Voting on slavery at the Constitutional Convention

This paper provides the first empirical study of delegate voting behavior on issues of slavery at the U.S. Constitutional Convention. We analyze two categories of votes: those related to apportionment and those related to the regulation of the slave trade. Although it is widely believed that delegates voted consistent with the interests of their states on issues of slavery, we find that for votes on apportionment, the effect of state interests was enhanced by both the delegate’s personal interest and his religious background. For votes regulating the slave trade, state interests had a significant effect but only within specific regions.     

Opinion Taking within Friendship Networks

Communication within friendship networks can provide gains in efficiency that help individuals enrich their understanding of politics. Through two panel survey experiments, we demonstrate that the dissemination of an individual's opinion about the hazards posed by public policies can have both durable and significant effects on the policy judgments of friends. These effects are conditioned by both the content of the communication and the recipient's level of political awareness. Opinions emphasizing potential risks carry more weight than those that attempt to alleviate concerns about potential risks. Moreover, opinion transmission is more effective for subjects who are less politically aware when policy issues are salient; but when the political issue is more esoteric, friends who are more politically aware evidence greater opinion change.     

Who Consents? Competing Pivots in Federal Judicial Selection

The salience of judicial appointments in contemporary American politics has precipitated a surge of scholarly interest in the dynamics of advice and consent in the U.S. Senate. In this article, we compare alternative pivotal politics models of the judicial nominations process, each capturing a different set of potential veto players in the Senate. We use these spatial models to guide empirical analysis of rejection patterns in confirmation contests for the lower federal courts. Using data on the outcomes of all nominations to the U.S. Courts of Appeals and the U.S. District Courts between 1975 and 2006, we show that models incorporating the preferences of the majority party median and the filibuster pivots best account for confirmation patterns we observe at the appellate and trial court levels, while advice and consent for trial courts has more recently been influenced by home-state senators.     

Testing the Reciprocal Effects of Campaign Participation

Questions persist regarding the robustness of cross-sectional estimates of effects of variables that are themselves endogenous to the participation process. On one hand, the consequences of working on a campaign have interesting implications for democratic society. Less benign, however, is the possibility that failure to control for reciprocal processes leads to biased estimates of the causes of campaign participation. I use a panel of Democratic and Republican contributors interviewed following each of the past three presidential elections (1996, 2000, and 2004) to explore the relationships between campaign participation and three variables typically parameterized as predictors of participation: receiving a contact, ideological extremism, and strength of party identification. The effect of strength of party identification on campaign participation proves robust; however, I find that nearly all of the associations between contacts and participation and ideological extremism and participation appear to extend from, not into, participation and past participation.

Escaping the International Governance Dilemma? Incorporated Transgovernmental Networks in the European Union

This article investigates the role of transgovernmental networks of national regulators in addressing collective action problems endemic to international cooperation. In contrast to recent work on transgovernmental actors, which emphasizes such networks as alternatives to more traditional international institutions, we examine the synergistic interaction between the two. Building on the broader premise that patterns of “dual delegation” above and below the nation‐state enhance the coordinating role of networks of national agencies in two‐level international governance, the article examines the formal incorporation of transgovernmental networks into European Union (EU) policymaking. The focus on authoritative rule‐making adds a crucial dimension to the landscape of EU governance innovations while connecting to the broader study of transgovernmental networks in international governance. The article develops an analytical framework that maps these incorporated networks across different sectors in terms of function, emergence, and effectiveness. Two case studies of data privacy and energy market regulation are presented to apply and illustrate the insights of this mapping.     

Electoral turnout and income redistribution by the state: A cross-national analysis of the developed democracies

Abstract.  This article explores the sources of variation in state redistribution across 13 developed democracies over the period 1979–2000, drawing upon data from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, the Luxembourg Income Study and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. The discussion begins with the median voter hypothesis, which predicts that the extent of state redistribution in a country will be positively related to the degree of pre-government inequality. In seeking to extend the median voter approach, the article takes into account two additional variables: the level of electoral turnout and the degree to which turnout is skewed by income. The analysis confirms that pre-government inequality is indeed positively related to state redistribution. However, the predictive power of the median voter approach is significantly improved when account is taken of the level of electoral turnout and the extent to which the turnout rate reflects an income skew – variables that are themselves related. The link between turnout and redistribution is especially strong for social transfers as opposed to taxes, and for the lower and middle, as opposed to the upper, part of the income spectrum.     

Determinants of regime type in newly independent states

Abstract.  Since 1945, newly independent states have differed from longer lived states in their greater risk of violent conflict and more challenging environment for democratisation. The authors of this article theorise that certain economic, demographic, violence-related and external factors should affect the regime type (level of democracy versus autocracy) in newly independent states. Examining exclusively newly independent states that have undergone major political transitions allows one to determine factors favouring democracy over autocracy under such volatile circumstances. The authors test several hypotheses, using cross-sectional and cross-sectional time-series analyses, and find that economic development elevates the level of democracy in new states. Cultural heterogeneity has no effect, but external factors play an important role. Genocide and politicide reduce democracy, while civil wars have the opposite effect. These findings prove robust to alternative measurements of the dependent variable and alternative model specifications.     

A Crowded Stage: Liabilities and Benefits of Multiparty Mediation

In today's environment, the international response to conflict often entails multiple mediators as well as other third-party actors such as peacekeeping forces, development agencies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and lone operators. Such a profusion of actors has often made peacemaking efforts messy, difficult, and at times chaotic. The vicious nature of internal conflicts, however, and the high costs for the international community of failing to prevent or end war make it critical to understand these multiple third-party interventions. The principal question is: do these multiparty mediations help or hurt the cause of peace? If the answer to that question is that a multiplicity of third parties can hurt a peace process, does the solution lie in stopping multiple third-party attempts at peacemaking? On the other hand, if the answer is that multiparty mediation can help, are there ways of increasing the chances that it will?     

Bush: The Sequel

This article examines the likely foreign policy initiatives of the U.S. under the leadership of George W. Bush. The new president has outlined a fairly thorough critique of America's international behavior in the 1990s. Because a leader's public statements arguably serve to persuade various audiences and to build support for policy change, the article takes Bush's words quite seriously—along with those spoken or written by his closest foreign affairs advisors. Bush intends to abandon the so-called Clinton Doctrine and deploy national missile defenses. He is critical of American policies toward China and Russia, but has not presented bold new initiatives toward those powers. Under the rubric of "compassionate conservatism," Bush may alter U.S. relations toward the Global South in some interesting ways. The president and his advisors often purport to be realists, but the article demonstrates that their own words belie this claim as they often justify policies based on ideals rather than the pursuit of power.