I deology is widely considered to be an important factor in shaping policy outcomes and in influencing election outcomes. We propose a theory of the coalition-directed vote. The argument suggests that voters anticipate the postelection bargains negotiated among potential members of the governing coalition and that these anticipated policy agreements inform their vote choice. Our analysis, based on 86 voter preference surveys from 23 countries and over a 25-year period, confirms that coalition-directed voting occurs with considerable frequency in contexts with multiparty coalition governments."However, many Danes are now worried by the power of the People's party and the racist attitudes of some of its supporters. Mr. Khader hopes to win votes by promising to rebalance politics, with his own party acting as the fulcrum.

Aldrich-McKelvey scaling is a powerful method that corrects for differentialitem functioning (DIF) in estimating the positions of political stimuli (e.g., parties and candidates) and survey respondents along a latent policy dimension from issue scale data. DIF arises when respondents interpret issue scales (like the standard liberal-conservative scale) differently and distort their placements of the stimuli and themselves. We develop a Bayesian implementation of the classical maximum likelihood Aldrich-McKelvey scaling method that overcomes some important shortcomings in the classical procedure. We then apply this method to study citizens' ideological preferences and perceptions using data from the 2004-2012 American National Election Studies and the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. Our findings indicate that DIF biases self-placements on the liberal-conservative scale in a way that understates the extent of polarization in the contemporary American electorate and that citizens have remarkably accurate perceptions of the ideological positions of Senators and Senate candidates.

No abstract

Aldrich-McKelvey scaling is a powerful method that corrects for differentialitem functioning (DIF) in estimating the positions of political stimuli (e.g., parties and candidates) and survey respondents along a latent policy dimension from issue scale data. DIF arises when respondents interpret issue scales (like the standard liberal-conservative scale) differently and distort their placements of the stimuli and themselves. We develop a Bayesian implementation of the classical maximum likelihood Aldrich-McKelvey scaling method that overcomes some important shortcomings in the classical procedure. We then apply this method to study citizens' ideological preferences and perceptions using data from the 2004-2012 American National Election Studies and the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. Our findings indicate that DIF biases self-placements on the liberal-conservative scale in a way that understates the extent of polarization in the contemporary American electorate and that citizens have remarkably accurate perceptions of the ideological positions of Senators and Senate candidates. Acknowledgements: An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association. We thank Jidong Chen for his valuable feedback. We would also like to thank the editor and the anonymous reviewers who offered helpful comments and suggestions during the review process. Data for replication, R code, and BUGS/JAGS scripts are available at: http://www.voteview.com/BAM.asp. All replication materials are also available on the AJPS Data Archive on Dataverse (http: //dvn.iq.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/ajps).

How does the race of protesters affect how police respond to protest events? Drawing on the protest policing literature and on theories of race and ethnic relations, we explore the idea that police view African American protesters as especially threatening and that this threat leads to a greater probability of policing. We examine more than 15,000 protest events that took place in the United States between 1960 and 1990 and find that in many years, African American protest events are more likely than white protest events to draw police presence and that once at events, police are more likely to take action at African American protest events. Additional analyses complicate these findings by showing that they vary over time. In many years, for example, African American protest events are no more likely than white protest events to be policed. While there is support for a “Protesting While Black” phenomenon, it is not invariant across the entire period of inquiry.

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, and the participants at a colloquium at the University of California, Riverside have offered useful feedback on the project. As is common, we have only been able to take limited advantage of their comments and suggestions.

What are the political and economic consequences of contention (i.e., genocide, civil war, state repression/human rights violation, terrorism, and protest)? Despite a significant amount of interest as well as quantitative research, the literature on this subject remains underdeveloped and imbalanced across topic areas. To date, investigations have been focused on particular forms of contention and specific consequences. While this research has led to some important insights, substantial limitations—as well as opportunities for future development—remain. In particular, there is a need for simultaneously investigating a wider range of consequences (beyond democracy and economic development), a wider range of contentious activity (beyond civil war, protest, and terrorism), a wider range of units of analysis (beyond the nation year), and a wider range of empirical approaches in order to handle particular difficulties confronting this type of inquiry (beyond ordinary least-squares regression). Only then will we have a better and more comprehensive understanding of what contention does and does not do politically and economically. This review takes stock of existing research and lays out an approach for looking at the problem using a more comprehensive perspective.