How does democratic politics inform the interdisciplinary debate on the evolution of human co-operation and the social preferences (for example, trust, altruism and reciprocity) that support it? This article advances a theory of partisan trust discrimination in electoral democracies based on social identity, cognitive heuristics and interparty competition. Evidence from behavioral experiments in eight democracies show ‘trust gaps’ between co- and rival partisans are ubiquitous, and larger than trust gaps based on the social identities that undergird the party system. A natural experiment found that partisan trust gaps in the United States disappeared immediately following the killing of Osama bin Laden. But observational data indicate that partisan trust gaps track with perceptions of party polarization in all eight cases. Finally, the effects of partisanship on trust outstrip minimal group treatments, yet minimal-group effects are on par with the effects of most treatments for ascriptive characteristics in the literature. In sum, these findings suggest political competition dramatically shapes the salience of partisanship in interpersonal trust, the foundation of co-operation.

Gender quotas have spread rapidly around the world in recent years. However, few studies have yet theorized, systematically or comparatively, variations in their features, adoption and implementation. This article surveys quota campaigns in Western Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand. It proposes that one or more sets of controversies influence the course and outcomes of quota reforms. These revolve around (1) competing principles of equality, (2) different ideas about political representation, and (3) various beliefs about ‘gender’ and its relation to other kinds of political identities. The article draws on these distinctions to identify four broad models of political citizenship that determine the kinds of quota policies that are pursued and their prospects for bringing more women into political office.

Numerous empirical studies have examined the role of third-party peacekeeping in reducing violence around the world. Their results reveal an extraordinary relationship between peacekeepers and peace, notwithstanding a number of well-known problems. This review article has three goals. The first is to summarize the results of past empirical research to move the debate beyond the question of whether peacekeeping works to the more pressing questions of how, when and why it works. The second is to reveal the limitations of the current quantitative research in order to identify areas in which scholars can make big, new contributions to the field. The final goal is to propose a new research agenda that is heavily evaluative – one that informs policy makers about the specific practices, mission compositions, and mandates that work, and identifies the local, regional, and international conditions that amplify or diminish peacekeeping's effectiveness. This type of research could help reduce the costs of peacekeeping operations, eliminate some of the negative consequences of interventions and save even more lives.

Data from Great Britain and the United States from the late 1950s to the early 1990s show relatively little change in the frequency with which citizens engage in political discussions, with whom they are likely to speak, and the variables that shape their propensity to engage in political talk. In addition, analyses of the data show that discussing politics enhances citizens' knowledge of public affairs, even net of other variables known to affect political knowledge. Students of political behaviour and those interested in strengthening democracy need to treat political discussions as an important form of political participation.

This article examines social cleavages and the impact of political legacies on Chile's post-authoritarian party system. In contrast to society-oriented approaches to party system formation, we argue that cleavage appearance in a party system depends on political agency, which can even (re)create social identities and social conflicts. The Chilean case illustrates this point; the structure of the party system is deeply influenced by distinctive political legacies of the authoritarian period. The cleavage between those who supported authoritarian rule and those who opposed it has powerfully shaped the party system during the new democratic period.

In post-authoritarian Chile (1990–2001), a societal approach does not adequately explain the formation of cleavages or the contours of the party system. A class cleavage has appeared between the governing coalition and the conservative opposition, but this cleavage is politically constructed and maintained. The Chilean case also shows that it is important to examine the ways in which political elites craft party systems from above during the transition period. Political agency from the supply side played a decisive role in emphasizing or diminishing some of the political and cultural conflicts existing after the authoritarian experience and, therefore, an essential role in party system formation in post-authoritarian Chile.

Despite considerable research, the theory of gender difference in electoral behaviour remains underdeveloped, especially in accounting for variation across elections. We focus on two aspects requiring particular attention: (1) accounts of gender difference, especially distinguishing between positional explanations, in which gender differences stem from men and women taking the same considerations into account, but having different positions on those considerations, or structural explanations, in which gender differences stem from men and women taking different considerations into account in making judgements; (2) the effects of electoral context in cuing gender as a consideration, thus stimulating or inhibiting the appearance of gender differences. We use a case study of the 1992 US presidential election, often labelled ‘The Year of the Woman’, to explore these problems.

Measuring high-level corruption is subject to extensive scholarly and policy interest, which has achieved moderate progress in the last decade. This article develops two objective proxy measures of high-level corruption in public procurement: single bidding in competitive markets and a composite score of tendering ‘red flags’. Using official government data on 2.8 million contracts in twenty-eight European countries in 2009–14, we directly operationalize a common definition of corruption: unjustified restriction of access to public contracts to favour a selected bidder. Corruption indicators are calculated at the contract level, but produce aggregate indices consistent with well-established country-level indicators, and are also validated by micro-level tests. Data are published at http://digiwhist.eu/resources/data/.

Political folk wisdom has long suggested that the electoral fortunes of left-of-centre political parties are affected by the rate of turnout. As is so often the case, the conventional wisdom has yet to be subjected to wide empirical scrutiny. In this Note, we attempt such an examination in the context of national elections in industrial democracies.

This article examines the extent of political participation by Latino non-citizens across the United States. The only previous national quantitative research on this topic is by Verba, Schlozman and Brady, who found little difference between the participation rates of Latino citizens and non-citizens. Using the Latino National Political Survey, large differences between citizen and non-citizen participation are found. Although Latino non-citizens participated in non-electoral political activities and in non-political civic groups, they were significantly less likely to do so than Latino citizens. Examination of the non-citizen population shows that immigrants who understood politics better, planned on naturalizing, had a stronger ethnic identity, were more familiar with English and were younger were more likely to become involved. The traditional socio-economic measures of education and income as well as length of stay in the United States were non-significant predictors of non-citizen participation.

Many developed democracies are experiencing high immigration, and public attitudes likely shape their policy responses. Prior studies of ethnocentrism and stereotyping make divergent predictions about anti-immigration attitudes. Some contend that culturally distinctive immigrants consistently generate increased opposition; others predict that natives’ reactions depend on the particular cultural distinction and associated stereotypes. This article tests these hypotheses using realistic, video-based experiments with representative American samples. The results refute the expectation that more culturally distinctive immigrants necessarily induce anti-immigration views: exposure to Latino immigrants with darker skin tones or who speak Spanish does not increase restrictionist attitudes. Instead, the impact of out-group cues hinges on their content and related norms, as immigrants who speak accented English seem to counteract negative stereotypes related to immigrant assimilation.

This article uses the British Election Panel Study to assess the impact of voters' and party positions vis-à-vis European integration on Conservative electoral support between 1992 and 1996. Over this period levels of public support for European integration declined markedly, so that by 1996 the Conservative party was even closer to aggregate public opinion, when compared with its main competitors, than it had been at the time of the 1992 election. However, an analysis of the proximity between individuals' positions on integration and the positions they then attributed to the parties indicates that Conservative divisions over Europe helped turn this potential electoral asset into a liability, leaving the party further from individual voters' own positions than were either of the other two main political contenders. Moreover, as issue proximity on integration predicts voting even when past vote and proximity on other issues are controlled for, it is likely that the European question will have resulted in electoral costs rather than the benefits it could have produced. One implication of these findings is that if the Conservatives hope to do well on this issue they will need to adopt a consistent Eurosceptic line, but such a strategy is unlikely to be easily maintained.

The concept of a neighbourhood effect within British voting patterns has largely been discarded, because no data have been available for testing it at the appropriate spatial scales. To undertake such tests, bespoke neighbourhoods have been created around the home of each respondent to the 1997 British Election Study survey in England and Wales, and small-area census data have been assembled for these to depict the socio-economic characteristics of voters' local contexts. Analyses of voting in these small areas, divided into five equal-sized status areas, provides very strong evidence that members of each social class were much more likely to vote Labour than Conservative in the low-status than in the high-status areas. This is entirely consistent with the concept of the neighbourhood effect, but alternative explanations are feasible. The data provide very strong evidence of micro-geographical variations in voting patterns, for which further research is necessary to identify the processes involved.

This article aims to maximize the reliability of presidential power scores for a larger number of countries and time periods than currently exists for any single measure, and in a way that is replicable and easy to update. It begins by identifying all of the studies that have estimated the effect of a presidential power variable, clarifying what scholars have attempted to capture when they have operationalized the concept of presidential power. It then identifies all the measures of presidential power that have been proposed over the years, noting the problems associated with each. To generate the new set of presidential power scores, the study draws upon the comparative and local knowledge embedded in existing measures of presidential power. Employing principal component analysis, together with the expectation maximization algorithm and maximum likelihood estimation, a set of presidential power scores is generated for a larger set of countries and country time periods than currently exists, reporting 95 per cent confidence intervals and standard errors for the scores. Finally, the implications of the new set of scores for future studies of presidential power is discussed.

Analyses of the occurrence of natural disasters show that in large coalition systems, such as democracies, their occurrence has little effect on protest or leader survival. However, if large numbers of people die in these disasters, more protests occur and leader survival diminishes. In contrast, for leaders in small coalition systems, the occurrence of disasters increases protests and reduces tenure, but the level of fatalities has little effect. The anticipation of these potential political effects accounts for why many more people die in disasters in small coalition systems than in large coalition systems.

There has been considerable recent debate about the importance of local context as an influence on political attitudes and voting behaviour in Great Britain. Resolution of that debate has been difficult, because analytical methods have not been available with which to evaluate the relative importance of both individual voter characteristics and the characteristics of their milieux as independent correlates of attitudes and behaviour. The technique of multi-level modelling has been developed by educational researchers to do just that. It is introduced here and illustrated using data for the 1987 British general election. The preliminary results suggest that place clearly does matter as a component of the processes that influence voters' choices.

As a consequence of Truman's Point Four Program of 1949, the provision of economic assistance to independent low-income countries became the official policy of the United States. In the early and mid-1950s economic development assistance, though growing, received relatively little attention as the Korean war turned the USA's foreign aid in the direction of military assistance. However, by the start of the 1960s, the transfer of economic assistance from high-income to low-income countries had developed into an institutionalized relationship. Economic assistance was clearly distinguished from military assistance and administered separately; the USA's monopoly of aid was decreasing as other high-income countries, partially under the USA's pressure, were establishing their own aid programmes; and the volume of aid and the number of recipients were increasing.

Does political sophistication influence the way in which voters use issues in evaluating parties and candidates? We consider two models of mass-elite linkage: the traditional spatial model, which conceives of issues as continua of policy options, and the directional model, which conceives of issues as simple dichotomies. The traditional model is more cognitively demanding and is the implicit model of journalists and political elites. We would expect, therefore, that better educated and more politically involved voters would rely on it, while less sophisticated voters would follow the directional paradigm. We investigate this hypothesis with survey data from the 1988 presidential election in the United States and the 1989 parliamentary election in Norway. The results show that at all levels of sophistication and in both countries, voters generally follow the directional model.

From the late 1970s on, after several decades characterized by relatively interventionist patterns of economic policy making, most advanced states began questioning and, in some instances, abandoning active industrial policies and privatizing public businesses. Examining the evolution of the public business sector in all nations included in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) from 1979 to 1993, this article shows that the sale of public firms did not mechanically derive from either declining growth rates, growing budget deficits or the increasing internationalization of domestic economies. Although the economic slowdown of the 1970s had the effect of breaking down the so-called Keynesian post-war consensus, the strategies towards the public business sector eventually adopted were shaped by the partisan composition of office – conservatives privatized while social democrats opted for the status quo – and by the internal structure of the cabinet – divided governments produced little change in either direction. From a theoretical point of view, this analysis broadens the current political-economic literature by showing that, although parties have a limited impact on the standard macroeconomic policies employed to manage the business cycle – a point widely confirmed in the literature – they do play a central role in designing policies, such as the level of public ownership of the business sector, that shape the supply side of the economy.

Some political theorists argue that patriotism differs from nationalism in being compatible with universalist liberalism. The theories offered range from the more cosmopolitan constitutional patriotism of Habermas to more rooted republican versions. Despite their rhetorical effectiveness in certain political situations, none of these variants stands up well to critical analysis, and none succeeds in delivering the promised reconciliation of universal humanitarian principles with limited and particularistic commitments.

Recent empirical studies on American elections suggest that campaigns provide voters with the necessary information to make reasoned voting decisions. Specifically, campaigns help voters learn about the electoral relevance of ‘fundamental variables’, such as the economy and party stances, that have been consistently shown to predict electoral outcomes. Do these findings generalize beyond the American case? This article uses cross-national survey data in order to subject this thesis to a more comprehensive test. The analysis provides further support for the hypothesis that campaigns ‘enlighten’ voters as the election draws near. Moreover, the article shows that some voters learn more from campaigns than others. Campaign effects are more pronounced among individuals with low political sophistication and those living in party list systems. Implications for future research are explored, suggesting a ripe research agenda using under-tapped cross-national data.