Recent scholarship has identified problems in the measurement of party system instability. To limit the conflation of different sources of instability in party systems (e.g., electoral shifts between stable parties and instability in parties, such as mergers, splinters or new parties), this article introduces a new indicator of electoral instability in parties, tests its robustness and construct validity and demonstrates its usefulness empirically. The indicators of party instability and the accompanying data of 27 European democracies, 1987–2011, will be valuable resources in comparative research on the interplay between elite and mass behavior, party and electoral systems, and democratic consolidation.

The logic of historical explanation obliges one to understand temporality as a moderator of various effects on political outcomes. Temporal problems remain in the empirical analysis of political phenomena, however, especially as it pertains to categorical data and long-term time dependence. Many theories in political science assert that sequencing matters or that political outcomes are path dependent, but they remain untested (or improperly tested) assertions for which sequence analysis may be valuable. This article briefly reviews the disciplinary origins of sequence analysis and applies the method in order to understand bargaining between actors during national crises. Finally, it explores the robustness of a commonly used sequence analysis metric. The ability to demonstrate and separate sequential effects from accumulative effects—made possible through sequence analysis—constitutes a major step in political science toward analyses that are truly time sensitive.

Recent empirical workin the study of political sophistication finds that citizens’ knowledge of politics is not only a function of their individual characteristics but also depends on the supply of information from their environment (the ‘information environment’). Yet this literature does not address the question of how the information environment may be shaped by institutional factors. This article aims to fill this void. It first argues that the relationship between a government and the media affects the information that is available to individual citizens. Using cross-national data, it then finds that less government interference with the media (1) positively affects political learning and (2) moderates the individual-level effect of education on learning.

Given similar economic distress indicators, why do some states enter into International Monetary Fund (IMF) programs while others do not? Building on extant studies of IMF program participation that highlight the importance of various economic and political determinants, this article proposes an argument focusing on the political incentives of the IMF and a borrowing country when they engage in IMF program negotiations. Specifically, the study develops a domestic politics argument to highlight the interactions among sovereignty costs, competence costs, economic conditions and domestic regime types, and tests the argument using a cross-national time-series dataset of all IMF agreements between 1970 and 2006. It finds that when the economic crisis is mild, democracies are less likely than non-democracies to enter IMF programs, but that when the economic crisis is severe, democracies are more likely to do so than their autocratic counterparts. The article attributes this tendency to democratic leaders’ electoral vulnerability and shows that these patterns become more pronounced as elections draw near.

Private information and the commitment problem are central to the rationalist theory of war, but causal evidence is scarce, as rationalist explanations for war are difficult to test with observational data. I design laboratory experiments to isolate the effects of private information and the commitment problem on the risk of conflict. I find that the commitment problem sharply increases the incidence of conflict, but there is no significant difference in conflict incidence with or without private information in the shadow of shifting power. I also investigate the realism of the positive experimental results with a case study of Japan’s decisionmaking on the eve of the Pacific War. The permutation of formal, experimental and historical methods applies the strength of one method to compensate for the weakness of another. Convergent results from the different methods strengthen the causal inference.

This article describes and investigates a model of strategic sequential decision making in networked policy-making environments with three agents. The primary interest is the effect of network structure on sequential policy making and information aggregation. The model and results illustrate how individual policy decisions of varying weight (in terms of a decision maker's unilateral effect on policy outcomes) can enable information aggregation in decentralized environments. In the studied environment, the incentive compatibility conditions for information aggregation are not invariant to network isomorphisms: individuals’ positions in the network matter. The study derives exact conditions for every acyclic network of three or fewer agents and illustrates the counterintuitive nature of comparative statics with respect to both network structure and individual agents’ policy preferences and discretionary authority.

Facebook ads are increasingly used by political scientists as a method of survey recruitment. A key advantage is said to be the ability to recruit targeted audiences defined by demographics, political beliefs, location, and numerous other attributes. The same feature has been decried by non-researchers concerned about potential racial discrimination and foreign influence in elections. The extent to which these ads actually reach their targets, however, is unknown. Using a series of six surveys and 20 targeted ads, I show these ads regularly fail to reach their targets. The success rate ranges from 23 to 99 percent, and ads targeted toward groups defined by self-reported data and broader geographic locations are generally more successful.

I propose a unified explanation for parties' joint policy and emphasis decisions which bridges saliency theory and spatial analyses of party campaigns. Party platforms are anchored by the policy preferences of activists, core supporters and target voters, leading parties to disproportionately emphasize issues where their policies are popular with all key constituencies. However, which voters a party targets relates to its historical electoral performance (“party size”). Traditionally successful (“major”) parties emphasize issues where the policies preferred by activists and core supporters are generally popular, but smaller (“minor”) parties emphasize issues where their preferred policies may be unpopular but are distinctive. Using recent European data and various empirical strategies, I show that this account has significant explanatory power beyond existing party typologies and theories of issue selection.

Many political scientists and economists have argued that coalition governments tend to accumulate more debt than single-party governments do, but the evidence for this proposition is mixed. This article argues that only some coalition governments are more likely to increase public debt than single-party governments: those in which parties are unable to make credible promises to their partners about future policy. It introduces the concept of ‘commitment potential’ within coalitions and proposes a way of measuring it. The study evaluates its theoretical claims using data on 20 advanced democracies observed over a period of almost 50 years. It finds that multiparty governments with high commitment potential do not, on average, accumulate more debt than single-party governments, but that governments with low commitment potential do.

Why do disputants favor some conflict management strategies when managing certain territorial claim types—land, river, or maritime—but not others? We propose that state interests—defined via claim characteristics and interdependence—and transaction costs (i.e., the challenges associated with aggregating state preferences over outcomes) differ across claim types. These differences then incentivize states to cede varying levels of control over claim management, ultimately encouraging them to prioritize and institutionalize certain conflict management strategies when managing particular types of territorial claims. More specifically, we theorize and find that states pursue distinct management strategies when addressing their land (informal; bilateral negotiations and arbitration), river (more formal; third-party non-binding), and maritime claims (most formal; multilateral negotiations and legal processes).

The expansion of digital interconnectivity has simultaneously increased individuals’ access to media and presented governments with new opportunities to regulate information flows. As a result, even highly democratic countries now issue frequent censorship and user data requests to digital content providers. We argue that government internet censorship occurs, in part, for political reasons, and seek to identify the conditions under which states censor. We leverage new, cross-nationally comparable, censorship request data, provided by Google, to examine how country characteristics co-vary with governments’ digital censorship activity. Within democracies, we show that governments engage in more digital censorship when internal dissent is present and when their economies produce substantial intellectual property. But these demand mechanisms are modulated by the relative influence that democratic institutions provide to narrow and diffuse interests; in particular, states with proportional electoral institutions censor less.

Where do armed conflicts occur? In applied studies, we may take ad hoc approaches to answer this question. In some regression studies, for instance, a single conflict event can cause an entire province to be classified as a conflict zone. In this paper, I fill this void of knowledge by developing a machine learning method that is less dependent on the areal-unit assumptions and can flexibly estimate conflict zones. I apply the method to a conflict event dataset and create a new dataset of conflict zones. A replication of Daskin and Pringle (2018, Nature 553, 328–332) with the new dataset indicates that the effect of civil war on mammal populations is much smaller than the original estimate.

Cognitively demanding electoral systems increase the chance that voters make their choices based on politically irrelevant cues. To illustrate this argument, I analyze the effect of candidate name complexity—a visual cue that contains no politically meaningful information—in Japan, where voters need to write their preferred candidate's name on a blank ballot paper. I find that when electoral systems require voters to weigh a large number of candidates and simultaneously reduce the usefulness of partisan cues, candidates with more complex names tend to receive lower vote shares. By contrast, under less cognitively demanding systems, candidate name complexity has no effect on election outcomes. These findings have important implications for the debate on the “best” electoral system design.

Do economic perceptions affect voters’ electoral choices? There is ample evidence showing a correlation between how people perceive the current state of the economy and electoral decisions. However, there are reasons to believe that political preferences can also determine how voters evaluate economic conditions, which will reverse the causality arrow. The strategies previously implemented to address this problem have been based on the use of structural equations and instrumental variables, but they require very strong parametric or identification assumptions. In this paper, I follow a design-based approach by emphasizing the study design rather than statistical modeling. In contrast to previous studies that used the same panel data in Brazil, I find evidence that supports egotropic, rather than sociotropic, voting. This finding shows that traditional research designs may be overstating the magnitude of sociotropic economic voting.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, macroeconomic policy returned to the political agenda, and the influence of Keynesian ideas about fiscal stimulus rose (and then fell) in expert circles. Much less is known, however, about whether and when Keynesian prescriptions for countercyclical spending have any support among the general public. We use a survey experiment, fielded twice, to recover the extent to which UK respondents hold such countercyclical attitudes. Our results indicate that public opinion was countercyclical—Keynesian—in 2016. We then use Eurobarometer data to estimate the same basic parameter for the population for the period 2010–2017. The observational results validate our experimental findings for the later period, but also provide evidence that the UK population held procyclical views at the start of the period. Thus, there appear to be important dynamics in public opinion on a key macroeconomic policy issue.

Using survey vignettes and scaling techniques, we estimate common socio-cultural and European integration dimensions for political parties across the member states of the European Union. Previous research shows that party placements on the economic left-right dimension are cross-nationally comparable across the EU; however, the socio-cultural dimension is more complex, with different issues forming the core of the dimension in different countries. The 2014 wave of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey included anchoring vignettes which we use as “bridge votes” to place parties from different countries on a common liberal/authoritarian dimension and a separate common scale for European integration. We estimate the dimensions using the Bayesian Aldrich–McKelvey technique. The resulting scales offer cross-nationally comparable, interval-level measures of a party's socio-cultural and EU ideological positions.

Until recently, researchers who wanted to examine the determinants of state respect for most specific negative rights (i.e., physical integrity and empowerment rights) needed to rely on data from the CIRI or the Political Terror Scale (PTS). The new Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset offers scholars a potential alternative to the individual human rights variables from CIRI. We analyze a set of key Cingranelli–Richards (CIRI) Human Rights Data Project and V-Dem negative rights indicators, finding unusual and unexpectedly large patterns of disagreement between the two sets. First, we discuss the new V-Dem dataset by comparing it to the disaggregated CIRI indicators, discussing the history of each project, and describing its empirical domain. Second, we identify a set of disaggregated human rights measures that are similar across the two datasets and discuss each project’s measurement approach. Third, we examine how these measures compare to each other empirically, showing that they diverge considerably across both time and space. These findings point to several important directions for future work, such as how conceptual approaches and measurement strategies affect rights scores. For the time being, our findings suggest that researchers should think carefully about using the measures as substitutes.

National economic indicators play a foundational role in political economic research, particularly in regards to electoral politics. Yet, scholars have failed to recognize that national economic indicators are simply aggregations of local economic information, and the manner in which they are aggregated may not be consistent with the process voters use to acquire, access, and incorporate economic information. We argue that the economic similarities among localities, and the way in which the media report on these similarities, provide more theoretically satisfying means of specifying how local information aggregates into an overall portrait of the national economy. We introduce a novel estimation procedure called the spatial-X ordered logit that offers the chance to model how voters’ evaluations respond to changes in contextualized economic information. Our results support our theory that voters incorporate economic information from other localities with similarly structured economies and in ways that are shaped by media messages. Furthermore, these two specifications offer greater explanatory power than national indicators and other geographical means of aggregating economic information. We conclude by offering a number of implications for research questions ranging from electoral accountability to spatial diffusion processes.

Previous research reports that parties in established European democracies learn from and emulate the successful election strategies of foreign incumbents, i.e., successful parties are influential abroad. We theorize that—in addition to incumbency (or success)—exchange takes place through transnational party alliances in the European Union. Relying on party manifesto data and spatial econometric analyses, we show that belonging to the same European Parliament (EP) party group enhances learning and emulation processes between national political parties. Estimated short- and long-term effects are approximately two and three times greater when foreign incumbents are in the same EP party group compared to other foreign incumbents. Our results have implications for our understanding of how transnational party groups influence national parties’ policy positions.

Research on presidential distributive politics focuses almost exclusively on federal domestic spending. Yet, presidential influence on public policy extends well-beyond grant allocation. Since the early 20th Century, for example, the president has had substantial discretion to adjust tariff schedules and non-tariff barriers “with the stroke of a pen.” These trade adjustments via presidential directive allow us to test the logic of presidential particularism in an area of policy understudied among presidency scholars. We examine unilateral adjustments to US trade policies between 1917 and 2006, with a detailed analysis of those made between 1986 and 2006, and find that presidents—in accordance with electoral incentives—strategically allocate trade protections to industries in politically valuable states. In general, states in which the president lacks a comfortable electoral majority are systematically more likely to receive protectionist unilateral orders. Overall, our results show that the president’s distributive imperative extends into the realm of foreign affairs, an arena in which the president has substantial authority to influence public policy.