It is well known that the bulk of the economic cost of a war is incurred many years after the armed hostilities themselves have ceased. By any reasonable and humane accounting, the human cost of a war is likely to far outweigh the economic cost. The immediate human toll, tallied in body counts, is apt to be terrible. But how much of the human cost, like the economic cost, does not become clear until long afterwards? That question, applied to one particular form of armed conflict, civil war, motivates the chillingly-titled “Civil Wars Kill and Maim People—Long After the Shooting Stops” by Hazem Adam Ghobarah, Paul Huth, and Bruce Russett. Analyzing death and disability data for 1999, Ghobarah, Huth, and Russett paint a grim picture of the impact of the civil wars that were fought earlier in the decade and show how this impact was manifested in particular diseases and conditions and how it affected particular groups of non-combatants. This is not a pleasant article to read, but it is undeniably an important one.

Political scientists have conducted only limited systematic research on the consequences of war for civilian populations. Here we argue that the civilian suffering caused by civil war extends well beyond the period of active warfare. We examine these longer-term effects in a cross-national (1999) analysis of World Health Organization new fine-grained data on death and disability broken down by age, gender, and type of disease or condition. We test hypotheses about the impact of civil wars and find substantial long-term effects, even after controlling for several other factors. We estimate that the additional burden of death and disability incurred in 1999, from the indirect and lingering effects of civil wars in the years 1991–97, was approximately equal to that incurred directly and immediately from all wars in 1999. This impact works its way through specific diseases and conditions and disproportionately affects women and children.We thank the Weatherhead Initiative on Military Conflict as a Public Health Problem, the Ford Foundation, and the World Health Organization, NIA (P01 17625-01), for financial support and Gary King, Thomas Gariepy, Melvin Hinich, Kosuke Imai, Roy Licklider, Jennifer Leaning, Greg Huber, Lisa Martin, Christopher Murray, Joshua Salomon, and Nicholas Sambanis for comments. Our data are available at http://www.yale.edu/unsy/civilwars/data.htm and at the Virtual Data Center web site, http://TheData.org, when it becomes operative.

A major rearmament program can have a lasting effect on the balance of political and economic power between societal groups. It will typically require the expansion of progressive taxation and government interference in the economy, both of which are disproportionately harmful to the interests of the upper classes. Consequently, conservative governments that face a sharp increase in international threat should be more likely than their leftist counterparts to try to substitute alliances and appeasement for arms. I test this hypothesis on Great Britain in 1895–1905, 1907–14, and 1931–39, France in 1904–14 and 1935–39, and the United States in 1938–41, 1948–60, and 1979–86. In all but one of these cases, I find that leftist governments did more to strengthen their countries' militaries than conservatives.This paper was made possible by the generous support of the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. I would also like to thank Ben Fordham, P. R. Goldstone, Greg Mitrovich, Talbot Imlay, Brad Lee, Ken Schultz, Deborah Boucoyannis, Mark Haas, Sean Lynn-Jones, and the participants in the Olin Institute's National Security Seminar Series and the Belfer Center's International Security Program Seminar Series for their helpful comments and advice.

We investigate the differential effects of open versus closed amendment rules within the framework of a distributive model of legislative bargaining. The data show that there are longer delays in distributing benefits and a more egalitarian distribution of benefits under the open amendment rule, the proposer gets a larger share of the benefits than coalition members under both rules, and play converges toward minimal winning coalitions under the closed amendment rule. However, there are important quantitative differences between the theoretical model underlying the experiment (Baron and Ferejohn 1989) and data, as the frequency of minimal winning coalitions is much greater under the closed rule (the theory predicts minimal winning coalitions under both rules for our parameter values) and the distribution of benefits between coalition members is much more egalitarian than predicted. The latter are consistent with findings from shrinking pie bilateral bargaining game experiments in economics, to which we relate our results.Research support from the Economics Division and the DRMS Divisions of NSF and the University of Pittsburgh is gratefully acknowledged. We have benefited from comments by David Cooper, Massimo Morelli, Jack Ochs, and seminar participants at Carnegie Mellon University, École des Hautes Études Commerciales, Harvard University, Indiana University, ITAM, Université de Montreal, Universite du Québec a Montréal, University of Pittsburgh, Joseph L. Rotman School, University of Toronto, Ohio State University, Texas \widehat{{\rm A}{\&}{\rm M}} University, Tilburg University CENTER, Western Michigan University, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, the 2000 Public Choice Meetings, the 2000 Summer Institute in Behavioral Economics, the 2000 Econometric Society World Congress meetings, and the CEA 35th Annual Meetings. We are responsible for all remaining errors.

The reallocation of authority upward, downward, and sideways from central states has drawn attention from a growing number of scholars in political science. Yet beyond agreement that governance has become (and should be) multi-level, there is no consensus about how it should be organized. This article draws on several literatures to distinguish two types of multi-level governance. One type conceives of dispersion of authority to general-purpose, nonintersecting, and durable jurisdictions. A second type of governance conceives of task-specific, intersecting, and flexible jurisdictions. We conclude by specifying the virtues of each type of governance.For comments and advice we are grateful to Christopher Ansell, Ian Bache, Richard Balme, Arthur Benz, Tanja Börzel, Renaud Dehousse, Burkard Eberlein, Peter Hall, Edgar Grande, Richard Haesly, Bob Jessop, Beate Kohler-Koch, David Lake, Patrick Le Galés, Christiane Lemke, David Lowery, Michael McGinnis, Andrew Moravcsik, Elinor Ostrom, Franz U. Pappi, Thomas Risse, James Rosenau, Alberta Sbragia, Philippe Schmitter, Ulf Sverdrup, Christian Tusschoff, Bernhard Wessels, the political science discussion group at the University of North Carolina, and the editor and three anonymous reviewers of APSR. We received institutional support from the Center for European Studies at the University of North Carolina, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the Wissenschaftszentrum für Sozialforschung in Berlin. Earlier versions were presented at the European Union Studies Association meeting, the ECPR pan-European Conference in Bordeaux, and Hannover Universität, Harvard University, Humboldt Universität, Indiana University at Bloomington, Mannheim Universität, Sheffield University, Sciences Po (Paris), Technische Universität München, and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The authors' names appear in alphabetical order.

In this paper, we contend that party realignments occur due to the interaction of candidates and activists. We examine independent party candidates who are motivated primarily to win elections but who use activist contributions to increase vote shares. In a two-dimensional policy space, such candidates will on occasion engage in “flanking” moves so as to enlist coalitions of disaffected voters, at the risk of alienating some of their traditional activist supporters. We argue that a result of such “flanking” moves, in the early part of the century, has been a shift in emphasis from an underlying social dimension to the economic dimension. In recent decades, electoral salience has shifted back to the social dimension. The net result is that the party cleavage line is much as it was a century ago—but the parties have switched sides.

The so-called “paradox of voting” is a major anomaly for rational choice theories of elections. If voting is costly and citizens are rational, then in large electrorates the expected turnout would be small, for if many people voted the chance of anyone being pivotal would be too small to make the act worthwhile. Yet many people do vote, even in large national elections. To address this puzzle we construct a model of adaptive rationality: Citizens learn by simple trial and error, repeating satisfactory actions and avoiding unsatisfactory ones. (Their aspiration levels, which code current payoffs as satisfactory or unsatisfactory, are also endogenous, themselves adjusting to experience.) Our main result is that agents who adapt in this manner turn out in substantial numbers even in large electorates and even if voting is costly for everyone.Standard conceptions of rational behavior do not explain why anyone bothers to vote in a mass election…. [Turnout is] the paradox that ate rational choice theory.

Fiorina (1990, 334)We would like to thank Stephen Ansolabehere, Sorin Antohi, Glenn Ellison, Dedre Gentner, Sunil Kumar, David Laitin, Tze Lai, Arthur Lupia, Elijah Millgram, Lincoln Moses, Scott Page, Tom Palfrey, John Patty, Paul Pfleiderer, Adam Simon, Joel Sobel, Carole Uhlaner, three anonymous referees, and the participants in the Political Economics seminar at the GSB, the Stanford–CalTech workshop, the UNC American Politics Research Group, the UCLA conference on Cognition, Emotion, and Rational Choice, panels at the Annual Meetings of the MPSA and the APSA, the Agent 2000 Workshop, the Seventh Annual Wallis Conference, the CMU–Pitt Colloquium Series, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences seminar series for their helpful comments. This paper was written while Ting was at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and he thanks UNC's Department of Political Science for its support. It was revised while Bendor was a Fellow at the CASBS, and he is grateful for the Center's financial and intellectual support.

This paper examines the sense in which rights can be said to exist. We examine various approaches to the definition and analysis of rights, focusing in particular on the compossibility of rights. Concentrating on three existing approaches to rights—social choice-theoretic, game-theoretic, and Steiner's approach—we suggest that rights are noncompossible in any interesting sense, that is, that the rights people have are nonexistent or vanishingly small. We develop an alternative account of rights—which we claim is more in tune with moral intuitions—where compossibility is not important and rights cannot form the exclusive basis of morality or a theory of justice. Rights are constructed on the basis of more fundamental moral values. We demonstrate how they are constructed and the sense in which they exist even though they might not always be exercised, while acknowledging that rights that may never be exercised are hardly worth the name.We would like to thank Cecile Fabre, Ruth Kinna, Matt Kramer, Anna Pilatova, three anonymous referees, and participants at the Analysis of Measurement of Freedom conference in Palermo, Italy, September 2001, the 2002 meeting of the Dutch Political Science Association, and the Economic Decisions Conference in Pamplona, Spain, June 2002, for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.

A number of liberal defenders of nationalism argue that cultural-national membership is a vital component of individual identity. Notable among these liberal “identity nationalists” is Will Kymlicka, who defends minority national and cultural rights on the basis of the importance of such membership for persons' sense of identity. Kymlicka's conception of the liberal autonomous self, however, is radically at odds with his views concerning the importance of cultural–national membership. It also privileges national identity in such a way as to lend support to an extreme and illiberal form of nationalism, one that bases the priority of national obligations on the priority of national identity. By prioritizing national identity as Kymlicka does, other nonnational sites of identity formation, such as religious communities, may receive inadequate protection in a pluralistic nation-state.The author would like to thank three anonymous reviewers and the editor of the American Political Science Review for their many helpful comments and suggestions.

We present a new way of extracting policy positions from political texts that treats texts not as discourses to be understood and interpreted but rather, as data in the form of words. We compare this approach to previous methods of text analysis and use it to replicate published estimates of the policy positions of political parties in Britain and Ireland, on both economic and social policy dimensions. We “export” the method to a non-English-language environment, analyzing the policy positions of German parties, including the PDS as it entered the former West German party system. Finally, we extend its application beyond the analysis of party manifestos, to the estimation of political positions from legislative speeches. Our “language-blind” word scoring technique successfully replicates published policy estimates without the substantial costs of time and labor that these require. Furthermore, unlike in any previous method for extracting policy positions from political texts, we provide uncertainty measures for our estimates, allowing analysts to make informed judgments of the extent to which differences between two estimated policy positions can be viewed as significant or merely as products of measurement error.We thank Raj Chari, Gary King, Michael McDonald, Gail McElroy, and three anonymous reviewers for comments on drafts of this paper.

Peceny, Beer, and Sanchez-Terry (2002) find that interstate dyads containing a democracy and a personalist dictatorship are more likely than other types of dyads to experience militarized disputes. They argue that this is because democracies are especially likely to challenge personalist dictatorships. Unfortunately, they do not identify which state in a conflictual dyad initiated the dispute and so cannot present data to support their claim. We improve on their research design by using “directed dyads” to identify potential initiators. We confirm their finding that democracy–personalist dictatorship dyads are particularly conflict-prone, but we also disprove their argument that democracies attack dictators, as we find that personalist dictatorships are more likely to challenge democracies, but not vice versa. We also find that other kinds of autocracies, namely, military regimes and single-party regimes, are more likely to challenge democracies than vice versa. Our findings have important implications for understanding the relationships between regime type and international conflict.The authors thank Caroline Beer very much for assistance with data.

Reiter and Stam advance the study of the conflict behavior of authoritarian regimes in two ways. First, they clearly demonstrate the importance of using directed dyad data sets for studying mixed pairs of political regimes. Second, they have refocused our attention on the question of decisional constraints and international conflict. This response examines the dispute patterns of a specific mixed pair of authoritarian regimes, single-party regimes, and personalist dictatorships. We find that single-party regimes are significantly less likely to start militarized disputes against personalist dictatorships than is true of other types of regime dyads. In contrast, personalist regimes are somewhat more likely to initiate militarized disputes against single-party regimes than is the norm for other regime dyads. These findings indicate that the relationships among specific types of authoritarian regimes may be as consequential as the relationships between democracies and authoritarian regimes of any type. They also indicate that we need to examine further the role that institutional constraints play in shaping the conflict behavior of authoritarian regimes.We thank Chris Butler for his comments and Dan Reiter for sharing his data.