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How to separate the office from the officeholder is one of the most difficult questions in the empirical study of institutions and leadership. We argue that provided there is an indicator for the overall individual influence among members of the political elite and there is sufficient variability among individuals taking the same office, being promoted and demoted into different offices over time, we can separate latent individual and institutional components of influence at an aggregate, regime level. Our latent variable model thus provides a new tool to measure the degree of regime deinstitutionalization. Using expert surveys that assess the ranking of the top political actors in Russia from 1994 to 2011 and restricting personal effects to those that are constant over time, we find that on average office dominates individual by the order of two. We discuss regime deinstitutionalization in comparative perspective, demonstrate the generalizability by analyzing Ukraine, and account for patronage networks.

AbstractThe simplification of the political landscape in terms of 'left' and 'right' is common across most democracies, if not most of the world. This would suggest that the terminology has a shared core meaning in different political contexts. While no such stable element has been established in the political science literature, various potential dividing lines that may form the core meaning have been proposed. This paper is the most extensive comparative study to our knowledge that evaluates these proposals by studying responses to open‐ended survey questions on what voters associate with the terms 'left' and 'right'. Data from eight different democratic political contexts are analysed using quantitative text analysis methods. The results demonstrate varied support for the different explanations. Evidence is found in all contexts for the hypothesis that acceptance of inequality divides left‐ from right‐wing politics. That the left‐right dimension is a divide between those for and against government intervention in the economy, or between those for change and against change, is mostly congruent with our findings. We find less evidence that either secular/religious divisions, or different conceptions of equality, consistently differentiate left from right. Our findings point towards the existence of a context‐independent underlying dimension of left‐right competition.

Abstract
The study of international relations by definition deals with interdependencies among countries. One form of interdependence between countries is the diffusion of country-level features, such as policies, political regimes, or conflict. In these studies, the outcome variable tends to be categorical, and the primary concern is the clustering of the outcome variable among connected countries. Statistically, such clustering is studied with spatial econometric models. This article instead proposes the use of a statistical network approach to model diffusion with a binary outcome variable. Using a statistical network instead of spatial econometric models allows for modeling autocorrelation in policy outcomes rather than the corresponding latent variable, and it simplifies the inclusion of temporal dynamics, higher level interdependencies, and interactions between network ties and country-level features. In our simulations, the performance of the Stochastic Actor-Oriented Model (SAOM) estimator is evaluated. Our simulation results show that spatial parameters and coefficients on additional covariates in a static binary spatial autoregressive model are accurately recovered when using SAOM. To demonstrate this model, the paper applies SAOM to original data on the international diffusion of same-sex marriage and gives practical instructions for using such models.

Economic voting is one of the most studied aspects of electoral behaviour. The dominant view is that sociotropic economic considerations are more important to voters in national elections. However, other research suggests that utilitarian motivations are key to understanding support for the EU. An EU integration referendum offers the opportunity to explore whether and when sociotropic or utilitarian motivations are more important in determining vote choice. The unusual combination of two successive referendums in Ireland on the Lisbon Treaty, either side of the global financial crisis, provides the ideal opportunity to test these assumptions. Using data from two post-referendum surveys, we demonstrate that the economy mattered in both referendums but that different economic motivations drove vote choice in each, with sociotropic motivations more critical as a result of the global financial crisis. Our study has implications for economic voting and referendums and demonstrates that context is crucial in determining a voter's economic motivations in a plebiscite.

AbstractBuilding on previous work on competition networks and governmental performance among British local governments, this article investigates the diffusion of government quality across subnational regions of Europe through strategic interaction with neighbouring regions or competitor regions more generally. The article demonstrates the presence of spatial interdependence using standard spatial regression models and controlling for common explanations of quality of government. In particular for regions with high levels of autonomy from the national government, there is clear adjustment in government quality to be seen in response to disparities with competitor regions. The article further investigates the intensity of this geographical effect separately in the north and south of Europe in order to estimate the potential for virtuous or vicious cycles of good governance in the two regions, respectively. It is found that while regions in the north develop relatively independently of each other but respond to competitive pressure across Europe, in the south regions demonstrate a higher level of local interdependence, increasing the possibility of virtuous cycles – but also of vicious ones.