bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Crises of the Welfare State
Authors: Moran Michael
Published: January 2009

‘The essence of the welfare state’, wrote Wilensky in a classic study, ‘is government-protected minimum standards of income, nutrition, health, housing, and education, assured to every citizen’. This innocent definition is, we shall see, highly contestable, but it has the merit of putting into a few words the most important characteristics of modern welfare states: that they necessarily involve some model of citizenship; that they provide a stream of services for people called citizens; and that they use public power to raise the resources for those services and to organize their provision. If there is a crisis of the welfare state it has to involve, in other words, a crisis of citizenship, or a crisis in the capacity of states to raise resources and to transform those resources into services.
‘I Shoot Them with Words’: An Analysis of Political Hate-Letters
Authors: Temkin Benny , Yanay Niza
Published: January 2009

This article focuses on a peculiar behavioural manifestation of political hatred. Hate-letters received by an Israeli political party are analysed in order to probe the dynamics involved in the communication of political hatred. The act of writing and mailing hostile letters is characterized as a particular form of political participation and interpreted as part of the social struggle over the boundaries and definition of the collective. The text of the letters is examined to uncover the main themes and mechanisms that are involved in the expression of political hatred.
Neo-Fascist and Far Left Terrorists in Italy: Some Biographical Observations
Authors: Weinberg Leonard , Eubank William Lee
Published: January 2009

In recent years a good deal of concern has been expressed about the phenomenon of political terrorism in Italy. The mass media have directed our attention to spectacular acts of international terrorism committed on Italian soil by groups, largely from the Middle East, which have used the country as ateatroin which to stage their operations against targets of opportunity. Scholars and journalists have also drawn our attention to the problem of domestic terrorism. The kidnapping and assassination of the former Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978 may serve as the most dramatic example. It seems fair to say that much of this publicity has been focused on the Left. The attempts by various leftist groups, the Red Brigades (BR), Front Line (PL), Worker Autonomy (AO) and others, to use terrorist violence as a means of bringing about a Communist revolution was a source of apprehension in the Western world from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. Allegations that the revolutionary groups were aided by the Soviets or other Warsaw Pact nations, as part of an effort to destabilize the Western democracies, did much to heighten the concern.
The Effectiveness of the Plurality Rule
Authors: Blais André , Carty R. K.
Published: January 2009

Plurality (first-past-the-post), majority and proportional electoral formulae all translate vote shares into seat shares in different ways. The consequences of these differences are the subject of a large literature, and the virtues and vices attributed to the plurality rule are particularly numerous. That is not surprising given the discrepancies between seat and vote shares it generates. What is surprising is that the literature has not examined the plurality rule's effectiveness, that is the extent to which it achieves its intended goals. We take effectiveness to be a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for an electoral rule's acceptability. At the very least, a given rule ought to produce the consequences it is designed to create. This short Note is intended to assess the extent to which the plurality system passes this minimum test.
Centralization and Elite Circulation in a Soviet Republic
Authors: Urban Michael E.
Published: January 2009

Central control over personnel placement in the Soviet Union (the nomenklatura system) is widely regarded as the complement to the centralization of substantive policy making and implementation. Some recent studies, however, argue that the central authorities have used their appointments powers to ratify rather than alter the results of the circulation process specific to localities. In order to advance the terms of this discussion, (he present study employs a systemic model of circulation. Here, circulation is regarded as a Markov process involving the movement of vacancies across a stratified hierarchy of 2,034 positions in the Belorussian Republic, and allunion jobs occupied by Belorussian politicans, over the period 1966–86. The model's predictions are reasonably accurate for the full data set but fit the data especially well when all-union positions are excluded, indicating a marginal centralizing influence on elite circulation that results more from the interaction between national and republic personnel systems than from centrally co-ordinated cadres policies in either Moscow or Minsk. Three auxiliary tests also support the conclusions derived from the Markov analysis.
Strong States and Weak States: Sectoral Policy Networks in Advanced Capitalist Economies
Authors: Atkinson Michael M. , Coleman William D.
Published: January 2009

The theme of strong and weak states has recently figured largely in comparative political economy. However, significant variation across sectors in single countries in the degree to which the state is able and willing to intervene in the economy has led to calls for a disaggregated view of the state, with more attention devoted to the different levels – micro, meso, macro – at which the state confronts the economy. The concepts of strength and weakness must pay much greater attention to specific bureaucratic arrangements and the relationships with key societal actors which, in company with bureaucratic agencies, form the core of ‘policy networks’ at the sectoral level. The article uses the concepts of state capacity and societal mobilization to identify six ideal typical policy networks at the sectoral level. It elaborates on the organizational logic associated with these policy networks by examining them in conjunction with industrial policy. After distinguishing between two approaches to industrial policy – anticipatory and reactive – it shows how different policy networks emerge to support alternative approaches and how a disjunction between networks and approaches can produce policy failure.
Getting Inside the Beltway: Perceptions of Presidential Skill and Success in Congress
Authors: Lockerbie Brad , Borrelli Stephen A.
Published: January 2009

Different methodological approaches sometimes lead to different substantive conclusions. Nowhere is this more evident than in studies relating assessments of presidential skill to legislative success. Scholars of the historical, traditionalist school of presidency research argue that presidents who are perceived to be adept at getting what they want are more likely to achieve their legislative goals than are those perceived as less adept. Neustadt identifies perceived skill, or what he calls ‘professional reputation’, as one of the three resources that are the essence of presidential power. Yet students of the presidency who employ quantitative methods have found little or no systematic relationship between variations in skill evaluations and variations in success. George Edwards reports thai similarly situated Congressmen are not especially more likely to support highly esteemed presidents than lowly esteemed presidents. Fleisher and Bond similarly find that once contextual variables have been controlled for, there is no pattern suggesting that presidents thought to be highly skilled do better with Congress.
Community Cohesion and Voter Turnout in English Parliamentary Constituencies
Authors: Eagles Munroe , Erfle Stephen
Published: January 2009

Voting turnout varies both over time and across space. In Britain there has been a secular trend in the postwar period for decreasing turnout at parliamentary elections (from a high of 84.1 per cent in 1950 to 75.4 percent in 1987, with a low point of 71.8 per cent in 1970). Such temporal variations in turnout are dwarfed in scale, however, by differences in turnout across constituencies at the same election. In the 1970 election, for example, turnout ranged from a low of 44.9 per cent in Stepney to 85.3 per cent in Cornwall North. Though diminished slightly, variation in constituency turnout rates remained significant in the June 1983 election (from a low of 51.8 percent in City of London and Westminster South to a high of 81.1 percent in Leicestershire NW).
A Test of the Importance of Tactical Voting: Great Britain, 1987
Authors: Galbraith John W. , Rae Nicol C.
Published: January 2009

The issue of ‘tactical voting’ aroused a great deal of interest during the 1987 United Kingdom general election campaign. This Note considers the nature and importance of tactical voting in Britain and makes an attempt to detect its presence empirically using electoral data.
Attitudinal Tolerance and Political Freedom in Britain
Authors: Barnum David G. , Sullivan John L.
Published: January 2009

Tolerance is an important concept in democratic theory and a recurring issue in British history. With rare exceptions, however, conclusions about tolerance in Britain have been based on impressionistic rather than empirical evidence. Only a few research studies have addressed the subject of tolerance in Britain, and none has collected nationwide data on attitudinal tolerance among the British.

This Note examines patterns of attitudinal tolerance in Britain and speculates about the impact of those patterns on the status of political freedom in Britain. The analysis is based on recently collected survey data on attitudinal tolerance among members of the public and Members of Parliament in Britain.
Marxism–Leninism as Discourse: The Politics of the Empty Signifier and the Double Bind
Authors: Walker Rachel
Published: January 2009

This article employs a semiotic approach to investigate the meaning of ‘Marxism-Leninism’ with a view to clarifying our understanding of this term. Contrary to conventional interpretations it demonstrates that ‘Marxism-Leninism’ is an empty signifier which is subject to definition on a contemporary basis by the CPSU itself. However, it also demonstrates that ‘Marxism-Leninism’ is the central element in a mechanism of control which bears all the hallmarks of a classic linguistic double bind. It therefore concludes that while ‘Marxism-Leninism’ is referentially open to re-definition it is connotatively attached to the practices of the CPSU. It is both fixed and not fixed in meaning.

The resulting analysis leads to a critique of terms which are conventionally taken for granted by Sovietologists and introduces a new methodological approach to the study of ‘Marxism-Leninism’.
The Comparative Analysis of Coalition Formation and Duration: Distinguishing Between-Country and Within-Country Effect
Authors: Grofman Bernard
Published: January 2009

Dodd is generally credited with providing clear empirical support for the proposition that, in the period after the Second World War, minimal winning coalitions in European party governments will tend to last longer in office than non-minimal winning coalitions. There has been a considerable body of research on this and related questions. Dodd, as well as most other authors treating cabinet coalition formation, has attempted to model features of cabinet formation such as cabinet duration or cabinet type (e.g. minimal winning v. minority government v. oversized coalitions) largely or entirely using data pooled from all cabinets in each of a number of different countries over some considerable time period. One difficulty with this method is that system-level variables (such as number of parties, or the presence of large anti-system parties), which might be able to explain aggregate-level between-county variations in cabinet type or cabinet durability, are not likely to be the same variables that are useful in explaining within-country differences. A second difficulty is that certain system-level characteristics such as effective number of parties or number of cleavage dimensions are highly correlated with both cabinet type and cabinet duration and, as a consequence, these variables are highly correlated with one another when pooled cross-national data are used. Thus, if the analyst is not very careful, results of pooled cross-national data may lead to mistakes about causal structure and a confusion of within-country and between-country effects.
Level-of-Analysis Effects on Explanations of Voting: The Case of the 1982 US Senate Elections
Authors: Wright Gerald C.
Published: January 2009

The availability of rich survey data, and concerns over the ecological fallacy, have led voting researchers to focus on the explanation of individual voting decisions at the expense of accounting for patterns of aggregate election outcomes. This has skewed our understanding of the relative importance of various factors in the electoral process. A framework for analysis of elections at multiple levels is developed and applied using data from twenty-three exit polls from the US Senate elections. Comparable parameters for a simple voting model are estimated for individual voting and for election outcomes. Election-level factors, especially candidates' issue strategies and incumbency, are substantially more important in accounting for election outcomes than in explaining individual voting decisions. Finally, working with election outcomes permits an estimate of a path model of Senate election outcomes that shows key relationships that are not accessible from individual level data.
Official and Reported Turnout in the British General Election of 1987
Authors: Swaddle Kevin , Heath Anthony
Published: January 2009

This Note looks afresh at the question of turnout in British general elections, using data gathered in the 1987 British General Election Study, together with information on the electoral behaviour of the sample, collected independently of the BGES survey. The official rate of turnout for Great Britain in 1987 (the number of votes cast over the number of entries on the electoral register) was around 75 per cent; that is to say, according to official figures, about one in four registered electors did not vote. In common with earlier surveys, the BGES indicates a much higher turnout figure than the official one; 86 per cent of respondents to the survey reported that they had voted.
The Structure of Attitudinal Tolerance in the United States
Authors: Gibson James L.
Published: January 2009

In recent years there has been a resurgence in interest in the cross-national study of public opinion. A significant component of this rekindling of attention has been the specific area of public support for the fundamental values of democracy. John Sullivan and his various colleagues have reported on political tolerance in the United States, Israel, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. In conjunction with a smattering of more limited cross-national studies, and newly-completed studies that are just now emerging, a wealth of comparative data is now available.
How Not to Defend Liberal Institutions
Authors: Barry Brian
Published: January 2009

Liberal institutions (freedom of speech and religious worship, for example) will naturally be supported by liberals – that is to say, those with a liberal outlook. But what arguments can be addressed to non-liberals? There are some traditional arguments but these are too limited in scope to provide a general justification for liberal institutions. A recent argument that claims to do the job is to the effect that justice entails neutrality and neutrality entails liberal institutions. However, neutrality is a principle that could appeal to non-liberals only if they had already swallowed a large dose of liberalism, since it requires that they regard their deepest convictions as preferences or personal opinions. It is also doubtful whether liberals are well advised to embrace neutrality.
A Reply to Clarke, Mishler and Whiteley
Authors: Sanders David , Marsh Dave , Ward Hugh
Published: January 2009

Clarke, Mishler and Whiteley (CMW) provide an interesting review and critique of our analysis of Mrs Thatcher's first-term popularity. They challenge our findings on two main grounds: (1) that we use orthodox time-series regression techniques inappropriately; and (2) that Box-Jenkins techniques are a superior vehicle for analysing government-popularity time series anyway. In this reply we seek to answer both of these general criticisms. We then outline our current – and, we believe, far more revealing – research strategy for analysing government-popularity data.
Avoiding Blame: An Experimental Investigation of Political Excuses and Justifications
Authors: McGraw Kathleen M.
Published: January 2009

Success and even survival in politics frequently depends on the ability of politicians and public officials to extricate themselves from various types of predicaments. Indeed, politicians are particularly adept at extricating themselves, with a wide range of explanations at their disposal to avoid blame for unpopular actions and decisions. However, there has been little systematic research on the effectiveness of various political blame-avoidance strategies. This Note has two purposes. First, a typology of blame-avoidance strategies, or accounts, is developed. Second, the results of an experiment examine the effectiveness of these various accounts in enhancing evaluations of a hypothetical public official are reported.
Acceptability Voting: A Modification
Authors: Paine Neil R.
Published: January 2009

Nurmi has analysed a number of voting procedures with respect to various criteria. It has been pointed out that acceptability voting not only fares as well as approval voting under Nurmi's type of analysis but also may be more intuitively appealing to voters.
Soviet Politics in the Gorbachev Era: The End of Hesitant Modernization
Authors: Amann Ronald
Published: January 2009

This is a sequel to an article written by the same author, which was published in theJournalin 1986. The current pace of economic and political reform in the Soviet Union represents a ‘paradigm’ change, which Western specialists have found difficult and challenging to assimilate; concepts have lagged behind events. The key to understanding these changes and the reason why they have been so long delayed lies in the fusion of economic and political institutions formed during the Stalin period. The interdependence of economic and political factors is explored as a basis for understanding why political reform has been a necessary accompaniment to economic reform. One can discern in the pattern of political reform an attempt to increase the level of democratization without fundamentally destabilizing the political and social order. Since this strategy requires that a new political culture will take root faster than the growth of popular discontent at deteriorating economic performance and frustrated national aspirations, the author is pessimistic as to the outcome.
Unveiling the Vote
Authors: Brennan Geoffrey , Pettit Philip
Published: January 2009

The case for secrecy in voting depends on the assumption that voters reliably vote for the political outcomes they want to prevail. No such assumption is valid. Accordingly, voting procedures should be designed to provide maximal incentive for voters to vote responsibly. Secret voting fails this test because citizens are protected from public scrutiny. Under open voting, citizens are publicly answerable for their electoral choices and will be encouraged thereby to vote in a discursively defensible manner. The possibility of bribery, intimidation or blackmail moderates this argument but such dangers will be avoidable in many contemporary societies without recourse to secrecy.
Structure and Behaviour: Extending Duverger's Law to the Japanese Case
Authors: Reed Steven R.
Published: January 2009

Japan uses simple plurality elections with multi-member districts to elect its lower house. This system tends to produce competition among n + 1 candidates per district. This ‘law of simple plurality elections’ is a structural generalization akin to Duverger's Law. Evidence from Japan also indicates that the causal mechanism behind this ‘law’ is not strategic voting, although strategic voting occurs, but elite coalition building. It is further argued that the connection between structure and behaviour is learning and not rationality. Equilibria are reached slowly through trial and error processes. Once reached, the equilibrium is unstable because parties and candidates try to change it. Even without rational actors and stable equilibria, however, this structural generalization accurately describes the dynamics of electoral competition at the district level in Japan.
Political Parties and Confidence in Government: A Comparison of Norway, Sweden and the United States
Authors: Miller Arthur H. , Listhaug Ola
Published: January 2009

Comparable survey data from Norway, Sweden and the United States are used to examine trends in political trust for the period 1964–86. During the early part of that period trust declined in all three countries; later it recovered for Norway but continued to plummet in Sweden and the United States. Three major features of the party system are hypothesized to explain the difference in these trends for the three countries. These features are: the structural aspects of the party system; the public's cognitive judgements of the parties as representatives of the policy interests; and the possibility that a negative rejection of political parties as undesirable institutions may spill over to citizen evaluations of government more generally.
Justice, Gender and International Boundaries
Authors: O'Neill Onora
Published: January 2009

Discussions of international and of gender justice both legitimately demand that principles of justice abstract from differences between cases and that judgements of justice respond to differences between them. Abstraction and sensitivity to context are often treated as incompatible: abstraction is taken to endorse idealized models of individual and state; sensitivity to human differences is identified with relativism. Neither identification is convincing: abstract principles do not entail uniform treatment; responsiveness to difference does not hinge on relativism. These points are used to criticize discussions of international and gender justice by liberals, communitarians and feminists. An alternative account of justice is sketched, which combines abstract principles with consideration of human differences in the application of principles. The case of poor women in impoverished economies – a hard case both for gender and for international justice – illustrates how universal, abstract principles of justice may not only permit but mandate differentiated application.
Comparing Japanese and American Administrative Elites
Authors: Aberbach Joel D. , Krauss Ellis S. , Muramatsu Michio , Rockman Bert A.
Published: January 2009

Using evidence from surveys of top administrators, we examine differences between Japanese and American administrative elites. Our findings are far more complex than the reigning stereotypes of an apolitical, technocratic and elitist Japanese bureaucracy contrasted to a politically charged, conflict-oriented and social-reformist American federal executive. For example, senior Japanese bureaucrats take political considerations into account, compared to technical ones, no less than top American officials. American administrators have a more negative view of the role of political parties than their Japanese counterparts and, on average, an equally negative view of politicians interfering in their work than the supposedly more elitist, autonomous and technocratic Japanese bureaucrats. The article closes with a discussion of why popular conceptions of the two bureaucracies break down in practice.
Renewal and Dead Souls: The Changing Soviet Central Committee
Authors: Mawdsley Evan , White Stephen
Published: January 2009

For a Soviet General Secretary presumably committed to the collectivist principles of Marxism-Leninism, Mikhail Gorbachev has been peculiarly insistent upon the decisive importance of individual leadership. In speech after speech it was not only the socioeconomic order that Gorbachev held to be the source of the Soviet Union's problems: the quality and style of its political leadership were also crucial factors.
Changing Attitudes Towards War: The Impact of the First World War
Authors: Mueller John
Published: January 2009

After the First World War the belief became substantially widespread among developed countries that the venerable institution of war should be abandoned from their affairs. It was an idea whose time had come. Historically, the war does not seem to have been all that unusual in its duration, destructiveness, grimness, political pointlessness, economic consequences or breadth. It does seem to have been unique in that (1) it was the first major war to be preceded by substantial, organized anti-war agitation, and (2) for Europeans, it followed an unprecedentedly peaceful century during which even war enthusiasts began, perhaps unknowingly, to appreciate the virtues of peace. Thus the war served as a necessary catalyst for opinion change. The process through which the change took place owes much to British war aims and to their efforts to get the United States into the war. The article concludes with some reflections on the historical movement of ideas.
Comity in Context: Confrontation in Historical Perspective
Authors: Uslaner Eric M.
Published: January 2009

Comity in Congress is adherence to the norms of courtesy and reciprocity within a ‘regular order’. There has been a decline of comity in the United States Congress since the 1970s. Institutional causes, such as legislative reform, increased reliance on the media and an influx of new members, are discussed and discarded. Instead, a societal explanation appears to be more useful: the decline of comity in the Congress reflects the decline of comity in the country. A comparison of the late twentieth century with the pre-Civil War era supports this general argument. It also offers little hope for the return of civility.
Tactical Voting in Great Britain in 1983 and 1987: An Alternative Approach
Authors: Johnston R. J. , Pattie C. J.
Published: January 2009

The analyses presented in this note have extended earlier work on tactical voting in Great Britain by looking at variations between constituencies in the flow-of-the-vote matrix that are consistent with hypotheses of tactical voting. They have suggested that about 4 per cent of the British electorate voted tactically in 1983, as did nearly 6 per cent in 1987. The volume of tactical voting was greater in Conservative-held than in Labour-held seats, and in both was greater the more marginal the seat. In general, the opposition party with the greatest chance of unseating the incumbent, as suggested by the result of the previous election, gained from the tactical voting process, and there is evidence that greater campaign effort, as indexed by constituency spending, helped them in this.
Constituency Service and Incumbency Advantage
Authors: King Gary
Published: January 2009

Numerous scholars have documented a dramatic increase in incumbency advantage in US congressional elections and also state legislative elections over the past four decades. For example, Gelman and King show that incumbents in the House of Representatives now receive about twelve extra percentage points solely as a result of holding congressional office during the campaign; the comparable figure for most of the first half of this century was only 2 per cent. This advantage of incumbency has made members of the US House and many state legislators nearly invulnerable to electoral defeat.
Corporatism and Consensus Democracy in Eighteen Countries: Conceptual and Empirical Linkages
Authors: Lijphart Arend , Crepaz Markus M. L.
Published: January 2009

This research Note has two complementary theoretical objectives. First, we shall attempt to place the form of interest representation and the involvement of interest groups in policy formation known as corporatism – or as democratic, societal, liberal or neo-corporatism – in a broader political context: is corporatism systematically linked with other democratic institutions and processes? Secondly, we shall try to fill a gap in the theory of consensus democracy. This theory holds that types of party, electoral, executive and legislative systems occur in distinct clusters, but it fails to link interest group systems to these clusters.
Interest Groups and Political Time: Cycles in America
Authors: McFarland Andrew S.
Published: January 2009

This article seeks to delineate a general theory of interest-group dynamics in America since 1890. Interest groups are seen to act in issue areas which cycle through phases of business control to reform activity and back again. Economic producer groups have a more stable incentive to participate in issue-area decision making than the reform groups that challenge their control. However, after a few years of the business-control phase of the cycle, unchecked producer groups tend to commit ‘excesses’, violations of widely shared values. This leads to political participation by reformers, most of whom lose interest in issue-area participation after a few years. Across the scope of hundreds of issue areas, business control or reform phases tend to occur at the same time. This is an important cause of similar cycles in the politics of the entire system, as described by such writers as Samuel Huntington, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr and Albert Hirschman. Interest-group cycles theory is based on critical pluralism, a new outlook that incorporates concepts of collective-action paradoxes, business power and social movements into interest-group studies.
Democratization Processes in East Central Europe: A Theoretical Reconsideration
Authors: Ekiert Grzegorz
Published: January 2009

This article explores various dimensions of the issue of transition to democracy in East Central Europe, focusing on the question of how past experiences shape the process of political change and on the limits of democratization in the region. The first part reviews scholarly debates on the relationship between the political crisis and processes of democratization in the region, arguing that new analytical categories are needed to account for different dimensions of the current transition process. The second part proposes a new framework for analysing changing relations between the party–state and society across time and in different state-socialist societies. The third part examines some recent political developments in countries of the region in order to identify those factors that may contribute to or impede a possibility of the transition to democracy in these countries. It concludes that in all East Central European countries the rapid collapse of party–states and the multidimensional social, political and economic crisis has initiated a parallel process of diminution of power of both the state and civil society, which may significantly endanger the transition to a democratic political order.
Postmaterialism, Cognitive Mobilization and Public Support for European Integration
Authors: Janssen Joseph I. H.
Published: January 2009

This article reviews the trends in public support for European integration in West Germany, France, Italy and Great Britain. The first conclusion is that the picture one gets depends heavily on the indicator one uses to measure support. This finding is probably a consequence of the fact that many people are only dimly aware of the issue. Furthermore, it appears that there are striking cross-national differences in support and in the development of support through time. To explain these differences, as well as the formation of individual attitudes towards integration, Inglehart's theory of the Silent Revolution is used. The theory and its central concepts – postmaterialism and cognitive mobilization – are put on trial at three levels of aggregation. The results are poor. Postmaterialism appears to be unrelated to attitudes towards European integration, while the concept of cognitive mobilization makes sense only at the individual level. The conclusion is therefore that Inglehart's theory is of almost no use in explaining attitudes towards integration and cross-national differences in support.
Political Instructors and the Decline of Communism in Hungary: Apparatus, Nomenclatura and the Issue of Legacy
Authors: Szakolczaia Árpád , Horváth Ágnes
Published: January 2009

This article, based on empirical research conducted in Hungary, interprets and assesses some aspects of the revolutionary changes that happened in Eastern Europe in 1990. The lack of distinction made between the apparatus and the nomenclatura represented a serious impediment to the understanding of both the nature and the dissolution of communist power. Some results of a survey conducted among the party apparatus in Budapest in the autumn of 1988 are presented, including an analysis of the professional and family background of political ‘instructors’ and their value preferences, the reconstruction of the type of career path that joining the apparatus represented for an individual, including the function of privileges and constraints; and the stages in the career of the apparatus itself, including its final dissolution. Finally, a distinction is made between two different ‘legacies’ of communism: the salvaging of the nomenclatura and the lasting impact of the earlier activity of the apparatus on all segments of the population. The widespread image of the thaw after a deep freeze is contrasted with that of a vacuum and its dangers.
Sandel's Critique of the Primacy of Justice: A Liberal Rejoinder
Authors: Caney Simon
Published: January 2009

Liberal theorists have traditionally emphasized the importance of rights and just institutions. Recently liberalism and the liberal emphasis on rights have been criticized on the grounds that they are individualistic and overlook the importance of community and fraternity. In this Note I look at two particular arguments, made by the communitarian Michael Sandel, that have been levelled at the liberal emphasis on rights, namely, what I shall call the ‘circumstances of justice’ argument and the ‘crowding out’ argument.
Decaying Versus Developing Party Systems: A Comparison of Party Images in the United States and West Germany
Authors: Klingemann Hans-Dieter , Wattenberg Martin P.
Published: January 2009

This article examines citizens' attitudes towards the two major parties in the United States since 1952 and in West Germany since 1969 employing open-ended data from each country's National Election Study time series. Despite similar declining trends in party identification in the two countries, it is found that the patterns of change in party images are markedly different. In the United States it is shown that voters have become increasingly neutral towards the two parties as the focus has turned more and more towards the candidates. In contrast, in West Germany voters have come to have a more balanced view of the parties, seeing both positive and negative features of both. Thus in both cases there has been a decline in polarized strong partisanship (‘my party right or wrong’), but for different reasons. In the United States this decline can be seen as a sign of the decay of an ageing and outdated party system; in West Germany it can be seen as the development of realistic and balanced views of a party system which is just reaching full maturity. The implications for analysing party system development in Eastern Europe are discussed.
The Party Mandate and the Westminster Model: Election Programmes and Government Spending in Britain, 1948–85
Authors: Hofferbert Richard I. , Budge Ian
Published: January 2009

Do party manifestos matter to government policy? Does a genuine party mandate operate within the British political process? These questions are generally neglected in analyses of British politics, but they are crucial in assessing how far political parties transmit electoral preferences into government action. We try to answer them through a novel use of available data, using content analysis to code and classify policy emphases within the post-war election programmes of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal parties. Statistical analysis reveals that government party programmes are remarkably well reflected in post-election policy priorities, measured as percentages of central government spending in major policy areas. This gives strong support to traditional mandate theory within the context of the ‘Westminster model’ of party government. Anomalies, such as a strong relationship between Liberal emphases and expenditures in three key areas, and the more consistent relationship of expenditures with Conservative rather than Labour priorities, are also considered.
Generational Replacement and Value Change in Eight West European Societies
Authors: Abramson Paul R. , Inglehart Ronald
Published: January 2009

Surveys sponsored by the Commission of the European Communities are employed to study value change in West Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, France, Belgium and Italy between 1970–71 and 1990 and in Denmark and Ireland between 1973 and 1990. During these years generational replacement had a major impact on value trends in all eight societies. In Germany, Britain, the Netherlands and Denmark generational replacement contributed to the growth of Postmaterialism, and in France, Italy and Ireland replacement was the major force creating the trend towards Postmaterialism. Even in Belgium, where there was only a slight move towards Postmaterialism, replacement may have prevented a movement towards Materialism. For the European public as a whole, replacement contributed to the growth of Postmaterialism. However, the impact of replacement is likely to be smaller in the coming two decades because relatively low birth rates during the late 1970s and the 1980s will contribute to lower rates of generational replacement.
Constituency Characteristics, Individual Characteristics and Tactical Voting in the 1987 British General Election
Authors: Niemi Richard G. , Written Guy , Franklin Mark N.
Published: January 2009

In Britain in recent years the study of tactical voting has become something of a growth industry. Unresolved, however, is a key question: the number of tactical voters. Despite an election-night estimate of 17 per cent, a variety of later analysts have estimated that little more than one in twenty voters behaved tactically in 1987, a surprisingly low figure in the light of the efforts of various groups to encourage tactical voting in order to avoid fragmentation of the anti-Thatcher vote. Most recently, Heath, Curtice and Jowell, in their analysis of the British Election Study survey, report that ‘just 6.5% of major party voters indicated in their replies a tactical motivation for their vote’.
Inter-Constituency Migration and Turnout at the British General Election of 1983
Authors: Denver David , Halfacree Keith
Published: January 2009

One of the most striking features of British general election results is the large variation in turnout across constituencies. In 1983, for instance, the mean turnout was 72.6 per cent of the registered electorate but it ranged from 82.1 per cent in Carmarthen to 51.8 per cent in the City of London and Westminster. Moreover, these variations tend to be reproduced in successive elections – the bivariate correlation between constituency turnout in the 1983 and 1987 elections for all 633 mainland Britain constituencies is +0.94.
The Effects of State–Societal Arrangements on International Competitiveness: Steel, Motor Vehicles and Semiconductors in the United States, Japan and Western Europe
Authors: Hart Jeffrey A.
Published: January 2009

Changes in international competitiveness since the Second World War have favoured Germany and Japan over France, the United States and Britain. This applies to competitiveness in general, but is examined here in three specific industries: steel, motor vehicles and semiconductors. Explanations of changes in competitiveness often focus on economic and cultural variables, but an examination of the three industries shows that a better explanation can be found in the way in which each country organizes its state and its society. State-societal arrangements influence competitiveness mainly through their impact on the speed of diffusion of new technologies. The disparate cases of Germany (strong business and labour, weak government) and Japan (strong business and government, weak labour) suggest that there is more than one path to competitiveness. The literature on competitiveness has focused too much on Japan, and therefore on state industrial policies, as the key to increasing competitiveness. The German case shows that increased competitiveness is possible with a relatively weak state, but only if there is a major commitment to upgrading the skill levels of the work force.
Of Time and Partisan Instability in Britain
Authors: Abramson Paul R.
Published: January 2009

Converse's ‘Of Time and Partisan Stability’ presents one of the most elegant theories in political science. Analysing the surveys collected in Almond and Verba's five-nation study, Converse explains the micro-level processes that can contribute to partisan stability among mass electorates. If, as Campbell, Converse, Miller and Stokes argue, partisan loyalties contribute to electoral stability, Converse's theory has important implications, not only for electoral behaviour, but for democratic political stability as well.
How Far is it from Virginia and Rochester to Frankfurt? Public Choice as Critical Theory
Authors: Dryzek John S.
Published: January 2009

Public choice and critical theory constitute two very different and often mutually hostile research traditions. An opportunity for conversation across the two traditions arises inasmuch as public choice has itself demonstrated the incoherence of a politics – in particular, a democratic politics – of unconstrained rational egoism. By deploying an expanded, communicative conception of rationality, critical theory can help move public choice beyond several related impasses. Critical theory benefits from this encounter by gaining content for its currently rather abstract critiques of politics and rationality, and additional insight into the forces conducive to different kinds of rationality. More importantly, political science stands to gain an account of politics more powerful than either tradition can muster by itself.
How to Win a Televised Debate: Candidate Strategies and Voter Response in Germany, 1972–87
Authors: Schrott Peter R. , Lanoue David J.
Published: January 2009

This article analyses candidates' strategies in leadership debates and voters' responses to those strategies. Based on an examination of German election campaign debates since 1972, we specify a number of different debating strategies available to the candidates. The strategic choices made by each party leader are then identified through content analysis. Finally, employing aggregate-level data, regression models are used to determine whether or not the debaters' strategies influenced voters' evaluations of who won and who lost each encounter. We report three major findings: (I) ‘positive’, non-attacking debating styles generate the most favourable public evaluations; (2) voters are most attentive to candidates' discussions of the parties' and government's record rather than their discussions of individual personalities; and (3), in some cases, these effects exceed those of party identification.
Hard Issues, Core Values and Vertical Constraint: The Case of Nuclear Power
Authors: Pollock Philip H. , Lilie Stuart A. , Vittes M. Elliot
Published: January 2009

Under what conditions are mass attitudes towards particular issues ‘vertically’ constrained by core cultural values? Vertical constraint is shaped by three related variables: the objective content of the issue, the way the issue is framed by elites and the individual's level of attentiveness to the controversy. Some issues are ‘easy’. They so permeate social discourse that people encounter, often without wanting to, many social agents offering shortcuts for the vertical, values-to-issue link. Most issues, however, are ‘hard’. Arcane in content and bereft of vigorous mediation, hard issues are more difficult for individuals to tie to core values. As the inferential connection between value and issue lengthens, and as social agents become fewer and more remote, an individual's ability to use values to interpret issues will increasingly depend on whether the decision makers, activists and other elites directly involved in the debate can create a connection and, of course, on whether the individual is paying attention. An analysis of the nuclear power controversy, a highly complex technical issue, reveals that a value-based interpretation favoured by elites and promoted by the media is faithfully reflected in how the mass public understands the issue. Furthermore, non-elites who are more attuned to political life are more polarized on the basis of these core values.
Why Politicians Are More Tolerant: Selective Recruitment and Socialization Among Political Elites in Britain, Israel, New Zealand and the United States
Authors: Sullivan John L. , Walsh Pat , Shamir Michal , Barnum David G. , Gibson James L.
Published: January 2009

In this article, we present data showing that national legislators are more tolerant than the public in Britain, Israel, New Zealand and the United States. Two explanations for this phenomenon are presented and assessed. The first is the selective recruitment of Members of Parliament, Knesset and Congress from among those in the electorate whose demographic, ideological and personality characteristics predispose them to be tolerant. Although this process does operate in all four countries, it is insufficient to explain all of the differences in tolerance between elites and the public in at least three countries. The second explanation relies on a process of explicitlypoliticalsocialization, leading to differences in tolerance between elites and their public that transcend individual-level, personal characteristics. Relying on our analysis of political tolerance among legislators in the four countries, we suggest how this process of political socialization may be operating.
Khrushchev and Gorbachev as Reformers: A Comparison
Authors: Tompson W. J.
Published: January 2009

Nikita Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev both pursued reformist policies during their respective periods as head of the CPSU. Although their policies were very different in substance, the political problems they faced in prosecuting reform were quite similar. The discussion here focuses on the obstacles facing reform-minded Soviet leaders and the options available for overcoming them. Both Khrushchev and Gorbachev were dependent for their position and for the implementation of their policies on a party-state apparat whose interests lay in opposing radical reform and in limiting the leader's power. As a result both men were in a particularly weak position from which to pursue reformist policies.
Class Structure and Social Democratic Party Strategy
Authors: Kitschelt Herbert
Published: January 2009

Arguments that infer the inevitable decline of European socialist and social democratic parties from the changing class structures of advanced capitalist societies have two major flaws. Firstly, they do not adequately reconstruct the link between citizens' experiences in markets, work organizations and the sphere of social reproduction, on the one hand, and the formation of political consciousness, on the other. Secondly, such propositions do not model the strategic terrain of party competition and intra-party decision making on which socialist politicians devise voter appeals. This article will first present a sketch of an alternative theory of preference formation that does not rely on conventional class categories and then analyse party competition as faced by social democrats under advanced capitalism. It will then test ‘naive’ and ‘sophisticated’ theories of class politics and account for their shortcomings in terms of the alternative theoretical framework.