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A growing literature in political science has pointed to the importance of heuristics in explaining citizens' political attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. At the same time, the multidisciplinary research on heuristics in general has revealed that individuals seem to use heuristics sensibly—applying them (perhaps subconsciously) when they are likely to be helpful but not otherwise. We extend this multidisciplinary work to political behavior and present a general theory of contextual variation in political heuristic use applied to discover under what conditions (i.e., what political contexts) voters will use a partisanship heuristic to infer the legislative votes of their legislators in imperfectly disciplined voting contexts. More specifically, we predict that US constituents of loyal partisan senators will use the partisanship heuristic more often than constituents of less loyal senators. Our empirical analysis reveals strong support for our theory, contributing to our understanding of political heuristics in general and adding nuance to our understanding of the partisanship heuristic in particular.

Recent scholarship in comparative political behavior has begun to address how voters in coalitional systems manage the complexity of those environments. We contribute to this emerging literature by asking how voters update their perceptions of the policy positions of political parties that participate in coalition cabinets. In contrast to previous work on the sources of voter perceptions of party ideology in parliamentary systems, which has asked how voters respond to changes in party manifestos (i.e., promises), we argue that in updating their perceptions, voters will give more weight to observable actions than to promises. Further, coalition participation is an easily observed party action that voters use as a heuristic to infer the direction of policy change in the absence of detailed information about parties' legislative records. Specifically, we propose that all voters should perceive parties in coalition cabinets as more ideologically similar, but that this tendency will be muted for more politically interested voters (who have greater access to countervailing messages from parties). Using an individual-level data set constructed from 54 electoral surveys in 18 European countries, we find robust support for these propositions. Adapted from the source document.

We present an empirical assessment of Lupia and Strøm's noncooperative bargaining model of cabinet terminations. We construct a stochastic version of the model and derive several testable implications. As the next mandatory election approaches: (1) the probability of an early election increases; (2) a cabinet's risks of being replaced without an intermediate election may be flat or even decrease; and (3) the overall chance that a cabinet falls (for whatever reason) increases. Using nonparametric duration analysis on a 15-country data set, we find qualified support for the Lupia and Strøm model. We conclude that the strategic approach is more promising than the nonstrategic alternative, but a more fully dynamic strategic model will be required to account for the dynamics of cabinet stability.

Our findings suggest that there are systematic differences in the ways that voters use the real values of economic variables when casting a vote depending on how long they have had to learn about the true state of the economy. It is possible that in campaigns of sufficient length voters may have more time to be exposed to competing campaign messages and to learn about the true state of the economy and the true policy positions of candidates. We tested this assertion on 113 elections in thirteen democracies. The test results in a confirmation of the hypothesis. In longer campaigns, voters rely more heavily on the true values of economic conditions to inform their evaluations of parties in power. In shorter campaigns, these effects are mostly absent. Campaign length seems to matter for voter learning. (British Journal of Political Science / FUB)

We present an empirical assessment of Lupia & Strom's noncooperative bargaining model of cabinet terminations. We construct a stochastic version of the model & derive several testable implications. As the next mandatory election approaches: (1) the probability of an early election increases; (2) a cabinet's risks of being replaced without an intermediate election may be flat or even decrease; & (3) the overall chance that a cabinet falls (for whatever reason) increases. Using nonparametric duration analysis on a 15-country data set, we find qualified support for the Lupia & Strom model. We conclude that the strategic approach is more promising than the nonstrategic alternative, but a more fully dynamic strategic model will be required to account for the dynamics of cabinet stability. 10 Figures, 11 References. Adapted from the source document.

Despite the proliferation of studies on the impact of military spending on economic growth, it is still not known whether defense spending hinders or promotes growth. Most analysts attribute the lack of consistent/robust findings to three problems: the lack of a sound theory of defense-growth trade-offs, an inadequate research design, and a failure to account for the externality effects that defense spending might have on other parts of the economy. In this study, the authors try to remedy these problems by (1) relying on a model of the defense-growth trade-off that is grounded in the neoclassic theory of growth, (2) estimating this model using time-series data on 103 countries, and (3) explicitly accounting for the externality effects of defense spending by the use of a multisectorial model. The results show that, regardless of the specification of the models, and contrary to most cross-national studies, military expenditures have a significant positive effect on growth in only about 10% of the cases.