Conventional wisdom holds that higher turnout favors Democrats. Previous studies of this hypothesis rely on presidential and House elections or on survey data, but senatorial and gubernatorial elections offer better conditions for directly testing turnout effects in U.S. politics. In a comprehensive analysis of these statewide elections since 1928, we find that the conventional theory was true outside the South through 1964, but since 1965 the overall relationship between turnout and partisan outcomes has been insignificant. Even before the mid-1960s, the turnout effect outside the South was strongest in Republican states and insignificant or negative in heavily Democratic states. A similar but weaker pattern obtains after 1964. In the South, which we analyze only since 1966, higher turnout helped Republicans until 1990, but in 1990–94 the effect became pro-Democratic. The conventional theory cannot account for these complex patterns, but they are impressively consistent with DeNardo's (1980) theory.

Applying insights from social-choice theory to illuminate the functioning of pluralitarian Westminster institutions, this article develops a coherent political answer to four puzzling questions about the economic liberalization that transformed New Zealand in 1984-93: why an anti-statist programme was initiated (and largely accomplished) by a labour party, why restructuring was more radical in New Zealand than in other democracies, why reformers were able to prevail through two elections and a change of government, and why they committed costly policy-sequencing errors. Understanding this remarkable case has implications for empirically grounded social-choice theory, the political theory of policy reform, and the evaluation of pluralitarian democracy -which New Zealanders themselves repudiated in 1993 by adopting proportional representation.Between 1984 and 1993, New Zealand underwent radical economic reform, moving from what had probably been the most protected, regulated and state-dominated system of any capitalist democracy to an extreme position at the open, competitive, free-market end of the spectrum. This process of market liberalization exhibited four puzzling and controversial features:(1) New Right reforms were initiated by the party of the left. A deeply anti-statist philosophy inspired New Zealand's economic restructuring, and the programme greatly exacerbated insecurity and inequality. Yet liberalization was begun (and largely accomplished) by a labour party, which had a socialist heritage, trade-union organizational base, and poor and working-class electoral constituency.

At least since Aristotle, theorists have believed that political dis-content and its consequents—protest, instability, violence, revolution—depend not only on the absolute level of economic well-being, but also on the distribution of wealth. Contemporary political analysts have tried to test this ancient assumption using modern statistical methods. Their results are distressingly confusing. One cross-national investigation finds the commonsensical positive linear relation: the more the inequality, the greater the instability. A second study purports to show the opposite relation in the important case of South Vietnam: the greater the inequality, the less the support for revolution. And a third analysis, also of South Vietnam, detects no relation at all between inequality and rebellion.

British elections exhibit two patterns contrary to expectations deriving from Duverger and Downs: centrist third parties (Liberals and their successors) win a large vote share; and the two major parties often espouse highly divergent policies. This article explores relations between the Liberal vote and left–right scores of the Labour and Conservative manifestos in the light of two hypotheses: the vacated centre posits that Liberals receive more votes when major parties diverge; the occupied centre proposes a lagged effect in which major parties diverge farther after Liberals do well in the preceding election. Data from elections since 1945 confirm the vacated-centre hypothesis, with Liberals benefiting about equally when the major parties diverge to the left and right, respectively. The results also support the occupied-centre hypothesis for Conservative party positions, but not for Labour’s. After considering explanations for this asymmetry, we identify historical events associated with turning points that our data reveal in post-war British politics.