Articles:

Kevin B. Smith, Christopher W. Larimer, Levente Littvay, and John R. Hibbing, “Evolutionary Theory and Political Leadership: Why Certain People Do Not Trust Decision-Makers” [More]

Sanford C. Gordon and Catherine Hafer, "Corporate Influence and the Regulatory Mandate" [More]

Cindy D. Kam and Donald R. Kinder, “Terror and Ethnocentrism: Foundations of American Support for the War on Terrorism” [More]

Samuel DeCanio, “Religion and 19th Century Voting Behavior: A New Look at Some Old Data” [More]

Josh Mitchell, “Religion is not a Preference” [More]

Karen Remmer, “The Political Economy of Patronage: Expenditure Patterns in the Argentine Provinces, 1983-2003” [More]

Nita Rudra, “Welfare States in Developing Countries: Unique or Universal?” [More]

Emilia Justyna Powell and Sara McLaughlin Mitchell, “The International Court of Justice and the World’s Three Legal Systems” [More]

Thomas E. Nelson, Kira Sanbonmatsu, and Harwood K. McClerking, “Playing a Different Race Card: Examining the Limits of Elite Influence on Perceptions of Racism” [More]

Jan E. Leighley and Jonathan Nagler, “Unions, Voter Turnout, and Class Bias in the U.S. Electorate, 1964-2004” [More]

Claudine Gay, “Legislating Without Constraints: The Effect of Minority Districting on Legislators’ Responsiveness to Constituency Preferences” [More]

Joshua Clinton, “Testing Lawmaking Theories” [More]

Jeffrey K. Staton, Robert A. Jackson, and Damarys Canache, “Dual Nationality Among Latinos: What Are the Implications for Political-Connectedness?” [More]

David Karol, “Does Constituency Size Affect Elected Officials’ Trade Policy Preferences?” [More]

Simon Hix and Michael Marsh, "Punishment or Protest? Understanding European Parliament Elections" [More]

John W. Schiemann, “Bizarre Beliefs and Rational Choices: A Behavioral Approach to Analytic Narratives” [More]

L. Joseph Hebert, Jr., “Individualism and Intellectual Liberty in Tocqueville and Descartes” [More]

Marcus J. Kurtz and Andrew Schrank, “Growth and Governance: Models, Measures, and Mechanisms” [More]

Daniel Kaufmann, Aart Kraay, and Massimo Mastruzzi, “Growth and Governance: A Reply” [More]

Marcus J. Kurtz and Andrew Schrank, “Growth and Governance: A Defense” [More]

Daniel Kaufmann, Aart Kraay, and Massimo Mastruzzi, “Growth and Governance: A Rejoinder” [More]

Abstracts and Files:

Evolutionary Theory and Political Leadership: Why Certain People Do Not Trust Decision-Makers
Kevin B. Smith, University of Nebraska
Christopher W. Larimer, University of Northern Iowa
Levente Littvay, Central European University
John R. Hibbing, University of Nebraska
Manuscript [PDF]
 

Central to social systems are the attitudes of the rank and file toward those who make political decisions (leaders), and attitudes toward leaders are known to be characterized by two fundamental features. First, the modal attitude is acceptance of the necessity of leaders coupled with acute aversion to leaders who are believed to be motivated by ambition and avarice; second, people are highly variable with some being markedly more sensitive than others to the traits of leaders. But the theoretical basis for these empirical facts has yet to be fully elucidated. In this article, we offer such a theory by drawing on biological evolution and then, using a series of laboratory experiments, provide an empirical test of it. Results are fully consistent with evolutionary theory in showing that people are indeed generally sensitive to leadership traits threatening to the larger group even as certain, expected individuals are a good deal more sensitive than others.

Industries face collective action and commitment problems when attempting to influence Congress. At the same time, an individual firm’s political investments can yield reduced bureaucratic scrutiny by indicating that firm’s willingness to contest agency decisions. We develop a model in which the desirability of maintaining a political footprint for this reason enables individual firms to commit to rewarding elected officials who maintain laws benefiting an entire industry. Our “dual forbearance” model anticipates that corporate political investments will be larger on average when statutes are stringent, and that even pro-industry legislative coalitions will benefit politically from the existence of a minimal regulatory state.

The events of September 11 set in motion a massive re-ordering of US policy. We propose that the American public’s response to this redirection in policy derives, in part, from ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism – “prejudice, broadly conceived” – refers to the commonplace human tendency to partition the social world into virtuous ingroups and nefarious outgroups. Support for the war on terrorism, undertaken against a strange and shadowy enemy, should hold special appeal for Americans with an ethnocentric turn of mind. To see if this is so, we analyze the panel component of the 2000-2002 National Election Study. We find that ethnocentrism powerfully underwrites support for the war on terrorism, across a variety of tests and specifications, and the strength of the relationship between ethnocentrism and opinion is influenced in part by the extraordinary events of 9/11. Ethnocentrism is easily found among Americans, but its relevance and potency for politics depends, we suggest, upon circumstance.

Recent studies of nineteenth century voting behavior have focused on how economic variables influenced elections during this period. Employing underutilized individual-level data from the 1870s, this paper argues that such studies overstate the influence of economic variables upon electoral behavior. Specifically, Democratic voters principally cast ballots on the basis of economic issues and divisions, while Republicans were primarily concerned with religious and cultural issues. These results suggest that the Democratic and Republican parties attracted voters on the basis of different policy dimensions, indicating that both ethnocultural and economic considerations affected both political parties, albeit in divergent ways.

The resurgence of religion around the globe poses a challenge for both empirical and normative social scientists. For the former, the question is whether the terms at their disposal are adequate to comprehend religious self-understanding and, therefore, human motivation and conduct. For the latter, the question is whether those terms confuse or clarify the way in which religion may be brought into public dialogue without violating the tenets of pluralism or toleration. How, then, do social scientists of both persuasions currently understand religion? I begin by distinguishing religious experience from other sorts of experience, with a view to demonstrating, first, that the two preeminent terms adopted by social scientists today—“preference” and “choice”—cannot comprehend religious experience. To do this, I provide a brief exposition of what I call the “fable of liberalism,” in order to explain why the terms “preference” and “choice” have achieved the currency that they have, and what problems their invocation was intended to address. Second, I consider two other terms social scientists often invoke—“value” and “identity”—and suggest that these terms also are inadequate for understanding religious experience. The first set of terms arises in the 18th century, out of the Anglo-American tradition; the second set of terms arises in the 19th century, out of the German tradition. None of these terms are able to comprehend religious experience, which antedates these sets of terms by centuries. I end by suggesting, first, that empirical social scientists would do well to reconsider whether terms that arose during specific historical moments in order to circumvent or to supersede religious experience can help them understand human motivation, let alone predict human conduct, whenever or wherever religion is involved; and, second, that the attempt by normative social scientists to bring religion into the public sphere by treating it in terms of “preference,” “choice,” “value,” or “identity” distorts religious experience, and cannot succeed as a strategy for reintroducing religion into public dialogue, since religion is not what they wish to render it in terms of.

Under what conditions do politicians emphasize patronage allocations over the provision of public goods? Building upon research on democratic policy management, this paper aims to improve our understanding of patronage politics by focusing upon the political incentives influencing the ability and willingness of politicians to target public sector allocations to political supporters. Drawing upon data on spending priorities at the provincial level in post-1983 Argentina, the statistical analysis provides evidence that the relative importance of patronage allocations fluctuates with partisanship, electoral cycles, revenue sources, and public sector investment in economic development. The findings underline important and largely neglected parallels between clientelistic and programmatic politics and thereby have important implications for the study of the political economy of democracy.

Do varieties of welfare capitalism exist in the developing world? This analysis challenges scholars of comparative political economy and international political economy who treat the political economies of less developed countries (LDCs) as more or less identical to one another or, at the other extreme, as nations marked by tremendous diversity. This paper is one of the first attempts to highlight systematic differences among the political economies of the developing world, particularly with respect to their distribution regimes. Using cluster analysis, the results illustrate that welfare efforts in LDCs are either directed towards promoting market development (a productive welfare state), protecting select individuals from the market (a protective welfare state) or both (a dual welfare state). The discovery of distinct patterns of welfare regimes in LDCs presents hitherto unknown implications for the influence of domestic politics and policies in late twentieth-century globalization.

This paper seeks to understand why some countries accept the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) more readily than others. The theory focuses on institutional differences between the world’s major legal systems: civil law, common law, and Islamic law. Important characteristics of these legal systems (stare decisis, bona fides, pacta sunt servanda) are integrated in an expressive theory of adjudication, which focuses on how adjudication enhances interstate cooperation by correlating strategies, constructing focal points, and signaling information. The theory considers the ability of states to communicate with each other, using acceptance of ICJ jurisdiction as a form of cheap talk. Empirical analyses show 1) civil law states are more likely to accept the jurisdiction of the ICJ than common law or Islamic law states, 2) common law states place the greatest number of restrictions on their ICJ commitments, and 3) Islamic law states have the most durable commitments.

There is much debate about the reach and seriousness of racial prejudice today. We ask: how do ordinary people come to view events as racist? Using an experiment, we investigate the effects of elite charges of racism on public perceptions of police conduct. We test several hypotheses, including discounting, expertise, and ingroup bias, pertaining to how public stereotypes moderate elite influence. We find that stereotypes matter, and that Democrats, Republicans, Blacks, and Whites cannot make claims about racism with equal success.

This paper uses indiviudal level data to examine the impact of unions on turnout and assesses the consequences of dramatic changes in union strength and in the composition of union membership since 1964 for the composition of the U.S. electorate. We rst estimate individual-level models to test for the distinct e ects of union membership and union strength on the probabilities of members and non-members voting, and then test whether the e ect of individual union membership and overall union strength varies across income levels. We nd that unions increase turnout of both members and non-members. By simulating what turnout would be were union membership at its 1964 level, we show that the decline in union membership since 1964 has a ected the aggregate turnout of both low- and middle-income individuals more than the aggregate turnout of high-income individuals. However, while class bias has increased as a consequence of the decline, the change is surprisingly small.

Numerous critics have charged that the practice of minority districting, by weakening the electoral incentives central to representative behavior, leads legislators to be less responsive to constituency opinion. Using data on referenda and initiative voting to estimate constituency preferences in each of California’s 80 Assembly districts, I assess the correspondence between district opinion and roll call voting for legislators from majority-minority and majority-white districts. I show that constituency preferences can explain the voting decisions of legislators equally well across districts. Despite the low levels of competition and voter turnout found in majority-minority districts, legislators from these districts are no less responsive to the policy demands of their constituents.

The ability to generate theories of lawmaking has not been matched by an ability to evaluate the success of these theories for explaining legislative reality. The principal problem in testing lawmaking theories is that many analysts use roll call votes { or various measures based on roll call votes { when, in fact, these votes are partly a cause and partly a consequence of the very things the theories seek to explain. This can lead to erroneous substantive conclusions and characterizations. I show how embedding the theoretical predictions of the party gatekeeping and veto pivot theories of lawmaking within a statistical model used to estimate ideal points yields a straightforward test; if the gridlock interval measured using votes on policies predicted by the theories is nonzero, the predictions of the theory are not supported by the observed data (and assumed behavioral voting model). Implementing the test reveals little support for either theory.

This study assesses the influence of dual nationality on connectedness to the American polity. Specifically, it examines whether first generation dual national Latinos are less politically connected than their sole-U.S. national counterparts. We define political-connectedness as the skills, attitudes, and behaviors that attach someone to the political system. According to the traditional view on immigration and assimilation, dual nationality should be associated with negative consequences for political integration. Conversely, according to the transnational perspective, multiple nationalities do not preclude, and in fact may facilitate, political assimilation and incorporation. Relying on data from The Washington Post/Henry J. Kaiser Foundation/Harvard University National Survey on Latinos in America (1999) and the Pew Hispanic Center/Kaiser Family Foundation 2002 National Survey of Latinos, we investigate the influence of dual nationality on first generation Latinos’ English language proficiency, attitudinal political-connectedness (specifically, their self-identification as an American, consideration of the United States as their real homeland, and civic duty) and electoral participation. Although our results support the traditional view, we cannot rule out that generational replacement will resolve dual nationality’s negative influence on political-connectedness.

Scholars have long argued that Presidents are less protectionist than Congress and Senators less so than Representatives due to their larger constituencies. Yet until now this theory has escaped scrutiny. I argue that it is based on a misguided view of trade policy as distributive politics. I show via a series of tests that it is untenable. Unlike their differences in constituency size, the pro-trade leanings of the Presidency and Senate are postwar phenomena. Even now state size is unrelated to Senators' votes on trade. In tests pooling legislators from both Houses, chamber membership predicts votes while constituency size generally does not. Senators are even less protectionist than Representatives with identical constituencies.

After six sets of European Parliament elections, do voters primarily use these elections to punish their national governments or to express their views on European issues? We answer this question by looking at all European elections (1979 to 2004) in all 25 EU states. We find that almost 40% of the volatility in party vote-shares in European elections compared to national elections is explained by the transfer of votes from large and governing parties to small and opposition parties. Nevertheless, anti-EU parties and green parties on average do better in European elections than in national elections. But, these “European effects” are minor, and the position a party takes on Europe is largely irrelevant to its performance. Hence, despite growing powers of the European Parliament, neither positions on matters regarding European integration, nor on matters regarding “normal” left-right policy, have much of effect on electoral outcomes.

Rational choice analytic narratives claim to take seriously the way real actors form their beliefs. I argue that a commonly applied formal technique – perfect Bayesian equilibrium – inadequately accounts for realistic beliefs, unnecessarily impoverishing analytic narratives. I propose an equilibrium concept drawn from cognitive psychology – support theory equilibrium – that provides an accurate account of beliefs within a formal analytic narrative approach. I ground both the critique and the alternative in a discussion of ethnic mobilization in Yugoslavia. The result is a behaviorally-informed analytic narrative that offers a more accurate account of the role of real – including bizarre – beliefs in strategic interaction.

This paper seeks to clarify Tocqueville’s view that a political order premised on the primacy of individual reason over moral authority can be detrimental to genuine intellectual liberty. Beginning with Tocqueville’s famous comment that Americans are Cartesians without having read Descartes, I compare Tocqueville’s assessment of American intellectual life to Descartes’ hopes for future political societies. I describe their disagreement about the effect that moral authority and rational individualism have on the development of the mind and locate its source in two competing theories of mind. This reveals a debate about our human needs with echoes in contemporary political discontent.

The regnant scholarly consensus linking good governance – the quality of public administration – to economic development has undergone surprisingly little empirical scrutiny. We examine the relationship by asking two questions: How confident are we in our cross-national measures of good governance? And how solid are the empirical foundations of the growth-governance causal linkage? Our results suggest that the dominant measures of governance are problematic, suffering from perceptual biases, adverse selection in sampling, and conceptual conflation with economic policy choices. And within the limits of somewhat problematic measures, the evidence suggests that there is far more reason to believe that growth and development spur improvements in governance than vice versa. The policy implications are profound, for international organizations and governments are beginning to condition developmental aid on problematic measures of administrative performance.

In this issue of the Journal of Politics, Marcus Kurtz and Andrew Shrank (hereafter KS) offer a sweeping critique of the exisiting literature on governance and growth. They argue that perceptions-based cross-country measures of governance, and in particular those we have constructed in our ongoing worki, are fatally flawed. They also produce empirical evidence which they claim shows that perceptions of governance are driven by short-term growth performance. Finally they argue that there is little convincing evidence that good governance spurs growth.

It is clear we have disagreements from our esteemed colleagues on this important issue. The KKM response raises a number of insightful points that advance this debate. We thank them for that and for taking the time to engage our article. As we have reflected on our original essay and KKM’s critique of it, we were struck by the fact that we may actually be talking past each other, and that differences in approach between political science and economics may foster this miscommunication. We are not arguing that political science offers a superior approach. To the contrary, our intellectual debt to economics is enormous. Our bibliography offers testimony to that very fact. We nevertheless believe that political scientists have as much to offer economists as vice-versa, including not only a venerable literature on state formation and governance but a no less important tradition of self-conscious concept formation that has been less central to most economists.1 While political scientists have traditionally been producers of political data, they have, therefore, treated the process of concept formation as a necessary prelude to both measurement and modeling (Sartori 1970; Collier and Mahon 1993; Gerring 1999). By contrast, economists have, until recently, been consumers of political data, and have, therefore, subordinated the need for self-conscious concept formation to the understandable urge to measure and model. We ultimately hope to demonstrate that conceptual issues – and corresponding measurement problems – are at the core of the debate over growth and governance and that progress will be less than ideal until they are addressed. A meeting of minds may be too much to ask for at the present time, but a meeting of method would almost certainly constitute a step in the right direction. We, therefore, offer this rebuttal as not just a response to the thoughtful critique of KKM, but as an effort to bridge these gaps and develop even better ways to make real advances in understanding the relationship between growth and governance.

In this brief rejoinder we would like to point several key areas where we disagree with Kurtz and Shrank's response entitled "Growth and Governance: A Defense".