Recent developments in Eastern Europe have created expectations of a “peace dividend” associated with reduced levels of U.S. defense expenditures. We present and empirically estimate a two-equation model for assessing the direct and indirect, immediate and delayed effects of changes in defense spending on economic growth in the United States.

Over the past 25 years a number of conclusions concerning the development of political tolerance have come to be well accepted in the literature on political behavior. There are, however, two persisting problems with the studies that have generated these findings: they have relied on a content-biased measure of tolerance, and have failed to examine well specified models of the factors leading to tolerance. In this article we report the results of an analysis of the determinants of political tolerance using a content-controlled measure of tolerance and a more fully specified multivariate model. The parameters of the model are estimated from a national sample of the U.S. The results indicate the explanatory power of two political variables, the level of perceived threat and the commitment to general norms, and psychological sources of political tolerance. Social and demographic factors are found to have no direct effect and little indirect influence on the development of political tolerance.

Changing U.S. attitudes toward new technologies are examined, as are explanations of such changes. We hypothesize that increased concern with the risks of new technologies by certain elite groups is partly a surrogate for underlying ideological criticisms of U.S. society. The question of risk is examined within the framework of the debate over nuclear energy. Studies of various leadership groups are used to demonstrate the ideological component of risk assessment. Studies of scientists' and journalists' attitudes, media coverage of nuclear energy, and public perception of scientists' views suggest both that journalists' ideologies influence their coverage of nuclear energy and that media coverage of the issue is partly responsible for public misperceptions of the views of scientists. We conclude with a discussion of the historical development of the environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s and the relation of this movement to the public's declining support for nuclear energy.

Since World War II, divided government has become increasingly common in the American states. A significant component of the increase is the deterioration of Republican fortunes in state legislatures: after the 1990 and 1992 elections, for example, only five state legislatures were controlled by the Republicans. I shall examine the hypothesis that the professionalization of state legislatures makes legislative service more attractive to Democratic candidates and less attractive to Republican candidates, because full-time legislative service is incompatible with another career, and Democrats, on average, have less lucrative career opportunities than Republicans. Statistical analysis of post-World War II legislative elections outside the South is consistent with the argument: other things being equal, every ten-thousand-dollar increase in real biennial legislative compensation is associated with approximately a 1% increase in Democratic legislators.

We posit that Supreme Court oral arguments provide justices with useful information that influences their final votes on the merits. To examine the role of these proceedings, we ask the following questions: (1) what factors influence the quality of arguments presented to the Court; and, more importantly, (2) does the quality of a lawyer's oral argument affect the justices' final votes on the merits? We answer these questions by utilizing a unique data source—evaluations Justice Blackmun made of the quality of oral arguments presented to the justices. Our analysis shows that Justice Blackmun's grading of attorneys is somewhat influenced by conventional indicators of the credibility of attorneys and are not simply the product of Justice Blackmun's ideological leanings. We thus suggest they can plausibly be seen as measuring the quality of oral argument. We further show that the probability of a justice voting for a litigant increases dramatically if that litigant's lawyer presents better oral arguments than the competing counsel. These results therefore indicate that this element of the Court's decisional process affects final votes on the merits, and it has implications for how other elite decision makers evaluate and use information.

Why is there so much alleged electoral fraud in new democracies? Most scholarship focuses on the proximate cause of electoral competition. This article proposes a different answer by constructing and analyzing an original data set drawn from the German parliament's own voluminous record of election disputes for every parliamentary election in the life of Imperial Germany (1871–1912) after its adoption of universal male suffrage in 1871. The article analyzes the election of over 5,000 parliamentary seats to identify where and why elections were disputed as a result of “election misconduct.” The empirical analysis demonstrates that electoral fraud's incidence is significantly related to a society's level of inequality in landholding, a major source of wealth, power, and prestige in this period. After weighing the importance of two different causal mechanisms, the article concludes that socioeconomic inequality, by making elections endogenous to preexisting social power, can be a major and underappreciated barrier to the long-term process of democratization even after the “choice” of formally democratic rules.

I show that restrictive registration laws do not dissuade individuals with lower levels of education from voting any more than individuals with higher levels of education. This finding contradicts the result reported in Wolfinger and Rosenstone's classic analysis of turnout. I show that their conclusion was actually an artifact of the methodology they employed. Examining predicted probabilities generated by a nonlinear model such as probit or logit may produce spurious results when used to determine interactive effects between two independent variables. By respecifying the model of turnout to explicitly include terms to test interactive hypotheses and reanalyzing the data from the 1972 Current Population Survey (as well as data from the 1984 survey), I show that in fact, no such substantive interactive effect between registration laws and individuals' level of education exists at the micro level.

Because war is costly and risky, states have incentives to negotiate and avoid conflict. The common rationalist explanation is that war results from private information and incentives to misrepresent it. By modeling warfare as a costly bargaining process, I show that inefficient fighting can occur in equilibrium under complete information and very general assumptions favoring peace. Specifically, I assume that peace can be supported in equilibrium and that fighting brings no benefits to either state, only costs. Although there exist agreements that Pareto-dominate the final settlement, states may prefer to fight. The result turns on the ability of states to impose costs on their opponents and bear costs in return. The existence of a range of acceptable settlements and the threat to revert to particularly disadvantageous ones make inefficient equilibria possible. A diminished ability to hurt the enemy, not simply military victory, is a major reason to stop fighting.This article is a shorter version of the first chapter of my dissertation. I thank Randall Stone, Curt Signorino, John Duggan, and Robert Westbrooke for valuable comments. Previous versions were presented to the Peace Science Society, October 2001, and the Midwest Political Science Association, April 2002.

Eliciting honest answers to sensitive questions is frustrated if subjects withhold the truth for fear that others will judge or punish them. The resulting bias is commonly referred to as social desirability bias, a subset of what we label sensitivity bias. We make three contributions. First, we propose a social reference theory of sensitivity bias to structure expectations about survey responses on sensitive topics. Second, we explore the bias-variance trade-off inherent in the choice between direct and indirect measurement technologies. Third, to estimate the extent of sensitivity bias, we meta-analyze the set of published and unpublished list experiments (a.k.a., the item count technique) conducted to date and compare the results with direct questions. We find that sensitivity biases are typically smaller than 10 percentage points and in some domains are approximately zero.

Many authoritarian regimes use frightening acts of repression to suppress dissent. Theory from psychology suggests that emotions should affect how citizens perceive and process information about repression risk and ultimately whether or not they dissent. I test the effects of emotions on dissent in autocracy by running a lab-in-the-field experiment with 671 opposition supporters in Zimbabwe that randomly assigns some participants to an exercise that induces a mild state of fear, whereas others complete a neutral placebo. The fear treatment significantly reduces hypothetical and behavioral measures of dissent by substantively large amounts. It also increases pessimism about parameters that enter into the dissent decision as well as risk aversion. These results show that emotions interact in important ways with strategic considerations. Fear may be a powerful component of how unpopular autocrats exclude large portions of their populations from mobilizing for regime change.

The 1969 Vietnam draft lottery assigned numbers to birth dates in order to determine which young men would be called to fight in Vietnam. We exploit this natural experiment to examine how draft vulnerability influenced political attitudes. Data are from the Political Socialization Panel Study, which surveyed high school seniors from the class of 1965 before and after the national draft lottery was instituted. Males holding low lottery numbers became more antiwar, more liberal, and more Democratic in their voting compared to those whose high numbers protected them from the draft. They were also more likely than those with safe numbers to abandon the party identification that they had held as teenagers. Trace effects are found in reinterviews from the 1990s. Draft number effects exceed those for preadult party identification and are not mediated by military service. The results show how profoundly political attitudes can be transformed when public policies directly affect citizens' lives.

Prior research on the contextual determinants of black racial attitudes has focused on the effects of residential segregation while overlooking differences in the socioeconomic character of neighborhoods. I posit that socioeconomic environments, in particular, the quality and socioeconomic composition of neighborhoods, may affect whether blacks view race as a defining interest in their lives. I test these propositions with a multilevel dataset that merges the 1992–1994 Multi-City Survey of Urban Inequality with block-group–level demographic statistics from the 1990 Census. The results indicate that neighborhood quality and neighborhood socioeconomic composition work at cross-purposes in affecting black racial attitudes. The salience of race recedes with improvements in neighborhood quality yet advances with greater exposure to the race-oriented predispositions of high-status blacks. In closing, I discuss the implications of shifting residential patterns for the future of political consensus and group-based mobilization among African Americans.

The defense of capitalism in America is rooted in a preference for the market's justice of earned deserts over the justices of equality and need associated with the polity. These preferences have structural roots in the way governments and markets serve different values and purposes, satisfy wants, focus on fairness or justice, enlist causal attributions, distribute or redistribute income, are limited by rights, and seem to offer either harmony or conflict of interest. Some of these “structural” differences, however, are themselves perceptual, and corrected by changed perceptions of the productivity of government and of our historic predecessors, and by a community point of view involving changed accounting systems, as well as by policies of full employment rather than guaranteed incomes. With few institutional changes, these altered perceptions may partially restore political justice to favor.

The laws of war seek to regulate conduct during wartime. The record of compliance with these treaties is mixed. I explain compliance as the result of publicly accepted and so legally binding agreements that create incentives for the parties to enforce those agreements through reciprocity. Ratification by a democracy is a signal that it intends to abide by the treaty standard; those that ratify are more likely to comply. Ratification does not effect the behavior of nondemocracies, however. Ratification of the relevant treaty by both warring parties strengthens reciprocity. There is a hierarchy of average compliance across issues which matches the scope for violations by individuals on each issue, with greater scope for such violations corresponding to lower levels of compliance.

In The Logic of Collective Action, Mancur Olson shows how the activities of various political organizations can be fruitfully analyzed using the theory of collective goods. Several of Olson's major conclusions concern the relationship between the size of a group and its ability to provide its members with collective benefits. He concludes that as group size increases, the amount of collective benefits provided will become increasingly suboptimal, and that the absolute amount of collective benefits provided will decrease. This paper shows that Olson's conclusion concerning the relationship between group size and the absolute amount of collective benefits provided is not generally true. Within the framework of analysis used by Olson, it is demonstrated that the relationship is determined by the interaction between two effects, an “income” effect which may cause the level of benefits provided to increase as group size increases, and a “congestion” effect which may cause the level of benefits to decrease as group size increases. The final result is that for “inclusive” collective goods the relationship is an increasing one, while for “exclusive” goods it is a decreasing one. Some implications of this result for the use of the theory of collective goods in studying political processes are discussed.

American legislative studies in recent years have been occupied to a large degree with the question of the effects of political parties on the policy behavior of elected legislators, with most of the research focusing on the U.S. Congress. We undertake a comparative analysis of state legislatures for a window into the character and extent of party's effects. Specifically, we compare the impact of party on the partisan polarization and dimensionality of campaign issue stances and roll call voting in the Kansas Senate and the largely comparable, though nonpartisan, Nebraska Unicameral. This comparison offers us a nice quasi-experiment to assess the impact of party by establishing a baseline condition in Nebraska for what happens when party is absent. We argue that party lends order to conflict, producing the ideological low-dimensional space that is a trademark of American politics. Where parties are not active in the legislature—Nebraska is our test case—the clear structure found in partisan politics disappears. This works to sever the connection between voters and their elected representatives and, with it, the likelihood of electoral accountability that is essential for the health of liberal democracy.

In societies with widespread gender discrimination, development programs with gender quotas are considered a way to improve women's economic, political, and social status. Using a randomized field experiment across 500 Afghan villages, we examine the effects of a development program that mandates female participation. We find that even in a highly conservative context like Afghanistan, such initiatives improve outcomes specific to female participation in some economic, social, and political activities, including increased mobility and income generation. They, however, produce no change in more entrenched female roles linked to family decision-making or in attitudes toward the general role of women in society.

We study how representation works in a context where accountability to voters is restricted because of term limits and accountability to parties is limited because of party weakness. Analyzing all Brazilian mayoral elections between 1996 and 2012 using a regression discontinuity design, we show that becoming the incumbent party results in large subsequent electoral losses. We theorize that the presence of term limits, combined with political parties to which politicians are only weakly attached, affects the incentives and behavior of individual politicians in such a way that their parties’ suffer systematic losses. A descriptive analysis of an original dataset on the career paths of Brazilian mayors suggests that our assumptions are an accurate description of Brazil’s political context, and we find support for three central empirical implications of our theoretical explanation. Moreover, based on an analysis of additional data from Mexico, Peru, Chile, Costa Rica, and Colombia, we show that the negative effects found in Brazil also exist in other democracies.

Why are some democratic governments more successful than others? What impact do various political institutions have on the quality of governance? This paper develops and tests a new theory of democratic governance. This theory, which we label centripetalism, stands in contrast to the dominant paradigm of decentralism. The centripetal theory of governance argues that democratic institutions work best when they are able to reconcile the twin goals of centralized authority and broad inclusion. At the constitutional level, our theory argues that unitary, parliamentary, and list-PR systems (as opposed to decentralized federal, presidential, and nonproportional ones) help promote both authority and inclusion, and therefore better governance outcomes. We test the theory by examining the impact of centripetalism on eight indicators of governance that range across the areas of state capacity, economic policy and performance, and human development. Results are consistent with the theory and robust to a variety of specifications.

Over two centuries ago, Adam Smith wrote of two passions that motivate those seeking public distinction: avarice and ambition. By investing these categories with appropriately concrete meaning, we develop a model of House members' career decisions. Like other individuals contemplating retirement options, politicians act with an eye to their financial interests, but not all financial interests are alike. The financial factor that matters most involves perennial considerations of post-retirement pension benefits, not fleeting opportunities to exploit ethically questionable sources of outside income. Second, we embed in the model a theory of intra-institutional ambition. Members impute value both to leadership positions they expect to retain and positions they expect to obtain. Majority members well-positioned to exert future legislative leverage are less likely to retire. Finally, several sources of electoral insecurity increase retirement probability. In the main, members may be reelection-seekers but will not pay any price to seek something they may not find.