explaining party ideological stances we apply the iterative algorithm by merrill and adams political analysis 9 347 361 2001 to compute the optimal positions of vote maximizing parties along a one dimensional space for a large number of elections this allows us to systematically evaluate factors that push parties toward more centrifugal locations in equilibrium our findings largely corroborate expectations suggested by the theoretical literature albeit with one notable exception the relative size of a partisan constituency reduces rather than enhances the likelihood of a party having an extreme optimal position we then compare derived equilibrium positions with actual party positions with the aim of understanding the nature of electoral incentives and offering insights about party system competition in particular we show that the age of a party the party family to which it belongs post election expectations and internal rules for candidate and leader selection are all factors that increase the probability of a party approaching the position predicted by pure vote maximizing considerations

multiparty electoral competition in the netherlands and germany a model based on multinomial probit a typical assumption of electoral models of party competition is that parties adopt policy positions so as to maximize expected vote share here we use euro barometer survey data and european elite study data from 1979 for the netherlands and germany to construct a stochastic model of voter response based on multinomial probit estimation for each of these countries we estimate a pure spatial electoral voting model and a joint spatial model the latter model also includes individual voter and demographic characteristics the pure spatial models for the two countries quite accurately described the electoral response as a stochastic function of party positions we use these models to perform a thought experiment so as to estimate the expected vote maximizing party positions we go on to propose a model of internal party decision making based both on pre election electoral estimation and post election coalition bargaining this model suggests why the various parties in the period in question did not adopt vote maximizing positions we argue that maximizing expected vote will not in general be a rational party strategy in multiparty political systems which are based on proportional representation

issues economics and the dynamics of multiparty elections the british 1987 general election we offer a model of multiparty elections that combines voters retrospective economic evaluations with consideration of parties issue positions and the issue preferences of voters we show that both policy issues and the state of the economy matter in british elections in 1987 voters made a largely retrospective evaluation of the conservatives based on economic performance those who rejected the conservative party chose between labour and alliance based on issue positions through simulations we move the parties in the issue space and reestimate vote shares as well as hypothesize an alternative distribution of views on the economy and we show that labour had virtually no chance to win with a centrist party as a viable alternative the predictions from our 1987 simulations are supported in an analysis of the 1992 british election we argue for multinomial probit in studying three party elections because it allows for a richer formulation of politics than do competing methods

a statistical model for multiparty electoral data we propose an internally consistent and comprehensive statistical model for analyzing multiparty district level aggregate election data this model can be used to explain or predict how the geographic distribution of electoral results depends upon economic conditions neighborhood ethnic compositions campaign spending and other features of the election campaign or characteristics of the aggregate areas we also provide several new graphical representations for help in data exploration model evaluation and substantive interpretation although the model applies more generally we use it to help resolve an important controversy over the size of and trend in the electoral advantage of incumbency in great britain contrary to previous analyses which are all based on measures now known to be biased we demonstrate that the incumbency advantage is small but politically meaningful we also find that it differs substantially across the parties about half a percent for the conservatives 1 for the labor party and 3 for the liberal party and its successors also contrary to previous research we show that these effects have not grown in recent years finally we are able to estimate from which party each party s incumbency advantage is predominantly drawn

intelligence social mobility and growth this study develops a model where the allocation of human resources intergenerational social mobility and technological growth are jointly determined high growth endogenously increases the equilibrium return to innate cognitive ability and makes the allocation of individuals depend more on innate ability and less on social background a social allocation based on innate ability and high growth will thus reinforce each other implying the possibility of multiple endogenous growth equilibria

why candidate divergence should be expected to be just as great or even greater in competitive seats as in non competitive ones basic downsian theory predicts candidate convergence toward the views of the median voter in two candidate elections common journalistic wisdom moreover leads us to expect these centripetal pressures to be strongest when elections are expected to be close yet the available evidence from the us congress disconfirms this prediction to explain this counterintuitive result we develop a spatial model that allows us to understand the complex interactions of political competition partisan loyalties and incentives for voter turnout that can lead office seeking candidates especially candidates in close elections to emphasize policy appeals to their voter base rather than courting the median voter

who wants to redistribute the tunnel effect in 1990s russia abstract support for governmental redistribution tended to be greater for the poor than the rich in a representative sample of russian adults in 1996 however support for redistribution is higher amongst those who expect their welfare to fall and this effect is strongest amongst the currently well off a rising trajectory inhibits demand for redistribution support is also stronger in rural areas amongst those with less schooling those who fear losing their job the elderly and amongst women our results are consistent with albert hirschman s idea of a tunnel effect whereby prospects of mobility in both directions influence demand for governmental redistribution

lessons in disguise multivariate predictive mistakes in collective choice models many political processes can be characterized as repeated collective decisions in which individual choices rendered by the same actors are combined to produce salient outcomes e g voting in legislatures the inherent interdependence among the choices within repeated collective decisions is often missed in statistical analysis i introduce the joint prediction error jpe a grouping of individual decisions that is poorly predicted by a model jpes capture the intersecting information missed by conventional diagnostics i demonstrate the use of jpes on data from two published articles one on u s supreme court voting and another on international defense alliances

capabilities perception and escalation the evolution of crises depends upon interpreting intentions under uncertainty we model crises as a game of two sided incomplete information players are uncertain about their own payoffs from war because of differences between observable and actual capabilities we derive four hypotheses testing them against crises in europe between 1815 and 1970 we show a nonmonotonic relationship between ex ante observable capabilities and the likelihood of violence in a crisis as well as the ex ante likelihood of a negotiated settlement we answer five questions 1 how do differences in observable capabilities between rivals influence the likelihood of a crisis and the escalation to violence 2 how do intangible capabilities alter the effects of observable capabilities on the likelihood of conflict and violence 3 what do national leaders learn from the responses of their adversaries in crises 4 under what conditions can deterrence succeed 5 under what conditions are the strong likely to give in to the weak or vice versa in a crisis

information power and war ultimatum bargaining models of international interactions suggest that when conflict is costly and the actors are fully informed the probability of conflict goes to zero however conflict occurs with some positive probability when the challenger is uncertain about the defender s reservation value i employ a simple ultimatum game of bargaining to evaluate two traditional power centric theories of world politics balance of power and power transition theory the formal and empirical analyses demonstrate that as states approach power parity information asymmetries are greatest thus enhancing the probability of militarized conflict uncertainty is a central cause of conflict emergence and is correlated with the distribution of observable capabilities recognizing the relationship between the distribution of power and the uncertainty offers a more sophisticated interpretation of power centric explanations of world politics

green electricity market development lessons from europe and the us this study compares the development and implementation of green electricity policies in germany the netherlands sweden and the united states a set of countries applying a range of policy instruments to encourage electricity from renewable energy sources a general tendency is identified that policies shift emphasis from r d stimulation towards dissemination and market application of renewable energy technologies we argue that in light of the long term nature of policy goals on energy security mitigation of climate change and environmental protection the applied range of policy instruments may be lacking in providing incentives for the long term development of new technologies clarifying policy objectives would allow careful selection of policy instruments including support for r d improved capacity building for policy implementation is also important

multicandidate equilibrium in american elections the united states presidential election of 1992 is anexample of a multicandidate contest involving bothdemocratic and republican candidates using a spatialmodelling approach i analyze candidate policystrategy for such elections under the assumption thatvoters choose according to the multivariate votingmodel of behavioral research this model representsvoters decisions as probabilistic functions of theirpolicy preferences and political partisanship isuggest reasons why partisan voting motivatescandidates to locate near their party s partisans inthe policy space and illustrate this argument withrespect to the 1992 presidential election the resultsof computer simulations suggest that these motivationslead to multicandidate spatial equilibria which arerobust to changes in the model s parameters partisanship appears to be an important source ofstability in multicandidate electoral competition

when politics and models collide estimating models of multiparty elections theory the spatial model of elections can better be represented by using conditional logit models which consider the position of the parties in issue spaces than by multinomial logit models which only consider the position of voters in the issue space the spatial model and random utility models in general suffer from a failure to adequately consider the substitutability of parties sharing similar or identical issue positions hypotheses multinomial logit is not necessarily better than successive applications of binomial logit conditional logit allows for considering more interesting political questions than does multinomial logit the spatial model may not correspond to voter decision making in multiple party settings multinomial probit allows for a relaxation of the iia condition and this should improve estimates of the effect of adding or removing parties methods comparisons of binomial logit multinomial logit conditional logit and multinomial probit on simulated data and survey data from multiparty elections results multinomial logit offers almost no benefits over binomial logit conditional logit is capable of examining movements by parties whereas multinomial logit is not multinomial probit performs better than conditional logit when considering the effects of altering the set of choices available to voters estimation of multinomial probit with more than three choices is feasible

social mobility and redistributive politics just like economists voters have conflicting views about redistributive taxation because they estimate its incentive costs differently we model rational agents as trying to learn from their dynastic income mobility experience the relative importance of effort and predetermined factors in the generation of income inequality and therefore the magnitude of these incentive costs in the long run left wing dynasties believing less in individual effort and voting for more redistribution coexist with right wing dynasties this allows us to explain why individual mobility experience and not only current income matters for political attiitudes and how persistent differences in perceptions about social mobility can generate persistent differences in redistribution across countries

modeling choice of fuelwood source among rural households in malawi a multinomial probit analysis abstract this paper addresses two questions what determines household s choice of fuelwood source and what are the environmental consequences of fuelwood collection choices we address these questions by estimating the multinomial probit model using survey data for households surrounding chimaliro and liwonde forest reserves in malawi after controlling for heterogeneity among households we find strong substitution opportunities across fuelwood collection sources attributes of the fuelwood sources size and species composition and distance to the sources are the most important determinants of fuelwood choice further results show that customary managed forests generate environmental benefits by reducing pressure on both plantation forests and forest reserves these findings support the need to strengthen community based institutions to manage local forest resources

pre electoral commitments and government formation recent studies show that pre electoral commitments and the ideological distance between parties influence government formation but do pre electoral pacts or rejections of party combinations really have an independent impact on the outcome of the government formation game which policy areas matter when parties agree to build a coalition this paper addresses these questions by applying a dataset that includes information on preferred rejected coalition partners and the policy area specific programmatic heterogeneity of all potential coalitions the results show that pre electoral commitments have a significant impact on government formation after controlling for endogeneity problems there is also evidence that not only diversity in economic issues determines the partisan composition of governments

intergenerational earnings mobility inequality and growth abstract we examine a model in which per capita income inequality intergenerational mobility and returns to education are all determined endogenously individuals earn wages depending on their ability which is a random variable they purchase an education with transfers received from their parents and are subject to liquidity constraints in the model multiple steady state equilibria are possible countries with identical tastes and technologies can reach differing rates of mobility inequality and per capita income equilibria with higher levels of output also have lower inequality higher mobility and more efficient distribution of education

social mobility what is it and why does it matter the definition of social mobility is a matter of debate in the following discussion conceptual issues in the literature on mobility are commented this paper defines social mobility as a situation in which the relative economic status of an agent is not dependent on starting conditions such as parental income or family background analyzing the determinants of mobility involves exploring the channels through which offspring s income is correlated to its parents such as inherited bequest education skills among many others this survey explores in an analytical framework the relation between social mobility and inequality among other important dimensions of income distribution that are jointly determined the focus is on the relevance of social mobility as it affects variables determining welfare and economic efficiency and therefore on policies to promote it

belief in a just world and redistributive politics international surveys reveal wide differences between the views held in different countries concerning the causes of wealth or poverty and the extent to which people are responsible for their own fate at the same time social ethnographies and experiments by psychologists demonstrate individuals recurrent struggle with cognitive dissonance as they seek to maintain and pass on to their children a view of the world where effort ultimately pays off and everyone gets their just deserts this paper offers a model that helps explain i why most people feel such a need to believe in a just world ii why this need and therefore the prevalence of the belief varies considerably across countries iii the implications of this phenomenon for international differences in political ideology levels of redistribution labor supply aggregate income and popular perceptions of the poor the model shows in particular how complementarities arise endogenously between individuals desired beliefs or ideological choices resulting in two equilibria a first american equilibrium is characterized by a high prevalence of just world beliefs among the population and relatively laissez faire policies the other european equilibrium is characterized by more pessimism about the role of effort in economic outcomes and a more extensive welfare state more generally the paper develops a theory of collective beliefs and motivated cognitions including those concerning money consumption and happiness as well as religion

opportunity and social mobility the fact that the children of rich parents have better economic prospects than the children of poor parents unequal opportunity is generally thought to be one of the weak points of modem capitalist societies the ability of the descendants of poor families to eventually become rich and the descendants of rich families to eventually become poor social mobility is commonly considered to be one of the strong points of these societies here i argue that both of these characteristics are in fact necessary implications of an efficient societal arrangement when incentives to work hard must be provided i argue this point using a generational version of the model of phelan and townsend 1991 an infinitely repeated general equilibrium economy with incentive constraints in my model each household s stochastic output is a function of its level of effort since effort is assumed to be costly and privately observed households can shirk higher than minimal effort levels must be induced by making a household s present or future consumption dependent on the household s observed output history a large literature considers models similar to this including green 1987 atkeson and lucas 1992 phelan 1994 1995 wang 1995 hopenhayn and nicolini 1997 khan and ravikumar 2002 the main difference between the economies in that literature and here is that here instead of a household consisting of a single infinitely lived individual a household consists of a sequence of altruistically linked individuals a familial dynasty each of whom lives for one period this difference affects the appropriate societal ranking of allocations when households consist of a single infinitely lived individual allocations can be ranked according to their implied distributions of ex ante lifetime utilities if one allocation delivers a distribution of ex ante utilities dominated by another allocation then the first allocation is inefficient however if a household consists of a sequence of altruistically linked individuals then the appropriate ranking of allocations is no longer obvious how those in the first generation rank allocations will in general differ from how their descendants rank allocations this paper addresses this conflict between generations by ranking allocations according to a rawlsian veil of ignorance criterion rawls 1971 that is here society seeks to maximize the expected dynastic utility utility including altruism toward descendants of an individual who does not know into which generation he will be born and the identity or output levels of his ancestors 1 i argue that this corresponds to a societal ranking which does

domestic opposition and signaling in international crises this article explores the effect of domestic political competition on the escalation of international crises it combines an incomplete information model of crisis bargaining with a simple model of two party electoral choice one state has two strategic actors a government and an opposition party both of which declare openly whether they support the use of force to alter the status quo the rival state updates its beliefs and selects its strategy in response to both signals the parties payoffs depend upon a retrospective evaluation by the domestic electorate the model shows that the inclusion of a strategic opposition party decreases the ex ante probability of war by helping to reveal information about the state s preferences this finding has important implications for research on democracy and international conflict since it suggests a mechanism through which democratic states can overcome informational asymmetries which have been identified as a central obstacle to negotiation

eating the rich vs feeding the poor borrowing constraints and the reluctance to redistribute this paper offers an explanation why most democracies arecharacterized by moderate taxation of wealth although thewealth distribution is persistently skewed to the right wemodel an economy in which agents have to acquire highereducation to qualify for skilled work and in which capitalmarket imperfections prevent poor individuals from making sucha profitable human capital investment if these borrowingconstraints do not bind for members of the middle class theymay rationally reject redistribution although both the currentand the future median of the wealth distribution are below themean

social mobility and the demand for redistribution the poum hypothesis this paper examines the often stated idea that the poor do not support high levels of redistribution because of the hope that they or their offspring may make it up the income ladder this prospect of upward mobility poum hypothesis is shown to be fully compatible with rational expectations and fundamentally linked to concavity in the mobility process a steady state majority could even be simultaneously poorer than average in terms of current income and richer than average in terms of expected future incomes a e rst empirical assessment suggests on the other hand that in recent u s data the poum effect is probably dominated by the demand for social insurance in the future everyone will be world famous for e fteen minutes andy warhol 1968

policy divergence in multicandidate probabilistic spatial voting existing models of multicandidate spatial competition with probabilistic voting typically predict a high degree of policy convergence yet in actual elections candidates advocate quite divergent sets of policies what accounts for this disparity between theory and empirical observation i introduce two variations on the basic probabilistic vote model which may account for candidate policy divergence 1 a model which incorporates candidate specific variables so that candidates may enjoy nonpolicy related electoral advantages or disadvantages 2 a model which allows nonzero correlations between the random terms associated with voters candidate utilities thereby capturing situations where voters view two or more candidates as similar on nonpolicy grounds i report candidate equilibrium analyses for each model which show far greater policy divergence than exists under the standard probabilistic vote model i then analyze the strategic logic which underlies these results

democracy war initiation and victory a study was conducted to examine the effects of nation states political institutions on state relations war fighting and selection effects explanation were compared to explain why democracies were more likely to win wars an analysis of all interstate wars between 1816 and 1982 revealed that democracies that initiate wars often win them results also suggest that domestic political structure is one factor that should not be omitted from the study of international relations copyright 1998 american political science associationrecent empirical scholarship has noted that democracies are significantly more likely to win the wars they fight than are other types of regimes though this finding refutes the general realist claim that regime type is unrelated to foreign policy behavior it also begs the important theoretical question of why democracies are more likely to win wars since different theories of foreign policy behavior provide different answers to this question discerning the real reasons would advance our theoretical understanding of foreign policy behavior scholars offer two different general arguments to explain democracies winning ways first they are perceived as intrinsically more effective at waging war than are nondemocracies hereafter termed the warfighting explanation primarily because it is easier for them to rally their society behind a war effort second as derived from several theories democracies win more often because they are more careful about deciding to initiate war hereafter termed the selection effects explanation significantly the theoretical assumptions of the latter argument are consistent with the structural explanation of the tendency for democracies not to fight one another popularly known as the democratic peace this article explores in detail why democracies are more likely to win wars specifically comparing the war fighting and selection effects explanations our empirical tests discriminate between these explanations by exploring whether democracies are more likely to win all wars in which they participate predicted by the war fighting explanation or just those they initiate predicted by the selection effects explanation our examination of all interstate wars from 1816 to 1982 finds that initiating democracies are significantly more likely to win wars than any other kind of belligerent we also find limited support for the proposition that democracies which are attacked are more likely to win wars than are other kinds of targets these results are in noteworthy contrast to previous empirical studies for three reasons we use a more complete sample account for possible interactions between democracy and initiation and include a more complete set of control variables the article has four parts the first presents the theoretical arguments relating domestic regime type to conflict behavior the second discusses hypotheses operationalization and the data set the third presents empirical results the fourth offers conclusions regime type and conflict behaviorare democracies more likely to win wars mainstream thinking during the twentieth century has occasionally doubted the ability of democracies to defend themselves especially during the 1930s and the cold war recently however scholars have examined the entirety of the post napoleonic historical record with quantitative tests and have found that when democracies fight they tend to win and their wars are of shorter duration bennett and stam 1996 lake 1992 stam 1996 what we call the war fighting and selection effects arguments have been advanced to explain this phenomenon the war fighting explanation argues that democracies simply fight wars more effectively than do other kinds of states lake 1992 developed a model of the state as rent seeker and posited three reasons for democracies superior war fighting abilities democracies extract fewer rents from society hence are wealthier and devote more resources to security they form overwhelming countercoalitions against aggressors democratic governments can extract higher levels of support from society for a war effort we discuss each of these arguments in turn we believe the last is the most persuasive the rent seeking argument has logical shortcomings the model assumes that democracies are wealthier because they extract fewer rents from their society than do autocratic states leading to greater wealth which in turn means more american political science review june 1998 v92 n2 p377 13 page 1 reprinted with permission additional copying is prohibited

heightening comparativists concern for model choice voting behavior in great britain and the netherlands as the research methodology more closely approximates the causal process being analyzed the inferences and predictions derived from that methodology will better represent actual behavior statistical models were specified on the basis of accepted theories of voting behavior and political cleavages in the netherlands and great britain we hypothesize that multinomial models provide a more accurate characterization of voting behavior in countries with more than two political parties competing for votes binomial logit multinomial logit and nested multinomial logit models of voting behavior are estimated on dutch and british national election study data compared to binomial methods we find that multinomial models of voting behavior produce results that are more congruent with accepted theories of dutch and british politics

an empirical analysis of household energy choice in ghana abstract using data from two recently available living standards surveys we trace the dynamics in cooking fuel choice among ghanaian households over the period 2005 6 and 2012 13 and further investigate the main forces driving households choice of a cooking fuel evidence from this paper reveals a significant transition from fuelwood use towards lpg over the period results further reveal factors such as price reliability in supply of lpg income and other household attributes as significant factors influencing households choice of a given energy type for cooking relevant policy prescriptions are offered to engender sustainable energy use and reduce over reliance on the already depleted forest resources for biomass energy

u s soviet chinese relations routine reciprocity or rational expectations international relations theorists disagree about whether great power behaviors reflect bureaucratic routine or reciprocity recently some have suggested that these behaviors result from great powers rational expectations rather than from simple routine or reciprocity the debate is flawed in several respects the quasi experimental studies of great power behavior suffer from specification and measurement errors furthermore most studies of great power behavior focus exclusively on the superpowers without adequately appreciating china s role in world politics we present an improved analysis that recognizes the potential effects of chinese behavior and ameliorates the methodological flaws in existing work the results indicate that the behaviors of the united states the soviet union and china are a relatively stable mix of bureaucratic routine and reciprocity the results also indicate complex asymmetrical connections among u s soviet u s chinese and soviet chinese relations consistent with the notion of a strategic triangle

capabilities uncertainty and resolve a limited information model of crisis bargaining this paper presents and solves a crisis bargaining game under limited information the sides alternate offers from three possible offers with war and its costs starting if the target s counteroffer is rejected the equilibrium of the model falls into four different cases these four cases are analyzed to determine how the sides communicate through their offers and how the costs of war initial beliefs misperceptions and distribution of capabilities drive the probabilities of a crisis and war the model demonstrates a joint selection bias misspecification problem in empirical studies of crises arising from the unobservable nature of beliefs several empirical studies of crisis bargaining are discussed in the light of this methodological problem new patterns of evidence are found that support the presence of the selection problem and their conclusions are reexamined

the mean voter theorem necessary and sufficient conditions for convergent equilibrium formal models of elections have emphasized the convergence of party leaders towards the centre of the electoral distribution this paper attempts to resolve the apparent disparity between the formal result and the perception of political divergence by considering a model incorporating valence valence can be interpreted as the non policy basis of political judgement made by the electorate concerning the quality of political contenders the theorem presented here shows that there is a necessary condition for convergence the condition involves the difference in party valences and the electoral variance when the condition fails the low valence parties will be forced to adopt policy positions far from the electoral centre the inference appears to be substantiated by an empirical model of the israel election in 1996 copyright 2007 wiley blackwell

who supports global economic engagement the sources of preferences in american foreign economic policy in this article we bring together opposing international relations theories to better understand u s foreign policy in particular foreign trade and aid using votes in the u s house of representatives from 1979 2004 we explore different theoretical predictions about preferences for foreign economic policy we assess the impact of domestic factors namely political economy and ideological preferences versus foreign policy pressures our three main results highlight the differential effect of these factors in the two issue areas first aid preferences are as affected by domestic political economy factors as are trade preferences second trade preferences but not economic aid ones are shaped by the president s foreign policy concerns for economic aid domestic political economy factors matter more than foreign policy ones third aid preferences are shaped more by ideological factors than are trade ones but ideology plays a different substantive role in each different constituencies support aid and trade this finding has implications for foreign policy substitutability the internationalist coalition in u s foreign policy statist theories of foreign policy and the connection between public opinion and legislative voting

energy affordability and the benefits system in italy abstract in this paper we discuss a number of ways to define and measure the affordability of energy consumption and we examine the emergence of energy poverty in italy in the period from 1998 to 2011 the paper examines the eligibility criteria for claiming the benefits available to support energy consumption for vulnerable families and it identifies the potential beneficiaries the study assesses the appropriateness of the eligibility criteria by comparing the population targeted by the policy with the population actually facing affordability problems a simulation exercise using the hypothetical scenario most likely to result in energy benefits being made available shows that regardless of the affordability index adopted the provision of state energy benefits has little impact on fuel poverty

who wins determining the party of the prime minister the prime ministership is the preeminent political post in parliamentary democracies yet few studies examine pm party choice perhaps under the assumption that the choice is a simple function of party size in this article we argue that key strategic actors and the context in which government negotiations take place can play a critical role in pm party choice we test our hypotheses using a mixed logit with random coefficients on an original data set comprising pm selection opportunities in 28 european countries our methodological approach allows us to incorporate qualitative concerns about heterogeneity and causal complexity into our analysis contrary to conventional wisdom we find that the largest party is often disadvantaged when it comes to pm party choice that some presidents play an influential role in choosing the pm and that the value of being the incumbent depends on one s performance in office and how the previous government ended

the strategic sources of foreign policy substitution while a growing body of work provides empirical support for the notion that political leaders substitute foreign policies depending on a variety of domestic political and economic conditions little work examines the underlying strategic causes of substitution this article argues that foreign states behave strategically in order to a avoid becoming the targets of domestically troubled executives or b to take advantage of the domestic trouble another state endures such strategic interaction delimits the set of foreign policies reasonably available to leaders in trouble at home thus producing the impetus for policy substitution this article develops a theoretical model of strategic behavior and policy substitution and reports empirical results of a multivariate probit model

improving forecasts of state failure this article offers the first independent scholarly evaluation of the claims forecasts and causal inferences of the state failure task force and its efforts to forecast when states will fail state failure refers to the collapse of the authority of the central government to impose order as in civil wars revolutionary wars genocides politicides and adverse or disruptive regime transitions states that sponsor terrorism or allow it to be organized within their borders are all failed states this task force set up at the behest of vice president gore in 1994 has been led by a group of distinguished academics working as consultants to the u s cia state failure task force reports and publications have received attention in the media in academia and from public decision makers the article identifies several methodological errors in the task force work that cause its reported forecast probabilities of conflict to be too large its causal inferences to be biased in unpredictable directions and its claims of forecasting performance to be exaggerated however the article also finds that the task force has amassed the best and most carefully collected data on state failure to date and the required corrections provided in this article although very large in effect are easy to implement the article also demonstrates how to improve forecasting performance to levels significantly greater than even corrected versions of its models although the matter is still a highly uncertain endeavor the authors are nevertheless able to offer the first accurate forecasts of state failure along with procedures and results that may be of practical use in informing foreign policy decision making the article also describes a number of strong empirical regularities that may help in ascertaining the causes of state failure

the inheritance of inequality how level is the intergenerational playing field what are the causal mechanisms that underlie the intergenerational transmission of economic status are these mechanisms amenable to public policies in a way that would make the attainment of economic success more fair these are the questions we will try to answer

the effects of alternative power sharing arrangements do moderating institutions moderate party strategies and government policy outputs advocates of consensual political institutions i e institutions that promote compromise and powersharing among political parties claim that these institutions promote moderation in government policy outputs to date however there exists little research either theoretical or empirical that evaluates whether consensual institutions promote moderation in parties policy declarations we develop a multiparty spatial model with policy seeking parties operating under proportional representation in which we vary the extent to which government policies reflect power sharing among all parties as opposed to being determined by a single party we determine parties optimal nash equilibrium policy positions and conclude that power sharing does not typically motivate parties to moderate their policy declarations in fact policy positioning under power sharing appears to be similar to or more extreme than under single party dominance consistent with previous research however we find that power sharing does promote moderation in government policy outputs our results have implications for parties election strategies for the design of political institutions and for representative government

don t stand so close to me spatial contagion effects and party competition in this article we bring together elements from the literatures on economic voting and spatial voting to gain theoretical leverage on the combined role of clarity of responsibility party policy positions and economic performance in elections building on evidence of voter knowledge we develop a theory of spatial contagion effects to explain how factors drawn from both of these literatures combine to shape changes in support for political parties we test this theory with a spatial autoregressive model of party competition in 23 nations from 1951 to 2005 as expected we find evidence of strong spatial contagion effects in elections with low clarity of responsibility

a theory of voting in large elections this paper provides a game theoretic model of probabilistic voting and then examines the incentives faced by candidates in a spatial model of elections in our model voters strategies form a quantal response equilibrium qre which merges strategic voting and probabilistic behavior we first show that a qre in the voting game exists for all elections with a finite number of candidates and then proceed to show that with enough voters and the addition of a regularity condition on voters utilities a nash equilibrium profile of platforms exists when candidates seek to maximize their expected margin of victory this equilibrium 1 consists of all candidates converging to the policy that maximizes the expected sum of voters utilities 2 exists even when voters can abstain and 3 is unique when there are only 2 candidates