This is an election year. I make that statement with certainty without so much as a glance at the calendar. It is always an election year, and all the more so as campaigns have stretched out into multi-year affairs and as voting has broken out in parts of the world where until recently it was but a distant dream. Reflecting these real-world developments and our own professional interests, it also is always an election year in political science. Hardly an issue of a major political science journal goes by without some consideration—and often several considerations—of elections and voting.

The standard explanation for the choice of electoral institutions, building on Rokkan's seminal work, is that proportional representation (PR) was adopted by a divided right to defend its class interests against a rising left. But new evidence shows that PR strengthens the left and redistribution, and we argue the standard view is wrong historically, analytically, and empirically. We offer a radically different explanation. Integrating two opposed interpretations of PR—minimum winning coalitions versus consensus—we propose that the right adopted PR when their support for consensual regulatory frameworks, especially those of labor markets and skill formation where co-specific investments were important, outweighed their opposition to the redistributive consequences; this occurred in countries with previously densely organized local economies. In countries with adversarial industrial relations, and weak coordination of business and unions, keeping majoritarian institutions helped contain the left. This explains the close association between current varieties of capitalism and electoral institutions, and why they persist over time.

Despite the importance of local elections in the United States, political scientists have little knowledge of what shapes vote choice in most municipalities and special districts, particularly in the suburbs where a majority of Americans live. This article develops and tests models of local voting behavior using unique survey data of over 1,400 voters in 30 different suburban communities. Suburban electoral politics are dominated by a nonrepresentative group of “stakeholders,” who are highly informed and interested in local affairs. Because of this, vote choice in suburban elections ends up sharing many characteristics with larger contests (i.e., issue salience, partisanship, and candidate likeability), although their impact varies with the size and diversity of the particular community (e.g., in smaller suburbs, voters are more engaged in local politics, more likely to know candidates personally, and more likely to vote against incumbents). These findings suggest the importance of developing new theories about voting behavior in micro-electoral contexts.

We compare the behavior of voters under simultaneous and sequential voting rules when voting is costly and information is incomplete. In many political institutions, ranging from small committees to mass elections, voting is sequential, which allows some voters to know the choices of earlier voters. For a stylized model, we generate a variety of predictions about the relative efficiency and participation equity of these two systems, which we test using controlled laboratory experiments. Most of the qualitative predictions are supported by the data, but there are significant departures from the predicted equilibrium strategies, in both the sequential and the simultaneous voting games. We find a tradeoff between information aggregation, efficiency, and equity in sequential voting: a sequential voting rule aggregates information better than simultaneous voting and is more efficient in some information environments, but sequential voting is inequitable because early voters bear more participation costs.

Traditional studies of political participation assume an electoral environment in which voters decide between two White candidates, and find Latino citizens less politically engaged. Given the growth in the number of Latino candidates for office over the past 20 years, this article tests whether ethnicity impacts Latino voting behavior. I argue that the presence of a Latino candidate mobilizes the Latino electorate, resulting in elevated voter turnout and strong support for the co-ethnic candidates. Although some research provides a theoretical basis for such a claim, this article brings together a comprehensive body of empirical evidence to suggest that ethnicity is salient for Latinos and provides a coherent theory that accounts for the empowering role of co-ethnic candidates. Analysis of recent mayoral elections in five major U.S. cities reveals that Latinos were consistently mobilized by co-ethnic candidates.

This article develops two conceptual tools to synthesize democratic theory and the empirical study of institutions. The first is a standard to assess conceptions of democracy called pragmatic equilibrium. A conception of democracy is in pragmatic equilibrium just in case the consequences of its institutional prescriptions realize its values well and better than any other feasible institutional arrangements across a wide range of problems and contexts. Pragmatic equilibrium is a kind of Rawlsian reflective equilibrium. The second is a method of practical reasoning about the consequences of alternative institutional choices that brings conceptions of democracy closer to pragmatic equilibrium. These two ideas are then applied to four conceptions of democracy—minimal, aggregative, deliberative, and participatory—and to two governance problems—deciding rules of political structure and minority tyranny—to show how each conception can improve through reflection on the empirical consequences of various institutional arrangements.

Federalism, when it has not been ignored altogether in normative political theory, has typically been analyzed in terms that fail to match the institution as it exists in the world. Federations are made up of provinces that are too few, too large, too rigid, too constitutionally entrenched, and too tied to ethnocultural identity to match theories based on competitive federalism, Tiebout sorting, democratic self-government, or subsidiarity. A relatively neglected tradition in liberal thought, based on a separation of loyalties and identifiable in Montesquieu, Publius, Constant, Tocqueville, and Acton, however, holds more promise. If the purpose of federalism is to compensate for worrisome tendencies toward centralization, then it is desirable that the provinces large enough to have political power be stable and entrenched and be able to engender loyalty from their citizens, such as the loyalty felt to ethnoculturally specific provinces. Separation of loyalty theories and the bulwark theories of which they are a subset match up with federalism as it exists in the world.

The first extant play of Aristophanes, Acharnians, contains an eerily modern thought-experiment: what if justice is self-interest, rightly understood? The drama examines evidence for the hypothesis in three contexts: international relations; relations between the citizen and the polity; and a special case of the latter, relations between the artist and the polity. The drama shows how rudimentary justice can be secured by promoting economic interests over citizenship and artistic dissent over loyalty. Historically, these thoughts on justice—as refined in Aristophanes' later works—constitute an ancient analog of early liberal thought with its derivation of justice from interest. They represent a pre-Platonic position on justice that differs from both Sophistic and conventional Greek thinking. Normatively, Aristophanes' thought sheds light on weaknesses in modern justice theory. By making the artist's political function the linchpin of a vision of justice, Acharnians suggests a new way to view justice in relation to self-interest.

The prevailing view of both the U.S. Supreme Court and liberal theory in America is that liberal principles are neither essentially religious nor essentially secular, but somehow foundationally neutral, or in the words of the Court neutral between “religion and nonreligion.” This essay challenges the cogency of this view through a comparative examination of two strong defenders of religious freedom from the American revolutionary era: Thomas Jefferson and Isaac Backus. Jefferson, the Enlightenment rationalist, and Backus, the Calvinist-Baptist, may initially seem tailor-made for this foundational neutrality, but closer examination reveals that religious freedom for them was not only an extension of their radically opposed views on religion but also an instrument for the promotion of those views throughout society. The ambiguity of America's founding principles is best understood, not through the notion of neutrality, but as the product of a yet unsettled struggle between devout religion and secular Enlightenment.

This essay takes on the broad question—what explains the political pursuits of religious actors?—by exploring two powerful influences on these pursuits. The first is differentiation, or the degree of autonomy between religious actors and states in their basic authority. The second is political theology, the set of ideas that religious actors hold about political authority and justice. Through global comparisons across religions, regions, and states, it seeks to establish the effect of both influences on two political pursuits in which religion's role is hotly debated today: support for democratization and political violence, including communal violence and terrorism. It concludes with lessons learned commonly from the analysis of both pursuits.

This paper develops a framework for analyzing a defender's allocation of scarce resources against a strategic adversary like a terrorist group in four settings: (1) a baseline case in which the sites the defender tries to guard are “independent” in that resources dedicated to protecting one site have no effect on any other site; (2) if the defender can also allocate resources to border defense, intelligence, or counterterrorist operations which, if successful, protect all of the sites; (3) if threats have strategic and nonstrategic components (e.g., the threat to public health from bioterror attacks and the natural outbreak of new diseases); and (4) if the defender is unsure of the terrorists' preferred targets. The analysis characterizes the defender's optimal (equilibrium) allocations in these settings, an algorithm or approach to finding the optimal allocations, and relevant comparative statics. These characterizations provide a general way of thinking about the resource-allocation problem in these settings.

This paper explores when and why private communication works in crisis diplomacy. Conventional audience-cost models suggest that state leaders must go public with their threats in international crises because leaders cannot tie their hands if signals are issued privately. I present a crisis bargaining game where both the sender and the receiver of signals have a domestic audience. The equilibrium analysis demonstrates that a private threat, albeit of limited credibility, can be equally compelling as a fully credible public threat. The analysis suggests that secrecy works in crisis diplomacy despite its informational inefficacy. Secrecy insulates leaders from domestic political consequences when they capitulate to a challenge to avoid risking unwarranted war. The logic of efficient secrecy helps shed light on the unaccounted history of private diplomacy in international crises. The Alaska Boundary Dispute illustrates this logic.

The laws of war seek to regulate conduct during wartime. The record of compliance with these treaties is mixed. I explain compliance as the result of publicly accepted and so legally binding agreements that create incentives for the parties to enforce those agreements through reciprocity. Ratification by a democracy is a signal that it intends to abide by the treaty standard; those that ratify are more likely to comply. Ratification does not effect the behavior of nondemocracies, however. Ratification of the relevant treaty by both warring parties strengthens reciprocity. There is a hierarchy of average compliance across issues which matches the scope for violations by individuals on each issue, with greater scope for such violations corresponding to lower levels of compliance.

What do countries do when they have committed to a treaty, but then find that commitment challenged? After the creation of the International Criminal Court, the United States tried to get countries, regardless of whether they were parties to the Court or not, to sign agreements not to surrender Americans to the Court. Why did some states sign and others not? Given United States power and threats of military sanctions, some states did sign. However, such factors tell only part of the story. When refusing to sign, many states emphasized the moral value of the court. Further, states with a high domestic rule of law emphasized the importance of keeping their commitment. This article therefore advances two classic arguments that typically are difficult to substantiate; namely, state preferences are indeed partly normative, and international commitments do not just screen states; they also constrain.

Appellate courts make policy, not only by hearing cases themselves, but by establishing legal rules for the disposition of future cases. The problem is that such courts are generally multimember, or collegial, courts. If different judges prefer different rules, can a collegial court establish meaningful legal rules? Can preferences that take the form of legal rules be aggregated? I use a “case-space” model to show that there will exist a collegial rule that captures majoritarian preferences, and to show that there will exist a median rule even if there is no single median judge. I show how collegial rules can differ from the rules of individual judges and how judicial institutions (such as appellate review and the power to write separate opinions) affect the stability and enforceability of legal rules. These results are discussed in light of fundamental debates between legal and political perspectives on judicial behavior.

We analyze the positive and normative implications of regulatory oversight when the policymaking agency can improve the quality of regulation through effort, but only some kinds of effort are observable by the overseer, and the overseer's only power is the ability to veto new regulation. Such oversight can increase the quality of agency regulation, but it also introduces inefficiencies—the agency underinvests in unobservable effort and overinvests in observable effort. Agencies have no incentive to conceal their activities from the overseer; the reforms that are likely to reduce inefficiency are therefore those that improve overseer expertise or lower the costs of agency disclosure, not those that compel disclosure. The normative implications depend on the relative severity of bureaucratic drift and slack problems. When slack is paramount, an overseer that is more anti-regulation than the agency or society improves social welfare, as long as it does not deter the agency from regulating entirely. When drift is paramount, oversight improves social welfare only when it deters regulation. In this case, regulatory oversight is weakly dominated by one of two alternatives: eliminating oversight or banning regulation.