The divergent results of two roughly simultaneous negotiations about international regimes for TV broadcasting and remote sensing from satellites reveal that governments do not form preferences by referring only to the interests emphasized in rational choice accounts or to the identities emphasized in sociological institutionalist ones. Tracing the course of the negotiations reveals that governments' perceptions of the interests and identities at stake, and their formulation of their preferences are shaped by their understanding of the contours of the problem or issue at hand. These understandings, or situation definitions, structure political interactions by indicating the causal and moral beliefs relevant to the question at hand, the range of efficacious and acceptable policy means available for addressing it, and the sorts of authority, expertise, skills, and other resources that give particular actors strong claims to inclusion in the process of deciding how to address it.

We inquire whether residence in majority–minority districts raises or lowers turnout among Latinos. We argue that the logic suggesting that majority–minority districts suppress turnout is flawed and hypothesize that the net effect is empowering. Further, we suggest that residing in multiple overlapping majority–minority districts—for state assemblies, senates, and the U.S. House—further enhances turnout. We test our hypotheses using individual-level turnout data for voters in five Southern California counties. Examining three general elections from 1996 to 2000, we demonstrate that residing in a majority-Latino district ultimately has a positive effect on the propensity of Latino voters to turn out, an effect that increases with the number of Latino districts in which the voter resides and is consistent across the individual offices in which a voter might be descriptively represented. In contrast, the probability that non-Hispanic voters turn out decreases as they are subject to increasing layers of majority-Latino districting.

Few dispute that secure property rights are critical to economic development. But if secure property rights are so beneficial, then why are they so rare? More precisely, what factors promote secure property rights? Do rightholders view private or state agents as a greater threat to property? Do they value bureaucratic commitment or discretion? I use evidence from two original surveys of company managers in Russia to assess the institutional, social, and political determinants of secure property rights. Most managers said that state arbitration courts did not work badly in disputes with other businesses, but few expected these courts to protect their rights in disputes with state officials. More importantly, managers who expressed confidence that state arbitration courts could constrain state officials invested at higher rates, even controlling for the perceived effectiveness of state institutions. Ironically, increasing constraints on state agents can increase the security of property and bolster state capacity. These results generate insights into debates on the role of state in the economy, the origins of secure property rights, the nature of state capacity, the importance of informal institutions, and the process of legal reform.

Does the organization of business matter for social policy development in the advanced capitalist democracies? Conventional welfare state analysis has given this significant question scant attention. We argue, however, that the representational power of business, coordination across business interest units, and integration of associations in corporatist policy-making forums, or what we call the social corporatist organization of business, should result in greater support and participation by employers in social policy formation and implementation. We test our arguments with models both of 1980–98 pooled time-series data on within- and across-country variation in spending on active labor market programs and of extensive firm-level survey data from Denmark and the United Kingdom. We find that the centralization and coordination of employers as well as the integration of employer organizations in corporatist policy-making forums are strongly associated with shares of national income devoted to active labor market policy. We find, moreover, that the degree of employer organization conditions active labor market policy responses to “de-industrialization” and increases in general unemployment. At the firm level, membership in an employer association has a significant positive effect on employer participation in active labor market programs in corporatist Denmark but not in the pluralist United Kingdom.

Although a large literature on delegation exists, few models have pushed beyond a core set of canonical assumptions. This approach may be justified on grounds of tractability, but the failure to grasp the significance of different assumptions and push beyond specific models has limited our understanding of the incentives for delegation. Consequently, the justifications for delegation that have received recent scrutiny and testing differ from some of the more plausible justifications offered by informal studies of delegation. We show that surprisingly few results in the literature hinge on risk aversion, and surprisingly many turn on the ignored, though equally canonical, technological assumption that uncertainty is fixed (relative to policies). Relaxing the key assumptions about dimensionality and functional forms provides a clearer intuition about delegation—one that is closer to classical treatments. The theory allows us to relate different institutional features (commitment, specialization costs, monitoring, multiple principals) to delegation's observable properties.

When two candidates of different quality compete in a one-dimensional policy space, the equilibrium outcomes are asymmetric and do not correspond to the median. There are three main effects. First, the better candidate adopts more centrist policies than the worse candidate. Second, the equilibrium is statistical, in the sense that it predicts a probability distribution of outcomes rather than a single degenerate outcome. Third, the equilibrium varies systematically with the level of uncertainty about the location of the median voter. We test these three predictions using laboratory experiments and find strong support for all three. We also observe some biases and show that they can be explained by quantal response equilibrium.

When policy arrangements appear to favor well-organized and wealthy interests, should we infer “capture” of the political process? In particular, might larger firms receive regulatory “protection” even when the regulatory agency is not captured by producers? I model regulatory approval—product approval, licensing, permitting and grant making—as a repeated optimal stopping problem faced by a learning regulator subject to variable political pressure. The model is general but stylistically applied to pharmaceutical regulation. Under the assumption that consumers are differentially organized, but producers are not, there nonetheless exist two forms of “protection” for larger, older producers. First, firms submitting more applications may expect quicker and more likely approvals, even in cases where their reputations for safety are below industry average. Second, “early entrants” to an exclusive market niche (disease) receive shorter expected approval times than later entrants, even when later entrants offer known quality improvements. The findings extend to cases of bounded rationality and a reduced form of endogenous firm submissions. The model shows that even interest-neutral “consumer” regulation can generate protectionist outcomes, and that commonly adduced evidence for capture is often observationally equivalent to evidence for other models of regulation.

Political bureaucracies make the overwhelming majority of public policy decisions in the United States. To examine the extent to which these agency actions are responsive to the preferences of elected officials, in particular, Congress, I develop a spatial model of oversight. The most important insight of this theory is that agencies make policy decisions within given regimes and may be constrained by the preferences of different political actors at different times. To test the theory, I collect and analyze data on the monitoring activities of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). I find that under certain conditions, the FDA is responsive to the preferences of committees and floors in Congress, but under other conditions the agency can act autonomously.

We analyze a model of delegation and policymaking in polities where bureaucratic capacity is low. Our analysis suggests that low bureaucratic capacity diminishes incentives for bureaucrats to comply with legislation, making it more difficult for politicians to induce bureaucrats to take actions that politicians desire. Consequently, when bureaucratic capacity is low, standard principles in the theoretical literature on delegation no longer hold. We also use the model to examine the issue of political reform in polities with low bureaucratic capacity. The model indicates that politicians in such polities will be trapped in a situation whereby they have little incentive to undertake reforms of either the bureaucracy or other institutions (such as courts) that are crucial for successful policymaking.

This paper asks (a) why and how institutions change, (b) how an institution persists in a changing environment, and (c) how processes that it unleashes lead to its own demise. The paper shows that the game-theoretic notion of self-enforcing equilibrium and the historical institutionalist focus on process are both inadequate to answer these questions. Building on a game-theoretic foundation, but responding to the critique of it by historical institutionalists, the paper introduces the concepts of quasi-parameters and self reinforcement. With these concepts, and building on repeated game theory, a dynamic approach to institutions is offered, one that can account for endogenous change (and stability) of institutions. Contextual accounts of formal governing institutions in early modern Europe and the informal institution of cleavage structure in the contemporary world provide illustrations of the approach.

The ancient Athenians regarded their ability to modify their laws as a fundamentally democratic trait; indeed, the faculty of “pragmatic innovation” was well known throughout the Greek world and was widely viewed as a key advantage that Athens had over its rival, Sparta. The Athenian commitment to legal change endured despite disastrous consequences at the end of the fifth century, a comprehensive revision of the laws, and the complication of legal procedure in the fourth century. In an apparent paradox, however, the Athenians also used “entrenchment clauses” to make certain laws immutable. Through analysis of entrenched laws and decrees, it is shown that the innovativeness that made Athens enviable also made it a difficult ally; entrenchment enabled the Athenians to make its commitments more credible. Although today entrenchment is typically used to protect crucial constitutional provisions, such as rights, in the ancient world it served a strategic purpose.

To most readers, Aristotle's many references to nature throughout the first book of the Politics imply a foundational role for nature outside and prior to politics. Aristotle, they claim, pairs nature with necessity and, thus, sets nature as a standard that fixes the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in political life. Through readings of Aristotle on the nature of citizens, slaves, and foreigners in the Politics, this essay argues, in contrast, that, to Aristotle, nature, especially human nature, is changeable and shaped by politics. Through an analysis of Aristotle's philosophical and scientific treatments of nature in the Metaphysics and Physics, this essay demonstrates that in order to preserve what he takes to be characteristic and also constitutive of a distinctively human way of living—prohairetic activity—Aristotle is especially keen to guard against any assimilation of nature to necessity.

Most scholars, following Rousseau himself, have had little to say about what Rousseau calls “the desire to extend our being.” Yet the concept is foundational to his political philosophy. Though less compelling a formulation (and deliberately so) than Plato's “eros” or Nietzsche's “will to power,” “the desire to extend our being” is comparable to these in its strength and reach, and hence in its power to unlock the full meaning of Rousseau's thought. My purpose in this paper is to uncover Rousseau's view of the meaning and significance of this desire; its pervasive influence on moral and political life; and the means through which it can and cannot, and should and should not, be fulfilled.

I saiah Berlin is remembered for his positive/negative liberty distinction and his value pluralism, but he was also an active participant in the debate over the nature of political inquiry. This essay argues that his neglected contribution to this debate is central to his thought and a valuable resource in today's debate over political science's methods and ends. I first show how Berlin understood the relationship of empirical science to humanistic study. I then demonstrate that his conceptions of political judgment and the “sense of reality” were intended as alternatives to the scientific pursuit of political knowledge. Finally, I argue that his Churchill and Weizmann essays present exemplars of the moral excellence Berlin considered necessary to ennoble liberal society and the political understanding indispensable to comprehensive political inquiry. I conclude by noting how Berlin's critique of scientific political inquiry informs his liberalism and his own methods of political inquiry.

A central challenge in qualitative research is selecting the “negative” cases (e.g., nonrevolutions, nonwars) to be included in analyses that seek to explain positive outcomes of interest (e.g., revolutions, wars). Although it is widely recognized that the selection of negative cases is consequential for theory testing, methodologists have yet to formulate specific rules to inform this selection process. In this paper, we propose a principle—the Possibility Principle—that provides explicit, rigorous, and theoretically informed guidelines for choosing a set of negative cases. The Possibility Principle advises researchers to select only negative cases where the outcome of interest is possible. Our discussion elaborates this principle and its implications for current debates about case selection and strategies of theory testing. Major points are illustrated with substantive examples from studies of revolution, economic growth, welfare states, and war.

I model sequential decisions over multiple interconnected propositions and investigate path-dependence in such decisions. The propositions and their interconnections are represented in propositional logic. A sequential decision process is path-dependent if its outcome depends on the order in which the propositions are considered. Assuming that earlier decisions constrain later ones, I prove three main results: First, certain rationality violations by the decision-making agent—individual or group—are necessary and sufficient for path-dependence. Second, under some conditions, path-dependence is unavoidable in decisions made by groups. Third, path-dependence makes decisions vulnerable to strategic agenda setting and strategic voting. I also discuss escape routes from path-dependence. My results are relevant to discussions on collective consistency and reason-based decision-making, focusing not only on outcomes, but also on underlying reasons, beliefs, and constraints.

Gender differences in vote choice, opinion, and party identification have become a common feature of the American political landscape. We examine the nature and causes of gender differences in partisanship using a time series approach. We show that gender differences are pervasive—existing outside of the context of specific elections or issues—and that they are a product of the interaction of societal conditions and politics. We find that from 1979 to 2000, the partisan gender gap has grown when the political climate moved in a conservative direction, the economy deteriorated, and the percentage of economically vulnerable, single women increased. The gender gap is likely to be a continual feature of the American political landscape: one that shapes everything from elite political behavior to election outcomes.

This paper aims to clarify the meaning, and explain the utility, of the case study method, a method often practiced but little understood. A “case study,” I argue, is best defined as an intensive study of a single unit with an aim to generalize across a larger set of units. Case studies rely on the same sort of covariational evidence utilized in non-case study research. Thus, the case study method is correctly understood as a particular way of defining cases, not a way of analyzing cases or a way of modeling causal relations. I show that this understanding of the subject illuminates some of the persistent ambiguities of case study work, ambiguities that are, to some extent, intrinsic to the enterprise. The travails of the case study within the discipline of political science are also rooted in an insufficient appreciation of the methodological tradeoffs that this method calls forth. This paper presents the familiar contrast between case study and non-case study work as a series of characteristic strengths and weaknesses—affinities—rather than as antagonistic approaches to the empirical world. In the end, the perceived hostility between case study and non-case study research is largely unjustified and, perhaps, deserves to be regarded as a misconception. Indeed, the strongest conclusion to arise from this methodological examination concerns the complementarity of single-unit and cross-unit research designs.

One of the most contested questions in the social sciences is whether people behave rationally. A large body of work assumes that individuals do in fact make rational economic, political, and social decisions. Yet hundreds of experiments suggest that this is not the case. Framing effects constitute one of the most stunning and influential demonstrations of irrationality. The effects not only challenge the foundational assumptions of much of the social sciences (e.g., the existence of coherent preferences or stable attitudes), but also lead many scholars to adopt alternative approaches (e.g., prospect theory). Surprisingly, virtually no work has sought to specify the political conditions under which framing effects occur. I fill this gap by offering a theory and experimental test. I show how contextual forces (e.g., elite competition, deliberation) and individual attributes (e.g., expertise) affect the success of framing. The results provide insight into when rationality assumptions apply and, also, have broad implications for political psychology and experimental methods.

Neorealism and some versions of realism seek to furnish nomothetic theories of the international system at the same time that they also strive to prescribe policy for political leaders. Insofar as practical advice is insufficiently articulated by means of either nomothesis or the structural theoretical framework that (neo-)realist paradigms supply, these two aspirations seem contradictory. This essay is an examination of what contemporary realism and, especially, neorealism require to make practical wisdom available for practitioners. It argues that narrative, which is exemplified in the so-called classical realism of Thucydides, remains a crucial component of practical realism and neorealism.