In a recent article in this journal1 we reported the results of an experiment designed to investigate, amongst other things, the effect of canvassing and polling-day activity upon the results of local government elections. On the basis of our data we argued that thorough canvassing before polling day and ‘knocking up’ on the day produced an appreciable increase in turnout. We also showed that, in a situation in which only one party organized the election thoroughly, this party would benefit disproportionately from the higher turnout; that is, it would receive an increased share of the vote.

Public expenditure is quite the most visible and quantifiable measure of government activity. It is therefore surprising that in Britain, as distinct from the United States, this area has been massively neglected by political scientists. This neglect is all the odder since public expenditure in Britain – comprehensively and conventionally defined to include all spending by central and local government, as well as capital investment by public corporations – has been increasing rapidly both in absolute terms and as a proportion of the national income: between the early 1960s and the middle 'seventies, it rose from just under two-fifths to almost three-fifths of the Gross National Product. So, in effect, the scope of political decision-making about the distribution of national resources has grown considerably, reflecting the changing balance between the political market and the economic market. The dynamics of this process are highly relevant for an understanding of the British political system.

This Research Note examines the role democracy plays in explaining the disparity in educational attainment between men and women in a cross-national context. Policies designed to improve education figure prominently in recent attempts by governments, international institutions and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to stimulate economic development. The recent emphasis on education is grounded in a well-established literature in economics on the rate of return on investment in education and in a fairly new stream of research in economics – endogenous growth theory – that suggests knowledge is the generative force of economic growth. Although a majority of the work in both literatures focuses on aggregate levels of educational attainment (usually enrolment ratios or literacy rates), a growing body of evidence identifies women’s educational attainment relative to men’s as a crucial variable in explaining the wide variation in economic development throughout the world. In addition to its direct impact on economic growth, women’s education may indirectly affect economic performance in a number of important ways: through its impact on health, fertility and infant mortality. Previous empirical work shows that women’s education has a strong negative effect on fertility and infant mortality. Moreover, family health practices improve in direct proportion to female education. According to the World Bank, countries that achieved universal primary education for boys in 1965 but lagged far behind in educating girls had about twice the infant mortality and fertility rates in 1985 of countries with smaller gender gaps.

This article evaluates the role of community bonds in the long-term transmission of political values. At the end of World War II, Poland's borders shifted westward, and the population from the historical region of Galicia (now partly in Ukraine) was displaced to the territory that Poland acquired from Germany. In a quasi-random process, some migrants settled in their new villages as a majority group, preserving communal ties, while others ended up in the minority. The study leverages this natural experiment of history by surveying the descendants of these Galician migrants. The research design provides an important empirical test of the theorized effect of communities on long-term value transmission, which separates the influence of family and community as two competing and complementary mechanisms. The study finds that respondents in Galicia-majority settlements are now more likely to embrace values associated with Austrian imperial rule and are more similar to respondents whose families avoided displacement.

Americans not only bowl less today than they did fifty years ago, but also some bowl more than others. This is one of the major and simple messages of Robert Putnam's influential study of social capital in America. Using a variety of data sources, Putnam documents a significant variation in the states' levels of social capital, while arguing for specific general causes of the decline of social capital across the United States. Here, we evaluate the power of Putnam's theory in explaining state-level variation of stocks of social capital. We find that the strongest determinants of social capital levels are basic social and economic differences between states, such as education, church membership, farming and unemployment. Controlling for these determinants, we also find no evidence for a much-debated link between diversity and social capital.

Since the publication of Putnam's book, a growing quantitative literature on social capital has contributed to a much more nuanced and theoretically precise understanding of the link between social capital and the quality of American democracy. Pamela Paxton, as well as Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn, have re-examined Putnam's finding of the aggregate decline in social capital in the United States since the 1960s. Putnam's claim that higher levels of social capital improve the functioning of democracy on the state level has been examined systematically by, among others, Stephen Knack and Tom W. Rice. On a methodological level, Eric M. Uslaner has argued for a need to disaggregate different concepts of trust, and focus on generalized social trust and its effect on making democracy more effective.

One influential strand of public policy-making theory imputes considerable autonomy to civil servants (and politicians) from social pressures; and, in Heclo's variant, conceives of policy makers as engaging in a benign process of social learning, the results of which benefit society. In this article we use the campaign to enact legislation for voluntary sterilization as an example of such a process. The analysis is based on archival records of the deliberations of the Brock Committee (1932–34), established to investigate the desirability of sterilization; it demonstrates how the committee attempted to develop a stronger case for the measure than warranted by the scientific evidence. We argue that the content of the Brock Committee's deliberations conforms in broad terms to the predictions of social learning theory, but that the process was more complicated than this framework would suggest, involving a significant element of interest-group lobbying, thereby weakening the autonomy of state policy makers. Furthermore, the deliberations themselves give cause to revise the laudatory view, more or less explicit in social learning theory, of policy experts' machinations.

The European Union is a polity in the making, where political actors contend about basic questions of governance. While students have begun to map contention between public parties and private interests, little attention has been paid to how office-holders in the Commission conceive of European integration. Using interview data collected from 140 senior officials of theCommission, I identify contention along four dimensions: whether the EU should have supranational or intergovernmental institutions; whether it should use democratic or technocratic decision making; whether it should promote regulated capitalism or market liberalism; and whether the elite should defend the European public good or be responsive to various interests. My findings challenge EU theories that conceive of the Commission as a unitary actor with a pro-integration agenda.

An extensive literature in political science and sociology has analyzed how state repression shapes attempts by social movements to pursue political objectives. Less studied, however, is the effect that state repression of activists has on the broader public. Understanding public responses to repression is important, as both states and social movements take action with an eye toward (de)mobilizing broader constituencies. This letter analyzes this dynamic in the context of contemporary Catalonia, where the Spanish state cracked down on efforts by Catalan activists to hold a public referendum on independence. Matching poll respondents in the months before and after the crackdown in late 2017, the study finds that repression increased public sympathy for independence for a short period, and heightened animosity towards actors perceived to be associated or complicit with the Spanish state. The findings speak to the potential for state repression of nonviolent movements to create windows of opportunity for broader mobilization.

In its purest form a collective good is said to possess the characteristics of non-rivalness in consumption and non-price exclusion. Non-rivalness implies that consumption to the full by one person in no way impedes the consumption of that same quantity by others. This does not mean that the same subjective benefit is derived by each individual, but simply that consumption by one individual does not interfere with the benefits derived by another. The characteristic of non-exclusion requires that if the good is provided to one then it is provided to all. It is this attribute in particular which casts doubt on the likelihood that, in a large group, individuals will voluntarily reveal their preferences for the good. Goods which are not perfectly rival but which are price exclusive may be provided in the market by clubs. However, when an individual's consumption of a good is not dependent on his making a contribution to its provision the individual utility maximizer may be inclined to ‘free ride’, in the hope of enjoying the good at no personal expense. It is clear that if all individuals act in the same manner this good is not likely to be provided in the private market.

The general elections in Chile and Brazil in 1989 marked ‘the first time that all the Ibero-American nations, excepting Cuba, enjoyed the benefits of elected constitutional governments at the same time’. This occurrence was not as dramatic or visible as the collapse of Communism and the transitions to democracy in Eastern and Central Europe, which began in the same year, but it did mark a historical watershed. After almost two centuries as independent states, the countries of Latin America now comprised a new democratic universe. Similarly to the Eastern European experience, the Latin American watershed presented new opportunities for comparative research into democratic governance. In particular, it created a new context for the study of the relationships between institutional design, party systems and governability – defined in the narrow sense of institutional efficacy, as expressed through government stability, legislative capacity and the avoidance of gridlock. This article sets out to review the recent research on these topics, in order to describe the predominant regime type in Latin America and differentiate its distinct variants, examining their impact on governability.

One observation about the budgets of governments has passed into the conventional wisdom: budget-making, we are told, is a process of ‘incremental decision making’. The approach of the incrementalists is directed primarily to the question of how the creation of the new budget in a particular year (‘the budgetary process’) is to be explained. The approach seeks to characterize how budgeters respond to the problem of allocating resources and to develop explanatory models of budgetary outputs. But, despite the volume of research that now exists on budgetary incrementalism, the operationalization of the concept remains an issue, and many of the empirical studies have the limited perspective of a single budget-making system – that is, of one set of resource allocators, who employ the same standard operating procedures, rules of search, and so on. This paper has two objectives: (1) to explicate some simple operational models of budgetary incrementalism; and (2) to examine the adequacy of these models by means of an empirical test in four comparable budget-making systems – British county boroughs.

This article draws on the authoritarian institutions literature to explain the role of dominant parties in constraining the ability of autocrats to reshuffle cabinet ministers. Dominant party leaders are constrained in their ability to frequently reshuffle ministers by the need to maintain credible power-sharing commitments with party elites. These constraints also produce distinct temporal patterns of instability where large reshuffles occur following elections. Conversely, personalist leaders face fewer power-sharing constraints and engage in more extensive cabinet reshuffles at more arbitrary intervals. Military leaders face complex constraints that depend on whether officers or civilians occupy cabinet posts and the extent to which leaders are dependent upon civilian ministers for regime performance and popular support. Empirical analyses using data on the cabinets of ninety-four authoritarian leaders from thirty-seven African countries between 1976 and 2010 support the theoretical expectations for dominant party and personalist leaders, but are inconclusive for military leaders.

The re-emergence and political re-establishment of conservatism in a number of leading western welfare states has provided the empirical dots on the ‘i's’ of the ideology-is-not-dead-argument. Political issues have clearly become more technical, but their resolution has become anything but consensual. The current political dialogue may be tortuously symbolic, masking more than it reveals and more than technicians feel is good for us all, but this is perhaps more an indication of the balance of power between politicians and technicians than a sign of ideological deflation. We are not concerned in the present paper, therefore, with whether ideology is alive and kicking, but rather with who is kicking for what.

Would giving party leaders more influence in primary elections in the United States decrease elite polarization? Some scholars have argued that political party leaders tend to support centrist candidates in the hopes of winning general elections. In contrast, the authors argue that many local party leaders – especially Republicans – may not believe that centrists perform better in elections and therefore may not support nominating them. They test this argument using data from an original survey of 1,118 county-level party leaders. In experiments, they find that local party leaders most prefer nominating candidates who are similar to typical co-partisans, not centrists. Moreover, given the choice between a more centrist and more extreme candidate, they strongly prefer extremists: Democrats do so by about 2 to 1 and Republicans by 10 to 1. Likewise, in open-ended questions, Democratic Party leaders are twice as likely to say they look for extreme candidates relative to centrists; Republican Party leaders are five times as likely. Potentially driving these partisan differences, Republican leaders are especially likely to believe that extremists can win general elections and overestimate the electorate's conservatism by double digits.

Movements of the heavenly bodies are not affected in any discernible way by the fact that there are people on earth recording the apparent movement. Similarly it is almost inconceivable that the planets would alter their orbits because of Kepler's discovery and publication of the laws of planetary motion. The social and behavioural sciences are different in that the objects under investigation may behave differently as a result of the research process. This is particularly true when the method involves naturalistic observation, surveys or experiments. When people behave differently because of being research subjects, this is called a Hawthorne effect.

Public choice and critical theory constitute two very different and often mutually hostile research traditions. An opportunity for conversation across the two traditions arises inasmuch as public choice has itself demonstrated the incoherence of a politics – in particular, a democratic politics – of unconstrained rational egoism. By deploying an expanded, communicative conception of rationality, critical theory can help move public choice beyond several related impasses. Critical theory benefits from this encounter by gaining content for its currently rather abstract critiques of politics and rationality, and additional insight into the forces conducive to different kinds of rationality. More importantly, political science stands to gain an account of politics more powerful than either tradition can muster by itself.

The Classic party identification model originally derves from the work of Campbell et al. in the 1960sAngus Campbell, Phillip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller and Donald E. Stokes, The American Voter (New York: Wiley, 1960).In The American Voter Campbell et al. noted that there was a large disparity by age between, first, the number of voters claiming an Independent identification in the United States and, secondly, the numbers claiming a strong identification with one of the two parties.

Adopting a particular non-linear perspective resolves numerous paradoxes about collective political behaviour. Self-organized criticality occurs if the sensitivity of individuals or groups to each other's actions increases with the passage of time, and, therefore, sudden changes may occur as cascades. In this way scandals, betrayals, miscalculations and other seemingly insignificant actions can sometimes cause cabinet dissolutions, strikes, riots, electoral landslides, wars and a multitude of other phenomena that, until now, have seemed to have had nothing in common.