How do leaders select their top-level foreign policy appointees? Through a formal model of the domestic and intragovernmental politics surrounding an international crisis, I investigate the trade-offs shaping leaders’ appointment strategies. In the model, a leader selects a foreign policy appointee, anticipating how the appointment will affect the advice he receives in the crisis, the electorate's evaluation of his performance, and ultimately the policies that he and his foreign counterparts pursue as a consequence. The analysis uncovers a fundamental tension in the leader's ability to use appointments to advance his core political and policy objectives of deterring foreign aggression, obtaining accurate advice, and maximizing domestic approval: any appointment that advances one of these objectives invariably comes at the cost of another, and the leader's appointment strategy must balance across these trade-offs. Analyzing cross-national appointment patterns to the offices of ministers of defense and foreign affairs, I find descriptive evidence consistent with the model's predictions: leaders from dovish parties are more than twice as likely as leaders from hawkish parties to select cross-partisan and politically independent appointees, and such appointments are less likely for leaders of either party as they approach re-election.

How does the public respond to court-packing attempts? Longstanding accounts of public support for courts suggest voters retaliate against incumbents who seek to manipulate well-respected courts. Yet incumbents might strategically frame their efforts in bureaucratic terms to minimize the public’s outcry or use court-packing proposals to activate a partisan base of support. Drawing on a series of survey experiments, we demonstrate that strategic politicians can minimize electoral backlash by couching court reform proposals in apolitical language, and institutional legitimacy’s shielding effect dissolves in the face of shared partisanship. These results shed new light on how ambitious politicians might avoid electoral consequences for efforts to bend the judiciary to their will.

Recent scholarship on retrospective voting has shown that when they go to the polls, voters evaluate not only incumbent performance, but also the performance of parties in opposition. So far, however, these studies have not been able to identify how voters evaluate the performance of parties in opposition. The answers to a unique open-ended question included in a Belgian electoral survey in 2019 provide new insights into voters' minds. First, this study investigates what voters think about when they evaluate a party's performance in opposition. Second, it tests whether voters hold opposition parties responsible for the state of affairs in the country. The results show that voters are most concerned with opposition parties' competence in scrutinizing the government and providing constructive criticism, and dislike unconstructive and overly negative opposition. Furthermore, voters hold opposition parties accountable for the state of affairs in their country, albeit to a lesser extent than incumbent parties.

Although the advantage that incumbents may have over challengers has been extensively studied, less is known about how incumbency advantage is affected by the adoption of voluntary voting. In this paper, I study incumbency advantage in Chile, a country that adopted voluntary voting in 2012. I find that incumbency advantage substantively decreases with voluntary voting. The primary mechanism explaining such reduction was the entry of high-quality challengers, who invested their campaign resources much more efficiently compared to office-holders. Overall, this paper contributes to the literature on electoral accountability by identifying how sensible is incumbency advantage to voluntary voting and the entry of high-quality challengers. Indeed, as incumbency advantage decreases when capable challengers compete for office, it suggests that “scaring-off” skilled candidates is one of the drivers of such advantage.

Government cohesiveness is known to moderate retrospective voting. While previous work on this topic has focused on characteristics of the government, we build on the literature on clarity of responsibility and the literature on valence to argue that the extent to which government and opposition are ideologically distinct also moderates retrospective voting. Two alternative expectations follow from these two theoretical perspectives. While the clarity of responsibility framework leads to the expectation that a larger difference between government and opposition will strengthen retrospective voting, the valence literature presumes that retrospective voting is stronger when ideological differences are small. Using the data of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) project, we find evidence that is in line with the clarity of responsibility framework: the higher the degree of ideological polarization between government and opposition, the larger the effect of retrospective performance evaluations on the vote.