This article discusses possible issues of how media content and exposure were linked in previous research. It argues that the original conclusions of the article ‘Who's Afraid of Conflict? The Mobilizing Effect of Conflict Framing in Campaign News’ do not hold due to the chosen operationalization. It also demonstrates that using the proposed methodology, both exposure to conflictual and non-conflictual news yield the same substantive conclusion. In addition to re-evaluating the role of conflict, the article contributes to the discussion on how to integrate media and individual-level measures in the study of electoral behavior.

Scholars have long sought to understand when and why the Middle East fell behind Europe in its economic development. This article explores the importance of historical Muslim trade in explaining urban growth and decline in the run-up to the Industrial Revolution. The authors examine Eurasian urbanization patterns as a function of distance to Middle Eastern trade routes before and after 1500 CE – the turning point in European breakthroughs in seafaring, trade and exploration. The results suggest that proximity to historical Muslim trade routes was positively associated with urbanization in 1200 but not in 1800. These findings speak to why Middle Eastern and Central Asian cities – which had long benefited from their central location between Europe and Asia – declined as Europeans found alternative routes to the East and opened trade opportunities in the New World.

In contrast to much of the political economy literature, this article explores acts of refusal that obstruct attempts to impose austerity measures on advanced industrial democracies. It thereby complements a literature that has thus far focused far more upon the (apparently unobstructed) imposition of austerity. In doing so, it uses two typically ‘low-resistance’ countries – Japan and the UK –as least-likely cases and finds that austerity is rarely uncontested. Using fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis, it highlights the ‘causal recipes’ sufficient for both (1) anti-austerity activity to have a significant impact on austerity proposals and (2) the smooth (unobstructed) imposition of austerity. The politics of austerity is shown to be better understood as an iterative interaction between proposals for austerity and the acts of refusal they encounter. These obstacles to austerity appear more straightforward to activate effectively in Japan’s coordinated model of capitalism, whilst the UK’s liberal market economy tends to generate more innovative forms of dissent that (if they are sufficiently militant) provide an alternative route towards the obstruction of austerity.

What are the consequences of being the victim of crime for political participation? Previous studies report mixed results with respect to voter turnout, in contrast to the positive effects found for other indicators of political engagement. However, previous turnout studies have failed to differentiate between violent and non-violent crime, and have relied on cross-sectional survey data that is prone to measurement biases and selection effects. This article addresses these shortcomings via a panel analysis of official registry data from Denmark recording individual-level turnout in two municipal elections (in 2009 and 2013) and victimization from violent and non-violent crime. It identifies the effect of victimization by comparing changes in turnout between the two elections for victims and two different counterfactual groups: non-victims in the general population, and individuals who were victimized after the 2013 election. The results show that victimization from violent crime increases turnout by 2 to 3 percentage points. The study further demonstrates a large negative between-individual effect of victimization, suggesting that previous studies have been marred by severe selection bias.

There have been many comparative studies of British and American parties and elections, but little attention has been paid to comparisons of special elections (or by-elections) to fill vacancies in the two lower houses of the central legislatures, the House of Commons and the House of Representatives. Although British by-elections have been closely studied for a long time, even the most basic facts about American special elections were unknown until recently. Despite the lack of direct examination of how by-elections compare in the two countries, American academics have often dismissed American special elections with such passing comments as ‘because of their unsystematic nature and unsynchronized timing, American special elections, unlike British by-elections, have negligible predictive value’.

This article provides operational measures for comparing welfare states in terms of the concept of post-productivism, as pioneered by Goodin in this Journal, and discusses the normative relevance of such comparisons. Post-productivism holds that it is desirable to grant people a high level of personal autonomy, through the welfare state's labour-market institutions and transfer system, and maintains that on average, people would choose to make use of their autonomy by working less, hence earning less and having more free time. By contrast, existing welfare states, for example as classified in Esping-Andersen's three-way split of liberal, social-democratic and corporatist regimes, are largely ‘productivist’, as their policies try to design social rights so as ensure economic self-reliance through full-time work. The question is whether they actually succeed in doing so. With a limited dataset of thirteen OECD countries for 1993, three conditions of personal autonomy – income adequacy, temporal adequacy and absence of welfare-work conditionality – are discussed in terms of policy outputs, which can be read off from easily accessible OECD statistics. Two closely related concepts are explored: comprehensive post-productivism, measuring the extent to which welfare states approximate the ideal of personal autonomy, and restricted post-productivism, which follows from two common goals shared by all welfare states (avoidance of poverty and reduction of involuntary underemployment), and expressly focuses on the policy outputs on which the productivist and post-productivist perspectives specifically disagree: welfare-work unconditionality, voluntary underemployment and average annual hours of work per employee. After showing that ranking the thirteen cases puts the Netherlands at the top and the United States at the bottom, in conformity with Goodin's earlier work, it is shown that restricted post-productivism is not positively associated with the poverty rate, and negatively with the rate of involuntary underemployment. This finding sets the stage for our discussion of normative issues underlying a preference for either productivist or post-productivist arrangements of work and welfare. Suggestions for further research are given in the final section.

This article analyses the origins and consequences of multicameral representation and voting in international organizations. It is argued that the existence of visible and durable conflicts in an issue area can make standard procedures such as unicameral majority voting ineffective with respect to the functioning of the regime. Applying spatial models of strategic decision making, it is asserted that multicameralism is more likely to be effective than unicameralism if chambers consist of key groups with distinct interests. Empirical evidence is provided by studying the multicameral voting rule in the Council of the International Seabed Authority (ISA). I compare likely decision-making outcomes under unicameral and multicameral voting rules from 1996 to 2002 and find that multicameral outcomes are more likely to be stable and supported by those actors critical for the effective functioning of the regime.

In this analysis we have used a procedure based on estimating likelihoods, from background characteristics, of someone's - or something's - belonging in some category of a dependent variable. We have tried to demonstrate the applicability of this procedure to the specific task of distinguishing activists from ordinary electors in five divergent British localities, with a view to its general use in the prediction and description of initial participation and of activist dropout. The conclusions are:

Donor governments face a dilemma when providing development aid to states that violate human rights. While aid may contribute to positive development outcomes, it may also contribute to rights violations committed by these regimes. This article provides a conceptual framework for donors to address this dilemma in a normatively justified way. Drawing on recent methodological advancements in normative political theory, it develops a distinctively political framework of dilemmas, suggesting three models: complicity, double effect and dirty hands. It considers this framework in the context of development aid, discussing the relevant considerations for donors in different cases. The article demonstrates that an approach to development assistance that acknowledges political realities does not have to be normatively silent.

Douglas Hibbs's article, ‘On the Political Economy of Long-Run Trends in Strike Activity’, is the most recent of several comparative studies of the strike which explicitly reject the narrowly institutional approach characteristic of the ‘industrial relations school’ in favour of a broader socio-political perspective. These new approaches have the advantage of reminding us that industrial conflict is something more than an accident in the collectivebargaining process. Rather, the strike constitutes one working-class strategy – political action is another – in the acting out of class conflict in a capitalist society.

Many scholars and pundits believe that the 1964 presidential election between Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson disrupted the New Deal order and ushered in a sixth party system anchored in part by race issues. But, curiously, the conventional wisdom has not fared well empirically. In this article, I employ disaggregated survey data and novel methodological tools to identify temporal patterns in the relationships between partisanship, New Deal issues and race issues. My conclusions are as follows: (1) the association between race issues and partisanship has switched signs in the South; (2) a racial axis of cleavage has opened up outside the South; (3) the New Deal issue axis has grown in the South; and (4) New Deal issues continue to cleave partisans outside the South.

It is becoming increasingly accepted among analysts of British voting behaviour that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, local campaigning matters. The widespread view, largely propagated by David Butler and his co-workers on the Nuffield election studies, has been that campaigning in the constituencies by party activists and their candidates has no influence on the outcome: the distribution of votes across the parties in each constituency is a function of the national campaign only. This view was initially challenged by studies of canvassing in the 1970s, and extended during the 1980s by studies of campaign spending in the constituencies; further support was provided by work in the late 1980s and early 1990s on party canvassing activity. This note takes the challenge forward with an analysis of the impact of different aspects of constituency campaigning.

This article discusses the notion of ‘persuasion’ applied to a political method. It proceeds by comparing and contrasting ‘persuasion’ with concepts within the ‘power’ family. There are two sorts of justification for such an exploration of ‘persuasion’, the first positive and the second negative.

A debate, fanned by the experiences of South Korea and Taiwan, persists over how economic growth leads to democratization. This article provides a theoretical model showing that economic downturns lead to democratization and evaluates the conclusion systematically with data from South Korea and Taiwan. The model and results corroborate the hypothesis that economic downturns motivate government and non-government actors to pursue political reforms and democratization and highlight several contributions. They show democratization as the outcome of strategic responses pursued under weak economic conditions. Further, the findings are robust to alternative specifications of democratization. The results also bring empirics into line with theoretical expectations about democratization while simultaneously revealing that it is not a panacea for lack of support.

Scholars have long been concerned with the implications of income inequality for democracy. Conventional wisdom suggests that high income inequality is associated with political parties taking polarized positions as the left advocates for increased redistribution while the right aims to entrench the position of economic elites. This article argues that the connection between party positions and income inequality depends on how party bases are sorted by income and the issue content of national elections. It uses data from European national elections from 1996 to 2016 to show that income inequality has a positive relationship with party polarization on economic issues when partisans are sorted with respect to income and when economic issues are relatively salient in elections. When these factors are weak, however, the author finds no relationship between income inequality and polarization.

Recent studies take increasingly refined views of how socioeconomic conditions influence political behaviour. We add to this literature by exploring how voters' prospective evaluations of long-term economic and social opportunities relate to electoral contestation versus the stabilization of the political-economic system underpinning the knowledge society. Using survey data from eight West European countries, we show that positive prospects are associated with higher support for mainstream parties (incumbents and opposition) and lower support for radical parties on all levels of material well-being. Our results support the idea that ‘aspirational voters’ with positive evaluations of opportunities (for themselves or their children) represent an important stabilizing force in advanced democratic capitalism. However, we also highlight the importance of radical party support among ‘apprehensive voters’, who are economically secure but perceive a lack of long-term opportunities. To assess the implications of these findings, we discuss the relative importance of these groups across different countries.

The demise of President Clinton's 1993 health care reform plan provides a revealing window into the difficulties and hazards of drawing lessons from complex political events. In an effort to identify the causes and implications of the Clinton plan's failure, students of American health policy have offered a blizzard of alleged historical lessons that purport to explain why the plan, along with its leading alternatives, went down to such a crushing political defeat. On closer inspection, however, many of these putative lessons turn out to be hastily formulated, weakly grounded and prescriptively inadequate. These deficiencies are by no means unique to the commentary on health care reform in the United States. Rather, they reflect general risks of constructing lessons for action or analysis on the basis of just one or a few striking political events. Although these risks are endemic to historical lesson-drawing, they could be reduced by more careful attention to basic rules of historical comparison and counterfactual analysis. They could also be mitigated by a greater awareness of the fundamental uncertainties that, for a variety of reasons, characterize complex political interactions. Viewing outcomes as uncertain does not preclude forecasting and, indeed, may lead to more nuanced and accurate predictions, as well as to a greater appreciation of historical turning points and moments of meaningful strategic choice.

The past decade has seen the growth of a considerable literature on the link between government popularity, as reflected by the proportion of the public indicating their intention to vote for the government in opinion polls, and the state of the economy, as represented by certain key variables. The work began in the early 1970s with articles by Goodhart and Bhansali, Mueller, and Kramer. It continued through the decade; some of the more recent contributions can be found in a set of readings edited by Hibbs and Fassbender. However, despite the amount and quality of this work, problems remain. Principal amongst these, as Chrystal and Alt have pointed out, is the inability to estimate a relationship which exhibits any degree of stability either over time or between researchers. Nearly all the studies have been successful in finding a significant relationship for specific time periods, but when these are extended, or when the function is used to forecast outside the original estimation period, the relationship appears to break down.