Because New Zealand's majoritarian political system presents few institutional barriers to change, social choice theory would predict that it should experience frequent change in governments and policies. Although some periods in New Zealand history confirm this expectation, a striking exception is the Liberal era of 1890–1912. To explain the anomaly, this article applies Riker's concept of heresthetics, the strategic manipulation of decision processes and alternatives. The Liberal leader, Richard Seddon, masterfully exploited four main heresthetic devices that offer enduring insight about how to sustain a popular majority. While extending the scope of heresthetics as an explanatory principle, the article rebuts Riker's normative dismissal of populism. In terms compatible with social choice theory itself, Seddon's strategies can be interpreted as having enabled the will of the majority to prevail.

Most of the variables in survey-based studies of electoral behaviour are measured only at second hand. Although sex or race can be coded from direct observation, and whether an individual voted can often be ascertained from documentary evidence, researchers must usually rely on respondents' accuracy and truthfulness in reporting attitudes and in recalling past behaviour. Both of these may involve significant biases. Research has shown that many events are underreported by survey respondents, although clearly desirable activities like voting may be overreported. Other work has suggested the likelihood that ‘non-attitudes’ will be reported by many respondents. When these two are compounded, so that respondents are asked to recall previous attitudes or dispositions, the danger of misrepresentation is multiplied.

Does social media educate voters, or mislead them? This study measures changes in political knowledge among a panel of voters surveyed during the 2015 UK general election campaign while monitoring the political information to which they were exposed on the Twitter social media platform. The study's panel design permits identification of the effect of information exposure on changes in political knowledge. Twitter use led to higher levels of knowledge about politics and public affairs, as information from news media improved knowledge of politically relevant facts, and messages sent by political parties increased knowledge of party platforms. But in a troubling demonstration of campaigns' ability to manipulate knowledge, messages from the parties also shifted voters' assessments of the economy and immigration in directions favorable to the parties' platforms, leaving some voters with beliefs further from the truth at the end of the campaign than they were at its beginning.

Many students of the United States Congress have contended that the institution is too closely tied to the interests of members' local constituencies. While the responsiveness this charge implies may seem laudable, the localism said to exist, especially in the House, weakens national agents of representation such as the political parties. Institutional features like seniority and the norm of reciprocity are often criticized for the premium they place upon members' success in their local constituencies, and the narrow, particularistic policy which results. Those who prefer a legislature responsive to national interests lament the disproportionate influence of constituencies with well-placed representatives on the committees and subcommittees in the House, and the fragmented, ‘distributive’ character of the legislative process.

Calls for civility feature prominently in public discourse, and the concept has received growing attention by political philosophers recently. But what does it mean to be civil? The existing literature distinguishes between two main understandings of civility: civility as politeness and civility as public-mindedness. The objective of this article is to show that these conceptions and the different normative claims associated with them can all fit together. We argue that civility and incivility should be disaggregated in order to uncover fruitful connections between different aspects of the concept. We introduce a distinction between two dimensions of civility as public-mindedness (moral and justificatory), as well as a new distinction between the means and ends of civility. We examine the complex connections between the different dimensions of (in)civility and show that the disaggregation of civility and incivility tells us what kind of (in)civility matters, as well as when and why.

Leading accounts of the politics of the welfare state focus on societal demands for risk-spreading policies. Yet current measures of the welfare state focus not on risk, but on inequality. To address this gap, this letter describes the development of two new measures, risk incidence and risk reduction, which correspond to the prevalence of large income losses and the degree to which welfare states reduce that prevalence, respectively. Unlike existing indicators, these measures require panel data, which the authors harmonize for twenty-one democracies. The study finds that large losses affect all income and education levels, making the welfare state valuable to a broad cross-section of citizens. It also finds that taxes and transfers greatly reduce the prevalence of such losses, though to varying degrees across countries and over time. Finally, it disaggregates the measures to identify specific ‘triggers’ of large losses, and finds that these triggers are associated with risks on which welfare states focus, such as unemployment and sickness.

Government action presupposes extraction. Historically, four different sources of public revenue may be distinguished. Tributes, which are common in peimitive and belligerent states, are variable levies exacted at irregular intervals. Tariffs raised on the basis of the physical control of strategic passageways are important sources of income for mercantile states in the early stage of their development. Taxes play some role in semi modern economies but evolve more fully as the financial mainstay of government in advanced industrial societies. In addition, many states draw large receipts from the profits of trade. The planned economies in the socialist bloc are trading states rather than tax states. The different logistic properties of these revenue sources affect the prospects for government growth at various stages of economic development. The expansion of the tax state is strongly linked to the proliferation of monetary flows in modern society. At the same time, some non tax receipts such as user charges and other incomes from trade retain their importance, and the present ‘crisis of the tax state’ might possibly lead to a more composite structure of government revenue.

Central both to formal theories of coalition formation and many, actual, collective decision-making processes is the distribution of some reward, or payoff as it is commonly called, among those participants able to control a decision. The payoff constitutes an object of value for the players, or the stakes of the game, the disposition of which becomes a primary focus of bargaining among them. It is usual to assume that participants in coalition-forming contexts are rational actors, and this is often interpreted to mean that they pursue strategies intended to maximize their individual shares of the available payoff. Theories based upon this general structure have furnished a variety of important propositions, focusing mostly upon the composition of winning coalitions.

Rivalry is characterized by mutual mistrust, anger and fear, and becomes increasingly intractable as confrontations between rivals militarize. The empirical record confirms that rivalries account for the vast number of militarized interstate disputes and wars in the international system. Although considerable attention has been spent on the initiation, duration or termination of rivalries, to date no comprehensive theoretical framework for their persistence or failure exists. Following Fearon, a rationalist explanation of rivalry termination is developed. It is argued here that the adoption of liberal institutions helps alleviate the commitment problems arising in rivalry. Free-market reform, democratic institutions and membership in international organizations all build trust and increase defection costs among rival states, and therefore help to shorten the duration of rivalry. Using a Cox proportional hazard model and Thompson's data on rivalries, it is shown that change towards democracy, as well as the joint effect of democracy and economic development increase the likelihood of rivalry termination. Also, joint membership in international organizations with mechanisms for dispute settlement reduces the duration of rivalry.Arobustness check using Diehl and Goertz's list of rivalries produces similar results.

Traditionally, and for some good reasons, elections in Communist one-party states have been treated as relatively unimportant phenomena, essentially ‘massive demonstrations of ritualized affirmation’, or simply a test of the Communist party's mobilization powers. The absence of competing political parties and consequently opposing goals and programmes does clearly mean that such elections are very different from those in liberal democratic states. They do not and cannot, for example, resolve the often crucial question of political succession.

This article explores an agency model in which voters learn about both an incumbent and an opponent. They observe the incumbent’s policy record and update their beliefs about his opponent via a campaign. Although the former is relatively more informative, it can be costly for the voter to learn about the incumbent from her policy record. This is because policy reforms, which allow a voter to learn an incumbent’s ability, are risky and can leave the voter worse off. Then the voter may prefer the incumbent to take safer actions. The efficient level of reform – the one preferred by the voter – balances the value of learning with the expected policy costs/benefits. In a world where the opponent’s campaign is uninformative, reform can be too low due to the incumbent’s fear of failure. Or it can be too high: the incumbent may gamble on success. This article shows that the presence of an opponent who can reveal information via a campaign exacerbates these inefficiencies. An incumbent who anticipates the effect of an opponent’s campaign on voter beliefs is more likely to make inefficient policy choices. Further, such campaigns can lead to an overall welfare loss when they reveal little about the opponent’s ability and yet have an impact on the incumbent’s policy choice.

In recent years centrist-liberal parties, such as the German Free Democratic Party (FDP) in 2013 and the British Liberal Democrats in 2015 and 2017, suffered enormous electoral defeats. These defeats highlight a prominent puzzle in the study of party competition and voting behavior; the empty center phenomenon. That is, empirical evidence suggests that most parties do not converge to the median voter's position, despite the centripetal force of the voters’ preference distribution. Using survey data from Canada, Finland, Germany and the United Kingdom, this article shows that deterioration of centrist parties’ valence image is followed by a collapse of their vote shares. Using mathematical simulations, this article shows that centrist parties have limited strategic opportunities to regain their support. Differently from other parties, centrist parties cannot alter their policy platforms to compensate for their deteriorated valence image. These results have important implications for political representation and voters–elite linkages.

Coalition phenomena are at the heart of politics everywhere, but they acquire a special significance in fragmented multiparty systems. In these systems, the distribution of political forces is such that parties are compelled to seek out at least one and often two or more partners, depending on the level of the system's fragmentation. The existence of a structural constraint that forces co-operative interaction is a major distinguishing feature of these systems and, accordingly, coalition-related phenomena occupy a central position in the political process. Coalition-maintenance activities are prominent, debates over coalition alternatives are frequent, procedures for the resolution of cabinet crises become institutionalized, and appropriate general orientations develop both at the level of the specialized actors in the political system and of the citizenry.

What difference does it make that Britain has a monarch? ‘Some political scientists,’ as Edward Shils and Michael Young remarked at the time of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, ‘tend to speak as if Britain is now an odd kind of republic which happens to have as its chief functionary a Queen instead of a President’.2 Shils and Young felt that the intensity of public interest in the coronation quite clearly belied such a commonsense and demystified interpretation of British politics. Two decades later, signs of lively interest in the monarch still abound, as do the many royal activities that sustain that interest: the investiture of the Prince of Wales, the BBC film of the Royal Family, the London walkabout of the Royal Family, the engagement and wedding of Princess Anne. Even controversies over such matters as the size of the Civil List appear to enhance interest in the monarchy. Yet in this era of empirical political studies there has been little systematic analysis of the impact of the monarchy on Britain. The evidence is especially weak about the impact of what Bagehot considered to be the monarchy's most important function — not the occasional and subtle royal initiatives at

What explains the development of legislative party voting unity? Evidence from the United States and Britain indicate that partisan sorting, cohort replacement effects, electoral incentives, and agenda control contributed to enhancing party cohesion during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here, these mechanisms are evaluated by analysing a dataset containing all the recorded votes from the Canadian House of Commons, 1867–2011. Overall, we find that partisan sorting and the government’s ability to control the agenda are central to the consolidation of parties over time. Our results underscore the need to integrate institutional rules and legislative agendas into models of parliamentary voting behaviour and suggest that strict party discipline can lead to the development of a multi-party system in the legislative arena.

The increasing importance of women in politics is a common feature of almost all advanced industrial societies. Women have become increasingly active in most aspects of political life during the 1970s: as voters, as lobbyists and, perhaps most significantly of all, as candidates for election to public office. The traditional prejudice against women in public life, which assumes women to be less suited to politics by temperament and training, suggests that they could be expected to receive fewer votes than men in an election. But it is unclear to what extent this prejudice has been mitigated by the broad changes which have taken place in women's roles in recent years. Can we still expect women candidates to fare less well than their male counterparts?

Such eviddce as there is in Australia suggests that the parties are less likely to nominate women but that, once nominated, women candidates fare neither better nor worse than men. Sawer concludes that ‘the differential electoral fortunes of male and female candidates has always reflected the failure to pre-select women for safe and winnable seats, not any failure to win votes.’ In a similar vein Mackerras argues that ‘the average performance of women is neither better nor worse than that of men. Women will be elected when parties select them for winnable seats.’ Research in the United States and Britain also suggests that a candidate's sex does not matter: Darcy and Schramm found that sex did not matter in the United States, controlling for incumbency and party, and in an analysis of three British general elections, Hills concluded that ‘the gender of a candidate makes only a very small difference to the voters.’

This article addresses two aspects of social network influence on voters’ electoral choices that are not well understood: the role of party systems as institutional contexts and the relationship between social pressure and information sharing as mechanisms of influence. It argues that in the cleavage-based multiparty systems of Western Europe, discussant influence at elections occurs in two stages. First, discussants place social pressure on voters to opt for parties from the same ideological camp. Secondly, by providing information, discussants influence which parties voters eventually choose out of these restricted ‘consideration sets’. The study tests these assumptions using a panel survey conducted at the 2009 German federal election. The first proposition is clearly confirmed, and the evidence supports the second proposition, although less unequivocally.

Given the prevalence of riots throughout human history, the lack of normative theorizing about them compared to other forms of political violence is striking. The author hypothesizes that this is due to riots' extra-institutionality. Riots are extra-public because they involve the participation of crowds, rather than institutionalized groups such as parties or social movements. They are extra-state because they violate the state's monopoly on violence. Riots are extra-legal because they constitute a form of unlawful assembly. They are also extra-parliamentary because they operate outside the normal legislative process. This article considers justifiable reasons to resist each of these foundational institutions, and proposes provisional criteria for a justifiable riot. The author concludes by urging political theorists to further examine the normative dimension of riots.

Under what conditions does peacekeeping reduce one-sided violence in civil wars? This article argues that local sources of violence, particularly ethnic geography, affect peacekeeping effectiveness. Existing studies focus on the features of individual missions, yet curbing one-sided violence also depends on peacekeepers’ capacity to reduce the opportunities and incentives for violence. Moving from the idea that territorial control is a function of ethnic polarization, the article posits that peacekeepers are less effective against one-sided violence where power asymmetries are large (low polarization) because they (1) create incentives for escalation against civilians and (2) are less effective at separating/monitoring combatants. The UN mission in Sierra Leone from 1997 to 2001 is examined to show that UN troops reduce one-sided violence, but their effectiveness decreases as power asymmetries grow.