Do people believe the votes they cast are truly secret? Novel items added to a nationally representative survey show that 25 per cent of respondents report not believing their ballot choices are kept secret and over 70 per cent report sharing their vote choices with others. These findings suggest that standard models of candidate choice should account for the potential effects of doubts about ballot secrecy. Consistent with this view, regression analysis shows that social forces appear to have a greater effect on vote choices among people who doubt the formal secrecy of the ballot. This analysis supports the broader claim that the intended benefits of institutional rules may not be realized if people's perceptions of these rules differ from their formal characteristics.

Although qualified-majority voting is possible, member states in the Council of the European Union (EU) still adopt most policies by consensus. The agent-based model of coalition building in multilateral negotiations presented here addresses this puzzle. The model demonstrates that consensual decisions may emerge as an unintended by-product of government representatives’ desire to form blocking coalitions. A qualitative case study demonstrates the plausibility of the model's assumptions and resulting coalition-building dynamics. Moreover, a quantitative test shows that the model's predictions correspond closely to the observed consensus rates. Finally, computational experiments predict a positive effect of the voting threshold but no effect of increases in membership on winning coalition size, which has important practical implications for institutional design and enlargement policy.

Under what conditions are mass attitudes towards particular issues ‘vertically’ constrained by core cultural values? Vertical constraint is shaped by three related variables: the objective content of the issue, the way the issue is framed by elites and the individual's level of attentiveness to the controversy. Some issues are ‘easy’. They so permeate social discourse that people encounter, often without wanting to, many social agents offering shortcuts for the vertical, values-to-issue link. Most issues, however, are ‘hard’. Arcane in content and bereft of vigorous mediation, hard issues are more difficult for individuals to tie to core values. As the inferential connection between value and issue lengthens, and as social agents become fewer and more remote, an individual's ability to use values to interpret issues will increasingly depend on whether the decision makers, activists and other elites directly involved in the debate can create a connection and, of course, on whether the individual is paying attention. An analysis of the nuclear power controversy, a highly complex technical issue, reveals that a value-based interpretation favoured by elites and promoted by the media is faithfully reflected in how the mass public understands the issue. Furthermore, non-elites who are more attuned to political life are more polarized on the basis of these core values.

Textual analyses of party and government programmes open up exciting possibilities for the investigation of policy and operationalization of theory. This Note focuses on the validity of the resulting estimates, particularly of the massive policy time-series assembled by the Manifesto Research Group (MRG) of the European Consortium. These are important not only for the policy measurements they provide for fifty post-war democracies, but also from the point of view of validating other codings of texts, especially those deriving from computerized analyses. No other validating standard is available for any but a handful of post-war elections – certainly none other that so unambiguously measures policy preferences as opposed to actual party behaviour and which itself has been so well established by extensive use. Ian Budge, David Robertson and D. J. Hearl, eds., Ideology, Strategy and Party Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Data-collection continues under the direction of H-D. Klingemann and Andrea Volkens of the Wissenschaftzentrum Berlin under the title of the Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP) and now covers fifty countries.

This article reviews comparative research on institutions and economic performance, identifying analytical gaps in the political economy of growth literature. It also examines core assumptions underpinning the good-governance approach to development. Contrasting experiences of conceptual and policy issues in East Asia and Latin America are discussed. The author suggests future scholarship in this field should distinguish between the rules and the play of the game; move beyond the property rights approach to development; stress the distributional, endogenous nature of institutions; investigate the role of informal constraints and human learning; and consider sources of credible commitment and self-enforcing growth. Focusing on some uncertainties in the accepted wisdom on good governance and development, this article furthers the consolidation of research on the political foundations of prosperity.

How does wartime exposure to ethnic violence affect the political preferences of ordinary citizens? Are high-violence communities more or less likely to reject the politicization of ethnicity post-war? We argue that community-level experience with wartime violence solidifies ethnic identities, fosters intra-ethnic cohesion and increases distrust toward non-co-ethnics, thereby making ethnic parties the most attractive channels of representation and contributing to the politicization of ethnicity. Employing data on wartime casualties at the community level and pre- as well as post-war election results in Bosnia, we find strong support for this argument. The findings hold across a number of robustness checks. Using post-war survey data, we also provide evidence that offers suggestive support for the proposed causal mechanism.

Recent developments in the analysis of long-memoried processes provide important leverage for analysing time-series variables of interest to political scientists. This article provides an accessible exposition of these methods and illustrates their utility for addressing protracted controversies regarding the political economy of party support in Britain. Estimates of the fractionally differencing parameter, d, reveal that governing party support, prime ministerial approval and economic evaluations are long-memoried and non-stationary, and that governing party support and prime ministerial approval are fractionally cointegrated. Pace conventional wisdom that party leader images matter little, if at all, analyses of multivariate fractional error correction models show that prime ministerial approval has important short-run and long-run effects on party support. Prospective and retrospective personal economic evaluations are influential but, contrary to a longstanding claim, national economic evaluations are not significant. The article concludes by suggesting that individual-level heterogeneity is a likely source of the observed aggregate-level fractional integration in governing party support and its determinants. Specifying parsimonious models that incorporate theoretically meaningful heterogeneity is a challenging topic for future research.

Access to information is a hallmark of democracy, and democracy demands an informed citizenry. Knowledge of party positions is necessary for voters so that electoral choices reflect preferences, allowing voters to hold elected officials accountable for policy performance. Whereas most vote choice models assume that parties perfectly transmit positions, citizens in fact obtain political information via the news media, and this news coverage can be biased in terms of salience – which leads to asymmetric information. This study examines how information asymmetries in news coverage of parties influence knowledge about political party positions. It finds that the availability of information in the news media about a party increases knowledge about its position, and that party information in non-quality news reduces the knowledge gap more than information in quality news.

This article seeks to further our understanding of how social structure affects the onset of civil war. Existing studies to date have been inconclusive, focusing only on single-cleavage characteristics of social structure, such as ethnic or religious fractionalization. This study argues that models that do not take into account the relationship between cleavages (or cleavage structure) are biased and thus reach faulty conclusions. With the focus on the cleavages of ethnicity and religion, the effects of two characteristics of cleavage structure on civil war onset (cross-cuttingness and cross-fragmentation) are defined and tested. A new index of ethno-religious cross-cuttingness (ERC), derived from national public opinion surveys, reveals that ERC is a significant determinant of civil war onset when interacted with ethnic fractionalization.

In an article published some time ago. we analysed in a systematic way the relationship between constituency marginality and turnout in British general elections between 1955 and 1970. Previous considerations of marginality had concentrated on its effect upon change in turnout from one election to the next, but we were concerned with the relationship between the absolute level of turnout in constituencies in one election and their marginality at the previous election (‘previous marginality’). We found that there was a consistent, significant, positive relationship between previous constituency marginality and turnout.

This article scrutinizes the relationship between collective nostalgia and populism. Different populist figures utilize nostalgia by referring to their country's ‘good old’ glorious days and exploiting resentment of the elites and establishment. Populists instrumentalize nostalgia in order to create their populist heartland, which is a retrospectively constructed utopia based on an abandoned but undead past. Using two original datasets from Turkey, this study first analyzes whether collective nostalgia characterizes populist attitudes of the electorate. The results illustrate that collective nostalgia has a significantly positive relationship with populist attitudes even after controlling for various independent variables, including religiosity, partisanship, satisfaction with life and Euroscepticism. Secondly, the study tests whether nostalgic messages affect populist attitudes using an online survey experiment. The results indicate that Ottoman nostalgia helps increase populist attitudes. Kemalist nostalgia, however, has a weak direct effect on populist attitudes that disappears after controlling for party preference.

Institutions operating beyond direct control of government, such as central banks, constitutional courts and public broadcasters, enjoy guarantees of de jure independence, but de jure independence is no guarantee of de facto independence. This is especially so for public broadcasting, where cultural variables are often assumed to be decisive. In this article, the de jure and de facto independence of thirty-six public service broadcasters world-wide are operationalized, and de jure independence is found to explain a high degree of de facto independence when account is taken of the size of the market for news. Other variables considered in previous literature – such as bureaucratic partisanship and the polarization of the party system – are not found to be significant.

‘In the last ten years on my individual reckoning’, observes S. E. Finer, ‘there have been seventy-three coups in forty-six countries’. ‘Coups’, Gurr comments, ‘can alter political processes and social institutions as drastically as any classic revolutions’. Yet the incidence and importance of coups are hardly reflected in the sparse literature proposing generalizations about their causes. Certainly, many case studies of individual coups have been undertaken, but the choice of the country has usually been decided by availability of data rather than its significance for a general theory. Given that coups have occurred all over the world, they clearly are a general phenomenon. Existing general explanations for them, however, are open to criticism. These suggest that essentially there is room for a theory which is about coups in particular rather than about wider forms of political instability, or about the narrower, military, coup; which is capable of falsification, avoiding inherently untestable hypotheses or concepts that are defined so loosely as to invite accusations of tautology; and which is, of course, able to withstand appropriate empirical examination.

In the past three decades, scholars have frequently used the concept of framing effects to assess the competence of citizens' political judgments and how susceptible they are to elite influence. Yet prior framing studies have reached mixed conclusions, and few have provided systematic cumulative evidence. This study evaluates the overall efficacy of different types of framing effects in the political domain by systematically meta-analyzing this large and diverse literature. A combined analysis of 138 experiments reveals that when examined across contexts, framing exerts medium-sized effects on citizens' political attitudes and emotions. However, framing effects on behavior are negligible, and small effects are also found in more realistic studies employing frame competition. These findings suggest that although elites can influence citizens by framing issues, their capacity to do so is constrained. Overall, citizens appear to be more competent than some scholars envision them to be.

One of the chief explanations for the decline of social capital in the United States is the passing of the ‘civic generation’, those who came of age during the Depression and the Second World War. These Americans experienced greater government largesse than previous generations, yet we know little about how public programmes influenced their subsequent involvement in public life. This article draws on policy feedback theory to examine how the educational benefits of the GI Bill, through which 7.8 million Second World War veterans attended college or gained vocational training, affected recipients' political participation across three time periods, from 1950 to 1998. We find that initially, interpretive effects of programme implementation produced increased levels of participation among users generally. Later on, resource effects enhanced participation rates selectively, with the strongest effects among those who had attained the highest levels of education. Overall, the study illustrates distinct mechanisms, timing and sequencing through which public policy can shape the interests and capacities of programme recipients to engage in democratic participation.

Some studies find that democracy inhibits growth while other studies find that democracy facilitates growth. Which conclusion is correct? To help resolve this debate, a variety of sensitivity analyses is conducted to answer two basic questions. First, why has the literature yielded contradictory results? Secondly, how believable are these results? The existing contradictions can be explained by analysts' choice of time period, with democracy having a negative effect on growth in the 1960s, a positive effect in the 1980s and no effect at all in the 1970s and 1990s. More generally, however, it is shown here that the statistical significance of these findings varies radically depending upon which control variables one utilizes and how one measures both growth and democracy.

The authors contribute to the existing literature on the determinants of legislative voting by offering a social network-based theory about the ways that legislators’ social relationships affect floor voting behaviour. It is argued that legislators establish contacts with both political friends and enemies, and that they use the information they receive from these contacts to increase their confidence in their own policy positions. Social contacts between political allies have greater value the more the two allies agree on policy issues, while social contacts between political adversaries have greater value the more the two adversaries disagree on policy issues. To test these propositions, we use social network analysis tools and demonstrate how to account for network dependence using a multilevel modelling approach.

Regular church attendance is strongly associated with a higher probability of voting. It is an open question as to whether this association, which has been confirmed in numerous surveys, is causal. The repeal of the laws restricting Sunday retail activity (‘blue laws’) is used to measure the effects of church-going on political participation. Blue laws’ repeal caused a 5 percent decrease in church attendance. Its effect on political participation was measured and it was found that, following the repeal, turnout fell by approximately 1 percentage point. This decline in turnout is consistent with the large effect of church attendance on turnout reported in the literature, and suggests that church attendance may have a significant causal effect on voter turnout.

Deliberative democrats are committed both to inclusion and to barring coercion in public discourse. Their commitment to democratic inclusion should make them sympathetic to the challenges faced by social movements. An adequate sociology of contentious public discourse, however, shows that social movements must often act coercively in order to be included. For example, they must often alter the terrain of conflict, create a crisis, pressure interlocutors to argue consistently, or compel other parties to enter social arenas of contention that they have avoided. Democratic theorists who are committed to inclusion should approve of such coercion. Under the actual circumstances movements face, there is a tension between non-coercion and democratic inclusion. This tension demonstrates the need for a democratic standard and a mode of democratic social analysis beyond those that deliberative theory offers.

In this article it is proposed to take another look at what have elsewhere been called ‘sources of diversity’ in British local government. The purpose is to show that across a sample of English and Welsh county boroughs, significant associations can be found between levels of expenditure in certain public service areas and both socio-economic and political variables. In particular, it will be shown that the presence of greater Labour representation on councils is associated in such areas as housing, education, and local health with higher levels and in the case of the police service with lower levels of expenditure.