The article focuses on judicial politics in three international regimes. The courts of these regimes are trustee courts, operating in an environment of judicial supremacy with respect to states. An international trustee court meets three criteria: (1) the court is the authoritative interpreter of the regime’s law; (2) the court’s jurisdiction is compulsory; and (3) it is virtually impossible, in practice, for contracting states to reverse the court’s important rulings. After developing a theory of trusteeship, we turn to how judges have used their powers. Although there is variation, each court has engaged in “majoritarian activism,” producing law that reflects standard practices or a high degree of state consensus but that would not have been adopted by states under unanimity decision rules. Majoritarian activism helps judges to develop the law progressively, to mitigate potential legitimacy problems, and to render efforts at curbing the growth of their authority improbable or ineffective.

Though African-American and Latino electoral success in state legislative and congressional elections continues to occur almost entirely in majority-minority districts, minorities now have new opportunities in districts that are only 40–50% minority. This success can primarily be explained in terms of a curvilinear model that generates a “sweet spot” of maximum likelihood of minority candidate electoral success as a function of minority population share of the district and the proportion of the district that votes Republican. Past racial redistricting legal challenges often focused on cracking concentrated racial minorities to prevent the creation of majority-minority districts. Future lawsuits may also follow in the steps of recent successful court challenges against racially motivated packing that resulted in the reduction of minority population percentage in a previously majority-minority district in order to enhance minority opportunity in an adjacent non-majority-minority district.

The fact that two senators are elected from each state offers the potential for natural paired comparisons. In particular, examining historical and geographic patterns in terms of changes in the number of divided US Senate delegations (i.e., states whose two senators are of different parties) is a useful route to testing competing models of American politics, including theories of split-ticket voting, party polarization, and realignment. Brunell and Grofman (1998) used divided Senate delegations to indirectly examine evidence for realignment. We hypothesized that a partisan realignment will necessarily lead to a cyclical pattern in the number of divided Senate delegations. We predicted that the number of divided Senate delegations at the state level would decline after 1996 because we conjectured that there had been a realignment cusp around 1980. We tested this prediction with data from 1952–2016 and our prediction was confirmed.

Borrowing an approach from the literature on the economics of discrimination, we estimate the impact of nonvoters on the outcome of presidential elections from 1952–2000 using data from the National Election Study (NES). Our estimates indicate that nonvoters are, on average, slightly more likely to support the Democratic Party. Of the 13 presidential elections between 1952 and 2000 we find no change in the eventual outcome of the election with two possible exceptions: 1980 and 2000. Thus our results are not all that dissimilar from other research on participation. Higher turnout in the form of compulsory voting would not radically change the partisan distribution of the vote. When elections are sufficiently close, however, a two percentage point increase may suffice to affect the outcome. Limitations of the NES data we use suggest that our estimates underestimate the impact of nonparticipation. We also compare our method with other econometric techniques. Finally, using our findings we speculate as to why the Democratic Party fails to undertake widespread “get out the vote” or registration drives.

Evidence for long-term cycles in the parliamentary seat share of the major British parties is presented in this article. Spectral analysis of data from 1832 to 2005 suggests a cycle period of about twenty-eight years, similar to findings in US studies and to cycle-length estimates restricted to the post-1950 period in Britain. A four-parameter voter–party interaction model developed by Merrill, Grofman and Brunell is adapted and applied to Britain. That model depends on tensions between parties’ policy and office motivations and between voters’ tendency to sustain the governing party while reacting against non-centrist policies. The model operates homeostatically, projects patterns consistent with the empirical record and fits the data better than models based on economic factors or autoregressive predictions.

Are there cycles in American politics? In particular, does the proportion of the Democratic/Republican vote share for president and/or seat share in Congress rise and fall over extended periods of time? If so, are the cycles regular, and what are the cycling periods? Moreover, if there are regular cycles, can we construct an integrated model—such as a negative feedback loop—that identifies political forces that could generate the observed patterns? First, we use spectral analysis to test for the presence and length of cycles, and show that regular cycles do, in fact, exist—with periods that conform to those predicted by the Schlesingers—for swings between liberalism and conservatism—but with durations much shorter than those most commonly claimed by Burnham and others in characterizing American political realignments. Second, we offer a voter–party interaction model that depends on the tensions between parties' policy and office motivations and between voters' tendency to sustain incumbents while reacting against extreme policies. We find a plausible fit between the regular cycling that this model projects and the time series of two-party politics in America over the past century and a half.

In every contested election there are inevitably winners and losers,both among the candidates and among the voters. Some candidates willtake their seats as elected officials, and others will not. Somevoters will be happy with the outcome, others will not. Here I seekto better understand the relationship between whether a voter castsa ballot for the winning candidate in U.S. House elections and thatvoter's evaluations of her representative. I build on a burgeoningliterature on the relationship between voters and their electedgovernments to derive and test a theory about this connection. Thedata will show that voters whose preferred candidate wins a seat inthe House of Representatives are systematically happier with theirrepresentative than those voters whom did not vote for the winningcandidate. While this finding is not especially groundbreaking, theimplications for the way in which we draw congressional and statelegislative district lines are quite provocative. Specifically,since district lines in the House are necessarily an artificialconstruct, I argue that map makers ought to “pack” districts with asmany like-minded partisans as possible. Trying to draw “competitivedistricts” effectively cracks ideologically congruent voters intoseparate districts, which has the effect of increasing the absolutenumber of voters who will be unhappy with the outcome anddissatisfied with their representative. I discuss the benefits offundamentally rethinking the way in which we draw congressional andstate legislative districts, as well as address likely concerns thatmight be raised about drawing districts this way.I would like to thank Jim Adams, Valerie Brunell,Bruce Cain, Geoff Evans, Bill Koetzle, Bernie Grofman, SamHirsch, Michael D. McDonald, Iain McLean, Sam Merrill, GlennPhelps, David Rueda, Alec Stone Sweet, Chris Wlezian, and thePolitics Group at Nuffield College for their comments.

Expressive Politics: Issue Strategies of Congressional Challengers. By Robert G. Boatright. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004. 280p. $44.95.

In an era in which fewer and fewer congressional elections are competitive, why do candidates emerge at all to challenge entrenched incumbents who typically preside over very safe districts? In this book, Robert Boatright provides us with an explanation for this phenomenon. Not all challengers think they have a chance at beating the incumbent; in fact, most are quite aware that they will almost certainly lose and lose big in the general election. Furthermore, because these candidates are not running to win the election, they tend to run different campaigns, many of which are focused on highlighting certain issues and expressing certain political points of view. This is what the author means by “expressive politics.”

There is still a controversy over adjusting the census because thestatistical adjustment of the census did not work in 1990, nor didit work in 2000. The adjustment process, in both theory andpractice, is complicated and flawed. The chance of it working infuture censuses without major changes is small. Anderson andFienberg continue to twist language and report partial results inorder to confuse the debate.

Census 2000 is over; the debate over adjusting the census is not. Inthis essay I respond to a number of points from Anderson andFienberg (2001) and report some of the results from Census 2000.

With “Partisan Politics at Work,” Anderson and Fienberg continue their spirited, if misleading, defense of the plan to statistically adjust the census count. Unfortunately, their argument in favor of making the adjustments misses the mark and they gloss over some of the most serious of the evidence presented against the methods of adjustment. Rather, they are more interested in trying to remove politics from an inherently political process, which I maintain is an unrealistic goal. I conclude my portion of this exchange by reiterating my position that statistically adjusting the census totals will, at best, provide numbers that are no better than those of a traditional headcount; at worst, doing so may provide very inaccurate data.

At the end of their second article, Anderson and Fienberg plead for “legislation to insulate the Census Bureau from efforts at political manipulation and restore to it the authority to manage the technical details of how to fulfill the constitutional mandate for a census.” I do not share these wishes. Why does the federal bureaucracy need any more protection from congressional oversight than it already enjoys? Certainly, Census Bureau officials have more technical expertise and they are more readily able to judge whether a particular sampling plan is sound than are the collective members of the U.S. House of Representatives. Nevertheless, the Bureau remains the fiduciary for Congress. Erecting barriers between the two groups is not a solution to any identifiable problem.

In “History, Myth Making, and Statistics,” Anderson and Fienberg purport to have debunked one of the “myths” opponents of statistically adjusting census counts repeatedly invoke. The authors strive to show that critics have misplaced blame on a computer coding error for artificially inflating the national undercount by more than one million people and producing adjusted state population totals that would have provided justifications for shifting one or two House seats inappropriately. Rather, Anderson and Fienberg argue, an ad hoc decision to collapse the number of post-strata from 1392 to 357 led analysts to produce inaccurate numbers.

Far from discrediting the criticism, however, Anderson and Fienberg provide compelling evidence that both the computer error and the adjustment model itself produced numbers that would have led to a malapportionment of House seats. The authors report the 1990 apportionment based on official census numbers in their Table 1, the apportionment based on the incorrectly adjusted census numbers in their Table 5, and the apportionment based on the “corrected” (no computer error and with 1392 poststrata) adjusted counts in their Table 6. Note that the incorrectly adjusted apportionment differs from the actual apportionment by two seats and the correctly adjusted apportionment differs from the actual by two seats.

One of the most hotly debated issues of the past four years has been the method to be used to count the population in Census 2000. Broadly, the debate is over whether to incorporate statistical sampling in the decennial census for the purposes of enumerating the population. Each of the previous 21 U.S. censuses has failed to count all persons. Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were certain that the state population totals tallied for the first census in 1790 were wrong (Skerry 1992). To make matters worse, the census must do more than simply tally the number of people in the country; it must also report exactly where each of these people live. By any metric, this is a Herculean task. Indeed, enumerating and fixing geographically 100% of the population without some error is impossible.

In this article I outline the plan for Census 2000, define the political debate, and offer an assessment of the plan itself. I argue that deciding how to conduct the census has been, and will continue to be, an inherently political process, and that there are reasonable, scientific arguments against adjusting the census. I became interested in this issue during my tenure as an APSA Congressional Fellow, when I staffed the Subcommittee on the Census in the House of Representatives. Before I began my fellowship on Capitol Hill, I was suspicious of the argument against adjusting the census statistically. How could anyone possibly be against adjusting the census with statistical methods?

We argue that conservative districts that go Democratic for the House should be likely to choose a Republican for president, while liberal districts represented by a Republican should be likely to opt for a Democrat for president. We test these and related predictions about split-ticket voting with election data from the eight presidential elections between 1964 and 1992. We show that ideological differences in the estimated location of the district's median voter explains a substantial component of the systematic variation in patterns of split outcomes in this period across districts, but that other factors (e.g., an especially popular incumbent or a particularly poor challenger, the magnitude of presidential election victory, region-specific realignment effects) also play a role.

We maintain that the rise and fall in the number of states with divided Senate delegations can be explained primarily in terms of long-run forces of realignment/dealignment and staggered Senate elections. We test our model with election data from 1788–1996 rather than only the post–World War II period, which was common in previous research. We show that a large number of divided Senate delegations is not new; indeed, the highest percentage occurred in 1830. Exactly as predicted by our model, we find a cyclical pattern in divided Senate delegations that is tied to realigning epochs. Our analysis also calls attention to the recent decline in the number of such delegations, and we argue that this trend may well continue.

We present a theory of European legal integration that relies on three causal factors: transnational exchange, triadic dispute resolution, and the production of legal norms. After stating the theory in abstract terms, we explain the construction of the legal system and test the relationship among our three variables over the life of the European Community. We then examine the effect of the EC legal system on policy outcomes at both the national and supranational levels in two policy domains: the free movement of goods and gender equality. Our theory outperforms its leading rival, intergovernmentalism. The evidence shows that European integration has generally been driven by transnational activity and the efforts of EC institutions to reduce transaction costs, behavior which governments react to but do not control.