According to the classical perspective, polity size and democracy are inversely related. In this article, we argue that there is an important exception that manifests itself at the district level in settings where multiparty competition is allowed. Specifically, we find that larger districts encourage greater contestation. This results from a little-noticed mechanical effect as well as from several features of constituencies that are affected by size and have direct repercussions for contestation. To demonstrate this thesis we assembled a unique dataset, the Multi-level Election Archive (MLEA), which unites electoral contests across a variety of districts (national, regional, and local) and elective offices from the eighteenth century to the present, including a total of 88 countries, 2,344 elections, 79,658 districts, and more than 400,000 contests. With this evidence we were able to conduct a broad array of statistical tests, some global and others focused on particular countries or election types, all of which support our general argument.

Remittances are a significant source of foreign exchange for developing economies. I argue that remittances, due to their compensation and insurance functions, will increase the general income level and economic security of recipients, thereby reducing their perceived income risk. Over time, this will dampen demand from recipients for government taxation and social insurance. Therefore, I expect increases in income remitted to an economy to result in reduced levels of social welfare transfers at the macro-level. This dynamic can help us to understand spending patterns in developing democracies, and the absence of demand for social security transfers in countries with high levels of inequality and economic insecurity. I test this argument with a sample of 18 Latin American states, over the period 1990 to 2009, and subject the central causal mechanism to a battery of statistical tests. The results of these tests provide strong support for this argument.

This article evaluates the effect of territorial autonomy on the outbreak of internal conflict by analyzing ethnic groups around the world since WWII. Shedding new light on an ongoing debate, we argue that the critics have overstated the case against autonomy policies. Our evidence indicates that decentralization has a significant conflict-preventing effect where there is no prior conflict history. In postconflict settings, however, granting autonomy can still be helpful in combination with central power sharing arrangements. Yet, on its own, postconflict autonomy concessions may be too little, too late. Accounting for endogeneity, we also instrument for autonomy in postcolonial states by exploiting that French, as opposed to British, colonial rule rarely relied on decentralized governance. This identification strategy suggests that naïve analysis tends to underestimate the pacifying influence of decentralization.

When influencing the allocation of federal dollars across the country, do presidents strictly pursue maximally efficient outcomes, or do they systematically target dollars to politically influential constituencies? In a county-level analysis of federal spending from 1984 to 2008, we find that presidents are not universalistic, but particularistic—that is, they reliably direct dollars to specific constituents to further their political goals. As others have noted, presidents target districts represented by their co-partisans in Congress in the pursuit of influence vis-à-vis the legislature. But we show that, at much higher levels, presidents target both counties within swing states and counties in core states that strongly supported the president in recent elections. Swing state particularism is especially salient during presidential reelection years, and core partisan counties within swing states are most heavily rewarded. Rather than strictly pursuing visions of good public policy or pandering to the national median voter, our results suggest that presidents systematically prioritize the needs of politically important constituents.

Under what circumstances do new constitutions promote democracy? Between 1974 and 2011, the level of democracy increased in 62 countries following the adoption of a new constitution, but decreased or stayed the same in 70 others. Using data covering all 138 new constitutions in 118 countries during that period, we explain this divergence through empirical tests showing that overall increased participation during the process of making the constitution positively impacts postpromulgation levels of democracy. Then, after disaggregating constitution-making into three stages (drafting, debating, and ratification) we find compelling evidence through robust statistical tests that the degree of citizen participation in the drafting stage has a much greater impact on the resulting regime. This lends support to some core principles of “deliberative” theories of democracy. We conclude that constitutional reformers should focus more on generating public “buy in” at the front end of the constitution-making process, rather than concentrating on ratification and referendums at the “back end” that are unlikely to correct for an “original sin” of limited citizen deliberation during drafting.

Do informal institutions, rules, and norms created and enforced by social groups promote good local governance in environments of weak democratic or bureaucratic institutions? This question is difficult to answer because of challenges in defining and measuring informal institutions and identifying their causal effects. In the article, we investigate the effect of lineage groups, one of the most important vehicles of informal institutions in rural China, on local public goods expenditure. Using a panel dataset of 220 Chinese villages from 1986 to 2005, we find that village leaders from the two largest family clans in a village increased local public investment considerably. This association is stronger when the clans appeared to be more cohesive. We also find that clans helped local leaders overcome the collective action problem of financing public goods, but there is little evidence suggesting that they held local leaders accountable.

Previous research finds that House majority members and members in the president's party garner additional federal spending in their districts. Using federal spending data in individual districts, we implement two research designs to distinguish elected officials enacting policies that benefit like-minded voters—the party in the electorate—from those that benefit same-party elected officials—the party in government. We find robust evidence that presidential partisanship is associated with large differences in spending correlated with voter preferences, but little evidence that presidents favor areas represented by their party in the House. By contrast, control of the House is associated with differences in spending by voter preferences and with modest increases in spending in districts held by members of the majority. These findings have important implications for understanding presidential influence, as well as the role of parties in the House and in coordinating between elected branches.

A ratification referendum is a procedure in which framers submit a constitution to the people for binding approval before implementation. It is widespread, recommended, and affects the contents and reception of constitutions, yet remains unstudied. Moreover, the reasons or justification for using the procedure remain unexplored. This is troubling because ratification referenda are optional, and thus should only be implemented for good reasons that, today, are no longer given. This article begins correcting this oversight by identifying those that brought about the first ratification referendum and explaining why they did so. I demonstrate that the Berkshire Constitutionalists called for the procedure during the events leading up to the creation of the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution, and that they justified their actions by asserting that the people have an unalienable right to ratify their constitution through a referendum, for this provided needed protection against potentially corrupt elites. This argument remains the most fully developed justification for the procedure to date. My analysis not only reveals ratification referenda to be another product of early American political thought, but also points the way forward for future evaluation of the procedure, and forces reflection upon the importance of having solid grounds for the choices involved in structuring a constitution-making process.

Do knowledge and information about foreign countries affect people’s evaluation of domestic situations? Using unique survey and experimental data, this research finds that Chinese citizens with more positive perceptions and especially overestimation of foreign socioeconomic conditions have more negative evaluations of China and the Chinese government. Moreover, correcting socioeconomic misinformation about foreign countries improves one’s evaluations of China, indicating that the causal direction is at least partly from rosier estimation of foreign conditions to lower domestic evaluations. The relationship between domestic evaluations and international political knowledge, as measured by familiarity with political affairs and figures in foreign countries, is typically not significant, although awareness of political instability in other countries can increase satisfaction with one’s own country. These results contribute both substantively and conceptually to the study of politically relevant knowledge and information, and shed new light on the nuances of information flow and opinion formation in changing societies.

How do persistent terrorist attacks influence political tolerance, a willingness to extend basic liberties to one's enemies? Studies in the U.S. and elsewhere have produced a number of valuable insights into how citizens respond to singular, massive attacks like 9/11. But they are less useful for evaluating how chronic and persistent terrorist attacks erode support for democratic values over the long haul. Our study focuses on political tolerance levels in Israel across a turbulent 30-year period, from 1980 to 2011, which allows us to distinguish the short-term impact of hundreds of terrorist attacks from the long-term influence of democratic longevity on political tolerance. We find that the corrosive influence of terrorism on political tolerance is much more powerful among Israelis who identify with the Right, who have also become much more sensitive to terrorism over time. We discuss the implications of our findings for other democracies under threat from terrorism.

If perfectionism is understood as the state's non-neutral promotion of a valuable way of life, Confucian political theory, often pursued as a pluralist correction to global monism of liberal democracy, is ineluctably perfectionist. But how can Confucian perfectionism, committed to particular Confucian values, reconcile with the societal fact of value pluralism within the putative Confucian polity? This article argues that a potential tension between Confucian perfectionism and value pluralism can be avoided by making Confucian perfectionist goods the core elements of public reason with which citizens can justify their arguments to one another and by which the state can justifiably exercise its public authority to reasonable citizens who otherwise subscribe to various comprehensive doctrines. By defining a mode of Confucian perfectionism working through Confucian public reason broadly shared by citizens as public reason Confucianism, this article attempts to balance the Confucian polity's internal societal pluralism and the people's collective self-determination.

The transmission of ideas, information, and resources forms the core of many issues studied in political science, including collective action, cooperation, and development. While these processes imply dynamic connections among political actors, researchers often cannot observe such interdependence. One example is public policy diffusion, which has long been a focus of multiple subfields. In the American state politics context, diffusion is commonly conceptualized as a dyadic process whereby states adopt policies (in part) because other states have adopted them. This implies a policy diffusion network connecting the states. Using a dataset of 187 policies, we introduce and apply an algorithm that infers this network from persistent diffusion patterns. The results contribute to knowledge on state policy diffusion in several respects. Additionally, in introducing network inference to political science, we provide scholars across the discipline with a general framework for empirically recovering the latent and dynamic interdependence among political actors.

On page 556 of the article by Htun and Weldon (2012) it is stated that, “Before Vienna [the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights], mainstream human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International did not treat rape and domestic violence as core issues of human rights. (These organizations now have women's rights projects.)”

In the August 2015 issue of American Political Science Review, Eisenstadt et al. (2015) did not cite the last three authors in the reference for Mansbridge et al. (2012). The reference appears in the reference section below.

Owing to an editorial error, the titles in the affiliations of Andreas Schädel and Julian Wucherpfennig in the article by Cederman et al. (2015) in the May 2015 issue of American Political Science Review are incorrect. The correct affiliations are as follows:

Andreas Schädel is PhD candidate at ETH Zürich, Haldeneggsteig 4, 8092 Zürich, Switzerland ([email protected]).

Julian Wucherpfennig is Lecturer in International Security at University College London, 29/31 Tavistock Square, London, WC1H 9QU, United Kingdom ([email protected]).

We regret the error.

Owing to an editorial oversight, the citation and reference for Piplani and Talmadge (2015) was deleted twice on page 307 of the May 2015 issue of American Political Science Review. The citations should read as follows:

In this context, it is useful to consider the empirical results of two studies that find that the probability of coups is lower if the country is involved in a war (Piplani and Talmadge, 2015) and even in a crisis (Arbatli and Arbatli, 2014). The explanatory mechanisms these studies offer are different (although not necessarily incompatible): Piplani and Talmadge (2015) argue that when the military is engaged in a war there are fewer opportunities for a coup and more uncertainty about who will join it, whereas Arbatli and Arbatli (2014) argue that crises allow rulers to commit credibly to transfers to the military and to generate rally-around-the-flag effects.

Also, owing to a printer's error on page 305, Qaddafi is misspelled as Qaddaf.

We regret these errors.