Political Studies

The British Election Study is the major data resource for investigating electoral behaviour among the British electorate. It has seldom been subject to open critical review from within the political science community, yet, together with extensions such as the British Election Panel Study, it absorbs a considerable proportion of the resources available for British political research. This article sets out a critical appraisal of the study, examining its institutional organization, theoretical scope, and methodological conventions. The thrust of the critique is the need for serious rethinking about all three aspects. For the British Election Study to advance our understanding of electoral behaviour requires a more inclusive approach to its organization; moving beyond a preoccupation with sociological and socio-psychological models of electoral behaviour; and systematic attention to measurement issues.

Scholars examining British-European relations typically ascribe UK governmental positions firstly to a combination of distinct and incompatible values, attitudes, and beliefs stemming from historical experience; secondly to a distinct and incompatible set of functional imperatives – namely less interaction with European partners than is the case for other EU member states; and third a distinct and incompatible set of domestic interests. This article challenges these views. It presents evidence to suggest that British governments have failed to assimilate social demands, and that the reason is an under-recognized and untheorized intervening variable – namely the structure of decisionmaking institutions in Parliament. It models the influence of this variable, and suggests that historical institutionalist theory captures key elements of the variable in a manner superior to extant approaches.

Recent interdisciplinary theoretical work has suggested that social capital, or the interpersonal trust of citizens, plays an important role in explaining both the efficiency of political institutions, and in the economic performance of contemporary societies. This paper examines the relationship between social capital and economic growth in a sample of thirty-four countries over the period 1970 to 1992, within the framework of a modified neo-classical model of economic growth. The findings suggest that social capital has an impact on growth which is at least as strong as that of human capital or education, which has been the focus of much of the recent work on endogenous growth theory. It appears to have about the same impact on growth as catch-up or the ability of poorer nations to adopt technological innovations pioneered by their richer counterparts.

Some studies of public opinion suggest that most people are ignorant about the detail of politics and are simply unable to arrive at a considered vote. They hold that voters are ignorant about the ideological substance of politics, since their opinions do not appear to be constrained by ideas and are unstable over time. However, other studies cast doubt on both the definition of ideology employed in these studies and their operational measures. It is suggested that, once allowance is made for measurement error, the opinions of most voters are constrained and highly stable. This article demonstrates that differences in political awareness result in considerable heterogeneity among the electorate. The opinions of more aware voters are subject to greater constraint and are more stable over time than those of less aware voters. It is therefore suggested that issue-voting models must be applied with caution to less aware voters.

The recent experience of the former Yugoslavia provides an important test case for appraising theories of secession. This article begins with an outline of the main candidate justifications for a right to secession; withdrawal of consent; remedial right only; national self-determination and hybrids of these arguments. The article then provides a survey of the experience of the various secessions in the former Yugoslavia and draws attention to the particular problem of recursive secessions – that is counter secessions by minorities within the new ‘republics’. The discussion of recursive secession provides an additional criterion for assessing the adequacy of candidate theories of justified secession.

This article offers a critical assessment of Jürgen Habermas's discourse theory of democracy. It suggests that the main thrust of a discursive account of legitimacy is the attempt to show how the demands of maximal democratic inclusion might be reconciled with a politics of reasoned agreements. While this aim is endorsed, the thrust of the argument is that a critical theory of democracy requires that normative frameworks that bring certain substantive features of democratic life into focus should supplement Habermas's procedural approach. First, the account of maximal inclusion has to be developed in a way that clarifies the egalitarian demands of distributive justice. Secondly, the account of a politics of reasoned agreements has to be connected to a theoretical analysis of the bonds of solidarity that could underpin such a form of political engagement. These developments contribute to a critical theory that gives a more adequate account of the motivational basis of discursive democracy.

This article explores the tensions within multiculturalist theory between the aspiration to promote cultural recognition and the need to promote and protect women's concern with issues of sex and gender inequality. The article asseses the three main approaches to the reconciliation of sexual equality and group rights; according priority to the traditional values and practices of cultural groups; accepting collective and cultural rights but within a framework international human rights; and finally, the acceptance of group rights subject to respect for individual rights and freedoms. By focusing on the experience of aboriginal women activists in Canadian politics and their struggle to preserve constitutional sex equality, this article argues that only the third approach provides adequate safeguards for women in their public and private roles.

The importance of the concept of state in British political thought has recently been re-assessed, and Dyson's contrast between a continental ‘state tradition’ and an Anglo-American ‘stateless tradition’ has been put into question. Yet this paper argues that there remain crucial differences in the way in which French and British political thinkers have understood the concept of state. Focusing on a critical moment in the crystallization of the meaning of ‘state’, the turn of the twentieth century, and in particular on the anti-statist pluralist school, it analyses how state critics were influenced by national intellectual traditions. French thought has been permeated by the idea of the autonomy of the state vis-à-vis society at large, while British thought has remained committed to an ideal of fluidity between state and society.

‘Constitutional environmentalism’ has not been a prominent topic of political study, but in practice the phenomenon has been developing apace. It has become appropriate to ask, in a UK and European context, as elsewhere, whether constitutional environmental rights are valid, necessary, practicable or desirable. Accordingly, after clarifying the scope of a potentially feasible environmental right I assess the case for it in the light of four critical questions: whether environment protection can be considered a genuinely fundamental right; whether a new right is necessary for achieving that end; whether the right is practicable; and whether pursuing environmental ends by means of rights is democratically legitimate. While presenting arguments for an affirmative answer on each score, I also show that the strength of the case ultimately depends on a number of contextual issues. In the concluding section, I indicate issues which warrant further research by political scientists and theorists.