Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman's version of an expected utility theory of war is one of the most widely cited theories of international conflict. However, the testing of the theory has lagged its theoretical development. To date, the theory has been tested on only 707 dyad-years, all drawn from Europe between 1816 and 1970. We present a broader test of War and Reason's expected utility theory of war using the same methods as Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman. Our tests include the full international system from 1816 to 1984. We find that the theory receives empirical support using the set of politically relevant dyads for testing, but the relationship is less clear among the population of all interstate dyads.

The hypothesis is examined that casting a ballot in one election increases the voter's propensity to go to the polls in the future. Voter turnout patterns in the 1972–76 and 1992–96 American National Election Panel Surveys, as well as published experimental research, indicate that the effects of past voter turnout on current voting propensities are sizeable. Moreover, these effects are robust across a wide range of model specifications, including those that take into account the possibility of unobserved factors affecting both past and current turnout. We conclude by discussing the implications of consuetude for political and social behaviour.

This article focuses on one of the central controversies in French intellectual debate since the late 1980s: the extent to which traditional republican principles might be reconciled with a recognition of ethnic and cultural diversity, particularly with relation to North African immigrant communities. After locating the debate in its historical and ideological contexts, the article traces the emergence of three types of response: a ‘traditionalist’ view, which refuses to make any concessions to the claims of multiculturalism and which reaffirms the need to uphold the orthodox republican principles of the secular state; a ‘modernizing’ republicanism, which endorses some elements of cultural pluralism while maintaining the validity of key republican concepts; and a ‘multiculturalist’ republicanism, which calls for a pluralist conception of civic identity and a recognition of the positive value of minority cultures. The article concludes with an assessment of the broader questions of political theory raised by this debate.

This article analyses the nature of the support given to the candidates in the 1975 Conservative leadership contest, in which Margaret Thatcher replaced Edward Heath. In contrast to the orthodox account of the contest – which interprets it as largely non-ideological – the article argues that there were clear ideological forces at work. The right strongly supported Thatcher in both rounds; the left strongly backed Heath and then Whitelaw. Region, experience and education also influenced the voting. The traditional accounts, which explain those voting for Thatcher as doing so simply because she was not Heath, have, therefore, to explain why only certain types of MPs felt this way. Margaret Thatcher may have won because she was not Ted Heath; but she did not win solely because she was not Ted Heath.

Elections to the Irish presidency belong to the category of those in which hardly any political power is involved. In elections such as this one, according to second-order election theory, voter behaviour reflects mainly preferences in the first-order political arena, where actual policy is made. This theory fails, however, to explain voter preferences in the 1997 Irish presidential elections. An alternative perspective of a popularity contest, suggesting that voters' preferences are largely unconnected to their political opinions, and generally idiosyncratic in nature, also fails to fit the evidence. Nevertheless, the information, framing and priming that voters were subjected to during the 1997 campaign are shown here to result in the development of a significant unidimensional cognitive and preferential ordering of the candidates.

When Condorcet fell foul of the Jacobins in 1793, Robespierre said of him that he was a great mathematician in the eyes of men of letters, and a distinguished man of letters in the eyes of the mathematicians. It took two centuries for the first part of that vicious remark to be proved false and for Condorcet's true stature as a mathematician to be revealed. Soon after Mancur Olson died in February 1998, The Economist said aloud what many in academe had been muttering for years:

Had he lived, his theory of collective action might well have won him a Nobel prize in economics, though not a wholly uncontroversial one. Some economists viewed him as a one-idea thinker, and worse, they whispered, his idea had reverberated less loudly within economics than outside of it; for example, in political science. The charge would not have troubled Mr Olson for a moment. He was as disdainful of parochialism in the life of the mind as in the life of a nation.Keith Michael Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 383. ‘Obituary: Mancur Olson’, The Economist, 7 March 1998, p. 135.

In the words of Martin Paldam, comparative economic voting studies suffer from a ‘great instability’ – i.e., economic effects appear in some countries at some times, but not others, and tend to be weak and inconsistent across studies. Powell and Whitten propose a possible solution to the ‘instability’ of cross-national voting studies: ‘to explain differences in retrospective economic voting across nations and over time we must take account of the political context within which elections take place’. More specifically, they take into account the ‘context of political responsibility’, arguing that voters are more likely to punish/reward incumbent governments if it is very clear which parties are responsible for economic conditions. They find that voters hold government parties responsible for the economy when there is high ‘clarity of responsibility’, but not when ‘clarity of responsibility’ is low. Over Four Decades', 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), pp. 9–31, at p. 26.G. Bingham Powell Jr and Guy D. Whitten, ‘A Cross-National Analysis of Economic Voting: Taking Account of the Political Context’, American Journal of Political Science, 37 (1993), 391–414, p. 409.Powell and Whitten, ‘A Cross-National Analysis of Economic Voting’, p. 410.

Government-sponsored referendums on issues of national importance are occurring with greater frequency in countries with only sporadic experience with direct democracy. Comprehensive studies exist which examine the origins, conduct and regulation of referendums, as well as their consequences for the political system. There have also been a large number of studies addressing voting behaviour during particular campaigns, and a great deal of research on the far more elaborate and systematized processes in those countries, notably the United States and Switzerland, with recognized initiative mechanisms for citizens to pose referendum questions. Yet no empirical study has attempted to answer the question of how government-sponsored referendum campaigns in countries with little history of direct democracy affect citizens' democratic comportment more generally.