In a series of books and articles Arend Lijphart has established himself as the leading exponent of an important strain of new institutionalist thought, one whose central features have never, as far as we are aware, clearly been articulated, even by Lijphart himself. We compare and contrast the approach of Lijphart (and of the students and colleagues he has influenced)--one which we argue is distinguished by its mix of concern for taxonomic conceptualization, cross-national and cross-temporal applicability, and explanatory power--with other better known strains of the "new institutionalism." We also briefly discuss extensions and critiques of Lijphart's distinction between majoritarian and consensus-oriented governmental structures.

Combining salary data for permanent non-emeritus faculty at seven departments of political science within the University of California system with lifetime citation counts and other individual level data from the Masuoka, Grofman and Feld (2007) study of faculty at Ph.D. granting political science departments in the United States, we analyze determinants of faculty salaries. For the full data set our main finding are that (1) base salaries of UC political science faculty are slightly more strongly correlated to citation rates (annualized or total lifetime citations) as a measure of research visibility than they are to seniority measured by years since receipt of the Ph.D; and (2) that gender differences and subfield differences in salary essentially vanish once we take into account both year of Ph.D. and research visibility (as measured by annualized citation counts), while gender inequities would appear to exist if we did not control for both variables and thus may appear in the kinds of simpler gender equity comparisons commonly done within the UC system that lack any performance control variable. Also (3) looking across the seven campuses, despite the philosophy of common academic personnel standards across campuses, we find differences in average compensation levels even after we control for cross-campus difference in seniority and faculty research visibility. In particular, the three nationally highest ranked UC political science departments (UCB, UCLA and UCSD) collectively attach considerably less relative weight to seniority relative to citation record in determining faculty salaries than do the other four UC departments, have greater salary variation among those roughly the same time past Ph.D., and, on average, pay higher salaries even after seniority and citations are controlled.

A fundamental challenge faced by many countries is the accommodation of ethnic and religious diversity. The search for methods to mitigate or resolve conflicts in plural societies has been a major concern of both scholars and politicians, and there is a vast literature on this topic. This general debate about appropriate institutional design for plural societies plays itself out in terms of arguments about choice of electoral system. The two key academic protagonists in the debate over the appropriate electoral system to use in plural societies are Arend Lijphart, in his work on power sharing and consociationalism, and Donald Horowitz, in his work on constitutional design and ethnic accommodation. The former has advocated list PR, the latter advocates methods such as AV. Their two approaches to electoral system choice in plural societies are widely viewed as being in direct opposition to one another, both by academics studying ethnic conflict and by politicians in plural societies, themselves. This paper focuses on Horowitz’s approach to the use of the alternative vote as a tool for mitigating ethnic conflict. We illustrate such a situation hypothetically for the case of Fiji, a country where, largely due to Horowitz’s influence, in 1999, the alternative vote was adopted for national parliamentary elections.

Legislators have the power to make, edit, and retract laws, but what motivates the individual legislator to behave in the way they do? Why do some legislators support their party, while others chose to strike their own path? Undoubtedly, no single explanatory behavior can account for the wildly different behavior of so many individuals, but do the actions of legislators reveal the menu of preferences that determine their actions? This dissertation attempts to account for three major issues facing legislators in both the United States and in a comparative context. Chapter 2 analyzes how electoral security impacts the behavior of U.S. Representatives. Chapter 3 examines how electoral security of U.S. Representatives has changed across time. Chapter 4 analyzes the impact of legislative design using a novel sample of British MPs who have also served in the European Parliament. Finally, in Chapter 5 I summarize these findings and provide implications for U.S. Politics.

The United States has lower turnout than almost all other long-term democracies. Low turnout in the U.S. has been blamed on a number of factors, but many authors have asserted that the personal burden placed on most voters to register in advance of the election and the need (in many states) for continued reregistration are major causes of low U.S. turnout. It is also well-known that those with higher SES characteristics tend to vote at higher rates. Indeed, the SES gap in turnout rates is higher in the United States than in other democracies. This fact has been a major concern for those who view political participation as a hallmark of democracy. Those concerned with low levels of U.S. turnout, particularly by the poor and the less well educated, have predicted that liberalizing U.S. voter registration laws will significantly improve turnout, and that the gains will be especially great among the groups who now vote at the lowest rates. Here we offer a rational choice model of turnout that leads us to expect the greatest turnout gains from virtually eliminating voter registration costs in the United States will instead accrue to those with medium income and education. We test this prediction longitudinally over the period 1972-1992 using a vast survey on political participation and a natural experiment comparing voters in states that adopted election day registration (EDR) with those residing in states maintaining more traditional closing dates. Contrary to much of the literature, citizens with medium education and medium income voted more under EDR, as the model predicts. We conclude that the methods used here better capture and empirically identify the curvilinear relationship between voter registration laws and the turnout probabilities at various SES levels.

We offer a new tool to improve matchups between surname and ethnicity, illustrating the use of this method with data on Spanish surname matching drawn from the U.S. Census. We first show that there is no such thing as the proportion of bearers of a given name who are Hispanic. How Hispanic any given name will turn out to be is a function of the overall Hispanicity of the population, which will affect both the distribution of names and the conditional probability that the possessor of any given name will be Hispanic.  We then propose a simple approach, using only two common names -- one of which is far more likely to be Hispanic and one of which is far more likely to be non-Hispanic -- that allows us to generate, via Bayes Theorem, remarkably accurate estimates about the size of Hispanic populations in California cities from very limited data, here the ratio of those with the name ‘Garcia’ to those with the name ‘Anderson’.