Members of the House of Representatives often forsake re-election to run for the Senate. Do they realize what they might be giving up? In the 1978 elections only 5 per cent of House incumbents who sought another term were denied it, compared with 40 per cent of the Senators seeking to continue in office. While several students of House elections have referred to the few members in serious electoral trouble (and even fewer who actually lose) as ‘vanishing marginals’, the safe incumbent Senator, particularly a liberal Democrat, is an endangered species. In the 1976 and 1978 elections, ten moderate-toliberal Democratic Senators were defeated, five in each election. Over a dozen more faced the electorate in 1980, facing the threat that the liberal majority within the Senate Democratic party would be erased – or at least eroded. While 93·7 per cent of House incumbents seeking re-election won in 1978 (a figure which has changed little since 1968), the Senate figure of 60 per cent is the smallest percentage since the Democratic landslide of 1958. In an era when House seats have become relatively safe by almost any standard, incumbent Senators appear increasingly more vulnerable.

In his introduction to a definitive collection of articles on British by-elections, David Butler observed that by-elections ‘may offer some guide to the public mood; but who now would dare to give a figure for the likely difference between a by-election today and what would happen in an immediate general election?’

German unification in 1989 raised the spectre of German hegemony in post-cold war Europe. In this article, I demonstrate that Germany lacks the structural power consistent with European hegemony or dominance; that there is little evidence supporting an appreciable gap between Germany's structural power and foreign policy ambitions; and that apparent symptoms of German hegemony, particularly the process of institutional emulation in Central and Eastern Europe, reflect other international processes and incentives emanating from the state system itself. This reassessment and downgrading of Germany's relative and absolute power resolve the paradox of German structural power and German reluctance identified by others. But this alternative narrative raises another more important question: why is Germany treated as a potential or even aspiring hegemon in Europe? The answer to that question is located in the interconnected legacies of Auschwitz and the occupation regime. This joint legacy constitutes an important part of the historical context within which we frame our assessments and judgements of German power; explains the frequently unwarranted exaggeration and suspicion of German power; and demonstrates how the past can function as a powerful prism though which we interpret the intentions, ambitions and capabilities of a state.

If foreign aid is provided primarily for strategic reasons, as much of the field finds, how can donor generosity following natural disasters be explained? This article addresses this puzzle by building on the literature in three ways. First, it differentiates between three major types of aid: humanitarian, civil society and development. Second, it demonstrates that natural disasters act as an exogenous shock to the strategic calculus that donor countries undertake when making foreign aid allocation decisions. Specifically, the authors argue that donor countries use natural disasters as opportunities to exert influence on strategic opponents through the allocation of humanitarian and civil society aid. However, donors still reserve development aid for strategic allies irrespective of the incidence of natural disasters. Third, the findings are substantiated using a new measure of strategic interest that accounts for the indirect ties states share and the multiple dimensions upon which they interact.

This article examines party sorting, elite cue and ideological polarization accounts of polarization dynamics. The study tests their differing expectations about trends in redistributive ideological polarization and partisan polarization in the British case using repeated cross-section and panel data. The authors reject party sorting accounts, which require ideology to be stable and changes in party support to drive partisan polarization, because they find that ideology trends with elite polarization and that ideological change causes partisan polarization. The authors reject elite cue accounts, which maintain that it is mainly partisans’ ideology that follows elite polarization, because they find virtually identical trends for initially ideologically similar non-partisans too. The study thus finds support for an ideological polarization account in which changes in elite polarization are associated with general changes in citizen redistributive ideology.

When citizens hold multiple values relevant to their policy opinions, they might experience value conflict, value reconciliation or make a value trade-off. Yet, it is unclear which individuals are able to manage their multiple values in these ways. We posit a sophistication-interaction theory of value pluralism where the most politically sophisticated individuals are able to reconcile the existence of multiple values, thus increasing the stability of their policy opinions. We test this hypothesis using a series of heteroskedastic graded item response theory models of public opinion toward policies related to climate change. We find that people structure their policy preferences toward climate change policies in values toward the environment and the economy, but only the most sophisticated citizens are able to reconcile the potential conflict between these values.

Usually pictured in relations of opposition, political parties are sometimes inclined to make alliances. This article examines the ethical questions such arrangements give rise to. It considers first the formal characteristics of an alliance as a distinctive form of association, moving on to examine what reasons for alliance are good reasons. Intrinsic arguments that invoke epistemic or democratic criteria, and instrumental arguments that cite areas of shared programme or imperfect institutions, are weighed in turn, with the latter judged to be more consistent with the partisan ethos. The final section examines the normative standards to which alliances should be held once formed.

What effect does black politics in the United States have on the attitudes of black citizens in other national contexts? Literature on the black diaspora and transnationalism has characterized cultural and political linkages between black communities in North America, the Caribbean, and Europe, especially during the mid-20th century. In this article, I exploit random timing in the administration of a public attitudes survey to demonstrate that such linkages persist and that the police killing of Eric Garner in 2014 negatively affected black Londoners’ attitudes toward the Metropolitan Police. Notably, I find the effect was largely concentrated among black Londoners: estimates of an effect on white and South Asian Londoners were small and largely insignificant. The evidence presented here demonstrates that racial violence in the United States can affect racial politics in other national contexts and helps frame the emergence of Black Lives Matter chapters and protests beyond the United States.

Most of the poor in the developing world work in the informal economy, that is, in occupations that take place outside of the legal system of taxing, spending, and regulating. This article examines how informal work impacts the policy and electoral preferences of the poor. We emphasize the importance of the risks inherent in informal employment in shaping the responsiveness of citizens to clientelism and their policy and voting preferences. Since most informal workers are not covered by (formal) social insurance, they prefer material goods and candidates that produce targeted, clientelistic benefits rather than programmatically delivered insurance that is unlikely to reach them. As a result, we argue that informal workers are more likely to rely on clientelistic relations as a means of hedging risks than are formal workers; prefer policies that are delivered clientelistically via political mediators rather than programmatic solutions; and prefer clientelistic over programmatic local candidates. Our findings elucidate why the preferences of poor informal workers often diverge from those assumed by standard models of social insurance and have important implications for the political economy of social policy in a world where billions work outside work-based tax-transfer systems.

Whether or not nationalism fuels terrorist violence by ethnic groups is an important yet underexplored research question. This study offers a theoretical argument, empirical analysis and a case study. When political leaders such as presidents and prime ministers use nationalism to shore up legitimacy, they threaten the existence of disfavored ethnic groups. In turn, those groups are more likely to respond with terrorist attacks. The author tests this argument using a sample of 766 ethnic groups across 163 countries from 1970 to 2009. The multilevel mixed-effects negative binomial regression results provide evidence that leader nationalism is a significant driver of ethnic terrorism. The detrimental effect of nationalism remains the same after using a generalized method of moments method to account for possible reverse causality. A case study of Sinhalese nationalist leaders versus Tamil Tigers also supports the nationalism and terrorism nexus.

Studies of the domestic sources of Israel's foreign policy have tended to treat Israel's parties as homogeneous blocs of opinion. Israel's political parties are implicitly arrayed in such analyses on a left-to-right continuum. This begins on the left with the New Communist List (RAKAH) and extends through the Israel Communist Party (MAKI), MOKED, Haolam Hazeh Koah Hadash, the Civil Rights Movement, SHELI, the United Workers Party (MAPAM), the Labour Party (formerly Ahdut Haavoda), Israel's Workers List (RAFI) and the Workers of Israel Party (MAPAI), the Independent Liberals, the Democratic Movement for Change, the National Religious Party, the Likud (composed of the state list, the Liberal Party, Laam, the Free Centre, the Greater Israel Movement, Shlomzion and Herut) and finally ends on the right with the ultra-orthodox Agudath Israel (AGI) and the Workers of Agudath Israel (PAGI). The left-to-centre part of this continuum is presented as moderate in varying degrees on questions relating to Israel's most cardinal external question, namely the terms of accommodation with the Arabs. The right-to-centre part of this same continuum is associated with hawkish views, which also vary in their degree of militancy.

This brief paper has two purposes. The first is to suggest some reasons why the study of time is important and should be of interest to political analysts. The second is to present some data which link one aspect of temporal analysis, political impatience, with a range of political orientations and behaviors. Although the magnitude of the correlations reported is not large, the patterns of association suggest a syndrome to which more attention may be profitably turned.

The purpose of this Note is two-fold. First, it shows that Schmitter implicitly includes in his definitions of systems of interest intermediation faulty statements concerning the causal link from institutional forms to power relations between the state and interest groups. Second, it argues that in order to avoid such errors, and benefit in other ways, students of systems of interest representation should remove implicit statements about power from their definitions and explicitly state their hypotheses connecting institutional forms and power relations involving the two actors of those systems.

Government transparency is widely promoted, yet little is known about transparency’s effects. Survey experiments reported here, made on the streets of Lima, Peru, investigate a simple question: what are the effects of government-sponsored transparency websites, and the information revealed by those efforts, on attitudes about the Peruvian political system? Like many developing countries, Peru lacks much system support, making it more difficult to improve governance and democracy; transparency itself has little impact on political attitudes. However, some dimensions of the information provided by transparency matter: endorsement by a credible third party or framing that associates comparatively good community well-being with government performance. These conditions substantively increase Peruvians’ approval of the national political community, the regime’s performance, institutions, and local government.

Different methodological approaches sometimes lead to different substantive conclusions. Nowhere is this more evident than in studies relating assessments of presidential skill to legislative success. Scholars of the historical, traditionalist school of presidency research argue that presidents who are perceived to be adept at getting what they want are more likely to achieve their legislative goals than are those perceived as less adept. Neustadt identifies perceived skill, or what he calls ‘professional reputation’, as one of the three resources that are the essence of presidential power. Yet students of the presidency who employ quantitative methods have found little or no systematic relationship between variations in skill evaluations and variations in success. George Edwards reports thai similarly situated Congressmen are not especially more likely to support highly esteemed presidents than lowly esteemed presidents. Fleisher and Bond similarly find that once contextual variables have been controlled for, there is no pattern suggesting that presidents thought to be highly skilled do better with Congress.

The proper role of the values of the doer in the doing of political theory is a continuing and vexed problem. Is the holding of values an encumbrance or an integral part of the process? Recently Lukes has made a determined effort to argue, in the case of one particular concept, ‘power’, that theoretical and value disputes cannot in principle be disentangled: ‘I shall argue for a view of power (that is, a way of identifying it) which is radical in both the theoretical and political senses (and I take these senses in this context to be intimately related). The view I shall defend is… ineradicably evaluative and “essentially contested”.’ The notion of ‘essentially contested’ is defined by reference to Gallie, and although the above quotation may be ambiguous, Lukes' later usage makes clear that he is claiming that it is the concept of power (and not his metatheoretic statement about it) that is ‘essentially contested’. This claim is technically mistaken and the mistake, I would argue, is substantively pernicious.

In a recent article in this Journal Marsh, Smith and Richards (MSR) note the massive recent changes in the organization of British government and the attention the bureau-shaping model has received both at a theoretical level and as an explanation of changes. They suggest that the model has breathed new life into debates about the behaviour of officials and is important in the context of the ‘Next Steps’ agency reform. They state two aims of their article: ‘First, it is a critical contribution to the literature on the bureau-shaping model’, and secondly it examines ‘the model's utility as an explanation of the changes that have occurred in British central government in the past decade’. They also use their arguments as part of an assault upon rational choice and empirical political science more generally in favour of interpretative sociology. However, in this Note, we respond to their work on the bureau-shaping model and rational choice.

International conflict has profoundly influenced election outcomes in some cases, and in other cases has had a minimal impact. This article develops a theory that the increased salience of foreign policy issues following periods of international hostilities increases the variance of government parties’ vote shares. In elections following conflict, the ability to accurately predict election outcomes using traditional economic voting models is reduced. The article provides evidence from advanced democracies in the post-World War II era that being involved in international disputes increases the predictive error of vote shares. More substantively, vote choice models should model the role of exogenous shocks such as international conflict in order to avoid making misleading inferences. The study concludes by discussing the meaningful implications for various theories of voting behavior and international conflict.

Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem and Sen’s Minimal Liberalism example impose ‘impossibility’ roadblocks on progress. A reinterpretation explained in this article exposes what causes these negative conclusions, which permits the development of positive resolutions that retain the spirit of Arrow’s and Sen’s assumptions. What precipitates difficulties is surprisingly common, and it affects most disciplines. This insight identifies how to analyze other puzzles such as conflicting laws or controversies over voting rules. An unexpected bonus is that this social science issue defines a research agenda to address the ‘dark matter’ mystery confronting astronomers.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, the question of mass participation in primaries and caucuses became unusually salient, with a close Democratic race calling special attention to these often overlooked procedural elements of America's democratic system. This study adds a new element to scholarship on institutional design and citizen participation by way of a survey-based experiment conducted in the midst of the 2008 campaign. The results show that institutional choices are not neutral. Nominating candidates through caucuses rather than primaries not only reduces the number of participants, but also significantly affects the ideological composition of the electorate. Caucuses produce a more ideologically consistent electorate than do primaries, because policy centrists appear to avoid caucuses. This experimental finding is strongly buttressed by the observational data on Obama and Clinton voters.