“Worker agency”—the idea that workers have free will and will exercise it to meet their needs—is a fundamental part of organizational psychology and the sociology of work. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in a midwestern factory, the authors examine how workers create opportunities for short-term flexibility within a workplace characterized by shift work, strict production quotas, and …
This article reviews several recent studies on working families and discusses the importance of why workplace flexibility needs to become a standard of the U.S. workplace. Most children reside in households with either two employed parents or an employed single parent. The inflexibility of work and school schedules is a pressure that working parents feel on a daily basis and one that affects th…
This research aims to understand the consequences of inadequate workplace flexibility through the lens of daily stress processes. Using a sample of hourly paid hotel employees with children ages 10 to 18 who participated in a daily diary study, the authors compared workers with low and high flexibility on stressor exposure, reactivity, and transmission. The findings showed a consistent pattern …
Premier science largely depends on the quality of the pool of future scientists. Women now represent a large part of the talent pool in the United States, but many data sources indicate that they are more likely than men to “leak” out of the science pipeline before obtaining tenure at a college or university. The authors’ research examines this issue in detail, drawing on multiple sources, incl…
While the U.S. military might at first glance appear to be a model of rigidity rather than flexibility, there are strong incentives to address the work-family concerns of service members and their families. From a work-family perspective, military service generates substantial structural, energy, psychological, and behavioral tensions with family life. Although the U.S. military had already imp…
Since 1991, Western bilateral and multilateral democracy promotion assistance, especially for civil society development, has increased dramatically. Much of the literature that assesses the impact of this assistance has focused on either direct recipients in civil society or macro transformations, with minimal systematic analysis of how developments in civil society unfold. This article argues …
In recent years, China and India have extensively liberalized their economies. They have departed from the East Asian developmental states, which have restricted foreign direct investment (FDI) to protect domestic industry, and the liberal FDI strategy of Latin America during a similar stage of development as they have eschewed dependent development. Instead, they have taken a “liberalization t…
This article challenges a key part of the conventional view of coalitions in presidential systems that sees them as short-lived and ad hoc. The author shows instead that there is wide variation in the durability of governing coalitions across these regimes. She develops a theory of the incentives of parties to participate in the government and the circumstances under which scholars might expect…
A positive relationship between economic performance and support for incumbents is routinely taken as evidence that elections work for accountability. Recent investigations into this relationship have examined just how signals from the economy translate into popular support. However, neither selection models nor sanctioning models explicitly incorporate the actions of political elites. This art…
In this article, the authors focus attention on a poorly understood aspect of contentious politics: the interaction between the transnational diffusion of new forms of protest behavior and police practices in response to them. Studies of diffusion are usually limited to the diffusion of one kind of innovation by one set of actors to another, as in the diffusion of technical innovations from inn…
What impact, if any, do ethnic federalism and the geographic concentration of ethnic minorities have on the political incorporation of minorities in democracies with single-member district elections? Many studies on ethnic voting in the United States have examined the impact of majority-minority districts on the turnout of minority voters and the election of minority candidates. However, few st…
This article asks whether alleged partisan policy convergence has eradicated differences in relation to privatization of delivery of welfare state services. The study utilizes a novel methodological approach—numerous intrastate comparisons set in a consilience research framework—to assess the extent of convergence and its underlying reasons. It explores the partisan politics of school privatiza…
In this article the authors study delegation problems within multiparty coalition governments. They argue that coalition parties can use the committee system to “shadow” the ministers of their partners; that is, they can appoint committee chairs from other governing parties, who will then be well placed to monitor and/or check the actions of the corresponding ministers. The authors analyze whic…
Over the past decades, (mostly) private actors have been providing the public good of cross-national political data in a decentralized, uncoordinated, and unregulated fashion. They have been successful in generating an incessant supply of data. However, the success of current practices of data production has been masking severe structural limitations: the systematic undersupply of data and the …
When something goes awry in a governmental agency, a frequent claim is that appointed political heads are incompetent. If true, what explains this in a separation of powers system where the executive nominates and the legislature approves? Our analysis provides a rationale and conditions for rational incompetence. Specifically, we present a model in which a President nominates and the Senate co…
We develop a model of electoral accountability with primaries. Prior to the general election, the supporters of each of two parties decide which candidates to nominate. We show that supporters suffer from a fundamental tension: while they want politicians who will faithfully implement the party’s agenda in office, they need politicians who can win elections. Accountability to supporters fails w…
A model of political information processing drawn from the studies of political behavior and psychology is applied to the emergence of cooperation observed in classic repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) game experiments. The results show that the model can robustly account for the learning of cooperation observed in the experiments when players are aware of the strategic nature of the game and mak…
Since Hardin first formulated the tragedy of the commons, researchers have described various ways that commons problems are solved, all based on the model of individual rationality. Invariably, these institutional solutions involve creating some system of property rights. We formulate an alternative model, one not founded on property rights but on decision-making around so-called vector payoffs…
Many scholars show that institutions help citizens with their political decisions. However, real-world contexts contain multiple institutions that are imposed together. Thus, I develop a theory and experimental test of the conditions under which combinations of two institutions induce citizens to trust a speaker’s statements and make better decisions than when only one institution is present. T…
The protests associated with the 2011 Arab Spring represent a serious and sustained challenge to autocratic rule in the Middle East. Under what conditions will Arab protest movements translate into a full-fledged ‘fourth wave’ of democratization? We argue that questions about the commitment of Islamic political opposition to democracy beyond a country’s first free election may hinder Middle Eas…