British civil servants have a clear constitutional duty to obey their ministers. Yet civil servants may be confronted with situations in which they believe, on the basis of their knowledge or expertise, that the course of action a minister favours would have sharply damaging consequences for the government or the country. What should higher civil servants do then? We use data gathered in two rounds of interviews with senior civil servants (Grades 1–3) in 1989–90 and 1993–94 to explore how far civil servants feel able to go in challenging either inappropriate ministerial requests for services or policies they believe to be sharply damaging. Senior civil servants are divided on the appropriate course of action in such circumstances.

Prior research suggests that partisanship can influence how legislators learn from each other. However, same-party governments are also more likely to share similar issues, ideological preferences and constituency demands. Establishing a causal link between partisanship and policy learning is difficult. In collaboration with a non-profit organization, this study isolates the role of partisanship in a real policy learning context. As part of a campaign promoting a new policy among local representatives in the United States, the study randomized whether the initiative was endorsed by co-partisans, out-partisans or both parties. The results show that representatives are systematically more interested in the same policy when it is endorsed by co-partisans. Bipartisan initiatives also attract less interest than co-partisan policies, and no more interest than out-partisan policies, even in more competitive districts. Together, the results suggest that ideological considerations cannot fully explain partisan-based learning. The study contributes to scholarship on policy diffusion, legislative signaling and interest group access.

During the nineteenth century, a presidential voter actually selected a party-prepared candidate list, casting it in full view of others. The ‘Australian’ ballot, adopted in nearly all states by 1900, took away party preparation of the ballot. State officials now prepared overall candidate lists from which the voter picked in secret. The introduction of the Australian ballot was heralded as a blow against political corruption and for ‘good government’. But practical questions arose. With the state itself responsible for the ballot, how should it decide which candidates to list? Some barriers to entry seemed necessary, otherwise the list would be unwieldy. Each of the states began to pass laws restricting ballot access, often aimed at third parties.

Classic and revisionist perspectives on economic voting have thoroughly analyzed the role of macroeconomic indicators and individual partisanship as determinants of subjective evaluations of the national economy. Surprisingly, however, top-down analysis of parties’ capacity to cue and persuade voters about national economic conditions is absent in the debate. This study uses a novel dataset containing monthly economic salience in party parliamentary speeches, macroeconomic indicators and individual survey data covering the four last electoral cycles in Spain (1996–2011). The results show that the salience of economic issues in the challenger’s discourse substantially increases negative evaluations of performance when this challenger is the owner of the economic issue. While a challenger’s conditioning of public economic evaluations is independent of the state of the economy (and can affect citizens with different ideological orientations), incumbent parties are more constrained by the true state of the economy in their ability to persuade the electorate on this issue.

Two models of local policy formation can be set forth. Although they are complementary rather than competing models, for heuristic purposes it is useful to present them as contrasting approaches. Since the first, the bargaining model, is well known, I shall concentrate in this paper on elaborating and applying a second, unitary model of policy making. The paper is divided into four main parts. After briefly identifying the limitations of the bargaining model, the first part develops the theoretical rationale for the unitary model. The second part uses the model to analyse empirically differences in the revenue sources for national, state and local governments. Part 3 does the same for expenditure policies, and, in the course of the analysis, distinguishes among three types of public policy – developmental, allocational and redistributive. In the final part, hypotheses deduced from the model are tested by means of a regression analysis of state and local expenditures.

In many areas of political science, scholars have begun to emphasize the dynamics driving the statistical variance of political outcomes as well as those governing changes in the mean. Some recent studies have brought this methodological focus on variance to measures of presidential approval, but no one has yet examined how the effects of traditional explanatory variables (such as major events and war) on the volatility of approval interact with respondents’ partisan predispositions. Using both aggregate approval data and individual-level panel data, this analysis demonstrates that factors reinforcing a group’s partisan proclivities to support or oppose the president increase the stability of that group’s support, while developments that conflict with a group’s partisan predispositions increase the volatility of approval.

It is widely accepted that survey data tend to underestimate the levels of support for political parties or other groups that are perceived to advocate ‘extreme’ views. In this Note I propose the use of latent class analysis as a means by which this difficulty might be overcome and I illustrate it by an application to the case of support within Northern Ireland for Sinn Féin from survey data and apply latent class analysis to a recent dataset from Northern Ireland. The note concludes with some general remarks on the question of why surveys and elections disagree and the role of latent class analysis in explaining this phenomenon.

The National Front is England's fourth largest party in terms of electoral support. The number of candidates it has fielded at local and national elections has increased at each successive election since it was founded in 1968. It has not, however, been extensively studied by academic researchers. Walker has provided a historical account of the development of the National Front. Scott has examined the activities and attitudes of one local branch. Nugent and King have compared it with earlier right-wing political organizations, particularly the British Union of Fascists. But rather less is known about the National Front's electoral support.

Roberto Michels’ book Political Parties has come to be regarded as one of the classics of political sociology. Most recent studies of the internal government of parties, trade unions and pressure groups take it as their starting point: it influences the kind of questions that are asked and the concepts that are employed.

In their study of the ‘affluent worker’ in Luton,1 Goldthorpe and his colleagues reached a number of important conclusions about the political behaviour of the ‘traditional’ and ‘new’ working class in post-war Britain. They rejected the belief, commonly held by the late 1950s, that a growing proportion of manual workers was beginning to support the Conservative Party as a result of attaining a middle class level of income and material possessions (the ‘embourgeoisement’ theory). In their sample, which was elaborately designed to ensure the most favourable conditions for confirmation of the embourgeoisement theory, they found (i) that the level of stable Labour support was higher than the national average for manual workers; (ii) that there was no evidence of any gradual, long-term shift of support towards the Conservatives or away from Labour; and (iii) that the small minority of Conservatives was distinguished not by a higher than average standard of living, but by a relatively large number of white collar workers among their kin. The notion that there was a necessary connection, among manual workers, between growing material prosperity and increased support for the Conservative Party was therefore decisively rejected.

Diverse identities coexisting within the same society are often viewed as problematic for economic and political development. This article argues that different types of social diversity have differential effects on regime type. Specifically, ethno-linguistic diversity increases prospects for democracy while religious diversity decreases prospects for democracy. The article presents a variety of reasons why diversity might have divergent causal effects on regime type. Cross-national regressions in a variety of econometric formats – including instrumental variables – provide corroborating evidence for the argument.

The aim of this paper is to explicate the concept of manipulation, to show why it is of central importance in democratic theory, and to explain its relation to power. At first glance this might seem an unusual objective, since it remains one of the least studied of the concepts that are usually recognized as members of the power or control ‘family’. Yet allegations of the existence of manipulative practices, and demands for intervention by public agencies to prevent them, are commonplace in political life. Political science and political philosophy have contributed little to the understanding of how, for example, the following four claims about manipulation are to be evaluated.

The argument of this paper, which is conducted at two distinct levels of abstraction, has four parts. First, I consider how the disputed character of the concept of freedom bears on the definition of liberalism. This will be done by examining the contrasting accounts of the concept of freedom advanced by Felix Oppenheim and Sir Isaiah Berlin: my conclusion is that the contestability of the concept of freedom does not constitute an insuperable obstacle to formulating a working definition of liberalism. Secondly, I consider the general thesis that some, if not all, of the central concepts of social and political thought have an essentially contestable character, and look in particular at the application of this thesis to the concept of the ‘political’. Thirdly, I consider some aspects of the theories of distributive justice advanced by John Rawls and Robert Nozick, concluding that the supposedly contractarian mode of argument adopted by each of these writers is insufficient to yield the distributive principles specified, which must rather rest upon definite normative commitments and quasi-empirical assumptions about man and society. Fourthly, I explore the prospects of a procedural approach to questions of distributive justice, and I claim for such an approach a special congruence with basic liberal principles regarding equality and freedom. The substantive result of these arguments is that, within the conceptual framework of the liberal tradition, a just distribution is any that emerges from background economic and political institutions protecting equal freedom. The methodological or metatheoretical result is that, in virtue of the contestability and indeterminacy of the constitutive concepts and regulative principles of political discourse, my arguments fail to be demonstrative, having a persuasive and dialectical rather than a deductive form. If my arguments can be sustained, these are features of the paper it shares with every other essay in social philosophy.

This article unpacks the psychological influence of a Muslim cleric’s power to mobilize for collective action in an experiment in Afghanistan. The same cleric requests contributions for a hospital from day laborers when dressed as a civilian and as a cleric. In Civilian condition, 50 per cent contributed and 17 per cent made large contributions; in Cleric condition, 83 per cent contributed but average giving did not increase as most gave the smallest possible amount. Inclusion of a recitation of Qur’anic verses in the Cleric condition maintains the 82 per cent contribution rate while increasing large contributions to 30 per cent, doubling average contributions. Formal education and subjective perception of poverty appear to drive the opposing effects of cleric and scripture. These results suggest that the power to activate spiritual channels lies in the scripture, not with the human wielding religious authority, who instead appears to induce minimal compliance with Islamic norms of charitable giving.

The principles that we use to evaluate social and political institutions have affinities for one another whose precise nature is hard to establish. We sense that a person who holds a particular principle of freedom, for example, ought for consistency's sake to hold corresponding principles of authority, equality and so forth, but we are hard put to it to explain what ‘corresponding’ means here. My intention in the present paper is to examine what kind of connections may exist between the principle of democracy and various principles of social justice, and in doing so to throw some light on the evolution of liberal thinking from the classical liberalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the modified form of that doctrine that is prevalent in the West today. I shall try to show that changes in the liberal theory of social justice have been intimately connected to changing attitudes towards democracy as a form of government.

This article explores Stanley Baldwin's heresthetic in the 1920s. Faced by the rise of multidimensionality in the issue space of British politics, Baldwin sought initially to bring about a single-issue dimensionality through protection; this was defeated in the 1923 election which brought Labour to office, showing that the electoral system could deliver proportionality and perhaps sustain a three-party system. Baldwin's heresthetic was to recast the Conservative party as the only viable anti-socialist party, and attack the Liberal party as the obstacle to a single-issue dimension and polarized politics. New Conservatism was used to reposition the Conservative party on the class dimension and result was the Conservative landslide of 1924, which structured British politics for the next fifty years. Baldwin institutionalized a class-based two-party system and thereby secured Conservative hegemony.

Voting turnout varies both over time and across space. In Britain there has been a secular trend in the postwar period for decreasing turnout at parliamentary elections (from a high of 84.1 per cent in 1950 to 75.4 percent in 1987, with a low point of 71.8 per cent in 1970). Such temporal variations in turnout are dwarfed in scale, however, by differences in turnout across constituencies at the same election. In the 1970 election, for example, turnout ranged from a low of 44.9 per cent in Stepney to 85.3 per cent in Cornwall North. Though diminished slightly, variation in constituency turnout rates remained significant in the June 1983 election (from a low of 51.8 percent in City of London and Westminster South to a high of 81.1 percent in Leicestershire NW).

Studies of medical politics usually emphasize one of the following types of inquiries: (a) analyzing the internal politics of medical organizations, as with Oliver Garceau's classic study of the American Medical Association; (b) describing and explaining the roles individual physicians play in the political life of the community as voters, officials, or citizen participants in civic life; or, (c) assessing the impact of medical groups and organizations on public policy, particularly health policy. Harry Eckstein's widely known study of the British Medical Association is primarily a study of the third type, a discussion of the channels of influence, the tactics, and the effectiveness of the BMA in shaping public policy to its ends.