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…
We know little about how market reform affects political development, especially citizens' behavior. Market reform advocates prescribe that citizens should reduce their reliance on the state, turn to nonstate actors for assistance, and obtain limited state goods and services through their membership in certain social categories, not their particular traits. An analysis of three mass surveys and…
Previous studies have examined the causal link between Protestantism and democratization, primarily in shaping a nation-state's cultural ethos and its tendency to affect the outcome of democratic politics. Historically, Protestantism has also been linked to generating a political culture that promotes individualism, tolerance, the pluralism of ideas, and civic associationalism. Recent empirical…
Social transfer programs are thought to generate beneficiary groups who will act politically to defend "their" programs from retrenchment. But little empirical research has been conducted to either verify or disconfirm the micro foundations of this hypothesis, which lies at the heart of the "new social risks" thesis as well as many economic analyses of welfare state politics. This article tests…
Stylized evidence indicates that democracies and autocracies both expropriate foreign direct investment but that democracies do so less frequently. What explains the similarities and differences in expropriation between regime types? An analysis of actual expropriation acts in 63 developing countries from 1960 to 1990 shows that democracies are most likely to expropriate foreign investment when…
This article pushes forward our understanding of populism by developing one of the more underappreciated definitions of populism, populism as discourse. It does so by creating a quantitative measure of populist discourse suitable for cross-country and historical analysis. The article starts by laying out the discursive definition of populism in the context of existing definitions. It then opera…
In 2004-2005, for the first time in more than five decades, Egypt witnessed the rise of a protest movement calling for the end of one-party rule. In 1 year, Egypt witnessed more oppositional demonstrations, rallies, and the organization of nonviolent dissident groups than it has seen in the previous 25 years. However, the outcome of this mobilization in terms of democratic opening remained limi…
Political scientists largely agree that causal mechanisms are crucial to understanding causation. Recent advances in qualitative and quantitative methodology suggest that causal explanations must be contextually bounded. Yet the relationship between context and mechanisms and this relationship's importance for causation are not well understood. This study defines causal mechanisms as portable c…
Rules governing the corporate identity of multinational companies are national in nature, with the one exception of the European Company Statute. For the first time in the history of capitalism, this statute enables companies to jettison national rules of incorporation in favor of an international legal identity. This article explains why the statute was the most protracted legislative initiati…
In the 1990s, the choice of an appropriate exchange rate regime began to capture the attention of policy makers across Latin America. Several countries pegged their currency to the U.S. dollar or even officially substituted the dollar for their national currency. Although economists and political scientists have made piecemeal contributions to the understanding of such policy choices, the liter…
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…