Is the quality of democracy undermined or enhanced by party-system fragmentation? Addressing this question would help us better assess normative claims about electoral reforms. Yet, doing so is difficult because of endogeneity issues: party systems are endogenous to many other dynamics in a polity. We overcome this problem by putting forward an instrument for the number of parties in a system, based on the level of fragmentation added by parties that narrowly make it to parliament. We then test the effect of party-system fragmentation on the quality of democracy, drawing upon an extensive battery of outcomes. Against previous literature, we find that a higher number of parties leads to more fractionalized governments, but has no impact on other democratic outcomes. Subsample analyses suggest that fragmentation may have some effect in contexts of very high polarization, but we find no effect in other theoretically meaningful subsamples. Our results indicate that party-system fragmentation may have fewer normative implications than previously assumed.

There is an unresolved puzzle in research on the economics of democracy. While there is consensus that democracy is not generally associated with higher rates of economic growth, recent studies have found that democratization is followed by growth. But why should becoming a democracy bring growth if being one does not? This article shows that a substantial and immediate influx of foreign aid into new democracies accounts for the positive growth effect of democratization. The domestic regime characteristics of neither democracy nor democratization therefore seems to bring growth. The importance of aid in explaining the democratization-growth nexus underscores that democratizations do not occur in vacuum and cannot be fully understood from internal factors alone.

‘The first and perhaps most compelling attribute of the modern social structure which we inhabit’, according to James Coleman, ‘is the asymmetry of a large portion of its relations’. What is striking about modern society, however, is not the asymmetry of relations as such. Western societies have often been, and to some extent still are, highly asymmetric; think, for example, of the relations between feudal lords and their serfs, between factory owners and workers, between men and women. What is striking about the modern asymmetry is that the parties involved are completely different classes of entities, natural persons and complex organizations. Our (great) grandparents had to rely for their income, housing and the supply of goods and services mostly on independent employers, landlords, shopkeepers and artisans. We, on the other hand, are dealing with corporations, welfare institutions, public services, housing associations, building societies, banks and department stores. These organizations are not just rational, person-like servants, waiting quietly in the corners of society to be called upon. They also, and predominantly, act on their own account. Complex organizations are a new and powerful breed of social actors; they are corporate actors alongside the traditional, human actors.

Of the studies by British sociologists in the last decade focusing on the determinants of working-class attitudes to the class structure, those of Michael Mann and Anthony Giddens must, I think, be seen in retrospect as the most imaginative. While much effort at the time focused on what in the event turned out to be the rather minimal implications of the impact of certain variations in work and community milieux within Britain on workers' conceptions of class, Mann and Giddens took as their point of departure the well documented differences in the radicalism of the labour movements of different Western capitalist societies and sought to develop a theory that could account for them. Why should it be, they asked, that in countries such as France and Italy workers were sufficiently disenchanted with capitalist institutions to give relatively enduring support to parties that were at least formally committed to revolutionary objectives, while in countries such as Britain and the United States they gave their allegiances to parties that seemed largely to accept the existing structure of society?

'Party identification’ has been variously described: as an anchor; as constituting ‘psychological membership’ of, or ‘psychological identification’ with the party; and so on. The compilers of a recent collection of political attitude measures, published under the auspices of the University of Michigan's Survey Research Center (where most of the election analyses since 1952 have pivoted about the concept), even describe party identification as ‘probably the most important attitude variable in the field of political behavior’.² But the term itself and its connotations are misleading. Even where they do not suggest a borrowing from the technical vocabulary of psychoanalysisγ they tend to define away a set of questions that need to be answered: a preference for one party compared to what?; an intense preference, in what sense and compared to whom?4

In 1955 Professor H. L. A. Hart put forward the claim that ‘if there are any moral rights at all, it follows that there is at least one natural right, the equal right of all men to be free’, and this thesis and the arguments he adduces in its support have been thought sufficiently important for the article to be reprinted in a recent book of readings on political philosophy for students and general readers. The truth of Hart's thesis as stated is clearly meant to be independent of the moral stance of the asserter. Yet to my mind it is untenable as it stands, and could be modified only at the expense of taking up a particular moral position.

How should society structure income redistribution so as to correct for ineliminable inequalities in marketable talent? This article explores the strengths and weaknesses of an ‘egalitarian earnings subsidy scheme’ (ESS) in which individuals receive (or pay) a subsidy (or tax) for each pound earned based on the difference between their earnings potential and their society’s average earnings potential. ESS corrects for brute luck inequality in earnings potentials in a well-targeted fashion; implements an attractive conception of reciprocity; and, in contrast to an alternative lump-sum tax proposal, does not entail the ‘slavery of the talented’. However, any practicable version of ESS may undermine at least one other egalitarian objective – that of maintaining equality of status amongst unequally talented citizens. As a status-friendly alternative, we might try to approximate ESS through a more conventional redistribution scheme using taxes and subsidies that implicitly ‘tag’ low- and high-ability individuals. While it is difficult to draw any firm policy conclusions, it seems clear that the idea of talent-based taxes and subsidies on the model of ESS should occupy a more prominent place in our thinking about tax–benefits policy to tackle earnings inequality.

The concept of cross-cutting cleavages has provided an influential explanation of why some regions with severe ethnic divisions have been able to establish and maintain political stability, while others have experienced violent conflict. It is suggested that where a deep communal cleavage is cross-cut by other politically salient divisions, a network of overlapping group memberships is created. This generates a series of divided loyalties that reduce the internal cohesiveness of any one group and encourages greater social and political stability. In the absence of such cross pressures, cumulative, reinforcing allegiances create ‘fragmented’ political cultures where all the politically relevant sources of division lie parallel, where group loyalty is paramount and where intercommunal hostility is the norm.

Most explanations of variations in electoral support for the National Front involve some consideration of the importance of resentment and fear of coloured people among whites, the level of which is conditional upon the local incidence of coloured populations. Some writers, notably Harrop and Zimmerman and Whiteley, have suggested that National Front support, in so far as it can be explained by white ‘backlash’, may be considered as directly related to the relative size of the coloured population in different locales. Their argument is that, the higher the proportion of the population which is coloured, the greater the extent that their presence will be resented, and the higher the level of National Front support. Other commentators have advanced a rather different interpretation. Although agreeing that the National Front will do worst in areas with small or non-existent coloured populations, they argue that the party might do better in areas with moderate-sized coloured populations than in those with large ones. The existence of a moderate-sized coloured population, it is held, indicates that the area is ‘vulnerable’ to further migration or immigration, particularly where there are large coloured communities in neighbouring areas, and that whites may express their ‘exaggerated fears of the likely effects of immigrants moving in’ by supporting the National Front. These fears are regarded as being more important in mobilizing National Front support than the actuality of living in an area with a very large coloured population.

In the ten years or so since the publication of Hyman's seminal work, 1 students of politics have given increasing attention to political socialization. There has been a proliferation of works utilizing the concept. 2 The notion of socialization has perhaps been most rigorously applied in studies of the development of the political attitudes of children and adolescents, 3 but it has also been employed, if rather more loosely, in the study of adult electors. 4 There is, however, a dearth of material relating to the socialization of party activists at local level. This is not to say that the social and political background and the recruitment patterns of party activists have not been investigated, 5 but the concept of political socialization has not been explicitly or very rigorously employed. The importance of local party organizations and their memberships has not always been self-evident to students of politics and we do not propose to argue the point here. We merely assert that British parties and British politics derive much of their ‘style’ from the character of party activists. This being the case, we feel that the relative lack of information about the socialization of activists represents a considerable gap.

I have argued two points. Firstly, Skocpol has confused peasant autonomy and peasantstate alliances. The relationship between autonomy and revolt is spurious. Secondly, peasant solidarity is neither a necessary nor a sufficient cause of peasant revolt. It is not necessary because revolt concentrated in a specific niche in a peasant community cannot be attributed to peasant solidarity. Nor is solidarity sufficient, because it has effects only in communities with relatively high skill levels. When solidarity does have independent social effects, it is as a community norm and tends to be associated with a sort of revolt that is not intended to change the lord—peasant relationship.

In spite of all the research stimulated by the English and Scottish Royal Commissions on Local Government, we still have no clear idea of why people go into local politics, or of what sorts of people become local councillors. A recent study of Glasgow politics threw some light on these questions.1 One of the things it did was to draw attention to the central importance of the political party. Both Royal Commissions ignored the part played by parties, despite the fact that in virtually every large town in Britain the council is dominated by parties.2 One of the major functions the parties perform is the recruitment of candidates and councillors. Indeed, in connection with recruitment the parties are almost the only active agencies.

How do politicians use moral appeals in their rhetoric? Previous research suggests that morality plays an important role in elite communication and that the endorsement of specific values varies systematically across the ideological spectrum. We argue that this view is incomplete since it only focuses on whether certain values are endorsed and not how they are contextualized by politicians. Using a novel sentence embedding approach, we show that although liberal and conservative politicians use the same moral terms, they attach diverging meanings to these values. Accordingly, the politics of morality is not about the promotion of specific moral values per se but, rather, a competition over their respective meaning. Our results highlight that simple dictionary-based methods to measure moral rhetoric may be insufficient since they fail to account for the semantic contexts in which words are used and, therefore, risk overlooking important features of political communication and party competition.

As Jon Elster remarked in an earlier review, G. A. Cohen's Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence ‘sets a new standard for Marxist philosophy’. In one way, the praise is too faint. Existing paradigms of continental Marxist philosophy are marred by an absence of careful definition, clear and precise argumentation, and the sort of sustained discussion that is committed to the teasing out of the intellectual difficulties of the author's own position – in short, marred by an absence of those virtues in the attainment of which the philosophy practised in Britain, the United States, and the Scandinavian countries on the whole excels. Cohen would, presumably, agree that this has nothing intrinsically to do with Marx, or Marxism, but in the main arises from the fortuitous coupling of Marxism with continental philosophical fashions. If this sounds like some sort of cultural chauvinism, it also happens to be the truth. So the ‘new’ standards for Marxist philosophy, then, are only the same standards by which it is right to judge all philosophy, wherever it is written, and which any philosophy must pass in order to be accounted good. What is perhaps less faint praise of Cohen is to say that his book is good philosophy (without the qualifying adjective ‘Marxist’). It is an ingenious and imaginative volume, in which precision and detailed attention to argument count for everything.

The ‘October Revolution’ gave Russia a new political elite, manifesting very limited continuity with the elite that preceded it. This article has focused on the characteristics of this elite not at the top leadership level but at the level of the few hundred who were most significantly politically at the national stage and the few thousand who were most significant politically in the provinces. The data show that the Revolution dramatically widened access to the political elite for the following overlapping categories of the population, whose access had been limited or minimal before 1917:

(a) members of revolutionary parties;

(b) very young adults;

(c) persons drawn from lower social strata, notably workers and peasants;

(d) the poorly-educated;

(e) non-Russians;

(f) women.

Anxiety about the conditions that promote stable, democratic political relations in the developing countries has been a major preoccupation of both politicians and academics for over a generation now. One manifestation of this concern is the emergence of a new field of inquiry — the study of development — in the social sciences. The conditions most often put forward for political democracy fall into two general and by no means unrelated categories — cultural institutions, or values, and economic development. Political sociologists generally focus on one category or the other. Some, like Harry Eckstein and S. M. Lipset, concentrate mainly on cultural variables, the ‘patterns of integration’ supposedly conducive to the development and maintenance of democratic or authoritarian polities. Those who focus upon economic growth seem to fall into two groups. One school of thought, well represented by Daniel Lerner, emphasizes that democracy, as we understand it, is the end product of the modernization process; and the implicit assumption is that it is the inevitable end product of this process. The other trend in modernization thought, represented most notably by Professor Barrington Moore, argues that political democracy is the result of only a certain type of modernization — namely, the Anglo-American bourgeois variety.

What should major parties out of power do to win elections? To answer that question, we need to understand what these parties do to recapture political ascendancy and whether their actual behaviour differs from their optimal behaviour. In this article, we propose a systematic, replicable method of identifying the competitive strategies that American parties out of power have adopted in their pursuit of the presidency. We present a taxonomy of party strategies, which we operationalize by comparison of utility functions for hypothetical voters. Using both directional and proximity models of issue voting, we compute these utility functions for each presidential election from 1852 to 1996, controlling for variables that systematically affect voting, including economic conditions and incumbency. These results suggest that, contrary to the views of many political scientists and party activists, there is no single optimal strategy through which parties out of power can regain it. Rather, several competitive strategies offer similar prospects for electoral success.

So-called ‘general theory’, or ‘systems theory’, is now nearly friendless among political scientists. The charm it once held as an ordering framework for empirical research has given way to that of the economic models of the rational choice school. While the successor paradigm was self-consciously reacting against the ‘over-socialized’ conception of man underlying systems theory and political sociology in general, much of its broader appeal was founded on similar claims: the promise of a testable, empirical theory, and an aspiration to complete generality. Perhaps these two goals will turn out to be irreconcilable; there is some plausibility in the view that, in practical affairs anyway, the idea of a general empirical theory is a contradiction in terms. In this article, however, I wish to examine a problem for systems theory which is not due to this tension, one which has gone unnoticed, and which has survived the decline and fall of the research programme.

Liberals have regularly associated tradition with constraint. They have spoken of the ‘force’ of tradition or of the ‘despotism’ of custom. Locke drew a contrast between those who let themselves be guided by ‘traditional customs and the fashion of the country’ and those who use their liberty to think for themselves. For John Stuart Mill ‘the love of liberty’ was antagonistic to ‘the sway of Custom’. Tradition and custom are represented by liberals in much the way Machiavelli represented fortuna, as forces which, unless repulsed by independent, free-thinking persons, would inevitably dominate whole societies and epochs. Mill held up China as the warning example. Custom had there become the court of ultimate appeal, the standard of justice, the argument which none could contemplate resisting. Custom had annihilated individuality and with it liberty, along with genuine history. The consequence was ‘stationariness’. Unless the modern pressure of opinion was resisted Europe would become another China. The chief interest of the history of mankind, Mill declared, was the contest between custom and the progressive principle. A free society is in liberal terms an open society.

In this Note, I comment briefly on Browne and Patterson's interesting article on rational nominating behaviour in Japan. Their empirical results appear sound. Where I differ is mostly in how to interpret them.

Browne and Patterson frame their article as providing ‘a critical empirical test of the proposition that the nominating behaviour of Japanese parties is based on rational calculation’. Presumably Browne and Patterson did not mean to claim that they were testing the rationality assumption, as such a thing would be problematic from the usual Lakatosian view of social science. Instead, what they are really aiming at are previous studies that either directly impugn the ability of Japanese nominators to deduce and implement optimal seat-maximizing solutions to the nomination problems posed by Japan's former electoral system or that report ‘error rates’ that appear to them to call into question whether the nominators' main goal really could have been seat maximization.