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How Big is the Big Society?
At the core of David Cameron's vision for revitalizing both the UK and the Conservative party is what he describes as the Big Society. The concept calls for a restructuring of the relationship between state and society, with a substantial movement of power and responsibility from the former to the latter. Alongside a larger role for social enterprises, charities and voluntary organisations in t…
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- Vol. 64, No. 3, July 2011, pp. 403-424
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- 00312290
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- Parliamentary Affairs
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The Spatial Approach to the Party Mandate
This article applies spatial theory to the question of the party mandate. The party mandate model provides a system of linkage between citizen's preferences and parliamentary and governmental politics. Existing approaches to the party mandate focus on parties’ governmental mandate: do parties enact their pledges? Instead, the spatial approach looks at the representative aspect of the party mand…
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- Vol. 64. No. 3, July 2011.pp 425-447
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- 00312290
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- Parliamentary Affairs
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Rethinking Descriptive Representation : Rendering Women in Legislative Debates
This article addresses debates on identity and interest representation by re-conceptualising descriptive representation. The article revisits Pitkin's original work, arguing that descriptive representatives actively ‘stand for’ their constituents by making claims about group members' needs, circumstances and values. The utility of this re-conceptualisation is explored by analysing parliamentari…
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- Vol. 64, No. 3, July 2011.pp 448-472
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- 00312290
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- Parliamentary Affairs
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The Challenge of Consociation in Northern Ireland
This article assesses the role played by the principle of consociational government in promoting Northern Ireland's peace agreement. It reviews the central concept of consociation as it has evolved in recent comparative studies of the politics of divided societies. It describes the stages by which this concept moved to the centre of the political agenda in Northern Ireland, resting on contribut…
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- Vol. 64, No. 3, Juky 2011.pp 473-493
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- 00312290
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- Parliamentary Affairs
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Second-Class Representatives or Work Horses? Committee Assignments and Electo…
The Scottish Parliament was designed to break from the traditional Westminster model. Two major changes introduced in the Scottish Parliament were the use of the mixed-member proportional (MMP) system to elect representatives, and the creation of powerful legislative committees. This article links these two areas, by showing that there is a difference in the committee strategies of constituency…
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- Vol. 64, No. 3, July 2011.pp 494-512
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- 00312290
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- Parliamentary Affairs
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The Nature of Conservative Party Modernisation Under David Cameron : The Traj…
The modernisation of Conservative Party employment relations policy under David Cameron's leadership has been a contested process, but is divisible into three broad phases. A modernising trend, 2005–2008, was eclipsed by the resurgence of a more established approach, 2008–2010, highlighting the desirability of deregulation, opposition to European Union social and employment legislation, confron…
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- Vol. 64, No. 3, July 2011.pp. 513-529
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- 00312290
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- Parliamentary Affairs
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Tolerable Chance or Undesirable Arbitrariness ? Distributing Surplus Votes Un…
Electoral reform is not simply a matter of moving from one system to another. There are variations in the workings of each particular system and it is important for reformers to consider the consequences of each of these variations. For parliaments considering the system of proportional representation by the single transferable vote (PR-STV), as operates in Ireland, one such detail concerns the…
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- Vol. 64 No. 3, July 2011.pp. 530-551
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- 00312290
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- Parliamentary Affairs
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Executive Elections in the Arab World : When and How Do They Matter?
Although elections loom large in the study of nondemocracies, scholars continue debating what function those elections play. This article sets evidence from the Arab world in a global context to evaluate three theorized roles for elections: safety valve, patronage network, and performance ritual. Executive elections in the Middle East and North Africa remain less common and less competitive tha…
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- Vol. 44 No. 7, July 2011.pp. 807-828
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- 00104140
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- Comparative Political Studies
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Institutions and Legacies : Electoral Volatility in the Postcommunist World
The postcommunist states of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have witnessed levels of electoral volatility higher than both Western Europe and Latin America, levels that have deleterious effects on party consolidation and representative democracy in the region. This article presents a model of postcommunist legislative electoral volatility, testing explanations developed in Western Eu…
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- Vol. 44 no. 7, July 2011.pp. 829-853
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- 00104140
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- Comparative Political Studies
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Presidents and Parties : How Presidential Elections Shape Coordination in Leg…
This article explicates the mechanisms through which presidential elections shape the legislative party system, an issue that has received little attention to date. The authors argue that presidential elections exert their influence through two distinct channels. First, they affect the incentives of candidates, voters, and parties to coordinate within electoral districts. Second and most import…
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- Vol. 44 no. 7, July 2011.pp. 854-883
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- 00104140
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- Comparative Political Studies
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Notionally Defined Contributions or Private Accounts in Eastern Europe : A Re…
This article is concerned with what determines a government’s choice of pension reform. It starts from an argument by Myles and Pierson that claims that the newer pension systems are able to privatize whereas the older, matured systems faced with the double payment problem tend to adopt notional defined contributions (NDC) accounts. This argument is retested with in-depth qualitative analysis o…
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- Vol. 44 no. 7, July 2011.pp. 884-909
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- 00104140
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- Comparative Political Studies
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Constrain-Thy-Neighbor Effects as a Determinant of Transnational Interest Gro…
Why does the willingness of interest groups to join forces with their peers abroad vary across issues? The present article points to cross-issue variation in the “constrain-thy-neighbor” effects of transnational law. Interest groups consider not only whether they are worse off if they themselves are subjected to a transnational law. They also consider how it affects them if the same law applies…
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- Vol. 44 no. 7, July 2011.pp. 910-931
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- 00104140
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- Comparative Political Studies
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Comparative Studies of Policy Dynamics
Major new understandings of policy change are emerging from a program to measure attention to policies across nations using the same instrument. Participants in this special issue have created new indicators of government activities in 11 countries over several decades. Each database is comprehensive in that it includes information about every activity of its type (e.g., laws, bills, parliament…
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- Vol. 44 no. 8, August 2011.pp. 947-972
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- 00104140
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- Comparative Political Studies
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Comparing Government Agendas : Executive Speeches in the Netherlands, United …
At the beginning of each parliamentary session, almost all European governments give a speech in which they present the government’s policy priorities and legislative agenda for the year ahead. Despite the body of literature on governments in European parliamentary democracies, systematic research on these executive policy agendas is surprisingly limited. In this article the authors study the e…
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- Vol. 44 no. 8, August 2011.pp. 973-1000
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- 00104140
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- Comparative Political Studies
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Effects of the Core Functions of Government on the Diversity of Executive Age…
The distribution of attention across issues is of fundamental importance to the political agenda and outputs of government. This article presents an issue-based theory of the diversity of governing agendas where the core functions of government—defense, international affairs, the economy, government operations, and the rule of law—are prioritized ahead of all other issues. It undertakes compara…
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- Vol. 44 no. 8, August 2011.pp. 1001-1030
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- 00104140
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- Comparative Political Studies
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Content Matters : The Dynamics of Parliamentary Questioning in Belgium and De…
Why do MPs devote attention to some issues while ignoring others? The question of the issue content of parliamentary activities has been neglected in previous research. The authors use longitudinal data on parliamentary questioning in Belgium and Denmark, two similar European democracies. The analyses show that the questioning behavior of MPs is structured according to clear patterns. Oppositio…
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- Vol. 44 no. 8, August 2011.pp. 1031-1059
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- 00104140
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- Comparative Political Studies
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Reduction, Stasis, and Expansion of Budgets in Advanced Democracies
This article investigates changes within national budget by examining actors’ behavioral predilections and the institutional constraints under which they operate. The article presents three theoretical propositions about the influence of attention and institutions on all magnitudes of programmatic budget changes ranging from large cuts to massive expansions. Using quantile regression, the autho…
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- Vol. 44 no. 8, August 2011.pp. 1060-1088
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- 00104140
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- Comparative Political Studies
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Comparing Law-Making Activities in a Quasi-Federal System of Government The …
In this article the authors develop a new approach to the study of policy dynamics in a quasi-federal system of government. The goal is to contribute to previous research on comparative federalism by analyzing the variations of issue attention between levels of government and across four regional governments—Andalusia, Catalonia, Galicia, and the Basque Country. To do so the authors follow the …
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- Vol. 44 no. 8, August 2011 .pp. 1089-1119
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- 00104140
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- Comparative Political Studies
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Why new parties?
The variables explaining party system fragmentation have been investigated extensively, but little is known about changes in the number of parties over time within countries. This article is an attempt to fill the gap by explaining the entry of new viable competitors in party systems after the founding election. Using empirical evidence from Spain, we show that when there is an electoral market…
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- Vol. 17 no. 1, January 2011.pp. 3-20
- ISBN/ISSN
- 13540688
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- Party Politics
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Is the party over? The decline of party activism and membership across the de…
The decline of party activism and membership in European democracies has been well documented, but not effectively explained. This article examines the state of party membership and activism across a wide spectrum of democratic countries and shows that membership is in decline in most of them. It tests two rival explanations of the decline using a cross-sectional multi-level analysis of data fr…
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- Vol. 17 no. 1, January 2011.pp.21-44
- ISBN/ISSN
- 13540688
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- -
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- Party Politics
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