This paper studies political support in advanced industrial democracies. Our goal is to determine how citizens in these nations judge the democratic process today. Is there a popular "crisis of democracy'? This paper first provides a framework for assessing public support for democratic politics in advanced industrial democracies. Then, we demonstrate a broad decline in support for politicians, parties, and political institutions across these nations. However, democratic values and community support have not declined significantly. The paper discusses the implications of these findings for politics in advanced industrial democracies.

The concept of party identification has been central to our understanding of American electoral behavior. This research builds upon the functional logic of party identification and asks what occurs if citizens become better able to manage the complexities of politics without relying on habitual party cues. Using the data from the American National Election Studies, we track the distribution of party mobilization and cognitive mobilization within the American electorate. Then, we demonstrates the importance of these different mobilization patterns by documenting strong differences in the content of political thinking, voting choice, and electoral change. The results suggest a basic transformation in the characteristics of the American public since our the classic images of The American Voter, leading to a more differentiated and dealigned electorate.

This essay reviews some recent major research advances in comparative political behavior. We focus on a few major areas of research: political culture, political participation, value change, and electoral choice. I chose these areas for two reasons. First, I believe that these areas have made significant scientific advances in recent years. Second, although these examples are largely drawn from research on advanced industrial societies, they also are relevant to the process of transition for emerging democracies. These are areas where we can expand our present knowledge in the context of this global wave of democratization.

This paper examines the extent to which environmental groups cooperate globally. The literature on international environmentalism has increasingly stressed the development of cooperative networks among environmental NGOs, the sharing of environmental information and resources, and the development of a global civil society within the environmental movement. We determine the actual extent of this global environmental network, and the implications for international environmentalism. We examine the responses of 248 environmental groups included in the 1998 Global Environmental Organizations Survey (GEOS). The responses to our questions yield valuable insights into the extent to which groups cooperate nationally and internationally, and the nature of this cooperation. In addition, we provide an initial explanation for the crossnational variation in groups' responses to our questions.

With marine heat waves increasing in intensity and frequency due to climate change, it is important to understand how thermal disturbances will alter coral reef ecosystems, which are highly susceptible to thermally-induced, mass bleaching events. In Moorea, French Polynesia, we evaluated the response and fate of stony coral following a major thermal stress event in 2019 that caused a substantial amount of branching coral (dominantly Pocillopora) to bleach and die. We investigated whether Pocillopora colonies that occurred within territorial gardens protected by the farmerfish Stegastes nigricans were less susceptible to or survived bleaching better than Pocillopora on adjacent, undefended substrate. Bleaching prevalence (proportion of the sampled colonies affected) and severity (proportion of a colony’s tissue that bleached), which were quantified for >1,100 colonies shortly after they bleached, did not differ between colonies within or outside of defended gardens. By contrast, the fates of 399 focal colonies followed for a year revealed that a bleached coral within a garden was a third less likely to suffer complete colony death and, for survivors, about twice as likely to recover to its pre-bleaching cover of living tissue compared to Pocillopora outside of a farmerfish garden. Our findings indicate that while residing in a farmerfish garden may not reduce the bleaching susceptibility of a coral during thermal stress, it does help buffer a bleached coral against severe outcomes. This oasis effect of farmerfish gardens, where survival and recovery of thermally-damaged corals are enhanced, is another mechanism that helps explain why large Pocillopora colonies are far more abundant in farmerfish territories than elsewhere in the lagoons of Moorea, despite gardens being much less common. As such, farmerfish may have a growing role in maintaining the resilience of branching corals as the frequency and intensity of marine heat waves continue to increase.

Political protest plays an ambiguous role in the repertoire of political action. This essay examines cross-national levels of protest. With data from the new 1999-2002 wave of the World Values Survey, we test theories of protest derived from relative deprivation theory, political opportunity structures and political culture. The WVS enables us to test these theories on a near global scale with data from nearly 70 national surveys, comparing how the nature of protest potentially varies cross-nationally. We find that the primary sources of protest reflect the existing of resources and political opportunities to engage in protest activity. People protest not because they are frustrated and excluded from politics, but because the can protest and they expect governments to respond to their actions.

This report describes the preliminary findings from the World Values Survey conducted in Vietnam in 2001 within a comparative perspective of the 2000-01 World Values Survey (WVS). The WVS is a worldwide investigation of sociocultural and political change that has carried out representative national public opinion surveys in more than 65 societies on all six inhabited continents, containing almost 80% of the world's population. For the first time, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam joined the World Values Survey network. The Institute for Human Studies in Hanoi conducted the Vietnamese survey, under the direction of Prof. Pham Minh Hac. The Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of California in Irvine provided support for this study.