Many terrorist factions care about the level of popular support they enjoy within a population they claim to represent. Empirically, this level of support can either rise or fall in the aftermath of a campaign of terrorist violence. Under what circumstances is the use of terror an effective tactic for mobilizing political support for an extremist group? This article models a scenario in which an extremist faction considers attacking a government in the hopes of provoking a counterterror response that will radicalize the population, increasing the extremists' support at the expense of a more moderate faction. In our scenario, such radicalization can result either from the economic damage caused by counterterror operations or by the way in which such operations change the population's assessment of the government's motivations. We demonstrate that such attempts at mobilizing public support can be, but need not be, successful, discuss factors that make both the initiation of a terror campaign and successful mobilization more or less likely, and relate our results to several empirical cases. I t is often argued, by scholars and "practitioners" alike, that terrorism is a powerful tool for generating support for a violent extremist movement. 1 A central intuition underlying this idea is that terrorists use violence to provoke governments into harsh and indiscriminate counterterrorism responses in order to radicalize and mobilize a population whose interests the terrorists claim to represent. Examples abound both from history and the current day.Bell (1971) argues that the first successful use of guerrilla tactics in the twentieth century was by Irish Catholics during the "Rising" in Dublin in 1916. The British responded with harsh countermeasures. Several scholars, however, argue that the British response ultimately strengthened the republican cause. English writes, "The British response to republican subversion frequently involved punishing the wider population for IRA activities: this had the unintended-indeed, counterproductiveeffect of strengthening the IRA that it was intended to undermine" (2003,

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We exploit variation in U.S. gubernatorial term limits across states and time to empirically estimate two separate effects of elections on government performance. Holding tenure in office constant, differences in performance by reelectioneligible and term-limited incumbents identify an accountability effect: reelection-eligible governors have greater incentives to exert costly effort on behalf of voters. Holding term-limit status constant, differences in performance by incumbents in different terms identify a competence effect: later-term incumbents are more likely to be competent both because they have survived reelection and because they have experience in office. We show that economic growth is higher and taxes, spending, and borrowing costs are lower under reelection-eligible incumbents than under term-limited incumbents (accountability), and under reelected incumbents than under first-term incumbents (competence), all else equal. In addition to improving our understanding of the role of elections in representative democracy, these findings resolve an empirical puzzle about the disappearance of the effect of term limits on gubernatorial performance over time.E lections play two potential roles in representative democracy. First, elections may mitigate moral hazard by creating accountability; that is, politicians may take costly actions on behalf of voters because they know that they will only be reelected if their performance exceeds some standard (e.g., Barro 1973;Ferejohn 1986). Second, elections may mitigate adverse selection by allowing voters to select competent types who perform better, in expectation, than an unknown challenger. Moreover, in the absence of term limits, elections allow voters to retain incumbents whose competence has increased through experience (Padro i Miquel and Snyder 2006). Thus, over time elections may help voters weed out bad types and retain good types (e.g., Ashworth 2005; Ashworth and Bueno de Mesquita 2008;Fearon 1999;Gordon, Huber, and Landa 2007;Gowrisankaran, Mitchell, and Moro 2008;Zaller 1998). 1 Empirically distinguishing the accountability and competence effects of elections has proven difficult. While Fearon (1999) emphasizes a trade-off between accountability and competence (or selecting good types), in many theoretical models, both effects operate in the same direction (Ashworth 2005;Ashworth and Bueno de Mesquita 2006;Banks and Sundaram 1998;Besley 2006;Duggan 2000). Voters' threat to reelect only incumbents believed to be good types gives politicians an incentive to exert effort in order to try to convince voters that they are ''good'' (that is, more competent than they really are). For this reason, behavior by voters that alleviates adverse selection simultaneously alleviates moral hazard.We devise an empirical strategy to isolate the two effects by exploiting variation in the length of gubernatorial term limits. The basic argument is as follows. The relative performance of incumbents in the same term, some of whom are eligible to run again and some of whom a...

We study the comparative statics of the incumbency advantage in a model of electoral selection and strategic challenger entry. The incumbency advantage arises in the model because, on average, incumbents have greater ability than challengers. This is true for two reasons: high-ability candidates are more likely to win election (electoral selection) and high-quality incumbents deter challengers (strategic challenger entry). We show that this quality-based incumbency advantage is expected to be greater for high visibility offices, in polities with relatively small partisan tides, in unpolarized electoral environments, and in electorates that are relatively balanced in their partisan preferences.

We analyze a model of legislative particularism to understand how the provision of constituency service responds to variations in institutional and electoral environments. We show that increased partisan balance in the electorate, single-member districts, and independent executives all increase incentives for legislators to provide constituency service. The results of the model are consistent with existing comparative-institutional empirical observations. Moreover, the model addresses over time trends in the United States that are not explained by existing models and yields novel hypotheses that are amenable to empirical evaluation. changes in constituency service under two types of institutional variation: single-member versus multimember districts and presidential versus parliamentary systems. While the model clearly omits important determinants of constituency service (e.g., parties), the comparative statics are broadly consistent with a variety of empirical trends and the model yields several testable hypotheses.In our model, legislators invest resources in constituency service to enhance their reelection probabilities. The amount of constituency service provided is determined by two factors: a legislator's ability and the resources she invests. Voters consider two things when voting: the policy preferences of their legislator and her ability to provide both constituency service and global public goods. 1 All else equal, voters prefer highability representatives, but they receive only a noisy signal of ability by observing the constituency service provided to the district. Politicians expend scarce resources in order to convince the voters, through high levels of constituency service, that they are of high ability. Voters, in choosing a candidate, have to balance their policy preferences and their assessments of the candidates' abilities. The comparative statics investigate how different institutional and electoral

I study how a revolutionary vanguard might use violence to mobilize a mass public. The mechanism is informational--the vanguard uses violence to manipulate population member's beliefs about theI magine a citizen with antiregime feelings who is considering becoming involved in a revolutionary movement. He or she only wants to mobilize if he or she believes the movement is sufficiently likely to succeed. Success depends on many people mobilizing. So his or her assessment of the likelihood of success depends on his or her beliefs about how many of his or her fellow citizens will mobilize.Because he or she dislikes the government, he or she suspects that many of his or her fellow citizens dislike the government as well, although he or she faces uncertainty about his or her fellow citizens' views. The more extreme his or her own antigovernment feelings, the more confident he or she is that his or her fellow citizens also oppose the regime. Hence, more extreme citizens are doubly more willing to join the revolutionary movement. They care more about replacing the regime. And they are more confident that others are ready to join, so they believe the movement is more likely to succeed.A revolutionary vanguard wants to persuade citizens to mobilize. To do so, it must convince our citizen (and others like him or her) that the probability of success is sufficiently high. To do this, it must convince him or her that his or her fellow citizens are in fact quite antigovernment.The tool that the vanguard has at its disposal is insurgent violence, such as guerilla or terrorist attacks. These attacks may be persuasive to our citizen because she believes that the vanguard cannot produce a high level of violence without the support of the surrounding population. Thus, high levels of vanguard violence suggest, to our citizen, a high level of antigovernment sentiment in the population as a whole.Suppose that our citizen observes a series of unexpectedly successful vanguard attacks. These attacks convince him or her that his or her fellow citizens are quite hostile to the regime and, thus, likely to mobilize. As such, although his or her views of the regime have not changed, he or she becomes more willing to participate because he or she thinks the odds of the movement succeeding are higher. This is precisely the goal of the vanguard. (Of course, if vanguard violence had been lower than expected, the result would have been the opposite.) Thus, the vanguard has incentives to invest in violence to try to persuade citizens to participate.I model such an informational role for vanguard violence and explore the incentives and strategic dynamics it creates. I do so within a coordination model of regime change with a stage in which a revolutionary vanguard (e.g., insurgents, terrorists, guerillas) engages in publicly observable political violence before population members decide whether to mobilize.The mechanism I consider differs from standard accounts in several ways. First, although my model has multiple equilibria, I explicitly assume th...

A long research tradition in behavioral political science evaluates the performance of democracy by examining voter competence. This literature got its start arguing that voters' lack of information undermines a defense of democracy rooted in electoral accountability. A more recent literature deepens the debate, with some authors claiming that voters effectively use cues to substitute for information about candidates and policies, and other authors claiming that voters are insufficiently rational to do so. We argue that, regardless of its conclusions about voter competence, this literature's single-minded focus on voter behavior is misguided. We use a sequence of formal models to show that traditional intuitions are incomplete because they ignore the effect that changes in voter behavior have on the equilibrium behavior of politicians. When this strategic interaction is taken into account, increases in voter information or voter rationality sometimes make democratic performance better and sometimes make democratic performance worse. One simply cannot assess the implications of voter characteristics for democratic performance without also studying how those characteristics affect the behavior of politicians.A nxiety about the competence of voters is a longstanding theme of behavioral political science. At its heart, this literature is a debate over a proposition aptly summarized by Lupia and McCubbins (1998):It is widely believed that there is a mismatch between the requirements of democracy and most people's ability to meet these requirements. If this mismatch is too prevalent, then effective self-governance is impossible. The democratic dilemma is that the people who are called upon to make reasoned choices may not be capable of doing so. [p. 1, emphasis in original] This multifaceted debate revolves around a series of questions about voters' ability to perform their democratic function. Are voters sufficiently well informed? 1 Is the information voters do have sufficient to allow them to behave as if they were well informed? 2 Do voters respond to the right kinds of information? 3 We argue that this debate's single-minded focus on voter behavior is misguided. Elections affect democratic performance through the interaction of politicians and voters. 4 As such, facts about voter behavior, whether "positive" or "negative," on their own, are . 4 Throughout we will equate democratic performance with voter welfare. There are, of course, important non-welfarist normative arguments for democracy. We adopt this normative approach because it is in keeping with the arguments in the behavior literature we are responding to. not informative about whether a democratic system performs well or poorly.We consider a series of models that show just how important this interaction can be. 5 In our models, increased voter information sometimes improves democratic performance and sometimes makes democratic performance worse. Likewise, some forms of voter irrationality improve democratic performance and some forms of voter irrat...

An important empirical literature evaluates whether voters are rational by examining how electoral outcomes respond to events outside the control of politicians, such as natural disasters or economic shocks. The argument is that rational voters should not base electoral decisions on such events, so evidence that these events affect electoral outcomes is evidence of voter irrationality. We show that such events can affect electoral outcomes, even if voters are rational and have instrumental preferences. The reason is that these events change voters' opportunities to learn new information about incumbents. Thus, identifying voter (ir)rationality requires more than just identifying the impact of exogenous shocks on electoral fortunes. Our analysis highlights systematic ways in which electoral fortunes are expected to change in response to events outside incumbents' control. Such results can inform empirical work attempting to identify voter (ir)rationality. theoretical literature assumes voter rationality and claims to provide insight into a variety of political phenomena. 1 If actual voter behavior dramatically diverges from the assumptions in those models, then there is reason to be skeptical about that research agenda. An important empirical literature attempts to assess whether voters are indeed rational, examining the response of electoral outcomes to exogenous shocks outside the control of politicians. 2 The idea is that, with rational voters, these shocks should not affect incumbents' electoral fortunes. Although several studies find that incumbent electoral fortunes are unaffected by exogenous