K. I. Macdonald (this Journal, vi (1976), 380–2) asserts, first, that my claim that the concept of power is essentially contested is ‘technically mistaken’ and, second, that the mistake is ‘substantively pernicious’. Unfortunately, he does not succeed in showing what the mistake is – nor indeed what makes it ‘technical’, rather than just a mistake. He does not even try to show why this alleged mistake is pernicious – let alone substantively so.

The availability of detailed census data at the level of parliamentary constituencies has promoted the testing of ecological models of voting behaviour in the United Kingdom. To date, most of the testing has used the 1966 Census data, which is inferior to that for 1971 in certain respects. As a result, it has not been possible to test in detail two models – that of ‘embourgeoisement’ and that of the ‘property-owning-democracy’. But the cross-classifications available at constituency level for the 1971 Census allow the relative importance of the two to be assessed.

This article argues that long periods out of office make parties impatient and more willing to make concessions over portfolio allocation in exchange for participation in a coalition cabinet. Two hypotheses are analysed: on the one hand, being in opposition for a long time should put parties at a disadvantage when bargaining over office payoffs. On the other, this effect should not apply to the formateur party, since formation offers are based on the receivers’ impatience. The empirical results largely support these expectations. Additional evidence of the causality of the main effect is obtained through the use of matching techniques based on the propensity score.

Human trafficking affects millions of people globally, disproportionately harming women, girls and marginalized groups. Yet one of the main sources of data on global trafficking, the annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Reports, is susceptible to biases because report rankings are tied to political outcomes. The literature on human rights measurements has established two potential sources of bias. The first is the changing standards of accountability, where more information and increased budgets change the standard to which countries are held over time. The second is political biases in reports, which are amended to comply with the interests of the reporting agency. This letter examines whether either of these biases influence the TIP Reports. In contrast to other country-level human rights indicators, the State Department issues both narratives and rankings, which incentivizes attempts to influence the rankings based on political interests. The study uses a supervised machine-learning algorithm to examine how narratives are translated into rankings, to determine whether rankings are biased, and to disentangle whether bias stems from changing standards or political interests. The authors find that the TIP Report rankings are more influenced by political biases than changing standards.

Public funding for science is increasingly coming under attack. This article explores the normative force of these charges, and the arguments that are available to counter them. It examines two justifications of state support for science: Vannevar Bush’s vision of the universal material benefits of scientists pursuing basic research and John Rawls’s liberal justification of science funding as a voluntary public good. It argues that both accounts neglect the important political impact of scientific research and its status as the source of knowledge for the modern state. The article then traces the implications of the political role of science for the appropriate forms of democratic input into funding decisions.

How much do electoral institutions matter for the rise of populist parties? Evidence on this question is mixed, with some scholars arguing that the role of electoral rules is small. We provide new evidence for the impact of electoral system change. The UK's adoption of a proportional electoral system for European elections in 1999 provides a unique opportunity to study the link between electoral rules and the ascendancy of right-wing populist parties. Employing both synthetic control and difference-in-difference methods, we estimate that the electoral reform increased the vote share of right-wing populists by about 12 to 13.5 percentage points on average. During a time when populism was rising across Europe, the reform abruptly shifted populist votes in the UK above the European trend and above more plausible comparison cases. Our results also imply that caution is needed when empirical results based on partial reforms are extrapolated to electoral system change.

Deliberation is widely believed to enhance democracy by helping to refine the ‘public will’, moving its participants' policy attitudes closer to their ‘full-consideration’ policy attitudes – those they would hypothetically hold with unlimited information, to which they gave unlimited reflection. Yet there have also been claims that the social dynamics involved generally ‘homogenize’ attitudes (decreasing their variance), ‘polarize’ them (moving their means toward the nearer extreme), or engender ‘domination’ (moving their overall means toward those of the attitudes held by the socially advantaged) – attitude changes that may often be away from the participants' full-consideration attitudes and may thus distort rather than refine the public will. This article uses 2,601 group-issue pairs in twenty-one Deliberative Polls to examine these claims. Reassuringly, the results show no routine or strong homogenization, polarization, or domination. What little pattern there is suggests some faint homogenization, but also some faint moderation (as opposed to polarization) and opposition (as opposed to domination) – all as is to be expected when the outside-world forces shaping pre-deliberation attitudes are slightly more centrifugal than centripetal. The authors lay out a theoretical basis for these expectations and interpretations and probe the study's results, highlighting, among other things, deliberation's role in undoing outside-world effects on pre-deliberation attitudes and the observed homogenization's, polarization's, and domination's dependence on deliberative design.

Few contemporary crises have reshaped public policy as dramatically as the COVID-19 pandemic. In its shadow, policymakers have debated whether other pressing crises—including climate change—should be integrated into COVID-19 policy responses. Public support for such an approach is unclear: the COVID-19 crisis might eclipse public concern for other policy problems, or complementarities between COVID-19 and other issues could boost support for broad government interventions. In this research note, we use a conjoint experiment, panel study, and framing experiment to assess the substitutability or complementarity of COVID-19 and climate change among US and Canadian publics. We find no evidence that the COVID-19 crisis crowds out public concern about the climate crisis. Instead, we find that the publics in both countries prefer that their governments integrate climate action into COVID-19 responses. We also find evidence that analogizing climate change with COVID-19 may increase concern about climate change.

In the only official policy position ever taken by the American Political Science Association, it advocated the transformation of American political parties into a strong, centralized two-party system. Olson has proposed a detailed explanation of why Westminster political systems and parties will produce more efficient public policy than weak, decentralized political parties. He argues that centralized political parties in two-party political systems are ‘encompassing’ and, hence, have an incentive to minimize redistributive policies. Olson thus provides a justification for the policy position taken by the APSA. I evaluate Olson's explanation from the perspective of Tullock's rent-seeking behaviour argument and the deadweight losses needed for Olson's argument to hold. An alternative formulation of encompassing organizations is presented and contrasted with Olson's definition as it applies to political institutions. Finally, an empirical test of the responsible and Westminster party systems arguments is provided. The evidence presented here rejects the claims of the Westminster and responsible party models.

There is a growing body of literature dealing with the anticipation and management of international crises. However, there has been relatively little attention paid to the learning effects of successive ‘real world’ confrontations between the same protagonists. This gap is somewhat paradoxical, since there is a great emphasis upon ‘teaching’ the adversary certain lessons in the deterrence literature, and a preoccupation with ‘vicarious learning’ by policy makers who do not wish to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors.

Research into the recruitment process within British political parties has tended to focus on either the institutional machinery of selection or the socio-economic characteristics of candidates. The analysis of non-selected aspirants has been ignored and those hypotheses that do exist remain empirically untested. In this article data on the Labour party's recruitment process for the 1979 direct elections to the European Parliament are used to test a research strategy. A major finding is that significant differences exist between selected and non-selected aspirants which may reflect gate-keeping criteria. In particular, pro- or anti-EEC attitudes were found to be a dominant recruitment factor.

Terrorism elicits strong public reactions immediately after the attack, with important implications for democratic institutions and individual well-being. Are these effects short-lived? We answer this question using a natural experiment design and combining data on terrorist attacks in the United Kingdom with a Continuous Monitoring Survey. We find that heightened risk perceptions and emotional reactions in the wake of deadly attacks do not dissipate in the very short run but are sustained over time and up to 120 days after the attacks. Whereas large-scale attacks cause a long-lasting shift in risk assessments and emotions, the corresponding effect of smaller-scale terrorism incidents appears to subside within one month. Overall, the impact of terrorism does not fade away easily.

What explains why the United Nations Security Council meets and deliberates on some armed conflicts but not others? We advance a theoretical argument centred on the role of conflict externalities, state interests and interest heterogeneity. We investigate data on the Security Council's deliberation on armed conflicts in the 1989–2019 period and make three key findings: (1) conflicts that generate substantive military or civilian deaths are more likely to attract the Security Council's attention; (2) permanent members are varyingly likely to involve the Security Council when their interests are at stake; and (3) in contrast to the conventional wisdom, conflicts over which members have divergent interests are more likely to enter the agenda than other conflicts. The findings have important implications for debates about the Security Council's attention, responsiveness to problems and role in world politics.

Acentral puzzle in the comparative politics literature has been why certain societies are able to achieve political stability while others suffer from strife, repression and authoritarian rule. This article applies the solution concept of quantal response equilibrium (QRE) to Weingast's Sovereign-Constituency Co-ordination Game in order to show how our understanding of political stability can be enhanced when uncertainty and limited rationality are explicitly modelled. Comparative statics results first confirm the intuitive logic that civil conflict is unlikely when regimes threaten penalties for revolt that are much more severe than current living conditions and when the benefits to a successful revolt are not sufficiently enticing. In addition, our analysis provides a logic for the outbreak of civil conflict, noting that it is most likely when key payoffs are in their intermediate regions and far from critical ‘thresholds’, resulting in ambiguous and counterintuitive decision making by leaders and citizen opposition groups.

Why do states intervene in elections abroad? This article argues that outsiders intervene when the main domestic contenders for office adopt policy positions that differ from the point of view of the outside power. It refers to the split between the government's and opposition's positions as policy polarization. Polarization between domestic political forces, rather than the degree of unfriendliness of the government in office, attracts two types of interventions: process (for or against democracy) and candidate (for or against the government) interventions. The study uses a novel, original data set to track local contenders’ policy positions. It shows that the new policy polarization measurement outperforms a number of available alternatives when it comes to explaining process and candidate interventions. The authors use this measurement to explain the behavior of the United States as an intervener in elections from 1945 to 2012. The United States is more likely to support the opposition, and the democratic process abroad, if a pro-US opposition is facing an anti-US government. It is more likely to support the government, and undermine the democratic process abroad, if a pro-US government is facing an anti-US opposition. The article also presents the results for all interveners, confirming the results from the US case.

In recent years the chief emphasis of Soviet legislation on urban administration has been to expand the rights and responsibilities of city governments in planning and co-ordinating economic activities within their territory. Very little has been done, however, to enhance the power of city Soviets so that they might actually carry out these new responsibilities. The same problems that historically have plagued local Soviets continue to undermine their capabilities. Chief among these problems are the following:

1. Insufficient power vis-à-vis the ministries; in most decisions concerning enterprises subordinate to all-union (Moscow-based) or republic-level ministries, the local soviet has little influence. With the exception of Khrushchev's short-lived sovnarkhoz reform, which dismantled most of the central ministries and attempted to expand the power of regional authorities over economic decision-making, the branch principle of management has been dominant ever since the beginning of Stalin's industrialization drive. The most powerful actors are the ministries located in Moscow or in the republic capitals. A large percentage of the money invested in the construction of housing, cultural facilities and the urban infrastructure is not part of the budget of the local soviet. Instead, such facilities are financed out of funds that the ministries allocate to enterprises for these purposes. In the mid-1970s, ministries paid for and supervised the construction of 70 per cent of housing and 65 per cent of new kindergartens and nurseries. The result is that facilities are built according to the interests of the ministries rather than in response to more general, local needs.

The White House was once – and will be again – a great place for a young man to work. I did it myself and have never been sorry. Fate was kind and my age was right: it was Harry Truman's White House and I worked for Charlie Murphy – Charles S. Murphy, to give him his due. He was the President's Special Counsel, successor to Clark Clifford in that post and one of Truman's senior aides. Working for Murphy and with him for the President was a fine experience, as unlike Egil Krogh's or Gordon Strachan's as day from night. What made it so is illustrated by a story. And this story is a starting point for looking at the presidency now, by light of Watergate.

Local government borrowing is often referred to as a highly technical, not to say arcane, activity of local government. It should not be dismissed so easily. In reality, such borrowing illuminates broader relations between government and market by highlighting interdependencies which exist between central government, local government and financial markets.

There are few systematically comparative cross-national studies of urban policy or service provision, partly because there is little in the way of empirical testable theory that might guide research and partly because the variety of institutional methods of providing and financing urban services in different nation states makes it difficult to carry out such comparisons. Urban systems theory, however, applies to all levels of urban society from local collections of towns and villages right up to the world system of cities. It also enables the development of empirically testable hypotheses linking the hierarchical system of cities with the level of expenditure on public services in metropolitan areas. An examination of data for seventy-six metropolitan regions in France, eighty-three in Italy, seventy-four in West Germany, and sixty-three in England and Wales supports the hypothesis. The article concludes that urban systems theory offers a theoretically well-developed and empirically powerful means of carrying out systematic cross-national comparative urban research.