Party competition is central to the operation of representative democracy. Just as competition between firms in private markets is supposed to ensure the efficient provision of services required by consumers, so competition between parties delivers the policies desired by the electorate. As Elkins argues, party competition implies that governments ‘will not be self perpetuating and that elections can, and in some cases do, lead to the replacement of one set of officials with another set. The chance, or probability, of turnover is perhaps the most salient feature of this system of accountability’ If competition works then the ruling party is fearful of loss of office and seeks to produce policies that satisfy the electorate. Correspondingly, opposition parties will adopt a platform which is intended to be more popular than that of the incumbents. This, in essence, is the Downs model of party behaviour in a representative democracy: the struggle for electoral support leads rival parties to adopt ‘moderate’ policies that reflect median voter preferences. In the absence of competition, the ruling party would be free to neglect public opinion and pursue ‘extreme’ policies in line with the views of its activists or financial backers.D. Elkins, ‘The Measurement of Party Competition’, American Political Science Review, 68 (1974), 682–700, p. 682.A. Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1957).D. Robertson, A Theory of Party Competition (London: Wiley, 1976).

This article applies the portfolio allocation model of government formation to the formation of local government administrations in general, with a particular empirical application to the formation of administrations in British local authorities with hung councils. First, the implications of the portfolio allocation model for the formation of local administrations are discussed. Secondly, this model is operationalized in the context of British local politics, and specific empirical implications are explicitly derived from it. Thirdly, these implications are systematically evaluated against the recent experience of the formation of local administrations in Britain. The results suggest that policy is indeed important in the formation of British local administrations, but that more than a single left–right dimension of financial policy is needed to describe this process adequately.

This essay is the relic of a projected history of ‘individualism in politics’. That enterprise – the reasons for abandoning it will be transparent from what follows – prompted some reflections which may be of more general interest. For no habit is better established in the humanities and social sciences, as well as in political speech, than that of constituting a subject-matter for oneself by means of an -ism. And while there may be instances where the context makes this practice unproblematic, a survey of the past and contemporary record of -isms gives grounds for suspicion and reservations.

Complaints are common about the arbitrary and conservative bias of special-majority rules. Such complaints, however, apply to asymmetrical versions of those rules alone. Symmetrical special-majority rules remedy that defect, albeit at the cost of often rendering no determinate verdict. Here what is formally at stake, both procedurally and epistemically, is explored in the choice between those two forms of special-majority rule and simple-majority rule; and practical ways are suggested of resolving matters left open by symmetrical special-majority rules – such as ‘judicial extrapolation’ or ‘subsidiarity’ in a federal system.

Fifteen years have elapsed since the British Parliament enacted legislation designed to curb air pollution. The 1956 Clean Air Act appeared seven years in advance of comparable American legislation and well before the quality of the environment became a matter of world-wide concern. In view of the fact that Queen Elizabeth I had complained about smoke pollution in London, or that nineteenth-century novelists had penned vivid portraits of London's smoke and fog, the 1956 Act should perhaps be viewed as being at least a century late in appearing. Nevertheless, the Act did mark a distinctive policy innovation, particularly with regard to those provisions relating to smoke pollution from domestic sources. An analysis of the impact of those provisions will be the subject of this paper.

While Europarties have received increasing attention in recent years, little is known about how they arrive at common policy positions, given their strong internal ideological heterogeneity. In order to explain position formation within Europarties, this article argues that national parties compete with each other in an attempt to upload their own policy positions to their Europarty. The article hypothesizes that their ability to succeed in these attempts depends on their legislative resources. The argument is tested by analysing position formation within the four major Europarties for all European Parliament elections between 1979 and 2004. The empirical results confirm that position choice is skewed towards parties with a large seat share, which has important implications for political representation in Europe.

Prior research predicts that election administration changes that increase voting costs should decrease participation, but it fails to consider that some interpret those changes as attacking their franchise. Drawing on psychological reactance theory, this study tests whether such perceived attacks might instead activate those citizens. It leverages the State of Florida’s multi-stage effort in 2012 to purge suspected non-citizens from its voter rolls, comparing the voting rates of suspected non-citizens whose registration was and was not formally challenged by the state. Within-registrant difference-in-difference and matching analyses estimate a positive, significant participatory effect of being challenged, particularly for Hispanics (the vast majority of the sample). Placebo tests show that those challenged were no more likely than those not challenged to vote in previous elections.

Esping-Andersen developed a typology of welfare regimes: conservative, liberal and social democratic, which are measured on the basis of seven indicators. We re-examine Esping-Andersen's data as well as replication data compiled by Scruggs and Allan to show that the seven indicators do not form valid measures of these welfare regimes. In addition to divergences in their measurement, the seven indicators are a mixture of institutional characteristics of welfare systems and outcome measures of social stratification. A measurement model based on the five institutional characteristics of welfare regimes that pertain to social insurance, however, does fit both the original and replication data. This article therefore proposes a three-dimensional model of conservative and liberal social insurance, which treats universal insurance coverage as the third dimension, instead of Esping-Andersen's ‘socialist’ regime. Although this does not fundamentally alter the typology of countries, it has implications for previous studies that employ country scores based on Esping-Andersen's method as independent variables in causal models. To illustrate these implications, this article re-examines a study by Noël and Thérien and calls into question their conclusions on the causal connections between the social democratic welfare state and levels of foreign aid.

Constitutional amendment rules have traditionally been considered the most important part of a constitution. Nevertheless, recent empirical analyses argue that constitutional amendment rules do not matter at all. This dispute is due to the misuse of independent and dependent variables and inappropriate methodology. Using the Veto Players approach to measure constitutional rigidity, this article proposes a new index covering ninety-four democratic countries. It starts by explaining the underlying logic of the veto players approach and describing the specific derivation of the rules for the construction of the rigidity index, which aggregates all institutional provisions in a logically consistent way. It then explains why the lack of constitutional rigidity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for significant constitutional amendments in democratic countries. Finally, the author creates a new dataset on the significance of constitutional amendments and estimates the appropriate (heteroskedastic) model, which corroborates the theoretical expectations and demonstrates that more significant amendments lead to a better fit.

The electoral success of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a right-wing religious party, in India's 1991 national elections has often been attributed to the rise of Hindu religious sentiments.After the 1991 elections the BJP emerged as the second largest party in Parliament and captured almost a fifth of the votes cast. There is little in the way of substantive evidence, however, that Hindus have either become more religious or that they were willing to express their religiosity more politically only in the 1990s. This Note claims that the BJP was electorally successful on account of its ability to forge a coalition between religious groups and the middle classes. The BJP, an advocate of a mixed economy in the 1970s and Gandhian socialism in the early 1980s, emerged in the 1990s as an ardent critic of state intervention. It was this programmatic shift which enabled the BJP to garner the support of the middle classes, who were ‘mobilizable’ because of their growing disaffection with the political and economic policies pursued by the Congress party. The electoral success of the BJP hence lay not in mobilizing only the ‘religious’ but in its ability to put together a viable coalition between religious Hindus and those disaffected by excessive political intervention in the economy.

In an innovative and carefully argued article (‘The Used Vote and Electoral Outcomes: The Irish General Election of 1973’, this Journal, V (1975), 363–83) on the Irish Single Transferable Vote (STV) system in the 1969 and 1973 Dail elections, A. S. Cohan, R. D. McKinlay and Anthony Mughan state a proposition that requires further analysis. They argue that ‘the optimal number of candidates for a party is equal to the largest number of seats that the party might hope to win’ in a constituency, instead of the more common practice of nominating a larger number of candidates. The reasoning behind this proposition is that the nomination of fewer candidates means a greater concentration of the party's vote on these candidates and hence fewer vote transfers and less potential wastage of votes.

Our analyses have enabled us to test several important theoretical propositions advanced by two outstanding scholars, Anthony Downs and Donald E. Stokes. Our data do not support the Downsian position that it is possible to array parties along a single left-right continuum. The factor analyses suggested that a left-right factor underlies the perceptions some individuals have of the positions Canadian parties take on some specific issues. However, the left-right factor that emerged from the analyses was not always what conventional wisdom supposed it to be, with the NDP on the left, the Liberals to the left of center, the Conservatives to the right of center and Social Credit on the right.39 Nor was it in accord with the structuring of parties that places the NDP on the far left, both the Liberals and the Conservatives in the same right-of-center position and Social Credit on the far right.40 Moreover, the left-right factor most often underlies the perceptions of MPs. To a lesser extent it underlies the images of the upper stratum of the public. It least often underlies the perceptions of average Vancouver and Winnipeg citizens.

Once dominant and unchallenged throughout the USSR, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union rapidly lost authority in the last two years of Soviet rule. Banned by Russian presidential decree after the failure of the attempted coup of August 1991, it was re-established in February 1993 and soon became the largest of the postcommunist parties. A 1992 survey of current and former party members as well as other Russians found that members were characterized by a relatively high degree of activism. They were disproportionately male, more affluent than non-members, and better provided with consumer goods. Younger respondents and religious believers were more likely to have left the party than their older colleagues. Those who still regarded themselves as party members were the most likely to oppose economic reform and support the collectivist principles of the communist era, particularly if they were activists; but the differences between members and non-members were not substantial, and both were found to hold generally pessimistic views on the postcommunist system. These findings suggest that, although former members will continue to be influential, CPSU membership is by itself likely to play a limited part in shaping the political direction of postcommunist Russia.

Electoral systems determine the role that representatives’ party affiliations play in political representation. According to conventional expectations, party affiliation drives the behavior of representatives when they are elected under a proportional system, while majoritarian systems mute the role of party affiliation by forcing politicians to converge to the median position of their constituency. This study directly tests these predictions within a common party system by matching referenda decisions of constituents with voting behavior of their representatives who are elected either under a majoritarian or proportional system.

Whatever its limitations, the academic literature has not been short in supplying adjectives to describe and characterize the political economy of New Labour. Yet until Ben Clift and Jim Tomlinson's provocative and imaginative intervention in the debate published in this journal, ‘Keynesian’ was not one of them. In a way it is odd that New Labour's political economy should not previously have been labelled Keynesian – it has, after all, been called almost everything else and, as Clift and Tomlinson show well, there is a certain intuitive appeal to this designation.

In this brief response, however, I seek to demonstrate that the label ‘Keynesian’ is ultimately inappropriate, the resulting characterization misplaced. Despite their pretensions to normative neutrality, I suggest, Clift and Tomlinson's self-evident desire to label New Labour's political economy ‘Keynesian’ leads them to mischaracterize both the literature they critique and the putative object of that literature's and their own analytical attentions. I argue that whilst they do largely succeed in showing that New Labour has not ‘decisively repudiated’ Keynesianism, they do not show that it has actively embraced it. Indeed, even if one were to accept every aspect of their analysis, at best they show that the decision to cede operational independence to the Bank of England has bought consecutive New Labour governments since 1997 the fiscal policy discretion to respond – if, as and when the need arises (or is seen to arise) – to recessionary pressures in a Keynesian fashion. In short, they make a far stronger case for suggesting that New Labour's policies since 1997 are not incompatible with future Keynesianism than they do for suggesting that those policies are themselves Keynesian in intent or content.

How do international institutions affect political liberalization in member states? Motivated by an examination of the World Bank loans program, this article shows that institutions can incentivize liberalization by offering opportunities for countries to become associated with advanced, wealthy members. In the World Bank, when a loan recipient reaches a specified level of economic development, it becomes eligible to graduate from borrower status to lender status. Using a regression discontinuity design, the study demonstrates that this incentive motivates states to improve their domestic behavior with respect to human rights and democracy. Combining qualitative and quantitative evidence, the results suggest that the desire to become a member of this elite group is responsible for motivating member states to reform due to the belief that such membership brings diffuse international and domestic benefits.

If the welfare state embodies a collective obligation to give to those in need, it also attests to the failure of individual, private giving, which from the advent of industrialization has been far too modest and capricious to care adequately for the sick and indigent. Private, individual giving simply cannot compete with state help when it comes to guaranteeing people's welfare. But its failure to do a job better handled by the state does not mean that private giving is an irrelevant anachronism. Even the welfare state's most ardent supporters should appreciate its value. Private giving has intrinsic worth. It reveals how humane society is. Giving and helping palpably enrich public life, although, unlike high per capita income or low crime rates, they elude statistical composites of collective well-being. Private giving also has instrumental value. In so many ways – ranging from assisting an old lady off a bus to saving a drowning stranger – people can help each other when the state may be helpless. Privately-given funds, time, attention and ideas can supplement what the state offers; limited state resources inevitably leave some people with less than they need, and the gaps in state aid can be filled, at least in part, by private efforts.

There are three paths to constitutionalism in the modern world. Under the first, revolutionary outsiders use the constitution to commit their new regime to the principles proclaimed during their previous struggle. India, South Africa, Italy and France have followed this path. Under the second, establishment insiders use the constitution to make strategic concessions to disrupt revolutionary movements before they can gain power. Britain provides paradigmatic examples. Under the third, ordinary citizens remain passive while political and social elites construct a new constitution. Spain, Japan and Germany provide variations on this theme. Different paths generate different legitimation problems, but the EU confronts a special difficulty. Since its members emerge out of three divergent pathways, they disagree about the nature of the union’s constitutional problem, not merely its solution. Thus the EU confronts a cultural, not merely an economic, crisis.