Recent developments in the analysis of long-memoried processes provide important leverage for analysing time-series variables of interest to political scientists. This article provides an accessible exposition of these methods and illustrates their utility for addressing protracted controversies regarding the political economy of party support in Britain. Estimates of the fractionally differencing parameter, d, reveal that governing party support, prime ministerial approval and economic evaluations are long-memoried and non-stationary, and that governing party support and prime ministerial approval are fractionally cointegrated. Pace conventional wisdom that party leader images matter little, if at all, analyses of multivariate fractional error correction models show that prime ministerial approval has important short-run and long-run effects on party support. Prospective and retrospective personal economic evaluations are influential but, contrary to a longstanding claim, national economic evaluations are not significant. The article concludes by suggesting that individual-level heterogeneity is a likely source of the observed aggregate-level fractional integration in governing party support and its determinants. Specifying parsimonious models that incorporate theoretically meaningful heterogeneity is a challenging topic for future research.

This article measures the social rewards and sanctions associated with voting. A series of survey experiments shows that information about whether a person votes directly affects how favorably that person is viewed. Importantly, the study also compares the rewards and sanctions associated with voting to other activities, including the decisions to recycle, volunteer and return one’s library books on time. It presents a behavioral test of the consequences of non-voting and finds that individuals are willing to take costly action in a dictator game to reward political participation. Finally, it shows that survey measures of social norms about voting are correlated with county-level voter turnout. The study adds to the growing literature documenting the important influence of social concerns on turnout and other political choices.

Preferences for redistribution and social spending are correlated with income and unemployment risk, but it is unclear how these relationships come about. I build a theory emphasizing that only large changes in economic circumstances provide the information and motivation needed for people to change their preferences. Stable long-run preferences are shaped mainly by early socialization, which includes economic and ideological influences from the family, and early labor market experiences. Enduring shocks, low intergenerational mobility and the tendency of left-wing parents to be poorer generate correlations between circumstances and preferences. Because preferences are stable, greater inequality may not increase aggregate support for redistribution. Support is found for the theory with panel data from Switzerland, using a range of empirical tests.

There is ongoing controversy as to whether political democracy inhibits or facilitates national economic growth. It is argued here that the answer to this question depends greatly on the regional political context within which democracy functions. In regions where social groups clamour for redistribution, as in Latin America, democracy may lead to populism and poor economic performance. Similarly, in regions where state elites are generally committed to promoting rapid industrialization, as in parts of Asia, democratic pressures may impede effective economic policy. However, in regions where patrimonialism is chronic, as in Sub-Saharan Africa, democracy may provide a useful mechanism for evicting grossly corrupt politicians and may therefore facilitate higher rates of economic growth. These regional arguments are tested statistically here and show that democratic governance constrains growth in Latin America and Asia yet facilitates growth in Africa. Sensitivity analyses indicate that these findings are fairly robust.

Two theoretical perspectives on the connection between religion and politics are applied to Great Britain. Data from the 1991 and 1992 waves of the British Household Panel Study, used to conduct multinomial logistic regression analysis, dispute the general consensus that religion has weak or no effects on the voting decisions of British citizens. Religious belonging, behaviour and belief, as well as the religious context of households, continue to influence British voting behaviour. Interaction effects among religious variables and between religious variables and class also operate to influence vote choice. Areas for further research into the religious bases of British electoral behaviour are suggested.

Applying insights from social-choice theory to illuminate the functioning of pluralitarian Westminster institutions, this article develops a coherent political answer to four puzzling questions about the economic liberalization that transformed New Zealand in 1984–93: why an anti-statist programme was initiated (and largely accomplished) by a labour party, why restructuring was more radical in New Zealand than in other democracies, why reformers were able to prevail through two elections and a change of government, and why they committed costly policy-sequencing errors. Understanding this remarkable case has implications for empirically grounded social-choice theory, the political theory of policy reform, and the evaluation of pluralitarian democracy – which New Zealanders themselves repudiated in 1993 by adopting proportional representation.

Drawing on evidence from the 2011 Egyptian uprising, this article demonstrates how the use of two social media platforms – Facebook and Twitter – contributed to a discrete mobilizational outcome: the staging of a successful first protest in a revolutionary cascade, referred to here as ‘first-mover mobilization’. Specifically, it argues that these two platforms facilitated the staging of a large, nationwide and seemingly leaderless protest on 25 January 2011, which signaled to hesitant but sympathetic Egyptians that a revolution might be in the making. It draws on qualitative and quantitative evidence, including interviews, social media data and surveys, to analyze three mechanisms that linked these platforms to the success of the January 25 protest: (1) protester recruitment, (2) protest planning and coordination, and (3) live updating about protest logistics. The article not only contributes to debates about the role of the Internet in the Arab Spring and other recent waves of mobilization, but also demonstrates how scholarship on the Internet in politics might move toward making more discrete, empirically grounded causal claims.

Institutions operating beyond direct control of government, such as central banks, constitutional courts and public broadcasters, enjoy guarantees of de jure independence, but de jure independence is no guarantee of de facto independence. This is especially so for public broadcasting, where cultural variables are often assumed to be decisive. In this article, the de jure and de facto independence of thirty-six public service broadcasters world-wide are operationalized, and de jure independence is found to explain a high degree of de facto independence when account is taken of the size of the market for news. Other variables considered in previous literature – such as bureaucratic partisanship and the polarization of the party system – are not found to be significant.

Policy-sensitive models of judicial behaviour, whether attitudinal or strategic, have largely passed Britain by. This article argues that this neglect has been benign, because explanations of judicial decisions in terms of the positions of individual judges fare poorly in the British case. To support this argument, the non-unanimous opinions of British Law Lords between 1969 and 2009 are analysed. A hierarchical item-response model of individual judges’ votes is estimated in order to identify judges’ locations along a one-dimensional policy space. Such a model is found to be no better than a null model that predicts that every judge will vote with the majority with the same probability. Locations generated by the model do not represent judges’ political attitudes, only their propensity to dissent. Consequently, judges’ individual votes should not be used to describe them in political terms.

Under what conditions are mass attitudes towards particular issues ‘vertically’ constrained by core cultural values? Vertical constraint is shaped by three related variables: the objective content of the issue, the way the issue is framed by elites and the individual's level of attentiveness to the controversy. Some issues are ‘easy’. They so permeate social discourse that people encounter, often without wanting to, many social agents offering shortcuts for the vertical, values-to-issue link. Most issues, however, are ‘hard’. Arcane in content and bereft of vigorous mediation, hard issues are more difficult for individuals to tie to core values. As the inferential connection between value and issue lengthens, and as social agents become fewer and more remote, an individual's ability to use values to interpret issues will increasingly depend on whether the decision makers, activists and other elites directly involved in the debate can create a connection and, of course, on whether the individual is paying attention. An analysis of the nuclear power controversy, a highly complex technical issue, reveals that a value-based interpretation favoured by elites and promoted by the media is faithfully reflected in how the mass public understands the issue. Furthermore, non-elites who are more attuned to political life are more polarized on the basis of these core values.

This article seeks to further our understanding of how social structure affects the onset of civil war. Existing studies to date have been inconclusive, focusing only on single-cleavage characteristics of social structure, such as ethnic or religious fractionalization. This study argues that models that do not take into account the relationship between cleavages (or cleavage structure) are biased and thus reach faulty conclusions. With the focus on the cleavages of ethnicity and religion, the effects of two characteristics of cleavage structure on civil war onset (cross-cuttingness and cross-fragmentation) are defined and tested. A new index of ethno-religious cross-cuttingness (ERC), derived from national public opinion surveys, reveals that ERC is a significant determinant of civil war onset when interacted with ethnic fractionalization.

While research on conspiracy theories and those who believe them has recently undergone a renaissance, there still exists a great deal of uncertainty about the measurement of conspiratorial beliefs and orientations, and the consequences of a conspiratorial mindset for expressly political attitudes and behaviors. We first demonstrate, using data from the 2012 American National Election Study, that beliefs in a variety of specific conspiracy theories are simultaneously, but differentially, the product of both a general tendency toward conspiratorial thinking and left/right political orientations. Next, we employ unique data including a general measure of conspiratorial thinking to explore the predictors of specific conspiracy beliefs. We find that partisan and ideological self-identifications are more important than any other variable in predicting ‘birther’ beliefs, while conspiratorial thinking is most important in predicting conspiracy beliefs about the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Deliberative democrats are committed both to inclusion and to barring coercion in public discourse. Their commitment to democratic inclusion should make them sympathetic to the challenges faced by social movements. An adequate sociology of contentious public discourse, however, shows that social movements must often act coercively in order to be included. For example, they must often alter the terrain of conflict, create a crisis, pressure interlocutors to argue consistently, or compel other parties to enter social arenas of contention that they have avoided. Democratic theorists who are committed to inclusion should approve of such coercion. Under the actual circumstances movements face, there is a tension between non-coercion and democratic inclusion. This tension demonstrates the need for a democratic standard and a mode of democratic social analysis beyond those that deliberative theory offers.

In an article published some time ago. we analysed in a systematic way the relationship between constituency marginality and turnout in British general elections between 1955 and 1970. Previous considerations of marginality had concentrated on its effect upon change in turnout from one election to the next, but we were concerned with the relationship between the absolute level of turnout in constituencies in one election and their marginality at the previous election (‘previous marginality’). We found that there was a consistent, significant, positive relationship between previous constituency marginality and turnout.

This article contributes to the empirical turn in deliberative democratic theory, by studying the presence of arguing (discussion on the merits) and bargaining in the working groups of the Council of the European Union. It uses a survey of representatives of member states to analyse to what extent, under what circumstances, and by whom, arguing is used. The results indicate that arguing is indeed common in the Council working groups, but also that there is substantial variation. Most arguing is found in intergovernmental policy areas and by the most powerful and well-connected actors. The findings point to the conclusion that higher stakes and political pressure make actors less willing and able to engage in arguing.

Some scholars use the ‘dynamic representation’ approach to test how much current policy changes reflect past public preferences. This article tests hypotheses derived from this approach in a left–right context for the United Kingdom from 1976 to 2006. This shows that government policy on the left–right scale shifts as public preferences change (‘rational anticipation’). Secondly, a public with right-wing preferences elects the Conservatives, who pursue right-wing policies in office (‘electoral turnover’). However, popular incumbents are less likely to adjust their policy position to the public. The Westminster system is criticized for its weak link between the rulers and the ruled, but dynamic representation on the left–right scale in the United Kingdom seems to have functioned admirably in this period.

‘In the last ten years on my individual reckoning’, observes S. E. Finer, ‘there have been seventy-three coups in forty-six countries’. ‘Coups’, Gurr comments, ‘can alter political processes and social institutions as drastically as any classic revolutions’. Yet the incidence and importance of coups are hardly reflected in the sparse literature proposing generalizations about their causes. Certainly, many case studies of individual coups have been undertaken, but the choice of the country has usually been decided by availability of data rather than its significance for a general theory. Given that coups have occurred all over the world, they clearly are a general phenomenon. Existing general explanations for them, however, are open to criticism. These suggest that essentially there is room for a theory which is about coups in particular rather than about wider forms of political instability, or about the narrower, military, coup; which is capable of falsification, avoiding inherently untestable hypotheses or concepts that are defined so loosely as to invite accusations of tautology; and which is, of course, able to withstand appropriate empirical examination.

One of the chief explanations for the decline of social capital in the United States is the passing of the ‘civic generation’, those who came of age during the Depression and the Second World War. These Americans experienced greater government largesse than previous generations, yet we know little about how public programmes influenced their subsequent involvement in public life. This article draws on policy feedback theory to examine how the educational benefits of the GI Bill, through which 7.8 million Second World War veterans attended college or gained vocational training, affected recipients' political participation across three time periods, from 1950 to 1998. We find that initially, interpretive effects of programme implementation produced increased levels of participation among users generally. Later on, resource effects enhanced participation rates selectively, with the strongest effects among those who had attained the highest levels of education. Overall, the study illustrates distinct mechanisms, timing and sequencing through which public policy can shape the interests and capacities of programme recipients to engage in democratic participation.

Recently there has been a renewed interest in the role of local campaigns and their effectiveness on increasing turnout and support for political parties. However, there is a long-standing debate over the best way to measure campaign effort. This article advances the current literature by using a latent variable modelling approach to utilize, for the first time, evidence frorvey of agents, official records of campaign spending and individual voter survey data to produce a combined measure of campaign effort. This measure (latent variable) is then used in a structural equation model of party performance to assess the effect of the campaign effort of the three main parties at the 2005 British general election. In terms of both the delivery and effectiveness of campaigns the parties are found to behave in a way consistent with a rational model of party behaviour, though constrained by contextual factors.