In an article published in this Journal, we have examined whether American welfare recipients possess beliefs and attitudes that differ from mainstream public opinion. Although our findings cast doubt on the existence of a widespread ‘culture of dependence’, we do show that programme beneficiaries exhibit self-interested support for government policies that provide assistance to needy segments of the population. However, our analysis – like most others on this topic – assumes that welfare participation affects opinions and not vice versa. This is problematic because there are theoretical reasons to believe that influences flow in the opposite direction, as well. Therefore, some important questions remain to be answered: is it really the case that welfare participation, itself, shapes the outlook of programme beneficiaries? Or do political attitudes affect reliance on public assistance in the first place?

In this Research Note, we examine the underlying structure of the relationship between welfare participation and attitudes towards government activity. Our analysis uses the 1992 Center for Political Studies (CPS) National Election Study, the same dataset employed in the earlier article. But, we test a statistical model that allows for reciprocal influences between welfare and public opinion. The empirical results reinforce the earlier conclusion that welfare participation has an impact on mass attitudes. Conversely, political attitudes have no effect on whether citizens use public aid. Mirroring our earlier work, we find that people who rely on governmental assistance take rational, self-interested positions on the public policy issues which operate to their own direct benefit.

Scholars have long debated the positive and negative consequences of an aware public for the quality of governance in modern liberal democracies. This article extends this debate to the context of constitutional review by exploring how public awareness can limit the effective exercise of review by courts lacking strong public support. Incorporating aspects of both the legitimacy and separation of powers theories on judicial power, the author argues that public awareness weakens the efficacy of such unpopular courts by creating an electoral incentive for governments to defy adverse rulings, even when doing so may lead to punishment from other institutional stakeholders. The article develops a simple formal model that identifies how and under what conditions public awareness can influence an unpopular court's decision making. An analysis of rulings issued by the Court of Justice of the European Union finds support for the model's empirical implications.

This article critiques the meritocratic justification of Confucian democracy from the standpoint of democratic civil society by shifting the focus from governability of the people to their transformability. Its central claims are: (1) Confucian virtue politics (dezhi) can be creatively re-appropriated in a democratic civil society in terms of cultivating civility in ordinary people who belong to different moral communities; (2) in the modern East Asian social context, the Confucian ideal of benevolent government (ren zheng) can be attained better by the victims of socio-economic injustice contesting it democratically in the public space of civil society than by ‘thin’ democracy controlled by meritocratic elitism. ‘Confucian civil society’ operating on Confucian ritually mediated civility is an alternative to meritocratic elitism.

Few contemporary crises have reshaped public policy as dramatically as the COVID-19 pandemic. In its shadow, policymakers have debated whether other pressing crises—including climate change—should be integrated into COVID-19 policy responses. Public support for such an approach is unclear: the COVID-19 crisis might eclipse public concern for other policy problems, or complementarities between COVID-19 and other issues could boost support for broad government interventions. In this research note, we use a conjoint experiment, panel study, and framing experiment to assess the substitutability or complementarity of COVID-19 and climate change among US and Canadian publics. We find no evidence that the COVID-19 crisis crowds out public concern about the climate crisis. Instead, we find that the publics in both countries prefer that their governments integrate climate action into COVID-19 responses. We also find evidence that analogizing climate change with COVID-19 may increase concern about climate change.

How much do electoral institutions matter for the rise of populist parties? Evidence on this question is mixed, with some scholars arguing that the role of electoral rules is small. We provide new evidence for the impact of electoral system change. The UK's adoption of a proportional electoral system for European elections in 1999 provides a unique opportunity to study the link between electoral rules and the ascendancy of right-wing populist parties. Employing both synthetic control and difference-in-difference methods, we estimate that the electoral reform increased the vote share of right-wing populists by about 12 to 13.5 percentage points on average. During a time when populism was rising across Europe, the reform abruptly shifted populist votes in the UK above the European trend and above more plausible comparison cases. Our results also imply that caution is needed when empirical results based on partial reforms are extrapolated to electoral system change.

The authors examine the countervailing effects of two forces on external news coverage of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa during the 1970s. The first is purposeful government efforts at news management and information control undertaken by each of the two regimes. The second is the civil unrest which was present in the region during that period. They conclude that these effects and the policy consequences that flow from them are functions of the pre-existing image environment of each country in the foreign (US) press and of the character of its domestic unrest.

It is well-known that power relations can exhibit a ‘one plus one equals three’ effect. Two or more units can fuse into a bloc which has more power than the component units before had between them. The most obvious example of this type of synergy (whereby the whole is greater than its constituent parts) would be three people bargaining over the distribution of a fixed kitty, and needing a simple majority to impose any outcome. The three actors can, in the long run, expect one-third of the kitty (and can be thought of as having one-third of the power). If two combine into a single bloc, they will win every time. The new bloc controls all of the power (⅓ + ⅓ → 1) and its constituent members' expectations each increase to half of the kitty. Notwithstanding this, it is by no means the case that all combinations of units into blocs increase either aggregate power or individual expectations. Some combinations can result in a loss of power, although examples of this are slightly more complex, and depend upon some formal index of power for their elucidation. Thus, in the real world of coalition politics, the government coalition which actually forms controls all of the power as a bloc, despite the fact that coalition members do not control all of the power between them if they go it alone. Conversely, two parties can sometimes lose power by combining, particularly when they face a dominant opponent not far short of an overall majority.

This article investigates support for redistributive land policy in contemporary South Africa. From a large survey conducted in 2004, the author assesses whether contemporary policy preferences reflected egocentric instrumentalism – direct and immediate profit from redistributive policies – or symbolic justice – non-instrumental concern for contemporary and historical injustices against groups. Analysis of the data decidedly favours the symbolic justice hypothesis. Land redistribution is a symbolic issue for most black South Africans, grounded in values connected to land as a symbol and in concern for the historical injustices of apartheid and colonialism. Because land policy preferences are so strongly associated with concerns for historical injustices against groups, the land issue remains volatile and resistant to ‘simple’ economic solutions. Land is thus an example of historical injustices colliding with demands for contemporary fairness.

The community charge has been described as the flagship of Thatcherism. It was also the issue which, together with Europe, brought the Prime Minister's voyage to an end and set her adrift as a political Captain Bligh whilst her parliamentary and cabinet crew sailed on without her. But though the prospect of English electoral disaster was the most immediate and obvious political effect of the new tax, its introduction a year earlier in Scotland had other and possibly longer-lasting consequences.

What aspects of national trade-union movements systematically affect national policy making and economic performance? While there is general agreement that union density, the proportion of the workforce organized in unions, is an important element of union strength, social scientists are only beginning to identify the other critical elements. That union density is not the whole story can quickly be appreciated by comparing the influence of unions in Britain and Germany. For much of the post-war period, union density has been higher in Britain than Germany, although German unions have sustained at least as important a political and economic role as British unions. An influential theory of group-government relations directed our attention to the degree of hierarchy and monopoly present in an interest structure and to the degree of institutionalized access to policy-making circles, wrapping these characteristics together in the concept of corporatism. Yet there is a developing interest, particularly in the analysis of labour movements, in disaggregating corporatism as part of an effort to understand the specific characteristics that produce political and economic influence.

Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman's version of an expected utility theory of war is one of the most widely cited theories of international conflict. However, the testing of the theory has lagged its theoretical development. To date, the theory has been tested on only 707 dyad-years, all drawn from Europe between 1816 and 1970. We present a broader test of War and Reason's expected utility theory of war using the same methods as Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman. Our tests include the full international system from 1816 to 1984. We find that the theory receives empirical support using the set of politically relevant dyads for testing, but the relationship is less clear among the population of all interstate dyads.

This research is addressed to the problem of constructing scales of political attitudes within the British House of Commons. Our aim, broadly, is to produce measures that will enable us to distinguish between backbenchers of the same party – for example, a Right-Left scale applied to the Labour party – and to relate these data to biographical variables and other measures of political behaviour. Moreover, by observing the relationship between Members' positions on different scales, and changes over time, we hope to learn more about the belief-systems of Members of Parliament.

The use of negative political communication is a predominant characteristic of modern politics. However, literature doesn't provide an answer to the following question: what explains fluctuations in the use of negative messages within political organisations during a given political campaign? The present paper examines this question in the context of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. Data consists of all tweets distributed by the official Twitter account of both campaign organisations (@YesScotland and @UK_Together) between June 16, 2014 and September 17, 2014. Results are obtained by a non-parametric local regression and by time-series regression analyses. Our model demonstrates that having an advance in the polls had a statistically significant influence on the tweet sentiment of at least one organisation during the referendum campaign: Better Together's messages were more negative when it was ahead in the polls. Meanwhile, Yes Scotland's messages were more negative after each of the leaders' debates.

Power has been so extensively analysed and so variously defined that a raw student (or even a seasoned practitioner) who looks at a dozen or so definitions of power might well wonder about the nature of the enterprise. The situation seems to be that there is some agreement on what power is — the word might otherwise be expected to have fallen into disuse — and some very sharp disagreement. But one is at something of a loss to know, firstly where the agreement is, secondly what is at issue between rival definitions, and thirdly which disagreements are basic and which mere refinements. A new analyst might well be puzzled about where to begin; and I rather think that all those who analyse power must be quite uncertain about what it would be to succeed in their task.

Theories of voting have distinguished between prospective and retrospective evaluations of political parties. However, not only may both factors be at work in an election, but they may also be complementary. The 1980 Canadian federal elections were, according to most accounts, both a retrospective and a prospective referendum on the energy issue. However, previous examinations of this election have failed to show any mandate emerging from the contest. This re-analysis of election data from that contest, shows that both prospective and retrospective evaluations mattered, above and beyond the quality of leadership in the country. Moreover, the pattern of voting strongly suggests an elite-led pattern of issue concerns akin to that suggested by the ‘two-step flow of communications’. Those with the strongest pattern of issue concerns voted prospect-ively, while less committed partisans cast their ballots retrospectively.

Nikita Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev both pursued reformist policies during their respective periods as head of the CPSU. Although their policies were very different in substance, the political problems they faced in prosecuting reform were quite similar. The discussion here focuses on the obstacles facing reform-minded Soviet leaders and the options available for overcoming them. Both Khrushchev and Gorbachev were dependent for their position and for the implementation of their policies on a party-state apparat whose interests lay in opposing radical reform and in limiting the leader's power. As a result both men were in a particularly weak position from which to pursue reformist policies.

Analysis of the British Election Studies suggests that migration between the north and south of Britain does have political effects, southerly migration leading voters away from Labour and northerly migration towards Labour. This pattern persists even after controls for prior social and political characteristics, experience of social mobility, and changes in local political environment. It does, however, appear to be a new phenomenon, not apparent in the earlier election studies. The results support the hypothesis that the north-south divide constitutes a distinct new political cleavage distinct from social class and the other more familiar social bases of voting behaviour.

In recent years some of the best theoretical work on the political economy of political institutions and processes has begun surfacing outside the political science mainstream in high quality economics journals. This two-part article surveys these contributions from a recent five-year period. In Part I, the focus is on elections, voting and information aggregation, followed by treatments of parties, candidates and coalitions. In Part II, papers on economic performance and redistribution, constitutional design, and incentives, institutions, and the quality of political elites are discussed. Part II concludes with a discussion of the methodological bases common to economics and political science, the way economists have used political science research, and some new themes and arbitrage opportunities.

Despite the inadequacies of data available for Ihe study of New Zealand electoral behaviour, evidence from a number of small-scale projects has given rise to a conventional wisdom which suggests that, at least in the 1960s, the association between class and party was strong in New Zealand – similar to the level in Britain. New evidence suggests that past estimates of class voting exaggerated the size of the link. Furthermore since the 1960s the level of class voting has declined considerably, as it has in many other countries. In New Zealand this decline appears to have been brought about by new age cohorts with weaker class-party alignments replacing older cohorts with stronger class-party links. Multivariate analysis supports the initial findings while at the same time showing that occupation remains the central social structural determinant of the vote in New Zealand.