Many argue that international norms influence government behavior, and that policies diffuse from country to country, because of idea exchanges within elite networks. However, politicians are not free to follow their foreign counterparts, because domestic constituencies constrain them. This...

Stefan Svallfors' 1997 conclusion that patterns of attitudes towards redistribution are essentially the same across welfare-state regimes rests on a questionable treatment of missing data and on poor operationalization of the theoretical determinants of public opinion. Using demographic...