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…
Oil rents may at times fall like "manna from heaven" into the fiscal coffers of the state. Yet politicians also make decisions that can increase or decrease the extent to which oil rents accrue to the central government. Though counterintuitive, various evidence suggests that politicians sometimes do not seek to maximize the state’s claim on rents. In this article, the author substantiates this…
This article attempts to bring the politics of scale back into the study of comparative politics. Explicitly focusing on the question of electoral turnout in the less industrialized world, it explores the impact of variations in community size relative to other influences on citizen participation. The findings, which draw on both aggregate and individual-level data at the subnational level of a…
Correcting the relative lack of attention to the revenue side of public finance, this article examines to what extent globalization constrains partisan tax policy. The author hypothesizes that political ideology is still a good predictor of taxation in the neoliberal era, advancing this argument against the prominent globalization thesis: that global economic pressures have supplanted political…
This article aims to contribute to the debate on institutional change by introducing social structure as the basis for theorizing about the direction of such change. The empirical context is the long-term trends of federal institutional change in the federations of the industrialized West (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States). It is the author…
Building on the varieties of capitalism thesis of comparative advantages in technological innovation, the authors theorize the effect of sociopolitical coordination from a dynamic perspective and then apply the dynamic theories to the political economy of employment, in comparison to the existing employment literature situated in a constant-technology context. Based on cross-sectional survey as…
When environmental issues emerged on the international agenda in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the United States was of one of the strongest and most consistent supporters of international environmental treaties and agreements. The member states of the European Union subsequently ratified all the international treaties created in this period, but U.S. leadership was crucial and European state…
This article documents and explains the puzzling lack of backsliding in political reforms among the new postcommunist EU members, even though these countries are no longer subject to the powerful incentives of the EU membership promise. Using a combination of cross-national statistics, expert interviews, and public opinion data, the authors show that the new EU members have experienced at most …
Cross-national surveys suggest that regulatory and policy uncertainty is an important constraint on investment in developing countries. Yet there has been little direct empirical investigation of the sources of this uncertainty. This article presents evidence of an inverted U-shaped relationship between firms’ perceptions of policy uncertainty and political regime type. Firms in hybrid regimes …
An experimental survey on bureaucratic responsiveness in the social welfare arena in Poland and Russia shows that both countries’ social welfare workers are capable of performing in a manner deemed helpful to local Polish and Russian citizens—a key component of effective governance. Such findings are surprising given an absence of reforms to create Weberian bureaucracies out of both countries’ …
Does respect for human rights check or promote terrorism? This question is hotly debated within policy circles. Some hold that restricting human rights is a necessary if unfortunate cost of preventing terrorism. Others conclude that such abuses aggravate political grievances that contribute to terror. The authors demonstrate that theory and data support the latter position. They hypothesize tha…