‘The Irish party system is unique. In no other European polity does a small number of programmatically indistinguishable parties, each commanding heterogeneous electoral support, constitute the entire party system.’ This bold statement is merely a particularly forthright expression of a commonly held view about political parties in the Republic of Ireland. This view is understandable given that the formal casus belli between the two major parties was the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921; surely this issue must at some stage have been overtaken by events. In the revised edition of his standard text on Irish politics, Chubb points to the year 1948 as the date by which the ‘issues which had split Sinn Fein were either resolved or increasingly irrelevant’. He goes on to argue that from the 1950s ‘all parties were to a great extent drained of ideology; they overlapped considerably in the policies they proposed; and they competed for the votes of a public increasingly concerned with welfare and consumer politics and less and less with national issues’. What we may call ‘the no-differences thesis’ has far-reaching implications for our understanding of the Irish party system and of the role it plays in policy formulation and the wider political process.

This article examines party sorting, elite cue and ideological polarization accounts of polarization dynamics. The study tests their differing expectations about trends in redistributive ideological polarization and partisan polarization in the British case using repeated cross-section and panel data. The authors reject party sorting accounts, which require ideology to be stable and changes in party support to drive partisan polarization, because they find that ideology trends with elite polarization and that ideological change causes partisan polarization. The authors reject elite cue accounts, which maintain that it is mainly partisans’ ideology that follows elite polarization, because they find virtually identical trends for initially ideologically similar non-partisans too. The study thus finds support for an ideological polarization account in which changes in elite polarization are associated with general changes in citizen redistributive ideology.

This article studies the persistent effects of past agrarian inequality on contemporary voting preferences. Although Western European countries became industrial (and later post-industrial) economies, the political effects of the agrarian cleavage are still visible in those countries in which the agrarian issue was dominant in the interwar period (the industrial laggards). Looking at the spatial variation in voting patterns in the fifteen elections held in Spain since 1977, we show through mediation analysis that areas with high historical agrarian inequality have higher levels of leftist vote. We examine two transmission channels: one economic (related to backwardness); the other political (related to family transmission of political allegiances). A survey analysis provides evidence in favour of family transmission. A brief exploration of other cases confirms the general argument: a similar effect is found in Italy (an industrial laggard), but not in England (an early industrializer).

In the final two months of the 2020 US election, we conducted eight panel experiments to evaluate the immediate and medium-term effects of misinformation and factual corrections. Our results corroborate four sets of existing findings: fact-checks reliably improve factual accuracy, while misinformation degrades it; effects of fact-checks on belief accuracy endure, though they fade with time; effects on attitudes are minuscule; and there are important partisan asymmetries. We also offer one new empirical finding suggesting that effect heterogeneities by personality type and cognitive style may reflect attention paid to treatments. Our study confirms that the fundamental push and pull of misinformation and factual corrections on political beliefs holds even in electoral settings as saturated with mistruths as the 2020 US election.

The contemporary Republican Party has been the site of asymmetric partisan entrenchment and factional infighting. We test whether factional pressure from a far-right faction (the Tea Party) exacerbated the party's rightward movement with a granular analysis of Republican factionalism at the congressional district level. We develop a measure of local factionalism using novel datasets of activist presence and primary contests. Then, we conduct a difference-in-differences analysis to assess whether local factionalism in the Tea Party era heightened Republican partisanship and legislative extremism at the district level. We find that districts that experienced factional pressure moved rightward on both measures. These findings help clarify how the Tea Party captured the Republican Party and support a focus on the role of party factions in fomenting partisan conflict.

There are currently two views of the potential link between early learning and adult political attitudes and behaviour. The first holds that the consequences of early socialization persist over the life-cycle and have a pervasive effect on adult behaviour. Much of the research on child and adolescent political socialization adhered to this position. It is supported by studies which find that some orientations and personality dispositions seem relatively stable over time. This approach also finds some support in research which shows that earlier-learned orientations and experiences may influence later attitudes and behaviour, although this has been strongly contested.

Liberal theorists have traditionally emphasized the importance of rights and just institutions. Recently liberalism and the liberal emphasis on rights have been criticized on the grounds that they are individualistic and overlook the importance of community and fraternity. In this Note I look at two particular arguments, made by the communitarian Michael Sandel, that have been levelled at the liberal emphasis on rights, namely, what I shall call the ‘circumstances of justice’ argument and the ‘crowding out’ argument.

Recent developments in the political behaviour of the British electorate have called into question the once-prevalent view that class was what counted when it came to voting and all else was ‘embellishment and detail’. Two streams of thought dominate the recent literature. One notes the continuing prominence of social class in the context of voting behaviour, but stresses the extent to which class is no longer expressable as a simple function of occupation (manual and non-manual), but instead requires paying attention to such aspects of lifestyle as tenancy patterns. The other, best exemplified in Dunleavy's recent work, pays less attention to individual lifestyle and emphasizes instead the extent to which changes in the occupational structure (particularly sectoral location and unionization) have altered the political meaning of workplace (‘production’) locations. The theoretical interest in sectoral location arises from the growth of public sector employment since the early 1960s and the increase in public sector labour militancy in the early 1970s. According to this view, partisan choice is influenced by sectoral location and by union membership, which is itself not a matter of lifestyle nor a simple extension of social class, but is bound up with sectoral (public/corporate/small private) location of occupation.

In 1919, three years after the Easter Rising in Dublin, a revolutionary government was established in Ireland. This government, the Dail Eireann, was the forerunner of the Irish Free State that ultimately resulted from the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1922. Slightly more than fifty years have elapsed since the union of Ireland and Great Britain was formally dissolved and, in that period of time, many changes have occurred in both the social and political systems of Ireland. Not the least of these changes has been the passing of one elite generation from the political scene and the emergence of another.

Definitions of the political party in the context of Western competitive electoral politics have usually centred on the notion that the critical function of the political party is power-seeking or power-wielding. In practice, of course, Western parties of the unpaid voluntary kind cannot be solely concerned with power-seeking in the sense of vote-getting; they must also take the opinions and wishes of their own activists into account, at least to some extent. Thus, Epstein's emphasis on the nomination and electoral functions of political parties, although fundamentally correct, should not be allowed to obscure other central preoccupations of party leaders, in particular the problems they often face in attempting to keep an organization in being between elections without recourse to extensive material payoffs in the shape of patronage or regular salaries for large numbers of activists.

Agendas shape the strategies states adopt in international bargaining and, therefore, the substantive nature of the resulting outcomes. They are also a dynamic feature of the process, as states add and subtract issues in order to shift the bargaining outcome in their favor. This article analyzes when and why states will use these different ‘issue-linkage’ strategies. Focusing on the effects of a successful agreement and the costs of failure, it highlights conditions under which states are likely to add or subtract issues from the bargaining agenda. It tests these arguments using an original dataset of the bargaining strategies states have adopted in climate-change negotiations. It concludes by highlighting the implications the argument has for understanding the outcomes of international negotiations.

The application of spatial voting theories to popular elections presupposes an electorate that chooses political representatives on the basis of their well-structured policy preferences. Behavioral researchers have long contended that parts of the electorate instead hold unstructured and inconsistent policy beliefs. This article proposes an extension to spatial voting theories to analyze the effect of varying consistency in policy preferences on electoral behavior. The model results in the expectation that voters with less consistent policy preferences will put less weight on policy distance when learning about candidates who should represent their political positions. The study tests this expectation for the 2008 US presidential election, and finds that for respondents with less consistent self-placements on the liberal–conservative scale, policy distance less strongly affects their voting decision. The results have implications for the quality of political representation, as certain parts of the electorate are expected to be less closely represented.

Government transparency is widely promoted, yet little is known about transparency’s effects. Survey experiments reported here, made on the streets of Lima, Peru, investigate a simple question: what are the effects of government-sponsored transparency websites, and the information revealed by those efforts, on attitudes about the Peruvian political system? Like many developing countries, Peru lacks much system support, making it more difficult to improve governance and democracy; transparency itself has little impact on political attitudes. However, some dimensions of the information provided by transparency matter: endorsement by a credible third party or framing that associates comparatively good community well-being with government performance. These conditions substantively increase Peruvians’ approval of the national political community, the regime’s performance, institutions, and local government.

Immigrants now constitute a sizeable and rapidly growing group among many Western countries' electorates, but analyses of their party preferences remain limited. Theoretically, immigrants' party preferences might be explained with both standard electoral theories and immigrant-specific approaches. In this article, we rigorously test both perspectives against each other using the most recent data from Germany. Applying the Michigan model, with its three central explanatory variables – party identification, issue orientations and candidate evaluations – to the party preferences of immigrant-origin and native voters, we find that this standard model can explain both groups well. In contrast, we find no direct effects of the most prominent immigrant-specific variables, and neither do these meaningfully moderate the Michigan variables. However, we find strong formative effects on the presence of political attitudes and beliefs: immigrants with a longer time spent in Germany, a stronger German identity and less experience of discrimination report significantly fewer item non-responses for the Michigan model's main explanatory variables.

Leaders nearly always claim that their diplomatic campaigns are intended to attract foreign support. However, many diplomatic campaigns fail spectacularly in this regard. While these events have largely been explained as diplomatic failures, I argue that alienating the apparent target of an international diplomatic campaign can be a deliberate strategy leaders use to win domestic support. Under certain conditions, a costly backlash from a foreign actor can be a credible signal that the leader shares the domestic audience's preferences. Therefore, by intentionally provoking a backlash from a valuable foreign actor, leaders can exchange foreign condemnation for an increase in domestic support. I support this argument with evidence from Netanyahu's 2015 speech to the US Congress. I show that, as expected by this theoretical framework, Netanyahu's efforts resulted in a significant backlash among US Democrats and a corresponding increase of support among right-wing Israelis, a crucial constituency for his upcoming election.

For some time we have been engaged in a large scale study of various leadership strata in the United States. Our goal is to clarify similarities and differences in background, ideology and personality among members of such strata. We are also interested in the relationship between these variables and the manner in which members of different leadership groups perceive ‘reality’. This article reports preliminary findings on two groups – leading business executives and top level journalists. Our work has been partly informed by hypotheses developed by social scientists as diverse as Max Weber, Harold Lasswell, Joseph Schumpeter, S. M. Lipset, Alvin Gouldner, Jurgen Habermas, Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell and others.

Since 1945, industrial societies have experienced rapid socio-economic change. Occupational structures have altered to accommodate the new technological skills demanded by many new industries. These newer, smaller and more flexible industries have, in their turn, fostered unparalleled economic growth. Concomitantly, access to education has risen dramatically for all social groups, while the development of mass communications has enabled large amounts of information to be disseminated more rapidly to ever-increasing numbers of people. There is now persuasive and cumulative evidence to show that these profound changes have had two significant consequences for Western societies. Firstly, the values of Western mass publics have altered to place less emphasis on the material aspects of life and a greater priority on aesthetic and intellectual goals. Secondly, there has been a widespread upsurge in popular support for minority nationalist movements advocating some degree of territorial autonomy within their host state or separation from it.

The political economy literature has not considered in detail the dynamic interrelationship between one politico-economic system and another. To fill this lacuna, the author uses a VAR model to study the relationship between social democratic popularity and the economy not only within but also between the Scandinavian countries. In addition to the expected macroeconomic interdependence, there is empirical support for the traditional partisan theory. Economic voting is found only in Denmark. Social democratic popularity is not much affected by the economy, but it is found that the economy is influenced by social democratic popularity. An increase in the popularity of the social democrats eventually causes higher inflation. In particular, the popularity of the Swedish Social Democrats creates inflationary pressure in Sweden, and this pressure is exported to Denmark and Norway as well.