It has become clear from national surveys, both in Britain and elsewhere, that the attitudes of the mass public towards social and political issues tend to group together in broadly predictable ways. Analyses of British Election Study data have consistently found that attitudes towards economic issues such as nationalization, income redistribution and government intervention go together and are largely unrelated to attitudes towards moral issues. There are of course variations in the results, depending on the items included for analysis, but it has become apparent that a rather persistent attitudinal structure, at least at the aggregate level, has characterized the British electorate. Similar findings have been reported for the United States.

On 3 November 1992 the American electorate dismissed President George Bush after a campaign in which his opponents repeatedly criticized his management – or mismanagement – of the nation's sluggish economy. Although the salience of economic issues in the 1992 election is consistent with the emphasis placed on economic conditions in most studies of presidents' job approval ratings, the results of these studies have recently been challenged. Based on analyses of quarterly data for the 1953–88 period, MacKuen, Erikson and Stimson conclude that voters' subjective evaluations of the long-term performance of the national economy are crucial. Controlling for such expectations, retrospective judgements about economic performance and objective economic conditions are not important determinants of approval of the president. These conclusions are at odds both with the traditional ‘reward-punishment’ theory that emphasizes the importance of retrospective economic evaluations for approval of the president and with the revisionist ‘issue-priority’ theory which contends that inflation and unemployment rates have differential effects on support for Republican and Democratic presidents.

The policy-oriented coalition models that were developed in the 1960s and 1970s generally required that the positions of political parties were measured at ordinal level. More recent models of coalition formation, however, have tended to assume that interval-level data on parties' policy positions are available. This need for interval-level data has raised serious practical problems for empirical research. Analysts frequently wish to examine patterns of coalition formation after several, or many, elections. Unfortunately, detailed interval-level data on parties' positions are generally available at only one or two points in time. While it can often be plausibly argued that parties will occupy fairly stable ordinal positions over time, it is extremely doubtful whether this is also the case for their interval positions.

In a recent Note we investigated the incidence of tactical voting in the British election of 1987. A major hypothesis was that in situations where it made sense (i.e., in which voters preferred a party that was a long way from contention, so that a vote for that party was likely to be ‘wasted’), tactical voting would be much more frequent than had hitherto been assumed. We discovered that this was indeed the case; in what we called ‘objectively tactical situations’, tactical voting was as high as 25 per cent or more in the general case, rising to more than 50 per cent among highly educated weak partisans who had strong negative feelings about the winning party. In the process, however, we discovered what appeared to be an anomaly in need of further exploration.

At the end of this series of comments, rejoinders and second thoughts on tactical voting it may not be entirely clear what is actually in dispute. The aim of this Note, therefore, is simply to take stock and to try to elucidate the points on which there is agreement and disagreement.

States in liberal democracies are said to be structurally dependent on the decisions of private investors in the sense that governments do not directly control the level of investment and economic growth. The general consensus amongst Marxian political economists and neo-classical economists is that this imposes restrictions on the scope of the redistributive policies that governments can pursue. It is also frequently argued that these restrictions are increased with international capital mobility because of the threat or reality of capital flight. The McCracken Report noted this link between capital mobility and restrictions on government as early as 1977. It warned that some governments appeared to have ‘overrated their scope for independent action’ and they had paid insufficient attention to the consequences of ‘capital flight’. Since then, both the rate of capital mobility and the severity of these restrictions have probably increased. In the 1970s, capital outflows from the thirteen leading industrial countries averaged $52 billion per annum. In 1989 they averaged $444 billion. The problems that this presents to governments attempting to make transfers from capital to labour have been described in considerable detail and there is an extensive formal literature in trade theory that deals with capital transfers. There is also some work on strategies for social democratic governments wishing to minimize capital losses. The main gap in this literature, however, is that some of the fundamental political, or ‘democratic choice’, aspects of these problems are not well understood. In particular, little is known about the optimum rate of taxation for a government attempting to maximize workers' consumption out of profits. The purpose of this Note is to contribute towards such an analysis.

This Note examines the formation of the Socialist-led coalition government in Japan in 1947. Despite the recent expansion of positive research on coalition governments, the existing literature remains ‘European’ in its scope, leaving ambiguity as to whether the currently available models are truly general theoretical models, as some formal theorists seem to claim, or only applicable to a certain cultural and socio-political environment. The Japanese example presents an excellent vehicle, a hard case, with which to test contemporary coalition theories, because Japan is usually described as a country with a distinctive political culture and historical background.