This article draws attention to an aspect that thus far has escaped systematic scrutiny in the theoretical literature on the political legitimacy of global governance – functions. It does so by exploring the idea that the content and justification of a principle of political legitimacy for global governance may depend on the function of the entity it is supposed to regulate (for example, law making, policy making, implementation, monitoring). Two arguments are made: one meta-theoretical and one substantive. The meta-theoretical argument demonstrates the fruitfulness of adopting a ‘function-sensitive approach’ to political legitimacy to address this aspect. The substantive argument develops the contours of an account of political legitimacy by applying this approach. This account consists of five regulative principles, which are sensitive to, and vary in accordance with, different functions in global politics.

Since the 1950s, the dominant pattern of partisan change in the American electorate has involved movements between party identification and independence rather than direct or indirect shifts between parties. This article employs switching regression analyses to investigate the long-term evolution and short-term dynamics of independence between 1953 and 1988. The analyses reveal that a new ‘independence regime’ developed rapidly in the mid-1960s, with the ‘tipping point’ in the transition occurring in the second quarter of 1967. Under the new–but not the old–regime, short-term changes in the size of the independent cohort have reflected economic conditions as well as political events. These findings argue that future research on the dynamics of public support for political parties in the United States and elsewhere will profit by developing dynamic models which assess processes of long- and short-term change in tandem.

For a variety of reasons political science in Britain has made no serious attempt to study courts and judges as political institutions and actors. Or at least this was true until recently. Several works in the last few years, especially Griffith's, Stevens's and a forthcoming book on the law lords by Alan Paterson, have pointed to a much needed change in this attitude. However, none of them have been works of political science, even though they have considered politics. By this I mean two things: they have not principally considered the judges' thoughts as political ideology; and they have not used the techniques and assumptions of rigorous, analytic political science. Indeed one of the few slightly earlier studies of the political role of the courts in Britain, by Morrison, specifically denies that such approaches, especially the statistical approach of jurimetrics, is possible in Britain. This article is an attempt to do the impossible, not so much because the author believes that Morrison's point is necessarily wrong, but because it is never sound methodology to abandon techniques that have been useful elsewhere without trying to make them work on different data sets. But first we must attempt to characterize the judicial role, before we try any study of the politics that may be attendant on judicial ideology.

Conventional wisdom suggests that macroeconomic outcomes do not follow a political business cycle (PBC) pattern. In this study, the nature of the electoral underpinnings of such opportunistic behaviour are investigated by analysing alternative formulations of PBC theory: (1) a naïve-unconditional PBC, (2) an electoral security-conditional PBC, (3) an electoral uncertainty-conditional PBC; and (4) a partisan-conditional PBC. Data on the US real personal income growth rate for the 1948:1–2000:4 quarterly period reveals support for both naïve-unconditional and partisan-conditional PBCs, yet rejects an electoral cycle attributable to the incumbent administration's ex ante re-election prospects. Simulation analysis reveals that while Democratic administrations enjoy higher income growth than Republican counterparts for non pre-election stimulus periods, Republican presidents are associated with larger pre-election economic expansions than Democratic presidents consistent with a partisan-conditional PBC theoretical model. This finding supports the notion that incumbent governments engage in partisan-based policy balancing with respect to the creation of opportunistic electoral cycles in real macroeconomic activity. On a broader level, these statistical findings provide strong support for adaptive models of the electoral cycle that emphasize partisan differences while refuting the policy neutrality proposition and rational-competence models predicated on the extent to which an incumbent administration experiences electoral vulnerability.

The formation of new party systems involves processes that significantly distinguish them from the transformation of established ones. In new party systems historical legacies matter, timing and sequencing of events have important consequences, and politicians do not just limit themselves to winning votes but employ a wide range of co-ordination strategies (i.e. electoral coalitions, party switching, manipulation of electoral vote-counting procedures) to make votes count more effectively. The literature has identified many of these causal factors individually without, however, thinking systematically about their interactions. This article borrows from recent work on path dependency to analyse such interactions in greater depth and pays closer attention to the distinct temporal dynamics shaping the formation of new party systems.

What determines the responsiveness and effectiveness of democratic governments in meeting their citizens’ needs? Based on his 1993 study of the twenty Italian regions, Robert Putnam argued that ‘civic community’, a self-reinforcing syndrome of social engagement and political participation, is the explanation. A re-examination of Putnam’s data reveals little evidence of such a syndrome, but confirms that where more citizens participate in politics outside of networks of clientelistic exchange, more effective democratic government results. To discern the causes of variation in this self-motivated political participation, I test Putnam’s measures of social engagement against aspects of Italian socio-economic structure. Economic development and the historical distribution of land, not social engagement, are found to be powerful predictors of self-motivated political participation and in turn democratic quality.

The surveys for the 1983 general election marked the first twenty years' systematic study of the British electorate. The British Election series – originating with the 1963 pre-election Nuffield survey by Butler and Stokes, followed by the Essex series in the 1970s conducted by Särlvik and Crewe, and latterly in the hands of Heath, Jowell and Curtice – yield exceptionally rich portraits of voters and their responses to politics. The growing crop of secondary analyses, tracing changes in the electorate over those years, reflects the continuities of the series. More recently, a number of studies have challenged the ‘Michigan conventions’ central to the first generation of British electoral studies. It is a good time, then, to take stock of our understanding of voting behaviour in Britain. Let us start with what is generally agreed.

Are people under economic stress more or less likely to vote, and why? With large observational datasets and a survey experiment involving unemployed Americans, we show that unemployment depresses participation. But it does so more powerfully when the unemployment rate is low, less powerfully when it is high. Whereas earlier studies have explained lower turnout among the unemployed by stressing the especially high opportunity costs these would-be voters face, our evidence points to the psychological effects of unemployment and of campaign messages about it. When unemployment is high, challengers have an incentive to blame the incumbent, thus eliciting anger among the unemployed. Psychologists have shown anger to be an approach or mobilizing emotion. When joblessness is low, campaigns tend to ignore it. The jobless thus remain in states of depression and self-blame, which are demobilizing emotions.

‘The public does respond to candidates who offer a choice rather than an echo. But unfortunately for the candidate who offers the choice, the public seems to choose the echo.’ So concluded Nie, Verba and Petrocik when they studied electoral strategy in the United States. Goldwater and McGovern broke the consensus but paid a heavy price for introducing issues into American politics.

This article explores the antecedents of Americans' perceptions of global threat, which may influence people's policy preferences and ultimately public policy. Three predictors of global threat perceptions are in focus: news media use, global knowledge and global experience. Using the 2004 Survey of Attitudes and Global Engagement, it is discovered that media use best explains global threat perceptions, but its impact is largely conditional on the characteristics of the individual and on the type of threat.

Why do politicians and policymakers not prioritize pro-immigration reforms, even when public opinion on the issue is positive? This research note examines one previously overlooked explanation related to the systematically greater importance of immigration as a political issue among those who oppose it relative to those who support it. To provide a comprehensive empirical assessment of how personal immigration issue importance is related to policy preferences, I use the best available cross-national and longitudinal surveys from multiple immigrant-receiving contexts. I find that compared to pro-immigration voters, anti-immigration voters feel stronger about the issue and are more likely to consider it as both personally and nationally important. This finding holds across virtually all observed countries, years, and alternative survey measures of immigration preferences and their importance. Overall, these results suggest that public attitudes toward immigration exhibit a substantial issue importance asymmetry that systematically advantages anti-immigration causes when the issue is more contextually salient.

How do politicians with influence over public works programs balance their incentives to gain electoral support with their proclivities for rent seeking? This article argues that government elites in parliamentary systems manage this trade-off by concentrating rent-seeking opportunities in their own hands while facilitating efficient public goods provision in the constituencies of their more junior partisan colleagues. Analyses using fine-grained data on road construction in India based on a variety of causal inference strategies support the argument. While ruling party legislators showed higher levels of road provision in their constituencies regardless of ministerial status, road projects in ministers’ constituencies showed higher levels of rent seeking than those in the constituencies of other ruling party legislators. Moreover, consistent with the mechanism, ruling party legislators’ diminished access to rent-seeking opportunities appears to be largely driven by the influence of co-partisan ministers. The findings illuminate how politicized distribution can sometimes mitigate inefficiencies in infrastructure provision.

Media stories often reach citizens via a two-step process, transmitted to them indirectly via their social networks. Why are some media stories strongly transmitted and impact opinions powerfully in this two-step flow while others quickly perish? Integrating classical research on the two-step flow of political communication and novel theories from cognitive psychology, this article outlines a model for understanding the strength of political frames in the two-step flow. It argues that frames that resonate with cognitive biases (that is, deep-seated psychological decision rules) will be transmitted more and have a stronger influence on opinion when citizens recollect media frames in their social networks. Focusing on the case of episodic and thematic frames, the study tests this model. It introduces a novel research design: implementing the children’s game ‘Telephone’ in consecutive experimental online surveys fielded to nationally representative samples. This design helps gauge the reliability of transmission and the degree of persuasiveness in actual chains of transmission.

Influential studies by Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson claim that colonial legacies explain the origins of development-promoting property rights and thus account for the modern world income distribution. Specifically, they argue that European colonial powers engineered a global ‘reversal of fortune’, bringing property rights and prosperity to relatively uninhabited colonies while imposing inefficient institutions on locales with less potential for settlement. We re-evaluate their theoretical arguments and empirical findings and come to a different conclusion. We concur that British colonialism dramatically restructured four colonies, resulting in phenomenal economic success. For the majority of the world, however, colonialism had no discernible effect on property rights. We conclude that contemporary development studies must find another explanation for the modern world income distribution.

Along with other American public institutions, Congress and the federal bureaucracy have fallen upon hard times. Each has been the target of much public scorn. Among academic theorists who have compared the contemporary roles of the bureaucracy and Congress, however, Congress has received the worst evaluation by far. It has often been treated as a more or less quaintly archaic institution, structurally unable to cope with the complexities of national issues. Samuel Huntington delineates several factors which he thinks tend to insulate Congress from an effective national policy-making role. Internally, the institutionalization of Congress has created a system of leadership selection which fragments authority and rewards and reinforces provincial perspectives. Externally, with rare exceptions, electoral turn-over is limited. Thus, the intake of new blood, especially in the House, is mostly dependent upon voluntary departures or biological processes. Equally important in Huntington's view are the characteristics of the congressmen themselves. They are, as many have pointed out, essentially local politicians oriented to local rather than national problems. Their incentives lie in looking ‘homeward’ to local constituencies rather than outward to the nation. Edward Shils has described their orientations as ‘those of the small town society’, suspicious of large organization and wary of complexity. Responsiveness to local interests, not comprehension of complex national policy problems, is the sine qua non of the congressman's political survival.

Research shows that social welfare expenditures in post-Communist Europe continued to increase during the dual transition. This article analyses the economic and political factors that influence these changes in budgets for total welfare spending, and more specifically, pension assistance. I find that the economic hardship and budgetary shortfalls of the transition play the most prominent roles in the adjustments to total spending levels. And while these factors also heavily influence the modifications to pension funding, the strength of the right parties in parliament has an independent impact in increasing pension changes. I argue that this relationship reflects a short-term association between the right's liberal economic plans, their policy structural adjustments and rising pension budgets.

The mid-1960s to mid-1970s was a period of unexpected upheaval, ideological ferment, issue polarization and changing of the guard in the United States no less than in West Germany or other European countries. Nearly everywhere politics moved from an era of tranquillity to an era of confrontation. Established political parties were challenged by the salience of new issues and by new forms of political participation. The ability of parties to govern and, at the same time, to prove responsive under these circumstances was put to a severe test. The hold of parties on the mass electorate appeared to be slipping, and the writing of scenarios for partisan realignment and dealignment turned into a cottage industry.

Calls for civility feature prominently in public discourse, and the concept has received growing attention by political philosophers recently. But what does it mean to be civil? The existing literature distinguishes between two main understandings of civility: civility as politeness and civility as public-mindedness. The objective of this article is to show that these conceptions and the different normative claims associated with them can all fit together. We argue that civility and incivility should be disaggregated in order to uncover fruitful connections between different aspects of the concept. We introduce a distinction between two dimensions of civility as public-mindedness (moral and justificatory), as well as a new distinction between the means and ends of civility. We examine the complex connections between the different dimensions of (in)civility and show that the disaggregation of civility and incivility tells us what kind of (in)civility matters, as well as when and why.

Mixed-member electoral systems require voters simultaneously to cast ballots in single-member districts (SMD) and multimember, proportional representation (PR) constituencies. It may be that not all parties offer candidates in both electoral contexts, however. In this event would-be voters for some parties may find themselves ‘frustrated’ by the restricted choice menu on offer in the SMD, being effectively forced to split their vote between different parties. Here we explore the different behaviours of frustrated voters in the 1996 mixed-member election to Italy's Chamber of Deputies, characterizing these as being either in some sense non-strategic (concerned above all with the relative policy platforms of candidates) or strategic (concerned above all to influence the eventual composition of government). Using an extended method for ecological inference, we parameterize and estimate rates of different types of ticket-splitting at the district level, and link the degree of what we characterize as strategic voting to the relative policy distance between the respective local representatives of the Italian pre-electoral coalitions.