Quantitative international relations scholarship has focused on analysis of the so-called dyad. Few studies have given serious thought to the definition of a dyad, or to the implications that flow from such a conceptualization. This article argues that the current approach to dyadic analysis is necessarily incomplete and at times induces incoherent pictures of the ebb and flow of interactions among actors in global politics and economics. It presents the Social Relations Model as a systematic way of analyzing the dependencies inherent in dyadic data. The study uses this model to examine militarized interstate disputes from 1816 to 2001, the trade network of 2000 and reciprocity between enemies in the treatment of prisoners of war.

What explains a party's dual decision about whether to endorse a referendum on an international treaty and whether to support that treaty in a referendum campaign? Relying on an original game of second-order electoral competition, this article argues that the relative likelihood of a party endorsing a referendum is highest at the beginning and end of the electoral cycle, and when the public supports the treaty. The study uses data on the position of 175 parties in 24 member states vis-à-vis the EU's Constitutional Treaty and its preferred mechanism of ratification to test these expectations against empirical evidence. Using a multinomial logistic regression model, it finds robust support for the argument.

The electoral success of the left across Latin America has largely been interpreted as a backlash against globalization and a manifestation of anti-market voting of citizens increasingly frustrated with their experience of representative democracy. However, studies trying to test these propositions show rather inconclusive results and face the problem of translating objective economic conditions into observable individual perceptions. This article contends that theories of subjective well-being in psychology and economics can shed light on this left turn. In particular, life satisfaction, as a manifestation of experienced utility, can help explain the electoral outcomes observed throughout the region. The findings show that support for the left is higher the more unsatisfied voters are under a right incumbent.

The mobilization of culturally rooted issues has altered political competition throughout Western Europe. This article analyzes to what extent the mobilization of immigration issues has affected how people identify with politics. Specifically, it analyzes whether voters’ left/right self-identifications over the past 30 years increasingly correspond to cultural rather than economic attitudes. This study uses longitudinal data from the Netherlands between 1980 and 2006 to demonstrate that as time progresses, voters’ left/right self-placements are indeed more strongly determined by anti-immigrant attitudes than by attitudes towards redistribution. These findings show that the issue basis of left/right identification is dynamic in nature and responsive to changes in the political environment.

Traditional economic growth regressions are not adequate to identify the role of political institutions because they assume a universal growth paradigm exists. Instead, there are distinct paradigms of investment- and innovation-based growth, and the effects of political institutions vary across them. Using a dataset covering 83 countries from 1965–2008, this study employs a mixture models estimation to identify these paradigms. It finds that state authority is critical for countries engaged in investment-based growth, and competitive political participation tempers the pace of capital accumulation but increases productivity growth. Conversely, where innovation-based growth predominates, state authority has little effect and competitive political participation slows the pace of growth. Constraints on rulers do not support investment in either paradigm.

While the importance of individual candidates in British elections has long been minimized, this article argues that early day motions (EDMs)—formal, non-binding expressions of opinion—allow backbench MPs to cultivate reputations with constituents. First, this article demonstrates that greater sponsorship of EDMs is associated with better electoral outcomes, which suggests that EDMs could help vulnerable MPs improve their electoral prospects. Secondly, a Bayesian hierarchical negative binomial hurdle model, which accounts for specific features of EDM sponsorship and is novel in political science, shows that members from electorally competitive constituencies are more likely to introduce EDMs, and introduce them more often, than members from less competitive constituencies. Moreover, this relationship has increased over the past 20 years.

Regional economic organizations (REOs) proliferate in the developed and developing world. However, there is wide variation in both their institutional structure and the degree to which they achieve their goals. This article presents a theoretical framework and empirical evidence to explain the variance in the institutional design and effectiveness of these agreements. It argues that the conditions that produce effective and broad agreements are not a function of design, but rather of exogenous factors. If countries within the REO have fewer options for world trade beyond the REO, they will develop strong institutions and make substantial use of them. This study presents a new cross-regional dataset, compiled from expert surveys, to test these arguments. It shows that expert evaluations of how well a REO functions - including its ability to meet its own goals and the ambition of those goals—hinge less on that agreement's legalization and more on the trade opportunities that REO members faced when the institution was formed.