Quotas have become an important mechanism through which women today are entering legislatures worldwide. This study shows that the introduction of quotas has helped overcome constraints on women's representation posed by economic underdevelopment, cultural influences, and even electoral systems. This study also demonstrates that the introduction of quotas offers the most explanatory power for w…
International efforts to promote democracy can have unanticipated effects. International election observation is perceived to increase domestic confidence in the electoral process and reduce fraud. Conversely, election boycotts are perceived to be more likely as electoral fairness decreases. The authors document a puzzling relationship between monitored elections and opposition party boycotts: …
This article explains the unanticipated emergence of party-oriented legislators and rising party discipline in Brazil since the early 1990s. The authors contend that deputies in Brazil became increasingly party oriented because the utilities of party-programmatic and patronage-based electoral strategies shifted with market reforms that created a programmatic cleavage in Brazilian politics and d…
It is often underlined that African oil-producing countries are politically unstable as a result of the role that this resource can play in political incentives. Based on data documenting the duration in office of heads of state of 26 African countries (North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa), this study reveals a surprising twist on the conventional wisdom: The purported instability of African oi…
Evidence that turnout is higher under proportional representation (PR) than in majoritarian elections is overwhelming. Yet previous research has largely failed to explain why. One line of argument maintains that higher turnout under PR is a by-product of larger party systems. However, a larger number of parties has been demonstrated to depress turnout. Alternatively, it is argued that majoritar…
This article analyzes the formation of a stable dominant party in an authoritarian regime as a commitment problem between two sides: the ruler and other elites. After defining a dominant party regime and outlining the costs and benefits that such a regime entails for each side, the authors examine the efforts made in Russia to establish United Russia as a dominant party and argue that the Kreml…
How do nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) affect local politics in developing democracies? Specifically, do NGOs have systematic effects on the fortunes of incumbent political parties in local elections? Existing work predicts starkly contradictory political effects: Some scholars claim that NGOs most likely help incumbents by providing services for which politicians can claim credit, whereas…
The increase in health care expenditures is a major problem of all welfare states. To counter this trend, since the early 1980s, most OECD countries have changed the way hospitals are financed. Although these reforms are certainly linked to country-specific factors, the authors' main argument is that they are in part due to a diffusion process: Policy change in one country is influenced by prev…
Studies of transitions from authoritarian rule have shown that militaries play decisive roles in authoritarian breakdowns. The military possesses coercive resources that can suppress any challenge to authoritarian rule. This article explains why and under what conditions militaries in authoritarian regimes, when faced with popular demonstrations, will support the path of political liberalizatio…
Do Western European political parties adjust their ideological positions in response to shifts in public opinion and to changing global economic conditions? Based on a time-series, cross-sectional analysis of parties' ideological dynamics in eight Western European democracies from 1976-1998, the authors conclude that both factors influence parties' ideological positions but that this relationsh…
Virtually every government provides distributive transfers for electoral purposes. However, the level and form of such transfers vary dramatically across countries. Although transfers take many forms, they can generally be characterized as being either broad (providing benefits to large segments of the electorate) or narrow (targeting benefits only to select groups of voters). Variation in the …
This article examines the sociopolitical conditions for preventing market failure in public goods investment. Based on International Social Survey Program data for 17 advanced industrialized countries, the author compares economies with strong and weak institutions of interfirm coordination in how they encourage investment in skills and technological innovation and highlight the inefficiency of…
This article argues that differences in the dispersion of corporate ownership help to explain why party positions on corporate governance vary across countries and over time. It shows that British, French, and German political debates over takeover regulation since the 1950s differ significantly along several dimensions, including the pattern of left—right competition and the timing of debate, …
This article investigates the determinants of social capital by analyzing an original survey of post-Soviet Central Asia. It tests hypotheses derived from two related questions: whether networks, norms, and trust are empirically related and the extent to which four factors—culture, regime type, perceptions of government responsiveness, and development interventions—predict levels of social capi…
According to attitudinal theorists, justices on the U.S. Supreme Court decide cases largely on political preferences that fall within one dimension of ideology. The focus of this study is to test whether a unidimensional ideological model explains the voting behavior of Canadian Supreme Court justices (1992—1997). The factor-analytic results in three areas of law, two of which have never been e…
By focusing on parliamentary systems, this article presents an argument that legislators who have strong local ties and individual support bases are more likely to be individualistic and so break party unity in parliament. They are simply less dependent on parties for their careers, political and otherwise. The article draws on an original data set of legislators' votes and their biographies fr…
In the postcommunist countries' candidate to the European membership, the EU and the Council of Europe exercised a heavy pressure on domestic elite to promote the adoption of institutional guarantees of judicial independence and judicial capacity. Relying on a wide set of interviews with the key actors of the European and domestic institutions, this article will discuss the logic of action of t…
It has been argued that inclusive and decentralized selection procedures create greater incentives for parliamentarians to enhance their personal reputations. However, while the observable implications of this theory are at the level of individual members, the empirical data often brought to bear on this question to date have been collected at an aggregate level—the partisan bloc or legislative…
One might expect governments to react to deepening European integration since the mid-1980s by updating national school curricula in social science subjects such as history and geography so as to reflect the new realities. France has done so, whereas England has not. This study asks how one explains this variation in outcome. Established explanations for why Britain has been a more reluctant Eu…
Much of the disagreement in the debate about globalization and its present or absent effects on the welfare state stems from competing assumptions about the individual-level determinants of redistributional preferences. This article calls for and provides testing of these causal mechanisms at the individual level. Traditional accounts suggest that risks at the industry level are important deter…