Traditional explanations of the origins of regional parties as the products of regionally-based social cleavages cannot fully account for the variation in regional party strength both within and across countries. This unexplained variance can be explained, however, by looking at institutions, and in particular, political decentralization. This argument is tested with a statistical analysis of thirty-seven democracies around the world from 1945 to 2002. The analysis shows that political decentralization increases the strength of regional parties in national legislatures, independent of the strength of regional cleavages, as well as of various features of a country's political system, such as fiscal decentralization, presidentialism, electoral proportionality, cross-regional voting laws and the sequencing of executive and legislative elections.

Through a pooled cross-section time-series analysis of the determinants of wage inequality in sixteen OECD countries from 1973 to 1995, we explore how political-institutional variables affect the upper and lower halves of the wage distribution. Our regression results indicate that unionization, centralization of wage bargaining and public-sector employment primarily affect the distribution of wages by boosting the relative position of unskilled workers, while the egalitarian effects of Left government operate at the upper end of the wage hierarchy, holding back the wage growth of well-paid workers. Further analysis shows that the differential effects of government partisanship are contingent on wage-bargaining centralization: in decentralized bargaining systems, Left government is associated with compression of both halves of the wage distribution.

This article examines the relationship between national political and economic institutions and environmental performance since the early 1970s in seventeen OECD countries. After presenting hypotheses about some of the effects of the most important structural and institutional variables on performance, I test these hypotheses using a multiple regression analysis. I find that neo-corporatist societies experience much better environmental outcomes than more pluralist systems. However, neither the degree of ‘consensual’ political democracy nor traditional political factors can explain much variation in environmental performance. These relationships hold even after controlling for other structural factors such as income and manufacturing intensity. The results are robust despite perennial small-n statistical problems encountered in comparative political economy.

The bandwagon was the caravan in a circus that carried the band, and usually took the lead in a procession. It has come to stand as a symbol for a party or a cause which is successful; we talk of people wanting to climb on to a bandwagon when their desire to be associated with the winning party or cause is strong. A ‘bandwagon effect’ is the label given by social scientists to a situation where the information about majority opinion itself causes some people to adopt the majority view for whatever reason; conversely, an ‘underdog’ effect is held to exist if the information causes some people to adopt a minority view. Processes of this kind are of theoretical interest because they affect the possibility of stable prediction in the social sciences; if the very act of predicting that one party will win an election can be a self-fulfilling prophecy then the natural scientific model of the social sciences may be compromised. Bandwagon processes are also of practical importance to pollsters, since the professional nature of their trade might also be compromised if their predictions could be shown to be interfering in political reality. These effects have therefore received a fair amount of attention in the literature. The main context studied has been the effect of exposure to an opinion poll on the general public. In this article, I shall first examine the existing evidence for poll effects of this kind, and then present and discuss a study of such effects.

Elections constitute a principal avenue of citizen involvement in political life, and knowledge of their effects on public attitudes towards the polity and the role of the individual therein has important implications for theories of democratic governance. One sucli attitude is political efficacy, ‘the feeling that individual political action does have, or can have, an impact on the political process’. Although many studies have documented that political efficacy is positively associated with electoral participation, the causal mechanisms involved are not well understood. Most researchers have simply assumed that the ‘causal arrow’ runs from efficacy to participation, i.e. from the attitude to the behaviour. Investigations of the hypothesis that the behaviour (participation) affects the attitude (efficacy) are rare. Rarer still are enquiries focusing on the impact of election outcomes on efficacy, and studies that examine both effects are virtually non-existent. In this Note covariance structure analysis is used to investigate the effects of voting, campaign activity and the outcomes of the 1984 national elections on political efficacy in the American electorate.

We use a multi-level modelling approach to estimate the effect of ethnic diversity on measures of generalized and strategic trust using data from a new survey in Britain with a sample size approaching 25,000 individuals. In addition to the ethnic diversity of neighbourhoods, we incorporate a range of indicators of the socio-economic characteristics of individuals and the areas in which they live. Our results show no effect of ethnic diversity on generalized trust. There is a statistically significant association between diversity and a measure of strategic trust, but in substantive terms, the effect is trivial and dwarfed by the effects of economic deprivation and the social connectedness of individuals.

Do voters reward or punish incumbents for retrospective performance similarly in different democratic regimes? Despite debates on the merits of different regimes, little research has investigated the implications of constitutional design on voters' ability to hold politicians to account. This article shows that regime type determines the way and extent to which elections enable voters to reward or sanction incumbents. These regime effects are separate from and conceptually prior to factors previously identified in the literature on comparative economic voting. Analysis of elections from seventy-five countries reveals that, all else equal, voters have greater potential to hold incumbents to accounts under the separation of powers than under parliamentarism. Moreover, variables particular to separation of powers systems – the electoral cycle in pure presidential systems and instances of cohabitation in semi-presidential systems – affect the relative impact of the attribution of responsibility. The results contribute to ongoing debates about the relative advantages of different constitutional formats for democratic performance.

A fundamental divide has emerged over how portfolio payoffs are distributed among parties in parliamentary coalitions. On one side lies very strong empirical evidence that the parties in a governing coalition tend to receive portfolios in one-to-one proportion to the amount of legislative support they contribute to the coalition, with perhaps some slight deviations from proportionality coming at the expense of larger parties that lead coalition negotiations. On the other side of the debate lies a stream of formal theories that suggest the opposite – that parties in charge of coalition negotiations ought to be able to take a disproportionately large share of portfolio benefits for themselves. In this article, we address this disjuncture by re-examining the empirical connection between legislative seats and portfolio payoffs with the aid of a new and more extensive dataset, a different method of analysis, and what we see as a more valid operationalization of the dependent variable. This operationalization involves the inclusion, for the first time, of evidence concerning the importance or salience of the portfolios each party receives, as opposed to just their quantity. The article concludes with an assessment of the implications of our findings for the debate over the rewards of coalition membership in parliamentary democracies.

Political scientists’ explanations for ethnic voting differ. Some have argued that the utility of ethnicity lies partly in the information that demographic cues provide about candidates, particularly in information-poor societies. However, extant research has not tested this proposition directly. This article proposes that, if part of ethnicity's utility is informational, we should expect that voters’ reliance on ethnic cues will decline when certain types of higher-quality information are available. To test this, a survey experiment was conducted in Uganda, with subjects evaluating candidates under varying informational environments. While support for co-ethnics was high when ethnicity was the only distinguishing fact about candidates, it declined when information was presented that portrayed co-ethnics negatively vis-à-vis non co-ethnics. These results suggest that informational environments can impact ethnic voting.

Scholars generally agree that the electorate's reaction to an election outcome has important systemic consequences. As Ginsberg and Weissberg point out, ‘every election represents a test and potentially a threat to support for the political regime. Electoral conflicts may strain public acceptance of legal and institutional processes.’ The basic idea is that regime support among citizens in the aftermath of an election depends on the widespread belief that the electoral contest has been resolved in a legitimate fashion.

Attitudes towards the political system have often been assumed to be stable attributes that are not easily influenced by short-term forces. We examine the extent to which attention to media coverage, campaign activity and electoral outcomes can mobilize support for the political system in the context of an election campaign. Using pre-election and post-election survey panels from the United States, Britain and New Zealand, we find only small shifts in aggregate measures of system support. However, we find that there are significant shifts in system support at the individual level that can be explained by status as election winners, attention to the media, particularly serious news coverage and economic perceptions. The results have implications for the debate over measures of system support such as trust, cynicism and efficacy.

The right–left dimension is ubiquitous in politics, but prior perspectives provide conflicting accounts of whether cultural and economic attitudes are typically aligned on this dimension within mass publics around the world. Using survey data from ninety-nine nations, this study finds not only that right–left attitude organization is uncommon, but that it is more common for culturally and economically right-wing attitudes to correlate negatively with each other, an attitude structure reflecting a contrast between desires for cultural and economic protection vs. freedom. This article examines where, among whom and why protection–freedom attitude organization outweighs right–left attitude organization, and discusses the implications for the psychological bases of ideology, quality of democratic representation and the rise of extreme right politics in the West.

This article examines how authoritarian parties and legislatures affect regime survival. While authoritarian legislatures increase the stability of dictators, political parties – even when devised to quell internal threats – can destabilize dictators. The main argument is that authoritarian parties influence the distribution of power in a subsequent new democracy by helping to protect the interests of authoritarian elites. These institutions thus increase the likelihood of democratization. Using a dataset of authoritarian regimes in 108 countries from 1946 to 2002 and accounting for simultaneity, the analysis models transitions to democracy and to a subsequent authoritarian regime. Results indicate that authoritarian legislatures are associated with a lower probability of transition to a subsequent dictatorship. Authoritarian parties, however, are associated with a higher likelihood of democratization.

This article addresses the issue of specialization and committee formation in the European Parliament in the light of the largely US-centred debates on these issues. Clear evidence is found of specialization of behaviour, both with regard to committee assignment and the use of parliamentary questions. This is also accompanied by a trend towards a greater role for the party groups in co-ordinating and controlling behaviour across these specializations.

This article examines how voters attribute credit and blame to governments for policy success and failure, and how this affects their party support. Using panel data from Britain between 1997 and 2001 and Ireland between 2002 and 2007 to model attribution, the interaction between partisanship and evaluation of performance is shown to be crucial. Partisanship resolves incongruities between party support and policy evaluation through selective attribution: favoured parties are not blamed for policy failures and less favoured ones are not credited with policy success. Furthermore, attributions caused defections from Labour over the 1997–2001 election cycle in Britain, and defections from the Fianna Fáil/Progressive Democrat coalition over the 2002–07 election cycle in Ireland. Using models of vote switching and controlling for partisanship to minimize endogeneity problems, it is shown that attributed evaluations affect vote intention much more than unattributed evaluations. This result holds across several policy areas and both political systems.

While a substantial literature explores gender differences in participation inthe United States, Commonwealth countries and Western Europe, little attentionhas been given to gender’s impact on participation in the developingworld. These countries have diverse experiences with gender politics: some havebeen leaders in suffrage reforms and equal rights, while, in others, divorce hasonly recently been legalized. This article examines the relationship betweengender and participation in seventeen Latin American countries. Many coreresults from research in the developed world hold in Latin America as well.Surprisingly, however, there is no evidence that economic development providesan impetus for more equal levels of participation. Instead, the most importantcontextual factors are civil liberties and women’s presence among thevisible political elite.

This article examines the relationship between the legislature and the public administration in postwar Italy (understood as the period from about 1948 through 1994). Italian public administration is normally characterized as badly designed and inefficient, and government performance is usually classed as poor. I argue by contrast that bureaucratic inefficiency, excessive legislation and widespread bureaucratic corruption were features of Italian public administration that were deliberately designed by legislators and intended to enhance the re-election prospects for incumbents by providing them with opportunities for extensive constituency service. The underlying incentives stemmed from the candidates' search for the personal vote, essential for retaining public office. Differences in the laws regulating the financing of political campaigns explain why excessive bureaucratization in the Italian context also resulted in extensive political corruption.