The science of human rights requires valid comparisons of repression levels across time and space. Though extensive data collection efforts have made such comparisons possible in principle, statistical measures based on simple additive scales made them rare in practice. This article uses a dynamic measurement model that contrasts with current approaches by (1) accounting for the fact that human rights indicators vary in the level of information they provide about the latent level of repression, (2) allowing realistic descriptions of measurement uncertainty in the form of credible intervals and (3) providing a theoretical motivation for modeling temporal dependence in human rights levels. It presents several techniques, which demonstrate that the dynamic ordinal item-response theory model outperforms its static counterpart.

The literature on the determinants of democratization has long been dominated by a view that claimed a central role for economic development (‘modernization’). Acemoglu et al. (2008, 2009) have recently challenged the robustness of empirical support for the modernization hypothesis. As an alternative, they claim that democratization is likely to occur in moments of economic crisis. Brückner and Ciccone (2011) appear to offer strong support for this latter view, and claim that lagged adverse GDP shocks generated by poor rainfall generate ‘windows of opportunity’ for democratization in contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa. The current article presents evidence that Brückner and Ciccone's provocative finding does not survive several sensible robustness checks, calling into question whether their claim in fact offers new insights into the process of democratization.

This article analyzes the impact of economic voting in federal elections for the German parliament. It combines theories of coalition politics and cabinet decision making—like prime ministerial government, collective cabinet decision making and ministerial discretion—with theoretical approaches on voting behavior to test which cabinet actor voters reward for improved economic conditions. The empirical results, which are based on data from German national election studies from 1987–2009, show that the party of the chancellor (and, thus, the strongest coalition party) benefits most from a positive evaluation of economic policy outcomes. There is, however, no consistent empirical evidence that the coalition parties collectively benefit from perceived positive economic performance. Therefore the findings demonstrate that economic voting occurs in German parliamentary elections, but is targeted specifically toward the chancellor's party.

Economic integration is widely argued to increase subnational demands for independence. Yet increasingly high degrees of integration have not been associated with a commensurate growth in separatist activity. This article argues that integration is not likely to promote separatism in general because the economic benefits of integration are not uniformly positive, and are not large enough for most regions to provide for their own defense in order to sustain themselves as independent states. This argument is empirically tested using the case of post-WWII European integration, a hard test of the argument, since the European Union is the most advanced economic integration scheme in the world. The quantitative analysis supports the argument, showing that European integration is only weakly associated with a modest increase in electoral support for separatist parties. Further qualitative analysis suggests that the effect of integration is conditional on other factors as well.

The efficiency of local public goods provision and the functioning of local democracy crucially depend on the size and number of local jurisdictions. This article empirically analyzes voluntary municipal mergers in Finland. Our main focus is on aspects that have been somewhat neglected in prior empirical work: whether local democracy considerations, representation and voter preferences are involved in shaping the resulting municipal structure. The main results imply that some municipalities are forced to merge due to fiscal pressure and have to trade off political power to be accepted by their partners. The study also finds that the median voter's distance from services matters, while population size does not. The latter, somewhat surprising, observation is possibly explained by existing municipal co-operation, which already exhausts potential economies of scale.

Increasing numbers of comparative survey datasets span multiple waves. Moving beyond purely cross-sectional analyses, multilevel longitudinal analyses of such datasets should generate substantively important insights into the political, social and economic correlates of many individual-level outcomes of interest (attitudes, behaviors, etc.). This article describes two simple techniques for extracting such insights, which allow change over time in y to be a function of change over time in x and/or of a time-invariant x. The article presents results from simulation studies that assess the techniques in the presence of complications that are likely to arise with real-world data, and concludes with applications to the issues of generalized social trust and postmaterialist values, using data from World/European Values Surveys.

The Big-Issue Model predicts election outcomes based on voters’ perceptions of candidates’ ability to handle the most important issue. It provided accurate forecasts of the 2012 US presidential election. The results demonstrate the model's usefulness if one issue clearly dominates the campaign, such as the state of the economy in the 2012 election. It is also particularly valuable if economic fundamentals disagree, a situation in which forecasts from traditional political economy models suggest high uncertainty. The model provides immediate feedback to political candidates and parties on the success of their campaign and can advise them on which issues to assign the highest priority.