Mark P. Jones

Most empirical evidence indicates voters penalize deficits and spending growth. Contrary to this dominant finding, a few recent studies conclude that voters reward public spending. We reconcile these conflicting findings, positing that the structure of fiscal federalism in countries like Argentina causes voters to reward fiscal expansion because they perceive that this extra spending at the margin is not financed by them, but rather by the nation at large. We provide evidence and microfoundations for the electoral connection implicit in this argument: voters reward public spending when they can pass the cost on to someone else (e.g., as in Argentina), and punish it otherwise (e.g., as in the United States).

El presente artículo utiliza datos a nivel de distrito de las elecciones de legisladores nacionales en 19 países de América Latina para evaluar el efecto de las cuotas de género, en conjunto con otras reglas electorales, sobre la elección de mujeres legisladoras. El trabajo actualiza y amplía un estudio previo utilizando datos correspondientes al último turno de renovación legislativa en los mismos 19 países. La implementación de cuotas de género adecuadamente diseñadas tiene un fuerte impacto positivo en la elección de mujeres: cuando cuotas bien diseñadas están en vigencia, el uso de listas cerradas da lugar a un mayor porcentaje de legisladoras electas (respecto a las listas abiertas), debido principalmente a la superioridad de los sistemas de listas cerradas cuando un partido logra dos asientos en un distrito.

We use bill cosponsorship and roll‐call vote data to compare legislators' revealed preferences in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Argentine Chamber of Deputies. We estimate ideal points from bill cosponsorship data using principal‐component analysis on an agreement matrix that included information on all bills introduced in the U.S. House (1973–2000) and Argentine Chamber (1983–2002). The ideal‐point estimates of legislators' revealed preferences based on cosponsorship data strongly correlate with similar estimates derived from roll‐call vote data. Also, cosponsorship activity in the U.S. House has lower dimensionality than cosponsorship has in the Argentine Chamber. We explain this lower discrimination as a function of individual‐ and district‐level factors in both countries.

This article examines how political institutional structures affect political instability. It classifies polities as autocracies or democracies based on three institutional dimensions: election of the executive, constraints on executive decision‐making authority, and extent of political participation. It hypothesizes that strongly autocratic and democratic regimes will exhibit the greatest stability resulting from self‐enforcing equilibria, whereby the maintenance of a polity's institutional structure is in the interest of political elites, whether through autocratic or democratic control. Institutionally inconsistent regimes (those exhibiting a mix of institutional characteristics of both democracy and autocracy) lack these self‐enforcing characteristics and are expected to be shorter‐lived. Using a log‐logistic duration model, polity survival time ratios are estimated. Institutionally consistent polities are significantly more stable than institutionally inconsistent polities. The least stable political systems are dictatorships with high levels of political participation. The most unstable configuration for polities with an elected executive is one where the executive is highly constrained, but the electorate is very small.

Cartel Theory (and partisan theory more generally) expertly explains the functioning of the U.S. Congress. However, as a theory originally developed to study a single legislature where the instituti...