The study of policy feedback on public attitudes and policy preferences has become a growing area of research in recent years. Scholars in the tradition of Pierson usually argue that positive, self-reinforcing feedback effects dominate (that is, attitudes are commensurate with existing institutions), whereas the public thermostat model developed by Wlezien and Soroka expects negative, self-undermining feedback. Moving beyond the blunt distinction between positive and negative feedback, this article develops and proposes a more fine-grained typology of feedback effects that distinguishes between accelerating, self-reinforcing and self-undermining, specific and general, as well as long- and short-term dynamic feedback. The authors apply this typology in an analysis of public opinion on government spending in different areas of the welfare state for twenty-one OECD countries, employing a pseudo-panel approach. The empirical analysis confirms the usefulness of this typology since it shows that different types of feedback effects can be observed empirically.

An indicator of globalization is the growing number of humans crossing national borders. In contrast to explanations for flows of goods and capital, migration research has concentrated on unilateral movements to rich democracies. This focus ignores the bilateral determinants of migration and stymies empirical and theoretical inquiry. The theoretical insights proposed here show how the regime type of both sending and receiving countries influences human migration. Specifically, democratic regimes accommodate fewer immigrants than autocracies and democracies enable emigration while autocracies prevent exit. The mechanisms for this divergence are a function of both micro-level motivations of migrants and institutional constraints on political leaders. Global bilateral migration data and a statistical method that captures the higher-order dependencies in network data are employed in this article.

Over the last fifteen years political scientists have become much more critical of the role that business plays in American politics. Two decades ago business was primarily regarded as another interest group; now many scholars perceive a tension between the large business corporation and the principles and practices of pluralist democracy.

This article challenges this new ‘conventional wisdom’ by critically examining the recent writings of Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom. Dahl regards the corporation as undemocratic because its managers are not accountable to its employees. Yet, the corporation is hardly unique in this regard: not one single institution in our society – including the government itself – is governed by those who work for it. Lindblom contends that business occupies a privileged position in capitalist democracies. But he exaggerates the role investment decisions play in the performance of the economy, underestimates the options available to politicians to manipulate business decisions and fails to appreciate that businessmen are not unique in requiring inducements to perform their social role. The article concludes by suggesting that while corporations do exercise considerable political power, both its scope and magnitude can be satisfactorily analysed within the framework of interest-group politics.

A sophisticated research tradition has explored theoretically and empirically the consequences of election laws for vote–seat disproportionality and, more recently, for the distance between citizen and legislative left–right medians. In contemporary parliamentary systems, policy making tends to be dominated by governments, not legislatures. This article extends election law theory to its expected effects on the left–right representativeness of governing parties and examines whether these are realized after eighty-two elections in fifteen mature parliamentary systems. The analysis shows how the legislative median party, the legislative plurality party and pre-election coalition agreements between parties shape these connections between citizens, legislatures and governments. The article also develops more nuanced measures of party influence on policy making and re-examines the governmental findings using these. Governments and policy-making configurations emerging from bargaining after PR elections are in net significantly closer to their citizens than those created by SMD elections.

Abraham Kaplan in his ‘paradox of conceptualization’ draws attention to the fundamental problem of concept-formation: ‘The proper concepts are needed to formulate good theory, but we need a good theory to arrive at the proper concepts’. On this view, concepts are neither right nor wrong but are more or less useful; their utility is determined by the twin and mutually dependent requirements of empirical precision and theoretical importance. ‘Empirical precision’ has to do with a concept's ability to ‘carve up’ the world of phenomena without unnecessary ambiguities; ‘theoretical importance’ has to do with the utility of a concept in the development of statements of wide explanatory and predictive power.

Advocates of one or another set of institutions for new democracies have typically neglected the question of adoptability. The omission is especially evident in institutional prescriptions for the reduction of ethnic conflict in severely divided societies. These have been advanced with little regard for obstacles likely to be encountered in the process of adoption. Yet adoption is problematic. Processes of negotiation and exchange open the possibility of mixed outcomes reflecting the asymmetric preferences of majorities and minorities. The Northern Ireland Agreement of 1998, however, is a glaring exception, for it produced institutions that are intended to be clearly and consistently consociational. An examination of the process by which the agreement was produced suggests that the coherent outcome in Northern Ireland was the result of some very special conditions conducive to a consensus on institutions that spanned party lines. These conditions are unlikely to be widely replicable, and the fact of consensus does not imply that the agreed institutions are apt for the divided society whose problems they are intended to ameliorate.

Why have advanced democracies experienced a retreat of the interventionist state since 1980? This article provides evidence that in all relevant policy indicators (spending, subsidies, state-owned enterprises, regulation, capital taxation) government intervention has been scaled back across the OECD. An overview of the results of 130 quantitative studies analysing at least one of these indicators is provided. Focusing on five main explanatory variables – globalization, Europeanization, learning and emulation, socio-economic problems, and political parties – only limited agreement in the literature is found. The reasons for this disagreement are discussed. Ways forward are suggested for the theoretical models on which studies are based, how the dependent variable is chosen, the empirical approaches that may be applied, and how quantitative research and comparative case studies may be combined.

In Western democracies it is held that parties and their positions affect how politicians choose to make public expenditure and investment. This article examines the public policy choices of politicians in India, a large well-established democracy with remarkable subnational variation. Public expenditure, from education and health to agriculture and irrigation, is analysed. Counterintuitive findings – that election timing and political factors play a strong role in the subnational states, and that party competition increases investment in education – are explained by highlighting the role economic and political uncertainty plays in politicians’ choices. Building a ‘Polanyi’ argument enhanced by a supply-side mechanism highlights the importance of compensation and insurance and the imperatives of political stability for subnational politicians, who attempt to maximize re-election chances in an uncertain environment.

This article presents results from survey experiments investigating conditions under which Britons are willing to pay taxes on polluting activities. People are no more willing if revenues are hypothecated for spending on environmental protection, while making such taxes more relevant to people – by naming petrol and electricity as products to which they will apply – has a modestly negative effect. Public willingness increases sharply if people are told that new environmental taxes would be offset by cuts to other taxes, but political distrust appears to undermine much of this effect. Previous studies have argued that political trust shapes public opinion with respect to environmental and many other policies. But this article provides the first experimental evidence suggesting that the relationship is causal, at least for one specific facet: cynicism about public officials’ honesty and integrity. The results suggest a need to make confidence in the trustworthiness of public officials and their promises more central to conceptualizations of political trust.

An implicit element of many theories of constitutional enforcement is the degree to which those subject to constitutional law can agree on what its provisions mean (call this constitutional interpretability). Unfortunately, there is little evidence on baseline levels of constitutional interpretability or the variance therein. This article seeks to fill this gap in the literature, by assessing the effect of contextual, textual and interpreter characteristics on the interpretability of constitutional documents. Constitutions are found to vary in their degree of interpretability. Surprisingly, however, the most important determinants of variance are not contextual (for example, era, language or culture), but textual. This result emphasizes the important role that constitutional drafters play in the implementation of their product.

The existing literature on economic voting concentrates on egocentric and sociotropic evaluations of short-term economic performance. Scant attention is paid to other economic concerns people may have. In a neo-liberal economy characterized by global economic competition and a down-sized labour market, one widely-publicized economic concern – and one whose consequences political scientists have largely ignored – is job insecurity. Data from a survey conducted after the 1996 US presidential election show that job insecurity is a novel form of economic discontent that is distinctive in its origins and electoral impact from retrospective evaluations of short-term economic performance. In a multinomial probit model of electoral choice, performance measures offer little explanation of the Perot vote, but sociotropic job insecurity helps to explain why Americans rejected both major-party candidates, as well as abstention, in favour of the third-party alternative, Ross Perot.

Little is known about how ordinary Europeans feel about the central policy-making institutions of the European Union (EU). This has encouraged us to analyse mass attitudes towards the legitimacy of the European Court of Justice (ECJ). Relying on a cross-time (1992–93) panel analysis, as well as a cross-institutional analysis (the ECJ, the European Parliament and the high courts of the member states), we discover that (a) the ECJ does not possess a surplus of legitimacy, and it is doubtful whether the legitimacy shortfall is only a short-term function of the row over Maastricht; (b) attitudes toward the ECJ, although in the aggregate fairly stable, changed significantly over the one-year panel survey; (c) the European Parliament has little legitimacy it can share with the ECJ; and (d) although the national high courts do have greater legitimacy, there is little evidence that they are capable of transferring that legitimacy to the ECJ. We conclude with some speculation about whether the ECJ will be able to build greater legitimacy, and the consequences for the EU if the court fails to do so.

Those who study political participation will find that recent investigations have been lacking neither in scope nor methodological sophistication. Participation, once conceived of in rather narrow terms (usually focusing exclusively on voting) and whose study was restricted to certain geographic areas only (the United States and Western Europe), is now taken to include a wide range of activities across the globe. Similarly, the causal factors of participation have been expanded as well, so that currently they include the social-psychological, socio-economic, demographic, structural, historical and cultural. Nevertheless, despite the abundance of inquiry, little progress has been made in the development of theory.

In the practice of social science, the most conspicuous recent attempt at theorizing about nonconformity and protest in late communism rests on the conceptual schema of ‘civil society versus the state’. Based on a case study of the institutional basis of criticism of, and dissent against, communism in China, I contend that the dichotomous concept ‘civil society versus the state’. when used to explain the transition from communism, is applicable only in rare, extreme cases and misleading in most cases. Instead, I introduce the concept of ‘institutional amphibiousness’, stressing institutional parasitism and institutional manipulation and conversion. In most cases, institutional amphibiousness more adequately accounts for the dynamics of the erosion of communism than the concept of ‘civil society versus the state’.

The signing of a comprehensive peace agreement (CPA) is often seen as a historic milestone in a peace process, and its implementation takes a highly legitimized set of reforms and puts it front and center in national politics. This article examines the aggregate implementation of CPAs signed since 1989 and future conflict behavior between the negotiating parties and between the government and non-signatory groups. It argues that implementation is both a peace-building process and an outcome that normalizes political relations between hostile groups, solves commitment problems and addresses the root causes of civil conflict. Statistical tests utilizing new data on the implementation of CPAs support the argument. The extent to which an agreement is implemented is shown to have significant long-term effects on how long peace lasts – an effect that applies not only to the signatories of the agreement, but also to the government and non-signatory groups.

Constitutional patriotism is an influential attempt to reconcile the conflicting imperatives of political legitimacy and cultural inclusiveness. However, it underestimates the role of particularist political cultures in grounding universalistic principles of democracy and justice. Civic patriotism, by contrast, emphasizes the motivational prerequisites of democratic governance, stresses the need to preserve existing ‘co-operative ventures’ such as nation-states, and demands that existing political cultures be democratically scrutinized and re-shaped in an inclusive direction. It promotes a mainly political identity, whose political content makes it compatible with a variety of practices and beliefs, but whose thin particularistic form justifies citizens' commitment to specific institutions. This commitment is not so unconditional as to justify blind loyalty to one's own institutions, nor is it so absolute as to rule out certain forms of cosmopolitan citizenship.

When public programme demands exceed resources, tradeoffs between different public policies occur; that is, one policy gains while another loses in the allocation of these resources. Tradeoffs are most easily measured in terms of budgetary expenditures. If the budget is expanding, the consequences of tradeoffs are less severe than when the budget contracts or remains stable, and budgetary decisions involve zero-sum games. However, the concept of tradeoff is still relevant in an expanding budget since decisions are made about how the additional resources are to be allocated, and while all policy areas may gain, some obviously will receive more resources than others.

Compulsory voting is sometimes thought to be justified in democracies because it promotes high levels of voting and mitigates inequalities of turnout amongst social groups. Proponents of compulsory voting also argue that it helps to prevent the free-riding of non-voters on voters. This article casts a sceptical eye on both arguments. Democratic citizens do not have a duty to promote their self-interest, and their duties to others do not generally require them to vote, or to attend the polls. So, while people are sometimes morally obliged to vote, and to vote one way rather than another, legal compulsion to vote or to turn out is generally unjustified and inconsistent with democratic government.

It is often assumed that government-sponsored election violence increases the probability that incumbent leaders remain in power. Using cross-national data, this article shows that election violence increases the probability of incumbent victory, but can generate risky post-election dynamics. These differences in the consequences of election violence reflect changes in the strategic setting over the course of the election cycle. In the pre-election period, anti-incumbent collective action tends to be focused on the election itself, either through voter mobilization or opposition-organized election boycotts. In the post-election period, by contrast, when a favorable electoral outcome is no longer a possibility, anti-government collective action more often takes the form of mass political protest, which in turn can lead to costly repercussions for incumbent leaders.

Although the Paris Agreement arguably made some progress, interest in supplementary approaches to climate change co-operation persist. This article examines the conditions under which a climate club might emerge and grow. Using agent-based simulations, it shows that even with less than a handful of major actors as initial members, a club can eventually reduce global emissions effectively. To succeed, a club must be initiated by the ‘right’ constellation of enthusiastic actors, offer sufficiently large incentives for reluctant countries and be reasonably unconstrained by conflicts between members over issues beyond climate change. A climate club is particularly likely to persist and grow if initiated by the United States and the European Union. The combination of club-good benefits and conditional commitments can produce broad participation under many conditions.