Children are more likely to adopt their family's political views when politics is important to their parents, and the children of politically engaged parents tend to become politically engaged adults. When these transmission dynamics are considered together, an important hypothesis follows: the children who are most likely to initially acquire the political views of their parents are also most likely to later abandon them as a result of their own engagement with the political world. Data from the Political Socialisation Panel Study provide support for this hypothesis, illuminate its observational implications and shed light on the mechanisms, pointing to the role of new social contexts, political issues and salient political events. Replications using different data from the US and the UK confirm that this dynamic is generalizable to different cohorts and political periods.

Cross-country empirical studies have reviewed many aspects of peacekeeping missions, but the findings on their effectiveness diverge. This article draws on recent empirical literature on civil wars using a disaggregated approach, addressing the effectiveness of peacekeeping by examining the local variation in UN troop deployment and violence in the Bosnian civil war. The relationship between the intensity of local violence and troop deployment across Bosnian municipalities and peacekeeping effects on the intensity of subsequent violence are examined with a matching approach. The results indicate that although peacekeeping ‘works’, since it is deployed where the most severe violence takes place, peacekeepers have little effect on subsequent violence. This is consistent with research highlighting the obstacles to UN missions in addressing their objectives.

This article argues that human rights could be improved by motivating politicians and bureaucrats to put more effort into protecting human rights. It conceptualizes the production of human rights practices as the outcome of two principal-agent relationships that constrain politicians and bureaucrats. Reliance on taxes is a non-electoral, fiscal factor that makes politicians more willing to protect human rights. Increased government revenue, no matter the source, raises bureaucratic compensation and helps create a more accountable bureaucracy. Thus both a higher reliance on taxes and larger state revenues lead to the better protection of human rights. Each fiscal factor promotes a different type of accountability, both of which independently contribute to good human rights practices.

This article argues that the political risk associated with foreign direct investment (FDI) is primarily a function of investment in fixed-capital, and not a homogeneous feature of FDI. As such, empirical tests of a political institution's ability to mitigate political risk should focus directly on investments in fixed capital and not on more highly aggregated measures of multinational corporation (MNC) activity, such as FDI flow and stock data that are affected by the accumulation of liquid assets in foreign affiliates. We apply this to the study of bilateral investment treaties (BITs). We find that BITs with the United States correlate positively with investments in fixed capital and have little, if any, correlation with other measures of MNC activity.

This article examines how human rights international non-governmental organizations (hereafter HROs) can increase the level of political protest in neighboring states. Previous research suggests local activities of HROs help to generate mobilization for protests against governments. This article shows that the presence of HROs in neighboring states can be a substitute for domestic HROs; if domestic HROs are already flourishing, there will be less of a ‘neighbor’ effect. At sufficiently high levels of domestic HRO prevalence within a state, neighboring HROs help domestic HROs use institutionalized substitutes for protest mobilization strategies. Spatial econometric methods are used to test the implications of this theory. These results illuminate the role that non-governmental organizations play in these domestic political processes, and demonstrate the transnational nature of their activities.

After the collapse of the Soviet bloc, its twenty-seven successor states were charged with devising policies with respect to their ethnic minorities. This shock enables an analysis of the conditions that render states more likely to repress, exclude, assimilate or accommodate their minorities. One would anticipate that groups that are most ‘threatening’ to the state's territorial integrity are more likely to experience repression. However the data do not validate this expectation. Instead, the analysis suggests that minority groups’ demographics and states’ coercive capacities better account for variation in ethnic minority policies. While less robust, the findings further indicate the potential importance of lobby states and Soviet multinational legacies in determining minority rights. The results have implications for ethnic politics, human rights, nationalism, democratization and political violence.

This article provides a detailed set of coding rules for disaggregating electoral volatility into two components: volatility caused by new party entry and old party exit, and volatility caused by vote switching across existing parties. After providing an overview of both types of volatility in post-communist countries, the causes of volatility are analysed using a larger dataset than those used in previous studies. The results are startling: most findings based on elections in post-communist countries included in previous studies disappear. Instead, entry and exit volatility is found to be largely a function of long-term economic recovery, and it becomes clear that very little is known about what causes ‘party switching’ volatility. As a robustness test of this latter result, the authors demonstrate that systematic explanations for party-switching volatility in Western Europe can indeed be found.

The institutional turn in comparative authoritarianism has generated wide interest. This article reviews three prominent books on authoritarian institutions and their central theoretical propositions about the origins, functions and effects of dominant party institutions on authoritarian rule. Two critical perspectives on political institutions, one based on rationalist theories of institutional design and the other based on a social conflict theory of political economy, suggest that authoritarian institutions are epiphenomenal on more fundamental political, social and/or economic relations. Such approaches have been largely ignored in this recent literature, but each calls into question the theoretical and empirical claims that form the basis of institutionalist approaches to authoritarian rule. A central implication of this article is that authoritarian institutions cannot be studied separately from the concrete problems of redistribution and policy making that motivate regime behavior.

Whereas some researchers emphasize how World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement reduces complexity and clarifies legislation, others argue that dispute rulings promote co-operation by providing an enforcement mechanism. This article identifies empirical implications from these distinct arguments and tests them on WTO disputes from 1995 to 2006. The study's analytical approach combines a three-step coding of dispute escalation with a strategic bargaining model and statistical backwards induction to account for governments’ forward-looking behavior. It finds strong support for the argument that WTO dispute settlement primarily serves as an enforcement device. It finds much less support for the argument that dispute settlement reduces complexity and clarifies trade law. These results suggest that the role of WTO dispute settlement in generating information on acceptable trade policy standards is less relevant than proponents of the complexity argument tend to assume.

A strong statistical association between legislative opposition in authoritarian regimes and investment has been interpreted as evidence that authoritarian legislatures constrain executive decisions and reduce the threat of expropriation. Although the empirical relationship is robust, scholars have not provided systematic evidence that authoritarian parliaments are able to restrain the actions of state leaders, reverse activities they disagree with, or remove authoritarian leaders who violate the implied power-sharing arrangement. This article shows that authoritarian legislatures, by providing a forum for horse trading between private actors, are better at generating corporate governance legislation that protects investors from corporate insiders than they are at preventing expropriation by governments. The statistical analysis reveals that the strength of authoritarian legislatures is associated with corporate governance rules and not expropriation risk.

This article argues against the scholarly consensus that governments make pro-poor policies when they are democratic. In democracies and autocracies, a government's strongest incentive is to serve citizens who are organized, and poor citizens face collective-action disadvantages. But a ‘political entrepreneur’ can help poor citizens organize and attain power with their support; to stay in power, the political entrepreneur's incentive is to maintain poor citizens’ support with pro-poor policies. Politics and education are analyzed over half-a-century in countries with little in common – Ghana, Taiwan, and Brazil. Governments that expanded education for the poor were more often autocratic than democratic, but were always clearly associated with political entrepreneurs. The results suggest an alternative understanding of government incentives to serve poor citizens.

When are governments most likely to use election violence, and what factors can mitigate government incentives to resort to violence? How do the dynamics of election violence differ in the pre- and post-election periods? The central argument of this article is that an incumbent's fear of losing power as the result of an election, as well as institutionalized constraints on the incumbent's decision-making powers, are pivotal in her decision to use election violence. While it may seem obvious to suggest that incumbents use election violence in an effort to fend off threats to their power, it is not obvious how to gauge these threats. Thus, a central objective of this article is to identify sources of information about the incumbent's popularity that can help predict the likelihood of election violence. The observable implications of this argument are tested using newly available cross-national evidence on elections, government use of pre- and post-election violence, and post-election protests from 1981 to 2004.

A wide range of studies find that democracies experience more terrorism than non-democracies. However, surprisingly little terrorism research takes into account the variation among democracies in terms of their electoral institutions. Furthermore, despite much discussion of the differences in terrorist groups’ goals in the literature, little quantitative work distinguishes among groups with different goals, and none explores whether and how the influence of electoral institutions varies among groups with different goals. The argument in this article posits that electoral institutions influence the emergence of within-system groups, which seek policy changes, but do not influence the emergence of anti-system groups, which seek a complete overthrow of the existing regime and government. The study finds that within-system groups are significantly less likely to emerge in democracies that have a proportional representation system and higher levels of district magnitude, while neither of these factors affects the emergence of anti-system groups.

What determines state participation in regulatory regimes? This article argues that if international regulation creates markets for new technologies, innovative companies support the ratification of the relevant regulatory treaties. Consequently, technological innovativeness should have a positive effect on regulatory treaty ratification. From the harmonization of telecommunication technology to pesticide regulation, many regulatory treaties create new product markets, so the argument applies to a variety of regulatory issues. This hypothesis is tested against data on the ratification of two major multilateral treaties for pesticide control: the 1998 Rotterdam Convention and the 2001 Stockholm Convention. Countries that are capable of biotechnology innovation are found to be more likely to ratify each treaty. The findings suggest that (1) technology innovation is key to regulatory treaty ratification and (2) constituency preferences for regulatory treaties are contingent upon expected profits from innovation. More broadly, the article emphasizes the importance of technological factors for international co-operation.

While studies of the motives for intentional insurgent violence against civilians are now common, relatively little academic research has focused on the impact of victimization on conflict processes or war outcomes. This article addresses this gap in the literature. Specifically, the authors examine the influence of civilian victimization on bargaining between the regime and insurgents during a civil war. A curvilinear relationship between the level of civilian victimization used by insurgents and the likelihood that conflict ends in negotiated settlement is posited. The probability of settlement is highest for groups that engage in a moderate level of civilian killing but declines at particularly high levels. A competing risk analysis using monthly conflict data on African civil wars between 1989 and 2010 supports this argument.

The opportunity and willingness framework has received much attention in research on interstate conflict expansion. This framework is extended here by examining when and what side third parties join during ongoing conflicts. It is maintained that without examining both timing and side selection, understanding of conflict expansion is limited. The timing and side joined in interstate disputes between 1816 and 2001 are analysed using a competing risks duration model. The findings contribute novel insights into many key debates in conflict research such as balancing versus bandwagoning, as well as alliance reliability and the democratic peace. The results also indicate that relying on statistical models that do not distinguish between which side a third party can join may produce misleading results.