Since the Second World War, preferential trading arrangements (PTAs) have become increasingly pervasive features of the international economic system. A great deal of research has addressed the economic consequences of these arrangements, but far less effort has been made to identify the political factors leading states to enter them. In this article, the domestic political factors affecting whether countries enter PTAs are investigated, placing particular emphasis on the number of veto players within a state. It is argued that the probability of forming a PTA declines as the number of such players rises. The results, covering 194 countries from 1950 to 1999, strongly support this argument. Holding various political and economic factors constant, increasing the number of veto players within a country significantly reduces the probability of signing a PTA.

Operationalized as a simulation and checked against 1,737 policy shifts in twenty-four post-war democracies, this theory of party position-taking offers both an explanation and specific postdictions of party behaviour, synthesizing some previous approaches and linking up with mandate theories of political representation. These wider implications are considered at the beginning and the end of the article.

The received wisdom in international relations suggests that we can best account for the foreign policies of small states by examining structural/systemic rather than domestic level factors. This article challenges this scholarly consensus. The distribution of power and the balance of threat do influence domestic institutional formation and change in emerging states. However, the subsequent military strategies of these weak states are likely to reflect such domestic institutional choices in a number of important and predictable ways. The article tests this argument against pre-1900 US domestic regime change and foreign security policy. The historical evidence suggests that while international preconditions were critically linked to constitutional reform, the institutional structures and rules of democratic presidentialism affected both the timing and substance of US military strategies in later periods. The US case study provides a springboard for speculating on the international context of democratization in Eastern Europe and the long-term foreign-policy consequences of this domestic regime choice.

This article presents evidence that both micro (individual level) and macro (aggregate level) theories of public opinion overstate the importance of political sophistication for opinion change. It is argued that even the least politically sophisticated segment of society receives messages about the economy and uses this information to update attitudes about political issues. To test this hypothesis, the authors have used General Social Survey data to construct a 31-item measure of policy mood, disaggregated by political sophistication, that spans from 1972 to 2004. They found that all the subgroups generally changed opinion at the same time, in the same direction, and to about the same extent. Furthermore, they show that groups at different sophistication levels change opinions for predominantly the same reasons.

In order to understand how electoral rules affect political outcomes, we need to know whether and how voters react to them. The ability of voters to react strategically to electoral rules may be limited in cases where the electoral rules are complex. In this article, I look for evidence of rational reactions to a moderately complex electoral system, that used in the Federal Republic of Germany. By examining district-level election results, I find substantial evidence that voters do react rationally, despite the complexity of the two-vote system. The rational reactions by voters lead to excess first votes for incumbents, for candidates of the major party expected to be in government, to major-party candidates in close races and to major-party candidates in districts with significant minority-party support. The findings support both the general claim that voters can react strategically to complex electoral rules, and more specific claims about the value of the two-vote ballot in Germany.

The debate about electoral reform in Britain has taken a new turn with the latest upsurge in mid-term support for the Liberals, the launch of the SDP, and the immediate electoral success of the Alliance between the two parties. We do not deal here with the durability or consequences of these developments. We are concerned with the electoral system that they put under challenge. This concern is the more important because, as we shall show here, the working of that system altered fundamentally between 1955 and 1979. Before considering how fragile ‘the mould of British polities’ is or whether it should be broken, it is appropriate to reconsider and remeasure the precise shape and texture of that mould, and establish what are the chemical bonds which have determined those characteristics.

Japan uses simple plurality elections with multi-member districts to elect its lower house. This system tends to produce competition among n + 1 candidates per district. This ‘law of simple plurality elections’ is a structural generalization akin to Duverger's Law. Evidence from Japan also indicates that the causal mechanism behind this ‘law’ is not strategic voting, although strategic voting occurs, but elite coalition building. It is further argued that the connection between structure and behaviour is learning and not rationality. Equilibria are reached slowly through trial and error processes. Once reached, the equilibrium is unstable because parties and candidates try to change it. Even without rational actors and stable equilibria, however, this structural generalization accurately describes the dynamics of electoral competition at the district level in Japan.

The virtual disappearance of moderate and cross-pressured members from the US Congress is analysed in this article. There were substantial numbers of these partisan non-conformists in both parties and in both chambers until the early 1980s when the middle began to shrink. This trend continued and accelerated in the 1990s. Partisan non-conformists disappeared through replacement and conversion. When moderate and cross-pressured members left Congress, their replacements were much more likely to be mainstream partisans in the 1980s and 1990s than they had been in earlier decades. The occurrence of some type of conversion (a shift towards the party's ideological mainstream or a party switch) is also much more common in recent decades. We present evidence that the shrinking middle in Congress resulted from electoral changes.

Existing empirical models of international co-operation emphasize domestic determinants, although virtually all theories of international relations focus on interdependencies between countries. This article examines how much states’ linkages with the international system, relative to domestic factors, such as income and democracy, influence the dynamics of global governance efforts. To this end, we study the ratification behaviour of 180 countries vis-à-vis 255 global environmental treaties. Except for integration into the world economy, which affects co-operative behaviour negatively, our results show that international factors have a stronger and more positive impact on cooperative behaviour than domestic factors. This implies that Galton’s advice not to examine the effects of internal and external variables in isolation is also useful in the study of international politics.

EC directives must be transposed into the national legal order of the memberstates within a specified deadline. Although member states are obliged to notifytheir transposition measures, they often fail to comply with these deadlines.Distinguishing between domestic and EU-related factors, this study examinestransposition failure and delay of EC directives from 1986 to 2002. Notificationfailure is found to be more likely when there is conflict between the memberstates during the EU legislative process. National patterns of transpositiontimeliness are shown to vary significantly, and higher levels of complexity andincreased use of parliamentary legislation, as well as more federalist andpluralist structures, contribute to delayed compliance.

Aggregation means the organization of elements of a system into patterns that tend to put highly compatible elements together and less compatible elements apart. Landscape theory Predicts how aggregation will lead to alignments among actors (such as nations), whose leaders are myopic in their assessments and incremental in their actions. The predicted configurations are based upon the attempts of actors to minimize their frustration based upon their pairwise Propensities to align with some actors and oppose others. These attempts lead to a local minimum in the energy landscape of the entire system. The theory is supported by the results of two cases: the alignment of seventeen European nations in the Second World War and membership in competing alliances of nine computer companies to set standards for Unix computer operating systems. The theory has potential for application to coalitions of political Parties in parliaments, social networks, social cleavages in democracies and organizational structures.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, an important pair of studies established that greater female representation in government is associated with lower levels of perceived corruption in that government. But recent research finds that this relationship is not universal and questions why it exists. This article presents a new theory explaining why women’s representation is only sometimes related to lower corruption levels and provides evidence in support of that theory. The study finds that the women’s representation–corruption link is strongest when the risk of corruption being detected and punished by voters is high – in other words, when officials can be held electorally accountable. Two primary mechanisms underlie this theory: prior evidence shows that (1) women are more risk-averse than men and (2) voters hold women to a higher standard at the polls. This suggests that gender differences in corrupt behavior are proportional to the strength of electoral accountability. Consequently, the hypotheses predict that the empirical relationship between greater women’s representation and lower perceived corruption will be strongest in democracies with high electoral accountability, specifically: (1) where corruption is not the norm, (2) where press freedom is respected, (3) in parliamentary systems and (4) under personalistic electoral rules. The article presents observational evidence that electoral accountability moderates the link between women’s representation and corruption in a time-series, cross-sectional dataset of seventy-six democratic-leaning countries.

This article asks why some ethnically distinct regions fight fiercely to secede while others struggle to save the same multinational state. It tests competing explanations using a new dataset containing forty-five cases, significantly more than any previous study in the Soviet setting. The empirical results confirm arguments that the most separatist regions tend to be those possessing the most wealth, containing the least assimilated ethnic groups and already enjoying the greatest levels of autonomy. Demonstration effects are also found to be powerful. No support is found for prominent theories pointing to group upward mobility and ‘skill sets’ as being decisive. Group histories of grievous exploitation or national independence are found not to explain patterns of secessionism.

Voting power indexes such as that of Banzhaf are derived, explicitly or implicitly, from the assumption that all votes are equally likely (i.e., random voting). That assumption implies that the probability of a vote being decisive in a jurisdiction with n voters is proportional to 1/√n. In this article the authors show how this hypothesis has been empirically tested and rejected using data from various US and European elections. They find that the probability of a decisive vote is approximately proportional to 1/n. The random voting model (and, more generally, the square-root rule) overestimates the probability of close elections in larger jurisdictions. As a result, classical voting power indexes make voters in large jurisdictions appear more powerful than they really are. The most important political implication of their result is that proportionally weighted voting systems (that is, each jurisdiction gets a number of votes proportional to n) are basically fair. This contradicts the claim in the voting power literature that weights should be approximately proportional to √n.

Does exposure to political violence prompt civilians to support peace? We investigate the determinants of civilian attitudes toward peace during ongoing conflict using two original panel datasets representing Israelis (n=996) and Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza (n=631) (149 communities in total). A multi-group estimation analysis shows that individual-level exposure to terrorism and political violence makes the subject populations less likely to support peace efforts. The findings also confirm psychological distress and threat perceptions as the mechanism that bridges exposure to violence and greater militancy over time. The study breaks ground in showing that individual-level exposure – necessarily accompanied by psychological distress and threat perceptions – is key to understanding civilians’ refusal to compromise in prolonged conflict.

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.

If voters use information about the economy to assess the competence of incumbents, a connection between economic conditions and incumbent success should only be discernible in settings where public policy might plausibly affect the economy, and where the assignment of government responsibility is relatively straightforward. Applying this logic to gubernatorial elections in the United States, we test the following hypothesis: the connection between economic conditions and incumbents' vote shares is mediated by the structure of the state economy. This hypothesis is premised on the idea that voters understand that raw macroeconomic aggregates – when driven by factors like weather, commodity prices and federal policy – are poor signals of incumbent performance. Using data from gubernatorial elections held between 1950 and 1998, we show that the connection between macroeconomic indicators and incumbent success is weak in states dominated by natural resources and farming but quite strong elsewhere. This finding helps explain why earlier studies found no connection between state-level economic conditions and gubernatorial elections.

Legislative speech records from the 101st to 108th Congresses of the US Senate are analysed to study political ideologies. A widely-used text classification algorithm – Support Vector Machines (SVM) – allows the extraction of terms that are most indicative of conservative and liberal positions in legislative speeches and the prediction of senators’ ideological positions, with a 92 per cent level of accuracy. Feature analysis identifies the terms associated with conservative and liberal ideologies. The results demonstrate that cultural references appear more important than economic references in distinguishing conservative from liberal congressional speeches, calling into question the common economic interpretation of ideological differences in the US Congress.

Measuring high-level corruption is subject to extensive scholarly and policy interest, which has achieved moderate progress in the last decade. This article develops two objective proxy measures of high-level corruption in public procurement: single bidding in competitive markets and a composite score of tendering ‘red flags’. Using official government data on 2.8 million contracts in twenty-eight European countries in 2009–14, we directly operationalize a common definition of corruption: unjustified restriction of access to public contracts to favour a selected bidder. Corruption indicators are calculated at the contract level, but produce aggregate indices consistent with well-established country-level indicators, and are also validated by micro-level tests. Data are published at http://digiwhist.eu/resources/data/.