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The combination of parliamentary government and plurality elections in the British House of Commons is often assumed to produce highly cohesive parliamentary parties. However, the number and magnitude of backbench revolts against the governing party in the British Parliament has increased since the 1960s. The contention of this article is that particular forms of rebellion against the government are the norm rather than the exception in Britain. The reason, the authors contend, is that members of Parliament (MPs) who have been refused ministerial promotion or who are ex-ministers cannot be controlled by the promise of ministerial office and are hence free to vote against the government if they have variant policy preferences from the cabinet. This idea is confirmed in an analysis of Labour MPs' voting behavior in the 20012005 House of Commons. Keywords: parliamentary government; roll-call voting; legislative behavior; House of Commons

In this article, the authors address the rationalist-constructivist debate head on. They start by discussing a significant empirical phenomenon in contemporary EU politics: the changing pattern of political competition in the European Parliament (EP), from a 'grand coalition' of the two main parties in the 1994-1999 EP, to a new structure of left-right competition in the 1999-2004 EP. The authors then illustrate how rational choice and constructivist assumptions offer competing explanations of this shift in the 'culture of competition' in the EP, which in turn generate competing empirically testable hypotheses. These propositions are tested using a logistic analysis of more than 400 roll-call votes in a period from the 1994-1999 and the 1999-2004 parliament. The authors conclude that neither basic theoretical framework performs well and that the best explanation needs to incorporate assumptions from both frameworks. Keywords: European Parliament; coalitions; rational choice theory; constructivist theory.

Descriptive models of the EU political space are fundamental components of both descriptions of EU politics and theories of EU policy making. But there is no consensus on which, if any, model accurately captures the EU political space. In this article, the authors seek to advance their understanding of the EU political space by bringing evidence to bear on the accuracy of four extant models. Following the methodology used to analyze the national political space of European democracies, they assemble and code manifestos of party federations written prior to European elections. They then use confirmatory factor analysis to analyze the underlying structure of these party federations' policy positions. They also examine temporal differences in party federation positions over several sets of issues. The results of the study indicate that the EU political space is basically one dimensional and similar to the domestic Left-Right dimension in policy content.