It is widely believed that rational choice theory is grossly inconsistent with empirical observations about voter turnout. We report the results of an experiment designed to test the voter turnout predictions of the rational choice Palfrey–Rosenthal model of participation with asymmetric information. We find that the three main comparative statics predictions are observed in the data: the size effect, whereby turnout goes down in larger electorates; the competition effect, whereby turnout is higher in elections that are expected to be close; and the underdog effect, whereby voters supporting the less popular alternative have higher turnout rates. We also compare the quantitative magnitudes of turnout to the predictions of Nash equilibrium. We find that there is undervoting for small electorates and overvoting for large electorates, relative to Nash equilibrium. These deviations from Nash equilibrium are consistent with the logit version of Quantal Response Equilibrium, which provides a good fit to the data, and can also account for significant voter turnout in very large elections.

This paper explores three competing accounts of judicial review by comparing the enacting and invalidating coalitions for each of the fifty-three federal statutes struck down by the Supreme Court during its 1981 through 2005 terms. When a Republican judicial coalition invalidates a Democratic statute, the Court's decision is consistent with a partisan account, and when a conservative judicial coalition invalidates a liberal statute, the decision is explicable on policy grounds. But when an ideologically mixed coalition invalidates a bipartisan statute, the decision may have reflected an institutional divide between judges and legislators rather than a partisan or policy conflict. Finding more cases consistent with this last explanation than either of the others, I suggest that the existing literature has paid insufficient attention to the possibility of institutionally motivated judicial behavior, and more importantly, that any comprehensive account of the Court's decisions will have to attend to the interaction of multiple competing influences on the justices.

This paper develops a framework for analyzing a defender's allocation of scarce resources against a strategic adversary like a terrorist group in four settings: (1) a baseline case in which the sites the defender tries to guard are “independent” in that resources dedicated to protecting one site have no effect on any other site; (2) if the defender can also allocate resources to border defense, intelligence, or counterterrorist operations which, if successful, protect all of the sites; (3) if threats have strategic and nonstrategic components (e.g., the threat to public health from bioterror attacks and the natural outbreak of new diseases); and (4) if the defender is unsure of the terrorists' preferred targets. The analysis characterizes the defender's optimal (equilibrium) allocations in these settings, an algorithm or approach to finding the optimal allocations, and relevant comparative statics. These characterizations provide a general way of thinking about the resource-allocation problem in these settings.

Existing theories of labor protest depend on independent organizations representing workers. However, in many countries most workers are either not organized at all or are in labor unions intended for control, not representation. This is particularly the case in partially liberalized or hybrid regimes where, despite the introduction of electoral competition, autonomous, democratic organizations representing labor are not well developed. Yet such workers do protest. Drawing on an original new dataset from one hybrid regime, post-Communist Russia, I develop a theory of labor protest and of the institutional mechanisms used by elites to influence it. Instead of being a function of union membership or characteristics of the information environment, as the existing literature would have it, protest occurs when it is in the interest of powerful elements of the elite, or when economic conditions are truly desperate.

It is typically assumed that African leaders enact policies that benefit their ethnoregional group using all types of patronage. Crop production and political power are geographically concentrated in many African countries, and this paper exploits this overlap to cast doubt on this conventional wisdom. It shows, using data on 50 country-crop combinations, that cash crop farmers who are ethnically identified with the head of state face higher taxes. Furthermore, democratic regimes impose lower taxes. This paper shows that farmers who have few alternatives face higher taxes. African leaders have used local intermediaries to exert control over the countryside and to ensure that farmers do not support alternative candidates. It suggests that as leaders are better at selecting and monitoring these intermediaries in their home areas, they can extract more from the majority at home than abroad using taxes on cash crops, which are regionally but not individually targetable.

Building on previous research on the effects of racial priming on the opinions of White Americans, this paper engages the question of how exposure to racial cues in political messages shapes the opinions of African Americans. I argue that explanations of racial priming that focus exclusively on White Americans are insufficient to explain how racial cues influence the opinions of Black Americans, as they fail to account for the activation of in-group attitudes and mis-specify the role of explicit racial cues. In two separate laboratory experiments, I test the effects of explicitly racial, implicitly racial, and nonracial verbal cues on both Black and White Americans' assessments of an ostensibly nonracial issue. The results point to important racial differences in the effectiveness of explicit and implicit racial verbal cues in activating racial thinking about an issue. Only frames that provide oblique references to race successfully activated racial out-group resentment for Whites. Among Blacks, explicit references to race most reliably elicited racial thinking by activating racial in-group identification, whereas the effect of implicit cues was moderated by the activation of negative representations of the in group. These findings not only demonstrate that racial attitude activation works differently for African Americans than for Whites but also challenge conventional wisdom that African Americans see all political issues through a racial lens.

This paper explores when and why private communication works in crisis diplomacy. Conventional audience-cost models suggest that state leaders must go public with their threats in international crises because leaders cannot tie their hands if signals are issued privately. I present a crisis bargaining game where both the sender and the receiver of signals have a domestic audience. The equilibrium analysis demonstrates that a private threat, albeit of limited credibility, can be equally compelling as a fully credible public threat. The analysis suggests that secrecy works in crisis diplomacy despite its informational inefficacy. Secrecy insulates leaders from domestic political consequences when they capitulate to a challenge to avoid risking unwarranted war. The logic of efficient secrecy helps shed light on the unaccounted history of private diplomacy in international crises. The Alaska Boundary Dispute illustrates this logic.

In many resources-allocation problems, strategic adversaries move sequentially and are likely to have private information about the effectiveness of their spending. A defender, for example, often has to allocate its defensive resources before an attacker (e.g., a terrorist group) decides where to strike. Defenders are also likely to have private information about the vulnerability of the things they are trying to protect. Sequential decisions and private information about effectiveness creates a dilemma for a defender. Allocating more to a highly vulnerable site reduces the expected losses should that site be attacked but may also signal that that site is more vulnerable and thereby increase the probability of an attack. Modeling this tradeoff as a signaling game, the analysis shows that secrecy concerns generally swamp vulnerability concerns when more vulnerable sites are weakly harder to protect on the margin. The defender pools in equilibrium, that is, allocates its resources in the same way, regardless of the level of vulnerability. If more vulnerable sites are easier to protect on the margin, vulnerability concerns may swamp secrecy concerns.

The laws of war seek to regulate conduct during wartime. The record of compliance with these treaties is mixed. I explain compliance as the result of publicly accepted and so legally binding agreements that create incentives for the parties to enforce those agreements through reciprocity. Ratification by a democracy is a signal that it intends to abide by the treaty standard; those that ratify are more likely to comply. Ratification does not effect the behavior of nondemocracies, however. Ratification of the relevant treaty by both warring parties strengthens reciprocity. There is a hierarchy of average compliance across issues which matches the scope for violations by individuals on each issue, with greater scope for such violations corresponding to lower levels of compliance.

Over the last decade the scholarship on judicial politics has increasingly emphasized the strategic aspects of decision making in the United States Supreme Court. This scholarship, however, has struggled with two significant limitations—the restriction to unidimensional policy spaces and the assumption of binary comparisons of alternatives. These two assumptions have the advantage of implying stable, predictable outcomes, but lack a sound theoretical foundation and assume away potentially important aspects of strategic behavior on the Court. In this article, we identify institutional features of the Court that, under certain conditions, allow us to relax these two assumptions without sacrificing stable, predictable policy outcomes. In particular, we formalize the “part-by-part” opinion voting used by the justices, a feature that, together with separable preferences over policy issues, implies stable policy outcomes around the issue-by-issue median of the justices.

Why would government officials in authoritarian and transitional systems where formal democratic and bureaucratic institutions of accountability are often weak ever provide more than the minimum level of public goods needed to maintain social stability? Findings from a unique combination of in-depth case study research and an original survey of 316 villages in rural China indicate that even when formal accountability is weak, local officials can be subject to unofficial rules and norms that establish and enforce their public obligations. These informal institutions of accountability can be provided by encompassing and embedding solidary groups. Villages where these types of groups exist are more likely to have better local governmental public goods provision than villages without these solidary groups, all other things being equal.

This paper theorizes the link between ethnicity and conflict. Conventional research relies on the ethnolinguistic fractionalization index (ELF) to explore a possible causal connection between these two phenomena. However, such approaches implicitly postulate unrealistic, individualist interaction topologies. Moreover, ELF-based studies fail to articulate explicit causal mechanisms of collective action. To overcome these difficulties, we introduce the new index N* of ethnonationalist exclusiveness that maps ethnic configurations onto political violence. This formalization is confirmed statistically in regression analysis based on data from Eurasia and North Africa.

What do countries do when they have committed to a treaty, but then find that commitment challenged? After the creation of the International Criminal Court, the United States tried to get countries, regardless of whether they were parties to the Court or not, to sign agreements not to surrender Americans to the Court. Why did some states sign and others not? Given United States power and threats of military sanctions, some states did sign. However, such factors tell only part of the story. When refusing to sign, many states emphasized the moral value of the court. Further, states with a high domestic rule of law emphasized the importance of keeping their commitment. This article therefore advances two classic arguments that typically are difficult to substantiate; namely, state preferences are indeed partly normative, and international commitments do not just screen states; they also constrain.

Party activists face a coordination problem: a critical mass—a barrier to coordination—must advocate a single policy alternative if the party is to succeed. The need for direction is the degree to which the merits of the alternatives respond to the underlying fundamentals of the party's environment. An individual's ability to assess the fundamentals is his sense of direction. These three factors—the barriers to coordination, the need for direction, and an individual's sense of direction—combine to form an index of both the desirability and the feasibility of leadership. We offer insights into Michels' Iron Law: a sovereign party conference gives way to leadership by an individual or oligarchy if and only if the leadership index is sufficiently high. Leadership enhances the clarity of intraparty communication, but weakens the response of policy choices to the party's environment. Our model can also be applied to the coordination problems faced by instrumental voters in plurality-rule elections, and so relates to the psychological effect of Duverger's Law.

Partly hidden beneath the complexities of N* and an attack on the supposedly individualist presumptions of ethnic fractionalization measures, a simple and valuable question lies implicit in Cederman and Girardin's (2007) article (henceforth, CG). Are countries at greater risk of civil war when the state is controlled by an ethnic minority?

Morelli (1999) provides a model of government formation in which the parties make payoff demands and the order of moves is chosen by the leading party. Morelli's main proposition states that the ex post distribution of payoffs inside the coalition that forms is proportional to the distribution of relative ex ante bargaining power. We provide a counterexample in which the leading party is able to obtain the entire payoff; furthermore, there are coalitions for which proportional payoff division does not occur for any order of moves.

Appellate courts make policy, not only by hearing cases themselves, but by establishing legal rules for the disposition of future cases. The problem is that such courts are generally multimember, or collegial, courts. If different judges prefer different rules, can a collegial court establish meaningful legal rules? Can preferences that take the form of legal rules be aggregated? I use a “case-space” model to show that there will exist a collegial rule that captures majoritarian preferences, and to show that there will exist a median rule even if there is no single median judge. I show how collegial rules can differ from the rules of individual judges and how judicial institutions (such as appellate review and the power to write separate opinions) affect the stability and enforceability of legal rules. These results are discussed in light of fundamental debates between legal and political perspectives on judicial behavior.

In this reply, I will focus on the implications of Montero and Vidal-Puga's finding, acknowledging that their result is correct. Thus, what follows should not be interpreted as a defense of the Proposition 2 of Morelli 1999, but as a clarification of the impact of this correction for the demand bargaining research agenda as a whole.

We analyze the positive and normative implications of regulatory oversight when the policymaking agency can improve the quality of regulation through effort, but only some kinds of effort are observable by the overseer, and the overseer's only power is the ability to veto new regulation. Such oversight can increase the quality of agency regulation, but it also introduces inefficiencies—the agency underinvests in unobservable effort and overinvests in observable effort. Agencies have no incentive to conceal their activities from the overseer; the reforms that are likely to reduce inefficiency are therefore those that improve overseer expertise or lower the costs of agency disclosure, not those that compel disclosure. The normative implications depend on the relative severity of bureaucratic drift and slack problems. When slack is paramount, an overseer that is more anti-regulation than the agency or society improves social welfare, as long as it does not deter the agency from regulating entirely. When drift is paramount, oversight improves social welfare only when it deters regulation. In this case, regulatory oversight is weakly dominated by one of two alternatives: eliminating oversight or banning regulation.