The correlation between ideology and partisanship in the mass public has increased in recent decades amid a climate of persistent and growing elite polarization. Given that core values shape subsequent political predispositions, as well as the demonstrated asymmetry of elite polarization, this article hypothesizes that egalitarianism and moral traditionalism moderate the relationship between ideology and partisanship in that the latter relationship will have increased over time only among individuals who maintain conservative value orientations. An analysis of pooled American National Election Studies surveys from 1988 to 2012 supports this hypothesis. The results enhance scholarly understanding of the role of core values in shaping mass belief systems and testify to the asymmetric nature and mass public reception of elite cues among liberals and conservatives.

Outsiders are familiar figures in literature but feature scarcely at all in political analysis. This is despite the fact that some of the most significant political leaders of recent decades have been outsiders, including Britain's Margaret Thatcher. She was certainly a social outsider. She was almost certainly a psychological outsider. Not least, she chose to operate politically as an outsider. Her career points to both the strengths and the weaknesses of the role of the outsider as political leader.

A methodology is proposed for assessing the impact of televised debates on electoral outcomes, and it is applied to a specific case, that of the 1988 Canadian election. We present four tests of the debates' impact: first, a cross-sectional group comparison, which contrasts the voting behaviour of those who did and those who did not see the debates; secondly, a panel analysis of the shift in party support, before and after the debates, among those who watched the debates and those who did not; thirdly, a panel study of the impact of reactions to the debates on voting behaviour; and, fourthly, a time-series analysis, which examines the evolution of vote intentions over the course of the campaign and, more precisely, before and after the debates.

It is argued that because non-watchers are influenced by what their friends or the media tell them about the debates, the first two designs, based on a comparison of debate watchers and non-watchers, are not appropriate. The empirical analysis of the 1988 Canadian election substantiates this point. While these first two designs seem to indicate no debate impact, panel reaction and time-series analyses show that the debates had a substantial and enduring impact on the vote and that they were decisive in the contest for second place between the Liberals and the NDP.

There is little research on the thousands of individuals who take part in intergroup violence. This article proposes that their participation is motivated by the emotion of intergroup anger, which, in turn, is triggered by a comparison between the intergroup distribution of resources and the distribution that is believed to be desirable. Thus, when another group is perceived to violate group entitlements – by taking jobs thought to belong to the ingroup, for example – anger is experienced and individuals become more willing to take part in violence against the outgroup. Support for this theory is found in a new survey dataset, collected in a slum in South Africa where anti-immigrant violence occurred in 2008.

This article develops a number of themes first raised in an earlier paper where we attempted to publicize the existence of Census data based, for the first time, on British parliamentary constituencies, and where we briefly described the potential and limits of a variety of available statistical techniques of analysis. Until the earlier paper was published, studies of British electoral behaviour using aggregate data were largely historical, generally used only the simplest statistical techniques such as cross-tabulations, and usually proceeded blithely unaware of the snares of ecological inference. A small number of more advanced analyses had appeared but none focused on Britain or even on England as a whole. Since our earlier article appeared, there have been two attempts to construct predictive models of Labour support by applying multivariate statistical analysis to aggregate-level data. As we show in this paper, both Barnett and Rasmussen produce models that are statistically less powerful than our own and are subject to various weaknesses, of which the most important is the failure to tackle the problem of ecological inference.

Can rebel organizations in a civil conflict use social media to garner international support? This article argues that the use of social media is a unique form of public diplomacy through which rebels project a favorable image to gain that support. It analyzes the Libyan civil war, during which rebels invested considerable resources in diplomatic efforts to gain US support. The study entails collecting original data, and finds that rebel public diplomacy via Twitter increases co-operation with the rebels when their message (1) clarifies the type of regime they intend to create and (2) emphasizes the atrocities perpetrated by the government. Providing rebels with an important tool of image projection, social media can affect dynamics in an ever more connected international arena.

This article explains a surprising wave of lethal attacks by drug cartels against hundreds of local elected officials and party candidates in Mexico, 2007–2012. These attacks are puzzling because criminal organizations tend to prefer the secrecy of bribery over the publicity of political murder. Scholars suggest that war drives armed actors to attack state authorities in search of protection or rents. Using original data on high-profile attacks in Mexico, the authors show that war need arguments underexplain violence. Focusing on political opportunities, they suggest that cartels use attacks to establish criminal governance regimes and conquer local governments, populations and territories. The study presents quantitative and qualitative evidence showing that cartels took advantage of Mexico's political polarization and targeted subnational authorities who were unprotected by their federal partisan rivals. Cartels intensified attacks during subnational election cycles to capture incoming governments and targeted geographically adjacent municipalities to establish control over large territories. The findings reveal how cartels take cues from the political environment to develop their own de facto political domains through high-profile violence. These results question the widely shared assumption that organized criminal groups are apolitical actors.

What are the lessons of the 2016 referendum on UK membership of the European Union (EU) regarding the effects of message framing? This article reports findings from an innovative online survey experiment based on a two-wave panel design. The findings show that, despite the expectation that campaign effects are generally small for high-salience issues – such as Brexit – the potential for campaign effects was high for the pro-EU frames. This suggests that within an asymmetrical information environment – in which the arguments for one side of an issue (anti-EU) are ‘priced in’, while arguments for the other side (pro-EU) have been understated – the potential for campaign effects in a single direction are substantial. To the extent that this environment is reflected in other referendum campaigns, the potential effect of pro-EU frames may be substantial.

Recent studies of lynching have focused on structural theories that have been tested with demographic, economic and electoral data without much explanatory success. This article suggests that lynching was largely a reflection of a facilitating subculture of violence within which these atrocities were situationally determined by cultural factors not reported in census and economic tabulations, or election returns. Lynching declined in the twentieth century, in part, as a result of segregation and disfranchisement policies, but mainly because state executioners replaced lynch mobs in carrying out the will of the white majority.

Semi-presidential regimes have attracted increasing attention from scholars and constitutional reformers over the last quarter century. Yet, despite this popularity, there is no consensus on how to understand this constitutional format. Since Duverger defined semi-presidentialism as a ‘new political system model’, and Linz argued that the constitutional format shares many of the ‘perils of presidentialism’, subsequent research has questioned the conceptual status of semi-presidentialism as a distinct regime type, and whether it has any distinct effects on politics. In this article we review the progress of recent work on semi-presidentialism and suggest that the conceptual tools to clarify some of the major debates in the field are now available in the form of principal–agent theoretical work on democratic constitutions.

During the 1980s and the 1990s, the elites of the two largest Dutch parties converged dramatically in debates on income redistribution, nuclear power and the overall Left–Right dimension, paving the way for the Dutch party system's polarization on immigration and cultural issues. Did the Dutch mass public depolarize along with party elites, and, if so, was this mass-level depolarization confined to affluent, educated, politically engaged citizens? Analysis of Dutch Parliamentary Election Study respondents’ policy beliefs and partisan loyalties in 1986–98 shows that the mass public depolarized during this period, and that this extended equally throughout the electorate. These conclusions mirror previous findings on Britain, but differ from those on the United States, and have important implications for political representation and for parties’ election strategies.

Research shows that voters often use gender stereotypes to evaluate candidates, which should help women in some electoral contexts and hurt them in others. Yet, most research examines a single context at a time—usually US national elections, where partisanship is strong—and employs surveys and experiments, raising concerns that citizens’ responses may not reflect how they actually vote. By analyzing returns from thousands of nonpartisan local elections, we test whether patterns of women's win rates relative to men's match expectations for how the electoral effects of gender stereotyping should vary by context. We find women have greater advantages over men in city council than mayoral races, still greater advantages in school board races, and decreasing advantages in more conservative constituencies. Thus, women fare better in stereotype-congruent contexts and worse in incongruent contexts. These effects are most pronounced during on-cycle elections, when voters tend to know less about local candidates.

Bargaining theory predicts that as a political system’s polarization increases, parties have fewer opportunities to form coalitions without resorting to elections, inducing constraints on the management of political crises. This study tests the hypothesis that political polarization has a positive effect on cabinet duration, and draws on Social Networks Analysis to conceptualize and measure political polarization. Combining information about party ideology, inter-party distances and party size, this polarization index measures the structure of political systems in terms of possible and actual coalitions, and identifies proto-coalitions ex ante. The propositions regarding the effect of the bargaining environment on cabinet survival are tested with data covering sixteen European states in 1945–99, and are fairly robustly supported. The measure of political polarization outperforms alternative measures of this concept.

The effect of new International Monetary Fund (IMF) lending announcements on capital markets depends on the lender’s political motivations. There are conditions under which lending reduces the risk of a deepening crisis and the risk premium demanded by market actors. Yet the political interests that make lenders willing to lend may weaken the credibility of commitments to reform, and the act of accepting an agreement reveals unfavorable information about the state of the borrower’s economy. The net ‘catalytic’ effect on the price of private borrowing depends on whether these effects dominate the beneficial effects of the liquidity the loan provides. Decomposing the contradictory effects of crisis lending provides an explanation for the discrepant empirical findings in the literature about market reactions. This study tests the implications of the theory by examining how sovereign bond yields are affected by IMF program announcements, loan size, the scope of conditions attached to loans and measures of the geopolitical interests of the United States, a key IMF principal.

The concept of ‘overload’ was introduced into the vocabulary of political science in 1975, in two publications which appeared almost simultaneously in the United States and Britain. One was by Michel Crozier in a ‘report on the governability of democracies’ entitled The Crisis of Democracy; the other by Anthony King in Political Studies. Both authors took the same general line: that there had been a rapid growth in public expectations about what benefits could be provided by government in Western democracies, that many of these expectations had inevitably been disappointed, and that the result was a serious decline of public confidence in government. King summarized the development in an aphorism so striking that it deserves quotation once again: ‘Once upon a time man looked to God to order the world. Then he looked to the market. Now he looks to government’. And when things go wrong people blame ‘not “Him” or “it” but “them”.’ It was suggested by King that this development had made Britain more difficult to govern and by Crozier, more generally, that Western democracies might be moving towards a condition of ungovernability.

February 13th, 1692, is still remembered in the Western Highlands of Scotland. At 5 a.m. a blizzard was raging down the valley of Glencoe but there were soldiers about. They were two companies of the Argylls under Captain Robert Campbell of Glenlyon, peaceably billetted on the MacDonalds of Glencoe for the past two weeks. The MacDonalds, who had newly sworn allegiance to King William of Orange, had treated them well. Sacred bonds of hospitality had been forged – a reassuring sign that enmities were fading between MacDonalds and Campbells and between Highland supporters of the Stuarts and the new Edinburgh government of 1688. But that was illusion. Captain Campbell had received secret instructions the previous day. ‘Sir, You are hereby ordered to fall upon the rebels, the MacDonalds of Glencoe, and to put all to the sword under seventy… This you are to put in execution at five of the clock precisely… This is by the King's special command, for the good and safety of the country, that these miscreants be cut off root and branch…’ At five of the clock precisely the Argylls turned on their hosts. Almost forty MacDonalds were killed on the spot and many more, who scrambled away up the bleak walls of the glen, died of exposure in the blizzard. Crofts were burnt, cattle and goods carried off. That was the infamous Massacre of Glencoe. I shall start from here and gradually follow the moral questions which arise into the arena of politics at large.

This paper deals with the theories of electoral or party competition in liberal democracies which have been put forward in ‘economic’ models of democracy by Downs, Riker and Ordeshook, Robertson and others. There can be few doubts about the growing importance or appeal of these models, especially for North American political science. Barry, for example, argues that ‘we have seen the last of the “sociologists” in political science’, while in contrast the economic approach has ‘flourished quantitatively and qualitatively’. Barry attributes this change-round since the early 1960s to political scientists' penetration of sociologists' ‘characteristically sloppy logic and flabby prose to discover the deeper problems of circularity and vacuousness inherent in the approach’. In contrast, economic models have claimed the mantle of strictly developed deductive theory and displayed remarkable elusiveness as objects of criticism. Most attacks have been represented as irrelevant by appealing to the Friedmanite epistemology which denies any significance to the descriptive ‘realism’ of a deductive theory's assumptions. As Downs argued: ‘Theoretical models should be tested by the accuracy of their predictions rather than by the reality of their assumptions’. That such a naive verificationism cannot discriminate between the (potentially large) range of non-falsified explanations has not impeded economic models' progress, largely because a similar position is espoused in almost all competing ‘mainstream’ electoral analysis.

This article presents a categorization theory of spatial voting, which postulates that voters perceive political stances through coarse classifications. Because voters think in terms of categories defined by the ideological center, their behavior deviates from standard models of utility maximization along ideological continua. Their preferences are characterized by discontinuities, rewarding parties on their side of the ideological space more than existing spatial models would predict. While this study concurs with prior studies suggesting that voters tend to use a proximity rule, it argues that this rule mainly serves to distinguish among parties of the same side. Overall, the results suggest that voters’ party evaluations are characterized by a nontrivial identity component, generating in-group biases not captured by the existing spatial models of voting.

The conventional wisdom is that racial attitudes, by forming through early socialization processes, are causally prior to most things political, including whites' party identifications. Yet a broad literature demonstrates that partisanship can shape mass attitudes. The author argues that this influence extends even to presumptively fundamental predispositions like racial attitudes. The study applies cross-lagged models to panel data from the 1990s and 2000s to demonstrate that whites align their racial attitudes with their party loyalties. The results demonstrate that partisanship has a more pronounced influence in the latter time period, which is consistent with a view that changes in the political context can make partisanship a more likely causal force on other attitudes. Racial concerns not only provide a foundation for political conflict: my results reveal that political processes can increase or decrease racial animus.