On July 1 of last year, someone in North Andover, Massachusetts flipped a switch, and the APSR, which had used the US mail to communicate with authors and referees for its first hundred and one years, hit the worldwide web. Simultaneously, the official term of duty began for an excited if slightly apprehensive group of nine new co-editors at the University of California in Los Angeles. Since then, the APSR has been located in a fourth floor office behind the imposing façade of Bunche Hall, where our new senior editor, Joseph Riser, freshly poached from Sage Publications, has been overseeing the many details of the new operation, ably supported by our two editorial assistants, Sarah Leary and Rebekah Sterling.

Like our predecessors in this job, we in the UCLA group have been repeatedly surprised at how greatly subdisciplinary representation varies across issues purely from accidents of timing: when authors finish their revisions, when—still, alas, somewhat belatedly—we get articles to the press. Perhaps our surprise reflects the well-known psychological tendency to see patterns even in the most random data. If our previous issue (the third in this volume) was more formal and quantitative, the current one, by luck of the draw, inclines strongly toward political theory and judicial behavior. Four of its eight articles are on political theory (one of them on American political thought), two are on judicial behavior (both with a focus on European supranational courts), and two are on comparative politics.

This issue continues the gradual transition from the editorship of Lee Sigelman at George Washington University to the new team of co-editors at UCLA. We publish here the first two articles adjudicated from start to finish at UCLA—one by James Fowler, Laura Baker, and Christopher Dawes, and one by Michael Ting—which identify, respectively, a genetic predisposition to vote and a social cost of giving legal protections to whistleblowers. Keeping these two provocative and well-argued pieces company are five other full length articles on a variety of subjects that began the long journey into print under Sigelman's stewardship. We end with a forum, also edited mostly before our term, on the study of suicide terrorism.

As will be clear to anyone who has made it to this page, the current issue, like the last, is a little short and a little late. The reason why will be familiar to anyone who has maneuvered a battleship in choppy waters. Those waters—to literalize the metaphor—are the high and uneven rates of submission that the APSR faced in the second half of 2007 as the current UCLA crew took command. The submission rates are pictured in the graph provided.

I present a new empirical approach to the study of democratic consolidation. This approach leads to new insights into the determinants of democratic consolidation that cannot be obtained with existing techniques. I distinguish between democracies that survive because they are consolidated and those democracies that are not consolidated but survive because of some favorable circumstances. As a result, I can identify the determinants of two related yet distinct processes: the likelihood that a democracy consolidates, and the timing of authoritarian reversals in democracies that are not consolidated. I find that the level of economic development, type of democratic executive, and type of authoritarian past determine whether a democracy consolidates, but have no effect on the timing of reversals in democracies that are not consolidated. That risk is only associated with economic recessions. I also find that existing studies greatly underestimate the risk of early reversals while simultaneously overestimating the risk of late reversals, and that a large number of existing democracies are in fact consolidated.

Are there cycles in American politics? In particular, does the proportion of the Democratic/Republican vote share for president and/or seat share in Congress rise and fall over extended periods of time? If so, are the cycles regular, and what are the cycling periods? Moreover, if there are regular cycles, can we construct an integrated model—such as a negative feedback loop—that identifies political forces that could generate the observed patterns? First, we use spectral analysis to test for the presence and length of cycles, and show that regular cycles do, in fact, exist—with periods that conform to those predicted by the Schlesingers—for swings between liberalism and conservatism—but with durations much shorter than those most commonly claimed by Burnham and others in characterizing American political realignments. Second, we offer a voter–party interaction model that depends on the tensions between parties' policy and office motivations and between voters' tendency to sustain incumbents while reacting against extreme policies. We find a plausible fit between the regular cycling that this model projects and the time series of two-party politics in America over the past century and a half.

This article relies on the variation of terror attacks across time and space as an instrument to identify the causal effects of terrorism on the preferences of the Israeli electorate. We find that the occurrence of a terror attack in a given locality within three months of the elections causes an increase of 1.35 percentage points on that locality's support for the right bloc of political parties out of the two blocs vote. This effect is of a significant political magnitude because of the high level of terrorism in Israel and the fact that its electorate is closely split between the right and left blocs. Moreover, a terror fatality has important electoral effects beyond the locality where the attack is perpetrated, and its electoral impact is stronger the closer to the elections it occurs. Interestingly, in left-leaning localities, local terror fatalities cause an increase in the support for the right bloc, whereas terror fatalities outside the locality increase the support for the left bloc of parties. Given that a relatively small number of localities suffer terror attacks, we demonstrate that terrorism does cause the ideological polarization of the electorate. Overall, our analysis provides strong empirical support for the hypothesis that the electorate shows a highly sensitive reaction to terrorism.

This article seeks to elucidate some of the difficulties and reversals that afflict human rights by exploring three interpretations of Hannah Arendt's idea of a “right to have rights,” and in particular the images of politics these interpretations presuppose. The first, most conventional interpretation considers this right in terms of the use of power to implement rights; a second, broadly Kantian interpretation understands it in terms of laws and institutions; a third, which I develop through an original reading of Arendt, bases it on the activity of the rights-claimants or -holders themselves. Although each of these conceptions corresponds to different circumstances and speaks to different concerns, the third is especially valuable in helping us understand the problems that plague efforts on behalf of human rights and showing how human rights can best be realized and secured. If it is the most demanding, it alone fully honors human rights' emphasis on autonomy.

Scholars typically understand vote buying as offering particularistic benefits in exchange for vote choices. This depiction of vote buying presents a puzzle: with the secret ballot, what prevents individuals from accepting rewards and then voting as they wish? An alternative explanation, which I term “turnout buying,” suggests why parties might offer rewards even if they cannot monitor vote choices. By rewarding unmobilized supporters for showing up at the polls, parties can activate their passive constituencies. Because turnout buying targets supporters, it only requires monitoring whether individuals vote. Much of what scholars interpret as vote buying may actually be turnout buying. Reward targeting helps to distinguish between these strategies. Whereas Stokes's vote-buying model predicts that parties target moderate opposers, a model of turnout buying predicts that they target strong supporters. Although the two strategies coexist, empirical tests suggest that Argentine survey data in Stokes 2005 are more consistent with turnout buying.

Can international judges be relied upon to resolve disputes impartially? If not, what are the sources of their biases? Answers to these questions are critically important for the functioning of an emerging international judiciary, yet we know remarkably little about international judicial behavior. An analysis of a new dataset of dissents in the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) yields a mixed set of answers. On the bright side, there is no evidence that judges systematically employ cultural or geopolitical biases in their rulings. There is some evidence that career insecurities make judges more likely to favor their national government when it is a party to a dispute. Most strongly, the evidence suggests that international judges are policy seekers. Judges vary in their inclination to defer to member states in the implementation of human rights. Moreover, judges from former socialist countries are more likely to find violations against their own government and against other former socialist governments, suggesting that they are motivated by rectifying a particular set of injustices. I conclude that the overall picture is mostly positive for the possibility of impartial review of government behavior by judges on an international court. Like judges on domestic review courts, ECtHR judges are politically motivated actors in the sense that they have policy preferences on how to best apply abstract human rights in concrete cases, not in the sense that they are using their judicial power to settle geopolitical scores.

This article examines a fundamental aspect of democracy: the relationship between the policy positions of candidates and the choices of voters. Researchers have suggested three criteria—proximity, direction, and discounting—by which voters might judge candidates' policy positions. More than 50 peer-reviewed articles, employing data from more than 20 countries, have attempted to adjudicate among these theories. We explain why existing data and methods are insufficient to estimate the prevalence of these criteria in the electorate. We then formally derive an exhaustive set of critical tests: situations in which the criteria predict different vote choices. Finally, through survey experiments concerning health care policy, we administer the tests to a nationally representative sample. We find that proximity voting is about twice as common as discounting and four times as common as directional voting. Furthermore, discounting is most prevalent among ideological centrists and nonpartisans, who make sophisticated judgments that help align policy with their preferences. These findings demonstrate the promise of combining formal theory and experiments to answer previously intractable questions about democracy.

We examine the stability of individual ministers across parliamentary democracies. Our data show that this stability is only loosely related to the stability of cabinets, making it impossible to rely primarily on arguments about cabinet duration to explain patterns of individual stability. We argue that to explain patterns of individual stability, it is useful to focus on the problems that party leaders have in identifying which individuals have the qualities necessary to do their jobs well. The institutional powers of ministers, coalition attributes, and party-specific variables should affect the uncertainty that party leaders have about which individuals will be successful ministers, on one hand, and the ability of party leaders to replace unsuccessful ministers, on the other. Our empirical tests support these arguments. The analysis therefore has implications for expectations regarding the circumstances under which minister stability should positively or negatively influence the policymaking performance of government.

This paper investigates the political determinants of corporatist and pluralist employers' associations and reflects on the origins of the varieties of capitalism in the early decades of the 20th century. We hypothesize that proportional, multiparty systems tend to enable employers' associations to develop into social corporatist organizations, whereas nonproportional, two-party systems are conducive to the formation of pluralist associations. Moreover, we suggest that federalism tends to reinforce incentives for pluralist organization. We assess our hypotheses through quantitative analysis of data from 1900 to the 1930s from 16 nations and case studies of the origins of peak employers' associations in Denmark and the United States. Our statistical analysis suggests that proportional, multiparty systems foster, and federalism works against, social corporatist business organization; employers' organization is also greater where the mobilization of labor, traditions of coordination, and economic development are higher. These factors also largely explain pre-World War II patterns of national coordination of capitalism. Case histories of the origins of employers' associations in Denmark and the United States further confirm the causal importance of political factors. Although Danish and American employers had similar interests in creating cooperative national industrial policies, trajectories of associational development were constrained by the structure of party competition, as well as by preindustrial traditions for coordination.

We present a model of learning and policy choice across governments. Governments choose policies with known ideological positions but initially unknown valence benefits, possibly learning about those benefits between the model's two periods. There are two variants of the model; in one, governments only learn from their own experiences, whereas in the other they learn from one another's experiments. Based on similarities between these two versions, we illustrate that much accepted scholarly evidence of policy diffusion could simply have arisen through independent actions by governments that only learn from their own experiences. However, differences between the game-theoretic and decision-theoretic models point the way to future empirical tests that discern learning-based policy diffusion from independent policy adoptions.

Voter turnout theories based on rational self-interested behavior generally fail to predict significant turnout unless they account for the utility that citizens receive from performing their civic duty. We distinguish between two aspects of this type of utility, intrinsic satisfaction from behaving in accordance with a norm and extrinsic incentives to comply, and test the effects of priming intrinsic motives and applying varying degrees of extrinsic pressure. A large-scale field experiment involving several hundred thousand registered voters used a series of mailings to gauge these effects. Substantially higher turnout was observed among those who received mailings promising to publicize their turnout to their household or their neighbors. These findings demonstrate the profound importance of social pressure as an inducement to political participation.

The actual impact of judicial decisions often depends on the behavior of executive and legislative bodies that implement the rulings. Consequently, when a court hears a case involving the interests of those controlling the executive and legislative institutions, those interests can threaten to obstruct the court's intended outcome. In this paper, we evaluate whether and to what extent such constraints shape judicial rulings. Specifically, we examine how threats of noncompliance and legislative override influence decisions by the European Court of Justice (ECJ). Based on a statistical analysis of a novel dataset of ECJ rulings, we find that the preferences of member-state governments—whose interests are central to threats of noncompliance and override—have a systematic and substantively important impact on ECJ decisions.

Members of the same household share similar voting behaviors on average, but how much of this correlation can be attributed to the behavior of the other person in the household? Disentangling and isolating the unique effects of peer behavior, selection processes, and congruent interests is a challenge for all studies of interpersonal influence. This study proposes and utilizes a carefully designed placebo-controlled experimental protocol to overcome this identification problem. During a face-to-face canvassing experiment targeting households with two registered voters, residents who answered the door were exposed to either a Get Out the Vote message (treatment) or a recycling pitch (placebo). The turnout of the person in the household not answering the door allows for contagion to be measured. Both experiments find that 60% of the propensity to vote is passed onto the other member of the household. This finding suggests a mechanism by which civic participation norms are adopted and couples grow more similar over time.

Central to the recent argument from the “unitary executive” is the claim that the unitary executive is consistent with the text and history of the Constitution. But because this veracity and importance of this claim is contested, unitarians also argue that the unitary executive is consistent with democratic theory. This article examines that argument by addressing a question in the political thought of Alexander Hamilton. Although Hamilton was an important defender of an energetic executive, and is associated with an expansive interpretation of executive power, he wrote in The Federalist that the president and Senate would share the removal power. In contrast with existing scholarship, which either overlooks Hamilton's statement on removals or dismisses it as a careless error, this article argues that Hamilton's statement limiting presidential removals illuminates his larger argument about executive energy. By showing how “duration” would check “unity,” this article clarifies Hamilton's political thought and offers an important critique of the modern argument from the unitary executive.

The sexual division of labor and the social and economic value of women's work in the home has been a problem that scholars have struggled with at least since the advent of the “second wave” women's movement, but it has never entered into the primary discourses of political science. This paper argues that John Stuart Mill's Political Economy provides innovative and useful arguments that address this thorny problem. Productive labor is essential to Mill's conception of property, and property was vital to women's independence in Mill's view. Yet since Mill thought most women would choose the “career” of wife and mother rather than working for wages, then granting that work productive status would provide a radical and inventive foundation for women's equality. Mill, however, is ambiguous about the productive status of domestic labor, and is thereby representative of a crucial failure in political economic thought, as well as in egalitarian liberal thought on gender. But because Mill at the same time develops a conception of production that goes well beyond the narrow limits offered by other prominent political economists, he offers contemporary political scientists and theorists a way to rethink the relationship of reproductive to productive labor, the requirements for gender equality, and the accepted categories of political economy.

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.