I am really grateful to Geoffrey Brahm Levey for his critical comments, which push me to try to make clear, first, why I claim that torture is not susceptible of democratic accountability in liberal democracies; secondly, where I believe the residue of deep insight in the Durkheimian argument lies; and thirdly, why I think we cannot rightly speak, or even whisper, of torture as a lesser evil.

Torture and democratic accountability. Levey argues that torture can be rendered collectively accountable and that it is not different from other cases of political dirty hands on the democratic front. It could be subject to judicial oversight, for example, by ‘torture warrants’ in the manner of Dershowitz, or by the government or relevant minister being held accountable after the fact. He adds that states do not conceal torture because it is ‘inherently anti-democratic or unpopular’; on the contrary, today it appears ‘only too popular and open to democratic endorsement’.

But I do not mean to equate democracy and popularity. Democracy is not simply majority rule; majorities can tyrannize over minorities and individuals, who need protection on democratic grounds. ‘Democracy’ names an ideal and we could either, like Schumpeter, revise the ideal in a ‘realistic’ direction or, like Dahl, while retaining the ideal as background, characterize real political systems as approximations to it, using other terms, such as ‘polyarchy’. Either way, one of the things which makes a modern state more rather than less democratic is the extent to which it incorporates institutional arrangements and mechanisms that secure a range of basic rights, protecting all, especially the most vulnerable, from arbitrary abuses of power.

President Jimmy Carter twice attempted to enact major reforms of the US welfare system. Using archival material from the Carter Presidential Library, this article argues that one major reason for the failure of both initiatives was the persistence of regional divisions between representatives from the north and south in the Congress. This factor is as germane to the welfare failure as poor presidential-congressional relations and changes to the committee seniority system in the Congress. American welfare programmes were institutionalized in such a way that, from the 1930s, building a coalition across sectional interests (as represented by members of the Congress) was nearly impossible: gains to one region constituted losses to the other. The consequence of the way Carter pursued and failed to achieve welfare reform was to enhance the priorities, particularly ‘working for welfare’, exploited by Reagan in the final year of his administration when the Family Support Act was enacted.

Local government politics, particularly in urban areas, is now dominated by the major national parties though the process and causes of the take-over are not well documented. These notes, based on research in Doncaster, relate the process of the take-over of the anti-Labour position by the Conservative party and draw some possible conclusions.

National stereotypes have an understandable attraction, but are often a snare and a delusion. There has been no lack of commentators, in recent years, to remind the French that their structures of local administration were laid down at the Revolution, and have been little changed since. Fragmented into nearly 38,000 urban and rural communes, which vary enormously in population and wealth, the country has more local authorities than the other five states of the EEC and Britain put together. Most people, on both sides of the Channel, accept the idea of reform, but we find something of a contrast when we look at what has happened in practice. President Pompidou said at Lyon on 31 October 1970:

It is some fifteen years since Dahl and his associates inaugurated the ‘issue’ approach to studying power; it is therefore somewhat surprising that two recent articles by Christopher Hewitt1 comprise the first attempt at applying this method to Britain. But over the past decade and a half Dahl's approach has come in for some severe criticisms; it is unfortunate that Hewitt does not update the method to meet some of these criticisms - indeed his articles are, in some respects, a step backwards from Dahl.

In their article, ‘Some Correlates of Regime Support in Canada’, (this Journal, VIII (1978), 199–216), Allan Kornberg, Harold D. Clarke and Lawrence LeDuc set out to describe ‘the distribution and foundations of public support for the political regime in Canada’ (p. 199). Using the 1974 National Election Study as their data base and regression analysis as their primary technique, they attempt to identify the correlates of regime support and come to grips with the problem of causal sequence.

In their article – ‘Public Welfare Provision, Scandinavia, and the Sheer Futility of the Sociological Approach to Polities’ – Castles and McKinlay claim to have demonstrated that

two factors contribute to and explain the particularly high levels of public welfare provision in Scandinavian countries [compared to other advanced, industrial democratic states]. The absence of a large right-wing party establishes the initial necessary condition that removes the primary barrier to the development of welfare provision. The historic strength and unity of the working-class movement, reflected in the dominance of social democracy, is the factor which is then responsible for the development of public welfare to its current high level.

Recent studies suggest that public policy in established democracies mainly caters to the interests of the rich and ignores the average citizen when their preferences diverge. I argue that high-income taxation has become a clear illustration of this pattern, and I test the proposition on a least likely case: Norway. I asked Norwegians to design their preferred tax rate structure and matched their answers with registry data on what people at different incomes actually pay in tax. I find that within the top 1 per cent, tax rates are far below (by as much as 23 percentage points) where citizens want them to be. A follow-up survey showed that this divergence is entirely driven by capital incomes being taxed too low. My results suggest that even in a reasonably egalitarian society like Norway, the rich get away with paying considerably less in tax than what people deem fair.

This article contributes to normative debates about residential segregation and its relationship to inequality. It defends a position often disregarded in literature: that there is merit to advancing residential integration through some scenarios where advantaged individuals move to disadvantaged areas. It develops this case in dialogue with three other views. In relation to advocates of addressing the inequalities of residential segregation through redistribution, it defends integration as a means of tackling social and political factors that sustain injustice. It challenges those who defend relocating disadvantaged individuals to advantaged areas by highlighting the burdens and demand for cultural assimilation this imposes on the disadvantaged. It considers the worry that advantaged individuals relocating to disadvantaged areas harbours the problematic features of gentrification. It responds that these concerns, while important in some cases, do not arise in all scenarios of this kind.

Wealth provides self-insurance against financial risk, reducing risk aversion. We apply this insurance mechanism to electoral behaviour, arguing that a voter who desires a change to the status quo and who is wealthy is more likely to vote for change than a voter who lacks the same self-insurance. We apply this argument to the case of Brexit in the UK, which has been widely characterized as a vote by the ‘economically left-behind’. Our results show that individuals who lacked wealth are less likely to support leaving the EU, explaining why so many Brexit voters were wealthy, in terms of their property wealth. We corroborate our theory using two panel surveys, accounting for unobserved individual-level heterogeneity, and by using a survey experiment. The findings have implications for the potential broader role of wealth-as-insurance in electoral behaviour and for understanding the Brexit case.

Who gets represented in legislatures, and how does this depend on electoral institutions? Others have asked this question from the perspective of gender, race, and class. We focus on space, asking whether MPs disproportionately come from some places rather than others and how this depends on electoral rules. Using data on over 13,000 legislators in sixty-two democracies, we developed a new measure to determine whether the spatial distribution of MP birthplaces matched the spatial distribution of the citizens they represented. Contrary to received wisdom, single-member district systems do not have more geographically representative parliaments than multi-member district systems, while mixed-member systems perform significantly better than both. We attribute the higher spatial representativeness of mixed-member systems to the contamination effects in their single-member tier. We present evidence for this explanation from a within-country analysis of elections in Italy, the UK, and Germany.