State formation in seventeenth-century Ireland: the Restoration financial settlement, 1660–62

The Irish Restoration financial settlement formed an integral part of the deal that was struck between Irish Protestants and the restored Charles II in the early 1660s. Driven by a desire to retain lands acquired in the 1650s, the Protestant-dominated Irish government crafted a set of financial bills that granted the Crown a perpetual and hereditary revenue in Ireland in return for security of tenure. Based on innovative Cromwellian reforms, the royal government retained many elements of Cromwellian fiscal policy, which transformed the Irish economy into a net contributor to the English Treasury by the 1680s. The customs and excise acts also laid the basis for the emergence of an embryonic state bureaucracy that emerged in Ireland during Charles II's reign. This article examines both the rationale behind the Irish Protestant interest's policies in the early 1660s and the political negotiating that saw them secure favourable land legislation at the expense of those Catholics who had served the monarchy in the 1640s and 1650s.     

Lawyers' Perceptions of the U.S. Supreme Court: Is the Court a “Political” Institution?

Do legal elites—lawyers admitted to federal appellate bars—perceive the Supreme Court as a “political” institution? Legal elites differentiate themselves from the mass public in the amount and sources of information about the Court. They also hold near‐universal perceptions of Court legitimacy, a result we use to derive competing theoretical expectations regarding the impact of ideological disagreement on various Court perceptions. Survey data show that many legal elites perceive the Court as political in its decision making, while a minority perceive the Court as activist and influenced by external political forces. Ideological disagreement with the Court's outputs significantly elevates political perceptions of decision making, while it exhibits a null and moderate impact on perceptions of activism and external political influence, respectively. To justify negative affect derived from ideological disagreement, elites highlight the political aspects of the Court's decision making rather than engage in “global delegitimization” of the institution itself.     

Corruption and Political Culture in America: An Empirical Perspective

Political culture helps define the boundaries of permissiblepolitical action. Thus, it should affect the amounts and typesof political corruption occurring in political systems, as wellas responses to corruption when it is discovered. This articlecompares the distribution of corruption convictions among federaljudicial districts over a three-year period to social and politicalcharacteristics of the districts, and to scaled measures ofElazar's moralistic, individualistic, and traditionalistic politicalsubcultures. Nationally, strong moralistic subcultures and highvoter turnouts are associated with numerous convictions, bothbefore and after district population is controlled. Analysisof regional patterns reveals a different model in the South,however, one suggesting ideas about the dynamics of traditionalisticpolitics. Corruption, and the impact of federal laws againstit, are best understood within their political and culturalsettings. ^* I am indebted to George Calafut and Philip Sidel of the SocialScience Computer Research Institute, University of Pittsburgh,who gave me many hours of assistance in assembling data. LeonardKuntz and William Nelson of the Universitys Office of Research,Father Bernard Quinn of the Glenmary Research Center, and WilliamNewman of the University of Connecticut helped me locate religiouscensus results. The County and City Data Book is published ontape by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and SocialResearch. Daniel J. Elazar, Michael Margolis, Bert A. Rockman,and two anonymous referees gave me extremely helpful commentson this study.     

Spatial continuity and individual variability: A review of recent work on the geography of electoral change

Analyses have shown that the results of a series of general elections display considerable stability in the geography of voting patterns over time. Further, it has been suggested that the change between two electrons is similar in all places. This paper challenges the latter findings, using data from Great Britain and New Zealand. It is shown that even if there were a pattern of uniform swing, this would be produced by spatial variations in voter transition matrices. A review of analyses of those variations suggests the important roles of the neighbourhood effect, campaign spending, tactical voting, sectional effects, and migration as influences on voter behaviour.     

We’ve got them on the list: contacting,canvassing and voting in a British general election campaign

Many voters are canvassed by British political parties in the months and weeks immediately preceding a general election – but many are not. The parties are selective in whom they make contact with, and where. They focus on those in marginal constituencies who are likely to vote for them – and having identified them early in the process they contact them again, seeking to sustain that support in the seats where the contest overall will be either won or lost. A large panel survey conducted immediately before and after the 2010 general election allows detailed insight into that pattern of canvassing, identifying who the parties contacted, and where, in the six months prior to the election being called, and then who were contacted during the month immediately preceding polling day, and in how many different ways. Each party focused on its own supporters in the marginal constituencies, and in the middle-class neighbourhoods within those constituencies, but whereas the Conservatives, expecting to win the election, campaigned most intensively in the seats they lost by relatively small margins at the previous contest, Labour and the Liberal Democrats fought defensive campaigns in the seats that they won then. Such tactics were successful; the more ways in which respondents were contacted by a party, the more likely they were to vote for it.