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The study of voter competence has made significant contributions to our understanding of politics, but at this point there are diminishing returns to the endeavor. Voter competence is unlikely to improve dramatically enough to make much of a difference to our politics. By contrast, the competence of officials can and does vary substantially over short periods of time. To understand variations in government performance, therefore, we would do better to focus on the abilities and performance of officials, not ordinary citizens. We elaborate on this argument, emphasizing the “incompetence multiplier”: the way that the properties of hierarchies can amplify the incompetence of those in powerful positions. We illustrate our argument with an extended discussion of the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Climate change forecasts predict impacts that will increasingly expose coastal residents to existential risks, necessitating aggressive adaptation. While the polarization of climate change attitudes in American politics represents a barrier to climate adaptation efforts, it is not well-understood how political ideology mediates how individuals connect the abstract concept of “climate change” to concrete experiences with environmental risks. Understanding this link in the context of adaptation decision-making is important, as the effects of many, household-level adaptation efforts compound over space and time, affecting community flood risk and vulnerability. This paper asks, how do political ideologies interact with threat perception to affect coastal climate adaptation decisions? We frame this analysis using the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) and Protection Motivation Theory (PMT). Using responses from a survey of residents (n = 164) in North Carolina’s (USA) Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula, we examine how measures of residents’ subjective norms, threat-appraisals, and self-efficacy influence their intent to retreat or topographically adapt. We find that, despite political polarization around climate change, generally, when given concrete examples of risk, respondents’ political beliefs appear unrelated to their plans to protect their property and livelihoods.

The article argues that over the years a series of gradual developments has taken place in the judicial review policies of Israel’s Supreme Court, whereby the Court expanded its ad hoc discretion in determining the constitutional limits that apply to primary legislation. Israeli constitutionalism has become judiciary-centered. The article suggests that judicial discretion that the Israeli Supreme Court tends to exercise in constitutional matters is of two types: substantive judicial discretion, which concerns the interpretation or application of the law; and adjudicative discretion, which includes both the discretion to deny in limine petitions in which the Court does not deem it necessary to grant relief according to considerations such as standing or delay; and the Court’s discretion in the manner of the hearing. The article suggests three illuminations of Israeli judiciary-centered constitutionalism: expenditure of the justices’ awareness of their discretion; the decline of the rules structuring judicial discretion; and a re-rise of the justices’ recognition of legitimacy of adjudicative discretion due to the expansion of substantive judicial discretion.

In this forum we highlight innovative thought, design, and research in the area of interaction design and sustainability, illustrating the diversity of approaches across HCI communities. --- Roy Bendor, Editor

One of the main disputes in regard to how courts should interpret the federal Constitution pertains to the legitimacy of relying on international law in constitutional interpretation. This Article examines the interpretative status of international law, in general, and the controversy over the use of international law in constitutional interpretation, in particular. The Article offers an innovative approach to the controversy based on the significant difference between customary international law and treaty law; namely, that constitutional interpretation with reference to international law should be limited to customary international law, as opposed to treaty law.

Although Herbert Simon and Allen Newell studied problem-solving by experts as well as nonexperts, political scientists generally understand “bounded rationality” to refer primarily to cognitive constraints: how we fall short of completely rational decision-making. This incomplete understanding deprives us of an enormously useful intellectual legacy, built not only by Newell and Simon but also by a wide array of cognitive scientists who have explored how humans have collectively solved very difficult problems such as eliminating smallpox or designing nuclear submarines. This chapter surveys this richer understanding of bounded rationality. Cognitive capacities receive as much attention as cognitive constraints. The chapter reports work on how cultural storehouses of knowledge and certain organizational arrangements amplify our cognitive capacities in both the short and the long run. Finally, it extracts from the literature a set of thematically related propositions that are building blocks for constructing macro-theories of politics out of cognitively realistic micro-premises.

Urban development relies on many factors to remain viable, including infrastructure, services, and government provisions and subsidies. However, in situations involving federal or state level policy, development responds not just to one regulatory signal, but also to multiple signals from overlapping and competing jurisdictions. The 1982 U.S. Coastal Barrier Resources Act (CoBRA) offers an opportunity to study when and how development restrictions and economic disincentives protect natural resources by stopping or slowing urban development in management regimes with distributed authority and responsibility. CoBRA prohibits federal financial assistance for infrastructure, post-storm disaster relief, and flood insurance in designated sections (CoBRA units) of coastal barriers. How has CoBRA’s removal of these subsidies affected rates and types of urban development? Using building footprint and real estate data (n = 1,385,552 parcels), we compare density of built structures, land use types, residential house size, and land values within and outside of CoBRA units in eight Southeast and Gulf Coast states. We show that CoBRA is associated with reduced development rates in designated coastal barriers. We also demonstrate how local responses may counteract withdrawal of federal subsidies. As attention increases towards improving urban resilience in high hazard areas, this work contributes to understanding how limitations on infrastructure and insurance subsidies can affect outcomes where overlapping jurisdictions have competing goals.

Historians and some scholars of international relations have long argued that historical contingencies play a critical role in the evolution of the international system, but have not explained whether they do so to a greater extent than in other domains or why such differences may exist. The authors address these lacunae by identifying stable differences between war and other policy domains that render the evolution of the international system more subject to chance events than those other domains. The selection environment of international politics has produced tightly integrated organizations (militaries) as the domain’s key players to a much greater degree than other policy domains. Because there are few players, no law of large numbers holds, and because militaries are tightly integrated, microshocks can reverberate up to macro-organizational levels. The anarchic character of the international system amplifies the impact of these shocks. The authors explore these phenomena in a range of historical examples.

Planners often divisively advocate densification in developed areas. This article investigates the possibility that framing densifying development in positive ways may reduce conflict around greater density in developed urban areas of the United States. We use an online survey that asks verified voters in local elections ( n = 772) to describe their feelings toward a hypothetical densifying infill development in their neighborhoods before and after reading various framing statements. In particular, we consider the impact of these statements when they originate among planners versus when they originate among lay community experts. We use regression analyses to explore how reactions to the development relate to demographic characteristics and other aspects of respondents’ identities, and find that, while positive framing generally improves perceptions of the development regardless of its source, these effects are limited among respondents expressing concern about specific development impacts, among particular income groups, and in some neighborhood types.

Proportionality is a set of rules determining the conditions for a limitation of constitutionally protected rights. It is the mainstay of the protection of constitutional human rights in many Western democracies and worldwide. Aharon Barak’s Proportionality is probably the most important and comprehensive book written on the subject to date. The essay presents several key arguments concerning the weaknesses of proportionality in the model proposed and developed by Barak, and shows how Barak’s rejection of various arguments against proportionality is not fully convincing. The essay suggests that the benefits of Barak’s structuring of proportionality are more modest than Barak maintains; points out the weaknesses of Barak’s approach in regard to the interpretation of constitutional rights, which entails a trivialization of the rights and has problematic consequences for the interpretation and application of proportionality as well as undesirable symbolic connotations; and asserts that Barak’s approach increases the problem of incommensurability, which is inherent in the doctrine of proportionality. The essay claims that despite the importance of the book it does not provide a satisfactory answer to many difficult and complex problems regarding proportionality.

This article applies comparative law tools to portray eight significant aspects of the constitutional right to human dignity in Germany and Israel. The elements considered are: the constitutional status of human dignity; the nature of the right; its effect on other constitutional rights; its scope and definition; waiver of human dignity; human dignity after death; negative and positive aspects of the right; and the right to asylum. The textual foundations of the respective constitutional guarantees are as different as human dignity's core meaning. In Germany, such guarantees are held to be absolute, immune to restriction, and therefore quite narrow in scope. In Israel, the scope of the right is much broader, but it is subject to limitations when placed against the public interest. Still, based on the findings of our comprehensive comparison, similar dynamics can be identified in Germany and Israel The constitutional coverage of both absolute and relative principles is broad, as are the constitutional lacunas, which are those dimensions of constitutional law neglected by the written constitution.

We present a dynamic model of turnout in which voters’ behavior in one election depends only on whether they voted in the last election and whether their party won. This assumption may be justified by assuming citizens satisfice or by assuming they adjust subjective beliefs about being pivotal in ways that depend on whether they voted and on the outcome of the election. Regardless of the individual-level mechanism, the assumption that prior voter turnout and prior electoral outcome affect current turnout has empirical support, and we show that it implies turnout dynamics that are in accord with observed dynamics in several countries. Thus, this assumption or something very much like it is a necessary feature of any model of turnout. The ensuing model meets a basic requirement of any turnout model, substantial steady-state turnout, and correctly predicts some counterintuitive dynamical features of aggregate turnout—including declining turnout despite close elections and nonmonotonic changes—following signi...

The study of voter competence has made significant contributions to our understanding of politics, but at this point there are diminishing returns to the endeavor. There is little reason, in theory or in practice, to expect voter competence to improve dramatically enough to make much of a difference, but there is reason to think that officials’ competence can vary enough to make large differences. To understand variations in government performance, therefore, we would do better to focus on the abilities and performance of officials, not ordinary citizens.

This paper identifies two approaches to designing user experience in decision-support tools, each drawing from a particular model of political culture and operationalizing a different set of assumptions about typical users and potential use effects. While the analytic approach emphasizes the benefits of involving competent citizens in a 'rational' process of consensual decision making, the deictic approach highlights the benefits of finding resonance between everyday, lived experience and the premise and principles of policymaking. The paper demonstrates the two approaches by analyzing the visualization strategy chosen by the designers of MetroQuest, a Canadian sustainability decision-support tool commissioned by the City of Vancouver. The paper concludes by suggesting that the normative questions associated with the design of sustainability decision-support tools should be reconsidered in light of the relations between user experience and political culture.

This Note examines whether state or federal principles of administrative law should govern suits challenging state agency action pursuant to cooperative federalism statutes. Despite the prevalence of cooperative federalism statutes, courts and scholars alike have given scant attention to this question. That neglect has translated into poorly reasoned and inconsistent judicial decisions. We show that this question is one of federal common law that is properly governed by the framework of Kimbell Foods, which holds that federal common law should take state law as its substantive source unless doing so would create a significant conflict with federal policy.

The obvious security difficulties in Israel also carry problematic political, economic and social consequences. The unique Israeli condition — as a young democratic state, whose mere existence is still not self-evident to all — also has legal implications. In Israel, the law and the courts of law are often involved in resolving political issues, including issues pertaining to foreign and security policy. This involvement is more intensive in Israel than in many other democracies.1 That is why one might be interested in comprehending some legal aspects, especially those of constitutional law, that are present in the background of Israeli reality.

Many elections specialists take seriously V.O.Key’s hypothesis (1966) that much voting is retrospective: citizens reward good performance by becoming more likely to vote for the incumbent and punish bad performance by becoming less likely. Earlier (Bendor, Siegel, and Kumar 2005) we formalized Key’s verbal theory. Our model shows that people endogenously develop partisan voting tendencies, even if they lack explicit ideologies. However, that paper depicts parties as passive payo-generating mecha

Risk is not a simple phenomenon; contrary to the arguments of frustrated scientists who claim evidentiary support for the development and release of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), opponents of these organisms claim that the risks associated with their release are unacceptable. Obviously, the evaluation of risk is often contentious and ambiguous, and yet the phenomenon of how people actually evaluate risk is not widely known among scientists. Hence, we present a review of the literature on risk that underscores its complexity. Scholars argue the merits of different types of risk assessment, but most agree that the process is far more complex than simple cost/benefit analyses. Indeed, the literature presents a plethora of theories, ranging from economic and actuarial assessment to psychological and social assessments. We agree with the social constructionist view, and argue that opponents of GMOs have amplified the socially derived feelings of risk that the various stakeholders and publics harbour towards GMOs. We likewise conclude that GMO opponents are amplifying the factors of control and unknown risk. Keywords: social; political; synthesis

The power of women to negotiate, trade and barter their consent to sex could be perceived as an empowering capacity. The heart of the problem has always been the gender based double standard toward practicing sex prevailing in society. It is precisely the recognition and legitimacy of sex commensurability that might serve as a key toward neutralizing the women humiliation dimension of heterosexual intercourse.

What's in a name? Sometimes a good deal. Tom Hammond organized the panels on "Public Administration" for the 1988 meetings of APSA. As he later told me, he decided that this section name had a narrower connotation than he wanted. He told prospective panelists that he wanted the section to encompass phenomena outside public agencies that affected the agencies, phenomena inside the agencies themselves, and the interaction between outside and inside phenomena. Not much omitted, one would think. But the title he chose for the section-"Bureaucracy"-elicited an intense reaction from several professors of public administration. One said in rather vigorous terms that Tom was trying to read public administration out of the APSA. This reaction puzzled and frustrated him; he had tried to be inclusive.