Acentral puzzle in the comparative politics literature has been why certain societies are able to achieve political stability while others suffer from strife, repression and authoritarian rule. This article applies the solution concept of quantal response equilibrium (QRE) to Weingast's Sovereign-Constituency Co-ordination Game in order to show how our understanding of political stability can be enhanced when uncertainty and limited rationality are explicitly modelled. Comparative statics results first confirm the intuitive logic that civil conflict is unlikely when regimes threaten penalties for revolt that are much more severe than current living conditions and when the benefits to a successful revolt are not sufficiently enticing. In addition, our analysis provides a logic for the outbreak of civil conflict, noting that it is most likely when key payoffs are in their intermediate regions and far from critical ‘thresholds’, resulting in ambiguous and counterintuitive decision making by leaders and citizen opposition groups.

By many measures, the public knows little about politics. But just how little people seem to know depends on the questions that are put to them. In particular, knowledge levels seem higher when people are asked closed- rather than open-ended questions. In turn, differences between estimated knowledge levels are sometimes attributed to fundamental differences between these types of questions. Building on this previous research, the present study uses a pre-registered experiment conducted with a representative national sample to shed new light on the relationship between question form and knowledge measurement. The authors find that inferences about political knowledge depend less on fundamental differences between open- and closed-ended questions than on two little-appreciated aspects of survey design: the number and difficulty of the response options that accompany closed-ended questions. These aspects of survey design have large effects. Scholars who use the same questions with different response options may reach substantively different conclusions about the public's levels of knowledge.

Why do states intervene in elections abroad? This article argues that outsiders intervene when the main domestic contenders for office adopt policy positions that differ from the point of view of the outside power. It refers to the split between the government's and opposition's positions as policy polarization. Polarization between domestic political forces, rather than the degree of unfriendliness of the government in office, attracts two types of interventions: process (for or against democracy) and candidate (for or against the government) interventions. The study uses a novel, original data set to track local contenders’ policy positions. It shows that the new policy polarization measurement outperforms a number of available alternatives when it comes to explaining process and candidate interventions. The authors use this measurement to explain the behavior of the United States as an intervener in elections from 1945 to 2012. The United States is more likely to support the opposition, and the democratic process abroad, if a pro-US opposition is facing an anti-US government. It is more likely to support the government, and undermine the democratic process abroad, if a pro-US government is facing an anti-US opposition. The article also presents the results for all interveners, confirming the results from the US case.

Autocratic leaders differ considerably in how they consolidate power, but what gives rise to these variations remains under-theorized. This article studies how informal political constraints associated with retired leaders shape intra-elite power dynamics. We argue that ageing leaders' efforts to manage the succession problem create an important yet impermanent check on the power of subsequent leaders. To test this argument, we use the massive text corpus of Google Ngram to develop a new measure of power for a global sample of autocratic leaders and elites and employ a research design that leverages within-incumbent variations in former leaders' influence for identification. We show that incumbent leaders' ability to consolidate power becomes more limited when operating in an environment where influential former leaders are present. Further analyses suggest that the presence of former leaders is most effective in reducing incumbents' ability to appoint or remove high-level military and civilian personnel unilaterally. These findings have implications for our understanding of the dynamics of power-sharing and institutional change in autocracies.

How do economic opportunities abroad affect citizens’ ability to exit an authoritarian regime? This article theorizes the conditions under which authoritarian leaders will perceive emigration as a threat and use imprisonment instead of other types of anti-emigration measures to prevent mass emigration. Using data from communist East Germany's secret prisoner database that we reassembled based on archival material, the authors show that as economic opportunities in West Germany increased, the number of East German exit prisoners – political prisoners arrested for attempting to cross the border illegally – also rose. The study's causal identification strategy exploits occupation-specific differences in the changing economic opportunities between East and West Germany. Using differential access to West German television, it also sheds light on the informational mechanism underlying the main finding; cross-national data are leveraged to present evidence of the external validity of the estimates. The results highlight how global economic disparities affect politics within authoritarian regimes.

This article investigates the conditions which make it costly for governments to renege on institutional commitments governing monetary policy. Focusing on one such type of commitment – monetary integration – we develop and test a hypothesis which suggests that the presence of parallel international agreements plays an important role in raising the costs of exit for states which might otherwise withdraw from a monetary union. While existing political economy work on credible commitments in the area of monetary policy has had a heavy focus on countries in the European Union, we broaden the inquiry, using quantitative and qualitative evidence from the numerous African countries which have participated in monetary unions over the last forty years. Our results provide strong support for the parallel agreements hypothesis.

The military regime has now become a common phenomenon throughout the world. Research on the military in low-income systems used to focus on the military coup rather than on the military regime, but in recent years this imbalance has lessened. Moreover, many of the old ‘standard findings’ about military regimes have come to be rejected. It is fitting that they should have been since they tended to be the products more of stereotyping and inadequate theorizing than of systematic research.

Few events shatter confidence in widely held theory more than failure to predict colossal changes. Just such an instance has occurred in the budgetary politics of American cities. City budgeting can no longer be accurately described in terms of an incremental model that assumes stability, routine decisions and marginal adjustments in public spending and taxation. More than a decade of dramatic and largely unanticipated change – fiscal crises, illegal deficits, new groups demanding public services, severe retrenchment, emergency bail-outs and more – has surely challenged the conventional wisdom.

This article examines the concept of interests in politics which has been the subject of major debate in recent years. It makes two proposals: one concerns the elucidation of the concept of interests; the other concerns the relative status of an agent's perception of his or her own interests and an observer's specification of them. For brevity, statements of the form ‘x is in A's interest’ are referred to as interest-statements.

Debates between advocates of the two major alternative forms of electoral system often proceed at cross-purposes. In parliamentary systems, governments not only wield executive power, they strongly influence the agenda of the legislature and in some cases dominate it. The core literature on electoral systems focuses almost entirely on the relations between vote shares and legislative seat shares, leaving government formation aside. Yet the main debate about democratic accountability focuses on representative government, of which a representative legislature is at most only one part.

In a recent article, Steven Lukes offers a thought-provoking reflection on the apparently growing resort to torture by liberal democracies today. Professor Lukes aptly asks whether ‘torture is just another case of dirty hands in politics?’ – that is, the idea that in order to do the right thing or achieve the best public outcome in the circumstances one cannot avoid committing a wrong, such as deceit or cruelty. His answer is that torture differs from other cases of dirty hands in that it cannot be made ‘liberal-democratically accountable’, thus raising the question of ‘how should it be addressed in liberal democracies?’ Here he suggests we can learn from the sociologist Emile Durkheim and, especially, his conception of modern societies as being held together by a ‘religion of individualism’. Allowing state officials to violate basic rights of the individual thus profanes against the religion and threatens the ‘moral disintegration’ of society itself. Lukes argues that Durkheim's account helps us see both the folly in ‘certain ways of thinking and talking about torture’, such as construing it as a ‘lesser evil’ given the competing claims of risk and security, and the damage that liberal democracies inflict on themselves, in responding to the threat of terrorism, by so readily compromising their own principles.

There is much that is appealing in Professor Lukes's remarks. I also share his concern about the current erosion of civil liberties in liberal democracies. I wish, however, to raise some doubts about three key aspects of his argument: that torture is not susceptible to liberal-democratic accountability; that the ‘Durkheimian argument’ effectively precludes the practice of torture; and that we cannot rightly speak of torture as a ‘lesser evil’.

In this paper I shall present a very simple version of a bargaining model based on assumptions of limited information and limited capacity to make rational decisions. The justification for my work lies in the inadequacies both of the formal models in the microeconomic literature and of accounts of bargaining and other conflicts where power or closely related concepts lie at the basis of the discussion.

In summary, we do find that levels of services and expenditures are more closely related across time than they are in cross-sectional studies and that, further, these relationships are functionally specific. At the same time, however, it would appear from these data that the extension of services precedes the expansion of the budget. It may, therefore, be argued that the extension of services can be used as a rational means of expanding the budget available to an agency rather than as a response to the increased availability of funds. This expansion may also be seen as a function of demand creation on the part of the agencies in increasing these services.

A second point to be made is the importance of differentiating different categories of service. For those indicators of service that concern output or a service rendered, expenditures and policy are positively related. For those indicators of service that are more related to impacts – or needs – there is a negative relationship – i.e. lower quality associated with higher expenditure. Therefore, we find that the policy-making system of Sweden may have been making policy in relation to important objective changes in its service environment. It further leads us to expect quite different relationships between services and expenditures dependent upon the type of service measure being used.

The research site and the measures of services used here are obviously different from those of Sharkansky. However, these findings do speak to the general theoretical point of the connection between public expenditures and services. They demonstrate the need to examine this important research question within a more dynamic framework and in a variety of social and cultural settings. Sharkansky's findings for the American states should be tested, for example, in an examination of the same question for sub-national units in Sweden and other European systems. Through the gradual accretion of these findings, we can elaborate theoretically the linkages between expenditures and policy outputs.

The conservative revival that has taken place on both sides of the Atlantic in recent years has been an intellectual as well as a practical accomplishment. That this remarkable fact has received scant attention from political theorists can be attributed to two main causes. First, and less important, there has been an understandable tendency to focus on personalities and party politics where expediency blurs the sharp outlines of doctrine. As President Reagan confronts the problems of a second-term presidency, as Mrs Thatcher's iron grip on her party seems to weaken and as Chancellor Kohl or Mr Mulroney make their inevitable compromises and evasions, the conservative politician in office is revealed to be not dissimilar to his liberal or socialist predecessor. Now – as Elie Kedourie noted when asking the question ‘Is neo-conservatism viable?’ back in 1982 – this is only to be expected. The constraints of democratic politics will inevitably narrow ideological differences until they appear to be little more than rhetoric. If there has been a conservative revival, its significant and enduring features must be sought elsewhere.

Are local election campaigns just periodic acts of renewal, seasonal rites, or do they gain extra votes? Whatever may be true at general elections, low turnout is a reason for thinking that the scope for organization at local elections may be considerable.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic constituted a large shock to the risk of acquiring a disease that represents a meaningful threat to health. We investigate whether individuals subject to larger increases in objective health risk – operationalized by occupation-based measures of proximity to other people – became more supportive of increased government healthcare spending during the crisis. Using panel data that track UK individuals before (May 2018–December 2019) and after (June 2020) the outbreak of the pandemic, we implement a fixed-effect design that was pre-registered before the key treatment variable was available to us. While individuals in high-risk occupations were more worried about their personal risk of infection and had higher COVID-19 death rates, there is no evidence that increased health risks during COVID-19 shifted either attitudes on government spending on healthcare or broader attitudes relating to redistribution. Our findings are consistent with recent research demonstrating the limited effects of the pandemic on political attitudes.

French politics have been undergoing a process of restructuring since the coming of the Fifth Republic in 1958. This process, like any process of political change, has been a complex one involving many factors and variables. The most obvious of these factors has been the one most commented upon by journalists and contemporary historians – the influence of General de Gaulle and his policies (the new constitution, foreign policy, etc.). What is only beginning to emerge from the academic debate is the relationship between Gaullist politics and the other variables.

This article argues that the effect of economic crises on democratic transition is contingent on economic structure. Specifically, a high level of state engagement in the economy makes social forces dependent on the ruling elites for patrimonial interests and, therefore, the authoritarian regime liable for economic failure. Moreover, when authoritarian elites own a high share of economic assets, this aggravates the economic loss of both the business class and the masses when economic crises occur, which in turn makes defection of the business class, the revolt of the masses and the alliance of the two social classes more likely. Cross-national analyses show that economic crises trigger democratic transition only when state engagement in the economy is above a certain level.

As a reaction against contemporary democracy's inherent short-sightedness in solving problems that are likely to affect distant future generations, there has been a recent increase in proposals for different kinds of democratic representation of future persons. This article shows that even though there can be no such thing as political representation of future persons, the relevant affected interests of the as-yet unborn can still be taken into consideration in political decision making. This aim is achieved by focusing on the political representation of children as special cases of semi-future members of the class of the represented.