Why are highly informed citizens sceptical of referenda?

Past work on attitudes toward the use of referenda finds that the most politically informed citizens are more sceptical of its use than their less informed counterparts. An intriguing tension presents itself in that those citizens who may be best equipped for referendum voting, the highly informed and politically sophisticated, are the least likely to support the use of this tool of direct democracy. Using data from Canadian Election Studies, we consider three explanations for relative referenda scepticism among political sophisticates. Our analyses provide evidence to support a confidence in government explanation and a concern for minority rights explanation, but not an incompetent public explanation – a curious finding considering the centrality of citizen competence in the theoretical literature on referenda.     

War, Rivalry, and State Building in Latin America

Scholars of Latin America have recently begun to apply the bellicist approach to state building to the region, the central claim of which is that wars are a great stimulus to centralizing state power and building institutional capacity. This article argues that current applications of these models of state building are too narrowly specified to be of much use in Latin America or elsewhere in the developing world. Replacing the focus on interstate war with the more general phenomenon of interstate rivalry, alongside the consideration of intrastate rivals, allows us to account for the impact of both external and internal forces on the development of the state. I demonstrate the utility of this approach through several cross-sectional time-series analyses that provide evidence that external and internal rivals affect the Latin American state in a manner consistent with the general nature of bellicist theory.     

Book reviews

Word Processing for Solicitors, Kevin Townsend and Kate Taphouse, Gower Publishing, 1983 £12.50

Computer Law, Colin Tapper, Longman, London and New York, 1983 Third Edition, £9.50

Understanding Computer Contracts, Martin Edwards, Waterlow Publishers, 1983 £6.50

Data Protection: Perspectives on Information Privacy, Edited by Colin Bourn & John Benyon, Department of Adult Education, University of Leicester, 1983 £5

The Computer in Court, Alistair Kelman and Richard Sizer, Gower Publishing Company, 1982 £15.50

Principles of Database Systems, Jeffrey D Ullman, Pitman Publishing Ltd, 1982 Second Edition £13.95

Computers and the Law Teacher, A report of the proceedings of a conference held at North Staffordshire Polytechnic, Edited by David V Marshall, North Staffordshire Polytechnic, 1983 £3     

Public accountability: Effectiveness, equity, ethics

This article tests a wide range of government activities against requirements for public accountability. The article explores the incentives for ethical behaviour by public officials; the need for more outcome focused performance indicators, tensions between parliamentary and managerial accountability; the standards of accountability applied to public providers of services can be applied to private providers; the utility of spelling out service requirements in advance; the impacts on accountability of the convergence of the public and private sectors; the need, where responsibility for programs is collaborative, for a clear governance framework, tensions between representative and participative democracy, and trends towards more participative and collaborative leadership.     

Federalism and democratization in Russia

The scholarly literature on democratic transitions has largely ignored developments at the local level and the relationship between federalism and democracy. In this work I examine the development of federalism in Russia and I assess the impact of Russia's highly asymmetrical form of federalism on democratisation. The study shows that federalism far from promoting democracy has allowed authoritarianism to flourish in many of Russia's eighty nine regions and republics. Federalism and democratization in Russia exist in contradiction rather than harmony. In a vicious circle, authoritarianism at the centre has been nourished by authoritarianism in the region and vice versa. “Elective dictatorships” and “delegative democracies” are now well entrenched in many republics, and mini-presidential systems are firmly established in a majority of the regions.