers two million parliamentary speeches held in the UK House of Commons and the Irish Parliament. We use a dictionary-based method to measure emotive rhetoric, combining the Affective Norms for English Words dictionary with word-embedding techniques to create a domain-specific dictionary. We show that emotive rhetoric is more pronounced in high-profile legislative debates, such as Prime Minister’s Questions. These findings contribute to the study of legislative speech and political representation by suggesting that emotive rhetoric is used by legislators to appeal directly to voters.

Although all theories that oppose the subordination of women can be called feminist, beyond this common denominator, feminisms vary in terms of what they see as the cause of women's subordination, alternatives to patriarchal society, and proposed strategies to achieve the desired change. This article offers a critical examination of the interaction of feminist theories and the international human rights discourses as articulated at the UN forums and documents. It contends that although a range of feminisms that elucidate the diversity of women's experiences and complexities of oppression have been incorporated into some UN documents, the overall women's rights approach of the UN is still informed by the demands and expectations of liberal feminism. This is particularly evident in the aggregate indicators that are employed to assess the “empowerment of women.” In addition to explaining why liberal feminism trumps other feminisms, the article addresses the problems with following policies that are informed by liberal feminism. Noting that the integrative approach of liberal feminism may establish gender equality without empowering the majority of women, it criticizes using aggregate indicators of empowerment for conflating sources of power with empowerment and making false assumptions.

Many studies suggest that strict balanced budget rules can restrain sovereign debt and lower sovereign borrowing costs, even if those rules are never enforced in court. Why might public officials adhere to a rule that is practically never enforced in court? Existing literature points to a legal deterrence logic in which the threat of judicial enforcement deters sovereigns from violating the rules in the first place. By contrast, we argue that balanced budget rules work by coordinating decentralized punishment of sovereigns by bond markets, rather than by posing a credible threat of judicial enforcement. Therefore, the clarity of the focal point provided by the rule, rather than the strength of its judicial enforcement mechanisms, determines its effectiveness. We develop a formal model that captures the logic of our argument, and we assess this model using data on U.S. states. We then consider implications of our argument for the impact of the balanced budget rules recently imposed on eurozone states in the Fiscal Compact Treaty.

Recent empirical evidence suggests an ambiguous relationship between internal conflicts, state capacity, and tax performance. In theory, internal conflict should create strong incentives for governments to develop the fiscal capacity necessary to defeat rivals. We argue that one reason that this does not occur is because internal conflict enables groups with de facto power to capture local fiscal and property rights institutions. We test this mechanism in Colombia using data on tax performance and property rights institutions at the municipal level. Municipalities affected by internal conflict have tax institutions consistent with the preferences of the parties dominating local violence. Those suffering more right-wing violence feature more land formalization and higher property tax revenues. Municipalities with substantial left-wing guerrilla violence collect less tax revenue and witness less land formalization. Our findings provide systematic evidence that internal armed conflict helps interest groups capture municipal institutions for their own private benefit, impeding state-building.

Many liberals of the nineteenth century, and their predecessors of the middle eighteenth, thought the natural condition of men to be one of harmony. Dissension and strife do not inhere in man and society; they arise instead from mistaken belief, inadequate knowledge, and defective governance. With the evils defined, the remedies become clear: educate men and their governors, strip away political abuses. This is one theme in the history of liberal thought. Urged by humane philosophers and supported by pacifistic economists, its appeal in Western society is immense and enduring.

There is in liberal thought another theme as well, which is often obscured though it goes back to the earliest philosophers who can fairly be called liberal. Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and Kant made no easy assumptions about the rationality and goodness of man. Among men in nature and states in a world of states, they found not harmony and peace but hostility and war to be the natural condition.

In the 1961 federal election six per cent of West German voters failed to cast two valid votes under the single-ballot, two-vote German electoral system: 1.3 million voters cast their party list vote invalidly, while almost one million failed to vote validly for a district candidate. Since 1949—and 1953, when the present single-ballot, two-vote system was introduced —the development of the invalid vote has been as shown in Table I.

Not only has the total invalid vote increased steadily, despite the counter-movement of first and second vote trends; it has also been exceptionally high in comparison to the Weimar Republic, Imperial Germany and other Western European countries. Thus in pre-Hitler Germany the invalid vote seldom exceeded 1 per cent of the poll. In postwar parliamentary elections in Scandinavia it has not yet exceeded 1 per cent while in Britain, Switzerland and Austria it has approached 2 per cent only in rare instances. In Fourth and Fifth Republic France spoiled and blank ballots have been constant at about 3 per cent of the poll. Only in isolated cases—for example, where compulsory voting is combined with a deep-seated social and political malaise, as in Belgium—has the invalid vote been comparable in proportion to that of Western Germany.

This article hypothesizes that minority groups are more likely to protect persecuted groups during episodes of mass killing. The author builds a geocoded dataset of Jewish evasion and church communities in the Netherlands during the Holocaust to test this hypothesis. Spatial regression models of 93 percent of all Dutch Jews demonstrate a robust and positive correlation between the proximity to minority churches and evasion. While proximity to Catholic churches increased evasion in dominantly Protestant regions, proximity to Protestant churches had the same effect in Catholic parts of the country. Municipality level fixed effects and the concentric dispersion of Catholicism from missionary hotbed Delft are exploited to disentangle the effect of religious minority groups from local level tolerance and other omitted variables. This suggests that it is the local configuration of civil society that produces collective networks of assistance to threatened neighbors.

The politics of Michel Foucault remain controversial, mainly because they remain ambiguous. His critics charge that the ambiguity is symptomatic of a theory that fosters moral abandon and political impotence. This predicament is frequently attributed to Nietzsche's influence. I outline the critics' charges and investigate to what extent Foucault's thought evidences Nietzschean roots. Specifically, I examine Nietzsche's glorification of struggle and seek to demonstrate that a valorization of struggle constitutes the core of Foucault's political thought.