Once universal adult citizenship rights have been secured in a society, democratization is mostly a matter of the more authentic political inclusion of different groups and categories, for which formal political equality can hide continued exclusion or oppression. It is important, however, to distinguish between inclusion in the state and inclusion in the polity more generally. Democratic theorists who advocate a strategy of progressive inclusion of as many groups as possible in the state fail to recognize that the conditions for authentic as opposed to symbolic inclusion are quite demanding. History shows that benign inclusion in the state is possible only when (a) a group's defining concern can be assimilated to an established or emerging state imperative, and (b) civil society is not unduly depleted by the group's entry into the state. Absent such conditions, oppositional civil society may be a better focus for democratization than is the state. A flourishing oppositional sphere, and therefore the conditions for democratization itself, may actually be facilitated by a passively exclusive state, the main contemporary form of which is corporatism. Benign inclusion in the state can sometimes occur, but any such move should also produce exclusions that both facilitate future democratization and guard against any reversal of democratic commitment in state and society. These considerations have substantial implications for the strategic choices of social movements.

Modern constitutional democracy entails a particular kind of political self-understanding that uniquely centers on a constitution. While many recent studies have focused on how constitutional text shapes this self-understanding, little attention has been paid to the implications of different views of constitutional authority. This is a critical consideration, however, because constitutional authority has always been intrinsically fragile within constitutional democracy, and never more so than at present. In this article, I explore the potential of constitutional science to generate a conception of constitutional authority and collective identity. I focus on David Hume's effort to use constitutional science to shape opinion about liberty and the nature of the political community. This analysis also provides a basis for reflecting on the problematic relation of democracy to constitutionalism and on the peculiar problem of constitutional opinion in constitutional democracy.

This paper seeks to revive the old theory of a “Lockean consensus” in early American political thought against the prevailing “republican” view. The language of “virtue” and “slavery,” which was pervasive at the time of the founding, and which many have been eager to take as evidence for the influence of civic humanism, in fact has a perfectly plain Lockean provenance. This is established first through a reexamination of Locke that links his account of virtue to a Christian asceticism (i.e., the Protestant Ethic) rather than republican philosophy. That the founders understood virtue in this way is then established through an exploration of Adams and Jefferson. In both cases, it was a Lockean slavery which they feared and a Lockean virtue which they sought. A Lockean sympathy did exist among the founders; in order to understand it, however, it must be distinguished from modern liberalism, with which it has only tenuous connections.

The literature on the democratic peace has emerged from two empirical claims: (1) Democracies are unlikely to conflict with one another, and (2) democracies are as prone to conflict with nondemocracies as nondemocracies are with one another. Together these assertions imply that the democratic peace is a dyadic phenomenon. There is strong support for the first observation, but much recent scholarship contravenes the second. This paper assesses whether the democratic peace is a purely dyadic, a monadic, or perhaps a mixed dyadic and monadic effect. Our analysis offers two important advances. First, our model directly compares the dyadic and monadic explanations by using the state as the unit of analysis rather than the potentially problematic dyad. Second, our model controls for an important but overlooked confounding variable: satisfaction with the status quo. Our results indicate that the initiation of violence within crises is predominantly a dyadic phenomenon, but we also find evidence suggesting a strong monadic effect regarding the emergence of crises.

Governments in Italy both change and remain the same. From 1946 to 1992 the Christian Democratic Party always held governing power. But almost no cabinet stayed in office more than a few years, and many governments collapsed after only a few months. How can instability coexist with stability in this way? How can governments break up at such low cost and with so little effect on alternation? These questions are rooted in—but not resolved by—the available game-theoretic literature on coalitional behavior. My answer is that politicians' purposive actions can reduce the costs of coalition. I argue that the costs of making, breaking, and maintaining coalitions depend on political institutions and on the array of parties and voters in policy space. Institutional and spatial conditions structure politicians' opportunities and attempts to lower costs. Under some conditions, as I show, coalitions are cheap, and politicians can easily make coalitions even cheaper. The inference is that this framework comprehends both Italy's extremes and the degrees of stability found in other parliamentary democracies.

Electoral-connection theories of legislative politics view bill cosponsorship as low-cost position taking by rational legislators who communicate with target audiences (e.g., constituents) external to the legislature. Legislative signaling games suggest a view of bill cosponsorship in which early cosponsors attempt to communicate to target audiences (e.g., the median voter) within the legislature. Using data from the 103rd U.S. House of Representatives, we show that the timing of legislators' cosponsorship decisions are more supportive of cosponsorship as intralegislative signaling than as extralegislative position taking. First, policy extremists on both sides of the political spectrum are more likely than moderates to be initial endorsers of legislative initiatives. Second, extremist-moderate differences diminish over the course of bill histories.

Despite extensive research on party identification, links between partisanship at the individual and aggregate level have largely been ignored. This leaves a gap in our understanding of the dynamics of aggregate partisanship. To remedy this, we identify a set of ideal types that capture the essential arguments made about individual-level party identification. We then combine the behavioral assumptions for each type with existing results on statistical aggregation to deduce the specific temporal pattern that each type implies for aggregate levels of partisanship. Using new diagnostic tests and a highly general time series model, we find that aggregate measures of partisanship from 1953 through 1992 are fractionally integrated. Our evidence that the effects of a shock to aggregate partisanship last for years—not months or decades—challenges previous work by party systems theorists and students of “macropartisanship.” Our arguments and empirical evidence provide a conceptually richer and more precise basis for theories of issue evolution or endogenous preferences—in which partisanship plays a central role.

Justices are strategic actors. This is particularly evident when they change their votes between the original conference on the merits and the Court's announcement of the final decision. We predict that such voting fluidity may be influenced by strategic policy considerations, justices' uncertainty over issues involved in a case, the chief justice's interest in protecting his prerogatives, and other institutional pressures. To test our hypotheses, we explore the occurrence of fluidity on the Burger Court (1969–85). Using logistic regression, we show that justices' decisions to change their votes stem primarily from strategic policy considerations. In limited instances, the decision to switch can be attributed to either uncertainty or institutional pressures. Our findings suggest that the decision of a justice to join an opinion results from more than his or her initial policy preferences; final votes are influenced as well by the politics of opinion writing.

Crime and welfare are now widely viewed as “coded” issues that activate white Americans' negative views of blacks without explicitly raising the “race card.” But does the desire of whites to combat crime or curtail welfare really stem from their dislike of blacks? Are these not pressing problems about which Americans rightly should be concerned—apart from any associations these issues may have with race? In this paper I assess the extent to which white Americans' opposition to welfare is rooted in their attitudes toward blacks. Using conventional survey modeling techniques and a randomized survey-based experiment from a national telephone survey, I find that racial attitudes are the single most important influence on whites' welfare views. I also show that whites hold similar views of comparably described black and white welfare mothers, but that negative views of black welfare mothers are more politically potent, generating greater opposition to welfare than comparable views of white welfare mothers.

Social scientists who use history as a laboratory for theory development use the work of historians to construct background narratives which can then be coded according to theoretically relevant categories. Yet, virtually no attention has been paid to how these historical monographs are to be chosen. On most periods and themes of interest available accounts differ, not only substantively but also with respect to the implicit theories and conceptual frameworks used to establish salience or produce commonsensical explanations. Unself-conscious use of historical monographs thus easily results in selection bias. Social scientists are bound to be more attracted to and convinced by accounts that accord with the expectations about events contained in the concepts they deploy and the theories they seek to test. Consideration of recent developments in historiographical theory supports the argument that responsible techniques for using historical sources are available, but they require understanding the extent to which patterns within historiography, rather than “History,” must be the direct focus of investigation and explanation. Such an approach has the added advantage of helping to generate historically based studies where observations or cases outnumber variables.