bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Voter Rationality and Party Competition: A Comment on Laver's Suggested Approach
Authors: Budge Ian
Published: January 2009

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

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

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

(3) Modified office-seeking by politicians. In elections which they expect to be competitive there is thus a premium on the introduction of new cues, while in other elections old partisan appeals will be made to existing predispositions.
The Political Economy of ‘Radical’ Policy: An Analysis of the Scottish Daily News Worker Co-operative
Authors: Bradley Keith , Gelb Alan
Published: January 2009

Within six months of taking office in February 1974 Labour had funded three worker co-operatives: Meriden, Kirkby Manufacturing and the Scottish Daily News (SDN). All three ventures were the subject of considerable economic and political controversy. The Conservatives attacked them as ‘wasteful projects’ which would only encourage ‘creeping militancy’; theDaily Telegraphreferred to them as a ‘diet of sub-Trotskyism’. Michael Heseltine, Conservative spokesman for Industry, attacked Labour's support for the three co-operatives, suggesting that they encouraged ‘others to follow these illegal precedents, commit national resources to wasteful projects, and create a growing sense of injustice among the overwhelming majority of hardworking, law-abiding citizens who totally fail to understand why creeping militancy should attract government support at their expense’. There was criticism too from less obviously partisan sources: theSixth Report of the Committee on Public Expenditure, for example, concluded that worker co-operatives were non-viable and thus a waste of public money.
Does Spending on Defence Cut Spending on Health?: A Time-Series Analysis of the U.S. Economy 1929–74
Authors: Peroff Kathleen , Podolak-Warren Margaret
Published: January 2009

When public programme demands exceed resources, tradeoffs between different public policies occur; that is, one policy gains while another loses in the allocation of these resources. Tradeoffs are most easily measured in terms of budgetary expenditures. If the budget is expanding, the consequences of tradeoffs are less severe than when the budget contracts or remains stable, and budgetary decisions involve zero-sum games. However, the concept of tradeoff is still relevant in an expanding budget since decisions are made about how the additional resources are to be allocated, and while all policy areas may gain, some obviously will receive more resources than others.
Ministerial Reshuffles and the Civil Service
Authors: Alderman R. K. , Cross J. A.
Published: January 2009

The relationship between ministers and the senior civil servants with whom they are in closest contact has long fascinated students of British government. For all the attention lavished on it, however, the relationship remains obstinately elusive and unsusceptible to clear categorization and analysis. The problem is partly one of finding a suitable frame of reference. Despite their well-established limitations, the Weberian model of an instrumental bureaucracy and the closely-related ‘politics-administration dichotomy’ still loom surprisingly large in academic analyses of bureaucratic behaviour. But the attempt to specify roles appropriate to civil servants, on the one hand, or ministers, on the other, runs the risk either of proving inadequate in face of the empirical evidence or of leading to the conclusion that one of the groups – usually the civil servants – is usurping the other's role or roles. Elements of the latter can be seen in the concern evinced in recent years about the power of civil servantsvis-à-visministers in Britain. (Discussion of minister-civil servant relationships has, indeed, been almost entirely confined to aspects of power – particularly that of the minister's ability to get his way on policy.)
A Bargaining Theory of Coalition Formation
Authors: Browne Eric C. , Rice Peter
Published: January 2009

Central both to formal theories of coalition formation and many, actual, collective decision-making processes is the distribution of some reward, or payoff as it is commonly called, among those participants able to control a decision. The payoff constitutes an object of value for the players, or the stakes of the game, the disposition of which becomes a primary focus of bargaining among them. It is usual to assume that participants in coalition-forming contexts are rational actors, and this is often interpreted to mean that they pursue strategies intended to maximize their individual shares of the available payoff. Theories based upon this general structure have furnished a variety of important propositions, focusing mostly upon the composition of winning coalitions.
The SRC Panel Data and Mass Political Attitudes
Authors: Erikson Robert S.
Published: January 2009

One of the richest data sources for the study of public opinion is the Survey Research Center's panel study conducted in the late 1950s. Because the SRC interviewed its national panel of Americans three times over a four-year period, the SRC panel data allows the analysis of changes in survey responses over time. The most remarkable discovery from the SRC panel was that panelists changed their reported opinions on policy issues with considerable frequency when asked the same policy questions in different years. Moreover, the amount of observed change in the individual responses varied little with the time interval between responses. That is, the correlations between responses to the same issue item in 1956 and 1958 or in 1958 and 1960 (two years apart) were almost as low as the correlations to the same issue item in 1956 and 1960 (four years apart).
Eccentrically Contested Concepts
Authors: Clarke Barry
Published: January 2009

In a recent exchange in this Journal, K.I. Macdonald took issue with Steven Lukes's claim that power is an essentially contested concept. Macdonald claims that in arguing that power is essentially contested Lukes locates disputes about power in the concept itself rather than in the divergent uses of that concept. Macdonald's claim is that there are at least two types of dispute about concepts: disputes which arise from within the concept and disputes which arise in the differing values ‘from which the concept depends’. In the case of power, Macdonald argues, the dispute lies between contending perspectives and values and not within the concept of power itself. Whilst not denying that there are essentially contested concepts, Macdonald is clear that the concept of power is not essentially contested but reflects a contest between differing value positions. Macdonald argues that whenever a concept is ‘truly essentially contested the proper ground for the contest is the essence of the concept. Our disagreements inhere in that concept’.
Is There a Burger Court?
Authors: Hodder-Williams Richard
Published: January 2009

The history of the Supreme Court tends to be divided into historical slices coterminous with individual Chief Justiceships. One speaks of the Taft Court, the Hughes Court, the Stone Court, the Vinson Court, and the Warren Court. Behind these titles lies the implication that they can be differentiated in terms of something more than merely temporal variation; the Chief Justice himself must be the catalyst which is supposed to make each era special. But, in what senses can a period of Supreme Court history be thought of as specifically associated with its current Chief Justice?
The End of Party Politics? Activist-Officeseeker Relationships in the Colorado Democratic Party
Authors: Ware Alan
Published: January 2009

This Note is concerned with a neglected aspect of American party politics in the last decade: the sources of development or decay in local and state organizations. In the wake of much research into the transformation of the American electorate during this period, it might seem surprising that changes in organizational politics should have attracted such scant attention. Nevertheless, this is easily explained once it is recalled how virtually all American politics textbooks analyse parties. In the first place, they compartmentalize problems about parties into ones affecting either ‘the party-in-the-electorate’ or ‘the party organization’ or ‘the partyin-government’. One consequence of conceiving parties in this way has been to obscure an obvious fact: party organizations both affect and reflect electoral decomposition, and they partly define the potential for cohesion between a party's public office-holders. When the concept of party is taken to be a ‘confederate’ trinity of concepts, it is only to be expected that rigid boundaries will be established separating what are seen as being the major problem areas of electoral politics from those of organizational and governmental politics. Secondly, party organizations in America are usually dismissed as ‘disorganizations’. They are bodies that perform the minimum necessary electoral functions, but are incapable of becoming anything more and could scarcely be anything less without ceasing to exist. From this perspective both the alleged decline of party machines and the rise of amateur politics are merely interesting phenomena, ones that are unconnected in any important ways with the party-in-the-electorate or the party-in-government.
Comparing the Scottish Office with ‘Whitehall’: A Quantitative Approach
Authors: Hood Christopher , Dunsire Andrew , Thompson Suky
Published: January 2009

This article seeks to throw some light on what is perhaps a deceptively simple question: is the central administrative bureaucracy which governs Scotland from St Andrew's House in Edinburgh in any measurable way distinctively Scottish, as opposed to the mere manifestation in Scotland of the standard U.K. civil service? Do the Scottish Departments display characteristics not found in Whitehall, and is there a ‘Scottish administrative style’ for such Departments? Answers to these questions are not only interesting in their own right but clearly have some relevance to the devolution debate. For example, if Scottish administration is recognizably ‘different’, this might be regarded as evidence that a greater degree of effective devolution than is assumed already exists; if Scottish administration shows no distinctive features at present, one might speculate what changes devolution to an Assembly would engender. We shall make some brief comments on this point at the close of this article.
Not All Roads Lead to Rome: Local Housing Policy in the Unitary Italian State
Authors: Sbragia Alberta
Published: January 2009

Until the establishment of regional governments in the early 1970S, Italy was a formally centralized, unitary state. Both the legal and formal administrative frameworks within which local officials worked were such as to support the prevailing scholarly view that, in such a centralized state, the possibilities for local autonomy and initiative were very limited. The formal role of local governments after the Second World War continued to be that which had been specified by the Fascists in legislation designed to complete the centralization of the Italian state. Such a role left little room for local independence and initiative. Administratively, most decisions had to be approved by officials in Rome. Moreover, the policies and finances of local governments were closely supervised by the Prefects, who served as agents of central government.
Policy Making and Rationality in Sweden: The Case of Transport
Authors: Richardson J. J.
Published: January 2009

It is not uncommon for the case-study approach to the study of policy making to be criticized for failing to produce broad generalizations or concepts applicable to systems as a whole. For example, in discussing policy making and political culture in Sweden, Anton argues that case-studies of decision making do not offer an adequate or realistic view of the process. In doing so he suggests that we should shift our focus of concern ‘from the single decision (whatever it is), to the structure of relationships between participants and the norms which serve to maintain or change those relationships through time. The focus shifts, in other words, from decisions to systems of decision-making’. Whilst not disputing the need for studying the general properties of decision making in a given political system (or indeed the need for the comparative study of policy making in different systems), this article will suggest the value of studying individual policy areas – in this case, transport – as opposed to both individual decisions and entire political systems, as a means of testing broader propositions such as those formulated by Anton.
Nomination Strategies in the Irish STV System: The Dail Elections of 1969, 1973 and 1977
Authors: Lijphart Arend , Irwin Galen A.
Published: January 2009

In an innovative and carefully argued article (‘The Used Vote and Electoral Outcomes: The Irish General Election of 1973’, this Journal, V (1975), 363–83) on the Irish Single Transferable Vote (STV) system in the 1969 and 1973 Dail elections, A. S. Cohan, R. D. McKinlay and Anthony Mughan state a proposition that requires further analysis. They argue that ‘the optimal number of candidates for a party is equal to the largest number of seats that the party might hope to win’ in a constituency, instead of the more common practice of nominating a larger number of candidates. The reasoning behind this proposition is that the nomination of fewer candidates means a greater concentration of the party's vote on these candidates and hence fewer vote transfers and less potential wastage of votes.
Rejoinder
Authors: Cohan A. S.
Published: January 2009

In dealing with the question of the overnomination of candidates in Irish constituencies, Lijphart and Irwin have found that overnomination does tend to injure a party's chances of electing more candidates given the vagaries of proportional representation with the single transferable vote. They conclude that ‘this favourable ten-to-one ratio appears to entail strong support for the proposition that overnomination can be dangerous and should be avoided’. My disagreement with them is not in their methods and findings, but in their interpretation of the significance of those findings.
The National Front Vote in the 1977 GLC Elections: An Aggregate Data Analysis
Authors: Whiteley Paul
Published: January 2009

The National Front is England's fourth largest party in terms of electoral support. The number of candidates it has fielded at local and national elections has increased at each successive election since it was founded in 1968. It has not, however, been extensively studied by academic researchers. Walker has provided a historical account of the development of the National Front. Scott has examined the activities and attitudes of one local branch. Nugent and King have compared it with earlier right-wing political organizations, particularly the British Union of Fascists. But rather less is known about the National Front's electoral support.
‘Divisive’ Primaries: The Important Questions
Authors: Ware Alan
Published: January 2009

A small, but apparently expanding, area of research in the United States has developed around the issue of whether divisive primary elections harm the general election prospects of the winners of such primaries. The subject matter is important, being of interest to students of intra-party democracy, party organization and voting behaviour. Unfortunately the research reported in major American political science journals has been directed, with one exception, towards a trivial question, at the expense of the more complex and interesting ones. The purpose of this Note is to explain why this question is not even a poor substitute for them, and to suggest the problems towards which research in this area should be directed.
Sex and Games: On Oppression and Rationality
Authors: Sapiro Virginia
Published: January 2009

‘Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry’, was penned by Jeremy Bentham in 1825, but could as appropriately appear in most contemporary treatments of social choice and rationality. Political economists still use the felicific calculus; they search for ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ by exploring means and consequences of aggregating individuals' preferences to form social choices among competing values. The values are assigned equal weight. The origins and processes of development of individual preferences are taken as ‘givens’, i.e. as irrelevant to the problem of social choice. What counts is rational behaviour, which is said to exist when action is ‘correctly’ designed to maximize goal achievement, ‘given the goal in question and the real world as it exists’.
Legislative Reform and the Decline of Presidential Influence on Capitol Hill
Authors: Davis Eric L.
Published: January 2009

Observers of the American political scene might at times wonder why the 95th Congress, with nearly two-to-one Democratic majorities in both houses, did not take positive action on many of President Carter's important legislative proposals in 1977 and 1978. After all, it was argued when Carter was inaugurated at the beginning of 1977, the return of common party control to both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue would bring to an end the legislative-executive confrontations of the Nixon-Ford years. Thus, was not the unwillingness of Congress to approve his major programs an indication that Carter was inept, or even perhaps incompetent, as a legislative leader? If Lyndon Johnson could obtain swift approval of an extensive legislative agenda from the 89th Congress (1965–66), which in partisan composition was quite similar to the 95th Congress, why could Jimmy Carter not achieve comparable results?
The Political Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott
Authors: Parekh Bhikhu
Published: January 2009

Although Michael Oakeshott has written on such a wide variety of subjects as religion, jurisprudence, education, science, aesthetics and history, Ishall concentrate in this essay on his political philosophy. As a political philosopher Oakeshott has been concerned with two basic themes: firstly, to develop a conception of the nature of philosophy in general and political philosophy in particular; and secondly, to develop a substantive theory of politics. Accordingly I shall divide this essay into four sections. In the first three sections I shall outline his discussion of the two themes, and in the fourth, assess their adequacy.
Decision by Interpretation: A New Concept for an Often Overlooked Decision Mode
Authors: Steiner Jürg , Dorff Robert H.
Published: January 2009

This paper deals with political decision making in face-to-face groups. We begin by considering the range of decision modes available in group situations. It may seem that there is a choice between only two: a group may resolve a conflict either in a competitive way through the application of the majority principle or in a co-operative way in the sense of accommodation and amicable agreement. However, there is a third decision mode which is often overlooked in the literature: decision by interpretation. We have coined this term in a recent study of intra-party decision making in the Swiss Free Democratic party. The purpose of the present paper is to describe the main properties of the new concept and to demonstrate that its application goes far beyond intra-party decision making and the cultural context of Switzerland. In a broader project about political decision modes in general we have put the concept of decision by interpretation into a theoretical context, examining both its causes and consequences. Here, we shall limit ourselves to a few considerations about the direction in which we have developed the theory.
What was the Profit in Following the Crowd? The Effectiveness of Party Strategies on Immigration and Devolution
Authors: Miller W. L.
Published: January 2009

‘The public does respond to candidates who offer a choice rather than an echo. But unfortunately for the candidate who offers the choice, the public seems to choose the echo.’ So concluded Nie, Verba and Petrocik when they studied electoral strategy in the United States. Goldwater and McGovern broke the consensus but paid a heavy price for introducing issues into American politics.
The Provincial First Party Secretary in the People's Republic of China, 1949–78: A Profile
Authors: Goodman David S. G.
Published: January 2009

The position of first secretary of a provincial committee of the Chinese Communist Party – the highest ranking cadre at provincial level – was not originally one of major importance within the leadership in 1949 when the People's Republic of China was established. However, it has become so since largely as a result of the increase in the importance of the provincial level in the party–state system. The increased political significance of the first secretary was demonstrated most dramatically during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–69) when the provincial level was severely affected by the attack on the party–state system. Unlike their counterparts at the centre or sub-provincial levels almost all the provincial first party secretaries in office on the eve of the Cultural Revolution lost their positions as the attempt was made to completely reorganize the provincial level.
The Political Philosophy of Karl Popper
Authors: Lessnoff Michael
Published: January 2009

In 1968 there appeared in New Left Review an essay by its editor, Perry Anderson, which attracted considerable attention. Detecting in the student unrest then at its height ‘stirrings of a revolutionary consciousness’, Anderson was concerned to identify (and of course attack) the main elements ofthat British cultural conservatism which, in his view, the burgeoning revolutionary consciousness must overthrow. In brief, his view was that British intellectual life was dominated by a ‘“White”, counter-revolutionary emigration’ from Eastern and Central Europe – men who had fled the instability of their own societies for the continuity and order of the British tradition. Among them Anderson listed, as the dominant influence in social theory, Karl Popper. This was an accolade of sorts, but by no means any kind of intellectual tribute, for Anderson went on to dismiss Popper as nothing more than a ‘fluent ideologue’, incompetent alike in sociology and political theory.
Blasphemy, Offensiveness and Law
Authors: Jones Peter
Published: January 2009

Of all the freedoms cherished by liberals, perhaps none is more cherished than freedom of expression. Most would accept that some limits should be placed upon that freedom, but what sort of limits those should be and how far they should extend are matters of controversy. That controversy is all the greater when the purpose for which free expression is limited is itself one which is as potentially compromising to liberalism as the prevention of offence to people's feelings. In this paper I shall examine the relative claims of free expression and offended feelings by focusing on a subject which juxtaposes the two particularly clearly: blasphemy.
The Soviet Leader Cult: Reflections on the Structure of Leadership in the Soviet Union
Authors: Gill Graeme
Published: January 2009

A common feature of authoritarian regimes throughout history has been the creation of an elaborate mystique around the leader. This has consisted, in general terms, of the building up of the leader into a figure of superhuman dimensions dwarfing all the lesser mortals who surround him. Although such a cult often pandered to and was inflated by the egoism of its principal, its presence across millennia and cultural differences suggests a systemic basis for its development. Leader cults have rarely been the result simply of a desire for personal glorification or public worship on the part of a leader, significant though such factors may be in any particular instance, but have resulted in large part from structural features of the political system in question. The Soviet political system is clearly relevant in this regard, having been characterized by the existence of exaggerated cults of the leader for much of its sixty-two-year history. By analysing two of these cults, those of Stalin and Brezhnev as embodied in the images of the two leaders projected through the party press, it will be possible to isolate those structural aspects of the Soviet political system which encourage the emergence and growth of a leader cult.
Do Frozen Cleavages Ever Go Stale? The Bases of the Canadian and Australian Party Systems
Authors: Irvine William P. , Gold H.
Published: January 2009

The title of this paper derives from two sets of observations. The first, from Lipset and Rokkan, asserts that Western party systems reflect (or, at least, reflected in the mid-1960s) a congealment of political conflicts dating from the 1920s or earlier. The second, taken generally from the growing concern about political ungovernability, suggests that contemporary party systems are losing their capacity to structure choice effectively in Western polities. Since it is one of the defects of frozen food storage that any food, no matter how well frozen, will eventually become unappetizing if not downright unwholesome, it is worth enquiring whether the two sets of observations are interconnected. In a fast-changing world, party systems reflecting the shape of conflict over past problems may appear to the voter as out of touch with newer problems. Indeed, the party systems observed by Lipset and Rokkan have all been challenged subsequently by new forces.
Ideology, Gender and Political Action: A Cross-National Survey
Authors: Jennings M. Kent , Farah Barbara G.
Published: January 2009

Modern democratic theory stresses the need for citizens to be able to think in abstract ways about political objects and the political system. The underlying assumption is that those with a richer guiding conceptual framework participate more, monitor and process fresh stimuli in a more systematic fashion, and are less bewildered by a complicated political environment. These are generally conceded to be good qualities for the citizen and the state. To observe that women have a less developed sense of ideological sophistication is to conclude that their political lives are at least different, if not indeed more impoverished.
A Non-Zero-Sum Game of Football
Authors: McLean Iain
Published: January 2009

A recent unusual event in the First Division of the English (Association) Football League provides an interesting example of how a game that is normally zero-sum can be converted into a non-zero-sum game. The political implications are, I hope, obvious. If politics consists of zero-sum games such as Diplomacy, Marx's conception of class conflict, or some non-Marxists' conceptions of ethnic, language, or boundary disputes, then no long-run co-operation between the players is possible and war is a seemingly inevitable continuation of policy by other means. If it consists of non-zero-sum games such as Prisoners' Dilemma, most non-Marxists' conceptions of class conflict, or some Marxists' conceptions of ethnic, language, or boundary disputes, then there is scope for co-operation as well as for competition. The present example, originally developed as an undergraduate teaching aid, may be of some general interest.
A Comment on ‘The Incidence of Coloured Populations and Support for the National Front’
Authors: Whiteley Paul
Published: January 2009

In an ingenious piece of aggregate data analysis Stan Taylor finds a significant relationship between the percentage of the coloured population in a constituency, and the percentage voting for the National Front amongst whites, in the two general elections of 1974 (‘The Incidence of Coloured Populations and Support for the National Front’, this Journal, IX (1979), 250–5). He tests two alternative models of this relationship. The first is a linear model which postulates a white ‘backlash’ of increasing magnitude with further concentrations of coloured people; the second is a curvilinear model which postulates maximum National Front support in areas of moderate concentrations of coloured people, the argument being that people in this situation may feel most threatened by the possible future influx of coloured people. It is an elegant exercise in model building and testing, which finds the non-linear model consistent with the data for the February 1974 election, and the linear model consistent with the data for the October 1974 election.
A Reply to Whiteley
Authors: Taylor Stan
Published: January 2009

In a disingenuous piece of aggregate data analysis Paul Whiteley suggests that, because he found that the correlation between two variables in a local election held at one point of time in one city was spurious when a third was controlled for, this implies that the relationships between two variables, one calculated on a different basis, in two general elections which took place three years earlier and covered a wide area of England, will also be spurious when an additional variable is introduced into the analysis. It is an inelegant analysis in model building and testing, in so far as it cannot explain the findings it purports to explain. Unfortunately it is also a textbook case of making causal inferences from variables associated with each other for reasons that lie outside the scope of the model.
Rational Participation: The Politics of Relative Power
Authors: Goodin Robert , Dryzek John
Published: January 2009

Survey researchers have been reporting, for two decades or more, that a citizen's decision to participate in politics is most strongly influenced by his subjective sense of efficacy. Those who feel able to make a great impact tend to participate vigorously, while those who feel impotent tend to withdraw. According to the conventional wisdom all this is mostly inside one's head, with few objective – much less rational – referents. For example, social psychologists, and political researchers under their spell, see subjective efficacy as a mere reflection of ‘ego strength’. The more sociologically-inclined see psycho-cultural values (such as ‘civic orientation’) producing a sense of efficacy which, once again, bears little relationship to one's real influence.
Soviet Security and the Role of the Military: The 1968 Czechoslovak Crisis
Authors: Dawisha Karen
Published: January 2009

One of the major issues surrounding the perennial debates over Soviet alliance management is whether the Soviet leadership considers its military positionvis-à-visWestern Europe to be a more important determinant of policy than the political stability of its East European allies. Moscow showed itself willing to use force to achieve its objectives in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, but analysts are not agreed either on the nature of those objectives or on the wider priorities governing Soviet policy. Before 1968 it was widely believed that security considerations relating to the unity and strength of the Warsaw Pact dominated Soviet thinking. It was assumed that East European regimes would be allowed to undertake some, primarily economic, reforms provided they did not repeat the mistake made by the Hungarians in 1956 of calling for a withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. This belief in the supremacy of strategic considerations led the Czechoslovaks, and many Western analysts, to miscalculate both the extent of the Soviet Union's ideological disagreement with the reform movement and the interrelationships between political and strategic considerations.
Political Science and Scottish Politics
Authors: Kellas James G.
Published: January 2009

There is now a considerable literature about Scottish politics, most of it concerned with nationalism and devolution, but some of it consisting of institutional and administrative studies. The purpose of this article is to review the main books and articles in the field and to assess their successes and failures in accurately portraying and predicting the recent course of Scottish politics. I shall first consider the theoretical approaches which have been used. I shall then give an account of the principal texts, which will be evaluated with particular attention paid to their explanatory and predictive value. Lastly, some suggestions are made about the lines that future research on Scottish politics might take, in the light of the record so far.
The Labour Party: Three Unnoticed Changes
Authors: McCormick Paul
Published: January 2009

Within the last seven years there have been three important, but largely unnoticed, changes affecting the respective powers of the National Executive Committee (NEC) and the Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs). Assessment of these changes is not facilitated by the fact that they are central to an inner party dispute between left-wing and right-wing factions. The political rhetoric which has accompanied them is not a reliable indication of their true import and nature. This paper aims to describe and analyse the three changes and to assess them in terms of their impact on constitutional structures and their likely consequences for factional struggle – but not to make any value-judgements upon them or upon the inter-factional disputes.
The Urban Basis of Political Alignment: A Rejoinder to Harrop
Authors: Dunleavy Patrick
Published: January 2009

Martin Harrop makes a large number of disparate observations connected with some aspects of my paper. In the space available I can do no more than take up those which seem particularly significant or contentious. Four points struck me in this way.
Regime Support in Canada: A Comment
Authors: Atkinson Michael M. , Coleman William D. , Lewis Thomas J.
Published: January 2009

In their article, ‘Some Correlates of Regime Support in Canada’, (this Journal, VIII (1978), 199–216), Allan Kornberg, Harold D. Clarke and Lawrence LeDuc set out to describe ‘the distribution and foundations of public support for the political regime in Canada’ (p. 199). Using the 1974 National Election Study as their data base and regression analysis as their primary technique, they attempt to identify the correlates of regime support and come to grips with the problem of causal sequence.
Beyond ‘The Banality of Evil’
Authors: Clarke Barry
Published: January 2009

Although the relevance of evil to politics occupies a large part of the history of political thought few modern political theorists have paid sustained attention to the relationship between the political evils of our times and our understanding of the concept of evil. A major exception to this is Hannah Arendt. For Arendt the evils of totalitarianism, genocide and ‘administrative massacre’ have provided the material for the basic questions to which her thinking has been directed. In the posthumously published The Life of the Mind Arendt appears to depart from her concern with the evils of mass society; the work is outwardly a phenomenological account of some aspects of the history of Western thought. It is, however possible to see this work as a metaphysic for her more overtly political work. Viewed in this way it can also be used to deepen understanding of her concept of the ‘banality of evil’. This notion, which she first introduced in her report of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, became central to her understanding of one part of the Nazi phenomenon.
House Re-elections and Senate Defeats: The Role of the Challenger
Authors: Hinckley Barbara
Published: January 2009

The advantage of incumbency has long intrigued students of congressional elections. Whether measured at individual or aggregate levels, by re-election rates or voting margins, the advantage has been striking: simply knowing that there is an incumbent in the contest supplies a major predictor of the vote. The person in office – the incumbent – is overwhelmingly likely to win re-election and to win by larger margins than victorious non-incumbents.
Party Recruitment and the Nationalities in the USSR: A Study in Centre-Republican Relationships
Authors: McAuley Mary
Published: January 2009

The Soviet political system is usually thought of as an extremely centralized, uniform system. The centre decides, the Republican or local authorities obey. There is little scope for local initiative or autonomy. Yet, at the same time, another image of political life edges its way forward. Georgia was run for many years by its local boss, Mzhavanadze, along lines that clearly were not what the centre wanted; frequent reports appear of muddle, confusion, the non-implementation of legislation or the activities of local ‘family circles’. Somehow we have to make sense of these two aspects of Soviet politics. Is it that the centre chooses to exert its power in some policy areas and not in others, or is it that some are less amenable to control? Are some geographical or cultural regions treated differently from others? How much local autonomy is there? The question of the degree of decentralization in the Soviet system has been raised most recently and explored most interestingly by Hough. This is a contribution to the same theme. It does not provide any grand answers but it does focus attention on a topic that is of key importance in itself and about which we know little: the process of party recruitment. The paper seeks to explore the relationship between central party authorities and the Republican party organizations by looking at the recruitment of the different nationalities.
Reconstructing Past Partisanship in Britain
Authors: Katz Richard S. , Niemi Richard G. , Newman David
Published: January 2009

Most of the variables in survey-based studies of electoral behaviour are measured only at second hand. Although sex or race can be coded from direct observation, and whether an individual voted can often be ascertained from documentary evidence, researchers must usually rely on respondents' accuracy and truthfulness in reporting attitudes and in recalling past behaviour. Both of these may involve significant biases. Research has shown that many events are underreported by survey respondents, although clearly desirable activities like voting may be overreported. Other work has suggested the likelihood that ‘non-attitudes’ will be reported by many respondents. When these two are compounded, so that respondents are asked to recall previous attitudes or dispositions, the danger of misrepresentation is multiplied.
The Decomposition of Electoral Bias in a Plurality Election
Authors: Gudgin G. , Taylor P. J.
Published: January 2009

This paper describes an empirical procedure for analysing the difference between the proportion of votes a major party attracts and the proportion of seats it subsequently wins in a plurality election. This difference will be referred to as theelectoral biaswith respect to that particular party at the election being analysed:

B = S — V, (1)

whereSis the seat proportion andVthe vote proportion gained by the party. This bias is the basic concept underlying much of the debate about electoral reform but curiously it has been an under-researched topic in political science literature. Apart from a small continuing debate over the cubic law of seat proportions and some analyses of Australian and New Zealand elections most attention in election studies has been concerned with determining the proportion of votes rather than the subsequent proportion of seats.
A Crucial Test of Alphabetic Voting: The Elections at the University of Leiden, 1973–1978
Authors: Barker Eric A. , Lijphart Areno
Published: January 2009

Politicians and political scientists have long known that there is a slight tendency among voters to prefer candidates whose names appear at the top of the ballot compared with lower-placed candidates, and hence that ceteris paribus the former have a somewhat better chance of being elected than the latter. When the candidates' names appear on the ballot in alphabetical order, this positional voting bias is usually called ‘alphabetic voting’. It is of special importance and interest in preferential voting systems where the voters may indicate their first, second, third, etc., preferences among a list of candidates, as in the single-transferable vote elections to the Irish Dáil, or where they must do so, as in the alternative-vote elections to the Australian House of Representatives.
Markets and Politics: The Human Product
Authors: Lane Robert E.
Published: January 2009

What values should a society seek to maximize? Religious values, as in Calvin's Geneva or Khomeini's Iran? Power and Glory? The Wealth of Nations, the Gross National Product? The greatest happiness for the greatest number? Or, in Humboldt's phrase, ‘the highest and most harmonious development of [man's] powers to a complete and consistent whole?’

There is much to be said for wealth. Quite recently it has been discovered that the pursuit of wealth is a game against nature not a war game, a zero-sum game, with booty as its prize. The distribution of increments of wealth can, under these circumstances, be Pareto optimal. As Marx pointed out, winning the struggle against scarcity is a condition for everything else: men must eat before they can think. Similarly, in ordering a hierarchy of needs, the contemporary humanist psychologist, Abraham Maslow, makes the same obvious point: the satisfaction of physiological needs is a condition for the satisfaction of higher needs, in the end for self-fulfilment – for Humboldt's ‘harmonious development of man's powers’. Wealth gives satisfaction; Bentham believed it was the prime source of happiness. Adam Smith argued that ‘the desire of bettering our condition…[through] an augmentation of fortune’ was the most powerful (and vulgar) of motives, but it was often a mask for a concern for the good opinions of others. So strong a motive lends itself to social control: ‘the steadiest motive in ordinary business work is the desire for pay which is the material reward for work’. Like B. F. Skinner, Marshall held that money is a general reinforcer because of its universal appeal. And it is the foundation of civilization, not only because surplus value may be devoted to cathedrals, but, following Schumpeter, because a society guided by the rationalism of the market's manner of pursuing wealth, is reflected in the high art and science of the West. In the process of maximizing wealth, therefore, a society motivates its members, satisfies them, and provides the basis for high civilization.
The Spanish Public in Political Transition
Authors: McDonough Peter , Pina Antonio López , Barnes Samuel H.
Published: January 2009

Once again, Spain is in political transition. The death of Franco in 1975 provided the opportunity for rationalizing an awkward political system. The objective of the politicians who gathered to draft a new constitution was twofold: to organize a state that was to be both modern and legitimate in a society that is still in many ways ‘pre-civic’ but, at the same time, increasingly tied to the industrial and post-industrial West.
American Assassins: An Alternative Typology
Authors: Clarke James W.
Published: January 2009

Probably no group of political actors is more misunderstood than American assassins. My purpose in this preliminary report is to identify the sources of this misunderstanding and to suggest an alternative interpretation based on a reconsideration of the evidence.
The Case of the Vanishing Liberal Senators: The House Did It
Authors: Uslaner Eric M.
Published: January 2009

Members of the House of Representatives often forsake re-election to run for the Senate. Do they realize what they might be giving up? In the 1978 elections only 5 per cent of House incumbents who sought another term were denied it, compared with 40 per cent of the Senators seeking to continue in office. While several students of House elections have referred to the few members in serious electoral trouble (and even fewer who actually lose) as ‘vanishing marginals’, the safe incumbent Senator, particularly a liberal Democrat, is an endangered species. In the 1976 and 1978 elections, ten moderate-toliberal Democratic Senators were defeated, five in each election. Over a dozen more faced the electorate in 1980, facing the threat that the liberal majority within the Senate Democratic party would be erased – or at least eroded. While 93·7 per cent of House incumbents seeking re-election won in 1978 (a figure which has changed little since 1968), the Senate figure of 60 per cent is the smallest percentage since the Democratic landslide of 1958. In an era when House seats have become relatively safe by almost any standard, incumbent Senators appear increasingly more vulnerable.
Foreign Policy and British Bilateral Aid: A Comment on McKinlay and Little
Authors: Healey J. M. , Coverdale A. G.
Published: January 2009

In the July 1978 issue of this journal McKinlay and Little have written an interesting interpretation of British aid policy from 1960 to 1970, based on a statistical study of aid allocation during that period (viii (1978), 313–31). The purpose of the following Note is to question the adequacy of the support for their conclusion that the foreign policy objectives of aid have been dominant compared to humanitarian motivation. It is not intended to deny the existence of foreign policy objectives in aid giving. Aid policy in the United Kingdom, like most other policies, is not made by one ministry but is a compromise between ministries. The question at issue is the relative weight of different motives in aid allocation. There is no doubt that the authors' study has revealed clearly some interesting statistical associations and non-associations between aid allocation to different countries and, inter alia, their size, degree of poverty, colonial, trading and security links with the United Kingdom, Communist bloc associations, and various measures of their political stability and democratic character. However, the main question which must be raised is whether the statistical evidence amassed and analysed really permits the authors to draw their firm conclusions about the relative weight of different British objectives during this period.