Despite the close ties between tax-generated revenue and government policies, little is known about how political institutions shape the structure of tax choices across income levels. We propose and test a model based on the selectorate perspective, which predicts that leader choices regarding taxing and spending are driven by their desire to maximize their survival prospects against domestic challengers. The empirical tests investigate the conditions under which income taxes are non-existent, flat, more regressive or more progressive, and the degree of heterogeneity in tax systems as a function of governance institutions. The empirical results strongly and robustly support the theoretical predictions while also shedding light on how tax structures implemented in large coalition systems reduce income inequality.

International relations scholarship concerns dyads, yet standard modeling approaches fail to adequately capture the data generating process behind dyadic events and processes. As a result, they suffer from biased coefficients and poorly calibrated standard errors. We show how a regression-based approach, the Additive and Multiplicative Effects (AME) model, can be used to account for the inherent dependencies in dyadic data and glean substantive insights in the interrelations between actors. First, we conduct a simulation to highlight how the model captures dependencies and show that accounting for these processes improves our ability to conduct inference on dyadic data. Second, we compare the AME model to approaches used in three prominent studies from recent international relations scholarship. For each study, we find that compared to AME, the modeling approach used performs notably worse at capturing the data generating process. Further, conventional methods misstate the effect of key variables and the uncertainty in these effects. Finally, AME outperforms standard approaches in terms of out-of-sample fit. In sum, our work shows the consequences of failing to take the dependencies inherent to dyadic data seriously. Most importantly, by better modeling the data generating process underlying political phenomena, the AME framework improves scholars’ ability to conduct inferential analyses on dyadic data.

How responsive is the US’ Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) to the labor dislocation that results from trade integration? Recent findings suggest that the world's most ambitious trade adjustment program barely responds to import shocks, and that the shortfall is made up by disability insurance and early retirement. This holds considerable implications: TAA offers a lens onto the central question of whether developed democracies can effectively redistribute the gains from international economic integration. We take a closer look at these results. Using petition-level data over a 20-year period, we find that TAA is between 1.7 and 3.3 times more responsive than current estimates suggest. Yet the news is not all good. As we show, the responsiveness of TAA has decreased considerably since the 1990s, just as developed democracies started facing increasing pushback against liberalization. This shortfall, in turn, has political consequences: areas where TAA has been least responsive were also more likely to shift toward voting for Trump in the 2016 Presidential election. Our findings speak to the considerable challenge governments face in aiding workers “left behind” by liberalization.

How do personality traits condition the effects of campaign messages meant to mobilize voters? With two nationally representative US survey experiments, I show that common aggressive metaphors mobilize or demobilize voters depending on their traits. Aggressive metaphors increase the mobilizing impact of motivations to participate among aggressive individuals but decrease that impact among low-aggression people. For example, the language mobilizes strong partisans with aggressive personalities but demobilizes strong partisans low in aggression. This heterogeneity showcases the nuanced power of metaphors in campaigns, reaffirms the importance of personality in political behavior, and reveals the hidden role of aggression in non-violent political behavior for the first time. In practice, the net effects of aggressive metaphors can be positive, negative, or null depending on average traits in an audience.

Although scholars of international security share a skepticism for the extent to which agreements can be externally enforced, much existing game-theoretic work involves strong forms of commitment. Building on the canonical model of crisis bargaining, this article analyzes the role of two forms of commitment in bargaining: the ability to commit to a settlement and the ability to commit to end negotiations and initiate war fighting. The findings show that, contrary to expectations, allowing a proposer to retract their offer after learning of its acceptance does not lead to greater demands. Instead, a rational actor can be best off if he or she honors the accepted agreement in crisis bargaining, even though the act of accepting an offer changes the proposer's beliefs about the probability that an offer is acceptable. However, allowing a proposer to continue bargaining in lieu of fighting does change the dynamics of bargaining, although this effect diminishes as players become more patient. Finally, when there is no commitment to offers (or fighting after a rejected proposal), the behavior is the same as that found in the model with only renegotiation of agreements, and thus mirrors the behavior in the model in which both forms of commitment are present.

Using China's Great Leap Famine as example, this article shows how political career incentives can produce disastrous outcomes under the well-intended policies of a dictator. By exploiting a regression discontinuity design, the study identifies the causal effect of membership status in the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee—full (FM) Versus alternate members (AM)—on grain procurement. It finds that the difference in grain procurement between AMs and FMs who ranked near the discontinuity threshold is three times that between all AMs and all FMs on average. This may explain why Mao exceptionally promoted some lower-ranked but radical FMs shortly before the Leap: to create a demonstration effect in order to spur other weakly motivated FMs into action.

Many commonly used data sources in the social sciences suffer from non-random measurement error, understood as mis-measurement of a variable that is systematically related to another variable. We argue that studies relying on potentially suspect data should take the threat this poses to inference seriously and address it routinely in a principled manner. In this article, we aid researchers in this task by introducing a sensitivity analysis approach to non-random measurement error. The method can be used for any type of data or statistical model, is simple to execute, and straightforward to communicate. This makes it possible for researchers to routinely report the robustness of their inference to the presence of non-random measurement error. We demonstrate the sensitivity analysis approach by applying it to two recent studies.

Electronic voting technology is often proposed as translating voter intent to vote totals better than alternative systems such as paper ballots. We suggest that electronic voting machines (EVMs) can also alter vote choice, and, in particular, the way in which voters register anti-system sentiment. This paper examines the effects of the introduction of EVMs in India, the world's largest democracy, using a difference-in-differences methodology that takes advantage of the technology's gradual introduction. We find that EVMs are associated with dramatic declines in the incidence of invalid votes, and corresponding increases in vote for minor candidates. There is ambiguous evidence for EVMs decreasing turnout, no evidence for increases in rough proxies of voter error or fraud, and no evidence that machines with an auditable paper trail perform differently from other EVMs. The results highlight the interaction between voter technology and voter protest, and the substitutability of different types of protest voting.

The Arab world has historically had limited descriptive representation for women, although that is changing. Will having more women officeholders lead women citizens to become more engaged? Or could it depress engagement due to pervasive gender biases? To answer these questions, this paper uses a nationally-representative experiment in Tunisia. Unexpectedly, people were less likely to want to contact their representatives when primed to think of a mixed-gender group of officeholders compared to an all-women group. This pattern did not vary according to respondents’ gender. Further analyses reveal that the effect was concentrated among Islamists, which is consistent with some Islamists’ support for gender segregation. This finding encourages research examining women's political presence in conservative environments where gender segregation is common.

The signing of international treaties is usually considered insignificant for international legal cooperation. Accordingly, International Relations theorists have paid it little attention. We show in this paper how and why treaty signature matters for the ultimate decision to ratify an international treaty. We argue that when multiple well-informed actors publicly sign an international treaty, this can provide a strong signal of issue importance to domestic veto players, and in turn may persuade them to ratify the treaty. We formalize this argument in a two-level signaling game, and test it on a data set of 126 international environmental agreements. We find that treaties are more likely to be ratified when their signatories include countries with high levels of general or issue-specific knowledge.

The connection between the economy and vote choice continues to garner interest both in the academic and popular press. To isolate the effects of economic considerations, we develop a laboratory experiment that allows us to vary these considerations at three levels: the individual, community, and national economy. Choices by policymakers directly affect outcomes at each of these levels, allowing us to test for egotropic, “communotropic,” and sociotropic voting, as well as examine information search. We observe significant demand for information and that demand decreases with the complexity of the environment. Moreover, information demand is positively associated with other-regarding behavior.

Interactions between units in political systems often occur across multiple relational contexts. These relational systems feature interdependencies that result in inferential shortcomings and poorly-fitting models when ignored. General advancements in inferential network analysis have improved our ability to understand relational systems featuring interdependence, but developments specific to working with interdependence that cross relational contexts remain sparse. In this paper, I introduce a multilayer network approach to modeling systems comprising multiple relations using the exponential random graph model. In two substantive applications, the first a policy communication network and the second a global conflict network, I demonstrate that the multilayer approach affords inferential leverage and produces models that better fit observed data.

There is abundant empirical evidence that the plurality rule constrains party competition and favors two-party systems. This reduction of party system fragmentation may be due to parties deciding not to enter elections for which they are not viable and/or voters voting strategically. Yet, no prior research has attempted to estimate the respective role of parties and voters in this process. To fill this gap, we conducted a unique laboratory experiment where some subjects played the role of parties and others played the role of voters, and where the two were able to respond to each other just as in real-life elections. We find that the reduction due to party strategic exit is higher than that due to strategic voting. We conclude that parties play a key role in the effect of the plurality rule on party system fragmentation.

Textual data are plagued by underreporting bias. For example, news sources often fail to report human rights violations. Cook et al. propose a multi-source estimator to gauge, and to account for, the underreporting of state repression events within human codings of news texts produced by the Agence France-Presse and Associated Press. We evaluate this estimator with Monte Carlo experiments, and then use it to compare the prevalence and seriousness of underreporting when comparable texts are machine coded and recorded in the World-Integrated Crisis Early Warning System dataset. We replicate Cook et al.’s investigation of human-coded state repression events with our machine-coded events, and validate both models against an external measure of human rights protections in Africa. We then use the Cook et al. estimator to gauge the seriousness and prevalence of underreporting in machine and human-coded event data on human rights violations in Colombia. We find in both applications that machine-coded data are as valid as human-coded data.

The effect of conditioning on an additional covariate on confounding bias depends, in part, on covariates that are unobserved. We characterize the conditions under which the interaction between a covariate that is available for conditioning and one that is not can affect bias. When the confounding effects of two covariates, one of which is observed, are countervailing (in opposite directions), conditioning on the observed covariate can increase bias. We demonstrate this possibility analytically, and then show that these conditions are not rare in actual data. We also consider whether balance tests or sensitivity analysis can be used to justify the inclusion of an additional covariate. Our results indicate that neither provide protection against overadjustment.

We argue that democratic institutions influence property rights in attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) by providing: (1) a coherent logic to the property rights regime that is created in a state and (2) a legitimate way to manage conflicts that arise in dynamic economies. We expect that the marginal effect of property rights in attracting FDI has increased over time with the rate of technological dynamism. We test this using a non-nested multilevel modeling strategy with random coefficients on data from 1970 to 2009. Our results demonstrate that the effect of property rights on attracting FDI is contingent on democratic institutions and that this effect becomes more pronounced over time. This effect holds for both developing and developed countries across all regions.

While youth suffrage is widely debated, the causal effects of being eligible to vote on adolescents' political attitudes are less well known. To gain insights into this question, we leverage data from a real-life quasi-experiment of voting at 16 in the city of Ghent (Belgium). We compare the attitudes of adolescents that were entitled to vote with their peers that just fell below the age cut-off. We also examine the effects of the enfranchisement at 18-years-old. While we find an effect of youth enfranchisement on attention to politics, there is no evidence for an effect of enfranchisement on political engagement overall.

This study explores the consequences of legislative turnover for the hiring of lobbyists and influence of interest groups. We argue that lobbyists develop durable relationships with lawmakers in assemblies with low turnover. Such relationships allow lobbyists to attract clients. We use a new, state-level measure of multi-client lobbying to show that legislative turnover and multi-client lobbying are inversely related: decreases in turnover are correlated with more multi-client lobbying. In a second set of analyses, we find that legislative term limits are associated with less multi-client lobbying. Since multi-client lobbying poses risks to the representation of individual interests and magnifies the effects of resource differences between interests, our results suggest that turnover may help more diverse interests to achieve political influence.

Do minority voters respond to co-racial or co-ethnic candidates? That is does the increased chance of substantive representation translate into increased participation? Here, we focus on this question among African American voters. While much of the empirical literature on this question has produced conflicting answers, recent studies suggest that minority candidates can significantly increase minority turnout. We argue that past work on this topic does not adequately account for the fact that minority voters in places with minority candidates may systematically differ in their level of participation than minority voters in places without minority candidates. In this study we address the weaknesses of previous research designs and offer a new design that exploits the redistricting process to gain additional leverage over this question. We find little evidence that African American voter turnout increases when voters are moved to African American candidates. We find some evidence that white voters, however, tend to vote at lower rates when they are represented by African American candidates.

Institutions have the power to limit a government’s policy options. Policy restrictions are often used as solutions to coordination failures or time inconsistency problems. However, policy constraints can have significant drawbacks and these disadvantages have, to date, been overlooked in the literature. When institutional constraints tie a government’s hands, citizens will have less incentive to become informed about politics and participate in collective decision-making. This is because policy restrictions lower the private returns of political information. A fiscal policy restriction, for example, may decrease redistribution by lowering a poorer voters’ acquisition of political information. We illustrate our theoretical findings with numerical simulations and find that in one in three cases these policy restrictions make poorer voters worse off.