In a recent Note we investigated the incidence of tactical voting in the British election of 1987. A major hypothesis was that in situations where it made sense (i.e., in which voters preferred a party that was a long way from contention, so that a vote for that party was likely to be ‘wasted’), tactical voting would be much more frequent than had hitherto been assumed. We discovered that this was indeed the case; in what we called ‘objectively tactical situations’, tactical voting was as high as 25 per cent or more in the general case, rising to more than 50 per cent among highly educated weak partisans who had strong negative feelings about the winning party. In the process, however, we discovered what appeared to be an anomaly in need of further exploration.

Item nonresponse rates across regime assessment questions and nonsensitive items are used to create a self-censorship index, which can be compared across countries, over time and across population subgroups. For many authoritarian systems, citizens do not display higher rates of item nonresponse on regime assessment questions than their counterparts in democracies. This result suggests such questions may not be that sensitive in many places, which in turn raises doubts that authoritarian citizens are widely feigning positive attitudes towards regimes they secretly despise. Higher levels of self-censorship are found under regimes without electoral competition for the executive.

Over the past fifteen years, there has been a steady stream of books and articles on business-government relations describing the ‘privileged position’ occupied by the business corporation in the American political system. Taking issue with the pluralist paradigm that dominated writing and research on American national politics in the two decades after the Second World War, these writers have argued that business is not simply another interest group. Instead, they have suggested that its role in American society is more akin to that of a dominant class, power elite or private government: it thus possesses a degree of influence that invariably exceeds that of any other class or interest group. This appraisal of the political dominance of business in contemporary American society primarily rests on four sets of interrelated observations. These include the ability of business to define the political agenda; the extent to which business gains disproportionate benefits from the political process; the need for elected officials to maintain a high degree of ‘business confidence’; and the superior capacity of business interests to mobilize political resources, work closely with each other and shape the climate of public and elite opinion.

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.

This article provides the first systematic cross-country analysis of interest group appearances in the news media. The analysis included three countries – the UK, Spain and Denmark – each representing one of Hallin and Mancini’s1 three overall models of media and politics: the liberal system, the polarized pluralist system and the democratic corporatist system. It finds important similarities across countries with high levels of concentration in media coverage of groups, more extensive coverage of economic groups than citizen groups, and differential patterns of group appearances across policy areas and between right- and left-leaning papers. It also identifies country variation, with the highest degree of concentration among group appearances in Spanish newspapers and the most attention to economic groups in Danish newspapers.

This article reviews comparative research on institutions and economic performance, identifying analytical gaps in the political economy of growth literature. It also examines core assumptions underpinning the good-governance approach to development. Contrasting experiences of conceptual and policy issues in East Asia and Latin America are discussed. The author suggests future scholarship in this field should distinguish between the rules and the play of the game; move beyond the property rights approach to development; stress the distributional, endogenous nature of institutions; investigate the role of informal constraints and human learning; and consider sources of credible commitment and self-enforcing growth. Focusing on some uncertainties in the accepted wisdom on good governance and development, this article furthers the consolidation of research on the political foundations of prosperity.

According to what has recently been labeled ‘political realism’ in political theory, ‘political moralists’ such as Rawls and Dworkin misconstrue the political domain by presuming that morality has priority over politics, thus overlooking that the political is an autonomous domain with its own distinctive conditions and normative sources. Political realists argue that this presumption, commonly referred to as the ‘ethics first premise’, has to be abandoned in order to properly theorize a normative conception of political legitimacy. This article critically examines two features of political realism, which so far have received too little systematic philosophical analysis: the political realist critique of political moralism and the challenges facing political realism in its attempt to offer an alternative account of political legitimacy. Two theses are defended. First, to the extent that proponents of political realism wish to hold onto a normative conception of political legitimacy, refuting wholesale the ethics first premise leads to a deadlock, since it throws the baby out with the bathwater by closing the normative space upon which their account of political legitimacy relies. This is called the ‘necessity thesis’: all coherent and plausible conceptions of political legitimacy must hold onto the ethics first premise. Secondly, accepting this premise – and thus defending an ethics first view – does not entail that the political domain must be seen as a subordinate arena for the application of moral principles, that political normativity is reduced to morality or that morality trumps other reasons in political decision making, as claimed by political realists. Rather, the ethics first view is compatible with an autonomous political domain that makes room for an account of political legitimacy that is defined by and substantiated from sources of normativity specifically within the political. This is called the ‘compatibility thesis’.

While dislike of opposing parties, that is, affective polarization, is a defining feature of contemporary politics, research on this topic largely centers on the United States. We introduce an approach that analyzes affective polarization between pairs of parties, bridging the US two-party system and multiparty systems in other democracies. Analyzing survey data from twenty Western democracies since the mid-1990s, first, we show that partisans' dislike of out-parties is linked to elite policy disagreements on economic issues and, increasingly over time, also to cultural issues. Secondly, we argue and empirically demonstrate that governing coalition partners in parliamentary democracies display much warmer feelings toward each other than we would expect based on elite policy (dis)agreements. Third, we show that radical right parties are disliked much more intensely than we would expect based on policy disputes and coalition arrangements. These findings highlight the policy-based and institutional underpinnings of affective polarization.

Much scholarship concerning human rights international nongovernmental organizations (HR-INGOs) focuses on the central role they play within transnational advocacy networks. Despite this theoretical focus on networks, there has been scant empirical attention on the characteristics of the HR-INGO network or on whether the network characteristics of a HR-INGO matter for its advocacy output. Introducing a new relational dataset on 681 HR-INGOs, this article finds that the HR-INGO network is somewhat like a public good and that the organizations who utilize it benefit in terms of their international advocacy output. Other findings focus on how the structural characteristics of organizations can influence their propensity to connect to each other and how ‘free-riding’ can limit the benefits organizations receive from the network.

Prior international political economy public opinion research has primarily examined how economic and socio-cultural factors shape individuals’ views on the flows of goods, people and capital. This research has largely ignored whether individuals also care about rewarding or punishing foreign countries for their policies on these issues. We tested this possibility by administering a series of conjoint and traditional survey experiments in the United States and China that examined how reciprocity influences opposition to foreign acquisitions of domestic companies. We find that reciprocity is an important determinant of public opinion on the regulation of foreign investments. This suggests the need to consider the policies that other countries adopt when trying to explain public attitudes toward global economic integration.

The spatial maps of parties' policy programmes published by the Manifesto Research Group (MRG) for the European Consortium for Political Research reveal the following empirical patterns: that parties differentiate their policy positions from one another; that parties rarely leapfrog each other; that parties shift their positions over time but only within ‘ideologically delimited’ areas of the policy space. These findings are not well explained by existing spatial models of party competition, which typically predict policy convergence and which moreover do not examine temporal patterns of party policies. This article modifies the standard Downsian model to incorporate a concept originally developed by Chapman that, in addition to policies, voters are motivated by non-policy considerations arising from such factors as party leaders' images, social-psychological attachments rooted in class, religion, ethnicity and so on. For this ‘biased vote’ model I present illustrative arguments that vote-seeking parties are motivated to differentiate their policy positions from each other, and that over time they can be expected to vary their policy proposals but without leapfrogging – predictions that accord well with the MRG's empirical findings. I apply the biased vote model to empirical data on the distributions of voter preferences in recent British and French elections. My results support the illustrative arguments, and also suggest that these arguments apply even when the degree of voter bias in the electorate is quite low.

Do people believe the votes they cast are truly secret? Novel items added to a nationally representative survey show that 25 per cent of respondents report not believing their ballot choices are kept secret and over 70 per cent report sharing their vote choices with others. These findings suggest that standard models of candidate choice should account for the potential effects of doubts about ballot secrecy. Consistent with this view, regression analysis shows that social forces appear to have a greater effect on vote choices among people who doubt the formal secrecy of the ballot. This analysis supports the broader claim that the intended benefits of institutional rules may not be realized if people's perceptions of these rules differ from their formal characteristics.

Because non-voters are less politically informed than voters, some propose that increasing voter turnout would reduce the quality of information among the active voting population, damaging electoral outcomes. However, the proposed tradeoff between increased participation and informed participation is a false dichotomy. This article demonstrates that political information is endogenous to participation. A field experiment integrates an intensive mobilization treatment into a panel survey conducted before and after a city-wide election. Subjects who were mobilized to vote also became more informed about the content of the election. The results suggest institutions that encourage participation not only increase voter turnout – mobilizing electoral participation also motivates citizens to become more politically informed.

While studies of the motives for intentional insurgent violence against civilians are now common, relatively little academic research has focused on the impact of victimization on conflict processes or war outcomes. This article addresses this gap in the literature. Specifically, the authors examine the influence of civilian victimization on bargaining between the regime and insurgents during a civil war. A curvilinear relationship between the level of civilian victimization used by insurgents and the likelihood that conflict ends in negotiated settlement is posited. The probability of settlement is highest for groups that engage in a moderate level of civilian killing but declines at particularly high levels. A competing risk analysis using monthly conflict data on African civil wars between 1989 and 2010 supports this argument.

There is general agreement that democratic institutions shape politicians’ incentives to cater to certain constituencies, but which electoral system causes politicians to be most responsive to narrow interests is still debateable. Some argue that plurality electoral rules provide the greatest incentives for politicians to cater to the interests of a few; others say proportional systems prompt politicians to be relatively more prone to narrow interests. This study suggests that both positions can be correct under different conditions. Politicians competing in plurality systems privilege voters with a shared narrow interest when such voters are geographically concentrated, but when they are geographically diffuse, such voters have greater political influence in proportional electoral systems. Government spending on subsidies in fourteen developed countries provides empirical support for this argument.

The recent proliferation of referendums on sovereignty matters has fuelled growing scholarly interest. However, comparative research is hindered by the weaknesses of current compilations, which tend to suffer from conceptual vagueness, varied coding decisions, incomplete coverage and ad hoc categorizations. Based on an improved conceptualization and theory-driven typology, this article presents a new dataset of 602 sovereignty referendums from 1776–2012, more than double the number in existing lists. In an exploratory analysis, it uncovers eight distinctive clusters of sovereignty referendums and identifies patterns of activity over time and space as well as outcomes produced.

How does wartime exposure to ethnic violence affect the political preferences of ordinary citizens? Are high-violence communities more or less likely to reject the politicization of ethnicity post-war? We argue that community-level experience with wartime violence solidifies ethnic identities, fosters intra-ethnic cohesion and increases distrust toward non-co-ethnics, thereby making ethnic parties the most attractive channels of representation and contributing to the politicization of ethnicity. Employing data on wartime casualties at the community level and pre- as well as post-war election results in Bosnia, we find strong support for this argument. The findings hold across a number of robustness checks. Using post-war survey data, we also provide evidence that offers suggestive support for the proposed causal mechanism.

Access to information is a hallmark of democracy, and democracy demands an informed citizenry. Knowledge of party positions is necessary for voters so that electoral choices reflect preferences, allowing voters to hold elected officials accountable for policy performance. Whereas most vote choice models assume that parties perfectly transmit positions, citizens in fact obtain political information via the news media, and this news coverage can be biased in terms of salience – which leads to asymmetric information. This study examines how information asymmetries in news coverage of parties influence knowledge about political party positions. It finds that the availability of information in the news media about a party increases knowledge about its position, and that party information in non-quality news reduces the knowledge gap more than information in quality news.

To evaluate calls for a more theoretically generalizable, large-N study of EU interest representation, we adapt the ESA model of interest system density, originally developed to study the interest communities of the American states, to the EU case. We necessarily modify both model and measures in order to account for the unique features of the EU policy process. We test the model with OLS regression using data on the density of different types or guilds (economic and social sectors) of organized interests in the European Union. We use the findings to discuss the viability of inter-system transfers of theories about the politics of interest representation.