Over the past decade, both official defence establishments and independent strategic analysts have devoted increasing attention to the command, control, communications and intelligence (C3I) systems which support the US and Soviet strategic nuclear forces, and to the role of these systems in crises and in strategic nuclear war-fighting. In particular, specific consideration has been given to such critical issues as the extent to which current strategic C3I systems enhance crisis stability or instability, and whether or not they would serve to control escalation in the event of a strategic nuclear exchange or, because of their vulnerabilities, would in fact contribute to the dynamics of the escalation process.

While much is known about the effects of the economy on the popularity and electoral fortunes of political leaders, political scientists know very little about how economic decline and political performance influence support for the political regime and the stability of democratic systems. We use three cross-national longitudinal surveys to address this issue: two collected in Costa Rica in the midst of a severe economic crisis in the late 1970s and early 1980s; and one in West Germany during the recession of the mid-1970s. We show that in both countries, overall support for the political regime remained extremely high during the economic decline, while satisfaction with incumbent performance fluctuated much more sharply. Moreover, at the individual level, changes in satisfaction with incumbent performance were only weakly related to changes in regime support. These results provide strong evidence suggesting that if democracies enter economic downturns with initially high levels of regime support, they will be able to withstand even severe, prolonged crises of economic performance.

The large shift in voting in the House of Commons on repeal of the Corn Laws in the 1842-46 period has led many analysts to focus on the political calculus of Peel's government and on the role of ideology in shaping this policy change. While the claim that ideology was an independent source of change lacks substantiation, the claims about Peel's changing political calculus are an important part of a larger explanation for the change in voting. However, showing that Peel had his own reasons for preferring repeal is not the same as showing why Peel was successful. An analysis of the political and economic interests of constituents and Members of Parliament reveals that these interests were systematically related to Members' votes on repeal. Repeal is thus more appropriately understood as the result of the interaction of Peel's immediate objectives with a more congenial political environment that had arisen due to the changes induced by British economic development.

The availability of rich survey data, and concerns over the ecological fallacy, have led voting researchers to focus on the explanation of individual voting decisions at the expense of accounting for patterns of aggregate election outcomes. This has skewed our understanding of the relative importance of various factors in the electoral process. A framework for analysis of elections at multiple levels is developed and applied using data from twenty-three exit polls from the US Senate elections. Comparable parameters for a simple voting model are estimated for individual voting and for election outcomes. Election-level factors, especially candidates' issue strategies and incumbency, are substantially more important in accounting for election outcomes than in explaining individual voting decisions. Finally, working with election outcomes permits an estimate of a path model of Senate election outcomes that shows key relationships that are not accessible from individual level data.

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