Throughout Russian history, Jews have often been blamed when turmoil has arisen in the country. It is surprising, therefore, that Russian politics in the 1990s focused so little on Jews as a source of the political and economic crises afflicting the country. This article investigates anti-Jewish attitudes in Russia over time and cross-sectionally, carefully scrutinizing the hypothesis that perceptions of economic, social and political upheaval activate latent authoritarianism into anti-Semitism. Little if any support is found for the hypothesis and therefore it is argued that scapegoat theory, as currently constituted and applied to Jews, is too simplistic to be useful. Russian Jews were not subject to intolerance and repression in the 1990s because anti-Semitic beliefs were not widespread enough to be used successfully by political entrepreneurs seeking advantage through attacks on Jews.

This article explores if (and how) national elections affect the chances of concluding an international agreement. Drawing on a literature about the informational efficiency of elections, it examines how political uncertainty in the run-up to an election impacts the dynamics of international negotiations. Using the case of decision making in the European Union (EU), it finds that (1) pending national elections significantly reduce the chances of reaching an agreement at the international level (2) this effect is strongest during close elections with uncertain outcomes and (3) the effect is particularly pronounced in the case of elections in larger member states. The findings highlight the fruitfulness of further research on the dynamics between national and international politics. The article has positive and normative implications for the literature on two-level games, international negotiations and legislative bargaining in the EU.

This study examines the effect of incorporating taxation into the incumbency voting model using aggregate economic data for Canadian federal elections from 1953 to 1988. Although Canadian election campaigns tend to be dominated by economic performance issues, taxation, as measured by open-ended questions in the national election studies, has not been a salient campaign issue among voters. None the less, voters as consumers in the market economy have an interest in government policies that affect after-tax income. Furthermore, as economic citizens, voters have an interest in taxation as a measure of government efficiency – the costs of providing public services – independent of benefits generated by government. Paralleling American and British results, the economic and fiscal performance variables behave as expected in the incumbency model. Income change has a positive effect, and the rate of inflation and unemployment a negative effect, on incumbency voting. The relationship between taxation and incumbency voting is negative, both through its effect on after-tax income and also directly, independent of income. The results are consistent with an interpretation which suggests that voters, responding to the public agenda for economic performance and to a private agenda for taxation, behave both as politic consumers and as economic citizens.

Most of what is known regarding political socialization treats parent–child concordance as evidence of transmission. This direct-transmission approach remains agnostic regarding how socialization occurs, whether traits have a role in a child's ability to identify and understand their parent's values or their motivation to adopt their parents’ values. This article advances a perception-adoption approach to unpack these microprocesses of socialization. The authors test their model using three independent studies in the United States that together comprise 4,852 parent–child dyads. They find that the transmission of partisan orientations from parent to child occurs less than half the time, which is qualitatively different from the generally held view. More importantly, the findings provide a greater understanding of how key predictors facilitate the political socialization process. Specifically, politicization improves child perception, but has no role in the child's motivation to adopt parental values. Closeness and parental value strength influence children to want to be like their parents, but do nothing to improve children's ability to recognize their parents' values. And education, previously thought to have little role in transmission, does not influence a child's ability to understand their parent's affiliation, but appears to make children more likely to reject whatever they believe it to be.

Although scholars have studied education's effects on many different outcomes, little attention has been paid to its effects on adults’ economic views. This article examines those effects. It presents results based on longitudinal data which suggest that secondary education has a little-appreciated consequence: it makes Americans more opposed to redistribution. Placebo tests and other analyses confirm this finding. Further investigation suggests that these conservative effects of education operate partly by changing the way that self-interest shapes people's ideas about redistribution.

The rise of pressure-group politics in Britain has stimulated a corresponding growth of academic interest in pressure groups. Some distinguished early case studies were crowned in 1965 with Beer's majestic interpretation, while the last decade saw various accounts of the constitutional significance and merits of group activity. These bursts of academic energy illuminated parts of the pressure-group universe but left others in twilight. We are well informed about the lobbying activities of manufacturing industry, of organized labour and some of the professions. By contrast, there exists hardly any systematic discussion of how the interests of financial institutions are represented in government.

This article argues that the policy uncertainty generated by elections encourages private actors to delay investments that entail high costs of reversal, creating pre-election declines in the associated sectors. Moreover, this incentive depends on the competitiveness of the race and the policy differences between the major parties/candidates. These arguments are tested using new survey and housing market data from the United States. The survey analysis assesses whether respondents’ perceptions of presidential candidates’ policy differences increased the likelihood that they would delay certain purchases and actions. The housing market analysis examines whether elections are associated with a pre-election decline in economic activity, and whether any such decline depends on electoral competitiveness. The results support the predictions and cannot be explained by existing theories.

Studies of the American public demonstrate that partisans often diverge not only on questions of opinion but also on matters of fact. However, little is known about partisan divergence in factual beliefs among the government officials who make real policy decisions, or how it compares to belief polarization among the public. This letter describes the first systematic comparison of factual belief polarization between the public and government officials, which we conducted using a paired survey approach. The results indicate that political elites are consistently more accurately informed than the public across a wide range of politically contentious facts. However, this increase in accuracy does not translate into reduced factual belief polarization. These findings demonstrate that a more informed political elite does not necessarily mitigate partisan factual disagreement in policy making.

This article develops a two-part theory that accounts for both the origins and the persistence of patronage politics. First, greater centrifugal and disintegrative pressures at key moments in the state-building process give local elites more opportunity to institutionalize patronage at the subnational level. Second, decentralized patronage systems are more resistant to reform than centralized ones. Case studies of India and Ceylon illustrate how variation in centrifugal pressures allowed subnational elites to capture the state in the former but not the latter. Further data from the British Empire shows that greater centrifugal pressures faced by British colonies at the time of decolonization are correlated with the persistence of higher levels of patronage over time.

This article explores the link between industrial policy and electoral outcomes under dictatorship. Using a difference-in-differences analysis of county-level panel data from 1971–88 in South Korea, it examines whether the industrial policy implemented by an authoritarian government affects constituents’ electoral decisions. It finds that counties receiving economic benefits through the construction of industrial complexes cast more votes for the incumbent party in subsequent elections. The effects are larger in elections immediately after the appointment of an industrial complex or at the beginning of its construction compared to elections held after the completion of construction. Furthermore, the study tests and rejects reverse causality and migration effects as possible alternative mechanisms for the changes in electoral outcomes. Finally, to understand a unique feature of authoritarian elections, it tests whether industrial complexes affect electoral fraud. Using a genetic matching methodology, it finds that places with new industrial complexes are less likely to experience electoral fraud.

Recent publications argue that the traditional gender gap in voting has decreased or reversed in many democracies. However, this decrease may apply only to some types of elections. Building on prior studies, this article hypothesizes that although women participate at the same or higher rates than men in national elections, they participate less in supranational elections. The authors investigate this possibility empirically by analyzing the evolution of the gender gap in voter turnout in elections to the European Parliament (EP). The article makes three important contributions. First, it shows the presence and stability of the traditional gender gap in EP elections. Secondly, it finds that gender differences in political interest are the main source of this gender gap. Thirdly, these gender differences in political interest are, in turn, context dependent. They are strongly associated with cultural gender differences, which are captured through differences in boys’ and girls’ maths scores.

Leaders and activists in most Western political parties, appreciating Schattschneider's adage1 that parties are controlled by those who control nominations to public offices, jealously guard their right to choose parliamentary candidates. They realize that candidates play a crucial role in shaping voters’ images of the parties as well as in formulating the party policies. Not surprisingly, candidates are usually recruited through rather oligarchical procedures. Extra-parliamentary party leaders normally pick the nominees in closed private meetings and then submit their choices to rank-and-file party members and/or delegates who nearly always grant their approval. Such procedures reduce the role of party members to one of docile acquiescence, and completely exclude party voters.

Despite mass privatization and market reforms in Russia, the central state continues to redistribute considerable amounts of money between the country's eighty-nine regions. About 4.3 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) – or 31 per cent of federal tax revenues – was transferred back to the budgets of the regions in 1994. The average region recovered about 45 per cent of the taxes it remitted to the centre in different kinds of budget transfers, up from 37 per cent in 1993. But this understates the true scale of redistribution. In addition, many federal spending programmes, while not explicitly targeted at particular regions, had a geographically concentrated impact. This includes ‘indirect’ transfers due to revisions of the proportion of tax the regions were permitted to keep from those proportions voted in the federal budget. Russia's 4.3 per cent compares to grants to state governments of 0.7 per cent of GDP in Austria (1992), 2.5 per cent in the United States (1992), 3.6 per cent in Germany (1992), and 3.9 per cent in Canada (1991) (calculated from OECD, Revenue Statistics of OECD Member Countries: 1965–1994 (Paris: OECD, 1995)).Aleksei Lavrov, ‘Rossiiskiy Byudzhetny Federalizm: Pervie Shagi, Pervie Itogi’, Segodnya, 104 (7 June 1995), p. 5.

This article examines how human rights international non-governmental organizations (hereafter HROs) can increase the level of political protest in neighboring states. Previous research suggests local activities of HROs help to generate mobilization for protests against governments. This article shows that the presence of HROs in neighboring states can be a substitute for domestic HROs; if domestic HROs are already flourishing, there will be less of a ‘neighbor’ effect. At sufficiently high levels of domestic HRO prevalence within a state, neighboring HROs help domestic HROs use institutionalized substitutes for protest mobilization strategies. Spatial econometric methods are used to test the implications of this theory. These results illuminate the role that non-governmental organizations play in these domestic political processes, and demonstrate the transnational nature of their activities.

How does the risk of gridlock affect the type of legislative output? Do bureaucratic agents expand their activities when they can expect that the principals are unable to overrule them? This article introduces a novel approach for calculating the risk of gridlock in bicameral legislatures in order to estimate its impact on bureaucratic activities, combining data on all secondary and tertiary acts of the European Union (EU) from 1983 to 2009. The findings reveal that bureaucratic activities expand when the risk of gridlock increases and an overruling of tertiary acts becomes less likely. This may sustain the EU's overall decision-making productivity, but its bureaucratic nature may raise further questions about democratic legitimacy and principal-agent problems in the representation of interests.

A large literature has demonstrated that international action can promote the resolution of civil wars. However, international actors do not wait until violence starts to seek to manage conflicts. This article considers the ways in which the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) reduces the propensity for self-determination movements to escalate to civil war, through actions that directly pertain to the disputing actors or that indirectly shape actor incentives. It examines the relationship between the content of UNSC resolutions in all self-determination disputes from 1960 to 2005 and the onset of armed conflict in the disputes. The study finds that diplomatic actions that directly address disputes reduce the likelihood of armed conflict, and that military force and sanctions have more indirect preventive effects.

The study of global co-operation and conflict has been a central topic of enquiry in the field of international relations. Yet notwithstanding extensive work on these subjects, they are not well understood. Whenever research fails to resolve an intractable problem, it may be because the conceptualization of the dependent variable is fundamentally flawed and/or because the most critical independent variables have been ignored. The purpose of this analysis is to see if, by confronting these two problems, our ability to explain global contention can be improved.

In the Westminster system the prime minister's active participation in parliamentary proceedings is a key mechanism for ensuring the accountability of the executive. We survey the evolution of the four main prime ministerial activities across the period 1868–1990. There has been a long-term decline in prime ministers' speeches in the Commons, a stepped decline in debating interventions and a significant decrease in question-answering from the late nineteenth century to the 1950s. But prime ministerial statement-making increased after 1940, ebbing away again in the 1980s. And the downward drift in question-answering was halted by procedural innovations since the 1960s, which standardized the frequency of prime ministers' appearances and lead to the dominance of ‘open’ questions. We trace the varied impacts of institutional changes and shorter-term political or personal influences. The direct accountability of the prime minister to Parliament has undoubtedly declined, a trend probably paralleled by decreasing indirect accountability. These findings raise fundamental questions about executive-legislature relations in the United Kingdom

Who are Africa’s swing voters? This article argues that in settings where ethnicity is politically salient, core and swing are defined by whether ethnic groups have a co-ethnic leader in the election. For members of ethnic groups with a co-ethnic in the race, there is typically less uncertainty about which party or candidate will best represent the group’s interests. For members of groups without a co-ethnic in the race, uncertainty is often greater, making these voters potentially more receptive to campaign persuasion and more likely to change voting intentions during the campaign. Consistent with these expectations, panel data from Kenya’s 2013 presidential election shows that voters from groups without a co-ethnic in the race were more than two and a half times more likely to change their voting intentions during the campaign period.