This article measures the social rewards and sanctions associated with voting. A series of survey experiments shows that information about whether a person votes directly affects how favorably that person is viewed. Importantly, the study also compares the rewards and sanctions associated with voting to other activities, including the decisions to recycle, volunteer and return one’s library books on time. It presents a behavioral test of the consequences of non-voting and finds that individuals are willing to take costly action in a dictator game to reward political participation. Finally, it shows that survey measures of social norms about voting are correlated with county-level voter turnout. The study adds to the growing literature documenting the important influence of social concerns on turnout and other political choices.

To understand how electoral reform affects political outcomes, one needs to assess its total effect, incorporating how the reform affects the outcomes given the political status quo (the mechanical effects) and the additional reactions of political agents (the psychological effects). This article proposes a framework to ascertain the relative magnitude of mechanical and various psychological effects. The empirical approach is based on pairwise comparisons of actual and counterfactual seat allocation outcomes. It uses the design to analyze a nationwide municipal electoral reform in Norway, which changed the seat allocation method from D’Hondt to Modified Sainte-Laguë. The study documents clear psychological effects.

Parties are not unitary actors, and legislators within the same party may have divergent interests, which complicates the understanding of parties’ motivations and behaviour. This article argues that holding a ministerial portfolio confers an electoral advantage, and so, in contrast to their co-partisans, politicians who are ministers simultaneously maximize policy, office and votes. New data on Irish elections over a thirty-year period show that ministers are insulated from the electoral cost of governing compared with their co-partisans. Differentiating between ministers and their co-partisans helps to resolve the puzzle of political parties’ choosing to enter government despite the evident electoral costs they will encounter. Moreover, previously overlooked electoral benefits of ministerial office help explain their desirability, and thus their ability to incentivize legislative behaviour in parliamentary regimes.

Political violence remains a pervasive feature of electoral dynamics in many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, even where multiparty elections have become the dominant mode of regulating access to political power. With cross-national data on electoral violence in Sub-Saharan African elections between 1990 and 2010, this article develops and tests a theory that links the use of violent electoral tactics to the high stakes put in place by majoritarian electoral institutions. It is found that electoral violence is more likely in countries that employ majoritarian voting rules and elect fewer legislators from each district. Majoritarian institutions are, as predicted by theory, particularly likely to provoke violence where large ethno-political groups are excluded from power and significant economic inequalities exist.

This article addresses two aspects of social network influence on voters’ electoral choices that are not well understood: the role of party systems as institutional contexts and the relationship between social pressure and information sharing as mechanisms of influence. It argues that in the cleavage-based multiparty systems of Western Europe, discussant influence at elections occurs in two stages. First, discussants place social pressure on voters to opt for parties from the same ideological camp. Secondly, by providing information, discussants influence which parties voters eventually choose out of these restricted ‘consideration sets’. The study tests these assumptions using a panel survey conducted at the 2009 German federal election. The first proposition is clearly confirmed, and the evidence supports the second proposition, although less unequivocally.

Financial activity has become increasingly important in affluent economies in recent decades. Because this ‘financialization’ distributes costs and benefits unevenly across groups, politics and policy likely affect the process. Therefore, this article discusses how changes in the power of organizations representing the ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ of financialization affect its pace. An analysis of the United States from 1949–2005, shows that when unions are stronger, and when the Democratic Party is in power and is more reliant on the support of working-class voters, financialization is slower. In contrast, when the financial industry is more highly mobilized into politics, financialization is faster. The study also finds that financial deregulation was one policy translating the political power of these actors into economic outcomes.

Agendas shape the strategies states adopt in international bargaining and, therefore, the substantive nature of the resulting outcomes. They are also a dynamic feature of the process, as states add and subtract issues in order to shift the bargaining outcome in their favor. This article analyzes when and why states will use these different ‘issue-linkage’ strategies. Focusing on the effects of a successful agreement and the costs of failure, it highlights conditions under which states are likely to add or subtract issues from the bargaining agenda. It tests these arguments using an original dataset of the bargaining strategies states have adopted in climate-change negotiations. It concludes by highlighting the implications the argument has for understanding the outcomes of international negotiations.

Legal scholars frequently advocate institutional reforms to modernize the judiciary and promote judicial independence. However, constitutional reforms also offer an opportunity for politicians to reshuffle the high courts. The negative consequences of constitutional change for judicial stability are explored using an original database of Supreme Court and Constitutional Tribunal members in eighteen Latin American countries between 1904 and 2010. Because unobserved factors potentially explain constitutional replacement as well as judicial turnover, a two-stage event-history model has been employed. The analysis integrates two literatures, studies of constitution-making and studies of judicial politics. The results show that constitutional change is a significant cause of judicial instability and court manipulation, even after potential endogeneity has been taken into account.

This article investigates the impact of niche party success on the policy agendas of mainstream parties. Following from the expected electoral effects of issue politicization, the success of radical right and green parties will cause different reactions from mainstream parties. While mainstream parties emphasize anti-immigrant positions in response to radical right success, green party success will have the opposite effect for environmental issues. Since green parties constitute issue owners, their success will make established parties de-emphasize the environment. Analyzing time-series cross-section data for sixteen Western European countries from 1980 to 2011, this article empirically establishes that green and radical right parties differ in their effect on mainstream party behavior and that their impact depends on the ideological position and past electoral performance of the mainstream parties.

The problem raised when democratic majorities take decisions that impose restrictions on religious minorities may be avoided through ‘the strategy of privatization’, but not when the issue is the character of public space. This article considers a challenging case: the Swiss referendum decision to ban any future construction of Islamic minarets. It examines two grounds for opposition: the human right to freedom of religion, and the liberal principle of equal treatment of cultures. It argues that the human right is too limited, and that the equal treatment principle can be trumped by considerations of national identity when public space is involved. Nevertheless, the content of that identity and its public expression must remain open to democratic deliberation, and the Swiss decision can be faulted on those grounds.

This article starts with two empirical observations from Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries about longer constitutions: (1) they are more rigid (that is, more difficult to amend) and (2) they are in practice more frequently amended. The study presents models of the frequently adopted rules for constitutional revision (for example, qualified majorities in one or two chambers, referendums) and demonstrates that, if longer constitutions are more frequently revised, it is because they must impose actual harm on overwhelming majorities. In trying to explain this finding, the article demonstrates that longer constitutions tend to contain more substantive restrictions. Countries with longer constitutions also tend to have lower levels of GDP per capita and higher corruption. Finally, the negative effect of constitutional length on GDP per capita is shown to persist even if corruption is controlled for.