This article analyzes election data that permit simple tests of rational voting and agenda setting. The voting test pertains to aggregate election results. The prediction is that when voters have single-peaked preferences, there will be more opposition to the second of two budget proposals that are voted on simultaneously. Unlike the standard binary choice setting, not all voters have weakly undominated voting strategies, but the game among the voters can be solved simply by iterative application of weak dominance. The agenda-setting prediction tested is that agenda setters should make one proposal rather than two when given the option. The data come from Oregon school district financial elections from 1980–83, years in which the rules for these elections were abruptly changed.

Many articles use regression discontinuity designs (RDDs) that exploit the discontinuity in “close” election outcomes to identify various political and economic outcomes of interest. One of the most important types of diagnostic tests in an RDD is checking for balance in observable variables within the window on either side of the threshold. Finding an imbalance raises concerns that an unobservable variable may exist that affects whether a case ends up above or below the threshold and also directly affects the dependent variable of interest. This article shows that imbalance in RDDs exploiting close elections are likely to arise even in the absence of any type of strategic sorting. Imbalance may arise simply due to variation in the underlying distribution of partisanship in the electorate across constituencies. Using both simulated and actual election data, the study demonstrates that the imbalances driven by partisanship can be large in practice. It then shows that although this causes a bias for the most naive RDDs, the problem can be corrected with commonly used RDDs such as the inclusion of a local linear control function.

Why are some small parties successful whereas others wither away? Despite the voluminous literature on parties and party families, we have a limited understanding of what explains small party success. Most studies tend to emphasize the role of social cleavages and electoral systems. Instead, we propose a new institutional explanation that treats entering parliament as a key resource for small parties. Parliamentary entrance signals organizational capacity and candidates’ appeal, and reduces uncertainty about parties’ ideological profile. Taking advantage of the discontinuities generated by thresholds of representation, we estimate the causal effect of entering parliament on the future vote shares of small parties. We use a new data set that covers all post-WWII democracies with a national threshold of representation. Results indicate that presence in parliament increases parties’ vote share in the next election. Importantly, entering parliament is more important for parties in new democracies, where party branding is weak and the need for signaling is high.

How do marginal voters differ from regular voters? This article develops a method for comparing the partisan preferences of regular voters to those marginal voters whose turnout decisions are influenced by exogenous factors and applies it to two sources of variation in turnout in the United States—weather and election timing. In both cases, marginal voters are over 20 percentage points more supportive of the Democratic Party than regular voters—a significant divide. The findings suggest that the expansion or contraction of the electorate can have important consequences. Moreover, the findings suggest that election results do not always reflect the preferences of the citizenry, because the marginal citizens who may stay home have systematically different preferences than those who participate. Finally, the methods developed in the article may enable future researchers to compare regular and marginal voters on many different dimensions and in many different electoral settings.

Most formal models of valence competition add a single, separable and unweighted component to the standard one-dimensional utility function of voters. This article presents the results of a conjoint analysis experiment in which respondents were asked to choose between two candidates whose profiles vary along five attributes. Four of these traits behave like valence or policy issues as expected, but one, which has been employed in recent formal and empirical works, does not. Moreover, policy and valence are not separable. They interact at least in some cases, taking a competency form whereby the marginal impact of valence on voters’ choice is conditional on candidates’ policies. This result lends support to recent studies that have found more extensive valence voting under ideological convergence. Finally, policy trumps valence in awkward choices. Respondents even prefer corrupt candidates with similar policy views to honest ones with different opinions, despite integrity being declared the most important attribute.

Can American presidents use their budget proposal authority to achieve their own partisan policy priorities? This is an important, yet challenging, question to answer since formal executive authority is ambiguous, and budgetary powers are shared in the US separation of powers system. Indeed, the question remains open since prior empirical designs conflate external constraints (arising from political and policy conditions) with those that reflect executive partisan policy priorities. This study advances a novel stochastic decomposition of executive budget proposals in order to analyze the extent to which presidents can shape the legislative funding of US federal agencies consistent with their own partisan policy priorities. Statistical evidence reveals that presidents exert partisan-based budgetary influence over appropriations that cannot be ascertained from previous empirical studies that rely on either the observed gap between presidential requests and congressional appropriations or standard instrumental variable estimation methods. The statistical evidence also indicates that presidents are marginally more effective at converting their partisan policy priorities into budgetary outcomes under divided party government. Contrary to theoretical predictions generated from bilateral veto bargaining models, presidents are also shown to exert effective partisan budgetary influence even when their budget requests exceed congressional appropriations.

Recent scholarship has identified problems in the measurement of party system instability. To limit the conflation of different sources of instability in party systems (e.g., electoral shifts between stable parties and instability in parties, such as mergers, splinters or new parties), this article introduces a new indicator of electoral instability in parties, tests its robustness and construct validity and demonstrates its usefulness empirically. The indicators of party instability and the accompanying data of 27 European democracies, 1987–2011, will be valuable resources in comparative research on the interplay between elite and mass behavior, party and electoral systems, and democratic consolidation.

This article introduces a model of war and peace in which leaders believe that their adversaries might be crazy types who always behave aggressively, regardless of whether it is strategically optimal to do so. In the model, two countries are involved in a dispute that can either end in a peaceful settlement or escalate into ‘limited war’ or ‘total war.’ If it is common knowledge that the leaders of the countries are strategically rational, then the only equilibrium outcome of the model is peace. Yet if a leader believes that there is a chance that her adversary is a crazy type, then even a strategically rational adversary may have an incentive to adopt a madman strategy in which he pretends to be crazy. This leads to limited war with positive probability, even when both leaders are strategically rational. The article shows that despite having two-sided incomplete information, the model has a generically unique equilibrium. Moreover, the model identifies two countervailing forces that drive equilibrium behavior: a reputation motive and a defense motive. When the prior probability that a leader is crazy decreases, the reputation motive promotes less aggressive behavior by that leader, while the defense motive pushes for more aggressive behavior. These two forces underlay several comparative statics results. For example, the study analyzes the effect of increasing the prior probability that a leader is crazy, and the effect of changing the relative military strengths of the countries, on the equilibrium behavior of both leaders. The analysis also characterizes the conditions under which the madman strategy is profitable (or not), which contributes to the debate in the literature about its effectiveness.

I develop a theory of the emergence of minority and majority governments in multiparty parliamentary systems. I study a general bargaining environment with a policy space of arbitrary finite dimension, any number of political parties, and a general class of preferences over the government agreement space. I find that only majority governments form in the absence of significant political disagreement. However, I show that, except for knife-edge situations, minority government are formed with positive probability when parties represented in parliament are sufficiently ideologically polarized.

The European sovereign debt crisis continues to hold Europe and the world captive. Will the euro and the fiscal mechanism of the eurozone survive? And how effective is the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP)? Do the euro countries generally fail to comply with the rules of fiscal governance, or does the eurozone need a more member-specific fiscal mechanism? This article examines whether and how the SGP influenced the development of government debt making in the euro countries after the introduction of the common currency. While the SGP could not prevent euro countries from exceeding their deficits, this study’s synthetic control analysis reveals that the mechanism has effectively reduced the overall government debt of euro countries since 1999. In particular, donor countries were able to control governmental spending, while many recipient countries—including Greece, Portugal and Italy—have increased government debt ever since, resulting in the European sovereign debt crisis. This suggests that while the SGP effectively constrained overall government debt making, a more sophisticated mechanism is required for safeguarding compliance in large recipient countries.

Governments’ party identifications can indicate the types of economic policies they are likely to pursue. A common rule of thumb is that left-party governments are expected to pursue policies for lower unemployment, but which may cause inflation. Right-party governments are expected to pursue lower inflation policies. How do these expectations shape the inflation forecasts of monetary policy bureaucrats? If there is a mismatch between the policies, bureaucrats expect governments to implement, and those that they actually do, forecasts will be systematically biased. Using US Federal Reserve Staff’s forecasts we test for executive partisan biases. We find that irrespective of actual policy and economic conditions forecasters systematically overestimate future inflation during left-party presidencies and underestimate future inflation during right-party ones. Our findings suggest that partisan heuristics play an important part in monetary policy bureaucrats’ inflation expectations.

The logic of historical explanation obliges one to understand temporality as a moderator of various effects on political outcomes. Temporal problems remain in the empirical analysis of political phenomena, however, especially as it pertains to categorical data and long-term time dependence. Many theories in political science assert that sequencing matters or that political outcomes are path dependent, but they remain untested (or improperly tested) assertions for which sequence analysis may be valuable. This article briefly reviews the disciplinary origins of sequence analysis and applies the method in order to understand bargaining between actors during national crises. Finally, it explores the robustness of a commonly used sequence analysis metric. The ability to demonstrate and separate sequential effects from accumulative effects—made possible through sequence analysis—constitutes a major step in political science toward analyses that are truly time sensitive.

Empirical analyses in social science frequently confront quantitative data that are clustered or grouped. To account for group-level variation and improve model fit, researchers will commonly specify either a fixed- or random-effects model. But current advice on which approach should be preferred, and under what conditions, remains vague and sometimes contradictory. This study performs a series of Monte Carlo simulations to evaluate the total error due to bias and variance in the inferences of each model, for typical sizes and types of datasets encountered in applied research. The results offer a typology of dataset characteristics to help researchers choose a preferred model.

Africa’s arbitrary country borders have been seized upon as sources of “natural experiments”: having randomly assigned people to different country treatments, differences in outcomes on either side of the border can then be attributed to the institutions, demographics, or policies put in place in each country. While methodologically attractive, the use of African borders as sources of natural experiments presents several potential pitfalls. We describe these pitfalls—some common to all studies that employ jurisdictional boundaries, some unique to African borders—and offer guidelines for overcoming them. We conclude that African cross-border studies can provide research advantages similar to well-executed comparative case studies, but that they frequently offer weaker inferential leverage than is claimed.

How do marginal voters differ from regular voters? This article develops a method for comparing the partisan preferences of regular voters to those marginal voters whose turnout decisions are influenced by exogenous factors and applies it to two sources of variation in turnout in the United States—weather and election timing. In both cases, marginal voters are over 20 percentage points more supportive of the Democratic Party than regular voters—a significant divide. The findings suggest that the expansion or contraction of the electorate can have important consequences. Moreover, the findings suggest that election results do not always reflect the preferences of the citizenry, because the marginal citizens who may stay home have systematically different preferences than those who participate. Finally, the methods developed in the article may enable future researchers to compare regular and marginal voters on many different dimensions and in many different electoral settings.