The importance of political parties for inter-governmental differences in public policies has long been the subject of dispute. Given their comparative intentions and their concern with end-products rather than decision processes, statistical analyses of policy outputs should provide a valuable tool in evaluating this question. This they have seemingly failed to do, largely because they have devoted insufficient attention to the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings of their investigations. However, with Sharpe and Newton's Does Politics Matter? a theoretical approach has been introduced into the local outputs literature which should herald a new era in comparative statistical investigations and the welcome emergence of conceptual and theoretical advances. In addition, their efforts raise the promise of forging a closer alliance between the outputs literature and more detailed, qualitative investigations of policy-making processes in individual local authorities.

Convergence occurs in war and bargaining models as uninformed rivals discover their opponent's type by fighting and making calibrated offers that only the weaker party would accept. Fighting ends with the compromise that reveals the other side's type. This article shows that, if the protagonists are free to fight and bargain in the time continuum, they no longer make increasing concessions in an attempt to end the war promptly and on fair terms. Instead, the rivals stand firm on extreme bargaining positions, fighting it out in the hope that the other side will give in, until much of the war has been fought. Despite ongoing resolution of uncertainty by virtue of time passing, the rivals choose not to try to narrow their differences by negotiating.

Arguing about rational choice theory remains a popular pastime. Following the publication of Green and Shapiro’s Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory, a backlash against the use of rational choice theory within political science gained momentum. This article shows how, since 1994, sceptics have refined and extended the critique of rational choice and how practitioners have defended their approach, and a more general argument has emerged. In the 1990s, attitudes towards rational choice theory constituted a fundamental fault-line within the discipline, but changes to the way in which rational choice is practised and defended, together with some broader changes in the social sciences, have created more areas of common ground and taken some of the urgency out of this debate.

Autocrats rely on co-optation to limit opposition mobilization and remain in power. Yet not all opposition parties that pose a threat to their regime are successfully co-opted. This article provides a formal model to show that reliance on activists influences whether an opposition leader receives and accepts co-optation offers from an autocrat. Activists strengthen a party’s mobilization efforts, yet become disaffected when their leader acquiesces to the regime. This dynamic undermines the co-optation of parties with a strong activist base, particularly those with unitary leadership. Activists have less influence over elite negotiations in parties with divided leadership, which can promote collusion with the regime. The results ultimately suggest that party activism can erode authoritarian control, but may encourage wasteful conflicts with the government.

This article proposes a structuralist alternative to mainstream behavioural studies of political culture in the United States. After first describing the deficiencies in the mainstream approach, the article suggests that political culture as attitudes and values should be seen as surface elements of a deep cultural structure. The structuralist alternative is presented in some detail, with emphasis upon cultural narratives. Building upon structuralist theory, American political culture emerges as ‘mythologized individualism’, the ramifications of which are described in terms of American ideological cognition and in terms of American capacities to use culture as a means of realizing democratic ideals. In these latter respects, mythologized individualism is found wanting.

This article considers the issue of who should rebuild after war. Many leading advocates of the relevance of jus post bellum for Just War Theory adhere to the ‘Belligerents Rebuild Thesis’, which holds that those who have been involved with the fighting – such as the victor, just belligerent, unjust aggressor or humanitarian intervener – should be tasked with the responsibility to rebuild. By contrast, this article argues that there is a collective, international duty to rebuild that should be assigned primarily according to the agent's ability to rebuild – and not necessarily to the belligerents. The article also claims that, in contrast to the prevailing view, considerations of jus post bellum do not play any moral role in the justifiability of a war. Accordingly, defending the Belligerents Rebuild Thesis by invoking the alleged moral relevance of jus post bellum for Just War Theory is mistaken.

Recent policy documents in Britain that have emphasized the importance of integration can be understood as addressing the question of what conditions are required in order to achieve and sustain a just society. The answer they give is that minority cultural groups need to be integrated into society, and that this involves community cohesion, secured through ‘meaningful contact’, and sharing a national identity based on common values. Here, it is argued that although meaningful contact between members of different cultural groups may promote trust between them, this does not warrant the key role which has been given to the idea of community cohesion. It is suggested instead that policies should aim to foster a widespread sense of belonging to the polity, and that this is not the same as sharing a national identity.

The scholarly literature dealing with the effects of economic conditions on government support and election outcomes in advanced industrialized democracies is extensive.The bulk of this research relates government support and vote choice to objective economic conditions or subjective perceptions of those conditions in order to establish whether and to what extent such a relationship exists. For overviews, see Michael Lewis-Beck, Economics and Elections: The Major Democracies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988); Peter Nannestad and Martin Paldam, ‘The VP-Function: A Survey of the Literature on Vote and Popularity Functions After 25 Years’, Public Choice, 79 (1994), 213–45. Based on the so-called reward–punishment (or responsibility) hypothesis, empirical studies of economic conditions and government support often find that voters punish those incumbents who perform badly and reward those who do a good job.Lewis-Beck finds a general consensus among scholars that ‘when economic conditions are bad, citizens vote against the ruling party’ (Michael Lewis-Beck, ‘Introduction’, in Helmut Norpoth, Michael Lewis-Beck and Jean-Dominique Lafay, eds, Economics and Politics: The Calculus of Support (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), p.2). See also V. O. Key, The Responsible Electorate (New York: Vintage Books, 1968); Gerald Kramer, ‘Short-Term Fluctuations in US Voting Behavior, 1896–1964’, American Political Science Review, 65 (1971), 131–43. The reward–punish hypothesis states that the mass public holds the incumbent government accountable for the state of the economy. When the economy performs well, the government can take credit, but when there is a slump, the executive or the governing parties are blamed by the voters. Other hypotheses that have been tested are the issue-priority and the stability hypotheses (see Harold Clarke, Euel Elliott, William Mishler, Marianne Stewart, Paul Whiteley and Gary Zuk, Controversies in Political Economy: Canada, Great Britain, the United States (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992)).,Although frequently supportive of the general conclusion that the economy affects politics, the evidence for economic effects on government popularity or vote choice is not always conclusive or straightforward. Several authors have explored why economic conditions do not seem to affect popularity or vote choice all the time and under all circumstances. See, for example, Martin Paldam, ‘How Robust is the Vote Function? A Study of Seventeen Nations over Four Decades’, in Norpoth, Lewis-Beck and Lafay, eds, Economics and Politics, pp. 9–31; Christopher J. Anderson, ‘The Dynamics of Public Support for Coalition Governments’, Comparative Political Studies, 28 (1995), 350–83. In fact, over the years the notion that governments in democratic polities are in some way or another judged by how they perform at managing the economy has almost taken on the ring of a social scientific fact.

In a thought-provoking paper, Schultz develops an idea first put forward in a number of papers by Frey and Schneider and argues that governments will have less incentive to manipulate the economy when they lead in the polls. This helps to explain why electoral cycles have been so hard to detect. As other authors have observed, the best evidence suggests that electoral cycles (in output or instruments) are weak and irregular.Kenneth A Schultz ‘The Politics of the Political Business Cycle’, British Journal of Political Science, 25 (1995), 79–99.For example, Bruno Frey and Friedrich Schneider, ‘A Politico-Economic Model of the United Kingdom’, Economic Journal, 88 (1978), 243–53. Frey and Schneider were subjected to a severe critique at the time: see Alec Chrystal and James Alt, ‘Public Sector Behaviour: The Status of the Political Business Cycle’, in David Currie, Robert Nobay and David Peel, eds, Macroeconomic Analysis (London: Croom Helm, 1981).Alberto Alesina, ‘Macroeconomic policy in a Two-Party System as a Repeated Game’ Quarterly Journal of Economics, 102 (1987), 651–78; Alberto Alesina ‘Macroeconomics and Politics’, NBER Macroeconomics Annual (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1988); Alberto Alesina ‘Evaluating Rational Partisan Business Cycle Theory: A Response’, Economics and Politics, 5 (1990), 1–30; Alberto Alesina, G. Cohen and N. Roubini, ‘Electoral Business Cycles in Industrial Democracies’, European Journal of Political Economy, 9 (1993) 1–23; Stephen Sheffrin, ‘Evaluating Rational Partisan Business Cycle Theory’. Economics and Politics, 1 (1989) 239–60.

In the study of power structures, whether of the local community or the national society, three main approaches have been proposed: the reputational, the sociology of leadership and the issue approaches. Of these the least popular in practice is the last-named, which would attempt to discover ‘who rules?’ through an analysis of actual decision-making in a series of issues. This is particularly true of studies of national power, where evidence on how high-level political decisions were made is cited only to illustrate or exemplify an argument.² Although some studies of local community power have relied primarily on the issue method, studies of national power have almost invariably utilized the sociology of leadership method,³ and no systematic comparative analysis of a sample of national issues has been made. Since even those writers like Bachrach and Baratz who have raised objections to ‘the assumption that power is totally embodied and fully

Party competition is central to the operation of representative democracy. Just as competition between firms in private markets is supposed to ensure the efficient provision of services required by consumers, so competition between parties delivers the policies desired by the electorate. As Elkins argues, party competition implies that governments ‘will not be self perpetuating and that elections can, and in some cases do, lead to the replacement of one set of officials with another set. The chance, or probability, of turnover is perhaps the most salient feature of this system of accountability’ If competition works then the ruling party is fearful of loss of office and seeks to produce policies that satisfy the electorate. Correspondingly, opposition parties will adopt a platform which is intended to be more popular than that of the incumbents. This, in essence, is the Downs model of party behaviour in a representative democracy: the struggle for electoral support leads rival parties to adopt ‘moderate’ policies that reflect median voter preferences. In the absence of competition, the ruling party would be free to neglect public opinion and pursue ‘extreme’ policies in line with the views of its activists or financial backers.D. Elkins, ‘The Measurement of Party Competition’, American Political Science Review, 68 (1974), 682–700, p. 682.A. Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1957).D. Robertson, A Theory of Party Competition (London: Wiley, 1976).

Doctrines have been a prevalent form of foreign policy in American history. What explains their origins? This study addresses this question by examining the Reagan Doctrine, a declared policy which pledged aid to anti-communist guerrillas in the Third World. This case study examines the utility of the ‘structural realist’ theory, focusing on the international level of analysis.

Structural realism stresses the international balance of power, international conditions, limits on the government's freedom to make policy and the national interest. Sources of the Reagan Doctrine are found both in the international environment as a whole and in the individual countries where the Reagan Administration openly aided insurgents: Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Angola and Cambodia.

The findings indicate that the structural realist perspective is necessary to explain the Reagan Doctrine, but not sufficient. In particular, it fails to account for the role of political elites and their beliefs in foreign-policy making.

We should begin our reply to Paul Warwick by stating how very flattered we are by the diligent attention that he has given to our work on government formation. In particular, we are delighted that he has taken up and applied the simulation technology that we suggested as a way to explore cabinet stability, a matter on which we were beginning to feel like voices wailing in the wilderness.

This is not the place to bore readers of the Journal with detailed points of issue between us, of which there are obviously many. We want here to concentrate upon some larger issues provoked by Warwick's critique. These involve a debate on cabinet stability and duration between a school of thought, in Warwick's corner, that is essentially empiricist in its outlook and a school of thought, in ours, that takes analytical modelling as being more fundamental. This is a theme touched upon by Kaare Strom in his recent review essay on parliamentary democracy.

This article applies the portfolio allocation model of government formation to the formation of local government administrations in general, with a particular empirical application to the formation of administrations in British local authorities with hung councils. First, the implications of the portfolio allocation model for the formation of local administrations are discussed. Secondly, this model is operationalized in the context of British local politics, and specific empirical implications are explicitly derived from it. Thirdly, these implications are systematically evaluated against the recent experience of the formation of local administrations in Britain. The results suggest that policy is indeed important in the formation of British local administrations, but that more than a single left–right dimension of financial policy is needed to describe this process adequately.

Discussions of international and of gender justice both legitimately demand that principles of justice abstract from differences between cases and that judgements of justice respond to differences between them. Abstraction and sensitivity to context are often treated as incompatible: abstraction is taken to endorse idealized models of individual and state; sensitivity to human differences is identified with relativism. Neither identification is convincing: abstract principles do not entail uniform treatment; responsiveness to difference does not hinge on relativism. These points are used to criticize discussions of international and gender justice by liberals, communitarians and feminists. An alternative account of justice is sketched, which combines abstract principles with consideration of human differences in the application of principles. The case of poor women in impoverished economies – a hard case both for gender and for international justice – illustrates how universal, abstract principles of justice may not only permit but mandate differentiated application.

This essay is the relic of a projected history of ‘individualism in politics’. That enterprise – the reasons for abandoning it will be transparent from what follows – prompted some reflections which may be of more general interest. For no habit is better established in the humanities and social sciences, as well as in political speech, than that of constituting a subject-matter for oneself by means of an -ism. And while there may be instances where the context makes this practice unproblematic, a survey of the past and contemporary record of -isms gives grounds for suspicion and reservations.

Although students of American political economy argue that the United States has no industrial policy, this view misses entirely the recent emergence of industrial policies at the state level. An examination of twenty states that have written strategic economic development plans shows that in varying degrees state industrial policies resemble the national industrial policies of France and Japan both in terms of the structure of the underlying economic plans and in their programmatic emphasis. On the basis of the evidence here it is reasonable to conclude that the American taste and capacity for planned intervention and state participation in the market economy is far greater than might be supposed from an exclusive focus on national economic policy making.

A common feature of authoritarian regimes throughout history has been the creation of an elaborate mystique around the leader. This has consisted, in general terms, of the building up of the leader into a figure of superhuman dimensions dwarfing all the lesser mortals who surround him. Although such a cult often pandered to and was inflated by the egoism of its principal, its presence across millennia and cultural differences suggests a systemic basis for its development. Leader cults have rarely been the result simply of a desire for personal glorification or public worship on the part of a leader, significant though such factors may be in any particular instance, but have resulted in large part from structural features of the political system in question. The Soviet political system is clearly relevant in this regard, having been characterized by the existence of exaggerated cults of the leader for much of its sixty-two-year history. By analysing two of these cults, those of Stalin and Brezhnev as embodied in the images of the two leaders projected through the party press, it will be possible to isolate those structural aspects of the Soviet political system which encourage the emergence and growth of a leader cult.

The claim that income drives political preferences is at the core of political economy theory, yet empirical estimates of income’s effect on political behavior range widely. Drawing on traditions in economic history and anthropology, we propose using height as a proxy for economic well-being. Using data from the British Household Panel Study, this article finds that taller individuals are more likely to support the Conservative Party, support conservative policies and vote Conservative; a one-inch increase in height increases support for Conservatives by 0.6 per cent. As an extension, the study employs height as an instrumental variable for income, and finds that each additional thousand pounds of annual income translates into a 2–3 percentage point increase in the probability of supporting the Conservatives, and that income drives political beliefs and voting in the same direction.

American presidential politics in the 1960s and early 1970s was marked by the kinds of forces that characterize a period of electoral instability. These forces affected not only individual voters but also the candidates, parties and issues that interact as part of the electoral system. Among them was an increase in ‘issue voting’ which emphasized intra-party polarization on various non-economic issues. The civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam, riots in the cities, crime in the streets and other issues provided focal points for increased debate among political leaders and for the responses of an electorate newly mobilized by policy concerns. At the same time, the established political parties were faced with increased partisan defection and ticket splitting, by a rise in the number of political Independents and by the appearance of a threatening third-party movement. Even the styles and personalities of the parties’ presidential candidates contributed to the instability. The candidates presented to the electorate ran a gamut of styles and personalities that included the articulate Kennedy, the folksy Johnson, the impulsive Goldwater and the calculating Nixon. Along with the rise in mass interest in matters of policy came a new questioning of the trustworthiness and integrity of political leaders and the government in general. There also appeared in this period a new politics of confrontation, an influx into the electorate of young voters following the lowering of the voting age to 18, and a budding concern with the issues of ‘acid’, amnesty and abortion that the ‘New Politics’ promoted.