This article investigates the performance determinants of accountability institutions in new democracies. Current scholarship on accountability has identified a distinct mechanism through which the introduction of political competition may affect such institutions: the electoral connection or vertical accountability mechanism. This connection is not expected to be effective in new democracies, …
Partisan theories of political economy expect that bondholders will panic with the election of a left-wing presidential candidate. The latter seems to be what happened in Brazil in the 2002 presidential elections. However, quantitative analysis of perceptions of sovereign credit risk in Argentine, Brazilian, Mexican, and Venezuelan presidential elections from 1994 until 2007 shows no real evide…
Numerous studies indicate that political institutions play an important role in explaining variation in voter turnout across countries. The nuances of institutions unique to presidential elections have been largely overlooked, however, despite the different incentives they offer for voters to participate in elections. This article examines the effect that four presidential institutions had on v…
Political conflict across Africa is often linked to the pervasive use of patronage in retaining control of the state. However, few sources of data have been available to systematically examine the relationship between a leader’s patronage strategies and the likelihood of an extraconstitutional change in power. This article employs ministerial appointments to the cabinet as a proxy for changes i…
Using a mass survey of young members of 15 parties in six European democracies, this article explores their motivations, perceptions, attitudes, and behavior. In a context of general disenchantment with politics and febrile participation, particularly among young citizens, this article explains why a large number of youngsters still decide to get involved in one of the most traditional forms of…
The sight of thousands of people demonstrating for clean elections and an end to corrupt postcommunist regimes led many observers to declare that the so-called color revolutions had finally brought democracy to Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. But how successful have these electoral revolutions actually been? The authors analyze all cases of electoral revolutions worldwide since 1991, …
Effective deliberation is central to democracy and so should enter any definition of democratization. However, the deliberative aspect now ubiquitous in the theory, practice, and promotion of democracy is generally missing in comparative studies of democratization. Deliberation capacity can be distributed in variable ways in the deliberative systems of states and other polities. A framework is …
Modern liberal democracies demand high and equal levels of political action. Unequal levels of political action between ideological groups may ultimately lead to biased policy. But to what extent do citizens’ ideological preferences affect their likelihood to participate politically? And does the institutional environment moderate this relationship? From rivaling theories, the authors construct…
Modern states increasingly rely on two means of regulating markets: public regulation (by the government) and private self-regulation (by the firms themselves). This study assesses the evolution of the state toward co-regulation by examining, across countries, the incidence of a prominent type of self-regulation: the environmental protection standard ISO 14001. It focuses on technological capab…
Based on a three-wave, six-country comparative panel study experiment with 1,197 participants, this article shows how in the long term, political institutions and the media can affect the European identity of citizens. It shows not only that exposure to good or bad news on Europe and to symbols of the European Union has an effect on European identity but also that news works as a powerful time …
In this article, the authors evaluate the origins of generalized trust. In addition to examining individual-level determinants, the analytic focus is on the political-institutional context. In contrast to most of the analyses to date, the authors conduct hierarchical analyses of the World Values Surveys (1995-1997 and 1999-2001) to simultaneously test for differences among respondents in 58 cou…
Focusing on the left-right scale as a summary measure of citizens’ and representatives’ preferences, a growing body of literature has used a variety of approaches and data in measuring positions of citizens and representatives. The most recent studies, contrary to previous ones, show no significant difference between ideological congruence in single member district (SMD) and proportional repres…
In parliamentary democracies, the transfer of power from one government to the next is sometimes characterized by long periods of negotiations in which party leaders bargain over the composition and policy objectives of a new cabinet. Although these delays can have substantial political and economic consequences, surprisingly little is known about their determinants. Moreover, the few studies t…
Based on recent work that suggests that voters in proportional representation (PR) systems have incentives to cast strategic votes, the authors hypothesize that levels of strategic voting are similar in both first-past-the-post (FPTP) and PR systems. Comparing vote intentions in majoritarian elections in the United States, Mexico, Britain, and Israel to PR elections in Israel and the Netherland…
International migrants are agents of democratic diffusion. They spread attitudes and behaviors absorbed in democratic host countries to their less democratic home countries by way of three processes: (a) migrant returns, (b) cross-border communication between migrants still abroad and their friends and family back home, and (c) migrant information networks in high-volume migration-producing com…
This analysis fills an important lacuna in comparative legislative studies by testing the veto players theory against a newly constructed data set of significant domestic policy legislation passed in the Republic of Ireland between 1949 and 2000. Distinguishing between single-party majority, coalition, and minority governments, the analysis places into sharp relief the ways in which the unique …
This article develops and tests a general framework for explaining variations in the extent of postwar reconstruction. Existing studies point to the importance of economic resources and a coherent state apparatus in promoting effective reconstruction. This study argues that because reconstruction inherently requires coordination between numerous societal actors as well as between state and soci…
Paired comparison is a strategy of political analysis that has been widely used but seldom theorized. This is because it is often assimilated to single-case studies or regarded as a degenerate form of multicase analysis. This article argues that paired comparison is a distinct strategy of comparative analysis with advantages that both single-case and multicase comparisons lack. After reviewing …
The literature on the common pool resource problem in budgeting has thus far not explored the likely interaction between size fragmentation (the number of decision makers) and procedural fragmentation (the structure of the process in which they interact).The argument put forward in this article is that the effects of these two types of fragmentation should not be additive, but multiplicative, b…
Can all citizens learn political tolerance through engagement in democratic politics? The lack of direct experience with democratic processes may account for a portion of the tolerance gap between mass publics in established and new democracies and suggests optimism about trends in tolerance within postcommunist Europe. Yet learning tolerance may be limited to individuals who are psychologicall…