Government-sponsored referendums on issues of national importance are occurring with greater frequency in countries with only sporadic experience with direct democracy. Comprehensive studies exist which examine the origins, conduct and regulation of referendums, as well as their consequences for the political system. There have also been a large number of studies addressing voting behaviour during particular campaigns, and a great deal of research on the far more elaborate and systematized processes in those countries, notably the United States and Switzerland, with recognized initiative mechanisms for citizens to pose referendum questions. Yet no empirical study has attempted to answer the question of how government-sponsored referendum campaigns in countries with little history of direct democracy affect citizens' democratic comportment more generally.

Building upon Poole and Rosenthal’s NOMINATE technique and Kalt and Zupan’s residualization approach, I seek to disentangle the influences of constituency interests, party and ideology on the votes of MPs in the famous Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. I argue that while the Conservative party shared a distinct ideology, it was also a coalition of two interests-based alliances. The non-Peelite Conservatives represented mostly (protectionist oriented) agricultural districts while the Peelites represented districts with more free trade leaning interests. Before 1846, Peelites voted according to a general Conservative ideology, but in 1846 an abrupt change occurred: the pivotal Peelites appear to have eschewed Conservative party unity and their own personal ideology in favour more of the preferences of their constituents. Repeal appears to have gained passage as these MPs switched from voting more as trustees to voting more as delegates.

A sophisticated research tradition has explored theoretically and empirically the consequences of election laws for vote–seat disproportionality and, more recently, for the distance between citizen and legislative left–right medians. In contemporary parliamentary systems, policy making tends to be dominated by governments, not legislatures. This article extends election law theory to its expected effects on the left–right representativeness of governing parties and examines whether these are realized after eighty-two elections in fifteen mature parliamentary systems. The analysis shows how the legislative median party, the legislative plurality party and pre-election coalition agreements between parties shape these connections between citizens, legislatures and governments. The article also develops more nuanced measures of party influence on policy making and re-examines the governmental findings using these. Governments and policy-making configurations emerging from bargaining after PR elections are in net significantly closer to their citizens than those created by SMD elections.

Abraham Kaplan in his ‘paradox of conceptualization’ draws attention to the fundamental problem of concept-formation: ‘The proper concepts are needed to formulate good theory, but we need a good theory to arrive at the proper concepts’. On this view, concepts are neither right nor wrong but are more or less useful; their utility is determined by the twin and mutually dependent requirements of empirical precision and theoretical importance. ‘Empirical precision’ has to do with a concept's ability to ‘carve up’ the world of phenomena without unnecessary ambiguities; ‘theoretical importance’ has to do with the utility of a concept in the development of statements of wide explanatory and predictive power.

Political scientists have debated whether citizens can use core principles in lieu of ideological orientations to deduce their policy preferences. The ‘General Use’ model of public opinion holds that everyone draws equally on core principles to determine their preferences. The ‘Expertise Interaction’ model holds that the extent to which core principles influence policy preferences is a function of political expertise. Unfortunately, research design and measurement problems in extant work preclude a resolution of this debate. Here I account for these problems, test the predictions of both models, and find empirical support for each. The results demonstrate that while there is a moderate tendency for political expertise to strengthen the relationship between core beliefs and policy preferences, virtually all citizens use core beliefs to deduce preferences.

Ethnic diversity is generally associated with less social capital and lower levels of trust. However, most empirical evidence for this relationship is focused on generalized trust, rather than more theoretically appropriate measures of group-based trust. This article evaluates the relationship between ethnic diversity – at the national, regional and local levels – and the degree to which coethnics are trusted more than non-coethnics, a value referred to here as the ‘coethnic trust premium’. Using public opinion data from sixteen African countries, this study finds that citizens of ethnically diverse states express, on average, more ethnocentric trust. However, within countries, regional ethnic diversity is associated with less ethnocentric trust. This same negative pattern between diversity and ethnocentric trust appears across districts and enumeration areas within Malawi. The article then shows, consistent with these patterns, that diversity is only detrimental to intergroup trust at the national level when ethnic groups are spatially segregated. These results highlight the importance of the spatial distribution of ethnic groups on intergroup relations, and question the utility of micro-level studies of interethnic interactions for understanding macro-level group dynamics.

Despite its importance in contemporary American politics, presidential scandal is poorly understood within political science. Scholars typically interpret scandals as resulting from the disclosure of official misbehavior, but the likelihood and intensity of media scandals is also influenced by the political and news context. This article provides a theoretical argument for two independent factors that should increase the president's vulnerability to scandal: low approval among opposition party identifiers and a lack of congestion in the news agenda. Using new data and statistical approaches, I find strong support for both claims. These results suggest that contextual factors shape the occurrence of political events and how such events are interpreted.

Those who study political participation will find that recent investigations have been lacking neither in scope nor methodological sophistication. Participation, once conceived of in rather narrow terms (usually focusing exclusively on voting) and whose study was restricted to certain geographic areas only (the United States and Western Europe), is now taken to include a wide range of activities across the globe. Similarly, the causal factors of participation have been expanded as well, so that currently they include the social-psychological, socio-economic, demographic, structural, historical and cultural. Nevertheless, despite the abundance of inquiry, little progress has been made in the development of theory.

In the practice of social science, the most conspicuous recent attempt at theorizing about nonconformity and protest in late communism rests on the conceptual schema of ‘civil society versus the state’. Based on a case study of the institutional basis of criticism of, and dissent against, communism in China, I contend that the dichotomous concept ‘civil society versus the state’. when used to explain the transition from communism, is applicable only in rare, extreme cases and misleading in most cases. Instead, I introduce the concept of ‘institutional amphibiousness’, stressing institutional parasitism and institutional manipulation and conversion. In most cases, institutional amphibiousness more adequately accounts for the dynamics of the erosion of communism than the concept of ‘civil society versus the state’.

Citizen perceptions of the extent of fraud in a given authoritarian election can differ widely. This article builds on the literature on information acquisition and processing in democracies to argue that much of this variation is due to the way in which citizens’ underlying political orientations affect both the kind of information they gather and how they process that information. These differences in information acquisition and processing have important implications for how election monitoring reports, access to the internet and other sources of information are likely to affect the stability of contemporary authoritarian regimes. The theory is tested using observational data and a survey experiment from the Russian presidential election of 2012.

An implicit element of many theories of constitutional enforcement is the degree to which those subject to constitutional law can agree on what its provisions mean (call this constitutional interpretability). Unfortunately, there is little evidence on baseline levels of constitutional interpretability or the variance therein. This article seeks to fill this gap in the literature, by assessing the effect of contextual, textual and interpreter characteristics on the interpretability of constitutional documents. Constitutions are found to vary in their degree of interpretability. Surprisingly, however, the most important determinants of variance are not contextual (for example, era, language or culture), but textual. This result emphasizes the important role that constitutional drafters play in the implementation of their product.

The existing literature on economic voting concentrates on egocentric and sociotropic evaluations of short-term economic performance. Scant attention is paid to other economic concerns people may have. In a neo-liberal economy characterized by global economic competition and a down-sized labour market, one widely-publicized economic concern – and one whose consequences political scientists have largely ignored – is job insecurity. Data from a survey conducted after the 1996 US presidential election show that job insecurity is a novel form of economic discontent that is distinctive in its origins and electoral impact from retrospective evaluations of short-term economic performance. In a multinomial probit model of electoral choice, performance measures offer little explanation of the Perot vote, but sociotropic job insecurity helps to explain why Americans rejected both major-party candidates, as well as abstention, in favour of the third-party alternative, Ross Perot.

Constitutional patriotism is an influential attempt to reconcile the conflicting imperatives of political legitimacy and cultural inclusiveness. However, it underestimates the role of particularist political cultures in grounding universalistic principles of democracy and justice. Civic patriotism, by contrast, emphasizes the motivational prerequisites of democratic governance, stresses the need to preserve existing ‘co-operative ventures’ such as nation-states, and demands that existing political cultures be democratically scrutinized and re-shaped in an inclusive direction. It promotes a mainly political identity, whose political content makes it compatible with a variety of practices and beliefs, but whose thin particularistic form justifies citizens' commitment to specific institutions. This commitment is not so unconditional as to justify blind loyalty to one's own institutions, nor is it so absolute as to rule out certain forms of cosmopolitan citizenship.

When public programme demands exceed resources, tradeoffs between different public policies occur; that is, one policy gains while another loses in the allocation of these resources. Tradeoffs are most easily measured in terms of budgetary expenditures. If the budget is expanding, the consequences of tradeoffs are less severe than when the budget contracts or remains stable, and budgetary decisions involve zero-sum games. However, the concept of tradeoff is still relevant in an expanding budget since decisions are made about how the additional resources are to be allocated, and while all policy areas may gain, some obviously will receive more resources than others.

Theories often explain intraparty competition based on electoral conditions and intraparty rules. This article further opens this black box by considering intraparty statements of preferences. In particular, it predicts that intraparty preference heterogeneity increases after electoral losses, but that candidates deviating from the party’s median receive fewer intraparty votes. Party members grant candidates greater leeway to accommodate competing policy demands when in government. The study tests the hypotheses using a new database of party congress speeches from Germany and France, and uses automated text classification to estimate speakers’ relative preferences. The results demonstrate that speeches at party meetings provide valuable insights into actors’ preferences and intraparty politics. The article finds evidence of a complex relationship between the governing context, the economy and intraparty disagreement.

As the Reagan administration neared the end of its first full year in office, interpretations of the meaning of the 1980 presidential election were still as varied as the political positions of analysts and commentators. The politically dominant interpretation, promoted by the new administration and its supporters, was that the election provided a mandate to bring about several fundamental changes in the role of government in American social and economic life. In recommendations whose scope had not been matched since the first days of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the Reagan administration set about responding to what it understood to be popular demands for reduced government spending and taxes, expansion of the national defence establishment, limitation of environmental protection in favour of the development of energy resources, and a myriad of other tasks designed to encourage free enterprise by ‘getting government off the backs of the people’. With varying degrees of enthusiasm for the new administration's programmes, scores of Democratic politicians shared the interpretation of Reagan's victory as a new electoral mandate which rejected many of the fundamental policies of Democratic administrations from Roosevelt to Carter. This interpretation of the ‘meaning’ of the 1980 election was expressed by Democratic congressmen of many political colours who decried the bankruptcy of their own leadership and affirmed the victor's sense of mandate by supporting the President's various legislative programmes.

Three models of interest groups, power and political process in America are contrasted: (1) the Truman-Dahl-Lindblom pluralism of the 1960s; (2) the unfinished plural elitism of the 1970s, a theory emphasizing special-interest capture of policy systems whose most influential exponent is Lowi; (3) the ‘triadic’ model of process set forth by Wilson in The Politics of Regulation. The triadic model assumes the normality in policy systems of organized economic producers being challenged by the countervailing power of other organized interests, while state agencies act autonomously. It is argued that the triadic model is the most advanced of the three, although it still needs development. Eighteen illustrative propositions are presented in terms of triadic power. These include relationships among interest groups and state autonomy, ‘high polities’ and routine politics, and types of coalitions in policy systems. Other propositions describe links to possible cycles between triadic power and plural elitism, to corporatist decision-making, and to the ‘resource mobilization’ theory of social movements.

An indicator of globalization is the growing number of humans crossing national borders. In contrast to explanations for flows of goods and capital, migration research has concentrated on unilateral movements to rich democracies. This focus ignores the bilateral determinants of migration and stymies empirical and theoretical inquiry. The theoretical insights proposed here show how the regime type of both sending and receiving countries influences human migration. Specifically, democratic regimes accommodate fewer immigrants than autocracies and democracies enable emigration while autocracies prevent exit. The mechanisms for this divergence are a function of both micro-level motivations of migrants and institutional constraints on political leaders. Global bilateral migration data and a statistical method that captures the higher-order dependencies in network data are employed in this article.

Over the last fifteen years political scientists have become much more critical of the role that business plays in American politics. Two decades ago business was primarily regarded as another interest group; now many scholars perceive a tension between the large business corporation and the principles and practices of pluralist democracy.

This article challenges this new ‘conventional wisdom’ by critically examining the recent writings of Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom. Dahl regards the corporation as undemocratic because its managers are not accountable to its employees. Yet, the corporation is hardly unique in this regard: not one single institution in our society – including the government itself – is governed by those who work for it. Lindblom contends that business occupies a privileged position in capitalist democracies. But he exaggerates the role investment decisions play in the performance of the economy, underestimates the options available to politicians to manipulate business decisions and fails to appreciate that businessmen are not unique in requiring inducements to perform their social role. The article concludes by suggesting that while corporations do exercise considerable political power, both its scope and magnitude can be satisfactorily analysed within the framework of interest-group politics.