This article examines the effect of high school civic education on voter turnout in adulthood by integrating extensive academic transcript data on social studies and civic coursework into a large-scale, longitudinal survey of a nationally representative sample of adolescents. In an initial series of regression models, civics courses appear to have an effect on turnout in adulthood. However, after accounting for individual and family attributes, civic education has a fairly limited effect on turnout, though several measures have statistically significant effects even in the presence of controls. Interestingly, the study finds no support for the idea that high school courses that focus on service learning, civic skills development or political issues increase turnout in adulthood, which is contrary to expectations from the resource model of participation. After subjecting the civic effects that persist after accounting for controls to additional scrutiny by using family fixed-effects models that account for all observed and unobserved influences shared by siblings in the same family (for example, socialization, predispositions, etc.), the evidence suggests that there is a null relationship between civic education and turnout; the best-case scenario is that any civic education effects that do exist are likely very small. The idea that additional civics training will help to substantially elevate voter turnout appears to be overly optimistic.

This article combines theory and narrative to shed new light on the politics surrounding the making of central bank independence in contemporary Britain. Its central argument is that Gordon Brown's rewriting of the British monetary constitution in May 1997 constituted political manipulation in a Rikerian sense. The government removed a contentious issue from party politics in order to signal competence and enforce internal discipline. Building on Elster's constraint theory, the paper argues that Brown adopted a pre-commitment strategy aimed at binding others. The heresthetic move had dual consequences, both constraining and enabling. The institutionalization of discipline enabled New Labour to achieve economic and political goals. By revisiting the political rationality of precommitment, this article questions the dominant credibility story underlying the choice of economic institutions.

Low levels of voter turnout in the first election to the National Assembly for Wales in May 1999 brought into question both the ability of devolution to revitalize representative democracy and the legitimacy of the Assembly itself. But drawing wider implications from turnout requires that we understand why electoral abstention was so widespread. We examine three hypotheses about voter turnout in 1999: that non-participation simply reflected a general apathy towards politics; that it was based on a specific apathy towards the new Assembly; or that low voter turnout reflected antipathy towards an unwanted political institution. We find support for the first two hypotheses, but little evidence for the third. Devolution has failed to engage the interest and support of many in Wales, but low turnout has not been prompted by fundamental antagonism to the devolved institution among the Welsh electorate.

When do autocrats employ propaganda to threaten citizens with repression? Do threats of repression condition citizen behavior? This article develops a theory of propaganda-based threats in autocracies that builds on insights from experimental psychology. It argues that even credible threats of repression are costly, and so are reserved for moments when collective action is most likely. Since threats of repression are employed sparingly, the authors also expect them to be effective. The theory is tested using data from China, the world's most populous autocracy. The study analyzes all 164,707 articles published between 2009 and 2016 in the Workers' Daily, a state-run newspaper that focuses on domestic issues and targets a non-elite audience. It finds that the Chinese government employs propaganda-based threats of repression primarily around the anniversaries of ethnic separatist movements in Tibet and Xinjiang regions. Using an instrumental variables strategy, the study shows that these threats decrease protest rates by a substantively meaningful margin.

Conventional wisdom holds that languages, as ethnic markers, build communities with shared preferences and strong social networks. Consequently, ethnolinguistic homogeneity can facilitate growth. This article challenges this conception of language as a cultural marker. It argues that language is also a practical vehicle of communication; people can be multilingual, and second languages can be learned. Hence language boundaries are neither (1) congruent with ethnic boundaries nor (2) static. If true, the purported advantages of ethnolinguistic homogeneity should also be evident in countries with large populations of non-native speakers conversant in official languages. The study tests this hypothesis using an original cross-national and time-variant measure that captures both mother-tongue speakers and second-language learners. The empirical results are consistent with the understanding of language as an efficiency-enhancing instrument: countries with exogenously high levels of heterogeneity can avoid the ‘growth tragedy’1 by endogenously teaching the official language in schools.

Colonial investments impacted long-run political and economic development, but there is little systematic evidence of their origins and spatial distribution. Combining novel data sources, this article shows that colonial investments were very unequally distributed within sixteen British and French African colonies. What led colonial states to invest much more in some districts than others? The author argues that natural harbors and capes led some places to become centers of pre-colonial coastal trade, which in turn increased later colonial investments not only in infrastructure but also in health and education. Furthermore, distance from pre-colonial trading posts helps explain the diffusion of investments within each colony. The author finds limited support for alternative explanations such as natural resources and pre-colonial ethnic characteristics, including pre-colonial political centralization. These two findings suggest an economic origin for the regional and ethnic disparities observed in the colonial and contemporary periods.

In this article, it is argued that horizontal intra-industry trade is associated with reduced conflict propensity within dyads. Horizontal intra-industry trade is characterized by participation in international markets for similar – in many cases, branded – commodities, resulting from economies of scale and consumer tastes for variety. Conversely, inter-industry trade in accordance with the Ricardian and Heckscher–Ohlin models, while providing valuable trade gains, in some instances provokes vulnerability to trade partners, such that its overall impact on dyadic conflict is ambiguous. Support for this expectation is found in empirical tests spanning from 1963 to 2001. Additionally, there is evidence that development is insufficient to preclude conflict when jointly developed dyads engage in no intra-industry trade.

In international disputes, forgone settlement offers are frequently lamented, but their impact on the dynamics of ongoing negotiations is largely overlooked. In the psychological literature, however, the consequences of missing an advantageous action opportunity have been studied extensively in the context of the inaction inertia phenomenon. According to this literature, forgoing attractive action opportunities renders decision makers susceptible to regret and increases the likelihood that subsequent opportunities will also be missed. This article explores the explanatory potential of the inaction inertia effect in the context of international negotiations. Findings based on laboratory experiments and analysis of the negotiations between Israel and Hamas over the release of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit strongly suggest that the concept of inaction inertia can enrich the understanding of failures and deadlocks in international negotiations. The article defines the conditions that are instrumental in identifying inertia-induced deadlocks and discusses factors that encourage the termination of inaction inertia and promote dispute settlement.

A ‘deliberative wave’, with increasing uses of deliberative citizen forums, is sweeping the globe. Whereas deliberative citizen forum enthusiasts claim that they represent appropriate tools to reconnect citizens with politics and demand a stronger empowerment of deliberative citizen forums, critics argue that they will reduce rather than increase democratic legitimacy. This letter sheds new light on the roles of deliberative citizen forums in democratic systems, with a particular eye on disaffected citizens. Drawing on a conjoint experiment with a representative sample of non-participating German citizens, it shows that citizens in general challenge notions of the strong empowerment of deliberative citizen forums. They prefer deliberative citizen forums that are limited to policy advice, collaborate with legacy institutions and include extra provisions (such as a large size or clear majorities). By contrast, disaffected citizens are more open to the empowerment and decoupling of deliberative citizen forums compared to allegiant citizens, but this not imply that they are generally in clear favour of such design features (in fact, they are mostly indifferent via-à-vis empowerment and decoupling). These findings have important ramifications for democratic designs.

When the results of an analysis fly in the face both of generally accepted theory and the practice of professional politicians, it is usually a good idea to reconsider whether the point is really established. Such is the case with the small literature regarding the effects of nomination strategies on the outcomes of Dáil Éireann elections that has developed in these pages since the publication of an article by Cohan, McKinlay and Mughan (‘The Used Vote and Electoral Outcomes: The Irish General Election of 1973’, this Journal, v (1975), 363–83). The original article made several valuable points, including a demonstration that patterns of transfer votes may be more important than the distribution of first preference votes in determining the result of elections under the single transferable vote (STV) system, and an extension of the wasted vote concept to STV, majority, and proportional elections. Unfortunately, the notes that have followed have all focused on the most questionable conclusion of the original article, that overnomination hurts a party's chances of electing the maximum possible number of deputies.

This article synthesizes a large body of work in applied economics on the likely effects of European Monetary Union with an established literature in political science on the political sustainability of intervention by central or federal authorities in the economies of diverse nations, states or regions. Three possible economic scenarios resulting from EMU are identified – fiscal centralization, monetary discipline and loose money. The greatly enhanced central role implied by the first two would be difficult to legitimize in the context of the absence of a European citizen identity or party system. Historical precedent suggests that, in democracies, both central redistribution in social spending and retrenchment of established social programmes are facilitated by jurisdiction-wide political parties. The loose money scenario, while viable in most member states, would be unlikely to be acceptable in Germany. The article concludes, therefore, that all three scenarios most often predicted by the economics literature carry with them a risk that they will be difficult to sustain politically.

Prior research suggests that partisanship can influence how legislators learn from each other. However, same-party governments are also more likely to share similar issues, ideological preferences and constituency demands. Establishing a causal link between partisanship and policy learning is difficult. In collaboration with a non-profit organization, this study isolates the role of partisanship in a real policy learning context. As part of a campaign promoting a new policy among local representatives in the United States, the study randomized whether the initiative was endorsed by co-partisans, out-partisans or both parties. The results show that representatives are systematically more interested in the same policy when it is endorsed by co-partisans. Bipartisan initiatives also attract less interest than co-partisan policies, and no more interest than out-partisan policies, even in more competitive districts. Together, the results suggest that ideological considerations cannot fully explain partisan-based learning. The study contributes to scholarship on policy diffusion, legislative signaling and interest group access.

There has been a lively debate about the economic and cultural-based drivers of support for populism. This article argues that economic concerns matter, but that they are realized through the relative gains and losses of social groups. Using new survey items in a large representative survey administered in Britain, it shows that citizens' economic assessments of the ethnic minority out-group – in relation to the group's situation 12 months ago and to assessments of the economic conditions of the white British in-group – are a predictor of support for Brexit. The results, which are robust to prior referendum vote, immigration attitudes and cultural sentiment, extend across income groups and national identity strength. Extending the analysis to a comparison of geographic in- and out-groups between local communities and London lends additional support to the argument. The implications of relative group-based economics are important for understanding Brexit and the economic sources of support for populism more broadly.

This paper deals with political decision making in face-to-face groups. We begin by considering the range of decision modes available in group situations. It may seem that there is a choice between only two: a group may resolve a conflict either in a competitive way through the application of the majority principle or in a co-operative way in the sense of accommodation and amicable agreement. However, there is a third decision mode which is often overlooked in the literature: decision by interpretation. We have coined this term in a recent study of intra-party decision making in the Swiss Free Democratic party. The purpose of the present paper is to describe the main properties of the new concept and to demonstrate that its application goes far beyond intra-party decision making and the cultural context of Switzerland. In a broader project about political decision modes in general we have put the concept of decision by interpretation into a theoretical context, examining both its causes and consequences. Here, we shall limit ourselves to a few considerations about the direction in which we have developed the theory.

This article proposes a new statistical method to measure persuasion within small groups, and applies this approach to a large-scale randomized deliberative experiment. The authors define the construct of ‘persuasion’ as a change in the systematic component of an individual's preference, separate from measurement error, that results from exposure to interpersonal interaction. Their method separately measures persuasion in a latent (left–right) preference space and in a topic-specific preference space. The model's functional form accommodates tests of substantive hypotheses found in the small-group literature. The article illustrates the measurement method by examining changes in study participants' views on US fiscal policy resulting from the composition of the small discussion groups to which they were randomly assigned. The results are inconsistent with the ‘law of small-group polarization’, the typical result found in small-group research; instead, the authors observe patterns of latent and policy-specific persuasion consistent with the aspirations of deliberation.

Vast research on immigration lumps together native citizens' attitudes toward two different groups: the immigrant stock of non-naturalized resident aliens, and the immigrant flow, that is, the future arrival of foreigners seeking to enter and live in the country. Does popular opposition to immigration distinguish between the two, and if so, how? This article analyzes theoretically the reasons the stock and flow might induce different views among natives, and presents experimental evidence from the United States showing that natives are systematically more accepting of the former. The analysis indicates that this ‘stock premium’ partly stems from a sense of moral obligation toward people residing in the country. Replicating two widely cited experiments, the study shows that the stock–flow distinction has important implications for the interpretation of earlier findings on immigration attitudes, and for understanding voter preferences regarding policies designed to curtail immigration.

The appearance of a Republican majority among Southern members of the US House of Representatives provides a substantive reason to reconsider political change in the post-war South. And a newly created, merged dataset makes it possible to address the central and recurrent propositions about change in Southern politics in a manner not previously possible. When this is done, four basic contributions are highlighted, each a clear modification of the standard story. The main impetus for partisan change proves to be economic development, and a changing politics of economic interest. The main brake on this impetus proves to be legal desegregation, and a changing politics of racial identity. Several indirect interactions of race and class then enhance the impact of both contributions, while their joint impact is also powerfully shaped by the strategic response of partisan elites: by the appearance of Republican challengers but, especially, by the practical resistance of Democratic incumbents.