Annual Review of Political Science - Volume 19, 2016

Recently, the regression discontinuity (RD) design has become increasingly popular among social scientists. One prominent application is the study of close elections. We explicate several methodological misunderstandings widespread across disciplines by revisiting the controversy concerning the validity of RD design when applied to close elections. Although many researchers invoke the local or as-if-random assumption near the threshold, it is more stringent than the required continuity assumption. We show that this seemingly subtle point determines the appropriateness of various statistical methods and changes our understanding of how sorting invalidates the design. When multiple-testing problems are also addressed, we find that evidence for sorting in US House elections is substantially weaker and highly dependent on estimation methods. Finally, we caution that despite the temptation to improve the external validity, the extrapolation of RD estimates away from the threshold sacrifices the design's advantage in internal validity.

Research on nuclear security has gone quantitative. Rapid growth in empirical approaches to the consequences of nuclear weapons in recent years promises to settle some controversies, even as it initiates or resurrects debates that may eventually be resolved with better estimates or data. The toolkit for studying nuclear security had long been bereft of quantitative approaches, undermining the virtuous cycle between theory and evidence. New data and growing confidence in statistical approaches have finally produced a systematic empirical literature on the consequences of nuclear weapons. We review existing studies, organizing the literature along thematic lines. We also discuss challenges facing the emergent quantitative literature and suggest several avenues for future research. Although the terminus of the basic research agenda has been anticipated more than once, the literature on nuclear consequences has shown a remarkable ability to generate novel and often unexpected research questions.

Public opinion is increasingly at the heart of both political and scholarly debates on European integration. This article reviews the large literature on public support for, and opposition to, European integration, focusing on conceptualization, causes, and consequences: What is public support for European integration? How can we explain variation in support and Euroskepticism? What are the consequences of public support for elections and policy making in the European Union? The review reveals that although a growing literature has sought to explain individual support for European integration, more work is needed to understand the ways in which opinions are shaped by their national context and how increasing public contestation of the European Union poses a challenge to, and an opportunity for, the future of the integration project.

A range of policy problems—from climate change to pension sustainability to skill shortages—confront governments with intertemporal dilemmas: trade-offs between maximizing social welfare in the present and taking care of the future. There is, moreover, substantial variation in the degree to which democratic governments are willing to invest in long-term social goods. Surprisingly, the literature on the politics of public policy has paid little explicit attention to timing as a dimension of policy choice, focusing almost exclusively on matters of cross-sectional distribution. This article develops a framework for explaining intertemporal policy choices in democracies by adapting findings from the literatures on distributive politics, political economy, and political behavior. The article makes a case for analyzing the politics of the long term as a struggle over how welfare should be allocated across groups and over how policy effects should be distributed through time.

This article reviews scholarly research on the political economy of foreign direct investment (FDI) over the past 20 years. FDI research during this period reflects FDI's rapid growth, particularly in developing countries, and the emergence of intense competition among countries to attract investments. Countries have grown more open to FDI as evidenced by FDI deregulation, generous financial investment incentives, and the adoption of international agreements. Although extensive research shows that multinational corporations prefer to invest in countries with strong property rights protections, whether incentives and international agreements help countries attract FDI remains contested. Scholars can advance research by disaggregating FDI into multinational firms' specific production activities because the scope for countries to compete for FDI and firms' sensitivity to property rights vary widely. More generally, scholars should recast the separate study of trade and FDI into the study of global production in which trade and FDI are inextricably linked.

The far right party family is the fastest-growing party family in Europe. In addition to describing the ideological makeup of the far right party family, this review examines demand-side and supply-side explanations for its electoral success. Demand-side explanations focus on the grievances that create the “demand” for far right parties, whereas supply-side explanations focus on how the choices that far right parties make and the political opportunity structure in which they act influence their success. The review finishes by suggesting that far right scholars must recognize the interaction between demand-side and supply-side factors in their empirical analyses in order to draw valid inferences and that it would be productive to pay more attention to the political geography of far right support and the different stages of far right success.

Although understanding the role of race, ethnicity, and identity is central to political science, methodological debates persist about whether it is possible to estimate the effect of something immutable. At the heart of the debate is an older theoretical question: Is race best understood under an essentialist or constructivist framework? In contrast to the “immutable characteristics” or essentialist approach, we argue that race should be operationalized as a “bundle of sticks” that can be disaggregated into elements. With elements of race, causal claims may be possible using two designs: (a) studies that measure the effect of exposure to a racial cue and (b) studies that exploit within-group variation to measure the effect of some manipulable element. These designs can reconcile scholarship on race and causation and offer a clear framework for future research.

This article considers the potential to use knowledge of expected electoral system effects to engage in electoral engineering. The review focuses on contributions made in the past dozen or so years and is limited to five specific questions: How do electoral systems affect (a) the proportionality of seats–votes relationships, (b) party proliferation, (c) the ideological nature of party competition, (d) voter turnout, and (e) the degree of match between the preferences of citizens and the policy choices of the government?

Replication of simple and transparent experiments should promote the cumulation of knowledge. Yet, randomization alone does not guarantee simple analysis, transparent reporting, or third-party replication. This article surveys several challenges to cumulative learning from experiments and discusses emerging research practices—including several kinds of prespecification, two forms of replication, and a new model for coordinated experimental research—that may partially overcome the obstacles. I reflect on both the strengths and limitations of these new approaches to doing social science research. NOTE: This article has been corrected and republished as doi:10.1146/annurev-polisci-072516-014127.

The last decade has witnessed growing interest among political scientists and economists in nondemocratic politics. This trend has been reflected in increasingly rigorous game-theoretic modeling of its various aspects: regime persistence and breakdown, ruling-coalition formation and leadership change, protests and repression, formal institutions and elections, and censorship and media control. We review this research agenda, focusing on the foundational assumptions and political intuition behind key models. Our survey reveals a field populated by disparate models of particular mechanisms that nonetheless share two major analytical themes: asymmetries of information and commitment problems. We propose that future models move toward a genuinely comparative study of authoritarian institutions.