Realist and liberal theories of international politics both assume that the essential parameters of international politics are fixed, though they differ as to the character of these parameters. We deploy decision psychology and discourse analysis to show how the seemingly limited choices of actors can and do affect these parameters. Thus realism and liberalism are poor guides to action, for they rest on empirical misconception and faulty logic. Intelligent international action is reflexive in that it attends to the world that actions help constitute, as well as take effect within. We show how actors can and do engage in reflexive action, and how they might do so more consciously and effectively. There are substantial implications for how states and other actors ought to behave in the post-Cold War world.

Our findings suggest that there are systematic differences in the ways that voters use the real values of economic variables when casting a vote depending on how long they have had to learn about the true state of the economy. It is possible that in campaigns of sufficient length voters may have more time to be exposed to competing campaign messages and to learn about the true state of the economy and the true policy positions of candidates. We tested this assertion on 113 elections in thirteen democracies. The test results in a confirmation of the hypothesis. In longer campaigns, voters rely more heavily on the true values of economic conditions to inform their evaluations of parties in power. In shorter campaigns, these effects are mostly absent. Campaign length seems to matter for voter learning.

The debate over class dealignment is in part a debate about the meaning of class, which cannot be separated from the issue of the relationship between class and voting. Neither the simplified two-class model that has often been used nor the more sophisticated Goldthorpe class schema are adequate either at the conceptual or the empirical level. Both fail to deal coherently with the intermediate positions in the class structure. The argument that `social class' is of continuing significance for the analysis of voting behaviour and of party identification is correct, but only if the nature of the stratification order is properly understood. The Cambridge Scale, a measure of general hierarchical, material and social advantage, based on patterns of social interaction, is shown to be comparable to the Goldthorpe schema in terms of statistical prediction. It is argued that it is preferable in the sense that it most clearly captures the single most important aspect of ‘class’, which is hierarchical position.

Presidential campaigns are the most obvious means by which American voters receive information about candidates and issues, yet there is strong resistance to the notion that they influence presidential elections. We conduct an examination of presidential campaign effects in the 1992 and 1996 elections that features three departures from previous studies: (1) a stronger definition of campaigning and campaign events, facilitating a clearer idea of what it is that we are testing; (2) detailed data on television and newspaper coverage of the campaigns, allowing us to measure media effects; and (3) an alternative measure of electoral impact that is resistant to survey errors and random movement. We find that campaign events, and particularly media coverage of those events, significantly affect the candidates' chances for electoral success.

Supporters of liberal neutrality distinguish between ‘weak’ conceptions of autonomy which operate as background features of liberal democratic regimes, and ‘strong’ conceptions, which amount to conceptions of the good. These latter are to be excluded from the political realm on the grounds that in order to protect and promote a conception of the good, in the context of a pluralistic society, the state would have to resort to illiberal methods. The result of this will be the destablization and fragmentation of the regime. In this article I argue two things: first, that autonomy ought to be understood, not as a neutral background assumption of liberal theory, but as a partially comprehensive conception of the good in its own right; secondly, that protecting and promoting autonomy need not lead either to illiberalism or to the destabilization and fragmentation of liberal democratic society.

“The making of society is the finding of common meanings and directions.” (Raymond Williams)

“Here I believe one’s point of reference should not be to the great model of language (langue) and signs, but to that of war and battle. The history which bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a language: relations of power, not relations of meaning.” (Michel Foucault)

It is frequently asserted that we live in a post-metaphysical world, a world devoid of intrinsic meaning. This view of the world as disenchanted, as expressed in the works of Weber, has been deepened and extended over the past century.

The geography of the vote in Britain is in part a function of the geography of social class and other individual-level characteristics associated with vote choice. Since the proportion of working-class people is lower in the South than the North we expect support for Labour to be lower in the South than in the North.

In a recent article in this journal, John Bartle, has extended work on British voting behaviour by testing the ‘funnel of causation model’ associated with the work of Miller and Shanks. He reported that left–right positions were important determinants of voters' party choices at the 1992 general election, and that these could only partly be linked to social class. John Bartle, ‘Left–Right Position Matters, But Does Social Class? Causal Models of the 1992 British General Elction’, British Journal of Political Science, 28 (1998), 501–29. The key works by Miller and Shanks, on which he draws, include Warren E. Miller and J. Merrill Shanks, The New American Voter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).

It is widely accepted that survey data tend to underestimate the levels of support for political parties or other groups that are perceived to advocate ‘extreme’ views. In this Note I propose the use of latent class analysis as a means by which this difficulty might be overcome and I illustrate it by an application to the case of support within Northern Ireland for Sinn Féin from survey data and apply latent class analysis to a recent dataset from Northern Ireland. The note concludes with some general remarks on the question of why surveys and elections disagree and the role of latent class analysis in explaining this phenomenon.