Our investigation of the Senate politics of four major civil rights acts indicates that they did not result from winning coalitions bulldozing helpless minorities, nor did they result from some unpredictable chaotic process. These critical bills were the result of a flexible, multidimensional coalition-building process that proceeded by offering amendments carefully constructed to split off pivotal members of the winning coalition. Ideal point estimates of U.S. senators reveal that this coalitional negotiation process led to outcomes at some distance from the first choice of the winning coalition, testimony to significant compromise, both in early proposals and in refinements. This negotiation process resulted in outcomes apparently constrained by the boundaries of the uncovered set (McKelvey 1986; Miller 1980). “Closing the deal” in the U.S. Senate meant finding an outcome that could withstand robust attacks on pivotal coalition members—and that meant finding an outcome in the uncovered set.

Candidates often make ambiguous statements about the policies they intend to pursue. In theory, ambiguity affects how voters make choices and who wins elections. In practice, measurement and endogeneity problems have impeded empirical research about the consequences of ambiguity. We conducted survey experiments that overcame these obstacles by manipulating a common form of ambiguity: the imprecision of candidate positions. Our data show that, on average, ambiguity does not repel and may, in fact, attract voters. In nonpartisan settings, voters who have neutral or positive attitudes toward risk, or who feel uncertain about their own policy preferences, tend to embrace ambiguity. In partisan settings, voters respond even more positively to ambiguity; they optimistically perceive the locations of ambiguous candidates from their own party without pessimistically perceiving the locations of vague candidates from the opposition. We further find, through analysis of two additional new data sets, that candidates often take—and voters frequently perceive—ambiguous positions like the ones in our experiments. The pervasive use of ambiguity in campaigns fits with our experimental finding that ambiguity can be a winning strategy, especially in partisan elections.

What is the political legacy of violent conflict? I present evidence for a link from past violence to increased political engagement among excombatants. The evidence comes from northern Uganda, where rebel recruitment generated quasiexperimental variation in who was conscripted by abduction. Survey data suggest that abduction leads to substantial increases in voting and community leadership, largely due to elevated levels of violence witnessed. Meanwhile, abduction and violence do not appear to affect nonpolitical participation. These patterns are not easily explained by conventional theories of participation, including mobilization by elites, differential costs, and altruistic preferences. Qualitative interviews suggest that violence may lead to personal growth and political activation, a possibility supported by psychological research on the positive effects of traumatic events. Although the generalizability of these results requires more evidence to judge, the findings challenge our understanding of political behavior and point to important new avenues of research.

Survey data regularly show that assessments of current and expected future economic performance are more positive when a respondent's partisanship matches that of the president. To determine if this is a survey artifact or something deeper, we investigate whether partisanship is associated with behavioral differences in economic decisions. We construct a new data set of county-level quarterly taxable sales to examine the effect of partisanship on consumption. Consumption change following a presidential election is correlated with a county's partisan complexion, a result consistent with partisans acting outside the domain of politics in accordance with the opinions they express in surveys. These results support an expansive view of the role of partisanship in mass politics and help validate surveys as a method for studying political behavior.

In parliamentary systems, the need to preserve the political agreement that sustains the executive often motivates legislative involvement in policymaking. Institutional arrangements regulating executive–legislative relations and ministerial autonomy also structure parliamentary participation. However, empirical evidence of these effects remains limited to a few policies and countries. European Union legislation provides the opportunity to test expectations about legislative involvement for different types of measure across various institutional arrangements, across multiple policy areas, and across time. In this article, we investigate legislative involvement in the transposition of 724 directives in 15 member states from 1978 to 2004. Our results confirm that involvement increases as conflict between the responsible minister and her coalition partners intensifies. The discretionary scope embedded in the directive further inflates this effect. Additionally, parliamentary involvement decreases as the government's institutional advantage over the legislature increases, especially if intracoalitional conflict deepens.

This paper focuses on powerful third parties whose interests in a conflict are closely aligned with a single disputant's interests. I show that such third-party bias reveals private information about an intervener's willingness to secure an agreement using force. When a highly biased power intervenes in a crisis, a peaceful settlement is likely because warring parties are certain the third party will enforce an agreement by military means. When an intervener shows less favoritism, negotiations tend to fail because the disputants doubt that it is committed to use force. Peace is again more likely when the third party is unbiased because such a party behaves as a mediator, seeking agreements both adversaries find acceptable. These findings, coupled with evidence from U.S. and British interventions in the Balkans, suggest a possible explanation for why major power intervention can bring about drastically different outcomes.

A central challenge in political economy is to identify the conditions under which legislators seek to “bring home the pork” to constituents. We conduct the first systematic analysis of one determinant of constituency service, voter attachment to political parties, holding constant electoral and political institutions. Our analysis takes advantage of data from a unique type of public spending program that is proliferating across developing countries, the constituency development fund (CDF), which offers more precise measures of legislator effort than are common in the literature. Examining the CDF in India, we find that legislator effort is significantly lower in constituencies that are party strongholds. This result, which is robust to controls for alternate explanations, implies that legislators pass on pork when voters are more attached to political parties. It has implications not only for understanding political incentives and the dynamics of party formation, but also for evaluating the impact of CDFs.

Through an examination of Aeschylus' Oresteia, this essay argues for the critical importance of intergenerational justice to democratic theory. It explores the difficulties of democratic responsibility given the tension between necessity and freedom central to questions of intergenerational justice. The essay first details the relevant lacunae in the theories of two major figures of contemporary democratic theory, John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. It then develops an account of democratic responsibility that acknowledges human freedom to make decisions, even given the necessity created by the fact that individuals and communities inherit their own range of potential actions from previous generations. The essay elaborates this claim by examining how each of the central figures in the Oresteia deals first with the dilemmas inherited from the past and then with new situations engendered by his or her own actions. The essay concludes with a consideration of this aspect of democracy in contemporary political life.

Why have economic reforms aimed at reducing the role of the state been successful in some cases but not others? Are reform failures the consequence of leviathan states that hinder private economic activity, or of weak states unable to implement policies effectively and provide a supportive institutional environment? We explore these questions in a study of privatization in postcommunist Russia. Taking advantage of large regional variation in the size of public administrations, and employing a multilevel research design that controls for preprivatization selection in the estimation of regional privatization effects, we examine the relationship between state bureaucracy and the impact of privatization on firm productivity. We find that privatization is more effective in regions with relatively large bureaucracies. Our analysis suggests that this effect is driven by the impact of bureaucracy on the postprivatization business environment, with better institutional support and less corruption when bureaucracies are large.

Although contemporary Americans take it for granted that a “constitution” is a written document, written constitutions were almost unprecedented at America's founding. James Wilson, one of the most significant yet overlooked of America's founders, offers a comprehensive theory of America's written constitution. Wilson argues that the written-ness of the U.S. Constitution serves two essential functions. As an initial matter, it memorializes the primacy of liberty by announcing that the authority of government derives only from a free people. Perhaps more importantly, however, the written constitution uplifts and refines the character of its citizens, and thus helps to constitute a people. A review of Wilson's writings and speeches reveals how, even in a rights-centric political order, the written constitution helps to cultivate moderate and civic-minded citizens without diminishing the fundamental importance of individual rights.

Why do states provide sensitive nuclear assistance to nonnuclear weapon states, contributing to the international spread of nuclear weapons? Using a new data set on sensitive nuclear transfers, this article analyzes the determinants of sensitive nuclear assistance. I first describe a simple logic of the differential effects of nuclear proliferation, which I use to generate hypotheses about the conditions under which states provide sensitive nuclear assistance. I then show that the strategic characteristics of the potential nuclear suppliers are the most important determinants of sensitive nuclear assistance. Explanations that emphasize the importance of economic motivations do not find support in the data. This article presents a new approach to the study of the spread of nuclear weapons, focusing on the supply side of nuclear proliferation.

Deference and dissent strike a delicate balance in any polity. Insufficient deference to authority may incapacitate government, whereas too much may allow leaders to orchestrate mass violence. Although cross-national and cross-temporal variation in deference to authority and willingness to express dissent has long been studied in political science, rarely have scholars studied programs designed to change these aspects of political culture. This study, situated in post-genocide Rwanda, reports a qualitative and quantitative assessment of one such attempt, a radio program aimed at discouraging blind obedience and reliance on direction from authorities and promoting independent thought and collective action in problem solving. Over the course of one year, this radio program or a comparable program dealing with HIV was randomly presented to pairs of communities, including communities of genocide survivors, Twa people, and imprisoned génocidaires. Changes in individual attitudes, perceived community norms, and deliberative behaviors were assessed using closed-ended interviews, focus group discussions, role-play exercises, and unobtrusive measures of collective decision making. Although the radio program had little effect on many kinds of beliefs and attitudes, it had a substantial impact on listeners' willingness to express dissent and the ways they resolved communal problems.

Using survey data from 28 transition countries, we test for the complementarity and substitutability of market-relevant skills and institutions. We show that democracy and good governance complement market skills in transition economies. Under autocracy and weak governance institutions, there is no significant difference in support for revising privatization between high- and low-skilled respondents. As the level of democracy and the quality of governance increases, the difference in the level of support for revising privatization between the high and low skilled grows dramatically. This finding contributes to our understanding of microfoundations of the politics of economic reform.

Every dictator dislikes free media. Yet, many nondemocratic countries have partially free or almost free media. In this article, we develop a theory of media freedom in dictatorships and provide systematic statistical evidence in support of this theory. In our model, free media allow a dictator to provide incentives to bureaucrats and therefore to improve the quality of government. The importance of this benefit varies with the natural resource endowment. In resource-rich countries, bureaucratic incentives are less important for the dictator; hence, media freedom is less likely to emerge. Using panel data, we show that controlling for country fixed effects, media are less free in oil-rich economies, with the effect especially pronounced in nondemocratic regimes. These results are robust to model specification and the inclusion of various controls, including the level of economic development, democracy, country size, size of government, and others.

Criticisms of Quentin Skinner's approach to the study of the history of political thought have generally failed to directly address the philosophical presuppositions on which Skinner himself relies. Those presuppositions involve, primarily, theories of language associated most closely with Austin, Searle, and Grice. An investigation of the uses that Skinner makes of philosophical pragmatics raises serious doubts about a number of his central claims. Moreover, those philosophical resources actually point toward a decidedly non-Skinnerian approach that focuses not primarily on discovering or reconstructing historical circumstances, but on uncovering and explicating structures of argumentation.

In his most practical work, the Laws, Plato combines a frank statement of the radical Socratic thesis that virtue is knowledge and vice involuntary with a prudential acceptance of the political community's need for retributive punishment. This paper examines the Laws' statements of principle regarding responsibility and punishment and compares these with the actual criminal code proposed in Book 9. The result is to show how a radical philosophic insight can be adapted to make ordinary citizens more gentle, thoughtful, and humane without sapping their moral commitments. Lessons are drawn from the Laws for the contemporary restorative justice movement.

This article investigates the nature of the linkages between trade and labor rights in developing countries. Specifically, we hypothesize that a “California effect” serves to transmit superior labor standards from importing to exporting countries, in a manner similar to the transmission of environmental standards. We maintain that, all else being equal, the labor standards of a given country are influenced not by its overall level of trade openness, but by the labor standards of its trading partners. We evaluate our hypothesis using a panel of 90 developing countries over the period 1986–2002, and we separately examine the extent to which the labor laws and the actual labor practices of the countries are influenced by those of their export destinations. We find that strong legal protections of collective labor rights in a country's export destinations are associated with more stringent labor laws in the exporting country. This California effect finding is, however, weaker in the context of labor rights practices, highlighting the importance of distinguishing between formal legislation and actual implementation of labor rights.

One of the perennial puzzles of Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws is whether it has a coherent design. Although the dominant line of thinking is that this work has no unified structure, another believes it to have some organizing principle, even though proposals as to what it may be have failed to convince for lack of ability to account for various features of the work. I propose that The Spirit of the Laws is organized in a dialectical way, juxtaposing the antitheses of human freedom and determination. The tension between these is manifest in the first half of the work and resolved in the middle, and human freedom worked out and advanced in the second half. This article solves the long-standing question of the design of The Spirit of the Laws and reveals that the work's ultimate purpose is to champion human liberty over determination, contrary to the views of those who read the work as deterministic.

Does law exhibit a significant constraint on Supreme Court justices' decisions? Although proponents of the attitudinal model argue that ideology predominantly influences justices' choices, “hybrid models” posit that law and ideology exhibit discrete and concurrent effects on justices' choices. I offer a new conceptualization of legal constraint examining how legal rules permit varying degrees of ideological discretion, which establishes how strongly ideological preferences will influence justices' votes. In examining the levels-of-scrutiny legal doctrine, I posit theoretical models highlighting the differential constraining capacities of the strict scrutiny, intermediate scrutiny, and rational basis rules. I use a multilevel modeling framework to test the hypotheses within the context of the Grayned doctrine in free expression law. The results show that strict scrutiny, which Grayned applied to content-based regulations of expression, significantly constrains ideological voting, whereas intermediate scrutiny (applied to content-neutral regulations) and the low scrutiny categories each promote high levels of ideological voting.