Social trust forms a major component of current conceptions of social capital and as such has been attributed a significant role in providing the social context for the emergence and maintenance of stable, liberal democratic polities and effective economies. Its role in these processes has in turn been generalized to post-communist societies in East-Central Europe undergoing ‘dual transitions’ from authoritarian states with command economies to democratic free-market societies. In this article, however, it is shown that the relations between trust and democratization in East-Central Europe imply a rather different ‘top-down’ process, in which levels of trust reflect rather than influence the effectiveness of political and economic institutions. This calls into question the generalization of models developed in democratic societies to the post-communist context and provides the basis for an alternative understanding of the process of social capital formation.

An event-history analysis of the disbandings of nationally active gay and lesbian rights advocacy groups in the United States for the period 1945–98 is presented. Specifically, the hypothesis (which comes from population-ecology theory) is tested that the survival prospects of gay and lesbian rights interest groups are related non-monotonically to the number of groups in the population (i.e., density). The statistical analyses presented support the hypothesis: as density rises from near zero to high, the death rate first decreases but eventually increases. Several other hypotheses are also tested, and among the findings is the following: the survival prospects of gay and lesbian rights interest groups are related non-monotonically to group age – as group age increases, a group's probability of death first rises but then decreases.

This is an evaluation of the impact of corporatist and pluralist employers' associations on firms' programmatic participation in active labour-market and social policies in Denmark and Britain. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with randomly-selected companies, it explores whether employers' associations engage differently with their constituent firms in corporatist and pluralist settings, and whether corporatist countries have an advantage in implementing active social policies. Variations in type of employer organization are found to constitute a determinant of cross-national differences in business attitudes towards the welfare state. Membership in a Danish employers' association confers an entirely different set of effects from membership in a British group and associational membership is a significant positive determinant of firm participation in Denmark but not in Britain. Active social policy has been viewed as a growth opportunity in a new issue area by the Danish ‘peak’ employers' association and its sectoral members. Although this association is losing some control over collective bargaining, its constituent associations have developed other functions, such as creating deliberative forums for managers, especially at the local level. The research also highlights the role of the state in the renegotiation and survival of corporatist institutional arrangements.

Does the geographic concentration of industry ‘matter’ outside the United States? Observers have long speculated that while geographically concentrated industries may be influential in American politics, this is probably not the case in countries where the electorate votes more as a national constituency. Others disagree, urging that clustered industries have an advantage regardless of how the political map is drawn. We sharpen the terms of debate and weigh in with empirical evidence from a cross-sectional analysis of intended voter turnout in eight member-states of the European Union and a multi-year study of voter turnout in the Netherlands. These tests uniformly show that, across different types of electoral systems, including those in which voters vote as a national constituency, thereby removing any effects of electoral geography per se, workers in traded industries that are physically concentrated are, in fact, substantially more likely to vote than employees in traded but geographically dispersed sectors.

Roll-call cohesion scores are the most widely used measures of voting blocs in legislative studies, appearing in literally hundreds of studies since their introduction in 1924. Despite a staple of legislative studies, we know virtually nothing about the statistical properties of these scores. In this article, it is shown how such scores suffer a serious bias problem: scores are artificially inflated for small parties, especially those that are less unified. The problem is demonstrated and an intuitive solution proposed. It is illustrated with data from the United States and from Brazil.

In his 1790 address to the Académie Française in Paris, Condorcet noted that every new generation has a tendency to accuse itself of being less civic-minded than previous cohorts. Two centuries later, this argument has once again regained front-page status. The debate is currently focused on the question of whether or not social capital and civic engagement are declining in Western societies. In his academic best-seller Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam argues that younger age cohorts, socialized in the prosperous economic conditions of the 1960s and onwards, are less inclined to engage in community life and in politics, and also less likely to trust their fellow citizens. By contrast, the ‘long civic generation’, born roughly between 1910 and 1940, is portrayed as much more motivated in these respects. They readily volunteer in community projects, read newspapers and take on more social responsibilities. In this view, a process of generational replacement is responsible for a steady decline of social capital and civic engagement in American society. As the long civic generation is replaced by younger age cohorts, the social capital stock of American communities slowly diminishes. The indicators used to substantiate this claim are numerous and diverse: measures for voter turnout, attendance of club meetings, generalized trust, the number of common family dinners, the number of card games played together, and even respect for traffic rules. All of these attitudes and behaviours, it is argued, depict a significant downward trend.

Although Putnam is by far the most vocal of all scholars in the ‘decline of social capital’ choir, he certainly is not the only author describing an erosion of traditional societal relations.

Empirical studies of electoral competition and public policy in new democracies have been relatively underdeveloped. This article investigates the election-policy outcome link in a ‘hard case’ setting: South Korea in 1988–97. Contrary to expectations derived from the bureaucratic insulation or fiscal co-ordination argument, this study suggests a systematic impact of electoral competition on levels and distributive patterns of public spending. The analysis finds that levels of government expenditure increased according to the electoral calendar. Also, national subsidies tended to be allocated to ‘swing’ provinces in which electoral contests are competitive. The results of the analysis clearly show that fiscal policies in democratizing Korea are to a significant extent determined by electoral politics.

A common feature of contemporary political systems is the increasing amount of delegation from governments to non-majoritarian institutions. Governments may decide to delegate authority to such institutions for reasons relating to credible commitments, political uncertainty and policy complexity. This article focuses on Independent Administrative Authorities (Autorités administratives indépendantes) in France. We demonstrate that these institutions enjoy varying degrees of independence. We find that the degree of independence varies as a function of two factors: the need to make a credible commitment in areas subject to market opening and the complexity of policy in particular areas.

On 24 May 2001, US Senator James M. Jeffords of Vermont formally announced that he intended to leave the Republican party to become an Independent. Although congressional party switches in the United States are noteworthy because of their infrequency, the Jeffords switch was especially significant because he would caucus with the Democratic party, handing the Democratic party control of the Senate by a one-vote margin. When Jeffords formally left the Republican party on 5 June 2001, it was the first time that partisan control of the US Senate changed hands mid-session. Perhaps most importantly, with the House and presidency under Republican control, the Jeffords move ushered in the return of divided government – split party control of the executive and legislative branches. Indeed, Jeffords' switch received vast amounts of media attention precisely for this reason. The scant attention given to other recent party defectors in the US Senate such as Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado or Robert (Bob) Smith of New Hampshire suggests that the Jeffords switch was much larger than a senator simply changing his party affiliation.

Over the last twenty years, split partisan control of the executive and legislative branches occurred in American government roughly two-thirds of the time. Given the frequency of divided government, especially in the post-war era, scholars have written much about its causes. The focus of much of this research concerns voting behaviour, especially ticket-splitting and voting against the president's party at the midterm (midterm voting). Some scholars advocate ‘cognitive madisonianism’ or ‘policy-balancing’ explanations, which posit that a subset of voters with moderate policy preferences intentionally, but not necessarily consciously, engage in ticket-splitting or midterm voting to bring about policy moderation or ‘balance’ among the parties. Others contend that ticket splitting and midterm voting is unintentional, a by-product of factors that shape voting behaviour such as candidates, partisanship and campaigns.

One of the most creative theories advanced about legislative organization in recent years is Katz and Sala's linkage of the development of committee property rights in the US House of Representatives to the introduction of the Australian ballot. Katz and Sala argue that the Australian ballot – a government-printed ballot cast in secret that replaced a party-produced ballot that was cast in public – gave members of the House an incentive to pursue personal constituency votes. This, in turn, led to the rise of committee property rights as members sought to keep their committee assignments from term to term because of the potential electoral benefits they derived from them.

In this Note we use the state legislative committee membership dataset collected by Hamm and Hedlund and their colleagues to test whether committee property rights appeared in American state legislatures at roughly the same time as Katz and Sala find they emerged in the US House. State legislatures were, of course, exposed to the same electoral innovation at the same time. But, while in some ways state legislatures were much like Congress as organizations, in other ways they were very different. Our cross-sectional data and the variance in important institutional variables they provide allow us to test a critical proposition about the importance of membership stability rates in mediating the rise of committee property rights. We also go beyond Katz and Sala's analysis by testing to see if differences in Australian ballot design (office column and party bloc) across the states influenced the behaviour of legislators in the way their theory suggests.

Endowing agents that prefer co-operative outcomes with asymmetric power substantially increases the chances that both co-operative agents survive and that co-operative worlds evolve across a variety of structural settings of conflict and co-operation present in international relations; particularly when agents are endowed with the ability to selectively interact with other agents. These results are consistent with the general finding that non-compulsory play consistently helps co-operators. The question addressed in this analysis is whether or not asymmetric power also helps exploitive agents in the same structural settings; a question heretofore not analysed. Contrary to expectations, the simulation results reported here suggest that exploitive agents benefit from asymmetric power only in very restricted circumstances – circumstances relatively unlikely to occur in international relations. In effect, there is an asymmetry in the benefits of asymmetric power.

Human rights have long been a direct or indirect substantive topic in modern political science and, in particular, the study of human rights represents an important nexus between traditional concerns within comparative politics and those in international relations. On the one hand, comparative politics has traditionally been concerned with the functions, determinants and outcomes of different political regimes, political institutions, political culture, the relationship between states and citizens (protest and repression, social mobilization and citizenship rights, voting, elections and party systems), and large social processes such as social and political revolutions, democratization and the domestic effects of and responses to globalization. On the other hand, international relations has concentrated on the inter-state dynamics of war, peace and security; international trade, finance and development; the growth and role of international organizations; the proliferation and effectiveness of international regimes and foreign policy analysis. More recently, attention has focused on the interplay between domestic and international politics in examining the ways in which domestic political arrangements may have an impact on the international behaviour of states. The now famous notion of the ‘two-level’ game has been instructive for scholars examining the constraint of democratic institutions on state behaviour, while the large literature on the ‘democratic’ and ‘Kantian’ peace has used the tools of modern political science to examine the degree to which democracy and other ‘liberal’ variables have an inhibiting effect on the likelihood of interstate violence.

The study of human rights within modern political science fits neatly into these disciplinary developments. The history of human rights is one of the increasing internationalization of an idea that has traditionally been defended nationally.

In recent decades, political science has turned to the study of agenda setting as a central aspect of collective decision-making environments. The content of the public agenda – and the issue agendas of political institutions – make significant social change possible. Recent studies suggest that these political institutions are engaged in both competitive relationships, as they identify and pursue both active and latent public issues, and more complex cue-taking relationships. For separated powers, the problems of co-operation and competition with one another are entwined with internal collective decision-making dilemmas.

In this study, we focus on the tension within a political institution between agenda setting as a mechanism for internal organizational maintenance, and agenda setting as a consequence of that institution's interaction with other branches of government and the general public. Specifically, we examine agenda setting by the United States Supreme Court, and ask the question of why the Court allocates more or less of its valuable agenda space to one policy issue over others. Our study environment is the policy issue composition of the Court's docket: the Court's attention to criminal justice policy issues relative to other issues. Among the most important powers of the Court is the power to apportion its agenda space among policy issues.

Pacelle argues that the Court's agenda-building process, its culling of cases and issues from numerous petitions, may represent the most important sequence of decisions the Court makes. But the Court's docket is a finite agenda space on which some issues are provided with a larger proportion of the Court's attention. Allocating space to an issue can promote the issue's national visibility and legitimacy as an important public concern.

In September 1864, the Association Internationale pour le Progrès des Sciences Sociales met in Amsterdam to examine the system of proportional representation (PR) which had just been proposed by Thomas Hare. The meeting signalled a growing interest in systems of PR across the more democratic nations of the world – some of which had already begun experimenting with it. Sixty years later, the majority of existing democracies, including Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxemburg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, had adopted PR for the election of their national legislatures.

Why did so many countries decide to shift to PR? Why did the shift occur at a given point in time, not earlier or later? Why did some countries never move to PR? These are the questions that we address in this Note.

We are interested in exploring the factors that influenced the decision to adopt PR at the turn of the twentieth century. We argue that two factors of considerable theoretical relevance were particularly important in facilitating the shift to PR: the spread of democratic ideas and the presence of a majority (usually two-round) system and, as a consequence, a multi-party system.

Carstairs's classic history of electoral systems shows that at the turn of the twentieth century there was a strong demand for PR, which was linked to a more general demand for democratization. As Carstairs notes,

there was a general movement in the direction of more democratic political institutions which took several different forms … There was a movement for the establishment or strengthening of parliamentary institutions … Extensions of the franchise for parliamentary elections enabled an increasingly large proportion of the population to gain representation in parliament … With these developments it became a matter of increasing concern that the elected members of parliament and the parties they supported should fairly represent the various interests and opinions of the electorate.

Both academics and journalists have given increasing attention to the rising importance of prime ministers – a phenomenon often referred to ‘presidentialization’. Although many commentators use the term differently, and the term blurs the line between the very different institutional contexts of a parliamentary and presidential system, one careful definition of the term is ‘the movement over time away from collective to personalized government, movement away from a pattern of governmental and electoral politics dominated by the political party towards one where the party leader becomes a more autonomous political force.’

This phenomenon has been observed primarily in Britain and in West European parliamentary democracies – no one has ever described the Japanese parliamentary system as even remotely ‘presidentialized’. In fact, the Japanese prime minister has not been the subject of much academic research, and even the Japanese press often used to ignore the prime minister. Despite being the leader of a majority party in a centralized political system, the Japanese prime minister was almost universally described as weak and uninteresting, with both academic and popular discourse focusing on the powerful bureaucracy and factional politics within the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). However, recent political changes, most prominently the selection and popularity of Junichirō Koizumi as Japan's prime minister in the spring of 2001, have led to a surge of interest in the prime minister.