Formal coalition theory has tended to ignore the existence of local government coalitions. Local government studies have tended to ignore the existence of formal coalition theory. Yet local administrations frequently comprise coalitions of parties. There is clearly a need, therefore, to bring the two areas of study together.

Are ordinary citizens better at predicting election results than conventional voter intention polls? The authors address this question by comparing eight forecasting models for British general elections: one based on voters' expectations of who will win and seven based on who voters themselves intend to vote for (including ‘uniform national swing model’ and ‘cube rule’ models). The data come from ComRes and Gallup polls as well as the Essex Continuous Monitoring Surveys, 1950–2017, yielding 449 months with both expectation and intention polls. The large sample size permits comparisons of the models' prediction accuracy not just in the months prior to the election, but in the years leading up to it. Vote expectation models outperform vote intention models in predicting both the winning party and parties' seat shares.

Liberal institutions (freedom of speech and religious worship, for example) will naturally be supported by liberals – that is to say, those with a liberal outlook. But what arguments can be addressed to non-liberals? There are some traditional arguments but these are too limited in scope to provide a general justification for liberal institutions. A recent argument that claims to do the job is to the effect that justice entails neutrality and neutrality entails liberal institutions. However, neutrality is a principle that could appeal to non-liberals only if they had already swallowed a large dose of liberalism, since it requires that they regard their deepest convictions as preferences or personal opinions. It is also doubtful whether liberals are well advised to embrace neutrality.

The electoral domination of the Conservative party during the past decade has been interpreted by many as evidence of a long-term shift in the balance of public support from Labour to the Conservatives. This article argues that such a shift has not occurred. Rather, the stability apparent in recent election results disguises considerable underlying volatility. The balance of public support between the major parties continues to be highly unstable and subject to large and precipitous fluctuations in response to relatively small economic changes and ordinary political events. Recent Conservative victories appear to be the results more of good timing and luck than of any fundamental, long-term dynamic in British politics.

To authoritarian rulers, holding somewhat competitive elections enhances legitimacy, but entails political risks. Committing electoral fraud can secure victory, but may jeopardize regime legitimacy. However, there is a tool of electoral manipulation that allows authoritarian rulers to reduce electoral risk while preserving legitimacy: gerrymandering. This article undertakes a systematic study of gerrymandering in Hong Kong, using a dataset that documents boundary changes at the level of residential buildings. The empirical findings show a significant partisan bias in electoral redistricting: opposition constituencies are more likely to be redistricted. Redistricting, however, fails to deter opposition incumbents from seeking re-election. No significant negative relationship is found between redistricting and opposition incumbents’ vote share, although redistricting does reduce their overall chances of re-election. The results suggest that gerrymandering, which involves the use of packing and cracking strategies in different districts, can be employed to undermine the aggregate electoral performance of the opposition parties.

Vast research on immigration lumps together native citizens' attitudes toward two different groups: the immigrant stock of non-naturalized resident aliens, and the immigrant flow, that is, the future arrival of foreigners seeking to enter and live in the country. Does popular opposition to immigration distinguish between the two, and if so, how? This article analyzes theoretically the reasons the stock and flow might induce different views among natives, and presents experimental evidence from the United States showing that natives are systematically more accepting of the former. The analysis indicates that this ‘stock premium’ partly stems from a sense of moral obligation toward people residing in the country. Replicating two widely cited experiments, the study shows that the stock–flow distinction has important implications for the interpretation of earlier findings on immigration attitudes, and for understanding voter preferences regarding policies designed to curtail immigration.

Plurality electoral systems with multi-member districts and single nontransferable votes (SNTV) allow parties to win multiple seats in district elections by nominating multiple candidates, but they also penalize a party's seat share if the number of candidates offered is ‘too many’ or ‘too few’. Given an institutional incentive to nominate the ‘correct’ number of candidates, we seek to establish empirically that the nominating behaviour of parties in such systems results from a rational calculus of strategic choice. So we develop and test an empirical theory of rational nominating behaviour applied to Japanese district elections before the 1994 electoral reform. We establish, for all possible nominating strategies, the conditions on voting outcomes required for actors to maximize benefits in the context. The efficiency of actual strategy choices for maximizing benefits is found by comparing an observed outcome from voting (the distributed benefit) with the benefit that would be expected had the party chosen its ‘best’ alternative nominating strategy instead. Empirical testing indicates that Japanese parties discriminated between available nominating strategies and made choices that maximized benefits in the context,evidence that the nominating behaviour of parties in this test environment was based on rational calculation.

Cross-cutting cleavages do seem to help moderate social conflict.1 This can be explained in either of two ways. One argument focuses on the logic of electoral competition. Where parties must appeal to an electorate with diverse tastes along many dimensions, politicians must take moderate positions (defined as near the median voter) in most dimensions of cleavage if they are to win. A socialist party which draws its support from both Protestants and Catholics cannot take extreme positions on the religious question without alienating potential supporters and jeopardizing its electoral chances.2

This article considers the emergence of an informal institution vital to the functioning of Westminster polities: that the Shadow Cabinet is a ‘government in waiting’. It compares the evidence for two theoretical accounts of its timing: a ‘procedural’ theory wherein the Shadow Cabinet is a solution to internal organizational issues in the House of Commons prior to widespread working-class voting, and a ‘competition’ theory that predicts that suffrage extension acts as a key stimulus for Shadow Cabinet organization. Gathering a dataset of almost a million utterances in parliament between the First and Fourth Reform Acts, the study provides a novel method of identifying Shadow Cabinet members using the surges in term use from their speeches. It finds that the ‘competition’ hypothesis is the most plausible version of events, and that the opposition responded to the new ‘party-orientated electorate’ by strategically reorganizing in a way that mimicked the cabinet’s structure.

With some notable exceptions, comparative research on the welfare state falls generally into one of two categories: qualitative and generally descriptive case studies and large-scale quantitative efforts at explanation. Case studies have progressed past the point of being essentially journalistic descriptions of the peculiarities of the policy development process or the policies of a particular society. It is nevertheless true that there has been little progress in moving beyond the case study approach towards building a theory about how and why societies make particular decisions about the priorities and organization of their social welfare efforts. On the other hand, while large-scale aggregate analysis yields theoretical statements about the character of ‘the welfare state’, those conclusions are often so general as to be ‘difficult to relate to… how particular substantive problems have been [and might be] handled.’

Although a substantial philosophical literature exists on the concept of ‘friendship’ and its connections to politics, the possibility that groups such as states could be friends has largely been ignored. This is puzzling since the description of political communities as friends is one that goes back to Thucydides. Moreover, contemporary international politics is replete with references to the concepts of ‘friend’ and ‘friendship’. This article argues that international friendships provide powerful reasons for minimally just states to engage in other-regarding conduct. Drawing on an Aristotelian account of self-interest for inspiration, it is suggested that the same reasons that justify a state’s self-regard also justify its regard for other states. These reasons rest on whether the basic institutions of a state – one’s own or another’s – are minimally just. States, solely because of their character, have reason to enter into different levels of friendship. Those different relationships in turn generate different expectations regarding consultation, security and respect for autonomy.

Recent studies of American federalism have emphasized the division of government functions between the national government and the states. But the effects of federalism depend not only on the balance of functional authority but also on the structure of federalist institutions. The institutional structure of Aid to Dependent Children, created by the Social Security Act of 1935, comprised a system of state operational control unhindered by federal supervision. The effect of this federal bargain was the exclusion of African-Americans from welfare benefits in the South. But the federal structure of the programme also shaped implementation in the North, where decentralization allowed its capture by urban machines, which used welfare as a political benefit. New techniques for ecological inference establish these results. Administrative institutions structured the entry of African-Americans into the American welfare state and created the conditions for the welfare ‘crisis’ of the 1960s and later.

For decades political scientists have been fascinated with the problem of establishing a formal mathematical relationship between the popular votes cast for a political party and the number of parliamentary seats it holds. The most famous attempt at solving this problem, known as the ‘cube law’, was formulated more than sixty years ago by James Parker Smith. Since then a large number of papers in support of the cube law have been published. Perhaps the most cited paper is by Kendall and Stuart. The cube law also has been stated to apply to parliamentary elections in New Zealand, the United States and Canada. But doubts about the cube law have also been expressed by Brookes, Eldersveld and just a few years ago by Tufte.

What are the consequences of being sued for violating bilateral investment treaties? The conventional wisdom is that investor–state disputes (ISDS) tarnish countries' compliance records, and harm foreign direct investment in the process. This article re-examines this belief in light of recent trends in ISDS. The regime has witnessed a proliferation of claims, a growing proportion of which allege breaches of provisions like fair and equitable treatment and indirect expropriation. Combined with a decrease in the rate of success of such claims, the authors argue that the average ISDS claim now contains less information than it once did. If this is the case, investors should be less likely to update their expectations and reduce investments. This study examines 812 investor–state disputes from 1987 to the present day, and finds consistent evidence for this across two different datasets relating to firms' risk perceptions. Consequences of investor–state claims on foreign direct investment are only apparent in cases that allege direct expropriation. Even among these, the effects are smaller today than they were in the past. In sum, the reputational effects of ISDS claims appear to have been eroded by the developments of the last two decades. ISDS just isn't what it used to be.

Election-oriented elites are expected to emphasize issues on which their party possesses ‘issue ownership’ during campaigns. This article extends those theories to the content of executive and legislative agendas. Arguing that executives have incentives to pursue their party’s owned issues in the legislature, it theorizes three conditions under which these incentives are constrained: when governments are responsive to issues prioritized by the public, when a party has a stronger electoral mandate and under divided government. The theory is tested using time-series analyses of policy agendas of US congressional statutes and State of the Union addresses (1947–2012) and UK acts of Parliament and the Queen’s Speech (1950–2010). The results offer support for the theory, and are particularly strong for the US State of the Union address, providing insights into institutional differences. The implications provide reassurance concerning the conditions under which governments focus attention only on their partisan issue priorities.

This article proposes a measure of the social structuration of political parties. The measure has some distinctive virtues. It assesses the social bases of partisanship from the standpoint of the political party, and it provides a simple and transparent method for assessing the relative weight of social-structural and behavioral factors for party composition. We illustrate the power of this measure through a comparison of political parties in 30 European countries since 1975.

Does the geographic concentration of industry ‘matter’ outside the United States? Observers have long speculated that while geographically concentrated industries may be influential in American politics, this is probably not the case in countries where the electorate votes more as a national constituency. Others disagree, urging that clustered industries have an advantage regardless of how the political map is drawn. We sharpen the terms of debate and weigh in with empirical evidence from a cross-sectional analysis of intended voter turnout in eight member-states of the European Union and a multi-year study of voter turnout in the Netherlands. These tests uniformly show that, across different types of electoral systems, including those in which voters vote as a national constituency, thereby removing any effects of electoral geography per se, workers in traded industries that are physically concentrated are, in fact, substantially more likely to vote than employees in traded but geographically dispersed sectors.

How are defense co-operation and economic co-operation related? To answer this question, this article analyzes the coevolution of defense co-operation agreements (DCAs) and government-to-government loans. It argues that governments pursue two distinct sets of interests. At the bilateral level, governments use issue linkages and side payments to encourage spillover from defense co-operation to economic co-operation, and vice versa. That is, governments’ bilateral interests in DCAs and loans are largely complementary. However, at the network level, interests may diverge. Specifically, governments use DCAs to build clubs of like-minded defense collaborators or ‘security communities’, while they use loans to impose asymmetric forms of political authority or ‘hierarchies’. In some contexts, these network-level interests are, like bilateral interests, complementary. For example, defense partners rely on loans to co-ordinate their foreign policies and better respond to security threats, and debtors rely on lending patterns to identify suitable defense partners. In other cases, however, these interests strongly conflict. For example, governments that are highly active in the loan network are especially likely to rely on asymmetric exercises of political authority, which is incompatible with the network-level goal of using DCAs to establish communities of defense collaborators. Similarly, governments that are highly active in the DCA network are, due to their complex multilateral political commitments, less vulnerable to the asymmetric influences that loans enable. To empirically test these claims, the study develops a longitudinal model of multiplex network coevolution. Overall, the results show that while economic and defense co-operation often reinforce one another, they sometimes conflict in unexpected ways.

In a recent exchange in this Journal, K.I. Macdonald took issue with Steven Lukes's claim that power is an essentially contested concept. Macdonald claims that in arguing that power is essentially contested Lukes locates disputes about power in the concept itself rather than in the divergent uses of that concept. Macdonald's claim is that there are at least two types of dispute about concepts: disputes which arise from within the concept and disputes which arise in the differing values ‘from which the concept depends’. In the case of power, Macdonald argues, the dispute lies between contending perspectives and values and not within the concept of power itself. Whilst not denying that there are essentially contested concepts, Macdonald is clear that the concept of power is not essentially contested but reflects a contest between differing value positions. Macdonald argues that whenever a concept is ‘truly essentially contested the proper ground for the contest is the essence of the concept. Our disagreements inhere in that concept’.