What explains variations in electoral volatility? The authors argue that fiscal space—availability of financial resources to enact policy initiatives and provide public programs—possessed by governments can explain the level of electoral volatility. Where governments have fiscal space, citizens reward incumbent parties with their continued support. But when fiscal space is constrained, the incu…
This article focuses on the casting of invalid ballots and voting for extra-parliamentary parties. Drawing on evidence from more than 200 elections in Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and the Americas during the 1980-2000 period, it tests how well four sets of factors serve as explanations for the extent of such behavior in parliamentary contests. The main finding is that the structure o…
As developing countries expose portfolio investors to potential high risk, it is expected that investors will follow the advice of credit rating agencies (CRAs) before sending capital abroad. Controlling for political and economic explanations in the literature, the authors use panel data for 50 developing countries from 1987 to 2003 to determine if changes in CRA ratings affect portfolio flows…
Theories of civil society set high expectations for grassroots associations, claiming that they school citizens in democracy and constrain powerful institutions. But when do real-life organizations actually live up to this billing? Homeowner organizations in the United States and elsewhere have sparked debate among political scientists, criticized by some as nonparticipatory and harmful to the …
This article proposes and applies a unified model of economic voting. The central claim of this article is that economic judgments affect the decision of whether to vote as well as how to vote. An analysis of cross-national survey data supports this claim, demonstrating that previous studies of economic voting have failed to identify the full relationship by omitting abstention. In addition, th…
Can those in charge of redistricting foster electoral competitiveness by targeting some congressional incumbents while protecting others from potent competition? We provide an answer by presenting the dynamic redistricting thesis, which holds that the type of redistricting plan and the time passed since its enactment affect the emergence of high-quality congressional candidates. We demonstrate …
Many studies of the room to maneuver make no provision for popular evaluation of policy. They assert rather than demonstrate popular satisfaction with policy choices and macroeconomic outcomes. The authors present a framework that explicitly models channels for popular preferences to influence policies and outcomes. Results for economic policy making in Britain do not support the room to maneuv…
This article examines presidential proclamations on trade policy, a category of presidential unilateral power that we call delegated unilateral power that is used frequently in creating or modifying trade policy, between the period 1974 and 2006 and tests the boundaries of the explanations predicted by the unilateral powers literature. We also find that the use of proclamations on trade policy …
This article analyzes the interaction between economic crises and partisan politics during International Monetary Fund program initiation in Latin America in the 1980s and Eastern Europe in the 1990s. The author argues that economic crises are at least in part in the eye of the beholder, and therefore policy responses reflect the interaction between crisis intensity and the government's partisa…
Neighborhood context could condition voting decisions, but systematic investigation of whether (how) the traits of a given locale shape individual voting decisions is sparse. We explore the possibility that local partisan balance affects turnout and the use of convenience voting in particular. Using comprehensive registered-voter lists from four swing states in the 2002 and 2006 elections, we f…
In 1992, the United States and the European Community (EC) reached an agreement on the Uruguay Round Agreement of Agriculture (URAA). A comparison of the EC's and the United States's initial agricultural proposals with the final agreement shows that the specific commitments agreed to reduce agricultural support and protection went a long way to accommodate EC agricultural interests. However, th…
If legislators are sensitive to coalitional drift, they must perforce be forward looking. In this article, we propose that legislators anticipate change in government—and any associated coalitional drift. That is, legislators recognize that the government could move from unified to divided or divided to unified. As such, how legislators structure an agency’s discretion may be affected by the cu…
State budgets are flexible: In the same year, some budget categories dramatically rise or fall, whereas others closely follow the previous year’s appropriation. Public policy scholars label a budget that contains mainly small scale changes interspersed with dramatic fluctuations as punctuated. This research seeks to identify the determinants of these punctuated budgets in the American states. W…
In this study, we investigate four attitudinal structures (including liberal, conservative, and libertarian configurations) associated with two ideological dimensions among American voters and demonstrate that these attitudinal structures are related in expected ways to differential preferences for the values of freedom, order, and equality/caring. Liberals are inclined to trade freedom for equ…
This article explores the relationship between economic reforms and democracy in Latin America between 1970 and 1995. Existing theories suggest divergent effects across time horizons. The implementation of reforms— economic liberalization—may initially destabilize democracy due to popular backlash or overzealous reformers' usurpation of democratic institutions. However, the potential outcome of…
The continued dominance of legacy unions—state-backed unions inherited from the previous nondemocratic regime—has received little scholarly scrutiny. Through an analysis of Indonesia, this article presents a focused theoretical framework for analyzing the staying power of legacy unions and the strategies they pursue to maintain their dominance. The author argues that the capacity of legacy unio…
Voters who participate in elections to the European Parliament (EP) apparently use these elections to punish their domestic governing parties. Many students of the EU therefore claim that the party—political composition of the Parliament should systematically differ from that of the EU Council. This study shows that opposed majorities between council and parliament may have other than simply el…
This article focuses on the European governments' decision to involve unions and employers in the design and implementation of public policy. Based on new measures of the phenomenon, the authors argue that between 1974 and 2003, no convergence on a pluralist model of policy formation is visible. They then use these measures to identify and analyze the clearest cases of adoption or demise of con…
Research on the behavior of the Namibian judiciary highlights the importance of context-sensitivity in comparative courts research. Drawing from strategic understandings of judicial behavior, the analysis examines the extent to which political influences are affecting the behavior of judges in Namibia. The findings indicate that, for the most part, Namibia's judges have exercised high levels of…
In a recent contribution to this journal, Munck and Snyder found that many studies suffer from a deficient application of qualitative and quantitative methods. They argue that the combination of small-n and large-n analysis represents a viable method for promoting the production of knowledge. Recently, Evan Lieberman proposed nested analysis as a rigorous approach for comparative research that …