Past studies have offered diverse estimates of the role of policy preferences, party loyalties, candidate personalities and other factors in voting decisions. Most have postulated recursive (that is, one-way) causal relationships among the central variables.

This study specifies a non-recursive simultaneous equation model and estimates its parameters for the 1972 and 1976 elections using CPS data. The estimates differ markedly from those of simple recursive models. Policy preferences appear to have much more influence on voting decisions, and party attachments much less, than was previously thought. Candidate evaluations strongly affect voters' perceptions of closeness to candidates on policy issues. Party identification may be influenced by short-term factors. Differences between 1972 and 1976 reflect the issue-oriented McGovern candidacy.

Simultaneous equation models offer no cure-all; in the absence of accepted theory many specifications are open to controversy. But future research must take account of reciprocal causal paths.

This article contrasts the “self-interest” and “symbolic politics” explanations for the formation of mass policy preferences and voting behavior. Self-interested attitudes are defined as those supporting policies that would maximize benefits and minimize costs to the individual's private material well-being. The “symbolic politics” model emphasizes pressures to make adulthood attitudes consistent with the residues of preadult socialization. We compare the two models in terms of their ability to account for whites' opposition to busing school children for racial integration of the public schools, and the role of the busing issue in presidential voting decisions, using the 1972 Center for Political Studies election study. Regression analysis shows strong effects of symbolic attitudes (racial intolerance and political conservatism) on opposition to busing, and of the busing issue on presidential voting decisions. Self-interest (e.g., having children susceptible to busing) had no significant effect upon either. It is concluded that self-interest is often overestimated as a determinant of public opinion and voting behavior because it is too rarely directly assessed empirically.

Throughout the post–World War II period the president has been called upon to make decisions concerning the use of force as a political instrument. The explanation that is offered is based upon a characterization of the president as a cybernetic human decision maker facing limitations. These limitations, in conjunction with the complexity of the environment, lead presidents to develop and use a relatively simple decision rule. The dependent variable, which is the probability of the use of force at any point in time, is explained in terms of enduring and essential concerns, which are operationalized as coming from the international, domestic, and personal environments. Data are taken from Blechman and Kaplan's Force Without War. On the basis of our estimation and evaluation, presidential decisions to use force are based on factors in all three arenas.

A decade ago, political scientists were deploring the “lost world of municipal government” and calling for systematic studies of municipal life which emphasized the political, rather than the administrative, side of urban political life. In recent years, this demand has been generously answered and urban politics is becoming one of the most richly plowed fields of political research. In terms originally introduced by David Easton, political scientists have long been concerned with inputs, but more recently they have focused their attention on other system variables, particularly the political culture and policy outputs of municipal governments.

The present paper will treat two policy outputs, taxation and expenditure levels of cities, as dependent variables. We will relate these policy choices to socio-economic characteristics of cities and to structural characteristics of their governments. Our central research concern is to examine the impact of political structures, reformed and unreformed, on policy-making in American cities.

Congressional choices about administrative procedures affect an agency's political responsiveness and the technical accuracy of its decisions. Legislators would like to design procedures so that agencies make technically sound decisions and balance the needs of competing interests in the way intended. In practice, agency procedures designed to promote technical competence often allow for political drift, and those that promote political control provide little new technical information about the consequences of policy decisions. The trade-off between technical competence and political control is captured in a model of a legislative coalition's decision about agency procedures. The choice variables are the agency's expected preferences and independence. Depending on exogenous levels of technical and political uncertainty, optimal agency procedures can maximize technical competence, maximize political control, or achieve a combination of the two.

Political scientists are becoming more self-conscious about how they connect quantitative and qualitative data in social science and about the role of systematic country studies in comparative research. As the most striking example of both practices in recent years, Robert Putnam and his collaborators' Making Democracy Work deserves more serious criticism than it has received. While Putnam's original project aimed at a precise goal—studying how a new administrative reform is institutionalized—his ultimate project aimed at nothing less than examining how differently democracy works in different sociopolitical contexts, operationalized cross-sectionally in southern and northern Italy. The sources of these differences he found in the two regions' histories, which led him to employ the quantitative interregional data he had collected for one purpose to support a model of historical development of North and South. This historical reconstruction rests largely on qualitative data; but it also rests on a set of comparative inferences about individual values and community cohesiveness in the two regions that is of questionable historical validity and innocent of structural grounding. This article applauds Putnam's joining qualitative and quantitative data but attacks his reconstruction of Italian history to fit his model of social capital.

Analysis of both district-level and aggregate time-series data from postwar House elections supports the thesis that strategic political elites play a pivotal role in translating national conditions into election results and therefore in holding members of Congress collectively accountable for the government's performance. More high-quality candidates run when prospects appear to favor their party; they also win significantly more votes and victories than other candidates in equivalent circumstances. Thus, strategic career decisions both reflect and enhance national partisan tides. The electoral importance of strategic politicians has grown over time in tandem with the trend toward candidate-centered electoral politics. This has rendered the effects of national forces less automatic, more contingent, thus threatening the capacity of elections to enforce some degree of collective responsibility.

This article presents an empirical analysis of the National Labor Relations Board, focusing on the balance the agency strikes between the interests of business and labor. It is oriented by a theoretical framework that, relative to popular models, takes a broader view of the causal structure of regulatory performance—one that simultaneously allows for presidents, congressional committees, the courts, agency staff, constituents, and economic conditions. The empirical results are instructive. All of these factors prove to have significant impacts on NLRB decisions. In addition, the core regulatory actors —Board members, staff, and constituents—are shown to engage in mutually adaptive adjustment: each is responsive to the decisions of each of the others, and their reciprocal relationships impart equilibrating properties to the system as a whole. Thus, the evidence points to a varied set of important determinants and to the dynamic nature of their interconnection. To the extent that these findings are at all characteristic of other regulatory agencies, simple popular models of regulation are likely to give anemic explanations, if not highly distorted accounts, of why agencies behave as they do.

Although Europe has experienced unprecedented numbers of refugee arrivals in recent years, there exists almost no causal evidence regarding the impact of the refugee crisis on natives’ attitudes, policy preferences, and political engagement. We exploit a natural experiment in the Aegean Sea, where Greek islands close to the Turkish coast experienced a sudden and massive increase in refugee arrivals, while similar islands slightly farther away did not. Leveraging a targeted survey of 2,070 island residents and distance to Turkey as an instrument, we find that direct exposure to refugee arrivals induces sizable and lasting increases in natives’ hostility toward refugees, immigrants, and Muslim minorities; support for restrictive asylum and immigration policies; and political engagement to effect such exclusionary policies. Since refugees only passed through these islands, our findings challenge both standard economic and cultural explanations of anti-immigrant sentiment and show that mere exposure suffices in generating lasting increases in hostility.

A central challenge in qualitative research is selecting the “negative” cases (e.g., nonrevolutions, nonwars) to be included in analyses that seek to explain positive outcomes of interest (e.g., revolutions, wars). Although it is widely recognized that the selection of negative cases is consequential for theory testing, methodologists have yet to formulate specific rules to inform this selection process. In this paper, we propose a principle—the Possibility Principle—that provides explicit, rigorous, and theoretically informed guidelines for choosing a set of negative cases. The Possibility Principle advises researchers to select only negative cases where the outcome of interest is possible. Our discussion elaborates this principle and its implications for current debates about case selection and strategies of theory testing. Major points are illustrated with substantive examples from studies of revolution, economic growth, welfare states, and war.

A simple model is used to compare, under different electoral systems, the incentives for candidates to create inequalities among otherwise homogeneous voters, by making campaign promises that favor small groups, rather than appealing equally to all voters. In this game model, each candidate generates offers for voters independently out of a distribution that is chosen by the candidate, subject only to the constraints that offers must be nonnegative and have mean 1. Symmetric equilibria with sincere voting are analyzed for two-candidate elections and for multicandidate elections under rank-scoring rules, approval voting, and single transferable vote. Voting rules that can guarantee representation for minorities in multiseat elections generate, in this model, the most severely unequal campaign promises.

A voting equilibrium arises when the voters in an electorate, acting in accordance with both their preferences for the candidates and their perceptions of the relative chances of various pairs of candidates being in contention for victory, generate an election result that justifies their perceptions. Voting equilibria always exist, and the set of equilibria can vary substantially with the choice of voting system. We compare equilibria under the plurality rule, approval voting, and the Borda system. We consider a candidate-positioning game and find that the plurality rule imposes little restriction on the position of the winning candidate in three-candidate races, while approval voting leads to a winner positioned at the median of the voter distribution. We contrast campaign activities intended to influence voter preferences with activities meant to influence only perceptions of candidate viability.

Investigating reports of marginalization from Congresswomen of color, I examine legislative practices in the 103rd and 104th Congresses to illuminate dynamics that structure hierarchies on the basis of race and gender. I advance an account of racing–gendering as a political process that silences, stereotypes, enforces invisibility, excludes, and challenges the epistemic authority of Congresswomen of color. Racing–gendering constitutes a form of interested bias operating in Congress, which has important implications for understandings of the internal operations of political institutions, the policy priorities of Congresswomen of color, the substantive representation of historically underrepresented groups, and the practice of democracy in the United States.

To examine the traditional view that challenger spending is more effective than incumbent spending, I reestimate the effects of spending using instrumental variables that affect a candidate's ability to raise campaign funds, such as candidate wealth levels. When the endogeneity of candidate spending levels is properly taken into account, the marginal effects of incumbent and challenger spending are roughly equal. In contrast to previous research showing that, because of higher marginal returns to challenger spending, the incumbent's spending advantage cannot explain high incumbent reelection rates, this article shows that in an average Senate election the incumbent's spending advantage yields a 6% increase in the incumbent's vote share. That incumbent spending wins elections has direct implications regarding the consequences of campaign finance reform. My findings imply that equalizing spending levels may significantly increase incumbent defeat rates, and caps on candidate spending may improve the chances of challengers.

Participation as amicus curiae has long been an important tactic of organized interests in litigation before the U.S. Supreme Court. We analyze amicus curiae briefs filed before the decision on certiorari and assess their impact on the Court's selection of a plenary docket. We hypothesize that one or more briefs advocating or opposing certiorari increase the likelihood of its being granted. We test this hypothesis using data from the United States Reports and Briefs and Records of the United States Supreme Court for the 1982 term. The statistical analysis demonstrates that the presence of amicus curiae briefs filed prior to the decision on certiorari significantly and positively increases the chances of the justices' binding of a case over for full treatment—even after we take into account the full array of variables other scholars have hypothesized or shown to be substantial influences on the decision to grant or deny.

This article explores the effect of domestic political competition on the escalation of international crises. It combines an incomplete information model of crisis bargaining with a simple model of two-party electoral choice. One state has two strategic actors—a government and an opposition party—both of which declare openly whether they support the use of force to alter the status quo. The rival state updates its beliefs and selects its strategy in response to both signals. The parties' payoffs depend upon a retrospective evaluation by the domestic electorate. The model shows that the inclusion of a strategic opposition party decreases the ex ante probability of war by helping to reveal information about the state's preferences. This finding has important implications for research on democracy and international conflict, since it suggests a mechanism through which democratic states can overcome informational asymmetries, which have been identified as a central obstacle to negotiation.

Crime and welfare are now widely viewed as “coded” issues that activate white Americans' negative views of blacks without explicitly raising the “race card.” But does the desire of whites to combat crime or curtail welfare really stem from their dislike of blacks? Are these not pressing problems about which Americans rightly should be concerned—apart from any associations these issues may have with race? In this paper I assess the extent to which white Americans' opposition to welfare is rooted in their attitudes toward blacks. Using conventional survey modeling techniques and a randomized survey-based experiment from a national telephone survey, I find that racial attitudes are the single most important influence on whites' welfare views. I also show that whites hold similar views of comparably described black and white welfare mothers, but that negative views of black welfare mothers are more politically potent, generating greater opposition to welfare than comparable views of white welfare mothers.

Contact with the criminal justice system is greater today than at any time in our history. In this article, we argue that interactions with criminal justice are an important source of political socialization, in which the lessons that are imprinted are antagonistic to democratic participation and inspire negative orientations toward government. To test this argument, we conduct the first systematic empirical exploration of how criminal justice involvement shapes the citizenship and political voice of a growing swath of Americans. We find that custodial involvement carries with it a substantial civic penalty that is not explained by criminal propensity or socioeconomic differences alone. Given that the carceral state has become a routine site of interaction between government and citizens, institutions of criminal justice have emerged as an important force in defining citizen participation and understandings, with potentially dire consequences for democratic ideals.

Audience costs enable leaders to make credible commitments and to communicate their intentions to their adversaries during a crisis. I explain audience costs by simultaneously modeling crisis behavior and the domestic reelection process. I assume that a leader's ability influences the outcome of a crisis. As such, voters use outcomes as a signal of their leaders' quality. Leaders have incentives to make statements that deter their enemies abroad, since these statements also enhance their standing at home. Yet, such “cheap talk” foreign policy declarations are only credible when leaders suffer domestically if they fail to fulfill their commitments. In equilibrium, false promises are only made by the least competent types of leaders. Leaders that break their promises suffer electorally. Because initial domestic conditions and institutional arrangements affect the vulnerability of leaders to these domestic costs, such factors influence the credibility of policy declarations and, therefore, the crisis outcome.

Researchers use survey experiments to establish causal effects in descriptively representative samples, but concerns remain regarding the strength of the stimuli and the lack of realism in experimental settings. We explore these issues by comparing three national survey experiments on Medicare and immigration with contemporaneous natural experiments on the same topics. The survey experiments reveal that providing information increases political knowledge and alters attitudes. In contrast, two real-world government announcements had no discernable effects, except among people who were exposed to the same facts publicized in the mass media. Even among this exposed subsample, treatment effects were smaller and sometimes pointed in the opposite direction. Methodologically, our results suggest the need for caution when extrapolating from survey experiments. Substantively, we find that many citizens are able to recall factual information appearing in the news but may not adjust their beliefs and opinions in response to this information.