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Representation and Salient Issues: Legislator Responsiveness to the Service Constituency Bennett, Sherry L. Smith, Renee M. Uploaded 04-21-1999 Keywords service constituency opinion activation U.S. trade policy ordered probit IV estimation Abstract ormal models of the supply of public policy and of information transmission between lobbyists and legislators imply that the preferences of both organized and informed, but unorganized, interests influence legislators' vote choices. Denzau and Munger (1986) refer to these citizens as a legislator's service constituency. In this paper, we provide argument and evidence to show that the concept of a service constituency is crucial to theoretical explanations and empirical investigations of a legislator's responsiveness to constituent demands on salient issues. We also provide theory and evidence to account for the process by which unorganized citizens become part of a service constituency. Our argument emphasizes the effects of interest group competition on information accessibility and opinion activation for diffuse, unorganized citizens. Our empirical evidence provides strong support for our hypotheses about opinion activation and the effects of the service constituency on legislative behavio

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Trade and Conflict in the Cold War Era: An Empirical Analysis Beck, Nathaniel Uploaded 08-30-1999 Keywords trade conflict MIDs generalized additive model smooth Abstract What is the relationship between trade and conflict in the post-World War II era. Using a dyad-year design, and studying both all dyads and politically relevant dyads, this paper uses the generalized additive model to study the relationship between dyadic trade and militarized interstate disputes (both all disputes and those involving casualties only). For all dyads, moving from no trade to a small amount of trade increases the likelihood of conflict, though that mostly reflects the fact that non-traders also are likely to have little conflict in any arena. Moving from zero to low trade decreases the likelihood of conflict among politically relevant dyads, though this may simply reflect the nature of the Cold War world where dyads made up of Cold War opponents did not trade but did fight. In any event, there is little evidence for a causal pacific impact of trade, but also little evidence that trade is inherently conflictual, other than being an obvious necessary condition for trade disputes and also signalling that dyadic partners are in some interesting relationship.

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Trade and Militarized Conflict: How Modeling Strategic Interactions Between States Makes a Difference Rowan, Shawn E. Uploaded 07-19-2005 Keywords trade conflict interdependence asymmetry strategic Abstract The study between the interaction of war and foreign trade has occupied scholars from political science and economics for thousands of years. I contribute to the trade and conflict debate by accounting for the strategic interaction between states that most or all theories in international relations (IR) assume. I use a strategic statistical model (Signorino 1999, 2003b) that endogenizes the actions that leads states to militarized conflict and peace. The results of the strategic probit model reveal non-linear, asymmetric relationships between trade dependence and militarized conflict for each state in the dyad. Not only are these effects non-linear, but, in equilibrium, also depend on the actions taken by the other state in the dyad. The trade dependence of one state on another can have either a pacifying or a positive effect on militarized conflict. Additionally, these effects are only realized for initial increases in trade dependence and that once a threshold is reached, the effects of trade dependence are constant.