The theory in Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action is built from historically uncontroversial assumptions about interpersonal communication. Today, evolving technologies are changing communication dynamics in ways that invalidate some of these once uncontroversial assumptions. How do these changes affect Olson's thesis? Using research tools that were not available to Olson, we differentiate collective actions that new communication technologies help from the endeavors that they hurt. In the process, we refine some of Olson's best-known ideas. For example, we find that evolving communication technologies eliminate many of the organizational advantages that Olson attributed to small groups.

Open list proportional representation (PR) systems require that candidates seek personal votes in order to be successful. This feature of the system is considered to lead to intense competition among co-partisans and, ultimately, to weak electoral and legislative parties, narrow public policies, localism, clientelism, and corruption. We examine the distribution of personal votes among candidates from the same party for seven elections to the Brazilian national chamber of deputies (1990–2014). These elections are widely seen as hyper-competitive, particularly among candidates from the same list. Yet, the patterns in the data are not compatible with such a view. We find that the level of overall competition is considerably lower than the absolute number of parties and candidates competing would suggest. More significantly, we find that the number of viable candidates within party lists is limited and that their votes are distributed in such a way that indicates a contained competition among co-partisans during the election. These findings add to recent work that builds a more nuanced view of ballot structure, competition, and personalism.

In a recent issue of Perspectives on Politics, Larry Bartels examines the high levels of support for tax cuts signed into law by President Bush in 2001. In so doing, he characterizes the opinions of “ordinary people” as lacking “a moral basis” and as being based on “simple-minded and sometimes misguided considerations of self interest.” He concludes that “the strong plurality support for Bush's tax cut … is entirely attributable to simple ignorance.”Our analysis of the same data reveals different results. We show that for a large and politically relevant class of respondents, conservatives and Republicans, rising information levels increase support for the tax cuts. In fact, Republican respondents rated “most informed” supported the tax cuts at extraordinarily high levels (over 96 percent). For these citizens, Bartels' claim that “better-informed respondents were much more likely to express negative views about the 2001 tax cut” is untrue. Bartels' results depend on the strong assumption that if more information about the tax cut makes liberals less likely to support it, then conservatives must follow suit. Our analysis allows groups to process information in different ways and can better help political entrepreneurs better reconcile critical social needs with citizens' desires.Arthur Lupia is the Hal R. Varian Collegiate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan (lupia@umich.edu). Adam Seth Levine is a graduate student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan (adamseth@umich.edu). Jesse O. Menning received a Master's Degree in Political Science from the University of Michigan in 2005. He is currently an information technology consultant (Jesse.Menning@gmail.com). Gisela Sin is Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois (gsin@uiuc.edu). We thank Scott Althaus, John Bullock, Nancy E. Burns, James N. Druckman, Elisabeth R. Gerber, Orit Kedar, Kenneth W. Kollman, Arthur Lupia Sr., Jan Lupia, Diana C. Mutz, Samuel L. Popkin, Markus Prior, Paul M. Sniderman, and Kaare Ström for advice. We thank Larry Bartels for his generosity and assistance in our replication efforts. We thank David Howell and the NES Staff for assistance with the NES data set. This article uses data from the 2002 American National Election Studies, sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York (grant B7532), the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, the Russell Sage Foundation (grant 83-02-05), and the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research, Office of the Provost, Office of the Vice President of Research, and Department of Political Science for funding the 2002 National Election Studies; Nancy E. Burns and Donald R. Kinder, Principal Investigators.

This article analyzes the use of vetoes in multiparty presidential systems. It suggests that the nature of executive-legislative bargaining is fundamentally altered when multiple parties compose the legislature and when presidential veto prerogatives are extended to incorporate partial (line-item) vetoes. Using a data set that includes all bills passed by the Argentine Congress in the past 25 years, we estimate veto occurrence under different scenarios. Our findings are at odds with received expectations: whether the President holds a majority in Congress or not fails to explain variations in the likelihood of vetoes. Instead, the level of significance of legislation is relevant for predicting vetoes, with landmark legislation being more likely to be vetoed regardless of levels of support for the president in Congress. In addition, partial vetoes become the preferred alternative when confronting legislation initiated by the president herself.

It is now a commonplace assertion among scholars of regulation to say that new regulatory statutes follow “crises,” “tragedies,” or “scandals.” The content and form of these critical events varies considerably. They include acts of journalism or research such as the publication of the Nader Report (which purportedly led to new federal automobile safety regulations) or Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (which eased the path for the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906). They include instantaneous disasters such as the Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal, India, as well as slowly materializing epidemics like the thousands of horrific birth defects that resulted from widespread use of the sedative thalidomide in Europe and Australia in the late 1950s. As Lawrence Rothenberg describes this argument, it amounts to a meta-narrative of the origins of regulation, an alternative to capture theory. In the tragedy narrative of regulation, “public opinion becomes energized by some dramatic event or condition illustrating the pitfalls of a market's unobstructed operation; the outcry spurs elected officials to promulgate governmental regulation.” This story, as he notes, is at least as old as the work of Marver Bernstein and Anthony Downs.