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The popular notion of a trade-off between social and defense spending—or guns versus butter—appears often in elite discourse, popular media, and empirical studies of budgetary politics. Yet, there are good reasons to suspect that the public's preferences for these types of spending do not reflect that trade-off. I develop a theory that whether social and defense spending preferences are competing or complementary depends on if the respondent views the government as an important contributor to job creation. Using data from fifty-nine surveys in twenty-seven countries from 1985 to 2008, I show that favoring government-financed job creation makes a respondent much more likely to view social and defense spending as complementary. Indeed, aside from the anomalous case of the United States, preferences are consistent with guns yield butter instead of guns versus butter. This theory has important implications for the thermostatic model of policy responsiveness and theories of budgetary politics.

The popular notion of a trade-off between social and defense spending—or guns versus butter—appears often in elite discourse, popular media, and empirical studies of budgetary politics. Yet, there are good reasons to suspect that the public's preferences for these types of spending do not reflect that trade-off. I develop a theory that whether social and defense spending preferences are competing or complementary depends on if the respondent views the government as an important contributor to job creation. Using data from fifty-nine surveys in twenty-seven countries from 1985 to 2008, I show that favoring government-financed job creation makes a respondent much more likely to view social and defense spending as complementary. Indeed, aside from the anomalous case of the United States, preferences are consistent with guns yield butter instead of guns versus butter. This theory has important implications for the thermostatic model of policy responsiveness and theories of budgetary politics.

A dominant trend in models with binary outcomes is to control for unmodeled duration dependence by including temporal dependence variables. A second, distinct trend is to interpret both the short- and long-term effects of explanatory variables in autoregressive models. While the first trend is nearly ubiquitous in models with binary outcomes, the second trend has yet to be applied consistently beyond models with continuous outcomes. While scholars use temporal splines and cubic polynomials to model the underlying hazard rate, they have neglected the fact that this causes the explanatory variables to have a long-term effect (LTE) by modifying the future values of the temporal dependence variables. In this article, I propose a simple technique that estimates a wide range of probabilistic LTEs in models with temporal dependence variables. These effects can range from simple LTEs for a one-time change in an explanatory variable to more complex scenarios where effects change in magnitude with time and compound across repeated events. I then replicate Clare's (2010, Ideological fractionalization and the international conflict behavior of parliamentary democracies.International Studies Quarterly54:965–87) examination of the influence of government fractionalization on conflict behavior to show that failing to interpret the results within the context of temporal dependence underestimates the total impact of fractionalization by neglecting LTEs.

The power to remove the government via no-confidence motion is a powerful tool afforded to the opposition. By triggering the government's downfall, opposition parties can substantially influence policy direction in parliamentary democracies. Yet, we know surprisingly little about how government and opposition parties interact to determine the occurrence of no-confidence motions and their chance of success. In this project, I develop a simple formal model that identifies the factors influencing when opposition parties propose no-confidence motions and their outcomes. I find support for these expectations by estimating an empirical model that is explicitly derived from the underlying theoretical model. Unlike previous empirical studies of government stability, this project honors the strategic interactions that occur between government and opposition parties. In addition to the possibility of the motion passing, opposition parties are motivated by electoral considerations, which induce different behaviors at various stages of the electoral cycle. This project offers a number of implications for the study of parliamentary politics, including theories of opposition behavior, democratic accountability, and government duration and termination.

Systematic evidence linking defense spending preferences to electoral choice has evaded scholars. This is surprising, given the relative importance of defense spending in terms of the overall budget, as well as the popular conception that increases in defense spending must be offset by decreases in social spending. I develop a theory that identifies the conditions where, when, and for whom defense spending preferences influence vote choice. I then introduce a new method that isolates the defense spending vote with a series of survey-specific models that account for factors unique to the particular situation in that country. I find that-contrary to conventional wisdom-defense spending preferences consistently influence vote choice. This presents an opportunity for right-wing parties and those that emphasize military buildups to attract votes, especially during times of heightened international tensions. These results highlight a strong connection between voters' preferences and electoral support in terms of national security issues, and speak to a number of important literatures including the constraining effects of public opinion on foreign policy and democratic representation. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

The usefulness of the general class of spatial econometric models, which relaxes the assumption that the observations are independent, has only recently been realised. One particularly fruitful application includes models of parties' ideological change as well as the electoral consequences of party competition. In these studies, scholars can explicitly model the spatial interconnectedness of political parties in theoretically pleasing ways, producing inferences that are consistent with formal models of party competition, but are beyond the grasp of traditional ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models. To illustrate these benefits, this article replicates Adams and Somer-Topcu's 2009 study of parties' responses to ideological shifts by rival parties to show that appropriately modeling patterns of interconnectivity between parties via weights matrices provides more realistic inferences that are more consistent with formal models of party competition. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractThe usefulness of the general class of spatial econometric models, which relaxes the assumption that the observations are independent, has only recently been realised. One particularly fruitful application includes models of parties' ideological change as well as the electoral consequences of party competition. In these studies, scholars can explicitly model the spatial interconnectedness of political parties in theoretically pleasing ways, producing inferences that are consistent with formal models of party competition, but are beyond the grasp of traditional ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models. To illustrate these benefits, this article replicatesAdams and Somer‐Topcu's 2009 study of parties' responses to ideological shifts by rival parties to show that appropriately modeling patterns of interconnectivity between parties via weights matrices provides more realistic inferences that are more consistent with formal models of party competition.

Parliamentary regimes offer the unique opportunity for opposition parties to react to foreign policy by proposing no-confidence motions (NCMs). The threat of an NCM bringing down the government may be enough to induce pacific behavior by the executive. Yet, this simplistic characterization neglects the possible electoral motivations of opportunistic opposition parties. I develop a theory that opposition parties respond to involvement in international conflict by proposing NCMs as a tool to influence voters' opinions with an eye toward the next election. I develop two expectations based on policy disagreement and issue ownership that I use to explain the electorally motivated decision to propose NCMs following conflict. I test these expectations with a dataset of 14 European parliamentary democracies from 1970 to 2001. The empirical evidence suggests that the partisanship of both the government and opposition parties interact to create varying electoral incentives to propose NCMs based on issue ownership. Right-wing opposition parties are more likely to challenge than left-wing parties, and this effect is exacerbated when facing left-wing governments. This study has important implications that underpin a number of theories of the domestic causes of international conflict as well as implications for the study of party strategy. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

Parliamentary regimes offer the unique opportunity for opposition parties to react to foreign policy by proposing no-confidence motions (NCMs). The threat of an NCM bringing down the government may be enough to induce pacific behavior by the executive. Yet, this simplistic characterization neglects the possible electoral motivations of opportunistic opposition parties. I develop a theory that opposition parties respond to involvement in international conflict by proposing NCMs as a tool to influence voters' opinions with an eye toward the next election. I develop two expectations based on policy disagreement and issue ownership that I use to explain the electorally motivated decision to propose NCMs following conflict. I test these expectations with a dataset of 14 European parliamentary democracies from 1970 to 2001. The empirical evidence suggests that the partisanship of both the government and opposition parties interact to create varying electoral incentives to propose NCMs based on issue ownership. Right-wing opposition parties are more likely to challenge than left-wing parties, and this effect is exacerbated when facing left-wing governments. This study has important implications that underpin a number of theories of the domestic causes of international conflict as well as implications for the study of party strategy.