In this article, the hypothesis is examined that coalition government formation in West European parliaments is systematically constrained by the existence of limits or bounds on the extent to which parliamentary parties can compromise on their policy positions. Two methods are developed by which these bounds or ‘policy horizons’, as they are termed here, can be estimated, and it is demonstrated via the analysis of hypothetical data that the methods, although imperfect, are unlikely to manufacture artefactual threshold effects. These methods are then applied to data on fourteen post-war West European parliamentary systems to show that, even when other relevant factors are controlled, the structuring effect of policy horizons can be detected in the formation of coalition governments. The article concludes with some comments on the theoretical implications of the existence of policy horizons.

Many assert that the economic problems of Africa possess political origins. In particular, they point to a lack of political accountability and argue that economic reform and the renewal of growth depend upon political reform and in particular upon the promotion of competitive electoral politics. Summarizing these arguments, this article formalizes and tests them, using both an African and global sample of data. While it finds support for the view that within Africa – and globally – competitive institutions are associated with less extractive policies, it finds no evidence that these institutions have facilitated the implementation of Washington consensus policies.

This article explores Stanley Baldwin's heresthetic in the 1920s. Faced by the rise of multidimensionality in the issue space of British politics, Baldwin sought initially to bring about a single-issue dimensionality through protection; this was defeated in the 1923 election which brought Labour to office, showing that the electoral system could deliver proportionality and perhaps sustain a three-party system. Baldwin's heresthetic was to recast the Conservative party as the only viable anti-socialist party, and attack the Liberal party as the obstacle to a single-issue dimension and polarized politics. New Conservatism was used to reposition the Conservative party on the class dimension and result was the Conservative landslide of 1924, which structured British politics for the next fifty years. Baldwin institutionalized a class-based two-party system and thereby secured Conservative hegemony.

The Hutton Report is now established as an important element of Britain's involvement in the Iraq War. In this article the ideas that underpin it are analysed. In particular, the focus is on Hutton's presuppositions concerning the nature of truth, agency, subjectivity, meaning and language. It is shown how unquestioned assumptions structured his method and shaped his conclusions. Although such presuppositions are widely shared by the public, too, a discursive conflict within the report is identified, revealing a sub-text of competing understandings that protagonists invoked. These suggest a more phenomenological and intersubjective approach to the interpretation of events. The conclusion is that Dr Kelly and the BBC were victims of a particular sense of truth and that Hutton failed to situate important actors and events within geopolitical, institutional, experiential and affective structures. The author suggests that a greater appreciation of the contingent way information enters the public domain (itself more evident in the Butler Report) is a pre-condition for better intelligence and public policy making.

Few studies of the neighbourhood effect in British voting patterns have addressed the important issue of spatial scale: at what level do these effects operate (if any), and do they operate simultaneously at more than one? Using the British Household Panel Study data, to which information on the characteristics of the population in the areas around each individual respondent's home have been added, this article finds significant differences in the propensity of individuals to vote either Conservative or Liberal Democrat rather than Labour at two neighbourhood levels as well as at the regional level.

Social trust forms a major component of current conceptions of social capital and as such has been attributed a significant role in providing the social context for the emergence and maintenance of stable, liberal democratic polities and effective economies. Its role in these processes has in turn been generalized to post-communist societies in East-Central Europe undergoing ‘dual transitions’ from authoritarian states with command economies to democratic free-market societies. In this article, however, it is shown that the relations between trust and democratization in East-Central Europe imply a rather different ‘top-down’ process, in which levels of trust reflect rather than influence the effectiveness of political and economic institutions. This calls into question the generalization of models developed in democratic societies to the post-communist context and provides the basis for an alternative understanding of the process of social capital formation.

A common feature of contemporary political systems is the increasing amount of delegation from governments to non-majoritarian institutions. Governments may decide to delegate authority to such institutions for reasons relating to credible commitments, political uncertainty and policy complexity. This article focuses on Independent Administrative Authorities (Autorités administratives indépendantes) in France. We demonstrate that these institutions enjoy varying degrees of independence. We find that the degree of independence varies as a function of two factors: the need to make a credible commitment in areas subject to market opening and the complexity of policy in particular areas.

Human rights have long been a direct or indirect substantive topic in modern political science and, in particular, the study of human rights represents an important nexus between traditional concerns within comparative politics and those in international relations. On the one hand, comparative politics has traditionally been concerned with the functions, determinants and outcomes of different political regimes, political institutions, political culture, the relationship between states and citizens (protest and repression, social mobilization and citizenship rights, voting, elections and party systems), and large social processes such as social and political revolutions, democratization and the domestic effects of and responses to globalization. On the other hand, international relations has concentrated on the inter-state dynamics of war, peace and security; international trade, finance and development; the growth and role of international organizations; the proliferation and effectiveness of international regimes and foreign policy analysis. More recently, attention has focused on the interplay between domestic and international politics in examining the ways in which domestic political arrangements may have an impact on the international behaviour of states. The now famous notion of the ‘two-level’ game has been instructive for scholars examining the constraint of democratic institutions on state behaviour, while the large literature on the ‘democratic’ and ‘Kantian’ peace has used the tools of modern political science to examine the degree to which democracy and other ‘liberal’ variables have an inhibiting effect on the likelihood of interstate violence.

The study of human rights within modern political science fits neatly into these disciplinary developments. The history of human rights is one of the increasing internationalization of an idea that has traditionally been defended nationally.