This article examines the effect of high school civic education on voter turnout in adulthood by integrating extensive academic transcript data on social studies and civic coursework into a large-scale, longitudinal survey of a nationally representative sample of adolescents. In an initial series of regression models, civics courses appear to have an effect on turnout in adulthood. However, after accounting for individual and family attributes, civic education has a fairly limited effect on turnout, though several measures have statistically significant effects even in the presence of controls. Interestingly, the study finds no support for the idea that high school courses that focus on service learning, civic skills development or political issues increase turnout in adulthood, which is contrary to expectations from the resource model of participation. After subjecting the civic effects that persist after accounting for controls to additional scrutiny by using family fixed-effects models that account for all observed and unobserved influences shared by siblings in the same family (for example, socialization, predispositions, etc.), the evidence suggests that there is a null relationship between civic education and turnout; the best-case scenario is that any civic education effects that do exist are likely very small. The idea that additional civics training will help to substantially elevate voter turnout appears to be overly optimistic.

Incumbents have many tools to tip elections in their favor, yet little is known about how they choose between strategies. By comparing various tactics, this article argues that electoral malpractice centered on manipulating institutions offers the greatest effectiveness while shielding incumbents from public anger and criminal prosecution. To demonstrate this, the study focuses on a widespread institutional tactic: preventing candidates from accessing the ballot. First, in survey experiments, Russian voters respond less negatively to institutional manipulations, such as rejecting candidates, than to blatant fraud, such as ballot box stuffing. Next, using evidence from 25,935 Russian mayoral races, the article shows that lower societal and implementation costs enable incumbents to strategically reject candidacies from credible challengers and then reduce their electoral vulnerability. In all, the technology behind specific manipulations helps determine when and how incumbents violate electoral integrity.

Redistricting has a substantial influence on parties' electoral fortunes, so the process receives extremely close attention from those potentially affected by changes to the pattern of constituency boundaries. In the United Kingdom, redistricting recommendations are made by independent Boundary Commissions, but the political parties can influence the nature of those recommendations through the representations that they make during the consultative process. When a Commission has made provisional recommendations for a county (in England and Wales), region (in Scotland) or London borough, individuals and organizations have one month in which to make written representations, either favourable or unfavourable, regarding all or part of the recommendations, and they can suggest alternative sets of constituencies for the area concerned. The Commission may then hold a public inquiry, at which the interested parties can promote their views and contest those put forward by others. The assistant commissioner who conducts the inquiry reports to the commission, which may publish alterations to the provisional recommendations as a result of his/her advice. If their suggestions are adopted by the Commission for its final recommendations, then those promoting them at the public inquiry will have influenced the redistricting outcome.For detailed discussions of the work of the Boundary Commissions, see D. Butler, ‘The Redrawing of Parliamentary Boundaries in Britain’, Journal of Behavioural and Social Sciences, 37 (1992), 5–12; I. McLean and R. Mortimore, lsquo;Apportionment and the Boundary Commission for England’, Electoral Studies, 11 (1992), 293–309.

A large number of studies of ideological congruence, and of the effect of public opinion on policy outcomes more generally, have relied on the Kim-Fording (KF) measure of median voter opinion. This measure has the great virtue of being readily calculable – no direct measurement of voter opinion is required – but it rests on assumptions concerning party locations and voter behaviour that are unquestionably incorrect, at least some of the time. This article explores the sensitivity of the KF measure to violations of its core assumptions through simulation experiments. It then uses public opinion data to assess the degree to which consequential levels of violation occur in actual democratic systems. The article concludes with a discussion of what the KF median really measures and where it can – and cannot – be safely used.

When do autocrats employ propaganda to threaten citizens with repression? Do threats of repression condition citizen behavior? This article develops a theory of propaganda-based threats in autocracies that builds on insights from experimental psychology. It argues that even credible threats of repression are costly, and so are reserved for moments when collective action is most likely. Since threats of repression are employed sparingly, the authors also expect them to be effective. The theory is tested using data from China, the world's most populous autocracy. The study analyzes all 164,707 articles published between 2009 and 2016 in the Workers' Daily, a state-run newspaper that focuses on domestic issues and targets a non-elite audience. It finds that the Chinese government employs propaganda-based threats of repression primarily around the anniversaries of ethnic separatist movements in Tibet and Xinjiang regions. Using an instrumental variables strategy, the study shows that these threats decrease protest rates by a substantively meaningful margin.

After decades of relatively high inflows of foreign nationals, immigration is now at the center of substantial political divisions in most European countries and has been implicated in one of the most vexing developments in European politics, the rise of the xenophobic right. However, it is not clear whether high levels of immigration actually do cause a public backlash, or whether publics become habituated to, and supportive of, immigration. This study tests these backlash and habituation theories using novel measures of immigration mood and immigration concern produced by combining over 4,000 opinion datapoints across twenty-nine years and thirty countries. The authors find evidence of a public backlash in the short to medium run, where mood turns negative and concern about immigration rises. Yet the study also finds evidence of a longer-run process of habituation that cancels out the backlash effect within one (concern) to three (mood) decades.

In 1996, New Zealand changed its electoral system from single-member plurality (SMP) to a Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) system. This article addresses the effects on turnout of electoral system change, generational differences and national and district-level competitiveness. Both theory and cross-sectional empirical evidence indicate that turnout should be higher after the change to MMP. Yet turnout has declined. Most of this turns out to be an effect of lag effects generated by longer-term trends of declining competition, and generational experiences. MMP has shifted the main focus of electoral competition from the district to the national level, with consequent changes in turnout distribution. Electoral boundary changes also have negative effects under MMP, and most MMP elections have taken place after an electoral redistribution.

This article uses a replication experiment of ninety-four specifications from sixteen different studies to show the severity of the problem of selection on unobservables. Using a variety of approaches, it shows that membership in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade/World Trade Organization has a significant effect on a surprisingly high number of dependent variables (34 per cent) that have little or no theoretical relationship to the WTO. To make the exercise even more conservative, the study demonstrates that membership in a low-impact environmental treaty, the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species, yields similarly high false positive rates. The authors advocate theoretically informed sensitivity analysis, showing how prior theoretical knowledge conditions the crucial choice of covariates for sensitivity tests. While the current study focuses on international institutions, the arguments also apply to other subfields and applications.

In this article, the hypothesis is examined that coalition government formation in West European parliaments is systematically constrained by the existence of limits or bounds on the extent to which parliamentary parties can compromise on their policy positions. Two methods are developed by which these bounds or ‘policy horizons’, as they are termed here, can be estimated, and it is demonstrated via the analysis of hypothetical data that the methods, although imperfect, are unlikely to manufacture artefactual threshold effects. These methods are then applied to data on fourteen post-war West European parliamentary systems to show that, even when other relevant factors are controlled, the structuring effect of policy horizons can be detected in the formation of coalition governments. The article concludes with some comments on the theoretical implications of the existence of policy horizons.

The empirical literature in comparative politics holds that social cleavages affect the number of candidates or parties when electoral institutions are ‘permissive’, but it lacks a theoretical account of the strategic candidate entry and exit decisions that ultimately determine electoral coalitions in plural societies. This article incorporates citizen-candidate social identities into game-theoretic models of electoral competition under plurality and majority-runoff electoral rules, indicating that social group demographics can affect the equilibrium number of candidates, even in non-permissive systems. Under plurality rule, the relationship between social homogeneity and the effective number of candidates is non-monotonic and, contrary to the prevailing Duvergerian intuition, for some demographic configurations even the effective number of candidates cannot be near two. Empirical patterns in cross-national presidential election results are consistent with the theoretical model.

The large shift in voting in the House of Commons on repeal of the Corn Laws in the 1842-46 period has led many analysts to focus on the political calculus of Peel's government and on the role of ideology in shaping this policy change. While the claim that ideology was an independent source of change lacks substantiation, the claims about Peel's changing political calculus are an important part of a larger explanation for the change in voting. However, showing that Peel had his own reasons for preferring repeal is not the same as showing why Peel was successful. An analysis of the political and economic interests of constituents and Members of Parliament reveals that these interests were systematically related to Members' votes on repeal. Repeal is thus more appropriately understood as the result of the interaction of Peel's immediate objectives with a more congenial political environment that had arisen due to the changes induced by British economic development.

Recent research on economic voting has moved beyond the traditional reward–punishment hypothesis, according to which the economy is merely considered a valence issue. Instead, patrimonial economic voting research looks at voters as property owners within the economic system. These studies have relied on survey items that measure whether individuals own different kinds of property to test the patrimonial dimension. This study emphasizes the importance of a surprisingly neglected aspect: the value of assets. It uses official register data files from the Swedish Tax Agency on the value of individuals’ assets merged with survey data from the 2006 Swedish National Election Study. The study finds that the relationship between patrimony and voting behavior in Sweden is similar to that found in other countries, but only when it is tested in a similar way as in these studies – that is, only when it is coded as whether voters own different assets. This study brings three important contributions to the debate. First, it offers a new empirically based categorization of the dimensionality of asset ownership and shows that the previous distinction between low- and high-risk assets is insufficient. Secondly, it shows that merely having assets or not, which is what previous studies have measured, is not what primarily matters; the relevant factor is the value of the assets. And thirdly, it demonstrates that only the value of some kinds of assets matters (especially stocks and real estate properties), while other assets (savings in bonds and funds) do not affect voting behavior or political opinions.

Democratic rule is maintained so long as all relevant actors in the political system comply with the institutional rules of the game – democratic institutions must be self-enforcing. We examine the role of transparency in supporting a democratic equilibrium. Transparency improves the functioning of elections: in transparent polities, elections more effectively resolve adverse selection problems between the public and their rulers. Transparency increases popular satisfaction with democracy and inhibits challenges to the democratic order. We provide a game-theoretic model, test these claims, and find they enjoy empirical support. Transparency is associated with a reduction in both the probability of democratic collapse and of the irregular removal of democratic leaders. Transparency stabilizes democratic rule.

The term ‘constitutional democracy’ can be interpreted as either an oxymoron or a tautology. On the one hand, constitutionalism and democracy can appear opposed to each other. Whereas the first term refers to ‘restrained and divided’ power, the second implies its ultimately ‘unified and unconstrained’ exercise. On the other hand, constitutions can be presented as codifying the rules of the democratic game, indicating who can vote, how, when and why. Since the democratic ideal involves more than mere adherence to the formal procedural devices of democracy, such as majority rule, many constitutionalists argue that no true democrat could consistently allow a democracy to abolish itself. There is no contradiction, therefore, in entrenching the rights that are inherent to the democratic process itself and preventing their abrogation even by democratically elected politicians. However, democrats point out that rules constrain as well as enable. There are many different models of democracy, which define the democratic rules in a variety of often incompatible ways. If democracy is to mean ‘people rule’, then the Demos should be free to redefine the rules whenever they want and should not be tied to any given definition. The need to keep open the possibility of democratic review seems particularly important when one remembers that the constitutions of many democracies have excluded significant categories of people from citizenship, notably women and those without property, and placed severe limits on the exercise of the popular will, such as the indirect election of representatives. Of course, some exclusions and limitations are inevitable – they are intrinsic to any rule-governed activity. That we are not lumbered with the exclusions and limitations of the eighteenth century, though, is in large part due to successive social and democratic movements and reforms.See S. S. Wolin, ‘Collective Identity and Constitutional Power’, in The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 8; cf. also the various studies in J. Elster and R. Slagstad, eds, Constitutionalism and Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). On the restriction of scope that constitutionalism imposes on democracy, see A. Weale, ‘The Limits of Democracy’, in A. Hamlin and P. Pettit, eds, The Good Polity: Normative Analysis of the State (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); and R. Ruffilli, ‘Riforma delle istituzioni e trasformazione della politica’, in Istituzioni Società Stato, vol. III, (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991), pp. 707–21.Cf. P. Jones, Rights (London: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 173–5.

We investigate how emotions, threat perceptions and past violence influence foreign policy attitudes via a survey experiment in Georgia. Using a stratified sample across areas with differential exposure to the conflict and the presence of internally displaced persons, we randomly assign respondents to receive emotional primes about Russian aggression in the region. We find that exposure to violence, as well as simply being primed about past Russian aggression, both increase the perceived threat from Russia, and to a lesser extent anger towards Russia. Individuals who receive the primes are more supportive of a hardline foreign policy. In contrast, we find that exposure to violence does not have a direct effect on foreign policy attitudes, but increases hardline attitudes indirectly, through increased anger and threat. Taken together our results provide evidence that reminders of past violence have different effects than direct exposure to violence on foreign policy attitudes.

Do institutions constrain presidential power in Africa? Conventional wisdom holds that personalist rule grants African presidents unchecked powers. Consequently, there is very little research on African institutions such as legislatures and their impact on executive authority. In this article, the author uses original data on the exercise of presidential authority (issuance of subsidiary legislation) to examine how legislative independence conditions presidential rule making in Kenya. The study exploits quasi-exogenous changes in legislative independence, and finds that Kenyan presidents issue relatively more Legal Notices under periods of legislative weakness, but are constrained from doing so under periods of legislative independence. These findings shed new light on institutional politics in Kenya, and illustrate how executive–legislative relations in the country conform to standard predictions in the literature on unilateral executive action.

R. J. Johnston produces two striking and counter-intuitive results on bargaining power in a European Union Council of Ministers expanded by the addition of the four states applying for entry in 1994. One is that the ‘big four’ member states, including the United Kingdom, have more power if the minority with power to block a proposal is set at 27 rather than 23. UK Prime Minister John Major damaged himself politically by first insisting that he would veto a proposal to increase the blocking threshold from 23 to 27 and then being forced to climb down from this position. As Johnston notes, this episode ‘led to several calls for his resignation from among his own party's MPs, including one in the House itself’. If British interests, as seen by the Euro-sceptics whom Mr Major was vainly trying to appease, were actually better served by a threshold of 27 than of 23, his actions appear doubly futile. This is apparent by reading across Johnston's Table 1, using either of the indices he proposes.

Hans Keman's and Paul Pennings's critique (‘Managing Political and Societal Conflict in Democracies: Do Consensus and Corporatism Matter?’, this Journal, preceding pages) of our attempt to link corporatism and consensus democracy falls essentially into three parts. Their first criticism deals with the way we measured corporatism. They reject our ‘composite’ approach on the basis that different experts have different conceptual understandings of corporatism. Hence, they argue, it is unwarranted to add up these various scores. Secondly, they claim that our central relationship between consensus democracy and corporatism is a function of our particular measure of corporatism and, in addition, driven by two outlying cases: Italy and Austria. Thirdly, they claim that corporatism and consensus democracy are two different phenomena, and that therefore, corporatism should not be integrated into the concept of consensus democracy. We shall address these three main criticisms in the order described.

This article introduces the concept of patronage regimes and, through it, extends the research on American party development. No systematic empirical inquiry into the operation of American patronage practices has yet been undertaken. Its analysis investigates the strategic allocation of public jobs by party elites to enhance cadre performance in presidential elections. Utilizing a dataset of 49,000 Senate-confirmed, presidential appointments, presidential patronage removals between the years 1829 and 1917 are analysed. Two distinctive patronage regimes are identified: an antebellum regime structured by pure-and-simple spoils politics and a postbellum regime conforming to principles of machine rationality. Factors central to the process of regime transformation are pinpointed. The presence of two successive patronage regimes highlights the importance of endogenous political incentives and elite strategic choice to the emergent character of party organization, shedding new light on the historical development of these pre-eminent nineteenth-century American political institutions.