Adams and Merrill have developed a model of policy-seeking parties in a parliamentary democracy competing in a PR electoral system, in which party elites are uncertain about voters’ evaluations of the parties’ valence attributes such as competence, integrity and charisma. This article extends that model to situations where voters hold coalitions of parties collectively responsible for their valence-related performances, such as how voters evaluate governing parties’ competence in handling issues like the economy, crime and foreign policy crises. It may also be relevant to voters’ evaluations of proto-coalitions of opposition parties. Computations suggest the central substantive conclusions reported in Adams and Merrill extend to this generalized model, and that collective responsibility enhances coalition members’ incentives to converge to similar policy positions but depresses their prospects of achieving their policy objectives.

Public service broadcasters (PSBs) are a central part of national news media landscapes, and are often regarded as specialists in the provision of hard news. But does exposure to public versus commercial news influence citizens’ knowledge of current affairs? This question is investigated in this article using cross-national surveys capturing knowledge of current affairs and media consumption. Propensity score analyses test for effects of PSBs on knowledge, and examine whether PSBs vary in this regard. Results indicate that compared to commercial news, PSBs have a positive influence on knowledge of hard news, though not all PSBs are equally effective in this way. Cross-national differences are related to factors such as de jure independence, proportion of public financing and audience share.

Almost all the prolific work done on economic voting has been based on the classic reward–punishment model, which treats the economy as a valence issue. The economy is a valence issue, but it is much more than that. This article explores two other dimensions of economic voting – position and patrimony. Investigating a 2010 British survey containing relevant measures on these three dimensions, the authors estimate their impact on vote intention, using a carefully specified system of equations. According to the evidence reported, each dimension of economic voting has its own independent effect. Moreover, together, they reveal a ‘compleat’ economic voter, who wields considerable power over electoral choice in Britain. This new result confirms and extends recent work on American and French elections.

Although qualified-majority voting is possible, member states in the Council of the European Union (EU) still adopt most policies by consensus. The agent-based model of coalition building in multilateral negotiations presented here addresses this puzzle. The model demonstrates that consensual decisions may emerge as an unintended by-product of government representatives’ desire to form blocking coalitions. A qualitative case study demonstrates the plausibility of the model's assumptions and resulting coalition-building dynamics. Moreover, a quantitative test shows that the model's predictions correspond closely to the observed consensus rates. Finally, computational experiments predict a positive effect of the voting threshold but no effect of increases in membership on winning coalition size, which has important practical implications for institutional design and enlargement policy.

This article combines theory and narrative to shed new light on the politics surrounding the making of central bank independence in contemporary Britain. Its central argument is that Gordon Brown's rewriting of the British monetary constitution in May 1997 constituted political manipulation in a Rikerian sense. The government removed a contentious issue from party politics in order to signal competence and enforce internal discipline. Building on Elster's constraint theory, the paper argues that Brown adopted a pre-commitment strategy aimed at binding others. The heresthetic move had dual consequences, both constraining and enabling. The institutionalization of discipline enabled New Labour to achieve economic and political goals. By revisiting the political rationality of precommitment, this article questions the dominant credibility story underlying the choice of economic institutions.

This article sets out and tests a theory of public policy investment – how democratic governments seek to enhance their chances of re-election by managing a portfolio of policy priorities for the public, analogous to the relationship between investment manager and client. Governments choose policies that yield returns the public values; and rebalance their policy priorities later to adjust risk and stabilize return. Do the public reward returns to policy capital or punish risky policy investments? The article investigates whether returns to policy investment guide political management and statecraft. Time-series analyses of risk and return in Britain 1971–2000 reveal that risk and return on government policy portfolios predict election outcomes, and that returns, risk profiles and the uncertainty in public signals influence the prioritization of policies.

Studies of the link between state capacity and development often utilize national-level governance indicators to explain fine-grained development outcomes. As capacity in some bureaucratic agencies matters more for these outcomes than capacity in others, this work proxies for capacity within the set of relevant agencies by using a measure of ‘mean’ capacity across all agencies in a polity. This practice is problematic for two reasons: (1) within-country, cross-agency diversity in capacity often overwhelms the variation encountered across public sectors considered in their entireties; (2) national-level reputations for capacity are not particularly informative about differences in capacity in functionally equivalent agencies in different countries. The article draws on the author's survey of public employees in Bolivia, Brazil and Chile to establish these points.

In international politics ‘friends’ co-ally. But friendship is relational and contextual. Countries are more likely to act on particular common interests if few other actors share that identity. In contrast, new cleavages are likely to emerge as an identity becomes ubiquitous. The tendency for states to form alliances based on certain affinities is thus best thought of as a variable, rather than as a constant. For example, in systems where democracies are scarce, democracies eagerly co-ally. As democracy becomes common, however, incentives binding democratic allies together weaken compared to other definitions of mutual interest. This argument, and the evidence we provide, suggest that the salience of identities as cues to affinity and difference vary with the distribution of types in the system.

Research on terrorism in democracies borrows from the literature on civil war and rebellion to argue that more proportional representation decreases the likelihood of terrorist violence. However, theories of broader social mobilization may be ill-suited to predicting the occurrence of terrorism. This article proposes that proportionalism's institutionalization of small minority groups as legitimate but relatively insignificant political actors leads to militancy. Analyses of the Global Terrorism Database on domestic terrorist attacks across all democracies in 1975–2007 provide broad support for this argument. The presence and greater degrees of proportionalism are significantly associated with greater levels of domestic terrorism when ethnic fractionalization within a given society increases. Moreover, domestic terrorism increases as the number of small parties represented in the legislature increases.

What explains local variation in electoral manipulation in countries with ongoing internal conflict? The theory of election fraud developed in this article relies on the candidates’ loyalty networks as the agents manipulating the electoral process. It predicts (i) that the relationship between violence and fraud follows an inverted U-shape and (ii) that loyalty networks of both incumbent and challenger react differently to the security situation on the ground. Disaggregated violence and election results data from the 2009 Afghanistan presidential election provide empirical results consistent with this theory. Fraud is measured both by a forensic measure, and by using results from a visual inspection of a random sample of the ballot boxes. The results align with the two predicted relationships, and are robust to other violence and fraud measures.

How does individual political efficacy affect the construction of policy preferences? This article presents a model of individual-level politicization of policy preference, which draws on psychological and political explanations and posits that greater external political efficacy results in a stronger effect of political ideology on concrete policy preference. Two empirical studies that test this hypothesis are reported: an original survey experiment conducted in Israel, and an analysis that relies on the 2002 wave of the European Social Survey. The empirical findings support the hypothesis. In contrast to the established conviction that no association exists between political efficacy and policy preferences, these findings reveal that external political efficacy has a polarizing effect on expressed policy preferences.

Theorists have identified a wide range of reasons why individual and collective actors have a moral responsibility to help alleviate global poverty. There is now widespread agreement that several of these reasons are valid. From the perspective of the poverty opponent, it might seem that the more reasons there are to alleviate poverty, the better. The difficulty is that different reasons for alleviating poverty point to different poverty-alleviating activities. This situation generates questions about both how actors should set priorities among different poverty-alleviating activities (‘actor-centred’ questions) and who should have primary responsibility for alleviating particular cases of poverty (‘case-centred’ questions). This article explains why actor-centred and case-centred questions are worth asking and sketches a promising way of responding to them.

The question of how coercive government policies affect the duration and outcome of terrorist campaigns has only recently started to attract scholarly interest. This article argues that the effect of repression on terrorist group dynamics is conditional on the country's regime type. Repression is expected to produce a backlash effect in democracies, subsequently lengthening the duration of terrorist organizations and lowering the probability of outcomes favourable to the government. In authoritarian regimes, however, coercive strategies are expected to deter groups’ engagement in terrorism, thus reducing the lifespan of terrorist groups and increasing the likelihood of government success. These hypotheses are examined using data on terrorist groups for the 1976–2006 period; support is found for these conjectures on terrorist group duration and outcomes.

Esping-Andersen developed a typology of welfare regimes: conservative, liberal and social democratic, which are measured on the basis of seven indicators. We re-examine Esping-Andersen's data as well as replication data compiled by Scruggs and Allan to show that the seven indicators do not form valid measures of these welfare regimes. In addition to divergences in their measurement, the seven indicators are a mixture of institutional characteristics of welfare systems and outcome measures of social stratification. A measurement model based on the five institutional characteristics of welfare regimes that pertain to social insurance, however, does fit both the original and replication data. This article therefore proposes a three-dimensional model of conservative and liberal social insurance, which treats universal insurance coverage as the third dimension, instead of Esping-Andersen's ‘socialist’ regime. Although this does not fundamentally alter the typology of countries, it has implications for previous studies that employ country scores based on Esping-Andersen's method as independent variables in causal models. To illustrate these implications, this article re-examines a study by Noël and Thérien and calls into question their conclusions on the causal connections between the social democratic welfare state and levels of foreign aid.

Do people believe the votes they cast are truly secret? Novel items added to a nationally representative survey show that 25 per cent of respondents report not believing their ballot choices are kept secret and over 70 per cent report sharing their vote choices with others. These findings suggest that standard models of candidate choice should account for the potential effects of doubts about ballot secrecy. Consistent with this view, regression analysis shows that social forces appear to have a greater effect on vote choices among people who doubt the formal secrecy of the ballot. This analysis supports the broader claim that the intended benefits of institutional rules may not be realized if people's perceptions of these rules differ from their formal characteristics.

Elections, the defining feature of representative democracy, are generally considered domestic matters. However, elections are increasingly influenced by and conducted on the international stage, and migrants have become increasingly important political actors in home country elections. This article analyses the relationship between migrants’ remittances and elections in their countries of origin, and argues that migrants’ decisions to remit reflect their home countries’ electoral calendars and political context. An analysis of remittance flows to eighty-one developing countries, 1990–2005, provides systematic evidence for the existence of political remittance cycles. Remittances increase in election years, an effect that is larger the more contested the election and the poorer the home country, suggesting an understudied link between developing countries’ domestic politics and their citizens living abroad.

This article critiques the meritocratic justification of Confucian democracy from the standpoint of democratic civil society by shifting the focus from governability of the people to their transformability. Its central claims are: (1) Confucian virtue politics (dezhi) can be creatively re-appropriated in a democratic civil society in terms of cultivating civility in ordinary people who belong to different moral communities; (2) in the modern East Asian social context, the Confucian ideal of benevolent government (ren zheng) can be attained better by the victims of socio-economic injustice contesting it democratically in the public space of civil society than by ‘thin’ democracy controlled by meritocratic elitism. ‘Confucian civil society’ operating on Confucian ritually mediated civility is an alternative to meritocratic elitism.

This article explores the influence of Protestant missionaries on male–female educational inequalities in colonial India. Causal mechanisms drawn from the sociology and economics of religion highlight the importance of religious competition for the provision of public goods. Competition between religious and secular groups spurred missionaries to play a key role in the development of mass female schooling. A case study of Kerala illustrates this. The statistical analysis, with district-level datasets, covers colonial and post-colonial periods for most of India. Missionary effects are compared with those of British colonial rule, modernization, European presence, education expenditures, post-colonial democracy, Islam, caste and tribal status, and land tenure. Christian missionary activity is consistently associated with better female education outcomes in both the colonial and post-colonial periods.

Political scientists’ explanations for ethnic voting differ. Some have argued that the utility of ethnicity lies partly in the information that demographic cues provide about candidates, particularly in information-poor societies. However, extant research has not tested this proposition directly. This article proposes that, if part of ethnicity's utility is informational, we should expect that voters’ reliance on ethnic cues will decline when certain types of higher-quality information are available. To test this, a survey experiment was conducted in Uganda, with subjects evaluating candidates under varying informational environments. While support for co-ethnics was high when ethnicity was the only distinguishing fact about candidates, it declined when information was presented that portrayed co-ethnics negatively vis-à-vis non co-ethnics. These results suggest that informational environments can impact ethnic voting.

Analyses of the occurrence of natural disasters show that in large coalition systems, such as democracies, their occurrence has little effect on protest or leader survival. However, if large numbers of people die in these disasters, more protests occur and leader survival diminishes. In contrast, for leaders in small coalition systems, the occurrence of disasters increases protests and reduces tenure, but the level of fatalities has little effect. The anticipation of these potential political effects accounts for why many more people die in disasters in small coalition systems than in large coalition systems.