Parties can elitcit widespread electoral support by making the distribution of prizes or rewards to groups of voters contingent upon electoral support. In addition to altering which party wins, a voter's choice also influences the distribution of prizes. This latter factor, referred to in this article as prize pivotalness, tends to be the dominant influence in vote choice. The desire to win prizes can induce voters to coalesce into a highly supportive group, even if they dislike the party's policies. Characterizing voting equilibria in this framework explains the rationale for the support of patronage parties, variance in voter turnout and the endogenous political polarization of groups in both established and new democracies.

Why has the association between class and party declined over time? Contrary to conventional wisdom that emphasizes the fracturing of social structures and blurring of class boundaries in post-industrial society, it is argued here that class divisions in party preferences are conditioned by the changing shape of the class structure and the effect of parties’ strategic ideological responses to this transformation on the choices facing voters. This thesis is tested using British survey data from 1959 to 2006. We demonstrate that increasing class heterogeneity does not account for the decline of the class–party association, which occurs primarily as a result of ideological convergence between the main parties resulting from New Labour's shift to the centre.

There is general agreement that democratic institutions shape politicians’ incentives to cater to certain constituencies, but which electoral system causes politicians to be most responsive to narrow interests is still debateable. Some argue that plurality electoral rules provide the greatest incentives for politicians to cater to the interests of a few; others say proportional systems prompt politicians to be relatively more prone to narrow interests. This study suggests that both positions can be correct under different conditions. Politicians competing in plurality systems privilege voters with a shared narrow interest when such voters are geographically concentrated, but when they are geographically diffuse, such voters have greater political influence in proportional electoral systems. Government spending on subsidies in fourteen developed countries provides empirical support for this argument.

Group identities that are chosen, rather than inherited, are often associated with cohesive political attitudes and behaviours. Conventional wisdom holds that this distinctiveness is generated by mobilization through processes such as intra-group contact and acculturation. This article identifies another mechanism that can explain cohesiveness: selection. The characteristics that predict whether an individual selects a group identity may themselves determine political attitudes, and thus may account substantially for the political cohesion of those who share the identity. This mechanism is illustrated with analyses of the causes and consequences of the acquisition of lesbian, gay or bisexual identity. Seldom shared by parents and offspring, gay identity provides a rare opportunity to cleanly identify the selection process and its implications for political cohesion.

Civil war dynamics and outcomes are shaped by processes of change largely unaccounted for in current studies. This examination explores how the fragmentation of combatants, especially the weaker actors, affects the duration and outcomes of civil wars. Some results of a computational modelling analysis are consistent with the article's expectations, several of them are counterintuitive. They show that when combatants fragment, the duration of war does not always increase and such wars often end in negotiated agreements, contrasting with the expectations of literatures on spoilers, moderates and extremists. Empirical cases, such as Iraq, Congo, Chechnya and the Sudan, illustrate the importance of fragmentation. This study demonstrates the value of accounting for diverse changes in actors and circumstances when studying the dynamics of war.

A previously overlooked explanation for varying individual levels of political trust is concern about immigration. This article examines the effect of concern about immigration on political trust in Britain, where levels of opposition to immigration have remained high since the 1960s and yet the implications of such opposition are still unclear. Using the pre-election and post-election panel component of the 2005 British Election Study and the 2002–03 European Social Survey, the author shows, after controlling for other predictors of trust in politics, that concerns about the impact of immigration significantly affect political trust. In addition, in 2005 the perception that government had not handled the issue of immigration effectively also significantly affected political trust, with both linear and interactive effects.

This article argues that long periods out of office make parties impatient and more willing to make concessions over portfolio allocation in exchange for participation in a coalition cabinet. Two hypotheses are analysed: on the one hand, being in opposition for a long time should put parties at a disadvantage when bargaining over office payoffs. On the other, this effect should not apply to the formateur party, since formation offers are based on the receivers’ impatience. The empirical results largely support these expectations. Additional evidence of the causality of the main effect is obtained through the use of matching techniques based on the propensity score.

Deliberative Polls simulate public opinion in a given policy domain when members of the relevant mass public are better informed about the issues involved. This article reports on the results of a three-day Deliberative Poll, conducted before the June 2009 European Parliament elections, to evaluate the effects of deliberation on a representative sample of EU citizens. Findings show that, compared with a control group, deliberators changed their views significantly on immigration (becoming more liberal), climate change (becoming greener) and the EU itself (becoming more pro-European). Five different explanations of why deliberation appears to work are tested: sampling bias, increased political knowledge, discussion quality, small group social conformity pressure and the influence of other Deliberative Poll actors, but none is satisfactory.

This article assesses party effects on the performance of public services. A policy-seeking model, hypothesizing that left and right party control affects performance, and an instrumental model, where all parties strive to raise performance, are presented. The framework also suggests a mixed model in which party effects are contingent on party competition, with parties raising performance as increasing party competition places their control of government at increasing risk. These models are tested against panel data on English local governments’ party control and public service performance. The results question the traditional account of left and right parties, showing a positive relationship between right-wing party control and performance that is contingent on a sufficiently high level of party competition. The findings suggest left–right models should be reframed for the contemporary context.

Why and how do international courts justify decisions with citations to their own case law? We argue that, like domestic review courts, international courts use precedent at least in part to convince ‘lower’ (domestic) courts of the legitimacy of judgements. Several empirical observations are consistent with this view, which are examined through a network analysis of European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) citations. First, the Court cites precedent based on the legal issues in the case, not the country of origin. Second, the Court is more careful to embed judgements in its existing case law when the expected value of persuading domestic judges is highest. These findings contribute to a developing literature that suggests international and domestic review courts develop their authority in similar ways.

This article analyses the process of party constitutionalization in post-war Europe. It explores the temporal patterns of party constitutionalization and reveals their connection with moments of fundamental institutional restructuring. It discusses the different modes of party constitutionalization, and addresses what these convey about the underlying conceptions of party democracy. It argues that the constitutional codification of political parties has consolidated the empirical reality of modern party government as well as its normative foundations of modern party government, thereby transforming political parties from socio-political organizations into integral units of the democratic state. Finally, it suggests that the constitutionalization of the democratic importance of political parties might reflect an attempt to legitimize their existence in the face of their weakening as agents of democratic representation.

It is widely assumed that citizens are myopic, weighing policies’ short-term consequences more heavily than long-term outcomes. Yet no study of public opinion has directly examined whether or why the timing of future policy consequences shapes citizens’ policy attitudes. This article reports the results of an experiment designed to test for the presence and mechanisms of time-discounting in the mass public. The analysis yields evidence of significant discounting of delayed policy benefits and indicates that citizens’ policy bias towards the present derives in large part from uncertainty about the long term: uncertainty about both long-run processes of policy causation and long-term political commitments. There is, in contrast, little evidence that positive time-preferences (impatience) or consumption-smoothing are significant sources of myopic policy attitudes.

Two dominant arguments within international political theory, arguments from humanity and arguments from justice, can be distinguished along the lines of the well-known distinction between omissions and actions, respectively. The discussion in this paper shows that people in general are psychologically biased towards thinking that omissions producing harm are less morally grave than actions producing equivalent harm. It also canvasses evidence suggesting that greater moral gravity correlates with heightened guilt, and that heightened guilt is more likely to lead to action that would alleviate it, i.e. remedial or compensatory action. For those reasons, it is suggested that we should expect arguments from justice, which track actions, to be a more feasible means to the desired outcome of (local commitment to) global justice than arguments from humanity, which track omissions.

This study reassesses the ability of the mass media to influence voter opinions directly. Combining data on media content with individuals’ assessments of British political parties during the 2005 general election campaign allows a test of newspapers’ persuasive influence in a way previously considered a ‘virtual impossibility’. Utilizing repeated measures from the 2005 BES campaign panel, multilevel regression analysis reveals significant impact of partisan slant not just on the evaluation of the party mentioned but also on evaluations of its competitor(s). The strongest evidence of direct media persuasion is provided by the finding that variation in slant over the campaign drives how undecided voters evaluate the incumbent government party, even when controlling for a newspaper's average partisan slant.

A debate, fanned by the experiences of South Korea and Taiwan, persists over how economic growth leads to democratization. This article provides a theoretical model showing that economic downturns lead to democratization and evaluates the conclusion systematically with data from South Korea and Taiwan. The model and results corroborate the hypothesis that economic downturns motivate government and non-government actors to pursue political reforms and democratization and highlight several contributions. They show democratization as the outcome of strategic responses pursued under weak economic conditions. Further, the findings are robust to alternative specifications of democratization. The results also bring empirics into line with theoretical expectations about democratization while simultaneously revealing that it is not a panacea for lack of support.

Two leaders engaged in international co-operation must each build trust by credibly signalling that they will not exploit the other by defecting at the implementation stage. Previous research does not reveal the difficulty and cost of such international reassurance. The role that costly adjustments by markets play in international reassurance is analysed, showing that fully efficient information revelation can be achieved when market actors under intense competitive pressures undergo sufficiently costly adjustments in expectation of international co-operation. ‘Nice’ leaders can reveal their true preferences simply by saying they intend to co-operate, because ‘mean’ leaders are unwilling to mislead market actors into undergoing futile costly adjustments. However, market imperfections prevent full information revelation unless market actors prefer international co-operation to the status quo.

This article examines the impact of values on a key phenomenon of modern politics: non-violent protest. Previous studies have examined only the individual-level effects of values. Studying in addition the ‘ecological’ effects – how the social prevalence of values affects protest – generates new insights. Focusing on ‘emancipative values’, two ecological effects are shown: (1) the prevalence of emancipative values lifts people's protest above the level that their own emancipative values suggest (elevator effect); (2) the prevalence of these values enhances the impact of people's own emancipative values on protest (amplifier effect). We conclude that examining values in models of protest (and possibly of other activities), not only as individual attributes but also as ecological properties, gives ‘culture’ its full weight in explaining behaviour.