Preferences come from the most ubiquitous human activity: living with other people. Support for and opposition to different ways of life, the shared values legitimating social relations (here called cultures) are the generators of diverse preferences. After discussing why it is not helpful to conceive of interests as preferences or to dismiss preference formation as external to organized social life, I explain how people are able to develop many preferences from few clues by using their social relations to interrogate their environment. The social filter is the source of preferences. I then argue that culture is a more powerful construct than conceptual rivals: heuristics, schemas, ideologies. Two initial applications—to the ideology of the left-right distinctions and to perceptions of danger—test the claim that this theory of how individuals use political cultures to develop their preferences outperforms the alternatives.

Democratic theory must pay attention to what influences public opinion. In this study the content of network television news is shown to account for a high proportion of aggregate changes (from one survey to another) in U.S. citizens' policy preferences. Different news sources have different effects. News commentators (perhaps reflecting elite or national consensus or media biases) have a very strong positive impact, as do experts. Popular presidents tend to have positive effects, while unpopular presidents do not. In contrast, special interest groups tend to have a negative impact.

We examine the characteristics of a largely ignored low-turnout group—people who have recently moved. We find that neither demographic nor attitudinal attributes explain their lower turnout. Instead, the requirement that citizens must register anew after each change in residence constitutes the key stumbling block in the trip to the polls. Since nearly one-third of the nation moves every two years, moving has a large impact on national turnout rates. We offer a proposal to reduce the effect of residential mobility on turnout and estimate that turnout would increase by nine percentage points if the impact of moving could be removed. The partisan consequences of such a change would be marginal.

Scholarly inquiry concerning influences on electoral outcomes in the presidential nomination process, though extensive, has been conducted almost exclusively with data collected at the individual level of analysis. The Michigan model of normal vote analysis suggests that long-term influences measured at the aggregate level, such as the sociodemographic, economic, and ideological characteristics of the states, are also important in determining electoral outcomes. We present an aggregate-level analysis of state characteristics that affected the Hart, Jackson, and Mondale vote proportions in the 1984 Democratic caucuses and primaries. Our primary election models explain between 65% and 83% of the variance in candidate vote shares, with sociodemographic and economic factors as the leading indicators. In the caucuses, we find that campaign spending and sociodemographic influences are dominant in models that explain between 38% and 81% of the variance. We conclude with a brief discussion of what our findings mean for future Democratic candidates.

Legislative committees have fascinated scholars and reformers for more than a century. All acknowledge the central strategic position of committees in legislatures. The consensus, however, centers on empirical regularities and stylized facts, not on explanations. We seek to explain why committees are powerful. We formulate an institutionally rich rational-choice model of legislative politics in which the sequence of the legislative process is given special prominence. Committees, as agenda setters in their respective jurisdictions, are able to enforce many of their policy wishes not only because they originate bills but also because they get a second chance after their chamber has worked its will. This occurs at the conference stage in which the two chambers of a bicameral legislature resolve differences between versions of a bill. A theory of conference politics is offered and some evidence from recent Congresses is provided.

Participation in committee decision making is an important form of legislative behavior but one we know little about. I develop a model of committee participation and test it using data drawn from staff interviews and records of the House Committee on Education and Labor. The analysis confirms that congressmen are purposive actors, but it also shows that different interests incite participation on different issues and that motivational effects vary in predictable ways across legislative contexts. If members are purposive, however, they also face a variable set of opportunities and constraints that structure their ability to act. Members and especially leaders of the reporting subcommittee, for instance, enjoy advantages in terms of information, staff, and lines of political communication. At the same time, freshman status entails behavioral constraints despite the reputed demise of apprenticeship in legislative life. Understanding such patterns of interest and ability, I conclude, should permit us to illuminate several larger questions regarding decision making and representation in a decentralized Congress.

Work by Axelrod, Hardin, and Taylor indicates that problems of repeated collective action may lessen if people use decentralized strategies of reciprocity to induce mutual cooperation. Hobbes's centralized solution may thus be overrated. We investigate these issues by representing ongoing collective action as an n-person repeated prisoner's dilemma. The results show that decentralized conditional cooperation can ease iterated collective action dilemmas—if all players perfectly monitor the relation between individual choices and group payoffs. Once monitoring uncertainty is introduced, such strategies degrade rapidly in value, and centrally administered selective incentives become relatively more valuable. Most importantly, we build on a suggestion of Herbert Simon by showing that a hierarchical structure, with reciprocity used in subunits and selective incentives centrally administered, combines the advantages of the decentralized and centralized solutions. This hierarchical form is more stable than the decentralized structure and often secures more cooperation than the centralized structure. Generally, the model shows that the logic of repeated decision making has significant implications for the institutional forms of collective action.

A reduced form equation system is used to analyze the influence of economic, political, and institutional influences on the budgetary priorities of the executive branch and Congress during fiscal 1955–81. Three related issues are considered: the extent to which political and macroeconomic factors affect priorities; the degree of interdependence among the components of the federal budget and between spending and revenues; and differences between the executive branch and Congress with respect to these issues. Both types of interdependence are present within both executive branch and congressional budgeting, although this interdependence is stronger within the executive branch. The influence of economic conditions on budgetary outcomes is strong but varies considerably across spending categories. There is no evidence of apolitical business cycle. Political variables exert a modest influence on the budgetary outcomes examined; differences between Democratic and Republican budgetary policies, as well as differences in the budgetary priorities of different presidential administrations, are small by comparison with the differences between executive and congressional policies.

A considerable theoretical literature argues that if everyone votes sincerely, then an agenda setter has near dictatorial influence on final outcomes, whereas if everyone votes strategically, then an agenda setter's power is considerably reduced. This literature assumes that all feasible agendas are of a special type called amendment agendas. But actual legislative and committee agendas—notably those found in Congress—often are not of this type. Once we expand the domain of feasible agendas to include all types allowed by common parliamentary practice, the influence of agendas on legislative outcomes expands, even with strategic voting. Besides showing with counterexamples that previous results do not extend to a more realistic domain of agendas, we prove some theorems that specify the limits (such as they are) of an agenda setter's power.

Lebanon's banking system is viewed as an “international regime” that held the country together in the face of all pervasive warfare. The system illustrates the underlying logic of such regimes, in that the banks' credit policies operationalized the rational choice model of an iterated prisoner's dilemma game. And just as international regimes are supposed to reflect the interests of state actors, analysis of the banks' balance sheets and income statements reveals changes in capital structure that reflect changes in Lebanon's political balance. While sustaining elite cohesion, the banks serviced political clienteles and might, if a political settlement were reached, support the restructuring of a consociational system more in line with Lebanon's demographic balance. If, on the other hand, no settlement is reached, the poor country's suicide may highlight certain aspects of international reality that seem recalcitrant to the theory of international regimes.

The appropriate model of international conflict and war has been much discussed in recent years, and considerable progress has been made in modeling. Nevertheless the assumptions, conditions, and specifications for international conflict models remain eminently debatable. In the December 1986 issue of this Review, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and David Lalman presented a generalized expected utility model of international conflict. Here Seif Hussein takes issue with their model in various particulars, aiming to perfect and strengthen the model. Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman respond.

This research report analyzes the evolution of the bond between a charismatic leader and his mass following. Its empirical focus is the case of Juan Peron and the Peronist movement in Argentina. After discussing stages in the evolution of charisma, we review our earlier findings showing that by 1965 there was clear separation between those Peronists devoted to the movement and those Peronists devoted to the man. We note distinctive features in the social and attitudinal profiles of each and then turn to our principal concern, the recruitment of new blood into each Peronist camp. Personalist youth turn out to be much like their older counterparts, but organizationalist youth demonstrate social and attitudinal features that set them dramatically apart from the personalists and apart from the older organizationalists as well. We discuss the implications of this ever widening rift.