An important question for international investors concerns the relationship between political institutions and property rights. Yet a debate remains over whether authoritarian institutions promote favorable investment climates. Using data on oil nationalization in a sample of autocracies, this study finds that legislatures are correlated with lower expropriation risk in non-personalist dictatorships, but a higher risk of nationalization in personalist regimes. The results show a consistent pattern between authoritarian institutions and property protections, for which context matters.

In this article a new explanation for the emergence of democratic institutions is proposed: elites may extend the right to vote to the masses in order to attract migrant workers. It is argued that representative assemblies serve as a commitment device for any promises made to labourers by those in power, and the argument is tested on a new political and economic dataset from the thirteen British American colonies. The results suggest that colonies that relied on white migrant labour, rather than slaves, had better representative institutions. These findings are not driven by alternative factors identified in the literature, such as inequality or initial conditions, and survive a battery of validity checks.

Independent central banks prefer balanced budgets due to the long-run connection between deficits and inflation, and can enforce their preference through interest rate increases and denial of credit to the government. This article argues that legal central bank independence (CBI) deters fiscal deficits predominantly in countries with rule of law and impartial contract enforcement, a free press and constraints on executive power. It further suggests that CBI may not affect fiscal deficits in a counter-cyclical fashion, but instead depending on the electoral calendar and government partisanship. The article also tests the novel hypotheses using new yearly data on legal CBI for seventy-eight countries from 1970 to 2007. The results show that CBI restrains deficits only in democracies, during non-election years and under left government tenures.

This article argues that the effect of economic crises on democratic transition is contingent on economic structure. Specifically, a high level of state engagement in the economy makes social forces dependent on the ruling elites for patrimonial interests and, therefore, the authoritarian regime liable for economic failure. Moreover, when authoritarian elites own a high share of economic assets, this aggravates the economic loss of both the business class and the masses when economic crises occur, which in turn makes defection of the business class, the revolt of the masses and the alliance of the two social classes more likely. Cross-national analyses show that economic crises trigger democratic transition only when state engagement in the economy is above a certain level.

This article tests contextual and individual-level explanations of the gender gap in political knowledge in Latin American countries. It suggests that this gap is impacted by political and economic settings through two interrelated mechanisms: gender accessibility (that is, the extent of available opportunities for women to influence the political agenda) and gender-bias signaling (that is, the extent to which women play important roles in the public sphere). Analyzing data from the 2008 Americas Barometer survey, this study shows that the gender gap in political knowledge is smaller among highly educated citizens, in rural areas (where both men and women know little about politics) and in bigger cities (where women’s levels of political knowledge are higher). More importantly, the magnitude of the gap varies greatly across countries. Gender differences in income, party system institutionalization and the representation of women in national parliaments are all found to play a particularly important role in explaining the magnitude of the gender gap in political knowledge across Latin America.

What are the origins of belief in conspiracy theories? The dominant approach to studying conspiracy theories links belief to social stresses or personality type, and does not take into account the situational and fluctuating nature of attitudes. In this study, a survey experiment, subjects are presented with a mock news article designed to induce conspiracy belief. Subjects are randomly assigned three manipulations hypothesized to heighten conspiracy perceptions: a prime to induce anxiety; information about the putative conspirator; and the number and identifiability of the victim(s). The results indicate that conspiratorial perceptions can emerge from both situational triggers and subtle contextual variables. Conspiracy beliefs emerge as ordinary people make judgments about the social and political world.

The literature on political actors’ media appearances has repeatedly documented the so-called incumbency bonus (that parties and politicians in government have more media coverage than those in the opposition). This bias is normally attributed to news criteria that reflect political power, such as relevance and the elite status of actors. Supplementing existing perspectives, this study puts forward a new explanation of the incumbency bonus. The article argues that variations in the media dominance of incumbents are the result of the interplay between journalistic norms and political context. Outside election campaigns, political news is driven by the ‘watch dog’ norm. Thus the media focus on societal problems, which produces a critical emphasis on incumbent actors. But when party competition intensifies, either during campaigns or when issues become salient, the norm of objective and impartial journalism results in a more balanced coverage where challengers increase their presence. The argument receives support through multivariate models of incumbent and challenger appearances in Danish radio news broadcasts over a twenty-year period. Finally, in terms of democratic implications, the importance of the watchdog norm challenges the assumption that the incumbency bonus constitutes an electoral asset. Since media dominance is closely related to government responsibility for all kinds of problems, incumbent support is found to dwindle with increased media appearances.

How do electoral rules affect the composition of governments? It is a robust finding that countries with majoritarian rules more often elect conservative governments than those with proportional representation (PR) electoral systems. There are three explanations for this pattern. The first stresses the impact of voting behaviour: the middle class more often votes for right-wing parties in majoritarian electoral systems, anticipating governments’ redistributive consequences. The second explanation is based on electoral geography: the regional distribution of votes may bias the vote-seat translation against the Left in majoritarian systems due to the wide margins by which the Left wins core urban districts. The third explanation refers to party fragmentation: if the Right is more fragmented than the Left in countries with PR, then there is less chance of a right-wing party gaining formateur status. This study tests these three hypotheses for established democracies over the entire post-war period. It finds the first two mechanisms at work in the democratic chain of delegation from voting via the vote-seat translation to the formation of cabinets, while party fragmentation does not seem to co-vary as much as expected with electoral rules. These findings confirm that majoritarian systems have a substantive conservative bias, whereas countries with PR show more differentiated patterns.

Arrangements for sharing political power serve three purposes: to give all relevant groups access to important political decisions; to partition the policy process, thereby granting groups relevant autonomy; and to constrain holders of political power from abusing authority. A new global dataset of political power sharing institutions, 1975–2010, is introduced here, disaggregated these along three institutional dimensions: inclusive, dispersive, and constraining. Existing literature associates power sharing with democracy and civil conflict resolution. Unlike the existing literature, this dataset shows inclusive institutions are common in post-conflict states, though least strongly associated with electoral democracy. Conversely, constraining institutions, though comparatively rare in states with current or recent civil conflicts, are highly correlated with electoral democracy.

If deeply divided societies are to make the move from conflict to peace and democracy, their communities must pull together. While togetherness can be construed in different ways, its basic logic can be spelt out in terms of the notion of a ‘shared intention’. Accordingly, the burden of this article is to argue that developing shared intentions between conflicting communities is important for overcoming their conflict and to explain why deliberation is a better instrument than bargaining for developing them. Deliberation involves and promotes more extensive and robust shared intentions than bargaining and hence enables a stronger sense of togetherness between communities to emerge.

The question of whether and how war has influenced the development of advanced Western welfare states is contested. This article provides a systematic review of the state of the art and outlines an agenda for a comparative analysis of the warfare–welfare state nexus that is informed by an explicit consideration of the underlying causal mechanisms. By distinguishing between three different phases (war preparation, warfare and post-war period) it provides a systematic overview of possible causal mechanisms linking war and the welfare state and a discussion of likely effects of war for belligerent, occupied and neutral countries in the age of mass warfare stretching approximately from the 1860s to the 1960s.

In their 2014 article in the British Journal of Political Science, Eleanor Neff Powell and Joshua A. Tucker examine the determinants of party system volatility in post-communist Europe. Their central conclusion is that replacement volatility – volatility caused by new party entry and old party exit – is driven by long-term economic performance. This article shows that this conclusion is based entirely on a miscalculation of the long-term economic performance of a single country, Bosnia-Herzegovina. The study’s reanalysis suggests that little is known about what causes party system volatility in post-communist Europe. Given the negative consequences traditionally associated with party system volatility, this area of research cries out for new theoretical development.