The US Congress has often sought to limit presidential influence over certain public policies by designing agencies that are insulated from presidential control. Whether or not insulated agencies persist over time has important consequences for presidential management. If those agencies that persist over time are also those that are the most immune from presidential direction, this has potentially fatal consequences for the president's ability to manage the executive branch. Modern presidents will preside over a less and less manageable bureaucracy over time. This article explains why agencies insulated from presidential control are more durable than other agencies and shows that they have a significantly higher expected duration than other agencies. The conclusion is that modern American presidents preside over a bureaucracy that is increasingly insulated from their control.

Democracy is often described as a system in which a majority of electors choose one out of a number of competing parties to form a government and carry out its programme. Unfortunately, spontaneous majorities rarely form in support of one party. We generalize from a ‘government’ to a ‘median’ mandate, in which the median elector chooses the pivotal party in parliament, which then translates his or her preferences into public policy. To check this we investigate how accurately parliaments and governments represent the left–right position of the median voter in each of twenty parliamentary democracies. Distortions depend on the type of electoral arrangement, being relatively smaller under proportional representation than under single-member districts. Distortions do not equate to biased representation, however. Once we consider how distortions at one step or one time are compensated by distortions in the opposite direction at another, overall representation of the median voter position is reasonably accurate.

In this article we defend the importance of the concept of ‘stateness’ in scholarly understanding of political democratization. We argue that because processes of political democratization in different spatio-temporal settings often share important similarities they are therefore comparable. We investigate this proposition by comparing the process of American political democratization with those of other liberal democracies, old and new. We review extant accounts of the historical process of American democratization – including those addressing American exceptionalism, class structures, multiple traditions, social movements, and international pressures – before presenting an alternative comparative account based on the idea of stateness. Attention to stateness problems defined along legal, bureaucratic and ideological dimensions and derived from both the classic Weberian perspective on the state and the more recent ‘third wave’ of democratization theory help to place the long American experience of democratization in comparative perspective. This finding illuminates some of the common political challenges in the construction of liberal democracies, old and new.

Are government coalitions less frequent under presidentialism than under parliamentarism? Do legislative deadlocks occur when presidents do not form majoritarian governments? Are presidential democracies more brittle when they are ruled by minorities? We answer these questions observing almost all democracies that existed between 1946 and 1999. It turns out that government coalitions occur in more than one half of the situations in which the president's party does not have a majority, that minority governments are not less successful legislatively than majority coalitions in both systems, and that the coalition status of the government has no impact on the survival of democracy in either system. Hence, whatever is wrong with presidentialism, is not due to the difficulty of forming coalitions.

Theory suggests that three factors – the importance of ideology to primary voters, costly movement due to candidate reputations and lack of competition – all contribute to candidate divergence in US congressional elections. These predictions are analysed with new data from a 2000 mail survey that asked congressional candidates to place themselves on a left–right ideological scale. The data reveal that candidates often diverge, but that the degree of candidate polarization is variable and may be explained by factors in the theory. Candidates with firm public reputations, those who face weak general election competition, and those who experience stiff primary competition are all more likely to deviate from the median voter's position. Perhaps more importantly, the locations that candidates adopt have clear effects on their vote shares.

Previous research explains the evolution of parties' ideological positions in terms of decision rules that stress the uncertainty of the political environment. The authors extend this research by examining whether parties adjust their ideologies in response to two possible influences: shifts in public opinion, and past election results. Their empirical analyses, which are based on the Comparative Manifesto Project's codings of parties' post-war programmes in eight West European nations, suggest that parties respond to shifts in public opinion, but that these effects are only significant in situations where public opinion is clearly shifting away from the party's policy positions. By contrast, no evidence is found here that parties adjust their ideologies in response to past election results. These findings have important implications for parties' election strategies and for models of political representation.

Drawing on arguments about politics during the French Fourth Republic, the concept of cabinet instability is reconsidered. Rather than studying cabinet duration, the article examines the accumulation of experience by individual cabinet ministers. Two variables are measured in nineteen parliamentary democracies: portfolio experience the experience of cabinet ministers in the specific portfolios that they hold) and political experience (the experience of cabinet ministers in any significant portfolio). The results cast doubt on existing claims about cabinet government in the Fourth and Fifth Republics. They also uncover substantial cabinet turnover in majoritarian systems, suggesting that existing claims about stability in such systems may be overstated.

Public bodies adopt procedures for the competitive bidding for funds in the belief that they improve public welfare, while critics regard such practices as a waste of resources and open to political manipulation. We test the operation of a competitive bidding regime through Tobit models of data drawn from successful and unsuccessful bids in four years of the Single Regeneration Budget programme in England. We derive hypotheses from a model of competitive bidding, the official evaluation of the programme and the pork-barrel literature. Our data and statistical models show that successive rounds did not greatly improve the quality of the bids, did not systematically reward needy communities and diverted resources to ministers' parliamentary seats in some regions.

Does their need for greater tax revenue force governments to democratize? Most research on contemporary democratization says little about the effects of taxation. Yet there are good reasons to believe that taxation led to representation in the past: representative government first came about in early modern Europe when monarchs were compelled to relinquish some of their authority to parliamentary institutions, in exchange for the ability to raise new taxes; similarly, the war for independence in the United States began as a rebellion against British taxes. Some scholars argue that a comparable process is occurring today: the need to raise taxes forces authoritarian governments to democratize. These claims have never been carefully tested. In this article, the ‘taxation leads to representation’ argument is explored and tested using pooled time-series cross-national data from 113 countries between 1971 and 1997. One version of the argument appears to be valid, while another does not. These findings are important both for scholars who wish to understand the causes of democracy, and for policy makers who wish to promote it.

This article analyses the founding rate of nationally active homosexual rights interest groups in the United States for the period 1950–98. Drawing upon the extensive organizational ecology literature, we test the hypothesis that the founding rate of homosexual rights interest groups is related non-monotonically to the number of groups in the population. Our statistical analyses support the hypothesis that as population density rises from very low to high, the founding rate first rises but eventually decreases. This pattern holds when we control for a number of contextual variables. In all, the data provide a great deal of support for the theory of density dependence – a novel approach to the study of interest group formation.

The virtual disappearance of moderate and cross-pressured members from the US Congress is analysed in this article. There were substantial numbers of these partisan non-conformists in both parties and in both chambers until the early 1980s when the middle began to shrink. This trend continued and accelerated in the 1990s. Partisan non-conformists disappeared through replacement and conversion. When moderate and cross-pressured members left Congress, their replacements were much more likely to be mainstream partisans in the 1980s and 1990s than they had been in earlier decades. The occurrence of some type of conversion (a shift towards the party's ideological mainstream or a party switch) is also much more common in recent decades. We present evidence that the shrinking middle in Congress resulted from electoral changes.

Electoral competition is here specified as revolving around both candidate policy positions and non-policy issues.Two candidates spend their resources on non-policy issues to sway citizens' ideological voting decisions but they are constrained by their party activists who provide them with electoral resources. In this setting, a candidate with a resource advantage converges more towards the centre, but a candidate with a resource disadvantage diverges more from the centre. This asymmetry in two candidates' incentives to converge generates the result that the two candidates do not converge towards each other. To test these theoretical results, two-stage estimation is used in this article to solve the reciprocal relationship between policy moderation and campaign resources. This analysis produces strong empirical support for the model in the context of US Senate elections between 1974 and 2000.

Political theorists disagree about the extent to which issues of feasibility, stability, institutional design and human nature can be bracketed in analysing the concept of justice. At one end of the spectrum some argue that no analysis of justice can be adequate in the absence of an account of how it could be implemented, whereas at the other end there are those who argue that principles of justice are logically independent of issues of feasibility. Influenced by the work of John Rawls, many theorists occupy the middle ground, maintaining that analyses of justice must be realistic, that is, realizable under the best of foreseeable conditions. Against Rawls and others, this article argues that feasibility does not constrain what can count as an adequate principle of justice but nevertheless maintains that there are limits on such principles that derive in part from human nature, which divergent theories of justice must respect. It also distinguishes between different levels of analysis, some of which are governed by feasibility constraints.

Some studies find that democracy inhibits growth while other studies find that democracy facilitates growth. Which conclusion is correct? To help resolve this debate, a variety of sensitivity analyses is conducted to answer two basic questions. First, why has the literature yielded contradictory results? Secondly, how believable are these results? The existing contradictions can be explained by analysts' choice of time period, with democracy having a negative effect on growth in the 1960s, a positive effect in the 1980s and no effect at all in the 1970s and 1990s. More generally, however, it is shown here that the statistical significance of these findings varies radically depending upon which control variables one utilizes and how one measures both growth and democracy.

One of the central questions in discussions of distributive justice is that of the interest of the badly off, or the worst off, in the financial assets of the well off. By contrast, theorists of distributive justice are remarkably silent on the important and complicated issue of access to the organs of the dead. In this article, I aim to show that if one thinks that the poor’s interest in leading a minimally flourishing life, and a fortiori in remaining alive, is important enough to confer on them a right to some of the material resources of the well off, by way of taxation and, in particular, by way of restrictions on bequests and inheritance, one must think that that very same interest is important enough to confer on the sick a right to the organs of the now-dead healthy. I make a case to that effect, and I explore disanalogies between the posthumous transfer of resources and the posthumous transfer of organs. Finally, I rebut two objections to my proposal.

‘Mirror representation’ or a ‘politics of presence’ presupposes relatively modest levels of diversity among those being represented. If the groups to be represented are too numerous, internally too heterogeneous or too cross-cutting, too many representatives will be required for the assembly to remain a deliberative one where ‘presence’ can have the effects its advocates desire. In those circumstances, what is being represented ought be conceptualized as the ‘sheer fact of diversity’ rather than ‘all the particularities of the diversity among us’. The appropriate response to that is legislative reticence.

Voting power indexes such as that of Banzhaf are derived, explicitly or implicitly, from the assumption that all votes are equally likely (i.e., random voting). That assumption implies that the probability of a vote being decisive in a jurisdiction with n voters is proportional to 1/√n. In this article the authors show how this hypothesis has been empirically tested and rejected using data from various US and European elections. They find that the probability of a decisive vote is approximately proportional to 1/n. The random voting model (and, more generally, the square-root rule) overestimates the probability of close elections in larger jurisdictions. As a result, classical voting power indexes make voters in large jurisdictions appear more powerful than they really are. The most important political implication of their result is that proportionally weighted voting systems (that is, each jurisdiction gets a number of votes proportional to n) are basically fair. This contradicts the claim in the voting power literature that weights should be approximately proportional to √n.

Two decades of turnover data were collected for the national legislature of twenty-five industrialized countries. After a discussion of turnover's significance, we compare turnover rates across countries. A set of variables expected to influence turnover rates is described and multiple regression is used to test the hypotheses developed. Results show that frequency of elections, opportunity for double listings, electoral volatility and legislative institutionalization have statistically significant effects on turnover. In addition the type of electoral system (majoritarian versus proportional representation) is shown to have a statistically and substantively significant effect, with turnover much greater in the latter. Possible explanations for this effect are explored.

The theory of delegation developed by Epstein and O'Halloran for the US federal system is used here to generate original hypotheses on the politics of delegation in the European Community (EC). It is argued that two institutional features of the Community, namely the decision rules of the Council of Ministers and the possibility of relying on both the Commission and the member states for policy implementation are at the core of the choices of delegation of EC legislators. Using an original dataset of 158 major EC legislative acts, it is demonstrated that the Council delegates greater policy authority to national institutions if legislation is adopted unanimously or in issue areas that require specialized and technical knowledge, while it relies to a greater extent on the Commission when acts are adopted by qualified majority voting or require general managerial skills at the supranational level.

Results also show that national administrators are the main providers of policy expertise, while the informational role of the Commission appears to be secondary, though not negligible. Finally, these findings qualify propositions on the relation between veto players and bureaucratic autonomy and on that between conflict within the legislature and delegation outcomes.

This article calls into question the common claim that class identity does not matter for American political behaviour. Using panel-study data spanning thirty-two years and two generations, we investigate the effects of social-class identity on five participatory orientations towards government. As expected, working-class identifiers in both generations consistently display lower levels of involvement in politics than do middle-class identifiers. Significantly, however, these differences typically persist when the analysis controls for objective indicators of class and are always enhanced among those who retain the same class identity over time. Rather than sustaining a conclusion that class identification has little relevance for Americans, the results suggest that class may be particularly important in the present political context.