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This paper examines the relationship between the state and nonwhite civil society, specifically the connection between social policy regimes and the activities and ideologies that nonwhite organizations adopt. This paper conducts binary-logistic regression analysis of New York City Nonwhite Associational Dataset and the London Nonwhite Associational Dataset. This paper finds a relationship between governmental funding and the lack of a racial ideology in New York City and a relationship between governmental funding and the presence of a racial ideology in London. These findings reveal the influence of the neo-liberal social policy regimes of the United States and the United Kingdom, suggesting that the imperatives of the state more so than socioeconomic exigencies define the organizational tendencies of nonwhite communities. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper adopts a 'feminist institutionalist' approach to explore and understand the gendered dynamics of change and innovation in the institutions of candidate selection and recruitment in the United Kingdom. The focus of the paper is on multiple inter-connected 'paths' of institutional reform in the British Labour Party: situating the specific case of institutional innovation and (re)design of the institutions of political recruitment in post-devolution Scotland within a background of party reform processes at the UK level. Drawing on the findings of a micro-level case study of a Scottish constituency selection contest, the paper argues that the 'success' of institutional reform in the Labour Party is a complex and contingent question. Drawing on the insights of both feminist and new institutional theory, the paper attempts to theorize these institutional interconnections, illustrating the difficulties of reforming and redesigning the institutions of selection and recruitment in a multi-level party system. The paper concludes by offering some theoretical suggestions as to the complex and gendered dynamics of institutional innovation, design, continuity, and change. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The creation of the Scottish Parliament and Welsh assembly in 1999 brought a new electoral system to mainland Britain, mixed-member proportional (MMP). This paper examines the electoral effect of having two types of Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs). Lundberg (2006), using an elite survey in 2000 and 2003, has shown that MSPs elected through the constituency part of MMP spend more time doing constituency service than MSPs elected thought the list. This paper looks at the effect of these different types of incumbency on constituency vote totals in the 2003 and 2007 Scottish Parliament elections. While it finds that both types of incumbents have an incumbency advantage, this effect is small for list MSPs and is also affected by the party affiliation of the MSPs. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do corporations wield undue influence in politics? If so, how do they achieve this? And if business interests are so powerful, why do they sometimes seem to lose political battles, e.g. against trade unions or environmental groups? This paper investigates the claim of signaling models of lobbying that business can wield political influence by advising policymakers about the consequences of policy on the ground. To this end, a dataset of almost 200 policy proposals advanced by the UK government between 2001 and 2007 has been compiled to measure central variables in informational accounts of lobbying: the lobbying effort made by firms and trade associations, their reputation in the eyes of policymakers, the commitment to the policy made by the policymakers, and the costs and benefits of the policy in the view of the lobbyist and policymaker, respectively. The paper will present results from the initial analysis of these new data. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Nested newness' is a way of theorizing the bounded nature and contradictory outcomes of institutional innovation by highlighting the complex configurations and interconnections of political institutions in multi- level systems. Constitutional and institutional restructuring in the UK in the 1990s resulted in the creation of new parliamentary spaces and structures of governance. Women activists and feminist ideas were important elements in the shaping of constitutional reform. The inclusion of women and the promotion of gender equality were seen as emblematic of a wider aspiration for 'new politics' in Scotland and Wales: a more inclusive politics departing from the zero-sum games of the Westminster model. The paper draws upon new institutionalist and feminist insights to examine the general and gendered difficulties of institutionalising 'new politics' in the devolved institutions. The new institutions are not blank slates but are 'nested' within older ones and shaped by political continuities and path dependencies. The paper seeks to identify gendered mechanisms of institutional resistance and reproduction and the specific dynamics and institutional interconnections that underpin gendered institutions and limit change. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will assess the influence of mobility and migration on citizens’ satisfaction with local public services in the UK. The paper uses UK Census data and the Best Value Performance Indicators (BVPI) survey on the provision of local services. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between government policy and public preferences is a core concern of democratic theorists. One particularly powerful method of relating policy to opinion is the 'dynamic representation' approach. Scholars in this tradition test to what extent current policy changes are a function of past public preferences. This paper derives hypotheses from the dynamic representation approach and tests them for the United Kingdom in a left-right context from 1976-2006. First, it is shown that government policy on the left-right scale changes as a consequence of changing public preferences (the direct mechanism of 'rational anticipation'). Second, a right-wing public results in the election of the Conservative Party, which consequently pursues right-wing policies in office (the indirect mechanism of 'electoral turnover'). Third, government responsiveness is found to be conditional on electoral vulnerability. Popular incumbents are less likely than unpopular incumbents to adjust their policy position to the public. While the Westminster system has received much criticism for its failure to reliably link rulers to the ruled, this paper finds that dynamic representation on the left-right scale in the United Kingdom functions quite admirably. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of trade and its significance to national power and state survival has always been well appreciated and studied. While much attention has been lavished on the possible correlation between interdependence and conflict, unfortunately, an important variable has been largely left ignored. This "ignored" variable centers on the dependence countries possess not with one another, but with "third party markets." How does trade competition over third party markets factor in a country's cost/benefit calculations regarding the likelihood of war? Can this variable play a role in creating disincentives for conflict, as many argue interdependence can? Or do trade rivalries over markets create fears of vulnerability when the competition becomes asymmetrical? Consequently, by simply examining the levels of interdependence between states and its relationship between war and peace, scholars are missing an important element in the study of trade and conflict. Rectifying this omission is the central theme of this paper. The Genoese-Venetian rivalry of the 12th and 13th centuries and the Anglo-Dutch rivalry of the seventeenth century offer important insights into the exploration of how and why competitions for markets create the conditions for war or peace. This paper will argue that Trade Expectations Theory provides a more complete understanding of trade competition over third party markets and its casual relationship to conflict can be obtained. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

PLEASE DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR: The aim of this paper is to explain the roots and successes of contemporary anti- Europeanism in Great Britain. The contention is that the politics Euroskepticism provides a legitimate framework for otherwise explicitly racist and xenophobic attitudes. The past couple of years have seen a changing of the guard amongst extreme parties on the issue of immigration, from the racist politics of the British National Party (BNP) to the anti-EU xenophobia of the UK Independence Party (UKIP). The paper proceeds in explaining this change by way of three parts; part one examines the historical context of modern anti- Europeanism, looking specifically at institutions, traditional intergovernmentalism towards Europe and cultural protectionism as important historical themes. Given this context, part two seeks to explain what factors impel xenophobic voting. It tests the theory that economic and societal competition produce opposition to immigration (Money 1999) using cross-county descriptive statistics. Concluding that these factors are conditions, not explanations, part three asserts politics of perceived competition as bearing explanatory weight. Mechanism of politicization include the institutional characteristics of opposition in parliamentary democracy, newspapers and readership, and most importantly, campaigning. The paper conclude that anti-Europeanism heard on the continent is a projection of anti-immigrant voices politicized in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes advantage of the development of social-scientific textual analysis computer software, capable of processing vast amounts of material (Laver, Benoit and Garry, 2003; Young, 2000), in order to generate extensive data on the last 11 British Prime Ministers. Indeed, despite the importance of the Prime Minister to both British and international politics, systematic quantitative approaches to its study are extremely scarce. This reflects an as yet untaken opportunity to apply sophisticated methodological techniques to the vast amount of public-domain source-material available (Rhodes, 1995). In this study, the universe of Prime Minister responses to foreign policy questions, available through the Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates series, are collected and analyzed from the words as data perspective. Specifically, the content-analysis software program Profiler+ is applied. Developed specifically for use in conjunction with M.G. Hermann’s (1980/1999) Leadership Trait Assessment technique, Profiler+ generates data reporting an individual’s likely information processing style and choice propensities. These measures are supplemented by a quantitative investigation of the extent of prior experience of Prime Ministers on taking office. The resulting data-set allows for systematic analysis of variation and comparability in 11 post-1945 Prime Ministers, and can be linked to theories of individual impact on executive organization and operation. The paper will be of interest to those who study executive operations and decision-making in Prime Ministerial systems, individual political leaders, British politics and foreign policy, and those involved in the emerging words as data approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Awareness of voter dissatisfaction has prompted various attempts at institutional reform in Westminster political systems. Such reforms have attempted to increase the influence of backbench members, strengthen the role of committees and improve opportunities for public participation. Those pushing for change argue that such changes will have a positive impact on popular estimations of politics and the political system. In the absence of a clear understanding of the predictors of voter dissatisfaction, however, it is not clear what reformers are reacting to, nor what voters see as the source of their malaise. This paper examines voter satisfaction with democracy in Westminster systems in an effort to determine which factors can best account for declining confidence, satisfaction, efficacy and trust in politics. It pays particular attention to the influence of electoral systems, the role of politicians, and other civic institutions to determine whether the Westminster system itself is producing citizen malaise, or whether certain design features can be held responsible. In its analysis the paper relies on data from election studies in Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following methodology employed in the United States (Lieske 1993) this paper examines the existence of regional political cultures in Canada, the UK and Australia. Existing literature in all three cases suggests that political boundaries, whether provincial, regional or state, create political sub-cultures. An examination of existing data suggests, however, that these are not sub-cultures, nor are they created by sub-state politics. Rather, they are regional variant cultures encouraged by differing patterns of treatment from the parliaments in Ottawa, London and Canberra. Building on methodology adapted from Lieske’s article on “Regional subcultures in the United States” and presented at the recent Canadian Political Science Association Conference the analysis draws on aggregate data for constituencies and then identifies coherent cultural clusters. Data from election studies allow for an analysis of the dominant attitudes and behaviours in each cluster. The paper argues that such clusters operate across and within sub-State political boundaries and urges a conceptual distinction between political sub-cultures and regional variations of a dominant culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A closer look at the period of government of Margaret Thatcher (United Kingdom) and Gro Harlem Brundtland (Norway). Confronted with scepticism, both women had to prove that they were capable of equally good political leadership as men.ARE THEY ACTUALLY COMPETENT?………Two women Prime Ministers in the West in the late twentieth centuryBy Anneke RibberinkUntil recently, female national leaders were still very much in the minority all over the world. In the period 1945-1990, there were less than twenty. However, women in the West acquired more political influence than ever in the latter part of the twentieth century. There were more women in parliament, more women ministers and there were even a few women Prime Ministers, although only two of them were influential in the West. It is striking that the two women Prime Ministers who were important in the West came to power at more or less the same time, i.e. Margaret Thatcher (United Kingdom, 1979-1990) and Gro Harlem Brundtland (Norway 1981,1986-1989,1990-1996). And it would appear interesting to compare these two women in their political experiences as pioneers. Following a brief outline of the way in which the two women came to power, a closer look is taken at their period of government. How is the quality of their performance in government judged? Both women had to prove that they were capable of equally good political leadership as men. They were both confronted with scepticism and opposition when they came to power, as well as during their period of government. As indicated by the title of this paper, there was still a widespread view that women were incompetent in political spheres. The best way of withstanding negative expectations is to present a good policy and to perform effectively. The fact that female political leadership is already less controversial at the beginning of the 21st century than it was thirty or forty years ago is, in my view, due largely to the preliminary work of these pioneers. This paper will investigate this thesis. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young adults have since long been identified as a group of the electorate least likely to vote. Recent research suggests, however, that turnout among young cohorts is declining rapidly in some countries. It does so at a much faster pace than the turnout among older age groups. In sum, today's youth turns out at lower levels than their parents or grandparents did when they were young. Consequently, the turnout gap between younger and older voters enlarges. The trend towards a widening generational divide has been particularly well documented in Canada and Great Britain. In other countries, such as Sweden and the Netherlands, the turnout difference between younger and older citizens is however stable through time. This paper contributes to the literature on youth participation by assessing the age gap in voter turnout in a longitudinal and comparative way. After observing patterns in the age gap in turnout, competing hypotheses explaining trends are put to the test. Using time-series cross-sectional analysis, the impact of both characteristics of elections and characteristics of voters on the age gap are assessed. The focus is exclusively on Western democracies for which the age gap can be estimated through election survey data. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do governing parties voluntarily transfer significant political and/or fiscal powers to subnational authorities? Contributing to the literature on the origins of institutions, this paper views decentralization as an electoral strategy. Unlike existing strategic explanations, however, I argue that decentralization is a means to bolster a governing party's national-level electoral strength. It is a tool, akin to policy appeasement, used to co-opt pro-decentralization regionalist party voters. By conceiving of decentralization in this manner, we can understand why parties propose devolution reforms that would sabotage their control of the newly created subnational bodies. Because the costs of this institutional strategy are disproportionately concentrated at the subnational level, the policy will only be adopted and implemented by centralized parties that prioritize national-level power. I illustrate the power of the institutional appeasement theory by examining intranational variation in the degree and timing of decentralizing reforms in the regions of Great Britain. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While priming is often mentioned in studies of media effects in Britain, empirical tests of the media’s capacity to prime are lacking. Similarly, despite the recent claim that evaluations of party leaders in Britain are more important to voting behavior than previously thought, little is known about whether or how the media influence those evaluations. In this paper we examine media priming in British elections. Our analysis will demonstrate that there were some strong, dynamic, media effects on perceptions of Tony Blair in 2001 and 2005, both as a direct consequence of the amount of coverage of an issue and via priming. These effects appear stronger than the media’s capacity to set the agenda in either election. We will also examine the impact of the tone of coverage of issues on priming effects and explore short-term and cumulative effects of media coverage, in keeping with recent literature. Our findings thus far are at odds with claims that British elections are too short and British newspapers too partisan for there to be media effects beyond partisan reinforcement. Our analysis of the short-term and cumulative effects of media coverage on priming will also provide a unique examination of their influence outside the US. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses OLS regression analysis of pooled data to account for the significant regional variation in the emergence (or absence) of democracy among former British colonies from 1950 to 2000, as British colonial rule seems to have bequeathed a legacy of democracy in some regions (e.g. North America, Australia, India, the West Indies), while others failed to democratize at Independence (e.g. much of Africa, Southeast Asia, the Middle East). Developing a six part typology of colonization within the British Empire, I argue that the pattern of colonization (settlement, forced settlement or Occupation) and the legal status of the territory (Colony, Protectorate or Protected State) affected the poltical institutions established in each territory, and that these institutions, in turn, have affected the capacity of these countries to maintain democratic rule after Independence. In addition to this new typology, I also examine a variety of control variables to assess the validity of counter-arguments such as the level of economic development, the impact of oil production, ethnic fractionalization, religious composition and size. This study contributes to the growing body of literature on the longterm impact of colonization. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares and contrasts the discourses and practices of intra-EU migration in France and the UK. In both, emigration and immigration are significant and contemporary facts of national life; in each, traditional patterns are being challenged; and in both cases, scare-mongering in this regard has been a dominant feature of recent discourse. In particular, the free movement of people associated with the 2004 and 2007 (but especially 2004) enlargements of the EU posed specific policy challenges to political leaders and local communities alike. In France, the phenomenon contributed to the rejection of the EU’s Constitutional Treaty; in the UK, the government failed first to predict the numbers of economic migrants from East Europe, and then to count them once they had arrived. Both countries, finally, are experiencing significant cross-Channel mobility: a microcosm of intra-EU migration per se. France is for sale, it would appear (cheap houses), while the French are for hire (cheap labour). These stereotypes should tell us something about the range of political discourses we can expect when exploring the characteristics of intra-EU mobility, and the relations between movement on the one hand, and public policy on the other. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing body of research, particularly from the United States, that considers the role candidate sex has upon political attitudes and behaviour. There is some, mixed, evidence that women will tend to favour women candidates when making their vote choice (Plutzer and Zipp 1996; Cook 1998; Dolan 1998; Dolan 2001). Moreover, the literature suggests that all voters tend to assess men and women candidates differently (Huddy and Terkildsen 1993a; McDermot 1997; McDermot 1998; Cutler 2002; Schwindt-Bayer, Crisp and Malecki 2008). This paper uses the British case, which so far has not been included in the expanding literature, to explore the relationship between candidate sex and vote choice. Using the British election study series and the British parliamentary constituency database we test whether women really do vote for women. We use staged regression techniques to control for the endogeneity that arises from the disproportionate number of Labour women candidates placed in winnable seats. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, the global community, from UNESCO to NGOs, is committed to promoting the status of women in science, engineering and technology, despite the long-held prejudice or lack of role models. From the late 1990s, governments in Britain and Japan began collaborating with various bodies, including higher education institutes. The paper underscores the importance of the reputation of women's universities embedded in the institutional foundations, by explaining how female scientific communities take shape in different national contexts. Britain, as a primary example of the neoliberal welfare regime, promoted its policy under the auspices of the Department of Trade and Industry, while Japan, as a conservative welfare regime with strong emphasis on the male-breadwinner model, carefully treated this matter from the perspective of 'equal participation of both men and women', rather than that of 'equality'. In this trend, women's universities, with their tradition of encouraging to become a 'good wife, wise mother' were regarded as legitimate and effective players to reverse the low ratio of women in scientific research (12.6 percent as of 2007, in contrast to 39.2 percent in Britain). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modernization signaled the de-alignment of traditional social cleavages in advanced industrial states. Implicit in this is a homogenization of electorates according to post-material, "new politics" values. Although the impact of traditional social cleavages may have weakened, electorates are not de-aligned; the traditional social cleavages remain important divisions which structure the electorate in significant and meaningful ways. This paper focuses on the impact of religious voting relative to the other traditional social bases of politics in the United States, Germany, and Great Britain, comparing the modern electorates to the electorates of the early 1960s. Using election survey data and focusing on the social bases of conservative parties' support, the results show that while most of the social bases of electoral support have weakened, religious voting remains significant and has increased in the contexts of the United States and United Kingdom. This suggests that despite the decline in religious attendance, the traditional values shared by religious voters make them a tempting social basis of conservative parties’ voter coalitions, and that this may be occurring beyond these contexts. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How and why do the policy positions of parties change? We have good theoretical reasons to expect that political parties adopt policy positions in response to the preferences of voters, since voters are likely to prefer parties that have ideological positions that most resemble their own. At the aggregate level, this leads to the prediction that parties shift their positions towards the median voter's bliss point. Extensive research has documented that parties adjust their ideological position in response to public opinion shifts. Yet, such empirical research has tended to lack sufficiently long time-series of party positions to systematically examine the dynamics of party positions over time. This leaves a number of questions still to be further explored, such as: when do parties shift their ideological positions? Are parties more responsive to the median voter or to party supporters? Does the responsiveness of parties to voters depend on the electoral cycle? This paper examines these questions using time-series data on party leader positions from 1973-2008 in Denmark and Britain. We find that party leaders adjust their positions in the direction of the median voter, and that the extent of this adjustment is greater in election years. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An expansive literature demonstrates the importance of centralized wage bargaining for economic outcomes in OECD countries. Scholars have devoted far less attention to the origins of centralized bargaining and the question of why variations in the degree of bargaining centralization exist. Standard accounts suggest that centralized wage bargaining is the product of one of three factors: the exposure of small markets to trade, the strategic interest of employers in coordinated wage bargaining, or the Olsonian logic of union encompassment. In this paper, we show the importance of politics in generating centralized wage bargaining. We argue that political parties (not unions) are the relevant encompassing organizations that internalize the externalities of union behavior. Historically, left parties endeavored to use union-party ties to forge robust structures of centralized wage bargaining when they were electorally competitive and were successful in doing so when they had a high degree of control over affiliated unions. We test this hypothesis through historical process tracing in three paradigmatic cases (Sweden, West Germany and the United Kingdom) and a quantitative analysis of centralized bargaining in 15 OECD countries. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a structural equation modelling approach, this paper combines available campaign data to produce a latent measure of campaign effort to analyze its direct and indirect effect on party performance at the 2005 British General Election. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the impact of distance to polling station upon electoral turnout. Using polling station level data from a London borough, it examines three types of election, parliamentary, European and local elections, over a twenty year period. The UK is notable among western liberal democracies for its relatively large turnout gap - the percentage point difference between turnout at elections for the Westminster parliament compared to that for other institutions, including local councils and the supra-national European parliament. This research considers the hypothesis that in high information, high salience elections for the national parliament the costs of voting associated with travel to vote are perceived as either low or insignificant but that in low information, low salience elections, those costs are perceived as higher and may act as a deterrent upon voting. A series of regression models consider the relationships between the dependent variable, percentage turnout, and a range of independent variables, including socio-economic characteristics, party competition as well as the spatial context. We show that there is indeed a relationship between distance and voter turnout which is stronger for the lower salience European and local elections than it is for the higher salience national elections. Hence we conclude that the local geography of the polling station can have a significant impact on voter turnout and that there should be a more strategic approach to the location of polling stations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores how changes in the 'costs' of voting through the liberalisation of voting by mail has affected both the level of electoral turnout and the distribution of voter support for parties. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the institutional environment within which British prime ministers operate and finds the abundant powers of PMs can significantly shape foreign policy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Law and order is a collective good, enabling all groups to plan their lives, free from coercion. However, the police are also agents of the prevailing regime. As such they may target dissenting groups, particularly when socio-ethnic divisions threaten regime stability. Policing may therefore exacerbate conflict rather than contain it. The democratic response to this danger is to subject the police to the scrutiny of elected representatives. However, does this oversight encourage impartial policing, or do politicians seek protection for their own group(s), at the expense of minorities? This paper uses debates and questions from the UK and Canadian legislatures to determine the kind of policing demanded by politicians from Northern Ireland and Quebec - regions with deep divisions. Data is compared to the interventions of politicians from more homogenous regions. I therefore examine the reciprocal relationship between conflict and police accountability. Firstly, I detail the impact of inter-group conflict on the type of policing favoured by politicians. Secondly, I assess the likely effect of such demands - are the police cast as the defenders of one group to the exclusion of another, or do politicians co-operate to resolve conflicts over policing? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well known that the economic consequences of separation, divorce, and widowhood are strikingly different for men and women. While women on average experience a substantial decrease in incomes and living standards after transitions out of marriage, men often experience only small losses or even moderate gains. Recent work in political economy suggests that this difference in the economic consequences of marital dissolution leads to gendered redistributive and political preferences. After leaving marriage women should become more left-wing and men more right-wing. So far, however, credible causal inferences about the political consequences of marital dissolution do not exist. In this paper, we use data from the British Household Panel Survey in combination with a matching estimator to estimate the effects of transitions out of marriage on policy preferences and vote choice in British General Elections. We show that marital dissolution causes a large decline in turnout, but in contrast to previous research we find that it has no systematic effect on policy preferences and vote choice. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important property of any party system is the range of issues it presents to the electorate. Party systems are often characterized in terms of the level of ideological polarization, but rarely in terms of the relative amount of issue choice afforded to voters; what we refer to as issue fractionalization. In this paper, we present an innovate approach to measuring issue fractionalization and we examine what explains variation in issue fractionalization over time. Following the issue competition literature, we would expect that parties emphasize different issues (issue divergence is the norm) and that parties in opposition are more likely to diversify their issue appeal than parties in government. This theoretical approach does not, however, explain why issue fractionalization changes over time. We present an alternative explanation that draws upon the dynamic representation model. We argue that issue fractionalization is primarily driven by public opinion, and that parties in government as well as opposition parties are driven by the same incentives to diversify (or narrow) their issue appeal (issue convergence is the norm). These propositions are tested by analyzing party leader speeches in two parliamentary systems, Britain and Denmark, in the period 1953-2007, using time series analysis. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A (re)emergence of identity in England is occurring following the allocation of devolution to Scotland and Wales. This paper discusses why English identity is forcing Westminster to overhaul the administrative structure of the UK once again. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper connects the formal theory surrounding Duverger's Law with an empirical specification and test to examine the empirical evidence for strategic voting in the 2001 General Election in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper expands on the experimental findings of the motivated reasoning literature to numerous election studies in the U.S., Britain, and Germany. Conclusions inform both the information processing and campaign effects literatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women’s chronic under-representation in both elected and appointed elite office has unfortunately been an enduring feature of many nations’ political systems. Comparative research in this field has concentrated largely on system-level factors or large-n quantitative studies to shed light respectively on which conditions tend to be more conducive to progress toward parity and both how electable women are perceived to be and how much they act differently than men once elected. We know for instance, that women are better represented PR list systems, particularly when they are affiliated with parties possessing internal quotas or target parity goals. I would argue, however, that this work although quite important tends in composite to treat women simply as a case upon which variables operate, thereby effectively removing women themselves from the politics of their political place. Similarly, it also largely ignores the role of women elites within their own party structures in any period, but particularly any time prior to the so-called second wave of feminist mobilization in the 1970s. This study hopes to address what I believe to be weaknesses in the literature by examining comparatively a previously neglected institutional component - namely the intial conditions of entry negotiated, accepted or imposed upon the first cadre of elite partisan women post-suffrage. Using data from primary research in women’s organization and party archives, private papers of notables and other sources, I will argue that the formation of separate and definitely unequal women’s divisions in all major parties of Great Britain and the United States, was to have lasting deleterious effects on partisan women’s ability to successfully pursue any distinct women’s agenda once they had formally joined men’s parties. I will also argue that this strategic error was compounded by an political landscape charged by sex antagonism and competition for the loyalities of millions of new voters. It was also in many ways, one from which partisan women have never fully recovered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although many studies have examined the economic status of immigrants, most studies of immigration have neglected immigrant opinions. When immigration is addressed at all using survey data, studies almost exclusively focus on native attitudes toward immigration and not on attitudes of immigrants themselves. In this paper, we investigate whether immigrants and natives have systematically different attitudes toward social spending and redistribution. We employ surveys from Germany and Great Britain that sample a relatively large number of immigrants compared to typical national election surveys. In addressing this potential “opinion gap,” we control for socioeconomic characteristics, such as income and education as well as immigrants’ ability to assimilate into their new country’s labor market by comparing an immigrant’s skill level with his or her actual occupation in the new country. We also include contextual covariates to account for potential network effects. Our statistical analyses use ordered logistical regressions and are fully interactive (following Franzese 1999), consistent with our theoretical expectation that the models’ independent variables affect natives differently than they do immigrants. Once these controls are included, we observe that immigrants are never more likely than natives to favor increases in social spending or to endorse redistributive measures. In instances where we do find a significant opinion gap between natives and immigrants, the latter tend to support more conservative positions, favoring tax cuts at the expense of social spending. While some of our findings are preliminary in nature, they nevertheless represent a significant contribution to the extant literature, which, to our knowledge, does not include comparative studies on the political attitudes of immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there is considerable agreement that economic conditions affect electoral outcomes, there is less agreement as to exactly how. Scholars have spent a great deal of effort exploring the links between economics and vote choice but have generally ignored the potential that economic perceptions could also affect the likelihood of voter abstention. I explore that possibility in this paper. First, I develop a theory of how economic perceptions affect the likelihood of abstention. I argue that the relevant factors in this relationship are one?s retrospective and prospective judgments of the economy and the ideology of the respondent and government. Hypotheses are generated and tested using national election survey data from the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands. The results show that economic perceptions have an effect on the likelihood of electoral abstention. This effect is mediated by the ideology of the respondent and party and appears to be weakened in situations of greater coalitional complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the 11 years that Margaret Thatcher occupied the office of prime minister in the United Kingdom, the economy was transformed away from its quasi-corporatist roots toward a more market-centered, laissez-faire system like that of the United States. The power of the unions was diminished, monetarist programs were introduced, substantial privatization occurred, and the legacy of Keynesian politics faded away. At the same time, the welfare state was restructured to put more focus on market forces and flexibility. Of particular interest is the relative tameness of the welfare state changes as compared to those in the economic sector. What caused Thatcher to hold back on serious welfare state retrenchment? The argument presented in this paper is that the extent of liberalization that occurred in the United Kingdom can best be understood by recognizing the particular economic and electoral pressures that faced Thatcher’s Conservatives. While Thatcher’s government was capable of passing legislation in keeping with its neo-liberal agenda for the country, the cultural preference for some government provision of social services (such as the National Health Service) became a constraint on policy-making. Furthermore, the effect of popular pressure was felt not only in the electoral realm, but also within the Conservative Party itself. Thatcher would have preferred to cut deeper and retrench more, but the preferences of her caucus and party members, and the power that they yielded over her position as party leader, forced her to check her own instincts and institute a milder version of neo-liberal welfare state reform. In the end, the Thatcher governments of the 1980s produced a liberal economy-welfare state combination that had a market focus but also a (seemingly contradictory) measure of social democracy in its social policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines and compares occasions when foreign/defense policy has become atypically salient in British Public opinion by examining public opinion data on the Suez crisis, the Falklands war, the Gulf War, Kossovo, and the Iraq war. Our preliminary finding is that these issues are not generally seen as significant by UK voters, but surge to the fore in crisis periods, usually, but not always, to the benefit of the government of the day. The effect on public opinion tends to be short-term however, and foreign policy has not been a decisive issue in recent British General elections [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper treats the proposals of the Union of Democratic Control, a British organization during the First World War whose aim was to agitate for democratic control of foreign policy, arms reduction, and the rejection of balance of power politics in favor of international organization. The UDC was created by British politicians and political officials who dissented with the aims of the British Government during the war. They had an indirect influence on the formation of the League of Nations, and this paper will examine the extent of this influence, placing them in the context of contemporary theorists of international organization. Beyond these historical questions, the paper will also examine their proposals in light of more current theories of democratic peace. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an extension of a statistical model of multiparty aggregate electoral data to conduct a truly comparative analysis of elections across different electoral rules. Such a fully comparative study requires the analysis of intra-party votes for electoral rules with intra-party competition (e.g., open-list PR) and the estimation of winning probabilities which are, unlike vote shares, directly comparable across SMDs and MMDs. The paper develops a model of intra-party vote shares and proposes a two-step estimation of inter- and intra-party vote shares to accommodate electoral rules with intra-party competition. It also uses a simulation of vote shares and seat distributions based on these models to estimate winning probabilities of seats and candidates. To demonstrate its utility, the paper applies the methodology to comparing incumbency advantage in UK and Finland which use, respectively, an archetype of electoral rules at the opposite end of the spectrum: the SMD without intra-party competition and the MMD with intra-party competition. The estimation results support the hypothesis that incumbency advantage is higher in Finland than in UK due to the difference in legislator’s incentives to pursue personal votes. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper uses elements of structural and public choice approaches, and bases its analysis on the notion that academic evaluation of fiscal allocations should focus on the central government interests rather than mainly or exclusively on territorial demands. The paper concludes that in the British context in the period discussed, the continuously shifting ordering of government priorities is determined on the basis of some specific features of public policies, such as the policy’s relevance to the government support groups, the policy’s electoral and political visibility, the policy’s convenience for the central government and the ideas and individuals pursuing those ideas present in a specific public policy area. The paper has substantial theoretical significance in that it goes beyond evaluation of specific fiscal arrangements to discern the factors most relevant to the analysis of public policies at large and fiscal policies in particular. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent debates concerning the applicability of offensive realism have focused on the propensity of great powers to engaging in “extraregional balancing” outside of their own systems. Some have argued that powerful states go far beyond simple “offshore balancing,” the fairly limited strategy designed to avoid the consolidation of power under one state in a given region. Others have argued that great powers are often incapable of effective balancing outside of their immediate region. In this paper, we explore British balancing policy during the 1800s. We argue that Great Britain developed a strategy of supporting “custodial powers” in key regions outside of Europe to protected British interests and to maintain British security and commerce. Ottoman Turkey served this function in the Middle East while Japan supported British interests in East Asia. What factors best explain these British alliance choices? In answering this question, this paper seeks to advance the discussion on extraregional balancing and alliance formation. It also has practical implications for understanding the emergence of a US-India alliance under the Bush administration. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Realism argues that international cooperation between nations is hindered by state concerns over relative gains. Because states are consistently confronted with assaults to their security in an anarchic international environment, they will work at all costs to prevent the relative rise in power of potential competitors. This paper will focus on a prominent case in which state policies seemingly went unshaped by concerns over relative position- the case of Britain during the period of Pax Britannica from 1820 to 1870. By the beginning of this period, Britain had achieved a position of commercial and financial dominance over the world. Throughout the 19th century however, Britain, in a series of shifts in commercial policy from mercantilism to free trade, exposed to all who were interested the secrets of its success- the know-how and technology that had brought Britain such singular prosperity. This paper will attempt to both fill the empirical gap in the debate on relative gains by analyzing historical evidence surrounding this 19th century case and at the same time to develop a more subtle and comprehensive explication of cooperative behavior during the Pax Britannica than offered by current international relations theories. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research demonstrates that legalization affects foreign policy preferences: voters and policymakers are more likely to oppose policies that violate international law than to oppose otherwise identical policies that do not trammel upon the law. This paper examines the mechanisms through which international law affects preferences. Drawing on experiments in several countries (including Argentina, Israel, the United Kingdom, the United States), the paper finds strong evidence that legalization increases the reputational cost of breaking international commitments, and that it heightens the probability foreign retaliation, as well. These mechanisms are evident at both the elite and the mass levels. The importance of these mechanisms varies across countries, however, with small countries proving especially sensitive to concerns about reputation and retaliation. Overall, the paper deepens our understanding of international cooperation by providing the first experimental, micro-level evidence about how international law works. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I develop a new method for estimating the ideological preferences of members of the British House of Commons. Existing methods for estimating preferences from roll call votes produce implausible results due to high levels of party cohesion and strategic voting on the part of opposition parties. To circumvent these problems, this paper estimates MP preferences using Early Day Motions (EDMs) as an alternative to roll call votes. I adapt existing Bayesian ideal point methods using a simple behavioural model for the decision to sign an EDM that takes into account both policy preferences and signing costs. The estimates obtained have greater face validity than previous attempts to measure preferences in the House of Commons, recovering the expected order of parties and of members within parties. The estimates successfully predict voting behaviour in the House of Commons. As with other Bayesian ideal point methods, this approach produces natural uncertainty estimates and allows for easy calculation of quantities of interest such as member ranks. The model proposed here can be extended to evaluate theories of legislative behaviour in the House of Commons and to estimate changes in preferences over time. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I will argue that there has been a shift in Muslim incorporation policies around the 1990s which privileged a “religious” component. I will explore this in two case studies, Great Britain and France, through a controlled case comparison coupled with a within-case design. Through an analysis of the historical processes, this paper will offer an argument for when and why religion rose in salience when it did -- starting in the 1990s and accelerating after internal security issues connected to the Muslim community in the early 2000s. This paper will then move to a closer examination of the policies to address the issue of Muslim incorporation, paying particular attention to how the British and French governments created new institutions and emphasized funding and research strands to legitimize certain actors, particularly moderate and mainstream Muslims. In looking at the form of policies, this paper will suggest that the important distinction to be made is not between church-state institutional structures but the more general philosophies regarding the role of religion in public life. This will result in a typology of the Anglo-American model versus the Continental European model. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent public management reforms have emphasised the importance of a comprehensive approach to strategy, and governments in various nations have exhorted public agencies to align their internal arrangements with their service objectives. Very little research has been conducted however, on patterns of organizational strategy in the contemporary public sector, or on the links between strategies, other organizational characteristics and the environment in which public services operate. In this paper we explore these issues by applying Miles and Snow's (1978) seminal model of strategic management to a set of public organizations using data drawn from a large-scale four year multiple informant survey of English local governments. Miles and Snow argued that organizational success depended on the adoption of a consistent strategy for aligning an organization with its environment. Organizations without a clear, well-aligned and, at least in the short or medium term, 'stable' strategy, were likely to perform worse than their rivals. Furthermore, the successful pursuit of whatever strategy was selected would depend on adopting the appropriate internal structure and processes. In other words, it was necessary to establish a fit between strategy and environment, and the internal characteristics of an organization. We develop and apply the Miles and Snow model in order to answer three main research questions. First, do public organizations follow the strategies that are postulated by Miles and Snow? Second, to the extent that such strategies exist, are they related to internal structures and processes in the ways predicted by Miles and Snow? Third, are strategies and their internal correlates aligned with the organizational environments faced by public organizations? In the first part of the paper we review the Miles and Snow model and derive hypotheses from their arguments. In the second part, we outline our data and empirical methods. We then investigate whether public organizations have distinctive strategies, and whether each of these strategies is associated with different operational environments and internal structures and processes. Finally, our results are summarised and the implications for public management theory are discussed. Miles, R., & Snow, C. (1978). Organizational strategy, structure and process. London: McGraw Hill. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political disengagement of young people is a common theme across many of the mature democracies. One element of this disengagement is a cluster of characteristics and proclivities that might be termed "political inattentiveness." This inattentiveness among the young comprises three key elements: low levels of political knowledge, a relative lack of political interest and inattention to politics in the media. This paper seeks to advance our understanding of political inattentiveness among the young by assembling longitudinal data for six countries: Canada, the United States, Britain, Sweden, the Netherlands and Norway. The surveys are used to trace differences between young and old in political knowledge, interest and media attentiveness from the 1950s to the present day. This longitudinal and comparative analysis helps establish which dimensions of political attentiveness have changed most notably, the timing of these changes and the degree of cross-national divergence and convergence. In addition to the empirical contribution, the paper also assesses the implications of the findings for different theoretical accounts of political disengagement among the young. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will look at how party systems in Britain, the U.S., and Sweden have responded to the feminist movement. First, party pledges, as stated in platforms and manifestos, will be analyzed. To what extent do the parties make “feminist” pledges”? Different definitions of “feminist policy” will be analyzed and an argument will be made for one. Next, to what extent have such pledges been enacted into policy? What factors obstruct or encourage feminist policy success? The chosen cases allow us to analyze systems that are culturally and institutionally different. The U.S. and Britain are argued by Siaroff (1994) to be in the same “feminist family of nations”â€"“Protestant Liberal”â€"while Sweden is “Protestant Social Democratic.” A comparison of what parties say about feminist issues helps us to test whether this “family of nations” concept is useful. Comparing pledge enactment across countries also allows us to look at the impact of institutions on feminist policy; we will be comparing presidential two-party, parliamentary two-party, and parliamentary multi-party systems. This work will contribute to the literatures on comparative parties, comparative public policy generally, and comparative feminist policy specifically. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the discourse and strategies of extreme right parties in four European democracies; France, the UK, Germany and Romania. Using text analysis of party manifestoes, we disctinguish four sub-types of extreme right parties. We show that the extreme right party family can be classified into four distinct types based on the insight into the fundamental ideological core and the style of discourse it espouses. We explore the implications this typology has on party competition and the likely electoral success of the party within its given party system. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]