In small samples, maximum likelihood (ML) estimates of logit model coefficients have substantial bias away from zero. As a solution, we remind political scientists of Firth's (1993, Biometrika, 80, 27–38) penalized maximum likelihood (PML) estimator. Prior research has described and used PML, especially in the context of separation, but its small sample properties remain under-appreciated. The PML estimator eliminates most of the bias and, perhaps more importantly, greatly reduces the variance of the usual ML estimator. Thus, researchers do not face a bias-variance tradeoff when choosing between the ML and PML estimators—the PML estimator has a smaller bias and a smaller variance. We use Monte Carlo simulations and a re-analysis of George and Epstein (1992, American Political Science Review, 86, 323–337) to show that the PML estimator offers a substantial improvement in small samples (e.g., 50 observations) and noticeable improvement even in larger samples (e.g., 1000 observations).

Scholars studying opinion representation often rely on a survey question that asks about the “most important problem” (MIP) facing the nation. While it is known that MIP responses reflect public priorities, less is known about their connection to policy preferences. This article directly addresses the issue. First, it conceptualizes policy preferences and MIP responses, specifically considering the possibility that the latter may be either policy or outcome based. Second, using aggregate-level data from the United States and the United Kingdom, it then examines the correspondence between public spending preferences and MIP responses over time. The results indicate that MIP responses and spending preferences tap very different things, and that using MIP responses substantially understates the representational relationship between public opinion and policy.

As non-democratic regimes have adapted to the proliferation of social media, they have began actively engaging with Twitter to enhance regime resilience. Using data taken from the Twitter accounts of Venezuelan legislators during the 2014 anti-Maduro protests in Venezuela, we fit a topic model on the text of the tweets and analyze patterns in hashtag use by the two coalitions. We argue that the regime’s best strategy in the face of an existential threat like the narrative developed by La Salida and promoted on Twitter was to advance many competing narratives that addressed issues unrelated to the opposition’s criticism. Our results show that the two coalitions pursued different rhetorical strategies in keeping with our predictions about managing the conflict advanced by the protesters. This article extends the literature on social media use during protests by focusing on active engagement with social media on the part of the regime. This approach corroborates and expands on recent research on inferring regime strategies from propaganda and censorship.

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.

Many citizens abstain from the political process, and the reasons for this abstention are of great interest and importance. Most scholars and pundits assume that greater electoral competition and the increased chance of pivotality will motivate citizens to participate. We test this hypothesis through a large-scale field experiment that exploits the rare opportunity of a tied election for major political office. Informing citizens that an upcoming election will be close has little mobilizing effect. Any effect that we do detect is concentrated among a small set of frequent voters. The evidence suggests that increased pivotality is not a solution to low turnout and the predominant models of turnout focusing on pivotality are of little practical use.

Inattentive respondents introduce noise into data sets, weakening correlations between items and increasing the likelihood of null findings. “Screeners” have been proposed as a way to identify inattentive respondents, but questions remain regarding their implementation. First, what is the optimal number of Screeners for identifying inattentive respondents? Second, what types of Screener questions best capture inattention? In this paper, we address both of these questions. Using item-response theory to aggregate individual Screeners we find that four Screeners are sufficient to identify inattentive respondents. Moreover, two grid and two multiple choice questions work well. Our findings have relevance for applied survey research in political science and other disciplines. Most importantly, our recommendations enable the standardization of Screeners on future surveys.

Political scientists interested in estimating how public opinion varies by constituency have developed several strategies for supplementing limited constituency survey data with additional sources of information. We present two evaluation studies in the previously unexamined context of British constituency-level opinion: an external validation study of party vote share in the 2010 general election and a cross-validation of opinion toward the European Union. We find that most of the gains over direct estimation come from the inclusion of constituency-level predictors, which are also the easiest source of additional information to incorporate. Individual-level predictors combined with post-stratification particularly improve estimates from unrepresentative samples, and geographic local smoothing can compensate for weak constituency-level predictors. We argue that these findings are likely to be representative of applications of these methods where the number of constituencies is large.

A small but growing social science literature examines the correspondence between experimental results obtained in lab and field settings. This article reviews this literature and reanalyzes a set of recent experiments carried out in parallel in both the lab and field. Using a standardized format that calls attention to both the experimental estimates and the statistical uncertainty surrounding them, the study analyzes the overall pattern of lab-field correspondence, which is found to be quite strong (Spearman's ρ = 0.73). Recognizing that this correlation may be distorted by the ad hoc manner in which lab-field comparisons are constructed (as well as the selective manner in which results are reported and published), the article concludes by suggesting directions for future research, stressing in particular the need for more systematic investigation of treatment effect heterogeneity.

Although equality figures prominently in many foundational theories of democracy, liberal and electoral conceptions of democracy have dominated empirical political science research on topics like political regimes, democratization and democratic survival. This paper develops the concept of egalitarian democracy as a regime that provides de facto protection of rights and freedoms equally across the population, distributes resources in a way that enables meaningful political participation for all citizens and fosters an environment in which all individuals and social groups can influence political and governing processes. Using new indicators from the Varieties of Democracy project, the paper develops and presents measures of these important concepts, demonstrates their relationship to existing measures, and illustrates their utility for advancing the study of democracy in ways that more fully embrace the richness of democratic theory.

We apply recent advances in machine learning to measure Congressmember personality traits using floor speeches from 1996 to 2014. We also demonstrate the superiority of text-based measurement over survey-based measurement by showing that personality traits are correlated with survey response rates for members of Congress. Finally, we provide one empirical application showcasing the importance of personality on congressional behavior.

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.

The economic voting literature has been dominated by the incumbency-oriented hypothesis, in which voters reward or punish governments at the ballot box according to the nation's economic performance. The alternative (policy-oriented) hypothesis, in which voters favor parties that are closest to their issue position(s), has been neglected in this literature. This article explores policy voting with respect to an archetypal economic policy issue—unemployment. Voters who favor lower unemployment should tend to vote for left parties, since they “own” the issue. Examining a large time-series cross-sectional pool of Western European nations, this study finds some evidence for economic policy voting. However, it is conditioned by incumbency. According to varied tests, left incumbents experience a net electoral cost if the unemployment rate climbs. Incumbency, then, serves to break any natural economic policy advantage that might accrue to the left due to the issue of unemployment.

This research note investigates how mainstream party strategies affect the success of radical right parties (RRPs). It is a widespread view that mainstream party accommodation of radical right core issue positions would reduce the radical right's success. Empirical evidence for this claim, however, remains inconclusive. Using party level data as well as micro-level voter transitions between mainstream and RRPs, we re-evaluate the effectiveness of accommodative strategies and also test whether they work contingent on specific conditions, e.g., the newness of radical right challengers or the existence of a cordon sanitaire. We do not find any evidence that accommodative strategies reduce radical right support. If anything, our results suggest that they lead to more voters defecting to the radical right. Our findings have important implications for the study of multi-party competition as they challenge what has become a core assumption of this literature: that accommodative strategies reduce niche party success.

Twitter is a prominent communication tool for politicians with two potential uses: as a “substitute” channel to circumvent constraints from other political arenas, or as an “amplifier” that reinforces party messages. Using a novel dataset containing tweets and parliamentary speeches by members of parliament (MPs) in seven countries, we estimate politicians’ positions and intra-party dissent on European integration. We find that MPs’ sentiment about Europe on Twitter is a valid measure of their party's position, while also uncovering intra-party disagreements. Our results suggest that most MPs amplify the partisan message, but MPs who participate less in parliamentary debate tend to have larger differences with their party on Twitter. Social media thus can free politicians from their party's grip.

We study the effects of municipal mergers using novel geocoded data on local public sector jobs and local politicians' place of residence. We find that the mergers had no effects on municipal expenditures overall after eight years. However, the mergers led to highly unequal geographic political representation in the post-merger councils among the merged municipalities. Small and politically marginalized municipalities experienced a substantial reduction in local public jobs in administration and health and social care services relative to the municipalities with stronger representation. Development of house prices suggests that the quality of the service-tax bundle deteriorated in these politically marginalized municipalities.

Invalid ballots are relatively common in countries with compulsory voting, yet there is no cross-national evidence as to who is more likely to cast a blank or spoiled ballot where voting is forced. I argue that increased rates of blank and spoiled balloting where voting is obligatory result from the behavior of the politically unknowledgeable, uninterested, untrusting, and disaffected, who are incentivized to turn out to the polls where they can be sanctioned for abstention. To test this, I conduct an individual-level examination of the influence of compulsory voting on invalid balloting across countries. I find support for my expectations with analyses of survey data from several American democracies, many of which compel electoral participation.

We present a new method to analyze party manifestos to benefit the placement of political parties per se and to advance the study of elections. Our method improves on existing manual coding approaches by (1) generating semantically complete units based on syntax, (2) standardizing units into a subject–predicate–object structure, and (3) employing a fine-grained and flexible hierarchical coding scheme. We evaluate our approach by comparing estimates for the 2002, 2006, and 2008 Austrian national elections with those yielded by previous studies that employ the entire range of available measurement strategies. We also demonstrate how we link our new manifesto data with other kind of data produced in theAustrian National Election Study, especially mass and elite (party candidate) surveys.

Researchers studying electoral participation often rely on post-election surveys. However, the reported turnout rate is usually much higher in survey samples than in reality. Survey methodology research has shown that offering abstainers the opportunity to use face-saving response options succeeds at reducing overreporting by a range of 4–8 percentage points. This finding rests on survey experiments conducted in the United States after national elections. We offer a test of the efficacy of the face-saving response items through a series of wording experiments embedded in 19 post-election surveys in Europe and Canada, at four different levels of government. With greater variation in contexts, our analyses reveal a distribution of effect sizes ranging from null to minus 18 percentage points.

The view that multiparty elections in changing authoritarian regimes should be held sooner rather than later has been increasingly under attack. Critics argue that, under conditions of low institutional development, multiparty elections may lead to violence and civil war, rather than to the peaceful allocation of authority that everyone desires. Starting from the premise that elections are strategically timed and endogenous in transitioning authoritarian regimes, that is, more likely to be held when violence is imminent, we show that for Africa, the continent with the lowest levels of political institutionalization, elections do not increase the probability of a civil war initiation. In fact, for the post-Cold War period, the holding of multiparty elections is actually associated with a substantial reduction in the probability of civil war onset. To account for this pattern, we develop an informational theory of elections held under conditions that prevail in the post-Cold War, when foreign powers are reluctant to provide direct support for dictators (or their opponents) and elections are more reflective of the true level of a leader’s strength. We argue that, under these conditions, elections may prevent the eruption of a civil war that is already imminent, through two mechanisms: they may deter a weak opposition from initiating a war they are likely to lose or they may induce a weak dictator to offer ways to share power with the opposition.

We investigate the effect of personality on prosocial behavior in a Bayesian multilevel meta-analysis (MLMA) of 15 published, interdisciplinary experimental studies. With data from the 15 studies constituting nearly 2500 individual observations, we find that the Big Five traits of Agreeableness and Openness are significantly and positively associated with prosocial behavior, while none of the other three traits are. These results are robust to a number of different model specifications and operationalizations of prosociality, and they greatly clarify the contradictory findings in the literature on the relationship between personality and prosocial behavior. Though previous research has indicated that incentivized experiments result in reduced prosocial behavior, we find no evidence that monetary incentivization of participants affects prosocial tendencies. By leveraging individual observations from multiple studies and explicitly modeling the multilevel structure of the data, MLMA permits the simultaneous estimation of study- and individual-level effects. The Bayesian approach allows us to estimate study-level effects in an unbiased and efficient manner, even with a relatively small number of studies. We conclude by discussing the limitations of our study and the advantages and disadvantages of the MLMA method.