An ‘analytic narrative’ is the presentation of crucial historical events, using the intuitions of rational choice theory, to clarify the motivations and beliefs of the principal actors. This article attempts to understand a dilemma embedded in the Declaration of Independence: the expected costs of war against Britain far exceeded any possible benefits, if these are construed simply as the removal of colonial taxation. Furthermore, war against Britain necessitated an alliance with a potential aggressive power, France. An analysis is presented indicating that the benefits also included the enormous reward of the west and the ‘costs’ incorporated possible future aggression by France and Spain. The narrative is extended to the Ratification of the Constitution in 1787, to suggest that the Federalists, and Madison, justifiably feared Spanish aggression in the Mississippi Valley. In the 1790s, consensus (about credible threats by the European powers) fragmented, and this led to entirely different policy preferences by Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans. Napoleon's imperial intentions in Louisiana were, however, thwarted by the defeat of the French forces in Haiti in 1802–03. The result was the Louisiana Purchase of 1803–04.While the necessary causes of these various constitutional transformations can be appreciated, there appears to be an element of contingency, or happenstance, embedded in the sufficient causes. The purpose of the exercise is to attempt to understand the possibly chaotic basis of rapid institutional change.

What is the deliberative potential of everyday political discussion? We address this question using survey data and qualitative data collected in six communities in the United States and Britain. Our findings suggest that political discussion is infrequently public, modestly contested and sometimes marred by inequality. But the factors inhibiting more deliberative discussions – structural, cultural and motivational in nature – should be amenable to some change, particularly through education.

The absence of strategic voting in new democracies represents a potential threat to democratic consolidation because it could inhibit the development of a stable party system. Yet can we expect that citizens in new democracies have developed the skills associated with strategic voting in democratic elections? Based on evidence from Hungary, a post-communist democracy, this article suggests that citizens in new democracies respond to strategic voting situations in a fashion consistent with conventional theories of strategic voting. Analysis of Hungarian voting statistics over the past three national elections indicates that voters, consistent with strategic voting theories, vigorously penalized smaller parties thereby contributing to the rapid decline in the number of effective parties competing in Hungarian elections. We argue that strategic voting occurs in two stages: (1) recognition of a ‘wasted-vote’ situation and (2) strategic response to that situation.

Political intolerance has typically been conceptualized as an unwillingness to extend expressive rights to disliked groups or individuals. One problem with this conceptualization is that, when a given percentage of individuals in a polity is found to be intolerant, it is not known if these respondents are intolerant because of the act or because of the actor. We conceptualize intolerance multidimensionally, making a distinction between generic and discriminatory intolerance; while the former stems from an unwillingness to permit the expressive act (such as holding a rally) regardless of the actor, the latter is reserved for an unwillingness to permit the act only when performed by a noxious group. Using data from the Multi-Investigator II Study (a national telephone survey of adults in the United States), we employed a split ballot technique to decompose the total proportion of intolerant respondents into groups whose intolerance stems from an aversion to the actor (discriminatory) versus those whose intolerance stems from an aversion to the act (generic). We further explored the genesis of intolerance, finding that the two types we identified stem from different antecedents.

This article investigates the conditions which make it costly for governments to renege on institutional commitments governing monetary policy. Focusing on one such type of commitment – monetary integration – we develop and test a hypothesis which suggests that the presence of parallel international agreements plays an important role in raising the costs of exit for states which might otherwise withdraw from a monetary union. While existing political economy work on credible commitments in the area of monetary policy has had a heavy focus on countries in the European Union, we broaden the inquiry, using quantitative and qualitative evidence from the numerous African countries which have participated in monetary unions over the last forty years. Our results provide strong support for the parallel agreements hypothesis.

Why is government corruption more pervasive in some societies than in others? In this article we examine public choice explanations that attribute corruption to a lack of competition in either political or economic arenas or both. The principal part of our analysis draws on recently-published data about levels of corruption for a broad cross-section of countries reported for the early 1980s. We supplement this with an additional analysis of a second dataset on corruption measured during the late 1980s. Our analyses confirm that political competition affects level of corruption, but this effect is nonlinear. Corruption is typically lower in dictatorships than in countries that have partially democratized. But once past a threshold, democratic practices inhibit corruption. However, we obtained mixed results with respect to the relationship of economic competition and corruption: government size does not systematically affect corruption, but membership of the Oil Producing and Exporting Countries (OPEC) does. Finally, corruption is more pervasive in low-income countries which tend to underpay public sector employees.

The critics of direct democratic procedures typically presume that the bulk of the members of a present-day democratic polity fall considerably short of the ideal of a thinking, reasonable and deliberating citizen. Essentially, as Budge points out, ‘the case against direct democracy can be summed up as saying that ordinary citizens have little political sagacity or prudence, so that they will tend to make decisions hastily but also to be unreasonably attached to them’.Ian Budge, The New Challenge of Direct Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), pp. 59–61. According to the critics of direct democratic procedures, the problem is not only that citizens usually do not think and deliberate about the issues in question, the problem is above all that they lack the competence to do so in the first place. Thus Budge concludes: ‘Here is perhaps the nub of the whole argument against direct democracy: the mass of the citizens are not qualified to decide high policy, so they can be allowed to influence it only indirectly, by choosing those who are to decide rather than deciding themselves’.Budge, The New Challenge of Direct Democracy, p. 69. The point of the critics is that, as Sartori suggests, direct democracy ‘would quickly and disastrously founder on the reefs of cognitive incompetence’.Giovanni Sartori, The Theory of Democracy Revised (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers, 1987), p. 120.

In their recent article in this Journal, Alvarez and Nagler model strategic voting in the 1987 British general election using multinomial probit.R. Michael Alvarez and Jonathan Nagler, ‘A New Approach to Modelling Strategic Voting in Multiparty Elections, British Journal of Political Science, 30 (2000), 57–75. They claim to find lower levels of such voting than many other approaches. They also demonstrate purportedly that estimates of strategic voting obtained using self-reported motivations are biased by the time elapsed between the election and the point at which the self-report is obtained. In this Comment I show that these assertions are incorrect.

We are again pleased to respond to commentary on our article ‘An Empirical Theory of Rational Nominating Behaviour Applied to Japanese District Elections’, which appeared in the April 1999 issue of the Journal (pp. 259–89). Unlike an earlier comment by Gary Cox,Gary W. Cox, ‘A Comment on Browne and Patterson, “An Empirical Theory of Rational Nominating Behaviour Applied to Japanese District Elections” ’, British Journal of Political Science (1999), 565–9. See also our reply to Cox: ‘A Rejoinder to Cox's Comment on “An Empirical Theory of Rational Nominating Behaviour Applied to Japanese District Elections” ’, British Journal of Political Science, 29 (1999), 569–75. Professor Reed'sSteven R. Reed, ‘What Is Rational and Why Should We Care? A Comment on Browne and Patterson’, British Journal of Political Science, 30 (2000), 538–40. focuses upon his belief that the nominating behaviour of Japanese parties cannot be explained by a decision process based on rational calculation. Rather, he believes that Japanese nominations result from an on-going learning process based on ‘trial and error’ experimentation by party leaders. The substance of Reed's comment is that we ‘fail to address [his] learning hypothesis’ and that our interpretation of the Japanese nominating process is both theoretically implausible and empirically deficient. In the short space available to us we are not able to address all of Reed's misinterpretations of our work. Thus, we shall content ourselves here by offering some general comments on the issues he has raised.