Measuring the U.S. Supreme Court's policy changes is complicated by change in the content of the cases that come before the Court. I adapt from earlier scholarship a method to correct for changes in case content and use this method to measure change in the Court's support for civil liberties in the 1946–85 terms. Analysis based on this method indicates that because of changes in case content, the average difficulty of reaching a pro-civil liberties result varied during that period. With corrections for case difficulty, the Warren Court of the 1950s appears to have been more conservative, and the Burger Court more liberal, than patterns of case outcomes themselves suggest. This method, while imperfect, has utility for the measurement of policy change in the Supreme Court and other institutions and thus can serve as a building block in analyses of the processes and determinants of change.

To evaluate the comparability of the Gallup and Michigan Survey Research Center measures for studying levels of partisanship among the U.S. electorate we compare the overtime distribution of partisanship and the correlates of partisanship using the results of Gallup surveys, the National Election Studies, and the General Social Surveys. Compared with the Gallup results, both the other two surveys reveal less short-term variation and also less total variation. Compared with the Gallup results, the National Election Studies partisanship results are less related to short-term electoral outcomes and do not appear to be strongly driven by short-term economic and political evaluations. Our analyses suggest that scholars should be cautious about using Gallup results to revise conclusions based upon analyses that employ the Michigan Survey Research Center party identification measure.

This investigation is based on an experimental study of voting behavior in what the author terms a minimal-information election. This type of election is characterized by a dearth of public information about election issues and partisan considerations, so that the campaign is waged primarily on the basis of the voters' attitudes toward the candidates as personalities. In general, the minimal-information election most often characterizes local nonpartisan contests.

The experiment examined changes in voting that appeared to result from electioneering strategies designed to elicit “bandwagon” or “underdog” responses. These strategies consisted of presenting the “electorate” with the results of pre-election preferential polls, as well as qualitative information explicitly aimed at arousing the emotions of the voters.

The experiment clearly demonstrated that mere poll results are insufficient to impel would-be bandwagon or underdog identifiers to switch their votes. Rather, this type of behavior does not appear until a strong qualitative stimulus sensitizes or cues bandwagon or underdog tendencies among the voters.

Economic voting is generally regarded as a straightforward political demand for the amelioration of economic grievances. This assumption about motives underlies the implicit theories of politicians and the imputations of interests to voters in aggregate time series models. Several recent articles have argued that voting is not self-interested but a manifestation of “symbolic” preferences at the level of the collectivity. This article places the dispute between personal and collective decision referents into the broader perspective of a multi-stage model of information processing and decision making. Personal and collective decision referents are shown to define the poles of a continuum, and several hypotheses are derived to predict the relative weights assigned to each in the voter's calculus. The model is used in analyses of both the public's evaluations of incumbent economic management and economic voting in different electoral arenas by varying issue publics. Designed to maximize comparability with aggregate studies, this research includes both objective and subjective measures of economic conditions and indexes changes in personal conditions over time from panel data.

Why do ordinary people take extraordinary risks and join an ethnic armed rebellion? This article tests a series of well-established hypotheses about selfish and identity based motivations and a new hypothesis based on prospect theory. It then employs a unique multimethod research strategy combining one of the most comprehensive datasets on insurgent recruitment that contains biographical information about 8,266 Kurdish militants with extensive fieldwork involving in-depth interviews with relatives of the militants to test these hypotheses. The findings show the decision to rebel is as much political as economic and social. While security concerns and expectations of benefits affect the decision to rebel, social commitments, identities radicalized by state repression, and collective threat perceptions among efficacious individuals generated by political mobilization, rather than preexisting ethnic cleavages, also lead to participation in an ethnic insurgency. The latter findings explain the durability of insurgencies with limited economic resources and their ability to attract educated fighters.

It is often argued that internationally recognized human rights are common to all cultural traditions and adaptable to a great variety of social structures and political regimes. Such arguments confuse human rights with human dignity. All societies possess conceptions of human dignity, but the conception of human dignity underlying international human rights standards requires a particular type of “liberal” regime. This conclusion is reached through a comparison of the social structures of ideal type liberal, minimal, traditional, communist, corporatist and developmental regimes and their impact on autonomy, equality, privacy, social conflict, and the definition of societal membership.

In the course of making and justifying decisions, judges on state supreme courts often rely on precedents from other jurisdictions. These judicial references across boundaries constitute at least one means of communication and, in turn, demonstrate a complex web of deference and derogation between and among various courts. I attempt to uncover patterns of citation between the several state supreme courts and to evaluate alternative explanations for these patterns, including distance between courts; similarity of political culture; the prestige, professionalism, legal capital, and caseload of the cited court; the social diversity of the environment; differentials between courts on a number of dimensions; and presence in the same legal reporting region. More globally, I ask: Does the intensity of communications between a pair of courts result from the characteristics of the cited court or from differences and similarities between courts or jurisdictions? The results indicate the importance of legal reporting districts, distance between the courts, cultural linkages between the jurisdictions and, especially, characteristics of the cited court.

Political behavior research has delivered less than the “behavioral revolution” seemed originally to promise. A survey of recent work suggests that the reason is not its epistemological premises (which are accepted here) or its methodology, but (1) its unsystematic, atheoretical character and limited range of research topics, and (2) the erroneous conception of human nature on which research rests. Compared with either the established principles of modern biobehavioral science or the conceptions of human problems of earlier political science, political behavior research remains “pre-behavioral.”

To progress beyond this stage, political scientists must recognize and apply the basic knowledge about human behavior provided by the biobehavioral sciences. Two brief examples of such application are given: how ethological knowledge can supply a needed theoretical perspective for identifying political behavior problems worth studying; and how neurophysiological knowledge, particularly psychophysiology and psychophysics, can correct mistaken conceptions of the relationship between political attitudes, political words, and political actions.

This article develops and tests a new theoretical framework, gendered political socialization, which offers important insights into how children perceive gender in politics and the consequences of these perceptions on sex differences in political interest and ambition. Based on data from 1,604 children who live in four different regions across the United States, we find that children not only perceive politics to be a male-dominated space, but with age, girls increasingly see political leadership as a “man’s world.” Simultaneously, as children grow older, they internalize gendered expectations, which direct their interests toward professions that embody the gendered traits that fit with their own sex. One result of this mismatch between women and politics is that girls express lower levels of interest and ambition in politics than do boys.

Domestic support for a liberal commercial policy in the U.S. rests on a commonly accepted set of rules and norms. These rules and norms, best characterized as a defense of free and fair trade, arise from two different traditions. The first originated as a political reaction to high trade barriers preceding the Great Depression. Central decision makers took as a lesson from the depression period that short-term political forces should not determine the level of state intervention into the market. The second, to protect against unfair trade, emanates from a long history of state support for industries that claim foreign producers are pursuing unfair predatory practices. Established in statute before the Depression, these rules did not fundamentally change in the postwar period. Together, these decision rules are used to interpret American trade protectionism.

Armed forces strong enough to protect the state also pose a threat to the state. We develop a model that distills this “Guardianship Dilemma” to its barest essentials, and show that the seemingly ironclad logic underlying our existing understanding of civil-military relations is flawed. Militaries contemplating disloyalty must worry about both successfully overthrowing the government and defeating the state’s opponent. This twin challenge induces loyalty as the state faces increasingly strong external threats, and can be managed effectively by rulers using a number of policy levers. Disloyalty can still occur when political and military elites hold divergent beliefs about the threat environment facing the state, since militaries will sometimes have less incentive to remain loyal than the ruler suspects. Consequently, it is not the need to respond to external threats that raises the risk of disloyalty—as conventional wisdom suggests—but rather uncertainty about the severity of these threats.

Perhaps the most dramatic finding of recent research on the political socialization of children is that youngsters appear to be overwhelmingly favorably disposed toward political objects which cross their vision. Officers and institutions of government are regarded as benevolent, worthy, competent, serving and powerful. The implications of such findings are striking indeed. Childhood political dispositions may represent the roots of later patriotism; we may be observing the building of basic regime-level supportive values at a very young age.

These findings are by no means new; in fact, they might be classified as part of the conventional wisdom of the discipline. Moreover, they are extremely well documented, and the study of childhood political socialization has advanced to consider far more than basic regime-level norms. Despite all this, however, there are still many empirical questions to be asked about such norms. Perhaps the recent assertion that the political scientist's model of socialization is “static and homogeneous” is particularly apropos here. Consider two closely related characteristics of the appropriate literature: 1) the “positive image” which children have about politics and political figures has been synthesized from data gathered largely in the United States and to some extent in urban, industrialized communities within the United States; and 2) empirical explanation of the favorable disposition which children manifest has not progressed very far. Though there may be hypotheses about how children get this way, there has been little systematic testing of the relationships between variables.

A considerable theoretical literature argues that if everyone votes sincerely, then an agenda setter has near dictatorial influence on final outcomes, whereas if everyone votes strategically, then an agenda setter's power is considerably reduced. This literature assumes that all feasible agendas are of a special type called amendment agendas. But actual legislative and committee agendas—notably those found in Congress—often are not of this type. Once we expand the domain of feasible agendas to include all types allowed by common parliamentary practice, the influence of agendas on legislative outcomes expands, even with strategic voting. Besides showing with counterexamples that previous results do not extend to a more realistic domain of agendas, we prove some theorems that specify the limits (such as they are) of an agenda setter's power.

Do businesspeople who win elected office use their positions to help their firms? Business leaders become politicians around the world, yet we know little about whether their commitment to public service trumps their own private interests. Using an original dataset of 2,703 firms in Russia, I employ a regression discontinuity design to identify the causal effect of firm directors winning seats in subnational legislatures from 2004 to 2013. First, having a connection to a winning politician increases a firm’s revenue by 60% and profitability by 15% over a term in office. I then test between different mechanisms, finding that connected firms improve their performance by gaining access to bureaucrats and not by signaling legitimacy to financiers. The value of winning a seat increases in more politically competitive regions but falls markedly when more businesspeople win office in a convocation. Politically connected firms extract fewer benefits when faced with greater competition from other rent-seekers.

We use a formal bargaining model to examine why, in many domestic and international bargaining situations, one or both negotiators make public statements in front of their constituents committing themselves to obtaining certain benefits in the negotiations. We find that making public commitments provides bargaining leverage, when backing down from such commitments carries domestic political costs. However, when the two negotiators face fairly similar costs for violating a public commitment, a prisoner's dilemma is created in which both sides make high public demands which cannot be satisfied, and both negotiators would be better off if they could commit to not making public demands. However, making a public demand is a dominant strategy for each negotiator, and this leads to a suboptimal outcome. Escaping this prisoner's dilemma provides a rationale for secret negotiations. Testable hypotheses are derived from the nature of the commitments and agreements made in equilibrium.

Public support has long been thought crucial for the vitality and survival of democracy. Existing research has argued that democracy also creates its own demand: through early-years socialization and later-life learning, the presence of a democratic system coupled with the passage of time produces widespread public support for democracy. Using new panel measures of democratic mood varying over 135 countries and up to 30 years, this article finds little evidence for such a positive feedback effect of democracy on support. Instead, it demonstrates a negative thermostatic effect: increases in democracy depress democratic mood, while decreases cheer it. Moreover, it is increases in the liberal, counter-majoritarian aspects of democracy, not the majoritarian, electoral aspects that provoke this backlash from citizens. These novel results challenge existing research on support for democracy, but also reconcile this research with the literature on macro-opinion.

This essay analyses the explanatory power of Davis, Dempster, and Wildavsky's theory of budgetary incrementalism. By means of sensitivity testing, it demonstrates that inferences to “gaming” or strategic explanations of budgetary incrementalism are not warranted on the basis of correlational analysis.

To explain budgetary incrementalism more satisfactorily, recourse is made to concepts and variables explicit in the vocabulary of the budget process participants. When mandatory requests are distinguished from programmatic requests, the differential treatment of the two by Congress is observed to allow good explanation of budgetary relations. In particular, the inexorable but small mandatory request, which is almost automatically granted, is adequate by itself to explain why requests always increase and why one year's appropriation surpasses the previous one.

If candidates are uncertain about the policy position preferred by the median voter and therefore face the risk of stating an unpopular position, in equilibrium both candidates may prefer to make their positions ambiguous rather than to specify them. The incentives to be ambiguous are further increased if the position announced by one candidate allows the other candidate to estimate the preferences of the voters better.

I examine competing explanations for House rules changes with significant partisan overtones. I sought to identify all rules changes adopted from 1867 to 1998 that were intended either to advantage or to undermine the majority party and its leaders in their efforts to shape the House agenda. I test a majority party cartel model of institutional change against a model that focuses on the ideological balance of power on the floor, that is, on the closeness of the median voter to the median member of the majority and minority parties. I also evaluate the conditional party government approach. The data analysis suggests the preeminent importance of shifts in the ideological balance. Two variables identified by the conditional party government theory, party polarization and party capacity, obtain limited support, but their effect is neither as robust nor as large in magnitude as that of change in the median voter's position.

Games are paradigms of many political events, especially those that involve partial or complete conflicts of interest among the participants. As paradigms, they display in relatively simple social interaction the same fundamental forces found in the more complex interactions of the grander political events whose structure they share. This is the feature of games that makes them attractive vehicles for both theorizing and experimentation in the social sciences. The scientific expectation is that, by studying the quasi-political interaction of games—where the variations among institutional, psychological, and ideological components of behavior are minimized—one will be able to understand more profoundly the basic political activities of bargaining, forming coalitions, and choosing strategies. This more profound understanding is a consequence of obtaining answers to the following questions:

(1) What is the mathematical solution, that is, what amount of utility can players be expected to obtain, when it is assumed that players are rational and wish to maximize utility?

(2) What is the strategy (or method of playing) that will ensure players of achieving the solution?

An answer to the first question indicates what may be anticipated as the outcome of political events. If we know it, then, if also we can assume players are rational maximizers of utility, we can predict the political future with some confidence. An answer to the second question (about strategies) permits political engineers to give advice to politicians about how to behave successfully.