Do people in new democracies that are undergoing market reforms turn against these reforms when the economic adjustment is painful? The conventional wisdom is that they will. According to "economic voting" models, citizens punish elected governments for bad economic performance. The contributors to this collection, in contrast, begin with the insight that citizens in new democracies may have good reasons to depart from the predictions of economic voting. They use state-of-the-art statistical techniques to analyze changes in aggregate support levels, as reflected in public opinion polls, in...

Why do vote-suppression efforts sometimes fail? Why does police repression of demonstrators sometimes turn localized protests into massive, national movements? How do politicians and activists manipulate people's emotions to get them involved? The authors of Why Bother? offer a new theory of why people take part in collective action in politics, and test it in the contexts of voting and protesting. They develop the idea that just as there are costs of participation in politics, there are also costs of abstention - intrinsic and psychological but no less real. That abstention can be...