Political scientists often distinguish between two types of issues: moral versus non-moral issues or social-cultural versus economic issues. The implication is that these types of issues trigger different types of reasoning: while economic issues rely on pragmatic, consequentialist reasoning, social-cultural issues are said to be dependent on principles and deontological reasoning. However, it is not known whether this distinction is as clear-cut from a citizen's perspective. Scholars agree that understanding the morality of voters’ political attitudes has implications for their political behaviour, such as their willingness to compromise and openness to deliberation. However, few studies have analysed whether citizens reason in principled or pragmatic ways on different issues. This study takes an exploratory approach and analyses the determinants of principled versus pragmatic reasoning in direct democracy, in which citizens make direct policy decisions at the ballot box. Using a unique dataset based on thirty-four ballot decisions in Switzerland, it explores the justifications voters give for their ballot decisions in open-ended survey answers. It distinguishes between pragmatic (or consequentialist) arguments and principled (or value-based) arguments. The analysis shows that principled justifications are not tied to particular issues. Voters use both types of justifications almost equally frequently. Moral justifications are more likely when an issue is personally relevant, as well as when a proposition is accepted, while pragmatic justifications prevail when a proposition is rejected. Furthermore, right-wing voters more often argue in pragmatic terms. Finally, the framing of the issue during the campaign significantly affects moral versus pragmatic justifications.

A late-twentieth century political theorist presented with an essay on ‘Theories of Justice’ would be able to predict with some confidence what he or she was about to read. Justice is widely acknowledged to be a legitimate topic for political theory, and there are a number of recent studies which are exemplary as to content and style – most obviously the work of Rawls, but also of, amongst others, Nozick, Walzer, Sandel, Scanlon and Barry. These exemplary studies have generated an extensive secondary literature: the major figures in the ‘Justice’ industry comment upon and develop each others work, andare, in turn, the subject of commentary by the next generation. Obviously there is, as yet, no consensus as to the actual nature of justice, but there is quite general agreement as to how to go about investigating the subject. In short, this is, to apply a Rawlsian term, a ‘well-ordered’, professional, branch of political theory – and Rawls is an appropriate reference point here, since the professionalism of this discourse is largely attributable to the central role played by his work andthe literature it has generated.An excellent example of such an essay would be David Miller, ‘Review Article: Recent Theories of Social Justice’, British Journal of Political Science, 21(1991), 371–91.John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), and Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974); Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1983); Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Thomas Scanlon, ‘Contractualism and Utilitarianism’ in Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams, eds, Utilitarianism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 103–28; Brian Barry, Theories of Justice (Hemel Hempstead, Herts: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1989); and Justice as Impartiality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).See Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 453. The dominance of Rawls can, of course, be exaggerated, and there are important contemporary writers who do not simply disagree with his account of justice, but regard his project as misconceived; see, for example, Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (London: Duckworth, 1988).

This article assesses party effects on the performance of public services. A policy-seeking model, hypothesizing that left and right party control affects performance, and an instrumental model, where all parties strive to raise performance, are presented. The framework also suggests a mixed model in which party effects are contingent on party competition, with parties raising performance as increasing party competition places their control of government at increasing risk. These models are tested against panel data on English local governments’ party control and public service performance. The results question the traditional account of left and right parties, showing a positive relationship between right-wing party control and performance that is contingent on a sufficiently high level of party competition. The findings suggest left–right models should be reframed for the contemporary context.

Inherent in many models of voting, as well as in defences of representative democracy, is the assumption that the voting public has knowledge of and opinions about public policy issues. In recent years in the United States a stream of scholarly articles has been devoted to assessing not just the extent to which issue knowledge and opinions exist but also the extent to which they influence electoral decisions. This new literature suggests that issue-related perceptions and attitudes are rather more important in the electoral process than earlier studies had suggested. This increased focus on issues appears to reflect both methodological changes in the analysis of them and also real changes in the importance of policy issues in American electoral politics. By contrast, students of British electoral behaviour have made few systematic attempts to assess the fit between popular attitudes and knowledge of party policy positions on issues. Instead, the conventional wisdom is repeated which holds that ‘a majority of people are either ignorant of, or disagree with, the specific policies of the party they support’. The implication of this seems to be that electors' familiarity with issues is so low, and the holding of policy attitudes by them so uncommon, that rigorous analysis of issues in the context of electoral politics is unnecessary.

This article provides a justification of proportional representation (PR) in strictly liberal terms. Previous justifications of proportional representation have tended to be based either on its intuitive fairness to political parties, or on its being fair to social groups. The arguments of critics of PR, we argue, likewise rely on fairness to group identities. In contrast, our result shows that proportionality is logically implied by liberal equality, that is, by the requirement that all individual voters be treated equally. Thus we provide a justification for PR in terms of the theory of voting, similar to May’s theorem for majority rule.

Australian data are used in this article to re-examine Converse's thesis that the mass media's electoral effects are felt most strongly amongst voters with the lowest levels of political interest and awareness. Non-participation of many such voters in voluntary electoral systems obscures the full complexity of television's influence in voters' decision making. Australia's compulsory electoral system, however, by forcing the least interested to vote, crystallizes further distinctions in the patterns of media effects in the electorate. Results show that voters with the lowest levels of prior political awareness are the most responsive to effects of overall television news exposure, and they employ those media cues in their vote decisions late in the campaign. At the same time, voters with moderate levels of political interest are more susceptible to absorbing television's issue agenda, but do not use those issue-based cues to change their vote.

Fifteen years have elapsed since the British Parliament enacted legislation designed to curb air pollution. The 1956 Clean Air Act appeared seven years in advance of comparable American legislation and well before the quality of the environment became a matter of world-wide concern. In view of the fact that Queen Elizabeth I had complained about smoke pollution in London, or that nineteenth-century novelists had penned vivid portraits of London's smoke and fog, the 1956 Act should perhaps be viewed as being at least a century late in appearing. Nevertheless, the Act did mark a distinctive policy innovation, particularly with regard to those provisions relating to smoke pollution from domestic sources. An analysis of the impact of those provisions will be the subject of this paper.

Value hierarchies structure people's position on specific issues when values are in conflict. This general proposition is tested using surveys of Israeli public opinion on issues relating to the Israeli–Arab conflict. Value priorities are shown to be politically and ideologically structured, and not random, with certain value combinations more prevalent and more enduring than others. Most importantly, we establish that people's value hierarchies significantly structure policy preferences and changes therein. The more salient or acute the value conflict, the greater the correspondence between hierarchy and preference. This value trade-off approach presents a picture of Israeli public opinion which is very different from that usually portrayed: of a population firmly supporting a Jewish majority in their state, with a very strong desire for peace. The values of land and democracy are shown to be much less important.

How does natural resource extraction affect ethnic violence in a strong authoritarian state? This study investigates the effects of oil and natural gas development on violent incidents in Xinjiang, China, using data from its eighty-six counties. Contrary to the resource curse claim, we find that areas with larger quantities of resource production have lower rates of violence. The analysis of reserves data confirms that this finding is not driven by endogeneity between violence and resource production. This soothing effect of resources subsides, however, in areas with high mosque density. While we find no supporting evidence that drastic ethno-demographic changes or strengthening of public security are associated with resource extraction, the analysis shows that resource development contributes to improved local economic conditions, particularly with respect to employment and the incomes of employees of state-owned enterprises.

In recent years scholars have observed a restrictive turn in West European immigrant integration policies towards conditioning access to permanent residence and citizenship on language proficiency, knowledge of history, institutions, culture and political values, national loyalty and labour market integration. This has been accompanied by a strong reaction among European politicians and publics emphasizing that newcomers must share in certain liberal-democratic values and virtues that characterize the national community. Yet, the influential scholar Christian Joppke argues, among others, that liberal values cannot define national particularity, nor can cultural integration be enforced because legislation and policies are legally and normatively constrained by the same liberal values. Hence, prevalent liberal conceptions of national identity are paradoxical and inconsequential for the formulation of public policies. This article critically examines this argument in detail. It argues that the paradox of universalism does not exist, and that therefore nationalism should not be dismissed as a central factor behind recent policy developments.

Although the relevance of evil to politics occupies a large part of the history of political thought few modern political theorists have paid sustained attention to the relationship between the political evils of our times and our understanding of the concept of evil. A major exception to this is Hannah Arendt. For Arendt the evils of totalitarianism, genocide and ‘administrative massacre’ have provided the material for the basic questions to which her thinking has been directed. In the posthumously published The Life of the Mind Arendt appears to depart from her concern with the evils of mass society; the work is outwardly a phenomenological account of some aspects of the history of Western thought. It is, however possible to see this work as a metaphysic for her more overtly political work. Viewed in this way it can also be used to deepen understanding of her concept of the ‘banality of evil’. This notion, which she first introduced in her report of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, became central to her understanding of one part of the Nazi phenomenon.

We study the drivers of refugees' decision making about returning home using observational and experimental data from a survey of 3,003 Syrian refugees in Lebanon. We find that the conditions in refugee-hosting countries play a minor role. In contrast, conditions in a refugee's home country are the main drivers of return intentions. Even in the face of hostility and poor living conditions in host countries, refugees are unlikely to return unless the situation at home improves significantly. These results challenge traditional models of decision making about migration, where refugees weigh living conditions in the host and home countries (“push” and “pull” factors). We offer an alternative theoretical framework: a model of threshold-based decision making whereby only once a basic threshold of safety at home is met do refugees compare other factors in the host and home country. We explore some empirical implications of this new perspective using qualitative interviews and quantitative survey data.

This article explores the role of organized interests in congressional elections by examining the influence of the National Rifle Association (NRA) in contested House races in 1994 and 1996. Most research on the electoral impact of organized interests reports that groups have a negligible impact on the outcome. Yet anecdotal evidence regarding NRA influence abounds, particularly in 1994. We construct an aggregate model of congressional vote share that allows us to systematically analyse the electoral impact of the NRA in 1994 and 1996 House races. Unlike previous research of this sort, we provide evidence that the NRA can have a statistically discernible effect on election outcomes, but not in all elections and for all candidates. The NRA endorsement was particularly helpful to Republican challengers in 1994 (and to some extent Republican incumbents), but much less helpful to Democrats. These effects are much reduced in 1996 for all candidates. Likewise, having lots of NRA members in the district helped Republican challengers the most (in 1994) and Democrats not at all. Finally, reasons as to why the NRA was able to amplify but not mitigate the party trend, as well as individual-level mechanisms that might produce an endorsement effect, are discussed.

Previous studies of Western European foreign policy attitudes rely almost exclusively on single-item measures, such as support for defence spending, support for the new missiles in Europe, opinions on NATO, and so on. This article, using a multi-country data set, aggregates several survey items and explores the manner in which Europeans structure their attitudes towards one aspect of foreign policy: Atlantic co-operation. A factor analysis uncovers two underlying conceptual dimensions: military and non-military co-operation. These dimensions provide the axes to construct a four-fold typology of viewpoints, consisting of Atlanticists, Military Allies, Dovish Partners and Isolationists. Respondents are classified within this typology, and the European-wide and cross-national distributions of opinion are presented. The highest support for Atlantic co-operation is found among the West Germans, and the lowest is found among the French.

Because New Zealand's majoritarian political system presents few institutional barriers to change, social choice theory would predict that it should experience frequent change in governments and policies. Although some periods in New Zealand history confirm this expectation, a striking exception is the Liberal era of 1890–1912. To explain the anomaly, this article applies Riker's concept of heresthetics, the strategic manipulation of decision processes and alternatives. The Liberal leader, Richard Seddon, masterfully exploited four main heresthetic devices that offer enduring insight about how to sustain a popular majority. While extending the scope of heresthetics as an explanatory principle, the article rebuts Riker's normative dismissal of populism. In terms compatible with social choice theory itself, Seddon's strategies can be interpreted as having enabled the will of the majority to prevail.

There is a contradiction between theory and empirics with respect to portfolio allocation in parliamentary democracies. While the canonical model of legislative bargaining predicts the existence of a ‘formateur bonus’, empirical studies show that portfolios are allocated in a manner that favours smaller parties. This article argues that the difference between the empirical pattern and the theoretical predictions can be explained by the vote of no confidence, which provides an incentive for large formateur parties to overcompensate smaller coalition partners in exchange for their sustained support over time. This argument is tested by exploiting variations in the presence of no confidence votes across national and regional levels in France. As predicted, we find that larger formateur parties receive a greater share of portfolios if the vote of no confidence is absent than if it is present.

Why do dictators purge specific elites but not others? And why do dictators purge these elites in certain ways? Examining these related questions helps us understand not only how dictators retain sufficient competence in their regimes to alleviate popular and foreign threats, but also how dictators nullify elite threats. Dictators are more likely to purge first-generation elites, who are more powerful because they can negotiate their role from a position of strength and possess valuable vertical and horizontal linkages with other elites. Further, dictators tend to imprison purged first-generation elites – rather than execute, exile or simply remove them – to avoid retaliation from other elites or the purged elite continuing to sow discord. We find empirical support for our predictions from novel data on autocratic elites in 16 regimes from 1922 to 2020.

An analysis is made of the interaction between the legislature and the judiciary in the Dutch parliamentary setting, focusing in particular on the issue of euthanasia. Using the methodology of positive political theory, two alternative hypotheses are derived about the extent to which the courts may affect public policies. Two main conclusions can be drawn from the analysis of the decision-making process on euthanasia. First, the statutory interpretation the courts gave on euthanasia in the 1980s supports the hypothesis of the court as a policy advocate, not a policy conserver. Secondly, the fact that the courts were able to introduce and maintain a more liberal interpretation of euthanasia during the last decade can be explained as a consequence of the heterogenous preferences on this issue held by the political parties that formed the successive governing coalitions.

Prior research predicts that election administration changes that increase voting costs should decrease participation, but it fails to consider that some interpret those changes as attacking their franchise. Drawing on psychological reactance theory, this study tests whether such perceived attacks might instead activate those citizens. It leverages the State of Florida’s multi-stage effort in 2012 to purge suspected non-citizens from its voter rolls, comparing the voting rates of suspected non-citizens whose registration was and was not formally challenged by the state. Within-registrant difference-in-difference and matching analyses estimate a positive, significant participatory effect of being challenged, particularly for Hispanics (the vast majority of the sample). Placebo tests show that those challenged were no more likely than those not challenged to vote in previous elections.