Laver is undoubtedly right in suggesting (a) that ideas of rationality are more of a hindrance than a help in explaining electors' behaviour, but (b) that a rational-choice theory of party competition can still be superimposed on an a-rational explanation of voting choice. Since he develops this position through a critique of Robertson's ‘wide’ definition of voter rationality, it is only fair to point out that Robertson's ascription of modified office-seeking to politicians forms the best developed rational – choice theory of party competition. The hypothesis that politicians seek votes by widening their issue-appeals when they think the election is competitive, but stress partisan appeals otherwise, has been validated for British and United States' elections from 1920 to 1974 – a more general and more rigorous check than has been applied to any competing hypothesis. Moreover it has already been incorporated with an a-rational account of voting behaviour in the form Laver advocates. The key elements of this synthesis are:

(1) The location of electors and parties in a party-defined space, i.e. a space where individuals and groups are located in terms of their closeness to the election alternatives (party choices and non-voting). This is analogous to, but quite definitely not, the space produced by party identification, to which there are too many measurement objections.

(2) The division of influences upon voting into predispositions (loyalties, social group traditions, etc.) and cues (current issues, candidates, etc.). Predispositions are associated with electoral stability, i.e. limited and slow movement in the party-defined space. Cues have the potential to produce rapid change and widespread movement of electors, often associated with the appearance of new parties.

(3) Modified office-seeking by politicians. In elections which they expect to be competitive there is thus a premium on the introduction of new cues, while in other elections old partisan appeals will be made to existing predispositions.

In 1953 the King of the Baganda entered into a political confrontation with the British Governor of Uganda, Sir Andrew Cohen. The issues at stake ranged from whether Uganda should be forcibly tied to Kenya and Tanganyika to form an East African federation dominated by white settlers to the more immediate issue concerning the limits of the Governor's authority over the King of the Baganda. The British finally decided to send the Kabaka away into exile in England. There thus started one of the most fascinating wrangles between an African tribal community and the Colonial Office in London. The Kabaka's people were plunged into grief, but not into a spirit of resignation. Debates, petitions, and demonstrations in favour of the Kabaka's return became part of the strategy of his people to get him back to his throne.

At the time of going to press (November 1970) the Journal has proved successful in attracting articles but much less so in getting notes. I am sorry about this because one of the most important functions which we hoped the Journal would serve was that of improving communications within the discipline, especially in Britain. It is for that reason that we should like to give a generous amount of space for notes. But unless an editor is gifted with ESP he can hardly know that someone has had an idea or hit upon some new information suitable for publication in a note.

The literature on the politics of international business has many of the marks of an academic fashion: it continues to grow rapidly from a low point; it has seen the entry of conflicting ideological traditions into its debates; and it contains a stream of polemical works. Despite these indications of intellectual modishness it also represents something more substantial: an attempt to understand very important and puzzling changes which have occurred in the international system in recent years.

How much can a constituency influence the power of its representative in the legislature? This article develops a theoretical model of the constituency basis of legislator influence. The key players in the model are interest groups that may receive targeted transfers from the legislature. The model predicts that the amount of transfers that such groups receive is increasing in their ability to help a party win a legislative seat in the next election. This claim is tested using the changes in Japanese central-to-municipality transfers after a representative passes away while in office. The study finds that electorally ‘strong’ constituency groups do not lose transfers when they lose their representatives. However when ‘weak’ constituency groups lose their representatives, the transfers decrease.

The empirical–normative distinction is taken by many political scientists to be exclusive and fundamental. Yet if the distinction is deep and exclusive then any theory, or any of its components, must be either empirical or normative but not simultaneously both. If this is the case then each theoretical statement will have as its central verb either an ‘is’ or an ‘ought’ (or some equivalent) and no statement taking an ‘ought’ as its central verb will be derivable from any statement taking an ‘is’ as its central verb. Correlatively no purely descriptive statement or conjunction of such statements will warrant any normative or evaluative conclusion.

In his brief note on turnout and marginality in a recent issue of this journal Newton [K. Newton, ‘Turnout and Marginality in Local Elections’, II (1972), 251–5], raises some interesting questions. In our view, however, the boldness of some of his conclusions is not warranted by the evidence he presents or by his supporting argument. In particular, we think three points deserve comment.

In recent decades, citizenship policies in Europe have changed significantly: some governments have introduced restrictive new requirements for citizenship, while others have made citizenship more accessible. What explains this variation? Despite a burgeoning literature on both comparative citizenship and spatial competition among parties, scholarship on this question remains in its infancy and primarily focused on the influence of the far right. Expanding on this growing research, this article argues that citizenship policy change results from electoral competition on both sides of the political spectrum, in conjunction with governments’ ideological orientation. Using new data on citizenship policies across sixteen European countries from 1975 to 2014, the author demonstrates that left-of-center governments facing increasing levels of left party competition are associated with more accessible policy changes, while increasing levels of party competition from the far right yield more restrictive policy changes under not only right-of-center governments, but also centrist and left-of-center governments as well.

A recent paper in this Journal (John Hudson, ‘The Relationship Between Government Popularity and Approval for the Government's Record in the United Kingdom’, XV (1985), 165–86) examined the relationship between government popularity as indicated by the voting intentions series of the opinion polls and approval for the government's record. Among other things it demonstrated that government popularity increased in the quarter prior to an election and declined in the quarter thereafter and that in the two years following the election of a new government the polarization of political allegiances declined (low approval at this time yielded higher levels of government popularity than would otherwise be the case and high levels of approval yielded somewhat lower levels of government support than in other periods). No evidence was found for any other form of electoral cycle of the type suggested in previous studies. The conclusions were based on ordinary least squares estimates and the use of the Cochrane-Orcutt technique, employed because of potential problems with serial correlation in residuals. Whilst this attempt to examine the relationship between these two variables is to be welcomed, especially the theoretical developments hitherto frequently lacking in this area, there are a number of points of concern.

There is now a considerable literature about Scottish politics, most of it concerned with nationalism and devolution, but some of it consisting of institutional and administrative studies. The purpose of this article is to review the main books and articles in the field and to assess their successes and failures in accurately portraying and predicting the recent course of Scottish politics. I shall first consider the theoretical approaches which have been used. I shall then give an account of the principal texts, which will be evaluated with particular attention paid to their explanatory and predictive value. Lastly, some suggestions are made about the lines that future research on Scottish politics might take, in the light of the record so far.

Are voters sophisticated? Rational choice theories of voting assume they are. Students of voting behaviour are more doubtful. This article examines voting in a particularly demanding setting: direct democratic elections in which two competing proposals are on the ballot. It develops a spatial model of voting and proposal qualification with competing proposals. If voters are naïve, then competing proposals can be used to block the direct democratic route to change, but, if voters vote strategically, competing proposals can bring outcomes closer to the median voter. Voting intention data from California polls provide evidence that some votes are cast strategically even in these demanding circumstances. However, the level of strategic voting appears to be affected by the nature of the election campaign.

This comment discusses the impact of social media rule enforcement protocols on research on online data sources. It argues that the conclusions of the article ‘Do Islamic State's Deadly Attacks Disengage, Deter, or Mobilize Supporters?’ concerning the recruitment effects of deadly attacks cannot be assumed to hold when considering the timing of Twitter account suspensions. It highlights four ways in which suspensions can confound evidence of demobilization despite the introduction of control variables and fixed-effects model specifications. All change the composition of the sample in four non-random ways. First, suspending connected Islamic State accounts may result in follower loss. Secondly, Twitter suspension procedures may be tied to account characteristics, such as follower accrual rates. Thirdly, suspended accounts that re-emerge introduce replication bias. Fourthly, account closure may reflect user movement to other platforms in response to changing security environments following deadly attacks. In conclusion, caution is advised when platform-introduced variation risks altering the sample composition in non-random ways.

In a recent Note in this Journal by Gallagher and Unwin, it was stated that the element of randomness due to sampling surplus votes in single transferable vote (STV) elections ‘has long been recognized, but no previous attempt has been made to assess its impact’. This is incorrect. Work done in Australia (and reported in the leading Australian journals in their respective fields) has comprehensively dealt with this problem both in theory and practice. Since STV is practised in national elections in only three countries (Australia, Ireland and Malta, the most populous being Australia) it is surprising that contributors to, and referees of, this Journal should be unaware of such material. It was largely because of the evidence contained in these articles that the Joint Committee on Electoral Reform recommended to the Australian Parliament an amendment to the Electoral Act, to avoid the problems caused by sampling votes, by using the Gregory method of counting them. The Act was amended in this way in 1983.

This Comment proposes a new procedure for selecting a single winner in a multicandidate election. This procedure may be viewed as an offspeing of two other procedures which have been recently analysed in this journal.

Across myriad literatures, it is widely held that expanding economic grievances induce violence, protest, or other forms of backlash. In Latin America, where economic liberalization deepened the downturn of the ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s (and 1990s), reform has been tightly associated with protest and mobilization. At the same time, liberal economic reforms have proven to be remarkably durable, even where long-promised benefits are hard to discern. This article makes the case that economically liberal reforms, despite inducing or deepening severe and sustained economic downturns, have actually undermined political protest. Previous work confirming the conventional wisdom foundered on two main methodological problems. First, selection into economic reform was a consequence of the very economic pain and macroeconomic imbalances it also served to induce. Secondly, because of this, these key (macro)economic characteristics are both pre- and post-treatment. Utilizing a marginal structural model approach to assess the impact of economic liberalization on protest outcomes net of this selection process, and the prior history of treatment, the study finds that painful reform reduces political protest even as it heightens grievances. This depoliticizing dynamic helps to explain the surprising durability of liberal reforms in Latin America.

This article is a contribution to the debate between ‘empirical’ and ‘classical’ theories of democracy. It draws attention to a hitherto neglected aspect of that debate, namely the historical process by which a word like ‘democracy’ gains its commendatory overtones. To call a state a democracy was not always to praise it; the argument here is that an understanding of how this came about can clarify some of the issues involved in considering whether or not states are properly to be called democracies. Although the methods used derive from linguistic philosophy, the purpose is to direct attention towards the values and aspirations of historical agents using the term, rather than to a purely conceptual analysis of it.

This Note is concerned with a neglected aspect of American party politics in the last decade: the sources of development or decay in local and state organizations. In the wake of much research into the transformation of the American electorate during this period, it might seem surprising that changes in organizational politics should have attracted such scant attention. Nevertheless, this is easily explained once it is recalled how virtually all American politics textbooks analyse parties. In the first place, they compartmentalize problems about parties into ones affecting either ‘the party-in-the-electorate’ or ‘the party organization’ or ‘the partyin-government’. One consequence of conceiving parties in this way has been to obscure an obvious fact: party organizations both affect and reflect electoral decomposition, and they partly define the potential for cohesion between a party's public office-holders. When the concept of party is taken to be a ‘confederate’ trinity of concepts, it is only to be expected that rigid boundaries will be established separating what are seen as being the major problem areas of electoral politics from those of organizational and governmental politics. Secondly, party organizations in America are usually dismissed as ‘disorganizations’. They are bodies that perform the minimum necessary electoral functions, but are incapable of becoming anything more and could scarcely be anything less without ceasing to exist. From this perspective both the alleged decline of party machines and the rise of amateur politics are merely interesting phenomena, ones that are unconnected in any important ways with the party-in-the-electorate or the party-in-government.

In a recent article, Alan Ware argues the following:

(1) Manipulation is important to liberals because governments and law courts are justified in overriding some person's wants, when determining his interests, only when his wants have been manipulated (pp. 175, 177). (I shall call this person ‘B’.)

(2) Manipulation only occurs when some specified person (A) is both morally and causally responsible for the change in B's wants (pp. 165–6 and sec. III).

Therefore

(3) Liberals can override B's wants, when determining his interests, only when B's wants have been determined by some specified A who is both morally and causally responsible for the change in B's wants (pp. 176–7).

The energy crisis has, at least for the time being, been replaced in newspaper headlines and public attention by other, more fashionable, and seemingly more pressing preoccupations. In the United States, for example, the dilemmas posed by the shortages and spiralling price increases of the 1970s gave way to different policy problems and the Reagan Administration has all but ceased to consider the energy question important.