Although most incumbent members of Congress succeed in being re-elected, American politicians are in fact more subject to the vicissitudes of electoral politics than are the politicians of any other major democracy. They face re-election more often. They face the possibility of having to contest primaries. They have to raise most of their own money. They are not given a large measure of protective cover by strong political parties. The consequences for American government and politics are profound. They include such familiar and well-documented phenomena as particularism, ‘pork’ and the power of special interests; but they also include the high incidence in America of purely symbolic politics, the drastic foreshortening of American politicians' time horizons and the difficulty that the American system often has in taking tough decisions.

Political leaders across Africa frequently accuse the media of promoting homosexuality, while activists often use the media to promote pro-LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) narratives. Despite extensive research on how the media affects public opinion, including studies that show how exposure to certain information can increase support of LGBTQs, there is virtually no research on how the media influences attitudes towards LGBTQs across Africa. This study develops a theory that accounts for actors' mixed approach to the media and shows how different types of media create distinct effects on public opinion of LGBTQs. Specifically, the study finds that radio and television have no, or a negative, significant effect on pro-gay attitudes, whereas individuals who consume more newspapers, internet or social media are significantly more likely to support LGBTQs (by approximately 2 to 4 per cent). The author argues that these differential effects are conditional on censorship of queer representation from certain mediums. The analysis confirms that the results are not driven by selection effects, and that the relationship is unique to LGBTQ support but not other social attitudes. The results have important implications, especially given the growing politicization of same-sex relations and changing media consumption habits across Africa.

What are the consequences of being the victim of crime for political participation? Previous studies report mixed results with respect to voter turnout, in contrast to the positive effects found for other indicators of political engagement. However, previous turnout studies have failed to differentiate between violent and non-violent crime, and have relied on cross-sectional survey data that is prone to measurement biases and selection effects. This article addresses these shortcomings via a panel analysis of official registry data from Denmark recording individual-level turnout in two municipal elections (in 2009 and 2013) and victimization from violent and non-violent crime. It identifies the effect of victimization by comparing changes in turnout between the two elections for victims and two different counterfactual groups: non-victims in the general population, and individuals who were victimized after the 2013 election. The results show that victimization from violent crime increases turnout by 2 to 3 percentage points. The study further demonstrates a large negative between-individual effect of victimization, suggesting that previous studies have been marred by severe selection bias.

This article analyses the origins and consequences of multicameral representation and voting in international organizations. It is argued that the existence of visible and durable conflicts in an issue area can make standard procedures such as unicameral majority voting ineffective with respect to the functioning of the regime. Applying spatial models of strategic decision making, it is asserted that multicameralism is more likely to be effective than unicameralism if chambers consist of key groups with distinct interests. Empirical evidence is provided by studying the multicameral voting rule in the Council of the International Seabed Authority (ISA). I compare likely decision-making outcomes under unicameral and multicameral voting rules from 1996 to 2002 and find that multicameral outcomes are more likely to be stable and supported by those actors critical for the effective functioning of the regime.

In this analysis we have used a procedure based on estimating likelihoods, from background characteristics, of someone's - or something's - belonging in some category of a dependent variable. We have tried to demonstrate the applicability of this procedure to the specific task of distinguishing activists from ordinary electors in five divergent British localities, with a view to its general use in the prediction and description of initial participation and of activist dropout. The conclusions are:

There have been many comparative studies of British and American parties and elections, but little attention has been paid to comparisons of special elections (or by-elections) to fill vacancies in the two lower houses of the central legislatures, the House of Commons and the House of Representatives. Although British by-elections have been closely studied for a long time, even the most basic facts about American special elections were unknown until recently. Despite the lack of direct examination of how by-elections compare in the two countries, American academics have often dismissed American special elections with such passing comments as ‘because of their unsystematic nature and unsynchronized timing, American special elections, unlike British by-elections, have negligible predictive value’.

This article provides operational measures for comparing welfare states in terms of the concept of post-productivism, as pioneered by Goodin in this Journal, and discusses the normative relevance of such comparisons. Post-productivism holds that it is desirable to grant people a high level of personal autonomy, through the welfare state's labour-market institutions and transfer system, and maintains that on average, people would choose to make use of their autonomy by working less, hence earning less and having more free time. By contrast, existing welfare states, for example as classified in Esping-Andersen's three-way split of liberal, social-democratic and corporatist regimes, are largely ‘productivist’, as their policies try to design social rights so as ensure economic self-reliance through full-time work. The question is whether they actually succeed in doing so. With a limited dataset of thirteen OECD countries for 1993, three conditions of personal autonomy – income adequacy, temporal adequacy and absence of welfare-work conditionality – are discussed in terms of policy outputs, which can be read off from easily accessible OECD statistics. Two closely related concepts are explored: comprehensive post-productivism, measuring the extent to which welfare states approximate the ideal of personal autonomy, and restricted post-productivism, which follows from two common goals shared by all welfare states (avoidance of poverty and reduction of involuntary underemployment), and expressly focuses on the policy outputs on which the productivist and post-productivist perspectives specifically disagree: welfare-work unconditionality, voluntary underemployment and average annual hours of work per employee. After showing that ranking the thirteen cases puts the Netherlands at the top and the United States at the bottom, in conformity with Goodin's earlier work, it is shown that restricted post-productivism is not positively associated with the poverty rate, and negatively with the rate of involuntary underemployment. This finding sets the stage for our discussion of normative issues underlying a preference for either productivist or post-productivist arrangements of work and welfare. Suggestions for further research are given in the final section.

It is becoming increasingly accepted among analysts of British voting behaviour that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, local campaigning matters. The widespread view, largely propagated by David Butler and his co-workers on the Nuffield election studies, has been that campaigning in the constituencies by party activists and their candidates has no influence on the outcome: the distribution of votes across the parties in each constituency is a function of the national campaign only. This view was initially challenged by studies of canvassing in the 1970s, and extended during the 1980s by studies of campaign spending in the constituencies; further support was provided by work in the late 1980s and early 1990s on party canvassing activity. This note takes the challenge forward with an analysis of the impact of different aspects of constituency campaigning.

The demise of President Clinton's 1993 health care reform plan provides a revealing window into the difficulties and hazards of drawing lessons from complex political events. In an effort to identify the causes and implications of the Clinton plan's failure, students of American health policy have offered a blizzard of alleged historical lessons that purport to explain why the plan, along with its leading alternatives, went down to such a crushing political defeat. On closer inspection, however, many of these putative lessons turn out to be hastily formulated, weakly grounded and prescriptively inadequate. These deficiencies are by no means unique to the commentary on health care reform in the United States. Rather, they reflect general risks of constructing lessons for action or analysis on the basis of just one or a few striking political events. Although these risks are endemic to historical lesson-drawing, they could be reduced by more careful attention to basic rules of historical comparison and counterfactual analysis. They could also be mitigated by a greater awareness of the fundamental uncertainties that, for a variety of reasons, characterize complex political interactions. Viewing outcomes as uncertain does not preclude forecasting and, indeed, may lead to more nuanced and accurate predictions, as well as to a greater appreciation of historical turning points and moments of meaningful strategic choice.

This article discusses the notion of ‘persuasion’ applied to a political method. It proceeds by comparing and contrasting ‘persuasion’ with concepts within the ‘power’ family. There are two sorts of justification for such an exploration of ‘persuasion’, the first positive and the second negative.

Scholars have examined the role that negative stereotypes play in electoral discrimination against minority candidates. Incorporating literature on in-group favoritism, the author argues here that some degree of this discrimination can be explained instead by voters holding positive stereotypes of majority candidates and discriminating in their favor. Based on the results of an original moderation-of-process survey experiment carried out in Italy, the study provides evidence of electoral discrimination pertaining to immigrant-origin candidates, concentrated among right-wing citizens. It finds that stereotypes have little mediating effect on discrimination against candidates with a migration background; rather, the primary role played by stereotypes is in discrimination in favor of majority candidates, that is, positive bias that reserves electoral benefits to them. The relevance of in-group favoritism is corroborated by the finding that large segments of the Italian voting population hold distinctively positive stereotypes of majority candidates without also negatively stereotyping immigrant-origin candidates.

Many scholars and pundits believe that the 1964 presidential election between Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson disrupted the New Deal order and ushered in a sixth party system anchored in part by race issues. But, curiously, the conventional wisdom has not fared well empirically. In this article, I employ disaggregated survey data and novel methodological tools to identify temporal patterns in the relationships between partisanship, New Deal issues and race issues. My conclusions are as follows: (1) the association between race issues and partisanship has switched signs in the South; (2) a racial axis of cleavage has opened up outside the South; (3) the New Deal issue axis has grown in the South; and (4) New Deal issues continue to cleave partisans outside the South.

Legal scholars frequently advocate institutional reforms to modernize the judiciary and promote judicial independence. However, constitutional reforms also offer an opportunity for politicians to reshuffle the high courts. The negative consequences of constitutional change for judicial stability are explored using an original database of Supreme Court and Constitutional Tribunal members in eighteen Latin American countries between 1904 and 2010. Because unobserved factors potentially explain constitutional replacement as well as judicial turnover, a two-stage event-history model has been employed. The analysis integrates two literatures, studies of constitution-making and studies of judicial politics. The results show that constitutional change is a significant cause of judicial instability and court manipulation, even after potential endogeneity has been taken into account.

Douglas Hibbs's article, ‘On the Political Economy of Long-Run Trends in Strike Activity’, is the most recent of several comparative studies of the strike which explicitly reject the narrowly institutional approach characteristic of the ‘industrial relations school’ in favour of a broader socio-political perspective. These new approaches have the advantage of reminding us that industrial conflict is something more than an accident in the collectivebargaining process. Rather, the strike constitutes one working-class strategy – political action is another – in the acting out of class conflict in a capitalist society.

A debate, fanned by the experiences of South Korea and Taiwan, persists over how economic growth leads to democratization. This article provides a theoretical model showing that economic downturns lead to democratization and evaluates the conclusion systematically with data from South Korea and Taiwan. The model and results corroborate the hypothesis that economic downturns motivate government and non-government actors to pursue political reforms and democratization and highlight several contributions. They show democratization as the outcome of strategic responses pursued under weak economic conditions. Further, the findings are robust to alternative specifications of democratization. The results also bring empirics into line with theoretical expectations about democratization while simultaneously revealing that it is not a panacea for lack of support.

The past decade has seen the growth of a considerable literature on the link between government popularity, as reflected by the proportion of the public indicating their intention to vote for the government in opinion polls, and the state of the economy, as represented by certain key variables. The work began in the early 1970s with articles by Goodhart and Bhansali, Mueller, and Kramer. It continued through the decade; some of the more recent contributions can be found in a set of readings edited by Hibbs and Fassbender. However, despite the amount and quality of this work, problems remain. Principal amongst these, as Chrystal and Alt have pointed out, is the inability to estimate a relationship which exhibits any degree of stability either over time or between researchers. Nearly all the studies have been successful in finding a significant relationship for specific time periods, but when these are extended, or when the function is used to forecast outside the original estimation period, the relationship appears to break down.

Malapportionment doubly penalizes people from relatively large electoral districts or constituencies by under-representing them in the legislature and in the political executive or cabinet. The latter effect has not been studied. This article develops theoretical reasons for large constituency disadvantage in the cabinet formation process, and tests them using a new repeated cross-sectional dataset on elections and cabinet formation in India’s states, from 1977–2007. A one-standard-deviation increase in relative constituency size is associated with a 22 per cent fall in the probability of a constituency’s representative being in the cabinet. Malapportionment affects cabinet inclusion by causing large parties to focus on winning relatively small constituencies. These effects are likely to hold in parliamentary systems, and in other contexts where the legislature influences cabinet inclusion.

The importance of technological innovation in health care is due to the historical ascendancy of scientific medicine over other therapies. Scientific medicine in turn was strengthened through an alliance between professional elites and corporate interests. That alliance has been destabilized by developments in health care politics, by changes in industrial structures and by alterations in democratic politics. The medical goods industries remain powerful lobbies, but they operate in an increasingly competitive lobbying environment.