This paper tests whether the social information provided by the internet affects the decision to participate in politics. In a field experiment, subjects could choose to sign petitions and donate money to support causes. Participants were randomized into treatment groups that received varying information about how many other people had participated and a control group receiving no social information. Results show that social information has a varying effect according to the numbers provided, which is strongest when there are more than a million other participants, supporting claims about critical mass, and tipping points in political participation.

Diversity has powerful advantages, but may also generate internal tensions and low interpersonal trust. Despite extensive attention to these questions, the relationship between diversity and trust is often misunderstood and findings methodologically flawed. In this article, we specify two different mechanisms and adherent hypotheses. An individual might base her decision to trust on her perceived social similarity in relation to others in the community, that is, a similarity hypothesis. However, in a homogenous context, she might expect trustworthy behavior irrespective of her own social position due to signals of low degrees of social conflict and dense social networks, that is, a homogeneity hypothesis. Prior research has pinpointed only one of these mechanisms. The homogeneity hypothesis has not been explicated, and when the intention has been to test the similarity hypothesis, the homogeneity hypothesis has unintentionally been tested instead. The results are straightforward. While the homogeneity hypothesis is strongly supported, the findings speak against the similarity hypothesis.

During the latest decade, empirical research on the causes and consequences of the rule of law has expanded and, in the process, become extremely influential. However, we show that a number of widely used indices of the rule of law are not interchangeable. This lack of interchangeability is reflected in the fact that they are based on different defining attributes, to some extent cover distinct empirical scopes, do not correlate highly with each other, and support different explanatory factors. Until a consensus has been established with respect to the conceptualization of the rule of law, scholars are thus not free to opt for the measure that fits their data requirements best regarding spatial and/or temporal scope. Instead, they must carefully assess the content validity vis-à-vis their stipulated definition of the rule of law. Given the amount of money and time poured into the rule of law agenda, the problems identified reflect the lack of maturity of ‘good governance’ research.

In the United Kingdom, the transmission between policy promises and statutes is assumed to be both rapid and efficient because of the tradition of party discipline, relative stability of government, absence of coalitions, and the limited powers of legislative revision in the second chamber. Even in the United Kingdom, the transmission is not perfect since legislative priorities and outputs are susceptible to changes in public opinion or media coverage, unanticipated events in the external world, backbench rebellions, changes in the political parties, and the practical constraints of administering policies or programmes. This paper investigates the strength of the connection between executive priorities and legislative outputs measured by the Speech from the Throne and Acts of Parliament from 1911 to 2008. These are categorized according to the policy content coding system of the UK Policy Agendas Project (www.policyagendas.org.uk). Time series cross-sectional analyses show that there is transmission of the policy agenda from the speech to acts. However, the relationship differs by party, strengthening over time for Conservative governments and declining over time for Labour and other governments.

The famous dictum that ‘war makes states’ has received renewed interest with the experience of state failure and state collapse in many parts of the Developing World. Historical studies have shown that the activity of war-making was an essential ingredient of the process of state-making in early modern Europe. The history of state-making in the Arab Middle East shows that rentier states defy the ‘war makes states’ theory. This article compares four states from the Arab world, two having been exposed to the experience of war-making (Iraq and Jordan) and two not (the United Arab Emirates and Tunisia). The comparison of these four states shows that rentierism serves as an obstacle to the formation of legitimate and institutionalized states. However, the availability of external rents also allows state institutions and patronage channels to continue providing general welfare. Thus, rentierism produces a twin phenomenon of state weakness and life support for potentially failed states. It is only when war-making is employed in rentier states as a strategy of state-making that states fail and break.

In recent years, a growing literature has argued that European Union (EU) member states have undergone a profound transformation caused by international institutions and by the EU, in particular. However, the state core – the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force, embodied by the police – seemed to remain intact. The literature has argued that in this area, international institutions are weak, and cooperation has remained informal and intergovernmental. We take issue with these claims and evaluate the strength of international institutions in two core areas of policing (terrorism and drugs) over time. We find that in terms of decision-making, precision, and adjudication, international institutions have become considerably stronger over time. Even when international institutions remain intergovernmental they strongly regulate how EU member states exercise their monopoly of force. Member states are even further constrained because adjudication is delegated to the European Court of Justice. Thus, even the state core is undergoing a significant transformation.