The Russian parliamentary and presidential elections of December 1999 and March 2000 appeared to have been won in large part through the partisan use of (particularly state) television. According to the evidence of a spring 2001 national survey, television was the main source of political information for the supporters of all parties and candidates. However, state television (which had been most supportive of the Kremlin) was much more likely to be favoured by the supporters of the pro-regime Unity party; while commercial television (which had provided a more even-handed coverage of the elections) was more popular and respected among the supporters of anti-Kremlin parties and candidates and less popular among supporters of Vladimir Putin. Regression analysis that takes account of reciprocal causation between media source and vote choice indicates that these were not spurious associations. The findings suggest that the state itself may exercise a disproportionate influence upon the electoral process in newly established systems in which social structures and political allegiances remain fluid.

Electoral rules and constitutional structures can influence the level of political corruption. We show that proportional representation (PR) systems are more susceptible to corrupt political rent-seeking than plurality systems. We argue that this result depends on the different loci of rents in PR and plurality systems, and on the monitoring difficulties faced by both voters and opposition parties under PR. We also examine the interaction between electoral rules and presidentialism. We test our main predictions and interaction effects on a cross-section of up to ninety-four democracies. The empirical findings strongly support our hypothesis that PR systems, especially together with presidentialism, are associated with higher levels of corrupt political rent-seeking.

In this article, the hypothesis is examined that coalition government formation in West European parliaments is systematically constrained by the existence of limits or bounds on the extent to which parliamentary parties can compromise on their policy positions. Two methods are developed by which these bounds or ‘policy horizons’, as they are termed here, can be estimated, and it is demonstrated via the analysis of hypothetical data that the methods, although imperfect, are unlikely to manufacture artefactual threshold effects. These methods are then applied to data on fourteen post-war West European parliamentary systems to show that, even when other relevant factors are controlled, the structuring effect of policy horizons can be detected in the formation of coalition governments. The article concludes with some comments on the theoretical implications of the existence of policy horizons.

On the basis of an analysis of a four-wave panel survey, we argue that exposure to television news had significant, substantial effects on both attitudes and vote choices in Mexico's watershed presidential election of 2000. These findings support the contention, implicit in some research on political communication, that the magnitude of media effects varies with certain features of the political context. In particular, television influence in electoral campaigns may be substantially larger in emerging democratic systems.

Although commentary on the ‘gender gap’ is a staple of political discourse in the United States, most analyses of the dynamics of presidential approval have ignored possible gender differences in the forces driving approval ratings of US presidents. This article analyses gender differences in the impact of economic evaluations and political interventions on the dynamics of presidential approval between 1978 and 1997. The analyses are made possible by disaggregating 240 monthly Survey of Consumers datasets gathered over this period. These data show that women's economic evaluations are consistently more pessimistic than men's, regardless of who occupied the Oval Office. Analyses of rival presidential approval models reveal that a national prospective economic evaluation model performs best for women, but a personal prospective model works best for men. Parameter estimates indicate that economic evaluations accounted for substantial proportions of gender differences in presidential approval in the post-Carter era. Men and women also reacted differently to presidential transitions, with approval increasing more among men when Reagan replaced Carter, and more among women when Clinton replaced Bush. The hypothesis that men are more susceptible than women to rally effects induced by domestic and international crises and wars does not receive consistent support.

Many assert that the economic problems of Africa possess political origins. In particular, they point to a lack of political accountability and argue that economic reform and the renewal of growth depend upon political reform and in particular upon the promotion of competitive electoral politics. Summarizing these arguments, this article formalizes and tests them, using both an African and global sample of data. While it finds support for the view that within Africa – and globally – competitive institutions are associated with less extractive policies, it finds no evidence that these institutions have facilitated the implementation of Washington consensus policies.

This analysis outlines and tests the steps-to-war explanation of international conflict. At the core of this explanation is the expectation that territorial disputes are a key source of war and that as states that have these disputes make politically relevant alliances, have recurring disputes and build up their military forces against each other, they will experience ever-increasing probabilities of war. The absence of these risk factors is expected to lessen the chances of severe conflict. Utilizing the Militarized Interstate Dispute data of the Correlates of War project, the data analyses provide full support for the steps-to-war explanation during the 1816–1945 era and partial support for the Cold War nuclear 1946–92 span. Among the findings for this latter period is the presence of a curvilinear relationship between the number of prior disputes and the probability of war – after a large number of disputes, states begin to ritualize their behaviour at levels short of war.

How cohesive are political parties in the European Parliament? What coalitions form and why? The answers to these questions are central for understanding the impact of the European Parliament on European Union policies. These questions are also central in the study of legislative behaviour in general. We collected the total population of roll-call votes in the European Parliament, from the first elections in 1979 to the end of 2001 (over 11,500 votes). The data show growing party cohesion despite growing internal national and ideological diversity within the European party groups. We also find that the distance between parties on the left-right dimension is the strongest predictor of coalition patterns. We conclude that increased power of the European Parliament has meant increased power for the transnational parties, via increased internal party cohesion and inter-party competition.

Formal models of voting usually assume that political agents, whether parties or candidates, attempt to maximize expected vote shares. ‘Stochastic’ models typically derive the ‘mean voter theorem’ that each agent will adopt a ‘convergent’ policy strategy at the mean of the electoral distribution. In this article, it is argued that this conclusion is contradicted by empirical evidence. Estimates of vote intentions require ‘valence’ terms. The valence of each party derives from the average weight, given by members of the electorate, in judging the overall competence or ‘quality’ of the particular party leader. In empirical models, a party's valence is independent of current policy declarations and can be shown to be statistically significant in the estimation. It is shown here that the addition of valence gives a very strong Bayes factor over an electoral model without valence. The formal model is analysed and shown to be classified by a ‘convergence’ coefficient, defined in terms of the parameters of the empirical model. This coefficient gives necessary and sufficient conditions for convergence. When the necessary condition fails, as it does in these empirical studies with valence, then the convergent equilibrium fails to exist. The empirical evidence is consistent with a formal stochastic model of voting in which there are multiple local Nash equilibria to the vote-maximizing electoral game. Simulation techniques based on the parameters of the empirical model have been used to obtain these local equilibria, which are determined by the principal component of the electoral distribution. Low valence parties, in equilibrium, will tend to adopt positions at the electoral periphery. High valence parties will contest the electoral centre, but will not, in fact, position themselves at the electoral mean. Survey data from Israel for the elections of 1988, 1992 and 1996 are used to compute the parameters of the empirical model and to illustrate the dependence of equilibria on the electoral principal components. The vote maximizing equilibria do not perfectly coincide with the actual party positions. This divergence may be accounted for by more refined models that either (i) include activism or (ii) consider strategic party considerations over post-election coalition bargaining.

This article explores Stanley Baldwin's heresthetic in the 1920s. Faced by the rise of multidimensionality in the issue space of British politics, Baldwin sought initially to bring about a single-issue dimensionality through protection; this was defeated in the 1923 election which brought Labour to office, showing that the electoral system could deliver proportionality and perhaps sustain a three-party system. Baldwin's heresthetic was to recast the Conservative party as the only viable anti-socialist party, and attack the Liberal party as the obstacle to a single-issue dimension and polarized politics. New Conservatism was used to reposition the Conservative party on the class dimension and result was the Conservative landslide of 1924, which structured British politics for the next fifty years. Baldwin institutionalized a class-based two-party system and thereby secured Conservative hegemony.

This article contests the widely held view that an effective bill of rights requires judicial interpretation of rights to prevail over political judgement. Most bills of rights reflect classical liberal assumptions that premise freedom and liberty on the absence of state intervention. Yet they govern modern welfare states that presume and require substantial state involvement, seen to various degrees as facilitating rather than restricting the conditions for robust and equal citizenship. Judges cannot provide answers that are so definitive or persuasive to questions about whether social policy is reasonable in terms of human rights that they rule out other reasonable judgements. Although these concerns are often used to justify rejecting a bill of rights, this article takes a different position. It argues that a political community can benefit from exposure to judicial opinions on whether legislation is consistent with rights, but should also encourage and expect parliament to engage in legislative rights review. The article discusses how three parliamentary systems have attempted to infuse more concern for rights in their processes of decision making, and concludes with suggestions on how legislative rights review can be strengthened.

Deliberative democrats are committed both to inclusion and to barring coercion in public discourse. Their commitment to democratic inclusion should make them sympathetic to the challenges faced by social movements. An adequate sociology of contentious public discourse, however, shows that social movements must often act coercively in order to be included. For example, they must often alter the terrain of conflict, create a crisis, pressure interlocutors to argue consistently, or compel other parties to enter social arenas of contention that they have avoided. Democratic theorists who are committed to inclusion should approve of such coercion. Under the actual circumstances movements face, there is a tension between non-coercion and democratic inclusion. This tension demonstrates the need for a democratic standard and a mode of democratic social analysis beyond those that deliberative theory offers.

The Hutton Report is now established as an important element of Britain's involvement in the Iraq War. In this article the ideas that underpin it are analysed. In particular, the focus is on Hutton's presuppositions concerning the nature of truth, agency, subjectivity, meaning and language. It is shown how unquestioned assumptions structured his method and shaped his conclusions. Although such presuppositions are widely shared by the public, too, a discursive conflict within the report is identified, revealing a sub-text of competing understandings that protagonists invoked. These suggest a more phenomenological and intersubjective approach to the interpretation of events. The conclusion is that Dr Kelly and the BBC were victims of a particular sense of truth and that Hutton failed to situate important actors and events within geopolitical, institutional, experiential and affective structures. The author suggests that a greater appreciation of the contingent way information enters the public domain (itself more evident in the Butler Report) is a pre-condition for better intelligence and public policy making.

Work exploring the relationship between public opinion and public policy over time has largely been restricted to the United States. A wider application of this line of research can provide insights into how representation varies across political systems, however. This article takes a first step in this direction using a new body of data on public opinion and government spending in Britain. The results of analyses reveal that the British public appears to notice and respond (thermostatically) to changes in public spending in particular domains, perhaps even more so than in the United States. They also reveal that British policymakers represent these preferences in spending, though the magnitude and structure of this response is less pronounced and more general. The findings are suggestive about the structuring role of institutions.

The third wave of democratization has profoundly affected national political institutions and procedures throughout the developing world. In many nations, however, local political institutions and actors also hold considerable power. Democratic reforms at the national level are not necessarily replicated at the local level, yet democratization is inherently incomplete if a nation is speckled with scores of authoritarian local political enclaves. It follows that the process of subnational political change is of vital importance. In this article this process is examined, focusing on Mexico. The question is what dynamic has led to the erosion of the PRI's dominance at the municipal level since the mid-1980s. Two theoretical models, a diffusion model and a realignment model, are proposed. Empirical tests centre on data from municipal elections in four states for the period 1985 to 1998. Using event history analysis, substantial support for the diffusion model is discovered. In contrast, evidence consistent with the realignment model emerges in only one context – a state in which a new opposition party enjoyed unusual strength.

Conventional wisdom suggests that macroeconomic outcomes do not follow a political business cycle (PBC) pattern. In this study, the nature of the electoral underpinnings of such opportunistic behaviour are investigated by analysing alternative formulations of PBC theory: (1) a naïve-unconditional PBC, (2) an electoral security-conditional PBC, (3) an electoral uncertainty-conditional PBC; and (4) a partisan-conditional PBC. Data on the US real personal income growth rate for the 1948:1–2000:4 quarterly period reveals support for both naïve-unconditional and partisan-conditional PBCs, yet rejects an electoral cycle attributable to the incumbent administration's ex ante re-election prospects. Simulation analysis reveals that while Democratic administrations enjoy higher income growth than Republican counterparts for non pre-election stimulus periods, Republican presidents are associated with larger pre-election economic expansions than Democratic presidents consistent with a partisan-conditional PBC theoretical model. This finding supports the notion that incumbent governments engage in partisan-based policy balancing with respect to the creation of opportunistic electoral cycles in real macroeconomic activity. On a broader level, these statistical findings provide strong support for adaptive models of the electoral cycle that emphasize partisan differences while refuting the policy neutrality proposition and rational-competence models predicated on the extent to which an incumbent administration experiences electoral vulnerability.

This article adapts and tests the theory of enlightened preferences on two British electoral cycles: 1992–97 and 1997–2001. Using individual-level panel data, it extends previous work by explicitly incorporating the role of political knowledge. Its findings are generally very supportive of the theory. It is shown that knowledge of party platforms varies through both electoral cycles in a manner predicted by the theory; that is, it is highest immediately following election campaigns; these changes in political knowledge are closely mirrored by changes in the explanatory power of a model of party choice containing so-called ‘fundamental variables’ (i.e. socio-demographic and issue-related variables) as predictors. More specifically, fundamental variables do a much better job of accounting for party choice during election years than in mid-cycle. Finally, for all years of both panels a positive interaction is found between political knowledge and the ability of voters to match their issue preferences to party platforms.

Although the concept of policy transfer attracts growing attention in political science, its application to the European Union remains underdeveloped. This article offers a comprehensive conceptual account of EU policy transfer. It starts from the institutionalist premise that transfer processes and outcomes will vary between differently constituted governance regimes. Three forms of EU governance are identified; hierarchy, negotiation and ‘facilitated unilateralism’. The article develops hypotheses about the linkages between institutional variables and transfer outcomes, assessed on a scale from emulation to influence. Hypotheses are set against empirical evidence drawn from a variety of policy areas. We find evidence to support the general hypothesis that stronger forms of policy transfer occur in more highly institutionalized governance regimes. The evidence also points to micro-institutional variables shaping transfer outcomes: the powers accruing to supra-national institutions; decision rules; and the density of exchange between national actors.

In this article the impact of voters' regime preferences, i.e. their preferences for either divided or unified government, on their voting behaviour, is analysed. The theory expounded, combining behavioural as well as institutional approaches, predicts that voters weigh their regime against their partisan preferences to derive their vote choice. This theory and its implications are tested on the 2002 French legislative elections using a multinomial logit set-up. The results indicate that regime voting adds to the explanatory power of traditional vote-choice models. Statistical simulations provide further evidence that regime preferences play a decisive role in the voting booth, especially for voters who are not politically ‘anchored’.

Few studies of the neighbourhood effect in British voting patterns have addressed the important issue of spatial scale: at what level do these effects operate (if any), and do they operate simultaneously at more than one? Using the British Household Panel Study data, to which information on the characteristics of the population in the areas around each individual respondent's home have been added, this article finds significant differences in the propensity of individuals to vote either Conservative or Liberal Democrat rather than Labour at two neighbourhood levels as well as at the regional level.