Showing papers in "American Political Science Review in 2001"

Analyzing Incomplete Political Science Data: An Alternative Algorithm for Multiple Imputation

Abstract: We propose a remedy for the discrepancy between the way political scientists analyze data with missing values and the recommendations of the statistics community. Methodologists and statisticians agree that “multiple imputation” is a superior approach to the problem of missing data scattered through one’s explanatory and dependent variables than the methods currently used in applied data analysis. The discrepancy occurs because the computational algorithms used to apply the best multiple imputation models have been slow, difficult to implement, impossible to run with existing commercial statistical packages, and have demanded considerable expertise. We adapt an algorithm and use it to implement a general-purpose, multiple imputation model for missing data. This algorithm is considerably faster and easier to use than the leading method recommended in the statistics literature. We also quantify the risks of current missing data practices, illustrate how to use the new procedure, and evaluate this alternative through simulated data as well as actual empirical examples. Finally, we offer easy-to-use software that implements all methods discussed.

Toward a Democratic Civil Peace? Democracy, Political Change, and Civil War, 1816-1992

Abstract: The “third wave of democratization” (Huntington 1991; Vanhanen 2000) has raised hopes for a more peaceful world. The thesis of the democratic peace suggests that the spread of democracy will promote a decline in interstate warfare (Doyle 1986; Russett 1993), at least once the unsettling effects of the transition period are overcome (Ward and Gleditsch 1998). But does democratization also lead to civil peace? Considerable research has examined how regime type or the level of democracy relates to domestic conflict. Much of it focuses on the result that semidemocracies (regimes intermediate between a democracy and an autocracy) exhibit a higher propensity for civil conflict than either extreme. Another strand of research focuses on how changes in regime lead to domestic conflict. This has implications for the former finding, since semidemocracies are more prone to regime change. Indeed, is the greater propensity for violence of intermediate regimes equivalent to the finding that states in political transition experience more violence? Are the results relating civil violence to level and change, in fact, one and the same finding? Or, are both explanations relevant? That is the key issue examined in this article. We link level of democracy and regime change in an empirical analysis that uses data from 152 countries in the period 1816 ‐1992. We also explore the implications of the direction and magnitude of political change. The statistical model we formulate overcomes some of the problems in research that is based on country-years, such as the fact that these do not constitute independent observations, as well as the possibility that the amount of civil war in the system of states fluctuates over time. Finally, our work adopts a multivariate framework with several control variables, among them socioeconomic and cultural factors, as well as spatial and temporal contagion. A separate analysis, with a more extensive set of control variables, is performed for the post‐World War II period.

Measurement Validity: A Shared Standard for Qualitative and Quantitative Research

Abstract: Scholars routinely make claims that presuppose the validity of the observations and measurements that operationalize their concepts. Yet, despite recent advances in political science methods, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to measurement validity. We address this gap by exploring four themes. First, we seek to establish a shared framework that allows quantitative and qualitative scholars to assess more effectively, and communicate about, issues of valid measurement. Second, we underscore the need to draw a clear distinction between measurement issues and disputes about concepts. Third, we discuss the contextual specificity of measurement claims, exploring a variety of measurement strategies that seek to combine generality and validity by devoting greater attention to context. Fourth, we address the proliferation of terms for alternative measurement validation procedures and offer an account of the three main types of validation most relevant to political scientists.

An Asset Theory of Social Policy Preferences

Abstract: We present a theory of social policy preferences that emphasizes the composition of people's skills. The key to our argument is that individuals who have made risky investments in skills will demand insurance against the possible future loss of income from those investments. Because the transferability of skills is inversely related to their specificity, workers with specific skills face a potentially long spell of unemployment or a significant decline in income in the event of job loss. Workers deriving most of their income from specific skills therefore have strong incentives to support social policies that protect them against such uncertainty. This is not the case for general skills workers, for whom the costs of social protection weigh more prominently. We test the theory on public opinion data for eleven advanced democracies and suggest how differences in educational systems can help explain cross-national differences in the level of social protection.

Resurgent Mass Partisanship: The Role of Elite Polarization

Abstract: For the most part, scholars who study American political parties in the electorate continue to characterize them as weak and in decline. Parties on the elite level, however, have experienced a resurgence over the last two decades. Such a divergence between elite behavior and mass opinion is curious, given that most models of public opinion place the behavior of elites at their core. In fact, I find that parties in the electorate have experienced a noteworthy resurgence over the last two decades. Greater partisan polarization in Congress has clarified the parties’ ideological positions for ordinary Americans, which in turn has increased party importance and salience on the mass level. Although parties in the 1990s are not as central to Americans as they were in the 1950s, they are far more important today than in the 1970s and 1980s. The party decline thesis is in need of revision.

Inequality, Social Insurance, and Redistribution

Abstract: Is the political support for welfare policy higher or lower in less egalitarian societies? We answer the question using a model of welfare policy as publicly financed insurance that pays benefits in a redistributive manner. When voters have both redistributive and insurance motives for supporting welfare spending, the effect of inequality depends on how benefits are targeted. Greater inequality increases support for welfare expenditures when benefits are targeted to the employed but decreases support when benefits are targeted to those without earnings. With endogenous targeting, support for benefits to those without earnings declines as inequality increases, whereas support for aggregate spending is a V-shaped function of inequality. Statistical analysis of welfare expenditures in advanced industrial societies provides support for key empirical implications of the model.

Political Ignorance and Collective Policy Preferences

Abstract: In contrast with the expectations of many analysts, I find that raw policy-specific facts, such as the direction of change in the crime rate or the amount of the federal budget devoted to foreign aid, have a significant influence on the public’s political judgments. Using both traditional survey methods and survey-based randomized experiments, I show that ignorance of policy-specific information leads many Americans to hold political views different from those they would hold otherwise. I also show that the effect of policy-specific information is not adequately captured by the measures of general political knowledge used in previous research. Finally, I show that the effect of policy-specific ignorance is greatest for Americans with the highest levels of political knowledge. Rather than serve to dilute the influence of new information, general knowledge (and the cognitive capacities it reflects) appears to facilitate the incorporation of new policy-specific information into political judgments.

Facilitating Communication across Lines of Political Difference: The Role of Mass Media

Abstract: We use national survey data to examine the extent to which various sources of political information expose people to dissimilar political views. We hypothesize that the individual’s ability and desire to exercise selective exposure is a key factor in determining whether a given source produces exposure to dissimilar views. Although a lack of diverse perspectives is a common complaint against American news media, we find that individuals are exposed to far more dissimilar political views via news media than through interpersonal political discussants. The media advantage is rooted in the relative difficulty of selectively exposing oneself to those sources of information, as well as the lesser desire to do so, given the impersonal nature of mass media.

The Myth of the Vanishing Voter

Abstract: The apparent decline in voter participation in national elections since 1972 is an illusion created by using the Bureau of the Census estimate of the voting-age population as the denominator of the turnout rate. We construct a more accurate estimate of those eligible to vote, from 1948–2000, using government statistical series to adjust for ineligible but included groups, such as noncitizens and felons, and eligible but excluded groups, such as overseas citizens. We show that the ineligible population, not the nonvoting, has been increasing since 1972. During the 1960s the turnout rate trended downward both nationally and outside the South. Although the average turnout rates for presidential and congressional elections are lower since 1972 than during 1948–70, the only pattern since 1972 is an increased turnout rate in southern congressional elections. While the voting age was lowered to 18 in 1971, the lower turnout rate of young voters accounts for less than one-fourth of reduced voter participation.

Governance in a Partially Globalized World

Abstract: Facing globalization, the challenge for political science resembles that of the founders of the United States: how to design institutions for a polity of unprecedented size and diversity. Globalization produces discord and requires effective governance, but effective institutions are difficult to create and maintain. Liberal-democratic institutions must also meet standards of accountability and participation, and should foster persuasion rather than rely on coercion and interest-based bargaining. Effective institutions must rely on self-interest rather than altruism, yet both liberal-democratic legitimacy and the meaning of self-interest depend on people’s values and beliefs. The analysis of beliefs, and their effect on institutional outcomes, must therefore be integrated into institutional analysis. Insights from branches of political science as diverse as game theory, rational-choice institutionalism, historical institutionalism, and democratic theory can help political scientists understand how to design institutions on a world—and human—scale.

Collective Action and the Group Size Paradox

Abstract: According to the Olson paradox, larger groups may be less successful than smaller groups in furthering their interests We address the issue in a model with three distinctive features: explicit intergroup interaction, collective prizes with a varying mix of public and private characteristics, and nonlinear lobbying costs The interplay of these features leads to new results When the cost of lobbying has the elasticity of a quadratic function, or higher, larger groups are more effective no matter how private the prize With smaller elasticities, a threshold degree of publicness is enough to overturn the Olson argument, and this threshold tends to zero as the elasticity approaches the value for a quadratic function We also demonstrate that these results are true, irrespective of whether we examine group sizes over the cross-section in some given equilibrium or changes in the size of a given group over different equilibria

More Order with Less Law: On Contract Enforcement, Trust, and Crowding

Abstract: Most contracts, whether between voters and politicians or between house owners and contractors, are incomplete. “More law,” it typically is assumed, increases the likelihood of contract performance by increasing the probability of enforcement and/or the cost of breach. We examine a contractual relationship in which the first mover has to decide whether she wants to enter a contract without knowing whether the second mover will perform. We analyze how contract enforceability affects individual performance for exogenous preferences. Then we apply a dynamic model of preference adaptation and find that economic incentives have a nonmonotonic effect on behavior. Individuals perform a contract when enforcement is strong or weak but not with medium enforcement probabilities: Trustworthiness is “crowded in” with weak and “crowded out” with medium enforcement. In a laboratory experiment we test our model’s implications and find support for the crowding prediction. Our finding is in line with the recent work on the role of contract enforcement and trust in formerly Communist countries.

The Hunt for Party Discipline in Congress

Abstract: TTT e analyze party discipline in the House of Representatives between 1947 and 1998. The effects of 1/V/ party pressures can be represented in a spatial model by allowing each party to have its own cutting line on roll call votes. Adding a second cutting line makes, at best, a marginal improvement over the standard single-line model. Analysis of legislators who switch parties shows, however, that party discipline is manifest in the location of the legislator's ideal point. In contrast to our approach, we find that the Snyder-Groseclose method of estimating the influence of party discipline is biased toward exaggerating party effects.

The Butterfly Did It: The Aberrant Vote for Buchanan in Palm Beach County, Florida

Abstract: We show that the butterfly ballot used in Palm Beach County, Florida, in the 2000 presidential election caused more than 2,000 Democratic voters to vote by mistake for Reform candidate Pat Buchanan, a number larger than George W. Bush's certified margin of victory in Florida. We use multiple methods and several kinds of data to rule out alternative explanations for the votes Buchanan received in Palm Beach County. Among 3,053 U.S. counties where Buchanan was on the ballot, Palm Beach County has the most anomalous excess of votes for him. In Palm Beach County, Buchanan's proportion of the vote on election-day ballots is four times larger than his proportion on absentee (nonbutterfly) ballots, but Buchanan's proportion does not differ significantly between election-day and absentee ballots in any other Florida county. Unlike other Reform candidates in Palm Beach County, Buchanan tended to receive election-day votes in Democratic precincts and from individuals who voted for the Democratic U.S. Senate candidate. Robust estimation of overdispersed binomial regression models undernins much of the analysis.

State Supreme Courts in American Democracy: Probing the Myths of Judicial Reform

Abstract: I address the controversy over how judges should be selected by analyzing the electoral fortunes of incumbents on supreme courts from 1980 through 1995 in the 38 states using elections to staff the bench Court reformers argue that partisan elections fail to evidence accountability, while nonpartisan and retention elections promote independence Thus, issue-related or candidate-related forces should not be important in partisan elections, and external political conditions should not be important in nonpartisan and retention elections Results indicate that reformers underestimated the extent to which partisan elections have a tangible substantive component and overestimated the extent to which nonpartisan and retention races are insulated from partisan politics and other contextual forces On these two fundamental issues, arguments of reformers fail Moreover, the extraordinary variations across systems and over time in how well incumbents fare with voters, which bear directly upon the representative nature of elected courts, merit further explanation

Asymmetric Information and Legislative Rules: Some Amendments

Abstract: We reexamine the major tenets of the informational theory of legislative rules, focusing on the informational efficiency of rules with varying degrees of restrictiveness. When committees are heterogeneous, full efficiency is attainable under the unrestrictive open rule as well as the somewhat restrictive modified rule. In contrast, the restrictive closed rule always leads to inefficiencies. When committees are homogeneous, the situation is different. All equilibria are inefficient regardless of legislative rules, but the closed rule leads to greater informational efficiency than does the open rule. Furthermore, the efficiency gains under the closed rule more than offset distributional losses regardless of the degree of preference divergence. We also examine the incentives provided by the different rules for information acquisition and committee specialization.

Process Preferences and American Politics: What the People Want Government to Be

Abstract: How should democratic government work? This question has been debated by political philosophers since the birth of democracy in Athens 2,500 years ago, but we do not know much about the ordinary American’s answer. Understanding public desires concerning the processes and structures of government is crucial for several reasons. Negative attitudes may discourage prospective politicians from serving, sitting politicians (or whole institutions) from tackling controversial policy issues, and ordinary people from participating in politics. They also may embolden some people to view government as less legitimate and possibly even to take lightly their obligation to comply with the outputs of government (see, e.g., Hetherington 1998; Tyler 1990). Standard investigations tend to be less interested in how the people want their government to run than in which candidates, parties, and policies are preferred. We know people are displeased with interest groups, the campaign finance system, and politicians who are accorded a large staff and salary; we know they dislike Congress more than the president and certainly more than the Supreme Court, and the government in Washington more than state governments; we know they generally view people in government as dishonest and untrustworthy; and we even know something about their attitudes toward selected reform proposals. As useful as all this information has been, it does not tell us the kind of government people want. We know the things that upset the American people, but we do not know much about the larger issue of how they want government to go about its business, to be structured, and to locate power. This article focuses on public preferences for governmental procedures. Many aspects of modern American politics do not make sense unless consideration is given to process. Are people satisfied with the procedures they perceive to be employed by government? If not, toward which processes do they want the government to move? What are the consequences when people believe they are not getting the type of government they want? To come to grips with public desires for (and perceptions of) the workings of government, we administered a specially designed national survey to 1,266 randomly selected adults, and we conducted eight lengthy focus groups at locations around the nation. We report primarily on the survey items that measured the processes people prefer and the processes they perceive they are getting.

Politics, Markets, and Life Satisfaction: The Political Economy of Human Happiness

Abstract: Little is known about the political determinants of subjective well-being across nations. The dominant theoretical approaches, comparison and trait theory, suggest that cross-national differences will be either nonexistent or largely independent of political conditions. I argue instead that although culture does appear to play a significant role, the results of democratic competition have even more dramatic effects upon national levels of life satisfaction. Specifically, I demonstrate that subjective appreciation of life is positively affected by the ideological complexion of governments and by qualitative features of the welfare state. The implications for social policy, electoral politics, and our theoretical understanding of life satisfaction are discussed.

Outside Options and the Logic of Security Council Action

Abstract: I examine if and how a superpower can use its asymmetric power to achieve favorable outcomes in multilateral bargaining between states that have conflicting interests and veto power. Using a game-theoretic framework, I show that the ability to act outside, either unilaterally or with an ally, helps the superpower to reach agreements that would be vetoed in the absence of the outside option. These agreements, however, are usually not at the superpower's ideal point. Under some conditions, uncertainty about the credibility of the outside option can lead to unilateral action that all actors prefer to avoid. In other circumstances, this uncertainty results in multilateral actions that the superpower (and the ally) would not initiate without multilateral authorization. The model provides useful insights that help explain patterns of decision-making in the United Nations Security Council in the 1990s, including the failed attempt to reach agreement over the Kosovo intervention.

Winners or Losers? Democracies in International Crisis, 1918 -94

Abstract: We attempt to explain when and why democratic states will prevail in international crises. We review several of the prominent theories about democratic political structures and derive hypotheses from each framework about crisis outcomes. These hypotheses are tested against the population of 422 international crises between 1918 and 1994. Our findings provide further evidence that the democratic peace is not a spurious result of common interests. Moreover, we also begin the difficult task of differentiating among the many theories of the democratic peace. In particular, we find strong evidence that democratic political structures are important because of their ability to generate domestic audience costs. Our findings also support the argument that democratic political structures encourage leaders to select international conflicts that they will win.

Human Rights as a Common Concern

Abstract: The doctrine of human rights has come to play a distinctive role in international life. This is primarily the role of a moral touchstone-a standard of assessment and criticism for domestic institutions, a standard of aspiration for their reform, and increasingly a standard of evaluation for the policies and practices of international economic and political institutions. International practice has followed the controlling documents of international law in taking a broad view of the scope of human rights. Many political theorists argue, however, that this view is excessively broad and that genuine human rights, if they are to be regarded as a truly common concern of world society, must be construed more narrowly. I argue against that perspective and in favor of the view implicit in contemporary international practice, using the right to democratic institutions as an example.

A Developmental Model of Heterogeneous Economic Voting in New Democracies

Abstract: I argue that information and trust in nascent democratic institutions are two important sources of heterogeneity in economic voting in transition democracies. Economic voting develops in postcommunist electorates as ambiguity regarding the link between government policy and economic outcomes declines. The link becomes less ambiguous as citizens become more informed about how democratic institutions function and gain increasing confidence or trust in the responsiveness of these institutions to public preferences. In the early period of democratization the conditions necessary for an effective agency relationship between voter and incumbent are not yet fully developed. Economic voting increases as these levels of information on, and trust in, government rise. The analysis that tests these propositions is based on a public opinion survey conducted in Hungary in 1997. The test is replicated with a 1997 Polish election survey.

Recycling the Garbage Can: An Assessment of the Research Program

Abstract: The garbage can theory of organizational choice is one of the best-known innovations in modern organization theory. It also has significantly shaped a major branch of the new institutionalism. Yet, the theory has not received the systematic assessment that it both deserves and needs. We evaluate the early verbal theory and argue that it fails to create an adequate foundation for scientific progress. We then analyze and rerun Cohen, March, and Olsen’s computer model and discover that its agents move in lockstep patterns that are strikingly different from the spirit of the theory. Indeed, the simulation and the theory are incompatible. Next, we examine how the authors have built upon these incompatible formulations in developing the theory further. We assess this larger program, which includes the March-Olsen version of the new institutionalism, and find that many of the problems that attended the original article have intensified over time. We conclude that a fundamental overhaul is required if the theory is to realize its early promise.

Garbage Cans, New Institutionalism, and the Study of Politics

Abstract: Bendor, Moe, and Shotts want to rescue some of the ideas of the garbage can model and the new institutionalism. Their rescue program, however, is alien to the spirit of not only our work but also some recent developments that may promise a climate of dialogue between different approaches in political science. Bendor, Moe, and Shotts place themselves closer to a tradition of unproductive tribal warfare than to more recent attempts to explore the limits of and the alternatives to (means-end) rational interpretations of political actors, institutions, and change. By building on a narrow concept of what is valuable political science, they cut themselves off from key issues that have occupied political scientists for centuries.

Back to Kant: Reinterpreting the Democratic Peace as a Macrohistorical Learning Process

Abstract: The contemporary international relations literature links the democratic peace hypothesis to Kant’s famous peace plan. Yet, whether attempting to prove or disprove the hypothesis, most quantitative studies have lost sight of important dimensions of the Kantian vision. I reinterpret the democratic peace as a dynamic and dialectical learning process. In order to assess the dynamic dimension of this process (while controlling for exogenous dialectical reversals), I rely on quantitative evidence drawn from popular data sets. In conformance with the Kantian perspective, the conflict propensities among democracies exhibit a steadily falling trend since the nineteenth century. Yet, in partial opposition to Kant’s expectations, other dyads also experience a significant, although weaker, pacifying trend. A series of tests shows that these findings are robust to epochal effects, various control variables, and “maturity effects” measuring the age of democratic dyads.

White Residents, Black Incumbents and a Declining Racial Divide

Abstract: Despite the hopes of the civil rights movement, researchers have found that the election of African Americans to office has not greatly improved the well-being of the black community. This study focuses on the white community, however, and finds that black leadership can have a profound effect. Under black mayors there is positive change in the white vote and in the racial sentiments expressed by members of the white electorate. Although white Republicans seem largely immune to the effects of black incumbency, for Democrats and independents an experience with a black mayoralty tends to decrease racial tension, increase racial sympathy, and increase support of black leadership.

Poking Counterfactual Holes in Covering Laws: Cognitive Styles and Historical Reasoning

Abstract: We report a series of studies of historical reasoning among professional observers of world politics. The correlational studies demonstrate that experts with strong theoretical commitments to a covering law and cognitive-stylistic preferences for explanatory closure are more likely to reject close-call Counterfactual that imply that “already explained” historical outcomes could easily have taken radically different forms. The experimental studies suggest that counterfactual reasoning is not totally theory-driven: Many experts are capable of surprising themselves when encouraged to imagine the implications of particular what-if scenarios. Yet, there is a downside to openness to historical contingency. The more effort experts allocate to exploring counterfactual worlds, the greater is the risk that they will assign too much subjective probability to too many scenarios. We close by defining good judgment as a reflective-equilibrium process of balancing the conflicting causal intuitions primed by complementary factual and counterfactual posings of historical questions.

Thucydides the Constructivist

Abstract: The most superficial level of Thucydides’ history examines the destructive consequences of domestic and foreign policies framed outside the language of justice. His deeper political-philosophical aim was to explore the relationship between nomos (convention) and phusis (nature) and its implications for civilization.

Rethinking Moral Economy

Abstract: I establish three closely related claims. The first two are interpretive, the third theoretical. (1) The prevailing conception of moral economy in political science, presupposed by opponents as well as advocates, rests too heavily on the distinction between nonmarket and market-based societies. (2) The prevailing conception of moral economy reduces to the unduly narrow claim that economic incorporation of a nonmarket people is the basis for the moral indignation that leads to resistance and rebellion. (3) Reconceptualizing moral economy in terms of social goods reveals additional grounds for politically significant moral indignation and permits moral-economic political analysis of a larger set of cases and phenomena. Water politics in the arid American West illustrate the power of a conception of moral economy based on social goods.

Machiavellian Democracy: Controlling Elites with Ferocious Populism

Abstract: This essay demonstrates that Niccolo Machiavelli’s political thought addresses the deficiencies of two opposite poles of contemporary democratic theory: As do formal or minimalist approaches, he specifies electoral mechanisms for elite control; and similar to substantive or civic culture approaches, he encourages more direct and robust modes of popular participation. On these grounds, I cull from Machiavelli’s Discourses a theory of democracy in which the populace selects the elites who will hold office but also constantly patrols them through extraelectoral institutions and practices, such as the tribunes of the people, public accusations, and popular appeals. Machiavelli adds to these institutional features of popular government an important cultural dimension: The people should despise and mistrust elites, and they should actively confront the injustice that elite governing inevitably entails. Finally, I explore the ramifications of this theory for debates over elite accountability in contemporary democratic theory.