Political parties that wish to exercise executive power in parliamentary democracies are typically forced to enter some form of coalition. Parties can either form a pre-electoral coalition prior to election or they can compete independently and form a government coalition afterwards. While there is a vast literature on government coalitions, little is known about pre-electoral coalitions. A systematic analysis of these coalitions using a new dataset constructed by the author and presented here contains information on all potential pre-electoral coalition dyads in twenty industrialized parliamentary democracies from 1946 to 1998. Pre-electoral coalitions are more likely to form between ideologically compatible parties. They are also more likely to form when the expected coalition size is large (but not too large) and the potential coalition partners are similar in size. Finally, they are more likely to form if the party system is ideologically polarized and the electoral rules are disproportional.

Liberal democracies have long practised torture, but should they ever permit their officials to torture (and, if so, when?), how should their citizens think and talk about it, and how should the law treat it? Is it just another instance of ‘dirty hands’ in politics? If it averts some terrible harm, can resorting to it be seen as choosing the ‘lesser evil’? What, then, is torture? The ‘torture memos’ of the Bush administration's legal advisers are reviewed and their attempt to narrow its definition criticized, as is Judge Posner's attempt to confine it to physical coercion. Attempts to evade the questions above (on the grounds that torture is never effective in averting disaster) are rejected. It is suggested that torture, unlike other cases of dirty hands considered, cannot be rendered liberal-democratically accountable, in the sense that it will sometimes be legitimate and, when not, punished, because its practice cannot be publicly recognized without undermining both the democratic and liberal components of liberal democracy. This suggestion is supported by adducing a ‘Durkheimian argument’ to the effect that our institutions and customs have been so penetrated by core elements of an egalitarian ‘religion of individualism’ that violating them threatens a kind of ‘moral disintegration’. This, it is argued, requires liberal democracies to reject the very idea of a scale that can allow comparison of the benefits against the costs of torturing. The absolute prohibition serves to maintain inhibitions, though these are currently being eroded by the fear of terrorism.

Active labour-market policy is an important tool for governments interested in the promotion of employment. This article explores a topic in the comparative political economy literature in need of more attention: the politics behind the promotion of active labour policies. It is argued here that social democratic governments are often not interested in employment promotion measures; labour is divided into those with secure employment (insiders) and those without (outsiders); it is contended that social democratic governments have strong incentives to pursue labour-market policies that benefit insiders but not outsiders. There are factors, however, that either exacerbate or limit the effects of insider–outsider differences on social democracy. These claims are tested in three ways. First, the interplay of government partisanship and employment protection is explored in the British case. Secondly, the individual preferences assumed in the model are tested with Eurobarometer data. And thirdly, the effects of social democracy on active labour-market policy are analysed using data from sixteen industrialized democracies.

Recent veto player work argues that majoritarian regimes such as the United Kingdom have better fiscal discipline and smaller welfare states than proportional regimes with more veto players. An analytic narrative of the failure of land value taxation in the United Kingdom between 1909 and 1914 shows, however, that it failed not because of previously advanced reasons, but because the number of veto players in British politics was sharply increased. This increase in veto player numbers prevented a tax increase. All seven of the conventional reasons for characterizing the United Kingdom as a low-n veto player regime failed to hold between 1906 and 1914. Observable implications discussed include the need to review the entire history of British politics in this period in the light of the temporary increase in veto players; and the ambiguous implications of number of veto players for fiscal discipline.

Complaints are common about the arbitrary and conservative bias of special-majority rules. Such complaints, however, apply to asymmetrical versions of those rules alone. Symmetrical special-majority rules remedy that defect, albeit at the cost of often rendering no determinate verdict. Here what is formally at stake, both procedurally and epistemically, is explored in the choice between those two forms of special-majority rule and simple-majority rule; and practical ways are suggested of resolving matters left open by symmetrical special-majority rules – such as ‘judicial extrapolation’ or ‘subsidiarity’ in a federal system.

The eastern enlargement of the European Union is a twofold process, in which governments of transition countries decide whether or not to apply for membership and in turn EU members decide whether or not to accept these applicants. The authors argue that the level of democracy and the extent of market reforms together determine the first decision, while the second decision is largely determined by the EU observing the reform process in applicant countries imposed by the acquis communautaire conditionality. The natural procedure to test this theory is a Heckman selection model. A Heckman specification with panel probit estimators in both stages is used. The data supports the argument that uncontested reforms signal the policy support of relevant political parties to the EUand increase the likelihood of joining the Union. The authors also test for specification errors and check the robustness of the findings.

This article provides operational measures for comparing welfare states in terms of the concept of post-productivism, as pioneered by Goodin in this Journal, and discusses the normative relevance of such comparisons. Post-productivism holds that it is desirable to grant people a high level of personal autonomy, through the welfare state's labour-market institutions and transfer system, and maintains that on average, people would choose to make use of their autonomy by working less, hence earning less and having more free time. By contrast, existing welfare states, for example as classified in Esping-Andersen's three-way split of liberal, social-democratic and corporatist regimes, are largely ‘productivist’, as their policies try to design social rights so as ensure economic self-reliance through full-time work. The question is whether they actually succeed in doing so. With a limited dataset of thirteen OECD countries for 1993, three conditions of personal autonomy – income adequacy, temporal adequacy and absence of welfare-work conditionality – are discussed in terms of policy outputs, which can be read off from easily accessible OECD statistics. Two closely related concepts are explored: comprehensive post-productivism, measuring the extent to which welfare states approximate the ideal of personal autonomy, and restricted post-productivism, which follows from two common goals shared by all welfare states (avoidance of poverty and reduction of involuntary underemployment), and expressly focuses on the policy outputs on which the productivist and post-productivist perspectives specifically disagree: welfare-work unconditionality, voluntary underemployment and average annual hours of work per employee. After showing that ranking the thirteen cases puts the Netherlands at the top and the United States at the bottom, in conformity with Goodin's earlier work, it is shown that restricted post-productivism is not positively associated with the poverty rate, and negatively with the rate of involuntary underemployment. This finding sets the stage for our discussion of normative issues underlying a preference for either productivist or post-productivist arrangements of work and welfare. Suggestions for further research are given in the final section.

Why and how do candidates choose the issues on which their campaigns are based? Drawing on a large database of candidate advertisements from the 1998 House and Senate campaigns, extant theories of issue emphasis, which focus on factors such as party ownership and candidate record, are tested here and these theories are expanded by examining in more detail the role of constituency characteristics. Most notably, party ownership's impact is demonstrated to be weak: candidates are more willing to ‘trespass’ or talk about the other party's issues than previous literature has found. Also ‘trespassing’ is shown to be facilitated by framing the other party's issues in certain ways. The results have implications for theories of candidate strategy and for normative questions, such as how much ‘dialogue’ occurs in campaigns.

This article introduces the concept of patronage regimes and, through it, extends the research on American party development. No systematic empirical inquiry into the operation of American patronage practices has yet been undertaken. Its analysis investigates the strategic allocation of public jobs by party elites to enhance cadre performance in presidential elections. Utilizing a dataset of 49,000 Senate-confirmed, presidential appointments, presidential patronage removals between the years 1829 and 1917 are analysed. Two distinctive patronage regimes are identified: an antebellum regime structured by pure-and-simple spoils politics and a postbellum regime conforming to principles of machine rationality. Factors central to the process of regime transformation are pinpointed. The presence of two successive patronage regimes highlights the importance of endogenous political incentives and elite strategic choice to the emergent character of party organization, shedding new light on the historical development of these pre-eminent nineteenth-century American political institutions.

Do trade-transmitted international business cycles affect the timing of national elections? This article shows that export expansions do not differ substantively from booms in aggregate output in inviting opportunistic governments to call elections, especially as their terms mature. Further analysis confirms two ancillary implications of this relationship: (a) that clusters of countries tend to hold elections in periods of international economic expansion and (b) that national election cycles, much like business cycles, have become more correlated over time, most prominently in Europe. The findings in this article raise implications for continued economic integration: freer movement of goods, services and capital may imply more correlated business cycles and, by extension, election cycles.

Biotechnology policy in the United States promotes the commercial development of genetically modified crops, yet adopts a precautionary approach when it comes to stem cells and cloning. In this article, the evolution of this bifurcated policy domain is traced. A detailed analysis of congressional hearings shows how distinctions between the products of biotechnology came to be reflected in the character of committees holding hearings, the attention to risks and benefits, and the pattern of interest-group activity in different biotechnology applications. It is argued that many of the differences that separate the United States and Europe in biotechnology reflect the way institutions reinforce past policy choices.

Europe has over the past century experienced an impressive increase in the number of presidential heads of state. Many of the new democracies since the mid-1970s are semi-presidential regimes that combine a popularly elected president with the traditional features of parliamentary democracy. At the same time, the frequency of the appointment of non-partisan cabinet members has risen. Cabinet appointments are the most important personnel decisions in parliamentary systems, and traditionally such appointments have been virtually monopolized by the governing political parties. Under semi-presidentialism, however, cabinet appointments may instead become a tug-of-war between a prime minister and a president with different partisan preferences. In this article the relationship between presidential power and the incidence of non-partisan cabinet appointments is examined and a game-theoretic model of cabinet appointments in parliamentary systems with a strong president is developed. In this model the prime minister has proposal power over cabinet appointments and the president an ex post veto. This model yields three comparative statics predictions concerning non-partisan cabinet appointments. The incidence of such appointments should covary positively with the president's powers and negatively with the prime minister's electoral prospects. The likelihood of such appointments should also correlate in a non-intuitive way with the value that the president and the prime minister attach to non-partisan appointees. Based on these results, eight operational hypotheses are developed, which are tested against a sample of 134 European cabinets representing twelve semi-presidential and twelve purely parliamentary regimes in the 1990s. Significant empirical support is found for all three comparative statics results and for most of the specific hypotheses.

A heated scholarly debate rages over the ‘culture wars thesis’ in American politics. Drawing on the literature on mass opinion constraint and its sources, we propose a resolution to this debate: the culture wars influence mass political behaviour in special religious, policy and political contexts where logical, psychological, social and electoral sources of opinion constraint are in effect. Using data pooled from the 1992, 1996 and 2000 American National Election Studies, we find strong support for our argument. We conclude that the cultural wars are waged by limited religious troops on narrow policy fronts under special political leadership, and a broader cultural conflagration is largely a rumour.

Scholars have invested a great deal of effort in trying to estimate the impact of political campaigns on the public. While progress has been made, one fundamental problem continues to plague our attempts to study campaigns: the lack of good, detailed data about the behaviour of candidates. In the United States, for instance, the presidential battle is a national struggle that unfolds locally on the stages of fifty states, yet most data collection efforts have treated presidential elections as if they were national contests, conducted (implicitly) in an identical manner across the entire country. Using available (national) data as a baseline and theory to predict plausible variations from that baseline, the authors devise a method for simulating variation in presidential campaigns across states and over election years—one of the crucial missing pieces of the puzzle. Their method generates a range of plausible effects, which is often narrow enough to shed light on important hypotheses. It can be employed whenever data are available at a more aggregate level than is desirable. This method is then applied to assess the debate over the impact of attack advertising on turnout. This approach suggests that campaign negativism stimulated (rather than demobilized) turnout in presidential elections from 1980 through 2000.

Mixed-member electoral systems require voters simultaneously to cast ballots in single-member districts (SMD) and multimember, proportional representation (PR) constituencies. It may be that not all parties offer candidates in both electoral contexts, however. In this event would-be voters for some parties may find themselves ‘frustrated’ by the restricted choice menu on offer in the SMD, being effectively forced to split their vote between different parties. Here we explore the different behaviours of frustrated voters in the 1996 mixed-member election to Italy's Chamber of Deputies, characterizing these as being either in some sense non-strategic (concerned above all with the relative policy platforms of candidates) or strategic (concerned above all to influence the eventual composition of government). Using an extended method for ecological inference, we parameterize and estimate rates of different types of ticket-splitting at the district level, and link the degree of what we characterize as strategic voting to the relative policy distance between the respective local representatives of the Italian pre-electoral coalitions.

Why would fully informed, rational actors fight over possession of a valued asset when they could negotiate a settlement in peace? Our explanation of the decision to fight highlights the incentives that are present when the defender holds a valued asset coveted by the challenger. The defender receives utility from possession of the contested asset and sees any compromise as a loss that is lower if postponed. The challenger, instead, sees any compromise as a gain that is more valuable if reached earlier. Faced with the defender's vested interest in the status quo, the challenger needs to threaten war and may have no choice but to implement the threat to force a settlement. For the defender, the threat of war is a deterrent that might incite the challenger to back down. In the perfect equilibria that we describe, the players' ability to threaten each other credibly allows them to maintain incompatible bargaining positions instead of helping them narrow their differences. But the very credibility of these threats leads our rivals to engage in what can become lengthy protracted wars.

A sophisticated research tradition has explored theoretically and empirically the consequences of election laws for vote–seat disproportionality and, more recently, for the distance between citizen and legislative left–right medians. In contemporary parliamentary systems, policy making tends to be dominated by governments, not legislatures. This article extends election law theory to its expected effects on the left–right representativeness of governing parties and examines whether these are realized after eighty-two elections in fifteen mature parliamentary systems. The analysis shows how the legislative median party, the legislative plurality party and pre-election coalition agreements between parties shape these connections between citizens, legislatures and governments. The article also develops more nuanced measures of party influence on policy making and re-examines the governmental findings using these. Governments and policy-making configurations emerging from bargaining after PR elections are in net significantly closer to their citizens than those created by SMD elections.

In contests for the presidential nominations from the Democratic and Republican parties in the United States, the duration of candidacies determines both the winning candidate (i.e., the one who outlasts his or her opponents) and the amount of intraparty conflict before the nomination is bestowed. This article analyses how strategic considerations lead some candidates to exit the race more quickly than others. Factors which could shape such strategic considerations include initial candidate assets and characteristics (national poll standings, fund-raising totals and occupational background), initial contest outcomes (Iowa and New Hampshire) and structural variables (proportional representation delegate distribution rules, party, front-loaded calendar). Results from a duration model indicate that poll standings, money (in a curvilinear pattern), New Hampshire and Iowa results, occupational backgrounds and the front-loading of the primary calendar shaped the length of candidacies for presidential contestants from 1980 to 2004. Candidates lacking in initial assets or early victories leave the nomination race in a process most resembling a game of attrition.

Are some people more prone to instabilities in partisanship due to the ways they rank and organize their core values? We investigate the mechanisms of partisan volatility, considering whether instabilities reflect value conflict and ambivalence. Our expectation is that when the basic values of the American ethos come into conflict in elite discourse, citizens have difficulty reconciling their own value arrangement with that of elites, resulting in greater partisan volatility. To this end, we use several heteroscedastic regression and ordered probit models to explore whether the conflict of competing values explains the response variance and instability of individual-level partisanship and ideology over time. To construct measures of value conflict, we rely on data from the 1992, 1994 and 1996 American National Election Studies. We find that, while instabilities in partisan identification reflect low information for some, the competition of core values generates volatility in partisan affiliations for others. In deliberating the value tradeoffs of politics, people may be of two minds even about central beliefs such as party identification.

Do democratic elections and experience with democracy affect citizens' propensity to engage in political protest? If so, how? A model of protest potential based on the incentives election winners and losers face in new and established democratic systems is presented. Using surveys conducted by the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) in seventeen democracies around the globe, the effect on political protest potential of being in the political minority or majority after an election is compared. Being in the political minority heightens citizens' political protest potential. Moreover, the effect on protest potential of losing is significantly greater in new democracies compared with established ones. These findings provide systematic evidence that election outcomes should be considered important indicators of political protest potential, and they imply that this effect is particularly salient in countries whose democratic institutions are relatively new and potentially more unstable.