China's remarkable business expansion abroad since the mid-1980s cannot be explained simply by applying existing theories, which focus on conventional international businesses from capitalist systems. Many puzzling phenomena in Chinese investments abroad become intelligible only when we introduce a key variable–illicit privatization through internationalization. So far only advantageously-placed nomenklatura members and their kin have had access to crossborder ownership, but many of them are accumulating sizeable private wealth at the cost of nationalized property. Contrary to an impression held by many in the West, the Chinese economy under Communist rule experiences spontaneous privatization parallel to what has happened in European postcommunist nations–though with a few Chinese characteristics. An examination of informal privatization in China's multinationals adds a new dimension to our understanding of the shift from state socialism to market capitalism.

‘If citizenship is invoked in the defence of rights, the corresponding duties of citizenship cannot be ignored.' T. H. Marshall, `Citizenship and Social Class’, 1949

When Condorcet fell foul of the Jacobins in 1793, Robespierre said of him that he was a great mathematician in the eyes of men of letters, and a distinguished man of letters in the eyes of the mathematicians. It took two centuries for the first part of that vicious remark to be proved false and for Condorcet's true stature as a mathematician to be revealed. Soon after Mancur Olson died in February 1998, The Economist said aloud what many in academe had been muttering for years:

Had he lived, his theory of collective action might well have won him a Nobel prize in economics, though not a wholly uncontroversial one. Some economists viewed him as a one-idea thinker, and worse, they whispered, his idea had reverberated less loudly within economics than outside of it; for example, in political science. The charge would not have troubled Mr Olson for a moment. He was as disdainful of parochialism in the life of the mind as in the life of a nation.Keith Michael Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 383. ‘Obituary: Mancur Olson’, The Economist, 7 March 1998, p. 135.

“The making of society is the finding of common meanings and directions.” (Raymond Williams)

“Here I believe one’s point of reference should not be to the great model of language (langue) and signs, but to that of war and battle. The history which bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a language: relations of power, not relations of meaning.” (Michel Foucault)

It is frequently asserted that we live in a post-metaphysical world, a world devoid of intrinsic meaning. This view of the world as disenchanted, as expressed in the works of Weber, has been deepened and extended over the past century.

Hall's interesting article contains the bold, but undeveloped, argument that ‘social capital has been sustained in Britain largely by virtue of the increasing participation of women in the community’. Hall's statement draws attention to the curious silence within the social capital debate about gender dynamics. Hall modestly notes that his analysis of social capital in Britain raises more questions than it resolves. The purpose of this Comment is to clarify these questions as they relate to women and social capital. The objective is not simply to ‘add women and stir’. Rather, a consideration of gender dynamics illuminates key controversies within the wider social capital debate. Peter Hall, ‘Social Capital in Britain', British Journal of Political Science, 29 (1999), 417–61Virginia Sapiro, ‘Feminist Studies and Political Science – and Vice Versa’, in Anne Phillips, ed., Feminism and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 67–89, at p. 67.

In the words of Martin Paldam, comparative economic voting studies suffer from a ‘great instability’ – i.e., economic effects appear in some countries at some times, but not others, and tend to be weak and inconsistent across studies. Powell and Whitten propose a possible solution to the ‘instability’ of cross-national voting studies: ‘to explain differences in retrospective economic voting across nations and over time we must take account of the political context within which elections take place’. More specifically, they take into account the ‘context of political responsibility’, arguing that voters are more likely to punish/reward incumbent governments if it is very clear which parties are responsible for economic conditions. They find that voters hold government parties responsible for the economy when there is high ‘clarity of responsibility’, but not when ‘clarity of responsibility’ is low. Over Four Decades', in Helmut Norpoth, Michael Lewis-Beck and Jean-Dominique Lafay, eds, Economics and Politics: The Calculus of Support (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), pp. 9–31, at p. 26.G. Bingham Powell Jr and Guy D. Whitten, ‘A Cross-National Analysis of Economic Voting: Taking Account of the Political Context’, American Journal of Political Science, 37 (1993), 391–414, p. 409.Powell and Whitten, ‘A Cross-National Analysis of Economic Voting’, p. 410.

The geography of the vote in Britain is in part a function of the geography of social class and other individual-level characteristics associated with vote choice. Since the proportion of working-class people is lower in the South than the North we expect support for Labour to be lower in the South than in the North.

This study examines attitudes about the economy under conditions of system change. We argue that citizens in new market economics are relative novices with regard to understanding the new economic environment at the beginning of the transition phase, but that they accumulate experience as time passes. We develop and test two hypotheses: (1) we expect that, over time, economic perceptions more closely track objective economic performance; (2) as a corollary, we hypothesize that, over time, economic policy priorities of citizens in a new market economy more closely track objective economic performance. Time-series data of objective economic indicators and public opinion collected in East Germany between 1991 and 1995 are analysed using regression analyses and tests of structural change in parameters. We find that East Germans' economic perceptions correspond to actual economic trends as they develop experience with the political-economic system. The implications of our findings for research on the relationship between the economy and political support in societies in transition are discussed.

In recent years the study of divided government has been a growth industry. Numerous scholars have sought to explain patterns of divided government in the United States, while others have attempted to explore the consequences of the phenomenon. No doubt this scholarly interest in the subject is due in large part to the attention paid by the political media to divided control of the presidency and Congress during the 1980s, as well as the resulting ’gridlock‘ that dominated policy making in Washington during that time period.

I am, of course, extremely pleased that my M+1 hypothesis has received so much attention. Under the principle of ‘as long as you spell my name right’, I appreciate every single citation. Nevertheless, I have been surprised at some of the interpretations of my argument. Browne and Patterson offer me an opportunity to clarify my position. Eric C. Browne and Dennis Patterson, ‘An Empirical Theory of Rational Nominating Behaviour Applied to Japanese District Elections’, British Journal of Political Science, 29 (1999), 259–89.

Government-sponsored referendums on issues of national importance are occurring with greater frequency in countries with only sporadic experience with direct democracy. Comprehensive studies exist which examine the origins, conduct and regulation of referendums, as well as their consequences for the political system. There have also been a large number of studies addressing voting behaviour during particular campaigns, and a great deal of research on the far more elaborate and systematized processes in those countries, notably the United States and Switzerland, with recognized initiative mechanisms for citizens to pose referendum questions. Yet no empirical study has attempted to answer the question of how government-sponsored referendum campaigns in countries with little history of direct democracy affect citizens' democratic comportment more generally.

In a recent article in this journal, John Bartle, has extended work on British voting behaviour by testing the ‘funnel of causation model’ associated with the work of Miller and Shanks. He reported that left–right positions were important determinants of voters' party choices at the 1992 general election, and that these could only partly be linked to social class. John Bartle, ‘Left–Right Position Matters, But Does Social Class? Causal Models of the 1992 British General Elction’, British Journal of Political Science, 28 (1998), 501–29. The key works by Miller and Shanks, on which he draws, include Warren E. Miller and J. Merrill Shanks, The New American Voter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).

It is widely accepted that survey data tend to underestimate the levels of support for political parties or other groups that are perceived to advocate ‘extreme’ views. In this Note I propose the use of latent class analysis as a means by which this difficulty might be overcome and I illustrate it by an application to the case of support within Northern Ireland for Sinn Féin from survey data and apply latent class analysis to a recent dataset from Northern Ireland. The note concludes with some general remarks on the question of why surveys and elections disagree and the role of latent class analysis in explaining this phenomenon.