From the late 1970s on, after several decades characterized by relatively interventionist patterns of economic policy making, most advanced states began questioning and, in some instances, abandoning active industrial policies and privatizing public businesses. Examining the evolution of the public business sector in all nations included in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) from 1979 to 1993, this article shows that the sale of public firms did not mechanically derive from either declining growth rates, growing budget deficits or the increasing internationalization of domestic economies. Although the economic slowdown of the 1970s had the effect of breaking down the so-called Keynesian post-war consensus, the strategies towards the public business sector eventually adopted were shaped by the partisan composition of office – conservatives privatized while social democrats opted for the status quo – and by the internal structure of the cabinet – divided governments produced little change in either direction. From a theoretical point of view, this analysis broadens the current political-economic literature by showing that, although parties have a limited impact on the standard macroeconomic policies employed to manage the business cycle – a point widely confirmed in the literature – they do play a central role in designing policies, such as the level of public ownership of the business sector, that shape the supply side of the economy.

Although most incumbent members of Congress succeed in being re-elected, American politicians are in fact more subject to the vicissitudes of electoral politics than are the politicians of any other major democracy. They face re-election more often. They face the possibility of having to contest primaries. They have to raise most of their own money. They are not given a large measure of protective cover by strong political parties. The consequences for American government and politics are profound. They include such familiar and well-documented phenomena as particularism, ‘pork’ and the power of special interests; but they also include the high incidence in America of purely symbolic politics, the drastic foreshortening of American politicians' time horizons and the difficulty that the American system often has in taking tough decisions.

What do citizens and political leaders have in mind when they think about democracy? This article deals with the relationship between different conceptions of democracy and the level of support for democracy among both ordinary citizens and political elites in two post-Soviet countries, Russia and Ukraine.

Data collected through personal interviews in 1992 and 1995 reveal that the mass and elite in these post-socialist countries hold different conceptions of democracy. The elite tend to emphasize law and order and the rule of law, whereas the citizens stress freedoms in their understanding of democracy. Involvement in politics, especially in a political party, has a significant influence on the meaning of democracy as well as on the consistency among attitudes reflecting support for democratic principles. Different conceptions of democracy are also found to affect the perceived extent to which the current regime fits with the individual's idea of what a democracy should be like.

This article examines the conflict in political liberalism between the demands placed on education by liberalism and those placed on education by democracy. In so far as the principles of political liberalism entail both that the state not interfere with individuals' private commitments and that it ensure the maintenance of liberal democratic institutions, I suggest that it is rent by an internal tension that poses particular dilemmas for education. This tension is explored through three competing models of the school as a politically liberal institution, expressed in terms of a schematic analysis of three countries' approach to education: England, the United States and France. I argue that while all three countries capture important aspects of the politically liberal educational project, and while the American approach especially successfully and self-consciously addresses the balance between liberalism and democracy in constructing the school as a public square, no model in theory or in practice is able to meet the diverse and competing demands of political liberalism. In so far as any political system is viable only if it is able to maintain itself across generations, however, I conclude that political liberalism fails as a theory in at least one important respect, and that the problem of education thus deserves much deeper attention from liberal political theorists than it has yet enjoyed.

Ernest Gellner's is the best-known modernist explanatory theory of nationalism. This article summarizes its expression and development before considering its strengths and weaknesses. Discussion centres on Gellner's functionalist mode of explanation, the place of nationalism in his philosophy of history, the predictive and retrodictive nature of his theory, and the merits of his typology of nationalism. The apolitical character of his writings is emphasized: in particular, though Gellner established the connections between nationalism and egalitarianism in modern societies, he did not emphasize the mutually reinforcing relationships between nationalism, egalitarianism and democratization; moreover, his contempt for nationalist doctrines is not something liberals, socialists and conservatives need share.

Members of the Co-ordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM) agreed to disband this ‘economic arm of NATO’ as of March 1994. Despite the demise of COCOM, member states agreed to continue applying their existing export control policies and, in December 1995, replaced COCOM with the Wassenaar Arrangement on Export Controls for Conventional Arms and Dual-Use Goods and Technologies. Such actions are in contrast to conventional views about a likely decline in co-operation among COCOM members with the end of the Soviet threat. After providing a brief history of COCOM operations, we derive six categories of multilateral co-operative behaviours and assess evidence for COCOM in each category for two five-year periods, 1985–89 and 1990–94. We find that multilateral co-operation in this security institution not only increased in most categories in the last years of the Cold War, but increased in every category after 1989. We then review the possible explanations for the increase in co-operation, and find that the emergence of a liberal community identity among COCOM members explains this outcome better than more conventional theoretical approaches.

Despite considerable research, the theory of gender difference in electoral behaviour remains underdeveloped, especially in accounting for variation across elections. We focus on two aspects requiring particular attention: (1) accounts of gender difference, especially distinguishing between positional explanations, in which gender differences stem from men and women taking the same considerations into account, but having different positions on those considerations, or structural explanations, in which gender differences stem from men and women taking different considerations into account in making judgements; (2) the effects of electoral context in cuing gender as a consideration, thus stimulating or inhibiting the appearance of gender differences. We use a case study of the 1992 US presidential election, often labelled ‘The Year of the Woman’, to explore these problems.

Theories ascribing democracy to inclusive contestation imply that the speech of authoritarian rulers will differ from the speech of electoral politicians. Authoritarian rulers will use an official language that insulates them from populations under their control. This official language insults subject populations by implying that the vernacular in which they formulate their thoughts is inadequate for the discussion of political ideas. Electoral politicians, praising the competence of citizens to decide political questions, take care to frame their ideas in ordinary language, as otherwise the politicians would contradict their message that bearers of ordinary language are politically competent. If rulers implicitly insult and politicians flatter, citizens should respond with disaffiliation to rulers' language and affiliation to the language of politicians, at least of those politicians whom the citizens favour. This hypothesis is tested using an experimental paradigm in three Russian cities at the end of 1993. The prediction that Russians will affiliate to the texts of some electoral politicians contrasts with the claim that Russians evaluate political ideas mainly by contemplating change in their standard of living, since Russia represents an unusual case in which authoritarian speech is associated with greater affluence, while electoral speech is associated with increasing impoverishment for most people.

British civil servants have a clear constitutional duty to obey their ministers. Yet civil servants may be confronted with situations in which they believe, on the basis of their knowledge or expertise, that the course of action a minister favours would have sharply damaging consequences for the government or the country. What should higher civil servants do then? We use data gathered in two rounds of interviews with senior civil servants (Grades 1–3) in 1989–90 and 1993–94 to explore how far civil servants feel able to go in challenging either inappropriate ministerial requests for services or policies they believe to be sharply damaging. Senior civil servants are divided on the appropriate course of action in such circumstances.

This article investigates the interactions between democracy, political stability and economic growth. Two aspects of the study differentiate it from previous research. First, a simultaneous approach is adopted which combines the study of economic growth and political stability with that of economic growth and democracy. Secondly, a distinction is made between types of political instability, because different kinds of government change have different effects on economic growth and democracy. This analysis employs three-stage least-squares estimation, and utilizes aggregate data covering ninety-six countries from 1960 to 1980. The results indicate that democracy has a positive indirect effect upon growth through its impacts on the probabilities of both regime change and constitutional government change from one ruling party to another. In addition, the evidence indicates that the two kinds of political change mentioned above have significant and opposite effects on growth; that growth has a negative effect on regime change and a positive effect on the probability of the ruling party remaining in power; and that long-run economic growth tends to exert a positive effect upon democracy.

Past research on policy subsystems has not attempted to explain the manner in which policy preferences for customary subsystem participants are formed as part of a system. The purpose of this research is to narrow the gap between the theoretical conceptualization and empirical articulation of policy subsystems. This study examines the formation of policy preferences for standard subsystem participants in the area of commercial bank regulation for the 1949–89 period. The findings reveal that the formation of (regulatory) policy preferences for these main subsystem participants reflects strategic behaviour rather than retrospective behaviour. This suggests that institutional participants within the commercial banking regulatory subsystem strategically operate in a policy environment with an abundance of information.

The Northern Irish party system is plausibly represented as two systems, in which party competition occurs within nationalist and unionist blocs. Social and ideological divisions within these blocs constrain parties' electoral strategies and thus facilitate or inhibit cross-communal compromise. Using Northern Irish Social Attitudes data, various accounts of these intra-communal divisions are tested and their political implications assessed. Contrary to expectations concerning the effects of cross-communal contact, neighbourhood integration is found to have no relationship with partisanship although, consistent with political socialization theory, young people on both sides of the divide are more likely than those who are older to support the more recently introduced parties. Most significantly, however, there are noticeable asymmetries in the patterns of cleavage within the unionist and nationalist blocs. Among Protestants, left–right ideology has a far stronger impact than constitutional position on patterns of partisanship; and social class has considerably stronger effects than does denomination. Most Protestants, whatever their partisanship, also express strongly unionist constitutional preferences. In clear contrast, on the nationalist side party support is polarized along constitutional lines, there is no cross-cutting ideological division over economic inequality, and a majority of Catholics adopt a moderate stance on nationalism. It is argued in consequence, that within the unionist bloc the pattern of intra-communal party competition militates against constitutional compromise as a solution to ‘the troubles’, whereas among nationalists the unidimensional structure of competition for electoral support and the distribution of attitudes towards the constitutional issue are likely to have influenced the adoption of compromise strategies by Sinn Féin.

Following the Republican victory in the 1994 mid-term elections, the balance of power in the US House of Representatives between committees and central party leader shifted decisively in favour of the latter. The central thrust of the procedural and personnel changes instituted under Newt Gingrich in 1994 and 1995 was to consolidate party government. This article reviews these important changes and analyses their impact on the legislative process. The return to party government is explained as a product of Gingrich's partisan vision of legislative organization, the destabilization of existing institutional relations as a consequence of the shift in partisan control, the unusual conditions of the 1994 elections, and the strong team spirit and high levels of Republican party support. The article speculates that a return to more autonomous, less party-dominated committee system is unlikely given strong Democratic support for robust centralized party leadership, important changes in Congress's policy agenda, high membership turnover, and the probable continuation of split-party government, but the potency of these centralizing forces will probably be mitigated by familiar decentralizing pressures in contemporary American politics.

In this article we will review the literature on cabinet durability and cabinet termination. The fact that many cabinets in Western multi-party democracies do not serve out their full potential legal term in office has given rise to an important and growing body of research in political science. Cabinet durability is one of the three main features of cabinets, the others being cabinet party composition and allocation of portfolios. Each is of theoretical interest in itself, but of even greater interest for what it might tell us about broader questions of representation and governance. Each is also important as a development and testing ground for new methodologies. Our initial aim was to update the excellent review of cabinet durability done over a decade ago by Lawrence C. Dodd, ‘The Study of Cabinet Durability: Introduction and Commentary’, Comparative Political Studies, 17 (1984), 155–62, which became badly out of date because of the considerable volume of recent empirical and theoretical work. Subsequent to the initial submission of this article, we discovered that Paul Warwick, Government Survival in Parliamentary Democracies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), had provided a substantial review of this literature in the course of elaborating his own model of government survival. We have incorporated references to that work here. However, while we agree with much of what Warwick has written, our perspective on the extent of progress in understanding the determinants of cabinet termination and on what remains to be done and how best to proceed is rather different from his.There is a voluminous literature attempting to predict the party composition of cabinets from the party breakdown in the legislature and other factors, such as the ideological propinquity of the various parties. An excellent recent review is Michael Laver and Norman Schofield, Multiparty Government: The Politics of Coalition in Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), which also contains important new theoretical contributions of their own. The literature on portfolio allocations had been relatively dormant since the work of Eric Browne and his colleagues, e.g., Eric C. Browne and Mark Franklin, ‘Aspects of Coalition Payoffs in European Parliamentary Democracies’, American Political Science Review, 67 (1973), 453–69; Eric C. Browne and Karen Feste, ‘Qualitative Dimensions of Coalition Payoffs: Evidence for European Party Governments, 1945–1970’, American Behavioral Scientist, 18 (1975), 530–56; Eric C. Browne and James Frendreis, ‘Allocating Coalition Payoffs by Conventional Norm: An Assessment of the Evidence for Cabinet Coalition Situations,’ American Journal of Political Science, 24 (1980); 753–68, until reinvigorated by the innovative work of Michael Laver and Kenneth Shepsle, ‘Coalitions and Cabinet Government’, American Political Science Review, 84 (1990), 873–89; Michael Laver and Kenneth Shepsle, Making and Breaking Governments: Cabinets and Legislatures in Parliamentary Democracies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996) which provides a new model of the relationship between party composition, portfolio allocations and policy outcomes (see also David Austen-Smith and Jeffrey Banks, ‘Stable Governments and the Allocations of Policy Portfolios,’ American Political Science Review, 84 (1990), 891–906.

An analysis is made of the interaction between the legislature and the judiciary in the Dutch parliamentary setting, focusing in particular on the issue of euthanasia. Using the methodology of positive political theory, two alternative hypotheses are derived about the extent to which the courts may affect public policies. Two main conclusions can be drawn from the analysis of the decision-making process on euthanasia. First, the statutory interpretation the courts gave on euthanasia in the 1980s supports the hypothesis of the court as a policy advocate, not a policy conserver. Secondly, the fact that the courts were able to introduce and maintain a more liberal interpretation of euthanasia during the last decade can be explained as a consequence of the heterogenous preferences on this issue held by the political parties that formed the successive governing coalitions.

If the automobile business had developed like the computer business, a Rolls Royce would cost $2.75 and run for 3 million miles on one gallon of gas.

Forrester, Hight-Tech SocietyTom Forrester, High-Tech Society (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), p. 18.

The computer power available to political scientists has increased at least one thousandfold since 1970. We can now make millions of calculations in a few seconds, generate beautiful and meaningful graphics, and communicate instantly around the world, all at virtually no cost. But in what ways has this computer power helped us make more accurate statements about political phenomena? Beyond simply doing faster and more cheaply that which we had done previously, this computer revolution has made possible a qualitative leap in our analysis of political behaviour.

A late-twentieth century political theorist presented with an essay on ‘Theories of Justice’ would be able to predict with some confidence what he or she was about to read. Justice is widely acknowledged to be a legitimate topic for political theory, and there are a number of recent studies which are exemplary as to content and style – most obviously the work of Rawls, but also of, amongst others, Nozick, Walzer, Sandel, Scanlon and Barry. These exemplary studies have generated an extensive secondary literature: the major figures in the ‘ Justice’ industry comment upon and develop each others work, and are, in turn, the subject of commentary by the next generation. Obviously there is, as yet, no consensus as to the actual nature of justice, but there is quite general agreement as to how to go about investigating the subject. In short, this is, to apply a Rawlsian term, a ‘well-ordered’, professional, branch of political theory – and Rawls is an appropriate reference point here, since the professionalism of this discourse is largely attributable to the central role played by his work and the literature it has generated.An excellent example of such an essay would be David Miller, ‘Review Article: Recent Theories of Social Justice’, British Journal of Political Science, 21(1991), 371–91.John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), and Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974); Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1983); Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Thomas Scanlon, ‘Contractualism and Utilitarianism’ in Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams, eds, Utilitarianism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 103–28; Brian Barry, Theories of Justice (Hemel Hempstead, Herts: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1989); and Justice as Impartiality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).See Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 453. The dominance of Rawls can, of course, be exaggerated, and there are important contemporary writers who do not simply disagree with his account of justice, but regard his project as misconceived; see, for example, Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (London: Duckworth, 1988).

We are flattered that Ken Newton considers our research to be the only serious attempt to test Tiebout in Britain, but we would like to correct the errors of his fairy tale as well as refute his criticisms.Kenneth Newton, ‘Residential Mobility in London: Rational Choice Fairy Tale, Utopia, or Reality?’ British Journal of Political Science, this issue, pp. 148–51; Peter John, Keith Dowding and Stephen Biggs, ‘Residential Mobility in London: A Micro-Level Test of the Behavioural Foundations of the Tiebout Model’, British Journal of Poltical Science, 25 (1995), 379–97.

Interest in the relationship between political democracy and economic growth has been long-standing.See, for example, S. M. Lipset, ‘Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy’, American Political Science Review, 53 (1959), 69–105. Recently this work has been reanalysed b y J. Helliwell, ‘Empirical Linkages between Democracy and Economic Growth’, British Journal of Political Science, 24 (1994), 225–48; and by R. Burkhart and M. Lewis Beck, ‘Comparative Democracy: The Economic Development Th esis,’ American Political Science Review, 88 (1994), 903–10. Recently, there has been an explosion of empirical research emanating from political science and economics that once again attempts to understand the relationship between democracy and economic growth. The goal in much of this research has been to explain the variation in per capita growth rates that exists across nations. This goal has translated into a straightforward empirical mod elling strategy: regress a country's growth rate on a democracy variable and a number of control variables and see whether the partial correlation between democracy and economic growth is statistically significant. The last few years has seen the publicat ion of over twenty empirical studies; however, the results are far from conclusive. In their recent review of twenty-one statistical findings investigating this relationship, Przeworski and Limongi explain that ‘eight found in favor of democracy, eight in favor of authoritarianism, and five discovered no difference.’ Of the thirteen studies surveyed by Sirowy and Inkeles, three find a negative effect of democracy on economic growth, four find this negative effect in some situations, and six find no relationship whatsoever.See A. Przeworski and F. Limongi, ‘Political Regimes and Economic Growth’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 7 (1993), 1002–37; and L. Sirowy and A. Inkeles, ‘The Effects of Democracy on Economic Growth and Inequality: A Review,’ Studies in Comparative International Development, 25 (1990), 126–57. See also R. Levine and D. Renelt, ‘Cross-Country Studies of Growth and Policy: Methodological, Conceptual, and Statistical Problems’ (World Bank Working Paper, No. 608, Washington, DC, 1991). These conclusions are far from reassuring or instructive.

The importance of technological innovation in health care is due to the historical ascendancy of scientific medicine over other therapies. Scientific medicine in turn was strengthened through an alliance between professional elites and corporate interests. That alliance has been destabilized by developments in health care politics, by changes in industrial structures and by alterations in democratic politics. The medical goods industries remain powerful lobbies, but they operate in an increasingly competitive lobbying environment.