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.

Anti-black prejudice affects how some citizens evaluate black candidates. What does it take to reduce the role of prejudice in these evaluations? Using logical implications of relevant psychological phenomena, this article shows that repeated exposure to counter-stereotypical information is insufficient to reduce evaluative prejudice. Instead, citizens must associate this prejudice with adverse effects for themselves in contexts that induce them to rethink their existing racial beliefs. These findings explain important disagreements in empirical prejudice research, as only some empirical research designs supply the conditions for prejudice reduction predicted here. This study also clarifies why similarly situated citizens react so differently to counter-stereotypical information. In sum, we find that prejudice change is possible, but in a far narrower set of circumstances than many scholars claim.

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.

This article develops a game-theoretic model that reconciles three facts: (1) fraud is pervasive in non-competitive elections, (2) domestic and international monitoring of elections have become nearly universal and (3) incumbent regimes often invite monitoring and still cheat. The incumbent regime commits fraud to manipulate the information generated by a non-competitive election before a political interaction with some audience. The audience expects fraud, so the incumbent commits fraud because she would appear weak if not doing so. Increasing the visibility of fraud with monitoring is valuable because it lowers the equilibrium level of costly fraud without changing how popular the incumbent appears. The core results hold under multiple extensions, which produce a rich set of comparative static results.

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.

We present a model and a laboratory experiment on the informativeness of debate, varying both informational and institutional variables. The informational variable we focus on is a novel factor affecting the extent to which audience members can learn from exposure to unpersuasive arguments. The more easily a listener can learn from an argument she finds unpersuasive, the greater the risk that the speaker will alienate this listener when she fails to persuade her. We find a strong interaction between speakers’ responsiveness to that risk and the institutions of debate. When listeners can learn from unpersuasive arguments, many speakers are discouraged from attempting persuasion, irrespective of the debate rules we consider. In contrast, when listeners cannot learn from unpersuasive arguments, debate rules affect speakers’ willingness to engage in persuasion.

The nonverbal display of confidence is strongly associated with leadership and power. However, its importance for the persuasiveness of campaign messages has not been explored. How important is showing confidence for a political candidate’s ratings? How does confidence condition the effect of the quality of a candidate’s arguments? This article addresses these questions using an innovative experimental approach that makes it possible to better isolate the impact of the candidate’s nonverbal confidence and the quality of his message. While both of these aspects influence voters’ perceptions of the candidate’s electability and qualifications, the nonverbal dimension matters more when it comes to electability. This research contributes to the study of nonverbal communication in elections by expanding the focus of inquiry beyond the effect of pure emotions (happiness or anger) and facial traits.

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.

The institution of judicial review is an important mechanism of holding the government legally accountable, nevertheless questions remain about its proper role in a separation of powers system. This article analyzes the effect of judicial review on the policy-making process from an expertise perspective. It shows that the exercise of non-expert judicial review can induce more informed policies and that non-expert courts have incentives to exercise judicial review in a manner consistent with institutional concerns for expertise. In addition to its importance as a mechanism of legal accountability, our analysis underscores another virtue of judicial review: legal review of governmental policy by non-expert courts can improve the amount of information available for policy making. The article contributes to a literature on the scope and legitimacy of judicial review and has broader implications for understanding the effect of institutional checks and balances on the quality of policy making.

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.

Many political scientists and economists have argued that coalition governments tend to accumulate more debt than single-party governments do, but the evidence for this proposition is mixed. This article argues that only some coalition governments are more likely to increase public debt than single-party governments: those in which parties are unable to make credible promises to their partners about future policy. It introduces the concept of ‘commitment potential’ within coalitions and proposes a way of measuring it. The study evaluates its theoretical claims using data on 20 advanced democracies observed over a period of almost 50 years. It finds that multiparty governments with high commitment potential do not, on average, accumulate more debt than single-party governments, but that governments with low commitment potential do.

This paper uses a regression discontinuity design to estimate the degree to which incumbents scare off challengers with previous officeholder experience. The estimates indicate a surprisingly small amount of scare-off, at least in cases where the previous election was nearly tied. As Lee and others have shown (and as we confirm for our samples) the estimated party incumbency advantage in these same cases is quite large—in fact, it is about as large as the average incumbency advantage for all races found using other approaches. Drawing from previous estimates of the electoral value of officeholder experience, we thus calculate that scare-off in these cases accounts for only about 5–7 percent of the party incumbency advantage. We show that these patterns are similar in elections for US House seats, statewide offices and US senate seats, and state legislative seats.

Given similar economic distress indicators, why do some states enter into International Monetary Fund (IMF) programs while others do not? Building on extant studies of IMF program participation that highlight the importance of various economic and political determinants, this article proposes an argument focusing on the political incentives of the IMF and a borrowing country when they engage in IMF program negotiations. Specifically, the study develops a domestic politics argument to highlight the interactions among sovereignty costs, competence costs, economic conditions and domestic regime types, and tests the argument using a cross-national time-series dataset of all IMF agreements between 1970 and 2006. It finds that when the economic crisis is mild, democracies are less likely than non-democracies to enter IMF programs, but that when the economic crisis is severe, democracies are more likely to do so than their autocratic counterparts. The article attributes this tendency to democratic leaders’ electoral vulnerability and shows that these patterns become more pronounced as elections draw near.

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.

There are three fundamental duration dynamics of civil conflicts: time until conflict onset, conflict duration, and time until conflict recurrence. Theoretical and empirical models of war usually focus on one or at most two aspects of these three important duration dynamics. We present a new split-population seemingly unrelated duration estimator that treats pre-conflict duration, conflict duration, and post-conflict duration as interdependent processes thus permitting improved predictions about the onset, duration, and recurrence of civil conflict. Our findings provide support for the more fundamental idea that prediction is dependent on a good approximation of the theoretically implied underlying data-generating process. In addition, we account for the fact that some countries might never experience these duration dynamics or become immune after experiencing them in the past.

Empirical political science is not simply about reporting evidence; it is also about coming to conclusions on the basis of that evidence and acting on those conclusions. But whether a result is substantively significant––strong and certain enough to justify acting upon the belief that the null hypothesis is false––is difficult to objectively pin down, in part because different researchers have different standards for interpreting evidence. Instead, this article advocates judging results according to their “substantive robustness,” the degree to which a community with heterogeneous standards for interpreting evidence would agree that the result is substantively significant. This study illustrates how this can be done using Bayesian statistical decision techniques. Judging results in this way yields a tangible benefit: false positives are reduced without decreasing the power of the test, thus decreasing the error rate in published results.

When and why ethnic groups rebel remains a central puzzle in the civil war literature. In this paper, we examine how different types of inequalities affect both an ethnic group’s willingness and opportunity to fight. We argue that political and economic inter-group inequalities motivate ethnic groups to initiate a fight against the state, and that intra-group economic inequality lowers their elite’s costs of providing the necessary material and/or purposive incentives to overcome collective action problems inherent to rebel recruitment. We therefore predict that internally unequal ethnic groups excluded from power and/or significantly richer or poorer relative to the country’s average are most likely to engage in a civil war. To assess our claim empirically, we develop a new global measure of economic inequality by combining high-resolution satellite images of light emissions, spatial population data, and geocoded ethnic settlement areas. After validating our measure at the country- and group level, we include it in a standard statistical model of civil war onset and find considerable support for our theoretical prediction: greater economic inequality within an ethnic group significantly increases the risk of conflict, especially if political or economic inequalities between groups provide a motive.

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.