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The study of politics has been profoundly influenced in the post-war era by the introduction of concepts and explanations that highlight the role of culturally determined norms and values in shaping the political process.This study examines three main perspectives from which the social sciences are discussed, and compares the divergent theories by which social, economic, and political phenomena may be explained. Rational-choice theory is contrasted with the structuralist and the culturalist perspectives. The controversy is then given substance through the introduction of three issues central t

''Policy Horizons and Parliamentary Government'' introduces a new hypothesis concerning the formation and survival of coalition governments in Western European parliamentary democracies, the policy horizon hypothesis. Although the hypothesis itself is very simple, it implies a fundamental change in our understanding of how parliamentary systems function in the absence of a majority party. The book finds support for the hypothesis in a wide array of evidence, including findings based on a new survey of experts in West European political systems

This paper seeks to identify factors that may lie behind the tendency for parliamentary governments to form primarily from one side of the left-right spectrum and to adopt non-centrist policy positions. Because of measurement limitations as well as the inherent complexity of the processes involved, this exploration is undertaken through simulation experiments. The new software created for these experiments allows the potential impact of a wide variety of factors, including voter and party motivations and distributions, policy space dimensionality, and constraints on government formation, to be assessed. Although the results cannot tell us what fosters non-centrism in the real world, they do reveal some factors that appear to be conducive to that end and thus serve as a guide to further research on this neglected topic.

In response to my characterization of ideological congruence as an "illusion," Powell (this issue) demonstrates that incongruence, while common, tends to be only moderate in most cases, a conclusion with which I agree. Nevertheless, I argue that the concept of ideological congruence is misleading when applied as Powell does, and problematic, if not meaningless, when applied in the alternative ways proposed by Best, Budge, and McDonald. For these reasons, the term continues to obscure more than it reveals.

Considerable evidence has been generated to establish that "ideological congruence," that is, a close matching of government policy positions with median left‐right voter opinion, generally prevails in liberal democracies. Based on a cross‐national analysis of election survey data, this article challenges that view and elaborates an alternative perspective. In this perspective, nonpolicy or valence considerations strongly influence vote choices and electoral outcomes in a directional sense—sometimes favoring the Left overall, sometimes the Right. Partly as a result, government positions typically deviate substantially from median opinion, forming a pattern that is clearly bilateralist or two‐sided rather than center‐concentrated.

This article examines postwar government policy in Britain, as reflected in annual budget speeches. Like previous research, it aims to content-analyse these speeches to derive estimates of actual, as opposed to intended, government policy stances. Unlike previous research, it also aims to capture and measure the gap between intentions (as represented in electoral manifestos) and actual policy. This gap cannot be assessed from the final output of the Wordscores content analysis programme (in either the original version or the Martin-Vanberg variation), but it can be teased out of the raw output. This teasing-out process reveals the gap to be very small: there is no evidence that British governments either moderate or amplify their left-right stances when in office. This new measurement of government position is then used to cast further light on policy representation in Britain. The findings show that policy positions respond significantly to changes in public opinion as well as to electoral turnover, but do not exhibit or even approach the ideological congruence anticipated by the 'median mandate' interpretation of representative democracy. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractThis article examines postwar government policy inBritain, as reflected in annual budget speeches. Like previous research, it aims to content‐analyse these speeches to derive estimates of actual, as opposed to intended, government policy stances. Unlike previous research, it also aims to capture and measure the gap between intentions (as represented in electoral manifestos) and actual policy. This gap cannot be assessed from the final output of the Wordscores content analysis programme (in either the original version or theMartin‐Vanberg variation), but it can be teased out of the raw output. This teasing‐out process reveals the gap to be very small: there is no evidence thatBritish governments either moderate or amplify their left‐right stances when in office. This new measurement of government position is then used to cast further light on policy representation inBritain. The findings show that policy positions respond significantly to changes in public opinion as well as to electoral turnover, but do not exhibit or even approach the ideological congruence anticipated by the 'median mandate' interpretation of representative democracy.

The preceding article by Best, Budge and McDonald acknowledges much of the substance of the alternative 'bilateralist' interpretation of democratic governance I advocated and attempts to re-focus the median mandate approach towards a longer-term, and potentially more productive, understanding of the opinion-policy relationship. Both are welcome developments. Despite taking these steps, however, the authors choose to allow the fate of the median mandate thesis to rest ultimately on an attempt to re-establish the short-term one-to-one relationship that I challenged. In this brief note, I argue that this not only undercuts the more positive initiatives noted above, but also is based on a flawed understanding of how the short-term relationship should be operationalised and tested. Adapted from the source document.

Theoretical work on parliamentary government leads to the expectation that parties will defect from governing coalitions when they anticipate greater payoffs in replacement governments or after new elections; similarly, governments as a whole (or their prime ministers) will dissolve legislatures prematurely with the same expectation in mind. Surprisingly, however, very little empirical work has been done to assess the extent to which defectors from or dissolvers of coalition governments actually manage to profit from their actions. We also know very little about what happens to coalition members who engage in government-ending disputes. The purpose of this paper is to address these deficiencies by examining the fates of dissolvers, defectors, and disputers in West European democratic systems since 1945. The results show that parties generally end up no better off, and usually worse off, in terms of measurable benefits when they engage in these types of action.