The so-called cube ‘law’ has become ‘part of the political folklore of Great Britain’. Indeed it seems also to have passed into the general folklore of political science, having been applied to electoral systems having single-member constituencies contested by two major parties in the United States, New Zealand, Canada, Australia and South Africa.

Paul Abramson's Note (this Journal, p. 505) is an interesting exercise in comparative data reanalysis. But we do not believe that it effectively refutes our argument that partisan weakening in Britain has been caused by ‘period’ rather than ‘generational’ factors.

For more than a decade natural scientists have been prominent amongst dissenting Soviet intellectuals. Much effort is expended in the Soviet Union in attempting to stimulate commitment to official values amongst the great mass of the population, and only a tiny minority of Soviet citizens is prepared publicly to question the party's image of Soviet society. Nevertheless amongst the scientific intelligentsia signs of widespread alienation are clear. Even when they fall far short of public dissent, natural scientists are constantly criticized in the party journals for a lack of adequate partiinost' or party spirit.

This article investigates the hitherto under-examined relations between affirmative action, paternalism, and respect. We provide three main arguments. First, we argue that affirmative action initiatives are typically paternalistic and thus disrespectful towards intended beneficiaries who oppose them. Second, we argue that not introducing affirmative action can be disrespectful towards these potential beneficiaries because such inaction involves a failure to recognize their moral worth adequately. Third, we argue that the paternalistic disrespect involved in affirmative action is alleviated when the potential beneficiaries' preferences against such initiatives are adaptive. We conclude that, although there is a relevant sense in which paternalistic affirmative action is disrespectful, it may be more disrespectful not to pursue such policies.

One of the most profound changes in the interest group sector over the last fifty years is interest groups’ increasing need to attract financial donors in order to assure long-term sustainability. Groups’ growing propensity to attract ‘chequebook’ members is thought to compromise their ability to foster the personal involvement of individuals in their communities. Yet we know very little about the consequences of these dynamics for the strength of the interest group sector in American communities. This widespread macro-level analysis of the interest group sector indicates that human capital is more important than financial capital for the strength of a community's interest group sector. Financially disadvantaged communities may still enjoy the benefits of a strong interest group sector provided they have a citizenry equipped with time to donate.

Many fiscal federal scholars argue, often implicitly, that transfer dependence generally bolsters subnational creditworthiness by signalling a higher likelihood of national bailouts for distressed governments. This article argues that dependence fails to bestow general benefits on local borrowers because it suggests an inability to generate additional revenues in the event of fiscal distress, and because this inability does not, contrary to the expectations of many, necessarily translate into higher bailout expectations. Ultimately it is the nature, not the level, of transfers that affects local creditworthiness, whether through bailout or non-bailout channels. Stable and predictable payments, including robust equalization systems, support local creditworthiness, while volatile and unpredictable transfers do not. The article supports these arguments with a review of documents issued by the major international credit rating agencies and cross-national statistical analyses of bailout probabilities and standalone credit ratings issued by Moody’s Investors Service. It also discusses the implications of the findings for work on the fiscal discipline of subnational governments.

Legislators are likely to substantively represent groups to which they belong or with which they have some particular affinity. However, there are electoral systems that diminish this tendency and systems that promote it. More precisely, as district magnitude increases, representatives will be freer to focus on issues that are not decisive of vote choice for most voters. In this letter, we use a case of electoral reform and the nature of the post-reform chamber (Chile's Chamber of Deputies) to test whether increasing district magnitude makes it more likely that women will focus on women's issues. A series of tests on multiple sets of observations show robust results for the conclusion that as the number of candidates elected in a district increases, elected women become more likely to pursue women's issues.

A growing body of research demonstrates that political involvement by Christian religious leaders can undermine the religion's social influence. Do these negative consequences of politicization also extend to Islam? Contrary to scholarly and popular accounts that describe Islam as inherently political, we argue that Muslim religious leaders will weaken their religious authority when they engage with politics. We test this argument with a conjoint experiment implemented on a survey of more than 12,000 Sunni Muslim respondents in eleven Middle Eastern countries. The results show that connections to political issues or politically active religious movements decrease the perceived religious authority of Muslim clerics, including among respondents who approve of the clerics' political views. The article's findings shed light on how Muslims in the Middle East understand the relationship between religion and politics, and they contribute more broadly to understanding of how politicized religious leaders can have negative repercussions for religion.

We argue that policy expertise constrains the ability of politicians to act on voter preferences. Representatives with more knowledge and experience in a given domain have more confidence in their own issue-specific positions. Enhanced confidence, in turn, may lead politicians to discount opinions they disagree with, producing a distorted image of the electorate. Two experiments with Swedish politicians support this argument. First, officials are more likely to dismiss appeals from voters in their areas of expertise and less likely to accept that opposing views may represent the majority opinion. Consistent with the proposed mechanism, in a second experiment we show that inducing perceptions of expertise increases self-confidence. The results suggest that representatives with more specialized knowledge in a given area may be less capable of acting as delegates in that domain. The study provides a novel explanation for variations in policy responsiveness.

Democracies generate norms prescribing what behaviours and preferences are deemed acceptable. But what keeps these political norms in place? We expect that they are enforced by observers who disapprove of norm-breaching behaviour and are willing to apply sanctions that make it socially costly. We test this expectation with a survey in Spain, where respondents were shown pictures of individuals with different political views. We focus on norms against radical-right preferences, one of the most established political norms. In line with our expectations, individuals disapprove of radical-right preferences more than other political preferences. This makes them more likely to socially sanction those preferences, which they do mainly in indirect ways that do not force interaction with the person breaching the norm. We provide evidence on the individual-level predictors of norm enforcement. Our findings highlight the micro-level mechanisms by which social influence affects the behaviour of democratic citizens.

How do politicians with coercive linkages govern? This article relies on original data on militia-linked mayors in Colombia from 1988 to 2015 derived from 42,000 pages of Colombian Supreme Court sentencing documents. Using a regression discontinuity design, it examines the governance records of militia-tied mayors who won the elections by a narrow margin. It finds that being ruled by a militia-linked mayor significantly reduces levels of insecurity and crime, but has pernicious effects on the provision of other public goods, especially education. I theorize that these politicians' (perverse) comparative advantage on security, combined with their crowding out of social spending, engenders these outcomes. I evaluate these mechanisms with data on the nature of paramilitary–mayor alliances, police reinforcements, municipal budgets, politicians' Twitter feeds, and in-depth interviews with paramilitary commanders and politicians. The article has implications for understanding the effects of voting for politicians with coercive ties on the quality of governance and democracy.

Local Conservative associations have traditionally run their affairs independently and have successfully resisted interference from Central Office. Far from constituting a ‘centralized machine’ (as authors such as McKenzie, Beer and Crossman have maintained) the main feature of Conservative organization has been its decentralized, voluntary character. Nowhere has resistance to control by the party headquarters been more determined than in the major provincial cities. Here, confederations of city constituency associations, financed mainly by local business interests, have virtually excluded the Central Office area agents from participating in constituency organization. Attempts by successive national party chairmen to bring the city associations into the Central Office orbit have regularly been rebuffed. Consequently, Central Office's recent success in integrating the city associations into its area office organization marks the end of an era. It raises the question of whether the Conservative organization is at last becoming as centralized as many commentators have long supposed it to be. This note describes recent developments and assesses their significance.

In recent years the discipline of political science has focused much of its attention on political parties. In 1967 Professor L. D. Epstein noted ‘Writing about Political Parties in Western democracies is not a novel enterprise. It is several decades since political scientists, once preoccupied with constitutional forms, ceased to neglect parties’. In Britain, however, there remains much uncharted territory which requires detailed exploration by the political scientist. Much of the research carried out in Britain has concentrated on one of two levels of analysis, either national or local. Basic information about the intermediate branch of party organization, the regional and area structures, is lacking. As Professor J. Blondel has noted: ‘The eleven regions of the Labour Party and the twelve areas of the Conservative Party are rarely examined’. There is, therefore, a gap in our knowledge of political parties in Britain, a gap which Professor R. T. McKenzie readily acknowledged in his own study of British parties.

The study of urban politics has undergone considerable change over the last ten to fifteen years. During the 1950s and 1960s the ‘community power’ approach became well-established in American political science as the dominant form of analysis of local politics, although it was less marked in Britain. In contrast, and in part as reaction, to the ecological determinism and naturalistic explanation of the Chicago school in urban sociology that preceded it, power and decision making were seen as key features in explaining urban processes. Intentionality and human action were afforded explanatory dominance. In turn, however, this approach came under sustained critique as part of the ‘anti-behaviouralist’ or structuralist resurgence in Western social science in the 1970s which attributed causal primacy to structural determination and system contradictions, not actors or voluntarism. Yet structural approaches face methodological problems of functionalism and circularity, and in constructing tests of empirical adequacy and falsifiability. Some of the more interesting, recently-published work in urban politics seeks to maintain a non-behaviouralist, more structuralist interpretation of local policy outcomes within empirically-grounded analyses that allow space for politics and power. Dunleavy, Friedland and Saunders provided three of the best examples of such an approach, and have each sought to understand either a particular policy, or a set of policies in a particular locality, through frameworks which in varying degrees incorporate structuralist assumptions. They seek to apply objective cost-benefit analyses of public policies as empirically refutable hypotheses and accept the necessity of objective criteria for assessing whether or not interests have been met in any given situation. This article examines the extent to which these selected ‘non-behaviouralist’ interpretations of urban politics have successfully been applied to empirical contexts. A central element in this examination is a consideration of the way in which business is seen as a major influence in local politics.

The history of the Supreme Court tends to be divided into historical slices coterminous with individual Chief Justiceships. One speaks of the Taft Court, the Hughes Court, the Stone Court, the Vinson Court, and the Warren Court. Behind these titles lies the implication that they can be differentiated in terms of something more than merely temporal variation; the Chief Justice himself must be the catalyst which is supposed to make each era special. But, in what senses can a period of Supreme Court history be thought of as specifically associated with its current Chief Justice?

The aim of this Note is to examine recent local authority expenditure cuts in relation to Saunders's dual-state thesis. Saunders's model has important implications for the long-standing debates on local autonomy from central government and on the party effect in expenditure patterns. The extent to which local political control is a mediating factor in the nature and severity of spending cuts is analysed with reference to a case study of two districts in the Greater Manchester area.

In Volume 1 Part 4, the figures on page 474 have been incorrectly printed. This leaf is offered as a replacement.