Towards a multi‐party Britain?

This article examines the rise of the minor parties since 1973. Some of the causes of this increase were common to all the minor parties in Great Britain, others peculiar to particular parties. The scope for a rise in the support of minor parties is greater than is often supposed but they face special problems in mobilising this potential. Since 1974 their support has fallen, but the nineteen‐eighties are likely to see intermittent increases in their vote; unless there are major institutional changes however, the two party system is likely to survive albeit in a modified form.     

Natural Intellectual Property Rights and the Public Domain

No natural rights theory justifies strong intellectual property rights. More specifically, no theory within the entire domain of natural rights thinking – encompassing classical liberalism, libertarianism and left‐libertarianism, in all their innumerable variants – coherently supports strengthening current intellectual property rights. Despite their many important differences, all these natural rights theories endorse some set of members of a common family of basic ethical precepts. These commitments include non‐interference, fairness, non‐worsening, consistency, universalisability, prior consent, self‐ownership, self‐governance, and the establishment of zones of autonomy. Such commitments have clear applications pertaining to the use and ownership of created ideas. I argue that each of these commitments require intellectual property rights to be substantially limited in scope, strength and duration. In this way the core mechanisms of natural rights thinking ensure a robust public domain and categorically rule out strong intellectual property rights.     

The Shift from Agonistic to Non-Agonistic Debate in Early Nyāya

This article examines the emergence of the Nyāya distinction between vāda and jalpa as didactic-scientific and agonistic-sophistical forms of debate, respectively. Looking at the relevant sutras in Gautama’s Nyāya-sūtra (NS 1.2.1-3) in light of the earlier discussion of the types of debate in Caraka Saṃhitā 8, the article argues that certain ambiguities and obscurities in the former text can be explained on the hypothesis that the early Nyāya presupposed an agonistic understanding of vāda similar to what we find in Caraka.     

Intergenerational Justice and the Non-reciprocity Problem

Many of us share a strong intuitive sense that acts or policies that gravely threaten future people's well-being violate the requirements of justice. This intuition has proven problematic for theories that found justice on reciprocity because future people are viewed as powerless to reciprocate our actions towards them. The non-reciprocity problem appears to deliver a decisive blow to reciprocity-based theories of justice. I wish to dispute this view. I point to two well-known facts about human existence – generations overlap continuously and the old depend upon the young – to show that future generations are not asymmetrically vulnerable to our actions, and therefore that justice as reciprocity is not vulnerable to the non-reciprocity problem.     

Why can voters anticipate post-election coalition formation likelihoods?

A number of scholars have argued that, in contexts with multi-party governing coalitions, voters can use historical patterns to anticipate the ideological composition of likely post-election coalitions and make vote choices accordingly. In this paper we analyze historical coalition formation data from the period 1960–2007 in order to determine whether the historical regularities in the party composition of coalition governments are such that voters can use this information to assess the likelihood that different coalitions would form after an election. Specifically, we examine: (1) the likelihood of party pairs joining a coalition; (2) the likelihood of different coalition permutations; and (3) the likelihood of a party occupying the Prime Ministership.     

Measuring the democracy–repression nexus

A considerable amount of time and intellectual energy has been expended detailing the nature of the relationship between democracy and a state's use of repressive force against its citizens. This article moves the discussion forward both methodologically and substantively. I use a fully Bayesian structural model with latent variables to mitigate the effects of measurement error in both democracy and repression. Further, I estimate two models, one treating democracy as a single overarching concept, similar to the strategy followed by Davenport and Armstrong (2004), Poe and Tate (1994) and one treating democracy as two-dimensional (voice and veto) as suggested by Davenport (2007b). I find that the two models, though closely related offer substantively different predictions. Statistical measures of fit favor the two-dimensional model. Further, I find that the effects of voice and veto are each strongly conditioned by the other.