Presidential pardons anticipate South Korea's election

Significance A former prime minister was also pardoned, while an ex-lawmaker convicted of plotting a pro-Pyongyang rebellion was paroled. Impacts Prudence and ill-health are likely to prevent Park from playing any direct political role in future. In Seoul's vengeful politics, pardoning Park is also a bid by Moon to protect himself from potential persecution when he steps down. Conservative presidential candidate Yoon Seok-youl has lost his former lead, but voter opinion is volatile; there is still time to recover.

Populism, Foreign Policy, and the GOP

This chapter investigates the state of foreign policy opinion within the Republican Party today. Perhaps surprisingly, the basic distribution of voter opinion on foreign policy within the GOP has not changed that much since the early Obama era. However, Republican voters do support Trump, and not only because he is an incumbent president from the same party. The GOP has moved in a populist, culturally conservative, and white working-class direction over a period now spanning several decades. In this sense, Trump is as much an effect as a cause. He has broken open prior conservative orthodoxies. In certain ways, on a range of specific issues following his presidency, this leaves the future of Republican foreign policy wide open. But observers should understand that the conservative-leaning American nationalism he has championed is not about to disappear when he leaves the scene. In one form or another, it is here to stay.

Measuring the Median: The Risks of Inferring Beliefs from Votes

A large number of studies of ideological congruence, and of the effect of public opinion on policy outcomes more generally, have relied on the Kim-Fording (KF) measure of median voter opinion. This measure has the great virtue of being readily calculable – no direct measurement of voter opinion is required – but it rests on assumptions concerning party locations and voter behaviour that are unquestionably incorrect, at least some of the time. This article explores the sensitivity of the KF measure to violations of its core assumptions through simulation experiments. It then uses public opinion data to assess the degree to which consequential levels of violation occur in actual democratic systems. The article concludes with a discussion of what the KF median really measures and where it can – and cannot – be safely used.

The Corporation of Hull and the Government of James II, 1687–8

In 1688 James II's government attempted to pack parliament by extensively remodelling local office-holding. This article uses the records of the Hull corporation, in particular a newly-discovered letterbook, to re-examine the campaign's impact on one large freeman borough. It concludes that, although government agents failed to browbeat the mayor and aldermen into nominating suitable candidates, their royally-appointed successors would almost certainly have secured the election of ‘right’ M.P.s. By focusing on the presumed intractability of voter opinion, historians have overlooked the government's potentially far more productive intervention in the nomination process. Indeed, if Hull's experience is typical, James's campaign was by no means predestined to fail.

Program GROUP: The Identification of All Possible Solutions to a Constituency-Delimitation Problem

A computer program is designed to produce all of the electoral constituencies for an English local authority, within the constraints imposed on the Parliamentary Boundary Commissioners. This builds on the seminal work of Gudgin and Taylor, and introduces size constraints, evaluates shape, and evaluates the electoral consequences of swings in voter opinion.