Mitigating climate change requires countries to provide a global public good. This means that the domestic cleavages underlying mass attitudes toward international climate policy are a central determinant of its provision. We argue that the industry-specific costs of emission abatement and internalized social norms help explain support for climate policy. To evaluate our predictions we develop novel measures of industry-specific interests by cross-referencing individuals’ sectors of employment and objective industry-level pollution data and employing quasi-behavioral measures of social norms in combination with both correlational and conjoint-experimental data. We find that individuals working in pollutive industries are 7 percentage points less likely to support climate co-operation than individuals employed in cleaner sectors. Our results also suggest that reciprocal and altruistic individuals are about 10 percentage points more supportive of global climate policy. These findings indicate that both interests and norms function as complementary explanations that improve our understanding of individual policy preferences.

Both academics and journalists have given increasing attention to the rising importance of prime ministers – a phenomenon often referred to ‘presidentialization’. Although many commentators use the term differently, and the term blurs the line between the very different institutional contexts of a parliamentary and presidential system, one careful definition of the term is ‘the movement over time away from collective to personalized government, movement away from a pattern of governmental and electoral politics dominated by the political party towards one where the party leader becomes a more autonomous political force.’

This phenomenon has been observed primarily in Britain and in West European parliamentary democracies – no one has ever described the Japanese parliamentary system as even remotely ‘presidentialized’. In fact, the Japanese prime minister has not been the subject of much academic research, and even the Japanese press often used to ignore the prime minister. Despite being the leader of a majority party in a centralized political system, the Japanese prime minister was almost universally described as weak and uninteresting, with both academic and popular discourse focusing on the powerful bureaucracy and factional politics within the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). However, recent political changes, most prominently the selection and popularity of Junichirō Koizumi as Japan's prime minister in the spring of 2001, have led to a surge of interest in the prime minister.

Partisan bias and hostility have increased substantially over the last few decades in the American electorate, and previous work shows that partisan strength and sorting help drive this trend. Drawing on insights from moral psychology, however, we posit that partisan moral convictions heighten affective polarization beyond the effects of partisanship, increasing partisan animosity and copartisan favoritism. Testing this theory using data from two national samples and novel measures of affective polarization in everyday life, we find that people who tend to moralize politics display more partisan bias, distance and hostility, irrespective of partisan strength. These results shed light on a different moral divide that separates the American public and raise key normative questions about moral conviction and electoral politics.

Hall's interesting article contains the bold, but undeveloped, argument that ‘social capital has been sustained in Britain largely by virtue of the increasing participation of women in the community’. Hall's statement draws attention to the curious silence within the social capital debate about gender dynamics. Hall modestly notes that his analysis of social capital in Britain raises more questions than it resolves. The purpose of this Comment is to clarify these questions as they relate to women and social capital. The objective is not simply to ‘add women and stir’. Rather, a consideration of gender dynamics illuminates key controversies within the wider social capital debate. Peter Hall, ‘Social Capital in Britain', British Journal of Political Science, 29 (1999), 417–61Virginia Sapiro, ‘Feminist Studies and Political Science – and Vice Versa’, in Anne Phillips, ed., Feminism and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 67–89, at p. 67.

Coalition theory has a distinguished tradition in comparative politics. Beginning with William Riker's The Theory of Political Coalitions,William H. Riker, The Theory of Political Coalitions (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962). comparativists have made considerable theoretical and empirical progress in understanding the complexities of coalition politics, most significantly with respect to government formation and termination.

For years, scholars and pundits have blamed Japan's single, non-transferable vote (SNTV) electoral system for the factions that divide and organize the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). In January 1994, Japan abandoned SNTV, and the first election under the new rules occurred in October 1996. If SNTV did in fact sustain the factions, it makes sense that the factional structure ought to have weakened under the new rules. In this article, we provide an informal model of what the old factional exchange between leaders and followers was like and investigate the extent to which the terms of this exchange, and hence the characteristics of Japanese factionalism, have begun to change under the new rules. We expect and find the largest decline in factional leaders' role in the area of nominations, and the slightest changes, at least in the short run, in the allocation of posts. On the other side of the exchange, we find that followers appear less willing to march to their leaders' tunes in LDP presidential elections.

A unidimensional spatial model of multiparty parliamentary elections under proportional representation is presented, in which parties project that the median parliamentary party will implement its policy position. The parties are assumed to be uncertain about the electoral impact of valence issues relating to party elites’ images of competence, integrity and charisma. The assumptions of the model, highlighting the importance of the median party in parliament, are consistent with empirical work by McDonald and Budge. Under them, the existence of a Nash equilibrium under quite general concavity conditions is proved and it is shown that parties will moderate their positions when their valence images deteriorate. Computations of party equilibria are reported. The model and its implications for policy-seeking parties with results on vote-seeking parties can be contrasted with that recently reported by Schofield and Sened.

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 new model of government formation is elaborated and developed to allow consideration of politics within political parties. The impact of coalition bargaining on intraparty politics is considered, as well as the impact of intraparty politics on coalition bargaining. Different intraparty decision-making regimes are shown to affect coalition outcomes. Finally, the potential impact of anticipated coalition bargaining on the choice of decision-making regime within a party is explored.

This article explores the politics of attention in Britain from 1940 to 2005. It uses the Speech from the Throne (the King’s or Queen’s Speech) at the state opening of each session of parliament as a measure of the government’s priorities, which is coded according to topic as categorized by the Policy Agendas framework. The article aims to advance understanding of a core aspect of the political agenda in Britain, offering empirical insights on established theories, claims and narratives about post-war British politics and policy making. The analysis uses both distributional and time-series tests that reveal the punctuated character of the political agenda in Britain and its increasing fragmentation over time, with turning points observed in 1964 and 1991.

This article analyses how institutional and contextual factors explain the approval of presidential initiatives – presidential legislative success – in highly disciplined and cartelized assemblies. Of particular importance is to test whether public opinion, the electoral cycle and the use of different institutional rules affect the approval of presidential initiatives in Congress. Using a multilevel Bayesian model of legislative success, I model bill approval rates at individual and aggregate levels. This strategy is extremely flexible, allowing us to disentangle the different institutional and contextual factors that determine the approval of presidential initiatives in the Argentine Congress.

Mixed-member proportional election systems give voters two choices – one for a party candidate in a first-past-the-post single-member constituency election and the other for a party list in a multi-member constituency. Some will vote a straight ticket (i.e. vote for the same party at each contest); others may vote a split-ticket. Although such an electoral system has been operating in Germany since 1953, very little work has been done on variations between constituencies in either the volume of split-ticket voting or the direction of the switching involved. Using an entropy-maximizing method, this article reports estimates of the pattern of straight-ticket and split-ticket voting in each of Germany's 328 constituencies at the 1998 federal elections. Analyses of the variations show that the patterns are consistent with patterns of party strength at the constituency level: the stronger a party's performance at the 1994 election, the better its ability to retain the support of straight-ticket voters in 1998, to limit the out-flows of split-ticket voters, and to attract split-ticket voters who supported another party in the list contest.

This article argues that the political risk associated with foreign direct investment (FDI) is primarily a function of investment in fixed-capital, and not a homogeneous feature of FDI. As such, empirical tests of a political institution's ability to mitigate political risk should focus directly on investments in fixed capital and not on more highly aggregated measures of multinational corporation (MNC) activity, such as FDI flow and stock data that are affected by the accumulation of liquid assets in foreign affiliates. We apply this to the study of bilateral investment treaties (BITs). We find that BITs with the United States correlate positively with investments in fixed capital and have little, if any, correlation with other measures of MNC activity.

Why are some people willing to initiate protest against authoritarian regimes? How does repression affect their willingness to act? Drawing on data from the Arab Spring protests in Morocco, this article argues first that activism is passed down from one generation to the next: first movers often came from families that had been punished for opposing the regime in the past. Secondly, repression during the Arab Spring was also counterproductive: those connected to first movers via Facebook supported renewed pro-democracy protests when informed of the regime’s use of repression in 2011. A regime that jails and beats political dissidents creates incentives for its citizens to oppose it; these abuses can come back to haunt the regime long after repression occurs.

In The Civic Culture, perhaps the best known study of political culture, Almond and Verba say that ‘the relationship between political culture and political structure [is] one of the most significant researchable aspects of the problem of political stability and change’. I want to look at the way this relationship has been treated in one particular area, an area very relevant to questions of political stability and change in our own society; that is, in studies of political participation and apathy, especially research into the sense of political efficacy or competence. This is the area with which The Civic Culture itself is largely concerned, and it is now well established that individuals low in a sense of political efficacy tend to be apathetic about politics; indeed, Almond and Verba consider the sense of efficacy or competence to be a ‘key political attitude’.

Political scientists who set out to test theories of coalition formation in parliamentary contexts (notably Browne, de Swaan, and Taylor and Laver) found only limited evidence to support the more classical game-theoretic propositions, which predict the formation of coalitions that command a majority of seats in a parliament but are otherwise as small as possible, in some sense of the word ‘small’. As a consequence, Browne later advocated the laying aside of these size theories in favour of theories that took account of the policy preferences of potential coalition partners, and in two separate studies theories were tested that focused upon the ideological component in coalition formation. Both these studies found theories based on presumed policy preferences to perform better than size theories. A more recent study has shown that the relative performance of theories based on size and ideological considerations depends on assumptions made in conducting the research. This study employed multiple regression analysis to establish that both kinds of theory had parts to play in an explanation of formation outcomes, which were dominated sometimes by size and sometimes by ideology, depending on country and time period. In the course of the analysis an additive combination of size and ideology was found to correlate to the extent of r ≃ 0·4 with formation outcomes, producing consistently better predictions than any existing theory.

The pursuit of high ideals in politics is often scorned as unrealistic and, therefore, undesirable. This article considers two new ways in which this might be true. One allegation is that ideals might be so highly idealized as to be inaccessible to ordinary agents and hence incapable of guiding their actions. The other notes that the full and simultaneous implementation of all of our ideals is typically unrealistic, and that first-best ideal desiderata may well be imperfect guides to choice among second-best worlds.

In September 1864, the Association Internationale pour le Progrès des Sciences Sociales met in Amsterdam to examine the system of proportional representation (PR) which had just been proposed by Thomas Hare. The meeting signalled a growing interest in systems of PR across the more democratic nations of the world – some of which had already begun experimenting with it. Sixty years later, the majority of existing democracies, including Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxemburg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, had adopted PR for the election of their national legislatures.

Why did so many countries decide to shift to PR? Why did the shift occur at a given point in time, not earlier or later? Why did some countries never move to PR? These are the questions that we address in this Note.

We are interested in exploring the factors that influenced the decision to adopt PR at the turn of the twentieth century. We argue that two factors of considerable theoretical relevance were particularly important in facilitating the shift to PR: the spread of democratic ideas and the presence of a majority (usually two-round) system and, as a consequence, a multi-party system.

Carstairs's classic history of electoral systems shows that at the turn of the twentieth century there was a strong demand for PR, which was linked to a more general demand for democratization. As Carstairs notes,

there was a general movement in the direction of more democratic political institutions which took several different forms … There was a movement for the establishment or strengthening of parliamentary institutions … Extensions of the franchise for parliamentary elections enabled an increasingly large proportion of the population to gain representation in parliament … With these developments it became a matter of increasing concern that the elected members of parliament and the parties they supported should fairly represent the various interests and opinions of the electorate.

Examining the 1993 split of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in Japan offers an opportunity to gain greater insight into the impact of the various incentives that influence the behaviour of politicians. Surprisingly, previous analyses of the LDP split have been able to demonstrate only weak evidence of any electoral connection driving politicians' decisions. However, by also examining the role of policy preferences (support for reform) and utilizing interaction terms, our analysis takes into account the fact that politicians at different stages in their careers and facing different sorts of electorates respond to electoral factors in very different ways. Our findings thus confirm the importance of the electoral connection. We are also able to add that a variety of other incentives also shape political behaviour and that politicians do not necessarily all respond to similar stimuli in the same way.

The contribution made by the efforts of local party organizations to the results of elections is much disputed. Butler and Rose, writing on the 1959 General Election, whilst conceding that ‘In seats with a majority of a few hundreds it would be absurd to deny that local organizations can make all the difference to the result’, nevertheless conclude that‘… if all constituency electioneering were abandoned, the national outcome would probably be little altered.’ Similarly, J. W. Grove in his editor's preface to Constituency Electioneering in Britain by D. A. Kavanagh, says, ‘It is clear that although many candidates and party workers derive considerable personal psychic satisfaction from the campaign, their efforts have little if any effect on the outcome.’ On the other hand, however, the authors of a recent study of party organization in a London constituency during the election of 1964, though they confess that ‘… it is impossible for us to say to what degree Labour's victory was tied to the more effective and more efficient campaign organization which the party was able to put into the field’, state in conclusion, ‘… but our research strongly suggests that organization was an important influence in the 1964 election in Baron's Court’.