This article revisits the foundations of prior research on the effects of plebiscitarian selection mechanisms on candidates' electoral strength. While previous studies do not nest political parties' decision making, the authors argue that party primary effects entail the interdependence of party procedures for candidate selection. The article assesses the validity of the two approaches. Using original data from seven parties and 296 regional elections in Canada, Germany and Spain, and from sixty-two pre-election polls in Germany and Spain, it shows that, other things equal, primary-selected candidates are not stronger than those selected by other procedures. However, there is evidence of a penalty for parties that do not select candidates by primary when their main rival does, in particular when the primary election is not divisive and is held closer to the general election.

What shapes attitudes towards procedural rules that constrain executive power? This letter argues that procedural values are contextual: A function of who is in power. Supporters of those in power prefer fewer procedural constraints, while opposition supporters prefer greater. This study reports the results of a unique test using data from the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey. Respondents were asked, in both pre- and post-election waves, if they thought it should be ‘easier or harder for the president to keep documents secret from the public’. The panel design makes it possible to track individual changes following the shift in political context. The results show evidence of a partisan ‘flip’ in attitudes following the election, with Republicans becoming less likely – and Democrats more likely – to prefer additional constraints on presidential secrecy. However, this partisan ‘flip’ is present only among higher political knowledge respondents.

I first encountered the work of Harold Lasswell in the late 1950s, when I was a barely awake undergraduate at a university whose reputation for mediocrity was richly deserved. I opened Politics: Who Gets What, When, How to the first paragraph: ‘The study of politics is the study of influence and the influential. The science of politics states conditions; the philosophy of politics justifies preferences. This book, restricted to political analysis, declares no preferences. It states conditions.’ I had never heard of Lasswell, for my political science courses limited themselves to subjects like Congressional seniority and Cabinet responsibility in Britain. One course discussed the law of piracy, a subject I had trouble linking to international politics in the 1950s. Some enterprising instructors occasionally discussed the balance of power, and one even assigned David Truman. But Lasswell was terra incognita to me, as he no doubt was to most undergraduates in those years.

Why did historical anti-poverty programs in Britain, Denmark and France differ so dramatically in their goals, beneficiaries and agents for addressing poverty? Different cultural views of poverty contributed to how policy makers envisioned anti-poverty reforms. Danish elites articulated social investments in peasants as necessary to economic growth, political stability and societal strength. British elites viewed the lower classes as a challenge to these goals. The French perceived the poor as an opportunity for Christian charity. Fiction writers are overlooked political agents who engage in policy struggles. Collectively, writers contribute to a country's distinctive ‘cultural constraint’, or symbols and narratives, which appears in the national-level aggregation of literature. To assess cross-national variations in cultural depictions of poverty, this article uses historical case studies and quantitative textual analyses of 562 British, 521 Danish and 498 French fictional works from 1770 to 1920.

Terrorism often seeks to impact democratic politics. This article explores how it can influence the electoral fortunes of the incumbent. Existing research is contradictory. Models of retrospective voting predict a negative impact, as terrorism is detrimental to voters' welfare. However, the well-known ‘rally around the flag’ effect suggests otherwise: following a terrorist attack, voters often cling to the incumbent. We reconcile these arguments and argue that while both effects can coexist, the retrospective assessment is more durable than the rally around the flag. Using data on all deadly domestic terrorist attacks in Spain between 1977 and 2008, matched with municipal-level national election results, we show how exposure to strikes that occur during the last quarter of the term benefit the incumbent, while more temporally distant attacks are electorally harmful. In line with our theory, we find a more pronounced temporal heterogeneity for indiscriminate attacks and those that target civilians.

Trends of falling membership and support spell a time of crisis for political parties, possibly of transformation. Dilemmas of principle arise: should partisans revise their normative commitments in whatever way garners new supporters, or would that be to sell their party’s soul? This article investigates this as a problem of intergenerational obligation, examining what consideration (if any) partisans owe their party’s past and future. It seeks to show the limits of conceiving partisanship as a ‘presentist’ activity that is legitimately governed exclusively by the concerns of the present generation, and argues that it must include some notion of showing loyalty to the actions of predecessors and advancing the prospects of those to come. Two corresponding norms of ethical partisanship – fidelity and sustainability – are outlined and discussed. The article’s goal is to refine our concept of what a party is, and in so doing contribute to a broader ethics of activism.

The Soviet political system is usually thought of as an extremely centralized, uniform system. The centre decides, the Republican or local authorities obey. There is little scope for local initiative or autonomy. Yet, at the same time, another image of political life edges its way forward. Georgia was run for many years by its local boss, Mzhavanadze, along lines that clearly were not what the centre wanted; frequent reports appear of muddle, confusion, the non-implementation of legislation or the activities of local ‘family circles’. Somehow we have to make sense of these two aspects of Soviet politics. Is it that the centre chooses to exert its power in some policy areas and not in others, or is it that some are less amenable to control? Are some geographical or cultural regions treated differently from others? How much local autonomy is there? The question of the degree of decentralization in the Soviet system has been raised most recently and explored most interestingly by Hough. This is a contribution to the same theme. It does not provide any grand answers but it does focus attention on a topic that is of key importance in itself and about which we know little: the process of party recruitment. The paper seeks to explore the relationship between central party authorities and the Republican party organizations by looking at the recruitment of the different nationalities.

This Note is concerned with the problem of how to distribute votes in an assembly so that all interested groups are ‘fairly’ represented. It is clear that in many cases present arrangements are open to criticism. For example, in the United Nations General Assembly both China (population 732 million) and Norway (4 million) are represented by one vote. The situation at the British Labour Party annual conference is in direct contrast to this. Here votes are allocated to the individual unions and constituency Labour parties in proportion to their membership (rounded up to the nearest thousand), so that the Transport and General Workers' Union (membership 1,000,000) exercises 1,000 votes, whereas the 25,000 members of the National Union of Seamen are represented by only twenty-five votes. Since the total number of votes at the conference is about 6,000, it might be felt that the large unions exercise a disproportionate amount of influence.

During the past decade, political researchers have devoted growing attention to women's political involvement and, to a somewhat lesser extent, their political attitudes in Western cultures. This interest has been a response in part to contemporary feminist movements and, more specifically, to the increasingly visible role of women as social activists, partisan elites and governmental decision makers in Western European and North American society.

Most major nonviolent civil resistance campaigns target autocratic regimes. Yet, most dictators are toppled by their close supporters, not civilian protesters. Building on theories of strategic interactions between leaders, security agents, and protesters, we make three core claims: first, protesters are relatively less likely to mount a major nonviolent uprising against dictatorships with personalized security forces; secondly, personalized security forces are more likely to repress realized protest; and, thirdly, security force personalization shapes the prospects for success of mass uprisings in promoting democratic transitions. We leverage new data on security force personalization—a proxy for loyal security agents—and major nonviolent protest campaigns to test these expectations. Our theory explains why many dictatorships rarely face mass protest mobilization and why uprisings that are met with violent force often fail in bringing about new democracies.

The success and longevity of coalition governments depends on the ability to keep conflicts between coalition members at bay. The risk of such conflicts is often assessed by drawing on proxy measures, such as the ideological heterogeneity among government parties. This article presents a new approach to measuring the atmosphere between government parties. The ‘coalition mood’ is a time-varying measure that draws on applause patterns between coalition partners during legislative debates. The article exemplifies the measurement approach based on automated analyses of over 105,000 plenary debates in Germany and Austria. The article then assesses the measure's face, concurrent and predictive validity. It finds the measure well aligned with qualitative evidence, shows that the coalition mood is correlated with poll ratings of the government parties and helps to predict the duration of legislative processes. The conclusion highlights future applications of the coalition mood for research on coalition politics and public policy.

How does ballot structure affect party choice? We argue that open lists undermine the electoral support of cohesive parties, to the benefit of internally divided parties. We conduct a survey-embedded experiment in the aftermath of the European migrant crisis, presenting German voters with real parties but fictitious politicians. A crossover design varies ballot type and exposure to candidate positions on immigration. We find that the internally divided Christian Democrats gain votes at the expense of the cohesive Alternative for Germany when open lists are used and candidate positions are known. For individuals who are equally attracted to both parties, switching is most likely if their immigration preferences lie near the midpoint between the two parties. Overall, our analysis establishes conditions under which ballot structure can affect the electoral performance of parties in general, and that of the populist right in particular.

A large literature examines how citizens in violent conflicts react to the conflict's events, particularly violent escalations. Nevertheless, the temporal nature of these attitudinal changes remains under-studied. We suggest that popular reactions to greater violence are typically immediate but brief, indicating short-term emotional responses to physical threats. Over the longer term, however, public opinion is more commonly shaped by non-violent events signaling the adversary's perceived intentions, reflecting slower but deeper belief-updating processes. We support this argument using dynamic analyses of comprehensive monthly data from Israel spanning two full decades (2001–20). Rather than violence levels, we find that long-term changes in Jewish attitudes on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict follow non-violent events implying Palestinian preferences, particularly failed negotiations and out-group leadership changes. Our findings underscore the importance of public opinion's temporal dynamics and show that non-violent events, which are often overlooked in the literature, play a prominent role in shaping long-term attitudes in conflictual contexts.

Who gets what, when and how is affected by the power of different groups in society to affect the political process. Many feminists see increasing women's political representation, via elected office or interest-group involvement, as a necessary condition for improving the status of women. Many studies have examined whether the numerical representation of women translates into legislation or legislative behaviour that seeks to improve the status of women. Although we have evidence that women's legislative representation matters, the passage of legislation is only half of the story in public policy making. After policies are enacted, the bureaucracy must implement them and little research has examined the impact of women's political representation on policy outputs. The question of women's influence on bureaucracies is especially important, because bureaucracies deliver services that have a direct bearing on the status of women. It is an important issue for representative democracy whether women have an influence on the bureaucracies that affect them.Beth Reingold, ‘Concepts of Representation among Female and Male State Legislators’, Legislative Studies Quarterly, 17 (1992), 509–37; Michelle A. Saint-Germaine, ‘Does Their Difference Make a Difference? The Impact of Women on Public Policy in the Arizona Legislature’, Social Science Quarterly, 70 (1989), 956–68; Sue Thomas, ‘The Impact of Gender on Activities and Priorities of State Legislatures,’ Western Political Quarterly, 44 (1990), 445–56.

The first elections to the European Parliament were held on 10 June 1979 with each EEC country following its own electoral system. As in all recent elections, on-the-night forecasting was an integral part of the television coverage in Britain. This paper describes the method used by the BBC to predict the composition of the British delegation to the European Parliament. The performance of the method is discussed and some tentative conclusions are drawn about the behaviour of the British electorate.

The immodest purpose of this essay is to analyze the traditional arguments for political equality, and, with the help of a case study, to determine when these arguments apply and when they do not.

Ivor Crewe, Bo Särlvik and James Alt (‘Partisan Dealignment in Britain 1964–1974’, this Journal, VII (1977), 129–90) have made a major contribution to our understanding of partisan change in Britain. Whereas the declining share of the Conservative and Labour party vote can be documented through electoral statistics, Crewe and his colleagues focused on individual-level change in attitudes toward the parties, and thus provided valuable insights that help explain the dealignment that has occurred. One of their major findings was that the strength of party loyalties has declined among the British electorate. Building a measure of mean partisan strength that captures the distribution of ‘very strong’ identifiers, ‘fairly strong’ identifiers, ‘not very strong’ identifiers, and non-identifiers, they show a continuous decline in the strength of partisan loyalties between 1964 and October 1974. In 1964 the partisan strength of the electorate was 2·19; by October 1974 it had fallen to 1·90 (pp. 162–4). This overall decline is quite substantial, given that their measure of mean partisan strength ranges from 0·0 to 3·0.

Tucked inside Thomas Kuhn's masterly little book is a statement to the effect that scholarly endeavours, that have yet to fix upon an accepted paradigm, display continual and often exacerbatic confrontations between rival wings each trying to press upon the other the virtues of their particular mode of scientific procedure. In Kuhn's own words: ‘Because it [the awareness of anomaly] demands large scale paradigm destruction and major shifts in the problems and techniques of normal science, the emergence of new theories is generally preceded by a period of pronounced professional insecurity.’ It seems as if political scientists have taken this point to heart. Rarely does an issue of a journal appear without some restatement or reappraisal of the ‘State of the Discipline’ and related problems.² Apart from the obvious point that political scientists must be spending inordinate amounts of time in such debates, and so perhaps neglecting other fruitful activities — a point which my economist friends would characterize as opportunity costly — there is a concomitant danger that the political world may begin to appear only analyzable with the aid of abstruse, esoteric and above all novel paradigms. Theoretical reasoning may be sustained on the basis of novelty rather than perspicuity.

Pulzer's dictum – ‘Class is the basis of British party politics, all else is embellishment and detail’ – expresses a consensus about the social basis of partisan conflict in contemporary Britain. Although there are exceptions and important qualifications, recent research confirms the conclusion that social class is the foremost influence on partisan loyalties and a potent factor in electoral behaviour.