The historical development of rules of debate in the UK House of Commons raises an important puzzle: why do members of parliament (MPs) impose limits on their own rights? Despite a growing interest in British Political Development and the institutional changes of nineteenth-century UK politics, the academic literature has remained largely silent on this topic. Three competing explanations have emerged in studies of the US Congress, focusing on efficiency, partisan forces and non-partisan (or: ideology-based) accounts. This article falls broadly into the third category, offering a consensus-oriented explanation of the historical development of parliamentary rules. Working from a new dataset on the reform of standing orders in the House of Commons over a 205-year period (1811–2015), as well as records of over six million speeches, the author argues that MPs commit more quickly to passing restrictive rules in the face of obstruction when legislator preferences are proximate within both the opposition and government, and when polarization between both sides of the aisle is low. The research represents, to the author's knowledge, the first systematic and directional test of a range of competing theories of UK parliamentary reform, shedding light on the process of parliamentary reform over a prolonged period of Commons history, and advancing several new measures of polarization in the UK House of Commons.

Political scientists have long been concerned that a popularly elected presidency may destabilize competitive party systems. We develop and test a new theory holding that the impact is more immediate and severe than previously assumed. Coexisting legislative and presidential coalitions first and foremost impede the evolution of predictable party interactions at the executive level, which is the domain of the cabinet. This quality has become accessible for comparative research thanks to the concept of party system closure. Using a new dataset for all European democracies since 1848, we show that presidential elections undermine party system closure in two ways: (1) by confounding patterns of government formation (notably under powerful presidencies) and (2) by disturbing electoral/legislative politics, which in turn affect executive politics. The former, direct effect emerges as dominant from a series of panel analyses and case illustrations. These findings have important implications for current problems of constitutional design and institutional reform.

Public opinion research has shown that voters accept many falsehoods about politics. This observation is widely considered troubling for democracy – and especially participatory ideals of democracy. I argue that this influential narrative is nevertheless flawed because it misunderstands the nature of political understanding. Drawing on philosophical examinations of scientific modelling, I demonstrate that accepting falsehoods within one's model of political reality is compatible with – and indeed can positively enhance – one's understanding of that reality. Thus, the observation that voters accept many political falsehoods does not necessarily establish that they lack political understanding. I then address three worries: that voters cannot generally engage in such political modelling; that political modelling obscures facts that are crucial to political understanding; and that successful political modelling would require knowing that one's model contains falsehoods. My responses reveal how, going forward, we should measure political ignorance, and they highlight the standing importance of participatory democracy.

States often use reservations to modify their treaty obligations. Prior research demonstrates why states enter reservations and why states object to reservations, but little work explains why states withdraw them. We argue that states withdraw reservations in response to international social pressure. Using novel data on reservations and reservation withdrawals for the nine core international human rights treaties, our analyses reveal two factors that compel states to withdraw reservations: (1) pressure from peer states and (2) pressure from human rights treaty bodies conducting periodic reviews. While previous work emphasizes domestic factors, our research shows that the international community encourages states to withdraw reservations and strengthen their commitments to human rights and international law.

Observers of the American political scene might at times wonder why the 95th Congress, with nearly two-to-one Democratic majorities in both houses, did not take positive action on many of President Carter's important legislative proposals in 1977 and 1978. After all, it was argued when Carter was inaugurated at the beginning of 1977, the return of common party control to both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue would bring to an end the legislative-executive confrontations of the Nixon-Ford years. Thus, was not the unwillingness of Congress to approve his major programs an indication that Carter was inept, or even perhaps incompetent, as a legislative leader? If Lyndon Johnson could obtain swift approval of an extensive legislative agenda from the 89th Congress (1965–66), which in partisan composition was quite similar to the 95th Congress, why could Jimmy Carter not achieve comparable results?

This article examines the relationship between third-party actors and the intentional targeting of non-combatants in interstate war. It argues that war participants kill fewer civilians in war when their expectation of third-party punishment is high. Combatants will anticipate a high likelihood of third-party sanctions when their alliance and trade networks are dominated by third parties that have ratified international treaties prohibiting the intentional targeting of non-combatants. The study hypothesizes that war combatants kill fewer civilians in war as the strength of ratifiers within their alliance and trade networks increases. Quantitative tests on a dataset of all interstate wars from 1900–2003 provide strong statistical and substantive support for this hypothesis.

We live in a world of text. Yet the sheer magnitude of social media data, coupled with a need to measure complex psychological constructs, has made this important source of data difficult to use. Researchers often engage in costly hand coding of thousands of texts using supervised techniques or rely on unsupervised techniques where the measurement of predefined constructs is difficult. We propose a novel approach that we call ‘super-unsupervised’ learning and demonstrate its usefulness by measuring the psychologically complex construct of online political hostility based on a large corpus of tweets. This approach accomplishes the feat by combining the best features of supervised and unsupervised learning techniques: measurements of complex psychological constructs without a single labelled data source. We first outline the approach before conducting a diverse series of tests that include: (i) face validity, (ii) convergent and discriminant validity, (iii) criterion validity, (iv) external validity, and (v) ecological validity.

The United States Supreme Court recently employed foreign legal sources to interpret U.S. law, provoking widespread political and legal controversy. Scholars have yet to examine systematically the conditions under which justices cite foreign law, however. Applying theoretical approaches from international relations and judicial politics scholarship, we search every Supreme Court opinion between 1953 and 2009 for references to foreign law. Justices strategically reference foreign law to prop up their most controversial opinions. They also borrow law from countries whose domestic political institutions are viewed as legitimate; and, surprisingly, conservatives are as likely as liberals to cite foreign law. These findings add important information to the discussion over citing foreign law, and highlight how geopolitical context influences domestic legal policy.

When do corporations stop ignoring or opposing climate action and start to go green? We focus on the role of corporate boards of directors, which shape firms' positions on internal and external issues of corporate governance and public policy. We argue that board decisions to engage constructively on climate issues are likely to be influenced by the choices and experiences of other firms. Learning, socialization, and competitive dynamics are especially important in highly salient and rapidly evolving policy areas, such as climate change. To test this theory, we construct the network of board memberships for US public corporations and uncover robust evidence that climate innovations diffuse among companies that share board members in common and among companies whose board members interact at separate boards. Understanding the unfolding dynamics of corporate climate action requires examining corporate boards and their social context.

Political campaigns frequently emphasize the material stakes at play in election outcomes to motivate participation. However, field-experimental academic work has given greater attention to other aspects of voters' decisions to participate despite theoretical models of turnout and substantial observational work signaling that a contest's perceived importance affects the propensity to vote. We identify two classes of treatments that may increase the material incentive to participate and test these messages in a large-scale placebo-controlled field experiment in which approximately 24,500 treatment letters were delivered during Connecticut's 2013 municipal elections. We find some evidence that these messages are effective in increasing participation, as well as that some of them may be more effective than typical nonpartisan get-out-the-vote appeals. While these results remain somewhat preliminary, our findings have important implications for our understanding of how voters decide whether to participate and how best to mobilize citizens who would otherwise sit out elections.

How do immigration attitudes form? Drawing on the political socialization literature, I argue that growing up in a recession causes a lasting increase in anti-immigration attitudes. I delineate two mechanisms that emphasize the negative consequences of recessions for young workers and the anti-immigration narrative that often emerges during economic turmoil. Young adults are particularly vulnerable to these external shocks because they have minimal political experience and are developing their core political attitudes. Support is provided for this argument with evidence from the European Social Survey. An economic shock during young adulthood causes a significant increase in anti-immigration attitudes, a relationship not found for other ages. I find tentative evidence that growing up in a recession has a larger effect on the racial and cultural dimensions of immigration and causes a broader sociotropic response. Results highlight how economic crises affect the socialization of young adults and underscore their lasting political consequences.

Do the styles politicians use influence how voters evaluate them, and does this matter more for women than for men? Politicians regularly use anecdotal arguments, emotional appeals and aggressive attacks when communicating with voters. However, that women politicians have been branded as ‘nasty’, ‘inhuman’ and ‘unfeminine’ suggests that these strategies may come at a price for some. I report on a novel survey experiment assessing whether voters are biased in their perceptions and evaluations of politicians' communication styles. By manipulating politician gender and argument style, I assess, first, whether politicians incur backlash when violating gender-based stereotypes and, secondly, whether differential perceptions of the styles themselves explain this backlash. I find that style usage has important consequences for how voters evaluate politicians but that this is not gendered. These results have important implications, as they suggest that women politicians may not need to conform to stereotype-expected behaviours in order to receive positive voter evaluations.

In recent research Verba and Nie and Hansen have provided systematic evidence on the positive effects of mass participation on other aspects of the public policy process. Specifically, Verba and Nie demonstrated that for data on American communities, a curvilinear relationship exists between the level of mass political participation and the extent of elite-mass agreement on ‘policy agenda’ items. The effect of this relationship is such that the highest agreement, or ‘attitude concurrence’, is found in those communities with the highest levels of participation. Working with the same data, Hansen3 showed that the competitiveness of elections also influences concurrence independently and that there was an interaction effect of participation and competition on policy-agenda agreement. The interaction was such that attitude concurrence was highest in communities with especially high levels of both participation and competition.

It is widely believed that there exists in the United States a phenomenon called ‘clientelism’: that most federal government departments in the USA do not really control the interests with whom they do business but rather are controlled by them; that the interests and the departments between them typically have great influence over the department secretaries appointed by the president; and that in consequence a department secretary is, in reality, more likely to act as the interests' spokesman, or as his department's, than as the spokesman of the president. Thus it is often asserted that ‘cabinet officers are a president's natural enemies’. My aim in this article is to show that this belief, as it relates to the relationship between department secretaries and presidents, is widely held, plausible, but mistaken.

Committee chairmen in the United States House of Representatives were often very powerful figures until the reforms of the early 1970s – as the numerous tales about those stereotyped villains, the southern Democrats, bear witness. Yet, surprisingly little explicit typologizing about leadership in congressional committees appears in the academic literature despite a growing awareness of the different goals which congressmen pursue and the variety of environments in which they operate. Just two different models of chairmen's power were developed in the context of the pre-reform Congress. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the accepted view, perhaps caricature, was that committee chairmen were autocratic, obstructionist (at least as far as liberals were concerned), conservative, possibly senile, and more than likely representative of constituencies outside the mainstream of national politics. A list of chairmen seen as fitting into this mould would include men such as ‘Judge’ Howard Smith, chairman of the Rules Committee from 1955 to 1967; his somewhat less skilful successor from 1967 to 1972, William Colmer of Mississippi; Graham Barden, the provocative chairman of the Education and Labor Committee between 1953 and 1960; and the authoritative Carl Vinson of Georgia, chairman of the Armed Services Committee for seventeen years until 1966.

This Note will discuss the impact of random sampling at elections conducted under the single transferable vote (STV) electoral system in multi-member constituencies in the Republic of Ireland. STV, partly because of its popularity among electoral reformers, has received considerable theoretical scrutiny. It has been given an ‘intermediate’ rating in recent assessment of a number of electoral systems, and dismissed as a ‘perverse social choice function’ because it is subject to non-monotonicity. This shortcoming is also mainly responsible for the low degree of acceptance accorded to it by Brams and Fishburn. Nurmi concludes that STV (like other multi-stage systems) performs poorly, with regard to a number of criteria, in comparison with one-stage systems like approval voting. Black complains that STV ‘is a compound of minor complexities and is difficult to remember’. Others have discussed shortcomings in STV and suggested remedies which can be implemented where the counting of votes is entirely computerized.

England has long been fertile ground for scholars (usually American) concerned to locate the antecedents of stable and democratic government. More often than not they have stressed a particular configuration of attitudes as a basic support for such government. Evaluation of the consequences for the political system of these attitudes has frequently proceeded along very inferential and impressionistic lines, and has resulted in a benign view of the British political system.

James E. Alt ('Some Social and Political Correlates of County Borough Expenditures’ in British Journal of Political Science No. I, pp. 49–62) gives as his reasons for choosing to study county boroughs, ‘not only because of the fact that they are urban centres, the uniformity of their electoral procedure, the high level of competition (on terms of contested seats), their financial independence from other local authorities, and their service omnicompetence’. This is a standard explanation for the predominance in research on local government of the county borough to the neglect of other authorities. One positive gain of re-organization may be that future research will give a more rounded picture of local government performance and practice.