The argument that personal economic expectations drive support for British governing parties has received wide attention. This article employs aggregate data for the 1979–92 period to assess the effects of personal expectations, other subjective economic variables and evaluations of prime ministerial performance in rival party-support models. Analyses of competing models, including error correction specifications that take into account nonstationarity in the time series of interest, indicate that the personal expectations variants generally do very well, although they do not outperform one or more alternatives incorporating other types of economic evaluations. The error correction models show that the prime minister's approval ratings have significant short-term and long-term effects on governing party popularity.

The received wisdom in international relations suggests that we can best account for the foreign policies of small states by examining structural/systemic rather than domestic level factors. This article challenges this scholarly consensus. The distribution of power and the balance of threat do influence domestic institutional formation and change in emerging states. However, the subsequent military strategies of these weak states are likely to reflect such domestic institutional choices in a number of important and predictable ways. The article tests this argument against pre-1900 US domestic regime change and foreign security policy. The historical evidence suggests that while international preconditions were critically linked to constitutional reform, the institutional structures and rules of democratic presidentialism affected both the timing and substance of US military strategies in later periods. The US case study provides a springboard for speculating on the international context of democratization in Eastern Europe and the long-term foreign-policy consequences of this domestic regime choice.

This article addresses the issue of specialization and committee formation in the European Parliament in the light of the largely US-centred debates on these issues. Clear evidence is found of specialization of behaviour, both with regard to committee assignment and the use of parliamentary questions. This is also accompanied by a trend towards a greater role for the party groups in co-ordinating and controlling behaviour across these specializations.

Conflict within the British Conservative Party over the European Union provided a great deal of copy for media political coverage during 1992–94. It was undoubtedly responsible for severely damaging the prime minister's reputation within his party and the country. In July 1993, he could only achieve ratification of the Maastricht Treaty by making voting for it an issue of confidence in the House of Commons, thereby obtaining the support of most ‘Eurosceptic’ Conservative MPs. Nine months later, failure to achieve the United Kingdom's goal regarding voting procedures in the Council of Ministers following enlargement of the EU in 1995 led to several calls for his resignation from among his own party's MPs, including one in the House itself.

Until the late 1960s, most informed observers agreed with Pulzer's well-known claim that ‘class is the basis of British party politics; all else is embellishment and detail’. More recently, however, most analysts have come to believe that there has been a decline in the association between class and party choice, a development that is generally referred to as ‘class dealignment’. Nevertheless, several researchers have challenged this new consensus and argued that there has been little or no trend in the association between class and party.

In their Note ‘Corporatism and Consensus Democracy in Eighteen Countries’ (this Journal, 21 (1991), 235–46) Arend Lijphart and Markus Crepaz sought to analyse the conceptual and theoretical linkages between corporatism and consensus democracy. Their aim was not only to investigate whether the concepts were linked to each other, but also to examine to what extent they overlapped. The authors claim that corporatism is part and parcel of consensual types of democracy (p. 235). If corporatism could be included as a dimension of consensual democracy the contrasts between Westminster and consensual types of democracy would be empirically enhanced and would be more comprehensive. Although this is an interesting line of thought, we think that there are a number of conceptual and methodological flaws in the elaboration of this idea that should be discussed in more detail, because they may very well cast some doubt on the degree to which corporatism is indeed ‘part and parcel’ of consensual politics. In this Comment we shall elaborate this argument and also suggest some ways in which the thrust of Lijphart and Crepaz's theoretical arguments can be upheld and their empirical analysis improved.

Hans Keman's and Paul Pennings's critique (‘Managing Political and Societal Conflict in Democracies: Do Consensus and Corporatism Matter?’, this Journal, preceding pages) of our attempt to link corporatism and consensus democracy falls essentially into three parts. Their first criticism deals with the way we measured corporatism. They reject our ‘composite’ approach on the basis that different experts have different conceptual understandings of corporatism. Hence, they argue, it is unwarranted to add up these various scores. Secondly, they claim that our central relationship between consensus democracy and corporatism is a function of our particular measure of corporatism and, in addition, driven by two outlying cases: Italy and Austria. Thirdly, they claim that corporatism and consensus democracy are two different phenomena, and that therefore, corporatism should not be integrated into the concept of consensus democracy. We shall address these three main criticisms in the order described.