This article is a comparative study of the relationship between social movements and the individual rights of citizenship. It identifies three main connections between collective action and individual rights made in theory and history, and analyses them in the context of modern authoritarian regimes. It does so by measuring both social mobilization and the presence of rights over time in Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Spain, and analyses their mutual impact statistically – both within and across these national cases. The results demonstrate the mutual impact between rights and movements, and more importantly, constitute a robust defence of democracy as the direct result of collective struggles for individual rights.

Adopted in 1913, the 17th Amendment to the US Constitution requires that members of the US Senate be elected by citizens of their respective states. This article is concerned with understanding what factors have influenced Senate election outcomes and how their effects have changed over time. I focus on three independent variables, state partisan composition, incumbency, and national partisan tides, and then develop a model of Senate election outcomes that allows their effects to change from election year to election year. The results reveal substantial variability and lead to a new and detailed understanding of Senate elections in the United States. The significance of the findings is further demonstrated by showing how the effects of the independent variables have affected actual election outcomes.

The appearance of a Republican majority among Southern members of the US House of Representatives provides a substantive reason to reconsider political change in the post-war South. And a newly created, merged dataset makes it possible to address the central and recurrent propositions about change in Southern politics in a manner not previously possible. When this is done, four basic contributions are highlighted, each a clear modification of the standard story. The main impetus for partisan change proves to be economic development, and a changing politics of economic interest. The main brake on this impetus proves to be legal desegregation, and a changing politics of racial identity. Several indirect interactions of race and class then enhance the impact of both contributions, while their joint impact is also powerfully shaped by the strategic response of partisan elites: by the appearance of Republican challengers but, especially, by the practical resistance of Democratic incumbents.

Fighting corruption is often seen as a crucial step toward building better institutions, but how it affects political selection remains less well understood. This article argues that in systems where corruption functions as an informal incentive for government to attract talent, anticorruption initiatives that curb rent-seeking opportunities may unintentionally weaken both the quality and the representativeness of the bureaucracy. The authors test this argument in China using an original nationwide survey of government officials and an identification strategy that exploits exogenous variations in enforcement levels created by the recent anticorruption campaign. The study finds that intensified enforcement has generated two potentially negative selection effects: a deterrence effect that lowers the average ability of newly recruited bureaucrats, and a compositional effect that discourages the entry of lower-class individuals in favor of those who are affluent and well connected. These findings highlight important hidden human capital costs of corruption elimination in developing countries.

William Riker is one of the most influential political scientists at present writing on the theory and practice of democracy. A quick count on my part of the Social Science Citation Index, normally a Siva of academic reputations, revealed nearly one thousand entries under Riker's name between 1971 and the beginning of 1982. Not only is his work frequently cited, it is read long after it is originally published. The Theory of Political Coalitions, probably his best known work, was published in 1962, and is still seriously discussed by those engaged in the empirical study of political coalitions. Moreover, Riker has always been anxious to show the relevance of technical work in political science to the political philosophy of democracy. His work therefore represents not simply an impressive scholarly and academic achievement, but also an important contribution to the more wide-ranging public debate about the nature and value of democracy.

The relationship between median citizen opinion on the left–right dimension, as measured in the Eurobarometer and European Electoral Studies series of surveys, and the left–right positions of governments in West European democracies is explored to gain a fuller understanding of how and to what extent median opinion may influence what governments subsequently set out to do. The analysis allows for the possibility that measurement may not be equivalent across countries and surveys, that the data may contain significant dynamic effects, and that different countries may exhibit different relationships between the two variables. The analyses show that changes in the citizen median generally produce larger changes in government position, the size depending mainly on the proportionality of the electoral system.

The First World War is often cited as proof par excellence of the flaws in the liberal peace argument because the adversaries it engaged had been each other’s major pre-war trading partners. Although commonly assumed to have wreaked havoc on the trade of the states it engaged, the war’s impact on commerce has rarely been rigorously examined. Using an original dataset, this study shows that the Great War triggered substitution processes that reduced its trade-related costs. Although recourse to second-best alternatives always induces efficiency losses, the costs of adjustment were small relative to the other costs that states incurred during the war. The analysis shows that the Great War is not the egregious exception to the theory that conventional wisdom has long assumed it to be. At the same time, it makes clear that the deterrent power of trade varies inversely with belligerents’ ability to access the markets of alternative trading partners.

Can ideological inconsistency in legislators’ voting records be explained by uncertainty about constituent preferences? Do legislators ‘hedge their bets’ ideologically when faced with constituency uncertainty? This article presents an uncertainty-based theory of ideological hedging. Legislators faced with uncertainty about their constituent preferences have an incentive to present ideologically inconsistent roll-call records. Legislators experiment with a variety of roll-call positions in order to learn the preferences of their constituents. An examination of US senators during 1961–2004 shows that uncertainty due to black enfranchisement and mobilization led to higher ideological inconsistency in legislative voting records. Ideologically inconsistent behaviour by elected officials can be characterized as best responses to a changing and uncertain environment. These results have implications for representation and the stability of democracy.

Renewed scholarly interest in the role of US congressional parties has recently coincided with a continuing interest in legislative committee influence and the extent to which that influence relies on committee preference composition. We argue that majority party incentives to influence composition vary by committee salience and party margins. In turn, the party’s ability to influence composition of salient committees is constrained, but varies by party resource levels. We present data on committee composition for the 80th to 104th US Houses and test these expectations using time-series cross-section analysis. The evidence provides support for the predictions – which have been hypothesized or tested anecdotally but have not heretofore been systematically tested – explaining both spatial and temporal variation.

Recent research on political discussion has focused on whether aspects of interaction create a ‘democratic dilemma’ for the mass public in which people face a choice between political participation and political tolerance. This article argues that there are important variations in how people react to their immediate social contacts. It explores this idea by studying how social disagreement and expertise interact with gender to explain variance in political participation. First, it shows that there are conflicting expectations in the literature about how such dynamics should manifest, despite agreement that men and women should experience different kinds and degrees of social influence. Secondly, it examines these expectations by revisiting prominent, network-based explanations of political participation; it finds that these relationships do not display consistency across sex differences. The results point to the existence of varied ‘social logics’ for men and women, and suggest the need to reconsider how to think about the efficacy of discussion and disagreement in a democratic society.

David Mayhew’s Divided We Govern significantly challenged the conventional wisdom of the adversarial effect of divided government on government effectiveness in the United States. While the post-Mayhewian literature has been centred on legislative productivity as a measure of gridlock, gridlock is here defined as an ‘inability to change policy’. In this study, the preferences of the legislators, such as the filibuster, override and House median veto players are plotted in Euclidean space. The analysis focuses on the influence of the area of the winset, which is an intersection overlapped by the veto players’ indifference curves. There is a substantial impact of the area of the winset on the change in policy output point, which is measured by the ADA scores and by Poole’s Mean Winning Coordinate. Yet divided government has marginal or no effect on policy swing. The conclusion is that the preferences of veto players, but not party control of the government, have a substantial impact on gridlock in the United States.

How are defense co-operation and economic co-operation related? To answer this question, this article analyzes the coevolution of defense co-operation agreements (DCAs) and government-to-government loans. It argues that governments pursue two distinct sets of interests. At the bilateral level, governments use issue linkages and side payments to encourage spillover from defense co-operation to economic co-operation, and vice versa. That is, governments’ bilateral interests in DCAs and loans are largely complementary. However, at the network level, interests may diverge. Specifically, governments use DCAs to build clubs of like-minded defense collaborators or ‘security communities’, while they use loans to impose asymmetric forms of political authority or ‘hierarchies’. In some contexts, these network-level interests are, like bilateral interests, complementary. For example, defense partners rely on loans to co-ordinate their foreign policies and better respond to security threats, and debtors rely on lending patterns to identify suitable defense partners. In other cases, however, these interests strongly conflict. For example, governments that are highly active in the loan network are especially likely to rely on asymmetric exercises of political authority, which is incompatible with the network-level goal of using DCAs to establish communities of defense collaborators. Similarly, governments that are highly active in the DCA network are, due to their complex multilateral political commitments, less vulnerable to the asymmetric influences that loans enable. To empirically test these claims, the study develops a longitudinal model of multiplex network coevolution. Overall, the results show that while economic and defense co-operation often reinforce one another, they sometimes conflict in unexpected ways.

No consensus exists on the causal mechanisms underpinning declining voting based on social cleavages – religion and class – in Europe. Previous research has emphasized two main factors: social change within the electorate (bottom-up) and parties’ policy polarization (top-down). This article presents a third level of analysis that links parties and cleavage-related social organizations, producing a factor capable of reinforcing group identity and interest representation. This hypothesis was tested for Italy in 1968–2008, where changes in the party system provided a natural experiment to assess the impact of changing structural alternatives at the party–organizational level. The level of cleavage voting in Italy then responded primarily to changes in the structure of party–organization linkages, while the impact of policy mobilization and social change was negligible.

Politicians and political scientists have long known that there is a slight tendency among voters to prefer candidates whose names appear at the top of the ballot compared with lower-placed candidates, and hence that ceteris paribus the former have a somewhat better chance of being elected than the latter. When the candidates' names appear on the ballot in alphabetical order, this positional voting bias is usually called ‘alphabetic voting’. It is of special importance and interest in preferential voting systems where the voters may indicate their first, second, third, etc., preferences among a list of candidates, as in the single-transferable vote elections to the Irish Dáil, or where they must do so, as in the alternative-vote elections to the Australian House of Representatives.

This article examines the conflict in political liberalism between the demands placed on education by liberalism and those placed on education by democracy. In so far as the principles of political liberalism entail both that the state not interfere with individuals' private commitments and that it ensure the maintenance of liberal democratic institutions, I suggest that it is rent by an internal tension that poses particular dilemmas for education. This tension is explored through three competing models of the school as a politically liberal institution, expressed in terms of a schematic analysis of three countries' approach to education: England, the United States and France. I argue that while all three countries capture important aspects of the politically liberal educational project, and while the American approach especially successfully and self-consciously addresses the balance between liberalism and democracy in constructing the school as a public square, no model in theory or in practice is able to meet the diverse and competing demands of political liberalism. In so far as any political system is viable only if it is able to maintain itself across generations, however, I conclude that political liberalism fails as a theory in at least one important respect, and that the problem of education thus deserves much deeper attention from liberal political theorists than it has yet enjoyed.

This article draws attention to an aspect that thus far has escaped systematic scrutiny in the theoretical literature on the political legitimacy of global governance – functions. It does so by exploring the idea that the content and justification of a principle of political legitimacy for global governance may depend on the function of the entity it is supposed to regulate (for example, law making, policy making, implementation, monitoring). Two arguments are made: one meta-theoretical and one substantive. The meta-theoretical argument demonstrates the fruitfulness of adopting a ‘function-sensitive approach’ to political legitimacy to address this aspect. The substantive argument develops the contours of an account of political legitimacy by applying this approach. This account consists of five regulative principles, which are sensitive to, and vary in accordance with, different functions in global politics.

For a variety of reasons political science in Britain has made no serious attempt to study courts and judges as political institutions and actors. Or at least this was true until recently. Several works in the last few years, especially Griffith's, Stevens's and a forthcoming book on the law lords by Alan Paterson, have pointed to a much needed change in this attitude. However, none of them have been works of political science, even though they have considered politics. By this I mean two things: they have not principally considered the judges' thoughts as political ideology; and they have not used the techniques and assumptions of rigorous, analytic political science. Indeed one of the few slightly earlier studies of the political role of the courts in Britain, by Morrison, specifically denies that such approaches, especially the statistical approach of jurimetrics, is possible in Britain. This article is an attempt to do the impossible, not so much because the author believes that Morrison's point is necessarily wrong, but because it is never sound methodology to abandon techniques that have been useful elsewhere without trying to make them work on different data sets. But first we must attempt to characterize the judicial role, before we try any study of the politics that may be attendant on judicial ideology.

Since the 1950s, the dominant pattern of partisan change in the American electorate has involved movements between party identification and independence rather than direct or indirect shifts between parties. This article employs switching regression analyses to investigate the long-term evolution and short-term dynamics of independence between 1953 and 1988. The analyses reveal that a new ‘independence regime’ developed rapidly in the mid-1960s, with the ‘tipping point’ in the transition occurring in the second quarter of 1967. Under the new–but not the old–regime, short-term changes in the size of the independent cohort have reflected economic conditions as well as political events. These findings argue that future research on the dynamics of public support for political parties in the United States and elsewhere will profit by developing dynamic models which assess processes of long- and short-term change in tandem.

Welfare states are exposed to a host of cost-inducing ‘reform pressures’. An experiment implemented in Germany, Norway and Sweden tests how various reform pressure frames affect perceptions about the future financial sustainability of the welfare state. Such perceptions have been shown to moderate electoral punishment for welfare reform, but little is known about their origins. Hypotheses are formulated in dialogue with newer research on welfare state change, as well as with older theory expecting more stability in policy and attitudes (the ‘new politics’ framework). Research drawing on ‘deservingness theory’ is also consulted. The results suggest large variations in impact across treatments. The most influential path to effective pressure framing is to ‘zoom in’ on specific economic pressures linked to undeserving groups (above all immigration, but also to some extent low employment). Conversely, a message emphasizing pressure linked to a very deserving group (population aging) had little effect. A second conceivable path to pressure framing entails ‘zooming out’ – making messages span a diverse and more broadly threatening set of challenges. This possibility, however, received weaker support.

Conventional wisdom suggests that macroeconomic outcomes do not follow a political business cycle (PBC) pattern. In this study, the nature of the electoral underpinnings of such opportunistic behaviour are investigated by analysing alternative formulations of PBC theory: (1) a naïve-unconditional PBC, (2) an electoral security-conditional PBC, (3) an electoral uncertainty-conditional PBC; and (4) a partisan-conditional PBC. Data on the US real personal income growth rate for the 1948:1–2000:4 quarterly period reveals support for both naïve-unconditional and partisan-conditional PBCs, yet rejects an electoral cycle attributable to the incumbent administration's ex ante re-election prospects. Simulation analysis reveals that while Democratic administrations enjoy higher income growth than Republican counterparts for non pre-election stimulus periods, Republican presidents are associated with larger pre-election economic expansions than Democratic presidents consistent with a partisan-conditional PBC theoretical model. This finding supports the notion that incumbent governments engage in partisan-based policy balancing with respect to the creation of opportunistic electoral cycles in real macroeconomic activity. On a broader level, these statistical findings provide strong support for adaptive models of the electoral cycle that emphasize partisan differences while refuting the policy neutrality proposition and rational-competence models predicated on the extent to which an incumbent administration experiences electoral vulnerability.