Electoral rules and constitutional structures can influence the level of political corruption. We show that proportional representation (PR) systems are more susceptible to corrupt political rent-seeking than plurality systems. We argue that this result depends on the different loci of rents in PR and plurality systems, and on the monitoring difficulties faced by both voters and opposition parties under PR. We also examine the interaction between electoral rules and presidentialism. We test our main predictions and interaction effects on a cross-section of up to ninety-four democracies. The empirical findings strongly support our hypothesis that PR systems, especially together with presidentialism, are associated with higher levels of corrupt political rent-seeking.

This analysis outlines and tests the steps-to-war explanation of international conflict. At the core of this explanation is the expectation that territorial disputes are a key source of war and that as states that have these disputes make politically relevant alliances, have recurring disputes and build up their military forces against each other, they will experience ever-increasing probabilities of war. The absence of these risk factors is expected to lessen the chances of severe conflict. Utilizing the Militarized Interstate Dispute data of the Correlates of War project, the data analyses provide full support for the steps-to-war explanation during the 1816–1945 era and partial support for the Cold War nuclear 1946–92 span. Among the findings for this latter period is the presence of a curvilinear relationship between the number of prior disputes and the probability of war – after a large number of disputes, states begin to ritualize their behaviour at levels short of war.

Formal models of voting usually assume that political agents, whether parties or candidates, attempt to maximize expected vote shares. ‘Stochastic’ models typically derive the ‘mean voter theorem’ that each agent will adopt a ‘convergent’ policy strategy at the mean of the electoral distribution. In this article, it is argued that this conclusion is contradicted by empirical evidence. Estimates of vote intentions require ‘valence’ terms. The valence of each party derives from the average weight, given by members of the electorate, in judging the overall competence or ‘quality’ of the particular party leader. In empirical models, a party's valence is independent of current policy declarations and can be shown to be statistically significant in the estimation. It is shown here that the addition of valence gives a very strong Bayes factor over an electoral model without valence. The formal model is analysed and shown to be classified by a ‘convergence’ coefficient, defined in terms of the parameters of the empirical model. This coefficient gives necessary and sufficient conditions for convergence. When the necessary condition fails, as it does in these empirical studies with valence, then the convergent equilibrium fails to exist. The empirical evidence is consistent with a formal stochastic model of voting in which there are multiple local Nash equilibria to the vote-maximizing electoral game. Simulation techniques based on the parameters of the empirical model have been used to obtain these local equilibria, which are determined by the principal component of the electoral distribution. Low valence parties, in equilibrium, will tend to adopt positions at the electoral periphery. High valence parties will contest the electoral centre, but will not, in fact, position themselves at the electoral mean. Survey data from Israel for the elections of 1988, 1992 and 1996 are used to compute the parameters of the empirical model and to illustrate the dependence of equilibria on the electoral principal components. The vote maximizing equilibria do not perfectly coincide with the actual party positions. This divergence may be accounted for by more refined models that either (i) include activism or (ii) consider strategic party considerations over post-election coalition bargaining.

Work exploring the relationship between public opinion and public policy over time has largely been restricted to the United States. A wider application of this line of research can provide insights into how representation varies across political systems, however. This article takes a first step in this direction using a new body of data on public opinion and government spending in Britain. The results of analyses reveal that the British public appears to notice and respond (thermostatically) to changes in public spending in particular domains, perhaps even more so than in the United States. They also reveal that British policymakers represent these preferences in spending, though the magnitude and structure of this response is less pronounced and more general. The findings are suggestive about the structuring role of institutions.

In this article the impact of voters' regime preferences, i.e. their preferences for either divided or unified government, on their voting behaviour, is analysed. The theory expounded, combining behavioural as well as institutional approaches, predicts that voters weigh their regime against their partisan preferences to derive their vote choice. This theory and its implications are tested on the 2002 French legislative elections using a multinomial logit set-up. The results indicate that regime voting adds to the explanatory power of traditional vote-choice models. Statistical simulations provide further evidence that regime preferences play a decisive role in the voting booth, especially for voters who are not politically ‘anchored’.

Does the geographic concentration of industry ‘matter’ outside the United States? Observers have long speculated that while geographically concentrated industries may be influential in American politics, this is probably not the case in countries where the electorate votes more as a national constituency. Others disagree, urging that clustered industries have an advantage regardless of how the political map is drawn. We sharpen the terms of debate and weigh in with empirical evidence from a cross-sectional analysis of intended voter turnout in eight member-states of the European Union and a multi-year study of voter turnout in the Netherlands. These tests uniformly show that, across different types of electoral systems, including those in which voters vote as a national constituency, thereby removing any effects of electoral geography per se, workers in traded industries that are physically concentrated are, in fact, substantially more likely to vote than employees in traded but geographically dispersed sectors.

Roll-call cohesion scores are the most widely used measures of voting blocs in legislative studies, appearing in literally hundreds of studies since their introduction in 1924. Despite a staple of legislative studies, we know virtually nothing about the statistical properties of these scores. In this article, it is shown how such scores suffer a serious bias problem: scores are artificially inflated for small parties, especially those that are less unified. The problem is demonstrated and an intuitive solution proposed. It is illustrated with data from the United States and from Brazil.

Endowing agents that prefer co-operative outcomes with asymmetric power substantially increases the chances that both co-operative agents survive and that co-operative worlds evolve across a variety of structural settings of conflict and co-operation present in international relations; particularly when agents are endowed with the ability to selectively interact with other agents. These results are consistent with the general finding that non-compulsory play consistently helps co-operators. The question addressed in this analysis is whether or not asymmetric power also helps exploitive agents in the same structural settings; a question heretofore not analysed. Contrary to expectations, the simulation results reported here suggest that exploitive agents benefit from asymmetric power only in very restricted circumstances – circumstances relatively unlikely to occur in international relations. In effect, there is an asymmetry in the benefits of asymmetric power.