This paper is an exploration of various political environmental conditions associated with the incidence of political protest activities directed toward urban institutions, agencies, and officials in 43 American cities.

Two preliminary questions are considered first. One deals with making explicit the theoretical linkage between elements in the political environment and political behavior. The other is an attempt to define protest technically and to differentiate it from political violence. This effort is made necessary by the facts that violence and protest are not treated in the literature as distinct forms of behavior (but rather as similar acts at different points on a continuum of aggressiveness) and that studies of collective violence in American ghettos indicate no relation between environment and rioting.

Two alternative hypotheses are considered: protest varies negatively with indicators of an open political system (a linear model) and protest is greatest in systems characterized by a mix of open and closed factors (a curvilinear model). Data are drawn from newspaper accounts of protest incidents in 43 cities over a six month period in 1968, producing a sample of 120 protest incidents.

Both the simple incidence of protest and the intensity of protest seem to fit the curvilinear model more closely than the linear one. The incidence of protest, then, seems to signify change not only among previously quiescent or conventionally oriented groups but also in the political system itself as it becomes more open and responsive.

This study focuses on a nonmonetary dimension of public policy—innovation by states in the fields of education, welfare, and civil rights. Innovation is considered equivalent to the adoption of a law by a state. From the literature on diffusion (or spread) of innovations, the explanation of user interaction is taken, and a simple model with an interaction term is constructed. The model performs fairly well when evaluated by several common criteria. The results do vary somewhat from one issue area to another; other types of supplementary analysis also indicate variation in diffusion patterns according to the issue involved. Political and economic differences among states are found to account for differences in time of adoption, and “innovativeness” is shown to be an issue- and time-specific factor.

A large and growing literature links high levels of ethnic diversity to low levels of public goods provision. Yet although the empirical connection between ethnic heterogeneity and the underprovision of public goods is widely accepted, there is little consensus on the specific mechanisms through which this relationship operates. We identify three families of mechanisms that link diversity to public goods provision—what we term “preferences,” “technology,” and “strategy selection” mechanisms—and run a series of experimental games that permit us to compare the explanatory power of distinct mechanisms within each of these three families. Results from games conducted with a random sample of 300 subjects from a slum neighborhood of Kampala, Uganda, suggest that successful public goods provision in homogenous ethnic communities can be attributed to a strategy selection mechanism: in similar settings, co-ethnics play cooperative equilibria, whereas non-co-ethnics do not. In addition, we find evidence for a technology mechanism: co-ethnics are more closely linked on social networks and thus plausibly better able to support cooperation through the threat of social sanction. We find no evidence for prominent preference mechanisms that emphasize the commonality of tastes within ethnic groups or a greater degree of altruism toward co-ethnics, and only weak evidence for technology mechanisms that focus on the impact of shared ethnicity on the productivity of teams.

From Stokes's (1963) early critique on, it has been clear to empirical researchers that the traditional spatial theory of elections is seriously flawed. Yet fully a quarter century later, that theory remains the dominant paradigm for understanding mass-elite linkage in politics. We present an alternative spatial theory of elections that we argue has greater empirical verisimilitude.

Based on the ideas of symbolic politics, the directional theory assumes that most people have a diffuse preference for a certain direction of policy-making and that people vary in the intensity with which they hold those preferences. We test the two competing theories at the individual level with National Election Study data and find the directional theory more strongly supported than the traditional spatial theory. We then develop the implications of the directional theory for candidate behavior and assess the predictions in light of evidence from the U.S. Congress.

In recent years a rich outpouring of case studies on community decision-making has been combined with a noticeable lack of generalizations based on them. One reason for this is a commonplace: we have no general theory, no broad-gauge model in terms of which widely different case studies can be systematically compared and contrasted.

Among the obstacles to the development of such a theory is a good deal of confusion about the nature of power and of the things that differentiate it from the equally important concepts of force, influence, and authority. These terms have different meanings and are of varying relevance; yet in nearly all studies of community decision-making published to date, power and influence are used almost interchangeably, and force and authority are neglected. The researchers thereby handicap themselves. For they utilize concepts which are at once too broadly and too narrowly drawn: too broadly, because important distinctions between power and influence are brushed over; and too narrowly, because other concepts are disregarded—concepts which, had they been brought to bear, might have altered the findings radically.

Many investigators have also mistakenly assumed that power and its correlatives are activated and can be observed only in decisionmaking situations. They have overlooked the equally, if not more important area of what might be called “nondecision-making”, i.e., the practice of limiting the scope of actual decisionmaking to “safe” issues by manipulating the dominant community values, myths, and political institutions and procedures. To pass over this is to neglect one whole “face” of power.

The neorealist-neoliberal debate about the possibilities for collective action in international relations has been based on a shared commitment to Mancur Olson's rationalist definition of the problem as one of getting exogenously given egoists to cooperate. Treating this assumption as a de facto hypothesis about world politics, I articulate the rival claim that interaction at the systemic level changes state identities and interests. The causes of state egoism do not justify always treating it as given. Insights from critical international relations and integration theories suggest how collective identity among states could emerge endogenously at the systemic level. Such a process would generate cooperation that neither neorealists nor neoliberals expect and help transform systemic anarchy into an “international state”—a transnational structure of political authority that might undermine territorial democracy. I show how broadening systemic theory beyond rationalist concerns can help it to explain structural change in world politics.

Party identification is central to the study of American political behavior, yet there remains disagreement over whether it is largely instrumental or expressive in nature. We draw on social identity theory to develop the expressive model and conduct four studies to compare it to an instrumental explanation of campaign involvement. We find strong support for the expressive model: a multi-item partisan identity scale better accounts for campaign activity than a strong stance on subjectively important policy issues, the strength of ideological self-placement, or a measure of ideological identity. A series of experiments underscore the power of partisan identity to generate action-oriented emotions that drive campaign activity. Strongly identified partisans feel angrier than weaker partisans when threatened with electoral loss and more positive when reassured of victory. In contrast, those who hold a strong and ideologically consistent position on issues are no more aroused emotionally than others by party threats or reassurances. In addition, threat and reassurance to the party's status arouse greater anger and enthusiasm among partisans than does a threatened loss or victory on central policy issues. Our findings underscore the power of an expressive partisan identity to drive campaign involvement and generate strong emotional reactions to ongoing campaign events.

Though both journalists and the academic literature on ethnic conflict give the opposite impression, peaceful and even cooperative relations between ethnic groups are far more common than is large-scale violence. We seek to explain this norm of interethnic peace and how it occasionally breaks down, arguing that formal and informal institutions usually work to contain or “cauterize” disputes between individual members of different groups. Using a social matching game model, we show that local-level interethnic cooperation can be supported in essentially two ways. In spiral equilibria, disputes between individuals are correctly expected to spiral rapidly beyond the two parties, and fear of this induces cooperation “on the equilibrium path.” In in-group policing equilibria, individuals ignore transgressions by members of the other group, correctly expecting that the culprits will be identified and sanctioned by their own ethnic brethren. A range of examples suggests that both equilibria occur empirically and have properties expected from the theoretical analysis.

The Condorcet Jury Theorem states that majorities are more likely than any single individual to select the “better” of two alternatives when there exists uncertainty about which of the two alternatives is in fact preferred. Most extant proofs of this theorem implicitly make the behavioral assumption that individuals vote “sincerely” in the collective decision making, a seemingly innocuous assumption, given that individuals are taken to possess a common preference for selecting the better alternative. However, in the model analyzed here we find that sincere behavior by all individuals is not rational even when individuals have such a common preference. In particular, sincere voting does not constitute a Nash equilibrium. A satisfactory rational choice foundation for the claim that majorities invariably “do better” than individuals, therefore, has yet to be derived.

Past research has emphasized two critical economic concerns that appear to generate anti-immigrant sentiment among native citizens: concerns about labor market competition and concerns about the fiscal burden on public services. We provide direct tests of both models of attitude formation using an original survey experiment embedded in a nationwide U.S. survey. The labor market competition model predicts that natives will be most opposed to immigrants who have skill levels similar to their own. We find instead that both low-skilled and highly skilled natives strongly prefer highly skilled immigrants over low-skilled immigrants, and this preference is not decreasing in natives' skill levels. The fiscal burden model anticipates that rich natives oppose low-skilled immigration more than poor natives, and that this gap is larger in states with greater fiscal exposure (in terms of immigrant access to public services). We find instead that rich and poor natives are equally opposed to low-skilled immigration in general. In states with high fiscal exposure, poor (rich) natives are more (less) opposed to low-skilled immigration than they are elsewhere. This indicates that concerns among poor natives about constraints on welfare benefits as a result of immigration are more relevant than concerns among the rich about increased taxes. Overall the results suggest that economic self-interest, at least as currently theorized, does not explain voter attitudes toward immigration. The results are consistent with alternative arguments emphasizing noneconomic concerns associated with ethnocentrism or sociotropic considerations about how the local economy as a whole may be affected by immigration.

Professional lobbyists are among the most experienced, knowledgeable, and strategic actors one can find in the everyday practice of politics. Nonetheless, their behavioral patterns often appear anomalous when viewed in the light of existing theories. We revisit these anomalies in search of an alternative theory. We model lobbying not as exchange (vote buying) or persuasion (informative signaling) but as a form of legislative subsidy—a matching grant of policy information, political intelligence, and legislative labor to the enterprises of strategically selected legislators. The proximate political objective of this strategy is not to change legislators' minds but to assist natural allies in achieving their own, coincident objectives. The theory is simple in form, realistic in its principal assumptions, and counterintuitive in its main implications. Empirically, the model renders otherwise anomalous regularities comprehensible and predictable. In a later section, we briefly bring preferences back in, examining the important but relatively uncommon conditions under which preference-centered lobbying should occur.

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.

This crossnational study seeks to explain variations in governmental repression of human rights to personal integrity (state terrorism) in a 153-country sample during the eighties. We outline theoretical perspectives on this topic and subject them to empirical tests using a technique appropriate for our pooled cross-sectional time-series design, namely, ordinary least squares with robust standard errors and a lagged dependent variable. We find democracy and participation in civil or international war to have substantively important and statistically significant effects on repression. The effects of economic development and population size are more modest. The hypothesis linking leftist regime types to abuse of personal integrity rights receives some support. We find no reliable evidence that population growth, British cultural influence, military control, or economic growth affect levels of repression. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings for scholars and practitioners concerned with the prevention of personal integrity abuse.

Standard political economy models of redistribution, notably that of Meltzer and Richard (1981), fail to account for the remarkable variance in government redistribution across democracies. We develop a general model of redistribution that explains why some democratic governments are more prone to redistribute than others. We show that the electoral system plays a key role because it shapes the nature of political parties and the composition of governing coalitions, hence redistribution. Our argument implies (1) that center-left governments dominate under PR systems, whereas center-right governments dominate under majoritarian systems; and (2) that PR systems redistribute more than majoritarian systems. We test our argument on panel data for redistribution, government partisanship, and electoral system in advanced democracies.

We address two long-standing survey research problems: measuring complicated concepts, such as political freedom and efficacy, that researchers define best with reference to examples; and what to do when respondents interpret identical questions in different ways. Scholars have long addressed these problems with approaches to reduce incomparability, such as writing more concrete questions—with uneven success. Our alternative is to measure directly response category incomparability and to correct for it. We measure incomparability via respondents' assessments, on the same scale as the self-assessments to be corrected, of hypothetical individuals described in short vignettes. Because the actual (but not necessarily reported) levels of the vignettes are invariant over respondents, variability in vignette answers reveals incomparability. Our corrections require either simple recodes or a statistical model designed to save survey administration costs. With analysis, simulations, and cross-national surveys, we show how response incomparability can drastically mislead survey researchers and how our approach can alleviate this problem.

We test the possibility that political attitudes and behaviors are the result of both environmental and genetic factors. Employing standard methodological approaches in behavioral genetics—specifically, comparisons of the differential correlations of the attitudes of monozygotic twins and dizygotic twins—we analyze data drawn from a large sample of twins in the United States, supplemented with findings from twins in Australia. The results indicate that genetics plays an important role in shaping political attitudes and ideologies but a more modest role in forming party identification; as such, they call for finer distinctions in theorizing about the sources of political attitudes. We conclude by urging political scientists to incorporate genetic influences, specifically interactions between genetic heritability and social environment, into models of political attitude formation.

What is the effect of democratic competition on the power of elites to frame public opinion? We address this issue first by defining the range of competitive contexts that might surround any debate over a policy issue. We then offer a theory that predicts how audiences, messages, and competitive environments interact to influence the magnitude of framing effects. These hypotheses are tested using experimental data gathered on the opinions of adults and college students toward two policy issues—the management of urban growth and the right of an extremist group to conduct a rally. Our results indicate that framing effects depend more heavily on the qualities of frames than on their frequency of dissemination and that competition alters but does not eliminate the influence of framing. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results for the study of public opinion and democratic political debate.

Do political institutions affect citizen satisfaction with democracy? If so, how? Using cross-sectional survey data for eleven European democracies together with data on the type of democracy in which individuals live, we demonstrate that the nature of representative democratic institutions (measured by Arend Lijphart's consensus-majority index of democracies) mediates the relationship between a person's status as part of the political minority or majority and his or her satisfaction with the way the system works. Specifically, we find that (1) the losers of democratic competition show lower levels of satisfaction than do those in the majority and (2) losers in systems that are more consensual display higher levels of satisfaction with the way democracy works than do losers in systems with majoritarian characteristics. Conversely, winners tend to be more satisfied with democracy the more a country's political institutions approximate pure majoritarian government.

The relevance of socioeconomic class and of class-related parties for policymaking is a recurring issue in the social sciences. The “new politics” perspective holds that in the present era of austerity, class-based parties once driving welfare state expansion have been superseded by powerful new interest groups of welfare-state clients capable of largely resisting retrenchment pressures emanating from postindustrial forces. We argue that retrenchment can fruitfully be analyzed as distributive conflict involving a remaking of the early postwar social contract based on the full employment welfare state, a conflict in which partisan politics and welfare-state institutions are likely to matter. Pointing to problems of conceptualization and measurement of the dependent variable in previous research, we bring in new data on the extent of retrenchment in social citizenship rights and show that the long increase in social rights has been turned into a decline and that significant retrenchment has taken place in several countries. Our analyses demonstrate that partisan politics remains significant for retrenchment also when we take account of contextual indictors, such as constitutional veto points, economic factors, and globalization.Author names are in alphabetical order and they share equal responsibility for the manuscript. Early versions of this paper were presented at annual meetings of the Nordic Political Science Association in Aalborg, 2002, and the American Political Science Association in San Francisco, 2001, the International Sociological Association RC 28 meeting in Mannheim, 2001, the International Sociological Association RC 19 meeting in Tilburg 2000, and the American Sociological Association in Washington, DC, 2000, as well as at various seminars. For constructive comments on different versions of the manuscript we thank Rainer Lepsius, Anders Lindbom, Ingalill Montanari, John Myles, Michael Shalev, Sheila Shaver, and Robin Stryker, as well as other participants in these meetings. We want to thank Olof Bäckman, Stefan Englund, Ingrid Esser, Helena Höög, and Annita Näsström for very valuable help and Dennis Quinn for providing us his data on international financial deregulation. Our thanks are also due to three anonymous referees for careful reading. This research has been supported by grants from the Bank of Sweden Tercentennial Foundation and the Swedish Council for Social Research.

Political efficacy has been studied extensively since the 1950s, hut analysts have never been fully satisfied with its measurement. After considerable testing, four new questions tapping internal political efficacy were added to the 1988 National Election Study. Our investigation shows that inter-item correlations among these questions indicate high internal consistency, that by both exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis the items measure a single concept distinct from external efficacy and political trust, that the measurement model is robust across major subgroups, and that the overall scale is externally valid and provides a good distribution of efficacy scores across the population. Further, the results of an order experiment in the survey suggest that responses are unaffected by mode of presentation. In short, the four new questions constitute the most satisfactory measure of internal political efficacy to date.