This article presents a reconstruction of Michael Walzer's pluralist theory in Spheres of Justice. It starts by noting that Walzer's main thesis (justice resides in autonomous spheres of social goods, according to principles reflecting each good's social meaning) is too restrictive to clarify his own concern with ‘complex equality’. After analysing the shortcomings of the thesis by reference to medical care and social security, this article proposes an account of ‘justice across spheres’: citizens adjudicate the boundaries of the distributive spheres so as to achieve complex equality, the state in which no one counts as another's social inferior. The citizens are held to be motivated by the desire to create and maintain what Walzer calls the ‘society of equals’. As a result, Walzer's theory is recast in a form that makes it easier to compare his distinctively pluralist approach with the abstract-egalitarian theories of Ronald Dworkin and John Rawls. The account of ‘justice across spheres’ is also used to explain Walzer's radical institutional recommendations for achieving complex equality in his own society, the United States.

Plurality electoral systems with multi-member districts and single nontransferable votes (SNTV) allow parties to win multiple seats in district elections by nominating multiple candidates, but they also penalize a party's seat share if the number of candidates offered is ‘too many’ or ‘too few’. Given an institutional incentive to nominate the ‘correct’ number of candidates, we seek to establish empirically that the nominating behaviour of parties in such systems results from a rational calculus of strategic choice. So we develop and test an empirical theory of rational nominating behaviour applied to Japanese district elections before the 1994 electoral reform. We establish, for all possible nominating strategies, the conditions on voting outcomes required for actors to maximize benefits in the context. The efficiency of actual strategy choices for maximizing benefits is found by comparing an observed outcome from voting (the distributed benefit) with the benefit that would be expected had the party chosen its ‘best’ alternative nominating strategy instead. Empirical testing indicates that Japanese parties discriminated between available nominating strategies and made choices that maximized benefits in the context,evidence that the nominating behaviour of parties in this test environment was based on rational calculation.

This article is a comparative study of the relationship between social movements and the individual rights of citizenship. It identifies three main connections between collective action and individual rights made in theory and history, and analyses them in the context of modern authoritarian regimes. It does so by measuring both social mobilization and the presence of rights over time in Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Spain, and analyses their mutual impact statistically – both within and across these national cases. The results demonstrate the mutual impact between rights and movements, and more importantly, constitute a robust defence of democracy as the direct result of collective struggles for individual rights.

Previous research on elite change in Russia, the main findings of which are summarized here, has shown that well over half of post-Soviet Russia's political elite were drawn from the late-Soviet era elite. After a caveat against loose use of the nomenklatura concept, this article focuses on a far narrower sub-group, defined as the ‘top’ political elite, comprising 135 individuals in late 1988 and ninety-eight in 1996. Many of the old top elite found lower elite roles in post-Soviet Russia and most of the new top elite came from fairly senior jobs, but hardly any passed directly from the old top elite to the new. Only a minority of the top elite in 1996 were ‘natural heirs’ to their positions while others owed them primarily to connections or to their success in the new open competitive politics. In this respect (as in others) there are substantial differences between the three components of the new top elite, namely members of the government, senior office holders in the State Duma, and leading officials of the presidential administration. The Russian top elite today remains overwhelmingly male. Far more grew up in large cities than did their Soviet-era equivalents. Non-Russians are now relatively less under-represented. All are tertiary graduates, and nearly a half have postgraduate qualifications. Members of the presidential elite are far more likely than government members to be city-born and educated in the social sciences or humanities, and they average almost a decade younger. The Duma elite lies in between in all these respects.

The European Union is a polity in the making, where political actors contend about basic questions of governance. While students have begun to map contention between public parties and private interests, little attention has been paid to how office-holders in the Commission conceive of European integration. Using interview data collected from 140 senior officials of theCommission, I identify contention along four dimensions: whether the EU should have supranational or intergovernmental institutions; whether it should use democratic or technocratic decision making; whether it should promote regulated capitalism or market liberalism; and whether the elite should defend the European public good or be responsive to various interests. My findings challenge EU theories that conceive of the Commission as a unitary actor with a pro-integration agenda.

In this article the ability of Laver and Shepsle's portfolio allocation (PA) theory to account for the survival records of coalition governments in twelve West European parliamentary democracies is examined. The initial test consists of determining whether governments that are in PA equilibrium survive longer than other governments. Simulation experiments are then used to estimate the robustness of these equilibria in order to assess whether robust equilibria have significant survival-enhancing properties. The foil in this investigation is the ideological diversity approach, which sees ministerial accommodation, not ministerial autonomy, as the key to decision making in coalition governments. The evidence favours the latter perspective.

We should begin our reply to Paul Warwick by stating how very flattered we are by the diligent attention that he has given to our work on government formation. In particular, we are delighted that he has taken up and applied the simulation technology that we suggested as a way to explore cabinet stability, a matter on which we were beginning to feel like voices wailing in the wilderness.

This is not the place to bore readers of the Journal with detailed points of issue between us, of which there are obviously many. We want here to concentrate upon some larger issues provoked by Warwick's critique. These involve a debate on cabinet stability and duration between a school of thought, in Warwick's corner, that is essentially empiricist in its outlook and a school of thought, in ours, that takes analytical modelling as being more fundamental. This is a theme touched upon by Kaare Strom in his recent review essay on parliamentary democracy.

For some time now, formal modelling has been touted by its supporters as a panacea for political science – or at least as a major step forward in the discipline's development. Certainly, it embodies a number of praiseworthy elements. Its insistence on starting with a parsimonious and precisely formulated set of assumptions cannot help but constrain slippery thinking, for example, and its rigorous working out of implications, while often demonstrating the obvious, occasionally leads to unanticipated and intriguing results. Moreover, the combination of precision and rigour holds forth the promise of generating relatively clear-cut tests of rival explanations, a major boon – if it proves true – in a discipline more inclined to abandon theories than to disconfirm them.

How much better the analytical or formal orientation is, then, than the ‘funnel of causality’ approach of empiricists whose quest for the highest explained variance seldom produces more than a miscellaneous grab-bag of influences on the dependent phenomenon. Empirical work of that sort may have some limited utility in identifying possible causes, to be sure, but at some point the scholarly enterprise must move to the higher level of elaborating a clear logical structure among causal factors. Here, empirical success in accounting for observed phenomena cannot be the sole guide: the best theory is the one that provides the most accurate idea of what is actually going on in the real world, not the one with the best correlations.

When an intellectual exchange gets ‘curiouser and curiouser’, it is probably time to bring it to a conclusion in the hope that scholars other than the principals involved will bring a fresh perspective to the issues in dispute. Certainly when the dispute begins to focus on fine-grained details that are of interest only to the disputants, it is time to move the discussion back to a more general plane. This we shall do, and do in the briefest of ways.