Compassion, theorists from Arendt to Nussbaum suggest, carries an ineluctable pressure to identify with individual suffering. The very idea of a politics of compassion verges on incoherence. Politics typically demands attention to the aggregate and it is just there that compassion falters. This is a problem for critics addressing the politics of photography, who typically presume that the point of photographs must be to elicit compassion among viewers. But a proper understanding of compassion makes this presumption highly problematic. The role of compassion in exemplary writings on the politics of photography reflects a fixation with ‘emblematic’ individual subjects in ‘classic’ American documentary practice, which prevents critics from properly grasping the best of contemporary documentary. The conclusion is that promoting solidarity provides a more plausible, if elusive, aim for the politics of photography.

Reformers claim that public subsidies and regulation of political finance reduce corruption in politics, while observers worry that they have no impact on corruption, or even increase it. Despite national-level debates and billions of dollars spent, few studies have tested this relationship. The authors argue that political finance reform mitigates corruption by reducing private money's importance in politics and increasing the sanctions for corrupt behavior. Elite interviews from Paraguay's political finance reform illustrate the argument and elaborate the theoretical mechanisms. The study evaluates the argument using an original dataset measuring political subsidies from 175 countries from 1900–2015, as well as disaggregated corruption measures from the Varieties of Democracy project. The findings support the thesis that political finance reform reduces corruption, even in countries where such reforms are unevenly implemented.

Alberto Alesina and Howard Rosenthal argue that surprise about the outcomes of US presidential elections accounts for two important features of the American political economy: the regular loss of votes experienced by the president's party in midterm congressional elections, and the systematic relationship between the party of the incoming president and macroeconomic performance. Scholars recently have begun conducting rigorous tests of the relationship between surprise and economic performance, but no similar empirical work exists on how surprise affects midterm elections. In this article, we offer the first direct test of the proposition that electoral surprise drives the midterm loss. Our analysis shows that the more surprised moderate voters are about the outcome of a presidential election, the lower the probability that they will support the president's party in the following midterm contest.

Although ideological polarization can create problems for governability and democratic stability, this article argues that it also has beneficial effects in new democracies. By clarifying the political alternatives, polarization creates strong links between parties and voters, and thereby instills accountability mechanisms that force parties to remain responsive to evolving voter preferences. A comparative historical analysis of six South American cases demonstrates that the vast differences in the quality of representation in the 1980s, immediately after many countries in the region returned to democracy, were rooted in an early bifurcation of party systems in the first half of the twentieth century: while prolonged periods of ideological conflict occurred in some countries during this period, polarization was aborted by various means in others. By showing that ideological moderation may help formal democracies survive, but that aborting conflict in the long run severely hampers key aspects of the quality of democracy, this study suggests a revision of conventional views regarding ideological polarization.

It is only in connection with electoral law that the terms ‘majority principle’ and ‘proportionality’ are widely used. It seems to us meaningful to apply the two concepts also to the political decision-making process as a whole. In this broadened sense ‘majority principle’ and ‘proportionality’ denote certain models of conflict regulation. The majority model then denotes the regulation of conflict through majority decisions. The proportional model is much more difficult to describe: its basic characteristic is that all groups influence a decision in proportion to their numerical strength. Proportional conflict regulation is easiest to apply when a decision is concerned with several units, all of which are perceived as equivalent to one another. The classical case of this is the parliamentary election, for the parliamentary seats are perceived as equivalent to one another, so that by means of an appropriate electoral law they can relatively easily be distributed on a proportional basis among the different political groups. In Switzerland the election of the government by the parliament gives rise to an analogous situation, in that the seven seats in the Bundesrat (Federal Council) are perceived as equivalent to one another, so that they can likewise be relatively easily distributed on a proportional basis. In most other political systems the application of the rules of proportionality at the level of the government would entail greater difficulties, since the individual governmental posts are perceived as being of different value. The greatest difficulty presents itself when only a single office is to be filled, for example that of President. Here the application of proportional rules is only possible if rotation of office (i.e. proportionality in the temporal dimension) is brought into the reckoning, or if the disadvantage imposed on one group can be compensated by preference given to it in another decision.

Can referendums help increase perceived legitimacy among citizens with populist attitudes? Indeed, public opinion surveys show that populist citizens are especially in favour of referendums. However, we do not know whether this support reflects a principled desire for different decision-making procedures or an instrumental one (that is, because they expect referendums to yield favourable outcomes). We study this question on a real-life case: the Dutch 2018 referendum on the Intelligence and Security Services Act 2017. Using high-quality survey data from both before and after the referendum, we find that, counter to conventional wisdom and our hypotheses, populists' support for referendums is less driven by instrumental motives compared to that of non-populists, and that populists are more likely than non-populists to accept the outcome of a referendum, even when this outcome is unfavourable.

Researchers have long studied how the ideology of political leaders affects policymaking and social welfare. The limited coverage of cross-country ideology datasets, however, has meant that researchers have mainly focused on Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. This letter therefore presents the Global Leader Ideology dataset, which vastly expands the scope of previous datasets by classifying chief executives as leftist, centrist, rightist or non-ideological in 182 countries annually from 1945 or independence to 2020. The letter describes the dataset's contents and coding, compares it to existing datasets, and illustrates its uses by exploring how the ideologies of political leaders differ around the world and over time. The letter thereby outlines a research agenda on the global causes of chief executives' ideologies and their effects on policies and socio-economic outcomes.

The furore that followed the publication of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses has provided a graphic illustration of the conflicts that may still arise in societies characterized by diverse religious beliefs. This article examines how far the rules governing a plural society should require its members to defer to beliefs that they themselves do not share. In particular, it examines whether a principle of ‘respect for beliefs’ can provide adequate reason for limiting freedom of expression. A strong version of the principle, which would limit substantive criticism of beliefs, is found untenable. A weaker version of the principle, which would concern itself not with the matter but with the manner in which others' beliefs are treated, has greater plausibility and moral appeal. That also, however, proves too hazardous and indeterminate a basis for setting legal limits to freedom of expression.

The comparative literature on party systems has convincingly demonstrated that electoral rules, social cleavages and their interaction can explain much of the cross-national variation in the size of party systems. This literature, however, has thus far ignored campaign finance laws. This article argues that various campaign finance laws exert more or less restrictive pressures on party competition. It develops a new theoretical concept, fund parity. The study demonstrates the positive relationship between fund parity and party system size and employs additional tests to supplement the regression analysis in order to account for potential endogeneity issues. The findings underscore an intuitive – but heretofore untested – relationship: increasing parity makes party competition more permissive and increases the size of the party system.

How does individual political efficacy affect the construction of policy preferences? This article presents a model of individual-level politicization of policy preference, which draws on psychological and political explanations and posits that greater external political efficacy results in a stronger effect of political ideology on concrete policy preference. Two empirical studies that test this hypothesis are reported: an original survey experiment conducted in Israel, and an analysis that relies on the 2002 wave of the European Social Survey. The empirical findings support the hypothesis. In contrast to the established conviction that no association exists between political efficacy and policy preferences, these findings reveal that external political efficacy has a polarizing effect on expressed policy preferences.

This analysis challenges claims that regime type determines national economic performance, and hypothesizes that the level of public deliberation, rather than broad categories of regime type, is the driver of national economic performance across political systems; specifically, that negotiations, disagreements, and compromises between decentralized decision-making partisans (e.g., citizens, business representatives, professional associations, labor, and public administrators) are the underlying causal mechanism explaining the non-monotonic relationship between different types of political system and economic performance. Countries with high levels of public deliberation more often experience stable growth outcomes, while other countries can make radical changes in economic policy with uncertain outcome. The variation in public deliberation within regime type is significant, especially amongst authoritarian regimes. One startling implication is that, in certain situations, impressive gains in economic growth can be achieved only at the expense of active negotiation and participation in the policy-making process.

Previous research on elite change in Russia, the main findings of which are summarized here, has shown that well over half of post-Soviet Russia's political elite were drawn from the late-Soviet era elite. After a caveat against loose use of the nomenklatura concept, this article focuses on a far narrower sub-group, defined as the ‘top’ political elite, comprising 135 individuals in late 1988 and ninety-eight in 1996. Many of the old top elite found lower elite roles in post-Soviet Russia and most of the new top elite came from fairly senior jobs, but hardly any passed directly from the old top elite to the new. Only a minority of the top elite in 1996 were ‘natural heirs’ to their positions while others owed them primarily to connections or to their success in the new open competitive politics. In this respect (as in others) there are substantial differences between the three components of the new top elite, namely members of the government, senior office holders in the State Duma, and leading officials of the presidential administration. The Russian top elite today remains overwhelmingly male. Far more grew up in large cities than did their Soviet-era equivalents. Non-Russians are now relatively less under-represented. All are tertiary graduates, and nearly a half have postgraduate qualifications. Members of the presidential elite are far more likely than government members to be city-born and educated in the social sciences or humanities, and they average almost a decade younger. The Duma elite lies in between in all these respects.

This article examines party discipline and party cohesion or defection, offering as an illustration the rebellion over postal privatization in 2005 by members of Japan's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). It explores the importance of party rules – especially the seniority rule and policy specialization for district rewards – as intervening variables between election rules and party defection in a decentralized and diverse party. It is argued that in such cases, party rules like seniority can help prevent defection. When these rules are changed, as in the postal case of 2005, defection is more probable, but it is found that the relationship between defection and seniority is likely to be curvilinear, and also that the curvilinearity is conditional upon each legislator's having different incentives for vote, policy and office.

The description ‘radical’ tends to invoke left-wing images in many people's heads: it has almost become the antonym of conservative. But in the sense of appealing to fundamental principles, the present Conservative Government certainly claims to be radical. Its policies purport to break with the immediate past in British politics and they are said to derive from the principles of monetarism. No area has been subject to a more radical reassessment than that of central-local relations. Conservative policies have been seen as a grave threat to local government. They are said to undermine its constitutional foundations and considerable concern has been expressed about the erosion of local autonomy. This paper attempts to evaluate the distinctiveness of present policies. But in order to assess recent changes, it is necessary to look to the immediate past and to identify any continuities as well as disjunctions in central government's policy. A decade is a short time in the life of a polity but, by insisting that current developments be located in even this confined context, it will become clear that there is, in fact, a large measure of continuity in the relationship between central and local government. Whether the government has been Conservative or Labour, the trend has been towards the increased control of the level and pattern of sub-national expenditure.

The recent growth in the formation of think tanks in the United States raises questions about their role in the democratic process. A theory of think-tank formation is pre here, which posits that committee debate creates incentives for legislators to seek research-based, policy-analytic information supporting competing policy positions. As political entrepreneurs recognize this demand, they supply think tanks, just as scholars have suggested they supply interest groups. An important macro-level implication of this theory is that as legislators’ ideological polarization increases, the demand for policy analysis increases, as does the number of think tanks supplied. Empirical support for this proposition in the United States from 1903 to 2003 is shown, while controlling for market factors measuring the opportunity cost of investing in think tanks.

This article introduces the concept of opposition fragmentation into the study of the determinants of election results. Empirical studies have demonstrated that anti-government economic voting is likely to take place where the clarity of responsibility (the degree to which voters can attribute policy responsibility to the government) is high. This argument is extended by focusing on the effects of the degree of opposition fragmentation in influencing the extent to which poor economic performance decreases the government’s vote share. With data from seventeen parliamentary democracies, it is shown that when there are fewer opposition parties, the relationship between economic performance and governing parties’ electoral fortune is stronger. Opposition fragmentation appears to be as strong a factor as the clarity of responsibility.

This article tests the applicability of the democratic peace thesis tosub-Saharan African states by examining a ‘politicalinversion’ thesis. This suggests that the domestic politicalframework of African states compels their leaders to engage in internationalconflict, contrary to what the democratic peace thesiests: namely, politicallyopen African states are more likely to fight each other. This conclusion raisesthe issue of the universality of the democratic peace thesis; therefore, theextent to which the democratic peace is evident across other regions of theworld is examined. Empirical analyses of state dyads 1950–2001demonstrate that politically open African states are more likely to fight eachother and, moreover, the democratic peace does not hold in any region outside the West. These findings supportthe political inversion thesis of African conflicts and challenge the suggestionthat the spread of democracy will occasion international peace throughout theworld.

Do parties’ valence characteristics affect their policy strategies? The verdict of the spatial modeling literature on the positioning effects of valence is mixed on this point. Some spatial studies argue that valence-advantaged parties/candidates should moderate their policies, while others argue that they should radicalize their policies. Empirical cross-national work on this issue has been lacking. Using an original measure of valence and party positioning data compiled by the Comparative Manifesto Project, the period 1976–2003 is analyzed in this article for nine West European countries. The findings suggest that as parties’ character-based valence attributes worsen they tend to moderate their Left–Right positions, and there is a notable time lag in parties’ responses to changes in their character-based valence attributes.

Leaders are assumed to face fiscal constraints on their ability to remain in office by competitively distributing public and/or private goods. However, many leaders can relax this constraint by borrowing on sovereign credit markets. This article argues that states with the fiscal flexibility offered by favorable credit terms have the resources necessary to (1) respond to citizen demands with policies other than widespread repression and (2) avoid agency loss that may result in unauthorized repression by state agents. Empirical analyses indicate that creditworthy states have greater respect for physical integrity rights and are less likely to suffer diminished respect for those rights when facing violent dissent or negative shocks to government revenues.