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Military Service of Politicians, Public Policy, and Parliamentary Decisions
Abstract
How do politicians with past military service decide on societal issues? We explore the voting behavior of parliamentarians in the informative institutional setting of Switzerland with a conscription army. Our setting allows controlling for voter preferences and party ideology. Results show that politicians who have served in the military do not differ from those who have not served when comparing their voting behavior on issues related to female welfare and welfare of the weak and disabled. However, politicians who have served in the military tend to have a higher probability to accept proposals on neutrality and a lower probability to accept proposals linked to international human rights and the environment. We explore differences with respect to military ranks and ideological positions within parties and find that having chosen to serve in higher military ranks is associated with a differential voting pattern. This suggests that motivation for the military affects voting in parliament. (JEL codes: D72, F52, H56)
... This has particularly been the case in postwar countries where the ended conflicts remain politically salient and where political competition has given rise to a class of politicians with firsthand experience of armed combat. A substantial literature, often contextually focused on the United States, has found that veteran and non-veteran politicians do indeed differ in representing their constituents, particularly when it comes to policy positions on defense, foreign policy, and national security (Best and Vonnahme 2019;Karsten 2012;Eichenberger 2015, 2018). Unfortunately, we know far less about the nature of this distinction between veteran and non-veteran politicians when it comes to representation of groups directly affected by war violence, especially in postwar societies where significant numbers of former combatants, victims, and returnees have faced serious challenges when reintegrating into postwar lives. ...
... Gartner et al. (2004) find that state-level casualties and military experience affected candidate positions on the Vietnam War. In another study, Stadelmann et al. (2018) show that politicians who have served in the military do not differ from those who have not served when comparing their voting behavior on issues related to female welfare and welfare of the weak and disabled, but do differ when it comes to accepting proposals on neutrality or proposals linked to international human rights and the environment. Feaver and Gelpi (2011) show that top US military officials involved in the debate on the invasion of Iraq appeared reluctant to use force, while the most hawkish voices in the government were civilians who had not served in uniform. ...
How do politicians in postwar societies talk about the war past? How do they discursively represent vulnerable social groups created by the ended conflict? Does the nature of this representation depend on the politicians' ideology or their record of combat service? We answer these questions by pairing natural language processing tools and a large corpus of parliamentary debates with an extensive dataset of biographical information including detailed records of war service for all members of parliament during two recent terms in Croatia. We demonstrate not only that veteran politicians talk about war differently than their non-veteran counterparts, but also that the sentiment of war-related political discourse is highly dependent on the speakers' exposure to combat and ideological orientation. These results improve our understanding of the representational role played by combat veterans, as well as of the link between descriptive and substantive representation of vulnerable groups in postwar societies.
Does military conscription reduce the distance between the ordinary citizen and the state? Decades after its abolition, numerous European policy makers from across the political spectrum advocate the reintroduction of conscription to foster civic virtues, despite a lack of empirical evidence in this respect. Leveraging quasi‐random variation in conscription reforms across 15 European countries, we find that cohorts of men drafted just before its abolition display significantly and substantially lower institutional trust than cohorts of men who were just exempted. At the same time, ending conscription had no effect on institutional trust among women from comparable cohorts. Results are neither driven by more favorable attitudes toward the government, nor by educational choices. Instead, this civil–military gap unfolds through the formation of a homogeneous community with uniform values. We argue that reintroducing a compulsory military service may not produce the effects anticipated by its advocates.
We estimate the causal impact of military conscription on long-term beliefs and personality traits. To address potential endogeneity concerns, we exploit the conscription lottery in Argentina. We combine administrative data from the conscription lottery with data from a survey we designed on beliefs and personality traits. We find that men who were conscripted are more likely to adopt a military mindset and that the effect is long lasting. Given the many people who go through military conscription, our results are useful for understanding how personality traits and beliefs are formed for a very salient part of the world's population.
How does military experience shape the policy preferences and behavior of political elites? Research from across international relations suggests that military service influences the worldviews and policy preferences of these elites. Yet, in the American context, scholars find mixed evidence regarding the impact of military experience on the decision-making of legislators in the U.S. Congress. These studies, however, have not considered how self-selection into the armed forces may confound these results. In this paper, I address this problem of endogeneity by using vulnerability to the Vietnam draft lottery. I compare the roll call voting behavior of representatives who were eligible for the draft (based on their gender and birth year) and who served in the armed forces to those who were eligible for the draft but did not serve in the military. I also consider whether the effects of military service are unique to the experiences of the Vietnam era by examining cohort effects and comparing the voting records of veterans and non-veterans across different generations. I find that, across the 94th to 113th Congresses, there is indeed a significant difference in the roll call voting behavior between veterans and non-veterans on foreign and defense policy issues. This distinction cannot be explained by self-selection effects alone, as Vietnam draft eligible veterans vote differently than draft eligible non-veterans. Furthermore, I find some evidence of distinct cohort effects across specific issue areas. The results of my study carry implications for issues associated with Congressional oversight of the military, the influence of military experience on elite behavior, and how the personal experiences of elites influence their decision-making. Acknowledgements: Thank you to Scott Adams and Kassi Mettler for their excellent research assistance. Thank you also to Stephanie Pezard for her thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
Delegate conceptions of representation require activities of legislators to reflect their constituents’ preferences. Recent research has examined the distortionary effects of lobbying activities on this representational linkage. Here, I argue that the effect of interest groups on legislators’ behavior depends on the clarity of the majority’s preferences in a district. When the electorate is narrowly divided, Members of Parliament (MPs) may choose to reap the benefits associated with interest groups as costs from defection are lowest. The results show that MP defection from constituents’ preferences is only positively associated with sectional interest group ties when the constituency is narrowly divided on an issue. Likewise, MP defection is only negatively associated with MP’s ties to cause groups when the constituency is narrowly divided on an issue. These results are important because they specify the conditions under which interest group lobbying is sufficient to override constituents’ preferences.
This article assesses the claim that proportional representation (PR) fosters a closer correspondence between the views of citizens and the positions of the government. The study uses the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems data set and compares respondents’ self-placements on a Left-Right scale with placements of cabinet parties’ locations in 31 election studies. The authors argue that PR has two contradictory consequences. On one hand, PR leads to more parties and more choice for voters; but these parties are less centrist, and this increases the overall distance between voters and parties. On the other hand, PR increases the likelihood of coalition governments; this pulls the government toward the center of the policy spectrum and reduces the distance between the government and voters. These two contradictory effects of PR wash out, and the net overall impact of PR on congruence is nil. The data support the authors’ interpretation.
Does the gender of political representatives affect the extent to which they adhere to the voter majority's preferences? By matching individual male and female representatives' votes on legislative proposals with real referendum outcomes on the same issues, we obtain a direct measure of divergence. We find that female and male representatives adhere equally close to the majority's preferences if party affiliations are taken into account. This suggests that observed gender differences with respect to the national majority of voters may be reduced to an ideological left–right dimension.
This article examines the implications of mandatory conscription for women by studying the experience of women soldiers who serve as secretaries in the Israeli military. The author argues that the military service of the secretaries is shaped by three organizing principles: an employment principle of cheap labor, a matrimonial principle of the office wife, and a hierarchy principle that shapes the secretaries as status symbols. Employing the theory of gendered organizations, the author maintains that each one of these organizing principles operates as a gendering and a power mechanism. The convergence of these three gender/power principles results in overgendering of these women and their military experience. This overgendering reflects gender discrimination and creates feelings of alienation and frustration. For them, military service is not an experience that articulates their citizenship or enhances feelings of national belonging but rather stands in opposition to the values and goals of the mandatory people's army by estranging them from the state and its major institution.
The quality of government is often measured by the degree of congruence between policy choices and public opinion, but there is not an accepted method for calculating congruence. This paper offers a new approach to measuring policy-opinion congruence, and uses it to study 10 high-profile issues across the 50 states. For the issues examined, states chose the policy preferred by a majority of citizens (equivalent to the median voter outcome) 59 percent of the time-only 9 percent more than would have happened with random policymaking. Majoritarian/median outcomes were 18-19 percent more likely when direct democracy was available, and 11-13 percent more likely when judges were required to stand for reelection. The likelihood of a majoritarian/median outcome was not correlated with a variety of election laws, including campaign contribution limits, public funding of campaigns, and commission-based redistricting.
Other research has shown (1) that civilians and the military differ in their views about when and how to use military force; (2) that the opinions of veterans track more closely with military officers than with civilians who never served in the military; and (3) that U.S. civil–military relations shaped Cold War policy debates. We assess whether this opinion gap “matters” for the actual conduct of American foreign policy. We examine the impact of the presence of veterans in the U.S. political elite on the propensity to initiate and escalate militarized interstate disputes between 1816 and 1992. As the percentage of veterans serving in the executive branch and the legislature increases, the probability that the United States will initiate militarized disputes declines. Once a dispute has been initiated, however, the higher the proportion of veterans, the greater the level of force the United States will use in the dispute.
Using the index method, we developed the PollyBio model to predict election outcomes. The model, based on 49 cues about candidates' biographies, was used to predict the outcome of the 28 U.S. presidential elections from 1900 to 2008. In using a simple heuristic, it correctly predicted the winner for 25 of the 28 elections and was wrong three times. In predicting the two-party vote shares for the last four elections from 1996 to 2008, the model's out-of-sample forecasts yielded a lower forecasting error than 12 benchmark models. By relying on different information and including more variables than traditional models, PollyBio improves on the accuracy of election forecasting. It is particularly helpful for forecasting open-seat elections. In addition, it can help parties to select the candidates running for office.
Representatives have more effective incentives to cater to the preferences of the majority of citizens when they are elected
in districts with few rather than many seats. We investigate this hypothesis empirically by matching Swiss members of parliament’s
voting behavior on legislative proposals with real referendum outcomes on the same issues for the years 1996 to 2008. We thus
identify the impact of district magnitude on representatives’ incentives to adhere to citizens’ revealed preferences. We find
systematic, statistically significant and economically relevant evidence that individual representatives from districts with
few seats vote more often in line with majority preferences.
KeywordsVoter preferences–Political economy–Electoral systems
This paper addresses the personal linkages between the public service and the legislature that emerge because public servants
pursue a political mandate. There are concerns that the representation of public servants in parliaments generates a conflict
of interest. We present a cost-benefit calculus and analyze specific legal provisions for the German Laender to understand
the selection of public servants into parliaments. We find that a legal incompatibility of a position in the public service
and a political mandate decreases and a compensation for having to hold one’s office in abeyance increases the fraction of
public servants in Laender parliaments.
Political selection-Parliamentary election-Public servants-IncompatibilityJEL ClassificationD72-D73-H11-H83
Using data from 1960 to 2000 for OECD countries, we analyze the effect of compulsory military service on the demand for higher education, measured by the fraction of the working-age population enrolled in tertiary education. Based on a theoretical model, we hypothesize that a military draft has a negative effect on education. Empirically, we confirm this for the mere existence of conscription, albeit usually at low statistical significance. However, increasing intensity of its enforcement, measured by the share of the labor force conscripted by the military and the duration of service, significantly reduces enrollment in higher education.
World War II veterans earn more than nonveterans in their cohort. We test whether the World War II veteran premium reflects nonrandom selection into the military of men with higher earnings potential. The estimation is based on the fact that from 1942 to 1947 priority for conscription was determined by date of birth. Information on individuals' dates of birth may therefore be used to construct instrumental variables for veteran status. Empirical results from the 1960, 1970, and l980 censuses, along with two other microdata sets support a conclusion that World War II veterans earn no more than comparable nonveterans and may well earn less. Copyright 1994 by University of Chicago Press.
The paper addresses the divergence in majority rules at the moment of creating or reforming constitutions.
While constitutions require, in most cases, qualified majorities in order to be approved at the constitutional
assembly, they normally require only simple majorities to be ratified at the referendum. We analyze the set of
conditions under which each majority rule is preferable for constitutional referendums. We argue that the
simple majority requirement for referendums in constitution-making, which is nearly universally used, lacks
a clear theoretical justification. Qualified majority rules increase legitimacy and provide additional checks on
the drafters. We further highlight when simple majority rules have advantages: when decision-making costs
in the referendum are high. Thereafter, we present an evaluation mechanism to identify the cases in which
each majority rule should be used to increase stability and legitimacy. We then apply this evaluation
mechanism to the constitution-making processes in Poland, Bolivia and Egypt, which are three examples
of diverging majority rules.
Electoral systems determine the role that representatives’ party affiliations play in political representation. According to conventional expectations, party affiliation drives the behavior of representatives when they are elected under a proportional system, while majoritarian systems mute the role of party affiliation by forcing politicians to converge to the median position of their constituency. This study directly tests these predictions within a common party system by matching referenda decisions of constituents with voting behavior of their representatives who are elected either under a majoritarian or proportional system.
The 9/11 terror attacks are likely to have induced an increase in anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner sentiments, not only among US residents but also beyond US borders. Using unique longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and exploiting exogenous variation in interview timing throughout 2001, I find that the 9/11 events caused an immediate shift of around 40 percent of one within-standard deviation to more negative attitudes toward immigration and resulted in a considerable decrease in concerns over xenophobic hostility among the German population. The quasi-experiment 9/11 provides evidence on the relevance of non-economic factors in attitude formation and the role of education in moderating the negative terrorism shock. Additional descriptive analysis suggests that the effects have also been persistent in the years after the attacks.
Direct democracy may impose significant information demands on voters, especially when individual propositions are highly complex. Yet, it remains theoretically ambiguous how proposition complexity affects referendum outcomes. To explore this question, I use a novel dataset on 153 Swiss federal referendums that took place between 1978 and 2010. The dataset includes hand-collected data on the number of subjects per proposition based on official pre-referendum information booklets as a measure of complexity. My estimation results suggest that the relationship between proposition complexity and the share of yes-votes follows an inverse U-shape. Using micro-data from representative post-referendum surveys, I provide evidence for two opposing channels. More complex propositions are supported by a more diverse group of voters. On the other hand, voters find it more difficult to estimate the personal consequences of complex propositions and are therefore more likely to reject them.
We show that officer training during the Swedish military service has a strong positive effect on the probability of attaining a managerial position later in life. The most intense type of officer training increases the probability of becoming a civilian manager by about 5 percentage points, or 75%. Officer training also increases educational attainment post-military service. We argue that the effect on civilian leadership could be due to the acquisition of leadershipspecific skills during the military service, and we present suggestive evidence related to alternative mechanisms, such as signaling, networks, and training unrelated to leadership.
Models of political competition portray political candidates as seeking the support of the median voter to win elections by majority voting. In practice, political candidates seek supermajorities, rather than majorities based on support of the median voter. We study the political benefits of supermajorities using data from Bavaria, the largest German state. Members of the Bavarian parliament had been permitted to hire relatives as office employees, but in the year 2000 the practice was prohibited, with exceptions that allowed continuation of employment of previously hired relatives. The circumstances provide an informative setting to relate political behavior to protection of incumbency. Our results show that the likelihood of politicians hiring relatives increased with the margin of the majority for the incumbent in the previous election. When the majority increased by one percentage point, the likelihood of hiring relatives increased by about one percentage point. Supermajorities thus facilitated political rent extraction.
This article investigates whether political violence has long-term effects on attitudes toward political participation. This is an interesting topic because public engagement and social capital play a crucial role in shaping the economy and democracy. We exploit a recent survey on the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War to shed light on this question. Our findings indicate that being a member of a family that suffered violence during the Civil War is related to a higher interest, knowledge and engagement in politics. These results stand in stark contrast to the common expectation that political violence leads to lower public engagement, while they are consistent with other studies focusing on the short-term consequences of civil conflicts. Therefore, the legacy of political violence, far from creating political apathy, may be the higher involvement of citizens in politics.
Most research on congressional consideration of foreign and defense policy concludes that ideology is the most important influence on roll-call voting and that constituent economic interests are not very important. This article challenges this conclusion on two grounds. First, most previous research conceives of constituent economic interests on these issues very narrowly, examining only the benefits constituents obtain from providing military goods and services rather than their economic stakes in the broader goals of national security policy. Second, the effect of ideology on congressional voting has changed enormously over time, a fact that poses difficulties for research that has stressed this consideration. The effects of broader economic interests and the changing implications of ideology are tested using a sample of key Senate votes on military resource allocation, intervention, and foreign aid from 1947 through 2000.
Do politicians with a military background vote differently on military affairs? We investigate the informative institutional setting of the Swiss conscription army. Politicians who served in the military have a higher probability of accepting pro-military legislative proposals, even when controlling for party affiliations and the revealed preferences of their constituents. Although conscription requires all able-bodied man to serve at least as soldiers, we can exploit variation in exposure to enforced and voluntary service. We find evidence that intrinsic motivation to serve in the military, instead of compulsory service, plays a substantial role in explaining legislative decisions on military affairs.
The present article analyzes the differences between economists and non-economists with respect to observed corruption behavior used as a proxy for selfishness. For this purpose, I analyzed real world data of relating to the 109th–111th US Congress between 2005 and 2009, including 695 representatives and senators. I show that those who hold a degree in economics are significantly more prone to corruption than ‘non-economists’. These findings hence support the widespread, but controversial hypothesis in the ‘economist vs. non-economist literature’ that economists lack what Frey and Meier (2004) call ‘social behavior’. Moreover, by using real world data, these findings overcome the lack of external validity, which impact on the (low cost) experiments and surveys to date.
We investigate the causes of civil war, using a new data set of wars during 1960-99. Rebellion may be explained by atypically severe grievances, such as high inequality, a lack of political rights, or ethnic and religious divisions in society. Alternatively, it might be explained by atypical opportunities for building a rebel organization. While it is difficult to find proxies for grievances and opportunities, we find that political and social variables that are most obviously related to grievances have little explanatory power. By contrast, economic variables, which could proxy some grievances but are perhaps more obviously related to the viability of rebellion, provide considerably more explanatory power.
Citizens delegate the representation of their political preferences to Members of Parliament (MPs) who are supposed to represent their interests in the legislature. However, MPs are exposed to a variety of interest groups seeking to influence their voting behavior. We argue that interest groups influence how MPs cast their vote in Parliament, but that this effect varies across groups. While lobbying by sectional groups provides incentives for MPs to defect from their constituents, we expect that cause groups in fact strengthen the link between MPs and their voters. We test our argument based on an innovative study of 118 Swiss public referenda which allows for directly comparing voter preferences with legislative voting of 448 MPs on these issues. Drawing on a multilevel regression analysis, this study shows that interest groups considerably affect the link between MPs and their voters. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of political representation.
Conventional wisdom holds that parochialism shapes how Congress decides defense issues. Yet most statistical analyses point to ideology as the key variable in congressional voting on defense policy. This study examines Senate and House votes on several strategic weapons systems and corroborates previous findings; members of Congress generally vote in accordance with their policy views and not their constituency's economic interests. This departs markedly from congressional behavior in other areas of the defense budget and suggests that the conventional wisdom about the constituency-voting link is oversimplified. In particular, the findings here lend credence to the argument that the constituency should be viewed as a constraint on members' freedom of action rather than as a positive guide to behavior.
Immigration may adversely affect political stability if immigrants are perceived unfavourably by host country populations. Using a large sample of countries this study confirms that a higher immigrant share of a population is associated with decrease in the level of political stability. We further demonstrate that a higher immigrant share leads to increased military spending through the channel of political stability. The negative effect of immigration on political stability appears to be stronger in countries with assimilative citizenship laws. We account for the endogeneity of immigrant share by using an instrument constructed from gravity model estimates.
There is mounting evidence of the influence of personal characteristics of chief executive officers (CEOs) on corporate outcomes. In this paper we analyze the relation between military service of CEOs and managerial decisions, financial policies, and corporate outcomes. Exploiting exogenous variation in the propensity to serve in the military, we show that military service is associated with conservative corporate policies and ethical behavior. Military CEOs pursue lower corporate investment, are less likely to be involved in corporate fraudulent activity, and perform better during industry downturns. Taken together, our results show that military service has significant explanatory power for managerial decisions and firm outcomes.
Drawing on new data that combine recorded votes from the Swiss National Assembly with canton-level referendum results on identical legislative proposals, Portmann et al. (Public Choice 151:585–610, 2012) develop an innovative strategy to identify the effect of district magnitude on the relationship between representatives and their constituents. We replicate PSE’s central result and also estimate a related model that allows for the possibility of non-monotonicity in the relationship between district magnitude and representatives’ deviance from referendum median voters. Our results indicate that representatives elected in low-magnitude multi-member districts deviate from canton-level majorities less than either MPs from single-member districts or those from high-magnitude multi-member districts.
Countries differ substantially in how they deal with politicians that come from the public sector. Most constitutions include incompatibility and ineligibility rules due to concerns about conflicts of interest and the politicization of the public service. We study how these rules affect the attractiveness of parliamentary mandates for public servants and thus the selection into politics. We compile a novel dataset that captures the fraction of public servants in 71 national legislatures as well as the respective (in)compatibility regimes. On average, there are 7 percentage points fewer public servants in parliaments where a strict regime is in force. Supplementary evidence shows that the fraction of public servants in parliament is positively correlated with government consumption as well as the absence of corruption.
Military service has the capacity to inculcate members with politically relevant traits that influence political participation later in life. Results from three decades of pooled national cross-sectional data among males indicate that previous experience with the military, the most controlling and least democratic facet of American democracy, has a largely positive effect on turnout propensity. For WWII, Korean War, and post-conscription era veterans, previous military service positively influences turnout when compared to contemporaries without military service, while Vietnam-era veterans exhibited lower turnout rates than non-veteran peers. Evidence suggests that socialization effects rival self-selection bias in explaining increased veteran turnout.
As the American death toll in Iraq surpassed 1,900, some international research scholars may have been perplexed. Only a few years ago, foreign policy makers in Western democracies, including the United States, were described as being extremely sensitive to the risk of military combat casualties. Among the factors that influence the number of casualties that a democracy will experience in conflict, one variable that should not be ignored is its military manpower system. The author contends that democracies with conscript armies experience fewer combat casualties than democracies with volunteer or professional forces because the societal actors most closely affected by conscript casualties are more likely to have the political power and access with which to constrain policy makers. Using several selection models, the author finds that democracy and conscription contribute to fewer casualties than democracy and volunteer militaries, with democracy alone being responsible for casualty numbers that lie somewhere in between.
We analyze the effect of constituents’ preferences on legislators’ decisions within a quasi-experimental setting: In the Swiss referendum process, constituents and legislators vote on policy proposals and thus reveal their preferences. We match roll call votes of all legislators on 118 legislative proposals with revealed constituents’ preferences on exactly the same issues from 1996 to 2009. This setting allows us to quantify the quality of parliamentary representation. Results show that the probability of a legislator accepting a law proposal increases slightly when his/her constituency accepts the proposal and we explore mediating factors that affect congruence between legislators and constituents.
This article examines factors correlated with plans for military service (military propensity) and actual enlistment. It reports bivariate and multivariate regression analyses, conducted separately for men and women, using survey data from nationwide samples totaling more than 100,000 U.S. high school seniors (classes of 1984-1991), and follow-up data from a subsample of more than 15,000 of the high school seniors obtained 1 or 2 years after graduation. Correlations between propensity and actual enlistment are high among women (η = .38) and very high among men (η = .57). Enlistment rates are lower among individuals with college-educated parents, high grades, and college plans; rates are higher among men, African Americans, Hispanics, and those who view military work roles as attractive. These relations are interpreted primarily as indirect effects on enlistment via propensity.
We consider the relationship between the preferences of American voters and the preferences of the U.S. legislators who represent them. Using an Internet-based, national opinion survey in conjunction with legislator voting records from the 109th and 110th Congresses, we show that members of Congress are more extreme than their constituents, i.e., that there is a lack of congruence between American voters and members of Congress. We also show that when a congressional legislator is replaced by a new member of the opposite party, one relative extremist is replaced by an opposing extremist. We call this leapfrog representation, a form of representation that leaves moderates with a dearth of representation in Congress. We see evidence of leapfrog representation in states and House districts and in the aggregate as well: the median member of the 109th House was too conservative compared to the median American voter, yet the median of the 110th House was too liberal. Thus, the median American voter was leapfrogged when the 109th House transitioned to the 110th. Although turnover between the 109th and 110th Senates occurred at approximately the same rate as between the 109th and 110th Houses, the Senate appears to be a more moderate institution whose median member does not move as abruptly as that of the House.
Recent studies of the domestic distribution of military procurement expenditures and representation on congressional defense committees support the traditional committee-centered distributive theory of congressional policymaking in a manner consistent with the assumption that Congress is organized to produce gains from exchange among legislators with diverse interests via intercommittee logrolling. This paper compares the committee-centered distributive theory to a party-centered distributive theory. Analysis of a multiequation model using pooled time-series data on the distribution of military procurement expenditures and defense committee representation among states from 1963 to 1989 supports a party-centered version of the distributive theory.
How do domestic institutions affect autocratic leaders' decisions to initiate military disputes? This article points out important flaws in the few existing attempts to explain the conflict initiation behavior of autocracies. It then introduces a theoretical framework merging insights from comparative politics and international relations, developing hypotheses about the conflict propensity of different types of autocracies compared to democracies. The framework highlights which particular causal mechanisms should apply to different regime types. It then introduces new measures allowing for a test of these arguments against the alternatives. The findings indicate that despite the conventional focus on the differences between democracies and non-democracies, substantial variation in conflict initiation actually occurs among authoritarian regimes, and some types of autocratic institutions lead to no greater overall conflict initiation than democracy. The result is a deeper understanding of the conflict behavior of autocracies, with important implications for scholars as well as policymakers.
We assemble a novel dataset of matched legislative and constituent votes and demonstrate that less income does not mean less representation. We show 1) The opinions of high and low income voters are highly correlated; the legislator’s vote often reflects the desire of both. 2) What differences in representation by income exist, vary by legislator party. Republicans more often vote the will of their higher income over their lower income constituents; Democratic legislators do the reverse. 3) Differences in representation by income are largely explained by the correlation between constituent income and party affiliation.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.
One of the most intractable problems associated with studying representation in the U.S. House of Representatives involves the measurement of district-level constituency opinion. In measuring constituency opinion in House districts, scholars have relied on a number of alternative approaches, including the use of demographic variables, small-sample estimates of public opinion, presidential election results, referenda data, and “bottom-up” simulated opinion. In this article we develop an innovative “top-down” simulation of House district opinion that provides more reliable and valid measures of House district ideology. We model state-level ideology (as measured by Erikson, Wright, and McIver 1993) as a function of various demographic and political variables found at both the state and House district levels, and then use the estimates from the state-level model to generate predicted ideology scores for each House district during the 1980s and 1990s. Our findings suggest that the top-down simulated measure is a valid indicator of House district ideology that can be used in a number of research venues.
Although the literature examining the relationship between ideological congruence and electoral rules is quite large, relatively little attention has been paid to how congruence should be conceptualized. As we demonstrate, empirical results regarding ideological congruence can depend on exactly how scholars conceptualize and measure it. In addition to clarifying various aspects of how scholars currently conceptualize congruence, we introduce a new conceptualization and measure of congruence that captures a long tradition in democratic theory emphasizing the ideal of having a legislature that accurately reflects the preferences of the citizenry as a whole. Our new measure is the direct counterpart for congruence of the vote-seat disproportionality measures so heavily used in comparative studies of representation. Using particularly appropriate data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, we find that governments in proportional democracies are not substantively more congruent than those in majoritarian democracies. Proportional democracies are, however, characterized by more representative legislatures.
Two recent research programs-one on the sources of democratic consolidation and another on the causes and consequences of violent conflict-have tended to evolve in relative isolation. The contributions to this special issue of Journal of Conflict Resolution help to bridge this gap, through explicit theoretical and empirical analysis of the relationship between fighting and voting. Armed conflict and electoral politics may be strategic substitutes, in that political actors may optimally choose to submit to the ballot box or instead attempt to impose their will by force; or they may be strategic complements, in that actors use violence to bolster their electoral aims, or use electoral returns as sources of information on underlying preferences that they exploit in armed campaigns. In either case, the distribution of popular support for contending parties can shape not only the incidence but also the type of armed conflict, and it can also influence the incentives of parties to invest in institutional mechanisms that mitigate commitment problems and help to bring violent conflicts to an end. The contributions to this issue illuminate these themes and demonstrate the value of bringing these separate research programs into closer dialogue.
This paper studies whether the degree of women's representation in Swedish local councils affects local public expenditure patterns. To empirically address this question, I first analyze the differences in preferences between men and women expressed by elected local council representatives using survey data. This enables me to make precise predictions about the effects of women's representation on spending. The subsequent panel study on the composition of public spending supports the predictions that increased representation of women in the local council increases spending on childcare and education relative to elderly care.
The magnitude of the interaction effect in nonlinear models does not equal the marginal effect of the interaction term, can be of opposite sign, and its statistical significance is not calculated by standard software. We present the correct way to estimate the magnitude and standard errors of the interaction effect in nonlinear models.
We consider a planner who chooses between two public policies and ask whether a referendum or a cost benefit analysis leads to higher welfare. We find that a referendum leads to higher welfare than a cost benefit analysis in a "common value" environment. Cost benefit analysis is better in a "private value" environment. (c) 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved..
Makes a compelling case for the importance of thoughtful research design and persuasive evidence in theory building
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Despite the centrality of the median voter prediction in political economy models, overwhelming empirical evidence shows that legislators regularly take positions that diverge significantly from the preferences of the median voter in their districts. However, all these empirical studies to date lack the necessary data to directly measure the preferences of the median voter. We utilize a unique data set consisting of individual-level voting data that allows us to construct direct measures of voter preferences. We find that legislators are most constrained by the preferences of the median voter in homogeneous districts.
Legislators vote on numerous issues, many of which are not offered for citizen vote. As a result, most previous studies of legislative shirking have used only data on legislators' votes and the characteristics of the legislators' constituencies. The case of state lottery adoption allows a direct test of how well legislators voted according to the preferences of their constituencies, since both voters and legislators voted on the issue. In addition, the legislative vote on lottery adoption occurred before the citizen vote, thus forcing legislators to accurately forecast constituency preferences. Examining West Virginia legislators, I first find the lottery preferences of each legislator's average and core constituencies. I then compare each legislator's actual vote on lottery adoption to his or her predicted vote. After considering all possible determinants of legislators' votes, I find an average of 28 percent of West Virginia legislators still failed to vote according to their constituencies' majority preferences. Copyright 1999 by the University of Chicago.
There are two fundamentally different views of the role of elections in policy formation. In one view, voters can affect candidates' policy choices: competition for votes induces politicians to move toward the center. In this view, elections
have the effect of bringing about some degree of policy compromise. In the alternative view, voters merely elect policies: politicians cannot make credible promises to moderate their policies, and elections are merely a means to decide
which one of two opposing policy views will be implemented. We assess which of these contrasting perspectives is more empirically
relevant for the U. S. House. Focusing on elections decided by a narrow margin allows us to generate quasi-experimental estimates
of the impact of a “randomized” change in electoral strength on subsequent representatives' roll-call voting records. We find
that voters merely elect policies: the degree of electoral strength has no effect on a legislator's voting behavior. For example, a large exogenous increase in electoral strength for the Democratic party in a district does not result in shifting both parties' nominees
to the left. Politicians' inability to credibly commit to a compromise appears to dominate any competition-induced convergence
in policy.