What values should a society seek to maximize? Religious values, as in Calvin's Geneva or Khomeini's Iran? Power and Glory? The Wealth of Nations, the Gross National Product? The greatest happiness for the greatest number? Or, in Humboldt's phrase, ‘the highest and most harmonious development of [man's] powers to a complete and consistent whole?’

There is much to be said for wealth. Quite recently it has been discovered that the pursuit of wealth is a game against nature not a war game, a zero-sum game, with booty as its prize. The distribution of increments of wealth can, under these circumstances, be Pareto optimal. As Marx pointed out, winning the struggle against scarcity is a condition for everything else: men must eat before they can think. Similarly, in ordering a hierarchy of needs, the contemporary humanist psychologist, Abraham Maslow, makes the same obvious point: the satisfaction of physiological needs is a condition for the satisfaction of higher needs, in the end for self-fulfilment – for Humboldt's ‘harmonious development of man's powers’. Wealth gives satisfaction; Bentham believed it was the prime source of happiness. Adam Smith argued that ‘the desire of bettering our condition…[through] an augmentation of fortune’ was the most powerful (and vulgar) of motives, but it was often a mask for a concern for the good opinions of others. So strong a motive lends itself to social control: ‘the steadiest motive in ordinary business work is the desire for pay which is the material reward for work’. Like B. F. Skinner, Marshall held that money is a general reinforcer because of its universal appeal. And it is the foundation of civilization, not only because surplus value may be devoted to cathedrals, but, following Schumpeter, because a society guided by the rationalism of the market's manner of pursuing wealth, is reflected in the high art and science of the West. In the process of maximizing wealth, therefore, a society motivates its members, satisfies them, and provides the basis for high civilization.

As spending on welfare in the United States has increased over time, preferences for more spending have remained fairly stationary. Given that previous research shows that the public adjusts its welfare spending preference thermostatically in response to welfare spending, the over-time pattern of preferences implies that something must be producing an increase in public support, but what? We address this question, focusing on individuals' demographics and a set of aggregate economic variables, both macroeconomic and distributional. Results reveal that individual-level factors matter little to the temporal variation and aggregate economics matter a lot: there are pro-cyclical and counter-cyclical elements in spending preferences and a dampening effect of income inequality over time. The combination of these variables accounts for the underlying trend in welfare spending preferences in the US, and the method used to reveal these dynamics can be used to analyze preference evolution in other spending domains and countries.

Recent scholarship has found identity variables to be insignificant predictors of civilian targeting in war. Drawing on the European origins of the law of war, this article argues that previous scholarship has neglected the one specification of ‘identity’ that is most theoretically justified for understanding civilian targeting: whether a European state is fighting a non-European state. This article replicates and extends three recent statistical analyses – Downes; Valentino, Huth and Croco; and Morrow – of civilian targeting by including a variable capturing whether a European state fought a non-European state. The study finds that civilian targeting, and non compliance with the law of war more generally, is significantly more likely in European v. non-European dyads than in other types of dyads.

How can the growing personalization of power be identified and measured ex ante? Extant measures in the authoritarian literature have traditionally focused on institutional constraints and more recently on individual behaviour – such as purging opposition members from (and packing allies into) government bodies. This article offers a different strategy that examines leaders’ individual rhetoric. It focuses on patterns of pronoun usage for the first person. The author argues that as leaders personalize power, they are less likely to use ‘I’ (a pronoun linked to credit claiming and blame minimizing) and more likely to use ‘we’ (the leader speaks for – or with – the populace). To test this argument, the study focuses on all major, scheduled speeches by all chief executives in the entire Chinese-speaking world – that is, China, Singapore and Taiwan – since independence. It finds a robust pattern between first-person pronouns and political constraints. To ensure the results are not driven by the Chinese sample, the rhetoric of four other political leaders is considered: Albania's Hoxha, North Korea's Kim Il Sung, Hungary's Orbán and Ecuador's Correa. The implications of this project suggest that how leaders talk can provide insights into how they perceive their rule.

Right-wing candidates have rallied against same-sex marriage, abortion, and ‘gender ideology’ in several recent Latin American elections, attracting socially conservative voters. Yet, these issues are largely irrelevant to voting decisions in other parts of the region. Drawing on theories explaining partisan shifts in the US and Europe, we argue that elite and social movement debates on sexuality politics create conditions for electoral realignment. When politicians take polarized positions on newly salient ‘culture war’ issues, the masses’ voting behaviour shifts. Using region-wide multilevel analysis of the AmericasBarometer and Latinobarómetro and a conjoint experiment in Brazil, Chile, and Peru, we demonstrate that the rising salience of sexuality politics creates new electoral cleavages, magnifying the electoral impact of religion and sexuality politics attitudes and shrinking the impact of economic views. Whereas scholarship on advanced democracies posits the centrality of partisanship, our findings indicate that sexuality politics prompts realignments even in weak party systems.

This study leverages population registry data from Sweden to examine whether immigrants who live in areas with a high concentration of ethnic minorities are more or less likely to be nominated for political office. It exploits a refugee placement program in place in Sweden during the late 1980s and early 1990s that restricted refugees' opportunities to freely choose their place of residence. The article presents evidence that immigrants who live in areas with a high ethnic density are less likely to be nominated for political office. The findings have important implications for local integration policies as well as refugee placement policies, as many countries consider local context when resettling refugees.

In a recent Note in this Journal, Johnston and PattieR. J. Johnston and Charles Pattie, ‘Inconsistent Individual Attitudes within Consistent Attitudinal Structures: Comments on an Important Issue Raised by John Bartle's Paper on Causal Modelling of Voting in Britain’, British Journal of Political Science, 30 (2000), 361–74. contend that they have discovered an ecological fallacy in the behaviour of the six-item scaleJohnston and Pattie's analysis in fact deals with two different six-item scales which were included in alternate years on the BHPS. As their conclusions applied equally to both scales, for the sake of parsimony this note refers only to the scale included in ‘odd’ years 1991, 1993, 1995, etc. developed by Heath et al. to measure the ‘left–right’ political value dimension.Anthony Heath, Geoffrey Evans and Jean Martin, ‘The Measurement of Core Beliefs and Values: The Development of Balanced Socialist/Laissez Faire and Libertarian/Authoritarian Scales’, British Journal of Political Science, 24 (1994), 115–32. Using data from the first six waves of the British Household Panel Study (BHPS), they show that, while there is remarkable over-time stability in the factor structure of these questions at the aggregate level, when the consistency of individual responses to each item is considered, a very different picture emerges; around 50 per cent of the sample fail to select the same response alternative on successive waves and a third of respondents select a response alternative on the opposite side of the agree/disagree scale from one time to the next. Correlations between the same items over time of around 0.4, they argue, bear out a picture of massive longitudinal instability at the individual level.

Decision making in political executives is an oddly neglected subject in political science. The roles played by both formal institutions and less formal mechanisms in arriving at decisions in political executives are surprisingly understudied. There have been some important comparative studies of political executives but these have tended to focus on the role of the head of the political executive – the president or prime minister. The distinctive nature of cabinet systems as against presidential systems has been well brought out but a comparative framework for the analysis of variations among cabinet systems in the role of decision arenas other than the full cabinet has not been developed. Blondel in his wide-ranging survey of government structures gives only a passing mention to cabinet committees. Accordingly, in seeking to place the roles of cabinet committees in perspective, we have found it necessary to develop our own framework of decision arenas in cabinet systems.

A recent article in this Journal (Patrick Dunleavy and G. W. Jones with others, ‘Leaders, Politics and Institutional Change: The Decline of Prime Ministerial Accountability to the House of Commons, 1868–1990’, 23 (1993), 267–98) demonstrated a clear secular decline in prime ministers' accountability to Parliament. It examined the frequency with which prime ministers from W. E. Gladstone to Margaret Thatcher accounted directly to MPs by answering oral questions and making statements, major speeches and minor interventions in debates. The decline in each of these activities had followed a different pattern. There was a steep fall in prime ministers' participation in oral questions until the late 1950s, but after parliament and Harold Macmillan had agreed that prime ministers would answer questions for 15 minutes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the fall seemed to have been arrested. The evidence from John Major's premiership, which is presented below, shows that, even within this apparently rigid timetable, there has been further decline. The making of statements, after a period of near absence, had revived in the 1940s, but declined noticeably again in the 1980s. Dunleavy and Jones concluded that increases in the number of prime-ministerial statements were associated with international and domestic crises, summits and the relaxation of procedural rules. Evidence from Major's performance reinforces these findings. The long-term trend towards fewer substantial speeches was found to have accelerated in the 1980s, a development which was mirrored in a fall in the number of debating interventions during the Thatcher years. The evidence on these two activities, presented below, indicates a partial return under Major to pre-Thatcher norms – though this revival may be only a temporary phenomenon.

It is not uncommon for the case-study approach to the study of policy making to be criticized for failing to produce broad generalizations or concepts applicable to systems as a whole. For example, in discussing policy making and political culture in Sweden, Anton argues that case-studies of decision making do not offer an adequate or realistic view of the process. In doing so he suggests that we should shift our focus of concern ‘from the single decision (whatever it is), to the structure of relationships between participants and the norms which serve to maintain or change those relationships through time. The focus shifts, in other words, from decisions to systems of decision-making’. Whilst not disputing the need for studying the general properties of decision making in a given political system (or indeed the need for the comparative study of policy making in different systems), this article will suggest the value of studying individual policy areas – in this case, transport – as opposed to both individual decisions and entire political systems, as a means of testing broader propositions such as those formulated by Anton.

The results of this analysis may be reduced to four inter-related findings. First, evident throughout the paper is the similarity of activists at all three schools. Cross-national similarities consistently predominate over differences. The same patterns of relationships are found everywhere. This fact, among other things, enhances the credibility of our findings.

Do democratic dyads handle their disputes more peacefully than non-democratic dyads, or have they cleared the most contentious issues (that is, unsettled borders) off their foreign policy agenda before becoming democratic? This study compares the conflicting answers of the democratic peace and the territorial peace and examines the empirical record to see which is more accurate. It finds that almost all contiguous dyads settle their borders before they become joint democracies. Furthermore, the majority of non-contiguous dyad members also settle their borders with all neighboring states before their non-contiguous dyad becomes jointly democratic. Such findings are consistent with the theoretical expectations of the territorial peace, rather than the democratic peace. They also weaken a core argument of the democratic peace, for this analysis finds that one reason democratic dyads may handle their disputes more peacefully than non-democratic dyads is not because of their institutions or norms, but rather because they have dispensed with the disputes most likely to involve the use of military force prior to becoming democratic.

Arms races have been the subject of many and various explanations, but of few formal theories which manage to combine the virtues of plausibility and parsimony. Perhaps the best known is Richardson's, to which interesting modifications have been proposed by Smoker, Saaty and most recently Hamblin et al.2 Common to all these models is the assumption that arms races can be explained by an action-reaction process between the two nations involved.

Why do unthreatening social groups become targets of state repression? Repression of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people is especially puzzling since sexual minorities, unlike many ethnic minorities, pose no credible violent challenge to the state. This article contends that revolutionary governments are disproportionately oppressive toward sexual minorities for strategic and ideological reasons. Since revolutions create domestic instability, revolutionaries face unique strategic incentives to target ‘unreliable’ groups and to demonstrate an ability to selectively punish potential dissidents by identifying and punishing ‘invisible’ groups. Moreover, revolutionary governments are frequently helmed by elites with exclusionary ideologies – such as communism, fascism and Islamism – which represent collectivities rather than individuals. Elites adhering to these views are thus likely to perceive sexual minorities as liberal, individualistic threats to their collectivist projects. Statistical analysis using original data on homophobic repression demonstrates that revolutionary governments are more likely to target LGBT individuals, and that this effect is driven by exclusionary ideologues. Case study evidence from Cuba further indicates that the posited strategic and ideological mechanisms mediate the relationship between revolutionary government and homophobic repression.

Plurality (first-past-the-post), majority and proportional electoral formulae all translate vote shares into seat shares in different ways. The consequences of these differences are the subject of a large literature, and the virtues and vices attributed to the plurality rule are particularly numerous. That is not surprising given the discrepancies between seat and vote shares it generates. What is surprising is that the literature has not examined the plurality rule's effectiveness, that is the extent to which it achieves its intended goals. We take effectiveness to be a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for an electoral rule's acceptability. At the very least, a given rule ought to produce the consequences it is designed to create. This short Note is intended to assess the extent to which the plurality system passes this minimum test.

The current American debate about the relationship between business and government represents the most significant reopening of that issue since the New Deal. The debate is in part about government's role in the economy, but the issue of business's role in politics is being joined as well, joined in fact on several fronts. There are, of course, the polemics of corporations and their critics, in which business is cast alternately as victim and villain. The issue also divides more serious students of American politics and has fostered a wealth of theorizing about the role of the state. Finally, the issue of business influence pervades discussions about campaign finance.

Public support for the existing institutions of government depends in part on public perceptions of the alternatives. This assertion will not come as news in those parts of the world where changing the regime is a regular part of political life. In France, for example, where regimes have been numbered to distinguish them from each other, it is common knowledge that public evaluations of the Fourth Republic depended on comparisons with the Third, that especially in its early years the Fifth Republic was frequently judged by comparison with the Fourth, and that in particularly sophisticated circles these more or less contemporary regimes have been frequently compared with the First and Second Republics.

This article lays out the elementary logic of age structures in party preference data and proposes a simple estimation model with demographic and historical elements. As voters age their preferences intensify. But they do not intensify much and generational differences in the direction of party preferences are correspondingly weak. The Canadian electorate does not seem all that strongly anchored by the accumulated experience of the individuals that make it up. The major source of long-term electoral change, therefore, is conversion in the existing electorate. Consideration is given to how distinctive the Canadian pattern is.

In the 1950s modernization began to be an important paradigm for Latin American development. Early modernization theory depicted the economies of Latin America as traditional and underdeveloped. The theme of technological progress runs consistently through the modernization model. The purpose of this article is to assess an important question raised by Latin American development studies: that large allocations for the military sector are conducive to economic growth in Latin America. While this modernization literature is somewhat dated, many recent quantitative studies have also shown positive economic benefits from defence spending in the Third World. The added relevance here is that our model captures technological progress. After controlling for technological progress and externalities, our analysis shows that the military portion of budgets in Latin America have actually hindered modernization. We discuss these findings in terms of regime type and levels of US military aid to the region.

Most of the poor in the developing world work in the informal economy, that is, in occupations that take place outside of the legal system of taxing, spending, and regulating. This article examines how informal work impacts the policy and electoral preferences of the poor. We emphasize the importance of the risks inherent in informal employment in shaping the responsiveness of citizens to clientelism and their policy and voting preferences. Since most informal workers are not covered by (formal) social insurance, they prefer material goods and candidates that produce targeted, clientelistic benefits rather than programmatically delivered insurance that is unlikely to reach them. As a result, we argue that informal workers are more likely to rely on clientelistic relations as a means of hedging risks than are formal workers; prefer policies that are delivered clientelistically via political mediators rather than programmatic solutions; and prefer clientelistic over programmatic local candidates. Our findings elucidate why the preferences of poor informal workers often diverge from those assumed by standard models of social insurance and have important implications for the political economy of social policy in a world where billions work outside work-based tax-transfer systems.