In September 1864, the Association Internationale pour le Progrès des Sciences Sociales met in Amsterdam to examine the system of proportional representation (PR) which had just been proposed by Thomas Hare. The meeting signalled a growing interest in systems of PR across the more democratic nations of the world – some of which had already begun experimenting with it. Sixty years later, the majority of existing democracies, including Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxemburg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, had adopted PR for the election of their national legislatures.

Why did so many countries decide to shift to PR? Why did the shift occur at a given point in time, not earlier or later? Why did some countries never move to PR? These are the questions that we address in this Note.

We are interested in exploring the factors that influenced the decision to adopt PR at the turn of the twentieth century. We argue that two factors of considerable theoretical relevance were particularly important in facilitating the shift to PR: the spread of democratic ideas and the presence of a majority (usually two-round) system and, as a consequence, a multi-party system.

Carstairs's classic history of electoral systems shows that at the turn of the twentieth century there was a strong demand for PR, which was linked to a more general demand for democratization. As Carstairs notes,

there was a general movement in the direction of more democratic political institutions which took several different forms … There was a movement for the establishment or strengthening of parliamentary institutions … Extensions of the franchise for parliamentary elections enabled an increasingly large proportion of the population to gain representation in parliament … With these developments it became a matter of increasing concern that the elected members of parliament and the parties they supported should fairly represent the various interests and opinions of the electorate.

Examining the 1993 split of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in Japan offers an opportunity to gain greater insight into the impact of the various incentives that influence the behaviour of politicians. Surprisingly, previous analyses of the LDP split have been able to demonstrate only weak evidence of any electoral connection driving politicians' decisions. However, by also examining the role of policy preferences (support for reform) and utilizing interaction terms, our analysis takes into account the fact that politicians at different stages in their careers and facing different sorts of electorates respond to electoral factors in very different ways. Our findings thus confirm the importance of the electoral connection. We are also able to add that a variety of other incentives also shape political behaviour and that politicians do not necessarily all respond to similar stimuli in the same way.

The contribution made by the efforts of local party organizations to the results of elections is much disputed. Butler and Rose, writing on the 1959 General Election, whilst conceding that ‘In seats with a majority of a few hundreds it would be absurd to deny that local organizations can make all the difference to the result’, nevertheless conclude that‘… if all constituency electioneering were abandoned, the national outcome would probably be little altered.’ Similarly, J. W. Grove in his editor's preface to Constituency Electioneering in Britain by D. A. Kavanagh, says, ‘It is clear that although many candidates and party workers derive considerable personal psychic satisfaction from the campaign, their efforts have little if any effect on the outcome.’ On the other hand, however, the authors of a recent study of party organization in a London constituency during the election of 1964, though they confess that ‘… it is impossible for us to say to what degree Labour's victory was tied to the more effective and more efficient campaign organization which the party was able to put into the field’, state in conclusion, ‘… but our research strongly suggests that organization was an important influence in the 1964 election in Baron's Court’.

Mixed-member proportional election systems give voters two choices – one for a party candidate in a first-past-the-post single-member constituency election and the other for a party list in a multi-member constituency. Some will vote a straight ticket (i.e. vote for the same party at each contest); others may vote a split-ticket. Although such an electoral system has been operating in Germany since 1953, very little work has been done on variations between constituencies in either the volume of split-ticket voting or the direction of the switching involved. Using an entropy-maximizing method, this article reports estimates of the pattern of straight-ticket and split-ticket voting in each of Germany's 328 constituencies at the 1998 federal elections. Analyses of the variations show that the patterns are consistent with patterns of party strength at the constituency level: the stronger a party's performance at the 1994 election, the better its ability to retain the support of straight-ticket voters in 1998, to limit the out-flows of split-ticket voters, and to attract split-ticket voters who supported another party in the list contest.

If there is a consensus on ‘consensus’ amongst political scientists it is that it occurs where there is a high degree of ‘trust’ amongst members of a political system. It may not always be clear whether such trust must be found amongst the citizens at large or only amongst the elite or between citizens and elite. Nor is it always certain whether ‘trust’ is a condition for consensual politics or an aspect of it. Nevertheless ‘trust’ would appear essential in a liberal democracy or a polyarchy. The section on ‘Trust’ in Robert A. Dahl's Polyarchy is indicative of this current concern. He argues that ‘mutual trust favors polyarchy and public contestation while extreme distrust favors hegemony’. This is for three reasons. Firstly, the mutual communication required in a polyarchy best occurs where men trust one another. Secondly, men need to trust one another if they are to associate together in the achievement of those objectives which they cannot gain by their own individual action. Thirdly, a feeling of trust prevents political disputes from turning into severe enmity.

For a given number of troops in a peace operation, is it advisable to have soldiers from a single country, or should the UN recruit peacekeepers from a variety of donor countries? Since 1990, the number of contributors to peace operations has grown threefold, and most operations have carried the mandate to protect civilians. This article explores the effect of diversity in the composition of a mission, measured by fractionalization and polarization indices, on its performance in protecting civilians in Africa in the period 1991–2008. It finds that mission diversity decreases the level of violence against civilians, a result that holds when geographic and linguistic distances between countries are considered.

In The Civic Culture, perhaps the best known study of political culture, Almond and Verba say that ‘the relationship between political culture and political structure [is] one of the most significant researchable aspects of the problem of political stability and change’. I want to look at the way this relationship has been treated in one particular area, an area very relevant to questions of political stability and change in our own society; that is, in studies of political participation and apathy, especially research into the sense of political efficacy or competence. This is the area with which The Civic Culture itself is largely concerned, and it is now well established that individuals low in a sense of political efficacy tend to be apathetic about politics; indeed, Almond and Verba consider the sense of efficacy or competence to be a ‘key political attitude’.

I propose and test an informational theory of endogenous election timing. I assume leaders have more accurate estimates of future outcomes than citizens. The prospect of declining future performance spurs leaders to call early elections. Since leaders condition their timing decisions on their expectations of future performance, early elections signal a leader's lack of confidence in future outcomes. The earlier elections occur, relative to expectations, the stronger the signal of demise. Using data on British parliaments since 1945, I test hypotheses relating the timing of elections, electoral support and subsequent economic performance. As predicted, leaders who call elections early, relative to expectations, experience a decline in their popular support relative to pre-announcement levels.

The pursuit of high ideals in politics is often scorned as unrealistic and, therefore, undesirable. This article considers two new ways in which this might be true. One allegation is that ideals might be so highly idealized as to be inaccessible to ordinary agents and hence incapable of guiding their actions. The other notes that the full and simultaneous implementation of all of our ideals is typically unrealistic, and that first-best ideal desiderata may well be imperfect guides to choice among second-best worlds.

Commissions of inquiry play an important role in the aftermath of crisis, by serving as instruments of accountability and policy learning. Yet crises also involve a high-stake game of political survival, in which accountability and learning pose a serious threat to incumbent politicians. The political decision of whether to appoint a commission of inquiry after a crisis thus provides a unique prism for studying the intense conflict between politics, accountability and policy learning. Using data from the United Kingdom, this study develops and tests a choice model for this political decision. The results show that the political decision to appoint inquiries into public crises is strongly influenced by short-term blame avoidance considerations, media salience and government popularity.

The political ‘centre’ is often discussed in debates about public policy and analyses of party strategies and election outcomes. Yet, to date, there has been little effort to estimate the political centre outside the United States. This article outlines a method of estimating the political centre using public opinion data collected for the period between 1950 and 2005. It is demonstrated that it is possible to measure the centre in Britain, that it moves over time, that it shifts in response to government activity and, furthermore, that it has an observable association with general election outcomes.

International structures tie the hands of policy makers in the developing world. Dependency on the world economy is blamed for low growth, high volatility and less redistribution of income than average, but the effect of international constraints on mass politics is relatively unknown. This study examines how citizens of developing democracies assign responsibility for policy outcomes. A theory of the distribution of responsibility, combining insights from the political economy of development and the study of mass behaviour, is presented. Evidence from seventeen Latin American countries shows that citizens often blame policy outcomes on international and private-sector actors, to which they, as voters, have no direct recourse. Ties to world markets and the International Monetary Fund, especially foreign debt, shift responsibility towards international actors and tend to exonerate national politicians.

This article is a study of bicameral conflict resolution between the Council and the European Parliament in the European Union, which has established a bicameral conciliation process under the co-decision procedure. Scholars commonly agree that the European Parliament has gained power under the co-decision procedure, but the impact of the conciliation process on the power distribution between the Council and the European Parliament remains unclear. The scholarly debate suggests that the power of the institutional actors depends on their proximity to the status quo, the (im-)patience and the specific preference distribution of the institutional actors, although most analyses assume that the Commission plays an insignificant role. Using an ordered probit model, this study examines the power distribution between the two institutional actors, the factors for their bargaining success and the role of the Commission in the period between 1999 and 2002. The findings show that the European Parliament wins most conflicts, but that the Council is more successful in multi-dimensional disputes. The results confirm some theoretical claims made in the literature, such as the importance of the status quo location and of preference cohesiveness. However, they also reject a major assumption in the literature on the irrelevance of the Commission in the conciliation process, which we show to have an influential informational position for parliamentary success.

Why does the strength of class voting vary over time? Recent research has emphasized factors related to the structure of political choice at the party level. This article examines different aspects of this choice, and investigates whether voters are more likely to respond to the social or policy cues that parties send voters. The results from the British context suggest that the former are more important than the latter. The central implication of this finding is that social representation matters, and that the social background of political representatives influences how voters relate to political parties.

While much is known about the effects of the economy on the popularity and electoral fortunes of political leaders, political scientists know very little about how economic decline and political performance influence support for the political regime and the stability of democratic systems. We use three cross-national longitudinal surveys to address this issue: two collected in Costa Rica in the midst of a severe economic crisis in the late 1970s and early 1980s; and one in West Germany during the recession of the mid-1970s. We show that in both countries, overall support for the political regime remained extremely high during the economic decline, while satisfaction with incumbent performance fluctuated much more sharply. Moreover, at the individual level, changes in satisfaction with incumbent performance were only weakly related to changes in regime support. These results provide strong evidence suggesting that if democracies enter economic downturns with initially high levels of regime support, they will be able to withstand even severe, prolonged crises of economic performance.

The presidential-parliamentary distinction is foundational to comparative politics and at the center of a large theoretical and empirical literature. However, an examination of constitutional texts suggests a fair degree of heterogeneity within these categories with respect to important institutional attributes. These observations indicate that the classic presidential-parliamentary distinction, and the semi-presidential category, may not be systemic. This article investigates whether the defining attributes that separate presidential and parliamentary constitutions predict other attributes that are stereotypically associated with these institutional models. The results suggest the need for considerable skepticism of the ‘systemic’ nature of the classification. Indeed, the results imply that in order to predict the powers of a country's executive and legislature, it is more useful to know where and when the constitution was written than whether the country has a presidential or parliamentary system.

One of the most striking features of British general election results is the large variation in turnout from one constituency to another. In the 1970 election, for instance, turnout in Britain ranged from 44–9 per cent in Stepney to 85–3 per cent in Cornwall North. Moreover, the variation in turnout has become greater in recent years. While the mean turnout in general elections has tended to fall, the standard deviation of turnout has increased steadily from 5–3 in the 1955 election to 6–9 in the 1970 election. With the exception of the Nuffield studies, however, there have been few attempts to investigate this variation. Political scientists have concentrated instead on describing and attempting to explain differences in turnout between different social and demographic groups.

We study the relationship between voters' preferences and the emergence of party platforms in two-party democratic elections with adaptive parties. In the model, preferences of voters and the opposition party's platform determine an electoral landscape on which the challenging party must adaptively search for votes. We show that changes in the underlying distribution of voters' preferences result in different electoral landscapes which can be characterized by a measure of ruggedness. We find that locally adapting parties converge to moderate platforms regardless of the landscape's ruggedness. Greater ruggedness, however, tempers a party's ability to find such platforms. Thus, we are able to establish a link between the distribution of voters' preferences and the responsiveness of adaptive parties.

Surveys sponsored by the Commission of the European Communities are employed to study value change in West Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, France, Belgium and Italy between 1970–71 and 1990 and in Denmark and Ireland between 1973 and 1990. During these years generational replacement had a major impact on value trends in all eight societies. In Germany, Britain, the Netherlands and Denmark generational replacement contributed to the growth of Postmaterialism, and in France, Italy and Ireland replacement was the major force creating the trend towards Postmaterialism. Even in Belgium, where there was only a slight move towards Postmaterialism, replacement may have prevented a movement towards Materialism. For the European public as a whole, replacement contributed to the growth of Postmaterialism. However, the impact of replacement is likely to be smaller in the coming two decades because relatively low birth rates during the late 1970s and the 1980s will contribute to lower rates of generational replacement.

In regions plagued by reoccurring periods of war, violence and displacement, how does past exposure to violence affect altruism toward members of different ethnic or religious groups? Drawing on theories of empathy-driven altruism in psychology, this article proposes that violence can increase individuals’ capacity to empathize with others, and that empathy born of violence can in turn motivate helping behavior across group boundaries. This hypothesis is tested using data on the hosting behavior of roughly 1,500 Liberians during the 2010–11 Ivorian refugee crisis in eastern Liberia, a region with a long history of cross-border, inter-ethnic violence. Consistent with its theoretical predictions, the study finds that those who experienced violence during the Liberian civil war host greater numbers of refugees, exhibit stronger preferences for distressed refugees and less bias against outgroup refugees, and host a higher proportion of non-coethnic, non-coreligious and distressed refugees. These findings suggest that violence does not necessarily lead to greater antagonism toward outgroups, as is often assumed, and that in some circumstances it can actually promote inter-group co-operation.