Motivated by polar extremes of monopartisanship and nonpartisanship in existing literature on parties in legislatures, we introduce and analyze a more moderate theory of competitive partisan lawmaking. The distinguishing feature of competitive partisanship is that the minority party, although disadvantaged, has some guaranteed opportunities to influence lawmaking. Our analytic framework focuses on two dimensions of parties in legislatures: agenda-based competition, operationalized as a minority party right to make an amendment to the majority party’s proposal, and resource-based competition, characterized as the ability of both party leaders to use transferable resources when building winning or blocking coalitions. Building on the canonical model, we find that giving voice to the minority party in either one of these ways alone results in outcomes that, on the whole, are less lopsided and more moderate than those predicted by the existing monopartisan and nonpartisan theories.

In this paper, I examine the systemic effects of campaign spending, looking at outcomes at the level of the legislature rather than the individual seat. Using a difference-in-differences design, I show that state-level corporate campaign contribution bans have a large effect on electoral outcomes at the legislature level. A 1 percentage-point increase in the Democratic (or Republican) party’s share of all contributions in an electoral cycle is estimated to increase its share of the legislature by roughly half a percentage point. Policy outcomes as well as campaign finance reforms occur at the legislature level; understanding the systemic rather than individual-level effect of campaign spending is therefore directly relevant. Aggregating estimated effects of individual-level campaign finance would not produce this same estimate owing to spillovers and other strategic dynamics. Taken together, the analyses suggest that contribution bans have important electoral effects and thus point to the systemic effects of campaign spending.

Research on autocratic regimes in comparative politics and international relations often uses categorical typologies of autocratic regimes to distinguish among different forms of autocracy. This paper introduces historical data on dozens of features of dictatorships to estimate latent dimensions of autocratic rule. We identify three time-varying dimensions of autocracy that correspond to ideal types proposed in the literature: party dominance, military rule, and personalism. We show that dimensions of autocratic rule are orthogonal to commonly-used measures of democracy–autocracy, and compare these dimensions to existing typologies of autocracies, showing that time-varying information on personalism is unique. We discuss a measurement model of personalism and illustrate the time-varying features of this measure in applied research on conflict initiation and regime collapse.

This article discusses the methodological challenges of legislative surveys. Following an overview of different types of survey biases, the article argues that self-selection and misreporting are the most critical problems for legislative surveys. In order to identify the self-selection and misreporting biases, we compare the answers with a survey from Swiss members of parliament with their observed behavior in the parliament. The empirical analysis shows that the survey sample has a substantial misreporting bias. We conclude that the parliamentarian’s attitude toward the survey object is strongly linked to their response. These issues should be addressed to improve the design and quality of legislative surveys.

What attracts voters to far-right parties? Emphasizing the repercussions of far-right parties' past achievements on the mobilization of voters' electoral demand, this paper develops an argument of context-dependent strategic far-right voting. Far-right parties seek to mobilize on a combination of demand for nativist policies and anti-establishment protest sentiment. Their capacity of doing so, however, critically depends on the strategic incentives they supply. My findings from a comparative analysis based on six waves of the European Election Study show that far-right parties' past attainment of legislative strength boosts the credibility of their policy appeal and broadens the scope of their protest appeal whereas their participation in government jeopardizes their capacity to mobilize on popular discontent.

This article explores empirically how different types of labor market inequality affect policy preferences in post-industrial societies. I argue that the two main conceptualizations of labor market vulnerability identified in the insider–outsider literature are complementary: labor market risks are shaped by both labor market status—whether an individual is unemployed, in a temporary or permanent contract—and occupational unemployment—whether an individual is in an occupation with high or low unemployment. As a result, both status and occupation are important determinants of individual labor market policy preferences. In this paper, I first briefly conceptualize the link between labor market divides, risks and policy preferences, and then use cross-national survey data to investigate the determinants of preferences.

This study uses a discordant sibling-based design to assess the extent to which education is proxying for pre-adult experiences and predispositions rooted in the family. It draws on a unique data set that combines official voting records with Census data on siblings and their parents. The results show that the association between education and voting is considerably reduced when parental education, parental voting and unobserved characteristics that are shared by siblings within the same family are taken into account. This finding is confirmed by a variety of robustness checks. We end with a discussion of the benefits and limitations of sibling-based designs for testing causal hypotheses.

In many elections around the world, voters choose between politicians who differ not only in personal background and policy promises, but also in their history of dishonest electoral conduct. While recent literature has begun to investigate the conditions under which voters punish electoral malfeasance, we know relatively little about whether they penalize different forms of illicit activities carried out by politicians differently. In this paper, we present the results of a candidate choice experiment embedded in a survey fielded prior to the 2016 Romanian local election. We asked voters to choose between two hypothetical candidates, randomly varying several attributes, including different illicit electoral activities. We find that citizens tolerate some forms of political malfeasance less than others depending on how much that malfeasance infringes on voters' autonomy. Informational campaigns carried out by prosecutorial agencies also affect how much voters punish different illicit exchanges.

As part of a general inquiry into mental mechanisms that operate outside conscious awareness, experimental psychology has recently established the presence and importance of “implicit attitudes.” The purpose of our paper is to compare the roles played by implicit and explicit prejudice in politics. Relying on two national surveys of the American electorate that included standard measures of implicit and explicit prejudice, we provide a systematic comparison of prejudice’s political effects: for the candidates Americans choose, the policies they favor, the assessments they make of government performance, and the racialized information they absorb. We find that implicit and explicit prejudice provide radically different pictures of racial politics in America.

Territorial disputes are prone to conflict because of the value of territory to publics, whether due to its strategic and material worth, or to its intangible, symbolic value. Yet despite the implications of the distinction for both theory and policy, empirically disentangling the material from the symbolic has posed formidable methodological challenges. We propose a set of tools for assessing the nature of individual territorial attachment, drawing on a series of survey experiments in Israel. Using these tools, we find that a substantial segment of the Jewish population is attached to the disputed West Bank territory for intangible reasons, consisting not only of far-right voters but also of voters of moderate-right and centrist parties. This distribution considerably narrows the bargaining space of leaders regardless of coalitional configurations. Our empirical analysis thus illustrates how the distribution of territorial preferences in the domestic population can have powerful implications for conflict and its resolution.

In this paper, we examine consequences of party system nationalization. We argue that the degree to which party systems are nationalized should affect the provision of public benefits by governments. When political competition at the national level occurs between parties that represent specific sub-national constituencies, then the outcomes of policy debates and conflicts can lead to an undersupply of nationally focused public services. We test our argument using data on DPT and measles immunization rates for 58 countries. We find that low party system nationalization is a barrier to improvements in these health indicators. Specifically, a substantial presence of regionalized parties hinders states’ convergence toward international heath standards.

Electoral violence is conceived of as violence that occurs contemporaneously with elections, and as violence that would not have occurred in the absence of an election. While measuring the temporal aspect of this phenomenon is straightforward, measuring whether occurrences of violence are truly related to elections is more difficult. Using machine learning, we measure electoral violence across three elections using disaggregated reporting in social media. We demonstrate that our methodology is more than 30 percent more accurate in measuring electoral violence than previously utilized models. Additionally, we show that our measures of electoral violence conform to theoretical expectations of this conflict more so than those that exist in event datasets commonly utilized to measure electoral violence including ACLED, ICEWS, and SCAD. Finally, we demonstrate the validity of our data by developing a qualitative coding ontology.

Invalid voting and absenteeism are alternative sources of abstention under compulsory voting. Previous research failed to systematically study the mechanisms behind each form of non-voting and the relationships between them. We develop an analytical framework and an empirical strategy to jointly examine invalid voting and absenteeism in Brazil, the world’s largest democracy with mandatory voting. Using Bayesian inferential methods and analyzing both individual and district-level data, we show that less educated and politically knowledgeable citizens are less likely to vote and, when they do, they are typically unable to successfully complete their ballot. Unlike absenteeism, invalid voting also has a political dimension reflecting voters’ disenchantment with elections and democratic performance. Both sources of abstention coexist and, together, undermine electoral participation.

Though the demographic characteristics of judicial nominees in the United States have gained increased political attention in recent years, relatively little is known about how they affect public opinion toward judicial nominees and courts. We evaluate these relationships in the context of race and gender using a conjoint experiment conducted during a recent vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court. We find consistent evidence that Americans are more supportive of coracial nominees, particularly among white Republicans and Black Democrats, but no evidence of a similar effect on the basis of gender. Our results have important implications for theories of descriptive representation and suggest limits to its use as a means for generating political support for judicial nominees.

Political selection is important to authoritarian regime survival. Although selection outcomes are often observed, it is difficult to decipher elites’ logic of decision-making due to their multidimensional preference and the opaque process. Employing a conjoint experiment conducted among over 300 government officials in China, this paper unpacks multidimensional elite preference in entry-level political selection. It finds that while elites comply with institutional norms by selecting candidates based on competence and loyalty, they also take into account personal preference by favoring those with political connections. Kinship ties to government increase a candidate’s chance by over 20 percentage points, even though the candidate is not deemed more competent or loyal. These findings demonstrate that authoritarian elites do not always follow the logic of regime survival; there exists an agency problem in political selection that could undermine the effectiveness of the ruling class over time.

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.

Recent empirical work scrutinizes the ability of economic sanctions to destabilize targeted leaders. Limitations in data and modeling choices, however, may have inflated estimates of sanctions’ efficacy. I propose a unified theoretical model, incorporating the possibility that leaders targeted with threats and imposed sanctions differ in baseline risks from those who are not. I combine this hazards approach with an empirical strategy to account for differences in ex ante risks and improved data on leader failure. This approach uncovers a considerably more modest effect. Sanctions rarely destabilize their targets.

A wealth of research documents the rise of affective polarization, or the increasing disdain for the out-party in American politics. In this paper, we analyze ANES data from 1988 to 2016 to investigate the contribution of core value polarization to the phenomenon of out-party enmity. We find that greater differences in fundamental principles relate significantly to emotionally intense evaluations of the opposing party and its candidates, as well as the ideological out-group, independent of issue attitude extremity and the strength of one's partisan and ideological identities. Moreover, ANES panel data from 1992 to 1996 reveal that past value extremity promotes future affective polarization. These results are important for our understanding of the nature and extent of value-based polarization in American politics.

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.

Behavioral economists and social psychologists have shown that extrinsic motivations can crowd out intrinsic motivations to act. This study examines this crowding out effect in the context of legislative behavior. By exploiting the federal nature of Swiss elections, we examine if response rates to requests of voters residing inside or outside a candidate's district vary based on the electoral competition candidate legislators face. We report two main findings. First, we find a high response rate among Swiss candidates (66 percent) which remains high for voters who reside outside a candidate's district (59 percent) suggesting that intrinsic motivations are a key driver of constituency effort. Second, the response to voters who reside inside a candidate's district is more pronounced for candidates confronted with a high degree of electoral competition. This suggests that extrinsic motivations are important for constituency work, but at the same time their presence might crowd out intrinsic motivations. This evidence suggests that the relationship between electoral competition and responsiveness might be less straightforward than assumed.