Six different notions of ‘political’ are commonly used in discussions of the US Supreme Court. All six are familiar, but the distinctions among them are seldom carefully drawn. The six are: (1) purely definitional, in the sense that the Supreme Court, as an appellate court of last resort inevitably authoritatively allocates values; (2) empirical, in the sense that litigants use the Court to try to achieve their political purposes; (3) influence seeking, in the sense that the justices have a natural desire to prevail in arguments within the court; (4) prudential, in the sense that the justices frequently consider the probable consequences of their decisions; (5) policy-oriented, in the – usually pejorative – sense that justices are said to use the Court and the law as a cover for pursuing their own policy and other goals; and (6) systemic, in the sense that the Court's decisions frequently, as a matter of fact, have consequences for other parts of the American political system. These six notions are considered in the context of recent abortion decisions.

Nearly two decades ago researchers pointed out the sharp decline in marginal districts in elections for the US House of Representatives. That observation led to an outpouring of research describing the electoral changes, explaining their bases and speculating about their consequences for the larger political system. Recently Gary Jacobson has offered a major corrective to that line of research, arguing that ‘House incumbents are no safer now than they were in the 1950s; the marginals, properly defined, have not vanished; the swing ratio has diminished little, if at all; and competition for House seats held by incumbents has not declined’. While Jacobson advances an extremely provocative argument, there are complicating patterns in his evidence that support additional and/or different interpretations. We argue that the marginals, ‘properly defined’ have diminished, the swing ratio has declined, and party competition for House seats held by incumbents has lessened. While fears that the vanishing marginals phenomenon would lead to lower responsiveness on the part of ‘safe’ House incumbents have proved groundless, the collective composition of Congress does appear to be less responsive to changes in popular sentiments. Thus, the vanishing marginals have contributed to the occurrence of divided government in the United States and in all likelihood do have the effects on congressional leadership and policy-making that many analysts have claimed.

Doctrines have been a prevalent form of foreign policy in American history. What explains their origins? This study addresses this question by examining the Reagan Doctrine, a declared policy which pledged aid to anti-communist guerrillas in the Third World. This case study examines the utility of the ‘structural realist’ theory, focusing on the international level of analysis.

Structural realism stresses the international balance of power, international conditions, limits on the government's freedom to make policy and the national interest. Sources of the Reagan Doctrine are found both in the international environment as a whole and in the individual countries where the Reagan Administration openly aided insurgents: Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Angola and Cambodia.

The findings indicate that the structural realist perspective is necessary to explain the Reagan Doctrine, but not sufficient. In particular, it fails to account for the role of political elites and their beliefs in foreign-policy making.

This article examines how party organization affects, and is itself affected by, the objectives pursued by parties in liberal democracies; it focuses on vote-seeking behaviour by parties. It argues that it is a mistake to model activist–leader relations in the past as having been primarily the product of particular kinds of ‘exchanges’ between leaders and activists in a party. Such models limit our understanding of intra-party relations in four important respects – by focusing exclusively on the idea of ‘exchange’ and not examining the role of ‘gifts’; by not considering the role of solidary incentives; by omitting an analysis of loyalty; and by not taking account of the role of habit. However, the article also argues that ‘exchange’ is becoming now a far more significant element in intra-party relations and that this development will constrain party leaders and influence the goals pursued by parties. Greater reliance on exchange between leaders and activists may lead to parties becoming generally more policy-seeking in their behaviour and also to their becoming less manageable than in the past.

This article lays out the elementary logic of age structures in party preference data and proposes a simple estimation model with demographic and historical elements. As voters age their preferences intensify. But they do not intensify much and generational differences in the direction of party preferences are correspondingly weak. The Canadian electorate does not seem all that strongly anchored by the accumulated experience of the individuals that make it up. The major source of long-term electoral change, therefore, is conversion in the existing electorate. Consideration is given to how distinctive the Canadian pattern is.

This study examines the effect of incorporating taxation into the incumbency voting model using aggregate economic data for Canadian federal elections from 1953 to 1988. Although Canadian election campaigns tend to be dominated by economic performance issues, taxation, as measured by open-ended questions in the national election studies, has not been a salient campaign issue among voters. None the less, voters as consumers in the market economy have an interest in government policies that affect after-tax income. Furthermore, as economic citizens, voters have an interest in taxation as a measure of government efficiency – the costs of providing public services – independent of benefits generated by government. Paralleling American and British results, the economic and fiscal performance variables behave as expected in the incumbency model. Income change has a positive effect, and the rate of inflation and unemployment a negative effect, on incumbency voting. The relationship between taxation and incumbency voting is negative, both through its effect on after-tax income and also directly, independent of income. The results are consistent with an interpretation which suggests that voters, responding to the public agenda for economic performance and to a private agenda for taxation, behave both as politic consumers and as economic citizens.