Although the move to the center of many European Social Democratic parties in the 1990s was first rewarded with victories, these parties have since faced a remarkable electoral drought. What explains the seeming inability of these catchall parties to cast a wider but sustainable net for voters? Incorporating a temporal dimension helps explain when and why the broadening of party platforms fails and produces counterintuitive electoral outcomes. Our empirical study analyzes the votes of individuals in three European countries in the past three decades. The individual level allows us to track changes in parties’ voter structures, which are necessarily omitted from studies using aggregate vote shares. Our findings indicate that current analyses of the electoral effects of strategy shifts are misleading inasmuch as they fail to account for individual-level motivations for vote switching.

Existing research makes competing predictions and yields contradictory findings about the relationships between natives' exposure to immigrants and their attitudes toward immigration. Engaging this disjuncture, this article argues that individual predispositions moderate the impact of exposure to immigrants on negative attitudes toward immigrants. Negative attitudes toward immigration are more likely among individuals who are most sensitive to such threats. Because country-level studies are generally unable to appropriately measure the immigration context in which individuals form their attitudes, this article uses a newly collected dataset on regional immigration patterns in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland to test the argument. The data show that increasing and visible diversity is associated with negative attitudes toward immigrants, but only among natives on the political right. This finding improves the understanding of attitudes toward immigrants and immigration and has implications for the study of attitudes toward other policies and for immigration policy itself.The relationship between the presence of immigrants and citizens' attitudes toward immigrants and migration policies is uncertain and frequently debated. One perspective represented in many studies suggests that 'an increase in the percentage of ethnic minority members … reduces the majority's prejudice' (Wagner et al. 2006: 380). Another group of studies contradicts this finding, as exemplified by Quillian (1995: 602): 'prejudice is more likely when there is a large foreign presence'. These divergent findings align with the competing predictions from theories of natives' attitudes towards immigrants. Ethnic competition theory and realistic group conflict theory see exposure to outgroups, especially those from ethnically and culturally distinct origins, as leading to anti-immigrant attitudes among natives (Quillian 1995). Conversely, intergroup contact theory (e.g. Allport 1954) argues that larger outgroup populations can engender positive attitudes, although the eponymous 'contact' mechanism takes time to develop and its benefits are conditional on relative socioeconomic equality. On a different

Previous studies of internal armed conflict outcomes have found evidence that rebel-biased military intervention increases the likelihood of rebel victory, but little indication that pro-government interventions improve the odds of government victory. Our argument, grounded in a theory of the utility and limitations of military force in civil wars, anticipates that armed intervention increases the probability of victory for the supported side only when that belligerent’s primary challenge is a lack of conventional war-fighting capacity. Empirical analyses of internal armed conflicts from 1945 to 2010 support these expectations. Direct interventions in support of opposition movements have substantively large, robust effects on conflict outcomes. In contrast, government-biased interventions are only effective in increasing the odds of an outcome favorable to the government when the fighting capacity of rebel forces matches or exceeds that of the state.

We examine the potential of highly structured intergovernmental organizations (HSIGOs) to prevent the escalation of low-level, domestic armed conflicts in member states to civil wars. A state's membership in HSIGOs alters the bargaining game between the government and rebels by increasing the costs of escalation (e.g., via sanctions) and decreasing the amount of benefits the state hoped to receive from future international cooperation. The anticipation of such consequences provides the government with an increased interest in settling the conflict before it escalates. This in turn also mitigates an important aspect of uncertainty associated with bargaining failure, including enhancing the credibility of commitments. Empirical analyses and follow-up tests of all domestic armed conflicts from 1945 to 2000 provide robust support for the hypothesized conflict-management function of HSIGO memberships.

The adoption of UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1540 in 2004 reflects an emerging consensus that more should be done by the international community to address the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. UNSCR 1540 articulates a universal, legally binding obligation for all states to confront proliferation by adopting effective export control systems. To date, however, there have been no attempts to systematically analyze compliance with this new obligation, making it impossible to assess the success of this measure and the underlying causes of any shortcomings. This study addresses this by conducting a systematic empirical analysis of state compliance with UNSCR 1540. Drawing upon theories of compliance with international law, we investigate two distinct explanations for variation in the degree to which states adopt nonproliferation export controls: one based on state interests and enforcement and the other based on state capacity. Our statistical tests of these theories use a new, cross-national data set detailing the nonproliferation policies of 30 states. The empirical results indicate that compliance with international nonproliferation obligations is influenced most by a state's economic and governmental capacities and has little to do with interest-based factors. These findings suggest that capacity-building programs are the best option for improving the implementation of UNSCR 1540 and of nonproliferation efforts in general.