What explains states’ sub-national territorial reach? While large parts of the state-building literature have focused on national capabilities, little is known about the determinants of the unevenness of state presence at the sub-national level. This article seeks to fill this gap by looking at early attempts at state building: it investigates the processes of state penetration in the former colony of German East Africa. Contrary to previous studies – which largely emphasized antecedent or structural factors – the current study argues that geographical patterns of state penetration have been driven by the state’s strategic imperative to solidify control over territory and establish political stability. The article tests these propositions using an original, geo-referenced grid-cell dataset for the years 1890 to 1909 based on extensive historical records in German colonial yearbooks and maps.

On 24 May 2001, US Senator James M. Jeffords of Vermont formally announced that he intended to leave the Republican party to become an Independent. Although congressional party switches in the United States are noteworthy because of their infrequency, the Jeffords switch was especially significant because he would caucus with the Democratic party, handing the Democratic party control of the Senate by a one-vote margin. When Jeffords formally left the Republican party on 5 June 2001, it was the first time that partisan control of the US Senate changed hands mid-session. Perhaps most importantly, with the House and presidency under Republican control, the Jeffords move ushered in the return of divided government – split party control of the executive and legislative branches. Indeed, Jeffords' switch received vast amounts of media attention precisely for this reason. The scant attention given to other recent party defectors in the US Senate such as Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado or Robert (Bob) Smith of New Hampshire suggests that the Jeffords switch was much larger than a senator simply changing his party affiliation.

Over the last twenty years, split partisan control of the executive and legislative branches occurred in American government roughly two-thirds of the time. Given the frequency of divided government, especially in the post-war era, scholars have written much about its causes. The focus of much of this research concerns voting behaviour, especially ticket-splitting and voting against the president's party at the midterm (midterm voting). Some scholars advocate ‘cognitive madisonianism’ or ‘policy-balancing’ explanations, which posit that a subset of voters with moderate policy preferences intentionally, but not necessarily consciously, engage in ticket-splitting or midterm voting to bring about policy moderation or ‘balance’ among the parties. Others contend that ticket splitting and midterm voting is unintentional, a by-product of factors that shape voting behaviour such as candidates, partisanship and campaigns.

In recent decades, political science has turned to the study of agenda setting as a central aspect of collective decision-making environments. The content of the public agenda – and the issue agendas of political institutions – make significant social change possible. Recent studies suggest that these political institutions are engaged in both competitive relationships, as they identify and pursue both active and latent public issues, and more complex cue-taking relationships. For separated powers, the problems of co-operation and competition with one another are entwined with internal collective decision-making dilemmas.

In this study, we focus on the tension within a political institution between agenda setting as a mechanism for internal organizational maintenance, and agenda setting as a consequence of that institution's interaction with other branches of government and the general public. Specifically, we examine agenda setting by the United States Supreme Court, and ask the question of why the Court allocates more or less of its valuable agenda space to one policy issue over others. Our study environment is the policy issue composition of the Court's docket: the Court's attention to criminal justice policy issues relative to other issues. Among the most important powers of the Court is the power to apportion its agenda space among policy issues.

Pacelle argues that the Court's agenda-building process, its culling of cases and issues from numerous petitions, may represent the most important sequence of decisions the Court makes. But the Court's docket is a finite agenda space on which some issues are provided with a larger proportion of the Court's attention. Allocating space to an issue can promote the issue's national visibility and legitimacy as an important public concern.

What is the nature of the experience of risk? Risk can impose distinctive burdens on individuals: making us anxious, impairing our relationships and limiting our ability to plan our lives. On the other hand, risky situations are sometimes exciting, liberating and even empowering. The article explores the idea that risk can result in benefits for the individuals who bear it. Specifically, we evaluate John Tomasi’s claim that the experience of economic risk is a precondition of individual self-respect. Philosophical claims about the social bases of self-respect such as Tomasi’s have not been subjected to sufficient empirical scrutiny. The article exemplifies an alternative approach, by integrating philosophical argument with the analysis of large-scale survey data. Whilst Tomasi’s claim has force in some contexts, evidence from the economic domain shows that risk tends to undermine rather than to support self-respect.

In their recent article in this Journal, Alvarez and Nagler model strategic voting in the 1987 British general election using multinomial probit.R. Michael Alvarez and Jonathan Nagler, ‘A New Approach to Modelling Strategic Voting in Multiparty Elections, British Journal of Political Science, 30 (2000), 57–75. They claim to find lower levels of such voting than many other approaches. They also demonstrate purportedly that estimates of strategic voting obtained using self-reported motivations are biased by the time elapsed between the election and the point at which the self-report is obtained. In this Comment I show that these assertions are incorrect.

A certain amount of evidence has accumulated in the past few years to show that local election turnout is high in marginal wards. A number of different sources make the point, but the most complete evidence is presented in a recent issue of Political Studies by Fletcher who summarizes the prevailing view when he writes that ‘there was a very strong inverse correlation between the size of the majority in a contest and turnout. The smaller the margin between the victorious candidate and his closest opponent, the higher the proportion of electors voting was likely to have been.’ In an earlier report it was suggested that the closeness of party conflict is the overwhelming influence on turnout. Only three writers fail to discover a high poll in marginal wards.

Presidential approval ratings are a frequently used barometer of performance and popularity. However, despite recognition of the media age in which we live, little work has examined the impact of television on presidential popularity. Using a 1980 and 1984 television content study, panel data from the 1980 National Election Study and rolling cross-sectional data from the 1984 Continuous Monitoring Study, I compare two American presidents (Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan) commonly seen as having different effectiveness on television. While media effects were not uniformly present during the two presidencies, there was some evidence that television harmed popularity, particularly when the content of news stories and commentary turned negative. I conclude by discussing the ramifications of these results for presidential strategies based on ‘going public’.

Major inter-election vote shifts are characteristic of present-day American and British elections. In American elections since 1960 the presidency has changed parties on four of the six occasions. In British elections since 1959 the government has changed parties on four of the eight occasions. Students of both election systems ask whether these large and frequent shifts portend either major realignments or the weakening of the parties. The purpose of this Note is to analyse inter-election changes in the United States and Great Britain and to highlight and explain their differences.

Donor governments face a dilemma when providing development aid to states that violate human rights. While aid may contribute to positive development outcomes, it may also contribute to rights violations committed by these regimes. This article provides a conceptual framework for donors to address this dilemma in a normatively justified way. Drawing on recent methodological advancements in normative political theory, it develops a distinctively political framework of dilemmas, suggesting three models: complicity, double effect and dirty hands. It considers this framework in the context of development aid, discussing the relevant considerations for donors in different cases. The article demonstrates that an approach to development assistance that acknowledges political realities does not have to be normatively silent.

Past research on policy subsystems has not attempted to explain the manner in which policy preferences for customary subsystem participants are formed as part of a system. The purpose of this research is to narrow the gap between the theoretical conceptualization and empirical articulation of policy subsystems. This study examines the formation of policy preferences for standard subsystem participants in the area of commercial bank regulation for the 1949–89 period. The findings reveal that the formation of (regulatory) policy preferences for these main subsystem participants reflects strategic behaviour rather than retrospective behaviour. This suggests that institutional participants within the commercial banking regulatory subsystem strategically operate in a policy environment with an abundance of information.

In multi-party democracies, several parties usually have to join together in coalition to form government. Many aspects of that process have been fairly fully investigated, others less so. Among the latter is the timing of the formation and announcement of coalitions.

While the dominant popular image may be one of parties meeting together after the election to hammer out a coalition agreement, pre-election coalitions of one sort or another are actually quite common. In almost half of the elections in OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries since the Second World War, at least one pair of parties had pre-announced their intention to join together in government. A quarter of governments formed were based wholly (and another quarter in part) on pre-election agreements.

To date, such studies as there have been of pre-election coalitions have concentrated primarily on system-level explanations – features of the electoral system (majoritarian or proportional, and so on) that make such arrangements more or less likely.3 Here we shall instead look more at the agent-level logic of ‘early’ (pre-election) versus ‘late’ (post-election) coalition formation, from the point of view of voters and parties.

hypotheses concerning coalition timing

In the tradition of Downs and Riker and their coalition-theorist progeny, we shall assume that voters are interested primarily in getting policies adopted which are close to their ‘ideal points’ in policy space, and that parties are interested primarily in winning office to implement policies as close as possible to their ‘ideal points’ in policy space. That leads parties to strive for ‘minimal connected winning coalitions’: ‘connected’ in the sense that they link parties adjacent in policy space; ‘minimal’ in the sense that they involve the party's sharing power with the fewest parties backed by fewest voters that it can and still win.

When Condorcet fell foul of the Jacobins in 1793, Robespierre said of him that he was a great mathematician in the eyes of men of letters, and a distinguished man of letters in the eyes of the mathematicians. It took two centuries for the first part of that vicious remark to be proved false and for Condorcet's true stature as a mathematician to be revealed. Soon after Mancur Olson died in February 1998, The Economist said aloud what many in academe had been muttering for years:

Had he lived, his theory of collective action might well have won him a Nobel prize in economics, though not a wholly uncontroversial one. Some economists viewed him as a one-idea thinker, and worse, they whispered, his idea had reverberated less loudly within economics than outside of it; for example, in political science. The charge would not have troubled Mr Olson for a moment. He was as disdainful of parochialism in the life of the mind as in the life of a nation.Keith Michael Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 383. ‘Obituary: Mancur Olson’, The Economist, 7 March 1998, p. 135.

There have been a number of attempts in recent years to define the subject-matter of political science and to provide a theoretical framework within which the discipline may be expected to develop. Among these, the work of David Easton occupies a leading place.1 This article discusses how successful Easton has been in adumbrating a general theory embracing the discipline. It then offers a rather looser and less ambitious framework within which the theories collectively called ‘political science’ may be placed and their interrelationships perceived.

Several recent studies have found unequal policy responsiveness, meaning that the policy preferences of high-income citizens are better reflected in implemented policies than the policy preferences of low-income citizens. This has been found mainly in a few studies from the US and a small number of single-country studies from Western Europe. However, there is a lack of comparative studies that stake out the terrain across a broader group of countries. We analyze survey data on the policy preferences of about 3,000 policy proposals from thirty European countries over nearly forty years, combined with information on whether each policy proposal was implemented or not. The results from the cross-country data confirm the general pattern from previous studies that policies supported by the rich are more likely to be implemented than those supported by the poor. We also test four explanations commonly found in the literature: whether unequal responsiveness is exacerbated by (a) high economic inequality, (b) the absence of campaign finance regulations, (c) low union density, and (d) low voter turnout.

Scholars have long been concerned with the implications of income inequality for democracy. Conventional wisdom suggests that high income inequality is associated with political parties taking polarized positions as the left advocates for increased redistribution while the right aims to entrench the position of economic elites. This article argues that the connection between party positions and income inequality depends on how party bases are sorted by income and the issue content of national elections. It uses data from European national elections from 1996 to 2016 to show that income inequality has a positive relationship with party polarization on economic issues when partisans are sorted with respect to income and when economic issues are relatively salient in elections. When these factors are weak, however, the author finds no relationship between income inequality and polarization.

There is an emerging drive to define a new praiseworthy governance goal: a goal that not only implies addressing corruption but going further to establish institutions that are truly worthy of trust. That goal is ‘public integrity’. However, most current accounts of public integrity adopt an ‘officer-first’ approach: defining public integrity primarily as a quality of individual public officers, and only derivatively, if at all, as a quality of public institutions themselves. This article argues that this approach is flawed. Analysing the current debate, it identifies the need to define a role-specific sense of praiseworthy behaviour for public officers. However, it is only possible to define this role-specific sense of praiseworthy behaviour by referring to a public officer's contribution to the overall moral ideal of her institution. Assuming that this ideal itself is a form of public integrity, it then follows that such institutional integrity must be defined ‘first’ in order to then define a public officer's praiseworthy contribution to it second. Substantively, this article argues that ‘public institutional integrity’ is an institution's robust disposition to pursue its purpose efficiently, within the constraints of legitimacy, consistent with its commitments. ‘Public officer integrity’ is the robust disposition of an officer to support the integrity of her institution, within the course of her duties, to the best of her abilities.

Converse's ‘Of Time and Partisan Stability’ presents one of the most elegant theories in political science. Analysing the surveys collected in Almond and Verba's five-nation study, Converse explains the micro-level processes that can contribute to partisan stability among mass electorates. If, as Campbell, Converse, Miller and Stokes argue, partisan loyalties contribute to electoral stability, Converse's theory has important implications, not only for electoral behaviour, but for democratic political stability as well.

Notwithstanding the shortcomings of his argument, T. S. Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions continues to have a significant impact on the way in which economics and other social sciences view themselves. Indeed, it could be said that Kuhn's influence has been much the greater on the more methodologically disposed social sciences than upon the natural sciences to which his original thesis was addressed. However, since the first flush of enthusiasm for Kuhn amongst the social sciences there has emerged, as Keith Tribe has noted, a growing unease with the thesis on the grounds that it is ‘not capable of doing the work that it is called upon to perform’. Nevertheless, despite these new found doubts Kuhn's ideas still provide – to use a ‘Kuhnian’ expression – a powerful ‘framework’ through which changes in economic theory, such as the ‘Keynesian Revolution’, may be understood. Because consideration of such matters has been primarily the preserve of economists preoccupied with the development of techniques of economic analysis, rather than of students of politics concerned with the history of ideas, other issues, such as Keynes's notion of theoretical change and revolution, have in the analysis of the ‘Keynesian Revolution’ been neglected. Indeed, as Axel Leijonhufvud has observed, the absence from the debate on the structure of scientific revolutions of philosophically disposed case studies from economics and other social sciences has itself left social science ‘unsure about what exactly we can learn from it’.