Institutional legitimacy is perhaps the most important political capital courts possess. Many believe, however, that the legitimacy of elected state courts is being threatened by the rise of politicized judicial election campaigns and the breakdown of judicial impartiality. Three features of such campaigns, the argument goes, are dangerous to the perceived impartiality of courts: campaign contributions, attack ads, and policy pronouncements by candidates for judicial office. By means of an experimental vignette embedded in a representative survey, I investigate whether these factors in fact compromise the legitimacy of courts. The survey data indicate that campaign contributions and attack ads do indeed lead to a diminution of legitimacy, in courts just as in legislatures. However, policy pronouncements, even those promising to make decisions in certain ways, have no impact whatsoever on the legitimacy of courts and judges. These results are strongly reinforced by the experiment's ability to compare the effects of these campaign factors across institutions (a state Supreme Court and a state legislature). Thus, this analysis demonstrates that legitimacy is not obdurate and that campaign activity can indeed deplete the reservoir of goodwill courts typically enjoy, even if the culprit is not the free-speech rights the U.S. Supreme Court announced in 2002.

A venerable supposition of American survey research is that the vast majority of voters have incoherent and unstable preferences about political issues, which in turn have little impact on vote choice. We demonstrate that these findings are manifestations of measurement error associated with individual survey items. First, we show that averaging a large number of survey items on the same broadly defined issue area—for example, government involvement in the economy, or moral issues—eliminates a large amount of measurement error and reveals issue preferences that are well structured and stable. This stability increases steadily as the number of survey items increases and can approach that of party identification. Second, we show that once measurement error has been reduced through the use of multiple measures, issue preferences have much greater explanatory power in models of presidential vote choice, again approaching that of party identification.

What is leadership? What is good leadership? What is successful leadership? Answers emerge from our study of a formal model in which followers face a coordination problem: they wish to choose the best action while conforming as closely as possible to the actions of others. Although they would like to do the right thing and do it together, followers are unsure about the relative merits of their options. They learn about their environment and the likely moves of others by listening to leaders. These leaders bridge differences of opinion and become coordinating focal points. A leader's influence increases with her judgement (her sense of direction) and her ability to convey ideas (her clarity of communication). A leader with perfect clarity enjoys greater influence than one with a perfect sense of direction. When followers choose how much attention to pay to leaders, they listen only to the most coherent communicators. However, power-hungry leaders who need an audience sometimes obfuscate their messages, but less so when their followers place more emphasis on conformity than on doing the right thing.

The standard interpretation of Locke assumes symmetry between punishment by individuals in the state of nature and punishment by states in the state of nature. The standard interpretation is incorrect because in cases where the punishment is altruistic, the state is not the functional equivalent of a person, having a more restricted power to punish. The asymmetry arises from Locke's contractualism because individuals in the state of nature might reasonably refuse to give governments the power to punish altruistically. This interpretation clarifies some ongoing puzzles about Locke's theory of property where questions about coerced sacrifices to benefit others also arise. Locke's argument is vulnerable to important objections, specifically that he equivocates on the meaning of the word “body,” that he places too much emphasis on the right of self-preservation, and that he legitimates nearly unlimited appropriation by states.

Judicial scholars often struggle to disentangle the effects of law and policy preferences on U.S. Supreme Court decision making. We employ a new approach to measuring the effect—if any—of the law on justices' decisions. We use positions taken on Supreme Court cases by members of Congress and presidents to identify policy components of voting. Doing so enables us to isolate the effects of three legal doctrines: adherence to precedent, judicial restraint, and a strict interpretation of the First Amendment's protection of speech clause. We find considerable evidence that legal factors play an important role in Supreme Court decision making. We also find that the effect of legal factors varies across justices.

Systemic theories of international politics rarely predict conflict short of cataclysmic systemic wars, and dyadic theories of conflict lack systemic perspective. This article attempts to bridge the gap by introducing a two-step theory of conflict among Great Powers. In the first stage, states engage in a dynamic, ongoing process of managing the international system, which inevitably produces tensions among them. In the second stage, relative levels of security-related activity determine how and when those tensions erupt into disputes. A test of the theory on Great Power conflicts from the nineteenth century supports the argument and, moreover, favors the deterrence model over the spiral model as a proximate explanation of conflict in the second stage.

Democracy can entail the representation of discourses as well as persons or groups. We explain and advocate discursive representation; explore its justifications, advantages, and problems; and show how it can be accomplished in practice. This practice can involve the selection of discursive representatives to a formal Chamber of Discourses and more informal processes grounded in the broader public sphere. Discursive representation supports many aspects of deliberative democracy and is especially applicable to settings such as the international system lacking a well-defined demos.

The decision to vote has puzzled scholars for decades. Theoretical models predict little or no variation in participation in large population elections and empirical models have typically accounted for only a relatively small portion of individual-level variance in turnout behavior. However, these models have not considered the hypothesis that part of the variation in voting behavior can be attributed to genetic effects. Matching public voter turnout records in Los Angeles to a twin registry, we study the heritability of political behavior in monozygotic and dizygotic twins. The results show that a significant proportion of the variation in voting turnout can be accounted for by genes. We also replicate these results with data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and show that they extend to a broad class of acts of political participation. These are the first findings to suggest that humans exhibit genetic variation in their tendency to participate in political activities.

Public support for a conflict is not a blank check. Combat provides information people use to update their expectations about the outcome, direction, value, and cost of a war. Critical are fatalities—the most salient costs of conflict. I develop a rational expectations theory in which both increasing recent casualties and rising casualty trends lead to decreased support. Traditional studies neither recognize nor provide a method for untangling these multiple influences. I conduct six experiments, three on the Iraq War (two with national, representative samples) and three with a new type of panel experiment design on hypothetical military interventions. The results of hazard and ordered logit analyses of almost 3,000 subjects support a rational expectations theory linking recent casualties, casualty trends, and their interaction to wartime approval. I also examine the effects of the probability of victory, information levels, and individual characteristics on the support for war, and contrast results from representative and convenience samples.

The symmetric, stationary subgame-perfect Nash equilibrium in Volden and Wiseman (2007) is characterized by cutpoints between regions of purely collective, mixed, and purely particularistic budget allocations. The cutpoints in our published article were derived by finding conditions under which the proposer receives a higher utility in one region than in another. However, a stationary equilibrium requires that the proposer would not unilaterally offer a different type of proposal, given that all other players continue to play their present strategies.

This study considers whether and to what extent defections from a government coalition are punished. The study employs data on coalitions in eastern and western Europe from 1950 through 2006. The results show that if a coalition breaks due to conflict between partners or if one party withdraws from it, subsequent inclusion of the conflicting parties in the same coalition becomes less likely. Additional tests demonstrate that this effect occurs because defectors are punished by their former coalition partners. Another extension of the main analysis shows that rather than becoming pariah parties, defectors lose credibility only in the eyes of their former coalition partners.

By skipping managers and appealing directly to politicians, whistleblowers can play a critical role in revealing organizational information. However, the protection of whistleblowers can affect managers' abilities to provide employees with incentives to exert effort. This paper explores this tradeoff with a model of agency decision-making under incomplete information. In the game, an employee's effort determines a project's quality, and a manager chooses whether to approve the project and discipline the employee. The employee and politician wish for only “good” projects to be approved. By whistleblowing, an employee reveals the quality to a politician outside of the organization, who may override the manager's decision. A key finding is that from the politician's perspective, the benefits of whistleblower protections depend on the preferences of the manager. If the manager is inclined toward approving projects, then the costs of lower employee effort may outweigh the informational benefits of whistleblowing. The optimal policy may then be to ban whistleblowing. By contrast, when the manager is inclined toward rejecting projects, whistleblower protections prevent him or her from suppressing effort and are unambiguously beneficial.

Although democracy is a key concept in political science, debate continues over definitions and mechanisms. Bueno de Mesquita, Smith, Siverson, & Morrow (2003) make the important claim that most of democracy's effects are in fact due to something conceptually simpler and empirically easier to measure than democracy: the size of the minimum winning coalition that selects the leader. The argument is intuitively appealing and supported by extensive data analysis. Unfortunately, the statistical technique they use induces omitted variable bias into their results. They argue that they need to control for democracy, but their estimation procedure is equivalent to omitting democracy from their analysis. When we reestimate their regressions controlling for democracy, most of their important findings do not survive.

In “The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” Robert Pape (2003) presents an analysis of his suicide terrorism data. He uses the data to draw inferences about how territorial occupation and religious extremism affect the decision of terrorist groups to use suicide tactics. We show that the data are incapable of supporting Pape's conclusions because he “samples on the dependent variable.”—The data only contain cases in which suicide terror is used. We construct bounds (Manski, 1995) on the quantities relevant to Pape's hypotheses and show exactly how little can be learned about the relevant statistical associations from the data produced by Pape's research design.

What shapes politicians' strategies in political systems where pork, rather than programmatic platforms, wins elections? We argue that resource control provides much of the answer, as politics in pork-centric systems will in large part be organized around actors who control access to pork. We use new national and subnational data from Brazil and Japan to show how the degree of centralization of resources can affect party affiliation patterns. We find that in decentralized Brazil, both national and subnational politicians join parties that control their subnational government. In contrast, in our analysis of centralized Japan, politicians at both national and subnational levels base their party affiliation decisions on national-level partisan considerations.

Women have made less progress toward gender equality in the Middle East than in any other region. Many observers claim this is due to the region's Islamic traditions. I suggest that oil, not Islam, is at fault; and that oil production also explains why women lag behind in many other countries. Oil production reduces the number of women in the labor force, which in turn reduces their political influence. As a result, oil-producing states are left with atypically strong patriarchal norms, laws, and political institutions. I support this argument with global data on oil production, female work patterns, and female political representation, and by comparing oil-rich Algeria to oil-poor Morocco and Tunisia. This argument has implications for the study of the Middle East, Islamic culture, and the resource curse.

Kevin Clarke and Randall Stone (2008) offer a methodological critique of some of our tests of the selectorate theory in The Logic of Political Survival (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003). We accept their critique of residualization for control variables in those tests, but reject the contention that the size of the winning coalition does not predict the provision of public goods and private benefits. We present new tests that control for elements of democracy other than W and that do not use residualization. These new tests show that selectorate theory is strongly and robustly supported. Our measure of the size of the winning coalition is in the theoretically predicted direction and is statistically significant for 28 out of 31 different public goods and private benefits. Aspects of democracy not contained in the selectorate theory explain less of the variance than does the theory's core factor, namely, winning coalition size, for 25 of the 31 public goods and private benefits.

The names of authors Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Randolph M. Siverson were listed incorrectly both on the front cover and on the internal table of contents of the August 2008 issue of American Political Science Review for their Forum response article “Retesting Selectorate Theory, Separating the Effect of W from Other Elements of Democracy” (pp. 393–400).

Scott Ashworth, Joshua Clinton, Adam Meirowitz, and Kristopher Ramsay (2008) allege that I have committed the sin of sampling on the dependent variable by considering only the universe of suicide terrorist attacks rather than the universe of all imaginable instances when potential or actual terrorists might have committed suicide attacks, and so cannot measure the effects of any independent variables. They go on to describe a method that they say I should have used, which is not of interest because the accusation that is supposed to motivate this discussion is inaccurate.

The main claim—that my work on suicide terrorism samples on the dependent variable—is simply wrong. Indeed, the authors paid no attention to the large portions of my recent book that explain what we know about factors that make resort to suicide terrorist campaigns more or less likely, and how we know it. Hence, this letter is mainly devoted to updating Ashworth, Clinton, Meirowitz, and Ramsay on my work. I also make a few comments about the general question of whether concerns about “sample bias” should carry significant weight when dealing with the complete universe of a phenomenon, as is the case in my work on suicide terrorism.

A political leader's temptation to deny costly debts to past supporters is a central moral-hazard problem in politics. This paper develops a game-theoretic model to probe the consequences of this moral-hazard problem for leaders who compete to establish political regimes. In contests for power, absolute leaders who are not subject to third-party judgments can credibly recruit only limited support. A leader can do better by organizing supporters into a court which could cause his downfall. In global negotiation-proof equilibria, leaders cannot recruit any supporters without such constitutional checks. Egalitarian norms make recruiting costlier in oligarchies, which become weaker than monarchies. The ruler's power and limitations on entry of new leaders are derived from focal-point effects in games with multiple equilibria. The relationships of trust between leaders and their supporters are personal constitutions which underlie all other political constitutions.