Landscape theory proposed a model of the alignment of actors (such as nations) based upon the importance of individual actors and their pairwise relationships. The model was implemented in simulation software and its predictions compared favourably with empirical reality given several input situations. The model successfully predicted the alignment of seventeen European nations in the Second World War alliance patterns since the Cold War.

A history of local inclusive institutions is correlated with higher levels of democracy today. However, it is unclear whether this reflects the effect of historical institutions on democracy or a prior common cause. Using a geographic natural experiment, this letter demonstrates that historical experience with inclusive institutions is related to less support for autocratic parties in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany. This suggests that electoral support for political parties that seek to subvert democracy can be influenced by pre-modern institutions even when they were destroyed prior to the introduction of democracy.

In his review article on policy analysis [Hugh Heclo, ‘Policy Analysis’, this Journal, II (1972), 83–108], Heclo describes public policy as ‘necessarily at the heart of the political scientist’s concern’. But because public policy ‘is concerned with metachoices’ – ‘choices as to how others shall make choices in whatever sphere public authority is intervening’ – ‘the study of policy therefore necessarily straddles a number of previously distinct academic disciplines’.‘However, I wonder to what extent political scientists are willing to take part in a ‘coherent “interdiscipline” of policy studies’. Heclo quotes Vernon Van Dyke’s warning that the prospect of this for political scientists is ‘appalling’.2 If we examine firstly what political science has to offer in policy analysis and secondly what policy analysis itself has to offer, I feel that Van Dyke will suddenly find himself with massive support.

I am really grateful to Geoffrey Brahm Levey for his critical comments, which push me to try to make clear, first, why I claim that torture is not susceptible of democratic accountability in liberal democracies; secondly, where I believe the residue of deep insight in the Durkheimian argument lies; and thirdly, why I think we cannot rightly speak, or even whisper, of torture as a lesser evil.

Torture and democratic accountability. Levey argues that torture can be rendered collectively accountable and that it is not different from other cases of political dirty hands on the democratic front. It could be subject to judicial oversight, for example, by ‘torture warrants’ in the manner of Dershowitz, or by the government or relevant minister being held accountable after the fact. He adds that states do not conceal torture because it is ‘inherently anti-democratic or unpopular’; on the contrary, today it appears ‘only too popular and open to democratic endorsement’.

But I do not mean to equate democracy and popularity. Democracy is not simply majority rule; majorities can tyrannize over minorities and individuals, who need protection on democratic grounds. ‘Democracy’ names an ideal and we could either, like Schumpeter, revise the ideal in a ‘realistic’ direction or, like Dahl, while retaining the ideal as background, characterize real political systems as approximations to it, using other terms, such as ‘polyarchy’. Either way, one of the things which makes a modern state more rather than less democratic is the extent to which it incorporates institutional arrangements and mechanisms that secure a range of basic rights, protecting all, especially the most vulnerable, from arbitrary abuses of power.

As with any other institution, a scholarly journal can be understood as a system of norms. This article examines those norms, drawing its evidence from participant observation over a number of years. It discusses particular norms as they apply to authors, reviewers and editors, before considering some general themes including: the implicit nature of the norms and tacit knowledge, changes in norms and monitoring.

Courts prosecuting corruption serve a critical horizontal accountability function, but they can also play a role in moments of vertical accountability when voters can sanction corrupt candidates. This article documents the strategic use of corruption lawsuits, demonstrating the presence of an electoral cycle in filing new corruption accusations against politicians. Using an original dataset of daily corruption complaints filed in federal courts against members of Argentina's main political coalitions between 2013 and 2021, we document increased corruption accusations against and by politicians in the periods immediately preceding an election. A second dataset of daily media coverage of corruption accusations in two leading newspapers suggests that corruption is more salient before elections, offering politicians a temporal focal point to prepare and launch especially impactful lawsuits. Our findings shed new light on using courts for accountability and debates about the so-called ‘lawfare’ in Latin America.

Faced with rising levels of cross-border migration, many countries have extended local voting rights to non-citizen residents. However, empirical evidence indicates that voter turnout among non-naturalized immigrants is lower when compared to citizens. This raises the question of how to explain this difference. A common answer is that the low turnout rates of non-citizen residents are primarily due to the socio-economic composition of this group and the challenges involved in adapting to a new political system. An alternative but less discussed possibility is that the low turnout concerns the nature of the elections. Hence, we examine whether the turnout of non-citizens is hampered because they are only allowed to partake in local elections. Based on a regression discontinuity design (RDD) using Swedish administrative data, we find that turnout could increase by 10–20 percentage points if the voting rights of non-citizens were extended to the national level.

Theories of electoral accountability emphasize voters' ability to evaluate individual officeholders, which incentivises officials to demonstrate their quality. Before the Australian ballot was introduced in the US at the turn of the twentieth century, however, most ballot designs constrained voters' ability to distinguish individual candidates. Previous scholarship argues that ballot reform led to the rise of candidate-centred politics and the decline in party influence in the twentieth century. We reassess the evidence for this claim and implement the most comprehensive analysis to date on the secret ballot's effects on outcomes related to distributive politics, legislator effort, and party influence. Using an improved research design, we find scant evidence that ballot reform directly affected legislator behaviour, much less that it transformed political representation. While the Australian ballot may have been a necessary condition for the eventual rise of candidate-centred politics, ballot reform did not by itself reshape American politics.

This paper utilizes recent Marxist cultural theory to theorize about the cultural dynamics of racial group conflict in the United States. After laying out a typology of cultural relations between dominant and subordinate groups, the article examines data on African-American cultural penetration of American public culture. The data indicate that since the late 1960s ‘imagerial hegemony’ has yielded to ‘imagerial projection’ for African-Americans. The article concludes by speculating about some interpretations and consequences of this phenomenon.

Over a number of years, and with concerns as far apart as democratic theory and organizational behaviour, many commentators have studied the patterns of recruitment in local government and the contents of the job that elected officials take upon themselves. Most of these analyses have convincingly shown a tendency for political actors to possess a higher average socioeconomic status than the population from which they are drawn. One student is explicit in saying that ‘politics is a middle-class job and the training appropriate for middle-class jobs is also a training for politics’. What has not, however, been subject to such extended consideration is the question of differences among groups of legislators themselves. This Note attempts to restore the balance by reporting briefly on a limited and exploratory investigation of patterns of leadership/influence in one Scottish local council.

One of the central questions in discussions of distributive justice is that of the interest of the badly off, or the worst off, in the financial assets of the well off. By contrast, theorists of distributive justice are remarkably silent on the important and complicated issue of access to the organs of the dead. In this article, I aim to show that if one thinks that the poor’s interest in leading a minimally flourishing life, and a fortiori in remaining alive, is important enough to confer on them a right to some of the material resources of the well off, by way of taxation and, in particular, by way of restrictions on bequests and inheritance, one must think that that very same interest is important enough to confer on the sick a right to the organs of the now-dead healthy. I make a case to that effect, and I explore disanalogies between the posthumous transfer of resources and the posthumous transfer of organs. Finally, I rebut two objections to my proposal.

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.

The image of voting in the United States developed by political scientists over the last decade differs markedly from the perspective offered in that classic study of electoral behaviour in the 1950s, The American Voter. Whereas the authors of The American Voter painted a rather unflattering portrait of the way in which the voter of the 1950s made his electoral choice, contemporary research has begun to discover some unexpected virtues in the American electorate of the 1960s and early 1970s. Compared to his counterpart in the previous generation, today's voter seems to attach less significance to his party identification, and more importance to his perceptions of the parties' stands on issues with which he is concerned, in deciding which party to support in presidential elections. Indeed, it would perhaps be only a slight exaggeration to suggest that the notion of electoral choice has now become a realistic, and not merely a metaphorical, manner of speaking about the American voter.

Endowing agents that prefer co-operative outcomes with asymmetric power substantially increases the chances that both co-operative agents survive and that co-operative worlds evolve across a variety of structural settings of conflict and co-operation present in international relations; particularly when agents are endowed with the ability to selectively interact with other agents. These results are consistent with the general finding that non-compulsory play consistently helps co-operators. The question addressed in this analysis is whether or not asymmetric power also helps exploitive agents in the same structural settings; a question heretofore not analysed. Contrary to expectations, the simulation results reported here suggest that exploitive agents benefit from asymmetric power only in very restricted circumstances – circumstances relatively unlikely to occur in international relations. In effect, there is an asymmetry in the benefits of asymmetric power.

We know from election studies which demographic characteristics best predict vote choice, but we know far less about how citizens perceive their similarity to one another in terms of these characteristics. Previous research suggests that such perceptions may be crucial for the politicization of social identities and the emergence of political identities. I present results from a novel measurement strategy where respondents are presented with the profiles of two fellow citizens, including several demographic attributes. Respondents are asked which of the two they perceive themselves to have more in common with in terms of politics. Respondents' implicit trade-off of different demographic similarities allows me to measure the relative strength of their perceived political similarities. I find an important role for shared ethnicity, noticeably surpassing shared social class, age and education. Finally, I find that shared ethnicity receives substantially more weight among 2017 Conservative and 2016 Leave voters than among Labour and Remain voters.

This article assesses whether messages that are framed to denigrate a politician or political entity in the eyes of a particular group – defined here as negative targeted messages – decreases Blacks' enthusiasm to vote. It also explores why such messages are effective at demobilizing Black voters. Using a survey experiment implemented on a nationally representative sample, the authors find that Blacks are less enthusiastic about voting when presented with evidence of racism within their preferred political party. Whites and Latinxs do not respond similarly to the same stimulus. The findings also demonstrate evidence that the effectiveness of negative targeted messages towards Blacks is driven by the treatment's ability to alter perceptions of party empathy. Overall, the results suggest that targeted negative messages can be effective at depressing Black turnout. However, parties may be able to counter this negative messaging with evidence of outreach to minority communities to demonstrate a greater sense of empathy.

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.