Conventional models of clientelism often assume poor voters have little or no choice over which local broker to turn to for help. Yet communities in many clientelistic settings are marked by multiple brokers who compete for a following. Such competition makes client choices, and the preferences guiding such choices, pivotal in fueling broker support. We examine client preferences for a pervasive broker—slum leaders—in the context of urban India. To identify resident preferences for slum leaders, we conducted an ethnographically informed conjoint survey experiment with 2,199 residents across 110 slums in two Indian cities. Contra standard emphases on shared ethnicity, we find residents place heaviest weight on a broker's capability to make claims on the state. A survey of 629 slum leaders finds client-preferred traits distinguish brokers from residents. In highlighting processes of broker selection, and the client preferences that undergird them, we underscore the centrality of clients in shaping local brokerage environments.

The purpose of this paper is to specify the conditions in which parents influence the party identification and certain issue attitudes of their adolescent children (recent high school graduates). The nature and extent of the parent-adolescent attitude correspondence is first established. Next, parental as opposed to environmental explanations for this correspondence are considered. Finally, the effects on parental influence of family interaction, political interest, issue salience to the parent, and accuracy of the adolescent's perception of the parental attitude are analyzed. Issue salience and perceptual accuracy are found to have strong effects; the other variables have lesser or no effect. When issue salience and perceptual accuracy are held constant in a multivariate equation, the beta weights indicating the influence of the parent attitude on the attitude of the adolescent are very similar for all issues and party identification. It is concluded that idiosyncratic variations in successful parent-child attitude transmission can be explained by a general equation.

Somewhat paradoxically, numerous scholars in various disciplines have found that religion induces negative attitudes towards immigrants, while others find that it fuels feelings of compassion. We offer a framework that accounts for this discrepancy. Using two priming experiments conducted among American Catholics, Turkish Muslims, and Israeli Jews, we disentangle the role of religious social identity and religious belief, and differentiate among types of immigrants based on their ethnic and religious similarity to, or difference from, members of the host society. We find that religious social identity increases opposition to immigrants who are dissimilar to in-group members in religion or ethnicity, while religious belief engenders welcoming attitudes toward immigrants of the same religion and ethnicity, particularly among the less conservative devout. These results suggest that different elements of the religious experience exert distinct and even contrasting effects on immigration attitudes, manifested in both the citizenry's considerations of beliefs and identity and its sensitivity to cues regarding the religion of the target group.

Mediation is one of the most widespread techniques for preventing conflict and promoting cooperation. I examine the conditions under which mediators can facilitate cooperation by building trust between two parties. Assuming mediators have no intrinsic commitment to honesty, they can be credible trust builders in one-round interactions only if they care about the issue at stake, have a moderate ideal point, and do not find conflict to be too costly. A mediator that is solely interested in promoting cooperation, or one that is biased toward one side, will be ineffective. A desire to preserve a reputation for honesty can overcome a limited amount of bias or issue indifference.

Using two unusual surveys, this study analyzes participation in the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, comparing participants with revolution supporters, opponents, counter-revolutionaries, and the apathetic/inactive. As the analysis shows, most revolutionaries were weakly committed to the revolution's democratic master narrative, and the revolution's spectacular mobilizational success was largely due to its mobilization of cultural cleavages and symbolic capital to construct a negative coalition across diverse policy groupings. A contrast is drawn between urban civic revolutions like the Orange Revolution and protracted peasant revolutions. The strategies associated with these revolutionary models affect the roles of revolutionary organization and selective incentives and the character of revolutionary coalitions. As the comparison suggests, postrevolutionary instability may be built into urban civic revolutions due to their reliance on a rapidly convened negative coalition of hundreds of thousands, distinguished by fractured elites, lack of consensus over fundamental policy issues, and weak commitment to democratic ends.

Politicians and political scientists alike have long recognized the impact of the local political environment on the attitudes and behavior of community residents. V.O. Key demonstrated in a variety of contexts the striking persistence of distinctive community political traditions. The extensive discussion of the “suburban conversion” hypothesis has turned in part on the question of the influence of the local community on partisan attitudes. A number of studies of voting behavior have shown that majority views in a community have a disproportionate advantage in gaining and holding adherents. There is, in short, good reason to suspect that the local community has a significant influence on social attitudes and political behavior. Why is this so? How does the Republican “atmosphere” in Elmira affect the votes of individual Elmirans? How are community political traditions maintained through decades of changing community composition? Why does the minority party in a community fail to mobilize many of the voters who are predisposed toward it? What explanation of these sorts of community influence seems most adequate?—this is the question to be examined in this paper.

Partisanship is strongly correlated with attitudes and behavior, but it is unclear from this pattern whether partisan identity has a causal effect on political behavior and attitudes. We report the results of a field experiment that investigates the causal effect of party identification. Prior to the February 2008 Connecticut presidential primary, researchers sent a mailing to a random sample of unaffiliated registered voters who, in a pretreatment survey, leaned toward a political party. The mailing informed the subjects that only voters registered with a party were able to participate in the upcoming presidential primary. Subjects were surveyed again in June 2008. Comparing posttreatment survey responses to subjects’ baseline survey responses, we find that those reminded of the need to register with a party were more likely to identify with a party and showed stronger partisanship. Further, we find that the treatment group also demonstrated greater concordance than the control group between their pretreatment latent partisanship and their posttreatment reported voting behavior and intentions and evaluations of partisan figures. Thus, our treatment, which appears to have caused a strengthening of partisan identity, also appears to have caused a shift in subjects’ candidate preferences and evaluations of salient political figures. This finding is consistent with the claim that partisanship is an active force changing how citizens behave in and perceive the political world.

We study the impact of naturalization on the long-term social integration of immigrants into the host country society. Despite ongoing debates about citizenship policy, we lack reliable evidence that isolates the causal effect of naturalization from the nonrandom selection into naturalization. We exploit the quasi-random assignment of citizenship in Swiss municipalities that used referendums to decide on naturalization applications of immigrants. Comparing otherwise similar immigrants who narrowly won or lost their naturalization referendums, we find that receiving Swiss citizenship strongly improved long-term social integration. We also find that the integration returns to naturalization are larger for more marginalized immigrant groups and when naturalization occurs earlier, rather than later in the residency period. Overall, our findings support the policy paradigm arguing that naturalization is a catalyst for improving the social integration of immigrants rather than merely the crown on the completed integration process.

Since 1960 turnout has declined in presidential elections, and since 1966 it has declined in off-year congressional elections. These declines occurred despite several major trends that could have increased electoral participation. An analysis of the eight SRC-CPS presidential election surveys conducted between 1952 and 1980 and of the six SRC-CPS congressional election surveys conducted between 1958 and 1978 suggests that these declines may result largely from the combined impact of two attitudinal trends: the weakening of party identification and declining beliefs about government responsiveness, that is, lowered feelings of “external” political efficacy. Between two-thirds and seven-tenths of the decline in presidential turnout between 1960 and 1980 appears to result from the combined impact of these trends. Data limitations hinder our efforts to study the decline of congressional turnout, but approximately two-fifths to one-half of the decline between 1966 and 1978 appears to result from the combined impact of these attitudinal trends.

The collapse of autocratic regimes is often brought about through large-scale mobilization and collective action by elements of the populace. The willingness of any given member of the public to participate in actions such as strikes and protests is contingent upon her beliefs about others’ willingness to similarly mobilize. In this article, we examine the effect of a specific form of transparency—the disclosure of economic data by the government—on citizen belief formation, and consequently on collective mobilization. We present a theoretical model in which, under autocratic rule, transparency increases the frequency of protests, and increases the extent to which protest is correlated with incumbent performance. We find empirical support for these claims. Transparency destabilizes autocracies via mass protest.

The study of political influence in the West has for the most part focused on the process by which interest groups affect the content of legislation; hence, the input process has occupied the center of attention.

Students of politics in the new states of Africa and Asia who have adopted this perspective, however, have been struck by the relative weakness both of interest structures to organize demands and of institutionalized channels through which such demands, once organized, might be communicated to decisionmakers. The open clash of organized interests is often conspicuously absent during the formulation of legislation in these nations. To conclude from this, however, that the public has little or no effect on the eventual “output” of government would be completely unwarranted. Between the passage of legislation and its actual implementation lies an entirely different political arena that, in spite of its informality and particularism, has a great effect on the execution of policy.

Much of the expression of political interests in the new states has been disregarded because Western scholars, accustomed to their own politics, have been looking in the wrong place. A large portion of individual demands, and even group demands, in developing nations reach the political system, not before laws are passed, but rather at the enforcement stage.

A substantial literature on lower federal courts and state courts suggests that the “haves” usually come out ahead in litigation because they possess superior resources for it and they reap advantages from their repeat player status. We investigate the success of 10 categories of litigants before the Warren, Burger, and Rehnquist Courts to determine whether the resources or experience of litigants has effects on Supreme Court outcomes paralleling those found in the courts below. While different categories of litigants are found to have very different rates of success, those differences do not consistently favor litigants with greater resources. A time series analysis of the success of different categories of litigants over the 36 years studied suggests that the changing ideological complexion of the Court has a greater impact on the success of litigants than differences among litigants in resources and experience.

The development of social choice theory over the past three decades has brought many new insights into democratic theory. Surprisingly, the theory of representation has gone almost untouched by social choice theorists. This article redresses this neglect and provides an axiomatic study of one means of implementing proportional representation.

The distinguishing feature of proportional representation is its concern for the representativeness of deliberations as well as decisions. We define a representative in a way that is particularly attentive to this feature and then define a method of selecting representatives (a variant of the Borda rule) which selects a maximally representative body. We also prove that this method of selection meets four social choice axioms that are met by a number of other important social choice functions (including pairwise majority decision and the Borda rule).

What is leadership? What is good leadership? What is successful leadership? Answers emerge from our study of a formal model in which followers face a coordination problem: they wish to choose the best action while conforming as closely as possible to the actions of others. Although they would like to do the right thing and do it together, followers are unsure about the relative merits of their options. They learn about their environment and the likely moves of others by listening to leaders. These leaders bridge differences of opinion and become coordinating focal points. A leader's influence increases with her judgement (her sense of direction) and her ability to convey ideas (her clarity of communication). A leader with perfect clarity enjoys greater influence than one with a perfect sense of direction. When followers choose how much attention to pay to leaders, they listen only to the most coherent communicators. However, power-hungry leaders who need an audience sometimes obfuscate their messages, but less so when their followers place more emphasis on conformity than on doing the right thing.

States use repression to enforce obedience, but repression—especially if it is violent, massive, and indiscriminate—often incites opposition. Why does repression have such disparate effects? We address this question by studying the political legacy of Stalin’s coercive agricultural policy and collective punishment campaign in Ukraine, which led to the death by starvation of over three million people in 1932–34. Using rich micro-level data on eight decades of local political behavior, we find that communities exposed to Stalin’s “terror by hunger” behaved more loyally toward Moscow when the regime could credibly threaten retribution in response to opposition. In times when this threat of retribution abated, the famine-ridden communities showed more opposition to Moscow, both short- and long-term. Thus, repression can both deter and inflame opposition, depending on the political opportunity structure in which post-repression behavior unfolds.

On the most significant aspect of public budgeting, i.e., the allocation of expenditures among different purposes so as to achieve the greatest return, American budgetary literature is singularly arid. Toilers in the budgetary field have busied themselves primarily with the organization and procedure for budget preparation, the forms for the submission of requests for funds, the form of the budget document itself, and like questions. That these things have deserved the consideration given them cannot be denied when the unbelievable resistance to the adoption of the most rudimentary essentials of budgeting is recalled and their unsatisfactory condition in many jurisdictions even now is observed. Nevertheless, the absorption of energies in the establishment of the mechanical foundations for budgeting has diverted attention from the basic budgeting problem (on the expenditure side), namely: On what basis shall it be decided to allocate x dollars to activity A instead of activity B?

Writers on budgeting say little or nothing about the purely economic aspects of public expenditure. “Economics,” says Professor Robbins, “is the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.” Whether budgetary behavior is economic or political is open to fruitless debate; nevertheless, the point of view and the mode of thought of the economic theorist are relevant, both in the study of and action concerning public expenditure.

Survey data from the preconvention waves of the 1980 National Election Study are used to estimate the effect of expectations about who will be nominated on respondents' own preferences. The results confirm the conventional belief that bandwagons play an important role in nominating campaigns; at the same time, they suggest that the dynamics of the nominating process may be more subtle than simple bandwagon models would indicate. First, preferences are strongly and consistently projected onto expectations, making the relationship of central interest a reciprocal one. Second, the bases of candidate choice appear to change systematically with political circumstances. In close, volatile campaigns, support for bandwagon candidates (like George Bush in early 1980) is based largely on favorable expectations and on relatively general, diffuse political evaluations (e.g., “leadership”). By comparison, when expectations about the nomination are very one-sided, their impact on preferences approaches zero, and more specific, substantive political evaluations become increasingly important.

Midterm congressional elections have been generally viewed as relatively sterile affairs marked by reduced turnout, party voting, and the play of politically idiosyncratic forces such as friends-and-neighbors voting. The usual reduction in the number of seats controlled by the President's party, according to the “surge and decline” thesis, simply reflects the departure of short-term forces which presumably benefited the president's party two years earlier. In this study an alternative thesis is proposed which considers midterm election outcomes within the context of the current political environment. Evaluations of the President's performance are found to be directly associated with congressional preferences over a series of midterm elections from 1946 through 1966. Moreover, controlling for party identification, persons who disapprove of the President's performance were generally more likely to vote and to cast their ballot against the President's party than were his admirers to support it. This “negative voting” bias helps to explain why the Democratic and Republican parties have performed more poorly in those midterm elections during which they occupy the White House.

John Vasquez claims to follow Imre Lakatos but distorts his criteria for judging theories and evaluating research programs. Vasquez claims that facts observed can falsify a theory by showing that its predictions are wrong. He fails to consider the puzzles posed by the interdependence of theory and fact. He places all realists in a single paradigm despite the divergent assumptions of traditional and structural realists. In contrast to Vasquez, I argue that explanation, not prediction, is the ultimate criterion of good theory, that a theory can be validated only by working back and forth between its implications and an uncertain state of affairs that we take to be the reality against which theory is tested, and that the results of tests are always problematic.

How strong are normative prohibitions on state behavior? We examine this question by analyzing anti-nuclear norms, sometimes called the “nuclear taboo,” using an original survey experiment to evaluate American attitudes regarding nuclear use. We find that the public has only a weak aversion to using nuclear weapons and that this aversion has few characteristics of an “unthinkable” behavior or taboo. Instead, public attitudes about whether to use nuclear weapons are driven largely by consequentialist considerations of military utility. Americans’ willingness to use nuclear weapons increases dramatically when nuclear weapons provide advantages over conventional weapons in destroying critical targets. Americans who oppose the use of nuclear weapons seem to do so primarily for fear of setting a negative precedent that could lead to the use of nuclear weapons by other states against the United States or its allies in the future.