Showing papers in "American Journal of Political Science in 2004"

Measuring ethnic fractionalization in Africa

Abstract: In most studies of the impact of ethnic diversity on economic growth, diversity is hypothesized to affect growth through its effect on macroeconomic policies. This article shows that most measures of ethnic diversity (including the commonly used ELF measure) are inappropriate for testing this hypothesis. This is because they are constructed from enumerations of ethnic groups that include all of the ethnographically distinct groups in a country irrespective of whether or not they engage in the political competition whose effects on macroeconomic policy making are being tested. I present a new index of ethnic fractionalization based on an accounting of politically relevant ethnic groups in 42 African countries. I employ this measure (called PREG, for Politically Relevant Ethnic Groups) to replicate Easterly and Levine's influential article on Africa's growth tragedy. I find that PREG does a Much better job of accounting for the policy-mediated effects of ethnic diversity on economic growth in Africa than does ELF.

Political Partisanship and Welfare State Reform in Advanced Industrial Societies

Abstract: In this article we evaluate two claims made in recent studies of the welfare states of advanced industrial societies: first, that welfare states have remained quite resilient in the face of demands for retrenchment; and second, that partisan politics have ceased to play a decisive role in their evolution. Addressing the first claim, we present analysis from a new data set on unemployment insurance and sickness benefit replacement rates for 18 countries for the years 1975‐99. We find considerably more evidence of welfare retrenchment during the last two decades than do recent cross-national studies. Second, we examine the “end of partisanship” claim by estimating the effects of government partisanship on changes in income replacement rates in sickness and unemployment programs. Our results suggest that, contrary to claims that partisanship has little impact on welfare state commitments, traditional partisanship continues to have a considerable effect on welfare state entitlements in the era of retrenchment.

Oil Wealth and Regime Survival in the Developing World, 1960–1999

Abstract: The global oil market and its associated booms and busts have generated a large literature in political science. One contention in this literature is that political instability is a near-certain, long-term outcome of oil wealth. Another line of argument maintains just the opposite, that oil makes authoritarian regimes stronger by funding patronage and repressive apparatuses. In this article, I conduct the first cross-national tests of these arguments and investigate the effects of oil wealth and the oil booms and busts on political stability. Drawing on data from 107 developing countries between 1960 and 1999, I estimate the effects of oil wealth on regime failure, antistate social protest, and domestic armed conflict. Thus, as a first goal this article addresses an analytic shortcoming in previous studies by separating regime survival empirically from both economic policy and regime type (democratic or authoritarian) and by focusing on the direct effects of oil wealth on several measures of political stability. I address the relationship between oil wealth and these outcomes both by comparing exporters to the rest of the developing world and by comparing oil-rich states across pre-boom, boom, and bust periods. The results indicate that oil wealth is robustly associated with more durable regimes and significantly related to lower levels of protest and civil war. Moreover,

Civil Liberties vs. Security: Public Opinion in the Context of the Terrorist Attacks on America

Abstract: In the tradition of research on political tolerance and democratic rights in context, this study uses a national survey of Americans conducted shortly after the September 11, 2001 attack on America to investigate people’s willingness to trade off civil liberties for greater personal safety and security. We find that the greater people’s sense of threat, the lower their support for civil liberties. This effect interacts, however, with trust in government. The lower people’s trust in government, the less willing they are to trade off civil liberties for security, regardless of their level of threat. African Americans are much less willing to trade civil liberties for security than whites or Latinos, even with other factors taken into account. This may reflect their long-standing commitment to the struggle for rights. Liberals are less willing to trade off civil liberties than moderates or conservatives, but liberals converge toward the position taken by conservatives when their sense of the threat of terrorism is high. While not a forecast of the future, the results indicate that Americans’ commitment to democratic values is highly contingent on other concerns and that the context of a large-scale threat to national or personal security can induce a substantial willingness to give up rights.

Democracy and the Violation of Human Rights: A Statistical Analysis from 1976 to 1996

Abstract: Most studies posit and identify a linear and negative relationship between democracy and the violation of human rights. Some research challenges this finding, however, suggesting that nonlinear influences exist. Within this article, we examine the structure of the relationship between democracy and repression during the time period from 1976 to 1996. To conduct our analysis, we utilize diverse statistical approaches which are particularly flexible in identifying influences that take a variety of functional forms (specifically LOESS and binary decomposition). Across measures and methodological techniques, we found that below a certain level, democracy has no impact on human rights violations, but above this level democracy influences repression in a negative and roughly linear manner. The implications of this research are discussed within the conclusion.

Who Delivers? Partisan Clients in the Argentine Electoral Market

Abstract: Why do some parties fail to benefit from patronage in pork-ridden political systems? This article analyzes the interaction between patronage and partisanship to explain why some incumbents are more likely to benefit from pork politics than others. We explain such differences by focusing on political parties’ access to resources (supply side) and voters’ dependence on fiscal largesse (demand side). We show how these differences affect the patron’s choice of public sector wages and employment. We use subnational level data to show different electoral returns from patronage for the two major political coalitions in Argentina—Peronism and the UCR-Alianza—and their effect on preferences over public sector wages and employment. W hy do some political parties fail to benefit from patronage in pork-ridden political systems? This article analyzes the interaction between patronage and partisanship to explain why some incumbents are more likely to benefit from pork politics than others. We explain returns to patronage by highlighting differences in the political parties’ access to resources (supply side) and the voter’s dependence on public sector jobs (demand side). We propose that, just as political parties cater their policies to particular groups of voters, they pursue different strategies when allocating pork in exchange for support. On the supply side, we highlight the importance of partisan biases in the fiscal and electoral institutions that regulate the access and distribution of public resources. On the demand side, we show that patronage is a distributive mechanism that provides different returns to voters with different skills and labor market expectations.

What Does Corruption Mean in a Democracy

Abstract: Despite a growing interest in corruption, the topic has been absent from democratic theory. The reason is not a lack of normative issues, but rather missing links between the concepts of corruption and democracy. With few exceptions, political corruption has been conceived as departures by public officials from public rules, norms, and laws for the sake of private gain. Such a conception works well within bureaucratic contexts with well-defined offices, purposes, and norms of conduct. But it inadequately identifies corruption in political contexts, that is, the processes of contestation through which common purposes, norms, and rules are created. Corruption in a democracy, I argue, involves duplicitous violations of the democratic norm of inclusion. Such a conception encompasses the standard conception while complementing it with attention to the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion within democratic politics. By distinguishing the meanings of inclusion and exclusion within the many institutions, spheres, and associations that constitute contemporary democracies, I provide a democratic conception of corruption with a number of implications. The most important of these is that corruption in a democracy usually indicates a deficit of democracy.

Economic Insecurity and the Globalization of Production

Abstract: A central question in the international and comparative political economy literatures on globalization is whether economic integration increases worker insecurity in advanced economies. Previous research has focused on the role of international trade and has failed to produce convincing evidence that such a link exists. In this article, we argue that globalization increases worker insecurity, but that foreign direct investment (FDI) by multinational enterprises (MNEs) is the key aspect of integration generating risk. FDI by MNEs increases firms' elasticity of demand for labor. More-elastic labor demands, in turn, raise the volatility of wages and employment, all of which tends to make workers feel less secure. We present new empirical evidence, based on the analysis of panel data from Great Britain collected from 1991 to 1999, that FDI activity in the industries in which individuals work is positively correlated with individual perceptions of economic insecurity. This correlation holds in analyses accounting for individual-specific effects and a wide variety of control variables.

Entering the Arena? Gender and the Decision to Run for Office

Abstract: A critical void in the research on women’s underrepresentation in elective office is an analysis of the initial decision to run for office. Based on data from our Citizen Political Ambition Study, the first large-scale national survey of potential candidates, we examine the process by which women and men emerge as candidates for public office. We find that women who share the same personal characteristics and professional credentials as men express significantly lower levels of political ambition to hold elective office. Two factors explain this gender gap: first, women are far less likely than men to be encouraged to run for office; second, women are significantly less likely than men to view themselves as qualified to run. Our findings call into question the leading theoretical explanations for women’s numeric underrepresentation and indicate that, because of vestiges of traditional sex-role socialization, prospects for gender parity in U.S. political institutions are less promising than conventional explanations suggest.

International Conflict and the Tenure of Leaders: Is War Still Ex Post Inefficient?

Abstract: Recent work in comparative politics and international relations has shown a marked shift toward leaders as the theoretical unit of analysis. In most of the new theoretical models a core assumption is that leaders act to stay in power. There exists, however, remarkably little systematic empirical knowledge about the factors that affect the tenure of leaders. To provide a baseline of empirical results we explore how a broad range of domestic and international factors affects the tenure of leaders. We focus in particular on the effect of conflict and its outcome. We find that political institutions fundamentally mediate the costs and benefits of international conflict and that war is not necessarilyex postinefficient for leaders. This suggests that the assumption that war isex postinefficient for unitary rational actors can not be simply extended to leaders. Therefore, a focus on leaders may yield important new rationalist explanations for war.

Civil Wars and Economic Growth: Spatial Dispersion

Abstract: This article quantifies the impact of civil wars on economic growth at home and in nearby countries. Three alternative measures of nearness—contiguity, length of contiguous borders, and distance of closest approach—are used to capture the spatial dispersion of civil war consequences. We present short-run panel estimates (at five-year intervals) and long-run (1961‐95) panel estimates for the world. Generally, the distance measures, novel to this study, and not contiguity provides the most accurate measure of the diffusion of the negative economic consequences of civil wars on other countries. Unlike earlier studies, we also investigate the temporal influence of civil wars on growth at home and in nearby countries. Both the duration and the timing of civil wars have an economic impact.

Policing the Bargain: Coalition Government and Parliamentary Scrutiny

Abstract: Policymaking by coalition governments creates a classic principal-agent problem. Coalitions are comprised of parties with divergent preferences who are forced to delegate important policymaking powers to individual cabinet ministers, thus raising the possibility that ministers will attempt to pursue policies favored by their own party at the expense of their coalition partners. What is going to keep ministers from attempting to move policy in directions they favor rather than sticking to the “coalition deal”? We argue that parties will make use of parliamentary scrutiny of “hostile” ministerial proposals to overcome the potential problems of delegation and enforce the coalition bargain. Statistical analysis of original data on government bills in Germany and the Netherlands supports this argument. Our findings suggest that parliaments play a central role in allowing multiparty governments to solve intracoalition conflicts.

Bargaining and Learning While Fighting

Abstract: Much of the existing formal work on war models the decision to go to war as a game-ending, costly lottery. This article relaxes this assumption by treating war as a costly process during which the states run the risk of military collapse. The model also allows for uncertainty over either the cost of fighting or the distribution of power. The analysis makes four contributions to the growing costly-process literature: (i) the present model provides a more general treatment of the learning process that occurs when states are uncertain about the distribution of power, (ii) it explicitly compares the bargaining and learning processes for the two different sources of uncertainty, (iii) it suggests a way to empirically distinguish wars arising from these two sources, and (iv) it shows that the equilibrium dynamics of informational accounts of war may be quite sensitive to the underlying bargaining environment through which information is conveyed.

Accountability and Coercion: Is Justice Blind When It Runs for Office?

Abstract: Through their power to sentence, trial judges exercise enormous authority in the criminal justice system. In 39 American states, these judges stand periodically for reelection. Do elections degrade their impartiality? We develop a dynamic theory of sentencing and electoral control. Judges discount the future value of retaining office relative to implementing preferred sentences. Voters are largely uninformed about judicial behavior, so even the outcome of a single publicized case can be decisive in their evaluations. Further, voters are more likely to perceive instances of underpunishment than overpunishment. Our theory predicts that elected judges will consequently become more punitive as standing for reelection approaches. Using sentencing data from 22,095 Pennsylvania criminal cases in the 1990s, we find strong evidence for this effect. Additional tests confirm the validity of our theory over alternatives. For the cases we examine, we attribute at least 1,818 to 2,705 years of incarceration to the electoral dynamic.

Does Foreign Aid Promote the Expansion of Government

Abstract: Building on the literature on public finance, I seek to advance our understanding of variations in government size by exploring the impact of official development assistance on fiscal policy. I hypothesize that foreign aid operates in accordance with the “flypaper effect,” systematically generating incentives and opportunities for the expansion of government spending. Results from a time-series cross-sectional regression analysis of growth in government spending over the 1970–99 time period are consistent with the hypothesis. For middle- and lower-income nations, aid represents an important determinant of government expansion. Looking at the tax and revenue side of the equation, however, reveals a more perverse pattern of response: aid promotes not only increased spending but also reduced revenue generation. The results have important implications from both a theoretical and policy perspective. Inter alia they point to the potentially self-defeating nature of efforts to promote market-oriented programs of state retrenchment via development assistance as well as to the importance of incorporating international transfers into future research on government spending.

Avoidance or Engagement? Issue Convergence in U.S. Presidential Campaigns, 1960–2000

Abstract: A widely noted and oft-decried characteristic of campaigns in the United States is the tendency of the competing sides to talk past each other—to avoid engaging with one another on the same issues. We bring a massive database on statements by the major-party presidential candidates and other campaign spokespersons in the 1960 through 2000 elections to bear on the question of issue convergence. Far from the exception, a high degree of similarity in the issue emphases of the two sides appears to have been the norm in these campaigns. This result suggests the need to rethink some influential empirical, formal, and normative perspectives on campaigns.

Does Truth Lead to Reconciliation? Testing the Causal Assumptions of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Process

Abstract: Throughout the world, truth commissions have been created under the assumption that getting people to understand the past will somehow contribute to reconciliation between those who were enemies under the ancien regime. In South Africa, the truth and reconciliation process is explicitly based on the hypothesis that knowledge of the past will lead to acceptance, tolerance, and reconciliation in the future. My purpose here is to test that hypothesis, based on data collected in a 2001 survey of over 3,700 South Africans. My most important finding is that those who accept the “truth” about the country’s apartheid past are more likely to hold reconciled racial attitudes. Racial reconciliation also depends to a considerable degree on interracial contact, evidence that adds weight to the “contact hypothesis” investigated by western social scientists. Ultimately, these findings are hopeful for South Africa’s democratic transition, since racial attitudes seem not to be intransigent.

Politics and the New American Welfare States

Abstract: Federal law allows states to create new welfare policies determining who can receive welfare, what types of clients are exempted from new welfare work requirements, and the value of cash benefits. This project tests nine different theoretical explanations of welfare policy to explain why states have reacted differently to this new authority. We test these explanations on Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) policies promulgated between 1997 and 2000. Our findings confirm the strong role of race in TANF politics that Soss et al. (2001) recently reported, but we also find that other constituent characteristics, and institutions, paternalistic goals, and state resources have a consistent influence on welfare policy. These results indicate that different approaches to welfare are attributable to the unique, and very potent, combination of political characteristics in each state.

Campaign Advertising and Democratic Citizenship

Abstract: Concern about the state of American democracy is a staple of political science and popular commentary. Critics warn that levels of citizen participation and political knowledge are disturbingly low and that seemingly ubiquitous political advertising is contributing to the problem. We argue that political advertising is rife with both informational and emotional content and actually contributes to a more informed, more engaged, and more participatory citizenry. With detailed advertising data from the 2000 election, we show that exposure to campaign advertising produces citizens who are more interested in the election, have more to say about the candidates, are more familiar with who is running, and ultimately are more likely to vote. Importantly, these effects are concentrated among those citizens who need it most: those with the lowest pre-existing levels of political information.

The political (and economic) origins of consumer confidence

Abstract: Economic conditions, the story usually goes, influence consumer confidence, which in turn influences both political evaluations and votes. But we have little sense of the origins of consumer confidence itself. It is generally assumed that monthly reports of the nation's level of consumer confidence respond to objective economic conditions. We argue that politics is important for understanding consumer sentiment beyond what we know from economic conditions. Specifically, we demonstrate a direct effect of political evaluations of the president's management of the economy, the party of the president, extraordinary political events, and monetary policy, as well as an indirect effect of media coverage of the economy, on consumer sentiment, after controlling for economic conditions. When news coverage is positive, citizens give favorable evaluations, leading to more positive sentiment. Our findings suggest that understanding the political economy requires an emphasis on the causal effect of politics as well as economics.

The Conditional Nature of Presidential Responsiveness to Public Opinion

Abstract: How does public opinion affect presidential policymaking? We address this issue by testing a diverse set of hypotheses with data concerning a set of individual policies across time. In particular, the data revolve around presidential budgetary proposals on a set of major policy issues for which there are recurring surveys on citizens' preferences over spending. The analysis suggests that presidents are more responsive to mass opinion on issues that are familiar to citizens in their everyday lives. Also, for reelection-seeking presidents, responsiveness is shown to depend upon two key political factors. First, presidents are more responsive to public opinion when the next election is imminent. Second, the effect of presidential popularity is nonmonotonic; presidents with average approval ratings are most likely to adopt policy positions congruent with public opinion, whereas presidents with approval ratings that are significantly above or below average have the greatest propensity to take unpopular positions.

Quality Counts: Extending the Strategic Politician Model of Incumbent Deterrence

Abstract: Competitive elections are essential to representative democracy. Competition in U.S. House elections is low in part because incumbents have strategic advantages that deter strong potential candidates from running. Many observers conclude that incumbents retain their seats without full accountability to the electorate, but the mechanisms of deterrence have never been fully explored from the perspective of strong potential candidates. Based on a survey of potential House candidates designed to capture perceptions of incumbents' personal quality and reelection prospects, we find strong evidence for the “strategic politicians” thesis (Black 1972; Jacobson and Kernell 1983). We extend the logic of the strategic model first by showing that incumbents' reelection prospects are affected by their personal quality and second by demonstrating that incumbents' personal qualities deter strong challengers from running, independent of their electoral prospects. Our findings prompt us to suggest revisions to our understanding of competition and representation in contemporary House elections.

Executive Authority, the Personal Vote, and Budget Discipline in Latin American and Caribbean Countries

Abstract: Recent scholarship on budgeting in Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries indicates that political institutions impact the level of budget discipline. Building upon this previous research, we argue that the principal problem that must be addressed in both the government and the legislature to insure strong fiscal discipline is the common pool resource (CPR) problem. At the cabinet level, the CPR problem arises because ministers consider the implications of decisions on their ministries only. The level of the CPR problem in the legislature depends upon the electoral system. Using a data set of LAC countries for the period 1988–97, we find that executive power in the budget process is most effective in reducing budget deficits when electoral incentives for the personal vote is high in the legislature, while strengthening the president (or prime minister) in countries where the personal vote is low in the legislature has no effect.

How Initiators End Their Wars: The Duration of Warfare and the Terms of Peace

Abstract: The new theories of endogenous war termination generally predict that initiators would tend to do badly the longer the war, that information acquired during the war would outweigh information available prior to its outbreak, that stronger initiators would be slower to update their estimates about the outcome, and that uncertainty would increase the expected duration of conflict. This article subjects these hypotheses to statistical testing by estimating time-accelerated log-logistic hazard models of duration and bootstrapped ordered probit models of outcome with a new data set of 104 interstate wars from 1816 to 1991. The Monte Carlo simulation results support the hypotheses and the substantive findings provide ample reason for continuing with this research agenda.

Race, Bureaucratic Discretion, and the Implementation of Welfare Reform

Abstract: This article explores the impact of the race of individual clients and of the local racial context on the implementation of sanctions for recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) in a Midwestern state. We find that although nonwhites are sanctioned at lower rates than whites overall, nonwhites are sanctioned more compared to whites in each local area. This paradox occurs because nonwhites tend to live in areas with lower sanction rates. Consistent with the literature on race and policy, we find that sanction rates increase as the nonwhite population increases until a threshold is reached where nonwhites gain political power.

International Trust and Public Opinion About World Affairs

Abstract: This study argues that citizens base their opinions about world affairs in part on generalized beliefs about how much their nation can trust other nations. Using original data from a two-wave panel survey and a cross-sectional survey, we show that Americans hold stable, internally consistent, and largely pessimistic generalized beliefs about whether the United States can trust other nations. We find that social trust, political trust, partisanship, and age influence this form of trust, which we call international trust. We then demonstrate that international trust shapes whether Americans prefer internationalism to isolationism, perceive specific foreign nations as unfriendly and threatening, and favor military action against Iraq. The role of international trust in shaping opinion may be consistent with theories of low-information rationality, but competing interpretations are also plausible.

Political Sophistication and Policy Reasoning: A Reconsideration

Abstract: The sophistication-interaction theory of mass policy reasoning, which posits that the strength of the relationship between abstract principles and policy preferences is conditional on political sophistication, dominates the study of public opinion. This article argues that the sophistication-interaction theory does not hold to the degree the consensus claims. Specifically, it challenges the proposition that sophistication promotes the use of domain-specific beliefs and values. Analysis of 1984, 1986, 1987, 1988, and 1990 NES data yields two compelling findings. First, a series of confirmatory factor analyses indicate that beliefs about equal opportunity, self-reliance, and limited government in the social welfare domain and about militarism and anticommunism in the foreign policy domain are structured coherently and equivalently in the minds of citizens at different levels of sophistication. Second, structural equation model results demonstrate that political sophistication does not systematically enhance the impact these principles have on policy preferences.

Analyzing Roll Calls with Perfect Spatial Voting: France 1946–1958

Abstract: A recent methodological advance in legislative roll-call analysis is especially relevant to the study of legislative behavior outside the setting of the United States Congress. We argue that Poole’s (2000) optimal classification method for roll-call analysis is preferable to parametric methods for studying many legislatures. This is because the nature of party discipline, near-perfect spatial voting, and parliamentary institutions that provides incentives for strategic behavior lead to severe violations of the error assumptions underlying parametric methods. The robustness of the nonparametric method to the stochastic nature of the data makes it an ideal candidate for studying strategic behavior in legislatures. We illustrate these points with an analysis of data from the French Fourth Republic (1946‐1958). T his article argues that Poole’s (2000) new optimal classification method for roll-call analysis is preferable to parametric methods for studying many legislatures outside of the United States Congress. The reason is that assumptions about errors in voting that underlie W-NOMINATE and other parametric methods, generally developed for and tested on congressional roll-call data, are likely to be inappropriate in most legislative settings. We support this point through an analysis of data from the three legislatures of the French National Assembly in the short-lived and not lamented Fourth Republic (1946‐58). The National Assembly had at least five characteristics that make the application of parametric methods problematic: variation in discipline across parties, unstable party memberships, proxy voting, near perfect two-dimensional spatial voting, and parliamentary institutions that provide incentives for strategic voting. Our analyses demonstrate that Poole’s nonparametric method allows us to analyze legislative behavior within the theoretically attractive spatial framework when W-NOMINATE fails. Moreover, we show that the method’s robustness to the stochastic nature of the data

Why Democracies May Actually Be Less Reliable Allies

Abstract: Recent research builds on the observation that democracies have more durable alliances to argue that democracies make more reliable allies. This need not be the case. Alliances serve as commitment devices, adding ex ante credibility to states' claims about ex post behavior. Variation in alliance durability must reflect differences in the desirability of formalizing alignments. Put simply, democracies are “most improved” by formal commitments. We offer two related explanations for why democracies might actually be less reliable alliance partners. Information costs for participating in policymaking and the advantages of organized interest groups combined with distributional incentives generated by the periodic turnover of governments may conspire to make informal commitments on the part of democracies problematic. Determining the net effect of democratic virtue and vice is best done empirically. We test alliance reliability by focusing on intervention, rather than on the duration or the number of commitments. Our results suggest that democracies make less reliable allies.

Comparing Attitudinal and Strategic Accounts of Dissenting Behavior on the U.S. Courts of Appeals

Abstract: Students of judicial behavior have increasingly turned to strategic accounts to understand judicial decision making. Scholarship on the Supreme Court and state high courts suggests that the decision to dissent is better understood in light of strategic considerations rather than simply reflecting ideological disagreement. We investigate whether these findings comport with behavior by judges on the U.S. Courts of Appeals. We develop a spatial model of the decision to dissent that incorporates both attitudinal and strategic elements and subject this model to empirical analysis. We find that ideological disagreement between a judge and the majority opinion writer is a more persuasive explanation of the decision to dissent than a strategic account in which a judge conditions a dissent on whether circuit intervention would obtain the judge's preferred outcome. Though we do not discount the existence of other types of strategic behavior on the Courts of Appeals, our research suggests that strategic accounts of dissenting behavior are not generalizable to all courts.