Iain McLean

Between first and second order: a comparison of voting behaviour in european and local elections in britain

In Britain, both local elections and European elections can be regarded as second-order. However, voters believe that even less is at stake in European elections than in local elections, and their behaviour is congruent with this: voters are more likely to turn out in local elections, they are more likely to ‘split their ticket’ they are more likely to report that they vote on issues specific to the second-order arena. Logistic regression of party choices in the local, European and national contexts confirms this. National considerations played less part in the local election and there was some evidence that voters were influenced by the record of the locally-incumbent party. It appears that voting in the European elections has more of an expressive character, and is less instrumental than that in either local or national elections.

Deliberation, Single-Peakedness, and the Possibility of Meaningful Democracy: Evidence from Deliberative Polls

Majority cycling and related social choice paradoxes are often thought to threaten the meaningfulness of democracy. Deliberation can protect against majority cycles—not by inducing unanimity, which is unrealistic, but by bringing preferences closer to single-peakedness. We present the first empirical test of this hypothesis, using data from Deliberative Polls. Comparing preferences before and after deliberation, we find increases in proximity to single-peakedness. The increases are greater for lower- versus higher-salience issues and for individuals who seem to have deliberated more versus less effectively. They are not merely a by-product of increased substantive agreement (which in fact does not generally increase). Our results are important, quite apart from their implications for majority cycling, because single-peakedness can be naturally interpreted in terms of an underlying issue dimension, which can both clarify the debate and allow a majority-winning alternative to be interpreted as a median choice and thus as an attractive “compromise.”

The borda and condorcet principles: Three medieval applications

We report three medieval works, hitherto unknown to social choice, which discuss procedures for elections when there are more than two candidates. Two of the three propose Borda methods and the third a Condorcet method of successive pairwise comparison. All three discuss problems of manipulation. One of them displays a matrix for pairwise comparisons; this is a work written in 1299, nearly 600 years before the matrix notation was believed to have been invented by C. L. Dodgson. We conclude with a review of the theory of voting in medieval Europe.

William H. Riker and the Invention of Heresthetic(s)

AN INTELLECTUAL ODYSSEY[L]egislative strategy, which most writers have treated as a mystical art … , may on examination by this [social choice] theory turn out to be a science with quite coherent rules.W. Riker, ‘Voting and the Summation of Preferences: An Interpretive Bibliographical Review of Selected Developments During the Last Decade’, American Political Science Review, 55 (1961), 900–11, quoted at p. 911.At the most general level there are the things people talk about as possible subjects for group decision. Call this the feasible set. From this misty swamp, politicians – by constitutional restrictions and direction and by rhetorical and heresthetical maneuvers – form the set of considered issues.William H. Riker, Agenda Formation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), p. 2.

The Perils and Pitfalls of Performance Measurement: The CPA Regime for Local Authorities in England

From 2002 comprehensive performance assessment (CPA) has been used by the Audit Commission to scrutinize service delivery in English local authorities across six service blocks: benefits; social care; environment; libraries and leisure; use of resources; education and housing. The authors examined CPA in terms of how vulnerable it is to categorization errors and gaming, whether it is consistent with other government policies and how it deals with uncontrollable factors. CPA failed all of these tests.

EVALUATING THE PERFORMANCE OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT

Compared with most other industrialised nations, the UK government places greatest weight on performance assessments of local authorities as a tool to ensure high levels of public service standards and efficiency of public spending in areas such as education, social services, housing, culture, and benefits administration. Annual comprehensive performance assessments (CPA), published by the Audit Commission for England, are now an integral part of the central–local government nexus. By contrast, Wales and Scotland have embarked on different routes in the post-devolution era and have developed assessment frameworks that are much less prescriptive, less intrusive, and more reliant on self-assessment. Drawing on 20 semi-structured elite interviews with auditors, auditees, and other stakeholders in the three nations, this article evaluates the lessons learned from the respective assessment regimes. It also assesses critically the plans to replace the English CPA system from 2008 onwards with a regime that emulates Wales and Scotland-style self-assessments carried out by auditees themselves.

Power, Power Indices and Blocking Power: A Comment on Johnston

in the new evidence from the 1990s data which does not support and synthesize two of the speculative conclusions put forward by Dunleavy and Jones: (1) prime ministers do not have to be active in accounting to parliament when they are sure of their party majority (and John Majors behaviour after 1992 suggests the corollary may also be true); and (2) prime ministers do not focus so much of their activity on parliament because in the 1990s parliament is far less important in policy making than it was in earlier decades.

THE SOCIAL CONTRACT IN LEVIATHAN AND THE PRISONER'S DILEMMA SUPERGAME*

The familiar problem of whether Hobbesian men in the state of nature would ever abide by an agreement to obey a Sovereign is a version of the puzzle now known as ‘Prisoners Dilemma’. The present paper has the following aims: (1) To establish that the game-theory approach is a legitimate way to study Hobbes. (2) To see whether a proposed ‘solution’ to the paradox of Prisoners Dilemma applies to this example. The paradox is that individually rational self-interested calculations sum to an outcome that is suboptimal not only for society but also for every single member of it. The solution is the Supergame which consists of indefinitely repeated plays of the simple Prisoners Dilemma game. (3) To compare the results of the above with the similar conclusions reached by a different route by recent arguments in sociobiology.

What's wrong with the British constitution?

In this provocative new study, Iain McLean argues that the traditional story of the British constitution does not make sense. It purports to be both positive and normative: that is, to describe both how people actually behave and how they ought to behave. In fact, it fails to do either; it is not a correct description and it has no persuasive force. The book goes on to offer a reasoned alternative. The position that still dominates the field of constitutional law is that of parliamentary sovereignty (or supremacy). According to this view, the supreme lawgiver in the United Kingdom is Parliament. Some writers in this tradition go on to insist that Parliament in turn derives its authority from the people, because the people elect Parliament. An obvious problem with this view is that Parliament, to a lawyer, comprises three houses: monarch, Lords, and Commons. The people elect only one of those three houses. This book aims to show, contrary to the prevailing view, that the United Kingdom exists by virtue of a constitutional contract between two previously independent states. Professor McLean argues that the work of the influential constitutional theorist A. V. Dicey has little to offer those who really want to understand the nature of the constitution. Instead, greater understanding can be gleaned from considering the ‘veto plays’ and ‘credible threats’ available to politicians since 1707. He suggests that the idea the people are sovereign dates back to the seventeenth century (may be fourteenth century in Scotland), but has gone underground in English constitutional writing. He goes on to show that devolution and the United Kingdoms relationship with the rest of Europe have taken the United Kingdom along a constitutionalist road since 1972, and perhaps since 1920. He concludes that no intellectually defensible case can be made for retaining an unelected house of Parliament, an unelected head of state, or an established church. This book will be an essential reading for political scientists, constitutional lawyers, historians, politicians, and the like.

None of the Above The UK House of Commons votes on Reforming the House of Lords, February 2003 ⁄

In February 2003, members of the UK House of Commons voted on seven resolutions as to the future of the House of Lords. In quick succession, each possibility for reform was considered and then rejected at division. This paper examines plausible causes of this strange result. Inter alia, we reject notions of a voting cycle. We find that myopic and/or strategic voting by MPs was salient. We then explore the main voting groups and their party compositions.