bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Economic Theories of Politics and Public Finance
Authors: Toye J. F. J.
Published: January 2009

Over the last twenty years a succession of theories of politics has appeared of which the hallmark is an attempt to adapt utilitarian marginalism to the purpose of political explanation. Theories in this intellectual style may be designated ‘economic’ theories of politics since utilitarian marginalism was first developed in the context of economic theorizing; its invention was indeed the birth of a notion of ‘economies’ as distinct from the ‘political economy’of Smith, Ricardo, Marx and J. S. Mill. Anthony Downs pioneered the economic approach with his bravura economic theory of democracy in 1957, which remains probably the best-known example of it. Many of the fundamental objections to economic theories of politics were explored by C. B. Macpherson in 1961 in a brief but penetrating essay; but Macpherson's essay was not decisive in checking the popularity of such theories. Despite his criticism, they have continued to proliferate.
‘The Politics of Public Expenditure’ by Rudoĺf Klein: A Comment
Authors: Kogan Maurice
Published: January 2009

Rudolf Klein's article not only brings together many current theories of policy analysis and of public expenditure but also creates the anxiety that the use of phrases such as ‘public expenditure’ might turn what are obstinate and worthwhile issues into abstractions. Klein's opening statement that ‘public expenditure is quite the most visible and quantifiable measure of government activity’ gives us due warning that public expenditure is being regarded as an independent category, the characteristics and behaviour of which are capable of definition and analysis in their own right. But public expenditure is meaningful only if it is treated as a summation of multiple decisions (and on one dimension only) and of institutional relationships.
Convention Quotas and Communal Representation
Authors: Goodin Robert E.
Published: January 2009

The 1972 Democratic National Convention operated under much-heralded reform rules requiring, in effect, ‘quotas’ of blacks, women and youth in state delegations. The goal of these reforms obviously relates to deep normative concerns – improving representation, ‘democratizing’ conventions, etc. Their success in realizing this goal is obviously an empirical question, and it is one which has attracted considerable academic attention. Among the myriad of commentators, Jeane Kirkpatrick boasts the richest data base and the most subtle theoretical model. Her conclusion is that the reforms were largely a failure, insofar as they did little to improve the representation of Democratic party opinion by Convention delegates. On that point the data speak for themselves. The question to be raised here is simply whether these data really speak to the full range of normative concerns that might motivate quota requirements. This comment will discuss two other goals that convention quotas might serve, quite apart from their impact on representation of opinion.
Acceptable Inequalities
Authors: Mansbridge Jane J.
Published: January 2009

The immodest purpose of this essay is to analyze the traditional arguments for political equality, and, with the help of a case study, to determine when these arguments apply and when they do not.
From Life Space to Polling Place: The Relevance of Personal Concerns for Voting Behavior
Authors: Brody Richard A. , Sniderman Paul M.
Published: January 2009

To live is to have problems. However the country as a whole fares, the individual has bills to pay, work to do, children to worry about – to mention only a few of the commonplace problems that people face in their daily lives. Commonplace or not, these are problems that people must wrestle with. They are immediate, inescapable, and serious, far more so for most than the ‘large’ issues facing the country. Students of voting have long suspected that such problems may influence political choices, but key questions remain unanswered. Which personal problems are taken to be political and which non-political? Do personal problems have an impact on voting behavior only if they are taken to be political? When and how do personal problems become translated into political choices? In this paper we shall address such questions as these.
Patterns of Expenditure Development in Sweden, Norway and Denmark
Authors: Peters B. Guy , Klingman David
Published: January 2009

It is probably accurate to say that one of the major growth areas in political science over the last decade has been the analysis of public expenditures. Beginning with what now seems prehistory and the original Dawson and Robinson article, a growing number of books and articles has sought to explain the growth of public expenditures, especially of expenditures on the social services. Despite the numerous criticisms of these studies, they have added immensely to the discipline's knowledge of public policy processes, if for no other reason than that the critics themselves have been forced to engage in the types of research that they believed were really necessary to determine the causes, processes and consequences of expenditure decisions.
Newtonian Mechanics and Predictive Election Theory
Authors: Farlie Dennis , Budge Ian
Published: January 2009

Analyses of elections, whether academic or journalistic, are permeated by terms drawn from physics. We discuss the inertia or volatility of an electorate, the momentum of a campaign, pressures and cross-pressures, party actions and reactions, the impact of short-term forces. Although imprecise, these borrowings convey genuine information about the characteristics of an election, and they would be difficult to replace.
A Reply to K. I. Macdonald
Authors: Lukes Steven
Published: January 2009

K. I. Macdonald (this Journal, vi (1976), 380–2) asserts, first, that my claim that the concept of power is essentially contested is ‘technically mistaken’ and, second, that the mistake is ‘substantively pernicious’. Unfortunately, he does not succeed in showing what the mistake is – nor indeed what makes it ‘technical’, rather than just a mistake. He does not even try to show why this alleged mistake is pernicious – let alone substantively so.
Setting the Agenda in the U.S. Senate: A Theory of Problem Selection
Authors: Walker Jack L.
Published: January 2009

The choice of issues for debate is of central importance in any political system. By deciding what they will decide about, legislators also establish the terms and the most prominent participants in debate and, ultimately, the distribution of power and influence in the society. As Schattschneider has pointed out:

Political conflict is not like an intercollegiate debate in which the opponents agree in advance on a definition of the issues. As a matter of fact, the definition of the alternatives is the supreme instrument of power; the antagonists can rarely agree on what the issues are because power is involved in the definition. He who determines what politics is about runs the country, because the definition of alternatives is the choice of conflicts, and the choice of conflicts allocates power.
Political Recruitment and Drop-Out: The Netherlands and the United States
Authors: Farlie Dennis , Budge Ian , Irwin Galen
Published: January 2009

The analysis described below forms an extension to the Netherlands and the United States of research on British political recruitment that has already been reported in this Journal. The object of the research is to make quantitative estimates of the influence of personal characteristics in pushing the socially better endowed into active politics, and particularly to measure the extent to which advantages on some characteristics make up for disadvantages on others. These processes are of interest because they determine to a large extent what type of persons will emerge as elective politicians, with possible consequences for agenda-setting and policy-making.
Popular Evaluation of German Chancellors, 1950–66: An Investigation of the Chancellor Effect
Authors: Meszaros J. William
Published: January 2009

The first twenty years of the Federal Republic of Germany afford a particularly interesting context for the study of popular evaluation of executive figures. The importance of popular perceptions of executive political authorities has been dramatically demonstrated in contemporary German political history. The role of attitudes toward the leading executive figure in the current democratic regime has been the subject of much speculation. A well-established view suggests that the étatist and authoritarian attitudes that supported previous regimes have been very important in establishing the new one. Most important in this regard is the part played by Konrad Adenauer, the first Chancellor of the Federal Republic, in shaping party and electoral politics in the new regime's early years.
Research on the English Judicial Process
Authors: Baum Lawrence
Published: January 2009

This article is an examination of the English judicial process as a subject of research. My perspective is that of a political scientist whose major field of interest has been American judicial politics. If my subject were the House of Commons or party politics in Britain, it would be appropriate to focus my examination upon an evaluation of the relevant political science literature. But political scientists thus far have virtually ignored the English courts as an object of study; the limited scholarship done on this set of institutions has been contributed chiefly by social scientists in other fields and by legal scholars. For this reason, my primary goal is not to assess the existing literature on the judicial process. Rather, I wish to communicate this literature to political scientists and to suggest directions that they might take in studying the judicial branch.
Measurements of Backbench Attitudes by Guttman Scaling of Early Day Motions: A Pilot Study, Labour, 1968–69
Authors: Leece John , Berrington Hugh
Published: January 2009

This research is addressed to the problem of constructing scales of political attitudes within the British House of Commons. Our aim, broadly, is to produce measures that will enable us to distinguish between backbenchers of the same party – for example, a Right-Left scale applied to the Labour party – and to relate these data to biographical variables and other measures of political behaviour. Moreover, by observing the relationship between Members' positions on different scales, and changes over time, we hope to learn more about the belief-systems of Members of Parliament.
Affect and Mass Society: Some Californian Data
Authors: Groth Alexander J. , Schutz Howard G. , Blakely Edward J.
Published: January 2009

This paper is based upon data collected in a survey of public attitudes toward the energy crisis, and toward U.S. energy policies, in several California communities in mid-1975. The authors believe that some of the information obtained in this survey makes possible a significant, though by no means conclusive and exhaustive, comparison of two models of civic ‘affect’. Following the usage of Almond and Verba, we take ‘affect’ to be ‘feelings about the political system, its roles, personnel, and performance’.
Why Businessmen Distrust Their State: The Political Consciousness of American Corporate Executives
Authors: Vogel David
Published: January 2009

The most characteristic, distinctive and persistent belief of American corporate executives is an underlying suspicion and mistrust of government. It distinguishes the American business community not only from every other bourgeoisie, but also from every other legitimate organization of political interests in American society. The scope of direct and indirect government support for corporate growth and profits does not belie this contention; on the contrary, it makes it all the more paradoxical. Why should the group in American society that has disproportionately benefited from governmental policies continue to remain distrustful of political intervention in the economy?

It is of course possible to attribute at least some of the public distrust of government by members of the business community to political posturing; continually to denounce government is a way of assuring that the policies of government reflect corporate priorities. Wilbert E. Moore suggests:

When businessmen did, and do, make extreme, ideologically oriented pronouncements on freedom from political interference, it is surely fair to say that they do not mean to be taken with total seriousness…Often, in fact, the sayers and the doers are not the same people… [T]he extreme spokesmen of business ideology are more often lawyers and public relations men than they are practicing executives…These are generally men, who like professors and Congressmen, ‘have never met a payroll’.
Critical Elections, Congressional Parties and Clusters of Policy Changes
Authors: Brady David W.
Published: January 2009

Profound changes in American public policy have occurred only rarely and have been associated with ‘critical’ or ‘realigning’ elections in which ‘more or less profound readjustments occur in the relations of power within the community’. Since the appearance of V. O. Key's seminal articles on critical elections, an increasing number of political scientists have attributed great importance to such elections. Schatt-schneider views the structure of politics brought into being by critical elections as systems of action. Thus, during realignments, not only voting behavior but institutional roles and policy outputs undergo substantial change. Burnham, perhaps the most important analyst of realignment patterns, alleges the existence of an intimate relationship between realigning elections and ‘transformations in large clusters of policy’.
Communist Systems and the ‘Iron Law of Pluralism’
Authors: White Stephen
Published: January 2009

It is now nearly twenty years since Daniel Bell despatched ten theories ‘in search of Soviet reality’. Each of these theories represented, ‘despite some shading or overlap,… a coherent judgement of Soviet behavior’. Considering them side by side, Bell thought, would make it easier to identify their respective merits and shortcomings; and it should also make clear which had ‘“stood up” in explaining events’, and which had not. Bell himself refrained from judgement on this point. In retrospect, however, it seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that none of the theories that Bell identified – nor indeed any of those that have joined them in more recent years – has yet come close to success. Rather, as the scholarly literature groans under the weight of a steadily-accumulating load of models and paradigms, each one more abstruse and more removed from reality than its predecessor, there must be many who would be inclined to agree with Alfred Hirschman that the continued search for conceptual innovation may well have become a positive ‘hindrance to understanding’.
Back to the Barre, Brian Barry
Authors: Almond Gabriel A. , Flanagan Scott C.
Published: January 2009

Brian Barry has a critical talent of a high order. He often executes elegant ballet steps which take the breath away; but occasionally he trips over his own feet and falls into the orchestra pit, making a dreadful racket. His long review article on Crisis, Choice, and Change which appeared in the January and April (1977) numbers of this Journal is one of these unfortunate accidents.
On the Political Economy of Long-Run Trends in Strike Activity
Authors: Hibbs Douglas A.
Published: January 2009

Outbursts of strike activity in many industrial societies during the late 1960s and early 1970s focused considerable attention on relations between labour, capital and the state in advanced capitalist systems and led to many inquiries into the sources of the ‘new’ labour militancy. The events of May–June 1968 in France, the ‘hot autumn’ of 1969 in Italy, and the nation-wide strikes of the coal miners in 1972 and 1974 in the United Kingdom (the first since the great General Strike of 1926) are the most dramatic examples, but sharp upturns in strike activity in Canada (1969, 1972), Finland (1971), the United States (1970) and smaller strike waves in other nations also contributed to the surge of interest in labour discontent.
Electoral Change in Britain: The Campaign Reassessed
Authors: Mughan Anthony
Published: January 2009

Studies of patterns of voting change during the election campaigns of the 1940s and 1950s generally arrived at two conclusions: (1) the electorate is highly stable in its voting choice so that few votes change over the course of the campaign; and (2) those votes that do change are more or less random in their net impact on the distribution of party support. Butler and Stokes' more recent study of the national campaigns in 1964 and 1966 showed that the British electorate continued to be highly stable in its voting choice and that the most that could be said about the overall pattern of voting change was that it marginally benefited the opposition rather than government party. The authors then gave no further consideration to the campaign period and, emphasizing its practical and theoretical lack of importance, dropped the section on the national campaign from the second edition of their book. Thus, the campaign continued to be most noteworthy for the stability of aggregate voting patterns and was neglected in more recent studies of electoral change.
On Defining Voter Rationality and Deducing a Model of Party Competition
Authors: Laver Michael
Published: January 2009

One problem to which we must address ourselves before constructing any deductive model of voting behaviour is why people vote at all. On the face of it at least, this seems to be a stumbling block, given the theoretical problem that, compared with the costs of voting, the benefits to be expected are very small; and given the empirical problem that large numbers of people turn out to vote when they cannot possibly hope to influence the result, while others stay at home on the few occasions when a close result is expected. The most common attempted solution amounts to saying that people like voting, or at least that they feel guilty about not voting. This solution can be traced from the early work of Downs to the more recent and rigorous analyses of Riker and Ordeshook. Motives such as citizen duty, the satisfaction of belonging to a democracy, the satisfaction of supporting a particular party, and so on, are ascribed to voters. Each voter is then assumed to conduct a ‘calculus of voting’ in which he or she weighs up these benefits against any inconvenience involved in going to the polling booth. For many the net effect will be positive and voting will therefore be rational.
The Economic Policies of European Governments, Part I: Monetary Policy
Authors: Cowart Andrew T.
Published: January 2009

Rapidly changing economic conditions and the acceptance by governments of the responsibility for those conditions have together provided one of the most volatile and perplexing policy contexts for governments in the post-war era. The volatility of economic policy is inherent in its potential for change over the short run. It can take several years before changes are approved and implemented in order to deal with failures in social welfare programmes, transport services, or redistributive taxation provisions. In contrast, the instruments of economic policy may be altered on a daily, monthly, quarterly or yearly basis as conditions change.
The Persistence of Political Orientations: An Over-Time Analysis of Two Generations
Authors: Jennings M. Kent , Niemi Richard G.
Published: January 2009

In this article we take advantage of a two-wave panel study of two biologically-linked generations in order to examine some prevalent conceptions about the persistence of political orientations. The nature of the study design, outlined below, is particularly suited to addressing questions about individual-level continuities as they are affected by life-cycle, generational and historical processes. Our present discussion is geared to the individual level rather than to the aggregate level of continuity and change. Although many of the terms used are the same, and although it is difficult to discuss the one level without recourse to the other, the purposes and the approaches are fundamentally different. Aggregate analysis concerns itself with net movements and with the directionality of these movements. Individual analysis, as used here, concerns itself with the magnitudes of individual-level movements and has only a secondary interest in the direction of these movements.
On Liberty, Liberalism and Essential Contestability
Authors: Gray John
Published: January 2009

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.
Sejm Elections in Communist Poland: An Overview and a Reappraisal
Authors: Sakwa George , Crouch Martin
Published: January 2009

Traditionally, and for some good reasons, elections in Communist one-party states have been treated as relatively unimportant phenomena, essentially ‘massive demonstrations of ritualized affirmation’, or simply a test of the Communist party's mobilization powers. The absence of competing political parties and consequently opposing goals and programmes does clearly mean that such elections are very different from those in liberal democratic states. They do not and cannot, for example, resolve the often crucial question of political succession.
The Economic Policies of European Governments, Part II: Fiscal Policy
Authors: Cowart Andrew T.
Published: January 2009

While political controversies over the legitimacy of monetary interventions in Western economies were settled decades ago, the widespread acceptance of fiscal interventions as appropriate tools for achieving economic stability and economic growth is much more recent and much less pervasive. Even the pre-Depression classical economic model specified a role for government monetary policy: ensuring an appropriate stock of money. While institutions of monetary policy making now enjoy both a long history of utilizing monetary policy instruments and a low level of ideological conflict over the legitimacy of those interventions, the institutions of fiscal policy making enjoy neither. Though some governments had begun to practise fiscal interventions before the Second World War, the widespread use of such instruments is, by and large, a post-war phenomenon. Thus, governments have generally had less experience in learning ‘how to do it’.
Class and the Vote Before the First World War
Authors: Wald Kenneth D.
Published: January 2009

Pulzer's dictum – ‘Class is the basis of British party politics, all else is embellishment and detail’ – expresses a consensus about the social basis of partisan conflict in contemporary Britain. Although there are exceptions and important qualifications, recent research confirms the conclusion that social class is the foremost influence on partisan loyalties and a potent factor in electoral behaviour.
Coalitions and Government Formation: An Empirically Relevant Theory
Authors: Budge Ian , Herman Valentine
Published: January 2009

Traditional theories of government coalition formation concentrate on formal criteria inspired by – if not directly drawn from – game theory. One such criterion is that the coalition which forms must be winning; another is that it should have no surplus members without whom it would still be winning, i.e. it should be minimal; and a third is that the number of parties should be as few as possible. The closest that such theories come to considering the substantive issues affecting the formation of coalitions in the real world is their focus on reducing the ideological diversity of parties within the government. On many occasions, however, such ideological considerations receive negligible attention from politicians, who often ignore size factors altogether.
Strikers and the State: A Comment
Authors: Shalev Michael
Published: January 2009

Douglas Hibbs's article, ‘On the Political Economy of Long-Run Trends in Strike Activity’, is the most recent of several comparative studies of the strike which explicitly reject the narrowly institutional approach characteristic of the ‘industrial relations school’ in favour of a broader socio-political perspective. These new approaches have the advantage of reminding us that industrial conflict is something more than an accident in the collectivebargaining process. Rather, the strike constitutes one working-class strategy – political action is another – in the acting out of class conflict in a capitalist society.
The Used Vote and Electoral Outcomes: The Irish General Election of 1977
Authors: Cohan A. S. , Mckinlay R. D.
Published: January 2009

In an earlier article in this Journal (‘The Used Vote and Electoral Outcomes: The Irish General Election of 1973’, V (1975), 363–83) we argued that in elections generally the critical concern of political party leaders is not how many votes they may amass. Instead, they need to be concerned with how many votes of those they receive they are actually able to use to elect candidates. It matters little if party A wins Constituency 1 by thousands of votes if it then loses Constituencies 2 and 3 by only a handful. While we suggested that the concept of the used vote that we devised might have more relevance to the Continental electoral systems than to the British and American systems, it also has some application in the latter cases as well.
Party Identification, Voting Preference and Electoral Outcomes in Britain, 1964–74
Authors: Mughan Anthony
Published: January 2009

The sharp drop in the Conservative and Labour parties' combined share of the poll in the two 1974 parliamentary elections is perhaps the most important development in British electoral politics since the rise of the class alignment of partisanship. From an average of 91·8 per cent between 1950 and 1970, the share of the vote won by these two parties dropped sharply to an average of 75·3 per cent in 1974, a figure substantially below their previous low point of 87·5 per cent in 1964. The Liberal party's share of the vote increased almost threefold over the same two periods, jumping from an average of 6·8 per cent between 1950 and 1970 to an average of 18·8 per cent in 1974.
On Joining Interest Groups: A Comment
Authors: Grant Wyn
Published: January 2009

Following the exchange between Shackleton and Marsh on the work of Olson and its applicability to the case of the Confederation of British Industry, I wish to criticize some of Shackleton's points and develop some of those made by Marsh. I intend to ignore some of Shackleton's criticisms of the methodology Marsh and I employed in our book (for example, our use of semi-structured interviews, a respectable technique in elite interviewing) and instead to concentrate on substantive questions of more general interest.
The Electoral Cycle and Patterns of American Politics
Authors: Beck Paul Allen
Published: January 2009

The relationship between citizens and leaders is the core concern of democratic theory and the primary focus of students of democratic politics. Competitive elections are typically assigned the principal role in structuring this relationship. They are a means by which the public can make government officials accountable and influence the policy directions of government. The case for how elections should link public and leaders is a familiar one. Not so obvious is the strength of this link, particularly the extent to which mass electoral forces may make for fundamental changes in the behaviour of leaders and the policies of governments.
Public Welfare Provision, Scandinavia, and the Sheer Futility of the Sociological Approach to Politics
Authors: Castles Francis G. , McKinlay R. D.
Published: January 2009

In the last two decades, the prevailing orthodoxy in comparative studies has been the sociological view that public policy outcomes are primarily a reflection of what can loosely be described as ‘environmental’ factors: the demographic structure of the population, the incremental logic of policy programmes, and, most important of all, the level of economic development. This paper has two main objectives: first, to demonstrate that the sociological orthodoxy is methodologically and empirically unsound in its central tenet that politics does not matter, and, second, to provide a more detailed, and political, explanation of the particularly high levels of public welfare provision that characterize the Scandinavian countries.
A Behavioural Model of Bargaining
Authors: Ward Hugh
Published: January 2009

In this paper I shall present a very simple version of a bargaining model based on assumptions of limited information and limited capacity to make rational decisions. The justification for my work lies in the inadequacies both of the formal models in the microeconomic literature and of accounts of bargaining and other conflicts where power or closely related concepts lie at the basis of the discussion.
Electoral Forecasting from Poll Data: The British Case
Authors: Whiteley Paul
Published: January 2009

Forecasting elections has long been regarded by political scientists as an interesting problem in its own right. But it assumes special importance for those countries that do not have fixed election dates. In Britain, for example, it is up to the prime minister to choose the date, within the statutory five year limit. Correct timing can clearly be crucial to the outcome, and the prime minister can be expected to go to considerable lengths to ensure that the election is called for the date most favourable to his party. But there lies the prime minister's problem: elections must be called three to four weeks before polling day. With what degree of accuracy can the result be forecast at the time the election is called?

A small but interesting literature on election forecasting has emerged in recent years. The forecasting techniques used in this literature vary widely, from crude extrapolation to sophisticated model building. Up to now the emphasis has been on election night forecasting, in which the basic problem involves extracting the maximum amount of information from electoral returns, in order to forecast the outcome a few hours before it is finally known. For obvious reasons the techniques utilized in this context are of little use prior to election day.
The Incidence of Coloured Populations and Support for the National Front
Authors: Taylor Stan
Published: January 2009

Most explanations of variations in electoral support for the National Front involve some consideration of the importance of resentment and fear of coloured people among whites, the level of which is conditional upon the local incidence of coloured populations. Some writers, notably Harrop and Zimmerman and Whiteley, have suggested that National Front support, in so far as it can be explained by white ‘backlash’, may be considered as directly related to the relative size of the coloured population in different locales. Their argument is that, the higher the proportion of the population which is coloured, the greater the extent that their presence will be resented, and the higher the level of National Front support. Other commentators have advanced a rather different interpretation. Although agreeing that the National Front will do worst in areas with small or non-existent coloured populations, they argue that the party might do better in areas with moderate-sized coloured populations than in those with large ones. The existence of a moderate-sized coloured population, it is held, indicates that the area is ‘vulnerable’ to further migration or immigration, particularly where there are large coloured communities in neighbouring areas, and that whites may express their ‘exaggerated fears of the likely effects of immigrants moving in’ by supporting the National Front. These fears are regarded as being more important in mobilizing National Front support than the actuality of living in an area with a very large coloured population.
A Unitary Model of Local Taxation and Expenditure Policies in the United States
Authors: Peterson Paul E.
Published: January 2009

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.
Should a Two-and-a-Half Law Replace the Cube Law in British Elections?
Authors: Laakso Markku
Published: January 2009

For decades political scientists have been fascinated with the problem of establishing a formal mathematical relationship between the popular votes cast for a political party and the number of parliamentary seats it holds. The most famous attempt at solving this problem, known as the ‘cube law’, was formulated more than sixty years ago by James Parker Smith. Since then a large number of papers in support of the cube law have been published. Perhaps the most cited paper is by Kendall and Stuart. The cube law also has been stated to apply to parliamentary elections in New Zealand, the United States and Canada. But doubts about the cube law have also been expressed by Brookes, Eldersveld and just a few years ago by Tufte.
Erratum
Authors: Wald Kenneth
Published: January 2009

There is an error in Table 1 of my recent article, ‘Class and the Vote Before the First World War’ (this Journal, October 1978, p. 445). The ‘N’ column for middle-class Anglicans should indicate a total of twenty-four cases, with eighteen Conservative identifiers and just six respondents in the ‘Other’ partisan category. These adjusted figures correspond to the percentages which are printed correctly in the adjacent column.
The Urban Basis of Political Alignment: Social Class, Domestic Property Ownership, and State Intervention in Consumption Processes
Authors: Dunleavy Patrick
Published: January 2009

The declining association between occupational class and political alignment in Britain has now been documented by a number of studies. For the political analyst the decline of a previously important cleavage must raise complex questions of causation. One of the most important possible explanations for such a change is that a new cleavage has arisen or grown in political significance so that its influence on political alignment cross-cuts that of the previous cleavage, blurring its impact and exposing sections of the population to contradictory or cross-pressuring influences. But political commentators in present-day Britain have apparently ruled this out as an explanation of the declining electoral influence of occupational class. Crewe, for example, remarks:

It is difficult to think of any social cleavages or fundamental changes in the social structure in the last twenty years that could have affected national partisan alignments in any way comparable to the substitution of the religious cleavage by the class cleavage in the first three decades of this century. Glacially slow changes in the British social structure have undoubtedly taken place. The emergence of coloured immigrant communities, the growth of white collar employment (and of white collar ‘trade unionism’), the movement of agricultural workers to the towns and their displacement by commuters and the retired rich, a further secularization and a growing disparity of income between the organized and unorganized working class are all cases in point. But in all these cases, shifts in party support have been small, often only temporary, and always localized; no shift in the social structure has produced an enduring, nationwide realignment of party support since 1945.
USSR: Pluralist Monolith?
Authors: Groth Alexander J.
Published: January 2009

Since the 1960s, when the concept of totalitarianism began to be critically assailed, Western, and particularly academic, interpreters of the Soviet Union have increasingly moved in the direction of a new convergence. Many scholars have portrayed the political systems of the Soviet Union and of Western countries as increasingly alike, viewing them through the common perspective of ‘pluralism’. Basically, it has been said, conflict and differences of opinion are characteristic of all these political systems. To be sure, the conflicts and differences may be expressed through rather different institutions, and with somewhat different styles or nuances in each case, but they are there just the same.
Mass Participation, Electoral Competitiveness, and Issue-Attitude Agreement Between Congressmen and their Constituents
Authors: Hill Kim Quaile , Hurley Patricia A.
Published: January 2009

In recent research Verba and Nie and Hansen have provided systematic evidence on the positive effects of mass participation on other aspects of the public policy process. Specifically, Verba and Nie demonstrated that for data on American communities, a curvilinear relationship exists between the level of mass political participation and the extent of elite-mass agreement on ‘policy agenda’ items. The effect of this relationship is such that the highest agreement, or ‘attitude concurrence’, is found in those communities with the highest levels of participation. Working with the same data, Hansen3 showed that the competitiveness of elections also influences concurrence independently and that there was an interaction effect of participation and competition on policy-agenda agreement. The interaction was such that attitude concurrence was highest in communities with especially high levels of both participation and competition.
Trust, Efficacy and Modes of Political Participation: A Study of Costa Rican Peasants
Authors: Seligson Mitchell A.
Published: January 2009

Those who study political participation will find that recent investigations have been lacking neither in scope nor methodological sophistication. Participation, once conceived of in rather narrow terms (usually focusing exclusively on voting) and whose study was restricted to certain geographic areas only (the United States and Western Europe), is now taken to include a wide range of activities across the globe. Similarly, the causal factors of participation have been expanded as well, so that currently they include the social-psychological, socio-economic, demographic, structural, historical and cultural. Nevertheless, despite the abundance of inquiry, little progress has been made in the development of theory.
Party-State Relations and Soviet Political Development
Authors: Hill Ronald J.
Published: January 2009

One of the preoccupations of students of Soviet and communist politics in the past decade or so has been the problem of system change. There can be no doubt that in a number of fundamental respects the Soviet Union today bears little resemblance to the totalitarian model bequeathed by Stalin. In particular, despite the well publicized attempts to stifle vocal opposition, the abandonment of the capricious and widespread use of terror has brought about a radical modification in the life of the mass of the population and party membership. Equally significant has been the rise in living standards, over the past decade especially. Perhaps also of relevance to the average citizen, envious of and apprehensive towards foreigners – particularly Chinese and Germans – is the Soviet leadership's tangible success in reaching some form of accommodation with the country's main ideological adversaries, and the rise in prestige stemming from the USSR's achievements in space and in the international sports arena. Hence, for probably the majority of Soviet citizens, taking a broad view, Harold Macmillan's British election slogan of 1959 would be quite apposite: they have never had it so good.
Classical and Empirical Theories of Democracy: The Missing Historical Dimension?
Authors: Hampsher-Monk Iain
Published: January 2009

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.
Doves, Hawks, and other Birds of a Feather: The Distribution of Israeli Parliamentary Opinion on the Future of the Occupied Territories, 1967–1977
Authors: Yaniv Avner , Pascal Fabian
Published: January 2009

Studies of the domestic sources of Israel's foreign policy have tended to treat Israel's parties as homogeneous blocs of opinion. Israel's political parties are implicitly arrayed in such analyses on a left-to-right continuum. This begins on the left with the New Communist List (RAKAH) and extends through the Israel Communist Party (MAKI), MOKED, Haolam Hazeh Koah Hadash, the Civil Rights Movement, SHELI, the United Workers Party (MAPAM), the Labour Party (formerly Ahdut Haavoda), Israel's Workers List (RAFI) and the Workers of Israel Party (MAPAI), the Independent Liberals, the Democratic Movement for Change, the National Religious Party, the Likud (composed of the state list, the Liberal Party, Laam, the Free Centre, the Greater Israel Movement, Shlomzion and Herut) and finally ends on the right with the ultra-orthodox Agudath Israel (AGI) and the Workers of Agudath Israel (PAGI). The left-to-centre part of this continuum is presented as moderate in varying degrees on questions relating to Israel's most cardinal external question, namely the terms of accommodation with the Arabs. The right-to-centre part of this same continuum is associated with hawkish views, which also vary in their degree of militancy.
A Comment on Electoral Forecasting from Poll Data
Authors: Webb N. L.
Published: January 2009

I heartily approve of research based upon poll data, in which I include specifically the contribution by Paul Whiteley, ‘Electoral Forecasting from Poll Data: The British Case’ (this Journal, IX (1979), 219–36). I note with pleasure the fact that the author has relied heavily upon Gallup data for the testing of his time-series model. There is one specific objection that I have to the detail of the contents of this paper. I refer to the sentence bridging pages 231–2, in which he states: ‘the large inaccuracy of the 1951 forecast is not, in fact, due to the model so much as Gallup data, which were extremely inaccurate in that year’. There is a footnote which states that this was inferred from the residuals of the forecasting model. The error quoted is 8·3 per cent. This does refer to the last pre-campaign poll, admittedly. The last campaign poll, the only one that could be compared with the result itself, shows, according to Gallup records, a deviation of 2·2 per cent. The bland assertion of Mr Whiteley that our results were inaccurate in that year is totally unsupported by any evidence of a practical kind. Instead we have the statement that the fit of the model was rather bad on this occasion. Remembering that public opinion, including support for a specific political party, is known to change radically between elections, between local elections and by-elections, and so on (I confine myself here to actual elections – I do not depend upon poll data to substantiate my case) and knowing that among the causes of this are political events, and events of a social and economic nature which affect the mood and attitude of the electorate, it does not surprise me that a purely mathematical model does not necessarily fit from time to time. Indeed elsewhere in the article the author mentions the possibility of shocks affecting public opinion and the degree to which these shocks are effected in the auto-regressive scheme that he has put forward.
A Reply to Webb
Authors: Whiteley Paul
Published: January 2009

Norman Webb, the Director of Social Surveys (Gallup) Ltd. takes me to task for asserting that the Gallup Poll was unusually inaccurate in 1951 (this Journal, IX (1979), 231–2).
Strikes in Yugoslavia: Implications for Industrial Democracy
Authors: Shabad Goldie
Published: January 2009

In September, 1973, about 2,000 workers of the Zmaj factory in Belgrade went on strike.Politika, a Belgrade daily newspaper, reported that the director of the firm, surprised to see so many workers gathered in front of his office, believed (at first) that ‘they were protesting against the counter-revolutionary oppression in Chile’. He was shocked to discover soon after that the workers were not demonstrating in support of Allende but, instead, were demanding higher wages. The director should not have been so taken aback. The Zmaj strike is only one of the approximately 3,000 incidents of industrial conflict that have taken place in Yugoslavia since it experienced its first post-war strike in 1958.
Liberal and Conservative Voting in the House of Representatives: A National Model of Representation
Authors: Schwarz John E. , Fenmore Barton , Volgy Thomas J.
Published: January 2009

Critics of the American House of Representatives frequently cite, in one form or another, a national model of representation as a basis for criticizing both the House and the behaviour of some of its individual members. One of the more familiar criticisms, for example, is that members of the House are so motivated by local or regional concerns and interests that representation in some meaningful national form is rendered almost impossible. So widely is this characterization shared that it is hardly ever asked whether or not members of the House behave in ways that would be consistent and meaningful in terms of a national model of representation.