Most contracts, whether between voters and politicians or between house owners and contractors, are incomplete. “More law,” it typically is assumed, increases the likelihood of contract performance by increasing the probability of enforcement and/or the cost of breach. We examine a contractual relationship in which the first mover has to decide whether she wants to enter a contract without knowing whether the second mover will perform. We analyze how contract enforceability affects individual performance for exogenous preferences. Then we apply a dynamic model of preference adaptation and find that economic incentives have a nonmonotonic effect on behavior. Individuals perform a contract when enforcement is strong or weak but not with medium enforcement probabilities: Trustworthiness is “crowded in” with weak and “crowded out” with medium enforcement. In a laboratory experiment we test our model’s implications and find support for the crowding prediction. Our finding is in line with the recent work on the role of contract enforcement and trust in formerly Communist countries.

Negative campaigning is an important aspect of campaign competition but plays little or no role in existing models of campaigns. Within the context of plurality elections for a single office we model the incentives that affect the use of negative campaigning. Under simplifying but still quite general assumptions we show a number of results, including the following key conclusions: (1) for two-candidate competition the front-runner will engage in more positive and less negative campaigning than the opponent; (2) in a three-candidate contest with one candidate clearly trailing by a large margin and playing mainly a spoiler role, that candidate will only engage in positive campaigning; and (3) in any three-candidate contest, no candidate engages in negative campaigning against the weaker of his two opponents, so that to the extent there is negative campaigning, it will be directed against the front-runner or it will come from the front-runner. These results have direct empirical applications to multicandidate primaries and nonpartisan contests and can provide insight into recent general elections as well.

Scholarship on distributive politics focuses almost exclusively on the internal operations of Congress, paying particular attention to committees and majority parties. This article highlights the president, who has extensive opportunities, both ex ante and ex post, to influence the distribution of federal outlays. We analyze two databases that track the geographic spending of nearly every domestic program over a 24-year period—the largest and most comprehensive panels of federal spending patterns ever assembled. Using district and county fixed-effects estimation strategies, we find no evidence of committee influence and mixed evidence that majority party members receive larger shares of federal outlays. We find that districts and counties receive systematically more federal outlays when legislators in the president's party represent them.

Voting choices are a product of both personal attitudes and social contexts, of a personal and a social calculus. Research has illuminated the personal calculus of voting, but the social calculus has received little attention since the 1940s. This study expands our understanding of the social influences on individual choice by examining the relationship of partisan biases in media, organizational, and interpersonal intermediaries to the voting choices of Americans. Its results show that the traditional sources of social influence still dominate: Interpersonal discussion outweighs the media in affecting the vote. Media effects appear to be the product of newspaper editorial pages rather than television or newspaper reporting, which contain so little perceptible bias that they often are misperceived as hostile. Parties and secondary organizations also are influential, but only for less interested voters—who are more affected by social contexts in general. Overall, this study demonstrates that democratic citizens are embedded in social contexts that join with personal traits in shaping their voting decisions.

From an early, incorrect consensus that party identification was free of the short-term influences of political life, its aggregate, macropartisanship, drew little scholary notice. Though macropartisanship, typically seen as a biennial time series, appears essentially constant, our quarterly treatment demonstrates substantial and notably systematic movement of this crucial barometer of the U.S. party system. We demonstrate that it varies systematically with respect to time, has electoral consequences, and can be modeled as a function of economic evaluations and approval of the incumbent presidential administration. Macropartisanship, we argue, is a variable like others, subject to routine ebb and flow as citizens in the aggregate reflect their experiences of politics onto the parties. Its medium-term movements of considerable magnitude are lasting enough to matter but occur without connoting shifts in the underlying party system and can be understood without invoking the crises and convulsions of realignment theory.

The study of political institutions in general and international cooperation in particular has been beneficially influenced by the Prisoners' Dilemma (PD) game model, but there is a mistaken tendency to treat PD as representing the singular problem of collective action and cooperation. By relaxing the assumptions of 2 × 2 games and developing an alternate model of the coordination game, I show how some cooperation problems have very different properties from those found in PD. The analytical results of the two games are compared across several important dimensions: number of strategies available, number of iterations of the game, numbers of players, and the distribution of power among them. The discussion is illustrated with specific problems of international cooperation, and the implications of alternative cooperation problems for the formation and performance of international regimes are explored. The basic solutions for PD and coordination have divergent ramifications for the institutionalization, stability, and adaptability of regimes and for the role of hegemony in the international system. However, the coordination model does not replace the PD model but complements and supplements it as a way to understand the diversity of political institutions. These results are widely applicable to areas of politics beyond international relations.

A causal model of relationships between structural properties of states, civic culture attitudes of the general public, and change in level of democracy is tested with cross-national data. The model permits inferences about the possibility of unidirectional or reciprocal causation between civic culture attitudes and democracy, controlling for macrosocietal variables such as economic development, income inequality, and subcultural pluralism. Most civic culture attitudes do not have any significant impact on change in democracy. One of them, interpersonal trust, appears clearly to be an effect rather than a cause of democracy. The exception is the percentage of the general public that prefers gradual reform of society instead of revolutionary change or intransigent defense of the status quo. Support for gradual reform has a positive impact on change in democracy, and it is unrelated to a country's years of continuous democracy—findings that support the hypothesis of a unidirectional civic culture effect on democracy.

Crime victimization is an important cause of political participation. Analysis of survey data from five continents shows that individuals who report recent crime victimization participate in politics more than comparable nonvictims. Rather than becoming withdrawn or disempowered, crime victims tend to become more engaged in civic and political life. The effect of crime victimization is roughly equivalent to an additional five to ten years of education, meaning that crime victimization ranks among the most influential predictors of political participation. Prior research has shown that exposure to violence during some civil wars can result in increased political participation, but this article demonstrates that the effect of victimization extends to peacetime, to nonviolent as well as violent crimes, and across most of the world. At the same time, however, crime victimization is sometimes associated with dissatisfaction with democracy and support for authoritarianism, vigilantism, and harsh policing tactics, especially in Latin America.

Most studies of contextual influences on political attitudes and behavior have treated geographical areas as the operative social environment. As early research on social influence processes noted, the conditions that promote consensus among inhabitants of a common environment are likely to be present in formal organizations that encourage face-to-face interaction. Churches possess many of the characteristics that should maximize behavioral contagion and are thus fertile ground for the dissemination of common political outlooks. This expectation is tested by assessing the link between theological and political conservatism in 21 Protestant congregations. The theological climate in the churches is found to contribute strongly to the members' political conservatism over and above the personal commitment of respondents to traditional Christian values and a variety of social and attitudinal variables. As churches constitute the single most widespread form of voluntary organizational affiliation in the United States, their potential political impact appears to be considerable.

We challenge the widely held view that classic American voluntary groups were tiny, local, and disconnected from government. Using newly collected data to develop a theoretically framed account, we show that membership associations emerged early in U.S. history and converged toward the institutional form of the representatively governed federation. This form enabled leaders and members to spread interconnected groups across an expanding nation. At the height of local proliferation, most voluntary groups were part of regional or national federations that mirrored the structure of U.S. government. Institutionalist theories suggest reasons for this parallelism, which belies the rigid dichotomy between state and civil society that informs much current discussion of civic engagement in the United States and elsewhere.

We test three arguments about the effect of international politics on trade flows. The first argument states that trade flows are greater between states with similar interests than those with dissimilar interests, the second that trade flows are greater in democratic dyads than nondemocratic dyads, and the third that trade flows are greater between allies. We examine trade flows between the major powers from 1907 to 1990. This period provides variation on all three independent variables of interest and allows us to separate the three arguments empirically. We estimate a gravity model of trade with the above political variables added. Our results demonstrate that joint democracy and common interests increase trade in a dyad, but alliances generally do not, even when controlling for polarity of the system.

Public support for a conflict is not a blank check. Combat provides information people use to update their expectations about the outcome, direction, value, and cost of a war. Critical are fatalities—the most salient costs of conflict. I develop a rational expectations theory in which both increasing recent casualties and rising casualty trends lead to decreased support. Traditional studies neither recognize nor provide a method for untangling these multiple influences. I conduct six experiments, three on the Iraq War (two with national, representative samples) and three with a new type of panel experiment design on hypothetical military interventions. The results of hazard and ordered logit analyses of almost 3,000 subjects support a rational expectations theory linking recent casualties, casualty trends, and their interaction to wartime approval. I also examine the effects of the probability of victory, information levels, and individual characteristics on the support for war, and contrast results from representative and convenience samples.

Is electoral competition good for political selection? To address this issue, we introduce a theoretical model where ideological parties select and allocate high-valence (experts) and low-valence (party loyalists) candidates into electoral districts. Voters care about a national policy (e.g., party ideology) and the valence of their district's candidates. High-valence candidates are more costly for the parties to recruit. We show that parties compete by selecting and allocating good politicians to the most contestable districts. Empirical evidence on Italian members of parliament confirms this prediction: politicians with higher ex ante quality, measured by years of schooling, previous market income, and local government experience, are more likely to run in contestable districts. Indeed, despite being different on average, politicians belonging to opposite political coalitions converge to high-quality levels in close electoral races. Furthermore, politicians elected in contestable districts have fewer absences in parliament, due to a selection effect more than to reelection incentives.

Resolving a controversy on the relationship of development to democratization, this article expands the time period under study with panel data running from the early nineteenth century (a time where hardly any country was democratic) to the end of the twentieth century, and shows a positive and significant effect of income on the likelihood of democratic transitions and democratic consolidations. The estimations hold after I control for country and time effects and instrument for income. Results reveal that the effect of income varies across income levels and across eras. First, income has a decreasing marginal effect on democratization. In already developed (and democratized) countries, any extra growth has no further effect on the level of democracy. Second, the structure of the international system affects the resources and strategies of pro-authoritarian and pro-democratic factions in client states. The proportion of liberal democracies peaks under international orders governed by democratic hegemons, such as the post–Cold War period, and bottoms out when authoritarian great powers such as the Holy Alliance control the world system.

This article reports the findings of a series of experiments on committee decision making under majority rule. The committee members had relatively fixed preferences, so that the process was one of making decisions rather than one of problem solving. The predictions of a variety of models drawn from Economics, Sociology, Political Science and Game Theory were compared to the experimental results. One predictive concept, the core of the noncooperative game without side payments (equivalent to the majority rule equilibrium) consistently performed best. Significantly, however, even when such an outcome did not exist, the experimental results did not display the degree of unpredictability that some theoretical work would suggest. An important subsidiary finding concerns the difference between experiments conducted under conditions of high stakes versus those conducted under conditions of much lower stakes. The findings in the two conditions differed considerably, thus calling into question the political applicability of numerous social psychological experiments in which subjects had little or no motivation.

A unidimensional spatial model is proposed in this article. Although its formal structure parallels the spatial model of electoral competition, this model examines the decisions of individuals as they choose whether or not to become activists in one of two political parties. An individual “calculus of participation” is developed that is similar to the spatial interpretation of the “calculus of voting.” This calculus is then generalized by examining conditions that may hold for aggregate activism probabilities, and the relationship between the two forms is investigated. Some results are then presented which concern the distributions of activists in the two parties. These results in general conform to the existence of “party cleavages,” in which there are two stable (equilibrium) distributions of activists, such that the two parties' activists are relatively cohesive internally and relatively distinctive externally. Finally, some suggestions are offered about how this model can be combined with the spatial model of candidate competition to provide a more complete model of elections.

This study assesses the electoral impact of charges of corruption on candidates in contests for the U.S. House of Representatives in five elections from 1968 to 1978. This assessment includes a consideration of the victory or defeat of alleged or convicted corrupt candidates, and an examination of the impact of corruption charges on electoral turnout and percentage of votes polled by the accused candidates. While most candidates accused of corruption are reelected, overall they appear to suffer a loss of 6–11 percent from their expected vote. The type of corruption charge is an important determinant of vote loss. Allegations of corruption appear to have little effect on the net turnout.

The most telling criticism of political culture theory is that it has coped very inadequately with political change. There is a good reason for this: the assumptions of the political culture approach in fact lead to the expectation of continuity. But continuity can be reconciled with changes, though only changes of particular kinds. The nature of political changes consistent with culturalist assumptions and with the culturalist expectation of continuity are here specified by hypotheses about (1) the effects of changes in social context, whether “normal” or involving abrupt discontinuity, and (2) the effects of attempted revolutionary transformation.

Cabinet coalitions in multiparty parliamentary democracies lead a precarious existence. Legislative majorities can typically dismiss the cabinet at will and can sometimes force early elections through parliamentary dissolution. Since coalition termination can have substantial political consequences, it is important to understand when and why such decisions are made. To this end, we develop a model of coalition bargaining in a legislature with dismissal and dissolution powers. We use the model to identify necessary and sufficient conditions for both coalition termination and parliamentary dissolution. In contrast to several widely held maxims, we find that coalition terminations need not be the automatic consequence of exogenous shocks. Nor do opportunistic parties with favorable electoral prospects always dissolve parliament to enhance their power. Instead, decisions to terminate coalitions or call new elections result from party leaders' rational responses to the constraints of legislative and electoral institutions and the anticipated feelings of the electorate.

This article presents a model of individuals' party identification that contrasts with previous models. Past models, with the few recent exceptions noted, assume a hierarchical relationship either from identification to other aspects of political behavior, such as the perception and evaluation of issues and candidates, or from these behaviors to party identifications. The model discussed here places party within a dynamic concept of the electoral process and tests several hypotheses about factors producing changes in identifications. The first factor, consistent with the spatial-type issue voting models, estimates the effects of the relative proximity of each party to the individual's own policy preferences. Second, we examine the effect of the actual voting decision on subsequent identifications, with the expectation that if votes differ from previous identifications, there is a resulting shift in partisanship. Finally, we examine the hypothesis that identifications become less susceptible to change as people age and accumulate political experience. When combined with other research, the results indicate a model of the electoral process in which party identifications are both influenced by circumstances specific to each election and influence other behaviors. This nonrecursive model has a number of implications for the development and evolution of individual and aggregate partisanship. These implications are discussed at the end of the article.