This paper explores when and why private communication works in crisis diplomacy. Conventional audience-cost models suggest that state leaders must go public with their threats in international crises because leaders cannot tie their hands if signals are issued privately. I present a crisis bargaining game where both the sender and the receiver of signals have a domestic audience. The equilibrium analysis demonstrates that a private threat, albeit of limited credibility, can be equally compelling as a fully credible public threat. The analysis suggests that secrecy works in crisis diplomacy despite its informational inefficacy. Secrecy insulates leaders from domestic political consequences when they capitulate to a challenge to avoid risking unwarranted war. The logic of efficient secrecy helps shed light on the unaccounted history of private diplomacy in international crises. The Alaska Boundary Dispute illustrates this logic.

Converse's findings of low constraint and stability among mass attitudes are only one side of the story; mass attitudes often manifest much more coherent and stable patterns at the aggregate level than would seem possible if one took the results of panel survey analysis at face value. Items designed by Rokeach and Inglehart to tap basic value priorities, show modest individual-level stability, together with remarkably high aggregate stability structured in ways that could not occur if random answering were the prevailing pattern. Materialist/postmaterialist values show large differences between birth cohorts that not only persisted throughout 1970-1984 but seem to reflect distinctive formative experiences that occurred as much as 50 years ago. These aggregate results are much too skewed to result from equiprobable random answering and cannot be attributed to methods effects. They reflect underlying attitudinal predispositions in the respondents themselves. While random response to given items does play an important role, it is much less widespread than Converse's Black and White model implies and does not generally reflect an absence of relevant preferences. Structural equation analysis of multiple indicators demonstrates much stabler, broader orientations underlying the response to given items that account for the high aggregate-level stability observed here. Because it usually measures such orientations imperfectly, individual-level survey data tend systematically to underestimate constraint and stability in mass attitudes.

During the last thirty years, there have been numerous attempts to revise or reconstitute the “classical” theory of democracy: the familiar doctrine of popular rule, patterned after the New England town meeting, which asserts that public policy should result from extensive, informed discussion and debate. By extending general participation in decision-making the classical theorists hoped to increase the citizen's awareness of his moral and social responsibilities, reduce the danger of tyranny, and improve the quality of government. Public officials, acting as agents of the public at large, would then carry out the broad policies decided upon by majority vote in popular assemblies.

Although it is seldom made clear just which of the classical democratic theorists is being referred to, contemporary criticism has focused primarily on the descriptive elements of the theory, on its basic conceptions of citizenship, representation and decision-making. The concept of an active, informed, democratic citizenry, the most distinctive feature of the traditional theory, is the principal object of attack. On empirical grounds it is argued that very few such people can be found in Western societies. Public policy is not the expression of the common good as conceived of by the citizenry after widespread discussion and compromise. This description of policy making is held to be dangerously naive because it overlooks the role of demagogic leadership, mass psychology, group coercion, and the influence of those who control concentrated economic power. In short, classical democratic theory is held to be unrealistic; first because it employs conceptions of the nature of man and the operation of society which are Utopian, and second because it does not provide adequate, operational definitions of its key concepts.

An interrupted time-series quasi-experiment is employed to test the basic hypothesis that reformed cities (with city manager, at-large elections, and nonpartisan ballots) tax and spend less than unreformed communities. Eleven cities with populations of 25,000 and above which significantly changed their political structure between 1948 and 1973 are compared with 11 matched control cities that made no changes. We found that over an 11-year period, variations in fiscal behavior were virtually unaffected by changes in city government structure.

States, rebels, and mafias all provide governance beyond their core membership; increasingly, so do prison gangs. US gangs leverage control over prison life to govern street-level drug markets. Brazil’s Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) gang goes further, orchestrating paralyzing attacks on urban targets, while imposing a social order throughout slums that sharply reduces homicides. We analyze hundreds of seized PCC documents detailing its drug business and internal disciplinary system. Descriptively, we find vast, consignment-based trafficking operations whose profits fund collective benefits for members’ families; elaborate bureaucratic procedures and recordkeeping; and overwhelmingly nonviolent punishments for debt-nonpayment and misconduct. These features, we argue, reflect a deliberate strategy of creating rational-bureaucratic legitimacy in criminal governance. The PCC’s collectivist norms, fair procedures, and meticulous “criminal criminal records” facilitate community stigmatization of infractors, giving mild sanctions punitive heft and inducing widespread voluntary compliance without excessive coercion. This has aided the PCC’s rapid expansion across Brazil.

Presidents often lack legislative majorities, but situations of opposition-party majorities (“divided government”) are much less common outside the United States. The president's party's share of seats tends to increase in early-term elections but decline in later elections. Thus opposition majorities often result after midterm elections. Opposition majorities rarely occur in elections held concurrently with the presidential election but are more likely to do so if legislators enjoy electoral independence from their parties due to features of electoral laws.

While the possible decline in the level of social capital in the United States has received considerable attention by scholars such as Putnam and Fukuyama, less attention has been paid to the local activities of citizens that help define a nation's stock of social capital. Scholars have paid even less attention to how institutional arrangements affect levels of social capital. We argue that giving parents greater choice over the public schools their children attend creates incentives for parents as “citizen/consumers” to engage in activities that build social capital. Our empirical analysis employs a quasi-experimental approach comparing parental behavior in two pairs of demographically similar school districts that vary on the degree of parental choice over the schools their children attend. Our data show that, controlling for many other factors, parents who choose when given the opportunity are higher on all the indicators of social capital analyzed. Fukuyama has argued that it is easier for governments to decrease social capital than to increase it. We argue, however, that the design of government institutions can create incentives for individuals to engage in activities that increase social capital.

Despite extensive research on party identification, links between partisanship at the individual and aggregate level have largely been ignored. This leaves a gap in our understanding of the dynamics of aggregate partisanship. To remedy this, we identify a set of ideal types that capture the essential arguments made about individual-level party identification. We then combine the behavioral assumptions for each type with existing results on statistical aggregation to deduce the specific temporal pattern that each type implies for aggregate levels of partisanship. Using new diagnostic tests and a highly general time series model, we find that aggregate measures of partisanship from 1953 through 1992 are fractionally integrated. Our evidence that the effects of a shock to aggregate partisanship last for years—not months or decades—challenges previous work by party systems theorists and students of “macropartisanship.” Our arguments and empirical evidence provide a conceptually richer and more precise basis for theories of issue evolution or endogenous preferences—in which partisanship plays a central role.

The mass public in the Soviet Union is not enthusiastic about free-market reform. How, then, do citizens in a former communist regime develop an appreciation for free-market reforms? Different explanations for attitudes toward free market reforms are tested using data from a survey of the European USSR conducted in May 1990. First, negative assessments of recent economic performance is a catalyst for popular support for the market economy. Although very underdeveloped, there is a nascent free-market culture in the Soviet Union that makes a modest contribution to support for free-market reforms. The free-market culture that is developing in the former Soviet Union resembles that of social democracy, rather than laissez-faire capitalism. Democratic values and support for free markets are mutually reinforcing, suggesting that support for democracy makes a very important contribution to support for free-market reform.

A comparatively new line of research in political science involves the systematic investigation of political, social, and economic factors important in the formation of public policy. So far, such research has yielded temptingly persuasive evidence that political variables exert little or no independent influence on policy outcomes; that policy outcomes are governed overwhelmingly by socio-economic factors. Stated more succinctly, these findings have raised the question: Does politics make a difference in the policy formation process?

We suggest in the following analysis that these prior findings have been the result of the examination of a measure of public policy in which the influence of the political system is likely to be negligible, that is levels of public revenues and expenditures. To examine this proposition empirically, our study shifts attention to the allocation of the burdens and benefits of state revenue and expenditure policies across income classes. In redirecting analysis to allocations rather than levels of state revenues and expenditures, we focus on a province we believe to be more predictably political.

We have taken as our dependent variable the net redistributive impact of revenues and expenditures as represented by the ratio of expenditure benefits to revenue burdens for the three lowest income classes in each state. The major hypothesis of our study is that, in regard to the allocation of the burdens and benefits of state government revenues and expenditures, political variables will have a stronger influence on policy outcomes than will socio-economic variables.

This paper explores the etiology of ideological constraint in the United States. In an effort to gain understanding of the ideational elements of political socialization, we concentrate on a provocative new theory put forward by cognitive linguist George Lakoff. Lakoff argues that many people reflexively envision proper power relations between citizens and government based on their understanding of proper power relations between children and parents: “nurturant” visions of parental roles engender egalitarian and humanitarian political values, whereas “disciplinarian” visions of proper parenting predict political individualism and traditionalism. Using data obtained from the 2000 National Election Study, we consider the empirical mettle of this account.

Previous research on coalition politics has found an “incumbency advantage” in government formation, but it has provided no clear explanation as to why this advantage exists. We classify existing theories as either preference-based or institutions-based explanations for why incumbent coalitions might be likely to form again, and we integrate these explanations into a coherent theoretical argument. We also claim that it is possible, to some extent, to distinguish these explanations empirically by taking into account the “historical context” of coalition bargaining. Using a comprehensive new data set on coalition bargaining in Europe, we show that coalitions, in general, are more likely to form if the parties comprising them have worked together in the recent past, and that incumbent coalitions are more likely to re-form if partners have not experienced a severe public conflict while in office together or suffered a recent setback at the polls. The incumbency advantage disappears completely if partners have become mired in conflict or have lost legislative seats (even after accounting for the impact of seat share on coalition size). Moreover, in certain circumstances, institutional rules that grant incumbents an advantage in coalition bargaining greatly enhance their ability to remain in office.

Despite its prevalence, little is known about when parties buy turnout. We emphasize the problem of parties monitoring local brokers with incentives to shirk. Our model suggests that parties extract greater turnout buying effort from their brokers where they can better monitor broker performance and where favorable voters would not otherwise turn out. Exploiting exogenous variation in the number of polling stations—and thus electoral information about broker performance—in Mexican electoral precincts, we find that greater monitoring capacity increases turnout and votes for the National Action Party (PAN) and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Consistent with our theoretical predictions, the effect of monitoring capacity on PRI votes varies nonlinearly with the distance of voters to the polling station: it first increases because rural voters—facing larger costs of voting—generally favor the PRI, before declining as the cost of incentivizing brokers increases. This nonlinearity is not present for the PAN, who stand to gain less from mobilizing rural voters.

To judge by the absence of religion from the pages of the American Political Science Review in its first century, most political scientists have embraced a secular understanding of the political world. We explore the evolving status of religion in the discipline by examining patterns of scholarly inquiry in the discipline's flagship journal. After finding religion an (at best) marginal topic and rejecting some plausible hypotheses for this outcome, we examine the major reasons religion has received so little attention—the intellectual origins of the discipline, the social background of practitioners, the complexity of religious measurements, and the event-driven agenda of political science. Despite the resurgence of scholarly interest in religion during the 1980s, the status of the subfield remains tenuous because of the intellectual isolation of research on the topic.

In this article we outline a new framework for the formal analysis of bureaucratic politics. It departs from standard neoclassical approaches, notably those of Niskanen (1971) and Peltzman (1976), in several important respects. First our approach explicitly models a system of three-way interaction among bureaus, politicians, and interest groups. Second, it allows for institutional features of each type of participant. Third, it is a model of dynamic process. Fourth, participants make choices adoptively rather than optimizing. Fifth, participants are only minimally informed.

The result is a dynamic model of adaptive behavior, very much in the spirit of Simon's (1947) behavioral tradition, that offers a new perspective on political control, bureaucratic power, and the “intelligence of democracy.”

Scholars investigating European state development have long placed a heavy emphasis on the role played by representative institutions. The presence of an active representative assembly, it is argued, allowed citizens and rulers to contract over raising revenue and accessing credit. It may also have had implications for economic growth. These arguments have in turn been used to draw broad implications about the causal effect of analogous institutions in other places and during other time periods. But if assemblies had such clear efficiency benefits, why did they not become a universal phenomenon in Europe prior to the nineteenth century? I argue that in an era of costly communications and transport, an intensive form of political representative was much easier to sustain in geographically compact polities. This simple fact had important implications for the pattern of European state formation, and it may provide one reason why small states were able to survive despite threats from much larger neighbors. I test several relevant hypotheses using an original data set that provides the first broad view of European representative institutions in the medieval and early modern eras. I combine this with a geographic information system data set of state boundaries and populations in Europe between 1250 and 1750. The results suggest a strong effect of geographic scale on the format of political representation. The broader implication of this result is to provide a reminder that if institutions help solve contracting problems, ultimately, the maintenance of institutions may itself depend on ongoing transactions costs.

Ideology is widely considered to be an important factor in shaping policy outcomes and in influencing election outcomes. We propose a theory of the coalition-directed vote. The argument suggests that voters anticipate the postelection bargains negotiated among potential members of the governing coalition and that these anticipated policy agreements inform their vote choice. Our analysis, based on 86 voter preference surveys from 23 countries and over a 25-year period, confirms that coalition-directed voting occurs with considerable frequency in contexts with multiparty coalition governments.

How does spatial scale affect support for public policy? Does supporting housing citywide but “Not In My Back Yard” (NIMBY) help explain why housing has become increasingly difficult to build in once-affordable cities? I use two original surveys to measure how support for new housing varies between the city scale and neighborhood scale. Together, an exit poll of 1,660 voters during the 2015 San Francisco election and a national survey of over 3,000 respondents provide the first experimental measurements of NIMBYism. While homeowners are sensitive to housing’s proximity, renters typically do not express NIMBYism. However, in high-rent cities, renters demonstrate NIMBYism on par with homeowners, despite continuing to support large increases in the housing supply citywide. These scale-dependent preferences not only help explain the deepening affordability crisis, but show how institutions can undersupply even widely supported public goods. When preferences are scale dependent, the scale of decision-making matters.

Conventional wisdom assumes that increased censorship will strictly decrease access to information. We delineate circumstances when increases in censorship expand access to information for a substantial subset of the population. When governments suddenly impose censorship on previously uncensored information, citizens accustomed to acquiring this information will be incentivized to learn methods of censorship evasion. These evasion tools provide continued access to the newly blocked information—and also extend users’ ability to access information that has long been censored. We illustrate this phenomenon using millions of individual-level actions of social media users in China before and after the block of Instagram. We show that the block inspired millions of Chinese users to acquire virtual private networks, and that these users subsequently joined censored websites like Twitter and Facebook. Despite initially being apolitical, these new users began browsing blocked political pages on Wikipedia, following Chinese political activists on Twitter, and discussing highly politicized topics such as opposition protests in Hong Kong.

It has been argued that political democracy in nation-states is dependent upon certain levels of social and economic development. Some authors (Lipset and Cutright) argue that a particular complex of social and economic requisites appears necessary for the institutionalization and maintenance of democracy. Others (Lerner and Pye) suggest that national political development of any form is predicated upon the development of a system of communications sufficiently sophisticated to overcome the parochialism of traditional society. Still others (Almond and Verba) find social factors such as education crucial for the development of those attitudes deemed adequate for active citizens of democratic polities.

By definition, political democracy in nationstates requires some minimal level of citizen participation in decision making. Historically the most effective method of institutionalizing such participation is through some form of representative government. This mechanism permits groups of citizens with common preferences to support representatives who will, in turn, attempt to schedule those preferences for decision by the government. Groups of representatives will form coalitions in an attempt to insure that their common preferences will be enacted into public policy. Because preferences in society are likely to vary in direction and intensity, the successful implementation of political democracy imposes two requirements. One, communication of preferences among competing groups, must be widespread. If they are not, it will be difficult for groups with shared preferences to combine their resources such that “majority” preferences can be successfully implemented. Indeed at a more basic level, communication is necessary for the identification and articulation of common preferences. Second, groups within the citizenry holding competing preferences must be socialized into the procedural norms of the system. Most important is the acceptance of the norms of compliance so that groups which “lose” on any given issue (enactment of a preference set) do not withdraw from the decision system or opt to overthrow it. In short, two primary conditions for the maintenance of any system of political democracy are, (1) communication among members of the political system and, (2) socialization into the “rules of the game.”