Does United Nations peacekeeping protect civilians in civil war? Civilian protection is a primary purpose of UN peacekeeping, yet there is little systematic evidence for whether peacekeeping prevents civilian deaths. We propose that UN peacekeeping can protect civilians if missions are adequately composed of military troops and police in large numbers. Using unique monthly data on the number and type of UN personnel contributed to peacekeeping operations, along with monthly data on civilian deaths from 1991 to 2008 in armed conflicts in Africa, we find that as the UN commits more military and police forces to a peacekeeping mission, fewer civilians are targeted with violence. The effect is substantial—the analyses show that, on average, deploying several thousand troops and several hundred police dramatically reduces civilian killings. We conclude that although the UN is often criticized for its failures, UN peacekeeping is an effective mechanism of civilian protection.

This is an article about package deals in EU legislative politics and their effects on policy outcomes. It analyzes interchamber exchange between the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament. The main argument is that package deals allow Member States control over the financial aspects of legislation and ensure its timely adoption. In exchange, the Parliament gains access to some of the EU's most expensive policy areas. Intercameral logrolling is analyzed across all EU legislation completed in the period 1 May 1999–30 April 2007, including 2,369 issues, 1,465 legislative proposals, and 19 policy areas. The results indicate that package deals in the EU are conditional on the distributive nature of proposals and their urgency. In turn, through logrolling, the Parliament extends its influence in distributive policies.

The mass media devote a great deal of attention to high-profile elections, but in American political life such elections are the exception, not the rule. The majority of electoral contests feature candidates who are relative unknowns. In such situations, does name recognition breed contempt, indifference, or affection? Existing work presents modest theory and mixed evidence. Using three laboratory experiments, we provide conclusive evidence that name recognition can affect candidate support, and we offer strong evidence that a key mechanism underlying this relationship is inferences about candidate viability. We further show that the name-recognition effect dissipates in the face of a more germane cue, incumbency. We conclude with a field study that demonstrates the robustness of the name-recognition effect to a real-world political context, that of yard signs and a county election.

The effects of international institutions on state behavior make up a key research agenda in international-relations scholarship. Because states self-select into treaties, we cannot infer that these commitments have causal effects unless we address this selection effect. I explain the significant limitations of the methods used thus far to overcome this problem and argue that a more effective approach must take into account states’ treaty preferences. I describe a novel combination of ideal-point estimation and propensity-score matching that can estimate the probabilities of treaty commitment and use them to test hypotheses. I use this procedure to test the effects of three key international human-rights treaties. My results provide significant new findings regarding the effects of these important agreements. I show that the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women has significantly improved respect for women's rights, but that the Convention against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights have not had significant effects on human rights.

Political parties bargain over the allocation of cabinet portfolios when forming coalition governments. Noncooperative theories of legislative bargaining typically predict that the “formateur” enjoys a disproportionate share of government ministry positions. However, empirical evidence indicates that parties receive shares of portfolios proportional to their share of legislative seats that a government party contributes to the government coalition in support of Gamson's Law of portfolio allocation. This article examines government formation as a process in which both the government coalition and the formateur are determined endogenously. In equilibrium, if parties have similar preferences over cabinet portfolios, the share of seats they are allocated is proportional to the parties’ sizes.

Whereas presidents represent the entire nation, members of Congress serve districts and states. Consequently, presidents and members of Congress often disagree not only about the merits of different policies but also about the criteria used to assess them. To investigate the relevance of jurisdictional−and by extension criterial−differences for policymaking, we revisit classic models of bargaining under uncertainty. Rather than define uncertainty about the mapping of one policy into one outcome, as all previous scholars have done, we allow for every policy to generate two politically relevant outcomes, one local and another national. We then identify equilibria in which the president's utility is increasing in the value that a representative legislator assigns to national outcomes. As an application of this theory, we analyze budgetary politics in war and peace. We find that during periods of war, when members of Congress assign greater importance to the very same national outcomes that preoccupy presidents, congressional appropriations more closely reflect presidential proposals.

This article estimates the electoral effects of conditional cash transfers (CCTs) in three presidential elections in Brazil. It analyzes municipal-level electoral results and survey data and employs matching techniques to reduce causal inference problems typical of observational studies. Results show that CCTs are associated with increased performance by the incumbent party presidential candidate in all three elections but that these effects have been reaped by incumbents from different parties. It also shows that CCTs have had no discernible impacts on party identification and the performance of incumbent parties in legislative elections. Together, these findings suggest that CCTs are significant in the short run, but lack the capacity to induce substantial long-term voter realignments.

Although the secret ballot has been secured as a legal matter in the United States, formal secrecy protections are not equivalent to convincing citizens that they may vote privately and without fear of reprisal. We present survey evidence that those who have not previously voted are particularly likely to voice doubts about the secrecy of the voting process. We then report results from a field experiment where we mailed information about protections of ballot secrecy to registered voters prior to the 2010 general election. Consistent with our survey data, we find that these letters increased turnout for registered citizens without records of previous turnout, but they did not appear to influence the behavior of citizens who had previously voted. The increase in turnout of more than three percentage points (20%) for those without previous records of voting is notably larger than the effect of a standard get-out-the-vote mailing for this group. Overall, these results suggest that although the secret ballot is a long-standing institution in the United States, beliefs about this institution may not match the legal reality.

This article explains why dissatisfaction with the performance of individual politicians in new democracies often turns into disillusionment with democracy as a political system. The demands on elections as an instrument of political accountability are much greater in new than established democracies: politicians have yet to form reputations, a condition that facilitates the entry into politics of undesirable candidates who view this period as their “one-time opportunity to get rich.” After a repeatedly disappointing government performance, voters may rationally conclude that “all politicians are crooks” and stop discriminating among them, to which all politicians rationally respond by “acting like crooks,” even if most may be willing to perform well in office if given appropriate incentives. Such an expectation-driven failure of accountability, which I call the “trap of pessimistic expectations,” may precipitate the breakdown of democracy. Once politicians establish reputations for good performance, however, these act as barriers to the entry into politics of low-quality politicians. The resulting improvement in government performance reinforces voters’ belief that democracy can deliver accountability, a process that I associate with democratic consolidation. These arguments provide theoretical microfoundations for several prominent empirical associations between the economic performance of new democracies, public attitudes toward democracy, and democratic stability.

Why are voters influenced by the views of local patrons when casting their ballots? The existing literature suggests that coercion and personal obligations underpin this form of clientelism, causing voters to support candidates for reasons tangential to political performance. However, voters who support candidates preferred by local patrons may be making sophisticated political inferences. In many developing countries, elected politicians need to work with local patrons to deliver resources to voters, giving voters good reason to consider their patron's opinions of candidates. This argument is tested using data from an original survey of traditional chiefs and an experiment involving voters in Zambia. Chiefs and politicians with stronger relationships collaborate more effectively to provide local public goods. Furthermore, voters are particularly likely to vote with their chief if they perceive the importance of chiefs and politicians working jointly for local development.

Existing research on public opinion related to race and immigration politics emphasizes the role of prejudice or bias against minority groups. We argue that the social norm against prejudice, and individual motivations to comply with it, are crucial elements omitted from prior analyses. In contemporary Western societies, most citizens receive strong signals that prejudice is not normatively acceptable. We demonstrate that many majority-group individuals have internalized a motivation to control prejudiced thoughts and actions and that this motivation influences their political behavior in predictable ways. We introduce measures capturing this motivation, develop hypotheses about its influence, and test these hypotheses in three separate experimental and nonexperimental survey studies conducted in Britain and Germany. Our findings support a dual-process model of political behavior suggesting that while many voters harbor negative stereotypes, they also—particularly when certain contextual signals are present—strive to act in accordance with the “better angels of their natures.”

What makes African voters “up for grabs”? Existing approaches to the swing voter have several liabilities. This article introduces a new measure enabling a more comprehensive assessment of swing voting, including the differentiation between clientelistic and collective goods motivations. The issue of swing voting is then brought to an environment where voters are rarely considered persuadable: Africa. Using a count-model estimation technique and original survey data from Ghana's critical 2008 elections, the analysis challenges the near consensus in African politics on clientelism as the only electoral strategy. When voters perceive politicians as providing collective, developmental goods, the efficacy of clientelism as a tool to win over voters is reduced. Many persuadable voters can also be won over by both clientelistic and collective goods, thus contradicting the literature presenting these as mutually exclusive. Finally, the analysis shows that incumbents do better when they provide collective goods even in highly clientelistic environments.

It is generally acknowledged that large youth cohorts or “youth bulges” make countries more susceptible to antistate political violence. Thus, we assume that governments are forewarned about the political demographic threat that a youth bulge represents to the status quo and will attempt to preempt behavioral challenges by engaging in repression. A statistical analysis of the relationship between youth bulges and state repression from 1976 to 2000 confirms our expectation. Controlling for factors known to be associated with coercive state action, we find that governments facing a youth bulge are more repressive than other states. This relationship holds when controlling for, and running interactions with, levels of actual protest behavior. Youth bulges and other elements that may matter for preemptive state strategies should therefore be included in future empirical models of state repression.

Why do some individuals engage in more religious activity than others? And how does this religious activity influence their economic attitudes? We present a formal model in which individuals derive utility from both secular and religious sources. Our model, which incorporates both demand-side and supply-side explanations of religion, is unusual in that it endogenizes both an individual's religious participation and her preferences over economic policy. Using data on over 70 countries from the pooled World Values Survey, we find that religious participation declines with societal development, an individual's ability to produce secular goods, and state regulations on religion, but that it increases with inequality. We also find that religious participation increases economic conservatism among the poor but decreases it among the rich. Our analysis has important insights for the debate about secularization theory and challenges conventional wisdom regarding the relationship between religious participation and economic conservatism.

In the standard rational choice model, actors have exogenously given beliefs that perfectly match objective probabilities. As such, these beliefs cannot be optimistic or motivated by preferences, even though substantial empirical evidence indicates that human beliefs routinely satisfy neither of these criteria. I present a tractable Endogenous Beliefs Model and apply it to three different political environments from across the subfields of political science. In the model, players form beliefs that maximize a utility function that represents preferences over outcomes and the anticipatory experience of uncertainty. Applications include voter turnout, taxation and collective choice, and crisis bargaining. The model captures the empirical evidence about belief formation much better than the standard model. Moreover, these applications show how rigidly insisting on the standard rational choice model rejects otherwise reasonable explanations by fiat, precisely because of its implausible assumptions about beliefs.

Wars within states have become much more common than wars between them. A dominant approach to understanding civil war assumes that opposition movements are unitary, when empirically, most of them are not. I develop a theory for how internal divisions within opposition movements affect their ability to bargain with the state and avoid conflict. I argue that more divided movements generate greater commitment and information problems, thus making civil war more likely. I test this expectation using new annual data on the internal structure of opposition movements seeking self-determination. I find that more divided movements are much more likely to experience civil war onset and incidence. This analysis suggests that the assumption that these movements are unitary has severely limited our understanding of when these disputes degenerate into civil wars.

Why are politicians more likely to advance the interests of those of their race? I present a field experiment demonstrating that black politicians are more intrinsically motivated to advance blacks' interests than are their counterparts. Guided by elite interviews, I emailed 6,928 U.S. state legislators from a putatively black alias asking for help signing up for state unemployment benefits. Crucially, I varied the legislators’ political incentive to respond by randomizing whether the sender purported to live within or far from each legislator's district. While nonblack legislators were markedly less likely to respond when their political incentives to do so were diminished, black legislators typically continued to respond even when doing so promised little political reward. Black legislators thus appear substantially more intrinsically motivated to advance blacks’ interests. As political decision making is often difficult for voters to observe, intrinsically motivated descriptive representatives play a crucial role in advancing minorities’ political interests.

In the Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau advanced an impassioned critique of representative sovereignty, yet it is often thought that his objections were merely pragmatic and that he did not consider the question of representation to be a matter of basic political right. This article maintains, to the contrary, that Rousseau did have a principled argument against representative sovereignty and elucidates the nature and bearing of that argument by situating it in response to Hobbesian accounts of representation. Rousseau's argument is shown to have far-reaching implications, as it entails that the existence of representative sovereignty contravenes two principles central to the legitimacy of modern democratic states: the sovereignty of the people and the moral equality of the citizens.

When do elections in authoritarian regimes lead to democracy? Building from the distinction between competitive and hegemonic authoritarian regimes, I argue that presence of relatively weaker incumbents renders competitive authoritarian elections more prone to democratization, but only when domestic and international actors choose to actively pressure the regime. The effects of two forms of pressure—opposition electoral coalitions and international conditionality—are theorized. Propositions are tested using a comprehensive dataset of elections in authoritarian regimes from 1990 to 2007. Results support two core claims: that the effect of electoral pressure is conditional on the type of authoritarianism and that this greater vulnerability to pressure is the reason why competitive authoritarian elections are more likely to lead to democracy. In contrast, several alternative explanations—that differences across regime type are explained by alternation in power, better electoral conduct, or ongoing processes of liberalization—are not supported by the evidence.

Preventing large-scale atrocities has emerged as an important policy goal of the post–Cold War period. However, a debate exists about the effects of creating an international institution to prevent atrocities. Advocates of intervention argue that a credible threat to intervene should deter perpetrators and stop atrocities when deterrence fails. Critics argue that third-party intervention, by strengthening weak minority groups and lowering the cost of war, encourages rebellions and so makes war and atrocities more likely. We develop a model of intervention to analyze this debate. The model shows that the negative effects of intervention highlighted by critics can be mitigated if the third party is relatively neutral and if alternative costs are imposed on decision makers. We conclude that with appropriate institutional design, the net impact of stronger third-party commitments to end atrocities will be to lower the expected level of atrocities.

The recent increase in partisan media has generated interest in whether such outlets polarize viewers. I draw on theories of motivated reasoning to explain why partisan media polarize viewers, why these programs affect some viewers much more strongly than others, and how long these effects endure. Using a series of original experiments, I find strong support for my theoretical expectations, including the argument that these effects can still be detected several days postexposure. My results demonstrate that partisan media polarize the electorate by taking relatively extreme citizens and making them even more extreme. Though only a narrow segment of the public watches partisan media programs, partisan media's effects extend much more broadly throughout the political arena.

Using multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP), we estimate voter turnout and vote choice within deeply interacted subgroups: subsets of the population that are defined by multiple demographic and geographic characteristics. This article lays out the models and statistical procedures we use, along with the steps required to fit the model for the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections. Though MRP is an increasingly popular method, we improve upon it in numerous ways: deeper levels of covariate interaction, allowing for nonlinearity and nonmonotonicity, accounting for unequal inclusion probabilities that are conveyed in survey weights, postestimation adjustments to turnout and voting levels, and informative multidimensional graphical displays as a form of model checking. We use a series of examples to demonstrate the flexibility of our method, including an illustration of turnout and vote choice as subgroups become increasingly detailed, and an analysis of both vote choice changes and turnout changes from 2004 to 2008.

Previous research emphasizes the importance of path dependence for sustainable energy transitions, but their strategic nature is frequently overlooked. We examine formally how exogenous shocks, such as changes in international energy prices, interact with positive reinforcement factors, such as the growing strength of the renewables advocacy coalition. We find that political competition modifies the effect of path dependence on policy and outcomes. Specifically, while “green” governments can use positive reinforcement mechanisms to lock in policy commitments (by creating green constituencies), “brown” governments strategically underprovide public support for renewable energy (to avoid creating green constituencies). The effect of positive reinforcement also decreases with international energy prices. Our empirical analysis shows that (1) political competition conditions the policy response to exogenous shocks and market failures, while (2) governments strategically exploit path dependence for political gain.

We experimentally study the common wisdom that money buys political influence. In the game, one special interest (i.e., a corporate firm) has the opportunity to influence redistributive tax policies in her favor by transferring money to two competing candidates. The success of the investment depends on whether or not the candidates are willing and able to collude on low-tax policies that do not harm their relative chances in the elections. In the experiment, successful political influence never materializes when the firm and candidates interact just once. By contrast, it yields substantially lower redistribution in about 40% of societies with finitely repeated encounters. However, investments are not always profitable, and profit sharing between the firm and candidates depends on prominent equity norms. Our experimental results shed new light on the complex process of buying political influence in everyday politics and help explain why only relatively few firms do actually attempt to influence policymaking.

We study the extent of political homophily—the tendency to form connections with others who are politically similar—in local governments’ decisions to participate in an important form of intergovernmental collaboration: regional planning networks. Using data from a recent survey of California planners and government officials, we develop and test hypotheses about the factors that lead local governments to collaborate within regional planning networks. We find that local governments whose constituents are similar politically, in terms of partisanship and voting behavior, are more likely to collaborate with one another in regional planning efforts than those whose constituents are politically diverse. We conclude that political homophily reduces the transaction costs associated with institutional collective action, even in settings where we expect political considerations to be minimal.

Congressional districts create two levels of representation. Studies of representation focus on a disaggregated level: the electoral connection between representatives and constituents. But there is a collective level of representation—the result of aggregating across representatives. This article uses new measures of home styles to demonstrate that responsiveness to constituents can have negative consequences for collective representation. The electoral connection causes marginal representatives—legislators with districts composed of the other party's partisans—to emphasize appropriations in their home styles. But it causes aligned representatives—those with districts filled with copartisans—to build their home styles around position taking. Aggregated across representatives, this results in an artificial polarization in stated party positions: aligned representatives, who tend to be ideologically extreme, dominate policy debates. The logic and evidence in this article provide an explanation for the apparent rise in vitriolic debate, and the new measures facilitate a literature on home styles.

Motivated by recent work suggesting that low-income citizens are virtually ignored in the American policymaking process, this article asks whether a similar bias shapes the policy positions adopted by political parties much earlier in the policymaking process. While the normative hope is that parties serve as linkage institutions enhancing representation of those with fewer resources to organize, the resource-dependent campaign environment in which parties operate provides incentives to appeal to citizens with the greatest resources. Using newly developed measures of state party positions, we examine whether low-income preferences get incorporated in parties’ campaign appeals at this early stage in the policymaking process—finding little evidence that they do. This differential responsiveness was most pronounced for Democratic parties in states with greater income inequality; it was least evident for Republicans’ social policy platforms. We discuss the implications of these findings for representation in this era of growing economic inequality.

Researchers in comparative research increasingly use multilevel models to test effects of country-level factors on individual behavior and preferences. However, the asymptotic justification of widely employed estimation strategies presumes large samples and applications in comparative politics routinely involve only a small number of countries. Thus, researchers and reviewers often wonder if these models are applicable at all. In other words, how many countries do we need for multilevel modeling? I present results from a large-scale Monte Carlo experiment comparing the performance of multilevel models when few countries are available. I find that maximum likelihood estimates and confidence intervals can be severely biased, especially in models including cross-level interactions. In contrast, the Bayesian approach proves to be far more robust and yields considerably more conservative tests.

Fear is a pervasive aspect of political life and is often explored as a transient emotional state manipulated by events or exploited by elites for political purposes. The psychological and psychiatric literatures, however, have also established fear as a genetically informed trait, and people differ in their underlying fear dispositions. Here we propose these differences hold important implications for political preferences, particularly toward out-groups. Using a large sample of related individuals, we find that individuals with a higher degree of social fear have more negative out-group opinions, which, in this study, manifest as anti-immigration and prosegregation attitudes. We decompose the covariation between social fear and attitudes and find the principal pathway by which the two are related is through a shared genetic foundation. Our findings present a novel mechanism explicating how fear manifests as out-group attitudes and accounts for some portion of the genetic influences on political attitudes.

I develop a statistical method to measure the ideology of candidates and political action committees (PACs) using contribution data. The method recovers ideal points for incumbents that strongly correlate with ideological measures recovered from voting records, while simultaneously recovering positions for PACs, unsuccessful challengers, and open-seat candidates. As the candidate ideal points are estimated independently of voting records, they represent a useful new resource for testing models of legislative behavior. By incorporating nonideological covariates known to influence PAC contributions, the method also shows promise as a platform for furthering our understanding of PAC contribution behavior.

Party cues provide citizens with low-cost information about their representatives’ policy positions. But what happens when elected officials deviate from the party line? Relying on the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), we examine citizens’ knowledge of their senators’ positions on seven high-profile roll-call votes. We find that although politically interested citizens are the group most likely to know their senator's position when she votes with the party, they are also the group most likely to incorrectly identify their senator's position when she votes against her party. The results indicate that when heuristics “go bad,” it is the norm for the most attentive segment of the public to become the most misinformed, revealing an important drawback to heuristic use.

Previous scholarship has demonstrated that female lawmakers differ from their male counterparts by engaging more fully in consensus-building activities. We argue that this behavioral difference does not serve women equally well in all institutional settings. Contentious and partisan activities of male lawmakers may help them outperform women when in a polarized majority party. However, in the minority party, while men may choose to obstruct and delay, women continue to strive to build coalitions and bring about new policies. We find strong evidence that minority party women in the U.S. House of Representatives are better able to keep their sponsored bills alive through later stages of the legislative process than are minority party men, across the 93^rd–110^th Congresses (1973–2008). The opposite is true for majority party women, however, who counterbalance this lack of later success by introducing more legislation. Moreover, while the legislative style of minority party women has served them well consistently across the past four decades, majority party women have become less effective as Congress has become more polarized.

Attitudes toward racialized and redistributive policies like welfare are often thought of as a function of both principled ideological positions and the underlying racial attitudes a person holds. Kinder and Sanders (1996) look at racial resentment as one explanation, while Sniderman and his colleagues look to principled conservatism and authoritarianism as viable alternatives, claiming that racial resentment is merely proxying a legitimate race-neutral commitment to equality of opportunity. This article engages this debate through an experimental design which tests whether “hard work” is rewarded in a color-blind manner. The experimental design also affords scholars the opportunity to separate the effects of the two components of racial resentment: principled values and racial animus. The results show that American norms and implicit racism serve to uniquely privilege whites in a variety of ways.

Citizens minimize information costs by obtaining political guidance from others who have already assumed the costs of acquiring and processing political information. A problem occurs because ideal informants, typically characterized by the joint presence of political expertise and shared viewpoints, are frequently unavailable or rare within the groups where individuals are located. Hence, individuals must often look beyond their own group boundaries to find such informants. The problem is that obtaining information from individuals located beyond their own groups produces additional costs. Moreover, the availability of ideal informants varies across groups and settings, with the potential to produce (1) context-dependent patterns of informant centrality, which in turn generate (2) varying levels of polarization among groups and (3) biases in favor of some groups at the expense of others. The article's analysis is based on a series of small-group experiments, with aggregate implications addressed using a simple agent-based model.

This article explores the impact of novel change in the ethnic composition of Americans’ local context on their attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policy preferences. Adapting the “defended-neighborhoods hypothesis” regarding residential integration and black-white interracial relations to the context of immigration and intercultural relations, this article advances the acculturating-contexts hypothesis. This hypothesis argues that a large influx of an immigrant group will activate threat among white citizens when it occurs in local areas where the immigrant group had largely been absent. This theoretical argument is explored within the context of Hispanic immigration and tested using national survey and census data. This article demonstrates that over-time growth in local Hispanic populations triggers threat and opposition to immigration among whites residing in contexts with few initial Hispanics but reduces threat and opposition to immigration among whites residing in contexts with large preexisting Hispanic populations.

What explains variation in individuals’ opposition to immigration? While scholars have consistently shown cultural concerns to be strong predictors of opposition, findings regarding the labor-market competition hypothesis are highly contested. To help understand these divergent results, we distinguish between the prevalence and conditional impact of determinants of immigration attitudes. Leveraging a targeted sampling strategy of high-technology counties, we conduct a study of Americans’ attitudes toward H-1B visas. The plurality of these visas are occupied by Indian immigrants, who are skilled but ethnically distinct, enabling us to measure a specific skill set (high technology) that is threatened by a particular type of immigrant (H-1B visa holders). Unlike recent aggregate studies, our targeted approach reveals that the conditional impact of the relationship in the high-technology sector between economic threat and immigration attitudes is sizable. However, labor-market competition is not a prevalent source of threat and therefore is generally not detected in aggregate analyses.

When and why will states adopt more (or less) cooperative bargaining strategies? Standard answers to this question focus on the role of state power. Other scholars highlight socialization effects. I argue that in most international negotiations, the institutional bargaining structure will mitigate the effects of power and socialization, and drive state bargaining behavior. Factors highlighted by formal models of international bargaining should therefore best explain the variation in the strategies states adopt. I introduce empirical measures of these abstract concepts, and test their effects against those of power and socialization using an original dataset of state bargaining strategies in the European Union (EU). The results show that structural factors best explain variation in the EU states’ bargaining strategies. I conclude by highlighting the conditions under which these effects should explain state bargaining behavior in other international negotiations, and discuss the implications of this argument for the study of international bargaining.

We consider the effect of legislative primaries on the electoral performance of political parties in a new democracy. While existing literature suggests that primaries may either hurt a party by selecting extremist candidates or improve performance by selecting high valence candidates or improving a party’s image, these mechanisms may not apply where clientelism is prevalent. A theory of primaries built instead on a logic of clientelism with intra-party conflict suggests different effects of legislative primaries for ruling and opposition parties, as well as spillover effects for presidential elections. Using matching with an original dataset on Ghana, we find evidence of a primary bonus for the opposition party and a primary penalty for the ruling party in the legislative election, while legislative primaries improve performance in the presidential election in some constituencies for both parties.

Media outlets in multiparty electoral systems tend to report on a wider range of policy issues than media in two-party systems. They thus make more competing policy frames available to citizens. This suggests that a “free press” is insufficient to hold governments accountable. Rather, we should observe more challenges to the governments’ preferred frames and more politically aware citizens in multiparty democracies. Such citizens should thus be better equipped to hold their leaders accountable, relative to their counterparts in two-party democracies. I propose a mechanism through which democratic publics can sometimes constrain their leaders in foreign policy. I test hypotheses derived from my theory with cross-national data on the content of news coverage of Iraq, on public support for the war, and on decisions to contribute troops to the Iraq “Coalition of the Willing.” I find that citizens in countries with larger numbers of parties confronted more critical and diverse coverage of Iraq, while those with more widespread access to mass media were more likely to oppose the war and their nations likely to contribute fewer troops to the Coalition.

Recent scholarship in comparative political behavior has begun to address how voters in coalitional systems manage the complexity of those environments. We contribute to this emerging literature by asking how voters update their perceptions of the policy positions of political parties that participate in coalition cabinets. In contrast to previous work on the sources of voter perceptions of party ideology in parliamentary systems, which has asked how voters respond to changes in party manifestos (i.e., promises), we argue that in updating their perceptions, voters will give more weight to observable actions than to promises. Further, coalition participation is an easily observed party action that voters use as a heuristic to infer the direction of policy change in the absence of detailed information about parties’ legislative records. Specifically, we propose that all voters should perceive parties in coalition cabinets as more ideologically similar, but that this tendency will be muted for more politically interested voters (who have greater access to countervailing messages from parties). Using an individual-level data set constructed from 54 electoral surveys in 18 European countries, we find robust support for these propositions.

In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, a crucial question is whether popular protest is now likely to be a permanent part of Middle Eastern politics or if the protests that have taken place over the past two years are more likely to be a “one-shot deal.” We consider this question from a theoretical perspective, focusing on the relationship between the consequences of protests in one period and the incentives to protest in the future. The model provides numerous predictions for why we might observe a phenomenon that we call the “one-shot deal”: when protest occurs at one time but not in the future despite an intervening period of bad governance. The analysis focuses on the learning process of citizens. We suggest that citizens may not only be discovering the type or quality of their new government—as most previous models of adverse selection assume—but rather citizens may also be learning about the universe of potential governments in their country. In this way, bad performance by one government induces some pessimism about possible replacements. This modeling approach expands the formal literature on adverse selection in elections in two ways: it takes seriously the fact that removing governments can be costly, and it explores the relevance of allowing the citizen/principal to face uncertainty about the underlying distribution from which possible government/agent types are drawn.

Whenever fellow humans suffer due to natural catastrophes, we have a duty to help them. This duty is not only acknowledged in moral theory but also expressed in ordinary people's reactions to phenomena such as tsunamis, hurricanes, and earthquakes. Despite being widely acknowledged, this duty is also widely disputed: some believe it is a matter of justice, others a matter of charity. Although central to debates in international political theory, the distinction between justice and charity is hardly ever systematically drawn. To fill this gap in the literature, I consider three accounts of this distinction— the “agent-based,” the “recipient-based,” and the “mixed” view—and argue that they are all unsatisfactory. I then offer a fourth alternative, the “autonomy” view, which successfully overcomes the difficulties affecting its rivals. I conclude by considering the implications of this view for the moral grounds of disaster relief in earthquake-stricken Haiti, New Zealand, and Japan.

Dynamic strategies are an essential part of politics. In the context of campaigns, for example, candidates continuously recalibrate their campaign strategy in response to polls and opponent actions. Traditional causal inference methods, however, assume that these dynamic decisions are made all at once, an assumption that forces a choice between omitted variable bias and posttreatment bias. Thus, these kinds of “single-shot” causal inference methods are inappropriate for dynamic processes like campaigns. I resolve this dilemma by adapting methods from biostatistics, thereby presenting a holistic framework for dynamic causal inference. I then use this method to estimate the effectiveness of an inherently dynamic process: a candidate’s decision to “go negative.” Drawing on U.S. statewide elections (2000–2006), I find, in contrast to the previous literature and alternative methods, that negative advertising is an effective strategy for nonincumbents. I also describe a set of diagnostic tools and an approach to sensitivity analysis.