Gary W. Cox

The share of women in politics is higher, on average, under closed-list proportional representation (PR) electoral systems compared to majoritarian systems. Yet, even in PR systems, progress toward gender parity has been slow and uneven. We argue that women’s representation and career progression under PR might be impeded when single-occupant positions, such as local mayor and list leader, serve as important stepping stones in political career paths. Using a century of detailed candidate-level data from Norway, we investigate (1) whether gaps in women’s representation emerge at these “majoritarian stepping stones” and (2) how access to these positions affects women’s progression into higher offices. Our empirical analysis reveals that gender gaps indeed emerge at majoritarian stepping stones. However, we also document how Norwegian parties have employed workarounds—promoting women occupants of these positions at higher rates than men—to mitigate the adverse effects of this hidden majoritarianism on women’s representation in higher offices.

A vast and growing quantitative literature considers how social networks shape political mobilization but the degree to which turnout decisions are strategic remains ambiguous. Unlike previous studies, we establish personal links between voters and candidates and exploit discontinuous incentives to mobilize across district boundaries to estimate causal effects. Considering three types of networks – families, co-workers, and immigrant communities – we show that a group member's candidacy acts as a mobilizational impulse propagating through the group's network. In family networks, some of this impulse is non-strategic, surviving past district boundaries. However, the bulk of family mobilization is bound by the candidate's district boundary, as is the entirety of the mobilizational effects in the other networks.

We have two goals in this paper. First, we provide a unified account of several prominent institutional theories of the Congress, but especially present a model that is consistent with both the Cox-McCubbins theory of party cartels (2005; 2007) and the Aldrich-Rohde theory of conditional party government (1997; 2000; Aldrich, 2011; Rohde, 1991). We hope to demonstrate that, while these two theories might have developed independently, together they offer a unified account. Second, we develop a model of elections that includes party provision of campaign resources to provide electoral incentives for Members of Congress to vote on the floor for special rules that reflect positions away from their district median and towards the median of their party in the chamber. In this way we offer a theory that includes specific internal and external accounts to explain a wider array of MC behavior on the floor and in elections.

Two important puzzles characterize the development of pre-modern Eurasian polities. First, most rulers convened councils of nobles, but only European monarchs expanded them to create parliaments. Second, war was common throughout Eurasia, but only in Europe did it correlate with the formation of parliaments. We advance a new argument about the emergence of parliaments that accounts for both stylized facts while integrating the literature highlighting the rulers' need to finance wars with that emphasizing the importance of the medieval communal revolution. Using novel data, we document a ‘no communes, no parliaments’ rule: monarchs established parliaments only after they had fostered the creation of self-governing towns (aka communes). We also show that war was a significant predictor of parliamentary births across medieval Europe – but only during a window of opportunity that opened after a polity had experienced the communal revolution.

Following the coalition literature highlighting intraparty politics (e.g., Giannetti and Benoit 2009; Laver 1999; Strøm 2003), I address the well-known “portfolio allocation paradox” (Warwick and Druckman 2006) by introducing a new model of government formation based on two main assumptions. First, no actor has a structural advantage in the negotiations leading to government formation. Second, all actors who can deprive the coalition of a majority (or other critical threshold size) must be included in the negotiations—not just parties. Whereas standard bargaining models are inconsistent with Gamson’s Law, the model proposed here implies that equilibrium portfolio allocations should be mostly Gamsonian but with a small-party bias, as the empirical literature has long found. Empirically, I show that my model outperforms the literature’s standard specification (due to Browne and Franklin 1973). Moreover, one of the model’s new predictions—that candidate-centered electoral rules should promote more Gamsonian portfolio allocations—is supported.

This paper investigates party use of seniority systems to allocate nominations for elected and appointed offices. Such systems, which can regulate party members’ access to offices at multiple levels of their careers, are defined by two main rules or norms: an incumbent re-nomination norm and a seniority progression norm. Using comprehensive electoral and candidate data from Norwegian local and national elections from 1945 to 2019, we find systematic patterns consistent with these two norms. Our work illuminates an institutional aspect of candidate selection that the current literature has ignored while noting some of the important consequences of seniority-based nominations for party cohesion and stability.

Prominent scholars argue that Europe’s political fragmentation improved the security of property rights, thereby promoting growth. We explore a complementary mechanism: urban fragmentation—the proliferation of self-governing cities—helped emancipate labor, and freer labor promoted both faster and more correlated town growth. To test these hypotheses, we first show that polities with more self-governing cities offered more protection to runaway serfs against lordly recapture. We then show that more fragmented areas exhibited both faster and more correlated urban growth. While both the property rights and labor freedom mechanisms predict faster growth, only the latter predicts more highly correlated growth.

Did the English patent system helps to spark the Industrial Revolution? Most scholars addressing this question have focused on whether patents improved the economic incentive to invent. In contrast, I focus on whether patents improved access to useful knowledge—via the requirement (instituted in 1734) that patentees provide technical specifications for their inventions. I documented a structural break in per capita patenting in 1734—but only in London, where specifications were stored. I also documented a structural shift in London-based inventors’ responsiveness to non-metropolitan patents in 1734, when specifications for them became regularly available.