In an innovative and carefully argued article (‘The Used Vote and Electoral Outcomes: The Irish General Election of 1973’, this Journal, V (1975), 363–83) on the Irish Single Transferable Vote (STV) system in the 1969 and 1973 Dail elections, A. S. Cohan, R. D. McKinlay and Anthony Mughan state a proposition that requires further analysis. They argue that ‘the optimal number of candidates for a party is equal to the largest number of seats that the party might hope to win’ in a constituency, instead of the more common practice of nominating a larger number of candidates. The reasoning behind this proposition is that the nomination of fewer candidates means a greater concentration of the party's vote on these candidates and hence fewer vote transfers and less potential wastage of votes.

Once dominant and unchallenged throughout the USSR, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union rapidly lost authority in the last two years of Soviet rule. Banned by Russian presidential decree after the failure of the attempted coup of August 1991, it was re-established in February 1993 and soon became the largest of the postcommunist parties. A 1992 survey of current and former party members as well as other Russians found that members were characterized by a relatively high degree of activism. They were disproportionately male, more affluent than non-members, and better provided with consumer goods. Younger respondents and religious believers were more likely to have left the party than their older colleagues. Those who still regarded themselves as party members were the most likely to oppose economic reform and support the collectivist principles of the communist era, particularly if they were activists; but the differences between members and non-members were not substantial, and both were found to hold generally pessimistic views on the postcommunist system. These findings suggest that, although former members will continue to be influential, CPSU membership is by itself likely to play a limited part in shaping the political direction of postcommunist Russia.

A long tradition of studies in political science has unveiled the effects of electoral institutions on party systems and parliamentary representation. Yet their effects on campaign activities remain overlooked. Research in this tradition still lacks a strong comparative element able to explore the nuanced role of electoral institutions in shaping individual-level campaigns during first-order parliamentary elections. This study uses data from a variety of national candidate studies to address this lacuna, and shows that the structure of electoral institutions affects the electoral mobilization efforts put in place by candidates. Candidate-centred electoral systems incentivize more intense and complex mobilization efforts, and shift the campaign focus towards individuals rather than parties. By directly addressing the effects of electoral institutions on campaign behaviour, this study contributes to the wider debate on their role in promoting political engagement and mobilization. These results indicate that electoral institutions affect political competition much more than previously thought.

We investigate the prevalence and correlates of sexism in the British political context, using a measure of ambivalent sexism that distinguishes between hostile and benevolent sexist attitudes. Drawing on original data from two nationally representative online surveys, we find that more than half of the population hold some sexist attitudes and that these are predicted by gender, education, religiosity and authoritarian values. We demonstrate that the most significant division in sexist attitudes within the British electorate falls along political rather than gender lines, with men and women expressing more similar views about sexism than either Conservative and Labour voters, or Leave and Remain supporters. We also find that endorsing hostile sexism is associated with voting Conservative in the 2019 general election, even after controlling for sociodemographic characteristics and political values. Our findings reveal that sexism is important for political competition in contexts where gender is not obviously salient.

Electoral systems determine the role that representatives’ party affiliations play in political representation. According to conventional expectations, party affiliation drives the behavior of representatives when they are elected under a proportional system, while majoritarian systems mute the role of party affiliation by forcing politicians to converge to the median position of their constituency. This study directly tests these predictions within a common party system by matching referenda decisions of constituents with voting behavior of their representatives who are elected either under a majoritarian or proportional system.

In this paper we extend the probability model of voting which was first considered by Rae. We consider a voting body presented with issues on which decisions have to be made, and we seek the decision rule which maximizes in some sense the correspondence between individual preferences and the collective decisions of the voting body.

If the welfare state embodies a collective obligation to give to those in need, it also attests to the failure of individual, private giving, which from the advent of industrialization has been far too modest and capricious to care adequately for the sick and indigent. Private, individual giving simply cannot compete with state help when it comes to guaranteeing people's welfare. But its failure to do a job better handled by the state does not mean that private giving is an irrelevant anachronism. Even the welfare state's most ardent supporters should appreciate its value. Private giving has intrinsic worth. It reveals how humane society is. Giving and helping palpably enrich public life, although, unlike high per capita income or low crime rates, they elude statistical composites of collective well-being. Private giving also has instrumental value. In so many ways – ranging from assisting an old lady off a bus to saving a drowning stranger – people can help each other when the state may be helpless. Privately-given funds, time, attention and ideas can supplement what the state offers; limited state resources inevitably leave some people with less than they need, and the gaps in state aid can be filled, at least in part, by private efforts.

In 1950, members of the American Political Science Association’s Committee on Political Parties argued that voters could exercise greater control over government if the two major political parties adopted clear and ideologically distinct policy platforms. In 2015, partisan polarization is a defining feature of American politics and extreme parties have maintained support elsewhere. This article investigates voter decision-making with ideologically divergent electoral choices and argues that ideological conflict reduces citizens’ responsiveness to candidates’ ideological locations by increasing the role of motivated reasoning in political decision-making. Results from two observational studies and a survey experiment support this account, and the findings are robust across a range of models. These results have important implications for accountability and democratic decision-making in an age of partisan polarization.

To promote good governance, citizens can inform governments directly and routinely about the implementation of policies and the delivery of public services. Yet citizens lack incentives to provide information when they do not expect governments to be responsive, and citizen disengagement in turn often prevents governments from providing public goods effectively. In two field experiments, we studied potential remedies to this dilemma related to solid waste services in Uganda. We randomly assigned reporters to be recruited by community nomination and to be recognized by community leaders in an attempt to select for and motivate information sharing. We also randomly assigned reporters to hear from the government about how their reports were used to make real improvements to waste services. Community nominations and public announcements did not increase reporting. However, responsiveness boosted participation over several months for reporters who had been recruited earliest and had been reporting longest, highlighting the critical role of timely government responsiveness in sustaining information flows from citizens.

This paper describes an empirical procedure for analysing the difference between the proportion of votes a major party attracts and the proportion of seats it subsequently wins in a plurality election. This difference will be referred to as the electoral bias with respect to that particular party at the election being analysed:

B = S — V, (1)

where S is the seat proportion and V the vote proportion gained by the party. This bias is the basic concept underlying much of the debate about electoral reform but curiously it has been an under-researched topic in political science literature. Apart from a small continuing debate over the cubic law of seat proportions and some analyses of Australian and New Zealand elections most attention in election studies has been concerned with determining the proportion of votes rather than the subsequent proportion of seats.

In a critical review of the state of comparative politics fourteen years ago, Joseph LaPalombara noted important gaps in our information on politics even in the presumably well-researched Western democratic countries. As an illustration, he contrasted the wealth of information on American interest groups with the surprisingly few solid studies of interest groups in countries such as Britain, France, Italy or West Germany. Despite, or perhaps because of this information gap, specialists in comparative politics were prepared to make sweeping generalizations about politics in this or that foreign country that a United States specialist would never dare to make on the basis of the wealth of research data available on politics in the United States. In the years since LaPalombara's critique, few have picked up his challenge to fill these information gaps, particularly the lacunae in our knowledge of interest group politics outside the United States. This lack of information has not discouraged scholars from proposing high-flown generalizations and models on interest group-government interaction in Europe. Sometimes, as we shall see, scholars studying interest group-State interactions have thought they found what Sartori labelled ‘travelling universals’ in certain interest-group patterns existing in struggling, non-democratic Third World countries which they then assumed to be present in the modern industrial democracies of Western Europe.

Why would fully informed, rational actors fight over possession of a valued asset when they could negotiate a settlement in peace? Our explanation of the decision to fight highlights the incentives that are present when the defender holds a valued asset coveted by the challenger. The defender receives utility from possession of the contested asset and sees any compromise as a loss that is lower if postponed. The challenger, instead, sees any compromise as a gain that is more valuable if reached earlier. Faced with the defender's vested interest in the status quo, the challenger needs to threaten war and may have no choice but to implement the threat to force a settlement. For the defender, the threat of war is a deterrent that might incite the challenger to back down. In the perfect equilibria that we describe, the players' ability to threaten each other credibly allows them to maintain incompatible bargaining positions instead of helping them narrow their differences. But the very credibility of these threats leads our rivals to engage in what can become lengthy protracted wars.

The autonomy of a state is thought to depend on the state's structures. This widely accepted view of the policy-making process has given rise to an uncontested assertion: states that possess centralized administrative structures are better able than decentralized states to formulate and implement policies independently of societal pressures.

Is a decentralized state more permeable than a centralized one? We seek to answer this question by treating it as a hypothesis. The empirical material derives from a case study of a reform project proposed by the French state and objected to by the group in question, the notaires.

This article employs a semiotic approach to investigate the meaning of ‘Marxism-Leninism’ with a view to clarifying our understanding of this term. Contrary to conventional interpretations it demonstrates that ‘Marxism-Leninism’ is an empty signifier which is subject to definition on a contemporary basis by the CPSU itself. However, it also demonstrates that ‘Marxism-Leninism’ is the central element in a mechanism of control which bears all the hallmarks of a classic linguistic double bind. It therefore concludes that while ‘Marxism-Leninism’ is referentially open to re-definition it is connotatively attached to the practices of the CPSU. It is both fixed and not fixed in meaning.

The resulting analysis leads to a critique of terms which are conventionally taken for granted by Sovietologists and introduces a new methodological approach to the study of ‘Marxism-Leninism’.

The recent politics of South Asia has been dominated by separatist movements that have waged violent struggles to assert their control over parts of existing national states. The precise moment of the outbreak of these movements is influenced by the perception of the geopolitical context by their leaders and the stability of the central state against which they rebel. But their main driving force originates from a shared belief in their unique and distinct cultural identity, which, in their eyes, justifies their right to an exclusive homeland. This article examines subnationalism in South Asia as a special case of cultural nationalism. Subnationalism has long been an anomaly for both liberal and Marxist social theorists, who concede its existence but cannot explain it adequately. The analysis undertaken here moves beyond the sociological and historical accounts of the origins and evolution of subnationalism in South Asia by formulating a political explanation drawing on theories of rational choice and collective action. The article argues that (a) leaders of subnationalist movements draw on both sentiments and interests, and (b) the direction and pace of these movements are influenced by the political resources that they are able to mobilize. Though the case studies on which the article draws are mainly from South Asia, the model that underpins them is applicable to other cultural and temporal contexts as well.

Every face-to-face Deliberative Poll (DP) to date has been the subject of a television broadcast. We consider these broadcasts a helpful adjunct to the design – a way of motivating both the random sample and the policy experts and policy makers to attend, of educating the broader public about the issues, and, perhaps, of nudging public opinion in the direction of the results. In ‘Rickety Bridges’, John Parkinson examines just one of these broadcasts, Channel 4's on the DP on the future of Britain's National Health Service (NHS) in 1998. Applying his coding of the contents to other DP broadcasts might or might not yield similar results, but we are happy to assume, for argument's sake, that it would. If DP broadcasts are generally doing what he describes the NHS DP broadcast as doing, they are doing pretty well, at least as far as the distribution of coverage is concerned. It is Parkinson's notion of what they should be doing that is mistaken. As a result, his critique is fundamentally misguided.

THE AIMS OF DP BROADCASTS

Parkinson's critique rests on an inappropriate standard. His central claim is that Channel 4's broadcast of the NHS DP did not replicate the participants' experience. Of course it did not. No broadcast could ever give viewers the same experience they would have if they were actually part of the DP's on-site, weekend-long deliberations. The broadcast in that case would have to be weekend-long, and there would actually have to be multiple broadcasts – as many as there are participants – since every participant's experience is different.

The critics of direct democratic procedures typically presume that the bulk of the members of a present-day democratic polity fall considerably short of the ideal of a thinking, reasonable and deliberating citizen. Essentially, as Budge points out, ‘the case against direct democracy can be summed up as saying that ordinary citizens have little political sagacity or prudence, so that they will tend to make decisions hastily but also to be unreasonably attached to them’.Ian Budge, The New Challenge of Direct Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), pp. 59–61. According to the critics of direct democratic procedures, the problem is not only that citizens usually do not think and deliberate about the issues in question, the problem is above all that they lack the competence to do so in the first place. Thus Budge concludes: ‘Here is perhaps the nub of the whole argument against direct democracy: the mass of the citizens are not qualified to decide high policy, so they can be allowed to influence it only indirectly, by choosing those who are to decide rather than deciding themselves’.Budge, The New Challenge of Direct Democracy, p. 69. The point of the critics is that, as Sartori suggests, direct democracy ‘would quickly and disastrously founder on the reefs of cognitive incompetence’.Giovanni Sartori, The Theory of Democracy Revised (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers, 1987), p. 120.

Several recent studies have found unequal policy responsiveness, meaning that the policy preferences of high-income citizens are better reflected in implemented policies than the policy preferences of low-income citizens. This has been found mainly in a few studies from the US and a small number of single-country studies from Western Europe. However, there is a lack of comparative studies that stake out the terrain across a broader group of countries. We analyze survey data on the policy preferences of about 3,000 policy proposals from thirty European countries over nearly forty years, combined with information on whether each policy proposal was implemented or not. The results from the cross-country data confirm the general pattern from previous studies that policies supported by the rich are more likely to be implemented than those supported by the poor. We also test four explanations commonly found in the literature: whether unequal responsiveness is exacerbated by (a) high economic inequality, (b) the absence of campaign finance regulations, (c) low union density, and (d) low voter turnout.