This article explores the origins of youth engagement in school, community and democracy. Specifically, it considers the role of psychosocial or non-cognitive abilities, like grit or perseverance. Using a novel original large-scale longitudinal survey of students linked to school administrative records and a variety of modeling techniques – including sibling, twin and individual fixed effects – the study finds that psychosocial abilities are a strong predictor of youth civic engagement. Gritty students miss less class time and are more engaged in their schools, are more politically efficacious, are more likely to intend to vote when they become eligible, and volunteer more. Our work highlights the value of psychosocial attributes in the political socialization of young people.

In the general election of October 1974 the Scottish National Party gained 30·4 per cent of the vote in Scotland. This result and the build-up to it in the previous two elections, seemed to indicate a new pattern for Scottish voting. British and American writers had drawn attention to the decline of partisanship as a basis for voting. In Britain, the class basis of this partisanship had been dominant but now appeared to recede. Growing support for the SNP might have been an extension of this. Some went further and argued that a new issue – self-government for Scotland – had displaced class loyalties.

Charles Lindblom and Aaron Wildavsky are both prolific writers, so out of necessity a relatively brief review of their work would have to be either very selective as to the themes dealt with or quite superficial in its treatment of their many contributions to contemporary social science. I have essentially adhered to the latter strategy in this article. Any reader who expects an in-depth analysis and a critical appraisal of, for example, incrementalism will be disappointed. What I oner instead is a first acquaintance with all the major themes in the scholarly production of Lindblom and Wildavsky and also with the critiques they have provoked.

This article considers absolute majority rules, which require the affirmative vote of a majority of all those eligible to vote in the institution. I compare absolute majority rules to simple majority rules under which only those present and voting are counted, and to simple supermajority rules. Under plausible conditions, absolute majority rules prove superior. Absolute majority rules insure majorities against strategic behaviour by minorities and combine supermajoritarian effects with majoritarian symbolism.

What are the consequences of committing violent attacks for terrorist organizations? Terrorist attacks might broaden the base of supporters by increasing the perceived group efficacy. However, terrorist attacks might also lead its supporters to believe that the organization is excessively violent or involvement may become too dangerous. This article employs a unique dataset with 300,842 observations of 13,321 Twitter accounts linked to the Islamic State (IS), collected during a 127-day period, to empirically investigate the impact of terrorist attacks on the number of the organization’s supporters. By exploiting the exogenous timing of terrorist attacks as a natural experiment, we find that the number of followers of IS-related Twitter accounts significantly reduces in the aftermath of the attacks. Additionally, we provide some suggestive evidence to disentangle two mechanisms: disengagement – a change in supporters’ beliefs – and deterrence – demobilization due to fear. Because we do not find support for the latter, we conclude that the disengagement effect might explain our main result.

This article contributes to the recent research on Brexit and public opinion formation by contending that the determinants of the referendum results should be evaluated against the background of wider public security concerns. The British public has long regarded terrorism as a top concern, more so than in any other European country. Terrorist attacks on UK soil raised voters' awareness of security issues and their saliency in the context of the EU referendum. The study finds that locations affected by terrorist violence in their proximity exhibit an increase in the share of pro-Remain votes, particularly those that experienced more sensational attacks. Using individual-level data, the results show that in the aftermath of terrorist attacks, citizens are more likely to reconsider the security risks involved in leaving the EU.

This paper is concerned with the distribution and foundations of public support for the political regime in Canada. Support for the regime historically has been a matter of concern to Canadian elites. The recent provincial electoral victory of the Parti Québécois, a party dedicated to making Quebec an independent nation, has made regime support and maintenance matters of concern to average citizens as well. The analyses that follow are based upon data gathered in a nation-wide survey of the Canadian electorate in 1974. We focus on the following areas: the extent to which socio-demographic and attitudinal variables conventionally employed in studies of political behavior are related to levels of regime support; the relationships between the direction and strength of partisanship and support for the political regime; the relationships between attitudes toward key political institutions and political actors and the level of regime support; and finally, the effects of major structural and cultural factors (i.e. federalism and regionalism) on support for the regime. From the perspective of comparative political analysis, research in these areas allows us an opportunity to comment on and expand the base of the existing empirical research on regime support. From the more particular perspective of Canadian politics, our analysis may help to clarify the impact on regime support of ethnicity, regionalism, federalism and a British-model parliamentary system.

On 3 November 1992 the American electorate dismissed President George Bush after a campaign in which his opponents repeatedly criticized his management – or mismanagement – of the nation's sluggish economy. Although the salience of economic issues in the 1992 election is consistent with the emphasis placed on economic conditions in most studies of presidents' job approval ratings, the results of these studies have recently been challenged. Based on analyses of quarterly data for the 1953–88 period, MacKuen, Erikson and Stimson conclude that voters' subjective evaluations of the long-term performance of the national economy are crucial. Controlling for such expectations, retrospective judgements about economic performance and objective economic conditions are not important determinants of approval of the president. These conclusions are at odds both with the traditional ‘reward-punishment’ theory that emphasizes the importance of retrospective economic evaluations for approval of the president and with the revisionist ‘issue-priority’ theory which contends that inflation and unemployment rates have differential effects on support for Republican and Democratic presidents.

In much of the comparative literature on social structure and party choice, housing occupies an anomalous position. In Britain, its electoral consequences are undoubted, yet in other advanced industrial societies its impact is negligible. For example, in Britain Butler and Stokes go so far as to suggest that ‘housing has more to do with defining the sub-cultures of social class than all else but occupation itself’. Moreover, recent evidence has indicated that the electoral importance of housing may actually be increasing in Britain, rather than declining along with other traditional class predictors of voting. By contrast, in Australia and the United States, both societies with similarly sized home-owning and rental sectors, housing has never been advanced as a significant determinant of partisan choice.

This article builds on existing studies of the long-run persistence of geographical variation in tolerance towards other ethnicities. Using English data, the study tests whether the persistent characteristic is an attitude towards a specific ethnic group, or is an underlying cultural trait of which the attitude towards a specific group is just one expression. It finds evidence for the latter, identifying geographical variation in anti-immigrant sentiment in the twenty-first century that is correlated with patterns of immigrant settlement in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, despite the fact that modern immigrant groups are quite different from those in the Middle Ages.

How does a party’s organizational structure affect its chances of becoming a national party? While existing explanations of party nationalization focus on country-level institutional and societal variables, we argue that aspects of party organization such as the degree of centralization of authority, ideological unity and leadership factionalism also matter. By bringing the analysis to the party level, this article provides a multilevel analysis of institutional and party organization variables and disentangles the effect of each set of influences. We use original data on party organization and party nationalization for 142 parties across twenty European countries. This research contributes to the literature on nationalization and party development by advancing organizational strategies which parties could adopt in different social and institutional environments.

Political conservatives' opposition to COVID-19 restrictions is puzzling given the well-documented links between conservatism and conformity, threat sensitivity, and pathogen aversion. We propose a resolution based on the Dual Foundations Theory of ideology, which holds that ideology comprises two dimensions, one reflecting trade-offs between threat-driven conformity and individualism, and another reflecting trade-offs between empathy-driven cooperation and competition. We test predictions derived from this theory in a UK sample using individuals' responses to COVID-19 and widely-used measures of the two dimensions – ‘right-wing authoritarianism’ (RWA) and ‘social dominance orientation’ (SDO), respectively. Consistent with our predictions, we show that RWA, but not SDO, increased following the pandemic and that high-RWA conservatives do display more concerned, conformist, pro-lockdown attitudes, while high-SDO conservatives display less empathic, cooperative attitudes and are anti-lockdown. This helps explain paradoxical prior results and highlights how a focus on unidimensional ideology can mask divergent motives across the ideological landscape.

Why do middle-income country governments use costlier sovereign debt markets when cheaper finance is available from official creditors? This research note argues that left-leaning governments with labor and the poor as core constituencies are likely to prioritize markets in their annual foreign borrowings. This is because markets provide an exit option from official creditor conditions that have disproportionately negative effects on working classes. This finding puts limits on disciplinary assumptions that left-leaning governments should have relatively less access to sovereign debt markets and thus use them less. Instead, left-leaning middle-income countries are likely to use proportionally more market finance as they fulfill annual foreign borrowing needs. This, in turn, shapes which middle-income countries are likely to become relatively more exposed to global debt market costs and pressures as they accumulate external debt over time.

The ideological differences between the Labour and Conservative parties in the 1980s are greater than at any time in the postwar era. Consequently one would expect party control at the local level to have an increasing effect on local government decisions. Using an approach to cross-time analysis that avoids some of the major shortcomings of other studies, the relationship between party control and local fiscal decisions in English cities between 1974 and 1988 can be traced. The method allows not only an exploration of the direct effect of party control, but also its indirect effects, mediated through grant penalties and rate-capping. Under Mrs Thatcher's administration the impact of party on local fiscal decisions has increased quite substantially.

The relationship between ministers and the senior civil servants with whom they are in closest contact has long fascinated students of British government. For all the attention lavished on it, however, the relationship remains obstinately elusive and unsusceptible to clear categorization and analysis. The problem is partly one of finding a suitable frame of reference. Despite their well-established limitations, the Weberian model of an instrumental bureaucracy and the closely-related ‘politics-administration dichotomy’ still loom surprisingly large in academic analyses of bureaucratic behaviour. But the attempt to specify roles appropriate to civil servants, on the one hand, or ministers, on the other, runs the risk either of proving inadequate in face of the empirical evidence or of leading to the conclusion that one of the groups – usually the civil servants – is usurping the other's role or roles. Elements of the latter can be seen in the concern evinced in recent years about the power of civil servants vis-à-vis ministers in Britain. (Discussion of minister-civil servant relationships has, indeed, been almost entirely confined to aspects of power – particularly that of the minister's ability to get his way on policy.)

Compared with its counterparts in other countries the Soviet Union's national legislature, the USSR Supreme Soviet, has generally received little attention from scholars. The reasons are not far to seek. The Supreme Soviet meets much less frequently than its counterparts elsewhere; its votes are almost always unanimous; its discussion of government legislation is generally perfunctory and confined to details; and it has yet to ask a Soviet minister to resign. Yet, for all these obvious shortcomings, it has become increasingly apparent in recent years that the Supreme Soviet, like the soviets at lower levels of the state hierarchy, has been assuming greater powers and becoming a less marginal participant in the policy process than it was under Stalin or even Khrushchev. This apparent assumption of authority is evident most clearly in the expansion in the number and powers of the standing commissions attached to each of its chambers, through which, as in most modern legislatures, an increasing proportion of its business is conducted, but it is apparent in other ways as well. All in all, as one commentator has put it, the Supreme Soviet's meetings and discussions were indeed ‘perfunctory’ and ‘stage-managed’ for perhaps the first three decades of its existence (1936–66); but since Stalin, and more particularly since Khrushchev, the Supreme Soviet has made a ‘modest – but in terms of past history, impressive – comeback as an institution with more than purely symbolic functions’.

This Note presents a variety of new evidence on the paths and channels that one pressure group, the Trades Union Congress (TUC), has used to influence or obstruct public policy in Britain over the last decade. Where is pressure applied? At what level? Which departments are most important? What is the role of tripartite organizations? How are policy positions communicated? In addition to these and similar questions the evidence permits a systematic examination of the impact made by a change in the party of government upon the structure of group-government interaction. Two contrasting patterns of interaction, which represent a rapid and sharp change coinciding with the change in government, are revealed. Government decisions themselves appear to be determinants of pressure-group influence and activities – even for a group with such a central position in British politics as the TUC – as well as the other way around; ‘Bentley on his head’ as Harry Eckstein puts it.

In their 2014 article in the British Journal of Political Science, Eleanor Neff Powell and Joshua A. Tucker examine the determinants of party system volatility in post-communist Europe. Their central conclusion is that replacement volatility – volatility caused by new party entry and old party exit – is driven by long-term economic performance. This article shows that this conclusion is based entirely on a miscalculation of the long-term economic performance of a single country, Bosnia-Herzegovina. The study’s reanalysis suggests that little is known about what causes party system volatility in post-communist Europe. Given the negative consequences traditionally associated with party system volatility, this area of research cries out for new theoretical development.