Item nonresponse rates across regime assessment questions and nonsensitive items are used to create a self-censorship index, which can be compared across countries, over time and across population subgroups. For many authoritarian systems, citizens do not display higher rates of item nonresponse on regime assessment questions than their counterparts in democracies. This result suggests such questions may not be that sensitive in many places, which in turn raises doubts that authoritarian citizens are widely feigning positive attitudes towards regimes they secretly despise. Higher levels of self-censorship are found under regimes without electoral competition for the executive.

A number of writers have drawn upon the republican tradition in political thought to criticize liberals like Rawls and Dworkin for neglecting the importance of public service and civic virtue. In this article, I present and evaluate one version of this critique, which can be found in recent work by Quentin Skinner and Charles Taylor. I argue that their critique, which I term ‘instrumental republicanism’, is caught on the horns of a dilemma. Depending on how the critique is formulated, either there is no interesting disagreement between liberals and republicans, or there is, but not one which should concern liberals. Either way, instrumental republicanism cannot be said to offer an improvement on the liberal attitudes towards public service and civic virtue.

A basic question in the analysis of the economic voting of the individual is whether the decision to vote for the government is sociotropic or determined by the pocketbook? It is sociotropic if the voter considers the whole of the economy. It is pocketbook voting if people look at their personal economic circumstances. The question has remained at the centre of research in economic voting since it was first raised by Kinder and Kiewiet in 1979. Over the years, it has generated a sizeable number of empirical studies, mostly based on American data, as well as a fair share of disagreement. From a theoretical viewpoint it is not obvious whether economic man is a sociotropic or a pocketbook voter. There is a strong argument for both assumptions: (α) the pro-pocketbook argument suggests that homo economicus pursues his own interest or that of his household, and votes with his pocketbook; (β) the proto-sociotropic argument suggests that voters consider what governments try to accomplish. They do not try to steer the economy of any individual, but the economy of the country.The word sociotropic literally means society-directed. The corresponding concept for self-directed would be egotropic, as we write in other papers. The Editor has resolved that this is not in the dictionary. Moreover, several writers prefer the term egocentric. This is too loaded with other meanings for our taste. So we shall use the term pocketbook voting in the present Note.Donald R. Kinder and D. Roderick Kiewiet, ‘Economic Discontent and Political Behavior: The Role of Personal Grievances and Collective Economic Judgements in Congressional Voting’, American Journal of Political Science, 23 (1979), 495–527, and ‘Sociotropic Politics’, British Journal of Political Science, 11 (1981), 129–61. See further the cross-national study by Michael S. Lewis-Beck, Economics and Elections (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988, 1990), and the surveys by Peter Nannestad and Martin Paldam, ‘The VP-Function. A Survey of the Literature on Vote and Popularity Functions after 25 Years’, Public Choice, 79 (1994), 213–45; and Douglas A. Hibbs, Solidarity or Egoism? (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1993). These recent surveys allow us to restrict these references to a minimum.

Do people believe the votes they cast are truly secret? Novel items added to a nationally representative survey show that 25 per cent of respondents report not believing their ballot choices are kept secret and over 70 per cent report sharing their vote choices with others. These findings suggest that standard models of candidate choice should account for the potential effects of doubts about ballot secrecy. Consistent with this view, regression analysis shows that social forces appear to have a greater effect on vote choices among people who doubt the formal secrecy of the ballot. This analysis supports the broader claim that the intended benefits of institutional rules may not be realized if people's perceptions of these rules differ from their formal characteristics.

Studies of the link between state capacity and development often utilize national-level governance indicators to explain fine-grained development outcomes. As capacity in some bureaucratic agencies matters more for these outcomes than capacity in others, this work proxies for capacity within the set of relevant agencies by using a measure of ‘mean’ capacity across all agencies in a polity. This practice is problematic for two reasons: (1) within-country, cross-agency diversity in capacity often overwhelms the variation encountered across public sectors considered in their entireties; (2) national-level reputations for capacity are not particularly informative about differences in capacity in functionally equivalent agencies in different countries. The article draws on the author's survey of public employees in Bolivia, Brazil and Chile to establish these points.

The recent proliferation of referendums on sovereignty matters has fuelled growing scholarly interest. However, comparative research is hindered by the weaknesses of current compilations, which tend to suffer from conceptual vagueness, varied coding decisions, incomplete coverage and ad hoc categorizations. Based on an improved conceptualization and theory-driven typology, this article presents a new dataset of 602 sovereignty referendums from 1776–2012, more than double the number in existing lists. In an exploratory analysis, it uncovers eight distinctive clusters of sovereignty referendums and identifies patterns of activity over time and space as well as outcomes produced.

By the standard of most European parliaments, levels of party voting in the United States Congress are relatively low. Nevertheless, party voting does occur in the House of Representatives and the Senate. In the American context, a party vote occurs when majorities of the two congressional parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, oppose one another. The authors construct measurements of levels of party voting in Congress in the years after the Second World War. They then develop a model to test the effects of a number of independent variables that influence fluctuations in party voting levels over time. The study models the time series for party voting and demonstrates striking differences between the House and Senate in the correlates of partisan cleavage.

Can the positive impact of non-partisan ‘Get Out the Vote’ (GOTV) campaigns be generalized to a variety of institutional and cultural contexts? Gerber, Green and colleagues tested for the effects of these campaigns in a series of pioneering field experiments, which show that a face-to-face contact from a non-partisan source, carried out by a field force calling at the homes of citizens seeking to persuade them to vote, can increase voter turnout. Further experiments find that telephoning has an impact ranging from ineffective to positive, depending on the nature of the call; and there are positive, if weaker, results for other forms of intervention, such as door postings and leafleting; none for e-mail; and weakly positive or null impacts from rote telephoning. Many of these results derive from single cases or from a limited number of research sites; however, the culmination of these findings allows political scientists to be confident of the impact and hierarchy of these interventions. Although GOTV studies of this kind cannot adjudicate authoritatively on theories of mobilization, the difference in impact between the types of intervention, in particular the greater success of personalized messages, implies that it is the personal and face-to-face basis of influence that has an effect, rather than the types of message received and the simple provision of information.

So far most of this kind of research has been carried out in the United States, which means that, even with its variety of groups and locations, the range of variation in the institutional frameworks and social conditions is limited to the one-country case.

Much scholarship concerning human rights international nongovernmental organizations (HR-INGOs) focuses on the central role they play within transnational advocacy networks. Despite this theoretical focus on networks, there has been scant empirical attention on the characteristics of the HR-INGO network or on whether the network characteristics of a HR-INGO matter for its advocacy output. Introducing a new relational dataset on 681 HR-INGOs, this article finds that the HR-INGO network is somewhat like a public good and that the organizations who utilize it benefit in terms of their international advocacy output. Other findings focus on how the structural characteristics of organizations can influence their propensity to connect to each other and how ‘free-riding’ can limit the benefits organizations receive from the network.

Prior international political economy public opinion research has primarily examined how economic and socio-cultural factors shape individuals’ views on the flows of goods, people and capital. This research has largely ignored whether individuals also care about rewarding or punishing foreign countries for their policies on these issues. We tested this possibility by administering a series of conjoint and traditional survey experiments in the United States and China that examined how reciprocity influences opposition to foreign acquisitions of domestic companies. We find that reciprocity is an important determinant of public opinion on the regulation of foreign investments. This suggests the need to consider the policies that other countries adopt when trying to explain public attitudes toward global economic integration.

This paper sets out to consider two related questions: the significance of elections in single-party systems in underdeveloped countries, and the kind of study which political scientists have made of such elections.1

Democracy is frequently framed as a distributional game. Much of the evidence supporting this possibility rests on the World Bank’s 1996 ‘high-quality’ inequality dataset. Using the updated and revised ‘high-quality’ dataset of 2007, this article revisits those results. Using the same country sample, more years and similar specifications to previous studies, as well as a larger country sample with more appropriate statistical models, we find no relationship between democracy/civil liberties and aggregate measures of economic inequality. Whether, and how, democracy decreases economic inequality remains an open question.

Conventional accounts of British politics play down the electoral importance of MPs' actions in the House of Commons. Party, it is assumed, is the key feature in shaping voters' preferences: few voters are aware of how their local representative voted on a particular issue, and in any case most MPs vote along party lines. On occasion, however, MPs do vote against the party line. Where the issue involved commands considerable public interest, this may raise an individual MP's profile with his or her constituents, with consequent effects upon future electoral prospects. This article investigates the connection between MPs' votes on a series of free votes and rebellions during the 1987 Parliament and their share of the vote in the 1992 general election. Generally, Conservative MPs' actions in the Commons had no effect on their subsequent share of the popular vote. However where an issue was of marked public interest, such as capital punishment or the poll tax, how the MPs voted did exert a small but discernible effect on the support that they received in 1992.

Why do states create overlapping international institutions? This practice presents a puzzle: conventional wisdom suggests that states should use existing institutions to minimize the transaction costs of co-operation. This article proposes a bargaining approach to explain the de novo creation of overlapping international institutions. In this model, a dissatisfied ‘challenger’ state threatens to create a new institution, and a ‘defender’ state can propose to reform the currently focal institution. Overlapping institutions are created when the currently focal institution is (1) captured by interests opposed to the challenger and (2) domestic political pressure to abandon the status quo is intense. Similar to models of deterrence, the expectation that the new institution garners support among third parties is irrelevant for the equilibrium likelihood of de novo creation. A comparative analysis of international bargaining over energy, whaling and intellectual property rights provides empirical evidence.

The absence of strategic voting in new democracies represents a potential threat to democratic consolidation because it could inhibit the development of a stable party system. Yet can we expect that citizens in new democracies have developed the skills associated with strategic voting in democratic elections? Based on evidence from Hungary, a post-communist democracy, this article suggests that citizens in new democracies respond to strategic voting situations in a fashion consistent with conventional theories of strategic voting. Analysis of Hungarian voting statistics over the past three national elections indicates that voters, consistent with strategic voting theories, vigorously penalized smaller parties thereby contributing to the rapid decline in the number of effective parties competing in Hungarian elections. We argue that strategic voting occurs in two stages: (1) recognition of a ‘wasted-vote’ situation and (2) strategic response to that situation.

Discontent with the functioning of representative bodies is hardly new. Most of them were born and developed in the face of opposition denying their legitimacy and their feasibility. Most have lived amid persistent unfriendly attitudes, ranging from the total hostility of anti-democrats to the pessimistic assessments of such diverse commentators as Lord Bryce, Walter Lippmann, and Charles de Gaulle. Of particular interest today is the discontent with representative bodies expressed by the friends of democracy, the supporters of representative government, many of whom see in recent history a secular ‘decline of parliament’ and in prospect the imminent demise of representative bodies.

Governments have great difficulties designing politically sustainable responses to rising public debt. These difficulties are grounded in a limited understanding of the popular constraints during periods of fiscal pressure. For instance, an influential view claims that fiscal austerity does not entail significant political risk. But this research potentially underestimates the impact of austerity on votes because of strategic selection bias. This study addresses this challenge by conducting survey experiments in Spain, Portugal, Italy, the UK and Germany. In contrast to previous findings, the results show that a government's re-election chances greatly decrease if it proposes austerity measures. Voters object particularly strongly to spending cuts and, to a lesser extent, to tax increases. While voters also disapprove of fiscal deficits, they weight the costs of austerity policies more than their potential benefits for the fiscal balance. These findings are inconsistent with the policy recommendations of international financial institutions.

The US Congress has often sought to limit presidential influence over certain public policies by designing agencies that are insulated from presidential control. Whether or not insulated agencies persist over time has important consequences for presidential management. If those agencies that persist over time are also those that are the most immune from presidential direction, this has potentially fatal consequences for the president's ability to manage the executive branch. Modern presidents will preside over a less and less manageable bureaucracy over time. This article explains why agencies insulated from presidential control are more durable than other agencies and shows that they have a significantly higher expected duration than other agencies. The conclusion is that modern American presidents preside over a bureaucracy that is increasingly insulated from their control.

Conflict within the British Conservative Party over the European Union provided a great deal of copy for media political coverage during 1992–94. It was undoubtedly responsible for severely damaging the prime minister's reputation within his party and the country. In July 1993, he could only achieve ratification of the Maastricht Treaty by making voting for it an issue of confidence in the House of Commons, thereby obtaining the support of most ‘Eurosceptic’ Conservative MPs. Nine months later, failure to achieve the United Kingdom's goal regarding voting procedures in the Council of Ministers following enlargement of the EU in 1995 led to several calls for his resignation from among his own party's MPs, including one in the House itself.

In the last two decades, the prevailing orthodoxy in comparative studies has been the sociological view that public policy outcomes are primarily a reflection of what can loosely be described as ‘environmental’ factors: the demographic structure of the population, the incremental logic of policy programmes, and, most important of all, the level of economic development. This paper has two main objectives: first, to demonstrate that the sociological orthodoxy is methodologically and empirically unsound in its central tenet that politics does not matter, and, second, to provide a more detailed, and political, explanation of the particularly high levels of public welfare provision that characterize the Scandinavian countries.