Governments unable to make credible promises hinder economic development and effective policymaking. Scholars have focused considerable attention on checks and balances and the delegation of authority to independent agencies as institutional solutions to this problem. The political conditions under which these institutions enhance credibility, rather than policy stability, are still unclear, however. We show that checks—multiple veto players—enhance credibility, depending on the extent of uncertainty about the location of the status quo, on how agenda control is allocated among the veto players, and on whether veto players have delegated policymaking authority to independent agencies. In the context of monetary policy and independent central banks, we find evidence supporting the following predictions: Delegation is more likely to enhance credibility and political replacements of central bank governors are less likely in the presence of multiple political veto players; this effect increases with the polarization of veto players.We have benefited from the generous advice of many people, including Alberto Alesina, Tim Besley, Georgios Chortareas, Roberta Gatti, Simon Hug, Stephan Haggard, Witold Henisz, Aart Kraay, Francesca Recanatini, and Mary Shirley, and from comments of seminar participants at DELTA (Paris), George Mason, and Oxford. Three anonymous referees and the editor were especially helpful. This paper's findings, interpretations, and conclusions are entirely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of The World Bank, its executive directors, or the countries they represent.

We address two long-standing survey research problems: measuring complicated concepts, such as political freedom and efficacy, that researchers define best with reference to examples; and what to do when respondents interpret identical questions in different ways. Scholars have long addressed these problems with approaches to reduce incomparability, such as writing more concrete questions—with uneven success. Our alternative is to measure directly response category incomparability and to correct for it. We measure incomparability via respondents' assessments, on the same scale as the self-assessments to be corrected, of hypothetical individuals described in short vignettes. Because the actual (but not necessarily reported) levels of the vignettes are invariant over respondents, variability in vignette answers reveals incomparability. Our corrections require either simple recodes or a statistical model designed to save survey administration costs. With analysis, simulations, and cross-national surveys, we show how response incomparability can drastically mislead survey researchers and how our approach can alleviate this problem.

This article reports a test of a structural model of the antecedents of genocide and politicide (political mass murder). A case–control research design is used to test alternative specifications of a multivariate model that identifies preconditions of geno-/politicide. The universe of analysis consists of 126 instances of internal war and regime collapse that began between 1955 and 1997, as identified by the State Failure project. Geno-/politicides began during 35 of these episodes of state failure. The analytic question is which factors distinguish the 35 episodes that led to geno-/politicides from those that did not. The case–control method is used to estimate the effects of theoretically specified domestic and international risk factors measured one year prior to the onset of geno-/politicide. The optimal model includes six factors that jointly make it possible to distinguish with 74% accuracy between internal wars and regime collapses that do and those that do not lead to geno-/politicide. The conclusion uses the model to assess the risks of future episodes in 25 countries.This study was commissioned in 1998 by the Central Intelligence Agency's Directorate of Intelligence in response to President Clinton's policy initiative on genocide early warning and prevention. It was designed by the author and carried out using her data with other data and analytic techniques developed by the State Failure Task Force. Statistical analyses reported here were done by Michael Lustik and Alan N. Unger of Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), McLean, Virginia. The author is senior consultant to the Task Force, which was established in 1994 in response to a request from senior U.S. policymakers to design and carry out a data-driven study of the correlates of state failure, defined to include revolutionary and ethnic wars, adverse or disruptive regime transitions, and genocides and politicides (for the latest report on Task Force research see Goldstone et al. 2002). The author acknowledges the advice of other Task Force consultants and analysts throughout the research process. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent the official views of the U.S. government, the U.S. intelligence community, or the Central Intelligence Agency.The author especially thanks Ted Robert Gurr for his critiquing early drafts and using the findings to construct the table that identifies high-risk countries and groups. His insistence about the importance of the study prompted me to revise the manuscript a number of times, despite my initial reluctance, given the years of work that had gone into its preparation. It was especially hard to condense this effort from its original 75 pages. The paper also benefited from a careful reading by Mark I. Lichbach of a previous report and from comments of anonymous reviewers for the American Political Science Review.

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.

An influential conventional wisdom holds that civil wars proliferated rapidly with the end of the Cold War and that the root cause of many or most of these has been ethnic and religious antagonisms. We show that the current prevalence of internal war is mainly the result of a steady accumulation of protracted conflicts since the 1950s and 1960s rather than a sudden change associated with a new, post-Cold War international system. We also find that after controlling for per capita income, more ethnically or religiously diverse countries have been no more likely to experience significant civil violence in this period. We argue for understanding civil war in this period in terms of insurgency or rural guerrilla warfare, a particular form of military practice that can be harnessed to diverse political agendas. The factors that explain which countries have been at risk for civil war are not their ethnic or religious characteristics but rather the conditions that favor insurgency. These include poverty—which marks financially and bureaucratically weak states and also favors rebel recruitment—political instability, rough terrain, and large populations.We wish to thank the many people who provided comments on earlier versions of this paper in a series of seminar presentations. The authors also gratefully acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation (Grants SES-9876477 and SES-9876530); support from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences with funds from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; valuable research assistance from Ebru Erdem, Nikolay Marinov, Quinn Mecham, David Patel, and TQ Shang; sharing of data by Paul Collier.

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.

The relevance of socioeconomic class and of class-related parties for policymaking is a recurring issue in the social sciences. The “new politics” perspective holds that in the present era of austerity, class-based parties once driving welfare state expansion have been superseded by powerful new interest groups of welfare-state clients capable of largely resisting retrenchment pressures emanating from postindustrial forces. We argue that retrenchment can fruitfully be analyzed as distributive conflict involving a remaking of the early postwar social contract based on the full employment welfare state, a conflict in which partisan politics and welfare-state institutions are likely to matter. Pointing to problems of conceptualization and measurement of the dependent variable in previous research, we bring in new data on the extent of retrenchment in social citizenship rights and show that the long increase in social rights has been turned into a decline and that significant retrenchment has taken place in several countries. Our analyses demonstrate that partisan politics remains significant for retrenchment also when we take account of contextual indictors, such as constitutional veto points, economic factors, and globalization.Author names are in alphabetical order and they share equal responsibility for the manuscript. Early versions of this paper were presented at annual meetings of the Nordic Political Science Association in Aalborg, 2002, and the American Political Science Association in San Francisco, 2001, the International Sociological Association RC 28 meeting in Mannheim, 2001, the International Sociological Association RC 19 meeting in Tilburg 2000, and the American Sociological Association in Washington, DC, 2000, as well as at various seminars. For constructive comments on different versions of the manuscript we thank Rainer Lepsius, Anders Lindbom, Ingalill Montanari, John Myles, Michael Shalev, Sheila Shaver, and Robin Stryker, as well as other participants in these meetings. We want to thank Olof Bäckman, Stefan Englund, Ingrid Esser, Helena Höög, and Annita Näsström for very valuable help and Dennis Quinn for providing us his data on international financial deregulation. Our thanks are also due to three anonymous referees for careful reading. This research has been supported by grants from the Bank of Sweden Tercentennial Foundation and the Swedish Council for Social Research.

Democratic peace theory is probably the most powerful liberal contribution to the debate on the causes of war and peace. In this paper I examine the causal logics that underpin the theory to determine whether they offer compelling explanations for the finding of mutual democratic pacifism. I find that they do not. Democracies do not reliably externalize their domestic norms of conflict resolution and do not trust or respect one another when their interests clash. Moreover, elected leaders are not especially accountable to peace loving publics or pacific interest groups, democracies are not particularly slow to mobilize or incapable of surprise attack, and open political competition does not guarantee that a democracy will reveal private information about its level of resolve thereby avoiding conflict. Since the evidence suggests that the logics do not operate as stipulated by the theory's proponents, there are good reasons to believe that while there is certainly peace among democracies, it may not be caused by the democratic nature of those states.

The origins of fascism remain a major concern to social scientists. Because fascism emerged in societies seeking transitions to democracy, a better understanding of these failed attempts at democratic transitions improves our understanding of both democracy's possibilities and the strengths and weakness of democratic theory. Indeed, theoretical arguments employed to explain fascism have their analogues in theories of democracy. Three arguments have been advanced to explain both democracy and fascism: class, civil society, and rational choice. This research examines the rise of fascism in Italy, 1919–21. The evidence contradicts the class theory of fascism and offers mixed evidence for the civil society theory, while supporting the rational choice theory. Fascism will always be a minority movement. It cannot move beyond the cities.

Mussolini (1919)This paper is developed from research sponsored by the National Science Foundation under Grant SBR-94-2281. The Foundation's support is gratefully acknowledged. The Istituto Cattaneo of Bologna, the Dipartimento di Politica, Istituzioni, Storia of the University of Bologna, the Ministero dell'Intero, and the Istituto Nazionale di Statistica in Rome also provided invaluable assistance. Preliminary findings of this research were presented at the Organization and State Building Workshop, University of Chicago, May 11, 1998, and the Workshop on Political Processes and Spatial Analysis, Florida International University, March 5–6, 2001. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the European Consortium for Political Research Workshops in Torino, Italy, March 22–28, 2002. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation, the Istituto, the Dipartimento, or the Ministero. Particular thanks are extended to Professor William Brustein of the University of Pittsburgh for his comments on early drafts and for sharing his data. Additional gratitude is extended to Professors Paolo Pombeni and M. Serena Piretti of the Dipartimento di Politica, Istituzioni, Storia of the University of Bologna, to Professors John Grove and Rob Preuhs of the University of Denver, and to Gary King of Harvard University for comments on an early version.

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.

How does migration affect the security of advanced industrial states, and how does the security environment shape the way states deal with international migration? Migration rests at the nexus of three dimensions of security, including geopolitical interests, material production, and internal security. I argue that migration policy is an integral instrument of state grand strategy in this context, and that examining levels of threat on each facet of security at a given point in time can largely explain variation in policy. I test a series of hypotheses drawn from this security framework using a case-study method that examines policy development in four advanced industrial states, including the United States, Germany, France, and Great Britain in the period 1945–present.

This paper discusses “normalization” as a problem for the liberal order through a detailed examination of the liberal political theory of Michael Oakeshott. Oakeshott links the poststructuralist normalizing problematic with the “existential” dilemma of human finitude. In liberalism, he argues, selves become disciplined and normalized when they respond to finitude with an overemphasis on instrumentality. They understand freedom as an instrumental good, a means to external ends. Oakeshott reformulates liberalism based on another response when selves appreciate experience as a self-sufficient or intrinsic good. They understand freedom as a first-order good valuable for itself and this lessens the normalizing pressure. I argue that F. A. Hayek's theory of liberalism confirms Oakeshott's warning about an overemphasis on instrumentality. I show the importance of Oakeshott's work in that he restates the distinction between the public and the private and demonstrates the limits of contemporary liberal theories insofar as they neglect the problem of normalization.

This essay examines the tension between agenda-setting and majority rule in the writings of one of the earliest and most original theorists of participatory democracy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Exploring Rousseau's views on lawmaking and the complexities associated with legislative initiation, specifically, this essay challenges the notion that representatives or legislative experts in a democracy inevitably reduce popular participation to acclamation. Contrary to authors who believe that Rousseau surreptitiously devolves political power to an elected elite who predecide a legislative agenda for a passive majority to vote upon later, I argue that the philosopher delegates authority to initiate the laws to representatives without undermining either the sovereignty or the robustness of citizen self-rule. This argument reveals, in part, why contemporary participatory democracy is not inherently “immobile” owing to the self-reinforcing benefits of democratic participation within a well-balanced constitution.The author wishes to thank Mads Qvortrup, Benjamin Wong, and APSR's Reviewers.

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.

Blame plays an important role in motivating many human activities, but rarely has the attribution of blame been analyzed for its effects on protest behavior. I argue that how people understand causal relationships and attribute blame for a grievance plays a crucial role in their decision to redress the grievance through protest. The greater the specificity of blame attribution, the greater the probability of protest. Among the less specific attributors of blame, political entrepreneurs have more opportunities to mobilize protest, especially if they can aid in blame specification. I test these hypotheses using evidence from an original nationwide survey of 2,026 adult Russians conducted in 1998 during the height of the Russian wage arrears crisis. Russians who attributed blame for the crisis to specific culprits or problem-solvers protested more than Russians who did not, and the mobilizing efforts of entrepreneurs had a greater impact on the less specific attributors.An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2001 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. I would like to thank the Office of Research at the U.S. Information Agency (now State Department) for making the collection of these data possible and Vanessa Baird, Tami Buhr, Ray Duch, Steve Hanson, Will Moore, Cliff Morgan, Bob Stein, Randy Stevenson, Ric Stoll, and Andy Stock for their helpful advice. The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not represent official positions of the State Department or the U.S. Government. The data and documentation necessary to replicate this analysis can be obtained from the National Archives.

If war results from disagreement about relative strength, then it ends when opponents learn enough about each other. Learning occurs when information is revealed by strategically manipulable negotiation behavior and nonmanipulable battlefield outcomes. I present a model of simultaneous bargaining and fighting where both players can make offers and asymmetric information exists about the distribution of power. In the Markov perfect sequential equilibrium, making and rejecting offers has informational value that outweighs the one provided by the battlefield. However, states use both sources of information to learn and settle before military victory. The Principle of Convergence posits that warfare ceases to be useful when it loses its informational content and that belief in defeat (victory) is not necessary to terminate (initiate) hostilities. Thus, the standard puzzle in international relations that seeks to account for prewar optimism on both sides may not be that relevant.

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.

Ultimatum bargaining models of international interactions suggest that when conflict is costly and the actors are fully informed, the probability of conflict goes to zero. However, conflict occurs with some positive probability when the challenger is uncertain about the defender's reservation value. I employ a simple ultimatum game of bargaining to evaluate two traditional power-centric theories of world politics, balance of power, and power transition theory. The formal and empirical analyses demonstrate that as states approach power parity, information asymmetries are greatest, thus enhancing the probability of militarized conflict. Uncertainty is a central cause of conflict emergence and is correlated with the distribution of observable capabilities. Recognizing the relationship between the distribution of power and the uncertainty offers a more sophisticated interpretation of power-centric explanations of world politics.

Malapportionment of seats in bicameral legislatures, it is widely argued, confers disproportionate benefits to overrepresented jurisdictions. Ample empirical research has documented that unequal representation produces unequal distribution of government expenditures in bicameral legislatures. The theoretical foundations for this empirical pattern are weak. It is commonly asserted that this stems from unequal voting power per se. Using a noncooperative bargaining game based on the closed-rule, infinite-horizon model of Baron and Ferejohn (1989), we assess the conditions under which unequal representation in a bicameral legislature may lead to unequal division of public expenditures. Two sets of results are derived. First, when bills originate in the House and the Senate considers the bill under a closed rule, the equilibrium expected payoffs of all House members are, surprisingly, equal. Second, we show that small-state biases can emerge when (1) there are supermajority rules in the malapportioned chamber, (2) the Senate initiates bills, which produces maldistributed proposal probabilities, and (3) the distributive goods are “lumpy.”We thank seminar participants at New York University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the 2002 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association for helpful comments. James Snyder and Michael Ting gratefully acknowledge the financial support of National Science Foundation Grant SES-0079035. Stephen Ansolabehere gratefully acknowledges the support of the Carnegie Corporation under the Carnegie Scholars program. This paper was written while Michael Ting was at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and he thanks the Department of Political Science there for their support.

Because war is costly and risky, states have incentives to negotiate and avoid conflict. The common rationalist explanation is that war results from private information and incentives to misrepresent it. By modeling warfare as a costly bargaining process, I show that inefficient fighting can occur in equilibrium under complete information and very general assumptions favoring peace. Specifically, I assume that peace can be supported in equilibrium and that fighting brings no benefits to either state, only costs. Although there exist agreements that Pareto-dominate the final settlement, states may prefer to fight. The result turns on the ability of states to impose costs on their opponents and bear costs in return. The existence of a range of acceptable settlements and the threat to revert to particularly disadvantageous ones make inefficient equilibria possible. A diminished ability to hurt the enemy, not simply military victory, is a major reason to stop fighting.This article is a shorter version of the first chapter of my dissertation. I thank Randall Stone, Curt Signorino, John Duggan, and Robert Westbrooke for valuable comments. Previous versions were presented to the Peace Science Society, October 2001, and the Midwest Political Science Association, April 2002.