Unlike for the green party family, no empirically backed scholarly consensus exists about the grievances mobilized by populist right parties in Western Europe. To the contrary, three competing grievance mobilization models can be distinguished in the existing literature. These models focus on grievances arising from economic changes, political elitism and corruption, and immigration. This study…
The literature highlights how different individual levels of political interest and knowledge matter for political attitudes and behavior. A logical-quantitative voting model is thus proposed for a two-party system, based on voters' left—right ideological positions and their degree of political involvement. The model hypothesizes that although more involved voters generally behave in ac…
This article examines the conditions under which the policy positions of an international organization correspond to the positions of relevant national actors. The commission of the European Union (EU) is often portrayed as an autonomous supranational actor, insulated from national interests. Recent analyses question this view, arguing that the commission is an agent in a principal—agen…
Brazil's democratic constitution granted municipalities responsibility to design and implement social policies, allowing for tailored programs to meet local constituent demands. Yet instead of pursuing local diversity, many governments chose to emulate programs made famous elsewhere. What explains the diffusion of social programs across Brazil? This article investigates whether policy mak…
Why are people who live in liberal welfare regimes so reluctant to support welfare policy? And why are people who live in social democratic welfare regimes so keen to support welfare policy? This article seeks to give an institutional account of these cross-national differences. Previous attempts to link institutions and welfare attitudes have not been convincing. The empirical studies ha…
Drawing on a survey of more than 4,000 respondents, this article argues that contrary to claims by the 1994 Zapatista insurgency, indigenous and nonindigenous respondents in southern Mexico have been united more by socioeconomic and land tenure institution variables than by ethnic identity. Based on statistical models, it concludes that in rural southern Mexico, ethnicity alone is less importan…
This study explores how economic performance prior to democratic transitions affects the fate of successors to authoritarian rulers in new democracies. It investigates 70 founding election outcomes, finding that successful economic performance under an authoritarian regime increases the vote share of successors. It also finds that the past economic performance of authoritarian rulers decr…
What explains the nature of institutional change in post-1989 China? Dominant theories of institutional change focus on economic-rationalist, sociopolitical, or historical causes. Yet they have trouble explaining the pattern of institutional change in China. An alternative legitimacy-based perspective is proposed here that provides a more parsimonious and general theory of institutional change …
Participation in electoral politics is not a fully voluntary act. Suffrage rules regulate who can participate, whereas institutional arrangements affect incentives to vote by shaping the consequences of the voting act. The secular increase of electoral participation in the world during the past two centuries was largely due to extensions of suffrage rather than to increased turnout of those eli…
This study uses district-level data from national legislative elections in 19 Latin American countries to evaluate the effect of gender quota legislation, in concert with other electoral rules, on the election of women legislators. Well-designed quota legislation has a profound positive impact on the election of women, regardless of the type of party list (closed or open). Where quota legislati…
In light of extensive decentralization in much of the world, analyses of citizen satisfaction with democracy that treat citizens as subjects of their national governments alone are incomplete. In this article,the author uses regression analysis of unique survey data from Argentina to explore the relationship between local government performance and citizen satisfaction with democracy. She demon…
The notion of representation lies at the heart of liberal democratic thinking, and over the years considerable effort has gone into defining and measuring the concept. The least common denominator in the voluminous literature is that in a representative political system there should be a certain amount of attitudinal congruence between masses and elites. One much-debated strategy for obtaining …
Historical explanations seek to identify the causes of outcomes in particular cases. Although social scientists commonly develop historical explanations, they lack criteria for distinguishing different types of causes and for evaluating the relative importance of alternative causes of the same outcome. This article first provides an inventory of the five types of causes that are normally used i…
While most current research documents a negative relation between ethnic diversity and generalized trust, it has to be acknowledged that these results often originate from one-country analyses in North America. In this article, attitudinal measurements from the European Social Survey are combined with Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development data on migration patterns, thus examin…
Incumbent political leaders risk deposition by challengers within the existing political rules and by revolutionary threats. Building on Bueno de Mesquita, Smith, Siverson, and Morrow's selectorate theory, the model here examines the policy responses of office-seeking leaders to revolutionary threats. Whether leaders suppress public goods such as freedom of assembly and freedom of information t…
Despite the growing importance of domestic institutions in the political economy literature, few studies explore the effects of disaggregated measures of political institutions, specifically electoral rules and systems, on foreign direct investment (FDI). Building on institutional accounts, this articles tests the effects of electoral rules on FDI inflows for 16 Latin American countries from 19…
How do ideas affect political decision making? Despite much evidence that ideas matter, relatively little is known about the specific mechanisms through which they influence actors' beliefs, goals, and preferences. Drawing on psychological findings, the article elaborates a cognitive mechanism through which ideational frameworks shape political elites' preferences among options. It argues that …
Governments in democratic systems are expected to respond to the issue preferences of citizens. Yet we have a limited understanding of the factors that cause levels of responsiveness to vary across time and between countries. In this article, the authors suggest that political contestation is the primary mechanism driving policy responsiveness and that this, in turn, is mediated by politi…
There has been considerable debate about the characteristics of political cleavages underlying post-Communist Central and Eastern European party competition, with views ranging from no structure, to unidimensionality, to structured diversity, to entirely sui generis country-specific approaches. Much of the disagreement, the authors argue, results from the failure to take seriously the distincti…
The institutional differences between presidential and parliamentary rule are well known, yet the practical effects of these divergent constitutional arrangements within democratic polities have received scant attention. This article employs a global data set to test the relationship between a historical measure of parliamentary rule and 14 indicators ranging across three policy areas: politica…