Scholars of political elite behavior have documented a strong link between gender and social policy focus among politicians. In the electoral, legislative, and governmental arena, female politicians give higher priority to social policy matters. While this gender gap is well-documented, it is less well understood. Using measures of campaign issue emphasis as a dependent variable, this paper tes...

We examine how changes in perceptions of threat affect individuals’ policy views, as well as the political implications of this relationship. We administered a survey experiment to a representative sample of the U.S. population in which we exogenously manipulated individuals’ perceived likelihood of a future terrorist attack on American soil and assessed subsequent changes in support for terror...

In this paper, I develop a survey-based measure of district ideology for the House of Representatives. I use this index to document and study ways in which patterns of candidate positioning depart from perfect representation. These findings help distinguish between competing theories of candidate positioning. My findings present evidence against theories that attribute divergence to the prefere...

This article analyses British and American justifications for military intervention in the decade following 9/11. Taking Afghanistan in 2001 and Libya in 2011 as the main case studies, the article explores the ways in which political elites attempt to achieve policy dominance through rhetorical coercion, whereby potential opponents are left unable to formulate a socially sustainable rebuttal. S...

Using rare surnames we follow the socio-economic status of initial groups of rich, middling, and poor in England from 1800 until 2012. We measure social status through wealth, education, occupation, membership in political elites, and average age at death. Our method allows unbiased estimates of mobility rates. Mobility rates are much lower than conventionally estimated, including the most rece...

In recent years some of the best theoretical work on the political economy of political institutions and processes has begun surfacing outside the political science mainstream in high quality economics journals. This two-part paper surveys these contributions from a recent five-year period. In Part I, the focus is on elections, voting and information aggregation, followed by treatments of parti...

This study analyses the position of Roma people in the former Yugoslavia using state and civil society discourse on human rights implementation. It reveals that states are failing to give sufficient prioritisation to tackling longstanding discrimination and oppression. Instead of positive the effects predicted by complementarity theory, the findings reveal ‘frame dis-alignment’ between politica...

While media coverage and public discourse on climate change have increased significantly in the U.S. in recent years, it is not clear that this communication has gone beyond political elites to inspire action among the mass public. This paper applies knowledge from 30 years of literature on media effects and public opinion to the issue of climate change, examining the role of key communications...