Discontent with the functioning of representative bodies is hardly new. Most of them were born and developed in the face of opposition denying their legitimacy and their feasibility. Most have lived amid persistent unfriendly attitudes, ranging from the total hostility of anti-democrats to the pessimistic assessments of such diverse commentators as Lord Bryce, Walter Lippmann, and Charles de Gaulle. Of particular interest today is the discontent with representative bodies expressed by the friends of democracy, the supporters of representative government, many of whom see in recent history a secular ‘decline of parliament’ and in prospect the imminent demise of representative bodies.

Studies of the link between state capacity and development often utilize national-level governance indicators to explain fine-grained development outcomes. As capacity in some bureaucratic agencies matters more for these outcomes than capacity in others, this work proxies for capacity within the set of relevant agencies by using a measure of ‘mean’ capacity across all agencies in a polity. This practice is problematic for two reasons: (1) within-country, cross-agency diversity in capacity often overwhelms the variation encountered across public sectors considered in their entireties; (2) national-level reputations for capacity are not particularly informative about differences in capacity in functionally equivalent agencies in different countries. The article draws on the author's survey of public employees in Bolivia, Brazil and Chile to establish these points.

Governments have great difficulties designing politically sustainable responses to rising public debt. These difficulties are grounded in a limited understanding of the popular constraints during periods of fiscal pressure. For instance, an influential view claims that fiscal austerity does not entail significant political risk. But this research potentially underestimates the impact of austerity on votes because of strategic selection bias. This study addresses this challenge by conducting survey experiments in Spain, Portugal, Italy, the UK and Germany. In contrast to previous findings, the results show that a government's re-election chances greatly decrease if it proposes austerity measures. Voters object particularly strongly to spending cuts and, to a lesser extent, to tax increases. While voters also disapprove of fiscal deficits, they weight the costs of austerity policies more than their potential benefits for the fiscal balance. These findings are inconsistent with the policy recommendations of international financial institutions.

Conflict within the British Conservative Party over the European Union provided a great deal of copy for media political coverage during 1992–94. It was undoubtedly responsible for severely damaging the prime minister's reputation within his party and the country. In July 1993, he could only achieve ratification of the Maastricht Treaty by making voting for it an issue of confidence in the House of Commons, thereby obtaining the support of most ‘Eurosceptic’ Conservative MPs. Nine months later, failure to achieve the United Kingdom's goal regarding voting procedures in the Council of Ministers following enlargement of the EU in 1995 led to several calls for his resignation from among his own party's MPs, including one in the House itself.

The US Congress has often sought to limit presidential influence over certain public policies by designing agencies that are insulated from presidential control. Whether or not insulated agencies persist over time has important consequences for presidential management. If those agencies that persist over time are also those that are the most immune from presidential direction, this has potentially fatal consequences for the president's ability to manage the executive branch. Modern presidents will preside over a less and less manageable bureaucracy over time. This article explains why agencies insulated from presidential control are more durable than other agencies and shows that they have a significantly higher expected duration than other agencies. The conclusion is that modern American presidents preside over a bureaucracy that is increasingly insulated from their control.

The case for secrecy in voting depends on the assumption that voters reliably vote for the political outcomes they want to prevail. No such assumption is valid. Accordingly, voting procedures should be designed to provide maximal incentive for voters to vote responsibly. Secret voting fails this test because citizens are protected from public scrutiny. Under open voting, citizens are publicly answerable for their electoral choices and will be encouraged thereby to vote in a discursively defensible manner. The possibility of bribery, intimidation or blackmail moderates this argument but such dangers will be avoidable in many contemporary societies without recourse to secrecy.

This article offers the first systematic and comparative analysis of the effects of elite communication on citizen perceptions of the legitimacy of international organizations (IOs). Departing from cueing theory, it develops novel hypotheses about the effects of elite communication under the specific conditions of global governance. It tests these hypotheses by conducting a population-based survey experiment among almost 10,000 residents of three countries in relation to five IOs. The evidence suggests four principal findings. First, communication by national governments and civil society organizations has stronger effects on legitimacy perceptions than communication by IOs themselves. Secondly, elite communication affects legitimacy perceptions irrespective of whether it invokes IOs’ procedures or performance as grounds for criticism or endorsement. Thirdly, negative messages are more effective than positive messages in shaping citizens' legitimacy perceptions. Fourthly, comparing across IOs indicates that elite communication is more often effective in relation to the IMF, NAFTA and WTO, than the EU and UN.

This article argues that, in contemporary political circumstances, we should think of political toleration not as toleration that a government extends to those it rules but as a political ideal that governments can uphold and promote. We should substitute a conception of the tolerant society or the tolerant political order for that of the tolerant ruler. Toleration so conceived is consistent with the idea of a neutral state, although it need not entail a commitment to political neutrality. However, if we are to make sense of the idea of a tolerant society and, in particular, of the assumption that one political arrangement can be more tolerant than another, we need to place limits on what can count as toleration and intolerance. I use a distinction between agents, observers and patients to argue that point. I also argue that the presence of compossible options is a precondition of political toleration so that, if an issue requires a choice between incompossible options, it should not be conceived as an issue of toleration at all. The general message of the article is that, while we should reject claims that toleration has become obsolete as a political ideal, we need to revise our thinking on what constitutes political toleration if we are to apply that idea to liberal democratic arrangements ideally conceived.

The issue of ‘tactical voting’ aroused a great deal of interest during the 1987 United Kingdom general election campaign. This Note considers the nature and importance of tactical voting in Britain and makes an attempt to detect its presence empirically using electoral data.

In the last two decades, the prevailing orthodoxy in comparative studies has been the sociological view that public policy outcomes are primarily a reflection of what can loosely be described as ‘environmental’ factors: the demographic structure of the population, the incremental logic of policy programmes, and, most important of all, the level of economic development. This paper has two main objectives: first, to demonstrate that the sociological orthodoxy is methodologically and empirically unsound in its central tenet that politics does not matter, and, second, to provide a more detailed, and political, explanation of the particularly high levels of public welfare provision that characterize the Scandinavian countries.

Secession, defined as ‘formal withdrawal from a central authority by a member unit’, has been particularly rare in democracies. In fact, there has never been a single case of secession in democracies if we consider only the well-established ones, that is, those with at least ten consecutive years of universal suffrage. The cases most often mentioned happened only a few years after the introduction or significant expansion of universal suffrage: Norway and Sweden in 1905, Iceland and Denmark in 1918, Ireland and the United Kingdom in 1922. What is more, one would hesitate before calling the first two cases real secessions, since the ties between the political entities involved were very loose at the outset. Secessionists never managed to split a well-established democracy through a referendum or an electoral victory. We must conclude that it is very hard for them to achieve and maintain the magic number of 50 per cent support. My aim is to explain why this is the case.

Interest in the relationship between political democracy and economic growth has been long-standing.See, for example, S. M. Lipset, ‘Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy’, American Political Science Review, 53 (1959), 69–105. Recently this work has been reanalysed b y J. Helliwell, ‘Empirical Linkages between Democracy and Economic Growth’, British Journal of Political Science, 24 (1994), 225–48; and by R. Burkhart and M. Lewis Beck, ‘Comparative Democracy: The Economic Development Th esis,’ American Political Science Review, 88 (1994), 903–10. Recently, there has been an explosion of empirical research emanating from political science and economics that once again attempts to understand the relationship between democracy and economic growth. The goal in much of this research has been to explain the variation in per capita growth rates that exists across nations. This goal has translated into a straightforward empirical mod elling strategy: regress a country's growth rate on a democracy variable and a number of control variables and see whether the partial correlation between democracy and economic growth is statistically significant. The last few years has seen the publicat ion of over twenty empirical studies; however, the results are far from conclusive. In their recent review of twenty-one statistical findings investigating this relationship, Przeworski and Limongi explain that ‘eight found in favor of democracy, eight in favor of authoritarianism, and five discovered no difference.’ Of the thirteen studies surveyed by Sirowy and Inkeles, three find a negative effect of democracy on economic growth, four find this negative effect in some situations, and six find no relationship whatsoever.See A. Przeworski and F. Limongi, ‘Political Regimes and Economic Growth’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 7 (1993), 1002–37; and L. Sirowy and A. Inkeles, ‘The Effects of Democracy on Economic Growth and Inequality: A Review,’ Studies in Comparative International Development, 25 (1990), 126–57. See also R. Levine and D. Renelt, ‘Cross-Country Studies of Growth and Policy: Methodological, Conceptual, and Statistical Problems’ (World Bank Working Paper, No. 608, Washington, DC, 1991). These conclusions are far from reassuring or instructive.

Why do states create overlapping international institutions? This practice presents a puzzle: conventional wisdom suggests that states should use existing institutions to minimize the transaction costs of co-operation. This article proposes a bargaining approach to explain the de novo creation of overlapping international institutions. In this model, a dissatisfied ‘challenger’ state threatens to create a new institution, and a ‘defender’ state can propose to reform the currently focal institution. Overlapping institutions are created when the currently focal institution is (1) captured by interests opposed to the challenger and (2) domestic political pressure to abandon the status quo is intense. Similar to models of deterrence, the expectation that the new institution garners support among third parties is irrelevant for the equilibrium likelihood of de novo creation. A comparative analysis of international bargaining over energy, whaling and intellectual property rights provides empirical evidence.

Conventional accounts of British politics play down the electoral importance of MPs' actions in the House of Commons. Party, it is assumed, is the key feature in shaping voters' preferences: few voters are aware of how their local representative voted on a particular issue, and in any case most MPs vote along party lines. On occasion, however, MPs do vote against the party line. Where the issue involved commands considerable public interest, this may raise an individual MP's profile with his or her constituents, with consequent effects upon future electoral prospects. This article investigates the connection between MPs' votes on a series of free votes and rebellions during the 1987 Parliament and their share of the vote in the 1992 general election. Generally, Conservative MPs' actions in the Commons had no effect on their subsequent share of the popular vote. However where an issue was of marked public interest, such as capital punishment or the poll tax, how the MPs voted did exert a small but discernible effect on the support that they received in 1992.

The recent proliferation of referendums on sovereignty matters has fuelled growing scholarly interest. However, comparative research is hindered by the weaknesses of current compilations, which tend to suffer from conceptual vagueness, varied coding decisions, incomplete coverage and ad hoc categorizations. Based on an improved conceptualization and theory-driven typology, this article presents a new dataset of 602 sovereignty referendums from 1776–2012, more than double the number in existing lists. In an exploratory analysis, it uncovers eight distinctive clusters of sovereignty referendums and identifies patterns of activity over time and space as well as outcomes produced.

The relationship between citizens and leaders is the core concern of democratic theory and the primary focus of students of democratic politics. Competitive elections are typically assigned the principal role in structuring this relationship. They are a means by which the public can make government officials accountable and influence the policy directions of government. The case for how elections should link public and leaders is a familiar one. Not so obvious is the strength of this link, particularly the extent to which mass electoral forces may make for fundamental changes in the behaviour of leaders and the policies of governments.

There is ongoing controversy as to whether political democracy inhibits or facilitates national economic growth. It is argued here that the answer to this question depends greatly on the regional political context within which democracy functions. In regions where social groups clamour for redistribution, as in Latin America, democracy may lead to populism and poor economic performance. Similarly, in regions where state elites are generally committed to promoting rapid industrialization, as in parts of Asia, democratic pressures may impede effective economic policy. However, in regions where patrimonialism is chronic, as in Sub-Saharan Africa, democracy may provide a useful mechanism for evicting grossly corrupt politicians and may therefore facilitate higher rates of economic growth. These regional arguments are tested statistically here and show that democratic governance constrains growth in Latin America and Asia yet facilitates growth in Africa. Sensitivity analyses indicate that these findings are fairly robust.

Item nonresponse rates across regime assessment questions and nonsensitive items are used to create a self-censorship index, which can be compared across countries, over time and across population subgroups. For many authoritarian systems, citizens do not display higher rates of item nonresponse on regime assessment questions than their counterparts in democracies. This result suggests such questions may not be that sensitive in many places, which in turn raises doubts that authoritarian citizens are widely feigning positive attitudes towards regimes they secretly despise. Higher levels of self-censorship are found under regimes without electoral competition for the executive.

Two theoretical perspectives on the connection between religion and politics are applied to Great Britain. Data from the 1991 and 1992 waves of the British Household Panel Study, used to conduct multinomial logistic regression analysis, dispute the general consensus that religion has weak or no effects on the voting decisions of British citizens. Religious belonging, behaviour and belief, as well as the religious context of households, continue to influence British voting behaviour. Interaction effects among religious variables and between religious variables and class also operate to influence vote choice. Areas for further research into the religious bases of British electoral behaviour are suggested.

Applying insights from social-choice theory to illuminate the functioning of pluralitarian Westminster institutions, this article develops a coherent political answer to four puzzling questions about the economic liberalization that transformed New Zealand in 1984–93: why an anti-statist programme was initiated (and largely accomplished) by a labour party, why restructuring was more radical in New Zealand than in other democracies, why reformers were able to prevail through two elections and a change of government, and why they committed costly policy-sequencing errors. Understanding this remarkable case has implications for empirically grounded social-choice theory, the political theory of policy reform, and the evaluation of pluralitarian democracy – which New Zealanders themselves repudiated in 1993 by adopting proportional representation.