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How does space matter in our analyses? How can we evaluate diffusion of phenomena or interdependence among units? How biased can our analysis be if we do not consider spatial relationships? All the above questions are critical theoretical and empirical issues for political scientists belonging to several subfields from Electoral Studies to Comparative Politics, and also for International Relations. In this special issue on methods, our paper introduces political scientists to conceptualizing interdependence between units and how to empirically model these interdependencies using spatial regression. First, the paper presents the building blocks of any feature of spatial data (points, polygons, and raster) and the task of georeferencing. Second, the paper discusses what a spatial matrix (W) is, its varieties and the assumptions we make when choosing one. Third, the paper introduces how to investigate spatial clustering through visualizations (e.g. maps) as well as statistical tests (e.g. Moran's index). Fourth and finally, the paper explains how to model spatial relationships that are of substantive interest to some of our research questions. We conclude by inviting researchers to carefully consider space in their analysis and to reflect on the need, or the lack thereof, to use spatial models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on a study which compares repatriation policies of Germany, Russia, and Kazakhstan. The choice of cases is based on a “most similar case design.” The Russian case results in unsuccessful and unsustainable repatriation, the German case exhibits a change from sustainable repatriation to a slow termination of the program, while the case of Kazakhstan is one of sustainable and relatively successful repatriation. The main argument of the paper is that in order for a repatriation program to be sustainable, the program must contain both a practical component and an ideological component. If a repatriation program lacks ideological backing which permeates other aspects of political life in a state, then the repatriation program grinds to a halt. If a repatriation program has ideological backing, but is rendered impractical and does not meet the economic, demographic and labor market needs of a state, then the further development of the program stops. The findings of this study merit further reflection on issues of changing national identities, on transnational migration pathways, and on the “post-Soviet condition” which has set the stage for all of the aforementioned processes and transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research on autocratic regimes in comparative politics and international relations often uses categorical typologies of autocratic regimes to distinguish among different forms of autocracy. This paper introduces historical data on dozens of features of dictatorships to estimate latent dimensions of autocratic rule. We identify three time-varying dimensions of autocracy that correspond to ideal types proposed in the literature: party dominance, military rule, and personalism. We show that dimensions of autocratic rule are orthogonal to commonly-used measures of democracy–autocracy, and compare these dimensions to existing typologies of autocracies, showing that time-varying information on personalism is unique. We discuss a measurement model of personalism and illustrate the time-varying features of this measure in applied research on conflict initiation and regime collapse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When do cross-national comparisons enable citizens to hold governments accountable? According to recent work in comparative politics, benchmarking across borders is a powerful mechanism for making elections work. However, little attention has been paid to the choice of benchmarks and how they shape democratic accountability. We extend existing theories to account for endogenous benchmarking. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a test case, we embedded experiments capturing self-selection and exogenous exposure to benchmark information from representative surveys in France, Germany, and the UK. The experiments reveal that when individuals have the choice, they are likely to seek out congruent information in line with their prior view of the government. Moreover, going beyond existing experiments on motivated reasoning and biased information choice, endogenous benchmarking occurs in all three countries despite the absence of partisan labels. Altogether, our results suggest that endogenous benchmarking weakens the democratic benefits of comparisons across borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the journal "Government and Opposition," highlighting its status as a leading global comparative politics journal that publishes papers from around the world on diverse themes within comparative politics. Topics includes various themes within comparative politics, fostering clarity in writing, adherence to specified article length restrictions, advocating for impartial peer review, and emphasizing the importance of data sharing.

This article is a summary of a panel discussion entitled 'Towards an inclusive and representative academic landscape', held at the Building Bridges Meeting of Academia Europaea and the Young Academy of Europe on 26 October 2022. The panellists were Professor Yvonne Galligan, director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion and Professor of Comparative Politics at the Technological University Dublin, Dr Katalin Solymosi, plant biologist, assistant professor at Eötvös Loránd University and vice-chair of the Young Academy of Europe, and Professor Stephen Curry, Assistant Provost for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion and Professor of Structural Biology at Imperial College London. Dr Linn Leppert, Associate Professor of Computational Chemical Physics and board member of the Young Academy of Europe chaired the discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article undertakes a critical revisitation of mass–elite congruence on EU matters, taking stock of 30 years of research and addressing durable ambiguities flagged by recent scholarship. Its specific contribution leverages EUEngage elite and mass survey data gathered in 2016 in 10 European countries. Examining congruence at both the country and the party level, we carry out an uncommon multidimensional analysis that encompasses general European integration and certain key sub-dimensions. At both levels, we perform a distinctive systematization of multiple approaches to the assessment of EU issue congruence, probing the substantive consistency of ensuing results. The findings qualify and soften the conventional wisdom of a chasm between pro-European elites and lukewarm citizens. While most countries exhibit pro-EU elite bias in terms of averages and proportions alike, mass–elite alignment is the rule when the general dimension and its sub-dimensions are understood as binary. Party-level analyses display different outcomes, depending on whether party positions are derived from elites' self-placement or their voters' perceptions, yet discrepancies are generally lower than in past assessments. Altogether, 'constraining dissensus' chiefly emerges along sub-dimensions concerning decision-making authority, as opposed to sub-dimensions evoking solidarity and burden-sharing. The layered panorama of congruence and incongruence implies a dependence of mass–elite interplays on context and sub-dimensions, drawing attention to the mediating role of critical junctures and elite entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article assesses Moldova's political evolution during its first 25 years of independence. It argues that while the country has gone through 3 very distinct periods of governance during that time, the underlying conditions that have hobbled efforts to establish a stable democratic regime remained consistent. These included the country's precarious location in the international system, weak institutions and the rule of law, and a deep cleavage regarding national identity. Consequently, the country settled into a pattern of systemic corruption and, at best, a deeply flawed form of democracy. By the end of this period, Moldovans faced the task of mounting a renewed effort to regain control over their political institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent global developments, including the feminization of parliaments and the rise of gender quotas, have transformed the ways in which parties and legislatures operate. This introduction to the special issue ‘Candidate Selection: Parties and Legislatures in a New Era’ puts these recent developments in context, making the case for revisiting the ‘secret garden’ of candidate selection in light of this ‘new era’ in politics. It sets out a critical dialogue between party politics and gender politics scholarship and points to the need for more research on how political parties facilitate or block women’s access to political office. Building on the burgeoning research on gender and political recruitment, it outlines how a gendered and institutional approach allows us to retheorize candidate selection processes and opens up new avenues for empirically examining the pathways prior to election. The article then introduces the papers in this special issue and concludes by evaluating the main implications of gendering analyses of candidate selection and party politics more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

ABSTRACT Is it domestic politics or the international system that more decisively influences foreign policy? This article focuses on Latin America's three largest powers to identify patterns and compare outcomes in their relations with the regional hegemon, the United States. Through a statistical analysis of voting behavior in the UN General Assembly, we examine systemic variables (both realist and liberal) and domestic variables (institutional, ideological, and bureaucratic) to determine their relative weights between 1946 and 2008. The study includes 4,900 votes, the tabulation of 1,500 ministers according to their ideological persuasion, all annual trade entries, and an assessment of the political strength of presidents, cabinets, and parties per year. The findings show that while Argentina's voting behavior has been determined mostly by domestic factors and Mexico's by realist systemic ones, Brazil's has a more complex blend of determinants, but also with a prevalence of realist systemic variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of public policy agendas in comparative politics has been somewhat limited in terms of geography, time frame and political system, with studies on full-blown autocracies and hybrid regimes few and far between. This article addresses this gap by comparing policy dynamics in three Hungarian regimes over 73 years. Besides our theoretical contribution related to policy-making in Socialist autocracy and illiberal democracy, we also test hypotheses related to non-democratic regimes. We find that – similarly to developed democracies – policy agendas in autocracies are mostly stable with occasional but large-scale "punctuations". Our data also confirms that these punctuations are more pronounced in non-democratic polities. However, based on our results, illiberal political systems, such as the hybrid regime of Viktor Orbán, are difficult to pin down on such a clear-cut continuum between democracy and autocracy as the level of punctuation differs by policy agendas from parliamentary debates to budgets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A robust economy is assumed to bolster leaders' standing. This ignores how benefits of growth are distributed. Extending the partisan models of economic voting, we theorize executives are more likely rewarded when gains from growth go to their constituents. Analyses of presidential approval in 18 Latin American countries support our pro-constituency model of accountability. When economic inequality is high, growth concentrates among the rich, and approval of right-of-center presidents is higher. Leftist presidents benefit from growth when gains are more equally distributed. Further analyses show growth and inequality inform perceptions of personal finances differently based on wealth, providing a micro-mechanism behind the aggregate findings. Study results imply that the economy is not purely a valence issue, but also a position issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Authoritarian leaders around the world often fight against corruption in an effort to win public support. Conventional wisdom holds that this strategy works because leaders can signal their benevolent intentions by removing corrupt officials. We argue that fighting against corruption can undermine regime support. By revealing scandals of corrupt officials, corruption investigations can alter citizens' beliefs about public officials and lead to disenchantment about political institutions. We test this argument by examining how China's current anti-corruption campaign has changed citizens' public support for the government and the Communist Party. We analyze the results of two original surveys conducted before and during the campaign, and employ a difference-in-differences strategy to show that corruption investigations, at the margin, suppress respondents' support for the central government and party. We also examine our respondents' prior and posterior beliefs, and the results support our updating mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To learn about the effects of corporate campaign contributions, we study the potential influence of the insurance industry in US state politics. The insurance industry is one of the biggest players in state politics, and we have collected new data on objective measures of the industry's performance in each state over time. We exploit within-state changes in campaign finance regulations which can significantly restrict the ability of corporate contributors to give money and potentially influence elected officials. Across a range of outcomes and campaign finance reforms, we find little evidence that the ability to make corporate campaign contributions benefits the insurance industry in a state. Some results suggest that the ability to make campaign contributions may benefit the insurance industry in states with elected insurance commissioners, but overall, campaign contributions appear to have a little distortionary effect even in a setting where we would most expect to find it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We argue that a country's international security context influences individual bias against female leaders and propose three mechanisms: by increasing individual demand for defense, by shaping individual ideological orientations, and by increasing society's level of militarization. Using survey data of more than 200,000 individuals in 84 countries, we show the more hostile the country's security environment, the more individuals are likely to agree that men make better political leaders than do women. We also find support for some of our proposed mechanisms and that the effect of security environments is greater for men than women. Our study presents the first cross-national evidence that the country's international security environment correlates with bias against women leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professor Ellermann illustrates and evaluates this theoretical template with a comparative analysis of immigration admissions policies extending across four countries, Germany, Canada, Switzerland, and the United States, and across time, from the 1950s to the 2010s. Nonetheless, this book will leave an important mark on immigration policy scholarship both by its ambitious effort to find an encompassing theory of immigration policy and the careful attention to the complexity of immigration policy-making. Professor Ellermann follows the policy trajectory through the 1962 Regulations, the 1967 Points System, and the 1976 Immigration Act where the government managed a national dialog through the legislative branch to legitimize the policy change. [Extracted from the article]

Over the last two decades, the formation of grand coalitions has grown in the European Union (EU), even in countries with no previous political experience with them. Alongside a significant rise in both new and radical parties, grand coalitions signal the increasing fragmentation of contemporary European politics. We, therefore, investigate the electoral performance of both mainstream and new parties entering and leaving grand coalitions. We find that mainstream parties do not appear to enter grand coalitions after negative election results. They are, however, punished in the following elections, albeit not as heavily as previous findings have shown. This post-grand coalition electoral penalty is true for both major and minor grand coalition members. These findings contribute to the literature on party competition and provide insights into the choices mainstream parties' have been making in response to recent and rapid changes in the electoral landscape of the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-national statistical research based on "all country" data sets involves no deliberate selection and hence ignores the potential for endogenous selection bias. We show that these designs are prone to selection bias if existing units are subject to differential survival rates induced, in part, by treatment. Using rudimentary graph theory, we present survivorship bias as a form of collider bias, which is related to but distinct from selection on the dependent variable. Because collider bias is always relative to a specific causal model, we present a causal model of post-colonial sovereignty on the Arabian Peninsula, show that it implies survivorship bias in the form of false positives with respect to the political resource curse, and provide historical evidence confirming that the model correctly depicts the creation of sovereign countries on the Arabian Peninsula but not elsewhere. When we correct for endogenous selection bias, the effect of oil on autocratic survival is shown to be negligible. The study motivates the need to think more broadly about the nature of the data-generating process when making causal inferences with observational data and to construct statistical models that are sensitive to treatment heterogeneity and rooted in context-specific knowledge and qualitative inferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a first attempt to systematically examine policy design and its influence on policy effectiveness in a comparative perspective. We begin by providing a novel concept and measure of policy design. Our Average Instrument Diversity (AID) index captures whether governments tend to reuse the same policy instruments and instrument combinations or produce policy solutions that are carefully tailored to the policy problem at hand. Second, we demonstrate that our AID index is a valid and reliable measure of policy design quality with a strong explanatory power for the outcome variables tested. Analyzing the composition of environmental policy portfolios in 21 OECD countries, we show that higher levels of AID are positively associated with a country's policy effectiveness in environmental matters. Based on this finding, we analyze, in a third step, the factors that lead countries to adopt more or less diverse policy portfolios. We find that the policy design quality is significantly improved when policy makers are not bound by high institutional constraints and, more importantly, are backed by well-equipped bureaucracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In comparative studies, causal evaluations attempt to improve our understanding of the effectiveness of structural reforms by counterfactually inspecting post-treatment effects. Yet, even if comparative scholars find similar treatment and comparison units, the interpretation of the post-treatment trajectory is difficult as short-term estimates can be subject to strategic timing of reform implementation, while long-term effects are likely affected by further interventions. To illustrate these difficulties we apply the generalized synthetic control method to evaluate the introduction of a British national minimum wage. We find a short-term decreasing effect on youth unemployment that turns into an increasing effect over time. This suggests the presence of an upward biased selection effect from strategic timing. We also inspect two post-treatment interventions and find that they differ in their general and country-specific implications for the long-term trajectory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What explains variation in tax progressivity before World War I? I argue that trade politics shaped the emergence of progressive taxation. If labor could provide a useful ally, trade policy coalitions meant compromise on redistributive demands: progressive taxes, especially where inequality was lower. In time-series cross-sectional analysis, I find that trade interest proximity between labor and elites was associated with more progressive taxation in ten European countries between 1870 and 1913 under conditions of low inequality. The coalition and compromise mechanism is evident in sub-national evidence from Britain. Where constituency interests favored free trade, Liberal–Labour electoral alliance was more likely in 1906, and the local MP was more likely to support the 1909 "People's Budget" for progressive taxation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do left parties lose vote shares in times of economic crisis and hardship? Why do right-wing governments implement seemingly left-wing policies, such as labor market activation? Why is representation becoming more and more unequal? And why do workers vote for right-wing populist parties? Several political science theories propose meaningful and important answers to these key questions for comparative politics, focusing on identity politics, programmatic convergence of parties or exogenous constraints. However, there is an additional and distinct approach to all of the questions above, which emphasizes socio-structural transformations in the labor market: most of the processes above can be understood with reference to increasing labor market inequality and its political implications. The relevance and explanatory power of labor market inequality for mass politics have not been fully acknowledged in comparative political science and this is the reason for this symposium. Labor market inequality affects political preferences and behavior, electoral politics, representation, and government strategies. The main purpose of our symposium is to make broader comparative politics research aware of the crucial structural changes that labor markets have undergone in the advanced capitalist democracies of the OECD, and of the tremendous implications these changes have had for politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long a staple in the toolkit of American politics, comparison among subnational territorial units has gained increasing currency in comparative politics. A growing portion of subnational research, especially in the monographic literature, employs comparisons of subnational territorial units within different countries. This approach to comparison, which I term transnational comparison, has the potential to build on and extend the advantages of subnational comparison. Despite the numerous added challenges it poses, transnational comparison offers a variety of ways to incorporate and leverage variations between countries as well as within them. Drawing on exemplary studies from the literature on subnational regimes and beyond, I outline a typology of successful transnational comparative strategies. The choice among these strategies depends on their distinctive properties, on the substantive questions asked, and on the stage of a research program. All have contributed to advancing the study of politics beyond nation-centered comparison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last twenty years, comparative political theory has emerged as a distinctive contribution to contemporary theoretical and methodological debate in making the case for greater engagement between “Western” and “non-Western” traditions. While comparative political theory includes multiple methodological approaches and numerous objectives, this article argues for an interpretive method that combines conceptual and contextual analysis to demonstrate both the malleability of concepts and the varying implications that these concepts can have for political action in particular settings. The contextualized comparison need not necessarily be between Western and non-Western cases. This article argues for a “contextualizing concepts” approach and exemplifies this through an analysis of three cases where the concept of reconciliation has been articulated as a means of transforming divided societies since the 1990s: South Africa, Northern Ireland, and Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue Canadienne de Science Politique is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue Canadienne de Science Politique is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)