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This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the existing legacy of George W. Bush. It then considers the divergence in views of the president and his performance, his policies, decision-making, and leadership. An overview of the chapters in the volume is also presented.

This chapter reviews a selection of polling data on the president and the war to document the unprecedented partisan polarization in public attitudes these have jointly provoked, and to begin to explore some of the questions the data can be used to address concerning the formation, evolution, and consequences of mass opinion on the war. The public's unusually wide partisan divisions over evaluations of President Bush and his decision to force a regime change in Iraq are closely connected. Among Republicans of all stripes, but especially Christian conservatives, initial high regard for the president and trust in his honesty encouraged acceptance of his original case for war. When its premises proved faulty, they either missed that story or decided it was irrelevant and continued to support the war, accepting the administration's claim that it was integral to the war on terrorism and thus to the security of the US. Democrats tended to neither trust Bush nor appreciate his performance as president, so their support for the war depended crucially on belief in its necessity.

This essay discusses a particular aspect of poverty: its close and brutal association with a failure of aspirations. This is not an assertion about individuals who are poor; it is a statement about the condition of poverty itself. Poverty stifles dreams, or at least the process of attaining dreams. Thus, poverty and the failure of aspirations may be reciprocally linked in a self-sustaining trap. This essay seeks to draw out various aspects of this theme and, in the process, to introduce and discuss an aspirations-based view of individual behavior.

Israel had a closed list PR system that was so proportional that it resulted in a large multi-party system with a very fragmented parliament. One result is that for decades, Israel experienced difficulties in building and maintaining large coalition governments, often containing several small and more extreme parties, which can and do yield blackmail powers. The failure to reform the actual electoral system led to misguided attempts at institutional engineering. Reformers attempted to alleviate some of the effects of the electoral system by adopting party primaries and directly electing the prime minister. However, the unintended consequences of these reforms were immediate. Primaries undermined party discipline, while the direct election of the Prime Minister made the problem of sustaining coalition governments worse than before the reform. Israel has since returned to a ‘single-ballot’ system.

Parties and their programmes form the alternatives electors vote for under modern representative democracy. A precondition of mandate theory, as opposed to convergence theories of democracy, is that parties offer clear choices. This chapter asks — Are there choices? Are the choices gently graded or sharply polarised? Are the policy alternatives on offer clear? Do the specific issues within the parties’ bundles fall along a Left–Right continuum correlated with each other, and with the overall party position.

This chapter offers a historical description of the development of the national party systems of the countries represented in the book. First, it provides an overview of the political parties in the various countries and classifies them by party family. Second, it deals with three aspects of inter-party competition which have been singled out as important by previous research efforts: (1) the number of political parties (fragmentation), (2) the ideological distance between parties (polarization), and (3) the degree of electoral change (volatility). Measures of these characteristics allow a basic description of the structure and dynamics of party systems.

Compares Northern Ireland with prosperous and peaceful Canada. It shows that Canada's relative tranquillity was not inevitable but owes much to the development of consociational practices by its English and French Canadian elites. Noel argues that if consociationalism is to work in Northern Ireland, its elites must also embrace a consociational bargain, a desire to compromise. He sees limited evidence of this, and is sceptical of the Agreement's prospects. The chapter is a useful reminder that it is possible to support consociationalism normatively, while recognizing that it remains a difficult system to operate, particularly in sites of profound polarization.

Analyses the strategy of the opposition Labour party in the 1983 general election and the role of the newly created Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the political life in Britain at the beginning of the 1980s. The authors draw the conclusion that voters do not base their decisions only on issues important for them but, entirely rationally, give more weight to the issues on which the parties are polarized. Unfortunately for the Labour in 1983, it was unpopular on the issues where the parties were polarized such as nationalization and nuclear disarmament, and which therefore counted a lot, and its popular issues— unemployment and taxation—were ones where there was less perceived difference between the parties. In the 1983 election, Labour also lost some votes because the SDP positioned itself to the left of centre, competing for the left‐of‐centre ground and actually winning as many votes as Labour did from the moderate left. The reasons for this were a mixture of Labour's ideological extremism and perceived incompetence and division. The evidence also suggests that competence and policy are not the sole ingredients in the voter's calculus; loyalty, tradition and the more affective or emotional ties that link voters to parties account partly for the way the electorate votes.

This chapter considers the effect of the selection mechanisms for heads of state on the nature of elections. Using a variety of methodological approaches—case studies, paired comparisons, a natural experiment, and statistical analyses, this chapter shows that variation in the contentiousness of presidential elections is unrelated to the mode of election. This nonfinding can be explained by the fact that parties have an incentive to compete for the office in both situations. Specifically, this chapter argues that holding the presidential office is an electoral asset for parties: it boosts parties' vote shares in parliamentary elections—an effect that is present in the case of both directly and indirectly elected presidents. The effect of holding the presidency is substantial—presidential parties gain about 6 percentage points more votes than nonpresidential parties. This result in itself is novel and is likely to be of interest to anyone studying electoral politics. The findings in this chapter also indicate that the presence of a popular incumbent president is the most significant factor decreasing the level of contention and polarization in presidential campaigns.

Insofar as the reason ‘why’ we want deliberative democracy is just to pool information, what justifies so much emphasis among deliberative democrats on talking face-to-face to the exclusion of other equally good ways of pooling information? This chapter develops a contrast between two ways of pooling information: mechanically (through vote counting) and discursively (through talking together). It goes on to canvass five ways in which pooling information discursively might capture information that would have been lost had the information-pooling been done by more purely mechanical means.

It is argued that there are compelling reasons why we should be heading towards a fundamental incompatibility between the cherished goal of equality and the equally cherished goal of full employment. If this is so, we shall have left the epoch of the democratic class struggle and, possibly, regressed to a world dominated by the ‘social question’ and social polarization. These compelling reasons can be summarized under two labels: the first is globalization and technology, both of which undoubtedly enrich all nations, although in the process, they also accelerate industrial decline and contribute to unemployment; the second is tertiarization, which favours those with human and social capital, but which also may cause stagnation because of low productivity. In any case, both reasons point in the same direction: the less skilled are likely to become losers—be it as unemployed, or as low‐paid workers. The different sections of the chapter are: Jobs and Unemployment Trends Across Welfare Regimes; The Dilemmas of Globalization and Technological Change; Dilemmas of the New Service Economy; Identifying Services; Service Sectors; Service Occupations; Lousy Jobs or Outsiders? — post‐industrial job trends towards service job growth; The Cost‐Disease and Service Expansion; The Micro‐Foundations of Post‐industrial Employment; and The New Keynesian Household.

Depending on the degree of goal uncertainty and procedural uncertainty, organizational decision making may follow the bounded rationality model, process model, political model, or anarchic model. Individual decision making relies on heuristics that can lead to biases. Group decision making is vulnerable to the tendencies for groupthink, group polarization, and an escalation of commitment. In an attempt to reduce decision uncertainty and complexity, organizations control the creation and use of information by establishing decision premises, rules, and routines for different types of decision situations.

This chapter considers how dynamics in public opinion combine with changes in participation and in the degree of elite (specifically, congressional) polarization in this regard. It begins by discussing the systematic changes in polarization and participation. Since the importance of a liberal-conservative dimension and left-right thinking in the public may be of less obvious importance for understanding American politics, given its peripheral position in the study of public opinion, this chapter develops a set of claims regarding its existence and relevance and then considers how it might fit into the polarization-participation-public opinion dynamics. To support its arguments, the chapter draws on data from American National Election Studies (ANES) surveys, surveys of donors to political campaigns, and surveys of delegates to national conventions.

This chapter provides a methodological anchor and framework for the constructive juxtaposition that enables a creative interaction and dialogue instead of opposition and polarization between the traditional and critical Zen positions, by orienting the discussion in terms of the main ingredients of Zen's original self‐definition and how in early sources Zen portrayed itself as a unique and distinctive tradition. First there is a discussion of the role of Orientalism for interpreting and misinterpreting a phenomenon such as Zen Buddhism. Then the chapter establishes a basis for analyzing and evaluating the exchange of ideas concerning the real meaning of Zen theory and practice.