This Note looks afresh at the question of turnout in British general elections, using data gathered in the 1987 British General Election Study, together with information on the electoral behaviour of the sample, collected independently of the BGES survey. The official rate of turnout for Great Britain in 1987 (the number of votes cast over the number of entries on the electoral register) was around 75 per cent; that is to say, according to official figures, about one in four registered electors did not vote. In common with earlier surveys, the BGES indicates a much higher turnout figure than the official one; 86 per cent of respondents to the survey reported that they had voted.

Quantitative comparative social scientists have long worried about the performance of multilevel models when the number of upper-level units is small. Adding to these concerns, an influential Monte Carlo study by Stegmueller (2013) suggests that standard maximum-likelihood (ML) methods yield biased point estimates and severely anti-conservative inference with few upper-level units. In this article, the authors seek to rectify this negative assessment. First, they show that ML estimators of coefficients are unbiased in linear multilevel models. The apparent bias in coefficient estimates found by Stegmueller can be attributed to Monte Carlo Error and a flaw in the design of his simulation study. Secondly, they demonstrate how inferential problems can be overcome by using restricted ML estimators for variance parameters and a t-distribution with appropriate degrees of freedom for statistical inference. Thus, accurate multilevel analysis is possible within the framework that most practitioners are familiar with, even if there are only a few upper-level units.

The theory of delegation developed by Epstein and O'Halloran for the US federal system is used here to generate original hypotheses on the politics of delegation in the European Community (EC). It is argued that two institutional features of the Community, namely the decision rules of the Council of Ministers and the possibility of relying on both the Commission and the member states for policy implementation are at the core of the choices of delegation of EC legislators. Using an original dataset of 158 major EC legislative acts, it is demonstrated that the Council delegates greater policy authority to national institutions if legislation is adopted unanimously or in issue areas that require specialized and technical knowledge, while it relies to a greater extent on the Commission when acts are adopted by qualified majority voting or require general managerial skills at the supranational level.

Results also show that national administrators are the main providers of policy expertise, while the informational role of the Commission appears to be secondary, though not negligible. Finally, these findings qualify propositions on the relation between veto players and bureaucratic autonomy and on that between conflict within the legislature and delegation outcomes.

This article forms part of a longer-term project dealing with the impact of public choice theories in political science. The focus here is on economic models of bureaucracy, which despite their increasing theoretical significance and influence on practical politics have heretofore been little analysed, except by their exponents. I have argued elsewhere that amongst existing public choice accounts there are two seminal works, Antony Downs's pluralist treatment in Inside Bureaucracy and William Niskanen's new right thesis in Bureaucracy and Representative Government. The central innovation of economic approaches is their stress on rational officials' attachment to budget maximization strategies. In Downs's case this is a finite maximand limited by bureaucrats' conservatism and other motivations. But in Niskanen's case budget maximization is an open-ended process, constrained only by external limits on agencies' abilities to push up their budgets. None the less, despite their disparate approaches and conclusions, both these books share four failings common to almost all other public choice work in the field:

(1) They operate with vague and ill-defined definitions of bureaucrats' utility functions.

(2) They assume that all bureaucracies are hierarchical line agencies.

This article analyzes the political origins of differences in adherence to the fiscal framework of the European Union (EU). It shows how incentives to use fiscal policy for electoral purposes and limited budget transparency at the national level, combined with the need to respond to fiscal rules at the supranational level, interact to systematically undermine the Economic and Monetary Union through the employment of fiscal gimmicks or creative accounting. It also explains in detail how national accounts were manipulated to produce electoral cycles that were under the radar of the EU budget surveillance system, and concludes with new perspectives on the changes to (and challenges for) euro area fiscal rules.

Can there really be much doubt who governs our complex modern societies? Public bureaucracies, staffed largely by permanent civil servants, are responsible for the vast majority of policy initiatives taken by governments. Discretion, not merely for deciding individual cases, but for crafting the content of most legislation has passed from the legislature to the executive. Bureaucrats, monopolizing as they do much of the available information about the shortcomings of existing policies, as well as much of the technical expertise necessary to design practical alternatives, have gained a predominant influence over the evolution of the agenda for decision. Elected executives everywhere are outnumbered and outlasted by career civil servants. 1 In a literal sense, the modern political system is essentially ‘bureaucratic’ – characterized by ‘the rule of officials’.

Employing data from three surveys of mass opinion conducted in Lithuania, Ukraine and European Russia during 1990, 1991 and 1992, we examine three prominent but competing hypotheses about the source of political values in the post-Soviet societies: historically derived political culture, regime indoctrination and the effects of societal modernization. The literature on Soviet political culture argues that Russian mass values are distinguished by authoritarianism and love of order, values which will be largely shared by Ukrainians, especially East Ukrainians, whereas Lithuanian society would not evince this pattern. Our data do not support this hypothesis. We then examine acceptance of Soviet era norms, both political and economic. We do not find support for the argument that regime indoctrination during the Soviet period produced a set of ideologically derived values throughout the former Soviet Union and across a series of generations. The third hypothesis – that industrialization, urbanization, war and changing educational opportunities shaped the formative experiences of succeeding generations in the Soviet societies and, therefore, their citizens' values – receives the most support: in each of the three societies, differences in political values across age groups, places of residence and levels of education are noteworthy. The variations in political values we find across demographic groupings help us to understand the level of pro-democratic values in each society. We find that in Russia and Ukraine more support for democracy can be found among urban, better educated respondents than among other groups. In Lithuania, the urban and better educated respondents evince pro-democratic values at about the same level as their counterparts in Russia and Ukraine, but Lithuanian farmers and blue-collar workers support democracy at a level closer to urban, white-collar Lithuanians than to their Russian and Ukrainian counterparts. In all three societies, those citizens most likely to hold values supportive of democracy are those who are less favourable to Soviet-era values and less convinced of the primacy of the need for social and political ‘order’. Those who desire strong leadership, however, tend to have more democratic values, not more authoritarian ones.

The analyses presented in this note have extended earlier work on tactical voting in Great Britain by looking at variations between constituencies in the flow-of-the-vote matrix that are consistent with hypotheses of tactical voting. They have suggested that about 4 per cent of the British electorate voted tactically in 1983, as did nearly 6 per cent in 1987. The volume of tactical voting was greater in Conservative-held than in Labour-held seats, and in both was greater the more marginal the seat. In general, the opposition party with the greatest chance of unseating the incumbent, as suggested by the result of the previous election, gained from the tactical voting process, and there is evidence that greater campaign effort, as indexed by constituency spending, helped them in this.

Theories of inter-group threat hold that local concentrations of immigrants produce resource competition and anti-immigrant attitudes. Variants of these theories are commonly applied to Britain and the United States. Yet the empirical tests have been inconsistent. This paper analyses geo-coded surveys from both countries to identify when residents’ attitudes are influenced by living near immigrant communities. Pew surveys from the United States and the 2005 British Election Study illustrate how local contextual effects hinge on national politics. Contextual effects appear primarily when immigration is a nationally salient issue, which explains why past research has not always found a threat. Seemingly local disputes have national catalysts. The paper also demonstrates how panel data can reduce selection biases that plague research on local contextual effects.

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.

This article examines the impact of values on a key phenomenon of modern politics: non-violent protest. Previous studies have examined only the individual-level effects of values. Studying in addition the ‘ecological’ effects – how the social prevalence of values affects protest – generates new insights. Focusing on ‘emancipative values’, two ecological effects are shown: (1) the prevalence of emancipative values lifts people's protest above the level that their own emancipative values suggest (elevator effect); (2) the prevalence of these values enhances the impact of people's own emancipative values on protest (amplifier effect). We conclude that examining values in models of protest (and possibly of other activities), not only as individual attributes but also as ecological properties, gives ‘culture’ its full weight in explaining behaviour.

Using data from a randomized field experiment within a Deliberative Poll, this paper examines deliberation’s effects on both policy attitudes and the extent to which ordinal rankings of policy options approach single-peakedness (a help in avoiding cyclical majorities). The setting was New Haven, Connecticut, and its surrounding towns; the issues were airport expansion and revenue sharing – the former highly salient, the latter not at all. Half the participants deliberated revenue sharing, then the airport; the other half the reverse. This split-half design helps distinguish the effects of the formal on-site deliberations from those of other aspects of the treatment. As expected, the highly salient airport issue saw only a slight effect, while much less salient revenue-sharing issue saw a much larger one.

Do party manifestos matter to government policy? Does a genuine party mandate operate within the British political process? These questions are generally neglected in analyses of British politics, but they are crucial in assessing how far political parties transmit electoral preferences into government action. We try to answer them through a novel use of available data, using content analysis to code and classify policy emphases within the post-war election programmes of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal parties. Statistical analysis reveals that government party programmes are remarkably well reflected in post-election policy priorities, measured as percentages of central government spending in major policy areas. This gives strong support to traditional mandate theory within the context of the ‘Westminster model’ of party government. Anomalies, such as a strong relationship between Liberal emphases and expenditures in three key areas, and the more consistent relationship of expenditures with Conservative rather than Labour priorities, are also considered.

This study evaluates the extent of party-system extremism in thirty-one electoral democracies as a function of electoral-system proportionality. It uses data from the Comparative Studies of Electoral Systems project to estimate the extent of party-system compactness or dispersion across polities and to determine whether more proportional systems foster greater ideological divergence among parties. Electoral system characteristics most associated with party-system compactness in the ideological space are investigated. The empirics show that more proportional systems support greater ideological dispersion, while less proportional systems encourage parties to cluster nearer the centre of the electoral space. This finding is maintained in several sub-samples of national elections and does not depend on the inclusion of highly majoritarian systems (such as the United Kingdom).

This article analyses the relationship between the representatives and the represented by comparing elite and mass attitudes to gender equality and women’s representation in Britain. In so doing, the authors take up arguments in the recent theoretical literature on representation that question the value of empirical research of Pitkin’s distinction between substantive and descriptive representation. They argue that if men and women have different attitudes at the mass level, which are reproduced amongst political elites, then the numerical under-representation of women may have negative implications for women’s substantive representation. The analysis is conducted on the British Election Study (BES) and the British Representation Study (BRS) series.

The ‘environment’ as a political issue has had a mixed history. Its sudden upsurge in the late 1960s was followed by many ups and downs. It has, however, continued to press itself on to the political agenda in various forms. Most recently, the rise of green parties in Western Europe has demonstrated that the environment is not one of many issues which come and go but has led to more fundamental political change.

Since 1990, the number of preferential trade agreements has increased rapidly. The argument in this article explains this phenomenon, known as the new regionalism, as a result of competition for market access; exporters facing trade diversion because of their exclusion from a preferential trade agreement concluded by foreign countries push their governments into signing an agreement with the country in which their exports are threatened. The argument is tested in a quantitative analysis of the proliferation of preferential trade agreements among 167 countries between 1990 and 2007. The finding that competition for market access is a major driving force of the new regionalism is a contribution to the literature on regionalism and to broader debates about global economic regulation.

Political participation has long been a puzzle for political science analysis. The logic of collective action suggests that activity to achieve collective goals is irrational; yet citizens are active. In this article, we approach the subject from the point of view of political activists, using survey data to consider their own interpretations of why they took part. The data show that participants recall many gratifications from their activity and that the patterns differ substantially across modes of participation. These rewards tend to be ‘political’ in that activists cite both civic gratifications and the desire to achieve collective goals more frequently than would be expected on the basis of rational choice approaches. The variations among acts with respect to the nature of the retrospective interpretations of the rewards they provide – in conjunction with open-ended responses about the issues behind activity – lend credence to respondents' accounts. The results call into question the applicability of narrow rational choice approaches to political activity.