As most political scientists know, the outcome of the American presidential election can be predicted within a few percentage points (in the popular vote), based on information available months before the election. Thus, the general campaign for president seems irrelevant to the outcome (except in very close elections), despite all the media coverage of campaign strategy. However, it is also well known that the pre-election opinion polls can vary wildly over the campaign, and this variation is generally attributed to events in the campaign. How can campaign events affect people's opinions on whom they plan to vote for, and yet not affect the outcome of the election? For that matter, why do voters consistently increase their support for a candidate during his nominating convention, even though the conventions are almost entirely predictable events whose effects can be rationally forecast?

In this exploratory study, we consider several intuitively appealing, but ultimately wrong, resolutions to this puzzle and discuss our current understanding of what causes opinion polls to fluctuate while reaching a predictable outcome. Our evidence is based on graphical presentation and analysis of over 67,000 individual-level responses from forty-nine commercial polls during the 1988 campaign and many other aggregate poll results from the 1952–92 campaigns.

We show that responses to pollsters during the campaign are not generally informed or even, in a sense we describe, ‘rational’. In contrast, voters decide, based on their enlightened preferences, as formed by the information they have learned during the campaign, as well as basic political cues such as ideology and party identification, which candidate to support eventually. We cannot prove this conclusion, but we do show that it is consistent with the aggregate forecasts and individual-level opinion poll responses. Based on the enlightened preferences hypothesis, we conclude that the news media have an important effect on the outcome of presidential elections – not through misleading advertisements, sound bites, or spin doctors, but rather by conveying candidates' positions on important issues.

Because New Zealand's majoritarian political system presents few institutional barriers to change, social choice theory would predict that it should experience frequent change in governments and policies. Although some periods in New Zealand history confirm this expectation, a striking exception is the Liberal era of 1890–1912. To explain the anomaly, this article applies Riker's concept of heresthetics, the strategic manipulation of decision processes and alternatives. The Liberal leader, Richard Seddon, masterfully exploited four main heresthetic devices that offer enduring insight about how to sustain a popular majority. While extending the scope of heresthetics as an explanatory principle, the article rebuts Riker's normative dismissal of populism. In terms compatible with social choice theory itself, Seddon's strategies can be interpreted as having enabled the will of the majority to prevail.

Six single- or multi-winner voting procedures are compared to one another in terms of the outcomes of thirty-seven real elections conducted in Britain by various trade unions, professional associations and non-profit-making organizations. The six procedures examined are two versions of plurality voting (PV), approval voting (AV), the Borda-count (BR), the alternative and repeated alternative vote (ALV–RAL) and the single transferable vote (STV). These procedures are evaluated in terms of two general and five specific criteria that are common in social-choice theory. In terms of these criteria one version of the PV procedure (PVO) is found to be inferior to the other five procedures among which no significant difference has been found.

In the Westminster system the prime minister's active participation in parliamentary proceedings is a key mechanism for ensuring the accountability of the executive. We survey the evolution of the four main prime ministerial activities across the period 1868–1990. There has been a long-term decline in prime ministers' speeches in the Commons, a stepped decline in debating interventions and a significant decrease in question-answering from the late nineteenth century to the 1950s. But prime ministerial statement-making increased after 1940, ebbing away again in the 1980s. And the downward drift in question-answering was halted by procedural innovations since the 1960s, which standardized the frequency of prime ministers' appearances and lead to the dominance of ‘open’ questions. We trace the varied impacts of institutional changes and shorter-term political or personal influences. The direct accountability of the prime minister to Parliament has undoubtedly declined, a trend probably paralleled by decreasing indirect accountability. These findings raise fundamental questions about executive-legislature relations in the United Kingdom

Arguments that infer the inevitable decline of European socialist and social democratic parties from the changing class structures of advanced capitalist societies have two major flaws. Firstly, they do not adequately reconstruct the link between citizens' experiences in markets, work organizations and the sphere of social reproduction, on the one hand, and the formation of political consciousness, on the other. Secondly, such propositions do not model the strategic terrain of party competition and intra-party decision making on which socialist politicians devise voter appeals. This article will first present a sketch of an alternative theory of preference formation that does not rely on conventional class categories and then analyse party competition as faced by social democrats under advanced capitalism. It will then test ‘naive’ and ‘sophisticated’ theories of class politics and account for their shortcomings in terms of the alternative theoretical framework.

This article uses data from the Citizen Participation Study – a large-scale survey of the voluntary activity of the American public designed to oversample African-Americans and Latinos as well as political activists – to inquire about the extent and sources of differences in levels of political activity among African-Americans, Latinos and Anglo-Whites. Considering a variety of political acts, we find that, in the aggregate, African-Americans are slightly, and Latinos are substantially, less active than Anglo-Whites. However, the resources that facilitate participation – some of which, for example, education, are related to social class and others of which, for example, religious preference and activity are associated with race or ethnicity – are distributed very unevenly across the three groups, with Latinos at a particular disadvantage. After accounting for differences in politically relevant resources, there is no significant difference among the three groups in political participation.

Under what conditions are mass attitudes towards particular issues ‘vertically’ constrained by core cultural values? Vertical constraint is shaped by three related variables: the objective content of the issue, the way the issue is framed by elites and the individual's level of attentiveness to the controversy. Some issues are ‘easy’. They so permeate social discourse that people encounter, often without wanting to, many social agents offering shortcuts for the vertical, values-to-issue link. Most issues, however, are ‘hard’. Arcane in content and bereft of vigorous mediation, hard issues are more difficult for individuals to tie to core values. As the inferential connection between value and issue lengthens, and as social agents become fewer and more remote, an individual's ability to use values to interpret issues will increasingly depend on whether the decision makers, activists and other elites directly involved in the debate can create a connection and, of course, on whether the individual is paying attention. An analysis of the nuclear power controversy, a highly complex technical issue, reveals that a value-based interpretation favoured by elites and promoted by the media is faithfully reflected in how the mass public understands the issue. Furthermore, non-elites who are more attuned to political life are more polarized on the basis of these core values.

There is a considerable amount of evidence to suggest that the political preferences of voters are influenced by the condition of the domestic economy. This article examines the proposition that, in Britain at least, the connections between macro-economic change and public perceptions of the government are mediated by the way in which the major national daily newspapers cover economic news. Using an aggregate data-analytic approach, it is shown that there is a moderate correlation between the economic coverage of most national dailies and the condition of the ‘real economy’ – though, unsurprisingly, some newspapers tend to be more accurate in their coverage than others. It is also shown that although press coverage of the economy fails to exert a direct effect on government popularity, it does exert an indirect effect through its impact on the overall level of personal financial optimism/pessimism.

Aggregation means the organization of elements of a system into patterns that tend to put highly compatible elements together and less compatible elements apart. Landscape theory Predicts how aggregation will lead to alignments among actors (such as nations), whose leaders are myopic in their assessments and incremental in their actions. The predicted configurations are based upon the attempts of actors to minimize their frustration based upon their pairwise Propensities to align with some actors and oppose others. These attempts lead to a local minimum in the energy landscape of the entire system. The theory is supported by the results of two cases: the alignment of seventeen European nations in the Second World War and membership in competing alliances of nine computer companies to set standards for Unix computer operating systems. The theory has potential for application to coalitions of political Parties in parliaments, social networks, social cleavages in democracies and organizational structures.

This article analyses the influence of economic conditions upon the behaviour of voters in elections to Australian, Canadian and New Zealand legislatures between the First and Second World Wars. It shows that this influence need be neither uniform nor unconditional: rather, it is contingent upon both political and economic phenomena. The existence of the relationship as well as its form and strength differ systematically in different settings. It varies according to the stratum of the electorate, the point in time and the type of party analysed.

In this article, we present data showing that national legislators are more tolerant than the public in Britain, Israel, New Zealand and the United States. Two explanations for this phenomenon are presented and assessed. The first is the selective recruitment of Members of Parliament, Knesset and Congress from among those in the electorate whose demographic, ideological and personality characteristics predispose them to be tolerant. Although this process does operate in all four countries, it is insufficient to explain all of the differences in tolerance between elites and the public in at least three countries. The second explanation relies on a process of explicitly political socialization, leading to differences in tolerance between elites and their public that transcend individual-level, personal characteristics. Relying on our analysis of political tolerance among legislators in the four countries, we suggest how this process of political socialization may be operating.

This article examines a key assumption of many approaches to the analysis of government coalitions, that parties are exclusively concerned with the achievement of immediate policy objectives. We first consider the extent to which policy considerations can be used to characterize coalitions formed in eight postwar democracies, using party election programmes to operationalize and test a variety of policy-based models of government formation. We then see what parties get from governments in terms of declared policy commitments, both in and out of office. The conclusion in both cases is that party policy clearly influences the formation of coalitions, but its impact is substantially modified by long-term structures and cleavages within different party systems.

This article examines the emerging structure of party competition in the new democracies of Eastern Europe. It argues that the relationship between the social bases, issue dimensions and stability of party competition in countries in the region will vary depending on their differing experience of marketization, ethnic homogeneity and established statehood. In some countries, the predicted framework of party competition will derive from socio-economic divisions and will resemble that found in the West; in other countries, ethnicity and nation-building will provide the principal structuring factors; in yet other cases, where severe constraints exist on the emergence of any clear bases or dimensions, competition will centre on valence issues from which high voter volatility may be expected. Except where Western-type competition obtains, considerable doubts exist about the future stability of political systems in the region.

Nikita Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev both pursued reformist policies during their respective periods as head of the CPSU. Although their policies were very different in substance, the political problems they faced in prosecuting reform were quite similar. The discussion here focuses on the obstacles facing reform-minded Soviet leaders and the options available for overcoming them. Both Khrushchev and Gorbachev were dependent for their position and for the implementation of their policies on a party-state apparat whose interests lay in opposing radical reform and in limiting the leader's power. As a result both men were in a particularly weak position from which to pursue reformist policies.

In a familiar observation, members of the British House of Commons are demographically unrepresentative of the British population in terms of gender, race, education and class. This article takes a fresh look at the reasons why this is the case, based on data from the British Candidate Study, 1992. This study analyses the background, experience and attitudes of MPs, candidates, applicants, party members and voters. By comparing strata we can see whether the outcome of the selection process reflects the supply of those willing to stand for Parliament or the demands of local party activists when adopting candidates for local constituencies.

Political parties are prominent in legislative politics and legislative research. Using data from the 99th Congress, this article assesses the degree to which significant party behaviour – defined and operationalized as behaviour that is independent of preferences – occurs in two key stages of legislative organization: the formation of standing committees and the appointment of conferees. Four hypotheses are developed and tested. When controlling for preferences and other hypothesized effects, positive and significant party effects are rare. A discussion addresses some criticisms of this unorthodox approach and attempts to reconcile some differences between these and previous findings.

In a recent Research Note, Evans and Heath cast doubt on the validity of our measure of tactical voting. We and our critics agree on a set of ‘Main reason’ tactical voters – those who said they voted tactically in response to the question, ‘What comes closest to the main reason you voted the way you did?’ Unlike our critics, we reasoned that many of those who cast a tactical vote would not be identified so simply. Some respondents may have been reluctant to say they had voted for other than the best party. Others may have convinced themselves that the ‘best’ party was one that had a chance of winning and therefore answered in such a way as to place themselves squarely among non-tactical voters even though in other tactical circumstances they would have voted differently. Consequently, we sought to identify tactical behaviour through additional questions. Our final measure of tactical voting can be regarded as containing two components: the ‘main reason’ voters, who expressly told interviewers they voted for one party while ‘really preferring’ some other party, and ‘Other reason’ voters, whom we identified as tactical by their responses to additional questions. It is the ‘Other reason’ voters who are at issue.

In the only official policy position ever taken by the American Political Science Association, it advocated the transformation of American political parties into a strong, centralized two-party system. Olson has proposed a detailed explanation of why Westminster political systems and parties will produce more efficient public policy than weak, decentralized political parties. He argues that centralized political parties in two-party political systems are ‘encompassing’ and, hence, have an incentive to minimize redistributive policies. Olson thus provides a justification for the policy position taken by the APSA. I evaluate Olson's explanation from the perspective of Tullock's rent-seeking behaviour argument and the deadweight losses needed for Olson's argument to hold. An alternative formulation of encompassing organizations is presented and contrasted with Olson's definition as it applies to political institutions. Finally, an empirical test of the responsible and Westminster party systems arguments is provided. The evidence presented here rejects the claims of the Westminster and responsible party models.