American Journal of Political Science最新文献

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.

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.

To what extent and under what conditions do democratic institutions reduce socioeconomic ethnic inequality? I argue that democratization reduces ethnic inequality by introducing electoral accountability, which facilitates a series of egalitarian policies. However, the effect of democratization is conditional on the distribution of resources under the previous, nondemocratic regime. Countries that were more ethnically unequal prior to democratization experience greater egalitarian effects following democratization. To examine the argument, I leverage multiple country- and group-level measures of ethnic inequality. Using fixed effects regressions, instrumental variable analyses, and event studies, I demonstrate that democratization substantively reduces ethnic inequality, but mainly for countries with high predemocratic levels of inequality.