This article reviews the range of explanations which have been proposed for voting behaviour in the US elections won by Ronald Reagan and develops a comprehensive model for the evolution of electoral choices in both of those contests. Estimates are provided for both the direct and indirect effects of several types of variables or ‘explanatory themes’, and those estimates are used to assess the relative importance of each of those themes in explaining individual-level choices and the aggregate outcomes of both Reagan elections. These procedures suggest that preferences concerning both policy direction and evaluations of national and presidential performance played major roles in the two Reagan elections – both in the individual-level decisions and in producing the Republicans' aggregate victories.

Liberal institutions (freedom of speech and religious worship, for example) will naturally be supported by liberals – that is to say, those with a liberal outlook. But what arguments can be addressed to non-liberals? There are some traditional arguments but these are too limited in scope to provide a general justification for liberal institutions. A recent argument that claims to do the job is to the effect that justice entails neutrality and neutrality entails liberal institutions. However, neutrality is a principle that could appeal to non-liberals only if they had already swallowed a large dose of liberalism, since it requires that they regard their deepest convictions as preferences or personal opinions. It is also doubtful whether liberals are well advised to embrace neutrality.

This is a sequel to an article written by the same author, which was published in the Journal in 1986. The current pace of economic and political reform in the Soviet Union represents a ‘paradigm’ change, which Western specialists have found difficult and challenging to assimilate; concepts have lagged behind events. The key to understanding these changes and the reason why they have been so long delayed lies in the fusion of economic and political institutions formed during the Stalin period. The interdependence of economic and political factors is explored as a basis for understanding why political reform has been a necessary accompaniment to economic reform. One can discern in the pattern of political reform an attempt to increase the level of democratization without fundamentally destabilizing the political and social order. Since this strategy requires that a new political culture will take root faster than the growth of popular discontent at deteriorating economic performance and frustrated national aspirations, the author is pessimistic as to the outcome.

The furore that followed the publication of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses has provided a graphic illustration of the conflicts that may still arise in societies characterized by diverse religious beliefs. This article examines how far the rules governing a plural society should require its members to defer to beliefs that they themselves do not share. In particular, it examines whether a principle of ‘respect for beliefs’ can provide adequate reason for limiting freedom of expression. A strong version of the principle, which would limit substantive criticism of beliefs, is found untenable. A weaker version of the principle, which would concern itself not with the matter but with the manner in which others' beliefs are treated, has greater plausibility and moral appeal. That also, however, proves too hazardous and indeterminate a basis for setting legal limits to freedom of expression.

The literature on Indian electoral behaviour portrays parliamentary elections since independence as a series of critical, realigning and restoring contests in which voters are repelled by and attracted to the Congress party in great waves. The model is examined from the perspective of voter mobilization. Not only is the established view misleading, it often fails even to describe accurately what actually happened. Significant differences in voting behaviour are found separating the Hindi and non-Hindi speaking areas of India. District-level voting trends are explored within the framework of a multiple regression model applied comprehensively across all of India's general elections and administrative districts. Persistence of democratic politics is to a considerable degree due to the contained volatility of the Congress and opposition party coalitions.

The case for secrecy in voting depends on the assumption that voters reliably vote for the political outcomes they want to prevail. No such assumption is valid. Accordingly, voting procedures should be designed to provide maximal incentive for voters to vote responsibly. Secret voting fails this test because citizens are protected from public scrutiny. Under open voting, citizens are publicly answerable for their electoral choices and will be encouraged thereby to vote in a discursively defensible manner. The possibility of bribery, intimidation or blackmail moderates this argument but such dangers will be avoidable in many contemporary societies without recourse to secrecy.

Political life in the advanced industrial democracies since the Second World War has been characterized by periods of mass mobilization and protest followed by years of relative quiescence and institutional dominance. The individual phases have prompted extensive reflection. Far less attention, however, has been devoted to how developments in one phase might influence the subsequent one. Using data from a 1979 survey of activists of the Italian Communist Party, this article examines how the cycle of protest which swept Italy in the late-1960s and early-1970s was reflected in the distribution of attitudes towards dissent within the different generations of party activists. Our findings clearly suggest that participation in social movements had independent effects on the presence of particular tolerance attitudes and that phases of mobilization affect the distribution of politically salient attitudes among party activists during a subsequent phase of institutionalization. This, in turn, has possible implications for processes of change in the Italian political system.

Discussions of international and of gender justice both legitimately demand that principles of justice abstract from differences between cases and that judgements of justice respond to differences between them. Abstraction and sensitivity to context are often treated as incompatible: abstraction is taken to endorse idealized models of individual and state; sensitivity to human differences is identified with relativism. Neither identification is convincing: abstract principles do not entail uniform treatment; responsiveness to difference does not hinge on relativism. These points are used to criticize discussions of international and gender justice by liberals, communitarians and feminists. An alternative account of justice is sketched, which combines abstract principles with consideration of human differences in the application of principles. The case of poor women in impoverished economies – a hard case both for gender and for international justice – illustrates how universal, abstract principles of justice may not only permit but mandate differentiated application.

Using evidence from surveys of top administrators, we examine differences between Japanese and American administrative elites. Our findings are far more complex than the reigning stereotypes of an apolitical, technocratic and elitist Japanese bureaucracy contrasted to a politically charged, conflict-oriented and social-reformist American federal executive. For example, senior Japanese bureaucrats take political considerations into account, compared to technical ones, no less than top American officials. American administrators have a more negative view of the role of political parties than their Japanese counterparts and, on average, an equally negative view of politicians interfering in their work than the supposedly more elitist, autonomous and technocratic Japanese bureaucrats. The article closes with a discussion of why popular conceptions of the two bureaucracies break down in practice.

There has been considerable debate in recent years about the effects of the teaching of Politics upon levels of ‘political literacy’ – the knowledge and understanding of the political process and political issues which enables people to perform their roles as citizens effectively. Almost everyone receives some form of political education. For most people, however, the process of political education is informal: political knowledge, as well as opinions and attitudes, is picked up from the family, friends and the media. Informal political education also takes place in schools. In primary schools, children acquire elementary information about the political system, parties, leaders and so on. In secondary schools, subjects such as History and Geography and courses in General Studies frequently involve topics that are relevant to politics.

The ideological differences between the Labour and Conservative parties in the 1980s are greater than at any time in the postwar era. Consequently one would expect party control at the local level to have an increasing effect on local government decisions. Using an approach to cross-time analysis that avoids some of the major shortcomings of other studies, the relationship between party control and local fiscal decisions in English cities between 1974 and 1988 can be traced. The method allows not only an exploration of the direct effect of party control, but also its indirect effects, mediated through grant penalties and rate-capping. Under Mrs Thatcher's administration the impact of party on local fiscal decisions has increased quite substantially.

Japan uses simple plurality elections with multi-member districts to elect its lower house. This system tends to produce competition among n + 1 candidates per district. This ‘law of simple plurality elections’ is a structural generalization akin to Duverger's Law. Evidence from Japan also indicates that the causal mechanism behind this ‘law’ is not strategic voting, although strategic voting occurs, but elite coalition building. It is further argued that the connection between structure and behaviour is learning and not rationality. Equilibria are reached slowly through trial and error processes. Once reached, the equilibrium is unstable because parties and candidates try to change it. Even without rational actors and stable equilibria, however, this structural generalization accurately describes the dynamics of electoral competition at the district level in Japan.

Recently, Sanders et al. have made the intriguing and counter-intuitive argument that the impact of the Falklands war on Conservative popularity was inconsequential. Their analyses raise important theoretical and methodological issues concerning the time-series analysis of party support. This present article contends that the stepwise regression procedures employed by Sanders et al. are misleading, particularly when predictor variables are highly intercorrelated. Box-Jenkins analyses demonstrate that the Falklands strongly influenced Conservative support, net of the effects of macroeconomic conditions and personal economic expectations. The significance of the latter variable in the models confirms Sanders et al.'s argument about the role of subjective economic variables in party popularity functions. Non-economic variables are also relevant, however, and popularity functions that model them correctly will enhance our understanding of both the economics and the politics of party support.

A new model of government formation is elaborated and developed to allow consideration of politics within political parties. The impact of coalition bargaining on intraparty politics is considered, as well as the impact of intraparty politics on coalition bargaining. Different intraparty decision-making regimes are shown to affect coalition outcomes. Finally, the potential impact of anticipated coalition bargaining on the choice of decision-making regime within a party is explored.

Comparable survey data from Norway, Sweden and the United States are used to examine trends in political trust for the period 1964–86. During the early part of that period trust declined in all three countries; later it recovered for Norway but continued to plummet in Sweden and the United States. Three major features of the party system are hypothesized to explain the difference in these trends for the three countries. These features are: the structural aspects of the party system; the public's cognitive judgements of the parties as representatives of the policy interests; and the possibility that a negative rejection of political parties as undesirable institutions may spill over to citizen evaluations of government more generally.

McKeown's excellent article (this Journal, 19 (1989), 353–80) excavates a rich seam and shows that there is much more to be dug out. By voting for the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, a substantial number of MPs palpably voted against their economic interest. Even though many of the switchers can be shown to be Peelite office-holders with a vested interest in staying in office (p. 378), they cannot be described simply as Virginian (Chicagoan) self-interested actors, because everybody knew that Peel's action carried the risk of destroying the Tory coalition; his government fell in June 1846, and the Tories did not regain secure power until 1874. McKeown's regressions are valuable pointers towards alternative explanations, but the necessary limitations of his data may have led him to underestimate the effects of ideology and of consumer versus producer politics.

Although students of American political economy argue that the United States has no industrial policy, this view misses entirely the recent emergence of industrial policies at the state level. An examination of twenty states that have written strategic economic development plans shows that in varying degrees state industrial policies resemble the national industrial policies of France and Japan both in terms of the structure of the underlying economic plans and in their programmatic emphasis. On the basis of the evidence here it is reasonable to conclude that the American taste and capacity for planned intervention and state participation in the market economy is far greater than might be supposed from an exclusive focus on national economic policy making.

With one partial exception, political scientists have carried out little empirical research on corporate political activity. That one exception is political action committees, PACs. Perhaps because of the ready availability of apparently reliable data on corporate political contributions, most empirical studies of business political activity have concentrated on PACs. The study of PACs is not, however, synonymous with the study of corporate political behaviour. Indeed, not all corporations have PACs; Sabato estimated that almost half the largest manufacturing corporations did not. At least one politically active corporation, Du Pont, refused for many years to establish a PAC.

Clarke, Mishler and Whiteley (CMW) provide an interesting review and critique of our analysis of Mrs Thatcher's first-term popularity. They challenge our findings on two main grounds: (1) that we use orthodox time-series regression techniques inappropriately; and (2) that Box-Jenkins techniques are a superior vehicle for analysing government-popularity time series anyway. In this reply we seek to answer both of these general criticisms. We then outline our current – and, we believe, far more revealing – research strategy for analysing government-popularity data.