Scholars routinely make claims that presuppose the validity of the observations and measurements that operationalize their concepts. Yet, despite recent advances in political science methods, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to measurement validity. We address this gap by exploring four themes. First, we seek to establish a shared framework that allows quantitative and qualitative scholars to assess more effectively, and communicate about, issues of valid measurement. Second, we underscore the need to draw a clear distinction between measurement issues and disputes about concepts. Third, we discuss the contextual specificity of measurement claims, exploring a variety of measurement strategies that seek to combine generality and validity by devoting greater attention to context. Fourth, we address the proliferation of terms for alternative measurement validation procedures and offer an account of the three main types of validation most relevant to political scientists.

The most superficial level of Thucydides’ history examines the destructive consequences of domestic and foreign policies framed outside the language of justice. His deeper political-philosophical aim was to explore the relationship between nomos (convention) and phusis (nature) and its implications for civilization. Thucydides concludes that nomos constructs identities and channels and restrains the behavior of individuals and societies. Speech and reason (logos) in turn make nomos possible because all conventions depend on shared meanings. The feedback loop between logoi (words) and ergoi (deeds) created Greek civilization but also the international and civil strife (stasis) associated with the Peloponnesian War. International security and civil order depend upon recovering the meanings of words and the conventions they enable. Thucydides should properly be considered a constructivist.

Machiavelli scholarship is prolific but claustrophobic. Even though chapter 18 of The Prince advises the aspiring leader to emulate both lion and fox, commentators ignore or devalue the lion and focus on the fox. Machiavelli is thereby depicted as a champion of cleverness and deception, and not much else. This article takes up the lion. It argues that Machiavelli's lion is not a simple and violent beast, but is rather a complex tutor that complements clinical and lonely foxiness with crucial injections of virility and community.

Contemporary feminist scholars have devoted much attention to analyzing the relationship between justice and care theories but little to the ideas of early feminist authors. I bring the political philosophy of the Mary Wollstonecraft to bear on contemporary justice/care debates in order to highlight her unique contribution. Although usually interpreted as a classical liberal or republican thinker, Wollstonecraft is better understood as a feminist care theorist. She aimed at a revolutionary transformation of liberal society by emphasizing the importance of care-giving duties. Unlike some recent feminist scholars, however, she still recognized an important role for justice. She argued that before personal care-giving activities could transform the political, political justice had first to be extended to personal caring relationships. Wollstonecraft's political philosophy thus provides a feminist model for synthesizing justice and care theories and represents an innovative reformulation of classical liberal and republican ideas that incorporates the care perspective.

The election of African Americans to Congress is a primary achievement of the post– civil rights transition from protest to politics. I evaluate the link between black congressional representation and political engagement, as measured by voting participation. There are two related objectives: Construct a broader model of participation that takes into account a key component of the political environment since the civil rights era, and more fully appreciate the political significance of minority officeholding by considering its nonpolicy consequences. Using precinct data from eight midterm elections, I demonstrate that the election of blacks to Congress negatively affects white political involvement and only rarely increases political engagement among African Americans.

Despite the hopes of the civil rights movement, researchers have found that the election of African Americans to office has not greatly improved the well-being of the black community. This study focuses on the white community, however, and finds that black leadership can have a profound effect. Under black mayors there is positive change in the white vote and in the racial sentiments expressed by members of the white electorate. Although white Republicans seem largely immune to the effects of black incumbency, for Democrats and independents an experience with a black mayoralty tends to decrease racial tension, increase racial sympathy, and increase support of black leadership.

For the most part, scholars who study American political parties in the electorate continue to characterize them as weak and in decline. Parties on the elite level, however, have experienced a resurgence over the last two decades. Such a divergence between elite behavior and mass opinion is curious, given that most models of public opinion place the behavior of elites at their core. In fact, I find that parties in the electorate have experienced a noteworthy resurgence over the last two decades. Greater partisan polarization in Congress has clarified the parties’ ideological positions for ordinary Americans, which in turn has increased party importance and salience on the mass level. Although parties in the 1990s are not as central to Americans as they were in the 1950s, they are far more important today than in the 1970s and 1980s. The party decline thesis is in need of revision.

We attempt to explain when and why democratic states will prevail in international crises. We review several of the prominent theories about democratic political structures and derive hypotheses from each framework about crisis outcomes. These hypotheses are tested against the population of 422 international crises between 1918 and 1994. Our findings provide further evidence that the democratic peace is not a spurious result of common interests. Moreover, we also begin the difficult task of differentiating among the many theories of the democratic peace. In particular, we find strong evidence that democratic political structures are important because of their ability to generate domestic audience costs. Our findings also support the argument that democratic political structures encourage leaders to select international conflicts that they will win.

There are many well-developed theories that explain why governments redistribute income, but very few can explain why this often is done in a socially inefficient form. In the theory we develop, compared to efficient methods, inefficient redistribution makes it more attractive to stay in or enter a group that receives subsidies. When political institutions cannot credibly commit to future policy, and when the political influence of a group depends on its size, inefficient redistribution is a tool to sustain political power. Our model may account for the choice of inefficient redistributive policies in agriculture, trade, and the labor market. It also implies that when factors of production are less specific to a sector, inefficient redistribution may be more prevalent.

According to the Olson paradox, larger groups may be less successful than smaller groups in furthering their interests. We address the issue in a model with three distinctive features: explicit intergroup interaction, collective prizes with a varying mix of public and private characteristics, and nonlinear lobbying costs. The interplay of these features leads to new results. When the cost of lobbying has the elasticity of a quadratic function, or higher, larger groups are more effective no matter how private the prize. With smaller elasticities, a threshold degree of publicness is enough to overturn the Olson argument, and this threshold tends to zero as the elasticity approaches the value for a quadratic function. We also demonstrate that these results are true, irrespective of whether we examine group sizes over the cross-section in some given equilibrium or changes in the size of a given group over different equilibria.

We analyze party discipline in the House of Representatives between 1947 and 1998. The effects of party pressures can be represented in a spatial model by allowing each party to have its own cutting line on roll call votes. Adding a second cutting line makes, at best, a marginal improvement over the standard single-line model. Analysis of legislators who switch parties shows, however, that party discipline is manifest in the location of the legislator's ideal point. In contrast to our approach, we find that the Snyder-Groseclose method of estimating the influence of party discipline is biased toward exaggerating party effects.

Contrary to the claims of McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal, our method does not estimate the ideal points of moderates significantly less accurately than the ideal points of extremists. This is true for at least two reasons: (1) there is significant randomness in voting; as a consequence, on a lopsided vote moderates often vote with the extremists; and (2) our data set includes some roll calls that require a supermajority for passage; for these we define a 50%–50% roll call as lopsided. We also show that the classification-success method of McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal severely understates the presence of party influence. Furthermore, we show that a proper interpretation of some of their results reveals a significant amount of party influence in Congress.

Much of contemporary feminist theory presents itself as radically opposed to liberalism. Certain claims made by Catharine MacKinnon have contributed significantly to this view. In this article, however, I argue that certain fundamental aspects of MacKinnon's work must be understood within a liberal framework, even as she challenges the epistemological assumptions that tend to inform liberal political theories. I highlight the ways in which MacKinnon makes use of several fundamental liberal tenets, such as the primacy of individual choice, and then consider how her work contributes to an ongoing discussion about the relevance of liberal theory to contemporary feminist concerns.

MacKinnon responds that her theory, while not liberalism in denial or disguise, is engaged in dialogue with liberalism (as well as with other theoretical traditions).