This article reviews evidence for the effects of public opinion on court decision-making,
capital punishment policy and use, correctional expenditures, and incarceration rates. It also …

Donald Trump, the Arab Spring, Brexit: digital media have provided political actors and
citizens with new tools to engage in politics. These tools are now routinely used by activists …

This paper surveys the extensive literature that seeks to estimate the effect of the initiative
and referendum on public policy. The evidence on the referendum uniformly finds that …

Democracy has many attractive features. Among them is its tendency to track the truth, at
least under certain idealized assumptions. That basic result has been known since 1785 …

Can we design institutions that increase and deepen citizen participation in the political
decision making process? At a time when there is growing disillusionment with the …

Challenging the common assumption that models of direct democracy and representative
democracy are necessarily at odds, Direct Democracy Worldwide demonstrates how …

In recent years democratic theory has taken a deliberative turn. Instead of merely casting the
occasional ballot, deliberative democrats want citizens to reason together. They …

Political scientists often turn to natural experiments to draw causal inferences with
observational data. Recently, the regression discontinuity design (RD) has become a …

Providing an in-depth analysis of public opinion, including its origins in political
socialization, its role in the electoral process, and the impact of the media, American Public …

The scientific study of networks-computer, social, and biological-has received an enormous
amount of interest in recent years. However, the network approach has been applied to the …