This paper explores the relationship between malapportionment and blatant electoral fraud. Although blatant electoral fraud enables incumbents to win elections, it may undermine legitimacy and provoke protests. Malapportionment also helps the incumbent succeed by assigning larger portions of seats to party strongholds, yet its key features differ from electoral fraud. Because malapportionment neither involves coercion nor overt fraud, it is less likely to be followed by reactionary protests. But, it is an inflexible electioneering strategy, because reapportionment leads to difficult coordination problems among ruling legislators. Cross-national statistical analyses of 98 countries (1993–2012) show that, although malapportionment does not affect whether leaders use election violence and electoral cheating, political leaders become less dependent upon the simultaneous use of these fraudulent strategies when high levels of malapportionment are already endowed. The results suggest that although governments might continue to use specific types of blatant electoral fraud even when the levels of malapportionment are high, malapportionment allows governments to be more selective with combining different methods of blatant electoral fraud.

In many countries, constitutional amendments require the direct approval of voters, but the consequences of fundamental changes to the powers and operations of the state are difficult to anticipate. The referendums literature suggests that citizens weigh their prior beliefs about the merits of proposals against the heuristic provided by the partisanship of the proposer, but the relative salience of these factors across constitutional issue areas remains underexplored. This paper examines the determinants of citizen preferences on 12 diverse constitutional issues, based on a novel survey experiment in Japan. We show that support for amendments is greater when its proposer is described as non-partisan. However, constitutional ideology moderates this effect. Those who prefer idealistic constitutions that elevate national traditions tend to value proposals that expand government powers, compared to those who prefer pragmatic constitutions that constrain government authority. These results highlight the significance of constitutional beliefs that are independent of partisanship.

The world population of Muslims has increased exponentially in the past decade. Why is the world's Muslim population growing so quickly? This study offers a new theoretical perspective: the growth of the worldwide Muslim population is a result of a series of terrorist campaigns that inspire non-Muslims to convert to Islam. For empirical testing, this study employs a cross-national, time-series analysis of 152 countries from 1970 to 2007. Although there is lack of data on conversions that follow terrorist campaigns for a direct test of the theory, this study finds a correlation between terrorist attacks and growth of the Muslim population. This finding is robust and consistent even after controlling for salient demographic reasons for growth, such as the level of fertility and immigration.