This paper is about the things governments do and why they do them. It is written in the belief that, while we know quite a lot about decision-making processes in individual countries, we do not know nearly enough about why the governments of different countries make different decisions and pursue different policies. The countries of North America and western Europe are often described as ‘welfare states’, the implication being that the governments of all of them do broadly similar things in broadly similar ways. As we shall see, however, these broad similarities conceal important, wide divergences. These divergences deserve to be explained.

Elections involving a major scandal were unusual in the late 1970s, but today nearly half are so affected. Multilevel analyses of Eurobarometer data reveal that scandal elections once had negative net effects on satisfaction with democracy. However, as scandals have become more common, the negative effect has withered away. This ‘scandal fatigue’ process appears driven by changes in scandal material, rather than by changes in citizens’ reactions to a given type of material. Scandals involving several politicians and parties still really matter, but these have not become markedly more common. The possibility that the increasing incidence of scandals has created a more critical approach to scandal material is discussed. As scandals accumulate, citizens may become more prone to ponder the relevance of a story and the motives of the messenger.

There has been substantial debate on the measurement of tactical voting in this Journal, much of which has actually been concerned with the definition of a tactical vote. For this reason it is necessary to go ‘back to basics’ to examine the notion of a tactical vote within rational choice theory and follow its implications for the measurement of tactical voting. This Note has four aims: to elucidate the formal theoretical concepts behind the notion of tactical voting; to provide a practical definition of tactical voting based on those concepts; to examine and use the implications of the theory and definition to evaluate existing measures of tactical voting; and to further appraise measures of tactical voting from general methodological considerations. This Note focuses on tactical voting in single-member simple-plurality electoral systems. The following section argues that the range of situations where it may be optimal to vote tactically is both broader and less well defined than previous authors have generally realized. This implies that both the definition, and therefore the measurement, of tactical voting rest mainly on the criteria of voting for a party other than the first choice and doing so in order to best influence who wins. The empirical section examines various approaches to the measurement of tactical voting and argues that the Heath et al. measure is a priori the most attractive available. Furthermore, detailed analysis using British Election Study (BES) data from English voters in 1987, 1992 and 1997, shows that whilst the Heath et al. measure is relatively robust, it can be usefully revised to improve consistency with the strength-of-feeling scores. A corresponding method for identifying a voter's preferred party is also presented.

Classical rational choice explanations of voting participation are widely thought to have failed. This article argues that the currently dominant Group Mobilization and Ethical Agency approaches have serious shortcomings in explaining individually rational turnout. It develops an informal social network (ISN) model in which people rationally vote if their informal networks of family and friends attach enough importance to voting, because voting leads to social approval and vice versa. Using results from the social psychology literature, research on social groups in sociology and their own survey data, the authors argue that the ISN model can explain individually rational non-altruistic turnout. If group variables that affect whether voting is used as a marker of individual standing in groups are included, the likelihood of turnout rises dramatically.

The ability of the news media to mobilize voters during an election campaign is not well understood. Most extant research has been conducted in single-country studies and has paid little or no attention to the contextual level and the conditions under which such effects are more or less likely to occur. This study tests the mobilizing effect of conflict news framing in the context of the 2009 European Parliamentary elections. The unique multi-method and comparative cross-national study design combines a media content analysis (N = 48,982) with data from a two-wave panel survey conducted in twenty-one countries (N = 32,411). Consistent with expectations, conflict framing in campaign news mobilized voters to vote. Since the effect of conflict news was moderated by evaluations of the EU polity in the general information environment, conflict framing more effectively mobilized voters in countries where the EU was evaluated more positively.

The 1997 British general election saw a record 120 women returned to the House of Commons, 101 of them Labour. Yet if the most striking feature of the 1997 intake into the House of Commons was the number of newly elected women, then the most striking feature of the backbench rebellions in that parliament was the lack of these women amongst the ranks of the rebels. They were less than half as likely to rebel against the party whip as the rest of the Parliamentary Labour Party; even those who did, did so around half as often. Attempts to explain this difference fall into two broad groups: (i) those that attempt to explain the difference away, as resulting from other characteristics of the women, and (ii) those that attempt to explain it – indeed, celebrate it – as evidence of a different, women's, style of political behaviour. Attempts at (i) are largely unconvincing: most of the supposed explanations for the difference do not stand up to empirical verification. Although difficult to prove, a belief in (ii) is dominant amongst the new women themselves.

Numerous scholars have documented a dramatic increase in incumbency advantage in US congressional elections and also state legislative elections over the past four decades. For example, Gelman and King show that incumbents in the House of Representatives now receive about twelve extra percentage points solely as a result of holding congressional office during the campaign; the comparable figure for most of the first half of this century was only 2 per cent. This advantage of incumbency has made members of the US House and many state legislators nearly invulnerable to electoral defeat.

This article assesses the presence or absence in Russia of a political culture compatible with the emergence of democratic institutions. It offers a test of the thesis that political culture may be an important variable linking economic development to transitions to democracy. On the basis of findings from a systematic random sample of opinions about politics in the city of Yaroslavl' in March 1990, the article finds little support for the argument that Russian political culture today is dominated by the autocratic traditions of the past. Rather, the patterns that emerge suggest that Russian political thinking comes closer to what is found in Western industrial democracies.

Little is known about how immigrants participate in politics and whether they transform political engagement in contemporary democracies. This study investigates whether citizenship (as opposed to being foreign-born) affects political and civic engagement beyond the voting booth. It is argued that citizenship should be understood as a resource that enhances participation and helps immigrants overcome socialization experiences that are inauspicious for political engagement. The analysis of the European Social Survey data collected in nineteen European democracies in 2002–03 reveals that citizenship has a positive impact on political participation. Moreover, citizenship is a particularly powerful determinant of un-institutionalized political action among individuals who were socialized in less democratic countries. These findings have important implications for debates over the definition of and access to citizenship in contemporary democracies.

In this article we take advantage of a two-wave panel study of two biologically-linked generations in order to examine some prevalent conceptions about the persistence of political orientations. The nature of the study design, outlined below, is particularly suited to addressing questions about individual-level continuities as they are affected by life-cycle, generational and historical processes. Our present discussion is geared to the individual level rather than to the aggregate level of continuity and change. Although many of the terms used are the same, and although it is difficult to discuss the one level without recourse to the other, the purposes and the approaches are fundamentally different. Aggregate analysis concerns itself with net movements and with the directionality of these movements. Individual analysis, as used here, concerns itself with the magnitudes of individual-level movements and has only a secondary interest in the direction of these movements.

This article analyses the founding rate of nationally active homosexual rights interest groups in the United States for the period 1950–98. Drawing upon the extensive organizational ecology literature, we test the hypothesis that the founding rate of homosexual rights interest groups is related non-monotonically to the number of groups in the population. Our statistical analyses support the hypothesis that as population density rises from very low to high, the founding rate first rises but eventually decreases. This pattern holds when we control for a number of contextual variables. In all, the data provide a great deal of support for the theory of density dependence – a novel approach to the study of interest group formation.

The article examines the relationship between corruption and voting behavior by defining two distinct channels: pocketbook corruption voting, i.e. how personal experiences with corruption affect voting behavior; and sociotropic corruption voting, i.e. how perceptions of corruption in society do so. Individual and aggregate data from Slovakia fail to support hypotheses that corruption is an undifferentiated valence issue, that it depends on the presence of a viable anti-corruption party, or that voters tolerate (or even prefer) corruption, and support the hypothesis that the importance of each channel depends on the salience of each source of corruption and that pocketbook corruption voting prevails unless a credible anti-corruption party shifts media coverage of corruption and activates sociotropic corruption voting. Previous studies may have underestimated the prevalence of corruption voting by not accounting for both channels.

Political science, unlike economics, does not have a long tradition of forecasting models. However, this is changing. Currently, there is considerable interest in election forecasting. The basis for the interest is a flurry of related publications on House, Senate and presidential elections. A common goal for these studies is the development of a model, inevitably based on aggregate time-series data, which predicts election returns. The resulting models, some of which are quite accurate, can differ a good deal in specification and estimation. Also, they vary in complexity, making them more or less accessible to the engaged voter.

Independent central banks prefer balanced budgets due to the long-run connection between deficits and inflation, and can enforce their preference through interest rate increases and denial of credit to the government. This article argues that legal central bank independence (CBI) deters fiscal deficits predominantly in countries with rule of law and impartial contract enforcement, a free press and constraints on executive power. It further suggests that CBI may not affect fiscal deficits in a counter-cyclical fashion, but instead depending on the electoral calendar and government partisanship. The article also tests the novel hypotheses using new yearly data on legal CBI for seventy-eight countries from 1970 to 2007. The results show that CBI restrains deficits only in democracies, during non-election years and under left government tenures.

Is foreign aid an effective instrument of soft power? Does it generate affinity for donor countries and the values they espouse? This article answers these questions in the context of Chinese aid to Africa and the competing aid regime of the United States. The study combines data on thirty-eight African countries from Afrobarometer, AidData, and the Aid Information Management Systems of African finance and planning ministries. The authors use spatial difference-in-differences to isolate the causal effects of Chinese and US aid. The study finds that Chinese aid to Africa does not increase (and may in fact reduce) beneficiaries’ support for China. By contrast, US aid appears to increase support for the United States and to strengthen recipients’ commitment to liberal democratic values, such as the belief in the importance of elections. Chinese aid does not appear to weaken this commitment, and may strengthen it. The study also finds that Chinese aid increases support for the UK, France and other former colonial powers. These findings advance our understanding of the conditions under which competing aid regimes generate soft power and facilitate the transmission of political principles and ideals.

In this article, we present data showing that national legislators are more tolerant than the public in Britain, Israel, New Zealand and the United States. Two explanations for this phenomenon are presented and assessed. The first is the selective recruitment of Members of Parliament, Knesset and Congress from among those in the electorate whose demographic, ideological and personality characteristics predispose them to be tolerant. Although this process does operate in all four countries, it is insufficient to explain all of the differences in tolerance between elites and the public in at least three countries. The second explanation relies on a process of explicitly political socialization, leading to differences in tolerance between elites and their public that transcend individual-level, personal characteristics. Relying on our analysis of political tolerance among legislators in the four countries, we suggest how this process of political socialization may be operating.

This article extends Lau and Redlawsk's notion of correct voting – whether voters, under conditions of uncertainty, choose the alternative they would have chosen had they been fully informed about the issues and candidates in that election – to sixty-nine elections in thirty-three established and emerging democracies around the world. At the individual level, political sophistication, political experience and motivation all significantly predict the probability of casting a correct vote. However several institutional factors proved to be even more important. In particular, elections with more parties running – and settings that encourage candidate-centred voting – decrease the probability of correct voting, while more ideologically distinctive alternatives, clearer lines of responsibility and greater media access to information are associated with higher rates of correct voting.

Constitutions devised by rank-and-file legislative politicians in the ‘Third Wave’ of democratization tend to exhibit an inverse relationship between party strength and executive strength. Party strength refers to the extent to which legislators campaign on the basis of their parties' reputations as providers of public policy as opposed to personal reputations as providers of more narrowly targeted services. Executive strength refers to the constitutional authority of the executive to influence policy independent of partisan support in the legislature. Politicians' interest in one configuration of power or another can be deduced logically from the situation in which they find themselves at the time they are designing a new democratic regime.

Rich Americans, far more likely to vote than their poorer fellow citizens, also differ in how they vote and what policies they favour. These undisputed facts lead to the widespread belief ‘that if everybody in this country voted, the Democrats would be in for the next 100 years.’ The gist of this conclusion, which seems to follow ineluctably from our opening sentence, is accepted by almost everyone except a few empirical political scientists. Their analyses of survey data show that no objectively achieved increase in turnout – including compulsory voting – would be a boon to progressive causes or Democratic candidates. Simply put, voters' preferences differ minimally from those of all citizens; outcomes would not change if everyone voted. John Kenneth Galbraith, Interview in California Monthly, February 1986, p. 11.

Citizens do not choose sides on issues like busing or abortion whimsically. They have reasons for their preferences – certainly they can give reasons for them. But how is this possible? Citizens as a rule pay little attention to politics, indeed take only a modest interest in it even during election campaigns when their interest in politics is at its height. And since they pay little attention to politics, it is hardly surprising that they know little about it. Many, in fact, are quite ignorant of basic facts of political life – such as the identity of the party that controls Congress or indeed the name of the congressman who represents them. Which, of course, raises a question of some interest: how do citizens figure out what they think about political issues, given how little they commonly know about them?