The policy-oriented coalition models that were developed in the 1960s and 1970s generally required that the positions of political parties were measured at ordinal level. More recent models of coalition formation, however, have tended to assume that interval-level data on parties' policy positions are available. This need for interval-level data has raised serious practical problems for empirical research. Analysts frequently wish to examine patterns of coalition formation after several, or many, elections. Unfortunately, detailed interval-level data on parties' positions are generally available at only one or two points in time. While it can often be plausibly argued that parties will occupy fairly stable ordinal positions over time, it is extremely doubtful whether this is also the case for their interval positions.

Sunday, 29 October 1994 was cool, partly cloudy, and almost warm when the sun was out, a pleasant autumn day in Washington. Clusters of sightseers strolled along Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House, others sat across the street in Lafayette Square, some of them paying concessionaires to have themselves photographed beside life-size images of President Bill Clinton and his wife. At approximately 2.55 p.m., a man in a long, bulky, tan trench coat stood next to the wrought-iron fence, gazing intently towards the White House. He had been standing there for nearly an hour when two young boys on a field trip ran to a spot near him, pointing excitedly towards a small group of men in dark suits strolling near the north portico of the White House. ‘That looks like Bill Clinton,’ one of them said. ‘Yeah it does,’ replied the other.

At that moment, the man near the fence, pushed the boys aside, slipped a semiautomatic assault rifle from beneath his coat, extended its folding stock, and began firing at the person he mistakenly believed was President Clinton. Running back and forth along the fence as he fired, the shooter quickly emptied a clip of thirty rounds at his intended victim as bystanders scattered in panic, one of them leaving unattended an infant in a baby carriage. When he stopped to insert another thirty-round clip, a very courageous tourist, Michael Rokosky, tackled him from behind. As they struggled on the sidewalk, two other courageous bystanders joined Rokosky, subduing the attacker before uniformed Secret Service officers arrived. No one had been injured.Another bystander cooly recorded the whole event on videotape. As he was being handcuffed, Francisco Martin Duran spoke for the first time: ‘I wish you had shot me,’ were his only words. Meanwhile, President Clinton was watching a televised football game on the opposite side of the White House, unaware until he was informed moments later by his Secret Service detail of what had happened.The account is drawn from, White House Security Review Public Report: Francisco Martin Duran, http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/ustreas/usss/t1pubrpt.htm, p. 1. Hereafter cited as White House Security Report Website.

Incentive compatibility solutions to social dilemmas change individual consequences of non-co-operative and co-operative acts such that self-maximizers will rationally choose to act in ways that promote the public good, i.e. to co-operate. The traditional selfish egoism assumption of rational choice requires dilemmas to be solved by either adding some likely punishment to defection or reward to co-operation. Dilemma co-operation can also, of course, be explained by relaxing the narrow self-interest assumption. By allowing for the possibility that outcomes of interdependent interactions are subjectively evaluated by reference to the actor's own as well as others' interests, or that people get additional utility (or avoid disutility) by following certain normative codes, co-operation in finitely repeated dilemmas can be rational.For examples of evidence of subjective transformations of given payoff matrices, see James Andreoni, ‘Giving with Impure Altrusim: Applications to Charity and Recardian Equivalence’, Journal of Political Economy, 97 (1989), 447–51; and Michael D. Kuhlman and Alfred F. J. Marshello, ‘Individual Differences in Game Motivation as Moderators of Preprogrammed Strategic Effects in Prisoner's Dilemma’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32 (1975), 922–31.

John Charvet, in a recent article, charges various ‘attempts to make of equality a substantive principle of society’ with being ‘incoherent and self contradictory’ (p. 13). The unifying theme of Charvet's article is that certain contenders for equality do so in a manner that logically presupposes the assuming away of those elements of social life which entitle us to talk about individuals as ‘human beings at all, i.e. as beings possessing the attributes of humanity’ (p. 2). I wish to show how little justified these charges are.

Nobody, least of all anyone intending to allude to sociology and stay respectable, should nowadays dare employ a generalization from a single instance. Nonetheless (since this is an introductory paragraph, and therefore only rhetoric), 1 I shall permit myself to do so and excuse the lapse by calling it an illustration. A professor of my acquaintance recently observed that reading an essay on Montesquieu (by one of my better students) had almost persuaded him to go himself and read Esprit des lois. In this country, I suspect, Montesquieu is less read than merely acknowledged as ‘a precursor of sociology’ or even as one of the ‘great theorists’ of sociology in general and political sociology in particular. One of the contributions that I hope this article will make is to persuade others, not merely historians of ideas, that Montesquieu should actually be read, because his ideas and his difficulties are important, interesting and instructive.

In the literature on new nations, much attention has been given to the threat to nationhood posed by cultural and linguistic variations, rather less to the political repercussions of the regional inequality with which such variations are often associated. Regional disparities in resources and services inherited at independence tend to be compounded by policies which stress growth rather than equity. Given that such imbalances are not easily or speedily corrected by means of compensatory economic policies – even if the will exists – the political vulnerability of governments to regional disaffection is bound up with the question of whether it is possible for a common national outlook to be superimposed upon regional variation. The purpose of this brief Note is to test two hypotheses which relate to this question against Kenyan data and experience.

Families are not only the first institution ever created, they are also, for most people, the first institution ever encountered. The preindustrial family structure, which was a function of local ecology and cooperation needs, instilled family members with different values, such as trust in strangers and respect for elders. These values passed through generations and, as we show in three studies, impact today's political attitudes and policies. First, using surveys of second-generation immigrants representing roughly 180 ethnicities living in 32 European countries, we show that the tighter kinship structure of a person's ancestors predicts right-wing cultural attitudes. Among those who are less engaged in politics, tighter ancestral kinship structure also predicts left-wing economic attitudes. In a second study, we control for country-level differences by comparing ethnic groups within countries and find that ancestral kinship strength predicts right-wing cultural attitudes but not left-wing economic attitudes. Finally, in a third study, we examine the policy implications of ancestral kinship. We show that stronger country-level ancestral kinship strength also increases anti-LGBT policies and welfare spending. Finally, we examine whether value systems link preindustrial kinship with modern political attitudes. In total, this work indicates that our political beliefs are rooted in the value systems and familial institutions created by our forebears.

In political discourse, it is common to claim that non-majoritarian institutions are legitimate because they are technical and value-free. Even though most analysts disagree, many arguments for non-majoritarian legitimacy rest on claims that work best if institutions are, in fact, value-free. This paper develops a novel standard for non-majoritarian legitimacy. It builds on the rich debate over the value-free ideal in philosophy of science, which has not, so far, been applied systematically to political theory literature on non-majoritarian institutions. This paper suggests that the argument from inductive risk, a strong argument against the value-free ideal, (1) shows why a naive claim to value freedom is a poor general foundation for non-majoritarian legitimacy; (2) provides a device to assess the degree of democratic value inputs required for an institution to be legitimate; which (3) shows the conditions under which a claim to technical legitimacy might still be normatively acceptable.

When authoritarian regimes liberalize, are there observable patterns in the ordering of reforms, and are these patterns distinct for cases that transition to democracy? While the prevailing literature tends to focus on exogenous ‘determinants’ of democracy, this letter describes the endogenous dynamics of liberalization itself. Using pairwise domination analysis, it assesses the institutional order of reforms during 371 episodes of liberalization in autocracies between 1900 and 2019. Based on twenty-four indicators of democratic institutions and practices, our findings reveal (1) a clear pattern of reform during liberalization episodes, (2) with strong similarities across outcomes, but also that (3) reforms to the administration of elections tend to develop comparatively earlier in episodes of liberalization that produce a democratic transition.

This article provides an accessible introduction to the phenomenon of monotone likelihood in duration modeling of political events. Monotone likelihood arises when covariate values are monotonic when ordered according to failure time, causing parameter estimates to diverge toward infinity. Within political science duration model applications, this problem leads to misinterpretation, model misspecification and omitted variable biases, among other issues. Using a combination of mathematical exposition, Monte Carlo simulations and empirical applications, this article illustrates the advantages of Firth's penalized maximum-likelihood estimation in resolving the methodological complications underlying monotone likelihood. The results identify the conditions under which monotone likelihood is most acute and provide guidance for political scientists applying duration modeling techniques in their empirical research.

This paper uses a conjoint survey experiment fielded in the US, Australia, Chile, and Argentina to develop and test the compensatory theory of tax fairness, which states that higher taxes on the rich can be used to compensate for other benefits unequally granted by the state. Drawing on social psychology, this paper argues that evidence of preferential treatment by the state violates well-established fairness principles and shows, experimentally, that it leads to taxation to restore equality in crisis times, irrespective of wealth and across a variety of settings. The paper makes two important contributions: it provides the first direct, causal evidence of the importance of compensatory arguments for tax preferences and presents unconfounded estimates of the effect of more established fairness considerations as benchmarks against which to compare the importance of compensatory arguments.

The public places an important constraint on funding security in Europe, and austerity risks making the constraint tighter. Several recent studies show that curtailing military spending is a popular way to reduce debt in Europe. Yet it remains unclear if military spending aversion persists when threats are salient. We fielded an original survey experiment in Italy weeks before the Russian invasion of Ukraine to examine how information about security threats influences military spending preferences and fiscal trade-offs. We found that information about threats increases support for military spending. To validate the survey experiment, we recontacted and remeasured our respondent's preferences three weeks after Russia's invasion and find evidence consistent with our initial experiment. Our findings suggest that, while public opposition to military spending remains high in Italy, external threats dampen the public's opposition to military spending, even under high debt burdens.

Paul Abramson's Note (this Journal, p. 505) is an interesting exercise in comparative data reanalysis. But we do not believe that it effectively refutes our argument that partisan weakening in Britain has been caused by ‘period’ rather than ‘generational’ factors.

Many fiscal federal scholars argue, often implicitly, that transfer dependence generally bolsters subnational creditworthiness by signalling a higher likelihood of national bailouts for distressed governments. This article argues that dependence fails to bestow general benefits on local borrowers because it suggests an inability to generate additional revenues in the event of fiscal distress, and because this inability does not, contrary to the expectations of many, necessarily translate into higher bailout expectations. Ultimately it is the nature, not the level, of transfers that affects local creditworthiness, whether through bailout or non-bailout channels. Stable and predictable payments, including robust equalization systems, support local creditworthiness, while volatile and unpredictable transfers do not. The article supports these arguments with a review of documents issued by the major international credit rating agencies and cross-national statistical analyses of bailout probabilities and standalone credit ratings issued by Moody’s Investors Service. It also discusses the implications of the findings for work on the fiscal discipline of subnational governments.

Ivor Crewe begins his paper on the affluent worker research by giving clear expression to a number of objections which may be brought against that work. He then goes on to make two tests of the embourgeoisement thesis which Goldthorpe, Lockwood and their colleagues called into question. This Note concerns itself with only one of the two tests, namely that based on correlations of residuals.

L. J. Sharpe's two-part article ('American Democracy Reconsidered’ in this Journal, III [1973], 1–28,129–68) is an important and controversial one. He questions many of the orthodox interpretations of American urban politics, suggests that some of the supposedly well-established observations about British and American contrasts may boil down to bits of conventional wisdom, and raises many points about social justice and democracy, which are at the centre of everyday practical politics but which sometimes slide from view in modern ‘value free‘ social science. The article will hopefully attract the critical attention of American writers, but meanwhile here are some reflections from a slightly different point of view on some of the themes of the article.

One of the most profound changes in the interest group sector over the last fifty years is interest groups’ increasing need to attract financial donors in order to assure long-term sustainability. Groups’ growing propensity to attract ‘chequebook’ members is thought to compromise their ability to foster the personal involvement of individuals in their communities. Yet we know very little about the consequences of these dynamics for the strength of the interest group sector in American communities. This widespread macro-level analysis of the interest group sector indicates that human capital is more important than financial capital for the strength of a community's interest group sector. Financially disadvantaged communities may still enjoy the benefits of a strong interest group sector provided they have a citizenry equipped with time to donate.