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 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.

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.

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.

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.

The possibility that actors strategically condition their behavior on partially unobservable factors poses a grave challenge to causal inference, particularly if only some of the actors whose behavior we analyze are at risk of experiencing the outcome of interest. We present a crisis bargaining model that indicates that targets can generally prevent war by arming. We then create a simulated data set where the model is assumed to perfectly describe interactions for those states engaged in crisis bargaining, which we assume most pairs of states are not. We further assume researchers cannot observe which states are engaged in crisis bargaining, although observable variables might serve as proxies. We demonstrate that a naïve design would falsely (and unsurprisingly) indicate a positive relationship between arming and war. More importantly, we then evaluate the performance of matching, instrumental variables, and statistical backwards induction. The latter two show some promise, but matching fares poorly.

What factors make it more likely that non-state organizations will target civilians as a political strategy? This study examines targeting civilians as a tactical and normative choice, and hypothesizes that the targeting of civilians (compared to the general use of violence) is a function of the ideological make-up of organizations, organization weakness and state repression. Other factors related to organizational capability will not have a differential impact on the likelihood that an organization will target civilians for violence. This article uses data from the Minorities at Risk Organizational Behavior database to examine these issues with respect to ethno-political organizations. It argues that the typical analytic focus on general violence obscures understanding of the factors that lead to targeting civilians. It finds that targeting civilians—while similar in some respects to the use of general violence—is different, particularly with respect to organizational ideology.

What would Israel’s economy have looked like without the 2000 Palestinian Intifada? This article examines this counterfactual question by statistically comparing the economic growth trajectories of Israel and a “synthetic” Israel, which is constructed by applying a method proposed by Abadie and Gardeazabal (2003) and Abadie, Diamond and Hainmueller (2010, 2014). The results of the analysis suggest that Israel’s per capita gross domestic product during the Second Intifada was reduced by an average of about $2,003 per year (in 2005 US dollars). This amounts to about 8.6 percent of the 2000 baseline level. In the case of the Second Intifada, the opportunity cost of conflict was indeed substantial and significant.

A large class of spatial models of elections converges upon a single prediction: a candidate’s vote share increases in the congruence between her platform and the median voter’s preferences. Though considerable empirical research provides support for this prediction, these studies have not adequately identified the effects of platform positioning net of other factors. In this paper, we study the impact of challenger moderation on vote shares using data from 444 US House elections from 1996 to 2006 in which successive challengers competed against a common incumbent. Our findings are largely null. We uncover no evidence that challengers increase their vote shares by adopting more moderate platform positions. This finding is robust across a wide range of model specifications and subsets of districts.

Party identification and issue preferences are central explanatory factors in many voting choice models. Their effects on party preferences are usually understood to be additive. That is, issue preferences’ impact on party utilities is assumed to be the same among both party identifiers and nonidentifiers. This article suggests an alternative model in which party identification moderates the impact of issues on the vote. The impact of issue preferences on party utilities should be weaker among voters who identify with a party. This hypothesis is tested using data from four recent Dutch election studies. The results show that identifying with a party substantially weakens the issue preference effect on party evaluations, particularly for the party with which a voter identifies.

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.

A large literature argues that public opinion is vulnerable to various types of framing and cue effects. However, we lack evidence on whether existing findings, which are typically based on lab experiments involving low-salience issues, travel to salient and contentious political issues in real-world voting situations. We examine the relative importance of issue frames, partisan cues, and their interaction for opinion formation using a survey experiment conducted around a highly politicized referendum on immigration policy in Switzerland. We find that voters responded to frames and cues, regardless of their direction, by increasing support for the position that is in line with their pre-existing partisan attachment. This reinforcement effect was most visible among low knowledgeable voters that identified with the party that owned the issue. These results support some of the previous findings in the political communication literature, but at the same time also point toward possible limits to framing effects in the context of salient and contested policy issues.