This article introduces a theory of Nested Games which accounts for the cohesion of coalitions. The parties in a coalition are considered to be playing a game with variable payoffs. The payoffs depend on a higher-order game between the coalition and its opponents. Several political situations approximate to this conceptualization, such as Government and Opposition coalitions, factions inside parties, international coalitions, class conflict. The theory of Nested Games predicts the cohesion of coalitions as a function of the relative size of both the coalitions and the partners within each coalition.

The test case of the theory is the cohesion of French electoral coalitions in 1978. Empirical results corroborate the theory. All parties behave according to its predictions. Moreover, a difference in the way parties behave, according to whether the game is visible (by the electorate) or invisible, is discovered and explained.

This article analyses the normative status of claims to the social rights of citizenship in the light of New Right criticisms of the welfare state. The article assesses whether there is any normative justification for treating welfare provision and citizenship as intrinsically linked. After outlining T. H. Marshall's conception of citizenship the article reviews its status in relation to: traditional arguments about citizenship of the polity; relativist arguments about the embedded place of citizenship within current societies; and, drawing upon Rawlsian analysis, absolutist arguments about what being a member of a modern society implies. Each argument has some strengths and together they indicate the importance of retaining the idea of citizenship at the centre of modern political debates about social and economic arrangements.

The architecture of houses of parliament and of legislative chambers in countries around the world is analysed for its relationship to political culture. It is argued that parliamentary buildings and spaces (1) preserve cultural values of the polity over time; (2) articulate contemporaneous political attitudes and values; and (3) contribute to the formation of political culture. Preservation is illustrated by how parliament buildings occupy sacred sites, symbolize the state and assure the continuity of legislative traditions. Articulation is exemplified by reflecting the relative importance of the two legislative houses and making expressive statements about the role of parties, executives and individual legislators. Formation can be affected by the physical dimensions of chambers, the arrangement of seats, aisles and lecterns, and spatial relationships between houses and the parliament versus the executive. It is concluded that the advent of television broadcasting of parliamentary sessions may make these architectural features even more important in perpetuating, manifesting and shaping political culture.

Government action presupposes extraction. Historically, four different sources of public revenue may be distinguished. Tributes, which are common in peimitive and belligerent states, are variable levies exacted at irregular intervals. Tariffs raised on the basis of the physical control of strategic passageways are important sources of income for mercantile states in the early stage of their development. Taxes play some role in semi modern economies but evolve more fully as the financial mainstay of government in advanced industrial societies. In addition, many states draw large receipts from the profits of trade. The planned economies in the socialist bloc are trading states rather than tax states. The different logistic properties of these revenue sources affect the prospects for government growth at various stages of economic development. The expansion of the tax state is strongly linked to the proliferation of monetary flows in modern society. At the same time, some non tax receipts such as user charges and other incomes from trade retain their importance, and the present ‘crisis of the tax state’ might possibly lead to a more composite structure of government revenue.

Scholars have long assigned a key role to party identification as an explanation of voting behaviour. In doing so, they have assumed that individuals' partisan affiliations remain unchanged for long periods of time. But is partisanship sufficiently stable to justify this assumption? At the very least, to be considered a long-term force party identification cannot change during an election. Yet the intra-election stability of party affiliations has been accepted on faith, rather than examined empirically.

Our analysis tests this assumption by looking at the evolution of partisanship over the course of the 1980 election. We find that many citizens do alter their partisanship over a single electoral period. These changes in party identification follow a systematic - and not a random - pattern. Both cognitive and affective factors account for this intra-election partisan lability. These findings suggest that much of the previous research on voting behaviour has been seriously misspecified.

This article explores some of the major reasons for the weakness of the European steel unions during the crisis years of 1974–84. The crisis revealed the absence of viable union strategies and the inefficiency of their tactics, and also exposed – and aggravated – the divisions within and between the unions and their inability fully to control their members. The crisis underlined the dilemmas inherent in tripartite crisis management and the problems of adjusting to the internationalization of the market and the Europeanization of decision making. Finally, the crisis highlighted the fact that subcontracting, new technology, new working practices and new patterns of labour relations at plant level harboured damaging implications for union organization and influence.

Despite the inadequacies of data available for Ihe study of New Zealand electoral behaviour, evidence from a number of small-scale projects has given rise to a conventional wisdom which suggests that, at least in the 1960s, the association between class and party was strong in New Zealand – similar to the level in Britain. New evidence suggests that past estimates of class voting exaggerated the size of the link. Furthermore since the 1960s the level of class voting has declined considerably, as it has in many other countries. In New Zealand this decline appears to have been brought about by new age cohorts with weaker class-party alignments replacing older cohorts with stronger class-party links. Multivariate analysis supports the initial findings while at the same time showing that occupation remains the central social structural determinant of the vote in New Zealand.

Public-choice models argue that large interest groups are less likely to overcome free-rider problems because of the irrelevance of individual's participation to the supply of non-excludable group benefits. But these accounts are constructed in terms of ‘objective’ variables, and hence rely on perfect information assumptions. Paying attention instead to how people learn that interest groups are relevant for them indicates a key role for group identities, i.e. subjective perceptions of interests shared with others. Recasting the decision to form or join groups in terms of subjective variables highlights the imporlance of perceived group viability. In a liberal democratic context, increasing group size has ambiguous effects; it somewhat accentuates the irrelevance of individual participation to supply, and yet (ceteris paribus) also increases (he group's viability. Applying the group identity approach sheds light on a problem which public-choice theory cannot adequately explain: the reasons why (apart from group size) social interests are differentially difficult or easy to organize.

This article outlines a cognitive-affective model of the role of social groups in political thinking. The model is based on the assumptions that people have stored information and emotional reactions to social groups, and that people are purposive in their thinking about social groups in the sense that they are interested in understanding what various groups have obtained and whether it is deserved. The process through which social groups influence political thinking varies significantly depending upon whether an individual identifies with the group in question. Generally, people are more inclined to feel sympathetic towards the groups to which they belong. These ideas are illustrated with an empirical analysis that focuses on women's issues and makes use of data collected in the 1984 National Election Study Pilot Study.

This article focuses on a peculiar behavioural manifestation of political hatred. Hate-letters received by an Israeli political party are analysed in order to probe the dynamics involved in the communication of political hatred. The act of writing and mailing hostile letters is characterized as a particular form of political participation and interpreted as part of the social struggle over the boundaries and definition of the collective. The text of the letters is examined to uncover the main themes and mechanisms that are involved in the expression of political hatred.

This second article asks what it means to be independent in the contemporary United States. Four different meanings are hypothesized: (1) negative feelings about major political parties and partisanship; (2) positive identification with ideals of independence, especially individualistic autonomy; (3) neutrality or indifference because of no detectable party differences of significance; (4) a self-perceived pattern of variability in partisan behaviour. These four attitudinal dimensions are supported empirically via principal components analysis using both national and Wisconsin data. The four dimensions of independence attitudes show varied patterns of association with general indices of Independence self-classification, relevant political attitudes and behaviours, and various antecedents such as age and education.

This article examines the relative impact of different political cleavages on party preference in a comparative West European context. The point of departure is the so-called ‘new polities’ theory, which postulates that the value polarization between materialist and post-materialist (MPM) political orientation is a new and increasingly important dimension in this respect.

The findings from ten West European democracies confirm that the MPM cleavage is an important party cleavage in most of the countries examined, although the traditional structural cleavages are still most important from a causal perspective. The MPM dimension does not, however, have the largest impact in the most advanced industrial democracies, something new politics theory appears to contend. Another ideological cleavage dimension – ‘Left-Right Materialism’ – is also an important party cleavage, and appears to have most impact in the most advanced (post-industrial) West European countries.

Formal analysis is fairly new in public administration, and there is some scepticism in the field about the intellectual advantages of mathematical methods. This is appropriate. Using these methods is now faddish, and fads can cause goal displacement. A formal model of bureaucracy should be only a tool for deepening our knowledge about public organizations. If the underlying ideas are silly, translating them into mathematics will do little good. If they are promising, however, deductive reasoning can help us explore their potential: if one believes A is a general property of bureaucracies, to fail to work out A's logical implications would be throwing away information. Analysis can also increase the falsifiability of our ideas: if A implies B but empirically we find not-B, the truth status of A is brought into question. Or it may turn out, as Arrow discovered about democratic principles, that our informal ideas are logically inconsistent: we thought properties C and D describe existing or possible institutions, but recasting the ideas into mathematical form reveals that such an institution is impossible. Finally, some problems are just too hard to tackle without formal tools. It is unlikely, for example, that Robert Axelrod would have discovered the robustness of the simple strategy of tit-for-tat in the two person prisoners' dilemma without the help of a computer (to pit tit-for-tat against many opponents in thousands of rounds of play) and of mathematics (to prove some generic properties of tit-for-tat).

With the decline in popular attachment to the two major parties in the United States since the mid-1960s, collective political independence has risen. Using new survey questions introduced in 1980, this article employs alternative measures of independence to reassess the phenomenon of independence in America. These new measures give us fresh insights beyond what we had using only the traditional measures. One casualty of this new approach is the portrait of the Independent given by The American Voter. This portrait appears seriously misleading, given that it is those who deny being either partisan or Independent who fit that portrait – not Independents per se. And the most politically involved voters turn out to be Independent Partisan Supporters; not simple partisans.

Two competing themes – traditionalism and constitutional design – lead to inconsistency in F. A. Hayek's work. This inconsistency and its implications for understanding his thought are examined. It is shown that his failure to reconcile these conflicting emphases reflects uncertainty about the proportions of reasoned choice and unreflective rule-following in human decisions. This uncertainty is traced to Hayek's growing pessimism about modern man's ability to preserve the market and the traditions upon which the market rests. Once Hayek's pessimism is set aside, the implications of his work on tradition can be developed in a more useful direction. Realization that reason rests on a non-rational matrix and that people's choices affect that matrix should not lead towards embrace and veneration of the past, but towards emphasis on the necessity of responsible political choice in the present and future.

‘The essence of the welfare state’, wrote Wilensky in a classic study, ‘is government-protected minimum standards of income, nutrition, health, housing, and education, assured to every citizen’. This innocent definition is, we shall see, highly contestable, but it has the merit of putting into a few words the most important characteristics of modern welfare states: that they necessarily involve some model of citizenship; that they provide a stream of services for people called citizens; and that they use public power to raise the resources for those services and to organize their provision. If there is a crisis of the welfare state it has to involve, in other words, a crisis of citizenship, or a crisis in the capacity of states to raise resources and to transform those resources into services.

By the standard of most European parliaments, levels of party voting in the United States Congress are relatively low. Nevertheless, party voting does occur in the House of Representatives and the Senate. In the American context, a party vote occurs when majorities of the two congressional parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, oppose one another. The authors construct measurements of levels of party voting in Congress in the years after the Second World War. They then develop a model to test the effects of a number of independent variables that influence fluctuations in party voting levels over time. The study models the time series for party voting and demonstrates striking differences between the House and Senate in the correlates of partisan cleavage.