Summary: American Political Science Review - Volume 105, Issue 03 - 01 August 2011

In this issue of the American Political Science Review:

• Snyder and Borghard explore whether democratic leaders pay domestic political costs for failing to carry out public threats made during an international crisis.
• Croco examines whether leaders who are culpable for bringing their country into conflict are more or less successful in achieving favorable war outcomes than non-culpable leaders, and also whether voters punish culpable or non-culpable leaders more severely for poor outcomes.
• Cederman, Weidmann, and Gleditsch study the role of horizontal inequality in promoting ethnonationalist conflict.
• Bullock presents two experiments that test the impact of elites on the policy views of citizens in democracies.
• Mathis offers a new model for understanding how voting rules and uncertainty over preferences influence the full sharing of information during deliberations.
• Shor and McCarty share a new ideological mapping of American state legislatures.
• Folke, Hirano, and Synder consider the role that control of patronage jobs plays in increasing a political party's chance of winning US state elections.
• Fukumoto and Horiuchi detail a natural experiment that they argue can be used to detect electoral fraud .
• Hughes analyzes how gender and minority quotas actually perform in terms of increasing the political influence of minority women.
• Mansbridge responds to Rehfeld's critique of her model of representation by offering a modification, and Rehfeld responds with further critiques.