Recent theories of foreign aid assume that moral motives drive voters’ preferences about foreign aid. However, little is known about how moral concerns interact with the widely accepted instrumental goals that aid serves. Moreover, what effects does this interplay have on preferences over policy actions? This article assesses these questions using a survey experiment in which respondents evaluate foreign aid policies toward nasty recipient regimes (those that violate human rights, rig elections, crack down on media, etc.). The results indicate that the public does have a strong aversion to providing aid to nasty recipient regimes, but that it also appreciates the instrumental benefits that aid helps acquire. Contrary to a mainstay assertion in the literature, the study finds that moral aversion can largely be reversed if the donor government engages more with the nasty country. These findings call into question the micro-foundations of recent theories of foreign aid, and produce several implications for the aid literature.

Political theorists disagree about the extent to which issues of feasibility, stability, institutional design and human nature can be bracketed in analysing the concept of justice. At one end of the spectrum some argue that no analysis of justice can be adequate in the absence of an account of how it could be implemented, whereas at the other end there are those who argue that principles of justice are logically independent of issues of feasibility. Influenced by the work of John Rawls, many theorists occupy the middle ground, maintaining that analyses of justice must be realistic, that is, realizable under the best of foreseeable conditions. Against Rawls and others, this article argues that feasibility does not constrain what can count as an adequate principle of justice but nevertheless maintains that there are limits on such principles that derive in part from human nature, which divergent theories of justice must respect. It also distinguishes between different levels of analysis, some of which are governed by feasibility constraints.

Are some people more prone to instabilities in partisanship due to the ways they rank and organize their core values? We investigate the mechanisms of partisan volatility, considering whether instabilities reflect value conflict and ambivalence. Our expectation is that when the basic values of the American ethos come into conflict in elite discourse, citizens have difficulty reconciling their own value arrangement with that of elites, resulting in greater partisan volatility. To this end, we use several heteroscedastic regression and ordered probit models to explore whether the conflict of competing values explains the response variance and instability of individual-level partisanship and ideology over time. To construct measures of value conflict, we rely on data from the 1992, 1994 and 1996 American National Election Studies. We find that, while instabilities in partisan identification reflect low information for some, the competition of core values generates volatility in partisan affiliations for others. In deliberating the value tradeoffs of politics, people may be of two minds even about central beliefs such as party identification.

Nearly two decades ago researchers pointed out the sharp decline in marginal districts in elections for the US House of Representatives. That observation led to an outpouring of research describing the electoral changes, explaining their bases and speculating about their consequences for the larger political system. Recently Gary Jacobson has offered a major corrective to that line of research, arguing that ‘House incumbents are no safer now than they were in the 1950s; the marginals, properly defined, have not vanished; the swing ratio has diminished little, if at all; and competition for House seats held by incumbents has not declined’. While Jacobson advances an extremely provocative argument, there are complicating patterns in his evidence that support additional and/or different interpretations. We argue that the marginals, ‘properly defined’ have diminished, the swing ratio has declined, and party competition for House seats held by incumbents has lessened. While fears that the vanishing marginals phenomenon would lead to lower responsiveness on the part of ‘safe’ House incumbents have proved groundless, the collective composition of Congress does appear to be less responsive to changes in popular sentiments. Thus, the vanishing marginals have contributed to the occurrence of divided government in the United States and in all likelihood do have the effects on congressional leadership and policy-making that many analysts have claimed.

Mainstream parties in Western Europe are increasingly struggling to hold together their base of support. As a lens for exploring this changing electoral landscape, this article focuses on the growing share of the electorate that is cross-pressured between conservative and progressive attitudes on economic and cultural issues. It argues that a stable asymmetry characterizes Western European mass attitudes: while support for the left is common among voters with progressive attitudes on both issues, it is enough to be conservative on one issue to turn right. Analyzing survey data collected from 1990 to 2017, the study shows that cross-pressures are resolved in favor of the right and examines the trade-offs this poses to center-right parties. These findings contribute to debates on electoral dealignment and realignment and shed light on the electoral choices of the center-right.

Does the attention of human rights organizations limit exports from rights-abusing states? This article examines how naming and shaming by human rights organizations (HROs) conditions the influence of human rights abuse on exports, and argues that human rights abuse alone is insufficient to damage a state’s exports. However, as attention to abuse via HRO shaming increases, abuse has an increasingly negative impact on exports. Importantly, this relationship is also conditional on the respect for human rights among importing states; human rights abuse, even if it is shamed, has no effect when importers are similarly abusive. Empirical tests utilizing gravity models of trade incorporating data on physical integrity rights abuse and HRO shaming in 1990–2008 yield strong support for our expectations.

In his recent review of Albert O. Hirschman's book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty Brian Barry suggested that the next step was ‘to look more systematically at ways in which exit and voice can be related, and to try and bring all the variables relevant to each kind of relationship into an explicit theoretical structure.’ This paper is an attempt to move in this direction by locating the concepts involved unequivocally within the so-called ‘economic’ or ‘rational choice’ paradigm. It is hoped that any resulting loss of richness will be more than compensated for by an increase in the internal consistency of the argument. It will be demonstrated that most of the logic of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty rests on ‘economic’ assumptions – Barry has already shown that where Hirschman departs from these his argument is at its weakest – and that making this reliance fully explicit not only increases the rigor of the approach but reorients some of the conclusions.

This book review examines the theory of populism advanced by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart in Cultural Backlash. The authors offer a distinct explanation of the rise of authoritarian populism in advanced democracies. As societies become more liberal over time, older, more conservative cohorts feel under threat of losing majority status and allegedly turn towards authoritarian-populist parties that promise to stop the tide of liberalism. However, this theory of populism finds little empirical support. In contrast to what the authors argue, there is no polarization of attitudes between younger and older cohorts, and younger cohorts are more likely to vote for authoritarian-populist parties. To substantiate this claim, I replicate many of the analyses in Cultural Backlash and add additional ones with the newest wave of the European Social Survey and the Chapel Hill Expert Survey. I conclude by observing that while the cultural backlash theory of populism does not hold, this does not invalidate cultural approaches more generally.

In new democracies, why do political party leaders relinquish power over nominations and allow legislative candidates to be selected by primary elections? Where the legislature is weak and politics is clientelistic, democratization of candidate selection is driven by local party members seeking benefits from primary contestants. Analysis of an original dataset on legislative nominations and political interference by party leaders for the 2004 and 2008 elections in Ghana shows that primaries are more common where nominations attract more aspirants and where the party is more likely to win, counter to predictions in the existing literature. Moreover, the analysis shows that party leaders interfere in primaries in a pattern consistent with anticipation of party members’ reactions.

Nations have historically sought power and prosperity through control of physical space. In recent decades, however, this has largely ceased. Most states that could do so appear relucant, while the weak cannot expand. This article presents a theory of imperialism and decolonization that explains both historic cycles of expansion and decline and the collective demise of the urge to colonize. Technological shocks enable expansion, while rising labour costs and the dynamics of military technology gradually dilute imperial advantage. Simultaneously, economic development leads to a secular decline in payoffs for appropriating land, minerals and capital. Once conquest no longer pays great powers, the systemic imperative to integrate production vertically also becomes archaic.

Political intolerance has typically been conceptualized as an unwillingness to extend expressive rights to disliked groups or individuals. One problem with this conceptualization is that, when a given percentage of individuals in a polity is found to be intolerant, it is not known if these respondents are intolerant because of the act or because of the actor. We conceptualize intolerance multidimensionally, making a distinction between generic and discriminatory intolerance; while the former stems from an unwillingness to permit the expressive act (such as holding a rally) regardless of the actor, the latter is reserved for an unwillingness to permit the act only when performed by a noxious group. Using data from the Multi-Investigator II Study (a national telephone survey of adults in the United States), we employed a split ballot technique to decompose the total proportion of intolerant respondents into groups whose intolerance stems from an aversion to the actor (discriminatory) versus those whose intolerance stems from an aversion to the act (generic). We further explored the genesis of intolerance, finding that the two types we identified stem from different antecedents.

This article examines a key assumption of many approaches to the analysis of government coalitions, that parties are exclusively concerned with the achievement of immediate policy objectives. We first consider the extent to which policy considerations can be used to characterize coalitions formed in eight postwar democracies, using party election programmes to operationalize and test a variety of policy-based models of government formation. We then see what parties get from governments in terms of declared policy commitments, both in and out of office. The conclusion in both cases is that party policy clearly influences the formation of coalitions, but its impact is substantially modified by long-term structures and cleavages within different party systems.

A previously overlooked explanation for varying individual levels of political trust is concern about immigration. This article examines the effect of concern about immigration on political trust in Britain, where levels of opposition to immigration have remained high since the 1960s and yet the implications of such opposition are still unclear. Using the pre-election and post-election panel component of the 2005 British Election Study and the 2002–03 European Social Survey, the author shows, after controlling for other predictors of trust in politics, that concerns about the impact of immigration significantly affect political trust. In addition, in 2005 the perception that government had not handled the issue of immigration effectively also significantly affected political trust, with both linear and interactive effects.

The British Conservative party during 1997–2005 appeared to support the view that parties react to defeat by energizing their core vote base. Using a series of spatial and salience-based definitions of the core vote, combined with elite interviews with William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard, the three Conservative leaders between 1997 and 2005, empirical evidence in support and also refutation of the core vote critique is evaluated here. The analyses suggest that Conservative issue strategies between 1997 and 2005 were chosen on grounds of spatial proximity and public perceptions of issue ownership, and that an appeal to Conservative voters was consistent with a broader appeal. The implications of this evidence are important for conceptualizing and applying party base explanations in Britain and beyond.

Civil war dynamics and outcomes are shaped by processes of change largely unaccounted for in current studies. This examination explores how the fragmentation of combatants, especially the weaker actors, affects the duration and outcomes of civil wars. Some results of a computational modelling analysis are consistent with the article's expectations, several of them are counterintuitive. They show that when combatants fragment, the duration of war does not always increase and such wars often end in negotiated agreements, contrasting with the expectations of literatures on spoilers, moderates and extremists. Empirical cases, such as Iraq, Congo, Chechnya and the Sudan, illustrate the importance of fragmentation. This study demonstrates the value of accounting for diverse changes in actors and circumstances when studying the dynamics of war.

Elections are inherently about selecting good candidates for public office and sanctioning incumbents for past performance. Yet, in the low salience context of ‘second-order elections’ to the European Parliament, empirical evidence suggests that voters sanction first-order national incumbents. However, no previous study has examined whether voters also use these elections to select good candidates. This article draws on a unique dataset on the political experience of party representatives in eighty-five national elections to the European Parliament to evaluate the extent to which voters prefer candidates with more political experience. The results show that selection considerations do matter. Parties that choose experienced top candidates are rewarded by voters. This effect is greatest when European elections are held in the middle of the national electoral cycle.

Despite a plethora of theoretical frameworks, IR scholars have struggled with the question of how observers assess resolve. We make two important contributions in this direction. Conceptually, we develop an integrative framework that unites otherwise disconnected theories, viewing them as a set of heuristics actors use to simplify information-rich environments. Methodologically, we employ a conjoint experiment that provides empirical traction impossible to obtain using alternative research designs. We find that ordinary citizens are ‘intuitive deterrence theorists’ who focus to a great extent on capabilities, stakes, signals and past actions in judging resolve. We also find that observers see democracies as less resolved than autocracies (not more), casting doubt on key propositions of democratic credibility theory. Finally, a conceptual replication shows that a group of elite decision makers converge with the US public in how they interpret costly signals, and in viewing democracies as less resolved than autocracies.

Researchers have puzzled over the finding that countries that ratify UN human rights treaties such as the Convention Against Torture are more likely to abuse human rights than non-ratifiers over time. This article presents evidence that the changing standard of accountability – the set of expectations that monitoring agencies use to hold states responsible for repressive actions – conceals real improvements to the level of respect for human rights in data derived from monitoring reports. Using a novel dataset that accounts for systematic changes to human rights reports, it is demonstrated that the ratification of human rights treaties is associated with higher levels of respect for human rights. This positive relationship is robust to a variety of measurement strategies and model specifications.