Using the racial integration of national labor unions as a case study, I find that courts played an important and meaningfully autonomous role in integrating unions while elected officials largely failed to act. Courts, unlike elected officials, offered civil rights groups relatively easy access to the legal agenda. In response to thousands of cases in federal courts, judges rewrote key civil rights statutes, oversaw the implementation of their rulings, and used attorneys' fees and damage awards to impose significant financial costs on resistant unions. Court power was the product of multiple and historically contingent forces that involved the interaction of elected officials, civil rights activists, and the legal community. Elected officials delegated to the courts the power to enforce civil rights laws and tacitly endorsed procedural changes that augmented the courts' institutional powers and the legal community's professional influence. In response, judges and lawyers promoted and implemented a civil rights agenda far beyond the endorsement of elected officials. An historical–institutional approach helps explain how courts achieved and wielded independent power and the consequences of their action for civil rights, labor unions, and the American state.Thanks for very helpful comments go to Amy Bridges, Kerstin Carlson, Malcolm Feeley, Beth Garrett, Howard Gillman, Mark Graber, Jeff Haydu, David Karol, Ken Kersch, David Mayhew, Jim Morone, Shehzad Nadeem, Ruth O'Brien, Corey Robin, Pam Singh, John Skrentny, Mark Tushnet, Rick Valelly, Keith Whittington, Janelle Wong, the APSR reviewers, and Lee Sigelman. The University of California's Institute for Labor and Employment provided generous financial assistance.

Peceny, Beer, and Sanchez-Terry (2002) find that interstate dyads containing a democracy and a personalist dictatorship are more likely than other types of dyads to experience militarized disputes. They argue that this is because democracies are especially likely to challenge personalist dictatorships. Unfortunately, they do not identify which state in a conflictual dyad initiated the dispute and so cannot present data to support their claim. We improve on their research design by using “directed dyads” to identify potential initiators. We confirm their finding that democracy–personalist dictatorship dyads are particularly conflict-prone, but we also disprove their argument that democracies attack dictators, as we find that personalist dictatorships are more likely to challenge democracies, but not vice versa. We also find that other kinds of autocracies, namely, military regimes and single-party regimes, are more likely to challenge democracies than vice versa. Our findings have important implications for understanding the relationships between regime type and international conflict.The authors thank Caroline Beer very much for assistance with data.

Richardson's finding that the severity of interstate wars is power law distributed belongs to the most striking empirical regularities in world politics. This is a regularity in search of a theory. Drawing on the principles of self-organized criticality, I propose an agent-based model of war and state formation that exhibits power-law regularities. The computational findings suggest that the scale-free behavior depends on a process of technological change that leads to contextually dependent, stochastic decisions to wage war.Early drafts of this paper were prepared for presentation at the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, Ohio State University, Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Cornell University. I am grateful to the participants in those meetings and to Robert Axelrod, Claudio Cioffi-Revilla, Fredrik Liljeros, and the editor and the anonymous reviewers of this journal for excellent comments. Laszlo Gulyas helped me reimplement the model in Java and Repast. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the generous support of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies. Nevertheless, I bear the full responsibility for any inaccuracies and omissions.

Reiter and Stam advance the study of the conflict behavior of authoritarian regimes in two ways. First, they clearly demonstrate the importance of using directed dyad data sets for studying mixed pairs of political regimes. Second, they have refocused our attention on the question of decisional constraints and international conflict. This response examines the dispute patterns of a specific mixed pair of authoritarian regimes, single-party regimes, and personalist dictatorships. We find that single-party regimes are significantly less likely to start militarized disputes against personalist dictatorships than is true of other types of regime dyads. In contrast, personalist regimes are somewhat more likely to initiate militarized disputes against single-party regimes than is the norm for other regime dyads. These findings indicate that the relationships among specific types of authoritarian regimes may be as consequential as the relationships between democracies and authoritarian regimes of any type. They also indicate that we need to examine further the role that institutional constraints play in shaping the conflict behavior of authoritarian regimes.We thank Chris Butler for his comments and Dan Reiter for sharing his data.

Political institutions translate inputs—in the form of changed preferences, new participants, new information, or sudden attention to previously available information—into policy outputs. In the process they impose costs on this translation, and these costs increase institutional friction. We argue that the “friction” in political institutions leads not to consistent “gridlock” but to long periods of stasis interspersed with dramatic policy punctuations. As political institutions add costs to the translation of inputs into outputs, institutional friction will increase, and outputs from the process will become increasingly punctuated overall. We use a stochastic process approach to compare the extent of punctuations among 15 data sets that assess change in U.S. government budgets, in a variety of aspects of the public policy process, in election results, and in stock market returns in the United States. We find that all of these distributions display positive kurtosis—tall central peaks (representing considerable stability) and heavy tails (reflecting the punctuations, both positive and negative). When we order institutions according to the costs they impose on collective action, those with higher decision and transaction costs generate more positive kurtosis. Direct parameter estimates indicate that all distributions except budget data were best fit by the double-exponential probability distribution; budgets are Paretian.This project was funded by the Political Science Program of the National Science Foundation, Award SES9904700. We appreciate the support of Frank Scioli, the program officer, and various political science program directors. We benefited from comments by Frank Baumgartner, John Brehm, Chris Mackie, Peter John, John Padgett, Bat Sparrow, Jim True and John Wilkerson.

Students of public organizations acknowledge that administrative agencies make decisions in an uncertain policy environment. Existing research on public bureaucracy either makes simplifying a priori assumptions about such behavior or completely ignores this fundamental issue. This study proposes a statistical test of agency risk-bearing behavior to shed light on bureaucratic decision making under conditions of uncertainty. An analysis of Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) agency budget requests for the 1949–97 period yields risk coefficients that are compatible with analytically derived results. The empirical findings indicate that the SEC exhibits relatively greater concern about organizational maintenance when the type of uncertainty that it experiences is external to the decision-making purview of the organization than when it is internal to the agency. However, mixed statistical evidence is obtained that the SEC places comparatively greater value on organizational maintenance, as reflected in its budgetary decisions, during an era of greater political instability induced by divided party government than under unified government.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meetings of the 1999 Public Choice Society, March 12–14, 1999, Hotel Monteleone, New Orleans, Louisiana. The author wishes to thank Janice Boucher Breuer, Charles Cameron, Brandice Canes–Wrone, Dan Carpenter, Jeffrey Cohen, Stephen Dilworth, Jim Douglas, David Epstein, Brad Gomez, Chris Kam, David Lewis, Ken Meier, Tom Romer, Andy Whitford, B. Dan Wood, LeeAnne Krause, and seminar participants at Columbia University and the University of South Carolina, and the anonymous APSR reviewers for their helpful suggestions and comments at various stages of this project. I thank Tim Groseclose and Dan Ponder for providing some of the ADA voting score data used in this paper. This paper is dedicated to the memory of Sherry Ann Krause. Any errors that remain are my own.