Dunleavy's bureau-shaping model has breathed new life into existing debates about the behaviour of senior bureaucrats. This article assesses the utility of this model as an explanation of the development of Next Step agencies in the last decade in Britain, using data drawn from a series of extensive interviews with senior civil servants. Our conclusion is that, although the bureau-shaping model represents a significant advance on previous models of bureaucratic behaviour that stress budget maximization, it is flawed. In particular, we argue that: it pays insufficient attention to the broader political context within which civil servants operate; mis-specifies bureaucrats' preferences; and oversimplifies the distinction between managerial and policy advice work. More specifically, we suggest that any explanation of the development of Next Steps agencies needs to recognize that: politicians rather that civil servants played the major role in their creation; the strategic calculations of bureaucrats were significantly more sophisticated than the model assumes; and the consequence of the reforms has been that senior civil servants have played a greater, rather than a more limited, management role.

British elections exhibit two patterns contrary to expectations deriving from Duverger and Downs: centrist third parties (Liberals and their successors) win a large vote share; and the two major parties often espouse highly divergent policies. This article explores relations between the Liberal vote and left–right scores of the Labour and Conservative manifestos in the light of two hypotheses: the vacated centre posits that Liberals receive more votes when major parties diverge; the occupied centre proposes a lagged effect in which major parties diverge farther after Liberals do well in the preceding election. Data from elections since 1945 confirm the vacated-centre hypothesis, with Liberals benefiting about equally when the major parties diverge to the left and right, respectively. The results also support the occupied-centre hypothesis for Conservative party positions, but not for Labour’s. After considering explanations for this asymmetry, we identify historical events associated with turning points that our data reveal in post-war British politics.

While concerns about the public's receptivity to factual information are widespread, much less attention has been paid to the factual receptivity, or lack thereof, of elected officials. Recent survey research has made clear that US legislators and legislative staff systematically misperceive their constituents' opinions on salient public policies. This study reports the results from two field experiments designed to correct misperceptions of sitting US legislators. The legislators (n = 2,346) were invited to access a dashboard of constituent opinion generated using the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. Despite extensive outreach efforts, only 11 per cent accessed the information in Study 1 and only 2.3 per cent did so in Study 2. More troubling for democratic norms, legislators who accessed constituent opinion data were no more accurate at perceiving their constituents' opinions. The findings underscore the challenges confronting efforts to improve the accuracy of elected officials' perceptions and suggest that elected officials may indeed resist factual information.

Although a growing body of research suggests that the constabularization of the military for domestic policing is counterproductive, this increasingly prevalent policy has nonetheless enjoyed widespread support in the developing world. This study advances our understanding of the consequences of militarization for perceptions of law enforcement: whether visual features shape perceptions of effectiveness, respect for civil liberties, proclivity for corruption and acceptance of militarization in one's own neighborhood. Based on a nationally representative, image-based, conjoint experiment conducted in Mexico, the authors find that military weapons and uniforms enhance perceptions of effectiveness and respect for civil liberties, and that the effect of military uniform becomes greater with increased military presence. The study also finds that gender shapes perceptions of civil liberties and corruption, but detects no effect for skin color. The findings suggest that a central feature of militarization linked to greater violence – military weapons – is paradoxically a key factor explaining favorable attitudes, and that women can play a crucial role in improving perceptions of law enforcement.

The central question which this article attempts to raise is how we should understand the social structure that is emerging from the neo-colonial pattern of change in Africa, and what implications it has for politics. In its simplest form, the question is how far a stratification system is developing which is likely to make for class formation, class consciousness, and a politics of class struggle; or how far stratification can be contained within a predominantly peasant society, expressed politically in patron-client relationships.

Cultural identity has become prominent in studies of world politics in the post-Cold War era. First, a growing literature in world politics has emerged that focuses on the impact of social culture, broadly conceived as the shared religious, racial or ethnolinguistic characteristics of a society. The significance of this aspect of culture is epitomized in studies focusing on ‘ethnic conflicts’, ‘ethnic security dilemmas’, and most prominently in Huntington's ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis, which suggests, among other things, that shared civilization membership is the fulcrum upon which post-Cold War era world politics rests. Secondly, the impact of political culture, broadly conceived as the shared norms and institutions guiding political behaviour in a society, has become increasingly salient, as evidenced by the bourgeoning literature on the democratic peace thesis, which posits that the extent to which a state (or pair of states) is democratic is a major determinant of its war-proneness. Adherents of this view argue either that although democracies are just as war-prone as non-democracies they rarely fight other democracies, or that democracies are more peaceful than non-democracies, in general.

This article disaggregates coalitions of third-party mediators and examines their effectiveness in interventions. First, it is argued that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between the size of a mediating coalition and mediation effectiveness. Secondly, mediators sharing a history of conflict and distrust will transfer their past relationships to a mediation attempt, making it less effective. Consequently, states sharing friendly and co-operative ties with each other are more successful in managing conflicts. Finally, a coalition of mediators that is largely democratic should be more effective due to a shared culture of peaceful conflict resolution, inclusivity and increased communication flows. The empirical analysis using data from the Issues Correlates of War Project for 1965–2000 largely provides support for the theory.

Although scholars have studied education's effects on many different outcomes, little attention has been paid to its effects on adults’ economic views. This article examines those effects. It presents results based on longitudinal data which suggest that secondary education has a little-appreciated consequence: it makes Americans more opposed to redistribution. Placebo tests and other analyses confirm this finding. Further investigation suggests that these conservative effects of education operate partly by changing the way that self-interest shapes people's ideas about redistribution.

This article explores the influence of Protestant missionaries on male–female educational inequalities in colonial India. Causal mechanisms drawn from the sociology and economics of religion highlight the importance of religious competition for the provision of public goods. Competition between religious and secular groups spurred missionaries to play a key role in the development of mass female schooling. A case study of Kerala illustrates this. The statistical analysis, with district-level datasets, covers colonial and post-colonial periods for most of India. Missionary effects are compared with those of British colonial rule, modernization, European presence, education expenditures, post-colonial democracy, Islam, caste and tribal status, and land tenure. Christian missionary activity is consistently associated with better female education outcomes in both the colonial and post-colonial periods.

A vast amount of experimental evidence suggests that get-out-the-vote encouragements delivered through door-to-door canvassing have large effects on turnout. Most of the existing studies have been conducted in the United States, and are inspiring European mobilization campaigns. This article explores the empirical question of whether the American findings are applicable to Europe. It combines existing European studies and presents two new Danish studies to show that the pooled point estimate of the effect is substantially smaller in Europe than in the United States, and finds no effects in the two Danish experiments. The article discusses why the effects seem to be different in Europe compared to the United States, and stresses the need for further experiments in Europe as there is still considerable uncertainty regarding the European effects. While one possible explanation is that differences in turnout rates explain the differences in effect sizes, the empirical analysis finds no strong relationship between turnout and effect sizes in either Europe or the United States.

Throughout Russian history, Jews have often been blamed when turmoil has arisen in the country. It is surprising, therefore, that Russian politics in the 1990s focused so little on Jews as a source of the political and economic crises afflicting the country. This article investigates anti-Jewish attitudes in Russia over time and cross-sectionally, carefully scrutinizing the hypothesis that perceptions of economic, social and political upheaval activate latent authoritarianism into anti-Semitism. Little if any support is found for the hypothesis and therefore it is argued that scapegoat theory, as currently constituted and applied to Jews, is too simplistic to be useful. Russian Jews were not subject to intolerance and repression in the 1990s because anti-Semitic beliefs were not widespread enough to be used successfully by political entrepreneurs seeking advantage through attacks on Jews.

This study examines the effect of incorporating taxation into the incumbency voting model using aggregate economic data for Canadian federal elections from 1953 to 1988. Although Canadian election campaigns tend to be dominated by economic performance issues, taxation, as measured by open-ended questions in the national election studies, has not been a salient campaign issue among voters. None the less, voters as consumers in the market economy have an interest in government policies that affect after-tax income. Furthermore, as economic citizens, voters have an interest in taxation as a measure of government efficiency – the costs of providing public services – independent of benefits generated by government. Paralleling American and British results, the economic and fiscal performance variables behave as expected in the incumbency model. Income change has a positive effect, and the rate of inflation and unemployment a negative effect, on incumbency voting. The relationship between taxation and incumbency voting is negative, both through its effect on after-tax income and also directly, independent of income. The results are consistent with an interpretation which suggests that voters, responding to the public agenda for economic performance and to a private agenda for taxation, behave both as politic consumers and as economic citizens.

What motivates politicians to engage in legislative activities? In multilevel systems politicians may be incentivized by ambitions to advance their careers either at the state or federal level. This article argues that the design of the electoral institutions influences how politicians respond to these incentives. Analyzing a unique dataset of both ‘stated’ and ‘realized’ career ambitions of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), it finds that those who seek to move from the European to the national (state) level participate less in legislative activities than those who plan to stay at the European (federal) level. For MEPs who aim to move to the state level, attendance and participation in legislative activities is substantively lower among legislators from candidate-centered systems. Importantly, the effect of career ambitions on legislative participation is stronger in candidate-centered systems than in party-centered systems. These findings suggest that the responsiveness associated with candidate-centered systems comes at the expense of legislative activity.

The rise of pressure-group politics in Britain has stimulated a corresponding growth of academic interest in pressure groups. Some distinguished early case studies were crowned in 1965 with Beer's majestic interpretation, while the last decade saw various accounts of the constitutional significance and merits of group activity. These bursts of academic energy illuminated parts of the pressure-group universe but left others in twilight. We are well informed about the lobbying activities of manufacturing industry, of organized labour and some of the professions. By contrast, there exists hardly any systematic discussion of how the interests of financial institutions are represented in government.

This article extends theoretical arguments regarding the impact of economic globalization on policy making to electoral turnout and considers how distinct dimensions of globalization may produce different effects. It theorizes that constraints on government policy that reduce incentives to vote are more likely to be induced by foreign ownership of capital, while compensation through increased government spending is more likely (if at all) to be the product of structural shifts in production associated with international trade. Using data from twenty-three OECD countries from 1970–2007, the study finds strong support for the ownership-constraint hypothesis in which foreign ownership reduces turnout, both directly and – in strict opposition to the compensation hypothesis – indirectly by reducing government spending (and thus the importance of politics). The results suggest that increased foreign ownership, especially the most mobile capital flows, can explain up to two-thirds of the large declines in turnout over recent decades.

This article develops a two-part theory that accounts for both the origins and the persistence of patronage politics. First, greater centrifugal and disintegrative pressures at key moments in the state-building process give local elites more opportunity to institutionalize patronage at the subnational level. Second, decentralized patronage systems are more resistant to reform than centralized ones. Case studies of India and Ceylon illustrate how variation in centrifugal pressures allowed subnational elites to capture the state in the former but not the latter. Further data from the British Empire shows that greater centrifugal pressures faced by British colonies at the time of decolonization are correlated with the persistence of higher levels of patronage over time.

This article argues that the policy uncertainty generated by elections encourages private actors to delay investments that entail high costs of reversal, creating pre-election declines in the associated sectors. Moreover, this incentive depends on the competitiveness of the race and the policy differences between the major parties/candidates. These arguments are tested using new survey and housing market data from the United States. The survey analysis assesses whether respondents’ perceptions of presidential candidates’ policy differences increased the likelihood that they would delay certain purchases and actions. The housing market analysis examines whether elections are associated with a pre-election decline in economic activity, and whether any such decline depends on electoral competitiveness. The results support the predictions and cannot be explained by existing theories.

Studies of the American public demonstrate that partisans often diverge not only on questions of opinion but also on matters of fact. However, little is known about partisan divergence in factual beliefs among the government officials who make real policy decisions, or how it compares to belief polarization among the public. This letter describes the first systematic comparison of factual belief polarization between the public and government officials, which we conducted using a paired survey approach. The results indicate that political elites are consistently more accurately informed than the public across a wide range of politically contentious facts. However, this increase in accuracy does not translate into reduced factual belief polarization. These findings demonstrate that a more informed political elite does not necessarily mitigate partisan factual disagreement in policy making.

This article explores the link between industrial policy and electoral outcomes under dictatorship. Using a difference-in-differences analysis of county-level panel data from 1971–88 in South Korea, it examines whether the industrial policy implemented by an authoritarian government affects constituents’ electoral decisions. It finds that counties receiving economic benefits through the construction of industrial complexes cast more votes for the incumbent party in subsequent elections. The effects are larger in elections immediately after the appointment of an industrial complex or at the beginning of its construction compared to elections held after the completion of construction. Furthermore, the study tests and rejects reverse causality and migration effects as possible alternative mechanisms for the changes in electoral outcomes. Finally, to understand a unique feature of authoritarian elections, it tests whether industrial complexes affect electoral fraud. Using a genetic matching methodology, it finds that places with new industrial complexes are less likely to experience electoral fraud.