What are the consequences of being the victim of crime for political participation? Previous studies report mixed results with respect to voter turnout, in contrast to the positive effects found for other indicators of political engagement. However, previous turnout studies have failed to differentiate between violent and non-violent crime, and have relied on cross-sectional survey data that is prone to measurement biases and selection effects. This article addresses these shortcomings via a panel analysis of official registry data from Denmark recording individual-level turnout in two municipal elections (in 2009 and 2013) and victimization from violent and non-violent crime. It identifies the effect of victimization by comparing changes in turnout between the two elections for victims and two different counterfactual groups: non-victims in the general population, and individuals who were victimized after the 2013 election. The results show that victimization from violent crime increases turnout by 2 to 3 percentage points. The study further demonstrates a large negative between-individual effect of victimization, suggesting that previous studies have been marred by severe selection bias.

Bacteria living in surface-attached biofilm communities must maintain electrochemical gradients to support basic cellular functions, including chemo-osmotic transport and adenosine triphosphate synthesis. Central to this is the maintenance of electron flow to terminal electron acceptors. These acceptors can be soluble inorganic and organic molecules, such as oxygen, nitrate, sulfate, dimethyl sulfoxide, or fumarate, or solid metal oxides, such as Fe(III) and Mn(IV) oxides. When electrons are transferred to a solid substrate, they may be (1) carried directly to the acceptor via outer membrane cytochromes, (2) carried by electron shuttle molecules, (3) transferred along conductive protein nanowires, or (4) conducted through other extracellular matrices. No matter what the electron acceptor is, in the laboratory, bacterial biofilms are frequently studied while growing on inert surfaces, incapable of electron transfer. However, in natural environments, as well as many industrial and biotechnology settings, biofilms grow on electrically active surfaces. In this review, we propose that the study of bacterial biofilms on redox-active surfaces is important both for the development of industrial processes, such as microbial fuel cells and wastewater treatment systems, as well as for our understanding of how these communities of microbes affect global nutrient cycling, other geobiological processes, and even human disease.

Using national survey panel data collected in Germany during the 1990 Bundestag election campaign, we develop a model to assess the effect of the campaign on individual votes and the election outcome. We find that the dominant effects of the campaign on German voters, as in the Lazarsfeld et al. studies from the 1940s and in more recent US research, were the ‘reinforcement’ of earlier preferences and the ‘activation’ of latent vote dispositions based on fundamental individual attitudes such as party affiliation and left-right ideology. At the same time, the analysis shows that the number of campaign ‘converts’ (those who vote against their dispositions and prior preferences) was approximately 14 per cent of the electorate. The vote division among these individuals was overwhelmingly pro-government, suggesting that the 1990 German campaign altered a sufficient number of votes to turn what was an even contest, based on the electorate's initial political dispositions, into a solid government coalition victory.

While much is known about the effects of the economy on the popularity and electoral fortunes of political leaders, political scientists know very little about how economic decline and political performance influence support for the political regime and the stability of democratic systems. We use three cross-national longitudinal surveys to address this issue: two collected in Costa Rica in the midst of a severe economic crisis in the late 1970s and early 1980s; and one in West Germany during the recession of the mid-1970s. We show that in both countries, overall support for the political regime remained extremely high during the economic decline, while satisfaction with incumbent performance fluctuated much more sharply. Moreover, at the individual level, changes in satisfaction with incumbent performance were only weakly related to changes in regime support. These results provide strong evidence suggesting that if democracies enter economic downturns with initially high levels of regime support, they will be able to withstand even severe, prolonged crises of economic performance.

Democracy promotion has been an explicit doctrine of U.S. foreign policy since the end of the cold war. Between 1990 and 2003 resources for democracy programs increased by over 500 percent. Has this policy worked? Prior research has been inconclusive, relying either on case studies or on quantitative efforts that have not distinguished overall foreign assistance from democracy promotion. The authors answer this question using a new data set that includes program information for 165 countries for the years 1990–2003. The analysis distinguishes between direct and indirect causal mechanisms and employs a variety of statistical models that allow the authors to control for the unique democratization trend in each country when assessing causal effects, as well as for the potential endogeneity of U.S. democracy assistance. The analysis shows that democracy assistance does indeed have a significant impact.

This article examines the effect of adult civic education programs on political participation in two developing democracies, the Dominican Republic and South Africa. I first develop hypotheses about the effects of civic education on participation from theories of political culture and recent work on recruitment and group mobilization. Using survey data collected on participants in numerous civic education programs as well as control groups in both countries, I then show that civic education has significant and substantively meaningful effects on local-level political participation in four of the seven programs studied in South Africa and the Dominican Republic and that the results hold after controlling for potential biases related to the individual's self-selection into the programs. The effects of civic education on participation are largely conditional in nature, dependent on the frequency and nature of the civic education “treatment,” and the individual's store of prior political and participatory resources. The results suggest that civic education and other group mobilization processes are highly complementary in both countries; civic education training stimulates individual political behavior in much the same way as does participation in other kinds of secondary group activities.

Causal inference in research testing rational choice models of unconventional political behavior has been hampered by the inability to use perceptions of the costs and benefits of participation at a given time to predict behavior that necessarily occurred in the past and by ambiguities associated with analyzing behavioral intentions instead of actual participation. Using panel data collected on a national sample in West Germany between 1987 and 1989, we show that variables from a “collective interest” model measured in 1987—individuals' dissatisfaction with the provision of collective goods, beliefs that group actions can be successful, and beliefs in the importance of their own participation—predict subsequent participation in collective protest activities. Variables corresponding to the private “selective incentives” associated with protest are found to be less relevant. Furthermore, we find that engaging in protest changes many of the perceptions that influence future participation. We discuss the implications for theories of political mobilization.

Discontent theories of rebellion postulate that politicized discontent will have a strong independent effect on individuals' potential to participate in rebellious political action. Expected utility theories postulate that participation in rebellious action is motivated by expectation of reward and that discontent is relevant at most only insofar as individuals expect that collective action can be successful and that their participation is important to that end. We test these theories with data from a national sample and a sample of students at a protest-prone university in Peru, a country with significant objective conditions of discontent and a high incidence of rebellious political conflict. The results provide no evidence for the discontent models but strong support for the expected utility models. The potential for participation in rebellious political action proves to be a function primarily of discontent weighted by the expectancy of the action's success and the perceived importance of personal participation. Private social and normative rewards and costs also are relevant—but to a lesser extent—for the individual's calculation of the expected utility of participation.

Previous research has shown a strong relationship between party identification and participation in conventional political activities such as voting and campaign behavior. We extend these analyses by examining the effects of party identification and strength of identification on participation in both campaign activities and political protest. We hypothesize that party differences in these behaviors can be explained by the different levels of participatory incentives perceived by party identifiers and nonidentifiers. We specify a series of incentives derived from theories of collective action and measure them in a national and a Community probability sample in the Federal Republic of Germany. The results show that the bivariate relationships between party identification and political participation can be explained largely through their mutual relationship with participatory incentives such as policy dissatisfaction, belief in the moral justifiability of various forms of behavior, and willingness to conform to the behavioral expectations of important others. The effects of identification with all parties on participation are substantially reduced once the effects of the incentives are taken into account, and for protest participation, only identification with the Greens shows a nonnegligible net impact.

We propose two models to explain why individuals participate in collective political action—a personal influence model and a collective rationality model. Each model overcomes the free-rider problem posed by conventional rational choice theory and left unresolved in previous research. The models are tested for legal and illegal protest behaviors, using data from a national sample and two samples of protest-prone communities in the Federal Republic of Germany. The personal influence model is supported for both forms of participation, while the collective rationality model is supported for legal protest. We discuss implications of the results for grievance and rational choice theories of collective political action.