Existing explanations of domestic structural change focus on the role crises play in precipitating radical or episodic change. They largely ignore the sources and consequences of incremental change, even though this type of change also can have significant effects for policy processes and outcomes. We outline a framework for studying institutional transformation that accounts for both forms of change. The argument is a three part one. First, international and domestic events, including both crises and gradual pressures, open windows of opportunity that provide policy officials with the potential to transform existing institutions. Large-scale, system-wide changes open large windows, which allow radical change, while small-scale, issue-specific problems and changes create more limited opportunities for change. Secondly, whether an institutional change follows a window of opportunity depends on the actions and interests of state officials. Thirdly, state officials' ability to capitalize on a window of opportunity depends on their institutional position or capacity; the prevailing institutional arrangements create opportunities for, or place limits on, officials' ability to make change. Two case studies illustrate and probe the plausibility of the argument.

Why and how do international courts justify decisions with citations to their own case law? We argue that, like domestic review courts, international courts use precedent at least in part to convince ‘lower’ (domestic) courts of the legitimacy of judgements. Several empirical observations are consistent with this view, which are examined through a network analysis of European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) citations. First, the Court cites precedent based on the legal issues in the case, not the country of origin. Second, the Court is more careful to embed judgements in its existing case law when the expected value of persuading domestic judges is highest. These findings contribute to a developing literature that suggests international and domestic review courts develop their authority in similar ways.

Employing a comparative experimental design drawing on over 18,000 interviews across eleven countries on four continents, this article revisits the discussion about the economic and cultural drivers of attitudes towards immigrants in advanced democracies. Experiments manipulate the occupational status, skin tone and national origin of immigrants in short vignettes. The results are most consistent with a Sociotropic Economic Threat thesis: In all countries, higher-skilled immigrants are preferred to their lower-skilled counterparts at all levels of native socio-economic status (SES). There is little support for the Labor Market Competition hypothesis, since respondents are not more opposed to immigrants in their own SES stratum. While skin tone itself has little effect in any country, immigrants from Muslim-majority countries do elicit significantly lower levels of support, and racial animus remains a powerful force.

While there is broad consensus that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) sometimes succeed in influencing policy making within international organizations (IOs), there is much less agreement on the factors that make NGO lobbying effective. This article makes two contributions to this debate. First, the determinants of influence among NGOs active in different IOs, issue areas and policy phases are examined. The analysis builds on original survey data of more than 400 NGOs involved in five different IOs, complemented by elite interviews with IO and state officials. Secondly, the article advances a specific argument about how the strategic exchange of information and access between NGOs and IOs increases NGO influence in IOs. This argument, derived from theories of lobbying in American and European politics, is contrasted with three alternative explanations of NGO influence, privileging material resources, transnational networks and public opinion mobilization, and the broader implications of these results for research on NGOs in global governance are explored.

A model of policy implementation in a parliamentary democracy as delegation between the prime minister and her cabinet ministers is introduced. Cabinet reshuffles can be pursued as a strategy to reduce the agency loss which occurs due to the different preferences of the actors. This work thus explains why prime ministers resort to reshuffles: cabinet reshuffles reduce the moral hazard facing ministers. This answer both augments and distinguishes this work from traditional perspectives on reshuffles that have emphasized the deleterious effects of reshuffles on ministerial capacity, and also from recent work that casts reshuffles as solutions to the adverse-selection problems inherent in cabinet government. The conclusion offers a preliminary test of some of the hypotheses generated by this theory.

Institutional arrangements influence the type of policies that leaders pursue. We examine two institutional variables: size of the selectorate (S) – the set of people who have an institutional say in choosing leaders – and the size of the winning coalition (W) – the minimal set of people whose support the incumbent needs in order to remain in power. The larger the winning coalition, the greater the emphasis leaders place on effective public policy. When W is small, leaders focus on providing private goods to their small group of supporters at the expense of the provision of public goods. The size of the selectorate influences how hard leaders work on behalf of their supporters. The greater the size of the selectorate, the more current supporters fear exclusion from future coalitions. This induces a norm of loyalty that enables leaders to reduce their effort and still survive. As a first step towards a theory of endogenous selection of institutions, we characterize the institutional preferences of the different segments of society based on the consequences of these institutions for individual welfare. We conclude by examining the implication of the model for the tenure of leaders, public policy, economic growth, corruption, taxation and ethnic politics.

Democracy is often described as a system in which a majority of electors choose one out of a number of competing parties to form a government and carry out its programme. Unfortunately, spontaneous majorities rarely form in support of one party. We generalize from a ‘government’ to a ‘median’ mandate, in which the median elector chooses the pivotal party in parliament, which then translates his or her preferences into public policy. To check this we investigate how accurately parliaments and governments represent the left–right position of the median voter in each of twenty parliamentary democracies. Distortions depend on the type of electoral arrangement, being relatively smaller under proportional representation than under single-member districts. Distortions do not equate to biased representation, however. Once we consider how distortions at one step or one time are compensated by distortions in the opposite direction at another, overall representation of the median voter position is reasonably accurate.

Despite the prevalence of anti-government rumors in authoritarian countries, little is currently known about their effects on citizens’ attitudes toward the government, and whether the authorities can effectively combat rumors. With an experimental procedure embedded in two surveys about Chinese internet users’ information exposure, this study finds that rumors decrease citizens’ trust in the government and support of the regime. Moreover, individuals from diverse socio-economic and political backgrounds are similarly susceptible to thinly evidenced rumors. Rebuttals generally reduce people’s belief in the specific content of rumors, but often do not recover political trust unless the government brings forth solid and vivid evidence to back its refutation or win the endorsement of public figures broadly perceived to be independent. But because such high-quality and strong rebuttals are hard to come by, rumors will erode political support in an authoritarian state. These findings have rich implications for studies of rumors and misinformation in general, and authoritarian information politics in particular.

In Britain in recent years the study of tactical voting has become something of a growth industry. Unresolved, however, is a key question: the number of tactical voters. Despite an election-night estimate of 17 per cent, a variety of later analysts have estimated that little more than one in twenty voters behaved tactically in 1987, a surprisingly low figure in the light of the efforts of various groups to encourage tactical voting in order to avoid fragmentation of the anti-Thatcher vote. Most recently, Heath, Curtice and Jowell, in their analysis of the British Election Study survey, report that ‘just 6.5% of major party voters indicated in their replies a tactical motivation for their vote’.

The relationship between electoral systems can be examined on a number of dimensions. Seat allocation methods are conveniently divided into two groups: those based on largest remainders and those based on highest averages. The single transferable vote has its own distinct characteristics. Focusing on certain elements – the quota, thresholds, paradoxes and the conditions under which a majority of seats can be won – enables comparisons to be drawn between seat allocation methods. Certain seat allocation methods conventionally seen as variants of proportional representation (PR) cannot be regarded as such. PR methods can be rank ordered according to whether, when complete proportionality is not attainable, they display electoral bias towards larger or smaller parties. However, a definitive ordering is elusive, since some methods that are generally more favourable to larger parties can in some circumstances set lower thresholds of representation than methods generally favourable to smaller parties.

A heated scholarly debate rages over the ‘culture wars thesis’ in American politics. Drawing on the literature on mass opinion constraint and its sources, we propose a resolution to this debate: the culture wars influence mass political behaviour in special religious, policy and political contexts where logical, psychological, social and electoral sources of opinion constraint are in effect. Using data pooled from the 1992, 1996 and 2000 American National Election Studies, we find strong support for our argument. We conclude that the cultural wars are waged by limited religious troops on narrow policy fronts under special political leadership, and a broader cultural conflagration is largely a rumour.

German unification has revived earlier scholarly debates about the nature of the German political culture and the ability of the nation to rise above its cultural heritage – now focused on the cultural inheritance from the German Democratic Republic. This article examines popular support for democratic attitudes as a prerequisite for successful political unification and the development of democracy in a unified Germany. Our evidence focuses on a study of democratic attitudes conducted in West Germany and East Germany by the Mannheim Research Unit for Societal Development in early 1990, with supplemental data from more recent surveys. We find that East Germans voice support for democratic attitudes that rivals or excels the expression of democratic norms in the West. The correlates of these opinions suggest that democratic norms in the East developed from an on-going process of counter-cultural socialization and from judgements about the relative economic strength of the Federal Republic.

Success and even survival in politics frequently depends on the ability of politicians and public officials to extricate themselves from various types of predicaments. Indeed, politicians are particularly adept at extricating themselves, with a wide range of explanations at their disposal to avoid blame for unpopular actions and decisions. However, there has been little systematic research on the effectiveness of various political blame-avoidance strategies. This Note has two purposes. First, a typology of blame-avoidance strategies, or accounts, is developed. Second, the results of an experiment examine the effectiveness of these various accounts in enhancing evaluations of a hypothetical public official are reported.

Claims regarding the power of the mass media in contemporary politics are much more frequent than research actually analysing the influence of mass media on politics. Building upon the notion of issue ownership, this article argues that the capacity of the mass media to influence the respective agendas of political parties is conditioned upon the interests of the political parties. Media attention to an issue generates attention from political parties when the issue is one that political parties have an interest in politicizing in the first place. The argument of the article is supported in a time-series study of mass media influence on the opposition parties’ agenda in Denmark over a twenty-year period.

It is widely assumed that citizens are myopic, weighing policies’ short-term consequences more heavily than long-term outcomes. Yet no study of public opinion has directly examined whether or why the timing of future policy consequences shapes citizens’ policy attitudes. This article reports the results of an experiment designed to test for the presence and mechanisms of time-discounting in the mass public. The analysis yields evidence of significant discounting of delayed policy benefits and indicates that citizens’ policy bias towards the present derives in large part from uncertainty about the long term: uncertainty about both long-run processes of policy causation and long-term political commitments. There is, in contrast, little evidence that positive time-preferences (impatience) or consumption-smoothing are significant sources of myopic policy attitudes.

Although some scholars have argued that authoritarianism is characteristic only of the right and not of the left, persuasive reasons exist for doubting this claim. Intuitive observation of left-wing and right-wing regimes as well as radical political movements of the left and right reveals striking parallels in their styles of political engagement, their reliance upon force, their disdain for democratic ideals and practices and their violations of civil liberties. In addition, systematic inquiry into the similarities and differences between far-left and far-right radicals in the United States has been hampered by various methodological difficulties. One can list, among these, such problems as the obvious inappropriateness of the F scale (owing to its strong right-wing content) as a measure for identifying left-wing authoritarians; the difficulty of obtaining adequate samples of true believers of the extreme left and right; the self-image of the American left as a persecuted minority which, for reasons of self-interest, spuriously inflates the degree of support expressed by its members for individual rights and liberties; and the exposure of both extreme camps to the liberal democratic values dominating American political culture, which unmistakably colours their political rhetoric.

We have reason to think that a similar study conducted in some – perhaps many – European countries would reveal even greater similarities between the far left and far right than we have turned up in the United States. Unlike the United States, which has enjoyed a strong liberal democratic tradition that has served to weaken and soften the intensity of its radical movements, a number of European countries, less wedded to liberal democratic principles, have developed a more vigorous, less diluted tradition of radical politics. These nations have long had to contend with powerful extremist movements actively and significantly engaged in the political struggles of their respective nations. The radical movements of Europe have been more extreme and zealous – more unequivocally revolutionary and reactionary – than the radical movements of the United States. The sustained confrontation of these extremist movements, in our view, is likely to have intensified the authoritarian propensities of each.

In the present article, through a series of surveys in which we have tried to idenify, as best we can, supporters of the far left and far right, we have systematically compared the two camps on a variety of political and psychological characteristics. We find, in keeping with the conventional view, that the far left and the far right stand at opposite end of the familiar left–right continuum on many issues of public policy, political philosophy and personal belief. They hold sharply contrasting views on questions of law and order, foreign policy, social welfare, economic equality, racial equality, women's rights, sexual freedom, patriotism, social conventions, religion, family values and orientations towards business, labour and private enterprise.

Nevertheless, while the two camps embrace different programmatic beliefs, both are deeply estranged from certain features of American society and highly critical of what they perceive as the spiritual and moral degeneration of American institutions. Both view American society as dominated by conspiratorial forces that are working to defeat their respective ideological aims.

The degree of their alienation is intensified by the zealous and unyielding manner in which they hold their beliefs. Both camps possess an inflexible psychological and political style characterized by the tendency to view social and political affairs in crude, unambiguous and stereotypical terms. They see political life as a conflict between ‘us’ and ‘them’, a struggle between good and evil played out on a battleground where compromise amounts to capitulation and the goal is total victory.

The far left and the far right also resemble each other in the way they pursue their political goals. Both are disposed to censor their opponents, to deal harshly with enemies, to sacrifice the well-being even of the innocent in order to serve a ‘higher purpose’, and to use cruel tactics if necessary to ‘persuade’ society of the wisdom of their objectives. Both tend to support (or oppose) civil liberties in a highly partisan and self-serving fashion, supporting freedom for themselves and for the groups and causes they favour while seeking to withhold it from enemies and advocates of causes they dislike.

In sum, when the views of the far left and far right are evaluated against the standard left–right ideological dimension, they can appropriately be classifled at opposite ends of the political spectrum. But when the two camps are evaluated on questions of political and psychological style, the treatment of political opponents, and the tactics that they are willing to employ to achieve their ends, the display many parallels that can rightly be labelled authoritarian.

The project on which this paper reports is aimed not only at increased understanding of the United States federal budget process, but also at predicting government expenditures in total and by bureau with a view to their determination within United States national econometric models. Estimates of likely expenditures using standard econometric techniques are poor, both in absolute terms and in comparison with our own work. Management of the economy should be improved by the use of predictors based on considering budgeting as a political process that is responsive to economic and social conditions. Use of mathematical models in the social sciences should be furthered, not by arguing their hypothetical utility, but by demonstrating that they work. The proof is in the prediction.

Comparative studies of election rules and legislative representation have focused intensively on vote–seat disproportionality as an indication of poor representation. Beginning with citizens' preferences, rather than votes, has important advantages and is especially more appropriate for a majoritarian vision of democracy. We analyse the effect of election rules on both vote–seat correspondence and median left–right correspondence in seventy elections in seventeen countries. We show theoretically the stringent conditions necessary to reduce vote–seat disproportionality in high threshold systems and empirically their high variance (and higher levels) of distortion. Although good median correspondence could be created, in theory, under a wide range of electoral systems, our empirical results suggest that proportional representation (PR) systems tend to outperform single-member district (SMD) systems by this criterion also.

This article adapts and tests the theory of enlightened preferences on two British electoral cycles: 1992–97 and 1997–2001. Using individual-level panel data, it extends previous work by explicitly incorporating the role of political knowledge. Its findings are generally very supportive of the theory. It is shown that knowledge of party platforms varies through both electoral cycles in a manner predicted by the theory; that is, it is highest immediately following election campaigns; these changes in political knowledge are closely mirrored by changes in the explanatory power of a model of party choice containing so-called ‘fundamental variables’ (i.e. socio-demographic and issue-related variables) as predictors. More specifically, fundamental variables do a much better job of accounting for party choice during election years than in mid-cycle. Finally, for all years of both panels a positive interaction is found between political knowledge and the ability of voters to match their issue preferences to party platforms.

The new British government formed in May 1979 contained a Butler, a Chalker, a Fowler and a Prior. It also, as the whole world knows, contained a Thatcher. It did not, however, contain a single Barrister, Solicitor or Journalist; nor, remarkably, did it contain anybody by the name of Politician.