AN INTELLECTUAL ODYSSEY

[L]egislative strategy, which most writers have treated as a mystical art … , may on examination by this [social choice] theory turn out to be a science with quite coherent rules.W. Riker, ‘Voting and the Summation of Preferences: An Interpretive Bibliographical Review of Selected Developments During the Last Decade’, American Political Science Review, 55 (1961), 900–11, quoted at p. 911.

At the most general level there are the things people talk about as possible subjects for group decision. Call this the feasible set. From this misty swamp, politicians – by constitutional restrictions and direction and by rhetorical and heresthetical maneuvers – form the set of considered issues.William H. Riker, Agenda Formation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), p. 2.

We examine the effects of voting for the winners and losers of presidential and congressional elections on political trust. On the basis of survey and electoral data for 1972 and 1996, we argue and demonstrate empirically that presidential winner–loser status systematically affects citizens' trust in government. We find that voters for the losers of the presidential contest show lower levels of trust. Moreover, we find that voting for the congressional winners does not attenuate this effect. Political trust is highest among voters who voted either for both the presidential and congressional winners or the presidential winner and congressional losers; trust is lowest among those who voted for both the presidential and congressional losers or congressional winners and the presidential loser.

In a recent Note in this Journal, Johnston and PattieR. J. Johnston and Charles Pattie, ‘Inconsistent Individual Attitudes within Consistent Attitudinal Structures: Comments on an Important Issue Raised by John Bartle's Paper on Causal Modelling of Voting in Britain’, British Journal of Political Science, 30 (2000), 361–74. contend that they have discovered an ecological fallacy in the behaviour of the six-item scaleJohnston and Pattie's analysis in fact deals with two different six-item scales which were included in alternate years on the BHPS. As their conclusions applied equally to both scales, for the sake of parsimony this note refers only to the scale included in ‘odd’ years 1991, 1993, 1995, etc. developed by Heath et al. to measure the ‘left–right’ political value dimension.Anthony Heath, Geoffrey Evans and Jean Martin, ‘The Measurement of Core Beliefs and Values: The Development of Balanced Socialist/Laissez Faire and Libertarian/Authoritarian Scales’, British Journal of Political Science, 24 (1994), 115–32. Using data from the first six waves of the British Household Panel Study (BHPS), they show that, while there is remarkable over-time stability in the factor structure of these questions at the aggregate level, when the consistency of individual responses to each item is considered, a very different picture emerges; around 50 per cent of the sample fail to select the same response alternative on successive waves and a third of respondents select a response alternative on the opposite side of the agree/disagree scale from one time to the next. Correlations between the same items over time of around 0.4, they argue, bear out a picture of massive longitudinal instability at the individual level.

Why is government corruption more pervasive in some societies than in others? In this article we examine public choice explanations that attribute corruption to a lack of competition in either political or economic arenas or both. The principal part of our analysis draws on recently-published data about levels of corruption for a broad cross-section of countries reported for the early 1980s. We supplement this with an additional analysis of a second dataset on corruption measured during the late 1980s. Our analyses confirm that political competition affects level of corruption, but this effect is nonlinear. Corruption is typically lower in dictatorships than in countries that have partially democratized. But once past a threshold, democratic practices inhibit corruption. However, we obtained mixed results with respect to the relationship of economic competition and corruption: government size does not systematically affect corruption, but membership of the Oil Producing and Exporting Countries (OPEC) does. Finally, corruption is more pervasive in low-income countries which tend to underpay public sector employees.

This article examines the extent of political participation by Latino non-citizens across the United States. The only previous national quantitative research on this topic is by Verba, Schlozman and Brady, who found little difference between the participation rates of Latino citizens and non-citizens. Using the Latino National Political Survey, large differences between citizen and non-citizen participation are found. Although Latino non-citizens participated in non-electoral political activities and in non-political civic groups, they were significantly less likely to do so than Latino citizens. Examination of the non-citizen population shows that immigrants who understood politics better, planned on naturalizing, had a stronger ethnic identity, were more familiar with English and were younger were more likely to become involved. The traditional socio-economic measures of education and income as well as length of stay in the United States were non-significant predictors of non-citizen participation.

The critics of direct democratic procedures typically presume that the bulk of the members of a present-day democratic polity fall considerably short of the ideal of a thinking, reasonable and deliberating citizen. Essentially, as Budge points out, ‘the case against direct democracy can be summed up as saying that ordinary citizens have little political sagacity or prudence, so that they will tend to make decisions hastily but also to be unreasonably attached to them’.Ian Budge, The New Challenge of Direct Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), pp. 59–61. According to the critics of direct democratic procedures, the problem is not only that citizens usually do not think and deliberate about the issues in question, the problem is above all that they lack the competence to do so in the first place. Thus Budge concludes: ‘Here is perhaps the nub of the whole argument against direct democracy: the mass of the citizens are not qualified to decide high policy, so they can be allowed to influence it only indirectly, by choosing those who are to decide rather than deciding themselves’.Budge, The New Challenge of Direct Democracy, p. 69. The point of the critics is that, as Sartori suggests, direct democracy ‘would quickly and disastrously founder on the reefs of cognitive incompetence’.Giovanni Sartori, The Theory of Democracy Revised (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers, 1987), p. 120.

In their recent article in this Journal, Alvarez and Nagler model strategic voting in the 1987 British general election using multinomial probit.R. Michael Alvarez and Jonathan Nagler, ‘A New Approach to Modelling Strategic Voting in Multiparty Elections, British Journal of Political Science, 30 (2000), 57–75. They claim to find lower levels of such voting than many other approaches. They also demonstrate purportedly that estimates of strategic voting obtained using self-reported motivations are biased by the time elapsed between the election and the point at which the self-report is obtained. In this Comment I show that these assertions are incorrect.

Theorists such as Carole Pateman and Benjamin Barber suggest that democratic participation will engage citizens and lead them to have more positive regard for political processes and democratic practices. The American states provide a setting where provisions for direct voter participation in legislation vary substantially. If participatory institutions have an ‘educative role’ that shapes perceptions of government, then citizens exposed to direct democracy may be more likely to claim they understand politics and be more likely to perceive that they are capable of participation. They may also be more likely to perceive that government is responsive to them. We merge data on state-level political institutions with data from the 1992 American National Election Study to test these hypotheses with OLS models. Our primary hypotheses find support. We present evidence that the effects of exposure to direct democracy on internal and external political efficacy rival the effects of formal education.

We are again pleased to respond to commentary on our article ‘An Empirical Theory of Rational Nominating Behaviour Applied to Japanese District Elections’, which appeared in the April 1999 issue of the Journal (pp. 259–89). Unlike an earlier comment by Gary Cox,Gary W. Cox, ‘A Comment on Browne and Patterson, “An Empirical Theory of Rational Nominating Behaviour Applied to Japanese District Elections” ’, British Journal of Political Science (1999), 565–9. See also our reply to Cox: ‘A Rejoinder to Cox's Comment on “An Empirical Theory of Rational Nominating Behaviour Applied to Japanese District Elections” ’, British Journal of Political Science, 29 (1999), 569–75. Professor Reed'sSteven R. Reed, ‘What Is Rational and Why Should We Care? A Comment on Browne and Patterson’, British Journal of Political Science, 30 (2000), 538–40. focuses upon his belief that the nominating behaviour of Japanese parties cannot be explained by a decision process based on rational calculation. Rather, he believes that Japanese nominations result from an on-going learning process based on ‘trial and error’ experimentation by party leaders. The substance of Reed's comment is that we ‘fail to address [his] learning hypothesis’ and that our interpretation of the Japanese nominating process is both theoretically implausible and empirically deficient. In the short space available to us we are not able to address all of Reed's misinterpretations of our work. Thus, we shall content ourselves here by offering some general comments on the issues he has raised.

misunderstanding the regulatory state?

In the last quarter of the twentieth century something transformed government across the advanced capitalist world, and a large amount of comparative political enquiry is now concerned with pinning a convincing label on that transformation. Of the many candidates the subject of this review article has proved especially popular. As I will show, a regulatory state is now commonly said to exist in a wide range of geographical and institutional settings: writers speak of a regulatory state in the United States and in Britain; of the European regulatory state; and even of refinements like ‘a regulatory state inside the state’.