Applying insights from social-choice theory to illuminate the functioning of pluralitarian Westminster institutions, this article develops a coherent political answer to four puzzling questions about the economic liberalization that transformed New Zealand in 1984–93: why an anti-statist programme was initiated (and largely accomplished) by a labour party, why restructuring was more radical in New Zealand than in other democracies, why reformers were able to prevail through two elections and a change of government, and why they committed costly policy-sequencing errors. Understanding this remarkable case has implications for empirically grounded social-choice theory, the political theory of policy reform, and the evaluation of pluralitarian democracy – which New Zealanders themselves repudiated in 1993 by adopting proportional representation.

Recent studies of lynching have focused on structural theories that have been tested with demographic, economic and electoral data without much explanatory success. This article suggests that lynching was largely a reflection of a facilitating subculture of violence within which these atrocities were situationally determined by cultural factors not reported in census and economic tabulations, or election returns. Lynching declined in the twentieth century, in part, as a result of segregation and disfranchisement policies, but mainly because state executioners replaced lynch mobs in carrying out the will of the white majority.

This article analyses Imperial Germany's legendary coalition of landed aristocracy and heavy industry around a policy of tariff protection. Using a simple model of voting behaviour, where party affiliation serves as a partial intervening variable between constituency interests and legislative votes on trade policy, I test hypotheses derived from three different interpretations of the ‘marriage of iron and rye’. Roll-call votes from four key divisions in the Reichstag are analysed in a number of forms, ranging from cross-tabulations to conditional logistic regression. Ronald Rogowski's ‘factor endowment’ model offers an important dynamic perspective that is lacking in the others, but his model must be reconciled with anomalies that arise in the short run. Rather than attempting to disentangle political party ideology from constituents' interests, more insight may be gained from understanding why the effects of the two causal factors were not fixed, and how they varied over time.

This article applies the portfolio allocation model of government formation to the formation of local government administrations in general, with a particular empirical application to the formation of administrations in British local authorities with hung councils. First, the implications of the portfolio allocation model for the formation of local administrations are discussed. Secondly, this model is operationalized in the context of British local politics, and specific empirical implications are explicitly derived from it. Thirdly, these implications are systematically evaluated against the recent experience of the formation of local administrations in Britain. The results suggest that policy is indeed important in the formation of British local administrations, but that more than a single left–right dimension of financial policy is needed to describe this process adequately.

Taking it in turns is an endemic feature of political and social life. For instance, in a democratic system parties take turns in office according to the outcome of elections. Despite its empirical importance, taking it in turns has received virtually no attention from rational choice theorists. First, a general definition of taking it in turns is given. Secondly, the conditions for taking it in turns to be stable and efficient in Prisoners' Dilemma, Chicken, and Co-ordination supergames are discussed. The key result is that, where stable adherence to a taking it in turns pattern demands that players' continued adherence is conditional on the past adherence of others, players will stick with the pattern if they get their turn often enough. The precise conditions are shown to depend on the payoff structure and the discount rate. Potential problems are identified with initiating stable taking it in turns because of the existence of multiple equilibria and players' desire to get a stable taking it in turns pattern that gives them a high expected payoff. The paradigmatic version of this problem is who goes first when two players alternate between getting a high and a low payoff. The applicability of the results is illustrated by considering the questions of democratic stability and transitions to democracy.

This article examines those public interest groups that have grown through heavy advertising expenditure and sophisticated marketing techniques, most particularly direct mail solicitations. It suggests that an Olson-style rational choice understanding of this ‘mail order’ membership must be supplemented by a recognition of the importance of group activity in manipulating the factors considered by individuals in joining decisions. Thus it moves the focus from the demand-side to the supply-side. Active marketing by groups can exploit sympathy for causes and encourage the predisposed potential member to join. Individuals do consider the range of benefits offered (though the list of factors is broader than Olson indicates) in their membership choices, but the group deliberately shapes the way in which these are regarded.

The problem of aggregation processes in alignments is the subject of a paper published recently in a statistical physics journal. Two models are presented and discussed in that paper. First, the energy landscape model proposed by Robert Axelrod and D. Scott Bennett (this Journal, 23 (1993), 211–33) is analysed. The model is shown not to include most of its claimed results. Then a second model is presented to reformulate the problem correctly within statistical physics and to extend it beyond the initial Axelrod-Bennett analogy.

Landscape theory proposed a model of the alignment of actors (such as nations) based upon the importance of individual actors and their pairwise relationships. The model was implemented in simulation software and its predictions compared favourably with empirical reality given several input situations. The model successfully predicted the alignment of seventeen European nations in the Second World War alliance patterns since the Cold War.