There has been considerable disagreement among political scientists over the relative merits of political culture versus rational choice explanations of democratic and liberal norms and commitments. However, empirical tests of their relative explanatory power using quantitative evidence have been in short supply. This article employs national probability sample surveys conducted in 1994 to assess differences between Czechs and Slovaks in the expression of democratic norms and liberal attitudes with respect to economic, political, social and ethnic issues. The applicability of an explanation focusing on long-standing cultural differences between the two countries is compared with a rational choice explanation based on national differences in their recent experiences of political and economic transition. It is shown that differences in the expression of support for marketization and democracy in the two countries can be explained relatively parsimoniously in rational choice terms. The explanatory contribution of political culture appears to relate only to a narrow range of attitudes and values.

Lewis Fry Richardson (1881–1953) was one of the most original thinkers ever to apply their minds to the study of war and its causes. In a strict sense he was an amateur in that he held no position of profit dedicated to the pursuit of these researches. He was always employed to do something else and did the research at week-ends and in his retirement. He never taught in the field or anything close to it. Nevertheless he was a prolific publisher on a very wide range of topics, as the two volumes of his collected papers published by Cambridge University Press testify, though his work rarely reached the international relations or political science community at the time. It was after his death that his work had its impact.

In this article the ability of Laver and Shepsle's portfolio allocation (PA) theory to account for the survival records of coalition governments in twelve West European parliamentary democracies is examined. The initial test consists of determining whether governments that are in PA equilibrium survive longer than other governments. Simulation experiments are then used to estimate the robustness of these equilibria in order to assess whether robust equilibria have significant survival-enhancing properties. The foil in this investigation is the ideological diversity approach, which sees ministerial accommodation, not ministerial autonomy, as the key to decision making in coalition governments. The evidence favours the latter perspective.

There has been extensive research on Scottish, Welsh and Irish nationalism but little on British nationalism. Analysis of the British electorate shows that British nationalist sentiments cannot be reduced to the conventional left–right and libertarian–authoritarian value dimensions, and constitute a distinct normative dimension in their own right. They are related to attitudes towards Europe, nuclear defence, Scottish devolution and Irish unification. Although by no means as important as the left–right dimension, they are at least as important in contemporary voting behaviour as the libertarian–authoritarian dimension.

In this Note, I comment briefly on Browne and Patterson's interesting article on rational nominating behaviour in Japan. Their empirical results appear sound. Where I differ is mostly in how to interpret them.

Browne and Patterson frame their article as providing ‘a critical empirical test of the proposition that the nominating behaviour of Japanese parties is based on rational calculation’. Presumably Browne and Patterson did not mean to claim that they were testing the rationality assumption, as such a thing would be problematic from the usual Lakatosian view of social science. Instead, what they are really aiming at are previous studies that either directly impugn the ability of Japanese nominators to deduce and implement optimal seat-maximizing solutions to the nomination problems posed by Japan's former electoral system or that report ‘error rates’ that appear to them to call into question whether the nominators' main goal really could have been seat maximization.

We should begin our reply to Paul Warwick by stating how very flattered we are by the diligent attention that he has given to our work on government formation. In particular, we are delighted that he has taken up and applied the simulation technology that we suggested as a way to explore cabinet stability, a matter on which we were beginning to feel like voices wailing in the wilderness.

This is not the place to bore readers of the Journal with detailed points of issue between us, of which there are obviously many. We want here to concentrate upon some larger issues provoked by Warwick's critique. These involve a debate on cabinet stability and duration between a school of thought, in Warwick's corner, that is essentially empiricist in its outlook and a school of thought, in ours, that takes analytical modelling as being more fundamental. This is a theme touched upon by Kaare Strom in his recent review essay on parliamentary democracy.

We are pleased at the opportunity to respond to Professor Cox’s observations on our article ‘An Empirical Theory of Rational Nominating Behaviour Applied to Japanese District Elections’, which appeared in the previous issue of the Journal (pp. 259–89). His comments address several points including the motivation of our article, the way in which we characterize his prior work (with various co-authors) on the subject, and the adequacy of our effort to model the nominating process in Japanese district elections. While these points are not always separable, we shall address each of them.

Existing explanations of domestic structural change focus on the role crises play in precipitating radical or episodic change. They largely ignore the sources and consequences of incremental change, even though this type of change also can have significant effects for policy processes and outcomes. We outline a framework for studying institutional transformation that accounts for both forms of change. The argument is a three part one. First, international and domestic events, including both crises and gradual pressures, open windows of opportunity that provide policy officials with the potential to transform existing institutions. Large-scale, system-wide changes open large windows, which allow radical change, while small-scale, issue-specific problems and changes create more limited opportunities for change. Secondly, whether an institutional change follows a window of opportunity depends on the actions and interests of state officials. Thirdly, state officials' ability to capitalize on a window of opportunity depends on their institutional position or capacity; the prevailing institutional arrangements create opportunities for, or place limits on, officials' ability to make change. Two case studies illustrate and probe the plausibility of the argument.

For some time now, formal modelling has been touted by its supporters as a panacea for political science – or at least as a major step forward in the discipline's development. Certainly, it embodies a number of praiseworthy elements. Its insistence on starting with a parsimonious and precisely formulated set of assumptions cannot help but constrain slippery thinking, for example, and its rigorous working out of implications, while often demonstrating the obvious, occasionally leads to unanticipated and intriguing results. Moreover, the combination of precision and rigour holds forth the promise of generating relatively clear-cut tests of rival explanations, a major boon – if it proves true – in a discipline more inclined to abandon theories than to disconfirm them.

How much better the analytical or formal orientation is, then, than the ‘funnel of causality’ approach of empiricists whose quest for the highest explained variance seldom produces more than a miscellaneous grab-bag of influences on the dependent phenomenon. Empirical work of that sort may have some limited utility in identifying possible causes, to be sure, but at some point the scholarly enterprise must move to the higher level of elaborating a clear logical structure among causal factors. Here, empirical success in accounting for observed phenomena cannot be the sole guide: the best theory is the one that provides the most accurate idea of what is actually going on in the real world, not the one with the best correlations.

When an intellectual exchange gets ‘curiouser and curiouser’, it is probably time to bring it to a conclusion in the hope that scholars other than the principals involved will bring a fresh perspective to the issues in dispute. Certainly when the dispute begins to focus on fine-grained details that are of interest only to the disputants, it is time to move the discussion back to a more general plane. This we shall do, and do in the briefest of ways.

Low electoral turnout is often considered to be bad for democracy, whether inherently or because it calls legitimacy into question or because low turnout implies lack of representation of certain groups and inegalitarian policies. Yet there would appear to be a straightforward cure for low turnout: make voting compulsory. Of the twenty-five countries in the International Almanac of Electoral History for which Katz has collected institutional data, four have compulsory voting. Turnout in these countries averages 89 per cent, as compared to 75 per cent in the other twenty-one countries.

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.