Most research on voting behaviour and elections has focused on cross-sectional analysis of particular elections. This technique is very useful in telling us about the influences on individual voter decision making. Less commonly research has focused on short-term electoral change, and has tried to explain specific election results with respect to one another, or in relation to long-term trends.

I am grateful to James Fishkin and Robert Luskin for taking the time to consider and respond to my remarks on the dangers of relying on the news media to form a bridge between participants and non-participants in deliberative events. Clearly we are in agreement that there is a difference between deliberations as experienced by participants and a television audience. However, Fishkin and Luskin have misrepresented my aims and claims about that difference, and thus their response is less telling than it might have been, directed as it is at a man of straw.

At the outset, let me emphasize that the purpose ofmyresearch note was not to subject deliberative polls to a thorough critique: one case study would indeed have been an inadequate foundation for such work. Rather, the case study was a device used to highlight a feature common to many attempts to put deliberative democratic principles into practice, not just the deliberative poll (DP). The underlying issue is, to state it again, one of scale: millions of people cannot strictly deliberate together. Walzer proposes a maximum number of twenty individuals, although the literature on small groups suggests that the actual limit may be between five and seven, both which seem disturbingly small for purportedly democratic processes. Even if the deliberative limit were several hundred, however, the scale issue still arises and causes problems for the democratic legitimacy of such events: how can their decisions be binding on others when those others have not had the opportunity to have their views transformed by the encounter with the better argument?

This article develops a framework for assessing thought experiments in normative political theory. It argues that we should distinguish between relevant and irrelevant hypotheticals according to a criterion of modality. Relevant hypotheticals, while far-fetched, construct imaginary cases that are possible for us, here and now. Irrelevant hypotheticals conjure up imaginary cases that are barely conceivable at all. To establish this claim, the article interrogates, via a discussion of Susan Sontag and Judith Butler’s accounts of representations of violence, the frames through which hypotheticals construct possible worlds, and concludes that some frames are better than others at sustaining a link with the world as we know it. Frames that disrupt this link can be charged with failing to offer action-guidance.

People often fail to make the choices that best satisfy their preferences. The design of the social environment inevitably makes some choices easier than others. According to Libertarian Paternalists, these facts justify governments nudging people towards better choices through changes to the so-called choice architecture. This is a form of means paternalism. However, the social environment affects not only people's choices or means, but also the preferences they adopt in the first place. Call this the problem of ‘preference architecture’. This article argues that preference architecture constitutes a fundamental challenge to the justificatory basis of Libertarian Paternalism. More generally, it explores when, if ever, government paternalism that influences preference formation can be justified. While Libertarian Paternalism cannot provide a satisfactory answer, the author defends a contractualist account of paternalism based on a notion of primary goods and democratic deliberation.

How do external threats affect leaders' incentives to repress? We argue that external threats both increase and decrease state repression, but through different causal pathways. Directly, external threats provide leaders with political cover to use repression against political opponents. Indirectly, threats incentivize leaders to augment state capacity, which decreases the likelihood of state repression. To test this argument, we develop a new latent measure of external threat using a Bayesian measurement model. We use mediation analysis to examine the direct and indirect effects of external threats on repression in developing countries from 1980 to 2016. We find that external threats increase government repression directly, but indirectly decrease repression through stronger state capacity. Our findings have implications for how international factors connect to domestic politics to help explain state repression. In addition, our new measure of external threat will help scholars study the consequences of the international threat environment.

Are young people less likely to punish undemocratic behaviour? I employ experimental data from five studies, ten countries, and seventeen unique country-year samples to reassess the proposition that young people are less committed to democracy than older people. The studies consist of four conjoint and one vignette experiments, which permit estimating an interaction between undemocratic candidate behaviour and respondent age on voting intentions. I find the interaction between undemocratic behaviour and age is negative – such that punishment of undemocratic behaviour increases with age – in all studies and almost all country samples. Moreover, the interaction is approximately linear and statistically significant in the pooled sample and most studies. Thus, young people are less likely to sanction undemocratic behaviour than older people. This letter contributes with the hitherto most comprehensive empirical contribution on age differences in commitment to democracy judging from punishment of undemocratic behaviour.

The Editors and publishers apologize for the lack of distinction in Figures 2 and 3 printed on pages 255–6 of this volume of the Journal, and offer the following as replacements:

How do deported migrants engage in civic and political life after being forcibly returned to their home countries? Do experiences during the migration journey impact how deportees (re)engage? We explore how extortion experienced during migration alters political and civic engagement preferences. We utilize a multi-method approach combining original survey data of Guatemalans deported from the United States and a series of qualitative deportee interviews. We find that extortion during migration has a significant direct effect on increased citizen engagement. Economic hardship exacerbated by extortion may mediate this effect. Overall, extortion experienced while migrating has long-term financial consequences for deportees, with implications for their reintegration and the broader health of civic institutions in their home countries.

There are potentially multiple sources that make it difficult to compare the typical survey measure of the left-right self-placement cross-nationally. We focus on differential item functioning (DIF) due to the different use of response scales when the left-right is framed as an aggregate dimension of policies. We also examine whether and to what extent ordinary citizens’ use of the scale is cross-nationally comparable. Our goal is twofold. First, we assess the cross-national comparability of the left-right self-placement scale using the anchoring vignette method used in nine European countries. Second, we propose a measure that quantifies the extent of DIF at the country level. Our original survey and other benchmark studies suggest that the size of cross-national DIF (CN-DIF) in citizens' use of a left-right scale is relatively small when the left-right concept is considered in policy terms and when a comparison is made between Western European countries.

At a time when the nuclear power industry in many Western countries faces political and economic obstacles to expansion, commitment to assertive development of nuclear power continues to intensify in the Soviet Union, as well as in most East European countries. Although in 1980 nuclear power provided only about 5·1 per cent of electrical generating capacity in the Soviet Union, the 11th Five Year Plan (1981–85) projected an increase to 14 per cent, or to approximately 38,000 MW (megawatts) of installed capacity. Although longer-run projections are less definite, it appears that by 1990 authorities hope to achieve between 80,000 and 90,000 MW of nuclear generating capacity. A similar commitment to nuclear power exists in most CMEA countries, particularly in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and the German Democratic Republic (GDR). As of 31 December 1982, the GDR's 1,830 MW of nuclear generating capacity was the highest in Eastern Europe (outside the Soviet Union), although Bulgaria has overtaken the GDR in terms of proportion of electrical capacity provided by nuclear power (16 per cent for Bulgaria and 11 per cent for the GDR in 1980). According to projections, Czechoslovakia should increase its nuclear capacity from 880 MW in 1980 to between 3,100 and 3,600 MW by 1985, while the GDR plans to raise its capacity to 2,270 MW.

Quantitative methods have been used to: (1) better predict civil conflict onset; and (2) understand causal mechanisms to inform policy intervention and theory. However, an exploration of individual conflict onset cases illustrates great variation in the characteristics describing the outbreak of civil war, suggesting that there is not one single set of factors that lead to intrastate war. In this article, we use descriptive statistics to explore persistent clusters in the drivers of civil war onset, finding evidence that some arrangements of structural drivers cluster robustly across multiple model specifications (such as young, poorly developed states with anocratic regimes). Additionally, we find that approximately one-fifth of onset cases cannot be neatly clustered across models, suggesting that these cases are difficult to predict and multiple methods for understanding civil conflict onset (and state failure more generally) may be necessary.

Lawyers talk of the common law offence of ‘perverting the course of justice’ by bribing or intimidating judges or jurors, lying to the police or court, concealing or destroying or fabricating evidence. This article argues that the same things are wrong, and wrong for the same reasons, politically as judicially: they prevent people from knowing and applying for themselves the rules by which they are ruled. The sort of excuses typically offered for those perverse practices in politics – that ‘it made no difference’, that ‘they could and should have resisted’ or that it is merely a matter of ‘fair adversarial competition’ – would be laughed out of a court of law, and they should be shunned politically for the same reasons as judicially.

Analyses of elections, whether academic or journalistic, are permeated by terms drawn from physics. We discuss the inertia or volatility of an electorate, the momentum of a campaign, pressures and cross-pressures, party actions and reactions, the impact of short-term forces. Although imprecise, these borrowings convey genuine information about the characteristics of an election, and they would be difficult to replace.

Let me state at once the paradox referred to in the title. In nearly all capitalist countries, including Britain and Australia, most important trade unions are partisan in politics. That is, they openly, and as a matter of permanent policy, support a particular political party against its rivals. In a few countries, again including Britain and Australia, they actually become a part of such a party, through affiliation. If we look at the affairs and activities of the trade unions, there is little to suggest that this is an unpopular policy among their members.

What determines state participation in regulatory regimes? This article argues that if international regulation creates markets for new technologies, innovative companies support the ratification of the relevant regulatory treaties. Consequently, technological innovativeness should have a positive effect on regulatory treaty ratification. From the harmonization of telecommunication technology to pesticide regulation, many regulatory treaties create new product markets, so the argument applies to a variety of regulatory issues. This hypothesis is tested against data on the ratification of two major multilateral treaties for pesticide control: the 1998 Rotterdam Convention and the 2001 Stockholm Convention. Countries that are capable of biotechnology innovation are found to be more likely to ratify each treaty. The findings suggest that (1) technology innovation is key to regulatory treaty ratification and (2) constituency preferences for regulatory treaties are contingent upon expected profits from innovation. More broadly, the article emphasizes the importance of technological factors for international co-operation.

It seems a reasonable enough proposition that a president will organize his congressional relations to suit his policy goals and his personal style. Available literature supports this expectation – at least before the administration of Jimmy Carter. But, of course, recent presidents have been wise in the ways of Washington as a consequence of lengthy experience in the nation's capital. In fact, most have served in Congress. Among post-Second World War presidents, only Eisenhower before Carter lacked service on Capitol Hill (and Fred Greenstein now assures us that his political savvy was fine tuned).

Several theorems have been established recently on the existence or location of equilibrium policies in collective decision-making in the case when the alternatives are points in a multi-dimensional space. One of these theorems is founded on an assumption about individual preferences which seems intuitively plausible in the context of political decision-making. We have conducted a number of experiments designed to test this theorem directly. In addition, the resulting data were used to compare the accuracy of this assumption about individual preferences with that of certain alternative assumptions, some of which have also been used in theories of collective decision-making. Before the experiments and the analyses of the results are described, we first briefly present the theorem and the various alternative assumptions to be tested.