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It has become clear from national surveys, both in Britain and elsewhere, that the attitudes of the mass public towards social and political issues tend to group together in broadly predictable ways. Analyses of British Election Study data have consistently found that attitudes towards economic issues such as nationalization, income redistribution and government intervention go together and are largely unrelated to attitudes towards moral issues. There are of course variations in the results, depending on the items included for analysis, but it has become apparent that a rather persistent attitudinal structure, at least at the aggregate level, has characterized the British electorate. Similar findings have been reported for the United States.

This article examines a key assumption of many approaches to the analysis of government coalitions, that parties are exclusively concerned with the achievement of immediate policy objectives. We first consider the extent to which policy considerations can be used to characterize coalitions formed in eight postwar democracies, using party election programmes to operationalize and test a variety of policy-based models of government formation. We then see what parties get from governments in terms of declared policy commitments, both in and out of office. The conclusion in both cases is that party policy clearly influences the formation of coalitions, but its impact is substantially modified by long-term structures and cleavages within different party systems.

The assumption that individual preferences, or attitudes, are fixed and exogenously determined is central to many studies of political and economic institutions, such as markets and elections. We present a Bayesian model of adaptive preferences and empirical evidence consistent with that model to argue that preferences are not always exogenous and fixed. The changing relationships between partisanship and preferences on civil rights issues between 1956 and 1964 and on the Vietnam War issue between 1968 and 1972 coincide with significant changes in the major parties' positions on these issues, suggesting that preferences are endogenous to the electoral process. We conclude with a discussion of the positive and normative implications of endogenous preferences.

AbstractIn 1971, Peter Lougheed's Conservatives put an end to the long rule of the Social Credit party in Alberta. Many accounts maintain that large-scale social change that occurred in the province as a result of the postwar oil boom was responsible for this important change of government. Urbanization, in particular the expansion of the urban middle classes, secularization and increasing wealth are often cited as the primary causes of Social Credit's downfall. This article challenges this popular interpretation, arguing instead that short-term factors such as leadership, contemporaneous issues and campaign organization better explain the Conservative triumph. Also challenged is the larger claim that election outcomes may be determined by matters beyond anyone's control.

Early in the 20th century, Chicago was "the seventh heaven" of political activity for African-Americans. In no city had African-American empowerment proceeded as far. But from the 1950s to the election of Harold Washington in 1983, Chicago was considered a glaring example of African-American subordination and powerlessness. This transformation presents excellent conditions for analysis of the processes of political empowerment and the rollback of political power. The author challenges the conventional wisdom that political machines represent a "ladder" for minority empowerment. Rather, electoral competition among white factions or parties created the conditions under which African-American voters could determine electoral outcomes and African-American leaders could bargain for group empowerment.

The defeat of the Social Credit government of Alberta by Peter Lougheed's Progressive Conservatives in 1971 is examined. It is argued that the popular academic explanation of the fall of the Social Credit government, which stresses the causal role of social change, resulting from urbanization, secularization, & expansion of the middle class, rests on erroneous assumptions: (1) misunderstanding of the social bases of support for the Social Credit party; (2) inadequate explanation of the longevity of the Social Credit government; & (3) reliance on structural factors for determination of electoral outcomes. Short-term factors, eg, leadership, contemporaneous issues, & campaign organization, offer better explanations of the conservative triumph. 5 Tables. Adapted from the source document.

The inner city as a political issue has had a rare longevity. From Harold Wilson's expansion of the Urban Programme in 1968, through the new economic perspective embodied in the 1977 White Paper, to Margaret Thatcher's declaration of having 'a big job to do in those inner cities' on election night in 1987 — the issue has always been prominent.
This paper examines ways in which the issue has been 'framed' over the last decade. It draws on contrasts between state and market mechanisms, the relationships between central and local government and emerging ideologies of the city itself. The author concludes by proposing a new regulatory framework for the development of a national urban policy.

1993 was the International Year of Indigenous Peoples, the centenary of Women's Suffrage in Aotearoa/New Zealand, and an election year. In recognition of these events, this review of trends and issues in policies, practices and research in community and continuing education places some emphasis on noting how these relate to Maori and women as learners and providers. The first section examines trends and issues evident in policy developments – from the field, the government and the three other main political parties; and the second section, trends and issues in the provision of learning opportunities through local and national community organisations, school community education, institutions and private providers. Provision and policy development based in Iwi and Maori worlds are not covered.

Perhaps no single aspect of the American polity has been more analyzed, discussed, cited for evidence in grand theories of American political development, and yet less understood than the role of the urban voter in the regime formation and policy innovation of the Progressive era (circa 1890–1920). One century of prolific urban political analysis has produced an abundance of evidence, theory, and keen insight, yet we still have nothing like a systematic survey of urban voting behavior using reliable multivariate methods in more than a few elections or comparatively across several cities simultaneously. As a consequence, we have built for the urban voter a city of theoretical models without an adequate empirical infrastructure.

Results of a survey of political candidates in the Nov 1991 elections in Flanders, Belgium, are used to investigate the role of gender differences in degree of political representation. It is noted that male (M) candidates have advantages in educational attainment, professional status, & domestic life. Ms are more likely to hold university degrees & positions of authority in the political party or corporate business. Females (Fs) are more often than Ms responsible for child care & domestic work. F political underrepresentation is a structural problem, despite gains in equality of the sexes over the last fifty years. A structural intervention by the government in guaranteeing gender-based equal opportunity is suggested. 9 Tables. Adapted from the source document.

Theorists, both feminist & not, have attributed the consistent finding that women in the post-WWII era US are less militaristic & more opposed to war than men to gender, maternalism, & feminism. Here, data from the pilot study for the 1991 American National Election Study (N = 467 respondents) reveal no support for the maternalist, some evidence in favor of the feminist, & substantial support for the gender explanation. The structure of political thinking in these areas is also analyzed, indicating that the roots of women's & men's thinking usually differ even when they basically agree; in particular, men's attitudes are much more partisan. 2 Tables, 1 Appendix, 26 References. Adapted from the source document.

There has been considerable recent debate about the importance of local context as an influence on political attitudes and voting behaviour in Great Britain. Resolution of that debate has been difficult, because analytical methods have not been available with which to evaluate the relative importance of both individual voter characteristics and the characteristics of their milieux as independent correlates of attitudes and behaviour. The technique of multi-level modelling has been developed by educational researchers to do just that. It is introduced here and illustrated using data for the 1987 British general election. The preliminary results suggest that place clearly does matter as a component of the processes that influence voters' choices.

Abstract. The results of a survey conducted after the second round of the 1988 presidential election stress the inadequacy of the classical models of voting behaviour, as far as the Le Pen vote is concerned. The majority of lepenist electors identify themselves neither with the National Front, nor with the extreme‐Right; they show no electoral stability, no strong sociological specificity. Less educated than the average, they do not correspond to the profile of the rational voter. With the exception of a small hardcore of regular voters, politicized, extremist and dedicated to the National Front, Le Pen supporters are protest voters that come and go.

THE ISSUES OF DEFENCE AND EUROPE DID NOT PLAY A prominent part in the UK general election campaign of March-April 1992. One of the reasons was that public opinion polls throughout the campaign indicated consistently that domestic issues came first with the electorate. Secondly, with the disappearance of the Soviet threat and the restoration of consensus between the parties on nuclear weapons, defence was not a sufficiently contentious subject for it to be a central topic in the campaign. It was no surprise, however, that the Conservative Manifesto claimed that defence would not be safe in the hands of the opposition parties and that their policies would result in huge job losses in the defence sector.

Sarajevo Television achievedfinancial autonomy and a democratically elected management in July 1989, reluctantly tolerated by a severely weakened Bosnian Communist Party. But its newly-won editorial independence came under political fire. With the fall of Communist-style censorship, the three ethnically-based nationalist parties that emerged from Bosnia's November 1990 multi-party elections to form the coalition government attempted to impose new forms of censorship which, according to Nenad Pejic, would be worse than any imposed by Yugoslavia's Communist rulers. He predicts that the slide towards a purely nationalist media means not only the destruction of independent voices in Yugoslavia but ofany chance ofa peacefulfuture for the region. He was interviewed by Ursula Ruston.