Political business cycle theories tend to focus on one policy instrument or macroeconomic lever at a time. Efforts to find empirical evidence of opportunistic business cycles have turned up rather meagre results. We suggest that these facts may be related. If ways of manipulating the economy to win votes are thought of as substitutes, with changing relative costs, one would expect rational policy makers to switch between them in different periods as costs change. We illustrate this argument with a discussion of Russia. In Russia, four nationwide votes have been held since 1993. We deduce the set of policies that a rational, behind-the-scenes strategist – the ‘Chudar’ of the title – would recommend to an incumbent who believes the voters to vote retrospectively. We show that the expectations are borne out closely in the actual macroeconomic data.

Comparative analysis of original survey data from Ghana, Zambia and South Africa is used here to assess the attitudes of African citizens towards democracy. Is democracy valued intrinsically (as an end in itself) or instrumentally (for example, as a means to improving material living standards)? We find as much popular support for democracy in Africa as in other Third Wave regions but less satisfaction with the performance of elected governments. The fact that Africans support democracy while being discontented with its achievements implies a measure of intrinsic support that supersedes instrumental considerations. At the same time, approval of democracy remains performance-driven; but approval hinges less on the government's capacity at delivering economic goods than its ability to guarantee basic political rights. Our findings extend recent arguments about the importance of political goods in regime consolidation and call into question the conventional wisdom that governments in new democracies legitimate themselves mainly through economic performance.

The article analyses the role of the Commission, the Parliament, and the Council in the two main legislative procedures in the European Union: co-operation and co-decision (I). We use the legislative history of some 5,000 parliamentary amendments. These procedures have been the subject of a great deal of theoretical debate. According to conventional wisdom the co-decision procedure increases the powers of the European Parliament. Revisionist approaches, however, suggest that the conditional agenda-setting powers accorded to the Parliament by the co-operation procedure are more important than the veto powers ascribed by co-decision.

The US presidency has been progressively weakened over the past three decades – to the point where it is probably weaker today than at almost any time in the preceding century. The formal powers of the office have been trimmed. Congress, in the absence of Cold War and domestic emergency, has reasserted itself on all scores. The modern revolution in communications has diminished the President's ability to convey his message to his people. Not least, the White House is grossly overstaffed. As a result of these developments, the presidency more resembles Franklin D. Roosevelt's second term, in its worst months, than either his first term or his third, and is weaker than were those of any of his Cold War successors.

Among the many ways in which welfare regimes differ, one is how they articulate the demands of work and welfare. Such a framework not only renders more coherent the familiar ‘three worlds of welfare capitalism’ but also highlights another option: a ‘post-productivist’ welfare regime, which combines generous social benefits and a relaxed attitude towards work requirements, aiming at ‘autonomy’ as its core value. Analysis of OECD data circa 1993 shows that a work–welfare classification successfully locates most of the countries in their traditional regime types. It also shows the Netherlands as an instance of the new regime type, effectively promoting the three key components of post-productivist autonomy: income adequacy, temporal adequacy and minimimal conditionality.

The appearance of a Republican majority among Southern members of the US House of Representatives provides a substantive reason to reconsider political change in the post-war South. And a newly created, merged dataset makes it possible to address the central and recurrent propositions about change in Southern politics in a manner not previously possible. When this is done, four basic contributions are highlighted, each a clear modification of the standard story. The main impetus for partisan change proves to be economic development, and a changing politics of economic interest. The main brake on this impetus proves to be legal desegregation, and a changing politics of racial identity. Several indirect interactions of race and class then enhance the impact of both contributions, while their joint impact is also powerfully shaped by the strategic response of partisan elites: by the appearance of Republican challengers but, especially, by the practical resistance of Democratic incumbents.

Multiculturalism has emerged to challenge liberalism as an ideological solution in coping with ethnic diversity in the United States. This article develops a definition of political multiculturalism which refers to conceptions of identity, community and public policy. It then analyses the 1994 General Social Survey and a 1994 survey of Los Angeles County to assess the contours of mass support and opposition to multiculturalism, testing hypotheses concerning the role of social background, liberalism–conservatism and racial hostility. The main conclusions are that ‘hard’ versions of multiculturalism are rejected in all ethnic groups, that a liberal political self-identification boosts support for multiculturalism, and that racial hostility is a consistent source of antagonism to the new ethnic agenda of multiculturalism. There is strong similarity in the results in both the national and Los Angeles samples.

In the 1950s modernization began to be an important paradigm for Latin American development. Early modernization theory depicted the economies of Latin America as traditional and underdeveloped. The theme of technological progress runs consistently through the modernization model. The purpose of this article is to assess an important question raised by Latin American development studies: that large allocations for the military sector are conducive to economic growth in Latin America. While this modernization literature is somewhat dated, many recent quantitative studies have also shown positive economic benefits from defence spending in the Third World. The added relevance here is that our model captures technological progress. After controlling for technological progress and externalities, our analysis shows that the military portion of budgets in Latin America have actually hindered modernization. We discuss these findings in terms of regime type and levels of US military aid to the region.

The concept of a neighbourhood effect within British voting patterns has largely been discarded, because no data have been available for testing it at the appropriate spatial scales. To undertake such tests, bespoke neighbourhoods have been created around the home of each respondent to the 1997 British Election Study survey in England and Wales, and small-area census data have been assembled for these to depict the socio-economic characteristics of voters' local contexts. Analyses of voting in these small areas, divided into five equal-sized status areas, provides very strong evidence that members of each social class were much more likely to vote Labour than Conservative in the low-status than in the high-status areas. This is entirely consistent with the concept of the neighbourhood effect, but alternative explanations are feasible. The data provide very strong evidence of micro-geographical variations in voting patterns, for which further research is necessary to identify the processes involved.

During the past two decades growing public sectors and simultaneous slow economic growth have highlighted the role of deficit management as a central part of economic policies in modern democracies. Both economists and political scientists have emphasized the role of political institutions in public financial policies. This study contributes to this growing body of research by showing that: (1) during election years public deficits increase because governments refrain from raising taxes; (2) multi-party governments are no more prone to deficit problems than one-party governments but they are more likely to raise both public expenditure and revenue; (3) in achieving deficit reductions, one-party governments with decentralized labour markets emphasize expenditure cuts while multi-party governments with centralized labour markets raise taxes; and (4) as a consequence, the highest tax rates can be found in countries with centralized labour markets, especially if labour market centralization is combined with multi-party government.

A fundamental divide has emerged over how portfolio payoffs are distributed among parties in parliamentary coalitions. On one side lies very strong empirical evidence that the parties in a governing coalition tend to receive portfolios in one-to-one proportion to the amount of legislative support they contribute to the coalition, with perhaps some slight deviations from proportionality coming at the expense of larger parties that lead coalition negotiations. On the other side of the debate lies a stream of formal theories that suggest the opposite – that parties in charge of coalition negotiations ought to be able to take a disproportionately large share of portfolio benefits for themselves. In this article, we address this disjuncture by re-examining the empirical connection between legislative seats and portfolio payoffs with the aid of a new and more extensive dataset, a different method of analysis, and what we see as a more valid operationalization of the dependent variable. This operationalization involves the inclusion, for the first time, of evidence concerning the importance or salience of the portfolios each party receives, as opposed to just their quantity. The article concludes with an assessment of the implications of our findings for the debate over the rewards of coalition membership in parliamentary democracies.

Many scholars and pundits believe that the 1964 presidential election between Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson disrupted the New Deal order and ushered in a sixth party system anchored in part by race issues. But, curiously, the conventional wisdom has not fared well empirically. In this article, I employ disaggregated survey data and novel methodological tools to identify temporal patterns in the relationships between partisanship, New Deal issues and race issues. My conclusions are as follows: (1) the association between race issues and partisanship has switched signs in the South; (2) a racial axis of cleavage has opened up outside the South; (3) the New Deal issue axis has grown in the South; and (4) New Deal issues continue to cleave partisans outside the South.

Comparative studies of electoral institutions have largely neglected a fundamental characteristic of most of the world's electoral systems: malapportionment. This article provides a method for measuring malapportionment in different types of electoral systems, calculates levels of malapportionment in seventy-eight countries, and employs statistical analysis to explore the correlates of malapportionment in both upper and lower chambers. The analysis shows that the use of single-member districts is associated with higher levels of malapportionment in lower chambers and that federalism and country size account for variation in malapportionment in upper chambers. Furthermore, African and especially Latin American countries tend to have electoral systems that are highly malapportioned. The article concludes by proposing a broad, comparative research agenda that focuses on the origins, evolution and consequences of malapportionment.

Two theoretical perspectives on the connection between religion and politics are applied to Great Britain. Data from the 1991 and 1992 waves of the British Household Panel Study, used to conduct multinomial logistic regression analysis, dispute the general consensus that religion has weak or no effects on the voting decisions of British citizens. Religious belonging, behaviour and belief, as well as the religious context of households, continue to influence British voting behaviour. Interaction effects among religious variables and between religious variables and class also operate to influence vote choice. Areas for further research into the religious bases of British electoral behaviour are suggested.

Recent studies of American federalism have emphasized the division of government functions between the national government and the states. But the effects of federalism depend not only on the balance of functional authority but also on the structure of federalist institutions. The institutional structure of Aid to Dependent Children, created by the Social Security Act of 1935, comprised a system of state operational control unhindered by federal supervision. The effect of this federal bargain was the exclusion of African-Americans from welfare benefits in the South. But the federal structure of the programme also shaped implementation in the North, where decentralization allowed its capture by urban machines, which used welfare as a political benefit. New techniques for ecological inference establish these results. Administrative institutions structured the entry of African-Americans into the American welfare state and created the conditions for the welfare ‘crisis’ of the 1960s and later.

The demise of President Clinton's 1993 health care reform plan provides a revealing window into the difficulties and hazards of drawing lessons from complex political events. In an effort to identify the causes and implications of the Clinton plan's failure, students of American health policy have offered a blizzard of alleged historical lessons that purport to explain why the plan, along with its leading alternatives, went down to such a crushing political defeat. On closer inspection, however, many of these putative lessons turn out to be hastily formulated, weakly grounded and prescriptively inadequate. These deficiencies are by no means unique to the commentary on health care reform in the United States. Rather, they reflect general risks of constructing lessons for action or analysis on the basis of just one or a few striking political events. Although these risks are endemic to historical lesson-drawing, they could be reduced by more careful attention to basic rules of historical comparison and counterfactual analysis. They could also be mitigated by a greater awareness of the fundamental uncertainties that, for a variety of reasons, characterize complex political interactions. Viewing outcomes as uncertain does not preclude forecasting and, indeed, may lead to more nuanced and accurate predictions, as well as to a greater appreciation of historical turning points and moments of meaningful strategic choice.

Has regime transition in Russia generated a major cleavage in its elite structure and, if so, what is its nature? The concern of political scientists and reformers is that the presence of communist era elites in the post-Soviet regime, which have retained their core values and recirculated into positions of power, may be a significant obstacle to the consolidation of democracy and a market economy. While the communist system disintegrated with surprising rapidity in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it is not clear whether the norms internalised by elites operating under the ‘command-administrative’ system have changed along with the political system or whether the values and assumptions of the old pattern of government continue to be influential.

What should major parties out of power do to win elections? To answer that question, we need to understand what these parties do to recapture political ascendancy and whether their actual behaviour differs from their optimal behaviour. In this article, we propose a systematic, replicable method of identifying the competitive strategies that American parties out of power have adopted in their pursuit of the presidency. We present a taxonomy of party strategies, which we operationalize by comparison of utility functions for hypothetical voters. Using both directional and proximity models of issue voting, we compute these utility functions for each presidential election from 1852 to 1996, controlling for variables that systematically affect voting, including economic conditions and incumbency. These results suggest that, contrary to the views of many political scientists and party activists, there is no single optimal strategy through which parties out of power can regain it. Rather, several competitive strategies offer similar prospects for electoral success.

Does the voting behaviour of African-American legislators differ significantly from their white colleagues on legislative issues of importance to the black community? This question is important for two reasons. First, the underlying premise behind creating more majority-black legislative districts is that black legislators do a better job of representing the policy interests of black constituents than do white lawmakers.Charles Cameron, David Epstein and Sharyn O'Halloran, ‘Do Majority-Minority Districts Maximize Substantive Black Representation in Congress?’ American Political Science Review, 90 (1996), 794–812; Richard L. Hall and Colleen Heflin, ‘The Importance of Color in Congress: Members and the Representation of Race and Ethnicity in the US House’ (unpublished paper, University of Michigan, 1994); David I. Lublin, The Paradox of Minority Representation: Racial Gerrymandering and Minority Interests in Congress (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Kenny J. Whitby, The Color of Representation: Congressional Behavior and Black Interests (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). If this assumption is incorrect, then as one scholar notes, efforts to advance the substantive interests of African Americans through racial redistricting ‘would appear badly misdirected’Richard L. Hall, Participation in Congress (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 191. Even if the assumption is correct, the question also arises as to whether the importance associated with race is altered when it comes to specific types of legislative issues. Perhaps race matters not only for the policy representation of black interests, but also for whether or not the proposed legislation is disproportionately (dis)advantageous for African Americans compared to the general population.

Countries in the third wave of democratization have introduced competitive elections before establishing basic institutions of a modern state such as the rule of law, institutions of civil society and the accountability of governors. By contrast, countries in the first wave of democratization became modern states before universal suffrage was introduced. Because they have democratized backwards, most third-wave countries are currently incomplete democracies. Incomplete democracies can develop in three different ways: completing democratization; repudiating free elections and turning to an undemocratic alternative; or falling into a low-level equilibrium trap in which the inadequacies of elites are matched by low popular demands and expectations. The significance of incomplete democratization is shown by analysing public opinion survey data from three new democracies varying in their predecessor regimes: the Russian Federation (a totalitarian past); the Czech Republic (both a democratic and a totalitarian past) and the Republic of Korea (formerly an authoritarian military regime).