Research has shown that first-time voting experiences affect subsequent voting behavior, with salient elections boosting subsequent turnout and non-salient ones suppressing it. We challenge this view. Following research on the context-dependent nature of habit formation, we argue that all elections should affect subsequent turnout in elections of the same type. Comparing individuals that differ only in how salient their first eligible election was (Presidential or Midterm), we find support for this expectation. Individuals are more likely to vote for, and be interested in, elections of the same type as their first voting experience. Leveraging voting age laws in the US, we also show that such laws affect subsequent participation by changing the type of election individuals are first eligible for.

In the aftermath of a European Parliament (EP) election, there are normally two prominent aspects that receive attention by scholars and experts: the turnout rate and whether the Second Order Election (SOE) model proposed by Reif and Schmitt (1980) still applies. That model is based on the idea that, because EP elections do not themselves provide enough stimulus as to replace the concerns normally present at national elections, the outcomes of EP elections in any participating country manifest themselves as a sort of distorted mirror of national (Parliamentary) elections in that country. The mirror is distorted because those national concerns are modified, not so much by the concerns arising from the European context in which EP elections are held as simply by the fact that EP elections are not national elections. In particular, at EP elections, national executive power is not at stake. The same party or parties will rule in each country after an EP election as ruled there before.

One of the reasons for paying attention to the results of American mid-term elections is the hope that they will tell us something about the standing of the President's party with the electorate. But the electoral verdict is notoriously hard to interpret. Since the President is not himself standing for re-election, the verdict has to be inferred from the results of House and Senate races in which the national mood of the electorate may be obscured by local and temporary factors. This will be especially true in Senate races, with only some 33 seats at risk; but even in House elections, with some 435 seats at risk, a grave problem arises when one comes to compare the results with those of the preceding Presidential election. In every mid-term election since that of 1934, the party of the President, whether it be Republican or Democratic, has lost some of the seats it had won at the previous Presidential election. The net loss has been as low as four seats in 1962 and as high as seventy-one seats in 1938, but it has always occurred. Some loss to the President's party is considered to be ‘normal’ at mid term, and it is only to the extent that the actual loss diverges from the normal loss that implications can be drawn to the President's standing with the electorate.

One of the major unexplored areas in the literature of political science in Britain is the relationship between the attitudes of individual legislators in policy areas and their behaviour in the House of Commons. In the United States, the study of legislative behaviour has benefited from the fact that the unobtrusive measurement of the attitudes of legislators has been possible through the aggregation of roll-call votes. This procedure has provided the foundation for a body of literature upon which a theoretical framework has been constructed for further research.

Political scientists who set out to test theories of coalition formation in parliamentary contexts (notably Browne, de Swaan, and Taylor and Laver) found only limited evidence to support the more classical game-theoretic propositions, which predict the formation of coalitions that command a majority of seats in a parliament but are otherwise as small as possible, in some sense of the word ‘small’. As a consequence, Browne later advocated the laying aside of these size theories in favour of theories that took account of the policy preferences of potential coalition partners, and in two separate studies theories were tested that focused upon the ideological component in coalition formation. Both these studies found theories based on presumed policy preferences to perform better than size theories. A more recent study has shown that the relative performance of theories based on size and ideological considerations depends on assumptions made in conducting the research. This study employed multiple regression analysis to establish that both kinds of theory had parts to play in an explanation of formation outcomes, which were dominated sometimes by size and sometimes by ideology, depending on country and time period. In the course of the analysis an additive combination of size and ideology was found to correlate to the extent of r ≃ 0·4 with formation outcomes, producing consistently better predictions than any existing theory.

The victory of an established major party in the 1983 British general election, with the other established party coming second, should not be allowed to obscure the fact that the outcome could easily have been very different. The purpose of this article is to show how the social structure that used to underpin traditional two-party voting has changed its nature in recent years, so that at least since 1974 the potential has existed for the right combination of political forces to reduce one or both traditional major parties either to the status of minor contender, or else to that of a more equal partner in what is no longer a two-party system. In a recent article, Crewe has documented the extreme and unpredictable nature of the volatility that has marked party preferences among the British electorate in recent years. The present article seeks to lay bare the underlying concomitants of that more visible phenomenon.

In Britain in recent years the study of tactical voting has become something of a growth industry. Unresolved, however, is a key question: the number of tactical voters. Despite an election-night estimate of 17 per cent, a variety of later analysts have estimated that little more than one in twenty voters behaved tactically in 1987, a surprisingly low figure in the light of the efforts of various groups to encourage tactical voting in order to avoid fragmentation of the anti-Thatcher vote. Most recently, Heath, Curtice and Jowell, in their analysis of the British Election Study survey, report that ‘just 6.5% of major party voters indicated in their replies a tactical motivation for their vote’.