The issue of ‘tactical voting’ aroused a great deal of interest during the 1987 United Kingdom general election campaign. This Note considers the nature and importance of tactical voting in Britain and makes an attempt to detect its presence empirically using electoral data.

This paper analyses the dramatic reduction in the numbers of white southern Democrats in the US House of Representatives since 1992. After 30 years of gradual erosion as a political force on Capitol Hill, the decline in white southern Democratic numbers has markedly accelerated during the 1990s. Georgia's House delegation includes not a single white Democrat, and Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina had only one as of 1998. Moreover, in many of the southern US House districts that they continue to hold, white Democrats are clinging onto office by precarious electoral margins. The reduction in southern white Democratic members became noticeable in the 1992 elections and escalated in the 1994 national Republican landslide. The underlying movement continued in 1996 despite a national trend toward the Democrats in the House elections. In this paper, several hypotheses of this decline are tested: (1) redistricting and the creation of majority-minority districts following the 1990 census; (2) retirement of white Democratic incumbents; (3) increasing levels of campaign spending by Republican challengers; and (4) Republican realignment. We find that a combination of race-based redistricting and the overwhelming success of GOP candidates in open-seat elections combined with favorable partisan tides to produce the southern Republican majorities of 1994 and 1996. We conclude that this is the culmination of a process of secular realignment, and there are no indications that this reversal of fortune for the Democrats will change anytime soon. KEY WORDS _ elections _ House of Representatives _ realignment _ redistricting _ US SouthOne of the relatively unnoted political developments in US politics in recent years has been the drastic attrition in the number of southern white

In this article, we argue that Presidents Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush share a distinctive approach to politics and governing: an “evangelical” style of presidential leadership. Though they differed in terms of party and ideology, we claim, using examples from their foreign policies, that the evangelical faith of Carter and Bush provided them with a particular vision of the presidency and the global role of the United States. Richard Neustadt argued that aptitude for politics is the most essential attribute for contemporary presidential success and that the evangelical approach will inevitably lead to political failure. From our analysis of the Carter and Bush approaches to foreign policy, we conclude, however, that in certain circumstances, the evangelical style can contribute to successful presidential leadership and is worthy of further serious study by presidential scholars.