This paper examines the concept “career politician.” It seeks to clarify, systematize, and measure this ambiguous multidimensional concept in order to facilitate testing theories and hypotheses associated with it. We argue that career politicians are full-time politicians who lack significant experience in the wider world and have other distinguishing attributes for which they are both appreciated and criticized. From claims and critiques put forward by political scientists, journalists, publics, and politicians, we extract four principal dimensions: Strong Commitment, Narrow Occupational Background, Narrow Life Experience, and Strong Ambition. These dimensions and their indicators fit Wittgenstein’s family-resemblance conceptual structure, which is how we analyze, measure and validate them with data from a longitudinal study of British MPs spanning 1971–2016.

How much do the political values of politicians endure throughouttheir careers? And how might the endurance be explained? This paperuses a unique longitudinal data set to examine the persistence ofpolitical values among national politicians: members of the BritishHouse of Commons, who completed Rokeach-type value rankinginstruments during 1971–73 and again 40 years later in 2012–16. Thefindings show remarkable stability and provide strong support forthe persistence hypothesis which predicts that politicians developcrystallized value systems by their early thirties and largelymaintain those values into retirement. This is consistent with theview that rapid changes in aggregate party ideologies have more todo with new views among new waves of recruits than with conversionsamong old members.

The ‘primacy principle’ comprises three assumptions about political orientations. The first is that they are learned during childhood. The second is that this childhood learning further shapes any subsequent modifications of them. The third is that the scale of any such subsequent modifications is small: fundamental political orientations tend to endure through life. We propose, using cohort analysis, to examine the extent to which three political orientations – party identification, political efficacy and political trust – do, as a matter of fact, endure through adulthood.

Whips have always aroused curiosity. Their peculiar title, which suggests coercion and social control, derives from ‘Whipper-in’, a man who keeps headstrong hounds running with the pack. The packs, that is to say the parliamentary parties, are heterogeneous associations of independent and egocentric individuals, not at all the sort to shy away from dissent and rebellion. Between 1966 and 1970 the Labour Government faced backbench opposition on almost every major policy; the 1970–74 Conservative Government was actually defeated five times by its own supporters. Still, although it may well be true that ‘the golden age of ultra-disciplined parties is past’, when the time comes to march, and regardless of the issues involved, most Members seem ready to follow a lead: remarkably few bolt upon reaching the division lobbies. Even the recent ‘undisciplined’ record must appear to administrators everywhere as very successful social control indeed.

Tocqueville described the eventual progress of equality as inevitable; today its prospects seem less assured. The main engines of equality's modest advance are to be found in contemporary welfare states, where politics concerns who gets what and why. Governments are deeply concerned with these matters even when beguiling themselves, as well as the rest of us, into overlooking the cumulative results of their actions. By shoring up and gradually reshaping stratification systems, they help provide frameworks within which we live and plan our futures. Ordinary citizens are more attuned to the facts of inequality than to speculations about its origins. This essay investigates when and how citizens learn about stratification in England and the United States.

When streams of research are isolated from one another by methodological style and ideological character, the fact that they share similar explanatory principles is easily overlooked. Thus, since the 1950s many quantitative and ‘pluralistic’ American studies have argued that political leaders are more likely than the public to support procedural rules of the game. And since at least the 1930s, many qualitative and ‘left-wing’ European commentaries have argued that, in matters of socio-economic policy, members of parliaments become more moderate than their parties' activists. These important claims are embedded in two partial theories which have previously been treated as unrelated, the theories of institutional support and of deradicalization. And yet, different as these theories may be in many respects, they are driven by similar socialization principles which accompany movement from one role in the political system to another. Such socialization principles are a conservative force inculcating both institutional support in procedural rules of the game and deradicalization in orientations towards public policy.

In democratic theory, the practice of discussing public affairs has been associated with desirable consequences for citizenship and democracy. We use Anglo-American survey data to examine twelve hypotheses about psychological foundations for four general conditions that such discussions might promote: autonomous citizens, political legitimacy, good representation and democratic communities. Our data combine detailed measures of public discussion with measures of more of its hypothesized civic consequences than have heretofore been available. They also enable us to probe, using specialized samples, causal inferences suggested by our analyses of random samples in our British and American communities. Six of the hypotheses are supported, including at least one regarding each of the four general liberal democratic conditions we investigate.

It is a fundamental ideal of liberal democracy that all citizens should enjoy fully equal citizenship. Yet many minorities are still routinely ignored, excluded, patronized, and not regarded as full members of the political community. This denial of equal standing undermines their equal citizenship. Liberalism and Cultural Pluralism each advocate strategies to improve this situation. Their arguments build upon expectations about how citizens should, can, and do understand membership in the political community. Our survey and focus group data from six matched communities in the United States and Great Britain show how citizens’ understandings of membership in the political community incorporate communitarian attitudes that impede the liberal and cultural pluralist projects.

What is the deliberative potential of everyday political discussion? We address this question using survey data and qualitative data collected in six communities in the United States and Britain. Our findings suggest that political discussion is infrequently public, modestly contested and sometimes marred by inequality. But the factors inhibiting more deliberative discussions – structural, cultural and motivational in nature – should be amenable to some change, particularly through education.

I seek to reinvigorate the study of politicians' roles by showing how motivational role theory can be used to examine the impact of goals and incentives upon behavior and thereby integrate economic and sociological perspectives. I address three reasons for the recent neglect of politicians' roles—changes in interdisciplinary tastes, conceptual and theoretical muddles, and failures to demonstrate consequences for behavior—and find them unconvincing. I further argue that the most promising framework for the new institutionalism is one that incorporates not just formal but also informal institutional structures (like roles and norms), a framework that incorporates, rather than excludes, political behavior.

This study examines citizens' conceptions of rights, duties, and civic identities in the United States and Great Britain. By combining an information processing approach with a methodology—focus groups—that has seldom been used in political science, we have begun to explore empirical claims in contemporary theoretical controversies about citizenship. We find that in the minds of citizens citizenship is a complex matter, and that the roles constructed by citizens themselves blend together liberal and communitarian elements in ways unanticipated by many political theorists.

We address both a puzzle and a theory. The puzzle is posed by the emergence of “Thatcherism,” an un-Conservative ideology that has appeared in an antiideological British Conservative party. We address this puzzle by determining what Thatcherism is and by showing that although it represents a minority viewpoint, it does indeed fit into previous Conservative thinking. The theory in question is the spatial theory of ideological change, which, we argue, is impugned by the circumstances of Thatcherism's construction. We address this theory by investigating potential constituencies at the time of Thatcherism's creation and by examining evidence about the intentions of those who created it. Finally, we seek both to draw out the implications of Mrs. Thatcher's campaign to convert the voters to her views and to explain why the same spatial theory that Thatcherism confounds seem confirmed by equally striking cases in postwar British politics.

Politicians do not endorse rules of the game as reliably as is implied by traditional constitutional commentaries or by modern democratic theory. Interviews with Members of Parliament and candidates demonstrate that their views are deeply and systematically divided between alternative constitutional interpretations constructed upon foundations of party-political bias. Thus, attitudes towards nearly all rules of the game are powerfully shaped by political values such as authority and equality, values that differentiate views within as well as between the Conservative and labour parties. Similarly, patterns of support seem much affected by a disposition to boost norms that aid one's own party, depending on whether it is in Government or Opposition, and to downgrade norms that might aid political opponents. The article considers implications of these results for the viability of Britain's unwritten Constitution and for theories about the foundations of representative government.

Despite their prominence in political affairs, values have rarely been studied through survey research. This article offers groundwork for quantitative investigations of politicians' values by describing the development, administration and assessment of a ranking technique in the British House of Commons. It uses tape-recorded interviews which suggest that values are intelligible components of politicians' belief systems and help identify difficulties in conceptualizing and measuring them. The ranking instrument employed to measure values demonstrates its adequacy by reproducing familiar cleavages between political camps, distinguishing ideological party factions and generating data related to themes MPs put forward when discussing institutions and policy problems.