This article gives an account of experimental research conducted in France with focus groups on delinquency. It is based on theoretical work which shows how the political is partly a mode of expression as well as a way of addressing conflict. An empirical analysis is presented of how people take or resist the risk of conflict in public discussion over social issues. The group discussions corroborate previous insights by attesting that conflict in public discussion is generally latent and often repressed. Specific analysis follows of those processes that contribute to the rare transformation from latent to overt conflict, highlighting the evidence that the public expression of conflict proceeds from participants' alliances and biographical narratives. Moreover, a certain hierarchy of social identification is seen among the participants. The influence of political competence on political implication is complex.

Mass media play a central role in political life. Media not only transfer information; they also facilitate communication. These functions may ameliorate conflict, crisis and war in world politics. Accordingly, this study looks into the impact of media openness on international conflict. Based on a cross-sectional, time-series dataset for interstate dyads from 1950 to 1992, logistic regression analysis shows that an indicator of media openness has a strong dampening effect on Militarized Interstate Disputes (MIDs) and fatal MIDs. Moreover, this connection is significant even in the presence of a composite indicator of democracy (that measures its institutional attributes using the Polity data), economic interdependence and joint membership in international organizations. The results suggest that the successful neo-Kantian triad is complemented effectively by the presence of media openness.

This article questions prevailing interpretations of New Labour's political economy and challenges the assumption within the comparative and international political economy literatures of the exhaustion of the Keynesian political economic paradigm. New Labour's doctrinal statements are analysed to establish to what extent these doctrinal positions involve a repudiation of Keynesianism. Although New Labour has explicitly renounced the ‘fine tuning’ often (somewhat problematically) associated with post-war Keynesian political economy, we argue that they have carved out policy space in which to engage in macroeconomic ‘coarse tuning’ inspired by Keynesian thinking. This capacity to ‘coarse tune’ is precisely what is being sought in New Labour's quest for credibility through the redesign of British macroeconomic policy framework and institutions. Our empirical focus on New Labour in government since 1997 offers considerable evidence that this search for the capacity to ‘coarse tune’ has been successful.

We apply a dynamic perspective to forecasting votes and seats in British elections. Our vote model captures the swing of the electoral pendulum between the two major parties while using prime ministerial approval as the (sole) short-run predictor of vote choice. The seat model incorporates the inertia of the previous seat distribution while translating votes into seats. The models forecast the lead of one major party over the other (percentage for votes and number for seats). The statistical estimation includes data on British elections since 1945, although the test for cycles (swing of the electoral pendulum) goes as far back as 1832. The vote model picks the winner of every one of the 1945–2005 elections (out-of-sample forecasts) and is rarely off by more than 2 percentage points. The seat model does almost as well, rarely missing the seat lead by more than 25.

This essay examines the causes of government support for European integration. It evaluates several competing theories, both material and ideological. Two dependent variables are examined: government support for European integration in Council of Ministers decisions, and in the 1997 Amsterdam intergovernmental conference. There appear to be sharp differences between the two decision-making fora in the efficacy of predictive variables. In the Council of Ministers, left–right political ideology and financial transfers from the European Union to member states provide the best explanations. In the Amsterdam conference, experience in the Second World War and financial transfers provide the best explanations. This research extends our understanding of why governments choose co-operation within the European Union. It also extends our understanding of the relationship between ideology and integration preferences. Ideology matters not just to parties, but also to governments, which represent both territorial interests and ideologies. There appears to be a linear relationship, whereby left governments are more supportive of integration than right governments.

The relationship between electoral systems and corruption in a large sample of contemporary democratic nations is analysed in this article. Whereas previous studies have shown that closed-list proportional representation is associated with greater (perceived) corruption than open-list PR, it is demonstrated here that this relationship fails to hold once district magnitude is considered. The theory underlying this study draws on work on ‘the personal vote’ that suggests that the incentives to amass resources – and perhaps even to do so illegally – increase with district magnitude in open-list settings but decrease in closed-list contexts. Extending this insight, it is shown that political corruption gets more (less) severe as district magnitude increases under open-list PR (closed-list PR) systems. In addition, once district magnitude exceeds a certain threshold – the estimates here are that this is as low as fifteen – corruption is greater under open lists than closed lists. Only at small district magnitudes (below fifteen) is closed-list PR associated with more corruption, as conventionally held. These results hold for alternative measures of corruption, for different sets of countries analysed, for different measures of district magnitude and regardless of whether the political system is presidential or parliamentary, and of the number of parties.

Using an objective measure of corruption in public works contracting, corroborating evidence is also presented from Italian electoral districts. In Italy's open-list environment in the period prior to 1994, larger districts were more susceptible to corruption than smaller ones.

We examine ‘heuristic’ and ‘systematic’ candidate-appraisal strategies within a presidential election context. Controlling for political knowledge, we determine whether individual differences in the capacity for ideological thought condition voters' reliance on the major determinants of candidate choice, increasing reliance on policy considerations and decreasing reliance on the heuristic cue of party identification and on perceptions of candidate character when ideological capacity is high, and exerting the opposite effect – decreasing the role of issues and increasing the role of party identification and candidate qualities – when such capacity is low. Using American National Election Studies data from the 1984–2000 period, we find that ideological thinking consistently heightens voters' reliance on issues and decreases their reliance on candidate cues, but only among voters who report being concerned about the outcome of the election. In contrast, the effect of partisanship is stable across levels of ideological thinking and concern about the campaign. We discuss the cognitive processes by which ideological thinking regulates political choice, and assert its centrality in the political decision-making process.

What motivates citizens to vote or abstain from voting? What determines vote choice? Models of turnout predominantly focus on a series of factors that affect perceptions of the benefits and costs of voting. The economy's influence on those perceptions has gone largely undeveloped. Models of vote choice routinely account for economic influences while ignoring turnout. This article presents a comprehensive analysis of the role of the economy as mobilizer and demobilizer. I argue that the economy has an impact on turnout decisions and that its impact is asymmetric. All else equal, the incumbent party is able to mobilize more supporters, relative to the non-incumbent party, in good economic times and more supporters are demobilized in adverse economic times. However, Democrats and Republicans are not sensitive to the same elements of economic performance. This is in part a function of the way in which the economy influences perceptions of the closeness of the impending election and of the candidates and their parties. Analysis of pooled data from ANES surveys for the twelve presidential elections from 1956 to 2000 confirms the validity of these arguments.

Whatever its limitations, the academic literature has not been short in supplying adjectives to describe and characterize the political economy of New Labour. Yet until Ben Clift and Jim Tomlinson's provocative and imaginative intervention in the debate published in this journal, ‘Keynesian’ was not one of them. In a way it is odd that New Labour's political economy should not previously have been labelled Keynesian – it has, after all, been called almost everything else and, as Clift and Tomlinson show well, there is a certain intuitive appeal to this designation.

In this brief response, however, I seek to demonstrate that the label ‘Keynesian’ is ultimately inappropriate, the resulting characterization misplaced. Despite their pretensions to normative neutrality, I suggest, Clift and Tomlinson's self-evident desire to label New Labour's political economy ‘Keynesian’ leads them to mischaracterize both the literature they critique and the putative object of that literature's and their own analytical attentions. I argue that whilst they do largely succeed in showing that New Labour has not ‘decisively repudiated’ Keynesianism, they do not show that it has actively embraced it. Indeed, even if one were to accept every aspect of their analysis, at best they show that the decision to cede operational independence to the Bank of England has bought consecutive New Labour governments since 1997 the fiscal policy discretion to respond – if, as and when the need arises (or is seen to arise) – to recessionary pressures in a Keynesian fashion. In short, they make a far stronger case for suggesting that New Labour's policies since 1997 are not incompatible with future Keynesianism than they do for suggesting that those policies are themselves Keynesian in intent or content.