The California recall election of 2003 provides an excellent setting for investigating voter rationality and certain forms of sophisticated voting. In a pre-election telephone survey, 1,500 registered voters were asked to make pairwise comparisons between the major candidates, and their responses were combined to infer preferences. Individuals’ preference orderings over the major candidates rarely exhibited intransitivity. The patterns of tactical voting observed in the replacement part of the recall election were consistent with the declining rate hypothesis. Voters also engaged in ‘hedge voting’ on the recall question itself. The results suggest that voters’ decisions are ‘rationalistic’: while voters are consistent in forming utility-based preference rankings and choosing on that basis, their voting strategies do not incorporate probability assessments in a realistic, consistent fashion, if at all.

How does district magnitude affect electoral outcomes? This article addresses this question by exploiting a combination of two natural experiments in Argentina between 1985 and 2015. Argentine provinces elect half of their congressional delegation every two years, and thus districts with an odd number of representatives have varying magnitudes in different election years. Furthermore, whether a province elects more representatives in midterm or concurrent years was decided by lottery in 1983. I find that district magnitude (a) increases electoral support for small parties, (b) increases the (effective) number of parties that gain seats and (c) reduces electoral disproportionality. The last two results are driven by the mechanical rather than the psychological effect of electoral rules.

The US presidency has been progressively weakened over the past three decades – to the point where it is probably weaker today than at almost any time in the preceding century. The formal powers of the office have been trimmed. Congress, in the absence of Cold War and domestic emergency, has reasserted itself on all scores. The modern revolution in communications has diminished the President's ability to convey his message to his people. Not least, the White House is grossly overstaffed. As a result of these developments, the presidency more resembles Franklin D. Roosevelt's second term, in its worst months, than either his first term or his third, and is weaker than were those of any of his Cold War successors.

Legal scholars frequently advocate institutional reforms to modernize the judiciary and promote judicial independence. However, constitutional reforms also offer an opportunity for politicians to reshuffle the high courts. The negative consequences of constitutional change for judicial stability are explored using an original database of Supreme Court and Constitutional Tribunal members in eighteen Latin American countries between 1904 and 2010. Because unobserved factors potentially explain constitutional replacement as well as judicial turnover, a two-stage event-history model has been employed. The analysis integrates two literatures, studies of constitution-making and studies of judicial politics. The results show that constitutional change is a significant cause of judicial instability and court manipulation, even after potential endogeneity has been taken into account.

Scholars have examined the role that negative stereotypes play in electoral discrimination against minority candidates. Incorporating literature on in-group favoritism, the author argues here that some degree of this discrimination can be explained instead by voters holding positive stereotypes of majority candidates and discriminating in their favor. Based on the results of an original moderation-of-process survey experiment carried out in Italy, the study provides evidence of electoral discrimination pertaining to immigrant-origin candidates, concentrated among right-wing citizens. It finds that stereotypes have little mediating effect on discrimination against candidates with a migration background; rather, the primary role played by stereotypes is in discrimination in favor of majority candidates, that is, positive bias that reserves electoral benefits to them. The relevance of in-group favoritism is corroborated by the finding that large segments of the Italian voting population hold distinctively positive stereotypes of majority candidates without also negatively stereotyping immigrant-origin candidates.

Once again, Spain is in political transition. The death of Franco in 1975 provided the opportunity for rationalizing an awkward political system. The objective of the politicians who gathered to draft a new constitution was twofold: to organize a state that was to be both modern and legitimate in a society that is still in many ways ‘pre-civic’ but, at the same time, increasingly tied to the industrial and post-industrial West.

The third wave of democratization has profoundly affected national political institutions and procedures throughout the developing world. In many nations, however, local political institutions and actors also hold considerable power. Democratic reforms at the national level are not necessarily replicated at the local level, yet democratization is inherently incomplete if a nation is speckled with scores of authoritarian local political enclaves. It follows that the process of subnational political change is of vital importance. In this article this process is examined, focusing on Mexico. The question is what dynamic has led to the erosion of the PRI's dominance at the municipal level since the mid-1980s. Two theoretical models, a diffusion model and a realignment model, are proposed. Empirical tests centre on data from municipal elections in four states for the period 1985 to 1998. Using event history analysis, substantial support for the diffusion model is discovered. In contrast, evidence consistent with the realignment model emerges in only one context – a state in which a new opposition party enjoyed unusual strength.

Perhaps the most important decisions that the United States Supreme Court makes consist of which sorts of issues it will entertain and how, when, and in what forms it will resolve them. Indeed, as Mr Justice Brandeis once remarked, the ‘most important thing [the Court does] is not doing’, i.e. winnowing cases. Yet, until quite recently, few studies focused on the politics of the agenda-building process on the Supreme Court. From the important researches of Tanenhaus and his associates and of Ulmer and his colleagues we know that under certain conditions and in certain cases the justices operate on the basis of a few ‘cues’ in decisions to grant or deny petitions for certiorari – the main mode of obtaining a hearing from the Court. And Ulmer has instructed us that in making choices on certiorari, ‘Supreme Court justices are predisposed to support underdogs and upperdogs disproportionately but, also, are motivated to hide any “bias” that may be at work in determining votes’. So, although we do know more about some segments of agenda building than before, investigations are still at a relatively early stage. Furthermore, few have treated the Supreme Court as an institution that operates across time as well as space or have accounted for variations in its behaviour across that temporal dimension.

How does globalization affect politics? One of the most controversial aspects of globalization is offshoring, when manufacturing operations and business functions move abroad. Although voters generally dislike offshoring, it remains unclear how moving jobs abroad impacts democratic elections. Using a difference-in-differences estimation strategy, the author finds that incumbent government parties lose more votes in municipalities where a local plant moved production abroad between elections than in municipalities that did not experience such an event. The result holds across various time periods, different incumbent parties and diverse types of elections. In both national and regional elections, voters punish incumbent government parties when a local firm moves production abroad. Incumbent parties' vote shares fall as the number of jobs lost due to offshoring increases. In multiparty governments, voters disproportionately punish the largest coalition party for offshoring. The results of an original survey administered in Spain verify the importance of offshoring for voters' retrospective evaluations of incumbents.

This article investigates whether governing parties strategically time austerity policies to help them win re-election. It contributes to existing research by focusing directly on government policy output, analyzing over 1,200 welfare and taxation austerity measures in thirteen Western European countries over twenty years. In line with previous research, the authors find that governments become less likely to introduce austerity measures as elections approach. The study introduces original hypotheses about which governments have the ability and opportunity to strategically time policy decisions. The authors suggest that minimal winning cabinets with leadership change (new prime ministers) face less complex bargaining environments and can credibly shift responsibility for austerity measures to the preceding government. The empirical analyses show that these governments are most likely to strategically time austerity policies.

In many contemporary urban spaces, political information accrues to high status neighborhoods. This might exacerbate political inequality as the information-rich and information-poor each talk primarily with others like themselves. When information is specific and broadly diffused through the media, however, the convenience and low cognitive costs of everyday conversation could be especially helpful for the disadvantaged. This article shows how political conversations intensify or ameliorate spatial knowledge gaps, using a six-wave panel survey in fifty Brazilian neighborhoods between 2002 and 2006. Multilevel models demonstrate that conversation was more frequent in high education neighborhoods, but had a greater impact on specific, factual knowledge in low-education neighborhoods, leading to shrinking knowledge gaps. However, conversation slightly widened spatial gaps in socially perceived general knowledge.

Analyses of the economic transformation of the Polish economy and of the 1993 elections to the parliament suggest it is possible to proceed with pro-market and democratic reforms simultaneously. As demonstrated by the Polish case, the key to this process is the rate at which new enterprises are created. These enterprises, not the privatization of existing ones, are primarily responsible for the creation of a growing private economy. This evolving new economy, securely based and growing, creates a pro-reform constituency in the regions where it occurs. This constituency supports pro-reform parties. The Polish case offers important lessons about the reform process and about the way economies and political constituencies co-evolve.

In this article, versions of the n-person Chicken supergame are applied to the problem of public goods provision. The literature on two-person Chicken suggests that players should build a reputation for toughness in Chicken supergames by making, and sticking to, commitments not to co-operate. By doing this they are able to make the other player more likely to co-operate in future rounds of the game. However, in the n-person and continuous-strategy models examined here there may be risks associated with a reputation for toughness since, under certain conditions, other players are less likely to co-operate in future rounds of the game the greater your reputation for toughness. The implications of this are that the chances that vital public goods such as security and environmental stability will be provided may be reduced if players falsely generalize from the argument for maintaining a tough reputation in two-person, two-strategy chicken supergames.

In recent years the study of divided government has been a growth industry. Numerous scholars have sought to explain patterns of divided government in the United States, while others have attempted to explore the consequences of the phenomenon. No doubt this scholarly interest in the subject is due in large part to the attention paid by the political media to divided control of the presidency and Congress during the 1980s, as well as the resulting ’gridlock‘ that dominated policy making in Washington during that time period.

Using evidence from surveys of top administrators, we examine differences between Japanese and American administrative elites. Our findings are far more complex than the reigning stereotypes of an apolitical, technocratic and elitist Japanese bureaucracy contrasted to a politically charged, conflict-oriented and social-reformist American federal executive. For example, senior Japanese bureaucrats take political considerations into account, compared to technical ones, no less than top American officials. American administrators have a more negative view of the role of political parties than their Japanese counterparts and, on average, an equally negative view of politicians interfering in their work than the supposedly more elitist, autonomous and technocratic Japanese bureaucrats. The article closes with a discussion of why popular conceptions of the two bureaucracies break down in practice.

Regimes are often preoccupied with maintaining their credibility. Great powers wish to convey to their allies the impression that they are not only strong but reliable. In limited adversary relationships, credibility is viewed as a resource to perpetuate and develop the more co-operative aspects of a fragile relationship. During war time, during the Cold War, or in other sharply adversarial relationships, leaders have an interest in conveying to their rivals a sense of what they consider important. Regimes also cherish credibility as part of their own self-image. There is yet another, more paradoxical, reason why credibility is valued: it can be used as a resource to achieve deception. On the occasions when statements are meant to deceive, the effort will not be effective if it is based on a reputation for thoroughgoing mendacity.

Shackleton's comment on my earlier article seems to me to raise a number of interesting questions. He is very critical of my methodology and suggests alternative ways of testing Olson's model. He places most emphasis on the need to consider aggregate data on the changing patterns of interest group membership over time. In this short note I do not intend to reply at length to Shackleton's criticisms. Instead, I shall re-examine Olson's analysis using aggregate data on the changing patterns of CBI membership in the last decade.

This is an attempt to operationalize and test the basic proposition of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan: namely, that Leviathan (or an all-powerful government) makes the life of man less solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

This study reassesses the ability of the mass media to influence voter opinions directly. Combining data on media content with individuals’ assessments of British political parties during the 2005 general election campaign allows a test of newspapers’ persuasive influence in a way previously considered a ‘virtual impossibility’. Utilizing repeated measures from the 2005 BES campaign panel, multilevel regression analysis reveals significant impact of partisan slant not just on the evaluation of the party mentioned but also on evaluations of its competitor(s). The strongest evidence of direct media persuasion is provided by the finding that variation in slant over the campaign drives how undecided voters evaluate the incumbent government party, even when controlling for a newspaper's average partisan slant.