States engage in coercive diplomacy by sponsoring militant violence against their rivals. This gives militant groups’ sponsors bargaining power, but may produce moral hazard, because it can empower groups so much that sponsors cannot control them. This study develops a game theoretic model to explain why states take the risk of sponsoring militant groups. The model demonstrates that sponsorship may be a form of costly signalling that increases the probability both of bargaining failure and of a negotiated settlement favourable to the sponsor. The model further demonstrates that only moderately weak states and major powers are likely to gain coercive power through sponsorship. Data on militant violence during the period 1989–2001 support the model's predictions.

Legislative speech records from the 101st to 108th Congresses of the US Senate are analysed to study political ideologies. A widely-used text classification algorithm – Support Vector Machines (SVM) – allows the extraction of terms that are most indicative of conservative and liberal positions in legislative speeches and the prediction of senators’ ideological positions, with a 92 per cent level of accuracy. Feature analysis identifies the terms associated with conservative and liberal ideologies. The results demonstrate that cultural references appear more important than economic references in distinguishing conservative from liberal congressional speeches, calling into question the common economic interpretation of ideological differences in the US Congress.

Since 1990, the number of preferential trade agreements has increased rapidly. The argument in this article explains this phenomenon, known as the new regionalism, as a result of competition for market access; exporters facing trade diversion because of their exclusion from a preferential trade agreement concluded by foreign countries push their governments into signing an agreement with the country in which their exports are threatened. The argument is tested in a quantitative analysis of the proliferation of preferential trade agreements among 167 countries between 1990 and 2007. The finding that competition for market access is a major driving force of the new regionalism is a contribution to the literature on regionalism and to broader debates about global economic regulation.

During the 1980s and the 1990s, the elites of the two largest Dutch parties converged dramatically in debates on income redistribution, nuclear power and the overall Left–Right dimension, paving the way for the Dutch party system's polarization on immigration and cultural issues. Did the Dutch mass public depolarize along with party elites, and, if so, was this mass-level depolarization confined to affluent, educated, politically engaged citizens? Analysis of Dutch Parliamentary Election Study respondents’ policy beliefs and partisan loyalties in 1986–98 shows that the mass public depolarized during this period, and that this extended equally throughout the electorate. These conclusions mirror previous findings on Britain, but differ from those on the United States, and have important implications for political representation and for parties’ election strategies.

No consensus exists on the causal mechanisms underpinning declining voting based on social cleavages – religion and class – in Europe. Previous research has emphasized two main factors: social change within the electorate (bottom-up) and parties’ policy polarization (top-down). This article presents a third level of analysis that links parties and cleavage-related social organizations, producing a factor capable of reinforcing group identity and interest representation. This hypothesis was tested for Italy in 1968–2008, where changes in the party system provided a natural experiment to assess the impact of changing structural alternatives at the party–organizational level. The level of cleavage voting in Italy then responded primarily to changes in the structure of party–organization linkages, while the impact of policy mobilization and social change was negligible.

Why has the association between class and party declined over time? Contrary to conventional wisdom that emphasizes the fracturing of social structures and blurring of class boundaries in post-industrial society, it is argued here that class divisions in party preferences are conditioned by the changing shape of the class structure and the effect of parties’ strategic ideological responses to this transformation on the choices facing voters. This thesis is tested using British survey data from 1959 to 2006. We demonstrate that increasing class heterogeneity does not account for the decline of the class–party association, which occurs primarily as a result of ideological convergence between the main parties resulting from New Labour's shift to the centre.

A previously overlooked explanation for varying individual levels of political trust is concern about immigration. This article examines the effect of concern about immigration on political trust in Britain, where levels of opposition to immigration have remained high since the 1960s and yet the implications of such opposition are still unclear. Using the pre-election and post-election panel component of the 2005 British Election Study and the 2002–03 European Social Survey, the author shows, after controlling for other predictors of trust in politics, that concerns about the impact of immigration significantly affect political trust. In addition, in 2005 the perception that government had not handled the issue of immigration effectively also significantly affected political trust, with both linear and interactive effects.

This article analyses the process of party constitutionalization in post-war Europe. It explores the temporal patterns of party constitutionalization and reveals their connection with moments of fundamental institutional restructuring. It discusses the different modes of party constitutionalization, and addresses what these convey about the underlying conceptions of party democracy. It argues that the constitutional codification of political parties has consolidated the empirical reality of modern party government as well as its normative foundations of modern party government, thereby transforming political parties from socio-political organizations into integral units of the democratic state. Finally, it suggests that the constitutionalization of the democratic importance of political parties might reflect an attempt to legitimize their existence in the face of their weakening as agents of democratic representation.

A debate, fanned by the experiences of South Korea and Taiwan, persists over how economic growth leads to democratization. This article provides a theoretical model showing that economic downturns lead to democratization and evaluates the conclusion systematically with data from South Korea and Taiwan. The model and results corroborate the hypothesis that economic downturns motivate government and non-government actors to pursue political reforms and democratization and highlight several contributions. They show democratization as the outcome of strategic responses pursued under weak economic conditions. Further, the findings are robust to alternative specifications of democratization. The results also bring empirics into line with theoretical expectations about democratization while simultaneously revealing that it is not a panacea for lack of support.