Although a growing body of research suggests that the constabularization of the military for domestic policing is counterproductive, this increasingly prevalent policy has nonetheless enjoyed widespread support in the developing world. This study advances our understanding of the consequences of militarization for perceptions of law enforcement: whether visual features shape perceptions of effectiveness, respect for civil liberties, proclivity for corruption and acceptance of militarization in one's own neighborhood. Based on a nationally representative, image-based, conjoint experiment conducted in Mexico, the authors find that military weapons and uniforms enhance perceptions of effectiveness and respect for civil liberties, and that the effect of military uniform becomes greater with increased military presence. The study also finds that gender shapes perceptions of civil liberties and corruption, but detects no effect for skin color. The findings suggest that a central feature of militarization linked to greater violence – military weapons – is paradoxically a key factor explaining favorable attitudes, and that women can play a crucial role in improving perceptions of law enforcement.

This article analyses candidates' strategies in leadership debates and voters' responses to those strategies. Based on an examination of German election campaign debates since 1972, we specify a number of different debating strategies available to the candidates. The strategic choices made by each party leader are then identified through content analysis. Finally, employing aggregate-level data, regression models are used to determine whether or not the debaters' strategies influenced voters' evaluations of who won and who lost each encounter. We report three major findings: (I) ‘positive’, non-attacking debating styles generate the most favourable public evaluations; (2) voters are most attentive to candidates' discussions of the parties' and government's record rather than their discussions of individual personalities; and (3), in some cases, these effects exceed those of party identification.

In democratic theory, the practice of discussing public affairs has been associated with desirable consequences for citizenship and democracy. We use Anglo-American survey data to examine twelve hypotheses about psychological foundations for four general conditions that such discussions might promote: autonomous citizens, political legitimacy, good representation and democratic communities. Our data combine detailed measures of public discussion with measures of more of its hypothesized civic consequences than have heretofore been available. They also enable us to probe, using specialized samples, causal inferences suggested by our analyses of random samples in our British and American communities. Six of the hypotheses are supported, including at least one regarding each of the four general liberal democratic conditions we investigate.

This article explores the influence of Protestant missionaries on male–female educational inequalities in colonial India. Causal mechanisms drawn from the sociology and economics of religion highlight the importance of religious competition for the provision of public goods. Competition between religious and secular groups spurred missionaries to play a key role in the development of mass female schooling. A case study of Kerala illustrates this. The statistical analysis, with district-level datasets, covers colonial and post-colonial periods for most of India. Missionary effects are compared with those of British colonial rule, modernization, European presence, education expenditures, post-colonial democracy, Islam, caste and tribal status, and land tenure. Christian missionary activity is consistently associated with better female education outcomes in both the colonial and post-colonial periods.

Recent theories on the causes of war focus on how institutional and structural factors shape leaders’ decisions in foreign policy. However, citizens, policy-makers, and a growing number scholars argue that leaders’ background experiences may matter for both domestic and foreign policy choices. This article contributes to an emerging body of scholarship on leaders in international relations by showing how personal attributes influence the initiation of militarized disputes. Based on the soft power theory of international experiences and the impressionable-years hypothesis of socialization, I theorize that leaders with the experience of attending a university in a Western democratic country should be less likely than non-Western-educated leaders to initiate militarized interstate disputes. I test this proposition by employing a new dataset, building on Archigos and LEAD, that includes background attributes of more than 900 leaders from 147 non-Western countries between 1947 and 2001. The results strongly support the hypothesis, even when accounting for leader selection, time-variant country and leader-level controls, other leaders’ background characteristics, and country and year fixed effects. This finding lends credence to the soft power thesis of academic institutions on international sojourners, and highlights the value of considering leaders’ experiences in analyses about international relations.

A vast amount of experimental evidence suggests that get-out-the-vote encouragements delivered through door-to-door canvassing have large effects on turnout. Most of the existing studies have been conducted in the United States, and are inspiring European mobilization campaigns. This article explores the empirical question of whether the American findings are applicable to Europe. It combines existing European studies and presents two new Danish studies to show that the pooled point estimate of the effect is substantially smaller in Europe than in the United States, and finds no effects in the two Danish experiments. The article discusses why the effects seem to be different in Europe compared to the United States, and stresses the need for further experiments in Europe as there is still considerable uncertainty regarding the European effects. While one possible explanation is that differences in turnout rates explain the differences in effect sizes, the empirical analysis finds no strong relationship between turnout and effect sizes in either Europe or the United States.

Governments face different incentives when they reorganize many administrative agencies at one time rather than making infrequent, case-by-case changes. This article develops a theory of mass administrative reorganizations, which posits that the politics of reorganization is focused on government accountability. Viewing mass reorganization as a structured decision, it argues that choices about independence, agency organization and functional disposition have different impacts on the political costs of administrative policy making. Analyzing novel data from a recent British reorganization with sequential logistic statistical models provides substantial support for these claims. The study challenges the focus on organizational survival in the existing literature. By eschewing more fundamental political questions of democratic accountability, the prevailing approach masks essential politics, and in the context of this study, all influence of conflict due to party and agency policy positions.

In a recent Research Note, Evans and Heath cast doubt on the validity of our measure of tactical voting. We and our critics agree on a set of ‘Main reason’ tactical voters – those who said they voted tactically in response to the question, ‘What comes closest to the main reason you voted the way you did?’ Unlike our critics, we reasoned that many of those who cast a tactical vote would not be identified so simply. Some respondents may have been reluctant to say they had voted for other than the best party. Others may have convinced themselves that the ‘best’ party was one that had a chance of winning and therefore answered in such a way as to place themselves squarely among non-tactical voters even though in other tactical circumstances they would have voted differently. Consequently, we sought to identify tactical behaviour through additional questions. Our final measure of tactical voting can be regarded as containing two components: the ‘main reason’ voters, who expressly told interviewers they voted for one party while ‘really preferring’ some other party, and ‘Other reason’ voters, whom we identified as tactical by their responses to additional questions. It is the ‘Other reason’ voters who are at issue.

The social cleavage theory of parly systems has provided a major framework for the study of Western party systems. It has been quite unimportant in studying other party systems, especially those of developing countries, where comparative development, and not mass electoral politics, has been the focus of study. This article reports the results of an attempt to bridge these traditions by analysing popular support for the Congress Party of India in terms of the expectations of the social cleavage theory of parties. This analysis illustrates the degree to which Indian partisanship conforms to the expectations of the theory. More importantly, this social cleavage theory analysis offers some new perspectives on (1) the inability of the Indian political system to develop national parties other than the Congress and (2) the ‘disaggregation’ of the Congress party.

Labor unions play a prominent role in the economy and in politics, and have long been depicted by opponents as an overly powerful, corrupt and economically harmful institution. In labor-related news in recent years, anti-union rhetoric has regularly focused on union workers themselves, frequently portraying them as overpaid, greedy and undeserving of their wealth, while also drawing a contrast between the compensation of union vs. non-union workers. This type of rhetoric is referred to here as class-based anti-union rhetoric (CAR). Despite its prevalence, it remains unknown whether CAR affects public opinion toward unions. This study uses a series of national survey experiments to demonstrate that exposure to CAR reduces the perceived similarity of targeted union workers, unions’ perceived deservingness of public support and support for pro-union legislation. Moreover, CAR repeatedly nullified or reversed the otherwise positive relationship between the strength of worker identity and solidarity with union workers.

Ernest Gellner's is the best-known modernist explanatory theory of nationalism. This article summarizes its expression and development before considering its strengths and weaknesses. Discussion centres on Gellner's functionalist mode of explanation, the place of nationalism in his philosophy of history, the predictive and retrodictive nature of his theory, and the merits of his typology of nationalism. The apolitical character of his writings is emphasized: in particular, though Gellner established the connections between nationalism and egalitarianism in modern societies, he did not emphasize the mutually reinforcing relationships between nationalism, egalitarianism and democratization; moreover, his contempt for nationalist doctrines is not something liberals, socialists and conservatives need share.

Political parties are not unitary actors; rather, each contains within its ranks a variety of different ideological beliefs and strategic orientations. Nor are individual political parties wholly isolated; rather, each has friends and allies among the other parties, and, of course, some implacable opponents.

This second article asks what it means to be independent in the contemporary United States. Four different meanings are hypothesized: (1) negative feelings about major political parties and partisanship; (2) positive identification with ideals of independence, especially individualistic autonomy; (3) neutrality or indifference because of no detectable party differences of significance; (4) a self-perceived pattern of variability in partisan behaviour. These four attitudinal dimensions are supported empirically via principal components analysis using both national and Wisconsin data. The four dimensions of independence attitudes show varied patterns of association with general indices of Independence self-classification, relevant political attitudes and behaviours, and various antecedents such as age and education.

This article assesses the degree of policy responsiveness in the new democracies of post-communist Europe. Panel data on economic reform and public opinion show that public support for reform has a large and significant effect on reform progress. Where public support for reform is high, reform proceeds more quickly. This effect remains strong even when controlling for the endogeneity of public support and other economic and political causes of reform, though it is strongest in more democratic countries. These results suggest that economic reform may be better promoted by persuading the public of the beneficial consequences of reform than by trying to insulate reformers from the public, and that the quality of democracy in the region may be higher than commonly perceived.

British elections exhibit two patterns contrary to expectations deriving from Duverger and Downs: centrist third parties (Liberals and their successors) win a large vote share; and the two major parties often espouse highly divergent policies. This article explores relations between the Liberal vote and left–right scores of the Labour and Conservative manifestos in the light of two hypotheses: the vacated centre posits that Liberals receive more votes when major parties diverge; the occupied centre proposes a lagged effect in which major parties diverge farther after Liberals do well in the preceding election. Data from elections since 1945 confirm the vacated-centre hypothesis, with Liberals benefiting about equally when the major parties diverge to the left and right, respectively. The results also support the occupied-centre hypothesis for Conservative party positions, but not for Labour’s. After considering explanations for this asymmetry, we identify historical events associated with turning points that our data reveal in post-war British politics.

Research on political style suggests that where women make arguments that are more emotional, empathetic and positive, men use language that is more analytical, aggressive and complex. However, existing work does not consider how gendered patterns of style vary over time. Focusing on the UK, we argue that pressures for female politicians to conform to stereotypically ‘feminine’ styles have diminished in recent years. To test this argument, we describe novel quantitative text-analysis approaches for measuring a diverse set of styles at scale in political speech data. Analysing UK parliamentary debates between 1997 and 2019, we show that the debating styles of female MPs have changed substantially over time, as women in Parliament have increasingly adopted stylistic traits that are typically associated with ‘masculine’ stereotypes of communication. Our findings imply that prominent gender-based stereotypes of politicians' behaviour are significantly worse descriptors of empirical reality now than they were in the past.

Cultural identity has become prominent in studies of world politics in the post-Cold War era. First, a growing literature in world politics has emerged that focuses on the impact of social culture, broadly conceived as the shared religious, racial or ethnolinguistic characteristics of a society. The significance of this aspect of culture is epitomized in studies focusing on ‘ethnic conflicts’, ‘ethnic security dilemmas’, and most prominently in Huntington's ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis, which suggests, among other things, that shared civilization membership is the fulcrum upon which post-Cold War era world politics rests. Secondly, the impact of political culture, broadly conceived as the shared norms and institutions guiding political behaviour in a society, has become increasingly salient, as evidenced by the bourgeoning literature on the democratic peace thesis, which posits that the extent to which a state (or pair of states) is democratic is a major determinant of its war-proneness. Adherents of this view argue either that although democracies are just as war-prone as non-democracies they rarely fight other democracies, or that democracies are more peaceful than non-democracies, in general.

The central question which this article attempts to raise is how we should understand the social structure that is emerging from the neo-colonial pattern of change in Africa, and what implications it has for politics. In its simplest form, the question is how far a stratification system is developing which is likely to make for class formation, class consciousness, and a politics of class struggle; or how far stratification can be contained within a predominantly peasant society, expressed politically in patron-client relationships.

This article disaggregates coalitions of third-party mediators and examines their effectiveness in interventions. First, it is argued that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between the size of a mediating coalition and mediation effectiveness. Secondly, mediators sharing a history of conflict and distrust will transfer their past relationships to a mediation attempt, making it less effective. Consequently, states sharing friendly and co-operative ties with each other are more successful in managing conflicts. Finally, a coalition of mediators that is largely democratic should be more effective due to a shared culture of peaceful conflict resolution, inclusivity and increased communication flows. The empirical analysis using data from the Issues Correlates of War Project for 1965–2000 largely provides support for the theory.