Samuel Huntington's ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis has sparked considerable debate. Huntington argues that post-Cold War conflicts will revolve primarily around civilizations. This article uses the Minorities at Risk dataset to provide a quantitative element to the civilizations debate, which, thus far, has been based mostly on anecdotal arguments. The article focuses on whether there has been a rise in both the quantity and intensity of ethnic conflicts between groups belonging to different civilizations since the end of the Cold War. Overall, the analysis reveals several problems with Huntington's argument. First, Huntington's classification of civilizations is difficult to operationalize. Secondly, civilizational conflicts constitute a minority of ethnic conflicts. Thirdly, conflicts between the West and both the Sinic/Confucian and Islamic civilizations, which Huntington predicts will be the major conflicts in the post-Cold War era, constitute a small minority of civilizational conflicts. Finally, there is no statistically significant evidence that the intensity of civilizational ethnic conflicts have risen relative to other types of ethnic conflicts since the end of the Cold War.

Outsiders are familiar figures in literature but feature scarcely at all in political analysis. This is despite the fact that some of the most significant political leaders of recent decades have been outsiders, including Britain's Margaret Thatcher. She was certainly a social outsider. She was almost certainly a psychological outsider. Not least, she chose to operate politically as an outsider. Her career points to both the strengths and the weaknesses of the role of the outsider as political leader.

This article presents the results of the first Deliberative Poll, in which a national British sample discussed the issue of rising crime and what to do about it. We describe Deliberative Polling and its rationale, the representativeness of the deliberative sample, the extent to which the participants acquired factual information about the issue and about politics generally, and how much and how they changed their views. We also weigh the extent to which such changes of view hinge on small group influences versus information gains.

In French election studies, a central debate concerns the French voter's ‘standing decision’ – is it party or ideology? The debate has been ongoing because of data and measurement issues and, we add, because of an inadequate understanding of the role electoral institutions play. The 1995 French National Election Study allows a fresh attack on these questions. It contains promising party and ideology measures, on a very large national sample. Both party identification and left–right ideological identification are shown to be widely held, with the latter more so. Their relative structural effects are found to depend heavily on the dynamics of the dual ballot. Party is more important for electoral choice on the first ballot, while ideology is more important on the second. This finding, demonstrated in fully specified logistic regression models of the presidential vote, seems also to inhere in the logic of French electoral institutions. The two-ballot rules, coupled with the pervasiveness of ideological and party identification in the public mind, go far towards revealing and explaining an underlying stability of the French political system.

The existing literature on economic voting concentrates on egocentric and sociotropic evaluations of short-term economic performance. Scant attention is paid to other economic concerns people may have. In a neo-liberal economy characterized by global economic competition and a down-sized labour market, one widely-publicized economic concern – and one whose consequences political scientists have largely ignored – is job insecurity. Data from a survey conducted after the 1996 US presidential election show that job insecurity is a novel form of economic discontent that is distinctive in its origins and electoral impact from retrospective evaluations of short-term economic performance. In a multinomial probit model of electoral choice, performance measures offer little explanation of the Perot vote, but sociotropic job insecurity helps to explain why Americans rejected both major-party candidates, as well as abstention, in favour of the third-party alternative, Ross Perot.

AN INTELLECTUAL ODYSSEY

[L]egislative strategy, which most writers have treated as a mystical art … , may on examination by this [social choice] theory turn out to be a science with quite coherent rules.W. Riker, ‘Voting and the Summation of Preferences: An Interpretive Bibliographical Review of Selected Developments During the Last Decade’, American Political Science Review, 55 (1961), 900–11, quoted at p. 911.

At the most general level there are the things people talk about as possible subjects for group decision. Call this the feasible set. From this misty swamp, politicians – by constitutional restrictions and direction and by rhetorical and heresthetical maneuvers – form the set of considered issues.William H. Riker, Agenda Formation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), p. 2.