Primary voters are frequently characterized as an ideologically extreme subset of their party, and thus partially responsible for party polarization in government. This study uses a combination of administrative records on primary turnout and five recent surveys from 2008–14 to show that primary voters have similar demographic attributes and policy attitudes as rank-and-file voters in their party. These similarities do not vary according to the openness of the primary. These results suggest that the composition of primary electorates does not exert a polarizing effect above what might arise from voters in the party as a whole.

Why do repeated elections often fail to curb governmental corruption, even in full democracies? While much of the comparative literature on corruption focuses on the institutional features of democracies, this article argues that party system institutionalization is an additional and neglected factor in explaining why corruption may persist in the context of democratic elections. Under-institutionalized party systems impede accountability. They compromise the capacity of voters to attribute responsibility and undermine electoral co-ordination to punish incumbents for corruption. These expectations are tested by combining a controlled comparative study of eighty democracies around the world with an examination of the causal process in a case study of Panama. The findings suggest that party system institutionalization powerfully shapes the scope for governmental corruption.

This study examines attitudes about the economy under conditions of system change. We argue that citizens in new market economics are relative novices with regard to understanding the new economic environment at the beginning of the transition phase, but that they accumulate experience as time passes. We develop and test two hypotheses: (1) we expect that, over time, economic perceptions more closely track objective economic performance; (2) as a corollary, we hypothesize that, over time, economic policy priorities of citizens in a new market economy more closely track objective economic performance. Time-series data of objective economic indicators and public opinion collected in East Germany between 1991 and 1995 are analysed using regression analyses and tests of structural change in parameters. We find that East Germans' economic perceptions correspond to actual economic trends as they develop experience with the political-economic system. The implications of our findings for research on the relationship between the economy and political support in societies in transition are discussed.

In many countries, right-wing populist parties have gained electoral support by attracting voters from mainstream left parties. This has prompted public and scholarly debate about whether mainstream left parties can regain political power by taking a more restrictive position on immigration, a so-called accommodation strategy. However, selection bias confounds observational estimates of the effectiveness of this strategy. This letter reports the results of a survey experiment conducted among Danish voters during a unique political situation in which the mainstream left party's position on immigration is ambiguous, enabling experimental manipulation of voters' perceptions of the party's position. The authors show that, consistent with spatial models of politics, accommodation attracts anti-immigration voters and repels pro-immigration voters. Because repelled voters defect to other left parties, while attracted voters come from right parties, accommodation increases overall support for parties that support a mainstream left government. The results demonstrate that in some contexts, accommodation can improve the political prospects of the mainstream left.

After the First World War the belief became substantially widespread among developed countries that the venerable institution of war should be abandoned from their affairs. It was an idea whose time had come. Historically, the war does not seem to have been all that unusual in its duration, destructiveness, grimness, political pointlessness, economic consequences or breadth. It does seem to have been unique in that (1) it was the first major war to be preceded by substantial, organized anti-war agitation, and (2) for Europeans, it followed an unprecedentedly peaceful century during which even war enthusiasts began, perhaps unknowingly, to appreciate the virtues of peace. Thus the war served as a necessary catalyst for opinion change. The process through which the change took place owes much to British war aims and to their efforts to get the United States into the war. The article concludes with some reflections on the historical movement of ideas.

Public expenditure is quite the most visible and quantifiable measure of government activity. It is therefore surprising that in Britain, as distinct from the United States, this area has been massively neglected by political scientists. This neglect is all the odder since public expenditure in Britain – comprehensively and conventionally defined to include all spending by central and local government, as well as capital investment by public corporations – has been increasing rapidly both in absolute terms and as a proportion of the national income: between the early 1960s and the middle 'seventies, it rose from just under two-fifths to almost three-fifths of the Gross National Product. So, in effect, the scope of political decision-making about the distribution of national resources has grown considerably, reflecting the changing balance between the political market and the economic market. The dynamics of this process are highly relevant for an understanding of the British political system.

This Research Note examines the role democracy plays in explaining the disparity in educational attainment between men and women in a cross-national context. Policies designed to improve education figure prominently in recent attempts by governments, international institutions and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to stimulate economic development. The recent emphasis on education is grounded in a well-established literature in economics on the rate of return on investment in education and in a fairly new stream of research in economics – endogenous growth theory – that suggests knowledge is the generative force of economic growth. Although a majority of the work in both literatures focuses on aggregate levels of educational attainment (usually enrolment ratios or literacy rates), a growing body of evidence identifies women’s educational attainment relative to men’s as a crucial variable in explaining the wide variation in economic development throughout the world. In addition to its direct impact on economic growth, women’s education may indirectly affect economic performance in a number of important ways: through its impact on health, fertility and infant mortality. Previous empirical work shows that women’s education has a strong negative effect on fertility and infant mortality. Moreover, family health practices improve in direct proportion to female education. According to the World Bank, countries that achieved universal primary education for boys in 1965 but lagged far behind in educating girls had about twice the infant mortality and fertility rates in 1985 of countries with smaller gender gaps.

The general elections in Chile and Brazil in 1989 marked ‘the first time that all the Ibero-American nations, excepting Cuba, enjoyed the benefits of elected constitutional governments at the same time’. This occurrence was not as dramatic or visible as the collapse of Communism and the transitions to democracy in Eastern and Central Europe, which began in the same year, but it did mark a historical watershed. After almost two centuries as independent states, the countries of Latin America now comprised a new democratic universe. Similarly to the Eastern European experience, the Latin American watershed presented new opportunities for comparative research into democratic governance. In particular, it created a new context for the study of the relationships between institutional design, party systems and governability – defined in the narrow sense of institutional efficacy, as expressed through government stability, legislative capacity and the avoidance of gridlock. This article sets out to review the recent research on these topics, in order to describe the predominant regime type in Latin America and differentiate its distinct variants, examining their impact on governability.

One observation about the budgets of governments has passed into the conventional wisdom: budget-making, we are told, is a process of ‘incremental decision making’. The approach of the incrementalists is directed primarily to the question of how the creation of the new budget in a particular year (‘the budgetary process’) is to be explained. The approach seeks to characterize how budgeters respond to the problem of allocating resources and to develop explanatory models of budgetary outputs. But, despite the volume of research that now exists on budgetary incrementalism, the operationalization of the concept remains an issue, and many of the empirical studies have the limited perspective of a single budget-making system – that is, of one set of resource allocators, who employ the same standard operating procedures, rules of search, and so on. This paper has two objectives: (1) to explicate some simple operational models of budgetary incrementalism; and (2) to examine the adequacy of these models by means of an empirical test in four comparable budget-making systems – British county boroughs.

The re-emergence and political re-establishment of conservatism in a number of leading western welfare states has provided the empirical dots on the ‘i's’ of the ideology-is-not-dead-argument. Political issues have clearly become more technical, but their resolution has become anything but consensual. The current political dialogue may be tortuously symbolic, masking more than it reveals and more than technicians feel is good for us all, but this is perhaps more an indication of the balance of power between politicians and technicians than a sign of ideological deflation. We are not concerned in the present paper, therefore, with whether ideology is alive and kicking, but rather with who is kicking for what.

This article argues that the modern American partisan gender gap – the tendency of men to identify more as Republicans and less as Democrats than women – emerged largely because of mass-level ideological party sorting. As the two major US political parties ideologically polarized at the elite level, the public gradually perceived this polarization and better sorted themselves into the parties that matched their policy preferences. Stable pre-existing policy differences between men and women caused this sorting to generate the modern US partisan gender gap. Because education is positively associated with awareness of elite party polarization, the partisan gender gap developed earlier and is consistently larger among those with college degrees. The study finds support for this argument from decades of American National Election Studies data and a new large dataset of decades of pooled individual-level Gallup survey responses.

The Classic party identification model originally derves from the work of Campbell et al. in the 1960sAngus Campbell, Phillip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller and Donald E. Stokes, The American Voter (New York: Wiley, 1960).In The American Voter Campbell et al. noted that there was a large disparity by age between, first, the number of voters claiming an Independent identification in the United States and, secondly, the numbers claiming a strong identification with one of the two parties.

Movements of the heavenly bodies are not affected in any discernible way by the fact that there are people on earth recording the apparent movement. Similarly it is almost inconceivable that the planets would alter their orbits because of Kepler's discovery and publication of the laws of planetary motion. The social and behavioural sciences are different in that the objects under investigation may behave differently as a result of the research process. This is particularly true when the method involves naturalistic observation, surveys or experiments. When people behave differently because of being research subjects, this is called a Hawthorne effect.

Public choice and critical theory constitute two very different and often mutually hostile research traditions. An opportunity for conversation across the two traditions arises inasmuch as public choice has itself demonstrated the incoherence of a politics – in particular, a democratic politics – of unconstrained rational egoism. By deploying an expanded, communicative conception of rationality, critical theory can help move public choice beyond several related impasses. Critical theory benefits from this encounter by gaining content for its currently rather abstract critiques of politics and rationality, and additional insight into the forces conducive to different kinds of rationality. More importantly, political science stands to gain an account of politics more powerful than either tradition can muster by itself.

Public approval is a crucial source of executive power in presidential systems. Does the public support female and male presidents similarly? Combining insights from gender and politics research with psychological evidence, this study theorizes sex-based differentials in popularity based on more general expectations linking gender stereotypes to diverging performance evaluations. Using quarterly analyses of eighteen Latin American democracies, South Korea and the Philippines, the analyses compare the levels, dynamics, and policy performance of macro-approval for male and female presidents. As expected, female presidents are less popular, experience exaggerated approval dynamics and their approval is more responsive to security and corruption (though not economic) outcomes. These findings have clear implications for our understandings of mass politics, political accountability and presidentialism.

Prevention in public policy is much discussed but rarely theorized. This article begins with a theoretical framework for reflecting on the political economy of prevention in advanced capitalist economies that integrates the analysis of preventive policies across the social, environmental and economic domains. The next two sections survey prevention initiatives in social policy and climate change policy, respectively. These mainly focus on the last three decades and are based mainly on UK evidence. The article then considers the relative absence of prevention in contemporary economic policy and management: today's neo-liberal economic and political order powerfully constrains preventive public policy. The final section outlines an alternative social political economy that prioritizes preventive and precautionary policy making.

Adopting a particular non-linear perspective resolves numerous paradoxes about collective political behaviour. Self-organized criticality occurs if the sensitivity of individuals or groups to each other's actions increases with the passage of time, and, therefore, sudden changes may occur as cascades. In this way scandals, betrayals, miscalculations and other seemingly insignificant actions can sometimes cause cabinet dissolutions, strikes, riots, electoral landslides, wars and a multitude of other phenomena that, until now, have seemed to have had nothing in common.

The process by which people transfer their allegiance from ethnic to national identities is highly topical yet somewhat opaque. This article argues that one of the key determinants of national identification is membership in a ‘core’ ethnic group, or Staatsvolk, and whether or not that group is in power. It uses the example of Uganda as well as Afrobarometer data to show that, when the core ethnic group is in power (as measured by the ethnic identity of the president), members of this group identify more with the nation, but when this group is out of power members identify more with their ethnic group. This finding has important implications for the study of nationalism, ethnicity and African politics.