Stand-alone paper copies of journals have occupied academic library shelves largely unchanged for hundreds of years. Despite the prevalence of perverse incentives and market imperfections acknowledged in the business model for journals, the industry was characterized by durable relationships and institutions. Digitization and the internet revolution have transformed the landscape, giving rise to new institutional models and possibilities to challenge existing market inefficiencies in competition and distribution. However, digital information goods themselves guarantee neither appropriate incentives nor social efficiency. This article considers the collision of the new digital economy with an established, imperfect market for journals. It looks at some key changes that are now irreversible and their consequences for publishing in political science.

The British prime minister’s power to appoint and dismiss ministers is probably his most important single power. This article explores how prime ministers from Macmillan to Blair have used that power. The article considers the criteria that prime ministers use when choosing to appoint or dismiss individuals from office before examining the calculations and miscalculations that prime ministers have made in practice. Finally, the article analyses the way that prime ministers have exercised, in particular, their power to dismiss and finds that Thatcher was far more likely than others to sack cabinet colleagues on ideological or policy grounds. The article emphasizes that prime ministers’ relationships with especially powerful ministers – ‘big beasts of the jungle’ – are crucial to an understanding of British government at the top.

British elections exhibit two patterns contrary to expectations deriving from Duverger and Downs: centrist third parties (Liberals and their successors) win a large vote share; and the two major parties often espouse highly divergent policies. This article explores relations between the Liberal vote and left–right scores of the Labour and Conservative manifestos in the light of two hypotheses: the vacated centre posits that Liberals receive more votes when major parties diverge; the occupied centre proposes a lagged effect in which major parties diverge farther after Liberals do well in the preceding election. Data from elections since 1945 confirm the vacated-centre hypothesis, with Liberals benefiting about equally when the major parties diverge to the left and right, respectively. The results also support the occupied-centre hypothesis for Conservative party positions, but not for Labour’s. After considering explanations for this asymmetry, we identify historical events associated with turning points that our data reveal in post-war British politics.

Ethnopolitical expression spans three primary forms: electoral politics, non-violent protest and violent rebellion. Previous literature has studied these strategies in isolation from one another. Using original data on the seventeen autonomous communities of Spain, this article combines a new method for operationalizing contentious strategies with Gurr’s ethnopolitical conflict model to explain communities’ movements between categories of the full range of nationalist political behaviour. The findings confirm that organizations acting within a community respond to altered incentives and changing political contexts by moving up and down the ‘ladder of contention’; they suggest an under-explored ‘strategic dynamism’ in ethnonational communities. Capturing this dynamic movement allows for a better understanding of which features of a group’s environment have an ‘escalatory’ impact on conflict and which, conversely, have an ‘ameliorative’ effect.

Using data from a randomized field experiment within a Deliberative Poll, this paper examines deliberation’s effects on both policy attitudes and the extent to which ordinal rankings of policy options approach single-peakedness (a help in avoiding cyclical majorities). The setting was New Haven, Connecticut, and its surrounding towns; the issues were airport expansion and revenue sharing – the former highly salient, the latter not at all. Half the participants deliberated revenue sharing, then the airport; the other half the reverse. This split-half design helps distinguish the effects of the formal on-site deliberations from those of other aspects of the treatment. As expected, the highly salient airport issue saw only a slight effect, while much less salient revenue-sharing issue saw a much larger one.

The empirical literature in comparative politics holds that social cleavages affect the number of candidates or parties when electoral institutions are ‘permissive’, but it lacks a theoretical account of the strategic candidate entry and exit decisions that ultimately determine electoral coalitions in plural societies. This article incorporates citizen-candidate social identities into game-theoretic models of electoral competition under plurality and majority-runoff electoral rules, indicating that social group demographics can affect the equilibrium number of candidates, even in non-permissive systems. Under plurality rule, the relationship between social homogeneity and the effective number of candidates is non-monotonic and, contrary to the prevailing Duvergerian intuition, for some demographic configurations even the effective number of candidates cannot be near two. Empirical patterns in cross-national presidential election results are consistent with the theoretical model.

Systematic empirical research has yet to explain how national parties join political groups in the European Parliament. This article first demonstrates, using original empirical measures from expert surveys of party positions, that EP party groups consist of national parties sharing similar policy positions. Secondly, using Bayesian/MCMC methods, the paper estimates the policy determinants of group affiliation using a (conditional) multinomial logit model to explain that ‘party group’ choice is largely driven by policy congruence. Finally, predictions from the model identify national parties not in their ‘ideally congruent’ EP groups. The findings suggest that the organization of and switching between EP groups is driven mainly by a concern to minimize policy incongruence between national and transnational levels.

Are voters sophisticated? Rational choice theories of voting assume they are. Students of voting behaviour are more doubtful. This article examines voting in a particularly demanding setting: direct democratic elections in which two competing proposals are on the ballot. It develops a spatial model of voting and proposal qualification with competing proposals. If voters are naïve, then competing proposals can be used to block the direct democratic route to change, but, if voters vote strategically, competing proposals can bring outcomes closer to the median voter. Voting intention data from California polls provide evidence that some votes are cast strategically even in these demanding circumstances. However, the level of strategic voting appears to be affected by the nature of the election campaign.

This article introduces the concept of opposition fragmentation into the study of the determinants of election results. Empirical studies have demonstrated that anti-government economic voting is likely to take place where the clarity of responsibility (the degree to which voters can attribute policy responsibility to the government) is high. This argument is extended by focusing on the effects of the degree of opposition fragmentation in influencing the extent to which poor economic performance decreases the government’s vote share. With data from seventeen parliamentary democracies, it is shown that when there are fewer opposition parties, the relationship between economic performance and governing parties’ electoral fortune is stronger. Opposition fragmentation appears to be as strong a factor as the clarity of responsibility.