The existing literature on economic voting concentrates on egocentric and sociotropic evaluations of short-term economic performance. Scant attention is paid to other economic concerns people may have. In a neo-liberal economy characterized by global economic competition and a down-sized labour market, one widely-publicized economic concern – and one whose consequences political scientists have largely ignored – is job insecurity. Data from a survey conducted after the 1996 US presidential election show that job insecurity is a novel form of economic discontent that is distinctive in its origins and electoral impact from retrospective evaluations of short-term economic performance. In a multinomial probit model of electoral choice, performance measures offer little explanation of the Perot vote, but sociotropic job insecurity helps to explain why Americans rejected both major-party candidates, as well as abstention, in favour of the third-party alternative, Ross Perot.

In the practice of social science, the most conspicuous recent attempt at theorizing about nonconformity and protest in late communism rests on the conceptual schema of ‘civil society versus the state’. Based on a case study of the institutional basis of criticism of, and dissent against, communism in China, I contend that the dichotomous concept ‘civil society versus the state’. when used to explain the transition from communism, is applicable only in rare, extreme cases and misleading in most cases. Instead, I introduce the concept of ‘institutional amphibiousness’, stressing institutional parasitism and institutional manipulation and conversion. In most cases, institutional amphibiousness more adequately accounts for the dynamics of the erosion of communism than the concept of ‘civil society versus the state’.

Over the last fifteen years political scientists have become much more critical of the role that business plays in American politics. Two decades ago business was primarily regarded as another interest group; now many scholars perceive a tension between the large business corporation and the principles and practices of pluralist democracy.

This article challenges this new ‘conventional wisdom’ by critically examining the recent writings of Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom. Dahl regards the corporation as undemocratic because its managers are not accountable to its employees. Yet, the corporation is hardly unique in this regard: not one single institution in our society – including the government itself – is governed by those who work for it. Lindblom contends that business occupies a privileged position in capitalist democracies. But he exaggerates the role investment decisions play in the performance of the economy, underestimates the options available to politicians to manipulate business decisions and fails to appreciate that businessmen are not unique in requiring inducements to perform their social role. The article concludes by suggesting that while corporations do exercise considerable political power, both its scope and magnitude can be satisfactorily analysed within the framework of interest-group politics.

Constitutional patriotism is an influential attempt to reconcile the conflicting imperatives of political legitimacy and cultural inclusiveness. However, it underestimates the role of particularist political cultures in grounding universalistic principles of democracy and justice. Civic patriotism, by contrast, emphasizes the motivational prerequisites of democratic governance, stresses the need to preserve existing ‘co-operative ventures’ such as nation-states, and demands that existing political cultures be democratically scrutinized and re-shaped in an inclusive direction. It promotes a mainly political identity, whose political content makes it compatible with a variety of practices and beliefs, but whose thin particularistic form justifies citizens' commitment to specific institutions. This commitment is not so unconditional as to justify blind loyalty to one's own institutions, nor is it so absolute as to rule out certain forms of cosmopolitan citizenship.

When public programme demands exceed resources, tradeoffs between different public policies occur; that is, one policy gains while another loses in the allocation of these resources. Tradeoffs are most easily measured in terms of budgetary expenditures. If the budget is expanding, the consequences of tradeoffs are less severe than when the budget contracts or remains stable, and budgetary decisions involve zero-sum games. However, the concept of tradeoff is still relevant in an expanding budget since decisions are made about how the additional resources are to be allocated, and while all policy areas may gain, some obviously will receive more resources than others.

Why do countries join international human rights institutions, when membership often yields few material gains and constrains state sovereignty? This article argues that entering a human rights institution can yield substantial benefits for democratizing states. Emerging democracies can use the ‘sovereignty costs’ associated with membership to lock in liberal policies and signal their intent to consolidate democracy. It also argues, however, that the magnitude of these costs varies across different human rights institutions, which include both treaties and international organizations. Consistent with this argument, the study finds that democratizing states tend to join human rights institutions that impose greater constraints on state sovereignty.

Why have advanced democracies experienced a retreat of the interventionist state since 1980? This article provides evidence that in all relevant policy indicators (spending, subsidies, state-owned enterprises, regulation, capital taxation) government intervention has been scaled back across the OECD. An overview of the results of 130 quantitative studies analysing at least one of these indicators is provided. Focusing on five main explanatory variables – globalization, Europeanization, learning and emulation, socio-economic problems, and political parties – only limited agreement in the literature is found. The reasons for this disagreement are discussed. Ways forward are suggested for the theoretical models on which studies are based, how the dependent variable is chosen, the empirical approaches that may be applied, and how quantitative research and comparative case studies may be combined.

An indicator of globalization is the growing number of humans crossing national borders. In contrast to explanations for flows of goods and capital, migration research has concentrated on unilateral movements to rich democracies. This focus ignores the bilateral determinants of migration and stymies empirical and theoretical inquiry. The theoretical insights proposed here show how the regime type of both sending and receiving countries influences human migration. Specifically, democratic regimes accommodate fewer immigrants than autocracies and democracies enable emigration while autocracies prevent exit. The mechanisms for this divergence are a function of both micro-level motivations of migrants and institutional constraints on political leaders. Global bilateral migration data and a statistical method that captures the higher-order dependencies in network data are employed in this article.

This article presents results from survey experiments investigating conditions under which Britons are willing to pay taxes on polluting activities. People are no more willing if revenues are hypothecated for spending on environmental protection, while making such taxes more relevant to people – by naming petrol and electricity as products to which they will apply – has a modestly negative effect. Public willingness increases sharply if people are told that new environmental taxes would be offset by cuts to other taxes, but political distrust appears to undermine much of this effect. Previous studies have argued that political trust shapes public opinion with respect to environmental and many other policies. But this article provides the first experimental evidence suggesting that the relationship is causal, at least for one specific facet: cynicism about public officials’ honesty and integrity. The results suggest a need to make confidence in the trustworthiness of public officials and their promises more central to conceptualizations of political trust.

This article scrutinizes the relationship between collective nostalgia and populism. Different populist figures utilize nostalgia by referring to their country's ‘good old’ glorious days and exploiting resentment of the elites and establishment. Populists instrumentalize nostalgia in order to create their populist heartland, which is a retrospectively constructed utopia based on an abandoned but undead past. Using two original datasets from Turkey, this study first analyzes whether collective nostalgia characterizes populist attitudes of the electorate. The results illustrate that collective nostalgia has a significantly positive relationship with populist attitudes even after controlling for various independent variables, including religiosity, partisanship, satisfaction with life and Euroscepticism. Secondly, the study tests whether nostalgic messages affect populist attitudes using an online survey experiment. The results indicate that Ottoman nostalgia helps increase populist attitudes. Kemalist nostalgia, however, has a weak direct effect on populist attitudes that disappears after controlling for party preference.

Little is known about how ordinary Europeans feel about the central policy-making institutions of the European Union (EU). This has encouraged us to analyse mass attitudes towards the legitimacy of the European Court of Justice (ECJ). Relying on a cross-time (1992–93) panel analysis, as well as a cross-institutional analysis (the ECJ, the European Parliament and the high courts of the member states), we discover that (a) the ECJ does not possess a surplus of legitimacy, and it is doubtful whether the legitimacy shortfall is only a short-term function of the row over Maastricht; (b) attitudes toward the ECJ, although in the aggregate fairly stable, changed significantly over the one-year panel survey; (c) the European Parliament has little legitimacy it can share with the ECJ; and (d) although the national high courts do have greater legitimacy, there is little evidence that they are capable of transferring that legitimacy to the ECJ. We conclude with some speculation about whether the ECJ will be able to build greater legitimacy, and the consequences for the EU if the court fails to do so.

As the Reagan administration neared the end of its first full year in office, interpretations of the meaning of the 1980 presidential election were still as varied as the political positions of analysts and commentators. The politically dominant interpretation, promoted by the new administration and its supporters, was that the election provided a mandate to bring about several fundamental changes in the role of government in American social and economic life. In recommendations whose scope had not been matched since the first days of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the Reagan administration set about responding to what it understood to be popular demands for reduced government spending and taxes, expansion of the national defence establishment, limitation of environmental protection in favour of the development of energy resources, and a myriad of other tasks designed to encourage free enterprise by ‘getting government off the backs of the people’. With varying degrees of enthusiasm for the new administration's programmes, scores of Democratic politicians shared the interpretation of Reagan's victory as a new electoral mandate which rejected many of the fundamental policies of Democratic administrations from Roosevelt to Carter. This interpretation of the ‘meaning’ of the 1980 election was expressed by Democratic congressmen of many political colours who decried the bankruptcy of their own leadership and affirmed the victor's sense of mandate by supporting the President's various legislative programmes.

Three models of interest groups, power and political process in America are contrasted: (1) the Truman-Dahl-Lindblom pluralism of the 1960s; (2) the unfinished plural elitism of the 1970s, a theory emphasizing special-interest capture of policy systems whose most influential exponent is Lowi; (3) the ‘triadic’ model of process set forth by Wilson in The Politics of Regulation. The triadic model assumes the normality in policy systems of organized economic producers being challenged by the countervailing power of other organized interests, while state agencies act autonomously. It is argued that the triadic model is the most advanced of the three, although it still needs development. Eighteen illustrative propositions are presented in terms of triadic power. These include relationships among interest groups and state autonomy, ‘high polities’ and routine politics, and types of coalitions in policy systems. Other propositions describe links to possible cycles between triadic power and plural elitism, to corporatist decision-making, and to the ‘resource mobilization’ theory of social movements.

What are the origins of belief in conspiracy theories? The dominant approach to studying conspiracy theories links belief to social stresses or personality type, and does not take into account the situational and fluctuating nature of attitudes. In this study, a survey experiment, subjects are presented with a mock news article designed to induce conspiracy belief. Subjects are randomly assigned three manipulations hypothesized to heighten conspiracy perceptions: a prime to induce anxiety; information about the putative conspirator; and the number and identifiability of the victim(s). The results indicate that conspiratorial perceptions can emerge from both situational triggers and subtle contextual variables. Conspiracy beliefs emerge as ordinary people make judgments about the social and political world.

Instrumentally, militant groups should seek to maximize their power against governments by forming alliances. However, studies in bargaining theory predict that alliances between militants would suffer from commitment problems. This study seeks to identify the conditions under which militant groups overcome these acute commitment problems and form alliances. Two game theory models of alliances amongst militants are presented, the first capturing bilateral co-operation, and the second under conditions of asymmetry. It may be concluded that while militants less susceptible to government repression should prefer bilateral alliances, vulnerable militants are more likely to form asymmetric alliances involving state sponsors. Following the theoretical predictions, the theory is tested empirically using the UCDP/PRIO data.

In Western democracies it is held that parties and their positions affect how politicians choose to make public expenditure and investment. This article examines the public policy choices of politicians in India, a large well-established democracy with remarkable subnational variation. Public expenditure, from education and health to agriculture and irrigation, is analysed. Counterintuitive findings – that election timing and political factors play a strong role in the subnational states, and that party competition increases investment in education – are explained by highlighting the role economic and political uncertainty plays in politicians’ choices. Building a ‘Polanyi’ argument enhanced by a supply-side mechanism highlights the importance of compensation and insurance and the imperatives of political stability for subnational politicians, who attempt to maximize re-election chances in an uncertain environment.

Compulsory voting is sometimes thought to be justified in democracies because it promotes high levels of voting and mitigates inequalities of turnout amongst social groups. Proponents of compulsory voting also argue that it helps to prevent the free-riding of non-voters on voters. This article casts a sceptical eye on both arguments. Democratic citizens do not have a duty to promote their self-interest, and their duties to others do not generally require them to vote, or to attend the polls. So, while people are sometimes morally obliged to vote, and to vote one way rather than another, legal compulsion to vote or to turn out is generally unjustified and inconsistent with democratic government.

In this article we will review the literature on cabinet durability and cabinet termination. The fact that many cabinets in Western multi-party democracies do not serve out their full potential legal term in office has given rise to an important and growing body of research in political science. Cabinet durability is one of the three main features of cabinets, the others being cabinet party composition and allocation of portfolios. Each is of theoretical interest in itself, but of even greater interest for what it might tell us about broader questions of representation and governance. Each is also important as a development and testing ground for new methodologies. Our initial aim was to update the excellent review of cabinet durability done over a decade ago by Lawrence C. Dodd, ‘The Study of Cabinet Durability: Introduction and Commentary’, Comparative Political Studies, 17 (1984), 155–62, which became badly out of date because of the considerable volume of recent empirical and theoretical work. Subsequent to the initial submission of this article, we discovered that Paul Warwick, Government Survival in Parliamentary Democracies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), had provided a substantial review of this literature in the course of elaborating his own model of government survival. We have incorporated references to that work here. However, while we agree with much of what Warwick has written, our perspective on the extent of progress in understanding the determinants of cabinet termination and on what remains to be done and how best to proceed is rather different from his.There is a voluminous literature attempting to predict the party composition of cabinets from the party breakdown in the legislature and other factors, such as the ideological propinquity of the various parties. An excellent recent review is Michael Laver and Norman Schofield, Multiparty Government: The Politics of Coalition in Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), which also contains important new theoretical contributions of their own. The literature on portfolio allocations had been relatively dormant since the work of Eric Browne and his colleagues, e.g., Eric C. Browne and Mark Franklin, ‘Aspects of Coalition Payoffs in European Parliamentary Democracies’, American Political Science Review, 67 (1973), 453–69; Eric C. Browne and Karen Feste, ‘Qualitative Dimensions of Coalition Payoffs: Evidence for European Party Governments, 1945–1970’, American Behavioral Scientist, 18 (1975), 530–56; Eric C. Browne and James Frendreis, ‘Allocating Coalition Payoffs by Conventional Norm: An Assessment of the Evidence for Cabinet Coalition Situations,’ American Journal of Political Science, 24 (1980); 753–68, until reinvigorated by the innovative work of Michael Laver and Kenneth Shepsle, ‘Coalitions and Cabinet Government’, American Political Science Review, 84 (1990), 873–89; Michael Laver and Kenneth Shepsle, Making and Breaking Governments: Cabinets and Legislatures in Parliamentary Democracies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996) which provides a new model of the relationship between party composition, portfolio allocations and policy outcomes (see also David Austen-Smith and Jeffrey Banks, ‘Stable Governments and the Allocations of Policy Portfolios,’ American Political Science Review, 84 (1990), 891–906.

It is often assumed that government-sponsored election violence increases the probability that incumbent leaders remain in power. Using cross-national data, this article shows that election violence increases the probability of incumbent victory, but can generate risky post-election dynamics. These differences in the consequences of election violence reflect changes in the strategic setting over the course of the election cycle. In the pre-election period, anti-incumbent collective action tends to be focused on the election itself, either through voter mobilization or opposition-organized election boycotts. In the post-election period, by contrast, when a favorable electoral outcome is no longer a possibility, anti-government collective action more often takes the form of mass political protest, which in turn can lead to costly repercussions for incumbent leaders.

This article presents a model of terrorist attacks as signals where the government is uncertain as to whether it is facing a group that is politically motivated or militant. Pooling equilibriums result with two types of ex post regret: P-regret, where the government concedes to political types that would not subsequently attack; and M-regret, where the government does not concede to militant types that subsequently attack at greater levels. Avoidance of such regret defines a measure of the value of intelligence. Counter-terrorism policy can then be characterized in terms of whether a government should focus on increased intelligence versus increased security (hardening targets). The recommended use of asset freezing is also evaluated in terms of the resources required by terrorists to achieve the various equilibriums. Finally, this article supports the empirical finding of intertemporal substitution of resources by terrorists, concerned with the level of government response to their attacks.