Margaret Thatcher's dominance of British politics during the 1980s is well known. A self-proclaimed ‘conviction politician’, she was likely to seize any opportunity to shape the public's values. Surprisingly, however, her efforts seem to have been ineffective. Ivor Crewe has labelled Thatcher's attempt to modify the public's beliefs ‘the crusade that failed’. He concluded that ‘much of Thatcherism will die with Thatcher. Its permanent legacy at the level of the mass public will be very limited.’ So unexpected is this finding that it invites further investigation. Did Crewe find little evidence of Thatcher's impact simply because of the generality of his analysis? Might a more sharply focused study, one dealing with the delimited area of public policy, reach a different conclusion?Ivor Crewe, ‘Values: The Crusade that Failed’, in Dennis Kavanagh and Anthony Seldon, eds, The Thatcher Effect: A Decade of Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 250. See also Ivor Crewe, ‘The Thatcher Legacy’, in Anthony King et al., Britain at the Polls 1992 (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers, 1993), pp. 1–28, especially pp. 8–11.

One of the salient characteristics of the British first-past-the-post electoral system is the amount of bias which it produces. Parties with large percentages of the votes (i.e. 25 or greater) almost invariably get even larger percentage shares of the parliamentary seats, whereas those with smaller vote percentages tend to get very few seats. That bias largely reflects the superimposition of a geography of constituency boundaries on the geographies of party support, so that different sets of constituencies can produce different levels and even directions of bias, as is clearly illustrated in studies using US data.See, for example, R. L. Morrill, ‘Ideal and Reality in Reapportionment’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 63 (1973), 463–77. More generally on bias in electoral systems, see D. W. Rae, The Political Consequences of Electoral Laws, 2nd edn (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1971); and R. Taagepera and M. S. Shugart, Seats and Votes: The Effects and Determinants of Electoral Systems (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989).

Redistricting has a substantial influence on parties' electoral fortunes, so the process receives extremely close attention from those potentially affected by changes to the pattern of constituency boundaries. In the United Kingdom, redistricting recommendations are made by independent Boundary Commissions, but the political parties can influence the nature of those recommendations through the representations that they make during the consultative process. When a Commission has made provisional recommendations for a county (in England and Wales), region (in Scotland) or London borough, individuals and organizations have one month in which to make written representations, either favourable or unfavourable, regarding all or part of the recommendations, and they can suggest alternative sets of constituencies for the area concerned. The Commission may then hold a public inquiry, at which the interested parties can promote their views and contest those put forward by others. The assistant commissioner who conducts the inquiry reports to the commission, which may publish alterations to the provisional recommendations as a result of his/her advice. If their suggestions are adopted by the Commission for its final recommendations, then those promoting them at the public inquiry will have influenced the redistricting outcome.For detailed discussions of the work of the Boundary Commissions, see D. Butler, ‘The Redrawing of Parliamentary Boundaries in Britain’, Journal of Behavioural and Social Sciences, 37 (1992), 5–12; I. McLean and R. Mortimore, lsquo;Apportionment and the Boundary Commission for England’, Electoral Studies, 11 (1992), 293–309.

The term ‘constitutional democracy’ can be interpreted as either an oxymoron or a tautology. On the one hand, constitutionalism and democracy can appear opposed to each other. Whereas the first term refers to ‘restrained and divided’ power, the second implies its ultimately ‘unified and unconstrained’ exercise. On the other hand, constitutions can be presented as codifying the rules of the democratic game, indicating who can vote, how, when and why. Since the democratic ideal involves more than mere adherence to the formal procedural devices of democracy, such as majority rule, many constitutionalists argue that no true democrat could consistently allow a democracy to abolish itself. There is no contradiction, therefore, in entrenching the rights that are inherent to the democratic process itself and preventing their abrogation even by democratically elected politicians. However, democrats point out that rules constrain as well as enable. There are many different models of democracy, which define the democratic rules in a variety of often incompatible ways. If democracy is to mean ‘people rule’, then the Demos should be free to redefine the rules whenever they want and should not be tied to any given definition. The need to keep open the possibility of democratic review seems particularly important when one remembers that the constitutions of many democracies have excluded significant categories of people from citizenship, notably women and those without property, and placed severe limits on the exercise of the popular will, such as the indirect election of representatives. Of course, some exclusions and limitations are inevitable – they are intrinsic to any rule-governed activity. That we are not lumbered with the exclusions and limitations of the eighteenth century, though, is in large part due to successive social and democratic movements and reforms.See S. S. Wolin, ‘Collective Identity and Constitutional Power’, in The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 8; cf. also the various studies in J. Elster and R. Slagstad, eds, Constitutionalism and Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). On the restriction of scope that constitutionalism imposes on democracy, see A. Weale, ‘The Limits of Democracy’, in A. Hamlin and P. Pettit, eds, The Good Polity: Normative Analysis of the State (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); and R. Ruffilli, ‘Riforma delle istituzioni e trasformazione della politica’, in Istituzioni Società Stato, vol. III, (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991), pp. 707–21.Cf. P. Jones, Rights (London: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 173–5.

Once upon a time, and a good time it was too, there was a faraway country ruled by a wise economist-king called Tiebout who realized that the way to happiness was to organize local public services in market-analogous manner. He did this by dividing local government in Tieboutiana into many competing units, each with its own package of public goods and taxes. In this way citizens (in Tieboutiana they were called consumer-voters) could move between local authorities in search of the public services they wanted at tax rates they thought reasonable.

Any author would welcome such an informed and constructive comment as Burt makes on my ‘New Spatial Theory of Party Competition’. I have just one minor qualification, and a suggested extension to his remarks.

The qualification regards his uncharacteristically reproachful remark about the absence of ‘true success rates’ (p. 652) – the fact that in the original article I did not test each model over all the data. This criticism really derives not from the inappropriateness of my statistics but from the fact that my purposes were not his purposes. I was not concerned to see how well one model would perform over all the data but rather to sort out which model would apply best to which set of parties. As my starting point was the idea that different parties would adopt different decision rules under uncertainty, this procedure was one which suited my purposes, though not his.

My suggested extension concerns the demonstration that parties actually alternate less than might be expected by chance, ‘suggesting that there may be a slight tendency for continuation of policy movements’ (p. 657). Clearly this casts doubt on the validity of the original decision rule, which postulated that (under uncertainty) parties reversed previous policy at each election.

In the study of politics, as in political life, ‘plus ça change’ is not always an accurate description. Recent models of the interelection dynamics of support for British governing parties illustrate the point. Unlike their traditional rivals that accorded pride of place to macroeconomic indicators, especially inflation and unemployment rates, the new models have focused on the effects of voters' subjective evaluations of economic conditions and their assessments of the performance of the prime minister. By incorporating these variables, analysts have articulated aggregate party support models more closely to the micro-analytical literature on voting behaviour and election outcomes. To date, however, another variable, party identification, that has been the subject of longstanding controversies in that literature, has been neglected because of a lack of appropriate time-series data. Such data are now available, and they enable one to investigate the dynamics and determinants of British ‘macropartisanship’, and to incorporate party identification variables in vote intention and prime ministerial approval models. This Note does so in a study of Conservative party support over the January 1992–November 1995 period. For references to a number of the more recent studies, see Harold D. Clarke and Marianne C. Stewart, ‘Economic Evaluations, Prime Ministerial Approval and Governing Party Support: Rival Models Reconsidered’, British Journal of Political Science, 25 (1995), 597–622. For more comprehensive literature reviews, see, for example, Michael S. Lewis-Beck, Economics and Elections: The Major Western Democracies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988); William L. Miller, ‘Studying How the Economy Affects Public Attitudes and Behavior: Problems and Prospects’, in Harold D. Clarke, Marianne C. Stewart and Gary Zuk, eds, Economic Decline and Political Change: Canada, Great Britain, the United States (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989); Helmut Norpoth, Confidence Regained: Economics, Mrs Thatcher, and the British Voter (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992).‘MacKuen, Erikson and Stimson introduced the term ‘macropartisanship’ in their study of the aggregate dynamics of party identification in the United States. See Michael B. MacKuen, Robert S. Erikson and James A. Stimson, ‘Macropartisanship’, American Political Science Review, 83 (1989), 1125–42.

A basic question in the analysis of the economic voting of the individual is whether the decision to vote for the government is sociotropic or determined by the pocketbook? It is sociotropic if the voter considers the whole of the economy. It is pocketbook voting if people look at their personal economic circumstances. The question has remained at the centre of research in economic voting since it was first raised by Kinder and Kiewiet in 1979. Over the years, it has generated a sizeable number of empirical studies, mostly based on American data, as well as a fair share of disagreement. From a theoretical viewpoint it is not obvious whether economic man is a sociotropic or a pocketbook voter. There is a strong argument for both assumptions: (α) the pro-pocketbook argument suggests that homo economicus pursues his own interest or that of his household, and votes with his pocketbook; (β) the proto-sociotropic argument suggests that voters consider what governments try to accomplish. They do not try to steer the economy of any individual, but the economy of the country.The word sociotropic literally means society-directed. The corresponding concept for self-directed would be egotropic, as we write in other papers. The Editor has resolved that this is not in the dictionary. Moreover, several writers prefer the term egocentric. This is too loaded with other meanings for our taste. So we shall use the term pocketbook voting in the present Note.Donald R. Kinder and D. Roderick Kiewiet, ‘Economic Discontent and Political Behavior: The Role of Personal Grievances and Collective Economic Judgements in Congressional Voting’, American Journal of Political Science, 23 (1979), 495–527, and ‘Sociotropic Politics’, British Journal of Political Science, 11 (1981), 129–61. See further the cross-national study by Michael S. Lewis-Beck, Economics and Elections (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988, 1990), and the surveys by Peter Nannestad and Martin Paldam, ‘The VP-Function. A Survey of the Literature on Vote and Popularity Functions after 25 Years’, Public Choice, 79 (1994), 213–45; and Douglas A. Hibbs, Solidarity or Egoism? (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1993). These recent surveys allow us to restrict these references to a minimum.

Increasingly in political science, models are developed and tested against datasets which have quite complicated structures. Sometimes it happens that the standard statistical tests are not directly applicable. Furthermore one's intuition as to what counts as strong evidence in favour of a particular model can be misleading. In such circumstances it may be necessary to think more formally about the situation in order to establish valid interpretations of the evidence. This Note seeks to illustrate the value of such formal thinking by reanalysing the evidence in Budge's recent article on parties' policy positions.I. Budge, ‘A New Spatial Theory of Party Competition: Uncertainty, Ideology and Policy Equilibria Viewed Comparatively and Temporally’, British Journal of Political Science, 24 (1994), 443–67. This draws on H-D. Klingemann, R. I. Hofferbert and I. Budge, Parties, Policies and Democracy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994).

The electoral success of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a right-wing religious party, in India's 1991 national elections has often been attributed to the rise of Hindu religious sentiments.After the 1991 elections the BJP emerged as the second largest party in Parliament and captured almost a fifth of the votes cast. There is little in the way of substantive evidence, however, that Hindus have either become more religious or that they were willing to express their religiosity more politically only in the 1990s. This Note claims that the BJP was electorally successful on account of its ability to forge a coalition between religious groups and the middle classes. The BJP, an advocate of a mixed economy in the 1970s and Gandhian socialism in the early 1980s, emerged in the 1990s as an ardent critic of state intervention. It was this programmatic shift which enabled the BJP to garner the support of the middle classes, who were ‘mobilizable’ because of their growing disaffection with the political and economic policies pursued by the Congress party. The electoral success of the BJP hence lay not in mobilizing only the ‘religious’ but in its ability to put together a viable coalition between religious Hindus and those disaffected by excessive political intervention in the economy.

Who gets what, when and how is affected by the power of different groups in society to affect the political process. Many feminists see increasing women's political representation, via elected office or interest-group involvement, as a necessary condition for improving the status of women. Many studies have examined whether the numerical representation of women translates into legislation or legislative behaviour that seeks to improve the status of women. Although we have evidence that women's legislative representation matters, the passage of legislation is only half of the story in public policy making. After policies are enacted, the bureaucracy must implement them and little research has examined the impact of women's political representation on policy outputs. The question of women's influence on bureaucracies is especially important, because bureaucracies deliver services that have a direct bearing on the status of women. It is an important issue for representative democracy whether women have an influence on the bureaucracies that affect them.Beth Reingold, ‘Concepts of Representation among Female and Male State Legislators’, Legislative Studies Quarterly, 17 (1992), 509–37; Michelle A. Saint-Germaine, ‘Does Their Difference Make a Difference? The Impact of Women on Public Policy in the Arizona Legislature’, Social Science Quarterly, 70 (1989), 956–68; Sue Thomas, ‘The Impact of Gender on Activities and Priorities of State Legislatures,’ Western Political Quarterly, 44 (1990), 445–56.

The scholarly literature dealing with the effects of economic conditions on government support and election outcomes in advanced industrialized democracies is extensive.The bulk of this research relates government support and vote choice to objective economic conditions or subjective perceptions of those conditions in order to establish whether and to what extent such a relationship exists. For overviews, see Michael Lewis-Beck, Economics and Elections: The Major Democracies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988); Peter Nannestad and Martin Paldam, ‘The VP-Function: A Survey of the Literature on Vote and Popularity Functions After 25 Years’, Public Choice, 79 (1994), 213–45. Based on the so-called reward–punishment (or responsibility) hypothesis, empirical studies of economic conditions and government support often find that voters punish those incumbents who perform badly and reward those who do a good job.Lewis-Beck finds a general consensus among scholars that ‘when economic conditions are bad, citizens vote against the ruling party’ (Michael Lewis-Beck, ‘Introduction’, in Helmut Norpoth, Michael Lewis-Beck and Jean-Dominique Lafay, eds, Economics and Politics: The Calculus of Support (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), p.2). See also V. O. Key, The Responsible Electorate (New York: Vintage Books, 1968); Gerald Kramer, ‘Short-Term Fluctuations in US Voting Behavior, 1896–1964’, American Political Science Review, 65 (1971), 131–43. The reward–punish hypothesis states that the mass public holds the incumbent government accountable for the state of the economy. When the economy performs well, the government can take credit, but when there is a slump, the executive or the governing parties are blamed by the voters. Other hypotheses that have been tested are the issue-priority and the stability hypotheses (see Harold Clarke, Euel Elliott, William Mishler, Marianne Stewart, Paul Whiteley and Gary Zuk, Controversies in Political Economy: Canada, Great Britain, the United States (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992)).,Although frequently supportive of the general conclusion that the economy affects politics, the evidence for economic effects on government popularity or vote choice is not always conclusive or straightforward. Several authors have explored why economic conditions do not seem to affect popularity or vote choice all the time and under all circumstances. See, for example, Martin Paldam, ‘How Robust is the Vote Function? A Study of Seventeen Nations over Four Decades’, in Norpoth, Lewis-Beck and Lafay, eds, Economics and Politics, pp. 9–31; Christopher J. Anderson, ‘The Dynamics of Public Support for Coalition Governments’, Comparative Political Studies, 28 (1995), 350–83. In fact, over the years the notion that governments in democratic polities are in some way or another judged by how they perform at managing the economy has almost taken on the ring of a social scientific fact.

Parliamentary decision making is a growth area in the study of the British House of Commons. This is a facet of the behaviour of Members of Parliament (MPs) that tended to be ignored as long as the Commons was seen as a legislature that, cravenly subject to party discipline, simply rubber-stamped policy decisions made by the party leadership. By the 1960s, cohesive party voting had reached the point where ‘it was so close to 100 per cent that there was no longer any point in measuring it’. But more recently, this image of the Commons and its members has worn at the edges. While party loyalty remains very much the norm, MPs have shown themselves more willing than in the past to assert themselves against their party's leadership in order to exercise greater policy influence. One prominent example is the select committee system set up in 1979 to improve parliamentary scrutiny of the executive. Another is the higher incidence of backbench rebellion and dissent in the division lobbies after the mid-1960s.Samuel H. Beer, Modern British Politics (London: Faber, 1965), p. 350.Gavin Drewry, ed., The New Select Committees, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Michael Jogerst, Reform in the House of Commons (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1993).Philip Norton, Dissension in the House of Commons 1945–74 (London: Macmillan, 1975); Philip Norton, Dissension in the House of Commons 1974–79 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); Anthony Mughan, ‘Midterm Popularity and Governing Party Dissension in the British House of Commons, 1959–1979’, Legislative Studies Quarterly, 15 (1990), 341–56; and Charles Pattie, Edward Fieldhouse and R. J. Johnston, ‘The Price of Conscience: The Electoral Correlates and Consequences of Free Votes and Rebellion in the British House of Commons, 1987–92’, British Journal of Political Science, 24 (1994), 359–80.