Dennis Farlie

Newtonian Mechanics and Predictive Election Theory

Analyses of elections, whether academic or journalistic, are permeated by terms drawn from physics. We discuss the inertia or volatility of an electorate, the momentum of a campaign, pressures and cross-pressures, party actions and reactions, the impact of short-term forces. Although imprecise, these borrowings convey genuine information about the characteristics of an election, and they would be difficult to replace.

Political Recruitment and Drop-Out: The Netherlands and the United States

The analysis described below forms an extension to the Netherlands and the United States of research on British political recruitment that has already been reported in this Journal. The object of the research is to make quantitative estimates of the influence of personal characteristics in pushing the socially better endowed into active politics, and particularly to measure the extent to which advantages on some characteristics make up for disadvantages on others. These processes are of interest because they determine to a large extent what type of persons will emerge as elective politicians, with possible consequences for agenda-setting and policy-making.