Parties can elitcit widespread electoral support by making the distribution of prizes or rewards to groups of voters contingent upon electoral support. In addition to altering which party wins, a voter's choice also influences the distribution of prizes. This latter factor, referred to in this article as prize pivotalness, tends to be the dominant influence in vote choice. The desire to win prizes can induce voters to coalesce into a highly supportive group, even if they dislike the party's policies. Characterizing voting equilibria in this framework explains the rationale for the support of patronage parties, variance in voter turnout and the endogenous political polarization of groups in both established and new democracies.

Why should more women be elected to positions of power in Britain? What difference would it make? This Note aims to examine these questions using data from a survey of almost six hundred men and women candidates to the British Parliament in the 1987 general election. There are two major arguments for increasing women's representation.

Six single- or multi-winner voting procedures are compared to one another in terms of the outcomes of thirty-seven real elections conducted in Britain by various trade unions, professional associations and non-profit-making organizations. The six procedures examined are two versions of plurality voting (PV), approval voting (AV), the Borda-count (BR), the alternative and repeated alternative vote (ALV–RAL) and the single transferable vote (STV). These procedures are evaluated in terms of two general and five specific criteria that are common in social-choice theory. In terms of these criteria one version of the PV procedure (PVO) is found to be inferior to the other five procedures among which no significant difference has been found.

Does exposure to cyber terrorism prompt calls for retaliatory military strikes? By what psychological mechanism does it do so? Through a series of controlled, randomized experiments, this study exposed respondents (n = 2,028) to television news reports depicting cyber and conventional terror attacks against critical infrastructures in the United States, United Kingdom and Israel. The findings indicate that only lethal cyber terrorism triggers strong support for retaliation. Findings also confirm that anger bridges exposure to cyber terrorism and retaliation, rather than psychological mechanisms such as threat perception or anxiety as other studies propose. These findings extend to the cyber realm a recent trend that views anger as a primary mechanism linking exposure to terrorism with militant preferences. With cyber terrorism a mounting international concern, this study demonstrates how exposure to this threat can generate strong public support for retaliatory policies, depending on the lethality of the attack.

According to spatial models of elections, citizen perceptions of party policy positions are a key determinant of voting choices. Yet recent scholarship from Europe suggests that voters do not adjust their perceptions according to what parties advocate in their campaigns. This article argues that voters develop a more accurate understanding of parties’ ideological positions following a leadership change because a new leader increases the credibility of party policy offerings. Focusing on Western European parties in the 1979–2012 period, it shows that having a new leader is a necessary condition for voters to more accurately perceive the left–right placements of opposition parties. Voters do not use party platforms to form perceptions of incumbent parties’ positions, regardless of whether the leader is new or veteran. These results have important implications for models of party competition and democratic representation.

Why do some government formation periods end after a few days, while others last for several weeks or even months? Despite the rich literature on government formation, surprisingly little is known about the underlying bargaining processes. This article introduces a new dataset on 303 bargaining attempts in nineteen European democracies to analyse the duration of individual bargaining rounds. The study hypothesizes that (1) preference tangentiality, (2) ideological proximity, (3) incumbency and (4) party leadership tenure decrease the duration of coalition bargaining. Employing a copula approach to account for the non-random selection process of the observations, it shows that these actor-specific factors matter in addition to systemic context factors such as post-election bargaining and party system complexity. These findings highlight the need to consider both actor-specific and systemic factors of the bargaining context to explain government formation.

How do electoral rules affect the composition of governments? It is a robust finding that countries with majoritarian rules more often elect conservative governments than those with proportional representation (PR) electoral systems. There are three explanations for this pattern. The first stresses the impact of voting behaviour: the middle class more often votes for right-wing parties in majoritarian electoral systems, anticipating governments’ redistributive consequences. The second explanation is based on electoral geography: the regional distribution of votes may bias the vote-seat translation against the Left in majoritarian systems due to the wide margins by which the Left wins core urban districts. The third explanation refers to party fragmentation: if the Right is more fragmented than the Left in countries with PR, then there is less chance of a right-wing party gaining formateur status. This study tests these three hypotheses for established democracies over the entire post-war period. It finds the first two mechanisms at work in the democratic chain of delegation from voting via the vote-seat translation to the formation of cabinets, while party fragmentation does not seem to co-vary as much as expected with electoral rules. These findings confirm that majoritarian systems have a substantive conservative bias, whereas countries with PR show more differentiated patterns.

In order to understand the dynamics of contemporary government, we must consider what government does as well as why it grows. This is true whether theories seek to explain past growth or are hypotheses about future developments. Political science has a unique responsibility to address this problem, because it is the discipline for which government is central. Whereas economists and sociologists can produce models that treat political change as epiphenomenal, political scientists must identify what it is that changes when government changes.

Social class has long been assumed to be the predominant social or structural determinant of voting behaviour. This article assesses the effect of class on voting behaviour at the 1992 general election by adopting the causal modelling perspective developed by Warren E. Miller and J. Merrill Shanks. It explores two mechanisms (party identification and left–right ideological positions) which may mediate the effect of class on voting behaviour. However, it demonstrates that wherever class is assumed to be located in the causal order, it does not dominate analysis of voting behaviour and left–right positions.

Does membership in intergovernmental organizations help developing countries enhance their environmental performance? This article argues that IGO membership can improve the environmental performance of developing countries, by linking different issues, promoting the general idea of environmental sustainability and providing a channel through which these countries receive technologies and resources necessary to reduce pollution. This argument has been tested on panel data for 114 developing countries in 1970–2000. The results confirm that, controlling for a country's income and its political system, IGO membership is indeed associated with a reduction in both air pollution and greenhouse gases. To understand the mechanisms behind this result better, IGO membership is disaggregated according to both function and the degree of institutionalization of the respective organization.

Do political parties respond to interest group mobilization? While party responsiveness to voters has received widespread attention, little is known about how interest groups affect parties’ policy agendas. I argue that political parties respond to interest groups as lobbyists offer valuable information, campaign contributions, electoral support and personal rewards, but that party responsiveness is conditioned by voter preferences. Based on a novel longitudinal analysis studying the responsiveness of German parties to interest groups across eleven issue areas and seven elections from 1987 until 2009, it is shown that parties adjust their policy agendas in response to interest group mobilization and that interest groups are more successful in shaping party policy when their priorities coincide with those of the electorate.

Some parties are more popular among men, while other parties attract more female voters. This article proposes that these differences can be partially explained by two recurring gender differences in the socio-psychological literature. It argues that men’s generally lower sensitivity to social cues makes them more likely to vote for stigmatized and small parties, whereas women’s greater concern with social harmony is expected to make them less likely to vote for extreme parties. The models are tested at the individual and party levels using three waves of Comparative Study of Electoral Systems data from twenty-eight countries. Ceteris paribus, men are more likely than women to vote for parties that are socially stigmatized or ideologically extreme. This has consequences for the current understanding of gender gaps in voting, and reiterates that voting has important social aspects.

Historically, the drive toward European integration has been in the domain of political elites. The Community was conceived and implemented by Europeanists such as Monnet and Schuman, and shaped by national leaders such as de Gaulle and Adenauer. After the Treaty of Rome established the basic framework of the Community, the details and implementation of policy were largely decided by negotiationş among officials in Brussels or between Community officials and political elites of the member nations.

‘Mirror representation’ or a ‘politics of presence’ presupposes relatively modest levels of diversity among those being represented. If the groups to be represented are too numerous, internally too heterogeneous or too cross-cutting, too many representatives will be required for the assembly to remain a deliberative one where ‘presence’ can have the effects its advocates desire. In those circumstances, what is being represented ought be conceptualized as the ‘sheer fact of diversity’ rather than ‘all the particularities of the diversity among us’. The appropriate response to that is legislative reticence.

Comparativists interested in the political dynamics of policy development, and students of public policy desirous of studying national programs in crossnational contexts, face similar dilemmas at present. There is a literature focusing on decision-making processes which often pays little regard to policy substance. There are statistical analyses of expenditure levels, but these are difficult to relate to the ample literature bearing on how particular substantive problems have been handled in specific national and local situations. As a result, political scientists interested in the cross-national study of broad policy areas - such as those studying social policy development in Western Europe and America - are now engaged in the creation of historically based frameworks which will permit more fruitful analyses of differences in the patterns of development.

This article analyses the nature of the support given to the candidates in the 1975 Conservative leadership contest, in which Margaret Thatcher replaced Edward Heath. In contrast to the orthodox account of the contest – which interprets it as largely non-ideological – the article argues that there were clear ideological forces at work. The right strongly supported Thatcher in both rounds; the left strongly backed Heath and then Whitelaw. Region, experience and education also influenced the voting. The traditional accounts, which explain those voting for Thatcher as doing so simply because she was not Heath, have, therefore, to explain why only certain types of MPs felt this way. Margaret Thatcher may have won because she was not Ted Heath; but she did not win solely because she was not Ted Heath.

This article shows that religion has been consistently important in predicting voters’ party choices in Britain over time. The relationship between religion and party preference is not primarily due to the social make-up of different religious groups, nor to ideological differences between religious groups, whether in terms of social conservatism, economic leftism or national identity. Instead, particular denominations are associated with parties that represented those denominational groups in the early twentieth century when social cleavages were ‘frozen’ within the system. The main mechanism underpinning these divisions is parental transmission of party affiliations within denominations. These findings have important implications for how we understand both the persistence of social cleavages and the precise mechanisms that maintain social cleavages.

Political business cycle theories tend to focus on one policy instrument or macroeconomic lever at a time. Efforts to find empirical evidence of opportunistic business cycles have turned up rather meagre results. We suggest that these facts may be related. If ways of manipulating the economy to win votes are thought of as substitutes, with changing relative costs, one would expect rational policy makers to switch between them in different periods as costs change. We illustrate this argument with a discussion of Russia. In Russia, four nationwide votes have been held since 1993. We deduce the set of policies that a rational, behind-the-scenes strategist – the ‘Chudar’ of the title – would recommend to an incumbent who believes the voters to vote retrospectively. We show that the expectations are borne out closely in the actual macroeconomic data.

It is a fairly common criticism of deliberative democratic ideals that one cannot involve thousands, let alone millions, of people in a decision-making process and still retain its deliberative character, at least not in any sense as strict as those of the classic expositions of deliberative democratic principles. Various solutions to this scale problem have been proposed, but implicit in most deliberative designs is the media solution. People can watch the debate unfold on television, can listen to it on the radio, can follow it, or even contribute to a limited extent, online. This is supposed to ensure not only that deliberation is subject to the check of publicity, but also that it is dispersed throughout the public sphere.

This is precisely the idea behind James Fishkin's deliberative poll technique, designed to be televised so that deliberation among a few would be brought to ‘an audience of millions’, ‘bridging the gap’ between informed and uninformed opinion, and acting as a ‘catalyst’ to change the nature of discussion on a topic in a broader community. But what happens when we rely on the media to bear the weight of responsibility for generating links between insiders and outsiders in public deliberation? The media are not broad pipes which simply convey whatever is put into them but, like all institutions, shape that input in sometimes significant ways. If we are to understand the value of the media in addressing problems of deliberative scale, we need to understand those institutional effects.

In this Research Note I examine the effects the media had on the kinds of information transferred from deliberators to audience in a deliberative poll that took place in the United Kingdom in July 1998.

Parties are not unitary actors, and legislators within the same party may have divergent interests, which complicates the understanding of parties’ motivations and behaviour. This article argues that holding a ministerial portfolio confers an electoral advantage, and so, in contrast to their co-partisans, politicians who are ministers simultaneously maximize policy, office and votes. New data on Irish elections over a thirty-year period show that ministers are insulated from the electoral cost of governing compared with their co-partisans. Differentiating between ministers and their co-partisans helps to resolve the puzzle of political parties’ choosing to enter government despite the evident electoral costs they will encounter. Moreover, previously overlooked electoral benefits of ministerial office help explain their desirability, and thus their ability to incentivize legislative behaviour in parliamentary regimes.