How should we understand and explain individual acts of racism? Despite extensive debate about the broader place and importance of racism in America, there is surprisingly little theoretical or empirical analysis of what leads individuals to commit racist acts. In contrast to most political scientists who understand racism as an individual psychological attitude—an irrational prejudice—I argue that individual manifestations of racism are the result of a complex set of factors, and that latent psychology is less helpful to understanding them than are the maneuverings and behavior of strategic actors following rules and incentives provided by institutions. We need to examine the ways in which institutions encourage racist acts by motivating people to behave in a racist manner or behave in a manner that motivates others to do so. To further explore and compare institutional and individual-psychological approaches to understanding racism, I examine manifestations of racism in labor union elections. I analyze and contrast more than 150 cases in which the National Labor Relations Board and U.S. federal appellate courts formally responded to reported violations of racism in a union election. The principles of this approach can easily be applied to other contexts and suggests that racism in society is less intractable and innate than malleable and politically determined.

In much of the political economy literature, social democratic governments are assumed to defend the interests of labor. The main thrust of this article is that labor is divided into those with secure employment (insiders) and those without (outsiders). I argue that the goals of social democratic parties are often best served by pursuing policies that benefit insiders while ignoring the interests of outsiders. I analyze Eurobarometer data and annual macrodata from 16 OECD countries from 1973 to 1995. I explore the question of whether strategies prevalent in the golden age of social democracy have been neglected and Left parties have abandoned the goal of providing equality and security to the most vulnerable sectors of the labor market. By combining research on political economy, institutions, and political behavior, my analysis demonstrates that insider–outsider politics are fundamental to a fuller explanation of government partisanship, policy-making, and social democracy since the 1970s.

We test propositions about how different forms of civic engagement are related to democratic representation in American communities. Our data are for the samples of communities, their citizens, and their leaders originally examined by Verba and Nie in Participation in America (1972). Our analyses of those data indicate that membership in bridging social–capital civic associations is unrelated to democratic responsiveness of leaders to the mass public but that bonding social–capital membership is negatively associated with such responsiveness. We also demonstrate that bonding social–capital civic engagement weakens the democratic linkage processes inherent in elections.

Military mobilization simultaneously sinks costs, because it must be paid for regardless of the outcome, and ties hands, because it increases the probability of winning should war occur. Existing studies neglect this dualism and cannot explain signaling behavior and tacit bargaining well. I present a formal model that incorporates both functions and shows that many existing conclusions about crisis escalation have to be qualified. Contrary to models with either pure sunk costs or tying-hands signaling, bluffing is possible in equilibrium. General monotonicity results that relate the probability of war to an informed player's expected payoff from fighting do not extend to this environment with its endogenous distribution of power. Peace may involve higher military allocations than war. Rational deterrence models also assume that a commitment either does or does not exist. Extending these, I show how the military instrument can create commitments and investigate the difficulties with communicating them.

The increased “legalization” embodied in the revised Dispute Settlement Procedure (DSP) of the World Trade Organization (WTO) is shown to be an institutional innovation that increases the opportunities for states to temporarily suspend their obligations in periods of unexpected, but heightened, domestic political pressure for protection. This increased flexibility in the system reduces per-period cooperation among states but also reduces the possibility that the regime may break down entirely. There is shown to be a trade-off between rigidity and stability in international institutional design in the face of unforeseen, but occasionally intense, domestic political pressure. In a model with a WTO that serves both an informational and adjudicatory role, it is established that agreements with DSPs are self-enforcing, are more stable, and are more acceptable to a wider variety of countries than agreements without DSPs. Evidence drawn from data on preferential trading agreements supports the key hypotheses.

American political science has long struggled to deal adequately with issues of race. Many studies inaccurately treat their topics as unrelated to race. Many studies of racial issues lack clear theoretical accounts of the relationships of race and politics. Drawing on arguments in the American political development literature, this essay argues for analyzing race, and American politics more broadly, in terms of two evolving, competing “racial institutional orders”: a “white supremacist” order and an “egalitarian transformative” order. This conceptual framework can synthesize and unify many arguments about race and politics that political scientists have advanced, and it can also serve to highlight the role of race in political developments that leading scholars have analyzed without attention to race. The argument here suggests that no analysis of American politics is likely to be adequate unless the impact of these racial orders is explicitly considered or their disregard explained.

International cooperation is plagued by uncertainty. Although states negotiate the best agreements possible using available information, unpredictable things happen after agreements are signed that are beyond states' control. States may not even commit themselves to an agreement if they anticipate that circumstances will alter their expected benefits. Duration provisions can insure states in this context. Specifically, the use of finite duration depends positively on the degree of uncertainty and states' relative risk aversion and negatively on the cost. These formally derived hypotheses strongly survive a test with data on a random sample of agreements across all four of the major issue areas in international relations. Not only do the results, highlighting evidence on multiple kinds of flexibility provisions, strongly suggest that the design of international agreements is systematic and sophisticated; but also they call attention to common ground among various subfields of political science and law.

Understanding what James Madison's opponents sought and won at the U.S. Constitutional Convention revises our understanding of the founders' original intentions for the durable framework that has structured American political development. The Constitution is the by-product of expedient accommodations forced on Madison. Madison sought broad national authority independent of state governments and a swift victory for population-based congressional representation. Delegates from economically disadvantaged states opposed these plans, seeking instead to nationalize only selective public goods, to maintain most state policy autonomy, and to minimize contingencies imposed by other governments. Connecticut's delegates, particularly Roger Sherman, played a pivotal role in spoiling Madison's agenda and altering his substantive plans for Constitutional design. Madison's Convention opponents are responsible for a Constitution that nationalized only enumerated public goods and imposed potentially high transaction costs on any further nationalization of policy authority. They helped make federalism a lasting political weapon used to win substantive policy outcomes.

States routinely justify their policies in interstate forums, and this reason-giving seems to serve a legitimating function. But how could this be? For Habermas and other global public sphere theorists, the exchange of reasons oriented toward understanding—communicative action—is central to public sphere governance, where political power is held accountable to those affected. But most global public sphere theory considers communicative action only among nonstate actors. Indeed, anarchy is a hard case for public spheres. The normative potential of communicative action rests on its instability: only where consensus can be undone by better reasons, through argument, can we say speakers are holding one another accountable to reason. But argument means disagreement, and especially in anarchy disagreement can mean violence. Domestically, the state backstops argument to prevent violence. Internationally, I propose that international society and publicity function similarly. Public talk can mitigate the security dilemma and enable interstate communicative action. Viewing multilateral diplomacy as a legitimation process makes sense of the intuition that interstate talk matters, while tempering a potentially aggressive cosmopolitanism.

Political scientists know remarkably little about the extent to which legislatures are able to influence policymaking in parliamentary democracies. In this article, we focus on the influence of legislative institutions in periods of coalition government. We show that multiparty governments are plagued by “agency” problems created by delegation to cabinet ministers that increase in severity on issues that divide the coalition. We also argue that the process of legislative review presents an important—but understudied—institutional opportunity for coalition partners to overcome these tensions. We evaluate our argument using original legislative data on over 300 government bills collected from two parliamentary democracies. The central implication of our findings is that legislatures play a more important role in parliamentary democracies than is usually appreciated by providing a key institutional mechanism that allows coalition partners with divergent preferences to govern successfully.

Why are some democratic governments more successful than others? What impact do various political institutions have on the quality of governance? This paper develops and tests a new theory of democratic governance. This theory, which we label centripetalism, stands in contrast to the dominant paradigm of decentralism. The centripetal theory of governance argues that democratic institutions work best when they are able to reconcile the twin goals of centralized authority and broad inclusion. At the constitutional level, our theory argues that unitary, parliamentary, and list-PR systems (as opposed to decentralized federal, presidential, and nonproportional ones) help promote both authority and inclusion, and therefore better governance outcomes. We test the theory by examining the impact of centripetalism on eight indicators of governance that range across the areas of state capacity, economic policy and performance, and human development. Results are consistent with the theory and robust to a variety of specifications.

Regulatory agencies impose costs and benefits tailored to individual firms through their discretionary enforcement activities. We propose that corporations use political expenditures in part to “flex their muscles” to regulators and convey their willingness to fight an agency's specific determinations in the political arena. Because the signaling function of political expenditures is strategically complex, we derive a formal model wherein we demonstrate the existence of an equilibrium in which (1) large political donors are less compliant than smaller ones, but the bureaucracy monitors them less, and (2) firms with publicly observable problems reduce their political expenditures. We test the empirical implications of the model using plant-level data from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on the inspection of 63 privately operated nuclear power plants and the political expenditures of their parent companies. We find strong evidence for the first prediction and qualified support for the second.

This paper proposes a model that takes the dynamic agent-based analysis of policy-driven party competition into a multiparty environment. In this, voters continually review party support and switch parties to increase their expectations; parties continually readapt policy positions to the shifting affiliations of voters. Different algorithms for party adaptation are explored, including “Aggregator” (adapt party policy to the ideal policy positions of party supporters), Hunter (repeat policy moves that were rewarded; otherwise make random moves), Predator (move party policy toward the policy position of the largest party), and “Sticker” (never change party policy). Strong trends in the behavior of parties using different methods of adaptation are explored. The model is then applied in a series of experiments to the dynamics of a real party system, described in a published opinion poll time series. This paper reports first steps toward endogenizing key features of the process, including the birth and death of parties, internal party decision rules, and voter ideal points.

Research in international relations has identified a variety of actors who appear to influence U.S. foreign policy, including experts and “epistemic communities,” organized interests (especially business and labor), and ordinary citizens or “public opinion.” This research, however, has often focused on a single factor at a time, rather than systematically testing the relative importance of alternative possible influences. Using extensive survey data gathered over three decades we conduct a comparative test, attempting to account for the expressed foreign policy preferences of policy makers by means of the preferences of the general public and those of several distinct sets of elites. The results of cross-sectional and time-lagged analyses suggest that U.S. foreign policy is most heavily and consistently influenced by internationally oriented business leaders, followed by experts (who, however, may themselves be influenced by business). Labor appears to have significant but smaller impacts. The general public seems to have considerably less effect, except under particular conditions. These results generally hold over several different analytical models (including two-observation time series) and different clusters of issues (economic, military, and diplomatic), with some variations across different institutional settings (the U.S. House, Senate, and executive branch).

The exercise of constitutional review by an independent and active judiciary is commonly regarded as against the interest of current government officials, who presumably prefer to exercise power without interference. In this article, I advance an “overcoming obstructions” account of why judicial review might be supported by existing power holders. When current elected officials are obstructed from fully implementing their own policy agenda, they may favor the active exercise of constitutional review by a sympathetic judiciary to overcome those obstructions and disrupt the status quo. This provides an explanation for why current officeholders might tolerate an activist judiciary. This dynamic is illustrated with case studies from American constitutional history addressing obstructions associated with federalism, entrenched interests, and fragmented and cross-pressured political coalitions.

We use a formal bargaining model to examine why, in many domestic and international bargaining situations, one or both negotiators make public statements in front of their constituents committing themselves to obtaining certain benefits in the negotiations. We find that making public commitments provides bargaining leverage, when backing down from such commitments carries domestic political costs. However, when the two negotiators face fairly similar costs for violating a public commitment, a prisoner's dilemma is created in which both sides make high public demands which cannot be satisfied, and both negotiators would be better off if they could commit to not making public demands. However, making a public demand is a dominant strategy for each negotiator, and this leads to a suboptimal outcome. Escaping this prisoner's dilemma provides a rationale for secret negotiations. Testable hypotheses are derived from the nature of the commitments and agreements made in equilibrium.

As Thomas Kuhn noted, it is almost inevitable that scientific practitioners read the history of their field backward and perceive earlier stages as, at best, prototypical of the present. This is the manner in which political scientists, and even historians, have imaged the relationship between the debates about science and democracy that took place during the 1920s and 1950s. Despite the importance of Charles Merriam's role in the history of American political science, his work was not the discursive axis of the paradigmatic disciplinary shift that took place in the first quarter of the 20th century. It was the arguments of G. E. G. Catlin and W. Y. Elliott that most distinctly represented the transformation in both the theory of democracy and the image of science, and that, for the next two generations, set the terms of the debate about these issues as well as about the relationship between the mainstream discipline and the subfield of political theory. And, despite the theoretical and ideological differences between Catlin and Elliott, their exchange points to the intensely practical concerns that originally informed the controversy about the scientific study of politics.

Despite repeated calls for the use of “mixed methods” in comparative analysis, political scientists have few systematic guides for carrying out such work. This paper details a unified approach which joins intensive case-study analysis with statistical analysis. Not only are the advantages of each approach combined, but also there is a synergistic value to the nested research design: for example, statistical analyses can guide case selection for in-depth research, provide direction for more focused case studies and comparisons, and be used to provide additional tests of hypotheses generated from small-N research. Small-N analyses can be used to assess the plausibility of observed statistical relationships between variables, to generate theoretical insights from outlier and other cases, and to develop better measurement strategies. This integrated strategy improves the prospects of making valid causal inferences in cross-national and other forms of comparative research by drawing on the distinct strengths of two important approaches.

Whether poor single mothers move in response to welfare benefits has important implications for social policy in a federal system. Many scholars claim that welfare does not affect migration. These claims are not definitive, however, because the models underlying them rely on problematic assumptions and do not adequately control for nonwelfare determinants of migration. I address these shortcomings with an improved statistical model of individual-level migration. The results indicate that welfare does affect residential choice. Although the effects of welfare are much smaller than the effects of family ties, they are real and have the potential to cause nontrivial changes in welfare populations and welfare expenditures.

In their landmark study of a field experiment, Gerber and Green (2000) found that get-out-the-vote calls reduce turnout by five percentage points. In this article, I introduce statistical methods that can uncover discrepancies between experimental design and actual implementation. The application of this methodology shows that Gerber and Green's negative finding is caused by inadvertent deviations from their stated experimental protocol. The initial discovery led to revisions of the original data by the authors and retraction of the numerical results in their article. Analysis of their revised data, however, reveals new systematic patterns of implementation errors. Indeed, treatment assignments of the revised data appear to be even less randomized than before their corrections. To adjust for these problems, I employ a more appropriate statistical method and demonstrate that telephone canvassing increases turnout by five percentage points. This article demonstrates how statistical methods can find and correct complications of field experiments.