The political 'centre' is often discussed in debates about public policy and analyses of party strategies and election outcomes. Yet, to date, there has been little effort to estimate the political centre outside the United States. This article outlines a method of estimating the political centre using public opinion data collected for the period between 1950 and 2005. It is demonstrated that it is possible to measure the centre in Britain, that it moves over time, that it shifts in response to government activity and, furthermore, that it has an observable association with general election outcomes.The fundamental driving forces in democracy are the preferences of citizens across a wide range of issues. These preferences, together with other factors, influence the decisions of individual voters. Elections aggregate those individual preferences, however imperfectly, into collective choices. The aggregation of preferences across issues and across individuals, therefore, lies at the very heart of the democratic process.1 And since electoral choices are structured by political parties that tend to compete primarily along a single left-right dimension relating to the scope of government activity, it is just a small step to arguing that these preferences can be summarized by a measure of central tendency such as the 'typical', 'average', 'mean', 'median' or 'political centre'. 2The political centre is a concept of enormous political importance. Political theorists maintain that, if politics is unidimensional, the median voter is the 'Condorcet winner' in the sense that a policy package that suits this individual would defeat all others in a * Department of Government, University of Essex (email: jbartl@essex.ac.uk); School of Politics, University College Dublin; and Department of Political Science, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, respectively. The authors would like to thank Hershbinder Mann for collecting much of the early Gallup data. This project was funded by ESRC award number 00-22-2053. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the ECPR General Conference, Pisa, 2007 and the MPSA, Chicago, 2008. The authors also thank James Adams, Judith Bara, Malcolm Brynin, Evelyn Bytzek, Ian Budge, Lawrence Ezrow, Jane Green, Samantha Laycock, Anthony McGann, Hershbinder Mann, Samuel Merrill, Thomas J. Quinn, David Sanders, Elinor Scarbrough, Thomas J. Scotto, Stuart Soroka, Vera Troeger, Hugh Ward, Paul Whiteley and Chris Wlezien for their helpful comments and suggestions, and are particularly grateful to Frances Lynch of the University of Westminster for generously supplying data on average income tax levels.1 Philip E. Converse, 'Popular Representation and the distribution of information', in John A.

This article • Provides the first systematic analysis of the rise and diffusion of the idea of expansionary fiscal contractions (besides Blyth's book). • Uses comparative case studies to assess the actual influence of this policy idea during the Great Recession. • Provides a better understanding of the social construction of the financial crisis. • Contributes to the growing scholarship on ideational political economy, including works documenting the resilience of the neoliberal paradigm. This article examines the rise and influence of a powerful economic idea: 'expansionary fiscal contractions'. The counterintuitive policy belief that severe fiscal adjustments can be expansionary was originally advanced by economists Francesco Giavazzi and Marco Pagano in the early 1990s. Over the years, this idea became dominant in certain epistemic communities, mainly through the literature on lessons from successful consolidations. In the event, the relationship between budget reduction and economic growth turned out to be one of the most contested issues in the aftermath of the financial crash of 2008. This article is divided into three main sections. The first section documents the social diffusion of this singular economic idea, from academia to policy networks. The second reports the 'battle of ideas' over fiscal consolidation during the Great Recession. The third section assesses the influence of the idea of expansionary contractions on actual policy choices by examining the politics of austerity in Ireland, Spain and the UK in the period 2008-2012.

Problems of housing affordability have been afflicting parts of the UK, especially the South East of England, for a number of years. The problem is closely related to shortages in housing supply, which are, in turn, largely associated with constraints imposed by the English land planning system. A leading theory for explaining these constraints posits that they reflect political economy forces that convey the interests of current homeowners to planning decisions in disproportionate and excessively influential ways. We test this theory by examining survey data on public attitudes to house building in local communities; and by investigating whether these attitudes are related to local planning decisions. We find that there is a tendency for owner-occupiers to express greater opposition to local house building and that, in the decade to 2011, the housing stock grew significantly less in local authorities with higher proportions of owner-occupiers among local households. The results suggest the risk that planning decisions might have been distorted in favour of current homeowners is real and economically significant. We discuss a range of historical, socioeconomic and policy trends that help explain why successive governments of various stripes have been reluctant to address head-on problems in housing supply and put a curb on house prices.

We usually think of democratic accountability in national terms-the people do not approve of a government, they can replace it. However, in a plurinational democracy it is not obvious that such a single national public exists. We consider this problem in the case of Scotland, providing the first application of the macro-polity approach to a plurinational democracy. We provide a systematic study of how public opinion in Scotland changes over time compared to that in the rest of Great Britain, using recently developed Bayesian IRT scaling techniques, and ask whether Scottish and British public opinion move in parallel. To the extent that there is a separate Scottish public opinion with a separate party system, this forces us to rethink the way that democracy and accountability work in plurinational political systems.

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