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Central governments face compliance problems when they rely on local governments to implement policy. In authoritarian political systems, these challenges are pronounced because local governments do not face citizens at the polls. In a national-scale, randomized field experiment in China, we test whether a public, non-governmental rating of municipal governments' compliance with central mandates to disclose information about the management of pollution increased compliance. We find significant and positive treatment effects on compliance after only one year that persist with reinforcement into a second post-treatment year. The public rating appears to decrease the costs of monitoring compliance for the central government without increasing public and media attention to pollution, highlighting when this mode of governance is likely to emerge. These results reveal important roles that nonstate actors can play in enhancing the accountability of local governments in authoritarian political systems.

An analysis of U.S. budgetary changes shows that, among subaccounts that are cut, Democrats make more large cuts when they control more lawmaking institutions. This surprising finding is consistent with legislators who are subject to motivated reasoning. In an information-rich world, they disproportionately respond to information in line with their bias unless they must make a large accuracy correction. This article tests, for the first time, motivated information processing among legislators. It finds evidence that Democrats engage in motivated information processing and that the effects of it are felt more on social spending and in off-election years.

Scholars have long argued over the dimensionality of legislative voting. Using scores from ten groups, this research note shows that analysis of even basically unidimensional voting can benefit from consideration of domain-specific ideology. Although correlations between interest group scores and DW-NOMINATE--the most widely used measure of congressional ideology--are generally high, I find several areas of concern. First, correlations have increased over time, suggesting a need for caution when using the more general scores for historical analysis. Second, the policy-specific interest group scores differ substantially on aggregate measures, such as the location of the median, that political scientists use to test models of the political process. Third, at least one policy area where party is crosscutting, agriculture, is not well captured by NOMINATE scores. This research note concludes with an example of how the use of domain-specific group scores can shed light on the role of party and constituency in voting. Keywords: Policy Domain-Specific Ideology, Interest Group Scores, Dimensionality, Legislative Voting, NOMINATE, Agricultural Policy. La dimensionalidad de la votacion legislativa ha sido un tema de debate entre investigadores. Usando puntuaciones de diez grupos estas notas de investigacion muestran que incluso un analisis unidimensional de la votacion puede beneficiarse si se considera un area de ideologia especifico. Aunque las correlaciones entre las puntuaciones de los grupos de interes y NOMINATE--la medida mas usada para estimar la ideologia congresional--son generalmente altas, encuentro muchas areas de preocupacion. Primero, las correlaciones han aumentado con el tiempo, sugiriendo la necesidad de precaucion al usar las puntuaciones mas generales para un analisis historico. Segundo, las puntuaciones de los grupos de interes con politicas especificas difieren significativamente en medidas agregadas, tales como la localizacion de la mediana, que los politologos usan para probar modelos del proceso politico. Tercero, al menos un area en donde el partido es transversal, agricultura, no es correctamente capturada por la puntuacion NOMINATE.El investigacion concluye con un ejemplo de como el uso puntuaciones de grupos con areas especificas puede esclarecer el papel de la afiliacion partidaria y distrito electoral en las votaciones., The vast majority of studies on legislative voting in the U.S. Congress now rely almost solely on one dimension of NOMINATE scores to measure congressional voting, since Poole and Rosenthal [...]