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Why are government bureaus not necessarily organized to implement policy effectively? One view holds that a main culprit is political uncertainty. Elected officials know that they will not hold office forever, so they use "insulating" structures that constrain bureaucratic discretion, making bureaus less subject to sabotage but also less effective. I revise this theory by modeling how public officials choose administrative structures. I show that in systems with few veto points, groups will be most likely to act cooperatively on policy when political uncertainty is greatest. In contrast, in systems with many veto points, only electorally weak groups will insulate policies from future interference, therefore shifting focus from uncertainty to electoral strength. Because the conditions that lead to policy insulation are rare, electoral competition should not be thought of as a primary cause of bureaucratic inefficiency. 2 Figures, 1 Appendix, 30 References. Adapted from the source document.

One view in the study of intergroup conflict is that pride implies prejudice. However, an increasing number of scholars have come to view in‐group pride more benignly, suggesting that such pride can be accompanied by a full range of feelings toward the out‐group. In this article, we focus on a substantively interesting case of in‐group/out‐group attitudes—national pride and hostility toward immigrants. We explore the relationship in two fundamental ways: first by examining the prejudice associated with various dimensions of pride, and second by embedding these relationships in a comprehensive model of prejudice. We find that national pride is most validly measured with two dimensions—patriotism and nationalism—two dimensions that have very different relationships with prejudice. While nationalists have a strong predilection for hostility toward immigrants, patriots show no more prejudice than does the average citizen.

One of the central concerns about American policy making institutions is the degree to which political outcomes can be influenced by interested parties. While the literature on interest group strategies in particular institutions—legislative, administrative, and legal—is extensive, there is very little scholarship which examines how the interdependencies between institutions affects the strategies of groups. In this paper we examine in a formal theoretical model how the opportunity to litigate administrative rulemaking in the courts affects the lobbying strategies of competing interest groups at the rulemaking stage. Using a resource-based view of group activity, we develop a number of important insights about each stage that cannot be observed by examining each one in isolation. We demonstrate that lobbying effort responds to the ideology of the court, and the responsiveness of the court to resources. In particular, (1) as courts become more biased toward the status quo, interest group lobbying investments become smaller, and may be eliminated all together, (2) as interest groups become wealthier, they spend more on lobbying, and (3) as the responsiveness of courts to resources decreases, the effect it has on lobbying investments depends on the underlying ideology of the court.

We present a general framework for understanding why firms are slow to make major strategic changes in a wide range of empirical settings. We then apply this framework to investigate, more specifically, the relationship between firm age and scope in hedge funds. Our empirical analyses demonstrate that younger hedge funds outperform older hedge funds both before and after the launch of a new fund. Based on our framework, these results suggest that age-based rigidity in hedge funds is more attributable to internal political frictions that influence project selection than to constraints associated with exchange partners or implementation costs. We conclude by discussing how our framework can be used to identify the dominant source of rigidity in other contexts.

Rational choice theorists have long been ambivalent about the rationality postulate. Although many agree that humans have imperfect foresight and inaccurate understandings of the world within which they act, no satisfactory approach relaxing the rationality postulates exists. In this article, we apply a new method that allows us to model directly rational action when agents have incomplete or inaccurate mental models of their world. In particular, we utilize the game theoretic notion of self-confirming equilibrium. The self-confirming equilibrium framework allows us to model an environment where a player's predictions about one another's behavior are inaccurate. It also allows us to model a common aspect of disputes; viz., that both sides believe they are acting reasonably while the other side is acting unreasonably. Finally, the approach allows a type of surprise in which a player's mis-conjectures about another's behavior results in behavior that was not anticipated. We apply this framework to the problem of the American Revolution, helping to resolve several unexplained puzzles in the historical literature. Historians of the Revolution emphasize the role of ideas in underpinning the revolutionary crisis. From the rational choice standpoint, a critical omission in the literature is that historians do not connect the realm of ideas with the realm of action. We demonstrate how the framework we propose can more directly shed light on three aspects absent in the existing literature. First, to explain why either side fought about abstract ideals or how those ideals were connected to the realm of action, and thus why the two sides failed to come to some accommodation despite their differences. Second, to explain why the colonists became so incensed over seemingly trivial taxes imposed by the British after the Seven Years' War ended in 1763. And, finally, to explain that if the clash of fundamental ideals led the two sides to armed confiict, how the British and the Americans could be unaware of their profound differences during the previous 100 plus years of cooperation.