The controversy about whether ‘politics matters’ in the determination of public policy outcomes is frequently overlaid by assumptions concerning the role of structure and agency in human affairs. However, although it is usually assumed that the debate is about the rival explanatory claims of economic structure and political choice, the studies undertaken in the public policy field are almost invariably structural in character. Explicit recognition that the debate is about political and economic structures and the linkages between them will strengthen our ability to understand the nature of policy determination in the contemporary state. This view is illustrated by discussion and re-analysis of Cameron's thesis that the structure of international trade is the major determinant of the expansion of the public economy. What we do is to look at the relationship between the international economy and a wide variety of public expenditure patterns in eighteen capitalist democracies both in the early 1960s and mid-1970s. The analysis suggests that Cameron mis-specifies the relationship between political and economic structure, and that an important factor conditioning contemporary expenditure patterns is the way in which the emergence of modern party systems structured the opportunity for lower and middle-class participation in political life.

During recent years the state of the economy has been a very salient issue for the mass publics of the industrial democracies, and the French electorate is no exception. In this article the influence of inflation, unemployment and real income growth performance on popular ‘satisfaction’ with Presidents Pompidou and Giscard d'Estaing is analysed. The empirical analyses are based on a model of qualitative political responses. The most important features of the model are that people evaluate a President's economic performance relatively rather than absolutely, and that the weights placed upon current and past performance in the formation of contemporaneous political judgments decline geometrically. The empirical results indicate clearly that a President's standing with the mass public depends primarily on the performance of the real economy (in particular, the real income growth rate), rather than on nominal economic conditions (the inflation rate). This suggests that deflationary macroeconomic policies sacrificing employment and real output and income growth in order to achieve price deceleration are not likely to enhance a President's support in the French electorate.

For almost any social phenomenon there exist a great many different theories seeking to explain the respective social facts. This holds also for the field of political participation which is the subject of this paper. In order to explain why people participate more or less in a conventional or unconventional way, not only hypotheses of sociology and political science might be applied. Economics, too, claims to offer valid explanations. In this situation there arises the problem of which theories are superior. In order to contribute to answering this question, some hypotheses on political participation are stated, based upon utility theory. This ‘economic model’ of (conventional and unconventional) political participation is empirically confronted with two sociological theories of political participation. A theoretical analysis indicates that the economic model implies conditions for the validity of the two sociological theories. Furthermore, a secondary analysis with data from Western Germany showed that the economic model was, in spite of measurement problems, superior to the sociological theories.

The purpose of this paper is to test whether public spending by local communities in Belgium is influenced by local politics. Unlike previous studies which are briefly surveyed, we test alternative models of the local budgetary decision, and systematically favour the one which includes political variables. In spite of this deliberate bias, political factors influence neither the level nor the structure of local public spending in Belgium. This may imply little differentiation among parties at the local level, rather than institutional constraints.

The survey covers the rapidly growing body of literature on party-support models estimated on time series data for elections and popularity polls. The movements in the popularity of the parties are explained by their government participation and, mainly, the economic conditions as measured by the standard macroeconomic indicators. Sections 1 and 4 present the central qualitative findings and ideas of about 50 of the most important articles and conclude that the economic indicators explain around 1/3 of the variations in the party popularities; the main drawback of the models is their lack of stability. The remaining Sections—2 and 3—discuss the theory behind the models and some of the theoretical implications of the findings. That is, the problems involved in an adequate representation of the political factors; the time horizons at play; the relations to the micro theory of voting and the social welfare function; the formations of the expectations relevant and how people perceive the economy.

Earlier research on political recruitment (Budge & Farlie, 1975; Farlie et al., 1977) produced a simple quantitative index for scoring potential activists as such in advance of actual participation. This is useful for practical prediction, and theoretically interesting as a concrete demonstration that the social background explanation does work. Having analysed the career destinations of politicians (specifically, members of the Dutch Second Chamber interviewed in 1968) along the same lines (Irwin et al., 1979), we are now in a position to create an analogous scoring system for drop-outs, stayers and the successful among M.P.s.