Voters often make the effort to go to the polls but effectively throw their vote away by leaving their ballot blank or intentionally spoiled. Typically construed as anomalous or errant, we argue that blank and spoiled ballots are empirically differentiable and politically informative. We consider self-reported vote choice from a nationally representative survey following the 2011 Bolivian elections, in which 60 percent of votes cast were blank or spoiled. We estimate a multinomial logit model, finding that both blank and null voting were driven by political concerns, though null voting was more common among politically sophisticated individuals.

Organizational culture is the pattern of values and beliefs held by members of an organization and the management of culture is now one of the most frequently discussed of all organizational concepts. The excitement associated with culture is attributable to two factors. First, it is argued that culture is the key to organizational performance; simply stated, a strong organizational culture can be a source of competitive advantage. Second, culture is perceived as an alternative method of control to traditional and technocratic forms of management and can be manipulated to ensure that employees are enthusiastic and committed to organizational objectives.Despite the extensive interest in this topic, culture remains an elusive concept. This paper investigates the nature of culture and considers strategies for introducing cultural change. Specifically, the aims of the paper are threefold. First, to locate and explain the interests and significance of culture change for the public sector. Second, using a case study of a newly created agency, to investigate the problems and issues affecting cultural change in the civil service. Third, to reassess and critically evaluate the claims for culture management made in the literature. Finally, this paper questions some of the assumptions in the literature, which with few exceptions are biased toward top management and the unitary conception of organization, an ideological frame of reference which is particularly problematic in the public sector.

Legislative votes can be taken by roll call—noting the position of each individual member—or by some form of indication (sitting or standing, shouting yea or nay, etc.)—noting only an aggregate outcome. Cameral rules define one method of voting as the standard operating procedure and how to invoke any alternative voting methods. We develop a series of hypotheses related to position taking to explain why, when procedures would typically lead to a vote taken by indication, legislators choose to vote by roll call—a means that makes it much easier for actors outside the chamber to observe the positions taken by individual legislators and partisan blocs. With data from Argentina and Mexico, we test these hypotheses regarding the strategic choice of vote procedures and their relationship to observed party unity.

Gender and politics scholars have long recognized the importance of political institutions (Lovenduski 1998). Most of this work focuses on formal institutions (Chappell 2006;Kenney 1996), but several studies discuss gendered practices and norms in ways that can be seen as consistent with definitions of informal institutions (Duerst-Lahti and Kelly 1995;Kenny 2007). Despite these shared concerns, few feminists frame their research in relation to institutionalism. To the degree that they do, they tend to view the most promising point of intersections to be with historical, sociological, and discursive versions. In contrast, they seem more wary of rational choice, arguing that this brand of institutionalism is unhelpful to, if not fundamentally incompatible with, the objectives of feminist research (cf. Kenny and Paantjens 2006).In this article, we discuss the potential for a feminist rational choice institutionalism. The first section sketches the basic contours of feminism and rational choice theory in order to explore whether this silence means that they are in fact irreconcilable. In the second section, we consider what might be gained by forging a combined approach. A feminist rational choice institutionalism, we argue, would entail research designs attentive to issues of gender, strategy, institutions, power, and change. We illustrate the analytical benefits of this synthesis in the third section, where we consider how it might be used to answer a key question in recent research: What explains the adoption of candidate gender quotas?The Divide: Feminism and Rational Choice Theory Both feminism and rational choice theory are characterized by diverse schools of thought. At a minimum, doing better research for feminists 1. We would like to thank many people for their thoughts on this topic, especially Randall Calvert,

Feminism and rational choice theory have both been hailed as approaches with the potential to revolutionize political science. Apart from a few exceptions, however, work utilizing these two perspectives rarely overlaps. This article reviews their main contributions and explores the potential for a combined approach. It argues that a synthesis of feminism and rational choice theory would involve attending to questions of gender, strategy, institutions, power, and change. The contours and benefits of this approach are illustrated with reference to one particular area of research: the adoption of electoral gender quotas. Despite a current lack of engagement across approaches, this example illustrates that the tools of feminist and rational choice analysis may be brought together in productive ways to ask and answer theoretically and substantively important questions in political science.