American Journal of Political Science最新文献

Presidents select from a range of instruments when creating new policies through executive action. We study strategic substitution in this context and argue that presidents use less visible means of unilateral instruments when Congress is likely to scrutinize presidential action. Using data on unilateral orders issued between 1946 and 2020, we report two main findings. First, analyzing presidents’ choice of instruments, we show that presidents are more likely to substitute memoranda and other less visible instruments for executive orders and proclamations during periods of divided government. Second, after accounting for the substitution of executive orders with other instruments, we find that presidents issue greater numbers of directives during divided government than during unified government. These findings provide new evidence about the limitations of the separation of powers as a constraint on presidential unilateralism and highlight the importance of accounting for the variety of instruments through which presidents create unilateral policies.

Three key characteristics of effective electoral mobilizers have been identified in the literature: reputation, embeddedness in the local community, and the ability to reward and sanction voters. Religious leaders may possess all these characteristics. Can they favor their preferred candidates? Using a novel data set of connections between politicians and Italian Catholic bishops throughout the twentieth century, I conduct the first quantitative assessment of the electoral returns of personal connections to a religious leader. Leveraging the timing of bishops’ nominations within a difference-in-differences strategy, I estimate that bishops born in the electoral district yield a 27% increase in the individual preference votes for their connected candidate. Additional analyses point to the provision of campaign opportunities as the main mechanism driving the effect. These findings suggest that religious authorities can use their local embeddedness to mobilize voters, eventually influencing the selection of representatives in democratic systems.

This article examines how treaty withdrawal affects international cooperation. By terminating its treaty commitments, the exiting state could earn a reputation for unreliability, making other states less willing to cooperate with it. However, states’ reactions to withdrawal vary markedly, even though it is public behavior. I develop an experiential theory of international cooperation that explains this variation. I argue that withdrawal damages the exiting state's relations with other treaty members, causing them to ratify fewer agreements with it in the future. I test this theory using an original data set of all treaties registered with the United Nations and a case study of France's exit from NATO's Status of Forces Agreement. I find that withdrawal reduces treaty members’ ratification of agreements with the exiting state by 7.9% in the 7 years after exit. This effect increases with the salience and material cost of withdrawal and can spill across issue areas.

With increasing interest in the role of emotions in politics across the discipline, we review theoretical and methodological approaches utilized by political psychologists. Although theorists have been highlighting the role of emotions in politics for thousands of years, modern political psychologists primarily employ Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen's (2000) affective intelligence theory to grapple with the consequences of emotions for political attitudes and behavior. We present results from a formal meta-analytic assessment exploring the strength of the empirical evidence for the relationship between emotions and political information search and decision strategies. Overall, we find weak but statistically reliable evidence linking anger, anxiety, and enthusiasm to information search when search is self-reported, but when information search is objectively measured, we find no link between it and anxiety or enthusiasm. Surprisingly, we also find little reliable evidence linking emotions to differential reliance on heuristics or more evidence-based criteria in voter decision-making.

Bilateral conflict involves an attacker with several alternative attack methods and a defender who can take various actions to better respond to different types of attack. These situations have wide applicability to political, legal, and economic disputes, but they are particularly challenging to study empirically because the payoffs are unknown. Moreover, each party has an incentive to behave unpredictably, so theoretical predictions are stochastic. This article reports results of an experiment where the details of the environment are tightly controlled. The results sharply contradict the Nash equilibrium predictions about how the two parties’ choice frequencies change in response to the relative effectiveness of alternative attack strategies. In contrast, nonparametric quantal response equilibrium predictions match the observed treatment effects. Estimation of the experimentally controlled payoff parameters across treatments accurately recovers the true values of those parameters with the logit quantal response equilibrium model but not with the Nash equilibrium model.

Placebo tests are increasingly common in applied social science research, but the methodological literature has not previously offered a comprehensive account of what we learn from them. We define placebo tests as tools for assessing the plausibility of the assumptions underlying a research design relative to some departure from those assumptions. We offer a typology of tests defined by the aspect of the research design that is altered to produce it (outcome, treatment, or population) and the type of assumption that is tested (bias assumptions or distributional assumptions). Our formal framework clarifies the extra assumptions necessary for informative placebo tests; these assumptions can be strong, and in some cases similar assumptions would justify a different procedure allowing the researcher to relax the research design's assumptions rather than test them. Properly designed and interpreted, placebo tests can be an important device for assessing the credibility of empirical research designs.

Recent decades have witnessed the adoption of unprecedentedly broad and inclusive accountability mechanisms by many major international institutions, from grievance redress systems to transparency policies. What explains the establishment of these mechanisms—and why have only some institutions embraced them? I argue that adoption is more likely when member states, in particular the most powerful, face “bottom-up” pressures for accountability from dense transnational civil society networks—networks with the capacity to build leverage through agenda setting, coalition building, and advocacy strategies—and when institutions perform governance tasks that are costly to monitor. Analysis of a rich new dataset shows that adoption is positively related to the density of international nongovernmental organizations in an institution's issue area—including only those based in powerful member countries—and that this relationship is stronger when governance tasks entail high monitoring costs. Statistical tests are complemented by qualitative evidence from interviews and other primary sources.

This article argues office seekers’ messaging gives rise to a distinct and underappreciated epistemic form of political inequality. Electoral incentives push representatives to orient their rhetoric toward appealing to strategically valuable constituencies, yielding flows of elite cues that disproportionately reflect those groups’ perspectives. When inequalities in strategic value overlap with other inequalities of social power, politicians’ messaging strategies exacerbate the epistemic marginalization of disadvantaged citizens by denying them equal influence on the frames and understandings circulated in mainstream debate. This dynamic is best understood as a democratically perverse form of epistemic injustice distinct from but mutually reinforcing with citizens’ unequal influence on political outcomes. Moreover, I show how such inequalities distort otherwise epistemically salutary mechanisms of electoral accountability and undermine the quality of representative decision-making. I conclude by suggesting hypotheses for testing electoral reform's potential to mitigate these discursive consequences.

International organizations (IOs) are rapidly reorienting around climate change, despite powerful principal states having divergent preferences on the issue. When and why do IOs prioritize climate change? We argue that they do so as a result of an endogenous process of staff learning and rotation. IO staff surveil and implement programs in target states. When working in climate-vulnerable countries, they come to see climate change as an issue warranting aggressive action. As these staff are rotated and promoted, interest in climate diffuses outwards and upwards through the institution. To test this theory, we introduce original data tracking the International Monetary Fund's attention to climate change and the career paths of key staff. We complement this with interviews of International Monetary Fund personnel. We find support for our theory.

Why do some states comply with international agreements while others flout them? In this article, I introduce a previously unconsidered explanation: bureaucratic structure. I develop a rational choice model examining the impact of bureaucratic structure on compliance, suggesting that the existence of several distinct bureaucracies can mute compliance with an international agreement by insulating some bureaucrats from pressure to comply. I examine this theory through newly coded data on a 2001 OECD agreement designed to decrease the percentage of aid that is “tied” to donor-state products and services—a practice that is popular among special interests but which decreases foreign aid's effectiveness. I find that non–development-oriented bureaucracies, such as departments of interior, labor, and energy, were significantly less likely to comply with the agreement than traditional development bureaucracies. This aggregates to the state level as well, where states with many aid agencies were less compliant than states with a streamlined bureaucracy.