Suchergebnisse

Concerns about endogeneity often complicate attempts to estimate a causal link between public opinion and the voting records of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). In this article, I overcome this problem by exploiting a rare natural experiment—the surprising and exogenous revelation of Irish public opinion that resulted from Ireland's ratification of the Nice treaty. I find that the Irish electorate's rejection of Nice caused Ireland's European Parliament delegation to vote in a more conservative manner, while its subsequent ratification caused a partial reversal of this shift. My finding of an electoral connection on the Nice treaty casts doubt on the claim that MEPs are largely unconstrained by voter preferences on European issues, despite claims of a democratic deficit in European institutions.

During his time as a state senator in Illinois, Barack Obama voted "Present" 129 times, a deliberate act of nonvoting that subsequently became an important campaign issue during the 2008 presidential elections. In this article, I examine the use of Present votes in the Illinois state senate. I find evidence that Present votes can largely be characterized as protest votes used as a legislative tool by the minority party. Incorporating information from Present votes into a Bayesian polytomous item-response model, I find that this information increases the efficiency of ideal point estimates by approximately 35%. There is little evidence of significant moderation by Obama when Present votes are accounted for, though my results suggest that Obama's voting record may have moderated significantly before his subsequent election to the U.S. Senate. My results also suggest that because legislative nonvoting may occur for a variety of reasons, naive inclusion of nonvoting behavior into vote choice models may lead to biased results.

AbstractThe democratic peace—the idea that democracies rarely fight one another—has been called "the closest thing we have to an empirical law in the study of international relations." Yet, some contend that this relationship is spurious and suggest alternative explanations. Unfortunately, in the absence of randomized experiments, we can never rule out the possible existence of such confounding biases. Rather than commonly used regression-based approaches, we apply a nonparametric sensitivity analysis. We show that overturning the negative association between democracy and conflict would require a confounder that is forty-seven times more prevalent in democratic dyads than in other dyads. To put this number in context, the relationship between democracy and peace is at least five times as robust as that between smoking and lung cancer. To explain away the democratic peace, therefore, scholars would have to find far more powerful confounders than those already identified in the literature.

The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) is a landmark international treaty that is widely regarded as a cornerstone of the global nuclear non-proliferation regime. However, pessimists point to a growing divergence of preferences between nuclear weapons states and non-nuclear weapons states as a precursor to the impending 'unraveling of this vital piece of international law'. In this article, we test for evidence of preference divergence using statements from NPT review conferences, which are manifestos presenting each country's position on the NPT. We measure preferences on the NPT using Wordfish, a method that is frequently used to estimate ideological preferences from election manifestos. Our measure estimates the latent positions of state actors along a 'non-proliferation vs. disarmament' dimension, and shows little evidence of growing preference divergence between the nuclear weapons states and non-nuclear weapons states. Thus, a significant premise underlying more pessimistic assessments of the NPT appears to be in doubt.

The protests associated with the 2011 Arab Spring represent a serious and sustained challenge to autocratic rule in the Middle East. Under what conditions will Arab protest movements translate into a full-fledged 'fourth wave' of democratization? We argue that questions about the commitment of Islamic political opposition to democracy beyond a country's first free election may hinder Middle Eastern democratization. We extend Przeworski's canonical model of political liberalization as described in Democracy and the Market (1991) and find that transition to democracy is only possible under two conditions. First, uncertainty regarding the preferences of key elite actors is a necessary condition for democratic transition. Second, the repressive capacity of the state must lie above a minimum threshold. Given these conditions, democracy can occur when two types of political actors meet -- regime liberalizers who prefer democracy to a narrowed dictatorship, and civil society elite who honor democratic principles. While a series of influential studies have argued that authoritarian elites block democratic transition because of their fear of the economic redistributive preferences of the median voter, this study suggests that regime liberalizers in the Middle East suspect political openings could become a vehicle for Islamists to seize power through free elections only to deny the median voter another chance to express their will. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

The protests associated with the 2011 Arab Spring represent a serious and sustained challenge to autocratic rule in the Middle East. Under what conditions will Arab protest movements translate into a full-fledged 'fourth wave' of democratization? We argue that questions about the commitment of Islamic political opposition to democracy beyond a country's first free election may hinder Middle Eastern democratization. We extend Przeworski's canonical model of political liberalization as described in Democracy and the Market (1991) and find that transition to democracy is only possible under two conditions. First, uncertainty regarding the preferences of key elite actors is a necessary condition for democratic transition. Second, the repressive capacity of the state must lie above a minimum threshold. Given these conditions, democracy can occur when two types of political actors meet – regime liberalizers who prefer democracy to a narrowed dictatorship, and civil society elite who honor democratic principles. While a series of influential studies have argued that authoritarian elites block democratic transition because of their fear of the economic redistributive preferences of the median voter, this study suggests that regime liberalizers in the Middle East suspect political openings could become a vehicle for Islamists to seize power through free elections only to deny the median voter another chance to express their will.

The observation, measurement, and analysis of violent and contentious processes are essential parts of the scientific study of peace and conflict. However, concepts such as the level of repression, the number of individuals killed during a civil war, or the perception of members of an out-group, are often by definition difficult to observe directly. This is because governments, non-state groups, NGOs, international organizations, monitoring organizations, and other actors are not incentivized to make information about their actions systematically observable to analysts. In this context, latent variable models can play a valuable role by aggregating various behavioral indicators and signals together to help measure latent concepts of interest that would not otherwise be directly observable. Each of the articles in this special issue uses some form of a latent variable model or related measurement model to bring together observable pieces of information and estimate a set of values for the underlying theoretical concept of interest. Each of the articles pays special attention to the processes that make the observation of peace and conflict processes so challenging. As we highlight throughout this introductory article, the unifying framework we present in this special issue is validation. Though the substantive content of each of the articles in this special issue varies, they represent the diversity of substantive interests that span the study of peace and conflict, broadly conceived. Overall, we hope that the special issue becomes a standard reference for scholars interested in developing and validating new measurement models for the study of peace and conflict.