Showing papers in "American Political Science Review in 1995"
TL;DR: The generalized least squares approach of Parks produces standard errors that lead to extreme overconfidence, often underestimating variability by 50% or more, and a new method is offered that is both easier to implement and produces accurate standard errors.
Abstract: We examine some issues in the estimation of time-series cross-section models, calling into question the conclusions of many published studies, particularly in the field of comparative political economy. We show that the generalized least squares approach of Parks produces standard errors that lead to extreme overconfidence, often underestimating variability by 50% or more. We also provide an alternative estimator of the standard errors that is correct when the error structures show complications found in this type of model. Monte Carlo analysis shows that these “panel-corrected standard errors” perform well. The utility of our approach is demonstrated via a reanalysis of one “social democratic corporatist” model.
5,670 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a resource model of political participation is developed, where the resources considered are time, money, and civic skills, those communications and organizational capacities that are essential to political activity.
Abstract: This paper develops a resource model of political participation. The resources considered are time, money, and civic skills—those communications and organizational capacities that are essential to political activity. These skills are not only acquired early in life but developed in the nonpolitical institutional settings of adult life: the workplace, organizations, and churches and synagogues. These resources are distributed differentially among groups defined by socioeconomic status. A two-stage least squares analysis shows these resources have powerful effects on overall political activity, thus explaining why socioeconomic status has traditionally been so powerful in predicting participation. We disaggregate overall activity into three kinds of acts: those that involve giving time, those that entail donating money, and voting. Each requires a different configuration of resources resulting in different patterns of stratification across various political acts.
2,262 citations
TL;DR: The institutional grammar as mentioned in this paper is based on a view that institutions are enduring regularities of human action in situations structured by rules, norms, and shared strategies, as well as by the physical world.
Abstract: The institutional grammar introduced here is based on a view that institutions are enduring regularities of human action in situations structured by rules, norms, and shared strategies, as well as by the physical world. The rules, norms, and shared strategies are constituted and reconstituted by human interaction in frequently occurring or repetitive situations. The syntax of the grammar identifies components of institutions and sorts them into three types of institutional statements: rules, norms, and shared strategies. We introduce the grammar, outline methods for operationalizing the syntax, apply the syntax to an analysis of cooperation in collective dilemma situations, and discuss the pragmatics of the grammar for analyses of behavior within complex institutional settings.
1,266 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors develop a model of political reliability and derive seven related hypotheses from it that anticipate variation in the time a national political leader will survive in office after the onset of a war.
Abstract: We seek to answer the question, What effect does international war participation have on the ability of political leaders to survive in office? We develop a model of political reliability and derive seven related hypotheses from it that anticipate variation in the time a national political leader will survive in office after the onset of a war. Drawing upon a broadly based data set on state involvement in international war between 1816 and 1975, our expectations are tested through censored Weibull regression. Four of the hypotheses are tested, and all are supported by the analysis. We find that those leaders who engage their nation in war subject themselves to a domestic political hazard that threatens the very essence of the office-holding homo politicus, the retention of political power. The hazard is mitigated by longstanding experience for authoritarian elites, an effect that is muted for democratic leaders, while the hazard is militated by defeat and high costs from war for all types of leaders. Additionally, we find that authoritarian leaders are inclined to war longer after they come to power than democratic leaders. Further, democratic leaders select wars with a lower risk of defeat than do their authoritarian counterparts.
624 citations
TL;DR: This paper found strong support for an on-line model of the candidate evaluation process that in contrast to memory-based models shows that citizens are responsive to campaign information, adjusting their overall evaluation of the candidates in response to their immediate assessment of campaign messages and events.
Abstract: We find strong support for an on-line model of the candidate evaluation process that in contrast to memory-based models shows that citizens are responsive to campaign information, adjusting their overall evaluation of the candidates in response to their immediate assessment of campaign messages and events. Over time people forget most of the campaign information they are exposed to but are nonetheless able to later recollect their summary affective evaluation of candidates which they then use to inform their preferences and vote choice. These findings have substantive, methodological, and normative implications for the study of electoral behavior. Substantively, we show how campaign information affects voting behavior. Methodologically, we demonstrate the need to measure directly what campaign information people actually attend to over the course of a campaign and show that after controling for the individual's on-line assessment of campaign messages, National Election Study-type recall measures prove to be spurious as explanatory variables. Finally, we draw normative implications for democratic theory of on-line processing, concluding that citizens appear to be far more responsive to campaign messages than conventional recall models suggest.
624 citations
TL;DR: This paper showed that military victories may be less likely to break down than negotiated settlements of identity civil wars, but they are also more likely to be followed by acts of genocide, and that such victories are more likely followed by wars over identity issues.
Abstract: We know very little about how civil wars end. Harrison Wagner has argued that negotiated settlements of civil wars are likely to break down because segments of power-sharing governments retain the capacity for resorting to civil war while victory destroys the losers' organization, making it very difficult to resume the war. An analysis of a data set of 91 post-1945 civil wars generally supports this hypothesis but only in wars over identity issues. Moreover, while military victories may be less likely to break down than negotiated settlements of identity civil wars, they are also more likely to be followed by acts of genocide. Outsiders concerned with minimizing violence thus face a dilemma.
554 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the tradeoff between technical competence and political control is captured in a model of a legislative coalition's decision about agency procedures, where the choice variables are the agency's expected preferences and independence.
Abstract: Congressional choices about administrative procedures affect an agency's political responsiveness and the technical accuracy of its decisions. Legislators would like to design procedures so that agencies make technically sound decisions and balance the needs of competing interests in the way intended. In practice, agency procedures designed to promote technical competence often allow for political drift, and those that promote political control provide little new technical information about the consequences of policy decisions. The trade-off between technical competence and political control is captured in a model of a legislative coalition's decision about agency procedures. The choice variables are the agency's expected preferences and independence. Depending on exogenous levels of technical and political uncertainty, optimal agency procedures can maximize technical competence, maximize political control, or achieve a combination of the two.
487 citations
TL;DR: This article examined the effect of economic crises on domestic political regime change and found that inflationary crises inhibited democratization from the 1950s through the early 1970s but may have facilitated it in the late 1980s and that recessionary crises facilitated democratic breakdown but had no effect on democratic transition.
Abstract: I examine the effect of economic crises on domestic political regime change. Using a statistical technique known as event history analysis and a new data set that identifies all instances of regime change in the 97 largest Third World countries, I develop multivariate models of democratic breakdown and democratic transition. My main findings are that inflationary crises inhibited democratization from the 1950s through the early 1970s but may have facilitated it in the late 1980s and that recessionary crises facilitated democratic breakdown but had no effect on democratic transition throughout this period. The inflation findings—though not the recession findings—support the arguments of Karen Remmer and Samuel Huntington that the processes affecting democratization were very different in the 1980s than in earlier eras. A number of other explanatory variables emerge as significant determinants of regime change, providing support for several other contentions that have appeared in the literature.
459 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors reexamine the access story with a model in which campaign contributions can act as signals of policy preference and the (informational) value of access to any agent is endogenous.
Abstract: An important and pervasive view of campaign contributions is that they are given to promote access to successful candidates under circumstances when such access would not ordinarily be given. In this story, access is valuable as it offers groups the opportunity to influence legislative decisions through the provision of policy-relevant information. Under complete information regarding donors' policy preferences, I argue that this model predicts a negative relationship between contributions and the extent to which the groups' and the recipient legislators' preferences are similar. However, one of the more robust empirical findings in the literature is that this relationship is positive. Relaxing the informational assumption on donors' preferences, I reexamine the access story with a model in which campaign contributions can act as signals of policy preference and the (informational) value of access to any agent is endogenous.
392 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors developed a model of coalition bargaining in a legislature with dismissal and dissolution powers and used the model to identify necessary and sufficient conditions for both coalition termination and parliamentary dissolution and found that coalition terminations need not be the automatic consequence of exogenous shocks.
Abstract: Cabinet coalitions in multiparty parliamentary democracies lead a precarious existence. Legislative majorities can typically dismiss the cabinet at will and can sometimes force early elections through parliamentary dissolution. Since coalition termination can have substantial political consequences, it is important to understand when and why such decisions are made. To this end, we develop a model of coalition bargaining in a legislature with dismissal and dissolution powers. We use the model to identify necessary and sufficient conditions for both coalition termination and parliamentary dissolution. In contrast to several widely held maxims, we find that coalition terminations need not be the automatic consequence of exogenous shocks. Nor do opportunistic parties with favorable electoral prospects always dissolve parliament to enhance their power. Instead, decisions to terminate coalitions or call new elections result from party leaders' rational responses to the constraints of legislative and electoral institutions and the anticipated feelings of the electorate.
369 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors identify circumstances in which the inefficient choosers have desirable political characteristics and are therefore immune from threats of having to face the economic consequences of their choices.
Abstract: The political process often compensates the losers from technical change or international competition in an economically inefficient way, namely by subsidizing or protecting declining industries instead of encouraging the movement of resources to other more productive uses. We find that a dynamic inconsistency in the game of redistributive politics contributes to this outcome. To achieve economically efficient outcomes, it is necessary that those making economically inefficient choices not be given offsetting transfers. But the political process distributes income on the basis of political characteristics, which are in general different from the economic characteristics that are rewarded by the market. We identify circumstances in which the inefficient choosers have desirable political characteristics and are therefore immune from threats of having to face the economic consequences of their choices.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors show that negative campaigning is an important aspect of campaign competition but plays little or no role in existing models of campaigns, and they show that the front-runner will engage in more positive and less negative campaigning than the opponent.
Abstract: Negative campaigning is an important aspect of campaign competition but plays little or no role in existing models of campaigns. Within the context of plurality elections for a single office we model the incentives that affect the use of negative campaigning. Under simplifying but still quite general assumptions we show a number of results, including the following key conclusions: (1) for two-candidate competition the front-runner will engage in more positive and less negative campaigning than the opponent; (2) in a three-candidate contest with one candidate clearly trailing by a large margin and playing mainly a spoiler role, that candidate will only engage in positive campaigning; and (3) in any three-candidate contest, no candidate engages in negative campaigning against the weaker of his two opponents, so that to the extent there is negative campaigning, it will be directed against the front-runner or it will come from the front-runner. These results have direct empirical applications to multicandidate primaries and nonpartisan contests and can provide insight into recent general elections as well.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors compare vote choice in U.S. Senate and gubernatorial elections from 1986 and 1990 with two retrospective voting hypotheses: the national referendum hypothesis and an economic retrospective hypothesis, and find that different types of retrospective evaluations are used with respect to vote choice.
Abstract: We compare vote choice in senate and gubernatorial elections from 1986 and 1990 with two retrospective voting hypotheses: the national referendum hypothesis and an economic retrospective hypothesis. Despite the similarities between the office of U.S. senator and governor (same constituency, high levels of campaign spending, highly visible candidates, etc.), we find that different types of retrospective evaluations are used with respect to vote choice. As members of the national legislative branch, senators' fortunes are linked to the success or failures of the president. In contrast, governors, as state executives, are held accountable for perceived state economic conditions, while senators escape unscathed from the same general economic evaluations. These findings shed some light on the nature of vote choice in a political system complicated by federalism and separation of powers.
TL;DR: In the United States, opposition majorities rarely occur in elections held concurrently with the presidential election but are more likely to do so if legislators enjoy electoral independence from their parties due to features of electoral laws.
Abstract: Presidents often lack legislative majorities, but situations of opposition-party majorities (“divided government”) are much less common outside the United States. The president's party's share of seats tends to increase in early-term elections but decline in later elections. Thus opposition majorities often result after midterm elections. Opposition majorities rarely occur in elections held concurrently with the presidential election but are more likely to do so if legislators enjoy electoral independence from their parties due to features of electoral laws.
TL;DR: In this paper, the consequences des changes in statut marital sur la participation politique are discussed. But the authors focus mainly on the effect of transition marital on the participation of spouses.
Abstract: Etude des consequences des changements de statut marital sur la participation politique ; le statut marital etant considere comme le point marquant de la continuite et de la transition dans l'histoire de vie d'un individu et le mariage comme cadre favorisant l'interaction et l'interdependance des deux partenaires L' analyse est fondee sur les donnees d'une etude de socialisation menee entre 1965 et 1982 aupres de parents, de descendants et d'epoux Il apparait que les transitions maritales affectent la participation politique de quatre manieres : 1) les partenaires ajustent leurs niveaux d'activite politique apres le mariage afin de devenir plus semblables l'un a l'autre, 2) tous types de transition marital, notamment le mariage chez les individus jeunes, tend a faire diminuer la participation, 3) neanmoins l'effet global du mariage est puissamment mediatise par le niveau de participation du partenaire, 4) ces effets de mediation sont plus forts dans le cas d'activites politiques demandant des efforts collectifs ou dependent des ressources conjointes du couple
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that the focus on the structure of property rights obscures a more fundamental problem of land reform, that of enforcement, and they illustrate this theoretical argument through an analysis of the property rights institutions in Akyem Abuakwa, a traditional state in colonial Ghana.
Abstract: The study of land tenure polarizes the field of development. Neoclassical scholars lobby for a move toward private property rights, while other economists and historians defend the maintenance of customary land tenure. I argue that the development scholars' focus on the structure of property rights obscures a more fundamental problem of land reform—that of enforcement. Property rights will not inspire individual investment and economic growth unless political institutions give the ruler of a local community or nation-state sufficient coercive authority to silence those who advocate an alternative, more distributionally favorable property rights system. At the same time, political institutions must force the ruler to establish a credible commitment to that property rights system. I illustrate this theoretical argument through an analysis of property rights institutions in Akyem Abuakwa, a traditional state in colonial Ghana.
TL;DR: This paper investigated the political legitimacy of the Court of Justice of the European Communities using a survey of mass publics and found that relatively obscure institutions such as the Court are unlikely to build support through satisfying their constituency's demands.
Abstract: Using a survey of mass publics, we investigate the political legitimacy of the Court of Justice of the European Communities. To what degree does the Court have the visibility and diffuse support necessary for legitimacy? What accounts for variability in support for the Court? Are theories developed largely in the American context generalizable in Western Europe to a transnational legal institution? Do the sources of the Court's legitimacy vary across nations, and how? Our analysis indicates that relatively obscure institutions such as the Court of Justice are unlikely to build support through satisfying their constituencies' demands. Without information about the Court of Justice, ordinary citizens form their views based on its connection with the European Union and its association with broad political and legal values. As the Court moves into the limelight of European law and politics, the decisions the judges make may increasingly shape citizens' perceptions of its legitimacy.
TL;DR: This article found that local party campaigners are rational in their use of funds, spending most in seats where the competition is close and least where there is little hope of winning, and that local campaign spending is clearly associated with voting, increasing support for the spending party and decreasing support for its rivals.
Abstract: Much recent analysis of British politics has assumed, explicitly or implicitly, that constituency campaigns have no impact upon an electorate that draws on an increasingly nationalized media for its information. We employ data on constituency campaign spending to challenge this interpretation. Local party campaigners are rational in their use of funds, spending most in seats where the competition is close and least where there is little hope of winning. What is more, campaign spending is clearly associated with voting, increasing support for the spending party and decreasing support for its rivals. Contrary to the accepted wisdom, local campaign spending can result in important shifts in the vote. However, local campaigning seems to be of much more value to challengers than to incumbents.
TL;DR: A new concept of proportional representation that takes account of voters' preferences over the full list of alternatives—fully proportional representation (FPR)—and schemes for its implementation are presented.
Abstract: Even though voters can have complex preferences over multiple candidates or parties, all extant electoral systems provide political representation based solely or primarily on voters' first preferences. I present a new concept of proportional representation that takes account of voters' preferences over the full list of alternatives—fully proportional representation (FPR)—and schemes for its implementation. I outline a “pure” FPR scheme, but because this scheme would have several undesirable features when used by real voters, I also discuss modifications that account for these difficulties. Although there are a variety of interpretations of the role played by voting in democracy, several can be shown to suggest FPR as a normative ideal. Fully proportional representation provides us with new ways to conceptualize existing electoral systems, a new standard against which alternative systems can be evaluated, and several feasible alternatives for approximating this new ideal.
TL;DR: In this paper, King, Keohane and Verba argue that the same logic that is "explicated and formalized clearly in discussions of quantitative research methods" underlies-or should-the best qualitative research (p. 4).
Abstract: In Designing Social Inquiry, Gary King, Bob Keohane and Sidney Verba (KKV) have performed a real service to qualitative researchers. I, for one, will not complain if I never again have to look into the uncomprehending eyes of first-year graduate students when I enjoin them (pace Przeworski and Teune) to "turn proper names into variables." The book is brief and lucidly argued and avoids the weighty, musclebound pronouncements that are often studded onto the pages of methodological manuals. But following KKV's injunction that "a slightly more complicated theory will explain vastly more of the world" (p. 105), I will praise them no more but focus on an important weakness in the book. Their central argument is that the same logic that is "explicated and formalized clearly in discussions of quantitative research methods" underlies-or should-the best qualitative research (p. 4). If this is so, then they really ought to have paid more attention to the relations between quantitative and qualitative approaches and what a rigorous use of the latter can offer quantifiers. But while they offer a good deal of generous (at times patronizing) advice to qualitatively oriented scholars, they say very little about how qualitative approaches can be combined with quantitative research. Especially with the growth of choicetheoretic approaches, whose users often illustrate their theories with stories, there is a need for a set of ground rules on how to make intelligent use of qualitative data. KKV do not address this issue. Rather, they use the model of quantitative research to advise qualitative researchers on how best to approximate good models of descriptive and causal inference. (Increasing the number of observations is their cardinal operational rule.) But in today's social science world, how many social scientists can be simply labeled "qualitative" or -quantitative"? How often, for example, do we find support for sophisticated game-theoretic models resting on the use of anecdotal reports or on secondary evidence lifted from one or two qualitative sources? More and more frequently in today's social science practice, quantitative and qualitative data are interlarded within the same study. A recent work that KKV warmly praise illustrates both that their distinction between quantitative and qualitative researchers is too schematic and that we need to think more seriously about the interaction of the two kinds of data.
TL;DR: This paper examined the determinants of change in state government indebtedness from 1961 through 1989 using a pooled time series cross-sectional analysis and found that debt is primarily a function of economic conditions reflecting both the need to borrow and the capacity of states to repay debt.
Abstract: We examine the determinants of change in state government indebtedness from 1961 through 1989 using a pooled time series cross-sectional analysis. The analysis reveals that debt is primarily a function of economic conditions reflecting both the need to borrow and the capacity of states to repay debt. However, political factors such as culture, partisan competition, and electoral cycles also affect state debt. We also find very weak evidence that tax and expenditure limitations, ironically, may increase state indebtedness, while constitutional debt limitations have no effect upon slowing the growth of state debt.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors show that a negotiator's decision to employ an agent as a veto player depends on the kinds of information available to the foreign country and the alignment of preferences between the negotiator and the agent.
Abstract: Putnam's (1988) conjecture that negotiators can benefit from their domestic constraints implies that they may want to impose domestic constraints on themselves by granting veto power to an agent. I show that a negotiator's decision to employ an agent as veto player depends on the kinds of information available to the foreign country and the alignment of preferences between the negotiator and the agent. When the foreign country has incomplete information about the negotiator's preferences and the negotiator has preferences too divergent from those of the agent, the negotiator will not give veto power to the agent. However, this applies only to an agent with extreme preferences, and a surprisingly large number of agent types will receive veto power. The attractiveness of the agent veto to the negotiator is in part due to its informational effect. By granting veto power to an agent, the negotiator can transmit more information to the foreign country and capture informational gains that would be lost in the absence of the agent veto.
TL;DR: This paper developed a model of House members' career decisions and found that the financial factor that matters most involves perennial considerations of post-retirement pension benefits, not fleeting opportunities to exploit ethically questionable sources of outside income.
Abstract: Over two centuries ago, Adam Smith wrote of two passions that motivate those seeking public distinction: avarice and ambition. By investing these categories with appropriately concrete meaning, we develop a model of House members' career decisions. Like other individuals contemplating retirement options, politicians act with an eye to their financial interests, but not all financial interests are alike. The financial factor that matters most involves perennial considerations of post-retirement pension benefits, not fleeting opportunities to exploit ethically questionable sources of outside income. Second, we embed in the model a theory of intra-institutional ambition. Members impute value both to leadership positions they expect to retain and positions they expect to obtain. Majority members well-positioned to exert future legislative leverage are less likely to retire. Finally, several sources of electoral insecurity increase retirement probability. In the main, members may be reelection-seekers but will not pay any price to seek something they may not find.
TL;DR: The authors examined the impact of party control on state welfare policy and found that the coalitional bases of the parties vary in important ways, both within and across the states, and that these differences in the state party systems have an important influence on the relationship between party control and state welfare effort.
Abstract: Attempts to determine the impact of party control on state welfare policy have produced mixed and inconclusive results, in part due to our inability to account for variations in the state partisan environments. I used CBS/New York Times surveys combined over the period 1976–88 to offer a detailed examination of the state party systems, resulting in a description of the dominant social group partisan cleavage in each state. This information is then used to examine the impact of party control on state welfare benefits. The findings show that the coalitional bases of the parties vary in important ways, both within and across the states. These differences in the state party systems have an important influence on the relationship between party control and state welfare effort. Specifically, party control has a significantly greater impact in states where partisan divisions reflect class-based New Deal-type coalitions. When examined in the context of state partisan environments, party control has a much greater impact on state welfare effort than has been suggested by previous studies.
TL;DR: The authors explore the process by which firms develop their political preferences, using the case of national health reform, and argue that economic interests alone are unable to account for the variation in firm response to the national reform effort.
Abstract: I shall explore the process by which firms develop their political preferences, using the case of national health reform. Although rising health costs have heavily burdened many companies, I argue that economic interests alone are unable to account for the variation in firm response to the national reform effort. Rather, institutional factors, shown elsewhere to shape government decision making, also influence corporate preferences. These are (1) the institutionalization of private policy expertise within the firm, (2) firm participation in policy groups, and (3) policy legacies. These findings challenge conventional views of business political mobilization that suggest largely autonomous agents acting on the basis of easily recognized self-interests. Preference formation and corporate mobilization transpire in collective settings as a new stratum of corporate policy managers search for solutions to social problems. The primacy of economic concerns is very real. But institutional analysis explains how these economic concerns are interpreted and acted upon.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors make recommendations about how qualitative analysts should confront a variety of methodological problems, such as selection bias in qualitative analysis, which is one of the most important issues in qualitative research.
Abstract: y pingg, Keohane, and Verba's Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research ..L _(KKV) is an ambitious attempt to translate for the qualitative researcher a series of insights derived from quantitative methodology. The authors build on the basic framework of regression analysis-which has been enriched over the past two decades with innovations introduced by econometricians and statisticians-to make recommendations about how qualitative analysts should confront a variety of methodological problems. KKV are strongly committed to the premise that the underlying logic of quantitative and qualitative research is basically the same (p. ix). At the same time, they are attentive to the specific dilemmas that arise in actually carrying out qualitative research, and they provide many useful examples and employ clear, nontechnical language. This is a book that moves the discussion forward, and therefore merits close attention. Selection bias is one of the important topics into which quantitative methodologists have recently offered significant new insights. Hence, the assessment of KKV's treatment of this topic' provides a useful window for evaluating their effort to transpose complex issues of quantitative method to the sphere of qualitative research. This is also an interesting topic to address because KKV are centrally concerned with selection bias resulting from deliberate selection by the investigator. Their recommendations are consequently of special importance: if their diagnosis is correct, a small improvement in methodological selfawareness can yield a large improvement in scholarship. Finally, KKV's recommendations merit examination precisely because they are quite emphatic. Given their emphatic character, readers may desire assurance that they are, in fact, receiving sound advice. The question of how to situate the problem of selection bias in relation to a spectrum of other methodological and theoretical issues is not an easy one. At one pole, in discussions of selection bias in quantitative sociology, one finds an influential article suggesting that the impact of selection bias is not as serious as has been believed, that efforts to introduce statistical corrections for selection bias may create more problems than they solve, and that among the many problems of quantitative analysis, this one does not merit special attention (Stolzenberg and Relles 1990). In the present context, the appropriate point of entry into the problem is different. First, in the examination of selection bias in qualitative political research, it is much more difficult to assess its precise impact, so that conclusions about its importance are inevitably more tentative. Second, KKV's recommendations about selection bias are centrally concerned with deliberate selection by the investigator. Hence, relevant corrections do not involve statistical procedures, but rather basic choices about case selection that are relatively easy to achieve. Third, one of KKV's central goals is to explore the interrelations among a series of different methodological problems. They are not singling out selection bias as a paramount problem: in their view, it is one of many. I conclude that KKV offer useful recommendations regarding selection bias. Yet they subsume under this term various issues with which qualitative researchers may already be familiar, but under different labels. Obviously, in a complex field it is common to find that a given phenomenon is named in different ways. For example, what was probably the first paper ever published on selection bias referred to it as a problem of spurious correlation (Berkson 1946, 51). Nevertheless, the overlap of labels raises the question of whether KKV's methodological insights really offer something new to the qualitative analyst. In fact, some of the important recommendations offered by KKV can just as well be viewed not as insights derived from advanced quantitative methods, but rather as part of a long-standing effort to encourage qualitative scholars to be more methodologically and theoretically aware of which cases they are analyzing. This self-consciousness can also be encouraged by insistently posing a question that, according to the traditional lore of the comparative politics subfield, should often be asked at doctoral dissertation defenses: "What is this a case of?" Many issues that underlie this question and that are highly relevant to KKV's discussion of selection bias have previously been raised in-discussions of the comparative method, that is, the branch of methodology concerned with the systematic, qualitative analysis of relatively small numbers of cases (a "small N"l).2 In assessing methodological claims about selection bias, it is useful to take these earlier discussions as a base line. With regard to issues of case selection, they include the ongoing evaluation of J. S. Mill's methods of experimental inquiry, the related distinction between "most similar" and "most different" systems designs, and a new perspective on case selection in small-N studies arising from counterfactual analysis. Regarding the problem of applying concepts and indicators across diverse contexts, an issue that arises in KKV's discussion, relevant insights from work on comparative method include the traditional concern with "conceptual stretching" and the use of "system-specific," as opposed to "common," indicators. Regarding the issue of generalization, relevant insights include the argument that it may at times be appropriate for scholars to limit severely the scope of generalizations from a given set
TL;DR: In the 1988 and 1991 national elections, Mexican voters asked themselves above all whether they continued to support the long-ruling official party as mentioned in this paper, and their behavior was not well explained by 5 attachments to social cleavages, attitudes on policy issues, or general assessments about the present circumstances and the prospects for the nation's economy or personal finances.
Abstract: |n the 1988 and 1991 national elections, Mexican voters asked themselves above all whether they continued to support the long-ruling official party. Voter behavior was not well explained by 5 attachments to social cleavages, attitudes on policy issues, or general assessments about the present circumstances and the prospects for the nation's economy or personal finances. In both elections, moreover, the parties of the Left failed to mobilize voters that had chosen to abstain in past elections. Once voters were ready to oppose the ruling party, however, differences by issue, prospective economic assessments, and social cleavages shaped their choice between the opposition parties.
TL;DR: The authors examined the role of incumbent fundraising in deterring strong challengers and showed that only under very limited circumstances will there be an observable relationship between fundraising and challenger quality, and that by making fundraising easily observable, Federal Election Commission regulations may encourage candidates to overinvest time and resources accumulating large war chests instead of governing.
Abstract: J /4T/e examine the role of incumbent fundraising in deterring strong challengers. We construct Vf V a signaling model in which incumbents can use fundraising strategically to ward off W v quality challengers. We show, however, that only under very limited circumstances will there be an observable relationship between fundraising and challenger quality. Therefore, previous empirical tests for deterrence have systematically underestimated the effects of fundraising in decreasing electoral competition. Our analysis also suggests that by making fundraising easily observable, Federal Election Commission regulations may encourage candidates to overinvest time and resources accumulating large war chests instead of governing.
TL;DR: The concept of a critical realignment can be used as a powerful tool in the study of electoral behavior and an important component of a broader theory of political change as mentioned in this paper, but it is not the majestic national movements some believed them to be.
Abstract: The realignment perspective has exerted an enormous amount of influence on thinking about American politics, but recently it has fallen into disfavor. As a theory of political change, this dissatisfaction is warranted. However, in rejecting the realignment perspective, scholars risk losing a valuable concept, the notion of a critical realignment. My thesis is that, properly defined, the concept of a critical realignment can be a powerful tool in the study of electoral behavior and an important component of a broader theory of political change. This thesis derives from an analysis of presidential elections between 1828 and 1984. This analysis provides dramatic evidence for the proposition that critical realignments are important electoral phenomena. The evidence is equally clear, however, that critical realignments are subnational phenomena that vary considerably in form, not the majestic national movements some believed them to be. The analyses reported here reveal broadly based electoral eruptions of 40 to 50 points that endure for decades.