This article analyzes the political origins of differences in adherence to the fiscal framework of the European Union (EU). It shows how incentives to use fiscal policy for electoral purposes and limited budget transparency at the national level, combined with the need to respond to fiscal rules at the supranational level, interact to systematically undermine the Economic and Monetary Union through the employment of fiscal gimmicks or creative accounting. It also explains in detail how national accounts were manipulated to produce electoral cycles that were under the radar of the EU budget surveillance system, and concludes with new perspectives on the changes to (and challenges for) euro area fiscal rules.

Religions are organized in a variety of ways. They may resemble an elected autocracy, a parliamentary democracy or something akin to a monarchy, in which heredity plays a primary role. These differing power arrangements call for different types of strategic behavior in the fight for control of church doctrine and finances. They also induce different institutional responses. This article explains cases in which screening is highly institutionalized and when a person's age may be an important strategic factor in choosing a leader. It thus explains what otherwise would be very puzzling differences in the age of appointment across religions and within a particular religion, over time. The study also applies the methodology to politics more generally by looking at elections in Venice and Genoa in the eighteenth century and the appointment of leaders in present-day China.

Legislators and legislative parties must strike a balance between collective and member-level goals. While there are legislative and reputational returns to co-ordinated behavior, partisan loyalty has a detrimental effect on members’ electoral success. This article argues that members and parties navigate these competing forces by pursuing partisan legislation when the threat of electoral repercussions is relatively low – when elections are distant. This study tests our theory by examining US House members’ likelihood of voting with their party on both partisan and non-divisive votes during the course of the election cycle in order to assess whether members strategically alter their levels of party loyalty as elections approach. It also explores whether majority parties strategically structure the agenda according to variation in members’ electoral constraints. This approach allows elite partisanship to follow a dynamic process, which is referred to here as dynamic elite partisanship. The results demonstrate that as elections approach, members are less likely to cast party votes, and parties are less inclined to schedule votes that divide the parties. At the same time, the study finds no evidence of strategic variation in members’ voting behavior on broadly consensual votes with election proximity.

Studies on what causes a state to democratize have focused on economic, social, and international factors. Many of them argue that higher levels of education should promote democracy. However, few articulate clearly how education affects democratization, and fewer still attempt to test the supposed link across time and space. This article fills that gap by considering how different levels of education influence democratization, and the conditions under which education is most likely to promote democracy. Analyses of eighty-five authoritarian spells from 1970 to 2008 find that higher levels of mass, primary, and tertiary education are robustly associated with democratization. Secondary analyses indicate that education is most effective in promoting democratization when both males and females are educated. An illustration from Tunisia follows.

This study uses new data on coups d’état and elections to document a striking development: whereas the vast majority of successful coups before 1991 installed durable rules, the majority of coups after that have been followed by competitive elections. The article argues that after the Cold War, international pressure influenced the consequences of coups. In the post-Cold War era, countries that were most dependent on Western aid were the first to embrace competitive elections after their coups. This theory also helps explain the pronounced decline in the number of coups since 1991. While the coup d’état has been (and still is) the single most important factor leading to the downfall of democratic governments, these findings indicate that the new generation of coups has been far less harmful for democracy than their historical predecessors.

Children are more likely to adopt their family's political views when politics is important to their parents, and the children of politically engaged parents tend to become politically engaged adults. When these transmission dynamics are considered together, an important hypothesis follows: the children who are most likely to initially acquire the political views of their parents are also most likely to later abandon them as a result of their own engagement with the political world. Data from the Political Socialisation Panel Study provide support for this hypothesis, illuminate its observational implications and shed light on the mechanisms, pointing to the role of new social contexts, political issues and salient political events. Replications using different data from the US and the UK confirm that this dynamic is generalizable to different cohorts and political periods.

This article examines how human rights international non-governmental organizations (hereafter HROs) can increase the level of political protest in neighboring states. Previous research suggests local activities of HROs help to generate mobilization for protests against governments. This article shows that the presence of HROs in neighboring states can be a substitute for domestic HROs; if domestic HROs are already flourishing, there will be less of a ‘neighbor’ effect. At sufficiently high levels of domestic HRO prevalence within a state, neighboring HROs help domestic HROs use institutionalized substitutes for protest mobilization strategies. Spatial econometric methods are used to test the implications of this theory. These results illuminate the role that non-governmental organizations play in these domestic political processes, and demonstrate the transnational nature of their activities.

Whereas some researchers emphasize how World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement reduces complexity and clarifies legislation, others argue that dispute rulings promote co-operation by providing an enforcement mechanism. This article identifies empirical implications from these distinct arguments and tests them on WTO disputes from 1995 to 2006. The study's analytical approach combines a three-step coding of dispute escalation with a strategic bargaining model and statistical backwards induction to account for governments’ forward-looking behavior. It finds strong support for the argument that WTO dispute settlement primarily serves as an enforcement device. It finds much less support for the argument that dispute settlement reduces complexity and clarifies trade law. These results suggest that the role of WTO dispute settlement in generating information on acceptable trade policy standards is less relevant than proponents of the complexity argument tend to assume.

What determines state participation in regulatory regimes? This article argues that if international regulation creates markets for new technologies, innovative companies support the ratification of the relevant regulatory treaties. Consequently, technological innovativeness should have a positive effect on regulatory treaty ratification. From the harmonization of telecommunication technology to pesticide regulation, many regulatory treaties create new product markets, so the argument applies to a variety of regulatory issues. This hypothesis is tested against data on the ratification of two major multilateral treaties for pesticide control: the 1998 Rotterdam Convention and the 2001 Stockholm Convention. Countries that are capable of biotechnology innovation are found to be more likely to ratify each treaty. The findings suggest that (1) technology innovation is key to regulatory treaty ratification and (2) constituency preferences for regulatory treaties are contingent upon expected profits from innovation. More broadly, the article emphasizes the importance of technological factors for international co-operation.