This article challenges the conventional wisdom that democratic consolidation depresses voter turnout. Studying democratic legislative elections held worldwide between 1939 and 2015, it explains why voting rates in new democracies decrease when they do, how much they decrease, and how this phenomenon relates to the voter decline observed in established democracies. The article identifies three main sources of decline. The first and most important is the democratization context. When democratizations are opposition-driven or occur in electorally mobilized dictatorships, voter turnout is strongly boosted in the founding democratic elections. As time passes and the mobilizing democratization context loses salience, voting rates return to normal, which translates into turnout declines. The second source is the democratic consolidation context, which seems to depress voter turnout only in post-Communist democracies. Finally, new democracies mirror established democracies in that their voting rates have been declining since the 1970s, irrespective of the two previous mechanisms.

Why do modern states regulate and provide mass education? This article proposes a theory of education as a state-building tool that is deployed when mass violence threatens the state’s viability. Experiencing mass violence can heighten national elites’ anxiety about the masses’ moral character and raise concerns about the efficacy of repression or concessions alone to maintain social order. In this context, a mass education system designed to teach obedience can become an attractive policy tool to prevent future rebellion and promote long-term order. Consistent with the theory, I detect a cross-national pattern of primary education expansion following civil wars in Europe and Latin America. In a complementary study of the 1859 Chilean civil war, I show that the central government responded by expanding primary schooling in rebel provinces not as a concession but to teach obedience and respect for authority. The theory helps explain why nondemocracies often expanded mass education.

Positive or rational choice theorists have tended to suppress under the rubric of “winning” elections a critical distinction in ths goals of political parties (or candidates)—the distinction between the primary goal of office and the goal of the benefits derived from the control of office. The distinction, however, has strategic consequences. Logically, the office-seeker should follow the vote-maximization strategy put forth by Downs, whereas the benefit-seeker should find Riker's minimal winning coalition most congenial. The distinction in goals and strategies also implies divergent ways of organizing political parties. A concern for benefits logically leads to the development of structures designed to insure that the party's officeholders will deliver the desired benefits. The office-seeking goal implies structures which free the party and the office-seeker to maneuver in response to electoral needs. Thus there are two positive theories resting upon two primary political goals. In their differences we find an explanation of the tensions in democratic parties.

The purpose of this article is to test the widely shared view that the experience of industrial democracy, the experience of direct decision making at places of work, necessarily leads to the enhancement of cooperative and egalitarian orientations among participants. Based on data collected through indepth interviews and questionnaires in Pacific-Northwest plywood cooperatives, the article argues that in market societies, such experiments in industrial democracy do not have the hypothesized results. Indeed, they seem to encourage the development of values most closely identified with classical liberalism or what MacPherson terms “possessive individualism.”

The first section of the article establishes the political salience of macroeconomic issues to the British electorate, reviews the distributional consequences of macroeconomic outcomes, and suggests that unemployment outcomes in particular have strong class-related distributional effects.

The second part presents a dynamic model of how rational voters evaluate the governing party, based on the idea that voters evaluate the cumulative performance of the governing party relative to the prior performance of the current opposition. Since the present relevance of prior outcomes decays over time, voters weight current performance more heavily than past performance informing contemporaneous political judgments.

The empirical analyses in the third section include measures of nominal economic performance (inflation and exchange rate movements) and real economic performance (unemployment and real income fluctuations). The regression results indicate that the responses of political support among the occupational classes to macroeconomic changes are sizeable, and that the cross-class variations are consistent with the distributional consequences reviewed at the beginning of the article.

The concluding section develops the electoral implications of the empirical results and presents a novel interpretation of trends in class-related political support for the parties. The evidence shows that the argument that there has been a persistent decline of class-based political alignments in Britain is erroneous.

The purpose of this article is to investigate the agrarian base of Indian communism through the use of statistical data and techniques in which the Communist vote over three general elections since 1957 is correlated with 35 largely socio-economic variables taken from Indian census data. The results indicate that two of these variables—landlessness in densely populated areas—explain a significant percentage of the variance in the Indian Communist vote. It is further suggested on the basis of statistical data accumulated by other investigators for Java and the Philippines that the same two variables are highly correlated with Communist strength in other parts of Asia.

How does an increase in cultural diversity affect state–society interactions? Do institutional differences between heterogeneous and homogeneous communities influence economic activity? I argue that heterogeneity not only impedes informal cooperation but also increases demand for third-party enforcement provided by the state. Over time, the greater willingness of heterogeneous communities to engage with state institutions facilitates the accumulation of state capacity and, in common-interest states, promotes private economic activity. I test this argument using original data on post-WWII population transfers in Poland. I find that homogeneous migrant communities were initially more successful in providing local public goods through informal enforcement, while heterogeneous migrant communities relied on the state for the provision of public goods. Economically similar during state socialism, heterogeneous communities collected higher tax revenues and registered higher incomes and entrepreneurship rates following the transition to the market. These findings challenge the predominant view of diversity as harmful to economic development.

Much of mainstream organization theory has been concerned with the implications for organizational design and policy process of high levels of uncertainty or complexity in task environments. Decentralization, disjointed incrementalist decision strategies, and quasi-market coordinative mechanisms have been advanced as rational responses to the complexity of most problems in the socio-political sphere. This article presents and illustrates four conditions which reduce the relative utility of this approach as a means of coping with uncertainty. The propositions are shown to be implicit in the logic of “muddling through,” and are used to help explain/predict the evolution of relatively centralized and planned organizations in certain types of complex task environments.

In making decisions on the merits, the members of the U.S. Supreme Court are often willing to provide authoritative answers to questions that have not been asked and to disregard issues that the parties have presented. What accounts for these forms of issue fluidity? Analyzing data from the 1988 term of the Court, we find that issue transformation is quite common, occurring in roughly half of the cases on the plenary agenda. We propose models of both issue discovery and issue suppression that, while successful in explaining how the justices select issues, suggest that these two forms of fluidity result from largely different influences.

We study the relationship between social structure and political incentives for public goods provision. We argue that when politicians—rather than communities—are responsible for the provision of public goods, social fractionalization may decrease the risk of elite capture and lead to increased public goods provision and electoral competition. We test this using large-scale data on family networks from over 20 million individuals in 15,000 villages of the Philippines. We take advantage of naming conventions to assess intermarriage links between families and use community detection algorithms to identify the relevant clans in those villages. We show that there is more public goods provision and political competition in villages with more fragmented social networks, a result that is robust to controlling for a large number of village characteristics and to alternative estimation techniques.

By skipping managers and appealing directly to politicians, whistleblowers can play a critical role in revealing organizational information. However, the protection of whistleblowers can affect managers' abilities to provide employees with incentives to exert effort. This paper explores this tradeoff with a model of agency decision-making under incomplete information. In the game, an employee's effort determines a project's quality, and a manager chooses whether to approve the project and discipline the employee. The employee and politician wish for only “good” projects to be approved. By whistleblowing, an employee reveals the quality to a politician outside of the organization, who may override the manager's decision. A key finding is that from the politician's perspective, the benefits of whistleblower protections depend on the preferences of the manager. If the manager is inclined toward approving projects, then the costs of lower employee effort may outweigh the informational benefits of whistleblowing. The optimal policy may then be to ban whistleblowing. By contrast, when the manager is inclined toward rejecting projects, whistleblower protections prevent him or her from suppressing effort and are unambiguously beneficial.

Crisis bargaining literature has predominantly used formal and qualitative methods to debate the relative efficacy of actions, public words, and private words. These approaches have overlooked the reality that policymakers are bombarded with information and struggle to adduce actual signals from endless noise. Material actions are therefore more effective than any diplomatic communication in shaping elites’ perceptions. Moreover, while ostensibly “costless,” private messages provide a more precise communication channel than public and “costly” pronouncements. Over 18,000 declassified documents from the Berlin Crisis of 1958–63 reflecting private statements, public statements, and White House evaluations of Soviet resolve are digitized and processed using statistical learning techniques to assess these claims. The results indicate that material actions have greater influence on the White House than either public or private statements; that public statements are noisier than private statements; and that private statements have a larger effect on evaluations of resolve than public statements.

Part and parcel of the conventional wisdom about rural publics in Africa is that populations on the periphery will accord ethnic solidarity greater significance than national consciousness. A survey of neighboring Hausa villages on different sides of the Niger-Nigeria boundary counters this myth. Probing issues of self-identity and ethnic affinity, we found that most Hausa villagers on the frontier did not place their Hausan ethnic identity above their national one as citizens of Nigeria or Niger and expressed greater affinity for non-Hausa cocitizens than for foreign Hausas. However, expressed attachments to ethnic, national, and other social identifications (such as religion) varied according to village: citizenship does make a difference in the political consciousness of villagers on the geographic margins of the state. More survey research in other transborder regions should shed further light on processes of state penetration and national integration in developing countries.

Depression is the most common mental health disorder. It has consequences not only on individuals but also on social and political levels. We argue that depressive symptoms impair political participation by reducing the motivation and physical energy of sufferers. We test our hypotheses by conducting regression analyses of four nationally representative cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys that collectively span many democracies. Our results are threefold. First, we find that the severest depressive symptoms lower the probability of voting by 0.05–0.25 points, an effect that is exceeded only by education and age. Second, we show that depressive symptoms negatively affect political interest and internal efficacy, thereby confirming that they diminish political motivation. Third, we find that depressive symptoms most strongly affect physically demanding acts, thereby confirming that they reduce the physical energy required for participation. We conclude by urging scholars to take depressive symptoms seriously in the study of political behavior.

Existing rational choice treatments of collective violence have consistently discounted the role of the public goods component of the individual's decision calculus about whether or not to participate in such acts. By assuming free rider effects with respect to the public goods, these theories are unable to account for the initial inception of violence or for the later nonlooting behaviors that constitute aspects of a riot and, indeed, are preconditions for the inception of looting, the only riot behavior for which these theories can offer any explanation. Five dimensions of discrimination are defined in rational choice terms and their elimination (or reduction) is defined as the creation of a public good. I use existing theories of individual contributions to the provision of public goods to demonstrate that free rider effects need not be assumed and that the inception of a riot and later nonlooting riot behaviors can best be explained as individual contributions to the provision of the public goods represented by the elimination of the several forms of discrimination.

The traditional emphasis on human nature as the foundation of politics needs to be reexamined from the perspective of contemporary biology. Because biological processes operate independently on the individual, the social group, and the species, an evolutionary approach to both observational research and cost-benefit analysis does not entail reductionism. Selfishness and altruism, participation in social groups, languages and cultures, and the rise and fall of centralized states can all be illuminated by empirical evidence and theories in the life sciences. For political philosophy, a new “naturalism” points to a return to the Aristotelian view that values or standards of judgment have rationally intelligible foundations, thereby challenging the relativist or nihilistic orientation that has characterized most contemporary thought.

In the evolution of the social sciences, disciplines (forms of research, training, and instruction) preceded professions (distinct occupational identities). Although professionalism has often been viewed as a conservative force, what was arguably the most prominent transformation in the history of political science was the result of a professional challenge to the discipline. The founding of the American Political Science Association represented not only an ideological break with some of the principal voices in the discipline but a reformulation of the reigning vision of the relationship between political science and politics. Despite the markedly different circumstances, the dissenting claims emanating from the subfield of political theory during the behavioral era reflected, in many respects, a similar form of confrontation.

What are the ethical implications of global poverty for immigration policy? This article finds substantial evidence that migration is effective at reducing poverty. There is every indication that the adoption of a fairly open immigration policy by rich countries, coupled with selective use of immigration restrictions in cases of deleterious brain drain, could be of significant assistance to people living in poor countries. Empirically there is nothing wrong with using immigration policy to address poverty. The reason we have to reject such an approach is not empirical but normative. People have human rights to stay in their home country and to migrate elsewhere. Counter poverty measures that require people to move or to stay are likely to violate these rights. Everyone should be free to migrate but no one should be forced to migrate. Using immigration policy to address global poverty, in place of alternatives, fails on both these counts.

One of the paradoxes of formal spatial voting models is the robustness of the theoretical result that candidates will converge toward centrists positions and the empirical observation of persistent policy divergence of candidates. A solution is that candidates are ideological (have policy preferences). When candidates have policy preferences and incomplete information about voter preferences, then platform divergence is theoretically predicted. Experimental tests of the ideological model are presented. It is shown that platform divergence is significant when candidates are ideological and have incomplete information about voter preferences. However, candidate positions are more convergent, on average, than the theory predicts, suggesting that subjects value winning independently of the expected payment.

This article develops a formal framework to aid political designers in the comparison of social choice functions. It generalizes earlier assumptions of “impartial culture” so that we may begin to investigate the effect of politically interesting variations on the probability that different social choice functions will satisfy given performance criteria. As an application of the framework, a detailed Monte Carlo study compares the ability of four different social choice functions to select a Condorcet winner when voter preference orders have been generated from a spatial representation of ideal points and alternatives. We also investigate the potential of alternative methods of selecting winners in presidential primary elections.