Much has been made in recent years of increasing the choice of the citizen-consumer. This article argues that the concept of ‘increasing choice’ is far more problematic than at first appears and has little intrinsic value in itself. Choice is only to be valued in itself in the sense that the process of choice or decision-making plays a part in our discovery of our own preferences. To justify the introduction of the market process on the grounds of increasing choice is doubly wrong; first, increasing choice is not in itself valuable and, secondly, what is valuable about the market has little to do with choice.

The question of whether and how war has influenced the development of advanced Western welfare states is contested. This article provides a systematic review of the state of the art and outlines an agenda for a comparative analysis of the warfare–welfare state nexus that is informed by an explicit consideration of the underlying causal mechanisms. By distinguishing between three different phases (war preparation, warfare and post-war period) it provides a systematic overview of possible causal mechanisms linking war and the welfare state and a discussion of likely effects of war for belligerent, occupied and neutral countries in the age of mass warfare stretching approximately from the 1860s to the 1960s.

This article examines the relationship between candidate names as they appear on the ballot paper and voting patterns in British local elections. Specifically, it explores whether some voters favour candidates with British-sounding names over those whose names suggest either European or non-European ethnic origins. Name classification software identifies three categories of candidate: British, other European and non-European. Separate analyses of aggregate voting data are undertaken of multi-member and single-member electoral districts. Data cover the period 1973–2012, and votes for more than 400,000 candidates are examined. In multi-member districts, after comparing within-party slates and finishing order generally, candidates whose surnames suggest a British ethnic origin perform best, while non-Europeans attract fewer votes. The analysis of single-member districts focuses on a party’s vote share after taking into account the pattern of candidate recruitment across electoral cycles. It shows that vote share is adversely affected when British candidates are replaced by those with European and non-European surnames, while the opposite pattern of succession is associated with a boost in votes. It is clear that the outcome of some elections has been determined by the parties’ choice of candidates.

The US House of Representatives underwent a series of reforms in the 1970s which, on paper, changed the institution in fundamental ways. Often, however, institutional inertia is able to transform important ‘paper’ changes into barely discernible actual changes. Have the reforms really led to alterations in the way Congress operates and the policies it produces? To provide a partial answer to this question, we single out one of the reforms – a change in the application of the seniority system in the selection of committee chairmen – and analyse it with an eye towards one hypothesized effect – alterations in the level of party support among key representatives. But by restricting our study in this manner, we are able to provide specific empirical facts which should be of considerable assistance in the important task of formulating more generalized conclusions about the ability of legislative reform to produce real change in the governing process.

The academic literature on interest groups has tended to concentrate on the assessment of the relative influence of these groups in different political systems, and on the implications of the activities of interest groups for democratic ideology. In recent years, however, the work of Mancur Olson has stimulated an increasing interest in the formation of interest groups, and in the reasons why individuals (or corporate bodies) join them. The aim of this article is to examine Olson's analysis in the light of a study of one major British economic interest group, the Confederation of British Industry. In the course of this examination I hope to illustrate some of the weaknesses of Olson's analysis and to suggest how it might be refined and developed.

The Tiebout model, which theorizes that residential choice can regulate the supply of local collective goods, has generated much criticism, but few empirical tests of its behavioural assumptions. The article presents the findings of the first British micro-level test of the effect of local taxes and services on geographical mobility, a postal survey of households' moving decisions in four London boroughs during the years of the poll tax. Taxes and services are found to be important factors in the moving decision, corroborating the behavioural assumptions of the model. Respondents acted Tiebout-rationally as those moving into low tax/good service quality boroughs are more likely to cite low taxes and good services as a moving factor than those doing the reverse. The policy implications, however, remain contingent on political orientation.

A ‘deliberative wave’, with increasing uses of deliberative citizen forums, is sweeping the globe. Whereas deliberative citizen forum enthusiasts claim that they represent appropriate tools to reconnect citizens with politics and demand a stronger empowerment of deliberative citizen forums, critics argue that they will reduce rather than increase democratic legitimacy. This letter sheds new light on the roles of deliberative citizen forums in democratic systems, with a particular eye on disaffected citizens. Drawing on a conjoint experiment with a representative sample of non-participating German citizens, it shows that citizens in general challenge notions of the strong empowerment of deliberative citizen forums. They prefer deliberative citizen forums that are limited to policy advice, collaborate with legacy institutions and include extra provisions (such as a large size or clear majorities). By contrast, disaffected citizens are more open to the empowerment and decoupling of deliberative citizen forums compared to allegiant citizens, but this not imply that they are generally in clear favour of such design features (in fact, they are mostly indifferent via-à-vis empowerment and decoupling). These findings have important ramifications for democratic designs.

Political machines dominate many electoral democracies. Scholars argue that local party members, commonly called brokers, are crucial to the success of machines. This article enhances our understanding of party machines by developing a formal model that reveals how leaders extract services from brokers. The model also shows that leaders of machines face a dilemma: they need effective brokers, but these brokers create vulnerabilities that can ultimately reduce the party’s vote share and even cause electoral loss. So, in addition to highlighting electoral strengths of political machines, this article reveals their organizational vulnerabilities. This argument is evaluated with a novel survey experiment from Argentina. The survey is the first to draw upon a probability sample of brokers in any country.

Tactical voting has become increasingly salient in recent elections in England. However, it is not only voters who behave tactically. Political parties may also act tactically by focusing their election campaigns on marginal seats. This Note provides a unique exploration of the relationship between local campaigning and tactical voting in England, at the 1992 general election.

Among the arguments that have featured in the recent revival of libertarian thinking is one purporting to show that a free market economy, protected by a minimal state – or even no state at all – is neutral as between capitalism and a certain form of socialism. The argument runs as follows. The market places no limits on the manner in which people may associate for purposes of economic activity. They may choose capitalist forms of organization, in which case those who become owners of capital assume a greater degree of risk and responsibility and stand to gain correspondingly higher rewards, or they may choose co-operative forms, where groups of producers supply their own capital and share the profits between them. If capitalist forms are overwhelmingly favoured, as the historical evidence shows, this reveals something about the preference structure of the population as a whole. Either the bulk of the population actively wish to avoid the risks and anxieties of capital ownership, and so willingly transfer these responsibilities to the few willing to bear them; or the efficiency of the capitalist firm is such that it can pay wages high enough to compensate the work force for their loss of autonomy in comparison with the co-operative alternative.

More than a decade has elapsed since Robert Axelrod first published his theory of political coalitions. At the time, it represented a significant departure from existing theoretical work by defining as a major component of an actor's utility function a preference to join winning coalitions which minimize the degree of ‘conflict of interest’ among potential partners. Axelrod has defined the degree of conflict of interest in terms of the incompatibility of actor goals (e.g., policy preferences), thus deriving the expectation that forming coalitions will minimize the degree of preference disagreement among their members. Subsequent theoretical research has tended to retain this emphasis upon closely shared preferences among prospective coalition partners.

Using the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) data for twenty established parliamentary democracies, the authors have studied the relationship between number of parties in a party system and party dispersion. They found that as the number of parties in the system increases, the dispersion of parties also increases, but only up to a point. The boundaries of a finite issue space appear to expand up to at most five parties. In addition, once the number of parties in the party system was controlled for, they found that electoral rules have no direct effect on party dispersion. Thus, their findings validate the theoretical predictions of spatial theory while at the same time highlighting surprising ways in which the policy space is constrained.

Immigration is one of the most salient and important issues in contemporary American politics. While a great deal is known about how cultural attitudes and economics influence public opinion toward immigration, little is known about how attitudes toward government influence support for immigration. Using cross-sectional data from the American National Election Studies (ANES), panel data from the ANES and General Social Survey, as well a Mechanical Turk (MTurk) survey experiment, I show that political trust exerts a positive and substantively meaningful influence on Americans' support for immigration. Politically trustful individuals, both Democrats and Republicans, are more supportive of pro-immigration policies. These findings underscore the political relevance of trust in government and show that public attitudes toward immigration are not driven solely by feelings about immigrant groups, partisanship, core political values, nor personality traits, but are also affected by trust in government, the actor most responsible for managing immigration policy.

A key finding in the literature on authoritarian regimes is that leaders frequently rely on ruling parties to stay in power, but the field lacks systematic ways to measure autocratic party strength. As a result, it is not clear how often ruling parties are actually strong and capable of carrying out important functions. This article demonstrates that strong ruling parties are much rarer than is typically assumed. Using a global sample of dictatorships from 1946–2008, the author shows that most ruling parties are unable to survive the death or departure of the founding leader. This is true even of many ruling parties that have been coded as leading single-party regimes. While strong parties may be key to durable authoritarianism, relatively few parties are truly strong.

Past findings on the connection between class position and political preferences are overwhelmingly derived from cross-sectional studies, which provided a limited basis for inferring causality. This study uses long-term panel data on thousands of British respondents to measure the impact of intra-generational class mobility across a range of political identities and preferences. Upward class mobility leads to small increases in economic conservatism, but party choice, class identity and attitudes to non-economic issues do not change. This updating of economic values is much smaller than cross-sectional differences between classes. These results are consistent with the short-run effects of class mobility operating primarily through a limited economic self-interest mechanism. Beliefs that are plausibly unconnected to economics are unaffected. The overall association between class and a range of identities, opinions and preferences is therefore more likely to be caused by early life experiences and longer-term socialization than by the immediate material interests associated with jobs.

Perceptions of leadership quality depend upon personality traits. With John Major as a case study, we demonstrate that the most important personality attributes are those which contribute to the belief that a leader can govern in a business-like fashion. Changes in personality traits affect the rating of a leader and ratings affect a party's electoral support. Using this approach, perceptions of John Major's personality are changed continuously to illustrate the impact on voters. A Monte Carlo simulation is introduced to allow for the likelihood that not everyone would perceive a personality change. This approach is preferable to alternatives and can explain why, on occasion, there has been dispute over the importance of party leadership in British general elections.

Research suggests that the costs of international conflict (e.g. casualties) alter public opinion, executive approval and policy positions of elected officials. However, do casualties affect voting in terms of aggregate outcomes and individual vote choices? This article examines how casualties from interstate conflicts affect voter behaviour, specifically incumbent vote share. Using the investment model of commitment to model individual vote choice, it is argued that increases in the costs of conflict (i.e., more casualties) can increase the probability that voters will support the incumbent, increasing incumbent vote share. This model is tested with both cross-national aggregate data from twenty-three countries and individual-level British survey data. The results support the argument.

After years of neglect, a growing literature has reclaimed the constituency campaign as an important aspect of British elections. However, relatively little work has been done to disentangle which aspects of the local campaign are effective, and which are not. For much of the twentieth century, the mechanics of the local campaign were in essentials unchanged. But changing campaign technologies in the last decade offer new possibilities to party campaign managers. The 1997 British general election was the first in which parties made extensive use of telephone canvassing as well as the more traditional doorstep canvass. This article provides a comparative analysis of the effectiveness of traditional versus telephone constituency campaigns. Traditional face-to-face canvassing had a statistically significant influence on the outcome of the 1997 general election. But the telephone canvass did not.

‘Tactical voting’ refers to voting contrary to one's nominal preferences. The usual form of tactical voting described in the literature consists of ‘third’ party supporters in plurality electoral settings voting for one of the two major parties in their constituency. This Note aims to demonstrate both theoretically and empirically the existence of the converse phenomenon, i.e. followers of one of the two big parties voting for a small one. We shall call this phenomenon ‘inverse tactical voting’ (ITV).