In theory, states can gain security by acquiring internal arms or external allies. Yet the empirical literature offers mixed findings: some studies find arms and allies to be substitutes, while others find them to be complements. This article contends that these conflicting findings are due to scholars failing to consider how regime type influences the choice between arms and allies. Since democracies are highly credible allies, states that form alliances with democracies can confidently reduce their internal arms. This is not the case when states form alliances with non-democracies. This study evaluates the argument using data on military expenditures and defense pacts from 1950 to 2001. Taking steps to account for the potentially endogenous relationship between arms and allies, it finds that democratic alliances are associated with lower levels of military spending.

How do crises affect trade policy? This article reconciles starkly diverging accounts in the literature by showing that economic adversity generates endogenous incentives not only for protection, but also for liberalization. It first formally develops the mechanisms by which two features of shocks – intensity and duration – influence the resources and political strategies of distressed firms. The central insight is that policy adjustments to resuscitate afflicted industries typically generate ‘knock-on’ effects on the profitability and political maneuverings of other firms in the economy. The study incorporates these countervailing pressures in its analysis of trade policy competition. In the wake of crises, protection initially increases when affected firms lobby for assistance, but then decreases as industries run low on resources to expend on lobbying and as firms in other industries mobilize to counter-lobby. The theoretical predictions are tested using sub-national and cross-national data, and real-world illustrations are presented to highlight the mechanisms driving the results.

In many contemporary urban spaces, political information accrues to high status neighborhoods. This might exacerbate political inequality as the information-rich and information-poor each talk primarily with others like themselves. When information is specific and broadly diffused through the media, however, the convenience and low cognitive costs of everyday conversation could be especially helpful for the disadvantaged. This article shows how political conversations intensify or ameliorate spatial knowledge gaps, using a six-wave panel survey in fifty Brazilian neighborhoods between 2002 and 2006. Multilevel models demonstrate that conversation was more frequent in high education neighborhoods, but had a greater impact on specific, factual knowledge in low-education neighborhoods, leading to shrinking knowledge gaps. However, conversation slightly widened spatial gaps in socially perceived general knowledge.

How does democratic politics inform the interdisciplinary debate on the evolution of human co-operation and the social preferences (for example, trust, altruism and reciprocity) that support it? This article advances a theory of partisan trust discrimination in electoral democracies based on social identity, cognitive heuristics and interparty competition. Evidence from behavioral experiments in eight democracies show ‘trust gaps’ between co- and rival partisans are ubiquitous, and larger than trust gaps based on the social identities that undergird the party system. A natural experiment found that partisan trust gaps in the United States disappeared immediately following the killing of Osama bin Laden. But observational data indicate that partisan trust gaps track with perceptions of party polarization in all eight cases. Finally, the effects of partisanship on trust outstrip minimal group treatments, yet minimal-group effects are on par with the effects of most treatments for ascriptive characteristics in the literature. In sum, these findings suggest political competition dramatically shapes the salience of partisanship in interpersonal trust, the foundation of co-operation.

An emerging literature points to the heterogeneous effects of violence on social norms and preferences in conflict-ridden societies. This article considers how responses to violence could be affected by in-group/out-group divisions. The research uses lab-in-the-field experiments to gauge norms for pro-social behavior in the aftermath of ethnic violence in post-war Kosovo. The study finds that one set of treatments (ethnicity) captures a negative legacy of violence on parochialism, while another (local/non-local) shows stronger evidence of pro-sociality and norm recovery. Examining individual variation in conflict exposure, it finds that victims of violence are more biased against ethnic out-groups and less pro-social to others outside of their local community. Balancing and matching on observables helps alleviate concerns that the results are driven by selection bias on victimization. Overall, the results suggest that the effects of violence may be contingent on the salience of in-group/out-group cues and boundaries.

United Nations (UN) peacekeepers tend to be deployed to ‘hard-to-resolve’ civil wars. Much less is known about where peacekeepers are deployed within a country. However, to assess peacekeepers’ contribution to peace, it matters whether they are deployed to conflict or relatively safe areas. This article examines subnational UN peacekeeping deployment, contrasting an ‘instrumental’ logic of deployment versus a logic of ‘convenience’. These logics are evaluated using geographically and temporally disaggregated data on UN peacekeepers’ deployment in eight African countries between 1989 and 2006. The analysis demonstrates that peacekeepers are deployed on the frontline: they go where conflict occurs, but there is a notable delay in their deployment. Furthermore, peacekeepers tend to be deployed near major urban areas.

The recent proliferation of referendums on sovereignty matters has fuelled growing scholarly interest. However, comparative research is hindered by the weaknesses of current compilations, which tend to suffer from conceptual vagueness, varied coding decisions, incomplete coverage and ad hoc categorizations. Based on an improved conceptualization and theory-driven typology, this article presents a new dataset of 602 sovereignty referendums from 1776–2012, more than double the number in existing lists. In an exploratory analysis, it uncovers eight distinctive clusters of sovereignty referendums and identifies patterns of activity over time and space as well as outcomes produced.

Studies of political budget cycles in developing countries have generally sought to inform understanding of short-term fiscal dynamics, but can also offer unique insight into broader political dynamics in developing countries. This article correspondingly employs markedly improved data in order to study the impact of elections on tax collection, and draw broader lessons. It shows that while elections as a group have had no significant effect on tax collection, the subset of competitive elections has had a significant negative impact on pre-election tax collection; while this effect appears to be largest where incumbents are particularly unpopular. This provides powerful evidence that the impact of elections on political incentives in developing countries is conditioned by the existence of an electorally competitive opposition, while offering preliminary evidence that popular resistance to taxation by unpopular governments may be an important means by which taxpayers may generate pressure for improved governance.

It is often assumed that government-sponsored election violence increases the probability that incumbent leaders remain in power. Using cross-national data, this article shows that election violence increases the probability of incumbent victory, but can generate risky post-election dynamics. These differences in the consequences of election violence reflect changes in the strategic setting over the course of the election cycle. In the pre-election period, anti-incumbent collective action tends to be focused on the election itself, either through voter mobilization or opposition-organized election boycotts. In the post-election period, by contrast, when a favorable electoral outcome is no longer a possibility, anti-government collective action more often takes the form of mass political protest, which in turn can lead to costly repercussions for incumbent leaders.

The claim that income drives political preferences is at the core of political economy theory, yet empirical estimates of income’s effect on political behavior range widely. Drawing on traditions in economic history and anthropology, we propose using height as a proxy for economic well-being. Using data from the British Household Panel Study, this article finds that taller individuals are more likely to support the Conservative Party, support conservative policies and vote Conservative; a one-inch increase in height increases support for Conservatives by 0.6 per cent. As an extension, the study employs height as an instrumental variable for income, and finds that each additional thousand pounds of annual income translates into a 2–3 percentage point increase in the probability of supporting the Conservatives, and that income drives political beliefs and voting in the same direction.

This article builds on existing studies of the long-run persistence of geographical variation in tolerance towards other ethnicities. Using English data, the study tests whether the persistent characteristic is an attitude towards a specific ethnic group, or is an underlying cultural trait of which the attitude towards a specific group is just one expression. It finds evidence for the latter, identifying geographical variation in anti-immigrant sentiment in the twenty-first century that is correlated with patterns of immigrant settlement in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, despite the fact that modern immigrant groups are quite different from those in the Middle Ages.

Does the attention of human rights organizations limit exports from rights-abusing states? This article examines how naming and shaming by human rights organizations (HROs) conditions the influence of human rights abuse on exports, and argues that human rights abuse alone is insufficient to damage a state’s exports. However, as attention to abuse via HRO shaming increases, abuse has an increasingly negative impact on exports. Importantly, this relationship is also conditional on the respect for human rights among importing states; human rights abuse, even if it is shamed, has no effect when importers are similarly abusive. Empirical tests utilizing gravity models of trade incorporating data on physical integrity rights abuse and HRO shaming in 1990–2008 yield strong support for our expectations.

This study addresses what it means, theoretically and diplomatically, to argue that states anticipate war. The ‘steps-to-war’ thesis contends that territorial disputes are high salience issues, but war is relatively unlikely unless state policies, such as arms buildups, directly increase the probability of war. This framework contrasts with the argument that these policies simply reflect underlying conflict, seen as the primary cause of both policies and war. The historical analysis here indicates that states do ‘anticipate’ war, but, at least in the case of wars related to ongoing territorial conflicts, it is theoretically trivial: states anticipate war, engaging in final preparations after their relations have deteriorated over time, and the process occurs in ways predicted by the steps-to-war theory.

The criticism that ordinary voters lack the necessary competence to make policy decisions persists despite the growth, popularity and implementation of direct democratic instruments throughout the democratic world. This article presents a novel measure of voters’ levels of justification as a possible, policy-specific, conceptualization of citizen competence in direct democracy. Using a unique dataset based on thirty-four ballot decisions in Switzerland, the study analyses the levels and correlates of citizen competence. The main findings are, first, that most voters do understand arguments about policies. Secondly, the political context as well as individual resources are important in determining voters’ competence. Finally, with regard to individual resources, motivation is strongly associated with justification levels, while the effect of ability is smaller than expected.

Because non-voters are less politically informed than voters, some propose that increasing voter turnout would reduce the quality of information among the active voting population, damaging electoral outcomes. However, the proposed tradeoff between increased participation and informed participation is a false dichotomy. This article demonstrates that political information is endogenous to participation. A field experiment integrates an intensive mobilization treatment into a panel survey conducted before and after a city-wide election. Subjects who were mobilized to vote also became more informed about the content of the election. The results suggest institutions that encourage participation not only increase voter turnout – mobilizing electoral participation also motivates citizens to become more politically informed.

This article presents an examination of class-based inequalities in turnout at British elections. These inequalities have substantially grown, and the class divide in participation has become greater than the class divide in vote choice between the two main parties. To account for class inequalities in turnout three main hypotheses – to do with policy indifference, policy alienation and social alienation – are tested. The results from the British context suggest that the social background of political representatives influences the ways in which voters participate in the political process, and that the decline in proportion of elected representatives from working-class backgrounds is strongly associated with the rise of working-class abstention.

Amid growing evidence of ‘unequal democracy’ in the United States, labor unions can play a potentially important role by ensuring that low-income citizens’ opinions receive more equal consideration when elected officials make policy decisions. To investigate this possibility, this article evaluates the relationship between labor union strength and representational equality across states and finds evidence that states with higher levels of union membership weigh citizens’ opinions more equally in the policy-making process. In contrast, there is no relationship between the volume of labor union contributions to political campaigns in a state and the equality of its political representation. These findings suggest that labor unions promote greater political equality primarily by mobilizing their working-class members to political action and, more broadly, underscore the important role that organized labor continues to play in shaping the distribution of political power across American society.

Theories of deliberation, developed largely in the context of domestic politics, are becoming increasingly relevant for international politics. The recently established Universal Periodic Review (UPR) operating under the auspices of the UN’s Human Rights Council is an excellent illustration. Our analysis of responses to its reports and recommendations suggests that the deliberative processes surrounding the UPR do indeed evoke co-operative responses even from countries with poor human rights records. Its highly inclusive, deliberative, repeated-play and peer-to-peer nature can serve as a model for how international organizations more generally can enhance deliberative capacity across the international system.

While there is broad consensus that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) sometimes succeed in influencing policy making within international organizations (IOs), there is much less agreement on the factors that make NGO lobbying effective. This article makes two contributions to this debate. First, the determinants of influence among NGOs active in different IOs, issue areas and policy phases are examined. The analysis builds on original survey data of more than 400 NGOs involved in five different IOs, complemented by elite interviews with IO and state officials. Secondly, the article advances a specific argument about how the strategic exchange of information and access between NGOs and IOs increases NGO influence in IOs. This argument, derived from theories of lobbying in American and European politics, is contrasted with three alternative explanations of NGO influence, privileging material resources, transnational networks and public opinion mobilization, and the broader implications of these results for research on NGOs in global governance are explored.

Previous research shows that the household context is a crucial source of influence on turnout. This article sets out a relational theory of voting in which turnout is dependent on the existence of relational selective consumption benefits. The study provides empirical tests of key elements of the proposed model using household survey data from Great Britain. First, building on expressive theories of voting, it examines the extent to which shared partisan identification enhances turnout. Secondly, extending theories of voting as a social norm, it tests whether the civic norms of citizens’ families or households affect turnout over and above the social norms of the individual. In accordance with expectations of expressive theories of voting, it finds that having a shared party identification with other members of the household increases turnout. It also finds that the civic duty of other household members is important in explaining turnout, even when allowing for respondent’s civic duty.