There has been extensive research on Scottish, Welsh and Irish nationalism but little on British nationalism. Analysis of the British electorate shows that British nationalist sentiments cannot be reduced to the conventional left–right and libertarian–authoritarian value dimensions, and constitute a distinct normative dimension in their own right. They are related to attitudes towards Europe, nuclear defence, Scottish devolution and Irish unification. Although by no means as important as the left–right dimension, they are at least as important in contemporary voting behaviour as the libertarian–authoritarian dimension.

To understand how electoral reform affects political outcomes, one needs to assess its total effect, incorporating how the reform affects the outcomes given the political status quo (the mechanical effects) and the additional reactions of political agents (the psychological effects). This article proposes a framework to ascertain the relative magnitude of mechanical and various psychological effects. The empirical approach is based on pairwise comparisons of actual and counterfactual seat allocation outcomes. It uses the design to analyze a nationwide municipal electoral reform in Norway, which changed the seat allocation method from D’Hondt to Modified Sainte-Laguë. The study documents clear psychological effects.

Cross-country empirical studies have reviewed many aspects of peacekeeping missions, but the findings on their effectiveness diverge. This article draws on recent empirical literature on civil wars using a disaggregated approach, addressing the effectiveness of peacekeeping by examining the local variation in UN troop deployment and violence in the Bosnian civil war. The relationship between the intensity of local violence and troop deployment across Bosnian municipalities and peacekeeping effects on the intensity of subsequent violence are examined with a matching approach. The results indicate that although peacekeeping ‘works’, since it is deployed where the most severe violence takes place, peacekeepers have little effect on subsequent violence. This is consistent with research highlighting the obstacles to UN missions in addressing their objectives.

With a proliferation of scholarly work focusing on populist, far-left, and far-right parties, questions have arisen about the correct ways to ideologically classify such parties. To ensure transparency and uniformity in research, the discipline could benefit from a systematic procedure. In this letter, we discuss how we have employed the method of ‘Expert-informed Qualitative Comparative Classification’ (EiQCC) to construct the newest version of The PopuList (3.0) – a database of populist, far-left, and far-right parties in Europe since 1989. This method takes into account the in-depth knowledge of national party experts while allowing for systematic comparative analysis across cases and over time. We also examine how scholars have made use of the previous versions of the dataset, explain how the new version of The PopuList differs from previous ones, and compare it to other data. We conclude with a discussion of the strengths and limitations of The PopuList dataset.

This analysis outlines and tests the steps-to-war explanation of international conflict. At the core of this explanation is the expectation that territorial disputes are a key source of war and that as states that have these disputes make politically relevant alliances, have recurring disputes and build up their military forces against each other, they will experience ever-increasing probabilities of war. The absence of these risk factors is expected to lessen the chances of severe conflict. Utilizing the Militarized Interstate Dispute data of the Correlates of War project, the data analyses provide full support for the steps-to-war explanation during the 1816–1945 era and partial support for the Cold War nuclear 1946–92 span. Among the findings for this latter period is the presence of a curvilinear relationship between the number of prior disputes and the probability of war – after a large number of disputes, states begin to ritualize their behaviour at levels short of war.

In an article published in this Journal, Nadeau, Martin and Blais argue that perceptions of the costs and benefits of alternative outcomes and general orientations to risk interact to affect voters' decisions in referendums on fundamental political questions such as Quebec sovereignty. We use Nadeau et al.'s data to demonstrate that their interaction-effects model is overly complex and suffers from serious multicollinearity difficulties. A simpler main-effects model has virtually identical explanatory power and removes anomalous findings. We also argue that their model is too simple because it omits variables such as party identification, feelings about party leaders and government performance evaluations that voters use as heuristic devices to help them make decisions when stakes are high and information about the costs and benefits of referendum outcomes is low. We analyse a dataset that includes these variables and demonstrate that they have strong effects in a model of referendum voting that controls for perceived costs and benefits of alternative referendum outcomes and several other variables. Additionally, differences in the magnitudes of the perceived costs and perceived benefits of alternative referendum outcomes are not statistically significant. This latter finding contradicts widely cited experimental results in behavioural economics and related ‘asymmetry’ hypotheses concerning the presumed status quo bias in major referendums.

How do individual party representatives respond to direct policy requests from citizens when the requests go against the party’s position? In a survey experiment, 2,547 Swedish politicians are randomly assigned to scenarios in which citizens make contact to influence a political decision. Their willingness to respond to citizens’ policy requests is measured using six indicators that capture adaptive as well as communicative responsiveness. The results show a lower willingness to adapt and to communicate when the request disagrees with the party’s position. The effect is mitigated when politicians agree with the proposal and when likely voters make contact, but only for listening and adaptive responses, not for explaining responses (which have the opposite relationship). Important findings for future research are that the party matters for politicians’ responsiveness and that their willingness to give explaining responses follows a different logic than for listening and adaptive responses.

Does enhanced descriptive representation lead to substantive representation? Legislators who share descriptive features with disadvantaged groups do not necessarily represent their group interests. Instead, Members of Parliament (MPs) strategically choose when to engage with the policy topic of their corresponding groups. MPs represent their respective group at the beginning of their career because it confers credibility when they have no legislative track record and few opportunities to demonstrate expertise. These group-specific efforts are replaced by other legislative activities at later stages of their careers. The authors apply this theoretical expectation across four disadvantaged groups – women, migrants, low social class and the young – and thereby offer a broad perspective on descriptive representation. Their sample consists of a unique data base that combines biographical information on German MPs with topic-coded parliamentary questions for the period 1998 to 2013. The study demonstrates the diminishing value of representing the disadvantaged across different types of MPs.

This article starts with two empirical observations from Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries about longer constitutions: (1) they are more rigid (that is, more difficult to amend) and (2) they are in practice more frequently amended. The study presents models of the frequently adopted rules for constitutional revision (for example, qualified majorities in one or two chambers, referendums) and demonstrates that, if longer constitutions are more frequently revised, it is because they must impose actual harm on overwhelming majorities. In trying to explain this finding, the article demonstrates that longer constitutions tend to contain more substantive restrictions. Countries with longer constitutions also tend to have lower levels of GDP per capita and higher corruption. Finally, the negative effect of constitutional length on GDP per capita is shown to persist even if corruption is controlled for.

Comparative scholars have disagreed for some time now as to whether democratic institutions in a divided society are more likely to remain stable if those institutions are premised on a concern for inclusion or on a concern for moderation. But since the empirical evidence marshalled by such scholars is often open to interpretative dispute, neither side has been able to prove its case conclusively. In order to help move this stability debate forward, this article demonstrates how inclusion and moderation can be recast as co-requirements of an underlying principle of political equality. To this end, it offers a deliberative democratic account of political equality, expressed in terms of requirements of publicity and reciprocity, that enables us to see how inclusion and moderation might be reconciled. Moreover, it shows how this deliberative reconciliation may itself provide for a more effective form of institutional stability than can be achieved under either of the two main contending comparative approaches.

A novel theory of the healthcare policy of right-wing governments is presented in this article. It posits that the politics of health care is inherently different from the politics of a social policy related to the labour market. Health care protects against risks that are in the main uncorrelated with the income distribution. This implies that median voters will favour public provision, while high-income voters will not. This generates a unique challenge to right-wing governments that have to balance the interests of the two. The solution is marketization via compensation, where public spending is expanded but where public support of private market solutions is given special priority.

While research on conspiracy theories and those who believe them has recently undergone a renaissance, there still exists a great deal of uncertainty about the measurement of conspiratorial beliefs and orientations, and the consequences of a conspiratorial mindset for expressly political attitudes and behaviors. We first demonstrate, using data from the 2012 American National Election Study, that beliefs in a variety of specific conspiracy theories are simultaneously, but differentially, the product of both a general tendency toward conspiratorial thinking and left/right political orientations. Next, we employ unique data including a general measure of conspiratorial thinking to explore the predictors of specific conspiracy beliefs. We find that partisan and ideological self-identifications are more important than any other variable in predicting ‘birther’ beliefs, while conspiratorial thinking is most important in predicting conspiracy beliefs about the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

A wide range of studies find that democracies experience more terrorism than non-democracies. However, surprisingly little terrorism research takes into account the variation among democracies in terms of their electoral institutions. Furthermore, despite much discussion of the differences in terrorist groups’ goals in the literature, little quantitative work distinguishes among groups with different goals, and none explores whether and how the influence of electoral institutions varies among groups with different goals. The argument in this article posits that electoral institutions influence the emergence of within-system groups, which seek policy changes, but do not influence the emergence of anti-system groups, which seek a complete overthrow of the existing regime and government. The study finds that within-system groups are significantly less likely to emerge in democracies that have a proportional representation system and higher levels of district magnitude, while neither of these factors affects the emergence of anti-system groups.

An essential feature of political representation is that a mediating assembly is set between the citizenry and political decision making. Representation involves indirect decision making or agency. Rational actor political theory often assumes representation in order to focus on problems of a principal–agent kind, but offers only relatively weak arguments for representation. We offer an alternative argument for representation that builds on our broader interpretation of rational actor political theory – an interpretation that emphasizes expressive considerations relative to instrumental considerations, and operates in a richer motivational setting. As well as providing an account of representation, we believe that our approach is capable of re-connecting rational actor political theory to many of the concerns of more traditional political theory.

Many assert that the economic problems of Africa possess political origins. In particular, they point to a lack of political accountability and argue that economic reform and the renewal of growth depend upon political reform and in particular upon the promotion of competitive electoral politics. Summarizing these arguments, this article formalizes and tests them, using both an African and global sample of data. While it finds support for the view that within Africa – and globally – competitive institutions are associated with less extractive policies, it finds no evidence that these institutions have facilitated the implementation of Washington consensus policies.

Systems theorists introduced the concept of ‘support’ to permit explanations of political stability and instability. Yet most attempts to verify the existence of a relationship between support and stability empirically have dealt with wellestablished political systems, and have relied on data collected at one point in time. This paper reports an initial effort to examine the growth of support for a new political regime using a series of sample surveys providing data on changes in the level of support over time.

The architecture of houses of parliament and of legislative chambers in countries around the world is analysed for its relationship to political culture. It is argued that parliamentary buildings and spaces (1) preserve cultural values of the polity over time; (2) articulate contemporaneous political attitudes and values; and (3) contribute to the formation of political culture. Preservation is illustrated by how parliament buildings occupy sacred sites, symbolize the state and assure the continuity of legislative traditions. Articulation is exemplified by reflecting the relative importance of the two legislative houses and making expressive statements about the role of parties, executives and individual legislators. Formation can be affected by the physical dimensions of chambers, the arrangement of seats, aisles and lecterns, and spatial relationships between houses and the parliament versus the executive. It is concluded that the advent of television broadcasting of parliamentary sessions may make these architectural features even more important in perpetuating, manifesting and shaping political culture.

With the decline in popular attachment to the two major parties in the United States since the mid-1960s, collective political independence has risen. Using new survey questions introduced in 1980, this article employs alternative measures of independence to reassess the phenomenon of independence in America. These new measures give us fresh insights beyond what we had using only the traditional measures. One casualty of this new approach is the portrait of the Independent given by The American Voter. This portrait appears seriously misleading, given that it is those who deny being either partisan or Independent who fit that portrait – not Independents per se. And the most politically involved voters turn out to be Independent Partisan Supporters; not simple partisans.