Political Studies

The Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 remains one of the most fascinating events in the history of political economy. A parliament securely controlled by the party of agriculture, which was the main beneficiary of protection, abolished protection. Explanations have included the hegemony of Manchester School economics; class conflict; the effectiveness of the Anti-Corn Law League; the personality of Sir Robert Peel; and evangelical religion. We aim to see why the standard ideas from political economy (Chicago and/or Virginia) seem to fit our case so poorly. We use the Aydelotte dataset on rollcalls in the Parliament of 1841–7, augmented from primary sources, and the letters and memoranda of the principal actors.

This paper seeks to extend discussion of the areas of state activity that are relevant to economic performance. It does this by linking several literatures that are now usually considered in isolation from each other. These are institutionalist theory, developmental state theory, and comparative and historical institutionalism. The paper focuses particularly on the experience of the east Asian developmental states. The paper suggests a new role for the state as catalyst in the formation of ideas, choice sets and motives concerning economic performance. It can play this role at national and policy community levels and in relation to desired overall outcomes, export or cluster development and innovation. The notion that economic globalization will inexorably drive convergence between states is discounted. On the contrary, this is as likely to nourish miscomprehension or incomprehension between citizens of different states. This is an additional reason for attending to the quality of opinion formation by states.

The annual budget presentation is one of the most important forms of public, partisan behaviour in a parliamentary democracy. As such, it should share many features with the addresses of US presidents, including their presumed efficacy. Yet public reactions to budget presentations have been studied only indirectly, and a link between these reactions and government standing has not been established. We use Gallup data over four decades to investigate how voters assess Chancellors of the Exchequer and their budgets. We find that voters' assessments are a product of the performance of the economy, the content of the budget, the media's reaction to the budget and political factors, and are not simply derivative of general feelings about the government in power or intended vote. While developed independently, evaluations of the Chancellor and the budget affect short-term voting intentions of the public. Thus, in unitary, parliamentary governments, as in federal and presidential systems, voters use more than one focal point (in a single party) to evaluate the government and its actions.

After some initial interest, analyses of contextual effects in British voting behaviour have tended to downplay or ignore the role of face to face conversations between electors. However, evidence from the 1992 British Election Study shows that conversations with partisan discussants do act as a statistically significant influence on voting. Those who discuss politics with supporters of a particular party are more likely to switch their votes to that party, if they had not previously voted for it, and less likely to switch to other parties. Conversations with family members are particularly important, though talking to other discussants also plays a part.

With the sell-off of the nationalized utilities, regulation became central to the way Britain is governed. The withdrawal of state ownership and provision, however, challenges agency models of state power, which suggest that state capacity increases only with increased resources. This paper suggests that distinguishing between direct and indirect power explains how diminishing state intervention can enhance state control. After reconceptualizing regulation in terms of these two media of power, the paper examines British utility regulations as the operations and effects of marketizing delegation. It shows how market processes operate as a medium of indirect control, permitting the core state to hold direct power in reserve and enhancing overall state power.

The long-running debate about who governs Japan has been given a new twist by ‘rat-choicers' who argue that Japan has been governed for the last thirty years or more neither by bureaucrats nor by a ‘conservative coalition’ of bureaucrats, politicians and businessmen but by the Liberal Democratic Party alone. This article examines their arguments and sets them in the context of other competing and conflicting explanations. It is argued that more relevant and researchable questions are what is governed and how, an approach calling for a more nuanced analysis of policy making in order to observe the impact on different policies and policy-processes of the role of the state and its institutional structures and their embedded ‘collective identities’.