BOOK REVIEW

Law, Politics and Birth Control, by C. Thomas Dienes, University of Illinois Press. Pp. 374.     

Changes in China that Amount to Revolution——Former Peru President Alan García Pérez on China’s Progress

ALAN García Pérez has always considered himself an admirer of the late former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, the former president of Peru told China Today. Perez twice came to power inPeru, serving as president from 1985to 1990 and from 2006 to 2011. Dur     

Strategic Voting in Multi‐Office Elections

What are the incentives for voters to vote strategically when legislative policy outcomes are constrained by a system of checks and balances? The policy‐balancing theory supposes that moderate voters split their tickets because such splitting is the only way these voters can achieve moderate policy outcomes. I show that a different type of strategic voting, policy stacking, is characteristic of legislatures that endow the majority party with only limited institutional powers. Focusing on voting for the president and House of Representatives in the United States reveals that a substantial proportion of voters engage in policy‐stacking behavior, but very few engage in policy‐balancing behavior.     

Only the Beginning

President Obama must re-evaluate the U.S. Iraq mission for the future president Barack Obama's draw-down to 50,000 U.S. troops has been well implemented and is, in fact, a prudent course of action.     

‘As time goes by’: Explaining the transposition of maritime directives1

The aim of this article is to explain the speed with which Member States transpose EC directives in the maritime sector. By discussing earlier work, the focus is on explanatory factors related to the contents of the directive that needs to be transposed and the context within which national transposition takes place. The authors' expectations have been tested using data across seven Member States and 32 maritime directives. Using survival analysis based on Cox regression, several political‐administrative and legal factors are identified that have an impact on the speed of transposition. The political sensitivity of the directive and the total number of national implementing measures lengthens the duration of transposition, while the degree of specialisation of the directive, the use of package law and experience speed up transposition. The authors also find that the impact of some of these explanatory factors changes over time. This underscores the importance of taking time seriously and to explore time dependency in further theoretical work on explaining policy‐making processes.     

Scaling Policy Preferences from Coded Political Texts

Scholars estimating policy positions from political texts typically code words or sentences and then build left‐right policy scales based on the relative frequencies of text units coded into different categories. Here we reexamine such scales and propose a theoretically and linguistically superior alternative based on the logarithm of odds‐ratios. We contrast this scale with the current approach of the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP), showing that our proposed logit scale avoids widely acknowledged flaws in previous approaches. We validate the new scale using independent expert surveys. Using existing CMP data, we show how to estimate more distinct policy dimensions, for more years, than has been possible before, and make this dataset publicly available. Finally, we draw some conclusions about the future design of coding schemes for political texts.