This article presents a categorization theory of spatial voting, which postulates that voters perceive political stances through coarse classifications. Because voters think in terms of categories defined by the ideological center, their behavior deviates from standard models of utility maximization along ideological continua. Their preferences are characterized by discontinuities, rewarding parties on their side of the ideological space more than existing spatial models would predict. While this study concurs with prior studies suggesting that voters tend to use a proximity rule, it argues that this rule mainly serves to distinguish among parties of the same side. Overall, the results suggest that voters’ party evaluations are characterized by a nontrivial identity component, generating in-group biases not captured by the existing spatial models of voting.

The architecture of houses of parliament and of legislative chambers in countries around the world is analysed for its relationship to political culture. It is argued that parliamentary buildings and spaces (1) preserve cultural values of the polity over time; (2) articulate contemporaneous political attitudes and values; and (3) contribute to the formation of political culture. Preservation is illustrated by how parliament buildings occupy sacred sites, symbolize the state and assure the continuity of legislative traditions. Articulation is exemplified by reflecting the relative importance of the two legislative houses and making expressive statements about the role of parties, executives and individual legislators. Formation can be affected by the physical dimensions of chambers, the arrangement of seats, aisles and lecterns, and spatial relationships between houses and the parliament versus the executive. It is concluded that the advent of television broadcasting of parliamentary sessions may make these architectural features even more important in perpetuating, manifesting and shaping political culture.

This analysis outlines and tests the steps-to-war explanation of international conflict. At the core of this explanation is the expectation that territorial disputes are a key source of war and that as states that have these disputes make politically relevant alliances, have recurring disputes and build up their military forces against each other, they will experience ever-increasing probabilities of war. The absence of these risk factors is expected to lessen the chances of severe conflict. Utilizing the Militarized Interstate Dispute data of the Correlates of War project, the data analyses provide full support for the steps-to-war explanation during the 1816–1945 era and partial support for the Cold War nuclear 1946–92 span. Among the findings for this latter period is the presence of a curvilinear relationship between the number of prior disputes and the probability of war – after a large number of disputes, states begin to ritualize their behaviour at levels short of war.

There is little research on the thousands of individuals who take part in intergroup violence. This article proposes that their participation is motivated by the emotion of intergroup anger, which, in turn, is triggered by a comparison between the intergroup distribution of resources and the distribution that is believed to be desirable. Thus, when another group is perceived to violate group entitlements – by taking jobs thought to belong to the ingroup, for example – anger is experienced and individuals become more willing to take part in violence against the outgroup. Support for this theory is found in a new survey dataset, collected in a slum in South Africa where anti-immigrant violence occurred in 2008.

Various theories of democratic governance posit that citizens should vote for incumbent politicians when they provide good service, and vote for the opposition when service delivery is poor. But does electoral accountability work as theorized, especially in developing country contexts? Studying Southern African democracies, where infrastructural investment in basic services has expanded widely but not universally, we contribute a new empirical answer to this question. Analyzing the relationship between service provision and voting, we find a surprising negative relationship: improvements in service provision predict decreases in support for dominant party incumbents. Though stronger in areas where opposition parties control local government, the negative relationship persists even in those areas where local government is run by the nationally dominant party. Survey data provide suggestive evidence that citizen concerns about corruption and ratcheting preferences for service delivery may be driving citizen attitudes and behaviors. Voters may thus be responsive to service delivery, but perhaps in ways that are more nuanced than extant theories previously recognized.

Can rebel organizations in a civil conflict use social media to garner international support? This article argues that the use of social media is a unique form of public diplomacy through which rebels project a favorable image to gain that support. It analyzes the Libyan civil war, during which rebels invested considerable resources in diplomatic efforts to gain US support. The study entails collecting original data, and finds that rebel public diplomacy via Twitter increases co-operation with the rebels when their message (1) clarifies the type of regime they intend to create and (2) emphasizes the atrocities perpetrated by the government. Providing rebels with an important tool of image projection, social media can affect dynamics in an ever more connected international arena.

An emerging literature points to the heterogeneous effects of violence on social norms and preferences in conflict-ridden societies. This article considers how responses to violence could be affected by in-group/out-group divisions. The research uses lab-in-the-field experiments to gauge norms for pro-social behavior in the aftermath of ethnic violence in post-war Kosovo. The study finds that one set of treatments (ethnicity) captures a negative legacy of violence on parochialism, while another (local/non-local) shows stronger evidence of pro-sociality and norm recovery. Examining individual variation in conflict exposure, it finds that victims of violence are more biased against ethnic out-groups and less pro-social to others outside of their local community. Balancing and matching on observables helps alleviate concerns that the results are driven by selection bias on victimization. Overall, the results suggest that the effects of violence may be contingent on the salience of in-group/out-group cues and boundaries.

Systems theorists introduced the concept of ‘support’ to permit explanations of political stability and instability. Yet most attempts to verify the existence of a relationship between support and stability empirically have dealt with wellestablished political systems, and have relied on data collected at one point in time. This paper reports an initial effort to examine the growth of support for a new political regime using a series of sample surveys providing data on changes in the level of support over time.

Many assert that the economic problems of Africa possess political origins. In particular, they point to a lack of political accountability and argue that economic reform and the renewal of growth depend upon political reform and in particular upon the promotion of competitive electoral politics. Summarizing these arguments, this article formalizes and tests them, using both an African and global sample of data. While it finds support for the view that within Africa – and globally – competitive institutions are associated with less extractive policies, it finds no evidence that these institutions have facilitated the implementation of Washington consensus policies.

This article questions prevailing interpretations of New Labour's political economy and challenges the assumption within the comparative and international political economy literatures of the exhaustion of the Keynesian political economic paradigm. New Labour's doctrinal statements are analysed to establish to what extent these doctrinal positions involve a repudiation of Keynesianism. Although New Labour has explicitly renounced the ‘fine tuning’ often (somewhat problematically) associated with post-war Keynesian political economy, we argue that they have carved out policy space in which to engage in macroeconomic ‘coarse tuning’ inspired by Keynesian thinking. This capacity to ‘coarse tune’ is precisely what is being sought in New Labour's quest for credibility through the redesign of British macroeconomic policy framework and institutions. Our empirical focus on New Labour in government since 1997 offers considerable evidence that this search for the capacity to ‘coarse tune’ has been successful.

Bargaining theory predicts that as a political system’s polarization increases, parties have fewer opportunities to form coalitions without resorting to elections, inducing constraints on the management of political crises. This study tests the hypothesis that political polarization has a positive effect on cabinet duration, and draws on Social Networks Analysis to conceptualize and measure political polarization. Combining information about party ideology, inter-party distances and party size, this polarization index measures the structure of political systems in terms of possible and actual coalitions, and identifies proto-coalitions ex ante. The propositions regarding the effect of the bargaining environment on cabinet survival are tested with data covering sixteen European states in 1945–99, and are fairly robustly supported. The measure of political polarization outperforms alternative measures of this concept.

According to spatial models of elections, citizen perceptions of party policy positions are a key determinant of voting choices. Yet recent scholarship from Europe suggests that voters do not adjust their perceptions according to what parties advocate in their campaigns. This article argues that voters develop a more accurate understanding of parties’ ideological positions following a leadership change because a new leader increases the credibility of party policy offerings. Focusing on Western European parties in the 1979–2012 period, it shows that having a new leader is a necessary condition for voters to more accurately perceive the left–right placements of opposition parties. Voters do not use party platforms to form perceptions of incumbent parties’ positions, regardless of whether the leader is new or veteran. These results have important implications for models of party competition and democratic representation.

The correlation between ideology and partisanship in the mass public has increased in recent decades amid a climate of persistent and growing elite polarization. Given that core values shape subsequent political predispositions, as well as the demonstrated asymmetry of elite polarization, this article hypothesizes that egalitarianism and moral traditionalism moderate the relationship between ideology and partisanship in that the latter relationship will have increased over time only among individuals who maintain conservative value orientations. An analysis of pooled American National Election Studies surveys from 1988 to 2012 supports this hypothesis. The results enhance scholarly understanding of the role of core values in shaping mass belief systems and testify to the asymmetric nature and mass public reception of elite cues among liberals and conservatives.

Outsiders are familiar figures in literature but feature scarcely at all in political analysis. This is despite the fact that some of the most significant political leaders of recent decades have been outsiders, including Britain's Margaret Thatcher. She was certainly a social outsider. She was almost certainly a psychological outsider. Not least, she chose to operate politically as an outsider. Her career points to both the strengths and the weaknesses of the role of the outsider as political leader.

How do political rights influence immigrant integration? This study demonstrates that the timing of voting rights extension plays a key role in fostering political incorporation. In Norway, non-citizens are eligible to vote in local elections after three years of residency. Drawing on individual-level registry data and a regression discontinuity design, the study leverages the exogenous timing of elections relative to the start of residency periods to identify the effect of early access to political institutions. It finds that immigrants who received early access were more likely to participate in subsequent electoral contests, with the strongest effects visible among immigrants from dictatorships and weak democracies. It also observes evidence consistent with spillover effects for other aspects of political engagement. These findings suggest that early access to voting rights influences subsequent trajectories of immigrant incorporation, in particular among immigrants from less developed states who may otherwise face high integration barriers.

A methodology is proposed for assessing the impact of televised debates on electoral outcomes, and it is applied to a specific case, that of the 1988 Canadian election. We present four tests of the debates' impact: first, a cross-sectional group comparison, which contrasts the voting behaviour of those who did and those who did not see the debates; secondly, a panel analysis of the shift in party support, before and after the debates, among those who watched the debates and those who did not; thirdly, a panel study of the impact of reactions to the debates on voting behaviour; and, fourthly, a time-series analysis, which examines the evolution of vote intentions over the course of the campaign and, more precisely, before and after the debates.

It is argued that because non-watchers are influenced by what their friends or the media tell them about the debates, the first two designs, based on a comparison of debate watchers and non-watchers, are not appropriate. The empirical analysis of the 1988 Canadian election substantiates this point. While these first two designs seem to indicate no debate impact, panel reaction and time-series analyses show that the debates had a substantial and enduring impact on the vote and that they were decisive in the contest for second place between the Liberals and the NDP.

Why do political parties present vague positions? We suggest that voter polarization provides them incentives to present either clear or vague positions, and the choice between these two is determined by the priority of an issue for the parties. We find that facing voter polarization, Western European political parties present clearer positions on an issue when it is a prime issue for them, but blur their positions when it is a secondary issue. Then, position blurring gives different implications to party systems with different degrees of issue dimensionality (such as American vs Western European party systems). The results also imply that political parties will respond to ongoing voter polarization on economic and immigration issues differently in the clarity of their position.

This article develops a number of themes first raised in an earlier paper where we attempted to publicize the existence of Census data based, for the first time, on British parliamentary constituencies, and where we briefly described the potential and limits of a variety of available statistical techniques of analysis. Until the earlier paper was published, studies of British electoral behaviour using aggregate data were largely historical, generally used only the simplest statistical techniques such as cross-tabulations, and usually proceeded blithely unaware of the snares of ecological inference. A small number of more advanced analyses had appeared but none focused on Britain or even on England as a whole. Since our earlier article appeared, there have been two attempts to construct predictive models of Labour support by applying multivariate statistical analysis to aggregate-level data. As we show in this paper, both Barnett and Rasmussen produce models that are statistically less powerful than our own and are subject to various weaknesses, of which the most important is the failure to tackle the problem of ecological inference.

What are the lessons of the 2016 referendum on UK membership of the European Union (EU) regarding the effects of message framing? This article reports findings from an innovative online survey experiment based on a two-wave panel design. The findings show that, despite the expectation that campaign effects are generally small for high-salience issues – such as Brexit – the potential for campaign effects was high for the pro-EU frames. This suggests that within an asymmetrical information environment – in which the arguments for one side of an issue (anti-EU) are ‘priced in’, while arguments for the other side (pro-EU) have been understated – the potential for campaign effects in a single direction are substantial. To the extent that this environment is reflected in other referendum campaigns, the potential effect of pro-EU frames may be substantial.