Much political behaviour can be interpreted as the pursuit of more or less naked self-interest. Occasionally, though, individuals do apparently exhibit some concern for their fellow human beings. The result is a less cold and dismal world – and one in which moral philosophers can find a role. Our focus here, however, is more on practical problems than philosophical ones. We shall be less concerned with questions of what moralists should demand of people than with questions of how such demands could be enforced upon people. Specifically, we will be asking how it is possible to evoke from people support for policies aiding those less fortunate than themselves. We propose to address this question by exploring the sources of support for the most broadly-based institution presently available for promoting social justice, the welfare state.

AN INTELLECTUAL ODYSSEY

[L]egislative strategy, which most writers have treated as a mystical art … , may on examination by this [social choice] theory turn out to be a science with quite coherent rules.W. Riker, ‘Voting and the Summation of Preferences: An Interpretive Bibliographical Review of Selected Developments During the Last Decade’, American Political Science Review, 55 (1961), 900–11, quoted at p. 911.

At the most general level there are the things people talk about as possible subjects for group decision. Call this the feasible set. From this misty swamp, politicians – by constitutional restrictions and direction and by rhetorical and heresthetical maneuvers – form the set of considered issues.William H. Riker, Agenda Formation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), p. 2.

How does economic inequality affect support for redistribution to native citizens and immigrants? While prior studies have examined the separate effects of inequality and immigration on redistribution preferences, the interaction between inequality and communal identity has been largely overlooked. This article explains that inequality triggers selective solidarity. Individuals exposed to inequality become more supportive of redistribution – but only if the redistribution benefits native-born citizens. Inequality therefore reinforces the already popular opinion that native citizens deserve welfare priority and widens the gap between support for natives and support for immigrants. This study first provides cross-national evidence with survey data linked to contextual socio-economic indicators from advanced industrialized countries. To evaluate causally identified effects, it then presents the results of a survey experiment administered to a nationally representative sample of Italian citizens. The findings imply that economic inequality can increase support for populist radical right parties that advocate discrimination in access to welfare services based on native citizenship.

Long-term immigrants often have the option but not the obligation to acquire citizenship in their state of residence. Contrary to the received wisdom, this article defends the idea of mandatory citizenship for immigrants. It suggests that the current asymmetry in the distribution of political obligations between native-born citizens and immigrants is unfair. It also argues that mandatory citizenship is required by the principle that those who persistently affect others should share a democratic setting. Finally, it claims that mandatory citizenship is more compatible with the ideal of democratic equality and more conducive to a stable society.

Researchers have puzzled over the finding that countries that ratify UN human rights treaties such as the Convention Against Torture are more likely to abuse human rights than non-ratifiers over time. This article presents evidence that the changing standard of accountability – the set of expectations that monitoring agencies use to hold states responsible for repressive actions – conceals real improvements to the level of respect for human rights in data derived from monitoring reports. Using a novel dataset that accounts for systematic changes to human rights reports, it is demonstrated that the ratification of human rights treaties is associated with higher levels of respect for human rights. This positive relationship is robust to a variety of measurement strategies and model specifications.

Two major traditions of belief, democracy and capitalism, have dominated American public life from its inception. Although they have not always coexisted in perfect harmony – indeed their union has often been torn by conflict – they have managed to accommodate to each other with sufficient flexibility to have forged a viable political culture.

This Note explores the candidate-endorsement process in the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) of Japan during its period of hegemony (1955–90). Even in parties without an enduring factional structure such as the LDP, nominations are often troublesome – witness, for example, the reselection controversy in Britain's Labour party at the end of the 1970s or the perennially damaging fights in American primary elections. Moreover, it is easy to understand why nomination politics is so consistently problematic: the gist of the problem is simply that different groups within a party may differ as to who should receive the party endorsement in a given district (or, in list systems, who should get the safe spots on the list). Group A naturally wants its candidate(s) endorsed (there may be more than one in multi-member districts), but so do groups B, C and D. The resulting interaction between groups can be what a game theorist would call a co-ordination, or Battle of the Sexes, game.

While previous research on the reciprocal effects of citizens’ issue attitudes and their party support emphasize citizens’ issue positions, political competition revolves equally around issue salience – that is, debates over which issue areas political parties should prioritize. Using multi-wave panel survey data from Germany and Great Britain, this study analyzes the reciprocal effects of citizens’ issue salience and their party support, and concludes that citizens’ issue priorities both influence and are influenced by their party attachments and, moreover, that these effects are linked to parties’ long-term associative issue ownership. This effect is strongest among supporters of a small issue-orientated niche party, the German Greens.

Many theorists believe that the manipulation of voting procedures is a serious problem. Accordingly, much of social choice theory examines the conditions under which strategy-proofness can be ensured, and what kind of procedures do a better job of preventing manipulation. This article argues that democrats should not be worried about manipulation. Two arguments against manipulation are examined: first, the ‘sincerity argument’, according to which manipulation should be rejected because it displays a form of insincere behaviour. This article distinguishes between sincere and non-sincere manipulation and shows that a familiar class of social choice functions is immune to insincere manipulation. Secondly, the ‘transparency’ argument against manipulation is discussed and it is argued that (sincere or insincere) manipulation may indeed lead to non-transparency of the decision-making process, but that, from a democratic perspective, such non-transparency is often a virtue rather than a vice.

What are the sources of mass partisanship? The focus of this article is on the role of party organizational strategies in Brazil, where sociological cleavages are weak. All Brazilian parties post electoral gains by opening local branch offices, but only the Workers’ Party (PT) manages to win voters’ hearts and minds, cultivating mass partisan identification. This follows from its deliberate effort to use its local party organization to reach out to organized civil society – to ‘mobilize the organized.’ Results further indicate that the PT only gains partisan identifiers where civil society is organizationally dense. Together, this suggests that party strategy to cultivate partisanship is insufficient: pre-existing organizational networks must exist in civil society, meaning that ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ strategies are two sides of the same coin.

This article tests several hypotheses about distributive politics by studying the distribution of federal spending across US states over the period 1978–2002. It improves on previous work by using survey data to measure the share of voters in each state that are Democrats, Republicans and Independents, or liberals, conservatives and moderates. No evidence is found that the allocation of federal spending to the states is distorted by strategic manipulation to win electoral support. States with many swing voters are not advantaged compared to states with more loyal voters, and ‘battleground states’ are not advantaged compared to other states. Spending appears to have little or no effect on voters’ choices, while partisanship and ideology have large effects.

All the theories of coalition formation known to us incorporate an assumption (or a set of assumptions which imply) that coalitions which are formed must at least be ‘winning’. 1 In the present context, a coalition is said to be winning if the sum of the seats held by its members is at least a simple majority of all the seats in the parliament. Most of these theories were intended to apply to government coalitions: indeed, several of them were specifically designed for this situation. Yet out of the total of 207 governments which have formed in twelve western democracies since the war, 2 seventy-four of them have not been winning.

Samuel Huntington's ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis has sparked considerable debate. Huntington argues that post-Cold War conflicts will revolve primarily around civilizations. This article uses the Minorities at Risk dataset to provide a quantitative element to the civilizations debate, which, thus far, has been based mostly on anecdotal arguments. The article focuses on whether there has been a rise in both the quantity and intensity of ethnic conflicts between groups belonging to different civilizations since the end of the Cold War. Overall, the analysis reveals several problems with Huntington's argument. First, Huntington's classification of civilizations is difficult to operationalize. Secondly, civilizational conflicts constitute a minority of ethnic conflicts. Thirdly, conflicts between the West and both the Sinic/Confucian and Islamic civilizations, which Huntington predicts will be the major conflicts in the post-Cold War era, constitute a small minority of civilizational conflicts. Finally, there is no statistically significant evidence that the intensity of civilizational ethnic conflicts have risen relative to other types of ethnic conflicts since the end of the Cold War.

Although the politics of law and order are currently a major issue of debate among criminologists, comparative public policy research has largely neglected it. This article fills that gap by bringing together criminological and public policy theories, and by examining law-and-order policies in twenty Western industrialized countries. It adds to the existing literature in two important ways: it provides a straightforward quantitative test of the existing criminological explanations of law-and-order policies using public spending as the dependent variable; and it shows that governments’ partisan ideology matters for law-and-order policies. Government ideology influences how much countries spend on public order and safety, but the effect depends on the budgetary room for manœuvre and the strength of institutional barriers.

In a valuable recent article, Brian Barry has given us an extended commentary on the logic of Albert Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, which Barry rightly regards as a good example of that phenomenon of American political science,

Open political discussion between citizens is a cornerstone of democratic theory and contextual accounts of political behaviour. It provides both a means through which individuals can discover what their peers think and a forum within which they can rationalize, explain and perhaps modify their own opinions. Much previous research has focused on the potential of political conversation as a means of influencing others and of converting holders of minority views to the opinions of the majority. However, theoretical accounts of political conversation also stress its potential impact on more systemic attitudes towards democracy, including the development of tolerance for divergent views and lifestyles. The article provides an evaluation of these potential effects in the context of recent British politics.

Roll-call cohesion scores are the most widely used measures of voting blocs in legislative studies, appearing in literally hundreds of studies since their introduction in 1924. Despite a staple of legislative studies, we know virtually nothing about the statistical properties of these scores. In this article, it is shown how such scores suffer a serious bias problem: scores are artificially inflated for small parties, especially those that are less unified. The problem is demonstrated and an intuitive solution proposed. It is illustrated with data from the United States and from Brazil.

This article examines critically an explanation, first propounded by Austin Ranney, as to the causes of party reform in the United States. Ranney argued that there is an ambivalent attitude to parties in the United States; while there is evidence of popular support for parties, the political culture is also infused by anti-party values. Periodically this has facilitated the enactment of legislation, promoted by anti-party reformers, constraining parties. Focusing on the Australian Ballot, the article argues that its rapid adoption in the United States resulted from its seeming to solve problems facing party elites in the 1880s – problems that arose from the erosion of a face-to-face society. Despite opposition from anti-party reformers, parties in most states legislated for types of ballot that preserved party control of the electorate. Moreover, during the Progressive era the parties generally continued to preserve a type of ballot that favoured them. The ability of parties to defend their interests against anti-party reformers was possible when it was clear where those interests lay. With other reforms, including the direct primary, this was much less evident, and it was then far more difficult for the parties to defend themselves.

It is widely supposed that the level of popular support for governments depends on those governments' success in handling the economy. Some recent studies have attempted to test this idea by estimating the statistical relationship between the government's popularity in the opinion polls and various indicators of the state of the economy such as unemployment rates, inflation rates, growth rates and so on. A general finding of these studies is that popularity is significantly correlated with all these indicators of the standard of living. All of them, however, operate on the assumption that the voters behave as if they had perfect knowledge of the state of the economy as set out for example by the Government Statistical Service. Whether this assumption does, in fact, approximate to the truth will, however, depend in large part on how the popular media present economic trends and economic relationships to their public. If there are gaps and biases in the information which is presented to many voters, then those voters will be responding to a picture of the economy which may differ dramatically from the picture offered by publications such as Economic Trends and the government will be selling its policies in a highly imperfect market. The purpose of this paper is to mount a preliminary investigation into the picture of the economy which has been presented by one important medium of communication, namely mass-circulation newspapers. The aim is to show how firstly the scope and secondly the interpretation of the economic data presented by the popular press developed over the period 1960–80. The limitations of this method should be spelled out. We are not considering all the sources from which people derive information about the economy (personal communications, radio, television, newspapers), but only the last and possibly the most partisan of these. This Note offers, therefore, in no sense ‘the ordinary man in the street's perception of the economy’ but simply the picture of the economy which one influential medium of communication presented.

Cascade models explain the roles of the intrepid few who initiate protest and the masses who join when the expected utility of dissent flips from negative to positive. Yet questions remain about what motivates participation between those points on the causal chain, or under any conditions of high risk. To explain these anomalies, this article employs theories of moral identity to explore the interdependence of a facet of decision making that rationalist models typically regard as fixed: individuals’ awareness of and need to express values central to their sense of self. Three mechanisms describe ways that individuals’ responses to early risers trigger moral identity-based motivations for protest. First, by conjuring normative ideals, first movers can activate bystanders’ urge to follow their example in order to earn their own self-respect. Secondly, by demonstrating the joy of agency, early risers can inspire bystanders’ desire to experience the same gratification. Thirdly, by absorbing punishments, early risers can activate onlookers’ sense of moral obligation to contribute to collective efforts. These mechanisms redouble bystanders’ sense of the inherent value of protest, apart from its instrumental utility, and intensify their acceptance of risks, independent of the actual risks anticipated. Original interviews with displaced Syrians about their participation in demonstrations illustrate these processes.