This article measures the social rewards and sanctions associated with voting. A series of survey experiments shows that information about whether a person votes directly affects how favorably that person is viewed. Importantly, the study also compares the rewards and sanctions associated with voting to other activities, including the decisions to recycle, volunteer and return one’s library books on time. It presents a behavioral test of the consequences of non-voting and finds that individuals are willing to take costly action in a dictator game to reward political participation. Finally, it shows that survey measures of social norms about voting are correlated with county-level voter turnout. The study adds to the growing literature documenting the important influence of social concerns on turnout and other political choices.

Our findings suggest that there are systematic differences in the ways that voters use the real values of economic variables when casting a vote depending on how long they have had to learn about the true state of the economy. It is possible that in campaigns of sufficient length voters may have more time to be exposed to competing campaign messages and to learn about the true state of the economy and the true policy positions of candidates. We tested this assertion on 113 elections in thirteen democracies. The test results in a confirmation of the hypothesis. In longer campaigns, voters rely more heavily on the true values of economic conditions to inform their evaluations of parties in power. In shorter campaigns, these effects are mostly absent. Campaign length seems to matter for voter learning.

This article utilizes the statistical analysis of an original dataset of African legislative seat volatility levels and three case studies to demonstrate that the size and configuration of politically salient ethnic groups bear a strong relationship with patterns of legislative seat volatility in Africa. Legislative seat volatility is highest in countries where either no social group is large enough to form a majority on its own, or a majority group contains within itself a second smaller majority group; it is lowest in countries where one, and only one, group forms a majority. In contrast, most standard explanations for volatility, including variations in economic performance, democratic period of origin and democratic duration, do not appear relevant in the African context.

The argument that personal economic expectations drive support for British governing parties has received wide attention. This article employs aggregate data for the 1979–92 period to assess the effects of personal expectations, other subjective economic variables and evaluations of prime ministerial performance in rival party-support models. Analyses of competing models, including error correction specifications that take into account nonstationarity in the time series of interest, indicate that the personal expectations variants generally do very well, although they do not outperform one or more alternatives incorporating other types of economic evaluations. The error correction models show that the prime minister's approval ratings have significant short-term and long-term effects on governing party popularity.

How do majority group members in emerging multicultural and multiracial societies respond to the experience of living amidst ethnic diversity? Recent public opinion surveys are analysed to assess the contextual determinants of English whites’ opinions towards ethnic minorities and immigrants. Multilevel analyses reveal that whites’ racial hostility is affected by local ethnic context; however, the direction of this effect depends on which ethnic minority groups reside in the area. Consistent with the contact hypothesis, whites who live in neighbourhoods with relatively large black populations display lower levels of racial hostility than respondents with few black neighbours. However, in line with racial threat theory, residential proximity to Pakistanis and Bangladeshis is associated with more negative attitudes towards ethnic minorities.

This article contributes to the empirical turn in deliberative democratic theory, by studying the presence of arguing (discussion on the merits) and bargaining in the working groups of the Council of the European Union. It uses a survey of representatives of member states to analyse to what extent, under what circumstances, and by whom, arguing is used. The results indicate that arguing is indeed common in the Council working groups, but also that there is substantial variation. Most arguing is found in intergovernmental policy areas and by the most powerful and well-connected actors. The findings point to the conclusion that higher stakes and political pressure make actors less willing and able to engage in arguing.

Some scholars use the ‘dynamic representation’ approach to test how much current policy changes reflect past public preferences. This article tests hypotheses derived from this approach in a left–right context for the United Kingdom from 1976 to 2006. This shows that government policy on the left–right scale shifts as public preferences change (‘rational anticipation’). Secondly, a public with right-wing preferences elects the Conservatives, who pursue right-wing policies in office (‘electoral turnover’). However, popular incumbents are less likely to adjust their policy position to the public. The Westminster system is criticized for its weak link between the rulers and the ruled, but dynamic representation on the left–right scale in the United Kingdom seems to have functioned admirably in this period.

Prior international political economy public opinion research has primarily examined how economic and socio-cultural factors shape individuals’ views on the flows of goods, people and capital. This research has largely ignored whether individuals also care about rewarding or punishing foreign countries for their policies on these issues. We tested this possibility by administering a series of conjoint and traditional survey experiments in the United States and China that examined how reciprocity influences opposition to foreign acquisitions of domestic companies. We find that reciprocity is an important determinant of public opinion on the regulation of foreign investments. This suggests the need to consider the policies that other countries adopt when trying to explain public attitudes toward global economic integration.

We apply a dynamic perspective to forecasting votes and seats in British elections. Our vote model captures the swing of the electoral pendulum between the two major parties while using prime ministerial approval as the (sole) short-run predictor of vote choice. The seat model incorporates the inertia of the previous seat distribution while translating votes into seats. The models forecast the lead of one major party over the other (percentage for votes and number for seats). The statistical estimation includes data on British elections since 1945, although the test for cycles (swing of the electoral pendulum) goes as far back as 1832. The vote model picks the winner of every one of the 1945–2005 elections (out-of-sample forecasts) and is rarely off by more than 2 percentage points. The seat model does almost as well, rarely missing the seat lead by more than 25.

Although the selection of candidates for elections to the national parliament is an important part of the political process, there is little writing on the way in which this is carried out in the Republic of Ireland. This no doubt springs largely from parties' reluctance to reveal details of this essentially internal matter. In Duverger's words, ‘parties do not like the odours of the electoral kitchen to spread to the outside world’.

Geographical mobility is a striking characteristic of modern societies. Since migrants are often faced with social, economic and political changes which may affect their political behaviour, population movement is crucial to an understanding of politics.

Important articles in this Journal by Nownes in 2004 and Nownes and Lipinksi in 2005 demonstrate that ‘population ecology’ approaches are now central to interest group studies. Partly at least this move to study at population level is a consequence of the numbers of such organizations. Party scholars typically deal with far fewer cases and sui generis discussion is more defensible. Ecology seems to offer a ‘handle’ on the thousands of cases that exist in the interest group field. Nownes and Lipinski stressed the importance of environmental factors in determining group populations, and challenged group scholars to address the dynamics among interest group populations. This article argues that animal-based population ecology may be an imperfect analogy to use in making sense of group circumstances. It considers the way groups respond to opportunities and constraints.

Recently there has been a renewed interest in the role of local campaigns and their effectiveness on increasing turnout and support for political parties. However, there is a long-standing debate over the best way to measure campaign effort. This article advances the current literature by using a latent variable modelling approach to utilize, for the first time, evidence frorvey of agents, official records of campaign spending and individual voter survey data to produce a combined measure of campaign effort. This measure (latent variable) is then used in a structural equation model of party performance to assess the effect of the campaign effort of the three main parties at the 2005 British general election. In terms of both the delivery and effectiveness of campaigns the parties are found to behave in a way consistent with a rational model of party behaviour, though constrained by contextual factors.

Policy-sensitive models of judicial behaviour, whether attitudinal or strategic, have largely passed Britain by. This article argues that this neglect has been benign, because explanations of judicial decisions in terms of the positions of individual judges fare poorly in the British case. To support this argument, the non-unanimous opinions of British Law Lords between 1969 and 2009 are analysed. A hierarchical item-response model of individual judges’ votes is estimated in order to identify judges’ locations along a one-dimensional policy space. Such a model is found to be no better than a null model that predicts that every judge will vote with the majority with the same probability. Locations generated by the model do not represent judges’ political attitudes, only their propensity to dissent. Consequently, judges’ individual votes should not be used to describe them in political terms.

Why has the American political landscape grown more partisan since the 1970s? This article provides a novel account of the determinants of partisanship. The author argues that partisanship is not only shaped by the traditionally suggested socio-economic factors, but also by the uncertainty of future income (risk exposure): rich individuals facing a high degree of risk exposure (or poor people facing low risk exposure) are ‘cross-pressured’; while their income suggests that they should identify with the Republicans, their income prospects make them sympathize with the Democrats. These two traits have overlapped increasingly since the 1970s. Those with lower incomes tend to be also those with higher risk exposure (risk inequality increased). This has led to a sorting of the American electorate: more citizens have become ‘natural’ partisans.

Scholars and policy makers have displayed a longstanding interest in the politics of economic reform, particularly over the 1990s as former Communist countries struggled to develop market economies. Yet remarkably little systematic research has been conducted on the political economy of commercial reform in the post-Communist world. We argue that the fragmentation of power within post-Communist countries has been a potent force for trade liberalization. In non-democracies where political power is highly concentrated in the hands of a small group of elites, state leaders face few impediments to rent seeking and are well insulated from interests favouring commercial reform. In non-democracies where power is fragmented within the national government, however, new elites with weak ties to the old regime are well placed to use trade liberalization as a weapon against their political opponents. Moreover, the dispersion of power in non-democracies creates space for groups favouring free trade to promote trade liberalization. Finally, in democracies, the dispersion of power within the national government combined with electoral competition creates an especially potent impetus to trade liberalization. To assess these arguments, we analyse the trade policy of post-Communist countries during the period 1990–98. The results support our claims, highlighting the importance of examining institutional differences within as well as across regime types in analyses of economic policy.

Preferences for redistribution and social spending are correlated with income and unemployment risk, but it is unclear how these relationships come about. I build a theory emphasizing that only large changes in economic circumstances provide the information and motivation needed for people to change their preferences. Stable long-run preferences are shaped mainly by early socialization, which includes economic and ideological influences from the family, and early labor market experiences. Enduring shocks, low intergenerational mobility and the tendency of left-wing parents to be poorer generate correlations between circumstances and preferences. Because preferences are stable, greater inequality may not increase aggregate support for redistribution. Support is found for the theory with panel data from Switzerland, using a range of empirical tests.

This essay examines the causes of government support for European integration. It evaluates several competing theories, both material and ideological. Two dependent variables are examined: government support for European integration in Council of Ministers decisions, and in the 1997 Amsterdam intergovernmental conference. There appear to be sharp differences between the two decision-making fora in the efficacy of predictive variables. In the Council of Ministers, left–right political ideology and financial transfers from the European Union to member states provide the best explanations. In the Amsterdam conference, experience in the Second World War and financial transfers provide the best explanations. This research extends our understanding of why governments choose co-operation within the European Union. It also extends our understanding of the relationship between ideology and integration preferences. Ideology matters not just to parties, but also to governments, which represent both territorial interests and ideologies. There appears to be a linear relationship, whereby left governments are more supportive of integration than right governments.

Since the seminal studies of Stouffer and McClosky it has become accepted that political elites are markedly more committed to civil liberties and democratic values than is the public at large; so much so that political elites should be recognized, in McClosky's words, as ‘the major repositories of the public conscience and as carriers of the Creed’. The argument of this article is that previous analyses have erred by focusing on the contrast between elites taken as a whole and the mass public. The crucial contrast is not between elites and citizens, but rather between groups of elites that are competing one with another for political power.

Drawing on large-scale surveys of two modern democracies, Canada and the United States, this article demonstrates that differences among elites in support for civil liberties eclipse, both in size and political significance, differences between elites and citizens. The fallacy of democratic elitism, as this study shows, is its indifference to which elites prevail in the electoral competition for power.