This article analyzes election data that permit simple tests of rationalvoting and agenda setting. The voting test pertains to aggregate electionresults. The prediction is that when voters have single-peaked preferences,there will be more opposition to the second of two budget proposals that arevoted on simultaneously. Unlike the standard binary choice setting, not allvoters have weakly undominated voting strategies, but the game among thevoters can be solved simply by iterative application of weak dominance. Theagenda-setting prediction tested is that agenda setters should make oneproposal rather than two when given the option. The data come from Oregonschool district financial elections from 1980–83, years in which the rulesfor these elections were abruptly changed.

Anti-black prejudice affects how some citizens evaluate black candidates. What does it take to reduce the role of prejudice in these evaluations? Using logical implications of relevant psychological phenomena, this article shows that repeated exposure to counter-stereotypical information is insufficient to reduce evaluative prejudice. Instead, citizens must associate this prejudice with adverse effects for themselves in contexts that induce them to rethink their existing racial beliefs. These findings explain important disagreements in empirical prejudice research, as only some empirical research designs supply the conditions for prejudice reduction predicted here. This study also clarifies why similarly situated citizens react so differently to counter-stereotypical information. In sum, we find that prejudice change is possible, but in a far narrower set of circumstances than many scholars claim.

Many articles use regression discontinuity designs (RDDs) that exploit thediscontinuity in “close” election outcomes to identify various political andeconomic outcomes of interest. One of the most important types of diagnostictests in an RDD is checking for balance in observable variables within thewindow on either side of the threshold. Finding an imbalance raises concernsthat an unobservable variable may exist that affects whether a case ends upabove or below the threshold and also directly affects the dependentvariable of interest. This article shows that imbalance in RDDs exploitingclose elections are likely to arise even in the absence of any type ofstrategic sorting. Imbalance may arise simply due to variation in theunderlying distribution of partisanship in the electorate acrossconstituencies. Using both simulated and actual election data, the studydemonstrates that the imbalances driven by partisanship can be large inpractice. It then shows that although this causes a bias for the most naiveRDDs, the problem can be corrected with commonly used RDDs such as theinclusion of a local linear control function.

This article develops a game-theoretic model that reconciles three facts: (1) fraud is pervasive in non-competitive elections, (2) domestic and international monitoring of elections have become nearly universal and (3) incumbent regimes often invite monitoring and still cheat. The incumbent regime commits fraud to manipulate the information generated by a non-competitive election before a political interaction with some audience. The audience expects fraud, so the incumbent commits fraud because she would appear weak if not doing so. Increasing the visibility of fraud with monitoring is valuable because it lowers the equilibrium level of costly fraud without changing how popular the incumbent appears. The core results hold under multiple extensions, which produce a rich set of comparative static results.

Motivated by polar extremes of monopartisanship and nonpartisanship inexisting literature on parties in legislatures, we introduce and analyze amore moderate theory of competitive partisan lawmaking. Thedistinguishing feature of competitive partisanship is that the minorityparty, although disadvantaged, has some guaranteed opportunities toinfluence lawmaking. Our analytic framework focuses on two dimensions ofparties in legislatures: agenda-based competition,operationalized as a minority party right to make an amendment to themajority party’s proposal, and resource-based competition,characterized as the ability of both party leaders to use transferableresources when building winning or blocking coalitions. Building on thecanonical model, we find that giving voice to the minority party in eitherone of these ways alone results in outcomes that, on the whole, are lesslopsided and more moderate than those predicted by the existing monopartisanand nonpartisan theories.

We present a model and a laboratory experiment on the informativeness ofdebate, varying both informational and institutional variables. Theinformational variable we focus on is a novel factor affecting the extent towhich audience members can learn from exposure to unpersuasive arguments.The more easily a listener can learn from an argument she findsunpersuasive, the greater the risk that the speaker will alienate thislistener when she fails to persuade her. We find a strong interactionbetween speakers’ responsiveness to that risk and the institutions ofdebate. When listeners can learn from unpersuasive arguments, many speakersare discouraged from attempting persuasion, irrespective of the debate ruleswe consider. In contrast, when listeners cannot learn from unpersuasivearguments, debate rules affect speakers’ willingness to engage inpersuasion.

The nonverbal display of confidence is strongly associated with leadership and power. However, its importance for the persuasiveness of campaign messages has not been explored. How important is showing confidence for a political candidate’s ratings? How does confidence condition the effect of the quality of a candidate’s arguments? This article addresses these questions using an innovative experimental approach that makes it possible to better isolate the impact of the candidate’s nonverbal confidence and the quality of his message. While both of these aspects influence voters’ perceptions of the candidate’s electability and qualifications, the nonverbal dimension matters more when it comes to electability. This research contributes to the study of nonverbal communication in elections by expanding the focus of inquiry beyond the effect of pure emotions (happiness or anger) and facial traits.

Why are some small parties successful whereas others wither away? Despitethe voluminous literature on parties and party families, we have a limitedunderstanding of what explains small party success. Most studies tend toemphasize the role of social cleavages and electoral systems. Instead, wepropose a new institutional explanation that treats entering parliament as akey resource for small parties. Parliamentary entrance signalsorganizational capacity and candidates’ appeal, and reduces uncertaintyabout parties’ ideological profile. Taking advantage of the discontinuitiesgenerated by thresholds of representation, we estimate the causal effect ofentering parliament on the future vote shares of small parties. We use a newdata set that covers all post-WWII democracies with a national threshold ofrepresentation. Results indicate that presence in parliament increasesparties’ vote share in the next election. Importantly, entering parliamentis more important for parties in new democracies, where party branding isweak and the need for signaling is high.

How do marginal voters differ from regular voters? This article develops amethod for comparing the partisan preferences of regular voters to thosemarginal voters whose turnout decisions are influenced by exogenous factorsand applies it to two sources of variation in turnout in the UnitedStates—weather and election timing. In both cases, marginal voters are over20 percentage points more supportive of the Democratic Party than regularvoters—a significant divide. The findings suggest that the expansion orcontraction of the electorate can have important consequences. Moreover, thefindings suggest that election results do not always reflect the preferencesof the citizenry, because the marginal citizens who may stay home havesystematically different preferences than those who participate. Finally,the methods developed in the article may enable future researchers tocompare regular and marginal voters on many different dimensions and in manydifferent electoral settings.

The institution of judicial review is an important mechanism of holding thegovernment legally accountable, nevertheless questions remain about itsproper role in a separation of powers system. This article analyzes theeffect of judicial review on the policy-making process from an expertiseperspective. It shows that the exercise of non-expert judicial review caninduce more informed policies and that non-expert courts have incentives toexercise judicial review in a manner consistent with institutional concernsfor expertise. In addition to its importance as a mechanism of legalaccountability, our analysis underscores another virtue of judicial review:legal review of governmental policy by non-expert courts can improve theamount of information available for policy making. The article contributesto a literature on the scope and legitimacy of judicial review and hasbroader implications for understanding the effect of institutional checksand balances on the quality of policy making.

Many political scientists and economists have argued that coalition governments tend to accumulate more debt than single-party governments do, but the evidence for this proposition is mixed. This article argues that only some coalition governments are more likely to increase public debt than single-party governments: those in which parties are unable to make credible promises to their partners about future policy. It introduces the concept of ‘commitment potential’ within coalitions and proposes a way of measuring it. The study evaluates its theoretical claims using data on 20 advanced democracies observed over a period of almost 50 years. It finds that multiparty governments with high commitment potential do not, on average, accumulate more debt than single-party governments, but that governments with low commitment potential do.

This paper uses a regression discontinuity design to estimate the degree towhich incumbents scare off challengers with previous officeholderexperience. The estimates indicate a surprisingly small amount of scare-off,at least in cases where the previous election was nearly tied. As Lee andothers have shown (and as we confirm for our samples) the estimated partyincumbency advantage in these same cases is quite large—in fact, it is aboutas large as the average incumbency advantage for all races found using otherapproaches. Drawing from previous estimates of the electoral value ofofficeholder experience, we thus calculate that scare-off in these casesaccounts for only about 5–7 percent of the party incumbency advantage. Weshow that these patterns are similar in elections for US House seats,statewide offices and US senate seats, and state legislative seats.

Most formal models of valence competition add a single, separable andunweighted component to the standard one-dimensional utility function ofvoters. This article presents the results of a conjoint analysis experimentin which respondents were asked to choose between two candidates whoseprofiles vary along five attributes. Four of these traits behave likevalence or policy issues as expected, but one, which has been employed inrecent formal and empirical works, does not. Moreover, policy and valenceare not separable. They interact at least in some cases, taking a competencyform whereby the marginal impact of valence on voters’ choice is conditionalon candidates’ policies. This result lends support to recent studies thathave found more extensive valence voting under ideological convergence.Finally, policy trumps valence in awkward choices. Respondents even prefercorrupt candidates with similar policy views to honest ones with differentopinions, despite integrity being declared the most important attribute.

Given similar economic distress indicators, why do some states enter into International Monetary Fund (IMF) programs while others do not? Building on extant studies of IMF program participation that highlight the importance of various economic and political determinants, this article proposes an argument focusing on the political incentives of the IMF and a borrowing country when they engage in IMF program negotiations. Specifically, the study develops a domestic politics argument to highlight the interactions among sovereignty costs, competence costs, economic conditions and domestic regime types, and tests the argument using a cross-national time-series dataset of all IMF agreements between 1970 and 2006. It finds that when the economic crisis is mild, democracies are less likely than non-democracies to enter IMF programs, but that when the economic crisis is severe, democracies are more likely to do so than their autocratic counterparts. The article attributes this tendency to democratic leaders’ electoral vulnerability and shows that these patterns become more pronounced as elections draw near.

Can American presidents use their budget proposal authority to achieve theirown partisan policy priorities? This is an important, yet challenging,question to answer since formal executive authority is ambiguous, andbudgetary powers are shared in the US separation of powers system. Indeed,the question remains open since prior empirical designs conflate externalconstraints (arising from political and policy conditions) with those thatreflect executive partisan policy priorities. This study advances a novelstochastic decomposition of executive budget proposals in order to analyzethe extent to which presidents can shape the legislative funding of USfederal agencies consistent with their own partisan policy priorities.Statistical evidence reveals that presidents exert partisan-based budgetaryinfluence over appropriations that cannot be ascertained from previousempirical studies that rely on either the observed gap between presidentialrequests and congressional appropriations or standard instrumental variableestimation methods. The statistical evidence also indicates that presidentsare marginally more effective at converting their partisan policy prioritiesinto budgetary outcomes under divided party government. Contrary totheoretical predictions generated from bilateral veto bargaining models,presidents are also shown to exert effective partisan budgetary influenceeven when their budget requests exceed congressional appropriations.

There are three fundamental duration dynamics of civil conflicts: time untilconflict onset, conflict duration, and time until conflict recurrence.Theoretical and empirical models of war usually focus on one or at most twoaspects of these three important duration dynamics. We present a newsplit-population seemingly unrelated duration estimator that treatspre-conflict duration, conflict duration, and post-conflict duration asinterdependent processes thus permitting improved predictions about theonset, duration, and recurrence of civil conflict. Our findings providesupport for the more fundamental idea that prediction is dependent on a goodapproximation of the theoretically implied underlying data-generatingprocess. In addition, we account for the fact that some countries mightnever experience these duration dynamics or become immune after experiencingthem in the past.

Empirical political science is not simply about reporting evidence; it is also about coming to conclusions on the basis of that evidence and acting on those conclusions. But whether a result is substantively significant––strong and certain enough to justify acting upon the belief that the null hypothesis is false––is difficult to objectively pin down, in part because different researchers have different standards for interpreting evidence. Instead, this article advocates judging results according to their “substantive robustness,” the degree to which a community with heterogeneous standards for interpreting evidence would agree that the result is substantively significant. This study illustrates how this can be done using Bayesian statistical decision techniques. Judging results in this way yields a tangible benefit: false positives are reduced without decreasing the power of the test, thus decreasing the error rate in published results.

When and why ethnic groups rebel remains a central puzzle in the civil warliterature. In this paper, we examine how different types of inequalitiesaffect both an ethnic group’s willingness and opportunity to fight. We arguethat political and economic inter-group inequalities motivate ethnic groupsto initiate a fight against the state, and that intra-group economicinequality lowers their elite’s costs of providing the necessary materialand/or purposive incentives to overcome collective action problems inherentto rebel recruitment. We therefore predict that internally unequal ethnicgroups excluded from power and/or significantly richer or poorer relative tothe country’s average are most likely to engage in a civil war. To assessour claim empirically, we develop a new global measure of economicinequality by combining high-resolution satellite images of light emissions,spatial population data, and geocoded ethnic settlement areas. Aftervalidating our measure at the country- and group level, we include it in astandard statistical model of civil war onset and find considerable supportfor our theoretical prediction: greater economic inequality within an ethnicgroup significantly increases the risk of conflict, especially if politicalor economic inequalities between groups provide a motive.

A small but growing social science literature examines the correspondence between experimental results obtained in lab and field settings. This article reviews this literature and reanalyzes a set of recent experiments carried out in parallel in both the lab and field. Using a standardized format that calls attention to both the experimental estimates and the statistical uncertainty surrounding them, the study analyzes the overall pattern of lab-field correspondence, which is found to be quite strong (Spearman's ρ = 0.73). Recognizing that this correlation may be distorted by the ad hoc manner in which lab-field comparisons are constructed (as well as the selective manner in which results are reported and published), the article concludes by suggesting directions for future research, stressing in particular the need for more systematic investigation of treatment effect heterogeneity.