We argue that voters' assessments of party leaders are comparative and prospective rather than individual and retrospective. Therefore, a prospective leadership-comparison evaluation should outperform a leader-approval, retrospective indicator as a determinant of government and party popularity. Using data from 1984–92, a popularity function that includes a variety of economic and political components, and several dependent variables, we test this hypothesis by comparing the performance of a ‘best prime minister’ question and the more usual ‘approval’ questions about party leaders. We find that the former gives consistently better results than the latter.

‘Tactical voting’ refers to voting contrary to one's nominal preferences. The usual form of tactical voting described in the literature consists of ‘third’ party supporters in plurality electoral settings voting for one of the two major parties in their constituency. This Note aims to demonstrate both theoretically and empirically the existence of the converse phenomenon, i.e. followers of one of the two big parties voting for a small one. We shall call this phenomenon ‘inverse tactical voting’ (ITV).

After years of neglect, a growing literature has reclaimed the constituency campaign as an important aspect of British elections. However, relatively little work has been done to disentangle which aspects of the local campaign are effective, and which are not. For much of the twentieth century, the mechanics of the local campaign were in essentials unchanged. But changing campaign technologies in the last decade offer new possibilities to party campaign managers. The 1997 British general election was the first in which parties made extensive use of telephone canvassing as well as the more traditional doorstep canvass. This article provides a comparative analysis of the effectiveness of traditional versus telephone constituency campaigns. Traditional face-to-face canvassing had a statistically significant influence on the outcome of the 1997 general election. But the telephone canvass did not.

Previous studies of group conflict theory look at the relationship between racial balance in a particular area (precinct, county, etc.) and racial attitudes or political behaviour within that area. While of value, there are significant methodological disadvantages to this approach. Here, I address those problems using public opinion experiments in which I ask respondents whether they would allocate political goods proportionally given different (randomly assigned) hypothetical racial environments. The experiment yields confirmatory results, with non-blacks more likely to support proportionality in less black than heavily black environments. In a second experiment, I find that the same relationship is much weaker when the variations in population are non-racial. Finally, I show that the relationship also holds for blacks and argue that this is theoretically consistent.

The question of whether and how war has influenced the development of advanced Western welfare states is contested. This article provides a systematic review of the state of the art and outlines an agenda for a comparative analysis of the warfare–welfare state nexus that is informed by an explicit consideration of the underlying causal mechanisms. By distinguishing between three different phases (war preparation, warfare and post-war period) it provides a systematic overview of possible causal mechanisms linking war and the welfare state and a discussion of likely effects of war for belligerent, occupied and neutral countries in the age of mass warfare stretching approximately from the 1860s to the 1960s.

The Tiebout model, which theorizes that residential choice can regulate the supply of local collective goods, has generated much criticism, but few empirical tests of its behavioural assumptions. The article presents the findings of the first British micro-level test of the effect of local taxes and services on geographical mobility, a postal survey of households' moving decisions in four London boroughs during the years of the poll tax. Taxes and services are found to be important factors in the moving decision, corroborating the behavioural assumptions of the model. Respondents acted Tiebout-rationally as those moving into low tax/good service quality boroughs are more likely to cite low taxes and good services as a moving factor than those doing the reverse. The policy implications, however, remain contingent on political orientation.

Political machines dominate many electoral democracies. Scholars argue that local party members, commonly called brokers, are crucial to the success of machines. This article enhances our understanding of party machines by developing a formal model that reveals how leaders extract services from brokers. The model also shows that leaders of machines face a dilemma: they need effective brokers, but these brokers create vulnerabilities that can ultimately reduce the party’s vote share and even cause electoral loss. So, in addition to highlighting electoral strengths of political machines, this article reveals their organizational vulnerabilities. This argument is evaluated with a novel survey experiment from Argentina. The survey is the first to draw upon a probability sample of brokers in any country.

In his celebrated study of American democracy written in 1888, Lord Bryce reserved his most condemnatory reflections for city government and in a muchquoted passage asserted: ‘There is no denying that the government of cities is the one conspicuous failure of the United States. The deficiencies of the National government tell but little for evil on the welfare of the people. The faults of the State governments are insignificant compared with the extravagance, corruption and mismanagement which mark the administration of most of the great cities'sangeetha.

Among the arguments that have featured in the recent revival of libertarian thinking is one purporting to show that a free market economy, protected by a minimal state – or even no state at all – is neutral as between capitalism and a certain form of socialism. The argument runs as follows. The market places no limits on the manner in which people may associate for purposes of economic activity. They may choose capitalist forms of organization, in which case those who become owners of capital assume a greater degree of risk and responsibility and stand to gain correspondingly higher rewards, or they may choose co-operative forms, where groups of producers supply their own capital and share the profits between them. If capitalist forms are overwhelmingly favoured, as the historical evidence shows, this reveals something about the preference structure of the population as a whole. Either the bulk of the population actively wish to avoid the risks and anxieties of capital ownership, and so willingly transfer these responsibilities to the few willing to bear them; or the efficiency of the capitalist firm is such that it can pay wages high enough to compensate the work force for their loss of autonomy in comparison with the co-operative alternative.

The eastern enlargement of the European Union is a twofold process, in which governments of transition countries decide whether or not to apply for membership and in turn EU members decide whether or not to accept these applicants. The authors argue that the level of democracy and the extent of market reforms together determine the first decision, while the second decision is largely determined by the EU observing the reform process in applicant countries imposed by the acquis communautaire conditionality. The natural procedure to test this theory is a Heckman selection model. A Heckman specification with panel probit estimators in both stages is used. The data supports the argument that uncontested reforms signal the policy support of relevant political parties to the EUand increase the likelihood of joining the Union. The authors also test for specification errors and check the robustness of the findings.

Research shows that voters often use gender stereotypes to evaluate candidates, which should help women in some electoral contexts and hurt them in others. Yet, most research examines a single context at a time—usually US national elections, where partisanship is strong—and employs surveys and experiments, raising concerns that citizens’ responses may not reflect how they actually vote. By analyzing returns from thousands of nonpartisan local elections, we test whether patterns of women's win rates relative to men's match expectations for how the electoral effects of gender stereotyping should vary by context. We find women have greater advantages over men in city council than mayoral races, still greater advantages in school board races, and decreasing advantages in more conservative constituencies. Thus, women fare better in stereotype-congruent contexts and worse in incongruent contexts. These effects are most pronounced during on-cycle elections, when voters tend to know less about local candidates.

A key finding in the literature on authoritarian regimes is that leaders frequently rely on ruling parties to stay in power, but the field lacks systematic ways to measure autocratic party strength. As a result, it is not clear how often ruling parties are actually strong and capable of carrying out important functions. This article demonstrates that strong ruling parties are much rarer than is typically assumed. Using a global sample of dictatorships from 1946–2008, the author shows that most ruling parties are unable to survive the death or departure of the founding leader. This is true even of many ruling parties that have been coded as leading single-party regimes. While strong parties may be key to durable authoritarianism, relatively few parties are truly strong.

While political controversies over the legitimacy of monetary interventions in Western economies were settled decades ago, the widespread acceptance of fiscal interventions as appropriate tools for achieving economic stability and economic growth is much more recent and much less pervasive. Even the pre-Depression classical economic model specified a role for government monetary policy: ensuring an appropriate stock of money. While institutions of monetary policy making now enjoy both a long history of utilizing monetary policy instruments and a low level of ideological conflict over the legitimacy of those interventions, the institutions of fiscal policy making enjoy neither. Though some governments had begun to practise fiscal interventions before the Second World War, the widespread use of such instruments is, by and large, a post-war phenomenon. Thus, governments have generally had less experience in learning ‘how to do it’.

Perceptions of leadership quality depend upon personality traits. With John Major as a case study, we demonstrate that the most important personality attributes are those which contribute to the belief that a leader can govern in a business-like fashion. Changes in personality traits affect the rating of a leader and ratings affect a party's electoral support. Using this approach, perceptions of John Major's personality are changed continuously to illustrate the impact on voters. A Monte Carlo simulation is introduced to allow for the likelihood that not everyone would perceive a personality change. This approach is preferable to alternatives and can explain why, on occasion, there has been dispute over the importance of party leadership in British general elections.

Research suggests that the costs of international conflict (e.g. casualties) alter public opinion, executive approval and policy positions of elected officials. However, do casualties affect voting in terms of aggregate outcomes and individual vote choices? This article examines how casualties from interstate conflicts affect voter behaviour, specifically incumbent vote share. Using the investment model of commitment to model individual vote choice, it is argued that increases in the costs of conflict (i.e., more casualties) can increase the probability that voters will support the incumbent, increasing incumbent vote share. This model is tested with both cross-national aggregate data from twenty-three countries and individual-level British survey data. The results support the argument.

Social networking has a powerful influence on voters, but we do not know enough about the mechanisms of network influence. Recent research shows that one network member's influence is highly dependent on the others in the network, i.e. autoregressive. I test whether the influence of social network political knowledge is also autoregressive. I show that a strong predictor of vote choice similarity is the level of knowledge of the discussant, but greater knowledge of the other network members lessens dyadic agreement. Data from the American National Election Study collected in 2000 show that in the presidential election of 2000 having a knowledgeable discussant increases the chance of vote similarity with that discussant by 5 percentage points, but vote similarity decreases by 10 percentage points for each level of residual network knowledge. This research confirms the autoregressive influence of social network political knowledge.

Electoral systems translate citizens' votes into seats in the legislature, and are thus critical components of democracies. But electoral systems can be unfair, insulating incumbents from adverse electoral trends, or biasing the mapping of votes to seats in favour of one party. I assess methods for measuring bias and responsiveness in electoral systems, highlighting the limitations of the popular ‘multi-year’ and ‘uniform swing’ methods. I advocate an approach that incorporates constituency-level and jurisdiction-wide variation in party's vote shares. I show how this method can be used to elaborate both the extent and consequences of malapportionment. I then present election-by-election estimates of partisan bias and responsiveness for ninety-three state and federal elections in Australia since 1949. The empirical results reported show that the coalition parties have generally ‘out-biased’ the Australian Labor party, despite some notable pro-ALP biases. The overall extent of partisan bias in Australian electoral systems, however, has generally diminished in magnitude over time.

Cross-sectional time-series data from fourteen stock markets, from 1973 to 1996, are used to study how political institutions compare in affecting party governments' incentives to enrich one group of industries at the expense of another. Using measures of cross-sectoral variance of price changes within stock markets as a proxy for change in redistributive policy, I show that political change is important in both proportional representation (PR) and majoritarian systems. As parties shift in and out of government, trade and industrial policy is redistributed to favour the parties' industrial supporters. Such changes in policy increase the cross-sectoral dispersion in price changes, with newly advantaged industries seeing their stock increase, while the price of those losing favourable policy declines. The temporal impact of redistribution differs across electoral systems, with the impact of political change being more immediate in majoritarian systems and the effect being more diffuse in PR systems. Majoritarian systems are also more responsive to economic shocks, while changes in economic conditions have few discernable effects on the dispersion of stock prices in PR countries. PR systems, however, experience overall higher levels of dispersion. I contrast these results with the dominant extant arguments of radical policy shifts in majoritarian systems and policy stability in PR systems.

Tolerance is an important concept in democratic theory and a recurring issue in British history. With rare exceptions, however, conclusions about tolerance in Britain have been based on impressionistic rather than empirical evidence. Only a few research studies have addressed the subject of tolerance in Britain, and none has collected nationwide data on attitudinal tolerance among the British.

This Note examines patterns of attitudinal tolerance in Britain and speculates about the impact of those patterns on the status of political freedom in Britain. The analysis is based on recently collected survey data on attitudinal tolerance among members of the public and Members of Parliament in Britain.