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.

The literature on political actors’ media appearances has repeatedly documented the so-called incumbency bonus (that parties and politicians in government have more media coverage than those in the opposition). This bias is normally attributed to news criteria that reflect political power, such as relevance and the elite status of actors. Supplementing existing perspectives, this study puts forward a new explanation of the incumbency bonus. The article argues that variations in the media dominance of incumbents are the result of the interplay between journalistic norms and political context. Outside election campaigns, political news is driven by the ‘watch dog’ norm. Thus the media focus on societal problems, which produces a critical emphasis on incumbent actors. But when party competition intensifies, either during campaigns or when issues become salient, the norm of objective and impartial journalism results in a more balanced coverage where challengers increase their presence. The argument receives support through multivariate models of incumbent and challenger appearances in Danish radio news broadcasts over a twenty-year period. Finally, in terms of democratic implications, the importance of the watchdog norm challenges the assumption that the incumbency bonus constitutes an electoral asset. Since media dominance is closely related to government responsibility for all kinds of problems, incumbent support is found to dwindle with increased media appearances.

In their article ‘Constituency Characteristics, Individual Characteristics and Tactical Voting in the 1987 British General Election’, Niemi, Whitten and Franklin claim that in the 1987 general election ‘about one in every six voters … had tactical considerations in mind in deciding whom to vote for’. As they point out, this figure is far higher than Heath et al.'s estimate of 6.5 per cent of major party voters having ‘a tactical motivation for their vote’. It is also far higher than estimates obtained by other analyses of the 1987 election using aggregate data. In this Note we point to methodological weaknesses in Niemi, Whitten and Franklin's article which indicate that their estimate is unlikely to be a valid measure of tactical voting, at least of the concept as customarily understood by political scientists. Indeed, when looked at carefully, the evidence they present to support their expanded estimate of tactical voting serves only to re-affirm the original claims of Heath and his colleagues and the other conservative estimates of the prevalence of tactical voting.

Is democracy a requirement of justice or an instrument for realizing it? This article argues that the correct answer to this question depends on the background circumstances against which democracy is defended. In the presence of thin reasonable disagreement about justice, we should value democracy only instrumentally (if at all); in the presence of thick reasonable disagreement about justice, we should value it also intrinsically, as a necessary demand of justice. Since the latter type of disagreement is pervasive in real-world politics, the conclusion is that theories of justice designed for our world should be centrally concerned with democracy.

Presidential campaigns are the most obvious means by which American voters receive information about candidates and issues, yet there is strong resistance to the notion that they influence presidential elections. We conduct an examination of presidential campaign effects in the 1992 and 1996 elections that features three departures from previous studies: (1) a stronger definition of campaigning and campaign events, facilitating a clearer idea of what it is that we are testing; (2) detailed data on television and newspaper coverage of the campaigns, allowing us to measure media effects; and (3) an alternative measure of electoral impact that is resistant to survey errors and random movement. We find that campaign events, and particularly media coverage of those events, significantly affect the candidates' chances for electoral success.

In recent years there has been a resurgence in interest in the cross-national study of public opinion. A significant component of this rekindling of attention has been the specific area of public support for the fundamental values of democracy. John Sullivan and his various colleagues have reported on political tolerance in the United States, Israel, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. In conjunction with a smattering of more limited cross-national studies, and newly-completed studies that are just now emerging, a wealth of comparative data is now available.

Existing scholarship claims that national policy has been much more deeply and dramatically Europeanized by the European Union (EU) than the administrative structures of national government. This finding appears to confirm the explanatory power of ‘new’ institutional theories, which emphasize the resilience of institutions in the face of strong pressures promoting greater convergence among dissimilar European political systems. Of the various national government structures that could be Europeanized, departments (or ministries) are especially important because they are primarily responsible for reconciling (or ‘fitting’) the demands of EU and national policy. However, existing scholarship does not fully investigate the extent to which departments themselves are Europeanized by the EU, or the impact that such a change could have on national policy. Taking as an example the Europeanization of one policy sector (the environment) in the United Kingdom, this article reveals that the national department has undergone a much deeper and more profound cultural change than one would expect if national structures were essentially unchanged by the Europeanization of policy. This single, but critical, case implies that the next phase of Europeanization research should open up the ‘black box’ of the state and examine the co-evolution of administrative structures, policies and politics.

This article extends the theory of government agency survival from separation of powers to parliamentary government systems. It evaluates expectations of increased risk to agencies following transitions in government, prime minister or departmental minister, and from incongruence between the originally establishing and currently overseeing political executive. Using survival models for UK executive agencies between 1989 and 2012, the study finds that politics trumps performance. Ministers seek to make their mark by terminating agencies created by previous ministers, which is reinforced by high media attention to the agency. Performance against agency targets is not associated with higher termination risk, and replacement agencies do not perform any better than those that were terminated. Financial autonomy provides some protection for agencies that are less dependent on budgetary appropriations.

Empirical studies of electoral competition and public policy in new democracies have been relatively underdeveloped. This article investigates the election-policy outcome link in a ‘hard case’ setting: South Korea in 1988–97. Contrary to expectations derived from the bureaucratic insulation or fiscal co-ordination argument, this study suggests a systematic impact of electoral competition on levels and distributive patterns of public spending. The analysis finds that levels of government expenditure increased according to the electoral calendar. Also, national subsidies tended to be allocated to ‘swing’ provinces in which electoral contests are competitive. The results of the analysis clearly show that fiscal policies in democratizing Korea are to a significant extent determined by electoral politics.

Religion can be a source of undemocratic attitudes but also a contributor to democratic norms. This article argues that different dimensions of religiosity generate contrasting effects on democratic attitudes through different mechanisms. The private aspect of religious belief is associated with traditional and survival values, which in turn decrease both overt and intrinsic support for democracy. The communal aspect of religious social behaviour increases political interest and trust in institutions, which in turn typically lead to more support for democracy. Results from multilevel path analyses using data from fifty-four countries from Waves 4 and 5 of the World Values Survey suggest there is some regularity in mechanisms responsible for the effect of religiosity on democratic support that extend beyond religious denomination.

China's remarkable business expansion abroad since the mid-1980s cannot be explained simply by applying existing theories, which focus on conventional international businesses from capitalist systems. Many puzzling phenomena in Chinese investments abroad become intelligible only when we introduce a key variable–illicit privatization through internationalization. So far only advantageously-placed nomenklatura members and their kin have had access to crossborder ownership, but many of them are accumulating sizeable private wealth at the cost of nationalized property. Contrary to an impression held by many in the West, the Chinese economy under Communist rule experiences spontaneous privatization parallel to what has happened in European postcommunist nations–though with a few Chinese characteristics. An examination of informal privatization in China's multinationals adds a new dimension to our understanding of the shift from state socialism to market capitalism.

In districts where only one seat is contested, the electoral formula (plurality or majority) should be a major determinant of the number of parties that receive votes. Specifically, plurality rule should generate two-party competition while other institutional arrangements should generate electoral fragmentation. Yet tests of these propositions using district-level data have focused on a limited number of cases; they rarely contrast different electoral systems and have reached mixed conclusions. This study analyses district-level data from 6,745 single-member district election contests from 53 democratic countries to test the evidence for Duverger's Law and Hypothesis. Double-ballot majoritarian systems have large numbers of candidates, as predicted, but while the average outcome under plurality rule is generally consistent with two-party competition, it is not perfectly so. The two largest parties typically dominate the districts (generally receiving more than 90 per cent of the vote), and there is very little support for parties finishing fourth or worse. Yet third-place parties do not completely disappear, and ethnic divisions shape party fragmentation levels, even under plurality rule. Finally, institutional rules that generate multiparty systems elsewhere in the country increase electoral fragmentation in single-member plurality districts.

Coalition governance requires parties to come to collective policy decisions while simultaneously competing for votes. This reality has inspired a vibrant literature on coalition policy making, which is focused on legislative organization and behavior, though it is not clear how it affects the electorate. This article addresses this gap in the literature by examining how voters’ perceptions of compromise in coalition policy making affect their vote choices. Analyzing data from six parliamentary democracies where multiparty governance is the norm, it finds that voters punish parties they view as compromising. More specifically, voters are found to discount the policy accomplishments and policy promises of compromising parties, and that this tendency is more pronounced among previous incumbent cabinet supporters and the politically disinterested. These findings have important implications for the study of voting as well as coalition policy making.

In common with most other mass democratic parties the Conservative party has a large group of active members who sustain the party over time. A model is developed to explain variations in activism within the party, which takes account of the ‘paradox of participation’. The results, based on the first national random sample survey of Conservative party members, show that activism is motivated by three classes of factors. Activism is motivated, firstly, by a variety of selective incentives, such as ambitions for elective office. It is motivated, secondly, by a desire for the party to achieve policy goals. These are ‘collective goods’, which are subject to the problem of free-riding. However, since activists can influence policy outcomes, via their contacts with party leaders, they have high levels of personal efficacy and a direct incentive to participate, which can override the paradox of participation. Finally, activism is motivated by expressive concerns, as measured by the strength of the respondent's partisanship, a motivation for involvement which lies outside a narrowly cast rational choice model of political participation.

In the study of politics, as in political life, ‘plus ça change’ is not always an accurate description. Recent models of the interelection dynamics of support for British governing parties illustrate the point. Unlike their traditional rivals that accorded pride of place to macroeconomic indicators, especially inflation and unemployment rates, the new models have focused on the effects of voters' subjective evaluations of economic conditions and their assessments of the performance of the prime minister. By incorporating these variables, analysts have articulated aggregate party support models more closely to the micro-analytical literature on voting behaviour and election outcomes. To date, however, another variable, party identification, that has been the subject of longstanding controversies in that literature, has been neglected because of a lack of appropriate time-series data. Such data are now available, and they enable one to investigate the dynamics and determinants of British ‘macropartisanship’, and to incorporate party identification variables in vote intention and prime ministerial approval models. This Note does so in a study of Conservative party support over the January 1992–November 1995 period. For references to a number of the more recent studies, see Harold D. Clarke and Marianne C. Stewart, ‘Economic Evaluations, Prime Ministerial Approval and Governing Party Support: Rival Models Reconsidered’, British Journal of Political Science, 25 (1995), 597–622. For more comprehensive literature reviews, see, for example, Michael S. Lewis-Beck, Economics and Elections: The Major Western Democracies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988); William L. Miller, ‘Studying How the Economy Affects Public Attitudes and Behavior: Problems and Prospects’, in Harold D. Clarke, Marianne C. Stewart and Gary Zuk, eds, Economic Decline and Political Change: Canada, Great Britain, the United States (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989); Helmut Norpoth, Confidence Regained: Economics, Mrs Thatcher, and the British Voter (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992).‘MacKuen, Erikson and Stimson introduced the term ‘macropartisanship’ in their study of the aggregate dynamics of party identification in the United States. See Michael B. MacKuen, Robert S. Erikson and James A. Stimson, ‘Macropartisanship’, American Political Science Review, 83 (1989), 1125–42.

Elections, the defining feature of representative democracy, are generally considered domestic matters. However, elections are increasingly influenced by and conducted on the international stage, and migrants have become increasingly important political actors in home country elections. This article analyses the relationship between migrants’ remittances and elections in their countries of origin, and argues that migrants’ decisions to remit reflect their home countries’ electoral calendars and political context. An analysis of remittance flows to eighty-one developing countries, 1990–2005, provides systematic evidence for the existence of political remittance cycles. Remittances increase in election years, an effect that is larger the more contested the election and the poorer the home country, suggesting an understudied link between developing countries’ domestic politics and their citizens living abroad.

How do domestic and global factors shape governments’ capacity to issue debt in primary capital markets? Consistent with the ‘democratic advantage’, we identify domestic institutional mechanisms, including executive constraints and policy transparency, that facilitate debt issuance rather than electoral events. Most importantly, we argue that the democratic advantage is contingent: investors’ attention to domestic politics varies with conditions in global capital markets. When global financial liquidity is low, investors are risk-averse, and political risk constrains governments’ capacity to borrow. But when global markets are flush, investors are risk-tolerant and less sensitive to political risk. We support our argument with new data on 245,000 government bond issues in primary capital markets – the point at which governments’ costs of market access matter most – for 131 sovereign issuers (1990–2016). In doing so, we highlight the role of systemic factors, which are under-appreciated in much ‘open economy politics’ research, in determining access to capital markets.

THE NATURE OF THE UNDERSTANDING

As many political scientists know, ‘biopolitics’ is the short-hand term used to describe the approach of those in the profession who believe that biological concepts — especially evolutionary theory, which treats behaviour as the product of both nature and nurture — and biological research techniques can help us study and understand political behaviour better.

Citizens are now central to national security strategies, yet governments readily admit that little is known about public opinion on security. This article presents a unique and timely examination of public perceptions of security threats. By focusing on the breadth of security threats that citizens identify, their psychological origins, how they vary from personal to global levels, and the relationships between perceptions of threats and other political attitudes and behaviours, the article makes several new contributions to the literature. These include extending the levels at which threats are perceived from the national versus personal dichotomy to a continuum spanning the individual, family, community, nation and globe, and showing the extent to which perceptions of threat at each level have different causes, as well as different effects on political attitudes and behaviour. These findings are also relevant to policy communities’ understanding of what it means for a public to feel secure.

Although commentary on the ‘gender gap’ is a staple of political discourse in the United States, most analyses of the dynamics of presidential approval have ignored possible gender differences in the forces driving approval ratings of US presidents. This article analyses gender differences in the impact of economic evaluations and political interventions on the dynamics of presidential approval between 1978 and 1997. The analyses are made possible by disaggregating 240 monthly Survey of Consumers datasets gathered over this period. These data show that women's economic evaluations are consistently more pessimistic than men's, regardless of who occupied the Oval Office. Analyses of rival presidential approval models reveal that a national prospective economic evaluation model performs best for women, but a personal prospective model works best for men. Parameter estimates indicate that economic evaluations accounted for substantial proportions of gender differences in presidential approval in the post-Carter era. Men and women also reacted differently to presidential transitions, with approval increasing more among men when Reagan replaced Carter, and more among women when Clinton replaced Bush. The hypothesis that men are more susceptible than women to rally effects induced by domestic and international crises and wars does not receive consistent support.