THE NATURE OF THE UNDERSTANDING

As many political scientists know, ‘biopolitics’ is the short-hand term used to describe the approach of those in the profession who believe that biological concepts — especially evolutionary theory, which treats behaviour as the product of both nature and nurture — and biological research techniques can help us study and understand political behaviour better.

We study the relationship between voters' preferences and the emergence of party platforms in two-party democratic elections with adaptive parties. In the model, preferences of voters and the opposition party's platform determine an electoral landscape on which the challenging party must adaptively search for votes. We show that changes in the underlying distribution of voters' preferences result in different electoral landscapes which can be characterized by a measure of ruggedness. We find that locally adapting parties converge to moderate platforms regardless of the landscape's ruggedness. Greater ruggedness, however, tempers a party's ability to find such platforms. Thus, we are able to establish a link between the distribution of voters' preferences and the responsiveness of adaptive parties.

It is becoming increasingly accepted among analysts of British voting behaviour that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, local campaigning matters. The widespread view, largely propagated by David Butler and his co-workers on the Nuffield election studies, has been that campaigning in the constituencies by party activists and their candidates has no influence on the outcome: the distribution of votes across the parties in each constituency is a function of the national campaign only. This view was initially challenged by studies of canvassing in the 1970s, and extended during the 1980s by studies of campaign spending in the constituencies; further support was provided by work in the late 1980s and early 1990s on party canvassing activity. This note takes the challenge forward with an analysis of the impact of different aspects of constituency campaigning.

This article examines those public interest groups that have grown through heavy advertising expenditure and sophisticated marketing techniques, most particularly direct mail solicitations. It suggests that an Olson-style rational choice understanding of this ‘mail order’ membership must be supplemented by a recognition of the importance of group activity in manipulating the factors considered by individuals in joining decisions. Thus it moves the focus from the demand-side to the supply-side. Active marketing by groups can exploit sympathy for causes and encourage the predisposed potential member to join. Individuals do consider the range of benefits offered (though the list of factors is broader than Olson indicates) in their membership choices, but the group deliberately shapes the way in which these are regarded.

With the rise of analytical or positive approaches to the study of politics over the last three decades, the collective action problem has emerged as one of the central concepts in political science. The concept's widespread acceptance as a descriptive and diagnostic tool, however, cannot obscure the fact that its predictions do not always hold. Co-operation sometimes does take place in contexts where, according to the theory, actors should have little incentive to engage in it.

The problem of aggregation processes in alignments is the subject of a paper published recently in a statistical physics journal. Two models are presented and discussed in that paper. First, the energy landscape model proposed by Robert Axelrod and D. Scott Bennett (this Journal, 23 (1993), 211–33) is analysed. The model is shown not to include most of its claimed results. Then a second model is presented to reformulate the problem correctly within statistical physics and to extend it beyond the initial Axelrod-Bennett analogy.

Over the past thirty years, the Democratic party has carried the mantle of racial liberalism. The party's endorsements of equal rights, fair housing laws and school busing have cost it the support of some whites, but these losses have been concentrated at the periphery of the party, among those least committed to its guiding principles or most unsympathetic to its efforts on behalf of racial equality. We argue that with the rise of affirmative action as the primary vehicle to advance racial equality, racial politics have become divisive in a new way, and that opposition to affirmative action now encompasses whites within the liberal core of the Democratic party.

Contrasting traditional survey measures of affirmative action attitudes with an experimentally-based, unobtrusive measure of opposition to affirmative action, we show that racially liberal whites are reluctant to admit their anger over racial preferences when confronted with traditional survey questions in a telephone interview. When measured with an unobtrusive instrument, however, white opposition to affirmative action is found to be just as strong among liberals as conservatives, among Democrats as Republicans, and among those most committed to racial harmony and equality as among those least committed to such values. We argue that whites' anger over affirmative action stems less from a lack of concern with racial equality than from a commitment to individual achievement and self-reliance. Thus, while core constituents of the Democratic party are more opposed to affirmative action than has previously been recognized, the Democrats can draw strength from the enduring commitment of many whites to the goal of racial equality.

Landscape theory proposed a model of the alignment of actors (such as nations) based upon the importance of individual actors and their pairwise relationships. The model was implemented in simulation software and its predictions compared favourably with empirical reality given several input situations. The model successfully predicted the alignment of seventeen European nations in the Second World War alliance patterns since the Cold War.

Party competition is central to the operation of representative democracy. Just as competition between firms in private markets is supposed to ensure the efficient provision of services required by consumers, so competition between parties delivers the policies desired by the electorate. As Elkins argues, party competition implies that governments ‘will not be self perpetuating and that elections can, and in some cases do, lead to the replacement of one set of officials with another set. The chance, or probability, of turnover is perhaps the most salient feature of this system of accountability’ If competition works then the ruling party is fearful of loss of office and seeks to produce policies that satisfy the electorate. Correspondingly, opposition parties will adopt a platform which is intended to be more popular than that of the incumbents. This, in essence, is the Downs model of party behaviour in a representative democracy: the struggle for electoral support leads rival parties to adopt ‘moderate’ policies that reflect median voter preferences. In the absence of competition, the ruling party would be free to neglect public opinion and pursue ‘extreme’ policies in line with the views of its activists or financial backers.D. Elkins, ‘The Measurement of Party Competition’, American Political Science Review, 68 (1974), 682–700, p. 682.A. Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1957).D. Robertson, A Theory of Party Competition (London: Wiley, 1976).

Despite mass privatization and market reforms in Russia, the central state continues to redistribute considerable amounts of money between the country's eighty-nine regions. About 4.3 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) – or 31 per cent of federal tax revenues – was transferred back to the budgets of the regions in 1994. The average region recovered about 45 per cent of the taxes it remitted to the centre in different kinds of budget transfers, up from 37 per cent in 1993. But this understates the true scale of redistribution. In addition, many federal spending programmes, while not explicitly targeted at particular regions, had a geographically concentrated impact. This includes ‘indirect’ transfers due to revisions of the proportion of tax the regions were permitted to keep from those proportions voted in the federal budget. Russia's 4.3 per cent compares to grants to state governments of 0.7 per cent of GDP in Austria (1992), 2.5 per cent in the United States (1992), 3.6 per cent in Germany (1992), and 3.9 per cent in Canada (1991) (calculated from OECD, Revenue Statistics of OECD Member Countries: 1965–1994 (Paris: OECD, 1995)).Aleksei Lavrov, ‘Rossiiskiy Byudzhetny Federalizm: Pervie Shagi, Pervie Itogi’, Segodnya, 104 (7 June 1995), p. 5.

In a thought-provoking paper, Schultz develops an idea first put forward in a number of papers by Frey and Schneider and argues that governments will have less incentive to manipulate the economy when they lead in the polls. This helps to explain why electoral cycles have been so hard to detect. As other authors have observed, the best evidence suggests that electoral cycles (in output or instruments) are weak and irregular.Kenneth A Schultz ‘The Politics of the Political Business Cycle’, British Journal of Political Science, 25 (1995), 79–99.For example, Bruno Frey and Friedrich Schneider, ‘A Politico-Economic Model of the United Kingdom’, Economic Journal, 88 (1978), 243–53. Frey and Schneider were subjected to a severe critique at the time: see Alec Chrystal and James Alt, ‘Public Sector Behaviour: The Status of the Political Business Cycle’, in David Currie, Robert Nobay and David Peel, eds, Macroeconomic Analysis (London: Croom Helm, 1981).Alberto Alesina, ‘Macroeconomic policy in a Two-Party System as a Repeated Game’ Quarterly Journal of Economics, 102 (1987), 651–78; Alberto Alesina ‘Macroeconomics and Politics’, NBER Macroeconomics Annual (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1988); Alberto Alesina ‘Evaluating Rational Partisan Business Cycle Theory: A Response’, Economics and Politics, 5 (1990), 1–30; Alberto Alesina, G. Cohen and N. Roubini, ‘Electoral Business Cycles in Industrial Democracies’, European Journal of Political Economy, 9 (1993) 1–23; Stephen Sheffrin, ‘Evaluating Rational Partisan Business Cycle Theory’. Economics and Politics, 1 (1989) 239–60.