At the heart of the puzzle of representation is the responsibility to construct policy that both responds to the separatist pull of local constituencies and meets the republican aspiration that government leaders define and promote common interests. The difficulty of balancing responsiveness and deliberation is heightened by divided government, where pursuing a competitive course leads to stalemate, while compromising too readily threatens to undermine party principle. This article argues that politicians have an incentive to accommodate their strategies to divided government, and that this accommodation will take the form of centralizing power in the congressional party leadership, with an increased willingness on the part of the president and the congressional leadership to engage in substantive consultation over the content of the legislative agenda. These accommodations will foster the possibility of meaningful deliberation; whether it will occur on any given issue will depend on the context of information and interpretation. Because most policies are open to multiple interpretations, political leaders have some leeway in framing the issue and thus determining what information and which political resources will shape the strategic context. Beginning with a review of the literature on legislative processes and presidential influence in Congress, and drawing on the formal theory literature on information and uncertainty, I explicate the argument by way of an empirical case study of one of the most historically significant tax policy negotiations in the post-war period.

An examination of executive-legislative conflict occurring in US congressional committees between 1947 and 1990 reveals that, despite current concerns of gridlock, the overall level of conflict declined during this period. There are two structural sources of inter-branch conflict – constituent and partisan. The constituent basis for conflict in the United States is rooted in the differing manner in which members of the two branches are elected. Because the executive has a national constituency, it is primarily concerned with matters of national policy. Members of Congress, who have smaller, more homogeneous constituencies, are more concerned with the geographically distributive effects of these policies. The authors' evidence suggests that conflict between the executive and legislative in the United States is greatest on issues that are of both national and distributive significance. The partisan basis for conflict, long established in the House and increasingly visible in the Senate, is reinforced by competitive political contests. Yet conflict between members of Congress and executive officials of the opposite party did not increase between 1947 and 1990. And conflict with executive officials of the same party declined, producing an overall drop in executive-legislative conflict.

Since the 1950s, the dominant pattern of partisan change in the American electorate has involved movements between party identification and independence rather than direct or indirect shifts between parties. This article employs switching regression analyses to investigate the long-term evolution and short-term dynamics of independence between 1953 and 1988. The analyses reveal that a new ‘independence regime’ developed rapidly in the mid-1960s, with the ‘tipping point’ in the transition occurring in the second quarter of 1967. Under the new–but not the old–regime, short-term changes in the size of the independent cohort have reflected economic conditions as well as political events. These findings argue that future research on the dynamics of public support for political parties in the United States and elsewhere will profit by developing dynamic models which assess processes of long- and short-term change in tandem.

In common with most other mass democratic parties the Conservative party has a large group of active members who sustain the party over time. A model is developed to explain variations in activism within the party, which takes account of the ‘paradox of participation’. The results, based on the first national random sample survey of Conservative party members, show that activism is motivated by three classes of factors. Activism is motivated, firstly, by a variety of selective incentives, such as ambitions for elective office. It is motivated, secondly, by a desire for the party to achieve policy goals. These are ‘collective goods’, which are subject to the problem of free-riding. However, since activists can influence policy outcomes, via their contacts with party leaders, they have high levels of personal efficacy and a direct incentive to participate, which can override the paradox of participation. Finally, activism is motivated by expressive concerns, as measured by the strength of the respondent's partisanship, a motivation for involvement which lies outside a narrowly cast rational choice model of political participation.

It has become clear from national surveys, both in Britain and elsewhere, that the attitudes of the mass public towards social and political issues tend to group together in broadly predictable ways. Analyses of British Election Study data have consistently found that attitudes towards economic issues such as nationalization, income redistribution and government intervention go together and are largely unrelated to attitudes towards moral issues. There are of course variations in the results, depending on the items included for analysis, but it has become apparent that a rather persistent attitudinal structure, at least at the aggregate level, has characterized the British electorate. Similar findings have been reported for the United States.

The policy-oriented coalition models that were developed in the 1960s and 1970s generally required that the positions of political parties were measured at ordinal level. More recent models of coalition formation, however, have tended to assume that interval-level data on parties' policy positions are available. This need for interval-level data has raised serious practical problems for empirical research. Analysts frequently wish to examine patterns of coalition formation after several, or many, elections. Unfortunately, detailed interval-level data on parties' positions are generally available at only one or two points in time. While it can often be plausibly argued that parties will occupy fairly stable ordinal positions over time, it is extremely doubtful whether this is also the case for their interval positions.

States in liberal democracies are said to be structurally dependent on the decisions of private investors in the sense that governments do not directly control the level of investment and economic growth. The general consensus amongst Marxian political economists and neo-classical economists is that this imposes restrictions on the scope of the redistributive policies that governments can pursue. It is also frequently argued that these restrictions are increased with international capital mobility because of the threat or reality of capital flight. The McCracken Report noted this link between capital mobility and restrictions on government as early as 1977. It warned that some governments appeared to have ‘overrated their scope for independent action’ and they had paid insufficient attention to the consequences of ‘capital flight’. Since then, both the rate of capital mobility and the severity of these restrictions have probably increased. In the 1970s, capital outflows from the thirteen leading industrial countries averaged $52 billion per annum. In 1989 they averaged $444 billion. The problems that this presents to governments attempting to make transfers from capital to labour have been described in considerable detail and there is an extensive formal literature in trade theory that deals with capital transfers. There is also some work on strategies for social democratic governments wishing to minimize capital losses. The main gap in this literature, however, is that some of the fundamental political, or ‘democratic choice’, aspects of these problems are not well understood. In particular, little is known about the optimum rate of taxation for a government attempting to maximize workers' consumption out of profits. The purpose of this Note is to contribute towards such an analysis.

This Note examines the formation of the Socialist-led coalition government in Japan in 1947. Despite the recent expansion of positive research on coalition governments, the existing literature remains ‘European’ in its scope, leaving ambiguity as to whether the currently available models are truly general theoretical models, as some formal theorists seem to claim, or only applicable to a certain cultural and socio-political environment. The Japanese example presents an excellent vehicle, a hard case, with which to test contemporary coalition theories, because Japan is usually described as a country with a distinctive political culture and historical background.