Sunday, 29 October 1994 was cool, partly cloudy, and almost warm when the sun was out, a pleasant autumn day in Washington. Clusters of sightseers strolled along Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House, others sat across the street in Lafayette Square, some of them paying concessionaires to have themselves photographed beside life-size images of President Bill Clinton and his wife. At approximately 2.55 p.m., a man in a long, bulky, tan trench coat stood next to the wrought-iron fence, gazing intently towards the White House. He had been standing there for nearly an hour when two young boys on a field trip ran to a spot near him, pointing excitedly towards a small group of men in dark suits strolling near the north portico of the White House. ‘That looks like Bill Clinton,’ one of them said. ‘Yeah it does,’ replied the other.

At that moment, the man near the fence, pushed the boys aside, slipped a semiautomatic assault rifle from beneath his coat, extended its folding stock, and began firing at the person he mistakenly believed was President Clinton. Running back and forth along the fence as he fired, the shooter quickly emptied a clip of thirty rounds at his intended victim as bystanders scattered in panic, one of them leaving unattended an infant in a baby carriage. When he stopped to insert another thirty-round clip, a very courageous tourist, Michael Rokosky, tackled him from behind. As they struggled on the sidewalk, two other courageous bystanders joined Rokosky, subduing the attacker before uniformed Secret Service officers arrived. No one had been injured.Another bystander cooly recorded the whole event on videotape. As he was being handcuffed, Francisco Martin Duran spoke for the first time: ‘I wish you had shot me,’ were his only words. Meanwhile, President Clinton was watching a televised football game on the opposite side of the White House, unaware until he was informed moments later by his Secret Service detail of what had happened.The account is drawn from, White House Security Review Public Report: Francisco Martin Duran, http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/ustreas/usss/t1pubrpt.htm, p. 1. Hereafter cited as White House Security Report Website.

Examining the 1993 split of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in Japan offers an opportunity to gain greater insight into the impact of the various incentives that influence the behaviour of politicians. Surprisingly, previous analyses of the LDP split have been able to demonstrate only weak evidence of any electoral connection driving politicians' decisions. However, by also examining the role of policy preferences (support for reform) and utilizing interaction terms, our analysis takes into account the fact that politicians at different stages in their careers and facing different sorts of electorates respond to electoral factors in very different ways. Our findings thus confirm the importance of the electoral connection. We are also able to add that a variety of other incentives also shape political behaviour and that politicians do not necessarily all respond to similar stimuli in the same way.

Scholars and policy makers have displayed a longstanding interest in the politics of economic reform, particularly over the 1990s as former Communist countries struggled to develop market economies. Yet remarkably little systematic research has been conducted on the political economy of commercial reform in the post-Communist world. We argue that the fragmentation of power within post-Communist countries has been a potent force for trade liberalization. In non-democracies where political power is highly concentrated in the hands of a small group of elites, state leaders face few impediments to rent seeking and are well insulated from interests favouring commercial reform. In non-democracies where power is fragmented within the national government, however, new elites with weak ties to the old regime are well placed to use trade liberalization as a weapon against their political opponents. Moreover, the dispersion of power in non-democracies creates space for groups favouring free trade to promote trade liberalization. Finally, in democracies, the dispersion of power within the national government combined with electoral competition creates an especially potent impetus to trade liberalization. To assess these arguments, we analyse the trade policy of post-Communist countries during the period 1990–98. The results support our claims, highlighting the importance of examining institutional differences within as well as across regime types in analyses of economic policy.

Recent developments in the analysis of long-memoried processes provide important leverage for analysing time-series variables of interest to political scientists. This article provides an accessible exposition of these methods and illustrates their utility for addressing protracted controversies regarding the political economy of party support in Britain. Estimates of the fractionally differencing parameter, d, reveal that governing party support, prime ministerial approval and economic evaluations are long-memoried and non-stationary, and that governing party support and prime ministerial approval are fractionally cointegrated. Pace conventional wisdom that party leader images matter little, if at all, analyses of multivariate fractional error correction models show that prime ministerial approval has important short-run and long-run effects on party support. Prospective and retrospective personal economic evaluations are influential but, contrary to a longstanding claim, national economic evaluations are not significant. The article concludes by suggesting that individual-level heterogeneity is a likely source of the observed aggregate-level fractional integration in governing party support and its determinants. Specifying parsimonious models that incorporate theoretically meaningful heterogeneity is a challenging topic for future research.

Does the lack of competitive elections in the less democratic newly industrialized or industrializing countries (NICs) mean that their governments are unconstrained by their citizens' preferences for economic performance? In this article, I show how non-electoral mechanisms in the less democratic NICs of South Korea, Singapore and Malaysia constrain their governments. Governments pay attention to the effects of policies on economic performance because labour disquiet and disinvestment are likely to arise otherwise. To pre-empt labour disquiet and disinvestment, the governments offer ‘credible apologies’ that include punishment and monitoring of government when economic performance is less than optimal in these countries. When they fail to offer credible apologies, labour and producers respond with strikes and disinvestment. Governments' credible apologies play an important role in explaining labour quiescence and production investment. The argument and evidence contrasts with the general impression that governments in the less democratic NICs are constrained only by elites or are responsible only to themselves. The analysis shows that governments use bargaining mechanisms even where the citizens are perceived as meek and without bargaining strength.

After years of neglect, a growing literature has reclaimed the constituency campaign as an important aspect of British elections. However, relatively little work has been done to disentangle which aspects of the local campaign are effective, and which are not. For much of the twentieth century, the mechanics of the local campaign were in essentials unchanged. But changing campaign technologies in the last decade offer new possibilities to party campaign managers. The 1997 British general election was the first in which parties made extensive use of telephone canvassing as well as the more traditional doorstep canvass. This article provides a comparative analysis of the effectiveness of traditional versus telephone constituency campaigns. Traditional face-to-face canvassing had a statistically significant influence on the outcome of the 1997 general election. But the telephone canvass did not.

Renewed scholarly interest in the role of US congressional parties has recently coincided with a continuing interest in legislative committee influence and the extent to which that influence relies on committee preference composition. We argue that majority party incentives to influence composition vary by committee salience and party margins. In turn, the party’s ability to influence composition of salient committees is constrained, but varies by party resource levels. We present data on committee composition for the 80th to 104th US Houses and test these expectations using time-series cross-section analysis. The evidence provides support for the predictions – which have been hypothesized or tested anecdotally but have not heretofore been systematically tested – explaining both spatial and temporal variation.

This article analyses the origins and consequences of multicameral representation and voting in international organizations. It is argued that the existence of visible and durable conflicts in an issue area can make standard procedures such as unicameral majority voting ineffective with respect to the functioning of the regime. Applying spatial models of strategic decision making, it is asserted that multicameralism is more likely to be effective than unicameralism if chambers consist of key groups with distinct interests. Empirical evidence is provided by studying the multicameral voting rule in the Council of the International Seabed Authority (ISA). I compare likely decision-making outcomes under unicameral and multicameral voting rules from 1996 to 2002 and find that multicameral outcomes are more likely to be stable and supported by those actors critical for the effective functioning of the regime.

Coalition theory has a distinguished tradition in comparative politics. Beginning with William Riker's The Theory of Political Coalitions,William H. Riker, The Theory of Political Coalitions (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962). comparativists have made considerable theoretical and empirical progress in understanding the complexities of coalition politics, most significantly with respect to government formation and termination.

This Note uses the British Household Panel Study (BHPS) to consider the changing volume and distribution of voluntary association membership (and hence social capital) in Great Britain. We aim to supplement Hall's study of trends in social capital published in this Journal with more recent and longitudinal data. This allows us to show that whilst the volume of social capital is not declining, it is becoming increasingly class specific, and that its relative aggregate stability masks considerable turnover at the individual level. These findings are significant for current debates on social capital.

In their 1996 article in this Journal, Robert Jackman and Karin Volpert analyse the systematic conditions that influence the electoral success of extreme right parties in sixteen West European countries from 1970 to 1990. In particular, they focus on the effects of unemployment, electoral thresholds and multi-partism.

The Classic party identification model originally derves from the work of Campbell et al. in the 1960sAngus Campbell, Phillip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller and Donald E. Stokes, The American Voter (New York: Wiley, 1960).In The American Voter Campbell et al. noted that there was a large disparity by age between, first, the number of voters claiming an Independent identification in the United States and, secondly, the numbers claiming a strong identification with one of the two parties.