Although qualified-majority voting is possible, member states in the Council of the European Union (EU) still adopt most policies by consensus. The agent-based model of coalition building in multilateral negotiations presented here addresses this puzzle. The model demonstrates that consensual decisions may emerge as an unintended by-product of government representatives’ desire to form blocking coalitions. A qualitative case study demonstrates the plausibility of the model's assumptions and resulting coalition-building dynamics. Moreover, a quantitative test shows that the model's predictions correspond closely to the observed consensus rates. Finally, computational experiments predict a positive effect of the voting threshold but no effect of increases in membership on winning coalition size, which has important practical implications for institutional design and enlargement policy.

Studies of the link between state capacity and development often utilize national-level governance indicators to explain fine-grained development outcomes. As capacity in some bureaucratic agencies matters more for these outcomes than capacity in others, this work proxies for capacity within the set of relevant agencies by using a measure of ‘mean’ capacity across all agencies in a polity. This practice is problematic for two reasons: (1) within-country, cross-agency diversity in capacity often overwhelms the variation encountered across public sectors considered in their entireties; (2) national-level reputations for capacity are not particularly informative about differences in capacity in functionally equivalent agencies in different countries. The article draws on the author's survey of public employees in Bolivia, Brazil and Chile to establish these points.

Research on terrorism in democracies borrows from the literature on civil war and rebellion to argue that more proportional representation decreases the likelihood of terrorist violence. However, theories of broader social mobilization may be ill-suited to predicting the occurrence of terrorism. This article proposes that proportionalism's institutionalization of small minority groups as legitimate but relatively insignificant political actors leads to militancy. Analyses of the Global Terrorism Database on domestic terrorist attacks across all democracies in 1975–2007 provide broad support for this argument. The presence and greater degrees of proportionalism are significantly associated with greater levels of domestic terrorism when ethnic fractionalization within a given society increases. Moreover, domestic terrorism increases as the number of small parties represented in the legislature increases.

The question of how coercive government policies affect the duration and outcome of terrorist campaigns has only recently started to attract scholarly interest. This article argues that the effect of repression on terrorist group dynamics is conditional on the country's regime type. Repression is expected to produce a backlash effect in democracies, subsequently lengthening the duration of terrorist organizations and lowering the probability of outcomes favourable to the government. In authoritarian regimes, however, coercive strategies are expected to deter groups’ engagement in terrorism, thus reducing the lifespan of terrorist groups and increasing the likelihood of government success. These hypotheses are examined using data on terrorist groups for the 1976–2006 period; support is found for these conjectures on terrorist group duration and outcomes.

This article critiques the meritocratic justification of Confucian democracy from the standpoint of democratic civil society by shifting the focus from governability of the people to their transformability. Its central claims are: (1) Confucian virtue politics (dezhi) can be creatively re-appropriated in a democratic civil society in terms of cultivating civility in ordinary people who belong to different moral communities; (2) in the modern East Asian social context, the Confucian ideal of benevolent government (ren zheng) can be attained better by the victims of socio-economic injustice contesting it democratically in the public space of civil society than by ‘thin’ democracy controlled by meritocratic elitism. ‘Confucian civil society’ operating on Confucian ritually mediated civility is an alternative to meritocratic elitism.

The authors contribute to the existing literature on the determinants of legislative voting by offering a social network-based theory about the ways that legislators’ social relationships affect floor voting behaviour. It is argued that legislators establish contacts with both political friends and enemies, and that they use the information they receive from these contacts to increase their confidence in their own policy positions. Social contacts between political allies have greater value the more the two allies agree on policy issues, while social contacts between political adversaries have greater value the more the two adversaries disagree on policy issues. To test these propositions, we use social network analysis tools and demonstrate how to account for network dependence using a multilevel modelling approach.

While Europarties have received increasing attention in recent years, little is known about how they arrive at common policy positions, given their strong internal ideological heterogeneity. In order to explain position formation within Europarties, this article argues that national parties compete with each other in an attempt to upload their own policy positions to their Europarty. The article hypothesizes that their ability to succeed in these attempts depends on their legislative resources. The argument is tested by analysing position formation within the four major Europarties for all European Parliament elections between 1979 and 2004. The empirical results confirm that position choice is skewed towards parties with a large seat share, which has important implications for political representation in Europe.

Does naming and shaming states affect respect for human rights in those states? This article argues that incentives to change repressive behaviour when facing international condemnation vary across regime types. In democracies and hybrid regimes – which combine democratic and authoritarian elements – opposition parties and relatively free presses paradoxically make rulers less likely to change behaviour when facing international criticism. In contrast, autocracies, which lack these domestic sources of information on abuses, are more sensitive to international shaming. Using data on naming and shaming taken from Western press reports and Amnesty International, the authors demonstrate that naming and shaming is associated with improved human rights outcomes in autocracies, but with either no effect or a worsening of outcomes in democracies and hybrid regimes.

Over the past fifty years, top political science journals have published hundreds of articles about policy diffusion. This article reports on network analyses of how the ideas and approaches in these articles have spread both within and across the subfields of American politics, comparative politics and international relations. Then, based on a survey of the literature, the who, what, when, where, how and why of policy diffusion are addressed in order to identify and assess some of the main contributions and omissions in current scholarship. It is argued that studies of diffusion would benefit from paying more attention to developments in other subfields and from taking a more systematic approach to tackling the questions of when and how policy diffusion takes place.

Policy-sensitive models of judicial behaviour, whether attitudinal or strategic, have largely passed Britain by. This article argues that this neglect has been benign, because explanations of judicial decisions in terms of the positions of individual judges fare poorly in the British case. To support this argument, the non-unanimous opinions of British Law Lords between 1969 and 2009 are analysed. A hierarchical item-response model of individual judges’ votes is estimated in order to identify judges’ locations along a one-dimensional policy space. Such a model is found to be no better than a null model that predicts that every judge will vote with the majority with the same probability. Locations generated by the model do not represent judges’ political attitudes, only their propensity to dissent. Consequently, judges’ individual votes should not be used to describe them in political terms.