Followers of law, politics and business commonly relate stories of individuals who appear to predict an expected performance level below what they believe themselves to be capable of. The standard explanation for such rhetoric is that it hedges against the negative consequences of unanticipated...

Parliamentary institutions and partisan norms are complex and new members of parliament are unlikely to possess an innate awareness of optimal behaviour. This paper examines how new legislators adopt the behavioural patterns of incumbent members in the Sixth European Parliament. The latter...

Theoretical accounts of compliance with court orders emphasize the importance of transparency. Most empirical studies of compliance center on high profile political cases, largely ignoring the high-volume, quotidian claims against the state for basic services that constitute the largest share of...

Although scholars have made considerable progress on a number of important research questions by relaxing assumptions commonly used to divide political science into subfields, rigid boundaries remain in some contexts. In this essay, we suggest that the assumption that international politics is...

While the behavior of judges clearly affects the success of judicial reform efforts, it is not clear how judges might influence the selection of judicial institutions aimed at building healthier courts. In this paper, I suggest that judges might play an important role in defining the judicial...

Recent theory in judicial politics suggests that a normative public commitment to a state’s high court can undermine political constraints on judging induced by the separation-of-powers system. If public support affects judicial authority in this way, judges ought to care about...