This study reassesses the ability of the mass media to influence voter opinions directly. Combining data on media content with individuals’ assessments of British political parties during the 2005 general election campaign allows a test of newspapers’ persuasive influence in a way previously considered a ‘virtual impossibility’. Utilizing repeated measures from the 2005 BES campaign panel, multilevel regression analysis reveals significant impact of partisan slant not just on the evaluation of the party mentioned but also on evaluations of its competitor(s). The strongest evidence of direct media persuasion is provided by the finding that variation in slant over the campaign drives how undecided voters evaluate the incumbent government party, even when controlling for a newspaper's average partisan slant.

We study the drivers of refugees' decision making about returning home using observational and experimental data from a survey of 3,003 Syrian refugees in Lebanon. We find that the conditions in refugee-hosting countries play a minor role. In contrast, conditions in a refugee's home country are the main drivers of return intentions. Even in the face of hostility and poor living conditions in host countries, refugees are unlikely to return unless the situation at home improves significantly. These results challenge traditional models of decision making about migration, where refugees weigh living conditions in the host and home countries (“push” and “pull” factors). We offer an alternative theoretical framework: a model of threshold-based decision making whereby only once a basic threshold of safety at home is met do refugees compare other factors in the host and home country. We explore some empirical implications of this new perspective using qualitative interviews and quantitative survey data.

National governments have intensified their attempts to create international institutions in various policy fields such as the environment, finance and trade. At the same time, many subnational policy makers have begun to duplicate international efforts by setting their own, stricter policies while others remain inactive or enact more lax regulation. This ‘glocalization’ of policy creates a complex and potentially costly patchwork system of regulations. To shed light on this phenomenon, this article analyzes the interaction between subnational and national governments within a game-theoretic model of international treaty negotiations. The glocalization of regulatory policy can be understood as an attempt by subnational policy makers to strategically constrain or empower national governments in international negotiations. The study finds that the shadow of international treaty formation gives rise to within-country and cross-country policy balancing dynamics that may explain some of the subnational policy polarization that is currently observable in many countries. The article specifies the conditions under which these dynamics occur, spells out empirically testable hypotheses and identifies possible theoretical extensions.

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.

Over the last twenty years a succession of theories of politics has appeared of which the hallmark is an attempt to adapt utilitarian marginalism to the purpose of political explanation. Theories in this intellectual style may be designated ‘economic’ theories of politics since utilitarian marginalism was first developed in the context of economic theorizing; its invention was indeed the birth of a notion of ‘economies’ as distinct from the ‘political economy’of Smith, Ricardo, Marx and J. S. Mill. Anthony Downs pioneered the economic approach with his bravura economic theory of democracy in 1957, which remains probably the best-known example of it. Many of the fundamental objections to economic theories of politics were explored by C. B. Macpherson in 1961 in a brief but penetrating essay; but Macpherson's essay was not decisive in checking the popularity of such theories. Despite his criticism, they have continued to proliferate.

This article develops a novel explanation for the incumbency advantage based on incumbents’ ability to signal positions that are ideologically distinct from those of their parties. Using voter-level data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study and controlling for unobserved district heterogeneity, the study finds that voters in US House elections primarily use information about the ideology of candidates’ parties to infer the location of challengers, while they instead rely on information about the individual candidates’ ideologies to place incumbents. In higher-profile Senate elections, the difference between challengers and incumbents is trivial. Decomposing the incumbency advantage into valence and signaling components, the study finds that the signaling mechanism explains 14 per cent of the incumbency advantage in House elections, but only 5 per cent of the advantage in Senate contests. It also finds that a 50 per cent increase in party polarization increases the incumbency advantage by 3 percentage points.

Recent presidential elections in the United States have been marked by widely divergent landslide victories. In 1964 Lyndon Johnson led the Democrats to a sweeping victory over Barry Goldwater. In 1968 Richard Nixon captured the White House for the Republicans in a contest that was close only because George Wallace ran as a third-party candidate and siphoned off a large share of the conservative vote. With Wallace eliminated from the 1972 race, Nixon easily won a lopsided re-election victory over George McGovern. Early in the campaign the 1976 election also appeared to be heading towards an overwhelming victory, this time for the Democrats. Yet, Jimmy Carter won by only two percentage points.

Holding elected officials accountable for their behavior in office is a foundational task facing citizens. Elected officials attempt to influence this accountability process by explaining their behavior with an eye toward mitigating the blame they might receive for taking controversial actions. This article addresses a critical limitation in the literature on elite explanation giving and accountability: the absence of attention to conflicting information regarding the official's behavior. The study shows across three pre-registered survey experiments that explanations are ineffective when other speakers offer counter-explanations that focus on the official's potential ulterior motives. It further demonstrates that this occurs even when the counter-explanation comes from a partisan source with low credibility. These results imply that elected officials enjoy less leeway for their actions than existing work allows, and highlight important tensions concerning the relationship between elite behavior and accountability processes.

Why do dictators purge specific elites but not others? And why do dictators purge these elites in certain ways? Examining these related questions helps us understand not only how dictators retain sufficient competence in their regimes to alleviate popular and foreign threats, but also how dictators nullify elite threats. Dictators are more likely to purge first-generation elites, who are more powerful because they can negotiate their role from a position of strength and possess valuable vertical and horizontal linkages with other elites. Further, dictators tend to imprison purged first-generation elites – rather than execute, exile or simply remove them – to avoid retaliation from other elites or the purged elite continuing to sow discord. We find empirical support for our predictions from novel data on autocratic elites in 16 regimes from 1922 to 2020.

Minor party candidates are quite common in modern democratic elections, but we know relatively little about the decision-making process of minor-party supporters. An extensive panel dataset is used to examine the individual-level dynamics of Nader support in the United States during the 2000 presidential election campaign. A multinomial logit model is estimated to analyse the factors related to a Nader supporter's decision to switch support to Gore, to switch support to Bush or to remain loyal to Nader from one interview to the next. The Nader supporters most likely to switch to a major-party candidate were the most politically aware, partisans, those concerned about policy outcomes and respondents in competitive states. Nader supporters were also more likely to abandon the candidate at the ballot box rather than earlier in the campaign. These findings challenge existing expectations about campaign dynamics and appear to reflect strategic calculations on the part of Nader supporters.

In the United States it is widely believed that public assistance may have harmful effects on the social and political orientations of those who receive it. Certain kinds of government support – particularly welfare – may foster a ‘culture of dependence’ comprising values and beliefs that are different from, and perhaps contrary to, the predominant American political culture. We examine the relationship between government assistance and public opinion using survey data taken from the 1992 CPS National Election Study. Our empirical results show that welfare benefits do have some effect on issue attitudes. But recipients of public aid are virtually identical to non-recipients in terms of their core values, reactions to the political system and general beliefs about American society. There is no evidence that a distinctive ‘culture of dependence’ has developed among people who rely on financial support from the federal government.

Empirical studies show that many governments gear the provision of goods and services towards their ethnic peers. This article investigates governments’ strategies to provide ethnic favors in Africa. Recent studies of ethnic favoritism find that presidents' ethnic peers and home regions enjoy advantages, yet cannot disentangle whether goods are provided to entire regions or co-ethnic individuals. This article argues that local ethnic demography determines whether governments provide non-excludable public goods or more narrowly targeted handouts. Where government co-ethnics are in the majority, public goods benefit all locals regardless of their ethnic identity. Outside of these strongholds, incumbents pursue discriminatory strategies and only their co-ethnics gain from favoritism. Using fine-grained geographic data on ethnic demographics, the study finds support for the argument's implications in the local incidence of infant mortality. These findings have important implications for theories of distributive politics and conflict in multi-ethnic societies.

Scholars have long sought to understand when and why the Middle East fell behind Europe in its economic development. This article explores the importance of historical Muslim trade in explaining urban growth and decline in the run-up to the Industrial Revolution. The authors examine Eurasian urbanization patterns as a function of distance to Middle Eastern trade routes before and after 1500 CE – the turning point in European breakthroughs in seafaring, trade and exploration. The results suggest that proximity to historical Muslim trade routes was positively associated with urbanization in 1200 but not in 1800. These findings speak to why Middle Eastern and Central Asian cities – which had long benefited from their central location between Europe and Asia – declined as Europeans found alternative routes to the East and opened trade opportunities in the New World.

In contrast to much of the political economy literature, this article explores acts of refusal that obstruct attempts to impose austerity measures on advanced industrial democracies. It thereby complements a literature that has thus far focused far more upon the (apparently unobstructed) imposition of austerity. In doing so, it uses two typically ‘low-resistance’ countries – Japan and the UK –as least-likely cases and finds that austerity is rarely uncontested. Using fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis, it highlights the ‘causal recipes’ sufficient for both (1) anti-austerity activity to have a significant impact on austerity proposals and (2) the smooth (unobstructed) imposition of austerity. The politics of austerity is shown to be better understood as an iterative interaction between proposals for austerity and the acts of refusal they encounter. These obstacles to austerity appear more straightforward to activate effectively in Japan’s coordinated model of capitalism, whilst the UK’s liberal market economy tends to generate more innovative forms of dissent that (if they are sufficiently militant) provide an alternative route towards the obstruction of austerity.

Comity in Congress is adherence to the norms of courtesy and reciprocity within a ‘regular order’. There has been a decline of comity in the United States Congress since the 1970s. Institutional causes, such as legislative reform, increased reliance on the media and an influx of new members, are discussed and discarded. Instead, a societal explanation appears to be more useful: the decline of comity in the Congress reflects the decline of comity in the country. A comparison of the late twentieth century with the pre-Civil War era supports this general argument. It also offers little hope for the return of civility.

Despite the greatly enhanced interest in processes of political change that political scientists have shown in recent years, there are still areas that have received attention in only the most speculative manner. Modernization, political development and comparative history are becoming established subdisciplines, reflecting ‘the change to change’. But the political processes involved in the transformation of advanced industrial societies have as yet received only cursory empirical treatment.

The seniority system in the American Congress exhibits many characteristics of its parent institution. Both are held to be powerful, durable, and somewhat peculiar. Both celebrate age, tradition, and a particular kind of experience. They are skeptical of new things – whether policies, computerized information systems, or newly elected members. Both can be attacked for sluggishness, defense of the status quo, and lack of vigor and merit in leadership. The family resemblance goes further. Both have been century-long targets of criticism and attempts at reform. And both have resisted these attacks by doing what they do best – by simply outlasting the reform attempts and the reformers.

This article discusses possible issues of how media content and exposure were linked in previous research. It argues that the original conclusions of the article ‘Who's Afraid of Conflict? The Mobilizing Effect of Conflict Framing in Campaign News’ do not hold due to the chosen operationalization. It also demonstrates that using the proposed methodology, both exposure to conflictual and non-conflictual news yield the same substantive conclusion. In addition to re-evaluating the role of conflict, the article contributes to the discussion on how to integrate media and individual-level measures in the study of electoral behavior.

In recent years a good deal of concern has been expressed about the phenomenon of political terrorism in Italy. The mass media have directed our attention to spectacular acts of international terrorism committed on Italian soil by groups, largely from the Middle East, which have used the country as a teatro in which to stage their operations against targets of opportunity. Scholars and journalists have also drawn our attention to the problem of domestic terrorism. The kidnapping and assassination of the former Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978 may serve as the most dramatic example. It seems fair to say that much of this publicity has been focused on the Left. The attempts by various leftist groups, the Red Brigades (BR), Front Line (PL), Worker Autonomy (AO) and others, to use terrorist violence as a means of bringing about a Communist revolution was a source of apprehension in the Western world from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. Allegations that the revolutionary groups were aided by the Soviets or other Warsaw Pact nations, as part of an effort to destabilize the Western democracies, did much to heighten the concern.

A long tradition of studies in political science has unveiled the effects of electoral institutions on party systems and parliamentary representation. Yet their effects on campaign activities remain overlooked. Research in this tradition still lacks a strong comparative element able to explore the nuanced role of electoral institutions in shaping individual-level campaigns during first-order parliamentary elections. This study uses data from a variety of national candidate studies to address this lacuna, and shows that the structure of electoral institutions affects the electoral mobilization efforts put in place by candidates. Candidate-centred electoral systems incentivize more intense and complex mobilization efforts, and shift the campaign focus towards individuals rather than parties. By directly addressing the effects of electoral institutions on campaign behaviour, this study contributes to the wider debate on their role in promoting political engagement and mobilization. These results indicate that electoral institutions affect political competition much more than previously thought.