The Cox proportional hazards model is a commonly used method for duration analysis in political science. Typical quantities of interest used to communicate results come from the hazard function (for example, hazard ratios or percentage changes in the hazard rate). These quantities are substantively vague, difficult for many audiences to understand and incongruent with researchers’ substantive focus on duration. We propose methods for computing expected durations and marginal changes in duration for a specified change in a covariate from the Cox model. These duration-based quantities closely match researchers’ theoretical interests and are easily understood by most readers. We demonstrate the substantive improvements in interpretation of Cox model results afforded by the methods with reanalyses of articles from three subfields of political science.

This article introduces the concept of patronage regimes and, through it, extends the research on American party development. No systematic empirical inquiry into the operation of American patronage practices has yet been undertaken. Its analysis investigates the strategic allocation of public jobs by party elites to enhance cadre performance in presidential elections. Utilizing a dataset of 49,000 Senate-confirmed, presidential appointments, presidential patronage removals between the years 1829 and 1917 are analysed. Two distinctive patronage regimes are identified: an antebellum regime structured by pure-and-simple spoils politics and a postbellum regime conforming to principles of machine rationality. Factors central to the process of regime transformation are pinpointed. The presence of two successive patronage regimes highlights the importance of endogenous political incentives and elite strategic choice to the emergent character of party organization, shedding new light on the historical development of these pre-eminent nineteenth-century American political institutions.

Hans Keman's and Paul Pennings's critique (‘Managing Political and Societal Conflict in Democracies: Do Consensus and Corporatism Matter?’, this Journal, preceding pages) of our attempt to link corporatism and consensus democracy falls essentially into three parts. Their first criticism deals with the way we measured corporatism. They reject our ‘composite’ approach on the basis that different experts have different conceptual understandings of corporatism. Hence, they argue, it is unwarranted to add up these various scores. Secondly, they claim that our central relationship between consensus democracy and corporatism is a function of our particular measure of corporatism and, in addition, driven by two outlying cases: Italy and Austria. Thirdly, they claim that corporatism and consensus democracy are two different phenomena, and that therefore, corporatism should not be integrated into the concept of consensus democracy. We shall address these three main criticisms in the order described.

R. J. Johnston produces two striking and counter-intuitive results on bargaining power in a European Union Council of Ministers expanded by the addition of the four states applying for entry in 1994. One is that the ‘big four’ member states, including the United Kingdom, have more power if the minority with power to block a proposal is set at 27 rather than 23. UK Prime Minister John Major damaged himself politically by first insisting that he would veto a proposal to increase the blocking threshold from 23 to 27 and then being forced to climb down from this position. As Johnston notes, this episode ‘led to several calls for his resignation from among his own party's MPs, including one in the House itself’. If British interests, as seen by the Euro-sceptics whom Mr Major was vainly trying to appease, were actually better served by a threshold of 27 than of 23, his actions appear doubly futile. This is apparent by reading across Johnston's Table 1, using either of the indices he proposes.

Liberal institutions (freedom of speech and religious worship, for example) will naturally be supported by liberals – that is to say, those with a liberal outlook. But what arguments can be addressed to non-liberals? There are some traditional arguments but these are too limited in scope to provide a general justification for liberal institutions. A recent argument that claims to do the job is to the effect that justice entails neutrality and neutrality entails liberal institutions. However, neutrality is a principle that could appeal to non-liberals only if they had already swallowed a large dose of liberalism, since it requires that they regard their deepest convictions as preferences or personal opinions. It is also doubtful whether liberals are well advised to embrace neutrality.

The electoral domination of the Conservative party during the past decade has been interpreted by many as evidence of a long-term shift in the balance of public support from Labour to the Conservatives. This article argues that such a shift has not occurred. Rather, the stability apparent in recent election results disguises considerable underlying volatility. The balance of public support between the major parties continues to be highly unstable and subject to large and precipitous fluctuations in response to relatively small economic changes and ordinary political events. Recent Conservative victories appear to be the results more of good timing and luck than of any fundamental, long-term dynamic in British politics.

Although ideological polarization can create problems for governability and democratic stability, this article argues that it also has beneficial effects in new democracies. By clarifying the political alternatives, polarization creates strong links between parties and voters, and thereby instills accountability mechanisms that force parties to remain responsive to evolving voter preferences. A comparative historical analysis of six South American cases demonstrates that the vast differences in the quality of representation in the 1980s, immediately after many countries in the region returned to democracy, were rooted in an early bifurcation of party systems in the first half of the twentieth century: while prolonged periods of ideological conflict occurred in some countries during this period, polarization was aborted by various means in others. By showing that ideological moderation may help formal democracies survive, but that aborting conflict in the long run severely hampers key aspects of the quality of democracy, this study suggests a revision of conventional views regarding ideological polarization.

Plurality electoral systems with multi-member districts and single nontransferable votes (SNTV) allow parties to win multiple seats in district elections by nominating multiple candidates, but they also penalize a party's seat share if the number of candidates offered is ‘too many’ or ‘too few’. Given an institutional incentive to nominate the ‘correct’ number of candidates, we seek to establish empirically that the nominating behaviour of parties in such systems results from a rational calculus of strategic choice. So we develop and test an empirical theory of rational nominating behaviour applied to Japanese district elections before the 1994 electoral reform. We establish, for all possible nominating strategies, the conditions on voting outcomes required for actors to maximize benefits in the context. The efficiency of actual strategy choices for maximizing benefits is found by comparing an observed outcome from voting (the distributed benefit) with the benefit that would be expected had the party chosen its ‘best’ alternative nominating strategy instead. Empirical testing indicates that Japanese parties discriminated between available nominating strategies and made choices that maximized benefits in the context,evidence that the nominating behaviour of parties in this test environment was based on rational calculation.

This article considers the emergence of an informal institution vital to the functioning of Westminster polities: that the Shadow Cabinet is a ‘government in waiting’. It compares the evidence for two theoretical accounts of its timing: a ‘procedural’ theory wherein the Shadow Cabinet is a solution to internal organizational issues in the House of Commons prior to widespread working-class voting, and a ‘competition’ theory that predicts that suffrage extension acts as a key stimulus for Shadow Cabinet organization. Gathering a dataset of almost a million utterances in parliament between the First and Fourth Reform Acts, the study provides a novel method of identifying Shadow Cabinet members using the surges in term use from their speeches. It finds that the ‘competition’ hypothesis is the most plausible version of events, and that the opposition responded to the new ‘party-orientated electorate’ by strategically reorganizing in a way that mimicked the cabinet’s structure.

Although a substantial philosophical literature exists on the concept of ‘friendship’ and its connections to politics, the possibility that groups such as states could be friends has largely been ignored. This is puzzling since the description of political communities as friends is one that goes back to Thucydides. Moreover, contemporary international politics is replete with references to the concepts of ‘friend’ and ‘friendship’. This article argues that international friendships provide powerful reasons for minimally just states to engage in other-regarding conduct. Drawing on an Aristotelian account of self-interest for inspiration, it is suggested that the same reasons that justify a state’s self-regard also justify its regard for other states. These reasons rest on whether the basic institutions of a state – one’s own or another’s – are minimally just. States, solely because of their character, have reason to enter into different levels of friendship. Those different relationships in turn generate different expectations regarding consultation, security and respect for autonomy.

With some notable exceptions, comparative research on the welfare state falls generally into one of two categories: qualitative and generally descriptive case studies and large-scale quantitative efforts at explanation. Case studies have progressed past the point of being essentially journalistic descriptions of the peculiarities of the policy development process or the policies of a particular society. It is nevertheless true that there has been little progress in moving beyond the case study approach towards building a theory about how and why societies make particular decisions about the priorities and organization of their social welfare efforts. On the other hand, while large-scale aggregate analysis yields theoretical statements about the character of ‘the welfare state’, those conclusions are often so general as to be ‘difficult to relate to… how particular substantive problems have been [and might be] handled.’

In this article we defend the importance of the concept of ‘stateness’ in scholarly understanding of political democratization. We argue that because processes of political democratization in different spatio-temporal settings often share important similarities they are therefore comparable. We investigate this proposition by comparing the process of American political democratization with those of other liberal democracies, old and new. We review extant accounts of the historical process of American democratization – including those addressing American exceptionalism, class structures, multiple traditions, social movements, and international pressures – before presenting an alternative comparative account based on the idea of stateness. Attention to stateness problems defined along legal, bureaucratic and ideological dimensions and derived from both the classic Weberian perspective on the state and the more recent ‘third wave’ of democratization theory help to place the long American experience of democratization in comparative perspective. This finding illuminates some of the common political challenges in the construction of liberal democracies, old and new.

Recent studies of American federalism have emphasized the division of government functions between the national government and the states. But the effects of federalism depend not only on the balance of functional authority but also on the structure of federalist institutions. The institutional structure of Aid to Dependent Children, created by the Social Security Act of 1935, comprised a system of state operational control unhindered by federal supervision. The effect of this federal bargain was the exclusion of African-Americans from welfare benefits in the South. But the federal structure of the programme also shaped implementation in the North, where decentralization allowed its capture by urban machines, which used welfare as a political benefit. New techniques for ecological inference establish these results. Administrative institutions structured the entry of African-Americans into the American welfare state and created the conditions for the welfare ‘crisis’ of the 1960s and later.

Election-oriented elites are expected to emphasize issues on which their party possesses ‘issue ownership’ during campaigns. This article extends those theories to the content of executive and legislative agendas. Arguing that executives have incentives to pursue their party’s owned issues in the legislature, it theorizes three conditions under which these incentives are constrained: when governments are responsive to issues prioritized by the public, when a party has a stronger electoral mandate and under divided government. The theory is tested using time-series analyses of policy agendas of US congressional statutes and State of the Union addresses (1947–2012) and UK acts of Parliament and the Queen’s Speech (1950–2010). The results offer support for the theory, and are particularly strong for the US State of the Union address, providing insights into institutional differences. The implications provide reassurance concerning the conditions under which governments focus attention only on their partisan issue priorities.

For decades political scientists have been fascinated with the problem of establishing a formal mathematical relationship between the popular votes cast for a political party and the number of parliamentary seats it holds. The most famous attempt at solving this problem, known as the ‘cube law’, was formulated more than sixty years ago by James Parker Smith. Since then a large number of papers in support of the cube law have been published. Perhaps the most cited paper is by Kendall and Stuart. The cube law also has been stated to apply to parliamentary elections in New Zealand, the United States and Canada. But doubts about the cube law have also been expressed by Brookes, Eldersveld and just a few years ago by Tufte.

In a recent exchange in this Journal, K.I. Macdonald took issue with Steven Lukes's claim that power is an essentially contested concept. Macdonald claims that in arguing that power is essentially contested Lukes locates disputes about power in the concept itself rather than in the divergent uses of that concept. Macdonald's claim is that there are at least two types of dispute about concepts: disputes which arise from within the concept and disputes which arise in the differing values ‘from which the concept depends’. In the case of power, Macdonald argues, the dispute lies between contending perspectives and values and not within the concept of power itself. Whilst not denying that there are essentially contested concepts, Macdonald is clear that the concept of power is not essentially contested but reflects a contest between differing value positions. Macdonald argues that whenever a concept is ‘truly essentially contested the proper ground for the contest is the essence of the concept. Our disagreements inhere in that concept’.

Does the geographic concentration of industry ‘matter’ outside the United States? Observers have long speculated that while geographically concentrated industries may be influential in American politics, this is probably not the case in countries where the electorate votes more as a national constituency. Others disagree, urging that clustered industries have an advantage regardless of how the political map is drawn. We sharpen the terms of debate and weigh in with empirical evidence from a cross-sectional analysis of intended voter turnout in eight member-states of the European Union and a multi-year study of voter turnout in the Netherlands. These tests uniformly show that, across different types of electoral systems, including those in which voters vote as a national constituency, thereby removing any effects of electoral geography per se, workers in traded industries that are physically concentrated are, in fact, substantially more likely to vote than employees in traded but geographically dispersed sectors.

The notion that cultural characteristics influence political regimes remains popular, despite mixed supporting evidence. In particular, democracy is argued to emerge and thrive in countries where liberal or freedom-oriented values (so-called self-expression values) are widespread. Inglehart and Welzel, for instance, report such an effect, mainly drawing inferences from cross-country comparisons. Yet cross-country correlations between self-expression values and democracy could stem from different processes. Reinvestigating this relationship, this article finds no empirical support when employing models accounting for sample-selection bias, country-specific effects and the endogeneity of values to democracy. Self-expression values do not enhance democracy levels or democratization chances, and neither do they stabilize existing democracies. In contrast, this study finds indications that a country’s experience with democracy enhances self-expression values.

Recent research on economic voting has moved beyond the traditional reward–punishment hypothesis, according to which the economy is merely considered a valence issue. Instead, patrimonial economic voting research looks at voters as property owners within the economic system. These studies have relied on survey items that measure whether individuals own different kinds of property to test the patrimonial dimension. This study emphasizes the importance of a surprisingly neglected aspect: the value of assets. It uses official register data files from the Swedish Tax Agency on the value of individuals’ assets merged with survey data from the 2006 Swedish National Election Study. The study finds that the relationship between patrimony and voting behavior in Sweden is similar to that found in other countries, but only when it is tested in a similar way as in these studies – that is, only when it is coded as whether voters own different assets. This study brings three important contributions to the debate. First, it offers a new empirically based categorization of the dimensionality of asset ownership and shows that the previous distinction between low- and high-risk assets is insufficient. Secondly, it shows that merely having assets or not, which is what previous studies have measured, is not what primarily matters; the relevant factor is the value of the assets. And thirdly, it demonstrates that only the value of some kinds of assets matters (especially stocks and real estate properties), while other assets (savings in bonds and funds) do not affect voting behavior or political opinions.