The widespread opposition to unprecedented austerity measures in Greece provides a unique opportunity to study the causes of mass protest. This article reports the results of a survey of the adult population in which two-thirds of the respondents supported protest and 29 per cent reported actual involvement in strikes and/or demonstrations during 2010. Relative deprivation is a significant predictor of potential protest, but does not play any role in terms of who takes part in strikes or demonstrations. Previous protest participation emerges as a key predictor of actual protest. This study seeks to place these results within a comparative context, contrasting Greece with other countries facing similar challenges, and discusses the implications for the future of austerity politics.

My primary purpose in this review is to provide a detailed critique of the internal logic of Albert O. Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Before doing this, however, I should like to consider briefly the phenomenon of which it is an exemplar: the ‘in’ book. For this raises some general questions of interest.

This article uncovers a new mechanism linking oil wealth to autocratic regime survival: the investigation tests whether increases in oil wealth improve the survival of autocracies by lowering the chances of democratization, reducing the risk of transition to subsequent dictatorship, or both. Using a new measure of autocratic durability shows that, once models allow for unit effects, oil wealth promotes autocratic survival by lowering the risk of ouster by rival autocratic groups. Evidence also indicates that oil income increases military spending in dictatorships, which suggests that increasing oil wealth may deter coups that could have caused a regime collapse.

Structural limitations in models of representative democracy have enhanced the space for other mechanisms of legitimacy in the European Union, including participatory models in which organized civil society interests are significant players. To some observers, such actors are likely only to aggravate already problematic input legitimacy. A range of less hostile approaches also prevail, from a neutral standpoint through to those sharing the perspective of EU policy practice where such actors are seen as a complementary mechanism of democratic input. Whilst concerns about the impact of asymmetries of power between different types of organized civil society interests arise as potential issues in any democratic setting, a particularly vigorous neo-pluralist regime, in which EU institutions actively create and develop as well as empower citizen interest groups, effectively mitigates these asymmetries in an EU context, although it can give rise to paradoxical tensions of elitism.

Europe has over the past century experienced an impressive increase in the number of presidential heads of state. Many of the new democracies since the mid-1970s are semi-presidential regimes that combine a popularly elected president with the traditional features of parliamentary democracy. At the same time, the frequency of the appointment of non-partisan cabinet members has risen. Cabinet appointments are the most important personnel decisions in parliamentary systems, and traditionally such appointments have been virtually monopolized by the governing political parties. Under semi-presidentialism, however, cabinet appointments may instead become a tug-of-war between a prime minister and a president with different partisan preferences. In this article the relationship between presidential power and the incidence of non-partisan cabinet appointments is examined and a game-theoretic model of cabinet appointments in parliamentary systems with a strong president is developed. In this model the prime minister has proposal power over cabinet appointments and the president an ex post veto. This model yields three comparative statics predictions concerning non-partisan cabinet appointments. The incidence of such appointments should covary positively with the president's powers and negatively with the prime minister's electoral prospects. The likelihood of such appointments should also correlate in a non-intuitive way with the value that the president and the prime minister attach to non-partisan appointees. Based on these results, eight operational hypotheses are developed, which are tested against a sample of 134 European cabinets representing twelve semi-presidential and twelve purely parliamentary regimes in the 1990s. Significant empirical support is found for all three comparative statics results and for most of the specific hypotheses.

This article examines the recent pattern and progress of health care reform in affluent democracies, focusing in particular on Britain, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States. Its main contention is that efforts to reform health care in advanced industrial states have been marked by a paradoxical pattern of ‘reform without change and change without reform’, in which large-scale structural reforms have had surprisingly modest effects yet major ground-level shifts have, nonetheless, frequently occurred as a result of decentralized adjustments to cost control. The main task of the article is to investigate the reasons for and effects of this puzzling pattern by plumbing the largely unexplored theoretical territory between comparative health policy analysis and cross-national research on the welfare state. Along the way, the article develops a simple model of the politics of reform that helps explain cross-national variation in legislative and policy outcomes – particularly outcomes that occur through decentralized processes of internal policy ‘conversion’ and policy ‘drift’, rather than through formal legislative reform. It also takes up a number of other intriguing issues raised by recent trends: why, for example, market reforms are clustered in centralized political and medical frameworks; why these reforms have generally enhanced state authority rather than market autonomy; why, despite fragmentation, decentralized political and medical systems shifted towards an expanded government role; and why significant retrenchment of the public-private structure of health benefits occurred in the United States.

Duverger's law regarding the impact of electoral systems on party competition depends upon two effects: the mechanical and the psychological. The former is well defined and well documented, whereas the latter has more often been a matter for theoretical speculation. In this article we provide an operational definition of the psychological effect of electoral systems and measure its impact across twenty democratic systems over more than a century. Our findings suggest that it does exist, that it works as Duverger predicted and that its impact is about the same magnitude as the mechanical effect.

What is a party? This article presents the argument that rmal party apparatus is only one part of an extended network of interest groups, media, other advocacy organizations and candidates. The authors have measured a portion of this network in the United States systematically by tracking lists of names transferred between political organizations. Two distinct and polarized networks are revealed, which correspond to a more liberal Democratic group and a more conservative Republican group. Formal party organizations, like the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee, tend to receive information within their respective networks, which suggests that other groups serve to funnel information towards the formal party.

Existing models of the political business cycle have performed poorly in empirical tests because they have misspecified the interests of their primary actors – the incumbent politicians. While these models assume that governments face similar incentives to manipulate the economy at each election, governments' incentives can in fact vary from election to election depending upon their political needs at the time. The more likely the government is to be re-elected, the less it can gain by inducing cycles that are costly because of their impact on both the government's reputation and future macroeconomic performance. The degree to which the government manipulates the economy should thus be negatively correlated with its political security going into the election.

This prediction is tested by examining transfer payments in Great Britain, 1961–92. While a traditional model that is insensitive to the government's political needs finds no evidence of politically-motivated manipulations, a model which takes these factors into account reveals a robust, and at times sizeable, electoral-economic cycle.

Low electoral turnout is often considered to be bad for democracy, whether inherently or because it calls legitimacy into question or because low turnout implies lack of representation of certain groups and inegalitarian policies. Yet there would appear to be a straightforward cure for low turnout: make voting compulsory. Of the twenty-five countries in the International Almanac of Electoral History for which Katz has collected institutional data, four have compulsory voting. Turnout in these countries averages 89 per cent, as compared to 75 per cent in the other twenty-one countries.

Do online social media undermine authoritarianism? The conditions under which online social networks can increase public awareness of electoral fraud in non-democracies are examined in this article and it is argued that a given online social network will only increase political awareness if it is first politicized by elites. Survey data from the 2011 Russian parliamentary elections show that usage of Twitter and Facebook, which were politicized by opposition elites, significantly increased respondents’ perceptions of electoral fraud, while usage of Russia's domestic social networking platforms, VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, which were not politicized by opposition activists, had no effect on perceptions of fraud. This study elucidates the causes of post-election protest by uncovering a mechanism through which knowledge of electoral fraud spreads.

The results of a quantitative investigation into the factors affecting coalition government membership in West European parliamentary democracies are reported in this article. Using a new data set covering the post-war era to 1990, separate logistic regression analyses are performed to determine what influences the odds of becoming the government ‘formateur’ and the odds of becoming a coalition partner. In addition, Laver and Shepsle's portfolio allocation theory is subjected to testing. Among the independent variables considered are a party's size, its previous experience in government, its willingness to trade off policy for office, and its ideological position in the parliamentary party system. The findings point to the important roles played by the formateur's preferences and by the need to build workable coalitions, given party-system constraints. They also suggest several criteria that ought to, but often do not, guide formal theory-building.

Although the concept of policy transfer attracts growing attention in political science, its application to the European Union remains underdeveloped. This article offers a comprehensive conceptual account of EU policy transfer. It starts from the institutionalist premise that transfer processes and outcomes will vary between differently constituted governance regimes. Three forms of EU governance are identified; hierarchy, negotiation and ‘facilitated unilateralism’. The article develops hypotheses about the linkages between institutional variables and transfer outcomes, assessed on a scale from emulation to influence. Hypotheses are set against empirical evidence drawn from a variety of policy areas. We find evidence to support the general hypothesis that stronger forms of policy transfer occur in more highly institutionalized governance regimes. The evidence also points to micro-institutional variables shaping transfer outcomes: the powers accruing to supra-national institutions; decision rules; and the density of exchange between national actors.

Does naming and shaming states affect respect for human rights in those states? This article argues that incentives to change repressive behaviour when facing international condemnation vary across regime types. In democracies and hybrid regimes – which combine democratic and authoritarian elements – opposition parties and relatively free presses paradoxically make rulers less likely to change behaviour when facing international criticism. In contrast, autocracies, which lack these domestic sources of information on abuses, are more sensitive to international shaming. Using data on naming and shaming taken from Western press reports and Amnesty International, the authors demonstrate that naming and shaming is associated with improved human rights outcomes in autocracies, but with either no effect or a worsening of outcomes in democracies and hybrid regimes.

This article argues that public opinion regarding the legitimacy of income differences is influenced by actual income inequality. When income differences are perceived to be high, the public thinks of larger income inequality as legitimate. The phenomenon is explained by the system justification motivation and other psychological processes that favor existing social arrangements. Three experiments show that personal experiences of inequality as well as information regarding national-level income inequality can affect which income differences are thought of as legitimate. A fourth experiment shows that the system justification motivation is a cause of this effect. These results can provide an empirical basis for future studies to assume that the public reacts to inequality with adapted expectations, not increased demands for redistribution.

Why has the association between class and party declined over time? Contrary to conventional wisdom that emphasizes the fracturing of social structures and blurring of class boundaries in post-industrial society, it is argued here that class divisions in party preferences are conditioned by the changing shape of the class structure and the effect of parties’ strategic ideological responses to this transformation on the choices facing voters. This thesis is tested using British survey data from 1959 to 2006. We demonstrate that increasing class heterogeneity does not account for the decline of the class–party association, which occurs primarily as a result of ideological convergence between the main parties resulting from New Labour's shift to the centre.

The representation of public preferences in public policy is fundamental to most conceptions of democracy. If representation is effectively undertaken, we would expect to find a correspondence between public preferences for policy and policy itself. If representation is dynamic, policy makers should respond to changes in preferences over time. The integrity of the representational connection, however, rests fundamentally on the expectation that the public actually notices and responds to policy decisions. Such a public would adjust its preferences for ‘more’ or ‘less’ policy in response to what policy makers actually do, much like a thermostat. Despite its apparent importance, there is little research that systematically addresses this feedback of policy on preferences over time. Quite simply, we do not know whether the public adjusts its preferences for policy in response to what policy makers do. By implication, we do not fully understand the dynamics of representation. This research begins to address these issues and focuses on the relationships between public preferences and policy in a single, salient domain.

Procedural fairness theory posits that the way in which authoritative decisions are made strongly impacts people’s willingness to accept them. This article challenges this claim by contending that democratic governments can achieve little in terms of acceptance of policy decisions by the procedural means at their disposal. Instead, outcome favorability is the dominant determinant of decision acceptance. The article explicates that while central parts of procedural fairness theory are true, outcome favorability is still overwhelmingly the strongest determinant of individuals’ willingness to accept authoritative decisions. It improves on previous research by locating all key variables into one causal model and testing this model using appropriate data. Findings from a large number of experiments (both vignette and field) reproduce the expected relationships from previous research and support the additional predictions.

This article develops a change-point model of democratic consolidation that conceives of consolidation as a latent quality to be inferred rather than measured directly. Consolidation is hypothesized to occur when a large, durable, and statistically significant decline in the risk of democratic breakdowns occurs at a well-defined point during a democracy's lifetime. This approach is applied to new data on democratic survival that distinguish between breakdowns due to military coups and incumbent takeovers. We find that the risk of an authoritarian reversal by either process differs both in its temporal dynamic and determinants. Crucially, new democracies consolidate against the risk of coups but not incumbent takeovers, suggesting that distinct mechanisms account for the vulnerability of new democracies to these alternative modes of breakdown.

Existing explanations of domestic structural change focus on the role crises play in precipitating radical or episodic change. They largely ignore the sources and consequences of incremental change, even though this type of change also can have significant effects for policy processes and outcomes. We outline a framework for studying institutional transformation that accounts for both forms of change. The argument is a three part one. First, international and domestic events, including both crises and gradual pressures, open windows of opportunity that provide policy officials with the potential to transform existing institutions. Large-scale, system-wide changes open large windows, which allow radical change, while small-scale, issue-specific problems and changes create more limited opportunities for change. Secondly, whether an institutional change follows a window of opportunity depends on the actions and interests of state officials. Thirdly, state officials' ability to capitalize on a window of opportunity depends on their institutional position or capacity; the prevailing institutional arrangements create opportunities for, or place limits on, officials' ability to make change. Two case studies illustrate and probe the plausibility of the argument.