Liberal democracies have long practised torture, but should they ever permit their officials to torture (and, if so, when?), how should their citizens think and talk about it, and how should the law treat it? Is it just another instance of ‘dirty hands’ in politics? If it averts some terrible harm, can resorting to it be seen as choosing the ‘lesser evil’? What, then, is torture? The ‘torture memos’ of the Bush administration's legal advisers are reviewed and their attempt to narrow its definition criticized, as is Judge Posner's attempt to confine it to physical coercion. Attempts to evade the questions above (on the grounds that torture is never effective in averting disaster) are rejected. It is suggested that torture, unlike other cases of dirty hands considered, cannot be rendered liberal-democratically accountable, in the sense that it will sometimes be legitimate and, when not, punished, because its practice cannot be publicly recognized without undermining both the democratic and liberal components of liberal democracy. This suggestion is supported by adducing a ‘Durkheimian argument’ to the effect that our institutions and customs have been so penetrated by core elements of an egalitarian ‘religion of individualism’ that violating them threatens a kind of ‘moral disintegration’. This, it is argued, requires liberal democracies to reject the very idea of a scale that can allow comparison of the benefits against the costs of torturing. The absolute prohibition serves to maintain inhibitions, though these are currently being eroded by the fear of terrorism.

The eastern enlargement of the European Union is a twofold process, in which governments of transition countries decide whether or not to apply for membership and in turn EU members decide whether or not to accept these applicants. The authors argue that the level of democracy and the extent of market reforms together determine the first decision, while the second decision is largely determined by the EU observing the reform process in applicant countries imposed by the acquis communautaire conditionality. The natural procedure to test this theory is a Heckman selection model. A Heckman specification with panel probit estimators in both stages is used. The data supports the argument that uncontested reforms signal the policy support of relevant political parties to the EUand increase the likelihood of joining the Union. The authors also test for specification errors and check the robustness of the findings.

This article introduces the concept of patronage regimes and, through it, extends the research on American party development. No systematic empirical inquiry into the operation of American patronage practices has yet been undertaken. Its analysis investigates the strategic allocation of public jobs by party elites to enhance cadre performance in presidential elections. Utilizing a dataset of 49,000 Senate-confirmed, presidential appointments, presidential patronage removals between the years 1829 and 1917 are analysed. Two distinctive patronage regimes are identified: an antebellum regime structured by pure-and-simple spoils politics and a postbellum regime conforming to principles of machine rationality. Factors central to the process of regime transformation are pinpointed. The presence of two successive patronage regimes highlights the importance of endogenous political incentives and elite strategic choice to the emergent character of party organization, shedding new light on the historical development of these pre-eminent nineteenth-century American political institutions.

A heated scholarly debate rages over the ‘culture wars thesis’ in American politics. Drawing on the literature on mass opinion constraint and its sources, we propose a resolution to this debate: the culture wars influence mass political behaviour in special religious, policy and political contexts where logical, psychological, social and electoral sources of opinion constraint are in effect. Using data pooled from the 1992, 1996 and 2000 American National Election Studies, we find strong support for our argument. We conclude that the cultural wars are waged by limited religious troops on narrow policy fronts under special political leadership, and a broader cultural conflagration is largely a rumour.

Do democratic elections and experience with democracy affect citizens' propensity to engage in political protest? If so, how? A model of protest potential based on the incentives election winners and losers face in new and established democratic systems is presented. Using surveys conducted by the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) in seventeen democracies around the globe, the effect on political protest potential of being in the political minority or majority after an election is compared. Being in the political minority heightens citizens' political protest potential. Moreover, the effect on protest potential of losing is significantly greater in new democracies compared with established ones. These findings provide systematic evidence that election outcomes should be considered important indicators of political protest potential, and they imply that this effect is particularly salient in countries whose democratic institutions are relatively new and potentially more unstable.

This article analyses the role of parties in political systems with legislative initiative. The model explicitly takes into account the multi-district nature of elections so that voters recognize that they are not voting for a policy but for members of a policy-making body. In this setting, parties can attain their ideological goals without resorting to extreme discipline of their members in the legislature. With respect to the electorate, although voters are endowed with perfect information about their candidates' ideological stance, this model explains how the legislature will display correlation across ideology and party, a feature often attributed to imperfect information.

To what extent does public support for subnational officials fluctuate in response to local rather than national performance? Are the policy failures of subnational officials reliably punished by voters? Drawing upon both individual and aggregate level data, this article attempts to shed new light on these questions about the politics of decentralization by exploring electoral outcomes and public opinion at the subnational level in Argentina. Consistent with referendum voting models, this analysis suggests that the fate of candidates in both national and subnational elections is shaped by the performance of the incumbent presidential administration. Moreover, to the extent that subnational performance has an electoral impact, voters do not necessarily respond in ways that enhance electoral accountability. Voters not only blame and reward subnational officials for national performance, but also attribute responsibility for subnational performance to national authorities. The implications with respect to the impact of decentralized decision making on democratic accountability are decidedly mixed and anything but consistent with the argument that decentralization results in a closer match between citizen preferences and the allocation of public resources.

Recent empirical studies on American elections suggest that campaigns provide voters with the necessary information to make reasoned voting decisions. Specifically, campaigns help voters learn about the electoral relevance of ‘fundamental variables’, such as the economy and party stances, that have been consistently shown to predict electoral outcomes. Do these findings generalize beyond the American case? This article uses cross-national survey data in order to subject this thesis to a more comprehensive test. The analysis provides further support for the hypothesis that campaigns ‘enlighten’ voters as the election draws near. Moreover, the article shows that some voters learn more from campaigns than others. Campaign effects are more pronounced among individuals with low political sophistication and those living in party list systems. Implications for future research are explored, suggesting a ripe research agenda using under-tapped cross-national data.

It is a fairly common criticism of deliberative democratic ideals that one cannot involve thousands, let alone millions, of people in a decision-making process and still retain its deliberative character, at least not in any sense as strict as those of the classic expositions of deliberative democratic principles. Various solutions to this scale problem have been proposed, but implicit in most deliberative designs is the media solution. People can watch the debate unfold on television, can listen to it on the radio, can follow it, or even contribute to a limited extent, online. This is supposed to ensure not only that deliberation is subject to the check of publicity, but also that it is dispersed throughout the public sphere.

This is precisely the idea behind James Fishkin's deliberative poll technique, designed to be televised so that deliberation among a few would be brought to ‘an audience of millions’, ‘bridging the gap’ between informed and uninformed opinion, and acting as a ‘catalyst’ to change the nature of discussion on a topic in a broader community. But what happens when we rely on the media to bear the weight of responsibility for generating links between insiders and outsiders in public deliberation? The media are not broad pipes which simply convey whatever is put into them but, like all institutions, shape that input in sometimes significant ways. If we are to understand the value of the media in addressing problems of deliberative scale, we need to understand those institutional effects.

In this Research Note I examine the effects the media had on the kinds of information transferred from deliberators to audience in a deliberative poll that took place in the United Kingdom in July 1998.

Every face-to-face Deliberative Poll (DP) to date has been the subject of a television broadcast. We consider these broadcasts a helpful adjunct to the design – a way of motivating both the random sample and the policy experts and policy makers to attend, of educating the broader public about the issues, and, perhaps, of nudging public opinion in the direction of the results. In ‘Rickety Bridges’, John Parkinson examines just one of these broadcasts, Channel 4's on the DP on the future of Britain's National Health Service (NHS) in 1998. Applying his coding of the contents to other DP broadcasts might or might not yield similar results, but we are happy to assume, for argument's sake, that it would. If DP broadcasts are generally doing what he describes the NHS DP broadcast as doing, they are doing pretty well, at least as far as the distribution of coverage is concerned. It is Parkinson's notion of what they should be doing that is mistaken. As a result, his critique is fundamentally misguided.

THE AIMS OF DP BROADCASTS

Parkinson's critique rests on an inappropriate standard. His central claim is that Channel 4's broadcast of the NHS DP did not replicate the participants' experience. Of course it did not. No broadcast could ever give viewers the same experience they would have if they were actually part of the DP's on-site, weekend-long deliberations. The broadcast in that case would have to be weekend-long, and there would actually have to be multiple broadcasts – as many as there are participants – since every participant's experience is different.

I am grateful to James Fishkin and Robert Luskin for taking the time to consider and respond to my remarks on the dangers of relying on the news media to form a bridge between participants and non-participants in deliberative events. Clearly we are in agreement that there is a difference between deliberations as experienced by participants and a television audience. However, Fishkin and Luskin have misrepresented my aims and claims about that difference, and thus their response is less telling than it might have been, directed as it is at a man of straw.

At the outset, let me emphasize that the purpose ofmyresearch note was not to subject deliberative polls to a thorough critique: one case study would indeed have been an inadequate foundation for such work. Rather, the case study was a device used to highlight a feature common to many attempts to put deliberative democratic principles into practice, not just the deliberative poll (DP). The underlying issue is, to state it again, one of scale: millions of people cannot strictly deliberate together. Walzer proposes a maximum number of twenty individuals, although the literature on small groups suggests that the actual limit may be between five and seven, both which seem disturbingly small for purportedly democratic processes. Even if the deliberative limit were several hundred, however, the scale issue still arises and causes problems for the democratic legitimacy of such events: how can their decisions be binding on others when those others have not had the opportunity to have their views transformed by the encounter with the better argument?