Although Michael Oakeshott has written on such a wide variety of subjects as religion, jurisprudence, education, science, aesthetics and history, Ishall concentrate in this essay on his political philosophy. As a political philosopher Oakeshott has been concerned with two basic themes: firstly, to develop a conception of the nature of philosophy in general and political philosophy in particular; and secondly, to develop a substantive theory of politics. Accordingly I shall divide this essay into four sections. In the first three sections I shall outline his discussion of the two themes, and in the fourth, assess their adequacy.

Parliamentary decision making is a growth area in the study of the British House of Commons. This is a facet of the behaviour of Members of Parliament (MPs) that tended to be ignored as long as the Commons was seen as a legislature that, cravenly subject to party discipline, simply rubber-stamped policy decisions made by the party leadership. By the 1960s, cohesive party voting had reached the point where ‘it was so close to 100 per cent that there was no longer any point in measuring it’. But more recently, this image of the Commons and its members has worn at the edges. While party loyalty remains very much the norm, MPs have shown themselves more willing than in the past to assert themselves against their party's leadership in order to exercise greater policy influence. One prominent example is the select committee system set up in 1979 to improve parliamentary scrutiny of the executive. Another is the higher incidence of backbench rebellion and dissent in the division lobbies after the mid-1960s.Samuel H. Beer, Modern British Politics (London: Faber, 1965), p. 350.Gavin Drewry, ed., The New Select Committees, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Michael Jogerst, Reform in the House of Commons (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1993).Philip Norton, Dissension in the House of Commons 1945–74 (London: Macmillan, 1975); Philip Norton, Dissension in the House of Commons 1974–79 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); Anthony Mughan, ‘Midterm Popularity and Governing Party Dissension in the British House of Commons, 1959–1979’, Legislative Studies Quarterly, 15 (1990), 341–56; and Charles Pattie, Edward Fieldhouse and R. J. Johnston, ‘The Price of Conscience: The Electoral Correlates and Consequences of Free Votes and Rebellion in the British House of Commons, 1987–92’, British Journal of Political Science, 24 (1994), 359–80.

Does the diffusion of nuclear programs encourage nuclear and radiological (NR) terrorism? It is argued that a country's vulnerability to NR terrorism grows as the size of its nuclear program increases. The presence of expansive nuclear infrastructure facilitates terrorists’ efforts to steal or acquire nuclear and radiological materials, increases the targets open to attack, and amplifies the potential economic and social-psychological consequences of related terrorist attacks. It is also argued that countries can reduce the likelihood of NR terrorism by improving nuclear security and reducing corruption. An empirical analysis of NR terrorist incidents during 1992–2006 supports for these arguments. The findings offer empirically grounded insights into the future risks of nuclear terrorism, and possible solutions are offered.

In the twenty-odd years since the declaration of a state of emergency in Kenya in October 1952, the analysis of the phenomenon known as ‘Mau Mau’ has undergone a fundamental revision. The initial interpretation, advanced by the colonial authorities and their apologists and by a few (mostly British) scholars, explained ‘Mau Mau’ as a fanatic, atavistic, savage religious cult consciously created and manipulated by a group of unscrupulous, power-hungry leaders. It was said to be rooted in a mass psychosis affecting an unstable tribe freed from the anchoring constraints of tradition. It was also said to have had no direct links to socio-economic conditions in the colony or to the policies of the Kenya government. This interpretation, popularized by a large and sensational journalistic literature, went virtually unchallenged for more than a decade. During this period ‘Mau Mau’ and its antecedents were largely ignored by social scientists. As late as 1965, Gilbert Kushner could report that a search of major anthropological journals revealed, at best, only peripheral mention of Mau Mau. Where ‘Mau Mau’ was explicitly considered, the basic premise of the official explanation was generally accepted, and the phenomenon was treated as a nativistic cult or revitalization movement.

The ‘average’ obkom first secretary is likely to be Russian or Ukrainian by nationality and will certainly have a higher education, with a reasonable chance that this has been acquired through, or supplemented by, the Party's own educational system. He34 will be (1966) about fifty years old, having joined the Party around the age of twenty-five in the period 1939 to 1945. First secretary status is likely to have come to him in 1961 or since 1963 and there is a 6:4 chance that he is a full or candidate member of the Central Committee (with the likelihood greatly enhanced if he is first secretary of a Russian obkom in the RSFSR).

This article attempts to explain why it is that in spite of being exposed to similar economic and social forces, cities in Europe and the United States have followed distinctive patterns of development. In continental Europe core urban areas have remained relatively resilient compared with equivalent areas in Britain and the United States. While economic and demographic factors are important explanatory factors, they cannot account for all of the important differences characteristic of the three urban systems, whether measured in quantitative or qualitative terms. It is argued that Continental cities are better protected because of a long-established elite commitment to specific urban areas which has its roots in the development of the modern state. This commitment is labelled ‘civic community’ which finds political expression through complex representational networks at the local, regional and national levels. In Britain no equivalent networks exist and civic community is low. As a result, elites have little commitment to core urban areas. In the United States, complex representational networks do exist, but they are not linked to a historically established elite commitment to core city areas. Instead, the economic market place determines the fortunes of central cities. It is concluded that these contrasting paths of development place considerable constraints on public policies designed to regenerate central city areas.

This article presents a formal model of path dependence inspired by England’s history. The introduction of feudalism after the Norman Conquest – the critical juncture – created a large elite that rebelled frequently. The king fought these revolts with the help of collaborators he recruited from the masses. In compensation, he made these collaborators members of the elite. This was a cost-effective form of compensation: rents were only partly rival, and so new elite members only partially diluted the rents received by the king. The dilution from adding new members decreased as the elite grew in size, generating positive feedback and path dependence. This mechanism can account for the extension of rights in England in the early stages of its journey towards democracy.

Do economic experiences early in life affect regime support later in life? Effects of recent economic performance on regime support are extensively studied, but lasting effects of individual-level economic experiences across the lifespan remain unexplored. We argue that in democracies and autocracies alike, economic experiences in early adulthood (that is, age eighteen to twenty-eight) are wired into people's memories and become important cues for their democratic support later in life. Having lived in a well-performing economy in a democracy increases democratic support throughout most of people's lives, whereas having lived in a well-performing economy in an autocracy decreases democratic support throughout most of people's lives. Using extensive survey data on support for democracy covering ninety-seven countries from 1994 to 2015, we find support for these propositions, demonstrating that economic experiences in early adulthood, conditional on the regime in place at the time, have strong, robust and lasting effects on democratic support.

One of the most creative theories advanced about legislative organization in recent years is Katz and Sala's linkage of the development of committee property rights in the US House of Representatives to the introduction of the Australian ballot. Katz and Sala argue that the Australian ballot – a government-printed ballot cast in secret that replaced a party-produced ballot that was cast in public – gave members of the House an incentive to pursue personal constituency votes. This, in turn, led to the rise of committee property rights as members sought to keep their committee assignments from term to term because of the potential electoral benefits they derived from them.

In this Note we use the state legislative committee membership dataset collected by Hamm and Hedlund and their colleagues to test whether committee property rights appeared in American state legislatures at roughly the same time as Katz and Sala find they emerged in the US House. State legislatures were, of course, exposed to the same electoral innovation at the same time. But, while in some ways state legislatures were much like Congress as organizations, in other ways they were very different. Our cross-sectional data and the variance in important institutional variables they provide allow us to test a critical proposition about the importance of membership stability rates in mediating the rise of committee property rights. We also go beyond Katz and Sala's analysis by testing to see if differences in Australian ballot design (office column and party bloc) across the states influenced the behaviour of legislators in the way their theory suggests.

The geography of the vote in Britain is in part a function of the geography of social class and other individual-level characteristics associated with vote choice. Since the proportion of working-class people is lower in the South than the North we expect support for Labour to be lower in the South than in the North.

Increasingly in political science, models are developed and tested against datasets which have quite complicated structures. Sometimes it happens that the standard statistical tests are not directly applicable. Furthermore one's intuition as to what counts as strong evidence in favour of a particular model can be misleading. In such circumstances it may be necessary to think more formally about the situation in order to establish valid interpretations of the evidence. This Note seeks to illustrate the value of such formal thinking by reanalysing the evidence in Budge's recent article on parties' policy positions.I. Budge, ‘A New Spatial Theory of Party Competition: Uncertainty, Ideology and Policy Equilibria Viewed Comparatively and Temporally’, British Journal of Political Science, 24 (1994), 443–67. This draws on H-D. Klingemann, R. I. Hofferbert and I. Budge, Parties, Policies and Democracy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994).

One of the issues that has dominated American political science in the last twenty years has been the debate between those who assert that America is ruled by an elite, and those who believe that the pluralist model is a more accurate description. Robert Dahl, who is the most influential of the pluralists, has attacked ‘elitists’ on two fronts: negatively, he has argued that they misperceive the nature of power and are sloppy in their criteria for determining a ruling elite; positively, in Who Governs?,he has attempted to apply his own conceptualization of power to an American community and thus give empirical backing to the pluralist model.

The position of first secretary of a provincial committee of the Chinese Communist Party – the highest ranking cadre at provincial level – was not originally one of major importance within the leadership in 1949 when the People's Republic of China was established. However, it has become so since largely as a result of the increase in the importance of the provincial level in the party–state system. The increased political significance of the first secretary was demonstrated most dramatically during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–69) when the provincial level was severely affected by the attack on the party–state system. Unlike their counterparts at the centre or sub-provincial levels almost all the provincial first party secretaries in office on the eve of the Cultural Revolution lost their positions as the attempt was made to completely reorganize the provincial level.

In recent years some of the best theoretical work on the political economy of political institutions and processes has begun surfacing outside the political science mainstream in high quality economics journals. This two-part article surveys these contributions from a recent five-year period. In Part I, the focus was on elections, voting and information aggregation, followed by treatments of parties, candidates and coalitions. In Part II, papers on economic performance and redistribution, constitutional design, and incentives, institutions and the quality of political elites are discussed. Part II concludes with a discussion of the methodological bases common to economics and political science, the way economists have used political science research, and some new themes and arbitrage opportunities.

If their treatment of power indices is anything to go by, reputable social scientists have a surprising tendency to lose touch with reality when using elementary mathematics. R. J. Johnston's article in this Journal is (unfortunately) a good illustration of this. The subsequent exchange between Johnston and Garrett, McLean and Machover also fails to get to the heart of the matter.

One of the most striking features of British general election results is the large variation in turnout across constituencies. In 1983, for instance, the mean turnout was 72.6 per cent of the registered electorate but it ranged from 82.1 per cent in Carmarthen to 51.8 per cent in the City of London and Westminster. Moreover, these variations tend to be reproduced in successive elections – the bivariate correlation between constituency turnout in the 1983 and 1987 elections for all 633 mainland Britain constituencies is +0.94.

Is technology competition between commercial rivals an impediment to international co-operation? Or could it instead help states collaborate? Our game-theoretic model suggests that technology competition impedes international co-operation when states hold ‘techno-nationalist’ preferences but have starkly asymmetric abilities to capture new markets. States that expect to lose refuse to co-operate, so treaty formation fails. However, technology competition may also facilitate co-operation. While states invest in new technologies out of self-interest, doing so also reduces consumer prices for other states. Comparative case studies of environmental co-operation demonstrate the model's utility. For example, European co-operation on climate policy was easier to achieve because forerunner countries, such as Denmark and Germany, implemented industrial policies that enhanced the competitiveness of their renewable energy industries. This technology competition reduced the cost of renewable energy for other European countries, and thus lowered the economic costs of their emissions reductions.

This study leverages population registry data from Sweden to examine whether immigrants who live in areas with a high concentration of ethnic minorities are more or less likely to be nominated for political office. It exploits a refugee placement program in place in Sweden during the late 1980s and early 1990s that restricted refugees' opportunities to freely choose their place of residence. The article presents evidence that immigrants who live in areas with a high ethnic density are less likely to be nominated for political office. The findings have important implications for local integration policies as well as refugee placement policies, as many countries consider local context when resettling refugees.

Scholars have long noted that couples are more likely to vote compared to individuals who live alone, and that partners' turnout behavior is strongly correlated. This study examines a large administrative dataset containing detailed information about validated turnout and the timing of individuals moving in together, and finds evidence of a substantial and robust increase in turnout after cohabitation. The study exploits the fact that two-voter households moving in together right before an election are comparable to those moving in together right after the election. Depending on the model specification, turnout increases by 3.5 to 10.6 percentage points in the months after taking up cohabitation. Voters are mobilized regardless of their own and their cohabitant's turnout behavior in a previous election. The results are robust to several robustness checks, including benchmarking with singles who move to mitigate the cost of moving in the analysis. The results highlight the importance of social norms and the household's essential role as a proximate social network that increases turnout.