The US presidency has been progressively weakened over the past three decades – to the point where it is probably weaker today than at almost any time in the preceding century. The formal powers of the office have been trimmed. Congress, in the absence of Cold War and domestic emergency, has reasserted itself on all scores. The modern revolution in communications has diminished the President's ability to convey his message to his people. Not least, the White House is grossly overstaffed. As a result of these developments, the presidency more resembles Franklin D. Roosevelt's second term, in its worst months, than either his first term or his third, and is weaker than were those of any of his Cold War successors.

Among the many ways in which welfare regimes differ, one is how they articulate the demands of work and welfare. Such a framework not only renders more coherent the familiar ‘three worlds of welfare capitalism’ but also highlights another option: a ‘post-productivist’ welfare regime, which combines generous social benefits and a relaxed attitude towards work requirements, aiming at ‘autonomy’ as its core value. Analysis of OECD data circa 1993 shows that a work–welfare classification successfully locates most of the countries in their traditional regime types. It also shows the Netherlands as an instance of the new regime type, effectively promoting the three key components of post-productivist autonomy: income adequacy, temporal adequacy and minimimal conditionality.

The concept of a neighbourhood effect within British voting patterns has largely been discarded, because no data have been available for testing it at the appropriate spatial scales. To undertake such tests, bespoke neighbourhoods have been created around the home of each respondent to the 1997 British Election Study survey in England and Wales, and small-area census data have been assembled for these to depict the socio-economic characteristics of voters' local contexts. Analyses of voting in these small areas, divided into five equal-sized status areas, provides very strong evidence that members of each social class were much more likely to vote Labour than Conservative in the low-status than in the high-status areas. This is entirely consistent with the concept of the neighbourhood effect, but alternative explanations are feasible. The data provide very strong evidence of micro-geographical variations in voting patterns, for which further research is necessary to identify the processes involved.

The demise of President Clinton's 1993 health care reform plan provides a revealing window into the difficulties and hazards of drawing lessons from complex political events. In an effort to identify the causes and implications of the Clinton plan's failure, students of American health policy have offered a blizzard of alleged historical lessons that purport to explain why the plan, along with its leading alternatives, went down to such a crushing political defeat. On closer inspection, however, many of these putative lessons turn out to be hastily formulated, weakly grounded and prescriptively inadequate. These deficiencies are by no means unique to the commentary on health care reform in the United States. Rather, they reflect general risks of constructing lessons for action or analysis on the basis of just one or a few striking political events. Although these risks are endemic to historical lesson-drawing, they could be reduced by more careful attention to basic rules of historical comparison and counterfactual analysis. They could also be mitigated by a greater awareness of the fundamental uncertainties that, for a variety of reasons, characterize complex political interactions. Viewing outcomes as uncertain does not preclude forecasting and, indeed, may lead to more nuanced and accurate predictions, as well as to a greater appreciation of historical turning points and moments of meaningful strategic choice.

What should major parties out of power do to win elections? To answer that question, we need to understand what these parties do to recapture political ascendancy and whether their actual behaviour differs from their optimal behaviour. In this article, we propose a systematic, replicable method of identifying the competitive strategies that American parties out of power have adopted in their pursuit of the presidency. We present a taxonomy of party strategies, which we operationalize by comparison of utility functions for hypothetical voters. Using both directional and proximity models of issue voting, we compute these utility functions for each presidential election from 1852 to 1996, controlling for variables that systematically affect voting, including economic conditions and incumbency. These results suggest that, contrary to the views of many political scientists and party activists, there is no single optimal strategy through which parties out of power can regain it. Rather, several competitive strategies offer similar prospects for electoral success.

The spatial maps of parties' policy programmes published by the Manifesto Research Group (MRG) for the European Consortium for Political Research reveal the following empirical patterns: that parties differentiate their policy positions from one another; that parties rarely leapfrog each other; that parties shift their positions over time but only within ‘ideologically delimited’ areas of the policy space. These findings are not well explained by existing spatial models of party competition, which typically predict policy convergence and which moreover do not examine temporal patterns of party policies. This article modifies the standard Downsian model to incorporate a concept originally developed by Chapman that, in addition to policies, voters are motivated by non-policy considerations arising from such factors as party leaders' images, social-psychological attachments rooted in class, religion, ethnicity and so on. For this ‘biased vote’ model I present illustrative arguments that vote-seeking parties are motivated to differentiate their policy positions from each other, and that over time they can be expected to vary their policy proposals but without leapfrogging – predictions that accord well with the MRG's empirical findings. I apply the biased vote model to empirical data on the distributions of voter preferences in recent British and French elections. My results support the illustrative arguments, and also suggest that these arguments apply even when the degree of voter bias in the electorate is quite low.

Political scientists have debated whether citizens can use core principles in lieu of ideological orientations to deduce their policy preferences. The ‘General Use’ model of public opinion holds that everyone draws equally on core principles to determine their preferences. The ‘Expertise Interaction’ model holds that the extent to which core principles influence policy preferences is a function of political expertise. Unfortunately, research design and measurement problems in extant work preclude a resolution of this debate. Here I account for these problems, test the predictions of both models, and find empirical support for each. The results demonstrate that while there is a moderate tendency for political expertise to strengthen the relationship between core beliefs and policy preferences, virtually all citizens use core beliefs to deduce preferences.

Incentive compatibility solutions to social dilemmas change individual consequences of non-co-operative and co-operative acts such that self-maximizers will rationally choose to act in ways that promote the public good, i.e. to co-operate. The traditional selfish egoism assumption of rational choice requires dilemmas to be solved by either adding some likely punishment to defection or reward to co-operation. Dilemma co-operation can also, of course, be explained by relaxing the narrow self-interest assumption. By allowing for the possibility that outcomes of interdependent interactions are subjectively evaluated by reference to the actor's own as well as others' interests, or that people get additional utility (or avoid disutility) by following certain normative codes, co-operation in finitely repeated dilemmas can be rational.For examples of evidence of subjective transformations of given payoff matrices, see James Andreoni, ‘Giving with Impure Altrusim: Applications to Charity and Recardian Equivalence’, Journal of Political Economy, 97 (1989), 447–51; and Michael D. Kuhlman and Alfred F. J. Marshello, ‘Individual Differences in Game Motivation as Moderators of Preprogrammed Strategic Effects in Prisoner's Dilemma’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32 (1975), 922–31.

Textual analyses of party and government programmes open up exciting possibilities for the investigation of policy and operationalization of theory. This Note focuses on the validity of the resulting estimates, particularly of the massive policy time-series assembled by the Manifesto Research Group (MRG) of the European Consortium. These are important not only for the policy measurements they provide for fifty post-war democracies, but also from the point of view of validating other codings of texts, especially those deriving from computerized analyses. No other validating standard is available for any but a handful of post-war elections – certainly none other that so unambiguously measures policy preferences as opposed to actual party behaviour and which itself has been so well established by extensive use. Ian Budge, David Robertson and D. J. Hearl, eds., Ideology, Strategy and Party Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Data-collection continues under the direction of H-D. Klingemann and Andrea Volkens of the Wissenschaftzentrum Berlin under the title of the Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP) and now covers fifty countries.

Rich Americans, far more likely to vote than their poorer fellow citizens, also differ in how they vote and what policies they favour. These undisputed facts lead to the widespread belief ‘that if everybody in this country voted, the Democrats would be in for the next 100 years.’ The gist of this conclusion, which seems to follow ineluctably from our opening sentence, is accepted by almost everyone except a few empirical political scientists. Their analyses of survey data show that no objectively achieved increase in turnout – including compulsory voting – would be a boon to progressive causes or Democratic candidates. Simply put, voters' preferences differ minimally from those of all citizens; outcomes would not change if everyone voted. John Kenneth Galbraith, Interview in California Monthly, February 1986, p. 11.