Committee chairmen in the United States House of Representatives were often very powerful figures until the reforms of the early 1970s – as the numerous tales about those stereotyped villains, the southern Democrats, bear witness. Yet, surprisingly little explicit typologizing about leadership in congressional committees appears in the academic literature despite a growing awareness of the different goals which congressmen pursue and the variety of environments in which they operate. Just two different models of chairmen's power were developed in the context of the pre-reform Congress. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the accepted view, perhaps caricature, was that committee chairmen were autocratic, obstructionist (at least as far as liberals were concerned), conservative, possibly senile, and more than likely representative of constituencies outside the mainstream of national politics. A list of chairmen seen as fitting into this mould would include men such as ‘Judge’ Howard Smith, chairman of the Rules Committee from 1955 to 1967; his somewhat less skilful successor from 1967 to 1972, William Colmer of Mississippi; Graham Barden, the provocative chairman of the Education and Labor Committee between 1953 and 1960; and the authoritative Carl Vinson of Georgia, chairman of the Armed Services Committee for seventeen years until 1966.

This letter studies the impact of past violence and repression on current territorial preferences in a contemporary democracy. Does a violent past lay the grounds for pro-secessionist preferences, or does it lead individuals to cling on to the territorial status quo? We study whether exposure to the events of the Spanish Civil War and its immediate aftermath made people more or less likely to support Catalan secession from Spain. Our analysis employs a dataset that combines a large N of individual-level survey data with historical data about repression and violence in each Catalan municipality. Findings indicate that current preferences for secession tend to diminish among the oldest Catalan generation that was exposed to higher levels of violence in their municipality. Most crucially, we show that exposure to violence created a sense of apathy towards politics among the oldest cohort, which eventually leads to a lower predisposition to support secession, a feeling that was not transmitted to subsequent generations. Our findings qualify some of the existing knowledge on the effects of past political violence on present political attitudes.

As the deficiencies of central planning have become more obvious, shares in market socialism have risen. Whilst accepting the case for competitive markets, market socialists question the desirability of and the need for capitalist forms of private property and share a commitment to more inclusive forms of ownership. Whilst this leaves open the question of precisely what form of ownership is appropriate, many have advocated the use of labour co-operatives in which (i) only those who work for a firm are entitled to a share of its ownership, (ii) all those who work for a firm are entitled to a share of its ownership, and in which consequently (iii) profits and (iv) decision making are shared.

When do cross-national comparisons enable citizens to hold governments accountable? According to recent work in comparative politics, benchmarking across borders is a powerful mechanism for making elections work. However, little attention has been paid to the choice of benchmarks and how they shape democratic accountability. We extend existing theories to account for endogenous benchmarking. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a test case, we embedded experiments capturing self-selection and exogenous exposure to benchmark information from representative surveys in France, Germany, and the UK. The experiments reveal that when individuals have the choice, they are likely to seek out congruent information in line with their prior view of the government. Moreover, going beyond existing experiments on motivated reasoning and biased information choice, endogenous benchmarking occurs in all three countries despite the absence of partisan labels. Altogether, our results suggest that endogenous benchmarking weakens the democratic benefits of comparisons across borders.

There has been a remarkable shift in the relationship between market and state responsibilities for public services like health care and education. While these services continue to be financed publicly, they are now often provided through the market. The main argument for this new institutional division of labor is economic: while (public) ends stay the same, (private) means are more efficient. Markets function as ‘mere means’ under the continued responsibility of the state. This article investigates and rejects currently existing egalitarian liberal theories about this division of labor and it presents and defends a new theory of marketization, in which social rights and democratic decision-making occupy center-stage.

A standard criticism of the welfare state which is enjoying a resurgent popularity is that many of its operations are inefficient, even counter-productive, in relation to their assumed objectives. At the level of political and journalistic rhetoric it is asserted or implied that large sums of tax-payers' money are being spent in ways which benefit mainly the army of officials that administers them, and that much needless legislative effort goes into securing complexes of rights which serve only to provide work for tribunals and lawyers. At its most extreme the claim is that some welfare enactments actually cause more harm than good in that their intended beneficiaries would be better off without them.

Has regime transition in Russia generated a major cleavage in its elite structure and, if so, what is its nature? The concern of political scientists and reformers is that the presence of communist era elites in the post-Soviet regime, which have retained their core values and recirculated into positions of power, may be a significant obstacle to the consolidation of democracy and a market economy. While the communist system disintegrated with surprising rapidity in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it is not clear whether the norms internalised by elites operating under the ‘command-administrative’ system have changed along with the political system or whether the values and assumptions of the old pattern of government continue to be influential.

In 1968 there appeared in New Left Review an essay by its editor, Perry Anderson, which attracted considerable attention. Detecting in the student unrest then at its height ‘stirrings of a revolutionary consciousness’, Anderson was concerned to identify (and of course attack) the main elements ofthat British cultural conservatism which, in his view, the burgeoning revolutionary consciousness must overthrow. In brief, his view was that British intellectual life was dominated by a ‘“White”, counter-revolutionary emigration’ from Eastern and Central Europe – men who had fled the instability of their own societies for the continuity and order of the British tradition. Among them Anderson listed, as the dominant influence in social theory, Karl Popper. This was an accolade of sorts, but by no means any kind of intellectual tribute, for Anderson went on to dismiss Popper as nothing more than a ‘fluent ideologue’, incompetent alike in sociology and political theory.

This study addresses what it means, theoretically and diplomatically, to argue that states anticipate war. The ‘steps-to-war’ thesis contends that territorial disputes are high salience issues, but war is relatively unlikely unless state policies, such as arms buildups, directly increase the probability of war. This framework contrasts with the argument that these policies simply reflect underlying conflict, seen as the primary cause of both policies and war. The historical analysis here indicates that states do ‘anticipate’ war, but, at least in the case of wars related to ongoing territorial conflicts, it is theoretically trivial: states anticipate war, engaging in final preparations after their relations have deteriorated over time, and the process occurs in ways predicted by the steps-to-war theory.

This study examines the media diet of Richard Nixon, whose exposure to the news consisted almost entirely of a White House-produced daily news summary. Nixon staffers repeatedly asserted that the summary was the most effective way to give the president a comprehensive, objective account of the previous day’s reporting. While the summaries covered a wide range of media sources, analysis of the framing and filtering done by the White House raises doubts about the assertion that summaries were an effective substitute for first-hand consumption of the news. Nixon’s handwritten marginal notes reveal that the summaries provoked reactions in the president that had important implications for his conduct of the presidency.

One of the reasons for paying attention to the results of American mid-term elections is the hope that they will tell us something about the standing of the President's party with the electorate. But the electoral verdict is notoriously hard to interpret. Since the President is not himself standing for re-election, the verdict has to be inferred from the results of House and Senate races in which the national mood of the electorate may be obscured by local and temporary factors. This will be especially true in Senate races, with only some 33 seats at risk; but even in House elections, with some 435 seats at risk, a grave problem arises when one comes to compare the results with those of the preceding Presidential election. In every mid-term election since that of 1934, the party of the President, whether it be Republican or Democratic, has lost some of the seats it had won at the previous Presidential election. The net loss has been as low as four seats in 1962 and as high as seventy-one seats in 1938, but it has always occurred. Some loss to the President's party is considered to be ‘normal’ at mid term, and it is only to the extent that the actual loss diverges from the normal loss that implications can be drawn to the President's standing with the electorate.

Studies of patterns of voting change during the election campaigns of the 1940s and 1950s generally arrived at two conclusions: (1) the electorate is highly stable in its voting choice so that few votes change over the course of the campaign; and (2) those votes that do change are more or less random in their net impact on the distribution of party support. Butler and Stokes' more recent study of the national campaigns in 1964 and 1966 showed that the British electorate continued to be highly stable in its voting choice and that the most that could be said about the overall pattern of voting change was that it marginally benefited the opposition rather than government party. The authors then gave no further consideration to the campaign period and, emphasizing its practical and theoretical lack of importance, dropped the section on the national campaign from the second edition of their book. Thus, the campaign continued to be most noteworthy for the stability of aggregate voting patterns and was neglected in more recent studies of electoral change.

When the SDP was founded in March 1981 it was a product of two main strands of opinion embodied in the persons of Roy Jenkins on the one hand and the ‘Gang of Three’ (David Owen, Shirley Williams and William Rodgers) on the other. Jenkins was the first of the four to talk openly of the desirability of ‘breaking the mould’ of British politics by the formation of a new centre party. During his time as President of the European Commission he had become convinced that a realignment of British parties was necessary and he argued this in the Dimbleby Lecture in November 1979. Initially the ‘Gang of Three’ were hostile to the idea of a new party. They remained deeply involved in the Labour party until the end of 1980, leading the battle against the constitutional and policy changes favoured by the left. When they eventually resigned from the Labour party the ‘Gang’ claimed that this was because the party had changed, not them.

One point of interest about the period of the Labour government from October 1974 to May 1979 is the short-term surge and subsequent decline between these dates of electoral support for the National Front (NF). This episode of NF voting raises a number of questions. Some of these are simple empirical ones. What, for example, were the political origins, in terms of voting behaviour in the October 1974 general election, of this body of NF voters? What were their political destinations in May 1979? What characterized the various groups of voters who between 1974 and 1979 had different voting trajectories, all of which none the less included at least a period of support for the NF? This research note presents data on the numerical size of these different groups and it analyses some of their aggregate social and attitudinal characteristics.

An interested and engaged electorate is widely believed to be an indicator of democratic health. As such, the aggregate level of political interest of an electorate – macrointerest – is an essential commodity in a democracy, and understanding the forces that change macrointerest is important for diagnosing the health of a democracy. Because being interested in politics requires time and effort, the article theorizes that the electorate's level of political interest will be highest when the electorate believes the government cannot be trusted or is performing poorly. To test hypotheses derived from a proposed theory against rival explanations, the study develops a measure of macrointerest using a quarterly time series of aggregated survey items (1973–2014) of political interest. The authors find support for the theory that the electorate responds as reasonable agents when determining how closely to monitor elected officials: interest is positively related to decreases in trust in government.

Is the quality of democracy undermined or enhanced by party-system fragmentation? Addressing this question would help us better assess normative claims about electoral reforms. Yet, doing so is difficult because of endogeneity issues: party systems are endogenous to many other dynamics in a polity. We overcome this problem by putting forward an instrument for the number of parties in a system, based on the level of fragmentation added by parties that narrowly make it to parliament. We then test the effect of party-system fragmentation on the quality of democracy, drawing upon an extensive battery of outcomes. Against previous literature, we find that a higher number of parties leads to more fractionalized governments, but has no impact on other democratic outcomes. Subsample analyses suggest that fragmentation may have some effect in contexts of very high polarization, but we find no effect in other theoretically meaningful subsamples. Our results indicate that party-system fragmentation may have fewer normative implications than previously assumed.

Two states in a dispute refuse to back down. One ties its own hands to strengthen its stand and gain advantage; the other tries to untie the tied hands to preempt disadvantage. Tying hands is a well-studied strategy, but it tells only part of the story, and the response strategy of untying hands remains unexplored. Can a state untie the tied hands of its opponent to give freedom back to its opponent—the freedom to concede? I identify three strategies of untying hands: counterthreat, reassurance, and normative framing. I show experimentally that these strategies can reduce the public costs of backing down and the perceived reputational damage from backing down. Tied hands and audience costs are not static and immutable, but dynamic and malleable by the other side.

Scholars have argued that there is a broad gender gap in support for the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in Japan. We uncover strong evidence that age, rather than gender, along with rural or urban location, serves as the most critical determinant of party support. Through logistic regression, propensity score matching and simulation techniques applied to four large-scale datasets; we demonstrate that age effects are consistent but slowly diminishing across cohorts between the mid-1970s and the early 2000s. As Japanese women and men age, they come to support the LDP at similar rates controlling for education, income and other demographic factors. We argue that this age gap is a result of socialization and redistribution and not educational levels or socio-economic status, as is often suggested.

There is an emerging consensus that international intervention can secure peace by helping combatants resolve commitment problems following civil wars. But how do interveners accomplish this? Some suggest that intervention primarily works through military coercion, while others propose non-military instruments. We build on the existing literature to theorize that interveners commonly condition political, economic, and legal incentives on compliance with peace processes. Despite a rich literature on intervention, scholars have only started to test the underlying instruments. This article takes a critical step toward this end, examining peacekeeping missions led by the United Nations from 1989 to 2012. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we show military coercion is neither commonly used nor necessary to ensure peace. Missions that employ conditional incentives—on which we collect original data—are consistently correlated with a reduced risk of conflict recurrence, even when controlling for observed selection effects, and regardless of whether they are also authorized to use military coercion.