This article examines critically an explanation, first propounded by Austin Ranney, as to the causes of party reform in the United States. Ranney argued that there is an ambivalent attitude to parties in the United States; while there is evidence of popular support for parties, the political culture is also infused by anti-party values. Periodically this has facilitated the enactment of legislation, promoted by anti-party reformers, constraining parties. Focusing on the Australian Ballot, the article argues that its rapid adoption in the United States resulted from its seeming to solve problems facing party elites in the 1880s – problems that arose from the erosion of a face-to-face society. Despite opposition from anti-party reformers, parties in most states legislated for types of ballot that preserved party control of the electorate. Moreover, during the Progressive era the parties generally continued to preserve a type of ballot that favoured them. The ability of parties to defend their interests against anti-party reformers was possible when it was clear where those interests lay. With other reforms, including the direct primary, this was much less evident, and it was then far more difficult for the parties to defend themselves.

This article asks why some ethnically distinct regions fight fiercely to secede while others struggle to save the same multinational state. It tests competing explanations using a new dataset containing forty-five cases, significantly more than any previous study in the Soviet setting. The empirical results confirm arguments that the most separatist regions tend to be those possessing the most wealth, containing the least assimilated ethnic groups and already enjoying the greatest levels of autonomy. Demonstration effects are also found to be powerful. No support is found for prominent theories pointing to group upward mobility and ‘skill sets’ as being decisive. Group histories of grievous exploitation or national independence are found not to explain patterns of secessionism.

Whether citizens vote strategically, using their votes to defeat their least-preferred candidate, or vote sincerely, voting for their first choice among the alternatives, is a question of longstanding interest. We offer two innovations in searching for the answer to this question. First, we begin with a more consistent model of sincere voting in multiparty democratic systems than has been presented in the literature to date. Secondly, we incorporate a new operationalization of the objective potential for strategic behaviour. We offer a test of strategic voting in the 1987 British general election based on the variance in strategic setting across constituencies in Britain. We allow voters to use available information about the relative standings of parties in their constituency in deciding whether or not to cast a strategic vote. We estimate a lower level of strategic voting than many other methods have estimated. We also demonstrate that the use of self-reported vote motivation causes errors in estimating the amount of strategic voting, and that this problem is exacerbated the further from the election the self-report is obtained.

This article seeks to show that the rights which protect people's autonomy should be entrenched in the constitution of a democratic state. It is firmly located in egalitarian liberal tradition, as it takes for valid the following claims: (1) people have a fundamental interest in autonomy; (2) people have rights that their interest in autonomy, and the interests to which it gives rise, be protected and promoted; (3) people's respective interests in autonomy must be protected equally. The argument for a bill of rights unfolds as follows: first, it is argued that we have autonomy-protecting rights not only against private individuals but also against the state, and the meaning of having such rights against the state is explained; then it is shown that it is legitimate to turn certain autonomy-protecting moral rights into legal rights, and that doing so in the case of the rights we have against the state amounts to turning them into constitutional rights; lastly, two objections to the argument deployed earlier are countered.

Data from Great Britain and the United States from the late 1950s to the early 1990s show relatively little change in the frequency with which citizens engage in political discussions, with whom they are likely to speak, and the variables that shape their propensity to engage in political talk. In addition, analyses of the data show that discussing politics enhances citizens' knowledge of public affairs, even net of other variables known to affect political knowledge. Students of political behaviour and those interested in strengthening democracy need to treat political discussions as an important form of political participation.

China's remarkable business expansion abroad since the mid-1980s cannot be explained simply by applying existing theories, which focus on conventional international businesses from capitalist systems. Many puzzling phenomena in Chinese investments abroad become intelligible only when we introduce a key variable–illicit privatization through internationalization. So far only advantageously-placed nomenklatura members and their kin have had access to crossborder ownership, but many of them are accumulating sizeable private wealth at the cost of nationalized property. Contrary to an impression held by many in the West, the Chinese economy under Communist rule experiences spontaneous privatization parallel to what has happened in European postcommunist nations–though with a few Chinese characteristics. An examination of informal privatization in China's multinationals adds a new dimension to our understanding of the shift from state socialism to market capitalism.

This study examines attitudes about the economy under conditions of system change. We argue that citizens in new market economics are relative novices with regard to understanding the new economic environment at the beginning of the transition phase, but that they accumulate experience as time passes. We develop and test two hypotheses: (1) we expect that, over time, economic perceptions more closely track objective economic performance; (2) as a corollary, we hypothesize that, over time, economic policy priorities of citizens in a new market economy more closely track objective economic performance. Time-series data of objective economic indicators and public opinion collected in East Germany between 1991 and 1995 are analysed using regression analyses and tests of structural change in parameters. We find that East Germans' economic perceptions correspond to actual economic trends as they develop experience with the political-economic system. The implications of our findings for research on the relationship between the economy and political support in societies in transition are discussed.

In recent years the study of divided government has been a growth industry. Numerous scholars have sought to explain patterns of divided government in the United States, while others have attempted to explore the consequences of the phenomenon. No doubt this scholarly interest in the subject is due in large part to the attention paid by the political media to divided control of the presidency and Congress during the 1980s, as well as the resulting ’gridlock‘ that dominated policy making in Washington during that time period.