The climate justice literature typically endorses a moral right to produce subsistence emissions, but this right appears problematic considering how urgent it has become to reduce all emissions. It seems that we are currently facing a dilemma between respecting people's right to subsistence and keeping emissions within a reasonably safe budget. This article argues, however, that there is no reason why a moral permission to produce subsistence emissions must be accompanied by an exemption from responsibility. Even when we are dealing with subsistence emissions, we can demand that people correct for having emitted if they can do so without jeopardizing their own vital interests. This reduces the tension between the right to produce subsistence emissions and avoiding very significant climate change. If many emitters offset their subsistence emissions or contribute to adaptation and compensation because of them, the negative consequences of recognizing this right are tempered when it comes to both mitigating climate change and responding to its adverse effects.

Latin American pension reforms during the 1990s dramatically increased the number of people in the region who had a direct stake in the returns on financial capital. This article asks: How, if at all, has this expansion affected Latin American politics? It focuses particularly on popular attitudes towards neoliberalism. It argues that government-induced expansions of capital ownership do not directly affect public preferences about neoliberalism, but did so indirectly by shaping the information that people use to judge whether neoliberalism is welfare enhancing. According to this view, participation in a reformed Latin American pension system should lead to acceptance of neoliberalism when pensions returns are high, but have the opposite effect when returns are low. This study analyzes multiple datasets of Latin American survey data and finds support for this theory.

For the first time in an Arab country, this article examines attitudes toward public opinion surveys and their effects on survey-taking behavior. The study uses original survey data from Qatar, the diverse population of which permits comparisons across cultural–geographical groupings within a single, non-democratic polity. The authors find that Qatari and expatriate Arabs hold positive views of surveys, both in absolute terms and relative to individuals from non-Arab countries. Factor analysis reveals that the underlying dimensions of survey attitudes in Qatar mostly mirror those identified in Western settings, but a new dimension is discovered that captures the perceived intentions of surveys. Two embedded experiments assess the impact of survey attitudes. The results show that generalized attitudes toward surveys affect respondents’ willingness to participate both alone and in combination with surveys' objective attributes. The study also finds that negative views about survey reliability and intentions increase motivated under-reporting among Arab respondents, whereas non-Arabs are sensitive only to perceived cognitive and time costs. These findings have direct implications for consumers and producers of Arab survey data.

In a recent paper, Dryzek and List attempt a reconciliation of Social Choice Theory and Deliberative Democracy. Such an attempt is certainly long overdue and their original article is an important first step. In some ways it succeeds. In particular, they show that much of the imagined tension between the two theoretical frameworks is illusory and due to the mistaken assumption that many of the claims of rational choice theory form part of social choice theory (SCT) too. But in the nature of a Comment, I shall concentrate on aspects of their discussion which in my view warrant more critical scrutiny.

This study examines the logic of recovering information about the decay of partisan loyalties in the electorate from observed patterns of declining turnout. If we entertain plausible assumptions about the behaviour of core and peripheral voters, the rates of electoral participation become a surprisingly useful barometer for measuring the intensity and character of partisan dealignment.

Several studies provide evidence of group-centric policy attitudes, that is, citizens evaluating policies based on linkages with visible social groups. The existing literature generally points to the role of media imagery, rhetoric and prominent political sponsors in driving group-centric attitudes. This article theorizes and tests an alternative source: exposure to rising local ethnic diversity. Focusing on the issue of crime, it first develops a theoretical account of how casual observation in the local context can give rise to ethnic stereotypes. Then, using two large, nationally representative datasets on citizen group and policy attitudes linked with registry data on local ethnic diversity, each spanning 20 years, it shows that crime attitudes become more strongly linked with immigration attitudes as local ethnic diversity rises. The results suggest that the typically emphasized ‘top-down’ influence on group-centric attitudes by elite actors is complemented by ‘bottom-up’ local processes of experiential learning about group–policy linkages.

How can one assess which countries select more experienced leaders for the highest office? There is wide variation in prior career paths of national leaders within, and even more so between, regime types. It is therefore challenging to obtain a truly comparative measure of political experience; empirical studies have to rely on proxies instead. This article proposes PolEx, a measure of political experience that abstracts away from the details of career paths and generalizes based on the duration, quality and breadth of an individual's experience in politics. The analysis draws on a novel data set of around 2,000 leaders from 1950 to 2017 and uses a Bayesian latent variable model to estimate PolEx. The article illustrates how the new measure can be used comparatively to assess whether democracies select more experienced leaders. The authors find that while on average they do, the difference with non-democracies has declined dramatically since the early 2000s. Future research may leverage PolEx to investigate the role of prior political experience in, for example, policy making and crisis management.

Since the 1960s, when the concept of totalitarianism began to be critically assailed, Western, and particularly academic, interpreters of the Soviet Union have increasingly moved in the direction of a new convergence. Many scholars have portrayed the political systems of the Soviet Union and of Western countries as increasingly alike, viewing them through the common perspective of ‘pluralism’. Basically, it has been said, conflict and differences of opinion are characteristic of all these political systems. To be sure, the conflicts and differences may be expressed through rather different institutions, and with somewhat different styles or nuances in each case, but they are there just the same.

What is the political role of the peasantry? Is it a source of revolution or reaction? For the Third World nations, where this is an issue of special importance, the answer is by no means clear. In the advanced capitalist countries, however, the political impact of peasants has become less ambiguous. Although Lipset once argued that radical consciousness in the United States had shown itself primarily through agrarian struggles, farmers have now evolved into perhaps the most conservative occupational group in America. Harrington Moore, considering the historical place of peasants in the modernization of France, England and Germany, details their revolutionary contribution. But, concerning more recent times, Huggett indicates that, in general, the peasants of Western Europe have expressed themselves politically through the parties of the Right. The contemporary evidence presented here demonstrates that these strong right-wing sentiments on the part of the peasantry persist.

Condorcet's paradox of voting and Arrow's impossibility theorem are by now well known. Inspired by Arrow's treatment of social choice, others have presented alternative proofs of his theorem and different impossibility results. Professor Fishburn has recently treated us to some interesting new voting paradoxes. It is important to have the area of inconsistency among the various treatments explored and clearly mapped out. It is equally important to come to terms with the known inconsistencies in order to construct a solid social choice edifice on safe ground. Coming to terms with the inconsistencies must surely mean deciding between alternative normative conditions when all of them cannot be satisfied simultaneously. This paper attempts to do just that by adding some computational criteria to the standard list of normative criteria and then singling out a subset as being more important (to the author at least) than the rest. Since the ‘important’ criteria are mutually consistent they can be used to derive some properties of democratic decision processes. Simple majority rule, applied in sequential elimination, is distinguished as the best collective decision method. It fails to satisfy the Pareto, or unanimity, criterion – one often regarded as a sine qua non of social choice – but when this condition is added to the author's list an impossibility result obtains. An argument is proposed to counter the suggestion that Pareto optimality be added to the list and some other condition removed.

What are the political consequences of economic reform in new democracies? Is the effect of economic reform on democratization the same across regions? Some scholars of transitology argue that economic reform has negative consequences on democratization largely because the resistance of established groups can undermine democratization processes. Others, mainly scholars of the post-socialist region, argue that in the post-socialist region economic reform has positive consequences on political democratization due in large part to the region's distinctive historical and structural legacies. The heated debate between Philippe Schmitter with Terry Karl and Valerie Bunce provides ample opportunity to (re)think about democratization in a more contextual and cross-regional perspective. However, there has been little systematic empirical analysis across regions. This analysis attempts to fill the gap by examining whether the dominant research paradigm of democratization is empirically valid across regions in transition.

Two main themes have been emphasized in recent description and interpretation of English political behaviour. One theme traces the stability of our political system to a widespread attachment to the civic values of submission to authority and an intermittent popular participation. The other theme explains support (at least among the manual working class) for the Conservative party in terms of deference to a traditional elite and/or a pragmatic appraisal of that party's economic and welfare capabilities. Little attention has been paid to the validity of either interpretation or to the relations between them. Accordingly, this paper first reviews the evidence for both themes and attempts to relate them, and then introduces some new survey data to throwfurther light on this problematic subject.

What shapes attitudes towards procedural rules that constrain executive power? This letter argues that procedural values are contextual: A function of who is in power. Supporters of those in power prefer fewer procedural constraints, while opposition supporters prefer greater. This study reports the results of a unique test using data from the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey. Respondents were asked, in both pre- and post-election waves, if they thought it should be ‘easier or harder for the president to keep documents secret from the public’. The panel design makes it possible to track individual changes following the shift in political context. The results show evidence of a partisan ‘flip’ in attitudes following the election, with Republicans becoming less likely – and Democrats more likely – to prefer additional constraints on presidential secrecy. However, this partisan ‘flip’ is present only among higher political knowledge respondents.

Until the late 1960s, most informed observers agreed with Pulzer's well-known claim that ‘class is the basis of British party politics; all else is embellishment and detail’. More recently, however, most analysts have come to believe that there has been a decline in the association between class and party choice, a development that is generally referred to as ‘class dealignment’. Nevertheless, several researchers have challenged this new consensus and argued that there has been little or no trend in the association between class and party.

The Hutton Report is now established as an important element of Britain's involvement in the Iraq War. In this article the ideas that underpin it are analysed. In particular, the focus is on Hutton's presuppositions concerning the nature of truth, agency, subjectivity, meaning and language. It is shown how unquestioned assumptions structured his method and shaped his conclusions. Although such presuppositions are widely shared by the public, too, a discursive conflict within the report is identified, revealing a sub-text of competing understandings that protagonists invoked. These suggest a more phenomenological and intersubjective approach to the interpretation of events. The conclusion is that Dr Kelly and the BBC were victims of a particular sense of truth and that Hutton failed to situate important actors and events within geopolitical, institutional, experiential and affective structures. The author suggests that a greater appreciation of the contingent way information enters the public domain (itself more evident in the Butler Report) is a pre-condition for better intelligence and public policy making.

Despite evidence that women win when they run for office, the number of women in the US House of Representatives has not increased substantially. I argue that women win when they run because women engage in strategic behavior by emerging in locations where they are most likely to win. While strategic behavior is a necessary condition for increasing women's representation in office, it is not a sufficient condition. Analyzing regularly scheduled elections between 1992 and 2014, I demonstrate that women engage in strategic behavior by emerging in elections where they are most likely to win. However, the electoral opportunities for women are far from “gender neutral” and are shaped by the parties. Democratic and Republican women are most likely to emerge as candidates in districts where they are likely to win the primary and general elections; however, Republican women face even more constrained electoral opportunities.

Issue ownership theory posits that when social welfare is electorally salient, left-wing parties gain public support by rhetorically emphasizing social welfare issues. There is less research, however, on whether left-wing governing parties benefit from increasing social welfare spending. That is, it is not known whether leftist governments gain from acting on the issues they rhetorically emphasize. This article presents arguments that voters will not react to governments’ social welfare rhetoric, and reviews the conflicting arguments about how government support responds to social welfare spending. It then reports time-series, cross-sectional analyses of data on government support, governments’ social welfare rhetoric and social welfare spending from Britain, Spain and the United States, that support the prediction that government rhetoric has no effects. The article estimates, however, that increased social welfare spending sharply depresses support for both left- and right-wing governments. These findings highlight a strategic dilemma for left-wing governments, which lose public support when they act on their social welfare rhetoric by increasing welfare spending.

This article examines the effect of corruption on ideological voting. Linking previous studies of political corruption with theories of ideological voting, it argues that when corruption is high, voters place less importance on ideology when voting than they otherwise would. The reason for this effect is related to voters’ reduced ability to accurately perceive parties’ positions and to their low political efficacy in these contexts. Using data from ninety-seven elections from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, the study shows that in countries with high levels of corruption, voters consider ideology less in their voting decisions, partially because they face difficulties identifying parties’ ideological positions and/or they do not believe parties can implement their electoral programmes. These relationships hold even after controlling for socio-economic and political confounders and for voters’ increased likelihood of abstaining when corruption is high.