Economic theories of voting argue that party popularity and vote are heavily influenced by the performance of the economy. Inferences about the direction of causality between perceptions of the economy and party support remain questionable, however. This article evaluates the microfoundations of economic theories of voting and party popularity using multiwave panel data. We model the dynamic relationships between party support and retrospective economic perceptions-both sociotropic and egocentric-through the 1992-97 British electoral cycle. Our findings indicate that sociotropic perceptions are strongly conditioned by prior opinions of the incumbent Conservative Party and once this temporal relationship is taken into account, they have little affect on incumbent party popularity. Throughout the electoral cycle, lagged political support has a substantially stronger effect on sociotropic perceptions than the latter have on concurrent party support. Moreover, egocentric perceptions appear to be neither strongly affected nor influenced by party support. The findings of these dynamic individual-level analyses indicate that conventional wisdom is likely to considerably overstate the importance of retrospective economic considerations for political preferences.

The belief that greater understanding leads to more positive attitudes informs many practical initiatives in the public understanding of science. However, there has been comparatively little empirical study of the justification for this belief. This paper explores the relationship between understanding of science and levels of support for science using a national sample of over 2000 British respondents. The analysis indicates that the internal consistency of attitudes towards science is poor, and that the links between attitudes towards science in general and attitudes towards specific areas of scientific research are weak. Understanding of science is weakly related to more positive attitudes in general: but, more significantly, it is also associated with more coherent and more discriminating attitudes. Of particular importance is the finding that while knowledgeable members of the public are more favourably disposed towards science in general, they are less supportive of morally contentious areas of research than are those who are less knowledgeable. Although an informed public opinion is likely to provide a slightly more supportive popular basis for some areas of scientific research, it could serve to constrain research in controversial areas such as human embryology.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 137.Butler and Stokes' authoritative analysis of the British electorate concluded that in general voters' political attitudes were poorly formed and, in consequence, unstable and inconsistent. This paper re-examines this question by developing and evaluating multiple-item scales of two core dimensions of mass political beliefs: left-right and libertarian-authoritarian values. The scales are shown to have respectable levels of internal consistency, high levels of stability over a one-year period, and to be useful predictors of support for political parties. In these respects they compare favourably with other commonly used indicators of political attitudes, values and ideology (left-right self-placement, postmaterialism and attitudes to nationalization). This superiority applies across different levels of political involvement. Contrary to the conclusions of earlier research into mass political ideology in Britain, therefore, it is contended that in general the electorate has meaningful political beliefs. Moreover, as the scales developed in this research form part of the British and Northern Irish Social Attitudes Series and recent British Election Studies, they provide an important resource for further studies of political culture in the UK. IN'I'RODUC'I'IONTraditional approaches to attitude measurement in public opinion surveys and election studies have typically involved a single forced-choice question or a short battery on each topic. The latter are often constructed from a more or less ad hoc combination of items included in the surveys. Even where questions have been designed to provide multiple indicator measures of political attitudes, they have focused on contemporary political issues rather than underlying dimensions of ideology and values. Consequently, the selection of attitude items has not usually been directed towards the construction of reliable and valid scales of central political beliefs, but rather towards topicality (for an exception see Feldman 1988).An alternative approach has focused upon respondents' judgments of the meaning of abstract terms such as 'left-right' or 'liberal-conservative', often with the use of visual self-placement scales. Again, however, these approaches are flawed in that they assume high levels of sophistication Psrit.Jtzl. OJSoc. Volutneno.47 1.s5ue rlo. I Marcll /996 1K4iNN()()()7-1315 (C)I.on(lonzichool oJl:cotzomic.s 1996 This content downloaded from 137.

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Explanations of cross-national variation in levels of popular support for democracy can be distinguished by the relative emphasis they place on the importance of economic and political factors. ‘First generation’ theorists emphasized economic variables, including levels of economic development and rising expectations. In contrast, ‘second generation’ writers have focused on the role of political factors, including the mode of the transition to democracy itself and the effectiveness of the institutions and electoral processes which emerge. This article uses national probability samples from Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia and Ukraine to examine potential influences on support for democratic processes in postcommunist Europe. These influences include evaluations of electoral and market performance, experience of economic well-being in the recent past and the near future, and indicators of the perceived responsiveness of the electoral system. Although both political and economic factors are found to be significant, multivariate analysis indicates that political experience is of greater weight than is economic. Moreover, when support for marketization is controlled for, there is very little link from economic experience to support for democracy.