The conventional wisdom about the US Supreme Court and the 2000 presidential election is that the Court wounded itself by participating in such a partisan dispute. By ‘wounded’ people mean that the institution lost some of its legitimacy. Evidence from our survey, conducted in early 2001, suggests little if any diminution of the Court’s legitimacy in the aftermath of Bush v. Gore, even among African Americans. We observe a relationship between evaluations of the opinion and institutional legitimacy, but the bulk of the causality seems to flow from loyalty to evaluations of the case, not vice versa. We argue that legitimacy frames perceptions of the Court opinion. Furthermore, increased awareness of the activities of the Court tends to reinforce legitimacy by exposing people to the powerful symbols of law. In 2000, legitimacy did indeed seem to provide a reservoir of good will that allowed the Court to weather the storm created by its involvement in Florida’s presidential election.

There has been an important shift in the pattern of divergence between consumer and environmental protection policies in Europe and the United States. From the 1960s through the mid 1980s American regulatory standards tended to be more stringent, comprehensive and innovative than in either individual European countries or in the European Union (EU). However, since around 1990 the obverse has been true; many important EU consumer and environmental regulations are now more precautionary than their American counterparts.

The ‘new’ politics of consumer and environmental regulation in Europe are attributable to three inter-related factors: a series of regulatory failures within Europe, broader and stronger political support for more stringent and comprehensive regulatory standards within Europe and the growth in the regulatory competence of the European Union.

In many respects, European regulatory politics and policies since the 1990s resemble those of the United States during the 1970s. Thus health, safety and environmental politics and policies in the United States are no longer as distinctive as many scholars have portrayed them.

Building upon Poole and Rosenthal’s NOMINATE technique and Kalt and Zupan’s residualization approach, I seek to disentangle the influences of constituency interests, party and ideology on the votes of MPs in the famous Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. I argue that while the Conservative party shared a distinct ideology, it was also a coalition of two interests-based alliances. The non-Peelite Conservatives represented mostly (protectionist oriented) agricultural districts while the Peelites represented districts with more free trade leaning interests. Before 1846, Peelites voted according to a general Conservative ideology, but in 1846 an abrupt change occurred: the pivotal Peelites appear to have eschewed Conservative party unity and their own personal ideology in favour more of the preferences of their constituents. Repeal appears to have gained passage as these MPs switched from voting more as trustees to voting more as delegates.

Previous studies of group conflict theory look at the relationship between racial balance in a particular area (precinct, county, etc.) and racial attitudes or political behaviour within that area. While of value, there are significant methodological disadvantages to this approach. Here, I address those problems using public opinion experiments in which I ask respondents whether they would allocate political goods proportionally given different (randomly assigned) hypothetical racial environments. The experiment yields confirmatory results, with non-blacks more likely to support proportionality in less black than heavily black environments. In a second experiment, I find that the same relationship is much weaker when the variations in population are non-racial. Finally, I show that the relationship also holds for blacks and argue that this is theoretically consistent.

This two-wave panel study was designed to investigate the effects of the media coverage leading up to and including an important European Union event (a summit meeting of EU leaders) on citizens’ attitudes towards the EU and European integration. A random sample of 817 citizens in the Netherlands was surveyed one month before the Amsterdam Summit in June 1997 and three days after it had ended. Two types of attitudes towards Europe were distinguished by scaling analysis: (a) national–pragmatic attitudes towards the EU and (b) supranational–idealistic attitudes towards the EU. Results indicated that supranational–idealistic attitudes were influenced positively as a result of the media coverage related to the summit, whereas national–pragmatic attitudes did not show a significant change. A control variable, attitudes towards immigrants, which was included to detect possible testing effects, showed no change. Effects of the summit’s media coverage were in the same direction across all levels of political knowledge and political attentiveness. When predicting change in supranational–idealistic attitudes, controlling for the original attitude and political knowledge, those who were most attentive to politics were more strongly influenced. These findings challenge traditional views of the impact of knowledge, attention and interest on attitude change.

Scholars and policy makers have displayed a longstanding interest in the politics of economic reform, particularly over the 1990s as former Communist countries struggled to develop market economies. Yet remarkably little systematic research has been conducted on the political economy of commercial reform in the post-Communist world. We argue that the fragmentation of power within post-Communist countries has been a potent force for trade liberalization. In non-democracies where political power is highly concentrated in the hands of a small group of elites, state leaders face few impediments to rent seeking and are well insulated from interests favouring commercial reform. In non-democracies where power is fragmented within the national government, however, new elites with weak ties to the old regime are well placed to use trade liberalization as a weapon against their political opponents. Moreover, the dispersion of power in non-democracies creates space for groups favouring free trade to promote trade liberalization. Finally, in democracies, the dispersion of power within the national government combined with electoral competition creates an especially potent impetus to trade liberalization. To assess these arguments, we analyse the trade policy of post-Communist countries during the period 1990–98. The results support our claims, highlighting the importance of examining institutional differences within as well as across regime types in analyses of economic policy.

Renewed scholarly interest in the role of US congressional parties has recently coincided with a continuing interest in legislative committee influence and the extent to which that influence relies on committee preference composition. We argue that majority party incentives to influence composition vary by committee salience and party margins. In turn, the party’s ability to influence composition of salient committees is constrained, but varies by party resource levels. We present data on committee composition for the 80th to 104th US Houses and test these expectations using time-series cross-section analysis. The evidence provides support for the predictions – which have been hypothesized or tested anecdotally but have not heretofore been systematically tested – explaining both spatial and temporal variation.

This article analyses the origins and consequences of multicameral representation and voting in international organizations. It is argued that the existence of visible and durable conflicts in an issue area can make standard procedures such as unicameral majority voting ineffective with respect to the functioning of the regime. Applying spatial models of strategic decision making, it is asserted that multicameralism is more likely to be effective than unicameralism if chambers consist of key groups with distinct interests. Empirical evidence is provided by studying the multicameral voting rule in the Council of the International Seabed Authority (ISA). I compare likely decision-making outcomes under unicameral and multicameral voting rules from 1996 to 2002 and find that multicameral outcomes are more likely to be stable and supported by those actors critical for the effective functioning of the regime.