A methodology is proposed for assessing the impact of televised debates on electoral outcomes, and it is applied to a specific case, that of the 1988 Canadian election. We present four tests of the debates' impact: first, a cross-sectional group comparison, which contrasts the voting behaviour of those who did and those who did not see the debates; secondly, a panel analysis of the shift in party support, before and after the debates, among those who watched the debates and those who did not; thirdly, a panel study of the impact of reactions to the debates on voting behaviour; and, fourthly, a time-series analysis, which examines the evolution of vote intentions over the course of the campaign and, more precisely, before and after the debates.

It is argued that because non-watchers are influenced by what their friends or the media tell them about the debates, the first two designs, based on a comparison of debate watchers and non-watchers, are not appropriate. The empirical analysis of the 1988 Canadian election substantiates this point. While these first two designs seem to indicate no debate impact, panel reaction and time-series analyses show that the debates had a substantial and enduring impact on the vote and that they were decisive in the contest for second place between the Liberals and the NDP.

This article explores the properties of paradoxical voting situations in legislatures as illustrated by the decision-making process attending passage of the 1951 Electoral Reform Act in Fourth Republic France. First, conditions for demonstrating existence of a voting paradox for the case are developed and applied to data describing the voting behaviour of individual deputies. There follows an exploration of how a voting cycle over reform alternatives was overcome, focusing on the ways institutional rules and procedures structured the behaviour of parties and individual members and on the strategic manœuvring of political leaders. We conclude by relating characteristics of the case to general propositions found in the theoretical literature on the paradox of voting.

This article presents spatial models of three legislative procedures in the EC: the consultation, co-operation and assent procedures. The theory characterizes for each procedure the set of policies that can be adopted and the equilibrium EC policy as a function of the ideal policies of the countries, the Commission and the Parliament, and the location of the status quo. It yields comparative statements about EC policy and the institutions' powers under the three procedures, thus providing a framework for assessing arguments about the merits and demerits of existing EC institutions and proposals for institutional change.

Perceptions of leadership quality depend upon personality traits. With John Major as a case study, we demonstrate that the most important personality attributes are those which contribute to the belief that a leader can govern in a business-like fashion. Changes in personality traits affect the rating of a leader and ratings affect a party's electoral support. Using this approach, perceptions of John Major's personality are changed continuously to illustrate the impact on voters. A Monte Carlo simulation is introduced to allow for the likelihood that not everyone would perceive a personality change. This approach is preferable to alternatives and can explain why, on occasion, there has been dispute over the importance of party leadership in British general elections.

We argue that voters' assessments of party leaders are comparative and prospective rather than individual and retrospective. Therefore, a prospective leadership-comparison evaluation should outperform a leader-approval, retrospective indicator as a determinant of government and party popularity. Using data from 1984–92, a popularity function that includes a variety of economic and political components, and several dependent variables, we test this hypothesis by comparing the performance of a ‘best prime minister’ question and the more usual ‘approval’ questions about party leaders. We find that the former gives consistently better results than the latter.

This Note explores the candidate-endorsement process in the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) of Japan during its period of hegemony (1955–90). Even in parties without an enduring factional structure such as the LDP, nominations are often troublesome – witness, for example, the reselection controversy in Britain's Labour party at the end of the 1970s or the perennially damaging fights in American primary elections. Moreover, it is easy to understand why nomination politics is so consistently problematic: the gist of the problem is simply that different groups within a party may differ as to who should receive the party endorsement in a given district (or, in list systems, who should get the safe spots on the list). Group A naturally wants its candidate(s) endorsed (there may be more than one in multi-member districts), but so do groups B, C and D. The resulting interaction between groups can be what a game theorist would call a co-ordination, or Battle of the Sexes, game.

Secession, defined as ‘formal withdrawal from a central authority by a member unit’, has been particularly rare in democracies. In fact, there has never been a single case of secession in democracies if we consider only the well-established ones, that is, those with at least ten consecutive years of universal suffrage. The cases most often mentioned happened only a few years after the introduction or significant expansion of universal suffrage: Norway and Sweden in 1905, Iceland and Denmark in 1918, Ireland and the United Kingdom in 1922. What is more, one would hesitate before calling the first two cases real secessions, since the ties between the political entities involved were very loose at the outset. Secessionists never managed to split a well-established democracy through a referendum or an electoral victory. We must conclude that it is very hard for them to achieve and maintain the magic number of 50 per cent support. My aim is to explain why this is the case.

The introduction of a ‘one-party participatory democracy’ in Zambia in 1973 under the United National Independence Party (UNIP) of President Kenneth Kaunda made significant changes in the nature and extent of political participation, regime structure and public policy in that country. Among a number of constitutional changes, the proscription of the opposition parties – African National Congress (ANC) and United Progressive Party (UPP) – was probably the most important. There is a relatively extensive literature describing these changes and evaluating their significance. A number of further changes which affected these political variables in varying degrees occurred during the life of the one-party system, which lasted until 1991, but much less has been written about these changes, at least in part because they have been assumed to be insignificant. This Note describes the collection of a systematic events dataset on changes in electoral and political party participation (including changes in policies towards participation and changes in party structures affecting participation), regime structure (including party–government relations, central government structure and central–local government relations), and policies affecting the economy, class structure and culture in Zambia from 1973 through 1985. It then describes the use of expert judges to scale events in the dataset and evaluate their cumulative significance for dimensions of change delineated by the investigator or themselves. Finally, it presents one substantive application of this methodology: specification of the overall directions and extent of change in electoral and party participation under the one-party system. Two contradictory directions of change not so far identified in the literature on the Zambian one-party state are uncovered. It is suggested that changes in the one-party state helped to undermine its support, even among some of those Zambians who initially believed in it.