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.

Influential studies by Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson claim that colonial legacies explain the origins of development-promoting property rights and thus account for the modern world income distribution. Specifically, they argue that European colonial powers engineered a global ‘reversal of fortune’, bringing property rights and prosperity to relatively uninhabited colonies while imposing inefficient institutions on locales with less potential for settlement. We re-evaluate their theoretical arguments and empirical findings and come to a different conclusion. We concur that British colonialism dramatically restructured four colonies, resulting in phenomenal economic success. For the majority of the world, however, colonialism had no discernible effect on property rights. We conclude that contemporary development studies must find another explanation for the modern world income distribution.

Existing empirical models of international co-operation emphasize domestic determinants, although virtually all theories of international relations focus on interdependencies between countries. This article examines how much states’ linkages with the international system, relative to domestic factors, such as income and democracy, influence the dynamics of global governance efforts. To this end, we study the ratification behaviour of 180 countries vis-à-vis 255 global environmental treaties. Except for integration into the world economy, which affects co-operative behaviour negatively, our results show that international factors have a stronger and more positive impact on cooperative behaviour than domestic factors. This implies that Galton’s advice not to examine the effects of internal and external variables in isolation is also useful in the study of international politics.

The recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been characterized by the deployment of large private military forces, under contract with the US administration. The use of so-called private military corporations (PMCs) and, more generally, of mercenaries, has long attracted criticisms. This article argues that under certain conditions (drawn from the Just War tradition), there is nothing inherently objectionable about mercenarism. It begins by exposing a weakness in the most obvious justification for mercenarism, to wit, the justification from freedom of occupational choice. It then deploys a less obvious, but stronger, argument – one that appeals to the importance of enabling just defensive killings. Finally, it rebuts five moral objections to mercenarism.

This article explores the politics of attention in Britain from 1940 to 2005. It uses the Speech from the Throne (the King’s or Queen’s Speech) at the state opening of each session of parliament as a measure of the government’s priorities, which is coded according to topic as categorized by the Policy Agendas framework. The article aims to advance understanding of a core aspect of the political agenda in Britain, offering empirical insights on established theories, claims and narratives about post-war British politics and policy making. The analysis uses both distributional and time-series tests that reveal the punctuated character of the political agenda in Britain and its increasing fragmentation over time, with turning points observed in 1964 and 1991.

This article examines how national parties and their members position themselves in European Parliament (EP) debates, estimating the principal latent dimension of spoken conflict using word counts from legislative speeches. We then examine whether the estimated ideal points reflect partisan conflict on a left–right, European integration or national politics dimension. Using independent measures of national party positions on these three dimensions, we find that the corpus of EP speeches reflects partisan divisions over EU integration and national divisions rather than left–right politics. These results are robust to both the choice of language used to scale the speeches and to a range of statistical models that account for measurement error of the independent variables and the hierarchical structure of the data.

Commissions of inquiry play an important role in the aftermath of crisis, by serving as instruments of accountability and policy learning. Yet crises also involve a high-stake game of political survival, in which accountability and learning pose a serious threat to incumbent politicians. The political decision of whether to appoint a commission of inquiry after a crisis thus provides a unique prism for studying the intense conflict between politics, accountability and policy learning. Using data from the United Kingdom, this study develops and tests a choice model for this political decision. The results show that the political decision to appoint inquiries into public crises is strongly influenced by short-term blame avoidance considerations, media salience and government popularity.

Some presidents facing term limits attempt – often successfully – to scrap tenure restrictions, while others step down when constitutionally required. Whether democratic, partly democratic or non-democratic, there is considerable variation among electoral regimes as to whether presidents respect term limits. This article focuses on what is at stake for a president required to leave the highest political office. It argues that for a given level of executive constraints, the value of holding political office in polities with large public sectors and prevalent corruption, combined with the probability of retaining assets and immunity after leaving office, influences whether presidents attempt to overstay their tenure.

Claims regarding the power of the mass media in contemporary politics are much more frequent than research actually analysing the influence of mass media on politics. Building upon the notion of issue ownership, this article argues that the capacity of the mass media to influence the respective agendas of political parties is conditioned upon the interests of the political parties. Media attention to an issue generates attention from political parties when the issue is one that political parties have an interest in politicizing in the first place. The argument of the article is supported in a time-series study of mass media influence on the opposition parties’ agenda in Denmark over a twenty-year period.

This contribution to the study of democratic inclusiveness advances three main claims, based on Lijphart’s original data. First, his measurement of executive inclusiveness is incoherent and invalid. Secondly, executive inclusiveness is best explained by the interaction of many parties and strong legislative veto points. This implies that executive inclusiveness should not be contained in either of Lijphart’s two dimensions of democracy. Thirdly, parties have incentives to economize on the costs of inclusive coalitions by avoiding strong legislative veto points, and these incentives are greater in parliamentary than in presidential systems. Hence, Lijphart’s favourite version of consensus democracy – characterized by a parliamentary system and a high degree of executive inclusiveness – is unlikely to be a behavioural-institutional equilibrium.