Why should more women be elected to positions of power in Britain? What difference would it make? This Note aims to examine these questions using data from a survey of almost six hundred men and women candidates to the British Parliament in the 1987 general election. There are two major arguments for increasing women's representation.

Elections constitute a principal avenue of citizen involvement in political life, and knowledge of their effects on public attitudes towards the polity and the role of the individual therein has important implications for theories of democratic governance. One sucli attitude is political efficacy, ‘the feeling that individual political action does have, or can have, an impact on the political process’. Although many studies have documented that political efficacy is positively associated with electoral participation, the causal mechanisms involved are not well understood. Most researchers have simply assumed that the ‘causal arrow’ runs from efficacy to participation, i.e. from the attitude to the behaviour. Investigations of the hypothesis that the behaviour (participation) affects the attitude (efficacy) are rare. Rarer still are enquiries focusing on the impact of election outcomes on efficacy, and studies that examine both effects are virtually non-existent. In this Note covariance structure analysis is used to investigate the effects of voting, campaign activity and the outcomes of the 1984 national elections on political efficacy in the American electorate.

China's politics have changed dramatically during the last decade. Schram, in one of the works which have stimulated this review article, has characterized the period since 1978 as one of ‘Economics in Command’ by way of contrast to the exhortation to put ‘Politics in Command’ – the slogan that dominated the last decade of Mao's life and the era of the Cultural Revolution. The drive to economic modernization has replaced ‘class struggle’ as the main goal of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Political reform has been an essential part of that drive, for in its analysis of the failings of the previous three decades the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has argued that economic growth and development could not occur without political stability and institutionalization.

Dodd is generally credited with providing clear empirical support for the proposition that, in the period after the Second World War, minimal winning coalitions in European party governments will tend to last longer in office than non-minimal winning coalitions. There has been a considerable body of research on this and related questions. Dodd, as well as most other authors treating cabinet coalition formation, has attempted to model features of cabinet formation such as cabinet duration or cabinet type (e.g. minimal winning v. minority government v. oversized coalitions) largely or entirely using data pooled from all cabinets in each of a number of different countries over some considerable time period. One difficulty with this method is that system-level variables (such as number of parties, or the presence of large anti-system parties), which might be able to explain aggregate-level between-county variations in cabinet type or cabinet durability, are not likely to be the same variables that are useful in explaining within-country differences. A second difficulty is that certain system-level characteristics such as effective number of parties or number of cleavage dimensions are highly correlated with both cabinet type and cabinet duration and, as a consequence, these variables are highly correlated with one another when pooled cross-national data are used. Thus, if the analyst is not very careful, results of pooled cross-national data may lead to mistakes about causal structure and a confusion of within-country and between-country effects.

Voting turnout varies both over time and across space. In Britain there has been a secular trend in the postwar period for decreasing turnout at parliamentary elections (from a high of 84.1 per cent in 1950 to 75.4 percent in 1987, with a low point of 71.8 per cent in 1970). Such temporal variations in turnout are dwarfed in scale, however, by differences in turnout across constituencies at the same election. In the 1970 election, for example, turnout ranged from a low of 44.9 per cent in Stepney to 85.3 per cent in Cornwall North. Though diminished slightly, variation in constituency turnout rates remained significant in the June 1983 election (from a low of 51.8 percent in City of London and Westminster South to a high of 81.1 percent in Leicestershire NW).

In recent years there has been a resurgence in interest in the cross-national study of public opinion. A significant component of this rekindling of attention has been the specific area of public support for the fundamental values of democracy. John Sullivan and his various colleagues have reported on political tolerance in the United States, Israel, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. In conjunction with a smattering of more limited cross-national studies, and newly-completed studies that are just now emerging, a wealth of comparative data is now available.

The issue of ‘tactical voting’ aroused a great deal of interest during the 1987 United Kingdom general election campaign. This Note considers the nature and importance of tactical voting in Britain and makes an attempt to detect its presence empirically using electoral data.

Tolerance is an important concept in democratic theory and a recurring issue in British history. With rare exceptions, however, conclusions about tolerance in Britain have been based on impressionistic rather than empirical evidence. Only a few research studies have addressed the subject of tolerance in Britain, and none has collected nationwide data on attitudinal tolerance among the British.

This Note examines patterns of attitudinal tolerance in Britain and speculates about the impact of those patterns on the status of political freedom in Britain. The analysis is based on recently collected survey data on attitudinal tolerance among members of the public and Members of Parliament in Britain.

Political science, unlike economics, does not have a long tradition of forecasting models. However, this is changing. Currently, there is considerable interest in election forecasting. The basis for the interest is a flurry of related publications on House, Senate and presidential elections. A common goal for these studies is the development of a model, inevitably based on aggregate time-series data, which predicts election returns. The resulting models, some of which are quite accurate, can differ a good deal in specification and estimation. Also, they vary in complexity, making them more or less accessible to the engaged voter.

Anthony Downs's model of voter choice is customarily interpreted to mean that each voter chooses the candidate whose positions are closest to the voter's. Actually, however, this is too simple a picture of Downs's views. Downs anticipated ideas of prospective and performance-based retrospective voting. He recognized that voters evaluate candidates in terms of their past performances and expectations about future performance, and may discount issue proximity to a candidate if the candidate is not expected to be able to live up to his campaign promises on the issue in question.