Parties are not unitary actors, and legislators within the same party may have divergent interests, which complicates the understanding of parties’ motivations and behaviour. This article argues that holding a ministerial portfolio confers an electoral advantage, and so, in contrast to their co-partisans, politicians who are ministers simultaneously maximize policy, office and votes. New data on Irish elections over a thirty-year period show that ministers are insulated from the electoral cost of governing compared with their co-partisans. Differentiating between ministers and their co-partisans helps to resolve the puzzle of political parties’ choosing to enter government despite the evident electoral costs they will encounter. Moreover, previously overlooked electoral benefits of ministerial office help explain their desirability, and thus their ability to incentivize legislative behaviour in parliamentary regimes.

In their Note ‘Corporatism and Consensus Democracy in Eighteen Countries’ (this Journal, 21 (1991), 235–46) Arend Lijphart and Markus Crepaz sought to analyse the conceptual and theoretical linkages between corporatism and consensus democracy. Their aim was not only to investigate whether the concepts were linked to each other, but also to examine to what extent they overlapped. The authors claim that corporatism is part and parcel of consensual types of democracy (p. 235). If corporatism could be included as a dimension of consensual democracy the contrasts between Westminster and consensual types of democracy would be empirically enhanced and would be more comprehensive. Although this is an interesting line of thought, we think that there are a number of conceptual and methodological flaws in the elaboration of this idea that should be discussed in more detail, because they may very well cast some doubt on the degree to which corporatism is indeed ‘part and parcel’ of consensual politics. In this Comment we shall elaborate this argument and also suggest some ways in which the thrust of Lijphart and Crepaz's theoretical arguments can be upheld and their empirical analysis improved.

Most Americans support liberal policies on the social welfare agenda, the dominant policy cleavage in American politics. Yet a striking feature of the US party system is its tendency to equilibrium. How, then, does the Republican Party minimize defection on the social welfare agenda? The results of this study illustrate a deep ideological asymmetry between the parties. Republican identifiers are ideologically aware and oriented to a degree that far exceeds their Democratic counterparts. Our investigation, which utilizes cross-sectional, longitudinal and experimental data, demonstrates the role of ideological awareness and involvement in the Republicans’ ability to maintain the backing of their supporters even on issues on which the position of the Democratic Party is widely popular. It also exposes two mechanisms, party branding and the use of the status quo as a focal point, that Democrats use to retain or rally support for issues on the social welfare agenda on which the Republican Party’s position is widely popular.

Recent research on parliamentary institutions has demonstrated that legislatures featuring strong committees play an important role in shaping government policy. However, the impact of the legislators who lead these committees – committee chairs – is poorly understood. This study provides the first examination of whether the partisan control of committee chairs in parliamentary systems has a systematic impact on legislative scrutiny. The article argues that committee chairs can, in principle, use their significant agenda powers to serve two purposes: providing opposition parties with a greater ability to scrutinize government policy proposals, and enabling government parties to better police one another. Analyzing the legislative histories of 1,100 government bills in three parliamentary democracies, the study finds that control of committee chairs significantly strengthens the ability of opposition parties to engage in legislative review. The analysis also suggests that government parties’ ability to monitor their coalition allies does not depend on control of committee chairs.

What is the effect of increased electoral competition on patronage politics? If programmatic appeals are not credible, institutional reforms that move politics from an elite- to a mass-focused and more competitive environment increase patronage efforts. This leads to an overall surge and notable spike in discretionary state hiring in election years. The study tests this prediction in the context of Indonesia’s decentralized education sector. The authors exploit the exogenous phasing in and timing of elections in Indonesian districts for causal identification. They find evidence of election-related increases in the number of contract teachers on local payrolls and increases in civil service teacher certifications, which dramatically increases salaries. These effects are particularly pronounced for districts in which the former authoritarian ruling party is in competition with new entrants.

Explaining the foreign policy behaviour of states has proved a particularly difficult task for theorists of international relations. For centuries it relied on an analogy between states and individuals in the state of nature, so that an endemic tendency to international anarchy resulted from states having ‘interests’; systemic, determinist theories could therefore explain foreign policy by appealing to such notions as national interest and power maximization. The elusive, contestable character of these notions later led many analysts to focus on the empirical decision-making process for explanations of foreign policy behaviour. Yet these attempts have run into a fundamental problem: the proper weight to be attached to the perceptions and reasons of the actors. Some of the literature takes the actors very seriously and relies either on a psychology of perception or on a decision-theoretic model of individual choice. Some of it, on the other hand, by-passes the actors altogether and concentrates on such structural features as bureaucratic position. In this article we shall argue the case for a concept of role, requiring a less mechanical view of action than the standard approaches allow, both separately and in combination.

Theories of deliberation, developed largely in the context of domestic politics, are becoming increasingly relevant for international politics. The recently established Universal Periodic Review (UPR) operating under the auspices of the UN’s Human Rights Council is an excellent illustration. Our analysis of responses to its reports and recommendations suggests that the deliberative processes surrounding the UPR do indeed evoke co-operative responses even from countries with poor human rights records. Its highly inclusive, deliberative, repeated-play and peer-to-peer nature can serve as a model for how international organizations more generally can enhance deliberative capacity across the international system.

Liberal democracies have long practised torture, but should they ever permit their officials to torture (and, if so, when?), how should their citizens think and talk about it, and how should the law treat it? Is it just another instance of ‘dirty hands’ in politics? If it averts some terrible harm, can resorting to it be seen as choosing the ‘lesser evil’? What, then, is torture? The ‘torture memos’ of the Bush administration's legal advisers are reviewed and their attempt to narrow its definition criticized, as is Judge Posner's attempt to confine it to physical coercion. Attempts to evade the questions above (on the grounds that torture is never effective in averting disaster) are rejected. It is suggested that torture, unlike other cases of dirty hands considered, cannot be rendered liberal-democratically accountable, in the sense that it will sometimes be legitimate and, when not, punished, because its practice cannot be publicly recognized without undermining both the democratic and liberal components of liberal democracy. This suggestion is supported by adducing a ‘Durkheimian argument’ to the effect that our institutions and customs have been so penetrated by core elements of an egalitarian ‘religion of individualism’ that violating them threatens a kind of ‘moral disintegration’. This, it is argued, requires liberal democracies to reject the very idea of a scale that can allow comparison of the benefits against the costs of torturing. The absolute prohibition serves to maintain inhibitions, though these are currently being eroded by the fear of terrorism.

With one partial exception, political scientists have carried out little empirical research on corporate political activity. That one exception is political action committees, PACs. Perhaps because of the ready availability of apparently reliable data on corporate political contributions, most empirical studies of business political activity have concentrated on PACs. The study of PACs is not, however, synonymous with the study of corporate political behaviour. Indeed, not all corporations have PACs; Sabato estimated that almost half the largest manufacturing corporations did not. At least one politically active corporation, Du Pont, refused for many years to establish a PAC.

An important question for international investors concerns the relationship between political institutions and property rights. Yet a debate remains over whether authoritarian institutions promote favorable investment climates. Using data on oil nationalization in a sample of autocracies, this study finds that legislatures are correlated with lower expropriation risk in non-personalist dictatorships, but a higher risk of nationalization in personalist regimes. The results show a consistent pattern between authoritarian institutions and property protections, for which context matters.

The diversionary proclivities of democratic and autocratic regimes have been debated in the empirical literature. This new theoretical synthesis on the subject builds upon the insights of the institutional approach, rational choice literature on voting and research on audience costs. It is contended that leaders in mature democracies have more incentive to use diversionary force than leaders in other regimes, and they are more likely to gain domestic political and economic benefits from it. To test this, dynamic generalized method of moments (GMM) models are used to ascertain the reciprocal relationships between domestic political unrest, domestic economic performance and foreign military intervention in 140 countries in 1950–96. The theory is supported since, collectively, mature democracies are more prone to use diversionary force and to benefit from it than non-democracies. Interesting nuances appear when specific types of presidential or parliamentary democracies are analysed.

This article seeks to delineate a general theory of interest-group dynamics in America since 1890. Interest groups are seen to act in issue areas which cycle through phases of business control to reform activity and back again. Economic producer groups have a more stable incentive to participate in issue-area decision making than the reform groups that challenge their control. However, after a few years of the business-control phase of the cycle, unchecked producer groups tend to commit ‘excesses’, violations of widely shared values. This leads to political participation by reformers, most of whom lose interest in issue-area participation after a few years. Across the scope of hundreds of issue areas, business control or reform phases tend to occur at the same time. This is an important cause of similar cycles in the politics of the entire system, as described by such writers as Samuel Huntington, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr and Albert Hirschman. Interest-group cycles theory is based on critical pluralism, a new outlook that incorporates concepts of collective-action paradoxes, business power and social movements into interest-group studies.

Though there is widespread scholarly consensus that American political elites have become increasingly ideologically polarized, there remains debate about how the mass electorate has responded to the increase in polarization at the elite level. This article shows that as party elites have become more polarized, individuals have become better able to identify the party that best matches their own ideological positions, thereby contributing to polarization at the mass level. Using forty years of ANES and DW-NOMINATE data to test this argument, it was found that the relationship between a voter’s position in policy space and their political behavior is indeed conditional upon polarization at the elite level. This finding demonstrates how changes in elite polarization translate to behavioral changes on the mass level.

The Russian parliamentary and presidential elections of December 1999 and March 2000 appeared to have been won in large part through the partisan use of (particularly state) television. According to the evidence of a spring 2001 national survey, television was the main source of political information for the supporters of all parties and candidates. However, state television (which had been most supportive of the Kremlin) was much more likely to be favoured by the supporters of the pro-regime Unity party; while commercial television (which had provided a more even-handed coverage of the elections) was more popular and respected among the supporters of anti-Kremlin parties and candidates and less popular among supporters of Vladimir Putin. Regression analysis that takes account of reciprocal causation between media source and vote choice indicates that these were not spurious associations. The findings suggest that the state itself may exercise a disproportionate influence upon the electoral process in newly established systems in which social structures and political allegiances remain fluid.

Transparency is one of the most contested aspects of international organizations. While observers frequently call for greater oversight of policy making, evidence suggests that settlement between states is more likely when negotiations are conducted behind closed doors. The World Trade Organization’s (WTO) legal body provides a useful illustration of these competing perspectives. As in many courts, WTO dispute settlement is designed explicitly to facilitate settlement through private consultations. However, this study argues that the privacy of negotiations creates opportunities for states to strike deals that disadvantage others. Looking at product-level trade flows from all disputes between 1995 and 2011, it finds that private (early) settlements lead to discriminatory trade outcomes – complainant countries gain disproportionately more than the rest of the membership. When the facts of a case are made known through a ruling, these disproportional gains disappear entirely. The article also finds that third-party participation – commonly criticized for making settlement less likely – significantly reduces disparities in post-dispute trade. It then draws parallels to domestic law and concludes with a set of policy prescriptions.

Previous research by Goldstone et al. (2010) generated a highly accurate predictive model of state-level political instability. Notably, this model identifies political institutions – and partial democracy with factionalism, specifically – as the most compelling factors explaining when and where instability events are likely to occur. This article reassesses the model’s explanatory power and makes three related points: (1) the model’s predictive power varies substantially over time; (2) its predictive power peaked in the period used for out-of-sample validation (1995–2004) in the original study and (3) the model performs relatively poorly in the more recent period. The authors find that this decline is not simply due to the Arab Uprisings, instability events that occurred in autocracies. Similar issues are found with attempts to predict nonviolent uprisings (Chenoweth and Ulfelder 2017) and armed conflict onset and continuation (Hegre et al. 2013). These results inform two conclusions: (1) the drivers of instability are not constant over time and (2) care must be exercised in interpreting prediction exercises as evidence in favor or dispositive of theoretical mechanisms.

In this article, the reason why incumbent spending is less effective than challenger spending is explained. The argument is that incumbent spending efficiency depends on the marginality of seats: safe incumbent spending is less effective than marginal incumbent spending, since safe incumbents have to buy fewer extreme voters, whereas marginal incumbents can easily buy a larger number of swing voters. The analysis of the US Senate elections between 1974 and 2000 shows that safe incumbent spending is less effective than challenger spending, but marginal incumbent spending is not. The analysis also shows that the previous finding of less effective incumbent spending is largely due to the fact that the data for marginal and safe incumbents have been aggregated.

Did the American public become more protectionist during the Great Recession of 2007–09? If so, why? During this period, many observers expressed concern that rising unemployment would stimulate protectionist pressures. The results of this study indicate that although increased unemployment did not affect the trade preferences of most Americans, individuals working in import-competing industries who lost their jobs during the Great Recession did grow more hostile to trade. However, even greater hostility to trade stemmed from a variety of non-material factors. Increasing ethnocentrism and opposition to involvement in world affairs between 2007 and 2009 help account for growing antipathy toward trade. But most importantly, increasing anxiety that foreign commerce would harm people in the future, even if it had not done so thus far, contributed to mounting opposition to trade among the American public.