Even before the sharp downturn that began in 2007, many Americans were concerned about economic risks. Yet this widespread public concern has not been matched by attention from political scientists regarding how citizens experience and understand the economic risks they face or how those experiences and understandings shape their views of public policy. We develop here an argument about the role of personal economic experiences in the formation of policy attitudes that we validate using a distinctive opinion survey of our own design, fielded not long after the onset of the Great Recession. The survey tracks citizens' economic experiences, expectations, and policy attitudes within multiple domains of risk (employment, medical care, family, and wealth arrangements). These investigations show that economic insecurity systematically and substantially affects citizens' attitudes toward government's role. Citizens' economic worries largely track exposure to substantial economic shocks. Citizens' policy attitudes in turn appear highly responsive to economic worries, as well as to the experience of economic shocks—with worries and shocks creating greater support for government policies that buffer the relevant economic risk. Attitudes seem most affected by temporally proximate shocks, shocks befalling households that have weak private safety nets, and shocks occurring within the domain most relevant to the policy in question, though attitudes are also (more weakly) correlated with shocks in other domains. The magnitude of these associations rivals partisanship and ideology and almost always exceeds that for conventional measures of socio-economic status. Given the long-term increase in economic insecurity and current sluggish recovery, understanding how insecurity shapes citizens' policy attitudes and political behavior should be a major concern of political science.

In informal urban areas throughout the developing world, and even in some US and UK neighborhoods, tens if not hundreds of millions of people live under some form of criminal governance. For them, states’ claims of a monopoly on the use of force ring hollow; for many issues, a local criminal organization is the relevant authority. Yet the state is far from absent: residents may pay taxes, vote, and even inform on gangs as punishment for abusive behavior. Criminal governance flourishes in pockets of low state presence, but ones that states can generally enter at will, if not always without violence. It thus differs from state, corporate, and rebel governance because it is embedded within larger domains of state power. I develop a conceptual framework centered around the who, what, and how of criminal governance, organizing extant research and proposing a novel dimension: charismatic versus rational-bureaucratic forms of criminal authority. I then delineate the logics that may drive criminal organizations to provide governance for non-members, establishing building blocks for future theory-building and -testing. Finally, I explore how criminal governance intersects with the state, refining the concept of crime–state “symbiosis” and distinguishing it from neighboring concepts in organized-crime and drug-violence scholarship.

Over the last decade, organized criminal violence has reached unprecedented levels and has caused as much violent death globally as direct armed conflict. Nonetheless, the study of organized crime in political science remains limited because these organizations and their violence are not viewed as political. Building on recent innovations in the study of armed conflict, I argue that organized criminal violence should no longer be segregated from related forms of organized violence and incorporated within the political violence literature. While criminal organizations do not seek to replace or break away from the state, they have increasingly engaged in the politics of the state through the accumulation of the means of violence itself. Like other non-state armed groups, they have developed variously collaborative and competitive relationships with the state that have produced heightened levels of violence in many contexts and allowed these organizations to gather significant political authority. I propose a simple conceptual typology for incorporating the study of these organizations into the political violence literature and suggest several areas of future inquiry that will illuminate the relationship between violence and politics more generally.

What is the relationship between civil war and terrorism? Most current research on these topics either explicitly or implicitly separates the two, in spite of compelling reasons to consider them together. In this paper, we examine the extent to which terrorism and civil war overlap and then unpack various temporal and spatial patterns. To accomplish this, we use newly geo-referenced terror event data to offer a global overview of where and when terrorist events happen and whether they occur inside or outside of civil war zones. Furthermore, we conduct an exploratory analysis of six separate cases that have elements of comparability but also occur in unique contexts, which illustrate some of the patterns in terrorism and civil war. The data show a high degree of overlap between terrorism and ongoing civil war and, further, indicate that a substantial amount of terrorism occurs prior to civil wars in Latin America, but yet follows civil war in other regions of the world. While the study of terrorism and of civil war mostly occurs in separate scholarly communities, we argue for more work that incorporates insights from each research program and we offer a possibility for future research by considering how geo-referenced terror and civil war data may be utilized together. More generally, we expect these results to apply to a wide variety of attitudes and behaviors in contentious politics.

To leverage the full range of observed variation in patterns of violence toward the development and testing of theories of political violence, scholars need adequate conceptual foundations: what should we mean by a pattern of violence on the part of an armed organization? Scholars often distinguish degrees or levels or types of violence across organizations and conflicts, but definitions and measures vary sharply. We argue that patterns of violence are not reducible in ways often assumed in the literature: lethal violence is not a good proxy for the overall pattern, and differences in patterns are not well captured in the binary “terror” versus “restraint.” To address these concerns, we provide a new conceptualization of political violence, defining an organization’s pattern of violence as the configuration of repertoire, targeting, frequency, and technique in which it regularly engages. This approach adds precision to the documentation and analysis of political violence, clarifies the evaluation of rival theories, and opens up new research questions. We demonstrate its utility through an analysis of violence against civilians in Colombia, drawing on an original database of massacres, judicial proceedings, and other sources, and show that the concept of “pattern” helps bring ideology and politics back into the analysis of organized violence.

Scholars seeking to understand the causes and consequences of political intolerance are now celebrating the fifty-year anniversary of Stouffer's pathbreaking research on intolerance and repression. Yet despite substantial advances in our understanding of intolerance, several major unanswered questions remain. The purpose of this article is to identify and discuss these tolerance enigmas, while proffering some ideas about how future research on intolerance might proceed. The article begins by documenting the significance of understanding intolerance and concludes with speculation about how resolving these enigmas might contribute to a more peaceful and democratic world.James L. Gibson is Sidney W. Souers Professor of Government in the Department of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis and a Fellow at the Centre for Comparative and International Politics, Stellenbosch University, South Africa (jgibson@wustl.edu). This is a revised version of the Alexander George Award Lecture, delivered at the International Society for Political Psychology Annual Conference, Eden Hall, Lund University, Lund, Sweden, July 15–18, 2004. The author is indebted to many for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper, including Dennis Chong, Jamie Druckman, Leonie Huddy, Jim Kuklinski, Marc Peffley, Brian Silver, and John Transue, and especially Stanley Feldman and Donald Green. He also appreciates the research assistance of Marc Hendershot. Support for the research on which this paper is based has been provided by the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy at Washington University in St. Louis, and Steven S. Smith in particular. This paper makes use of data collected from Russia with the support of the National Science Foundation (SBR-9423614 and SBR-9710137). The South African data were collected with support from NSF's Law and Social Sciences Program (SES 9906576). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

President Barack Obama's two signature first-term legislative victories—the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank Act—are the law of the land, but the political battle over their entrenchment continues. The question now is whether these landmark reforms will be consolidated and create a new politics going forward. We develop an argument about the limits of policy feedback to illuminate the obstacles to durable liberal reform in the contemporary American state. We argue that political scientists have paid insufficient attention to the fragility of inherited policy commitments, and that the capacity of reforms to remake politics is contingent, conditional, and contested. Feedbacks are shaped not only by the internal attributes of policies, but also by the interaction between policy-specific characteristics, the strategic goals of officeholders and clientele groups, and the political forces arising from a contentious and uncertain political environment.

Although the subprime crisis regenerated interest in and stimulated debate about how to study the politics of global finance, it has not sparked the development of new approaches to International Political Economy (IPE), which remains firmly rooted in actor-centered models. We develop an alternative network-based approach that shifts the analytical focus to the relations between actors. We first depict the contemporary global financial system as a network, with a particular focus on its hierarchical structure. We then explore key characteristics of this global financial network, including how the hierarchic network structure shapes the dynamics of financial contagion and the source and persistence of power. Throughout, we strive to relate existing research to our network approach in order to highlight exactly where this approach accommodates, where it extends, and where it challenges existing knowledge generated by actor-centered models. We conclude by suggesting that a network approach enables us to construct a systemic IPE that is theoretically and empirically pluralist.

Experimental evidence in cognitive psychology and behavioral economics is transforming the way political science scholars think about how humans make decisions in areas of high complexity, uncertainty, and risk. Nearly all those studies utilize convenience samples of university students, but in the real world political elites actually make most pivotal political decisions such as threatening war or changing the course of economic policy. Highly experienced elites are more likely to exhibit the attributes of rational decision-making; and over the last fifteen years a wealth of studies suggest that such elites are likely to be more skilled in strategic bargaining than samples with less germane experience. However, elites are also more likely to suffer overconfidence, which degrades decision-making skills. We illustrate implications for political science with a case study of crisis bargaining between the US and North Korea. Variations in the experience of US elite decision-makers between 2002 and 2006 plausibly explain the large shift in US crisis signaling better than other rival hypotheses such as “Iraq fatigue.” Beyond crisis bargaining other major political science theories might benefit from attention to the attributes of individual decision-makers.

Political scientists often characterize state and local governments as marginal and highly constrained in policymaking. However, I suggest that in recent decades state governments have moved from the margins to the center of partisan battles over the direction of U.S. public policy. Across 16 issue areas, I investigate interstate policy variation, policy differences across states, and policy polarization, the changing relationship between party control of state government and policy outcomes. Since the 1970s, interstate variation has increased such that an individual’s tax burden, right to obtain an abortion, and other relationships to government are increasingly determined by her state of residence. Policy polarization increases dramatically after 2000 in 14 of the 16 areas. I show that party control increasingly predicts socioeconomic outcomes in the polarized area of health care, but not in the nonpolarized area of criminal justice.

In this article we aim to return labor (particularly the most vulnerable members of the labor market) to the core of the comparative political economy of advanced democracies. We formulate a framework with which to conceptualize cheap labor in advanced democracies. We propose that to understand the politics of cheap labor, the weakest members of the labor market need to be divided into two structural groups: those in standard and those in nonstandard employment. Standard cheap labor includes “regular jobs” while nonstandard cheap labor includes low-cost, flexible, and temporary jobs. We show that the use of cheap labor is significant in all industrialized democracies but that there are important contrasts in how different economies use cheap labor. We argue that there is a trade-off between standard and nonstandard cheap labor. Countries that satisfy their need for cheap labor through standard employment do not develop large nonstandard sectors of their economies. Countries that do not promote cheap labor in the standard sector, on the other hand, end up relying on an army of nonstandard workers to meet their cheap labor needs.

When political scientists present empirical results, they are much more likely to use tables than graphs, despite the fact that graphs greatly increases the clarity of presentation and makes it easier for a reader to understand the data being used and to draw clear and correct inferences. Using a sample of leading journals, we document this tendency and suggest reasons why researchers prefer tables. We argue that the extra work required in producing graphs is rewarded by greatly enhanced presentation and communication of empirical results. We illustrate their benefits by turning several published tables into graphs, including tables that present descriptive data and regression results. We show that regression graphs emphasize point estimates and confidence intervals and that they can successfully present the results of regression models. A move away from tables towards graphs would improve the discipline's communicative output and make empirical findings more accessible to every type of audience.Jonathan P. Kastellec (jpk2004@columbia.edu) and Eduardo L. Leoni (eleoni@hmdc.harvard.edu) are Doctoral Candidates in Political Science at Columbia University. The authors' names appear in alphabetical order. They would like to thank Andrew Gelman, Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro, Gary King, David Epstein, Jeff Gill, Piero Stanig, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions. We also thank Noah Kaplan, David Park, and Travis Ridout for generously making their data publicly available. Eduardo Leoni is grateful for support from the Harvard MIT Data Center, where he was a fellow while working on this project.We have created a web site, http://tables2graphs.com, that contains complete replication code for all the graphs that appear in this article, as well as additional graphs that we did not present due to space limitations.

The SGML version of this article is currently unavailable.

Studies of women in legislatures indicate that achieving a “critical mass” of women may have the effect of changing the legislative priorities of women, increasing the number of legislative initiatives dealing with women and the passage rate of such initiatives, and altering the legislative priorities of men. In the absence of a critical mass, “token” women may be so constrained by their minority status as to be unable to respond proactively to their environment. Popular wisdom suggests that a critical mass may be necessary for women to make a difference as women in a legislature.

Yet, critical mass is both problematic and under-theorized in political science research. The critical mass threshold is debated, the mechanism of effect is unspecified, possible negative consequences are overlooked, and the potential for small numbers of elected women to effect political change on behalf of women is neglected. Beyond sheer numbers, what are the conditions that govern the ability of women legislators to make a difference? We argue that two major contextual factors beyond the sheer numbers are likely to govern the extent to which female legislators serve to represent women. Relying on the secondary literature, this article maps parliamentary and civil society contexts to sheer numbers of women to locate conditions in which female legislators are most likely to have policy successes.Karen Beckwith is the Flora Stone Mather Professor of Political Science at Case Western Research University and Editor, with Lisa Baldez, of Politics & Gender (karen.beckwith@case.edu). Her published work includes Women's Movements Facing the Reconfigured State (Cambridge 2003, with Lee Ann Banaszak and Dieter Rucht), Political Women and American Democracy (forthcoming, with Christina Wolbrecht and Lisa Baldez), and articles on gender and politics in the European Journal of Political Research, Politics & Society, and Signs, among others. Kimberly Cowell-Meyers is Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at American University (kcowell@american.edu). She is author of Religion and Politics: The Party Faithful in Ireland and Germany (Greenwood, 2002) and articles published in Women & Politics, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, and Irish Political Studies among others. She has worked in the British Parliament and the United States Institute of Peace.

This article draws on a comparative case study design to refine formal-quantitative models of civil war, expanding them to highlight political processes that lead to civil war. It uses 21 case studies of civil war onset and avoidance to show the shortcomings in prominent rationalist models of civil war that rely heavily on economic variables. These shortcomings include measurement error, unit heterogeneity, model misspecification, and lack of clarity about causal mechanisms. Additionally, the greed/grievance distinction that underlies the economic models is misguided. This article analyzes civil war not as a discrete phenomenon, but rather as one phase in a cycle of violence. Economic models of civil war, however, rely on theories that cannot distinguish effectively between civil war and other forms of political violence. To explain civil war, we must explain why various and often conflicting micro-level motives combine to produce political violence with the characteristics that we attribute to civil war. If we cannot understand why we get civil war instead of other forms of organized political violence, then we do not understand civil war.Nicholas Sambanis thanks Keith Darden, Anna Grzymala-Busse, Jennifer Hochschild, Stathis Kalyvas, Bruce Russett, Jack Snyder, Sidney Tarrow, Charles Tilly, and seminar participants at New York University and the University of Chicago for very useful comments, as well as Annalisa Zinn and Steve Shewfelt for excellent research assistance. He also gratefully acknowledges financial support from the World Bank's Post-Conflict Fund and from the Russell Sage Foundation, where he was fortunate to spend a year of academic leave working on this and related projects. This research is part of the Political Economy of Civil War, a collaborative project between Yale University's U.N. Studies Program and the World Bank's Conflict and Post-Conflict Reconstruction Unit.

Immigration has been a salient and contentious topic in the United States, with a great deal of congressional debate, advocacy efforts, and media coverage. Among conservative and liberal groups, there is a vigorous debate over the terms used to describe this population, such as “undocumented” or “illegal,” as both sides perceive significant consequences to public opinion that flow out of this choice in equivalency frames. These same groups also compete over the ways in which immigration policies are framed. Here, for the first time, we examine the use of both types of frames (of immigrants themselves, and the policies affecting them) in media coverage. Importantly, we also test for whether these various frames affect preferences on three different policies of legalization. Our results suggest that efforts to focus on the terms used to describe immigrants have limited effect, and that efforts to frame policy offer greater promise in swaying public opinion on immigration.

Rising income inequality has been a defining trend of the past generation, yet we know little about its impact on social policy formation. We evaluate two dominant views about public opinion on rising inequality: that Americans do not care much about inequality of outcomes, and that a rise in inequality will lead to an increase in demand for government redistribution. Using time series data on views about income inequality and social policy preferences in the 1980s and 1990s from the General Social Survey, we find little support for these views. Instead, Americans do tend to object to inequality and increasingly believe government should act to redress it, but not via traditional redistributive programs. We examine several alternative possibilities and provide a broad analytical framework for reinterpreting social policy preferences in the era of rising inequality. Our evidence suggests that Americans may be unsure or uninformed about how to address rising inequality and thus swayed by contemporaneous debates. However, we also find that Americans favor expanding education spending in response to their increasing concerns about inequality. This suggests that equal opportunity may be more germane than income redistribution to our understanding of the politics of inequality.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union's (EU) European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP) both occupy the policy space of crisis management. This overlap has two effects. First, overlap has generated “chessboard politics” shaping member state strategies. Second, institutional overlap has generated a number of feedback effects. The prior existence of NATO shaped the conceptualization and organization of ESDP at its creation, and the existence of two alternative security institutions continues to influence the ways that the institutions evolve—how each institution defines security interests and how member states adjust the mandate of each institution to address changes in the security environment. Because both institutions are intergovernmentally organized and consensus-based, the actions and decisions of both institutions reflect the agreements of members. Chessboard politics and feedback effects are consequently interrelated—states strategize to affect outcomes in one venue or another, and decisions in one institution can affect decisions and behaviors in the other institution.

Violence against women in politics is increasingly recognized around the world as a significant barrier to women’s political participation, following a troubling rise in reports of assault, intimidation, and abuse directed at female politicians. Yet conceptual ambiguities remain as to the exact contours of this phenomenon. In this article, we seek to strengthen its theoretical, empirical, and methodological foundations. We propose that the presence of bias against women in political roles—originating in structural violence, employing cultural violence, and resulting in symbolic violence—distinguishes this phenomenon from other forms of political violence. We identify five types of violence against women in politics—physical, psychological, sexual, economic, and semiotic—and three methodological challenges related to underreporting, comparing men’s and women’s experiences, and intersectionality. Inspired by the literature on hate crimes, we develop an empirical approach for identifying cases of violence against women in politics, offering six criteria to ascertain whether an attack was potentially motivated by gender bias. We apply this framework to analyze three cases: the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, and the murder of Jo Cox. We conclude with the negative implications of violence against women in politics and point to emerging solutions around the globe.

The study of local politics has been relegated to the periphery of political science and many explanations have been offered for the marginalization of the subfield. I offer three related arguments for why scholars should revisit the study of sub-state politics. First, the local level is the source of numerous political outcomes that matter because they represent a large proportion of political events in the United States. Secondly, there are methodological advantages to studying local politics. Finally, analyzing politics at the sub-state level can generate thoroughly different kinds of questions than a purely national-level focus and can offer different answers to questions that apply more generally. Research on local politics can and should contribute to broader debates in political science and ensure that we understand both how and why cities are unique.