The 1997 British general election saw a record 120 women returned to the House of Commons, 101 of them Labour. Yet if the most striking feature of the 1997 intake into the House of Commons was the number of newly elected women, then the most striking feature of the backbench rebellions in that parliament was the lack of these women amongst the ranks of the rebels. They were less than half as likely to rebel against the party whip as the rest of the Parliamentary Labour Party; even those who did, did so around half as often. Attempts to explain this difference fall into two broad groups: (i) those that attempt to explain the difference away, as resulting from other characteristics of the women, and (ii) those that attempt to explain it – indeed, celebrate it – as evidence of a different, women's, style of political behaviour. Attempts at (i) are largely unconvincing: most of the supposed explanations for the difference do not stand up to empirical verification. Although difficult to prove, a belief in (ii) is dominant amongst the new women themselves.

The two most influential traditions of contemporary theorizing about democracy, social choice theory and deliberative democracy are generally thought to be at loggerheads, in that one demonstrates the impossibility, instability or meaninglessness of the rational collective outcomes sought by the other. We argue that the two traditions can be reconciled. After expounding the central Arrow and Gibbard–Satterthwaite impossibility results, we reassess their implications, identifying the conditions under which meaningful democratic decision making is possible. We argue that deliberation can promote these conditions, and hence that social choice theory suggests not that democratic decision making is impossible, but rather that democracy must have a deliberative aspect.

According to a portrait of elections widely held in academic political science, election outcomes depend on the ‘fundamentals’, especially peace and prosperity. Al Gore's election showing in 2000 runs counter to the preceding interpretation of elections. Objective conditions pointed to a comfortable victory, if not a landslide, but Gore's narrow popular vote margin fell well below the expectations held by many political scientists. This article attempts to account for Gore's under-performance via detailed analyses of National Election Studies surveys. We find that Gore's often criticized personality was not a cause of his under-performance. Rather, the major cause was his failure to receive a historically normal amount of credit for the performance of the Clinton administration. Secondary contributors were the drag of Clinton's personal affairs and Gore's decision to run to the left of where Clinton had positioned the Democratic party. Quite possibly these three factors are logically related: failure to get normal credit reflected Gore's peculiar campaign, which in turn reflected fear of association with Clinton's behaviour.

The conventional wisdom about the US Supreme Court and the 2000 presidential election is that the Court wounded itself by participating in such a partisan dispute. By ‘wounded’ people mean that the institution lost some of its legitimacy. Evidence from our survey, conducted in early 2001, suggests little if any diminution of the Court’s legitimacy in the aftermath of Bush v. Gore, even among African Americans. We observe a relationship between evaluations of the opinion and institutional legitimacy, but the bulk of the causality seems to flow from loyalty to evaluations of the case, not vice versa. We argue that legitimacy frames perceptions of the Court opinion. Furthermore, increased awareness of the activities of the Court tends to reinforce legitimacy by exposing people to the powerful symbols of law. In 2000, legitimacy did indeed seem to provide a reservoir of good will that allowed the Court to weather the storm created by its involvement in Florida’s presidential election.

This article examines the relationship between the legislature and the public administration in postwar Italy (understood as the period from about 1948 through 1994). Italian public administration is normally characterized as badly designed and inefficient, and government performance is usually classed as poor. I argue by contrast that bureaucratic inefficiency, excessive legislation and widespread bureaucratic corruption were features of Italian public administration that were deliberately designed by legislators and intended to enhance the re-election prospects for incumbents by providing them with opportunities for extensive constituency service. The underlying incentives stemmed from the candidates' search for the personal vote, essential for retaining public office. Differences in the laws regulating the financing of political campaigns explain why excessive bureaucratization in the Italian context also resulted in extensive political corruption.

Cross-sectional time-series data from fourteen stock markets, from 1973 to 1996, are used to study how political institutions compare in affecting party governments' incentives to enrich one group of industries at the expense of another. Using measures of cross-sectoral variance of price changes within stock markets as a proxy for change in redistributive policy, I show that political change is important in both proportional representation (PR) and majoritarian systems. As parties shift in and out of government, trade and industrial policy is redistributed to favour the parties' industrial supporters. Such changes in policy increase the cross-sectoral dispersion in price changes, with newly advantaged industries seeing their stock increase, while the price of those losing favourable policy declines. The temporal impact of redistribution differs across electoral systems, with the impact of political change being more immediate in majoritarian systems and the effect being more diffuse in PR systems. Majoritarian systems are also more responsive to economic shocks, while changes in economic conditions have few discernable effects on the dispersion of stock prices in PR countries. PR systems, however, experience overall higher levels of dispersion. I contrast these results with the dominant extant arguments of radical policy shifts in majoritarian systems and policy stability in PR systems.

There has been an important shift in the pattern of divergence between consumer and environmental protection policies in Europe and the United States. From the 1960s through the mid 1980s American regulatory standards tended to be more stringent, comprehensive and innovative than in either individual European countries or in the European Union (EU). However, since around 1990 the obverse has been true; many important EU consumer and environmental regulations are now more precautionary than their American counterparts.

The ‘new’ politics of consumer and environmental regulation in Europe are attributable to three inter-related factors: a series of regulatory failures within Europe, broader and stronger political support for more stringent and comprehensive regulatory standards within Europe and the growth in the regulatory competence of the European Union.

In many respects, European regulatory politics and policies since the 1990s resemble those of the United States during the 1970s. Thus health, safety and environmental politics and policies in the United States are no longer as distinctive as many scholars have portrayed them.

The theoretical literature presents conflicting expectations about the effect of globalization on national democratic governance. One view expects globalization to enhance democracy; a second argues the opposite; a third argues globalization does not necessarily affect democracy. Progress in explaining how globalization affects democracy requires confronting these theoretical positions with data. We assess empirically the effects of globalization on the level of democracy from 1970 to 1996 for 127 countries in a pooled time-series cross-sectional statistical model. The effects of four national aspects of globalization on democracy are examined: trade openness, foreign direct investment inflows, portfolio investment inflows and the spread of democratic ideas across countries. We find that trade openness and portfolio investment inflows negatively affect democracy. The effect of trade openness is constant over time while the negative effect of portfolio investment strengthens. Foreign direct investment inflows positively affect democracy, but the effect weakens over time. The spread of democratic ideas promotes democracy persistently over time. These patterns are robust across samples, various model specifications, alternative measures of democracy and several statistical estimators. We conclude with a discussion of policy implications.

I propose and test an informational theory of endogenous election timing. I assume leaders have more accurate estimates of future outcomes than citizens. The prospect of declining future performance spurs leaders to call early elections. Since leaders condition their timing decisions on their expectations of future performance, early elections signal a leader's lack of confidence in future outcomes. The earlier elections occur, relative to expectations, the stronger the signal of demise. Using data on British parliaments since 1945, I test hypotheses relating the timing of elections, electoral support and subsequent economic performance. As predicted, leaders who call elections early, relative to expectations, experience a decline in their popular support relative to pre-announcement levels.

In the United States it is widely believed that public assistance may have harmful effects on the social and political orientations of those who receive it. Certain kinds of government support – particularly welfare – may foster a ‘culture of dependence’ comprising values and beliefs that are different from, and perhaps contrary to, the predominant American political culture. We examine the relationship between government assistance and public opinion using survey data taken from the 1992 CPS National Election Study. Our empirical results show that welfare benefits do have some effect on issue attitudes. But recipients of public aid are virtually identical to non-recipients in terms of their core values, reactions to the political system and general beliefs about American society. There is no evidence that a distinctive ‘culture of dependence’ has developed among people who rely on financial support from the federal government.

Building upon Poole and Rosenthal’s NOMINATE technique and Kalt and Zupan’s residualization approach, I seek to disentangle the influences of constituency interests, party and ideology on the votes of MPs in the famous Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. I argue that while the Conservative party shared a distinct ideology, it was also a coalition of two interests-based alliances. The non-Peelite Conservatives represented mostly (protectionist oriented) agricultural districts while the Peelites represented districts with more free trade leaning interests. Before 1846, Peelites voted according to a general Conservative ideology, but in 1846 an abrupt change occurred: the pivotal Peelites appear to have eschewed Conservative party unity and their own personal ideology in favour more of the preferences of their constituents. Repeal appears to have gained passage as these MPs switched from voting more as trustees to voting more as delegates.

This article examines social cleavages and the impact of political legacies on Chile's post-authoritarian party system. In contrast to society-oriented approaches to party system formation, we argue that cleavage appearance in a party system depends on political agency, which can even (re)create social identities and social conflicts. The Chilean case illustrates this point; the structure of the party system is deeply influenced by distinctive political legacies of the authoritarian period. The cleavage between those who supported authoritarian rule and those who opposed it has powerfully shaped the party system during the new democratic period.

In post-authoritarian Chile (1990–2001), a societal approach does not adequately explain the formation of cleavages or the contours of the party system. A class cleavage has appeared between the governing coalition and the conservative opposition, but this cleavage is politically constructed and maintained. The Chilean case also shows that it is important to examine the ways in which political elites craft party systems from above during the transition period. Political agency from the supply side played a decisive role in emphasizing or diminishing some of the political and cultural conflicts existing after the authoritarian experience and, therefore, an essential role in party system formation in post-authoritarian Chile.

Analyses of the economic transformation of the Polish economy and of the 1993 elections to the parliament suggest it is possible to proceed with pro-market and democratic reforms simultaneously. As demonstrated by the Polish case, the key to this process is the rate at which new enterprises are created. These enterprises, not the privatization of existing ones, are primarily responsible for the creation of a growing private economy. This evolving new economy, securely based and growing, creates a pro-reform constituency in the regions where it occurs. This constituency supports pro-reform parties. The Polish case offers important lessons about the reform process and about the way economies and political constituencies co-evolve.

In recent years, both mass communication and personal communication have attracted increased interest as sources of persuasive information which influence individual voting decisions. However, few efforts have so far been made to investigate how mass communication and personal communication interact with regard to electoral decision making. Katz and Lazarsfeld's ‘filter hypothesis’ maintains that personal communication mediates the influence of mass communication on individual voters, reinforcing or blocking the impact of media information, depending on the evaluative implications of that information and on the political composition of voters' discussant networks. This hypothesis is examined and corroborated here, using comparable national election studies from Britain, Spain, the United States and West Germany.

Previous studies of group conflict theory look at the relationship between racial balance in a particular area (precinct, county, etc.) and racial attitudes or political behaviour within that area. While of value, there are significant methodological disadvantages to this approach. Here, I address those problems using public opinion experiments in which I ask respondents whether they would allocate political goods proportionally given different (randomly assigned) hypothetical racial environments. The experiment yields confirmatory results, with non-blacks more likely to support proportionality in less black than heavily black environments. In a second experiment, I find that the same relationship is much weaker when the variations in population are non-racial. Finally, I show that the relationship also holds for blacks and argue that this is theoretically consistent.

‘Groupthink’ refers to a situation in which decision makers seek to achieve concurrence among group members more than to make calculated, carefully considered decisions. In this study, the theory is explored in the case of the 1990–91 Persian Gulf crisis, with particular emphasis on President George Bush's inner circle. Using rare interviews and primary sources, it is revealed that some important conditions of the theory were present that affected how decisions were made, and it is explained theoretically why the outcome was none the less positive, contrary to what the theory would seem to predict.

Attitudes towards the political system have often been assumed to be stable attributes that are not easily influenced by short-term forces. We examine the extent to which attention to media coverage, campaign activity and electoral outcomes can mobilize support for the political system in the context of an election campaign. Using pre-election and post-election survey panels from the United States, Britain and New Zealand, we find only small shifts in aggregate measures of system support. However, we find that there are significant shifts in system support at the individual level that can be explained by status as election winners, attention to the media, particularly serious news coverage and economic perceptions. The results have implications for the debate over measures of system support such as trust, cynicism and efficacy.

This two-wave panel study was designed to investigate the effects of the media coverage leading up to and including an important European Union event (a summit meeting of EU leaders) on citizens’ attitudes towards the EU and European integration. A random sample of 817 citizens in the Netherlands was surveyed one month before the Amsterdam Summit in June 1997 and three days after it had ended. Two types of attitudes towards Europe were distinguished by scaling analysis: (a) national–pragmatic attitudes towards the EU and (b) supranational–idealistic attitudes towards the EU. Results indicated that supranational–idealistic attitudes were influenced positively as a result of the media coverage related to the summit, whereas national–pragmatic attitudes did not show a significant change. A control variable, attitudes towards immigrants, which was included to detect possible testing effects, showed no change. Effects of the summit’s media coverage were in the same direction across all levels of political knowledge and political attentiveness. When predicting change in supranational–idealistic attitudes, controlling for the original attitude and political knowledge, those who were most attentive to politics were more strongly influenced. These findings challenge traditional views of the impact of knowledge, attention and interest on attitude change.

Mixed-member proportional election systems give voters two choices – one for a party candidate in a first-past-the-post single-member constituency election and the other for a party list in a multi-member constituency. Some will vote a straight ticket (i.e. vote for the same party at each contest); others may vote a split-ticket. Although such an electoral system has been operating in Germany since 1953, very little work has been done on variations between constituencies in either the volume of split-ticket voting or the direction of the switching involved. Using an entropy-maximizing method, this article reports estimates of the pattern of straight-ticket and split-ticket voting in each of Germany's 328 constituencies at the 1998 federal elections. Analyses of the variations show that the patterns are consistent with patterns of party strength at the constituency level: the stronger a party's performance at the 1994 election, the better its ability to retain the support of straight-ticket voters in 1998, to limit the out-flows of split-ticket voters, and to attract split-ticket voters who supported another party in the list contest.

Existing scholarship claims that national policy has been much more deeply and dramatically Europeanized by the European Union (EU) than the administrative structures of national government. This finding appears to confirm the explanatory power of ‘new’ institutional theories, which emphasize the resilience of institutions in the face of strong pressures promoting greater convergence among dissimilar European political systems. Of the various national government structures that could be Europeanized, departments (or ministries) are especially important because they are primarily responsible for reconciling (or ‘fitting’) the demands of EU and national policy. However, existing scholarship does not fully investigate the extent to which departments themselves are Europeanized by the EU, or the impact that such a change could have on national policy. Taking as an example the Europeanization of one policy sector (the environment) in the United Kingdom, this article reveals that the national department has undergone a much deeper and more profound cultural change than one would expect if national structures were essentially unchanged by the Europeanization of policy. This single, but critical, case implies that the next phase of Europeanization research should open up the ‘black box’ of the state and examine the co-evolution of administrative structures, policies and politics.