In the words of Martin Paldam, comparative economic voting studies suffer from a ‘great instability’ – i.e., economic effects appear in some countries at some times, but not others, and tend to be weak and inconsistent across studies. Powell and Whitten propose a possible solution to the ‘instability’ of cross-national voting studies: ‘to explain differences in retrospective economic voting across nations and over time we must take account of the political context within which elections take place’. More specifically, they take into account the ‘context of political responsibility’, arguing that voters are more likely to punish/reward incumbent governments if it is very clear which parties are responsible for economic conditions. They find that voters hold government parties responsible for the economy when there is high ‘clarity of responsibility’, but not when ‘clarity of responsibility’ is low. Over Four Decades', in Helmut Norpoth, Michael Lewis-Beck and Jean-Dominique Lafay, eds, Economics and Politics: The Calculus of Support (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), pp. 9–31, at p. 26.G. Bingham Powell Jr and Guy D. Whitten, ‘A Cross-National Analysis of Economic Voting: Taking Account of the Political Context’, American Journal of Political Science, 37 (1993), 391–414, p. 409.Powell and Whitten, ‘A Cross-National Analysis of Economic Voting’, p. 410.

This article provides the first systematic cross-country analysis of interest group appearances in the news media. The analysis included three countries – the UK, Spain and Denmark – each representing one of Hallin and Mancini’s1 three overall models of media and politics: the liberal system, the polarized pluralist system and the democratic corporatist system. It finds important similarities across countries with high levels of concentration in media coverage of groups, more extensive coverage of economic groups than citizen groups, and differential patterns of group appearances across policy areas and between right- and left-leaning papers. It also identifies country variation, with the highest degree of concentration among group appearances in Spanish newspapers and the most attention to economic groups in Danish newspapers.

According to what has recently been labeled ‘political realism’ in political theory, ‘political moralists’ such as Rawls and Dworkin misconstrue the political domain by presuming that morality has priority over politics, thus overlooking that the political is an autonomous domain with its own distinctive conditions and normative sources. Political realists argue that this presumption, commonly referred to as the ‘ethics first premise’, has to be abandoned in order to properly theorize a normative conception of political legitimacy. This article critically examines two features of political realism, which so far have received too little systematic philosophical analysis: the political realist critique of political moralism and the challenges facing political realism in its attempt to offer an alternative account of political legitimacy. Two theses are defended. First, to the extent that proponents of political realism wish to hold onto a normative conception of political legitimacy, refuting wholesale the ethics first premise leads to a deadlock, since it throws the baby out with the bathwater by closing the normative space upon which their account of political legitimacy relies. This is called the ‘necessity thesis’: all coherent and plausible conceptions of political legitimacy must hold onto the ethics first premise. Secondly, accepting this premise – and thus defending an ethics first view – does not entail that the political domain must be seen as a subordinate arena for the application of moral principles, that political normativity is reduced to morality or that morality trumps other reasons in political decision making, as claimed by political realists. Rather, the ethics first view is compatible with an autonomous political domain that makes room for an account of political legitimacy that is defined by and substantiated from sources of normativity specifically within the political. This is called the ‘compatibility thesis’.

Existing research suggests that voters tend to respond positively to legislator independence due to two types of mechanism. First, dissent has an indirect effect, increasing a legislator’s media coverage and personal recognition among constituents (profile effects). Secondly, constituents react positively to dissent when this signals that the legislator has matching political or representational preferences (conditional evaluation). This article presents a third effect: dissent acts as a valence signal of integrity and trustworthiness. Consistent with the valence signalling mechanism, it uses new observational and experimental evidence to show that British voters have a strong and largely unconditional preference for legislators who dissent. The findings pose a dilemma for political systems that rely on strong and cohesive parties.

This article studies gender differences in media portrayals of political leadership, starting with the expectation that male politicians are evaluated more often on traits belonging to the male leader stereotype, and that female politicians have no such advantage. These gender differences are expected to be especially pronounced during non-campaign periods. To test these expectations, a large-scale automated content analysis of all Dutch national newspapers from September 2006 to September 2012 was conducted. The results show that male politicians received more media coverage on leadership traits in general, although the male and female leader stereotypes explain most of the variation in gender bias between leadership traits. These gender effects are found during seldom-studied routine periods but not during campaigns. As leadership trait coverage has electoral consequences, this gender-differentiated coverage likely contributes to the under-representation of women in politics.

The spatial maps of parties' policy programmes published by the Manifesto Research Group (MRG) for the European Consortium for Political Research reveal the following empirical patterns: that parties differentiate their policy positions from one another; that parties rarely leapfrog each other; that parties shift their positions over time but only within ‘ideologically delimited’ areas of the policy space. These findings are not well explained by existing spatial models of party competition, which typically predict policy convergence and which moreover do not examine temporal patterns of party policies. This article modifies the standard Downsian model to incorporate a concept originally developed by Chapman that, in addition to policies, voters are motivated by non-policy considerations arising from such factors as party leaders' images, social-psychological attachments rooted in class, religion, ethnicity and so on. For this ‘biased vote’ model I present illustrative arguments that vote-seeking parties are motivated to differentiate their policy positions from each other, and that over time they can be expected to vary their policy proposals but without leapfrogging – predictions that accord well with the MRG's empirical findings. I apply the biased vote model to empirical data on the distributions of voter preferences in recent British and French elections. My results support the illustrative arguments, and also suggest that these arguments apply even when the degree of voter bias in the electorate is quite low.

There is general agreement that democratic institutions shape politicians’ incentives to cater to certain constituencies, but which electoral system causes politicians to be most responsive to narrow interests is still debateable. Some argue that plurality electoral rules provide the greatest incentives for politicians to cater to the interests of a few; others say proportional systems prompt politicians to be relatively more prone to narrow interests. This study suggests that both positions can be correct under different conditions. Politicians competing in plurality systems privilege voters with a shared narrow interest when such voters are geographically concentrated, but when they are geographically diffuse, such voters have greater political influence in proportional electoral systems. Government spending on subsidies in fourteen developed countries provides empirical support for this argument.

To evaluate calls for a more theoretically generalizable, large-N study of EU interest representation, we adapt the ESA model of interest system density, originally developed to study the interest communities of the American states, to the EU case. We necessarily modify both model and measures in order to account for the unique features of the EU policy process. We test the model with OLS regression using data on the density of different types or guilds (economic and social sectors) of organized interests in the European Union. We use the findings to discuss the viability of inter-system transfers of theories about the politics of interest representation.

Formal models of voting usually assume that political agents, whether parties or candidates, attempt to maximize expected vote shares. ‘Stochastic’ models typically derive the ‘mean voter theorem’ that each agent will adopt a ‘convergent’ policy strategy at the mean of the electoral distribution. In this article, it is argued that this conclusion is contradicted by empirical evidence. Estimates of vote intentions require ‘valence’ terms. The valence of each party derives from the average weight, given by members of the electorate, in judging the overall competence or ‘quality’ of the particular party leader. In empirical models, a party's valence is independent of current policy declarations and can be shown to be statistically significant in the estimation. It is shown here that the addition of valence gives a very strong Bayes factor over an electoral model without valence. The formal model is analysed and shown to be classified by a ‘convergence’ coefficient, defined in terms of the parameters of the empirical model. This coefficient gives necessary and sufficient conditions for convergence. When the necessary condition fails, as it does in these empirical studies with valence, then the convergent equilibrium fails to exist. The empirical evidence is consistent with a formal stochastic model of voting in which there are multiple local Nash equilibria to the vote-maximizing electoral game. Simulation techniques based on the parameters of the empirical model have been used to obtain these local equilibria, which are determined by the principal component of the electoral distribution. Low valence parties, in equilibrium, will tend to adopt positions at the electoral periphery. High valence parties will contest the electoral centre, but will not, in fact, position themselves at the electoral mean. Survey data from Israel for the elections of 1988, 1992 and 1996 are used to compute the parameters of the empirical model and to illustrate the dependence of equilibria on the electoral principal components. The vote maximizing equilibria do not perfectly coincide with the actual party positions. This divergence may be accounted for by more refined models that either (i) include activism or (ii) consider strategic party considerations over post-election coalition bargaining.

In contests for the presidential nominations from the Democratic and Republican parties in the United States, the duration of candidacies determines both the winning candidate (i.e., the one who outlasts his or her opponents) and the amount of intraparty conflict before the nomination is bestowed. This article analyses how strategic considerations lead some candidates to exit the race more quickly than others. Factors which could shape such strategic considerations include initial candidate assets and characteristics (national poll standings, fund-raising totals and occupational background), initial contest outcomes (Iowa and New Hampshire) and structural variables (proportional representation delegate distribution rules, party, front-loaded calendar). Results from a duration model indicate that poll standings, money (in a curvilinear pattern), New Hampshire and Iowa results, occupational backgrounds and the front-loading of the primary calendar shaped the length of candidacies for presidential contestants from 1980 to 2004. Candidates lacking in initial assets or early victories leave the nomination race in a process most resembling a game of attrition.

The case for secrecy in voting depends on the assumption that voters reliably vote for the political outcomes they want to prevail. No such assumption is valid. Accordingly, voting procedures should be designed to provide maximal incentive for voters to vote responsibly. Secret voting fails this test because citizens are protected from public scrutiny. Under open voting, citizens are publicly answerable for their electoral choices and will be encouraged thereby to vote in a discursively defensible manner. The possibility of bribery, intimidation or blackmail moderates this argument but such dangers will be avoidable in many contemporary societies without recourse to secrecy.

In the past three decades, scholars have frequently used the concept of framing effects to assess the competence of citizens' political judgments and how susceptible they are to elite influence. Yet prior framing studies have reached mixed conclusions, and few have provided systematic cumulative evidence. This study evaluates the overall efficacy of different types of framing effects in the political domain by systematically meta-analyzing this large and diverse literature. A combined analysis of 138 experiments reveals that when examined across contexts, framing exerts medium-sized effects on citizens' political attitudes and emotions. However, framing effects on behavior are negligible, and small effects are also found in more realistic studies employing frame competition. These findings suggest that although elites can influence citizens by framing issues, their capacity to do so is constrained. Overall, citizens appear to be more competent than some scholars envision them to be.

Regime changes occur at two levels, the macro and the micro. In Eastern Europe there has been holistic change at the regime level, but at the micro level individuals can differ in their reactions, some favouring the new and some preferring the old regime, thus creating aggregates of supporters and opponents of the new regime. Combining reactions to the old and new regimes results in a typology of democrats, reactionaries, sceptics and the compliant. Nationwide surveys in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania show that democrats overall are a bare majority of the respondents. If current divisions persist, then East Europeans will be politically polarized. Statistical tests of the influence of social structure and economic attitudes upon individual responses to regime change emphasize the importance of sociotropic economic assessments. But the data also show that most who do not currently support the pluralist regime expect to do so in the foreseeable future; they are laggards rather than anti-democrats. Moreover, the level of future support is so high that it is likely to be proof against fluctuations in the economic conditions of the new regimes.

While studies of the motives for intentional insurgent violence against civilians are now common, relatively little academic research has focused on the impact of victimization on conflict processes or war outcomes. This article addresses this gap in the literature. Specifically, the authors examine the influence of civilian victimization on bargaining between the regime and insurgents during a civil war. A curvilinear relationship between the level of civilian victimization used by insurgents and the likelihood that conflict ends in negotiated settlement is posited. The probability of settlement is highest for groups that engage in a moderate level of civilian killing but declines at particularly high levels. A competing risk analysis using monthly conflict data on African civil wars between 1989 and 2010 supports this argument.

Because non-voters are less politically informed than voters, some propose that increasing voter turnout would reduce the quality of information among the active voting population, damaging electoral outcomes. However, the proposed tradeoff between increased participation and informed participation is a false dichotomy. This article demonstrates that political information is endogenous to participation. A field experiment integrates an intensive mobilization treatment into a panel survey conducted before and after a city-wide election. Subjects who were mobilized to vote also became more informed about the content of the election. The results suggest institutions that encourage participation not only increase voter turnout – mobilizing electoral participation also motivates citizens to become more politically informed.

Human rights have long been a direct or indirect substantive topic in modern political science and, in particular, the study of human rights represents an important nexus between traditional concerns within comparative politics and those in international relations. On the one hand, comparative politics has traditionally been concerned with the functions, determinants and outcomes of different political regimes, political institutions, political culture, the relationship between states and citizens (protest and repression, social mobilization and citizenship rights, voting, elections and party systems), and large social processes such as social and political revolutions, democratization and the domestic effects of and responses to globalization. On the other hand, international relations has concentrated on the inter-state dynamics of war, peace and security; international trade, finance and development; the growth and role of international organizations; the proliferation and effectiveness of international regimes and foreign policy analysis. More recently, attention has focused on the interplay between domestic and international politics in examining the ways in which domestic political arrangements may have an impact on the international behaviour of states. The now famous notion of the ‘two-level’ game has been instructive for scholars examining the constraint of democratic institutions on state behaviour, while the large literature on the ‘democratic’ and ‘Kantian’ peace has used the tools of modern political science to examine the degree to which democracy and other ‘liberal’ variables have an inhibiting effect on the likelihood of interstate violence.

The study of human rights within modern political science fits neatly into these disciplinary developments. The history of human rights is one of the increasing internationalization of an idea that has traditionally been defended nationally.

How does wartime exposure to ethnic violence affect the political preferences of ordinary citizens? Are high-violence communities more or less likely to reject the politicization of ethnicity post-war? We argue that community-level experience with wartime violence solidifies ethnic identities, fosters intra-ethnic cohesion and increases distrust toward non-co-ethnics, thereby making ethnic parties the most attractive channels of representation and contributing to the politicization of ethnicity. Employing data on wartime casualties at the community level and pre- as well as post-war election results in Bosnia, we find strong support for this argument. The findings hold across a number of robustness checks. Using post-war survey data, we also provide evidence that offers suggestive support for the proposed causal mechanism.

In a previous article in this Journal entitled ‘Institutions and Environmental Performance in Seventeen Western Democracies’ (29 (1999), 1–31), I argued that neo-corporatist institutions delivered superior environmental performance during the first two decades of the modern environmental era (1970–90).For other work on the same or similar themes, see Detlef Jahn, ‘Environmental Performance and Policy Regimes: Explaining Variation in 18 OECD Countries’, Policy Sciences, 31 (1998), 107–31; Martin Jänicke and Helmut Weidner, eds, National Environmental Policies: A Comparative Study of Capacity-Building (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1997); Markus Crepaz, ‘Explaining National Variations of Air Pollution Levels: Political Institutions and Their Impact on Environmental Policy-Making’, Environmental Politics, 4 (1995), 391–414; Martin Janicke, H. Monch and M. Binder, ‘Ecological Aspects of Structural Change’, Intereconomics, July/August (1993), 159–69; Martin Jänicke, ‘Conditions for Environmental Policy Success’, in M. Jachtenfuchs and M. Strübel, eds, Environmental Policy in Europe (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1992), 71–97; and Martin Jänicke et al., ‘Structural Change and Environmental Impact’, Intereconomics, January/February (1989), 24–35. This note re-examines the thesis using slightly different data from a more recent time period (19807ndash;95). It also controls for some alternative explanations for environmental performance not included in the original article. The results suggest that the beneficial effects of neo-corporatism for environmental performance are robust. In confirming the results from the earlier analysis, this Note demonstrates the effects of neo-corporatism in unexpected policy areas. The positive results for environmental protection suggest that there may be benefits of neo-corporatist institutions in areas beyond those with which they are traditionally associated.

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.

Recently, Sanders et al. have made the intriguing and counter-intuitive argument that the impact of the Falklands war on Conservative popularity was inconsequential. Their analyses raise important theoretical and methodological issues concerning the time-series analysis of party support. This present article contends that the stepwise regression procedures employed by Sanders et al. are misleading, particularly when predictor variables are highly intercorrelated. Box-Jenkins analyses demonstrate that the Falklands strongly influenced Conservative support, net of the effects of macroeconomic conditions and personal economic expectations. The significance of the latter variable in the models confirms Sanders et al.'s argument about the role of subjective economic variables in party popularity functions. Non-economic variables are also relevant, however, and popularity functions that model them correctly will enhance our understanding of both the economics and the politics of party support.