Lewis Fry Richardson (1881–1953) was one of the most original thinkers ever to apply their minds to the study of war and its causes. In a strict sense he was an amateur in that he held no position of profit dedicated to the pursuit of these researches. He was always employed to do something else and did the research at week-ends and in his retirement. He never taught in the field or anything close to it. Nevertheless he was a prolific publisher on a very wide range of topics, as the two volumes of his collected papers published by Cambridge University Press testify, though his work rarely reached the international relations or political science community at the time. It was after his death that his work had its impact.

Six different notions of ‘political’ are commonly used in discussions of the US Supreme Court. All six are familiar, but the distinctions among them are seldom carefully drawn. The six are: (1) purely definitional, in the sense that the Supreme Court, as an appellate court of last resort inevitably authoritatively allocates values; (2) empirical, in the sense that litigants use the Court to try to achieve their political purposes; (3) influence seeking, in the sense that the justices have a natural desire to prevail in arguments within the court; (4) prudential, in the sense that the justices frequently consider the probable consequences of their decisions; (5) policy-oriented, in the – usually pejorative – sense that justices are said to use the Court and the law as a cover for pursuing their own policy and other goals; and (6) systemic, in the sense that the Court's decisions frequently, as a matter of fact, have consequences for other parts of the American political system. These six notions are considered in the context of recent abortion decisions.

How do failed coups influence power personalization in dictatorships? While scholars have studied the mechanisms of personalism in dictatorships in detail, little attention has been paid to the timing and determinants of surges in personalism levels. In this article, we propose that personalism can evolve non-linearly, and show that large, quite rapid increases in personalization by dictators occur after a failed coup attempt. The logic is that failed coups are information-revealing events that provide the dictator with strong motives and ample opportunities to accumulate power. The leader uses this window of opportunity to rapidly consolidate his power at the expense of the ruling coalition. We test the theory using time-series, cross-sectional data on dictatorships in 114 countries in the period between 1946 and 2010. Two placebo tests indicate that disruptive events by regime outsiders – failed assassination attempts and civil war onsets – do not promote the rush to personalize.

In authoritarian regimes, repression encourages private actors to censor not only themselves, but also other private actors—a behavior we call “regime-induced private censorship.” We present the results of a correspondence experiment conducted in Russia that investigates the censorship behavior of private media firms. We find that such firms censor third-party advertisements that include anti-regime language, calls for political or non-political collective action, or both. Our results demonstrate the significance of other types of censorship besides state censorship in an important authoritarian regime and contribute to the rapidly growing literature on authoritarian information control.

This article addresses the codification of formal rules and procedures of governance through Administrative Procedure Acts (APAs). The recent enactment of APAs in two new democracies, South Korea and Taiwan, highlights an apparent paradox. Because administrative reform limits the executive's power, it is clear why legislatures in separation-of-power systems would favour APAs. But it is less clear why presidents would support them. Why would a president accept a law designed to restrict her ability to act freely? The answer is that presidents have agency problems too. The more intra-branch conflict they face during their administrations, the more likely they will support administrative reform. Thus, instead of tying the hands of future administrations, presidents also use APAs to overcome current control problems. Three recently democratized East Asian countries, two with APAs (South Korea and Taiwan) and one without (Philippines), support this ‘reining in’ theory. Conflict within the executive branch may be an important ingredient in democratic consolidation. APAs result from political struggle.

The notion of power may well be central to all of the social sciences, yet the prevailing ways of thinking about power are very unsatisfactory. Intuitive ideas about power appear at first sight to have little logical consistency and are therefore confusing, while the more precise ideas that have been offered appear to be too narrow and are therefore ignored. Perhaps the main reason for the intractability of the concept is that it encompasses a number of seemingly unrelated ideas; it is ‘not a thing at all but many things’. This view is shared by many of those who have worked most closely with the concept. William Riker, for example, feels that the concept should be banished, James March says that it is disappointing, and Robert Dahl admits that there are students of the subject who feel that the whole study of power is a bottomless swamp.

Margaret Thatcher's dominance of British politics during the 1980s is well known. A self-proclaimed ‘conviction politician’, she was likely to seize any opportunity to shape the public's values. Surprisingly, however, her efforts seem to have been ineffective. Ivor Crewe has labelled Thatcher's attempt to modify the public's beliefs ‘the crusade that failed’. He concluded that ‘much of Thatcherism will die with Thatcher. Its permanent legacy at the level of the mass public will be very limited.’ So unexpected is this finding that it invites further investigation. Did Crewe find little evidence of Thatcher's impact simply because of the generality of his analysis? Might a more sharply focused study, one dealing with the delimited area of public policy, reach a different conclusion?Ivor Crewe, ‘Values: The Crusade that Failed’, in Dennis Kavanagh and Anthony Seldon, eds, The Thatcher Effect: A Decade of Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 250. See also Ivor Crewe, ‘The Thatcher Legacy’, in Anthony King et al., Britain at the Polls 1992 (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers, 1993), pp. 1–28, especially pp. 8–11.

The concept of critical realignment has shaped much of the thinking of political scientists and historians about the processes and patterns of change in American politics. Research on re-alignment has, however, tended to focus on successful cases and to concentrate on the electoral breakpoints rather than the process of regime formation, with the result that little systematic thinking has been devoted to the question of why some electoral upheavals lead to party realignment while other large vote shifts do not. This article begins from the proposition that the election does not so much constitute the realignment as offer the opportunity and the momentum for the new party to build a lasting national coalition. Whether the party capitalizes on this potential depends on processes and events that follow the critical election, during what could be called the ‘consolidation phase’ of the realignment. The question is ultimately one about public opinion, but the concept of consolidation needs to take in the interaction between the public and political elites, since mass opinion is formed in the context of elite initiatives and interpretations. The model of consolidation depicts two interrelated processes. The first involves strategic competition among elites, including elected officials and organized societal interests, who frame the conflict, by prioritizing issues and cleavages, and by relating policy proposals to group identities and widely-shared values. The second focuses on the public. Their standing loyalties disrupted by the crisis and the incumbents' inability to deal with it successfully, citizens engage in a process of experiential search as they seek to re-establish the stable political orientation given by attachment to a political party. The article draws on qualitative and quantitative information from the New Deal to illustrate the model of consolidation.

From public health to political campaigns, numerous attempts to encourage behavior begin with the spread of information. Of course, seeding new information does not guarantee action, especially when it is difficult for receivers to verify this information. We use a novel design that introduced valuable, actionable information in rural Uganda and reveals the intermediate process that led many in the village to hear the information but only some to act on it. We find that the seeded information spread easily through word of mouth via a simple contagion process. However, acting on the information spread less easily; this process relied instead on endogenously created social information that served to vet, verify, and pass judgment. Our results highlight an important wedge between information that a policy intervention can best control and the behavior that ultimately results.

Public opinion on complex policy questions is shaped by the ways in which elites simplify the issues. Given the prevalence of metaphor and analogy as tools for cognitive problem solving, the deployment of analogies is often proposed as a tool for this kind of influence. For instance, a prominent explanation for the acceptance of austerity is that voters understand government deficits through an analogy to household borrowing. Indeed, there are theoretical reasons to think the household finance analogy represents a most likely case for the causal influence of analogical reasoning on policy preferences. This article examines this best-case scenario using original survey data from the United Kingdom. It reports observational and experimental analyses that find no evidence of causation running from the household analogy to preferences over the government budget. Rather, endorsement of the analogy is invoked ex post to justify support for fiscal consolidation.

Numerous studies conclude that declining turnout is harmful for democracy. However, we uncover the arguably positive effect that political parties become more responsive to the median voter in the election after turnout has decreased. We assume that parties are vote seeking and show that moderate voters are responsible for changes in turnout, and we argue that declining turnout in an election sends a clear signal to political parties that there is an opportunity to mobilize disaffected voters in the following election by responding to changes in public opinion. We report the results of statistical analyses on data from thirteen democracies from 1977 to 2018 that provide evidence that declining voter turnout in one inter-election period is associated with increasing party responsiveness to public opinion in the following period. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of voter turnout, political representation, and parties' election strategies.

As internet penetration rapidly expanded throughout the world, press freedom and government accountability improved in some countries but backslid in others. We propose a formal model that provides a mechanism that explains the observed divergent paths of countries. We argue that increased access to social media makes partial capture, where governments allow limited freedom of the press, an untenable strategy. By amplifying the influence of small traditional media outlets, higher internet access increases both the costs of capture and the risk that a critical mass of citizens will become informed and overturn the incumbent. Depending on the incentives to retain office, greater internet access thus either forces an incumbent to extend capture to small outlets, further undermining press freedom; or relieve pressure from others. We relate our findings to the cases of Turkey and Tunisia.

While theoretical arguments distinguish regulatory policies from the institutional mechanisms of their implementation, empirical accounts often conflate the official regulatory policies of the government with the unofficial regulatory burden emanating from corruption and red tape. Building on the literature that emphasizes a separate and non-trivial effect of regulatory enforcement, this article identifies bureaucratic discretion as an important institutional factor that conditions the effects of regulatory policy on the business environment. An analysis of cross-sectional data covering 119 economies demonstrates that, under high levels of bureaucratic discretion, state regulatory involvement has no effect on the business environment. Low levels of bureaucratic discretion, however, accentuate the link between light regulatory burden and a business-friendly economic environment.

This article revisits the foundations of prior research on the effects of plebiscitarian selection mechanisms on candidates' electoral strength. While previous studies do not nest political parties' decision making, the authors argue that party primary effects entail the interdependence of party procedures for candidate selection. The article assesses the validity of the two approaches. Using original data from seven parties and 296 regional elections in Canada, Germany and Spain, and from sixty-two pre-election polls in Germany and Spain, it shows that, other things equal, primary-selected candidates are not stronger than those selected by other procedures. However, there is evidence of a penalty for parties that do not select candidates by primary when their main rival does, in particular when the primary election is not divisive and is held closer to the general election.

The established literature has recognized revolving-door hiring as a means for firms to obtain protection against political risks and advance their business interests. This article theorizes about the cost of the revolving door between politics and business, which transmits uncertainty during turbulent times from the political system to firms. I empirically estimate the cost of revolving-door recruitment for over 3,000 publicly listed firms in the early years of a major corruption crackdown in China. I show that firm-level returns on revolving-door recruitment became negative during this period. In contrast to conventional corporate governance explanations, the mechanism proposed in this article emphasizes the external perceptions and financing of firms. Text analyses of over 1 million equity reports and bank-loan record data show that political connections act as a negative signal to external financiers, thereby discouraging external financing.

Does the lack of competitive elections in the less democratic newly industrialized or industrializing countries (NICs) mean that their governments are unconstrained by their citizens' preferences for economic performance? In this article, I show how non-electoral mechanisms in the less democratic NICs of South Korea, Singapore and Malaysia constrain their governments. Governments pay attention to the effects of policies on economic performance because labour disquiet and disinvestment are likely to arise otherwise. To pre-empt labour disquiet and disinvestment, the governments offer ‘credible apologies’ that include punishment and monitoring of government when economic performance is less than optimal in these countries. When they fail to offer credible apologies, labour and producers respond with strikes and disinvestment. Governments' credible apologies play an important role in explaining labour quiescence and production investment. The argument and evidence contrasts with the general impression that governments in the less democratic NICs are constrained only by elites or are responsible only to themselves. The analysis shows that governments use bargaining mechanisms even where the citizens are perceived as meek and without bargaining strength.