Parliamentary institutions and partisan norms are complex, and new members of parliament are unlikely to possess an innate awareness of optimal behavior. This paper examines how new legislators adopt the behavioral patterns of incumbent members in the 6th European Parliament. The 6th EP provides...

While there is a vast literature highlighting the social dynamics that underlie political behavior, we know very little about the processes by which political behavior and practices disseminate among political actors. Drawing upon recent innovations, we study the diffusion of behavior within the...

Under what conditions do states maintain trade cooperation? We explore this question using models of imperfect monitoring. Most formal models of international cooperation rely on signaling games, in which actors' actions are perfectly observable. Here we examine conditions for cooperation when...

We study the diffusion of policy by examining how the policy opinions of Americans are influenced by the policy choices of foreign governments. Using survey experiments, we find limited evidence that foreign governments' policy choices influence American public opinion. Our results show that...

Theories of statutory interpretation abound. Scholars, judges and commentators have long puzzled over the best method to locate the meaning of a statute and to this end have proposed a range of approaches that rely on various forms of evidence, including statutory text, legislative intent,...

In this article, Professors Staudt, Lindstaedt, and O'Connor undertake a comprehensive study of congressional responses to Supreme Court cases and make a surprising finding: Overrides, although the sole focus in the extant literature, account for just a small portion of the legislative activity...

Parties value unity, yet, members of parliament face competing demands, giving them incentives to deviate from the party line. For members of the European Parliament (MEPs), these competing demands are national party and European party group pressures. Here, we look at how MEPs respond to those...

The global financial crisis has increased pressures on governments to pursue wide-ranging banking reform, highlighting the importance of domestic responses to globalization. In this paper, we study mass policy preferences on banking reform as well as the change of those preferences in response...

With Version 6, we are releasing new data for 113 countries covering 2013 and 2014, and for 76 of these countries data is also available for 2015 – in addition to the full data for all 173 countries from 1900-2012. The dataset now includes about 350 unique and disaggregated democracy...