Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem and Sen’s Minimal Liberalism example impose ‘impossibility’ roadblocks on progress. A reinterpretation explained in this article exposes what causes these negative conclusions, which permits the development of positive resolutions that retain the spirit of Arrow’s and Sen’s assumptions. What precipitates difficulties is surprisingly common, and it affects most disciplines. This insight identifies how to analyze other puzzles such as conflicting laws or controversies over voting rules. An unexpected bonus is that this social science issue defines a research agenda to address the ‘dark matter’ mystery confronting astronomers.

Economic statistics inform citizens of general conditions, while central leaders use them to evaluate local officials. Are economic data systematically manipulated? After establishing discrepancies in economic data series cross-nationally, this article examines Chinese sub-national growth data. It leverages variation in the likelihood of manipulation over two dimensions, arguing that politically sensitive data are more likely to be manipulated at politically sensitive times. Gross domestic product (GDP) releases generate headlines, while highly correlated electricity production and consumption data are relatively unnoticed. In Chinese provinces, the difference between GDP and electricity growth increases in years with leadership turnover, which is consistent with juking the stats for political reasons. The analysis points to the political role of information and the limits of non-electoral accountability mechanisms in authoritarian regimes.

Government formation in multiparty systems is of self-evident substantive importance, and the subject of an enormous theoretical literature. Empirical evaluations of models of government formation tend to separate government formation per se from the distribution of key government pay-offs, such as cabinet portfolios, between members of the resulting government. Models of government formation are necessarily specified ex ante, absent any knowledge of the government that forms. Models of the distribution of cabinet portfolios are typically, though not necessarily, specified ex post, taking into account knowledge of the identity of some government ‘formateur’ or even of the composition of the eventual cabinet. This disjunction lies at the heart of a notorious contradiction between predictions of the distribution of cabinet portfolios made by canonical models of legislative bargaining and the robust empirical regularity of proportional portfolio allocations – Gamson’s Law. This article resolves this contradiction by specifying and estimating a joint model of cabinet formation and portfolio distribution that, for example, predicts ex ante which parties will receive zero portfolios rather than taking this as given ex post. It concludes that canonical models of legislative bargaining do increase the ability to predict government membership, but that portfolio distribution between government members conforms robustly to a proportionality norm because portfolio distribution follows the much more difficult process of policy bargaining in the typical government formation process.

Tax competition is the quintessential example of policy interdependence. The general idea is that tax changes in one jurisdiction lead to similar changes in others. However, research has shown that institutional and political constraints limit competition. This article develops another argument: that socialization among policy makers attenuates competitive dynamics by setting limits to the extent of competition that is considered acceptable. Using fine-grained Swiss data and spatial econometric techniques, it shows that personal income tax rates are more strongly correlated among competitors that do not participate in the same intergovernmental organizations. This finding implies that, to some extent, the detrimental consequences of competition can be mitigated by fostering institutionalized forms of interaction among policy makers.

The article examines the relationship between corruption and voting behavior by defining two distinct channels: pocketbook corruption voting, i.e. how personal experiences with corruption affect voting behavior; and sociotropic corruption voting, i.e. how perceptions of corruption in society do so. Individual and aggregate data from Slovakia fail to support hypotheses that corruption is an undifferentiated valence issue, that it depends on the presence of a viable anti-corruption party, or that voters tolerate (or even prefer) corruption, and support the hypothesis that the importance of each channel depends on the salience of each source of corruption and that pocketbook corruption voting prevails unless a credible anti-corruption party shifts media coverage of corruption and activates sociotropic corruption voting. Previous studies may have underestimated the prevalence of corruption voting by not accounting for both channels.

Does increasing economic globalization influence aggregate policy mood toward the role and size of government in the United States? Drawing on insights from international political economy scholarship, this article suggests that the impact of trade on aggregate preferences will depend on citizens’ exposure to trade. It hypothesizes that employees of import-competing, export-oriented and multinational firms will adopt a ‘compensatory’ model in which higher levels of imports (exports) lead to a liberal (conservative) shift in policy preferences for more (less) government. It distinguishes between intrafirm and non-intrafirm trade flows. It measures policy mood using Stimson's ‘Mood’, and estimates Error Correction and Instrumental Variable models. Trade flows strongly influence Mood in a manner consistent with hypotheses drawn from international political economy and heterogeneous firms (or ‘new new’) trade theory.

There is little research on the thousands of individuals who take part in intergroup violence. This article proposes that their participation is motivated by the emotion of intergroup anger, which, in turn, is triggered by a comparison between the intergroup distribution of resources and the distribution that is believed to be desirable. Thus, when another group is perceived to violate group entitlements – by taking jobs thought to belong to the ingroup, for example – anger is experienced and individuals become more willing to take part in violence against the outgroup. Support for this theory is found in a new survey dataset, collected in a slum in South Africa where anti-immigrant violence occurred in 2008.

Citizens are now central to national security strategies, yet governments readily admit that little is known about public opinion on security. This article presents a unique and timely examination of public perceptions of security threats. By focusing on the breadth of security threats that citizens identify, their psychological origins, how they vary from personal to global levels, and the relationships between perceptions of threats and other political attitudes and behaviours, the article makes several new contributions to the literature. These include extending the levels at which threats are perceived from the national versus personal dichotomy to a continuum spanning the individual, family, community, nation and globe, and showing the extent to which perceptions of threat at each level have different causes, as well as different effects on political attitudes and behaviour. These findings are also relevant to policy communities’ understanding of what it means for a public to feel secure.

The ability of the news media to mobilize voters during an election campaign is not well understood. Most extant research has been conducted in single-country studies and has paid little or no attention to the contextual level and the conditions under which such effects are more or less likely to occur. This study tests the mobilizing effect of conflict news framing in the context of the 2009 European Parliamentary elections. The unique multi-method and comparative cross-national study design combines a media content analysis (N = 48,982) with data from a two-wave panel survey conducted in twenty-one countries (N = 32,411). Consistent with expectations, conflict framing in campaign news mobilized voters to vote. Since the effect of conflict news was moderated by evaluations of the EU polity in the general information environment, conflict framing more effectively mobilized voters in countries where the EU was evaluated more positively.

This article discusses possible issues of how media content and exposure were linked in previous research. It argues that the original conclusions of the article ‘Who's Afraid of Conflict? The Mobilizing Effect of Conflict Framing in Campaign News’ do not hold due to the chosen operationalization. It also demonstrates that using the proposed methodology, both exposure to conflictual and non-conflictual news yield the same substantive conclusion. In addition to re-evaluating the role of conflict, the article contributes to the discussion on how to integrate media and individual-level measures in the study of electoral behavior.

Voluntary compliance is an important aspect of strong tax regimes, but there is limited understanding of how social norms favoring compliance emerge. Using novel data from urban Nigeria, where tax enforcement is weak, this article shows that individuals with a positive experience of state services delivery are more likely to express belief in an unconditioned citizen obligation to pay tax. In addition to support for this fiscal exchange mechanism, social context is consequential. Where individuals have access to community-provided goods, which may substitute for effective state services provision, they are less likely to adopt pro-compliance norms. Finally, the article shows that norm adoption increases tax payment. These findings have broad implications for literatures on state formation, taxation and public goods provision.