This article investigates intra-party politics and explores the determinants of factional breakaways, going beyond the unitary actor assumption. It presents a game-theoretic model that focuses on intra-party competition and bargaining dynamics to analyse the interplay between party leaders and minority factions. It tests several hypotheses based on the formal model using a new dataset that contains information about the strength and policy positions of factions inside Italian parties, from 1946 to 2011, measured through quantitative content analysis of motions presented during party congresses. The results show that office, policy and electoral motives influence factions’ decisions to break away. Other elements – such as intra-party democracy, the electoral system and party system competitiveness – also affect leaders’ attitudes toward compromising and alter the likelihood of a split.

The bulk of the public opinion research on immigration identifies the factors leading to opposition to immigration. In contrast, we focus on a previously unexplored factor yielding support for immigration: humanitarianism. Relying upon secondary analysis of national public opinion survey data and an original survey experiment, we demonstrate that humanitarian concern significantly decreases support for restrictive immigration policy. Results from our survey experiment demonstrate that in an information environment evoking both threat and countervailing humanitarian concern regarding immigration, the latter can and does override the former. Last, our results point to the importance of individual differences in empathy in moderating the effects of both threat and humanitarian inducements.

Why do states create overlapping international institutions? This practice presents a puzzle: conventional wisdom suggests that states should use existing institutions to minimize the transaction costs of co-operation. This article proposes a bargaining approach to explain the de novo creation of overlapping international institutions. In this model, a dissatisfied ‘challenger’ state threatens to create a new institution, and a ‘defender’ state can propose to reform the currently focal institution. Overlapping institutions are created when the currently focal institution is (1) captured by interests opposed to the challenger and (2) domestic political pressure to abandon the status quo is intense. Similar to models of deterrence, the expectation that the new institution garners support among third parties is irrelevant for the equilibrium likelihood of de novo creation. A comparative analysis of international bargaining over energy, whaling and intellectual property rights provides empirical evidence.

This article extends theoretical arguments regarding the impact of economic globalization on policy making to electoral turnout and considers how distinct dimensions of globalization may produce different effects. It theorizes that constraints on government policy that reduce incentives to vote are more likely to be induced by foreign ownership of capital, while compensation through increased government spending is more likely (if at all) to be the product of structural shifts in production associated with international trade. Using data from twenty-three OECD countries from 1970–2007, the study finds strong support for the ownership-constraint hypothesis in which foreign ownership reduces turnout, both directly and – in strict opposition to the compensation hypothesis – indirectly by reducing government spending (and thus the importance of politics). The results suggest that increased foreign ownership, especially the most mobile capital flows, can explain up to two-thirds of the large declines in turnout over recent decades.

How much can a constituency influence the power of its representative in the legislature? This article develops a theoretical model of the constituency basis of legislator influence. The key players in the model are interest groups that may receive targeted transfers from the legislature. The model predicts that the amount of transfers that such groups receive is increasing in their ability to help a party win a legislative seat in the next election. This claim is tested using the changes in Japanese central-to-municipality transfers after a representative passes away while in office. The study finds that electorally ‘strong’ constituency groups do not lose transfers when they lose their representatives. However when ‘weak’ constituency groups lose their representatives, the transfers decrease.

Existing research emphasizes how United Nations Security Council (UNSC) approval helps convey information to domestic audiences that military action is conducted with good intentions, for desirable consequences and in a legitimate manner. This information transmission mechanism can also increase support for UNSC-endorsed military action in countries unlikely to provide major contributions to military actions. There is some cross-national evidence supporting the information transmission mechanism in the United States. Examining the causal mechanisms underlying foreign public support for US military action through a survey experiment with approximately 2,000 respondents in Japan shows that foreign public support varies depending on whether the military action has UNSC approval. The process of presenting draft resolutions to the UNSC also affects public support.

Recent scholarship has found identity variables to be insignificant predictors of civilian targeting in war. Drawing on the European origins of the law of war, this article argues that previous scholarship has neglected the one specification of ‘identity’ that is most theoretically justified for understanding civilian targeting: whether a European state is fighting a non-European state. This article replicates and extends three recent statistical analyses – Downes; Valentino, Huth and Croco; and Morrow – of civilian targeting by including a variable capturing whether a European state fought a non-European state. The study finds that civilian targeting, and non compliance with the law of war more generally, is significantly more likely in European v. non-European dyads than in other types of dyads.

This article develops a two-part theory that accounts for both the origins and the persistence of patronage politics. First, greater centrifugal and disintegrative pressures at key moments in the state-building process give local elites more opportunity to institutionalize patronage at the subnational level. Second, decentralized patronage systems are more resistant to reform than centralized ones. Case studies of India and Ceylon illustrate how variation in centrifugal pressures allowed subnational elites to capture the state in the former but not the latter. Further data from the British Empire shows that greater centrifugal pressures faced by British colonies at the time of decolonization are correlated with the persistence of higher levels of patronage over time.

Lobbies are active participants in international co-operation. In a repeated game, this article allows domestic lobbies to offer contingent rewards to influence their government to make pro-co-operation policy adjustments. The effect of lobbies depends on the type and intensity of their preferences. If the lobbies are ‘internationally benefiting’ – that is, they are interested in whether the foreign government reciprocates with adjustments of its own, they unambiguously improve co-operation. However, if the lobbies are ‘domestically benefiting’ – that is, they are interested in their own government's policy, they are less beneficial for co-operation. A domestically benefiting lobby that is willing to compensate its government even without foreign reciprocity undermines the credibility of punishing free riders. This article demonstrates this argument in the context of trade and environmental co-operation.

This article examines whether voters’ use of the internet as a source of political news affects the extent to which they are certain of their vote choice in national-level elections. It employs data pertaining to the 2011 general election in Ireland, linking geographical information on broadband coverage with individual-level public opinion data from the 2011 Irish National Election Study. The resultant dataset allows the adoption of a quasi-experimental approach in our examination of the effects of online political newsgathering on voters’ electoral uncertainty. Implementing instrumental variables, the study finds consistent evidence of a causal relationship between the use of the internet as a source of political information and increased levels of political uncertainty among voters, ceteris paribus. These findings are robust to a range of model specifications and alternative operationalizations of dependent and independent variables.

This article considers the issue of who should rebuild after war. Many leading advocates of the relevance of jus post bellum for Just War Theory adhere to the ‘Belligerents Rebuild Thesis’, which holds that those who have been involved with the fighting – such as the victor, just belligerent, unjust aggressor or humanitarian intervener – should be tasked with the responsibility to rebuild. By contrast, this article argues that there is a collective, international duty to rebuild that should be assigned primarily according to the agent's ability to rebuild – and not necessarily to the belligerents. The article also claims that, in contrast to the prevailing view, considerations of jus post bellum do not play any moral role in the justifiability of a war. Accordingly, defending the Belligerents Rebuild Thesis by invoking the alleged moral relevance of jus post bellum for Just War Theory is mistaken.

Why does the strength of class voting vary over time? Recent research has emphasized factors related to the structure of political choice at the party level. This article examines different aspects of this choice, and investigates whether voters are more likely to respond to the social or policy cues that parties send voters. The results from the British context suggest that the former are more important than the latter. The central implication of this finding is that social representation matters, and that the social background of political representatives influences how voters relate to political parties.

Despite its importance in contemporary American politics, presidential scandal is poorly understood within political science. Scholars typically interpret scandals as resulting from the disclosure of official misbehavior, but the likelihood and intensity of media scandals is also influenced by the political and news context. This article provides a theoretical argument for two independent factors that should increase the president's vulnerability to scandal: low approval among opposition party identifiers and a lack of congestion in the news agenda. Using new data and statistical approaches, I find strong support for both claims. These results suggest that contextual factors shape the occurrence of political events and how such events are interpreted.

This article develops and tests a set of theoretical mechanisms by which candidate ethnicity may have affected the party vote choice of both white British and ethnic minority voters in the 2010 British general election. Ethnic minority candidates suffered an average electoral penalty of about 4 per cent of the three-party vote from whites, mostly because those with anti-immigrant feelings were less willing to vote for Muslims. Ethnic minority voter responses to candidate ethnicity differed by ethnic group. There were no significant effects for non-Muslim Indian and black voters, while Pakistani candidates benefited from an 8-point average electoral bonus from Pakistani voters.

This article considers the role of principles in perceptions of what constitutes acceptable rhetoric in election campaigns. Previous research suggests that citizens use principles of what is an acceptable attack in campaigns when evaluating charges and countercharges, while acknowledging that under some circumstances citizens accept rhetoric that would seem to breach their principles. This research has not adequately considered how partisanship can affect a respondent's proclivity to call upon principles in assessing campaign rhetoric. This article draws on three original surveys to test competing models of the role of partisanship and finds robust results in support of a strong partisan bias. It concludes that it is not that citizens are resilient to violations of their principles, but that nearly the opposite is the case: citizens’ sensitivity to attacks on their preferred candidate leads them to take a very partial view of when to apply their principles faithfully to a judgment and when not to.

Although the politics of law and order are currently a major issue of debate among criminologists, comparative public policy research has largely neglected it. This article fills that gap by bringing together criminological and public policy theories, and by examining law-and-order policies in twenty Western industrialized countries. It adds to the existing literature in two important ways: it provides a straightforward quantitative test of the existing criminological explanations of law-and-order policies using public spending as the dependent variable; and it shows that governments’ partisan ideology matters for law-and-order policies. Government ideology influences how much countries spend on public order and safety, but the effect depends on the budgetary room for manœuvre and the strength of institutional barriers.

What affects who participates in politics? In most studies of political behaviour it is found that individuals with higher education participate to a larger extent in political activities than individuals with lower education. According to conventional wisdom, education is supposed to increases civic skills and political knowledge that functions as the causal mechanisms triggering participation. However, recently a number of studies have started dealing with the question of whether education is a direct cause for political participation or merely works as a proxy for other factors, such as pre-adult socialization or social network centrality. This review article provides an introduction and critical discussion of this debate.

According to what has recently been labeled ‘political realism’ in political theory, ‘political moralists’ such as Rawls and Dworkin misconstrue the political domain by presuming that morality has priority over politics, thus overlooking that the political is an autonomous domain with its own distinctive conditions and normative sources. Political realists argue that this presumption, commonly referred to as the ‘ethics first premise’, has to be abandoned in order to properly theorize a normative conception of political legitimacy. This article critically examines two features of political realism, which so far have received too little systematic philosophical analysis: the political realist critique of political moralism and the challenges facing political realism in its attempt to offer an alternative account of political legitimacy. Two theses are defended. First, to the extent that proponents of political realism wish to hold onto a normative conception of political legitimacy, refuting wholesale the ethics first premise leads to a deadlock, since it throws the baby out with the bathwater by closing the normative space upon which their account of political legitimacy relies. This is called the ‘necessity thesis’: all coherent and plausible conceptions of political legitimacy must hold onto the ethics first premise. Secondly, accepting this premise – and thus defending an ethics first view – does not entail that the political domain must be seen as a subordinate arena for the application of moral principles, that political normativity is reduced to morality or that morality trumps other reasons in political decision making, as claimed by political realists. Rather, the ethics first view is compatible with an autonomous political domain that makes room for an account of political legitimacy that is defined by and substantiated from sources of normativity specifically within the political. This is called the ‘compatibility thesis’.

This article shows that religion has been consistently important in predicting voters’ party choices in Britain over time. The relationship between religion and party preference is not primarily due to the social make-up of different religious groups, nor to ideological differences between religious groups, whether in terms of social conservatism, economic leftism or national identity. Instead, particular denominations are associated with parties that represented those denominational groups in the early twentieth century when social cleavages were ‘frozen’ within the system. The main mechanism underpinning these divisions is parental transmission of party affiliations within denominations. These findings have important implications for how we understand both the persistence of social cleavages and the precise mechanisms that maintain social cleavages.