The relationship between liberalism and democracy is notoriously paradoxical. On the one hand, the justification for democratic procedures most commonly rests on liberal assumptions. Standard liberal arguments for democracy range from the importance of consent due to the moral primacy of the individual, to the role of critical argument and the diversity of opinion for the discovery of truth. On the other hand, liberal institutional arrangements, such as the separation of powers and the rule of law, have frequently been interpreted as constraints upon democracy, albeit necessary ones if democracy is not to undermine itself. The paradox arises from the fact that liberalism provides a philosophical basis for regarding democracy as the only valid source of law whilst apparently appealing to some higher law in order to limit democracy itself. This paradox is embodied in the constitutions of most liberal democratic states. For generally these documents contain provisions – such as a bill of rights guaranteeing the freedoms of speech, assembly and association – designed to secure popular participation in the democratic process, alongside others – such as rights not obviously intrinsic to democratic decision making and mechanisms for judicial review – which seek to limit the power of democratic assemblies.

In the practice of social science, the most conspicuous recent attempt at theorizing about nonconformity and protest in late communism rests on the conceptual schema of ‘civil society versus the state’. Based on a case study of the institutional basis of criticism of, and dissent against, communism in China, I contend that the dichotomous concept ‘civil society versus the state’. when used to explain the transition from communism, is applicable only in rare, extreme cases and misleading in most cases. Instead, I introduce the concept of ‘institutional amphibiousness’, stressing institutional parasitism and institutional manipulation and conversion. In most cases, institutional amphibiousness more adequately accounts for the dynamics of the erosion of communism than the concept of ‘civil society versus the state’.

At the heart of the puzzle of representation is the responsibility to construct policy that both responds to the separatist pull of local constituencies and meets the republican aspiration that government leaders define and promote common interests. The difficulty of balancing responsiveness and deliberation is heightened by divided government, where pursuing a competitive course leads to stalemate, while compromising too readily threatens to undermine party principle. This article argues that politicians have an incentive to accommodate their strategies to divided government, and that this accommodation will take the form of centralizing power in the congressional party leadership, with an increased willingness on the part of the president and the congressional leadership to engage in substantive consultation over the content of the legislative agenda. These accommodations will foster the possibility of meaningful deliberation; whether it will occur on any given issue will depend on the context of information and interpretation. Because most policies are open to multiple interpretations, political leaders have some leeway in framing the issue and thus determining what information and which political resources will shape the strategic context. Beginning with a review of the literature on legislative processes and presidential influence in Congress, and drawing on the formal theory literature on information and uncertainty, I explicate the argument by way of an empirical case study of one of the most historically significant tax policy negotiations in the post-war period.

Regime changes occur at two levels, the macro and the micro. In Eastern Europe there has been holistic change at the regime level, but at the micro level individuals can differ in their reactions, some favouring the new and some preferring the old regime, thus creating aggregates of supporters and opponents of the new regime. Combining reactions to the old and new regimes results in a typology of democrats, reactionaries, sceptics and the compliant. Nationwide surveys in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania show that democrats overall are a bare majority of the respondents. If current divisions persist, then East Europeans will be politically polarized. Statistical tests of the influence of social structure and economic attitudes upon individual responses to regime change emphasize the importance of sociotropic economic assessments. But the data also show that most who do not currently support the pluralist regime expect to do so in the foreseeable future; they are laggards rather than anti-democrats. Moreover, the level of future support is so high that it is likely to be proof against fluctuations in the economic conditions of the new regimes.

Employing data from three surveys of mass opinion conducted in Lithuania, Ukraine and European Russia during 1990, 1991 and 1992, we examine three prominent but competing hypotheses about the source of political values in the post-Soviet societies: historically derived political culture, regime indoctrination and the effects of societal modernization. The literature on Soviet political culture argues that Russian mass values are distinguished by authoritarianism and love of order, values which will be largely shared by Ukrainians, especially East Ukrainians, whereas Lithuanian society would not evince this pattern. Our data do not support this hypothesis. We then examine acceptance of Soviet era norms, both political and economic. We do not find support for the argument that regime indoctrination during the Soviet period produced a set of ideologically derived values throughout the former Soviet Union and across a series of generations. The third hypothesis – that industrialization, urbanization, war and changing educational opportunities shaped the formative experiences of succeeding generations in the Soviet societies and, therefore, their citizens' values – receives the most support: in each of the three societies, differences in political values across age groups, places of residence and levels of education are noteworthy. The variations in political values we find across demographic groupings help us to understand the level of pro-democratic values in each society. We find that in Russia and Ukraine more support for democracy can be found among urban, better educated respondents than among other groups. In Lithuania, the urban and better educated respondents evince pro-democratic values at about the same level as their counterparts in Russia and Ukraine, but Lithuanian farmers and blue-collar workers support democracy at a level closer to urban, white-collar Lithuanians than to their Russian and Ukrainian counterparts. In all three societies, those citizens most likely to hold values supportive of democracy are those who are less favourable to Soviet-era values and less convinced of the primacy of the need for social and political ‘order’. Those who desire strong leadership, however, tend to have more democratic values, not more authoritarian ones.

Electoral systems translate citizens' votes into seats in the legislature, and are thus critical components of democracies. But electoral systems can be unfair, insulating incumbents from adverse electoral trends, or biasing the mapping of votes to seats in favour of one party. I assess methods for measuring bias and responsiveness in electoral systems, highlighting the limitations of the popular ‘multi-year’ and ‘uniform swing’ methods. I advocate an approach that incorporates constituency-level and jurisdiction-wide variation in party's vote shares. I show how this method can be used to elaborate both the extent and consequences of malapportionment. I then present election-by-election estimates of partisan bias and responsiveness for ninety-three state and federal elections in Australia since 1949. The empirical results reported show that the coalition parties have generally ‘out-biased’ the Australian Labor party, despite some notable pro-ALP biases. The overall extent of partisan bias in Australian electoral systems, however, has generally diminished in magnitude over time.

An examination of executive-legislative conflict occurring in US congressional committees between 1947 and 1990 reveals that, despite current concerns of gridlock, the overall level of conflict declined during this period. There are two structural sources of inter-branch conflict – constituent and partisan. The constituent basis for conflict in the United States is rooted in the differing manner in which members of the two branches are elected. Because the executive has a national constituency, it is primarily concerned with matters of national policy. Members of Congress, who have smaller, more homogeneous constituencies, are more concerned with the geographically distributive effects of these policies. The authors' evidence suggests that conflict between the executive and legislative in the United States is greatest on issues that are of both national and distributive significance. The partisan basis for conflict, long established in the House and increasingly visible in the Senate, is reinforced by competitive political contests. Yet conflict between members of Congress and executive officials of the opposite party did not increase between 1947 and 1990. And conflict with executive officials of the same party declined, producing an overall drop in executive-legislative conflict.

This article considers how parties can decide on policy when there is no reliable information about the effect of these decisions on voting. Where this is the case they must base their stands on a priori assumptions about appropriate priorities, namely on political ideologies. These indicate the general policy area a party should occupy, but do not give detailed guidance on which position to take within it. Five different ways of deciding on this, within ideological constraints, are specified. The predictions derived from these models well anticipate the actual decisions made by post-war parties in twenty democracies, as summarized in the unique spatial maps of policy movements published by the Manifesto Research Group of the European Consortium for Political Research.

German unification has revived earlier scholarly debates about the nature of the German political culture and the ability of the nation to rise above its cultural heritage – now focused on the cultural inheritance from the German Democratic Republic. This article examines popular support for democratic attitudes as a prerequisite for successful political unification and the development of democracy in a unified Germany. Our evidence focuses on a study of democratic attitudes conducted in West Germany and East Germany by the Mannheim Research Unit for Societal Development in early 1990, with supplemental data from more recent surveys. We find that East Germans voice support for democratic attitudes that rivals or excels the expression of democratic norms in the West. The correlates of these opinions suggest that democratic norms in the East developed from an on-going process of counter-cultural socialization and from judgements about the relative economic strength of the Federal Republic.

Conventional accounts of British politics play down the electoral importance of MPs' actions in the House of Commons. Party, it is assumed, is the key feature in shaping voters' preferences: few voters are aware of how their local representative voted on a particular issue, and in any case most MPs vote along party lines. On occasion, however, MPs do vote against the party line. Where the issue involved commands considerable public interest, this may raise an individual MP's profile with his or her constituents, with consequent effects upon future electoral prospects. This article investigates the connection between MPs' votes on a series of free votes and rebellions during the 1987 Parliament and their share of the vote in the 1992 general election. Generally, Conservative MPs' actions in the Commons had no effect on their subsequent share of the popular vote. However where an issue was of marked public interest, such as capital punishment or the poll tax, how the MPs voted did exert a small but discernible effect on the support that they received in 1992.

Since the 1950s, the dominant pattern of partisan change in the American electorate has involved movements between party identification and independence rather than direct or indirect shifts between parties. This article employs switching regression analyses to investigate the long-term evolution and short-term dynamics of independence between 1953 and 1988. The analyses reveal that a new ‘independence regime’ developed rapidly in the mid-1960s, with the ‘tipping point’ in the transition occurring in the second quarter of 1967. Under the new–but not the old–regime, short-term changes in the size of the independent cohort have reflected economic conditions as well as political events. These findings argue that future research on the dynamics of public support for political parties in the United States and elsewhere will profit by developing dynamic models which assess processes of long- and short-term change in tandem.

Using cross-sectional and pooled data for up to 125 countries over the period from 1960 to 1985, this article evaluates the two-way linkages between democracy and economic growth. The effects of income on democracy are found to be robust and positive. The effects of several measures of democracy and personal freedoms on growth are assessed in a comparative growth framework in which growth of GDP per adult depends negatively on initial income levels, as implied by the convergence hypothesis, and positively on rates of investment in physical and human capital. Adjusting for the simultaneous determination of income and democracy makes the estimated partial effect of democracy on subsequent economic growth negative but insignificant. This nonsignificant negative effect is in any case counterbalanced by the positive indirect effect that democracy exerts on growth via education and investment. The general result of the growth analysis is that it is still not possible to identify any systematic net effects of democracy on subsequent economic growth.

Value hierarchies structure people's position on specific issues when values are in conflict. This general proposition is tested using surveys of Israeli public opinion on issues relating to the Israeli–Arab conflict. Value priorities are shown to be politically and ideologically structured, and not random, with certain value combinations more prevalent and more enduring than others. Most importantly, we establish that people's value hierarchies significantly structure policy preferences and changes therein. The more salient or acute the value conflict, the greater the correspondence between hierarchy and preference. This value trade-off approach presents a picture of Israeli public opinion which is very different from that usually portrayed: of a population firmly supporting a Jewish majority in their state, with a very strong desire for peace. The values of land and democracy are shown to be much less important.

The rise of ‘New Politics’ concerns since the 1970s parallels the rise in popularity of market liberalism. Although often considered to be opposites, both goals have been pursued vigorously and simultaneously by social democratic governments in Australia and New Zealand. This article examines the circumstances of this unlikely marriage and, by applying multivariate analysis to election survey data collected in each country in 1990, examines the implications of these apparently contradictory policies for public opinion and party support. We conclude that value orientations associated with New Politics have mixed associations with party support. Postmaterialist and materialist value orientations are linked to attitudes towards the specifically Australasian old left strategy of ‘domestic defence’. The findings suggest that the effects of value change are more far-reaching in New Zealand, where social liberalism may have overtaken collectivism as the dominant value cleavage in the party system.

In common with most other mass democratic parties the Conservative party has a large group of active members who sustain the party over time. A model is developed to explain variations in activism within the party, which takes account of the ‘paradox of participation’. The results, based on the first national random sample survey of Conservative party members, show that activism is motivated by three classes of factors. Activism is motivated, firstly, by a variety of selective incentives, such as ambitions for elective office. It is motivated, secondly, by a desire for the party to achieve policy goals. These are ‘collective goods’, which are subject to the problem of free-riding. However, since activists can influence policy outcomes, via their contacts with party leaders, they have high levels of personal efficacy and a direct incentive to participate, which can override the paradox of participation. Finally, activism is motivated by expressive concerns, as measured by the strength of the respondent's partisanship, a motivation for involvement which lies outside a narrowly cast rational choice model of political participation.

Attitudes towards a departing administration can help shape attitudes towards candidates, especially when the incumbent vice-president is one of the candidates. This succession effect was apparent in the 1988 presidential election, when Vice-President Bush benefited from the enduring popularity of retiring President Reagan. This article develops a model in which succession effects, the net candidate score and party identification affect the general election vote. Analysis shows that this effect remains when controls are instituted for retrospective voting more generally. Attitudes towards Reagan also had an indirect impact by affecting the net Bush-Dukakis candidate score; altogether the estimated impact of the Reagan effect in 1988 was to turn the vice-president's predicted loss into his observed victory. Additionally, a succession effect was detected in the 1988 nominating campaign, with Bush's popularity over Dole benefiting from reactions to the Reagan administration. There is evidence of succession effects in other presidential elections, particularly a Johnson effect in 1968.

The Social Democratic Party (SDP) was perhaps the nearest thing to a ‘flash’ party seen in British politics in modern times. It was formed in March 1981, largely on the initiative of four leading figures in the Labour party (Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Shirley Williams and William Rogers), following the apparent success of the left in dominating the party, and initially it had a sensational impact on British politics. It had thirty MPs by March 1982 (mostly as a result of defections by Labour MPs); in alliance with the Liberals it immediately went to first place in the opinion polls and stayed in that position until May 1982. The Alliance won four by-elections between 1981 and 1983, and in the 1983 general election, with 25.4 per cent of the vote, came within two points of ousting Labour from its second place. For the next four years the Alliance held its position and in the 1987 election its vote fell only slightly to 22.6 per cent.

The issue of the equitable representation of women in political bodies has concerned both political activists and political scientists for a number of years. Greater representation of women is predicted to have a number of effects on public policy and social interactions. Among these effects are changes in policy priorities, improved system legitimacy and a change in the political culture as old stereotypes disappear and women come to be viewed as the equals of men in the political sphere. The view has been that if women were to get into office, they could prove themselves effective. Therefore societal views on women as political leaders would change, and old stereotypes as to their limited competence would break down. The hope of many is that as women politicians become commonplace, a country's political culture would change so that gender is no longer a relevant consideration in evaluating political leaders. This Note directly tests the assertion that increased participation by women leads to this genderneutral view of political leaders.