From the late 1970s on, after several decades characterized by relatively interventionist patterns of economic policy making, most advanced states began questioning and, in some instances, abandoning active industrial policies and privatizing public businesses. Examining the evolution of the public business sector in all nations included in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) from 1979 to 1993, this article shows that the sale of public firms did not mechanically derive from either declining growth rates, growing budget deficits or the increasing internationalization of domestic economies. Although the economic slowdown of the 1970s had the effect of breaking down the so-called Keynesian post-war consensus, the strategies towards the public business sector eventually adopted were shaped by the partisan composition of office – conservatives privatized while social democrats opted for the status quo – and by the internal structure of the cabinet – divided governments produced little change in either direction. From a theoretical point of view, this analysis broadens the current political-economic literature by showing that, although parties have a limited impact on the standard macroeconomic policies employed to manage the business cycle – a point widely confirmed in the literature – they do play a central role in designing policies, such as the level of public ownership of the business sector, that shape the supply side of the economy.

Despite considerable research, the theory of gender difference in electoral behaviour remains underdeveloped, especially in accounting for variation across elections. We focus on two aspects requiring particular attention: (1) accounts of gender difference, especially distinguishing between positional explanations, in which gender differences stem from men and women taking the same considerations into account, but having different positions on those considerations, or structural explanations, in which gender differences stem from men and women taking different considerations into account in making judgements; (2) the effects of electoral context in cuing gender as a consideration, thus stimulating or inhibiting the appearance of gender differences. We use a case study of the 1992 US presidential election, often labelled ‘The Year of the Woman’, to explore these problems.

Past research on policy subsystems has not attempted to explain the manner in which policy preferences for customary subsystem participants are formed as part of a system. The purpose of this research is to narrow the gap between the theoretical conceptualization and empirical articulation of policy subsystems. This study examines the formation of policy preferences for standard subsystem participants in the area of commercial bank regulation for the 1949–89 period. The findings reveal that the formation of (regulatory) policy preferences for these main subsystem participants reflects strategic behaviour rather than retrospective behaviour. This suggests that institutional participants within the commercial banking regulatory subsystem strategically operate in a policy environment with an abundance of information.

An analysis is made of the interaction between the legislature and the judiciary in the Dutch parliamentary setting, focusing in particular on the issue of euthanasia. Using the methodology of positive political theory, two alternative hypotheses are derived about the extent to which the courts may affect public policies. Two main conclusions can be drawn from the analysis of the decision-making process on euthanasia. First, the statutory interpretation the courts gave on euthanasia in the 1980s supports the hypothesis of the court as a policy advocate, not a policy conserver. Secondly, the fact that the courts were able to introduce and maintain a more liberal interpretation of euthanasia during the last decade can be explained as a consequence of the heterogenous preferences on this issue held by the political parties that formed the successive governing coalitions.

The importance of technological innovation in health care is due to the historical ascendancy of scientific medicine over other therapies. Scientific medicine in turn was strengthened through an alliance between professional elites and corporate interests. That alliance has been destabilized by developments in health care politics, by changes in industrial structures and by alterations in democratic politics. The medical goods industries remain powerful lobbies, but they operate in an increasingly competitive lobbying environment.

The term ‘constitutional democracy’ can be interpreted as either an oxymoron or a tautology. On the one hand, constitutionalism and democracy can appear opposed to each other. Whereas the first term refers to ‘restrained and divided’ power, the second implies its ultimately ‘unified and unconstrained’ exercise. On the other hand, constitutions can be presented as codifying the rules of the democratic game, indicating who can vote, how, when and why. Since the democratic ideal involves more than mere adherence to the formal procedural devices of democracy, such as majority rule, many constitutionalists argue that no true democrat could consistently allow a democracy to abolish itself. There is no contradiction, therefore, in entrenching the rights that are inherent to the democratic process itself and preventing their abrogation even by democratically elected politicians. However, democrats point out that rules constrain as well as enable. There are many different models of democracy, which define the democratic rules in a variety of often incompatible ways. If democracy is to mean ‘people rule’, then the Demos should be free to redefine the rules whenever they want and should not be tied to any given definition. The need to keep open the possibility of democratic review seems particularly important when one remembers that the constitutions of many democracies have excluded significant categories of people from citizenship, notably women and those without property, and placed severe limits on the exercise of the popular will, such as the indirect election of representatives. Of course, some exclusions and limitations are inevitable – they are intrinsic to any rule-governed activity. That we are not lumbered with the exclusions and limitations of the eighteenth century, though, is in large part due to successive social and democratic movements and reforms.See S. S. Wolin, ‘Collective Identity and Constitutional Power’, in The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 8; cf. also the various studies in J. Elster and R. Slagstad, eds, Constitutionalism and Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). On the restriction of scope that constitutionalism imposes on democracy, see A. Weale, ‘The Limits of Democracy’, in A. Hamlin and P. Pettit, eds, The Good Polity: Normative Analysis of the State (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); and R. Ruffilli, ‘Riforma delle istituzioni e trasformazione della politica’, in Istituzioni Società Stato, vol. III, (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991), pp. 707–21.Cf. P. Jones, Rights (London: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 173–5.

Any author would welcome such an informed and constructive comment as Burt makes on my ‘New Spatial Theory of Party Competition’. I have just one minor qualification, and a suggested extension to his remarks.

The qualification regards his uncharacteristically reproachful remark about the absence of ‘true success rates’ (p. 652) – the fact that in the original article I did not test each model over all the data. This criticism really derives not from the inappropriateness of my statistics but from the fact that my purposes were not his purposes. I was not concerned to see how well one model would perform over all the data but rather to sort out which model would apply best to which set of parties. As my starting point was the idea that different parties would adopt different decision rules under uncertainty, this procedure was one which suited my purposes, though not his.

My suggested extension concerns the demonstration that parties actually alternate less than might be expected by chance, ‘suggesting that there may be a slight tendency for continuation of policy movements’ (p. 657). Clearly this casts doubt on the validity of the original decision rule, which postulated that (under uncertainty) parties reversed previous policy at each election.

Increasingly in political science, models are developed and tested against datasets which have quite complicated structures. Sometimes it happens that the standard statistical tests are not directly applicable. Furthermore one's intuition as to what counts as strong evidence in favour of a particular model can be misleading. In such circumstances it may be necessary to think more formally about the situation in order to establish valid interpretations of the evidence. This Note seeks to illustrate the value of such formal thinking by reanalysing the evidence in Budge's recent article on parties' policy positions.I. Budge, ‘A New Spatial Theory of Party Competition: Uncertainty, Ideology and Policy Equilibria Viewed Comparatively and Temporally’, British Journal of Political Science, 24 (1994), 443–67. This draws on H-D. Klingemann, R. I. Hofferbert and I. Budge, Parties, Policies and Democracy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994).

The electoral success of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a right-wing religious party, in India's 1991 national elections has often been attributed to the rise of Hindu religious sentiments.After the 1991 elections the BJP emerged as the second largest party in Parliament and captured almost a fifth of the votes cast. There is little in the way of substantive evidence, however, that Hindus have either become more religious or that they were willing to express their religiosity more politically only in the 1990s. This Note claims that the BJP was electorally successful on account of its ability to forge a coalition between religious groups and the middle classes. The BJP, an advocate of a mixed economy in the 1970s and Gandhian socialism in the early 1980s, emerged in the 1990s as an ardent critic of state intervention. It was this programmatic shift which enabled the BJP to garner the support of the middle classes, who were ‘mobilizable’ because of their growing disaffection with the political and economic policies pursued by the Congress party. The electoral success of the BJP hence lay not in mobilizing only the ‘religious’ but in its ability to put together a viable coalition between religious Hindus and those disaffected by excessive political intervention in the economy.

The scholarly literature dealing with the effects of economic conditions on government support and election outcomes in advanced industrialized democracies is extensive.The bulk of this research relates government support and vote choice to objective economic conditions or subjective perceptions of those conditions in order to establish whether and to what extent such a relationship exists. For overviews, see Michael Lewis-Beck, Economics and Elections: The Major Democracies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988); Peter Nannestad and Martin Paldam, ‘The VP-Function: A Survey of the Literature on Vote and Popularity Functions After 25 Years’, Public Choice, 79 (1994), 213–45. Based on the so-called reward–punishment (or responsibility) hypothesis, empirical studies of economic conditions and government support often find that voters punish those incumbents who perform badly and reward those who do a good job.Lewis-Beck finds a general consensus among scholars that ‘when economic conditions are bad, citizens vote against the ruling party’ (Michael Lewis-Beck, ‘Introduction’, in Helmut Norpoth, Michael Lewis-Beck and Jean-Dominique Lafay, eds, Economics and Politics: The Calculus of Support (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), p.2). See also V. O. Key, The Responsible Electorate (New York: Vintage Books, 1968); Gerald Kramer, ‘Short-Term Fluctuations in US Voting Behavior, 1896–1964’, American Political Science Review, 65 (1971), 131–43. The reward–punish hypothesis states that the mass public holds the incumbent government accountable for the state of the economy. When the economy performs well, the government can take credit, but when there is a slump, the executive or the governing parties are blamed by the voters. Other hypotheses that have been tested are the issue-priority and the stability hypotheses (see Harold Clarke, Euel Elliott, William Mishler, Marianne Stewart, Paul Whiteley and Gary Zuk, Controversies in Political Economy: Canada, Great Britain, the United States (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992)).,Although frequently supportive of the general conclusion that the economy affects politics, the evidence for economic effects on government popularity or vote choice is not always conclusive or straightforward. Several authors have explored why economic conditions do not seem to affect popularity or vote choice all the time and under all circumstances. See, for example, Martin Paldam, ‘How Robust is the Vote Function? A Study of Seventeen Nations over Four Decades’, in Norpoth, Lewis-Beck and Lafay, eds, Economics and Politics, pp. 9–31; Christopher J. Anderson, ‘The Dynamics of Public Support for Coalition Governments’, Comparative Political Studies, 28 (1995), 350–83. In fact, over the years the notion that governments in democratic polities are in some way or another judged by how they perform at managing the economy has almost taken on the ring of a social scientific fact.

Parliamentary decision making is a growth area in the study of the British House of Commons. This is a facet of the behaviour of Members of Parliament (MPs) that tended to be ignored as long as the Commons was seen as a legislature that, cravenly subject to party discipline, simply rubber-stamped policy decisions made by the party leadership. By the 1960s, cohesive party voting had reached the point where ‘it was so close to 100 per cent that there was no longer any point in measuring it’. But more recently, this image of the Commons and its members has worn at the edges. While party loyalty remains very much the norm, MPs have shown themselves more willing than in the past to assert themselves against their party's leadership in order to exercise greater policy influence. One prominent example is the select committee system set up in 1979 to improve parliamentary scrutiny of the executive. Another is the higher incidence of backbench rebellion and dissent in the division lobbies after the mid-1960s.Samuel H. Beer, Modern British Politics (London: Faber, 1965), p. 350.Gavin Drewry, ed., The New Select Committees, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Michael Jogerst, Reform in the House of Commons (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1993).Philip Norton, Dissension in the House of Commons 1945–74 (London: Macmillan, 1975); Philip Norton, Dissension in the House of Commons 1974–79 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); Anthony Mughan, ‘Midterm Popularity and Governing Party Dissension in the British House of Commons, 1959–1979’, Legislative Studies Quarterly, 15 (1990), 341–56; and Charles Pattie, Edward Fieldhouse and R. J. Johnston, ‘The Price of Conscience: The Electoral Correlates and Consequences of Free Votes and Rebellion in the British House of Commons, 1987–92’, British Journal of Political Science, 24 (1994), 359–80.