To put it mildly, government wouldn’t work very well if people didn’t have to obey the laws they oppose. And the problem isn’t only that people would pretend to oppose laws to escape punishment for breaking them. Even if it is clear “beyond a reasonable doubt” that a defendant’s opposition to the law she broke …
Do college football games influence U.S. elections? Healy, Malhotra, and Mo (2010) found that college football outcomes are correlated with election results. Fowler and Montagnes (2015) found that the estimated effects of college football games do not vary in the ways we would theoretically expect if the effect were genuine and that NFL games have …
On the Importance of Independent Evidence: A Reply to Graham et al. Read More »
From today on through September 2023 the Journal of Politics offers a new article type: Registered Reports. A Registered Report (RR) is an empirical research article for which the theory, methods and proposed analysis are pre-registered, reviewed, and in-principle-accepted for publication prior to data access. Your reactions We are energized by the reaction we have …
The massive flow of money into politics has generated widespread concerns about its impact on political equality. Political campaigns’ increased reliance on private contributions has meant that the rich can exert far greater influence than citizens with lesser means. One insufficiently discussed route by which the super-rich can obtain outsized political clout is through ownership …
Concentrating the legitimate use of organized violence, and entrusting its use to a single individual, is generally considered to be a critical ingredient of state formation, and a necessary ingredient of political stability, especially in fractionalized political environments. Historically, this has been accomplished by appointing a ruler: an individual who is endowed with—or takes—political authority. …
The Peaceful Transfer of Power and Social Contract Read More »
A defining feature of democracy is that voters reward or punish incumbents at the ballot box in response to the policies and general conditions that they observe. By doing so, they can encourage politicians to implement better policies. In times of crisis, this might not be that easy. Adopting adequate measures in response to an …
Effective lawmakers are the workhorses of the U.S. Congress, but does this legislative effort translate into electoral success? That is, are members of Congress rewarded at the ballot box for the work that they put into advancing their bills through the lawmaking process? In today’s polarized political climate, gridlock is pervasive and elected officials are …
The Primary Path for Turning Legislative Effectiveness into Electoral Success Read More »
Political theorists have a number of different tools in their methodological toolkits. A great deal of political theorising is done with reference to empirical data, whereas others look to history to show how certain ideas were shaped by the historical contexts from which they emerged. Other theorists draw on tools like archival sources; however, one …
Are Intuitions Reliable Enough for Political Theorising? Read More »
On the front cover of one of its 2016 issues, The Economist depicted Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg in the guise of an emperor. It explained the choice thus: Not since the era of imperial Rome has the “thumbs-up” sign been such a potent and public symbol of power. A mere 12 years after it was …
In most democracies, including the USA and UK, voting is voluntary. This usually results in low and unequal electoral turnout, which some take to threaten the ideals of democratic responsiveness and political equality. Some have suggested that these problems could be solved by making voting compulsory, as it is in countries such as Australia and …
Making Non-Voters Pay: Prices as an Alternative to Compulsory Voting Read More »
It is an open secret in international politics that governments sometimes use money to buy political support from other governments. As an example, take this unusually frank remark from former US President Trump: “These nations that take our money and then they vote against us at the Security Council … We’re watching those votes. Let …
Governments use international organizations to hide contentious foreign policies Read More »
We propose a method to estimate sub-national public opinion from national survey data. Our approach extends the current gold-standard, multilevel regression, and post-stratification (MrP), with standard machine learning techniques to improve prediction accuracy. We also provide a package for the R statistical computing environment that implements our approach. This package, called autoMrP, is available for …
What is often referred to as ‘ideal theory’ in political philosophy, represented by theorists like John Rawls, is under attack from critics stressing that it is rather useless: since ideal theory presumes a world which is very different from our own world, it generates principles that do not tell us what we ought to do …
Who’s afraid of ideals? A defence of ideal theory Read More »
Social unrest often begins suddenly and spreads quickly. How does social unrest diffuse? This is the question we address in our forthcoming article. Our starting point is that riots diffuse when information about them spreads to new locations and reaches new individuals. This raises a number of important research questions: what are the networks that …
In November 2015, the Syria-based Islamic State terrorist organization perpetrated a large series of attacks in Paris, France, at a rock concert, football stadium, and the city’s cafes and restaurants. The attacks were the largest in an advanced democracy in over a decade and resulted in the deaths of 130 civilians. The attacks also coincided …
In a new paper titled “Can the Party in Power Systematically Win a Majority in Close Legislative Elections? Evidence from U.S. State Assemblies,” Dahyeon Jeong and Ajay Shenoy find evidence that parties can systematically win a slender majority of seats in close legislative elections, at the cost of winning fewer seats. Most states pass new …
How important is political ideology to the way judges decide cases? Are judges merely “politicians in robes,” or are they faithfully interpreting and applying the law? Political scientists have long been interested in these questions. We’re interested too, but we’re asking—and answering—these questions in a different way. The first difference is our focus. The US …
The President that Appoints Judges Matters for Civil Rights Read More »
When the media reports on federal judges, it often refers to the presidents who appointed them. This tendency reflects that many people think that ideology influences judges’ decisions. A wealth of research supports this sentiment. We believe something is missing in this account: the importance of interpersonal relationships among judges in determining the influence of …
Appeals Judges Only Rely on Ideology When Reviewing Judges They Don’t Know Well Read More »
Though formal and empirical research has established the importance of large protests, their dynamics remain less understood. Empirical investigations have generated contradictory results for decades, making repression and protest dynamics an enduring puzzle. Studying these dynamics has been difficult because existing methodologies generate coarse (ordinal) estimates of violence and have difficulty measuring the size of …
How State and Protester Violence Affect Protest Dynamics Read More »
Today, the US media market is both “high choice” and fragmented. This situation stands in stark contrast to the information environment of the 1970s and 1980s, when the three major television networks (i.e., ABC, CBS, NBC) and the similarity of their news programming created a true “information commons” shared by virtually all Americans. Today’s media …
Partisan Enclaves and Information Bazaars: Mapping Selective Exposure to Online News Read More »
Does information about government performance and corruption shape voter behaviour? Canonical theories of retrospective accountability suggest that it should, as voters reward their politicians for good performance and punish them for bad performance. Audits of financial management in government are an increasingly prominent source of such information in countries around the world, particularly when conducted …
Audits strengthen electoral accountability in South Africa Read More »
In fiscal year 2020, the U.S. federal executive branch employed approximately 97.07% of civilian employees (excluding those employed in The U.S. Postal Service or serving in uniformed military positions) housed within the three branches of the U.S. federal government (Federal Workforce Statistics and Sources: OPM and OMB 2021: 6, Table 3: https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R43590.pdf). In short, the …
A known critical element of executive authority involves how power is allocated among the president and administrative agencies. Less appreciated is how the allocation of powers between presidents and the bureaucracy is vital for understanding both coordination and power-sharing that takes place between governmental branches. The Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 (BAA) reforms sought …
Coup attempts are frequent events: Since 1945, there have on average been around 7 coup attempts each year. This is unlikely to change anytime soon. In 2021, coup attempts have taken place in Niger, Sudan, Myanmar, and several other places. While successful coups often make the headlines, half of all coup attempts fail. This is …
The Morning After: Minister Purges after Failed Coup Attempts in Dictatorships Read More »
One of the most robust empirical facts in the political science literature is that children resemble their parents along with a number of political behaviors and attitudes. In this study, we focus on such parent-child similarities (or so-called intergenerational transmission) in voter turnout. Differences in political participation related to family background carry special significance because …
International relations theories often assume that actors make military conflict decisions unemotionally, weighing the costs and benefits as a computer might. However, abundant historical examples suggest this is not the case. According to Bob Woodward’s account, President Trump responded to the news that the Syrian regime, led by Bashar al-Assad, had used chemical weapons by …
Major-power interventions in civil wars are extremely common: since the 1950s, close to half of the civil conflicts involve a major power and a third feature intervention by multiple powers. While scholars have amassed considerable evidence that rebel groups indeed anticipate the responses of potential interveners on the eve of conflict, the impact of an …
Do Major-Power Interventions Encourage the Onset of Civil Conflict? Read More »
Standing committees play a crucial role in the work of modern legislatures. A casual glance at recent news headlines makes this clear: in the current 117th Congress, the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure has been hard at work on the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and the House Ways and Means Committee recently presented a …
How Petitioning is Linked to the Origins and Development of Standing Committees Read More »
In this year’s German federal election campaign, voters with an immigrant background, who constitute ten percent of the electorate, played a remarkably small role in the appeals and mobilization efforts of the major parties. When representatives of the Turkish community asked the Bundestag candidates about their positions on topics important to immigrant voters, less than …
Do Politicians Discriminate Against Constituents with an Immigration Background? Read More »
In a new paper at the Journal of Politics, “Agricultural Comparative Advantage and Legislators’ Support for Trade Agreements”, Francesco Amodio, Leonardo Baccini, Giorgio Chiovelli, and Michele Di Maio find evidence that comparative advantage in agriculture predicts how legislators vote on the ratification of preferential trade agreements in Congress. Implementing trade liberalization is often a controversial policy …
Agricultural comparative advantage explains US legislators’ support for trade agreements Read More »
What happens when a government attempts to shut down one of the most popular social media platforms to combat foreign propaganda? In my recently accepted article for The Journal of Politics, I examine the effect of the Ukrainian ban on Russian social media to draw lessons on the use of censorship against information threats in …
We introduce Registered Reports as a new article format at the Journal of Politics. A Registered Report is a form of an empirical research article in which the theory, methods and proposed analysis are pre-registered, reviewed, and in-principle-accepted for publication prior to data access. We introduce Registered Reports as a trial and will report on …
Imagine that you live next to a beautiful forest. When you look at it, you feel a deep––almost spiritual––connection to the natural world. And you feel protective of the various animals that live and thrive there. Luckily, your neighbors feel the same way, so you are confident that the forest will be preserved. Some parts …
Earlier this month, the United States joined more than 40 other countries in announcing the coordination of war crimes investigations in Ukraine. By signing a political declaration in the Hague—the headquarters of the International Criminal Court (ICC)—the Biden administration took its latest step toward recalibrating the US relationship with the ICC. The policy shift was …
Apologize? Attack? How Governments Navigate International Law Violations Read More »
We set out to answer a simple question: Do constituents ask women legislators to work on more issues? To find the answer, we conducted an experiment in collaboration with two pairs of state legislators. In each pair there was one man and one woman. We worked with one Republican pair and one democratic pair. Each …
The opioid epidemic is one of the most pressing public health problems facing the United States. Drug overdose deaths are a leading cause of injury-related death and over 70% involve opioids. More than half a million Americans died of opioid overdoses between 1999 and 2020 and a record of over 100,000 Americans died of opioid-related …
Do media frames of the opiod epidemic shape public support for treatment? Read More »
