Gender quotas have spread rapidly around the world in recent years. However, few studies have yet theorized, systematically or comparatively, variations in their features, adoption and implementation. This article surveys quota campaigns in Western Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand. It proposes that one or more sets of controversies influence the course and outcomes of quota reforms. These revolve around (1) competing principles of equality, (2) different ideas about political representation, and (3) various beliefs about ‘gender’ and its relation to other kinds of political identities. The article draws on these distinctions to identify four broad models of political citizenship that determine the kinds of quota policies that are pursued and their prospects for bringing more women into political office.

While a substantial literature explores gender differences in participation in the United States, Commonwealth countries and Western Europe, little attention has been given to gender’s impact on participation in the developing world. These countries have diverse experiences with gender politics: some have been leaders in suffrage reforms and equal rights, while, in others, divorce has only recently been legalized. This article examines the relationship between gender and participation in seventeen Latin American countries. Many core results from research in the developed world hold in Latin America as well. Surprisingly, however, there is no evidence that economic development provides an impetus for more equal levels of participation. Instead, the most important contextual factors are civil liberties and women’s presence among the visible political elite.

David Mayhew’s Divided We Govern significantly challenged the conventional wisdom of the adversarial effect of divided government on government effectiveness in the United States. While the post-Mayhewian literature has been centred on legislative productivity as a measure of gridlock, gridlock is here defined as an ‘inability to change policy’. In this study, the preferences of the legislators, such as the filibuster, override and House median veto players are plotted in Euclidean space. The analysis focuses on the influence of the area of the winset, which is an intersection overlapped by the veto players’ indifference curves. There is a substantial impact of the area of the winset on the change in policy output point, which is measured by the ADA scores and by Poole’s Mean Winning Coordinate. Yet divided government has marginal or no effect on policy swing. The conclusion is that the preferences of veto players, but not party control of the government, have a substantial impact on gridlock in the United States.

Elections are thought to bolster legitimacy by providing fair mechanisms for selecting leaders. Survey data from more than 20,000 respondents in twelve African countries demonstrate that in Africa losers of elections are less inclined to trust their political institutions, consent to government authority or feel that voting matters. Contrary to initial expectations, however, losers are more willing than winners to defend their institutions against manipulation by elected officials. Losers in Africa seem critical of their institutions, but nonetheless willing to protect them, while winners seem submissive subjects, granting unconditional support to their current leaders. Finally, losers are much more likely than winners to denounce flawed elections, but losers have additional reasons to doubt the legitimacy of their current institutions.

EC directives must be transposed into the national legal order of the member states within a specified deadline. Although member states are obliged to notify their transposition measures, they often fail to comply with these deadlines. Distinguishing between domestic and EU-related factors, this study examines transposition failure and delay of EC directives from 1986 to 2002. Notification failure is found to be more likely when there is conflict between the member states during the EU legislative process. National patterns of transposition timeliness are shown to vary significantly, and higher levels of complexity and increased use of parliamentary legislation, as well as more federalist and pluralist structures, contribute to delayed compliance.

Using the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) data for twenty established parliamentary democracies, the authors have studied the relationship between number of parties in a party system and party dispersion. They found that as the number of parties in the system increases, the dispersion of parties also increases, but only up to a point. The boundaries of a finite issue space appear to expand up to at most five parties. In addition, once the number of parties in the party system was controlled for, they found that electoral rules have no direct effect on party dispersion. Thus, their findings validate the theoretical predictions of spatial theory while at the same time highlighting surprising ways in which the policy space is constrained.

In many areas of political science, scholars have begun to emphasize the dynamics driving the statistical variance of political outcomes as well as those governing changes in the mean. Some recent studies have brought this methodological focus on variance to measures of presidential approval, but no one has yet examined how the effects of traditional explanatory variables (such as major events and war) on the volatility of approval interact with respondents’ partisan predispositions. Using both aggregate approval data and individual-level panel data, this analysis demonstrates that factors reinforcing a group’s partisan proclivities to support or oppose the president increase the stability of that group’s support, while developments that conflict with a group’s partisan predispositions increase the volatility of approval.

Recently there has been a renewed interest in the role of local campaigns and their effectiveness on increasing turnout and support for political parties. However, there is a long-standing debate over the best way to measure campaign effort. This article advances the current literature by using a latent variable modelling approach to utilize, for the first time, evidence frorvey of agents, official records of campaign spending and individual voter survey data to produce a combined measure of campaign effort. This measure (latent variable) is then used in a structural equation model of party performance to assess the effect of the campaign effort of the three main parties at the 2005 British general election. In terms of both the delivery and effectiveness of campaigns the parties are found to behave in a way consistent with a rational model of party behaviour, though constrained by contextual factors.

One possible political determinant of macroeconomic instability scholars have explored at length is decentralization, but cross-national research measuring political decentralization in terms of constitutional federalism has produced mixed evidence regarding its effects on inflation. Conceptualizing political decentralization in terms of governing political party decentralization but acknowledging the challenges of cross-national data collection, the authors suggest the utility of a sub-national approach by studying one country under single-party rule. Drawing on provincial-level cross-section time-series data, they find that political decentralization measured as the inverse of central government political control, via the ruling party, over the different provincial governments is positively correlated with provincial inflation in China during 1978–97. The finding is robust to alternative specifications, expanded year coverage and Granger causality tests.

Three important books have recently been published in the long shadow of William H. Riker (1920–93). Norman Schofield declares himself a friend of Riker; Gerry Mackie, an enemy; Anthony McGann, a mere acquaintance. However, Riker’s legacy gives shape to all three. The main elements of the Riker programme are explained in this article, and then how far each book under review advances or undermines it is examined.

Although spatial theory posits that political parties adjust their policies in response to rival parties’ policy strategies, there is little comparative research that evaluates this hypothesis. Using the Comparative Manifesto Project data, we analyse the relationship between parties’ policy programmes and the policies of their opponents in twenty-five post-war democracies. The authors conclude that parties tended to shift their policy positions in the same direction that their opponents had shifted their policies at the previous election; furthermore, parties were particularly responsive to policy shifts by other members of their ‘ideological families’, i.e. leftist parties responded to other leftist parties while right-wing parties responded to right-wing parties. Their findings have important implications for spatial models of elections, for the dynamics of party systems and for political representation.

What is a party? This article presents the argument that rmal party apparatus is only one part of an extended network of interest groups, media, other advocacy organizations and candidates. The authors have measured a portion of this network in the United States systematically by tracking lists of names transferred between political organizations. Two distinct and polarized networks are revealed, which correspond to a more liberal Democratic group and a more conservative Republican group. Formal party organizations, like the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee, tend to receive information within their respective networks, which suggests that other groups serve to funnel information towards the formal party.

Scholars often incorrectly categorize informal social networks as homogeneous and dismiss their potential for exposing members to diverse opinions. Recent research in the United States, however, shows that diversity in informal social networks exists and has a positive influence on political tolerance. Whether exposure to a politically heterogeneous network also increases tolerance in socially homogeneous Japan is tested here. To do this, two new Japanese national sample surveys that utilize name-generator methodology were created and administered to a sample of respondents, as well as a new measure of network political diversity in a multi-party system. Also, an additional type of tolerance, moral tolerance, was tested. The conclusion is that diversity in informal social networks has a positive influence on political and moral tolerance in Japan.

Scholarly research has demonstrated rather conclusively that American political elites have undergone a marked partisan polarization over the past thirty years. There is less agreement, however, as to whether the American electorate is polarized. This review article evaluates the evidence, causes and consequences of polarization on both the elite and mass levels. A marked difference between the two is found. Elites are polarized by almost any definition, although this state of affairs is quite common historically. In contrast, mass attitudes are now better sorted by party, but generally not polarized. While it is unclear whether this potentially troubling disconnect between centrist mass attitudes and extreme elite preferences has negative policy consequences, it appears that the super-majoritarian nature of the US Senate serves as a bulwark against policy outcomes that are more ideologically extreme than the public would prefer. Moreover, a public more centrist than those who represent it has also at times exerted a moderating influence on recent policies.

The responsiveness of government to the preferences of its citizens is considered to be an important indicator of the performance of advanced democracy. This article argues that the thermostatic model of policy/opinion responsiveness can be represented in the form of an error-correction model where policy and public opinion variables are cointegrated, and extends the focus of investigation to government outputs. This models the short-run and long-run equilibrium of interactions between public opinion and policy/bureaucratic outputs. The article assesses the performance of British government – and, in particular, the Immigration and Nationality Directorate of the Home Office – in the operation of border controls and administration of claims for asylum, for the period between 1994 and 2007.

Semi-presidential regimes have attracted increasing attention from scholars and constitutional reformers over the last quarter century. Yet, despite this popularity, there is no consensus on how to understand this constitutional format. Since Duverger defined semi-presidentialism as a ‘new political system model’, and Linz argued that the constitutional format shares many of the ‘perils of presidentialism’, subsequent research has questioned the conceptual status of semi-presidentialism as a distinct regime type, and whether it has any distinct effects on politics. In this article we review the progress of recent work on semi-presidentialism and suggest that the conceptual tools to clarify some of the major debates in the field are now available in the form of principal–agent theoretical work on democratic constitutions.