Poole's (2000, Non-parametric unfolding of binary choice data. Political Analysis 8:211–37) nonparametric Optimal Classification procedure for binary data produces misleading rank orderings when applied to the modern House of Commons. With simulations and qualitative evidence, we show that the problem arises from the government-versus-opposition nature of British (Westminster) parliamentary politics and the strategic voting that is entailed therein. We suggest that political scientists think seriously about strategic voting in legislatures when interpreting results from such techniques.

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In Britain, both local elections and European elections can be regarded as secondorder. 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.

In this article we report the results from a new survey of political scientists regarding their evaluations of journals in the political science discipline. Unlike previous research that has focused on data from the United States, we conducted an Internet survey of political scientists in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. We present data on journal evaluations, journal familiarity, and journal impact, both for our entire sample (N= 1,695) and separately for respondents from each of the three countries. We document the overall hierarchy of scholarly journals among political scientists, though we find important similarities and differences in how political scientists from these three countries evaluate the scholarly journals in the discipline. Our results suggest that there is a strong basis for cross-national integration in scholarly journal communication, though methodological differences among the three countries may be an impediment.

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Australia displays high vertical fiscal imbalance (VFI) for historical and constitutional reasons. It also attempts to achieve the highest degree of horizontal fiscal equalization (HFE) to be found in any democratic federation. The Commonwealth Grants Commission (CGC), a non‐partisan body at arm's length from politicians, oversees the regime. A recent report claims that equity, efficiency and transparency would all improve if the regime were abolished. Such a change is politically unachievable, but it raises interesting issues in public finance and public administration, which carry over to other federations and union states. An economically efficient system would: minimize perverse incentives, especially incentives to seek rent; encourage states to grow; discourage suboptimal location decisions; minimize transaction costs. An equitable system would maximize equity between relevantly similar individuals. Aspects of the Australian system that should be copied include the non‐partisan agency and the target of HFE between component parts of the country. Aspects that should be discussed and perhaps copied include the very extensive equalization, including the feature of equalizing away the effects of grants for special purposes. Aspects that should probably not be copied include the cumbersome formulae and some of the perverse methods of calculating for ‘needs’. All abbreviations and acronyms are spelt out in the Appendix on page 37.

The expert survey and bibliometric methods of assessing the quality of work in political science are complementary. This project builds on previous surveys of academic political science journals conducted among US political scientists. The current wave extends the survey to political scientists in Canada and the UK. Preliminary results suggest both similarities and differences across the three countries. These results matter for policy debate in any country that is considering channelling flows of funds to universities in proportion to the quality of their research, and in helping to supply objective evidence about the research quality of work submitted by candidates for academic appointments and promotions.