In an earlier study of voting behavior of U.S. appeals courts judges, attitudinal patterns were investigated along with an analysis of the relationship of judges' backgrounds to their decisions. In this revisit, the earlier findings were treated as hypotheses and tested with a new case population covering a subsequent and longer time period. In all, 2,115 cases decided nonunanimously were coded on one or more issues. Most cases could be classified under ten broad issue categories which were then utilized for most of the analyses. Although the research design was similar to that of the earlier study, a wider variety of methods was employed including nonparametric and parametric intercorrelations of voting behavior on the ten issues and stepwise multiple regression and partial correla-tion analyses of seven background variables and their relationships to voting behavior on the issues. The principal findings were similar to those found earlier but it was possible to map voting behavior with some-what more precision and to uncover some unexpected relationships such as those concerning the potency of the age variable particularly for voting on political liberalism issues.

We demonstrate the surprising benefits of legislative redistricting (including partisan gerrymandering) for American representative democracy. In so doing, our analysis resolves two long-standing controversies in American politics. First, whereas some scholars believe that redistricting reduces electoral responsiveness by protecting incumbents, others, that the relationship is spurious, we demonstrate that both sides are wrong: redistricting increases responsiveness. Second, while some researchers believe that gerrymandering dramatically increases partisan bias and others deny this effect, we show both sides are in a sense correct. Gerrymandering biases electoral systems in favor of the party that controls the redistricting as compared to what would have happened if the other party controlled it, but any type of redistricting reduces partisan bias as compared to an electoral system without redistricting. Incorrect conclusions in both literatures resulted from misjudging the enormous uncertainties present during redistricting periods, making simplified assumptions about the redistricters' goals, and using inferior statistical methods.

Although a variety of age-related processes are known to affect rates of political participation over the adult life span, little is known about their interrelationships and relative impact. We set out a theory of life span civic development that focuses on how age-related changes in community attachment, strength of partisanship, church attendance, government responsiveness, family income, and civic competence impinge on voting participation. To test the theory, we estimated the coefficients of a structural equation model using data from nine National Election Studies combined into a large, cross-sectional time series data set. The model specifies the age-related processes and also controls for the effects of a large number of other variables. Overall, about one-half of the age-related increases in voting participation were attributable to these processes.

Sebastian Rosato (2003) finds the logic of the “democratic peace” flawed in his “The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory,” and he cites my work and other studies as examples of the flawed logic. Some of the logic he describes is flawed, and it may characterize some of the literature in the wide field of “democratic peace,” but it is not the logic underlying the core of liberal peace theory. Indeed, the persuasive core of the logic underlying the theory of liberal democratic peace is missing from Rosato's account. Republican representation, an ideological commitment to fundamental human rights, and transnational interdependence are the three pillars of the explanation. The logic underlying the peace among liberal states rests on a simple and straightforward proposition that connects those three causal mechanisms as they operate together and only together, and not separately as Sebastian Rosato claims.

When comparing states in the United States, one finds little correlation between state opinion and party control of the state legislature or between party control and state policy. Although these low correlations seeming to indicate that partisan politics is irrelevant to the representation process, the opposite is true. State opinion influences the ideological positions of state parties, and parties' responsiveness to state opinion helps to determine their electoral success. Moreover, parties move toward the center once in office. For these reasons, state electoral politics is largely responsible for the correlation between state opinion and state policy.

Some Illustrations of Militant Democracy. Before a more systematic account of anti-fascist legislation in Europe is undertaken, recent developments in several countries may be reviewed as illustrating what militant democracy can achieve against subversive extremism when the will to survive is coupled with appropriate measures for combatting fascist techniques.

1. Finland: From the start, the Finnish Republic was particularly exposed to radicalism both from left and right. The newly established state was wholly devoid of previous experience in self-government, shaken by violent nationalism, bordered by bolshevik Russia, yet within the orbit of German imperialism; no other country seemed more predestined to go fascist. Yet Finland staved off fascism as well as bolshevism. At first, the political situation was not unlike that of the Weimar Republic in the years of disintegration. The Communist party, declared illegal by the High Tribunal as early as 1925, reconstituted itself and, in 1929, obtained a large representation in the Riksdag, thereby blocking any constitutional reform. Under the decidedly extra-constitutional pressure of the nationalist and semi-fascist movement of the Lapuans, the Communists were so intimidated that nationalists, and progressives (bourgeois liberals), against the opposition of the social Democrats, were able to carry the constitutional reforms which not only strengthened the position of the government but also eventually barred subversive parties—meaning, at that time, the Communists—from national and communal representation.

Some recent theories have blamed the growth of government on budget-maximizing bureaucrats who are assumedly capable of imposing their most preferred budget-output combination on legislatures, subject to cost and demand constraints. However, theoretical examination of the range of bargaining outcomes that might occur between bureau and legislature shows that budget-maximizing behavior does not necessarily lead to super-optimal levels of production, nor do the suggested reforms of competition and privatization necessarily improve the situation. In this bargaining model, the central determinants of governmental growth are not budget-maximizing bureaucrats, but the legislature's decisions regarding mode of oversight and form of internal organization.

This analysis demonstrates that policy issues play an important role in the selection of members of Congress. We differ with the conclusion of much of the existing research on congressional elections, which indicates that policy considerations are of minor importance. We have conducted an analysis of the 1982 U.S. Senate elections, drawing on data from the CBS News/New York Times 1982 congressional poll and from 23 statewide exit polls. We demonstrate that (1) candidates behave as though they believe issues are important to voters; (2) candidates' policy positions systematically influence voters' decisions; and (3) candidates' issue positions and voters' evaluations of the president and the economy interact to provide clear patterns of policy effects on Senate election outcomes. Policy effects are substantial and systematic in Senate elections, and cannot be omitted if we are to appreciate the importance of congressional elections in the national policy-making process.

Ideology has been the subject of a surprising amount of attention during the last half of the twentieth century. Although it has been argued that the term has been “thoroughly muddied by diverse uses” (Converse 1964, 207), an empirical investigation of the pages of the Review reveals substantial convergence among political scientists over time on a core definition. This essay traces the use of the concept in the Review since its launch in 1906. It reveals changing fashions in the connotation of the term, but suggests an underlying agreement on the essential components—coherence, stability and contrast—and underlines the centrality of the concept of ideology in political science.

The Peruvian Social Fund (FONCODES) was created by President Alberto Fujimori in 1991 with the stated objectives of generating employment, alleviating poverty, and improving access to social services. This article uses province-level data on monthly expenditures, socioeconomic indicators, and electoral outcomes to analyze political influences on the timing and geographic distribution of FONCODES expenditures between 1991 and 1995. I reach three main conclusions. First, these expenditures increased significantly before national elections. Second, FONCODES projects were directed at provinces in which the marginal political effect of expenditures was likely to be largest. Third, these projects favored the poorest provinces, which suggests that the program also had a redistributive function. The results are robust to a large number of specifications and controls. The Peruvian data support predictions made in the literature on political business cycles as well as the literature on political influences on the allocation of discretionary funds.

This article introduces a theoretical framework and an econometric methodology for analyzing the increasingly important effects of the national government on the federal system. The framework is a synthesis of the dominant political and economic approaches to this issue: it attempts to capture key elements of the complex political and administrative processes that implementation research has identified in contemporary federalism, and to exploit formal models of local fiscal choice used to analyze the impact of federal grants on state and local spending and taxing. The vehicle for the synthesis is a principal-agent model which represents the federal system as a formal hierarchy extending from Congress and the president to subnational bureaucrats. An econometric analysis of two major federal grant programs in each state for the years, 1965-1979, demonstrates that 1) economic models alone cannot explain the effects of federal grants on subnational fiscal behavior; politics must be included, and 2) the political effects can be disaggregated into ideological and constituency-oriented demands made by Congress and the White House on federal grant agencies.

Can international judges be relied upon to resolve disputes impartially? If not, what are the sources of their biases? Answers to these questions are critically important for the functioning of an emerging international judiciary, yet we know remarkably little about international judicial behavior. An analysis of a new dataset of dissents in the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) yields a mixed set of answers. On the bright side, there is no evidence that judges systematically employ cultural or geopolitical biases in their rulings. There is some evidence that career insecurities make judges more likely to favor their national government when it is a party to a dispute. Most strongly, the evidence suggests that international judges are policy seekers. Judges vary in their inclination to defer to member states in the implementation of human rights. Moreover, judges from former socialist countries are more likely to find violations against their own government and against other former socialist governments, suggesting that they are motivated by rectifying a particular set of injustices. I conclude that the overall picture is mostly positive for the possibility of impartial review of government behavior by judges on an international court. Like judges on domestic review courts, ECtHR judges are politically motivated actors in the sense that they have policy preferences on how to best apply abstract human rights in concrete cases, not in the sense that they are using their judicial power to settle geopolitical scores.

This article contributes to current debates and discussions in critical social theory about diversity, inclusion/exclusion, power, and social justice by exploring intersectionality as an important theoretical resource to further develop and advance care ethics. Using intersectionality as a critical reference point, the investigation highlights two key shortcomings of care ethics which stem from this ethics’ prioritization of gender and gendered power relations: inadequate conceptualizations of diversity and power. The article draws on concrete examples related to migrant domestic work to illustrate how an intersectionality lens can advance new theoretical insights for understanding caring practices (or lack of them), and generate new methodological and practical strategies for confronting and transforming the deeply entrenched interlocking power inequities that undermine the realization of care in an increasingly complex context of national and international policy and politics.

We propose a new model of cooperators' advantage depending neither on supplementary incentives nor on cooperators' capacity to recognize, and play selectively with, other cooperators. It depends, rather, on players' making the play-no play decision by the heuristic of projecting their own “cooperate-defect” choices onto potential partners. Cooperators offer to play more often, and fellow cooperators will more often accept their offer. When certain boundary conditions are met, this results in a higher expected payoff for cooperators than for defectors. Empirical support for this heuristic is suggested by expectations data from related social dilemma experiments. Moreover, its use can be justified in Bayesean terms. Our model brings behavioral decision theory's “cognitive miser” paradigm to bear on interdisciplinary concern with the evolution of cooperative behavior and shows how, if other mechanisms provide a suitable “initial kick,” cooperation can evolve in the absence of iteration and in large, mobile societies.

We attempt to explain when and why democratic states will prevail in international crises. We review several of the prominent theories about democratic political structures and derive hypotheses from each framework about crisis outcomes. These hypotheses are tested against the population of 422 international crises between 1918 and 1994. Our findings provide further evidence that the democratic peace is not a spurious result of common interests. Moreover, we also begin the difficult task of differentiating among the many theories of the democratic peace. In particular, we find strong evidence that democratic political structures are important because of their ability to generate domestic audience costs. Our findings also support the argument that democratic political structures encourage leaders to select international conflicts that they will win.

We develop and test a general argument about the conditions under which state leaders are most likely to choose legal dispute resolution over bilateral negotiations as a means to settle international disputes. Our central claim is that leaders who anticipate significant domestic audience costs for the making of voluntary, negotiated concessions are likely to seek the “political cover” of an international legal ruling. In such cases, it will be easier for leaders to justify the making of concessions if they are mandated as part of a ruling by an international court or arbitration body. We test a series of domestic-level hypotheses using a dataset comprised of nearly 1,500 rounds of talks concerning disputed territorial claims. Our multivariate analyses indicate that state leaders opt for legal dispute resolution when they are highly accountable to domestic political opposition, as well as when the dispute is highly salient to domestic audiences.

I propose a new majoritarian bargaining model in which more than one implicit proposal can be on the table at the same time. Institutional differences from system to system affect the order of play, the equilibrium majorities, and the policy outcome. The ex post distribution of payoffs within a winning coalition is, however, invariant to fundamental institutional differences, and it is always proportional to the distribution of relative ex ante bargaining power. The bargaining process is modeled as a sequential demand game, in which players are called to propose a policy and to specify their desired share of the private benefits related to being in office. The order of play is endogenous, and the distribution of payoffs within an equilibrium majority usually does not depend on who is the proposal maker. The role of the head of state and the advantages to center parties are also studied.

This article examines a fundamental aspect of democracy: the relationship between the policy positions of candidates and the choices of voters. Researchers have suggested three criteria—proximity, direction, and discounting—by which voters might judge candidates' policy positions. More than 50 peer-reviewed articles, employing data from more than 20 countries, have attempted to adjudicate among these theories. We explain why existing data and methods are insufficient to estimate the prevalence of these criteria in the electorate. We then formally derive an exhaustive set of critical tests: situations in which the criteria predict different vote choices. Finally, through survey experiments concerning health care policy, we administer the tests to a nationally representative sample. We find that proximity voting is about twice as common as discounting and four times as common as directional voting. Furthermore, discounting is most prevalent among ideological centrists and nonpartisans, who make sophisticated judgments that help align policy with their preferences. These findings demonstrate the promise of combining formal theory and experiments to answer previously intractable questions about democracy.

Three important questions are raised by the “return to the state” movement of recent years. First, are the pluralist, structural functionalist, and Marxist literatures of political science societally reductionist, as this movement contends? Second, does the neostatist paradigm remedy these defects and provide a superior analytical model? Third, regardless of the substantive merits of these arguments, are there heuristic benefits flowing from this critique of the literature? Examination of the evidence leads to a rejection of the first two criticisms. The answer to the third question is more complex. There is merit to the argument that administrative and institutional history has been neglected in the political science of the last decades. This is hardly a “paradigmatic shift”; and it has been purchased at the exorbitant price of encouraging a generation of graduate students to reject their professional history and to engage in vague conceptualization.

Despite the importance of local elections in the United States, political scientists have little knowledge of what shapes vote choice in most municipalities and special districts, particularly in the suburbs where a majority of Americans live. This article develops and tests models of local voting behavior using unique survey data of over 1,400 voters in 30 different suburban communities. Suburban electoral politics are dominated by a nonrepresentative group of “stakeholders,” who are highly informed and interested in local affairs. Because of this, vote choice in suburban elections ends up sharing many characteristics with larger contests (i.e., issue salience, partisanship, and candidate likeability), although their impact varies with the size and diversity of the particular community (e.g., in smaller suburbs, voters are more engaged in local politics, more likely to know candidates personally, and more likely to vote against incumbents). These findings suggest the importance of developing new theories about voting behavior in micro-electoral contexts.