Across Western democracies, individuals frequently vote for different parties in different elections. A variety of explanations have been proposed for this behavior. In the European context, scholars have focused on the idea that individuals may vote for different parties because some elections are less important than others (i.e., are “second-order” elections). In the U.S. context, scholars have focused on the possibility that individuals might vote for different parties because they care about how the two chambers will affect policy outcomes. In this article, the authors test among four alternative motivations for vote switching, two predicated on the notion that individuals treat one of the elections as second-order and two predicated on the notion that individuals care about policy outcomes from both chambers. The tests are performed by analyzing Euro-barometer survey data on individual voting behavior in European national and European Parliament elections. The authors find support for all four motivations.

High courts such as the US Supreme Court announce legal rules that guide subsequent decisions by lower courts and other actors. Because legal rules are forward-looking in this sense, judges’ expectations about the distribution of future cases are critical. Focusing on this fact, we provide microfoundations for judicial preferences over legal rules by deriving them directly from expectations about the distribution of future cases. Doing so has important consequences: in contrast to standard assumptions in models of judicial decision-making, preferences over legal rules are asymmetric rather than symmetric. We demonstrate that this has significant implications for judicial decision-making on collegial courts. Finally, we show that changes in the case distribution—for example, as a result of technological change—can lead to significant legal change, even in the absence of ideological or doctrinal change on the court.

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