Without much question, the third-party movement of George C. Wallace constituted the most unusual feature of the 1968 presidential election. While this movement failed by a substantial margin in its audacious attempt to throw the presidential contest into the House of Representatives, in any other terms it was a striking success. It represented the first noteworthy intrusion on a two-party election in twenty years. The Wallace ticket drew a larger proportion of the popular vote than any third presidential slate since 1924, and a greater proportion of electoral votes than any such movement for more than a century, back to the curiously divided election of 1860. Indeed, the spectre of an electoral college stalemate loomed sufficiently large that serious efforts at reform have since taken root.

At the same time, the Wallace candidacy was but one more dramatic addition to an unusually crowded rostrum of contenders, who throughout the spring season of primary elections were entering and leaving the lists under circumstances that ranged from the comic through the astonishing to the starkly tragic. Six months before the nominating conventions, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had been the expected 1968 protagonists, with some greater degree of uncertainty, as usual, within the ranks of the party out of power. The nominating process for the Republicans followed the most-probable script rather closely, with the only excitement being provided by the spectacle of Governors Romney and Rockefeller proceeding as through revolving doors in an ineffectual set of moves aimed at providing a Republican alternative to the Nixon candidacy. Where things were supposed to be most routine on the Democratic side, however, surprises were legion, including the early enthusiasm for Eugene McCarthy, President Johnson's shocking announcement that he would not run, the assassination of Robert Kennedy in the flush of his first electoral successes, and the dark turmoil in and around the Chicago nominating convention, with new figures like Senators George McGovern and Edward Kennedy coming into focus as challengers to the heir apparent, Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

The open rule in the House is a complex set of restrictions, limiting, for example, the number of motions and the order of recognition. By incorporating constraints based on the actual set of rules into a model, I show that legislative outcomes appear more predictable than was previously thought. These rules nearly always allow the proponents of legislation to respond to an opponent's amendment, mitigating the potential damage of the latter. An advantage of the approach is that it provides a new interpretation of the changes in floor activity observed in the postreform period.

Since the debt crisis of 1982, Mexico has experienced more than a decade of market-oriented economic reform, but research on public opinion toward reform is limited. Drawing on general findings from opinion research in the United States, this study examines how policy preferences of Mexicans are shaped by social background, judgments about the economy, and political loyalties. The effect of these variables is examined across three national surveys, conducted in 1992, 1994, and 1995. We found that favorable orientations toward the president and the ruling party were consistently the strongest predictors of preferences about reform. Furthermore, as in the United States, sociotropic evaluations of the economy outweigh “pocketbook” concerns; despite many years of reform, both expectations and retrospective judgments are important in shaping preferences, particularly since the 1994 crisis; and social background variables have limited direct influence.

Many of Locke's early writings have been discovered and published in the last 30 years. Among them are two short tracts in which Locke argues that the power of the civil magistrate should be absolute. Because these early tracts are very different from Locke's later teachings, they have been misunderstood by contemporary scholars who do not see any connection between absolutism and liberal toleration. I explain the connection by reconstructing Locke's critique of religious politics, which reveals that absolutism and toleration are the same in principle despite their great difference in practice. I then use this demonstration to explain Locke's development and to illuminate the foundations of contemporary liberalism.

Historically, republicans were of different minds about markets: some, such as Rousseau, reviled them, while others, like Adam Smith, praised them. The recent republican resurgence has revived this issue. Classical liberals such as Gerald Gaus contend that neorepublicanism is inherently hostile to markets, while neorepublicans like Richard Dagger and Philip Pettit reject this characterization—though with less enthusiasm than one might expect. I argue here that the right republican attitude toward competitive markets is celebratory rather than acquiescent and that republicanism demands such markets for the same reason it requires the rule of law: because both are essential institutions for protecting individuals from arbitrary interference. I reveal how competition restrains—and in the limit, even eradicates—market power and thereby helps us realize “market freedom,” i.e., freedom as nondomination in the context of economic exchange. Finally, I show that such freedom necessitates “Anglo-Nordic” economic policies.

We develop a model of crisis stability based on a deterrence game. Players are assumed to be able to choose any level of initial cooperation or noncooperation; the more cooperative player (if there is one) may then choose to retaliate. In a crisis, players are assumed to have escalated their conflict and desire to stabilize it before it explodes. Players can, by threatening their opponent, stabilize the new status quo. In addition, points of threat escalation are identified at which neither player can prevent the opponent from escalating further without threatening the opponent more severely than before the crisis erupted, thereby heating up an already tense situation. Crisis stabilization is aided by being close to the full-cooperation position, though, paradoxically, both players may benefit from having created a crisis that only escalating threats may resolve. We discuss ways of avoiding threat escalation and the increased risk of war that it entails, especially in conflicts between the superpowers.

Distributing “raw” data among types or classes is a necessary and illuminating part of the process of research and discovery in any science, particularly in the early stages of the latter's development. But it produces fruitful results only if the types or classes make sense, which they will just to the extent that, inter alia, the variables we fix upon in defining them are the significant ones (for the purpose in view, of course), and that the classes (a) exhaust the phenomena under consideration, and (b) do not overlap.

One of the most elementary procedures used in dealing with the raw data of political conflict is that which, taking its departure from the notion of “party systems,” seeks to assign each observed instance to one or another of three types: the “one-party system,” the “two-party system,” and the “multiple-party system.” All party systems, it is assumed, belong as a matter of course to one of the three, so that one of the researcher's first tasks in studying the phenomena of party conflict in a given political situation is to find out with which one of the three types he is dealing. Until he has done this—so runs the tacit premise—he does not have his problem in manageable shape.

Those who specialize in the study of Soviet government and politics are beginning to feel and acknowledge the need for a more effective theoretical apparatus. The post-war years of expanded research in this field have been fruitful in empirical studies of Soviet political history and institutions, but the theoretical development has not kept pace; and now the lag is beginning to inhibit the further fruitful progress of empirical research itself. Instead of a gradually developing body of theory, we still have a mélange of “ten theories in search of reality,” as Daniel Bell has summed it up in the title of a recent article.

The purpose of the present paper is not to propound an eleventh theory. It is only an exploratory effort, a consideration of a somewhat different approach to the problem than has been customary in the field of Soviet studies. In presenting it, I shall try to shed the blinkers of a Russian specialist and take a look at the whole political galaxy in which Russia is only the biggest star and probably no longer the brightest one.

The best way out of the theoretical difficulty may lie in making the study of Soviet government and politics more comparative than it has generally been so far, thus bringing it into much closer working relations with political science as a whole and particularly with the slowly growing body of theory in comparative politics. As this statement implies, our work on Soviet government and politics has been characterized by a certain theoretical isolationism.

The law of standing—rules by which judges find whether a party may bring suit—has been liberalized in the federal courts to permit interest group disputes not ordinarily possible. Following an historical pattern of conflict containment within judicial-style processes, consumer and environmental groups contest corporate business decisions by challenging the legality of their regulatory or legislative authorization. The vagueness and substantive emphasis of the new rules give groups more influence in determining when courts will intervene in the affairs of the other branches; and the doctrine's recognition of noneconomic injuries logically forces judges to consider whether they may find standing for some “public interest” beyond a specific plaintiff. Changes in standing equalize social power; but the entanglement of courts in the puzzles of interest representation may restrict protections for strictly private litigants, and may further remove the political system from the Rule of Law.

The Soviet Union achieved its stability in the early stages of development not by institutionalizing participation but by forcing departicipation and substituting a functionally distinct form of political activity—involvement in co-production. These policies constitute essential complements in the Leninist developmental strategy. The ability of enlisted involvement to block the growth of participatory pressures tends to decline in later stages of development, however. The result is spontaneous withdrawal from the institutions of coproduction and the rise of participatory pressures. This pattern is documented with evidence from Soviet electoral and membership statistics, Soviet reports of opinion surveys, Western interviews of Soviet émigrés, and cross-national estimates of political dissidence. The Leninist crisis of participation requires a policy response to close the participation-institution gap once again. The alternative policy responses of Soviet general secretaries are characterized as totalitarian, authoritarian, liberal, and socialist.

Modern presidents must be attentive to influences of the federal bureaucracy on their policy initiatives and all attempt some measure of bureaucratic control. This article assesses the extent of President Nixon's success in gaining some degree of management control over the bureaucracy through the manipulation of the civil service personnel system. We find that Republicans were, in fact, more likely to be selected to top career positions during the Nixon years. We find also that career executives calling themselves Independents were more likely during the Nixon years than before to resemble Republican executives in their support of Nixon's policies and goals. This is significant to presidential control because of the large number of bureaucrats calling themselves Independents. We conclude that Independent career executives may provide a president with a considerable reservoir of bureaucratic support.

We study a core question of interest in political science: Do candidates position themselves differently under different electoral systems and is their positioning in line with the expectations of spatial theories? We use validated estimates of candidate ideological positions derived from quantitative scaling of 7,497 Japanese-language election manifestos written by the near universe of candidates who competed in the eight House of Representatives elections held on either side of Japan’s 1994 electoral reform. Leveraging variation before and after Japan’s electoral reform, as well as within each electoral system, we find that candidates converge in single-member districts and diverge in multimember districts, and converge on copartisans when not faced with intraparty competition and diverge when they do. Our study helps to clarify debates about the effects of electoral systems on ideological polarization and party cohesion in Japan and more generally.

A classic question about democratic elections is how much they are able to influence politician behavior by forcing them to anticipate future reelection attempts, especially in contexts where voters are not paying close attention and are not well informed. We compile a new dataset containing roughly 780,000 bills, combined with more than 16 million roll-call voting records for roughly 6,000 legislators serving in U.S. state legislatures with term limits. Using an individual-level difference-in-differences design, we find that legislators who can no longer seek reelection sponsor fewer bills, are less productive on committees, and are absent for more floor votes, on average. Building a new dataset of roll-call votes and interest-group ratings, we find little evidence that legislators who cannot run for reelection systematically shift their ideological platforms. In sum, elections appear to influence how legislators allocate their effort in important ways even in low-salience environments but may have less influence on ideological positioning.

Norwegian party politics is characterized by coalition avoidance that defies conventional coalition theory. This failure of coalescence can be caused either by policy pursuit (preference-induced) or by institutional constraint (structure-induced). We test the explanatory power of policy-based and institutional explanations, relying on content analysis of authoritative party and government documents for our policy measures. The results show that the left–right policy dimension has powerfully constrained Norwegian interparty bargaining and that policy-based coalition theory can account for many apparent anomalies in Norwegian coalition politics. A permissive institutional environment has also fostered coalition avoidance. Although core-based coalition theory can thus be successfully adapted to the Norwegian case, it rests on a number of critical assumptions that limit its general applicability.

Studies attempting to predict public expenditures using political variables have generally incorrectly assumed that political, like socioeconomic, variables function as determinants of policy levels and types. If one assumes, however, that the function of the political process in representative government is to translate citizens' demands for various levels of services as accurately as possible, then political variables must be conceptualized as mediating in character. In the absence of knowledge of whether public services are being oversupplied or undersupplied in relation to citizen demands, the effects of political variables can therefore, be better tested by moving beyond single-equation regression models.

An alternative method for examining impacts of political variables is presented by integrating them with conventional theories of political representation. This leads to a concept of “translation error,” and ways of examining relationships between this concept and political variables are explicated. Finally, the greater theoretical utility of this reformulation for the study of public policy is examined, and empirical studies which indicate its validity are cited.

This paper discusses the construction of a formal model of national political development derived from theories of political integration and instability, and reports the results of tests of the model based on data descriptive of contemporary black African nations. Political integration is conceptually elaborated in terms of processes of horizontal, vertical, and value integration, and political centralization. Political instability is conceptualized in terms of elite, communal, and mass instability. These dimensions of integration and instability are operationalized, and the analysis evaluates the hypothesis that integration decreases the likelihood of political instability in African nations, and that political centralization, in particular, decreases the likelihood of political instability by modifying, or reinforcing, the effects of other processes of integration. Methodologically, the analysis is based on the assessment of convergent validation for hypotheses tested with multiple indicators, regression, and path-analytic techniques.

Our article (1990) on alliance dynamics in multipolarity, which John Vasquez criticizes, differs from some neorealist approaches by incorporating variables from the theory of the security dilemma, including perceptual factors. Nonetheless, our argument meets Imre Lakatos's criteria for a progressive problem shift insofar as it explains more than the original theory, does so parsimoniously, has been successfully applied to new domains, and does not introduce new assumptions that contradict the core of the original theory.

Are citizens willing to tolerate violations of democratic rules and norms by competent political leaders? I examine this question employing well-powered conjoint experiments in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Mexico, and South Korea. The findings yield good as well as bad news for democracy. I find that undemocratic behavior by political candidates decreases voter support, whereas candidate competence increases support. Contrary to expectations, the effects of undemocratic behavior and competence do not interact. This means that competent candidates are sanctioned for violating democratic principles but also that support for undemocratic candidates increases with their competence. These findings can help explain the successes and failures of undemocratic political leaders around the world: although these leaders can gain support by appearing to be competent, competence does not make citizens tolerate undemocratic behavior entirely.

Postindustrial occupational change has ended an era of unprecedented upward mobility. We examine the political implications of this immense structural shift by introducing the concept of status discordance, which we operationalize as the difference between status expectations formed during childhood and outcomes realized in adulthood. We leverage German household panel data and predictive modeling to provide empirical estimates of status expectations based on childhood circumstances and parental background. The analysis reveals that political dissatisfaction is widespread among voters who fall short of intergenerational status expectations. We show that such dissatisfaction is associated with higher abstention rates, less mainstream party support, and more radical voting. Moreover, we explore variation in status discordance by gender, education, and occupation, which influence the choice between radical left and right parties. Our findings highlight how expectations about opportunities underlie generational voting patterns and shed light on the ongoing breakdown of the postwar political consensus.

Theorists of democracy emphasize the importance of a public sphere, distinct from the apparatus of the state, where citizens can freely associate, deliberate, and engage in collective will formation. Discourse ethicists and deliberative democrats locate the public sphere within civil society and the manifold associations that comprise it. For Seyla Benhabib, the public sphere is constituted by the anonymous “public conversation” of civil society. By contrast, John Rawls has a much more limited conception of the public sphere. For Rawls, public reason, which establishes norms for democratic discourse, applies to a limited domain. I defend Rawls's view against the charge that it depends upon an untenable distinction between the public and nonpublic spheres. I argue that Rawls's more limited “liberal” conception better guarantees the heterogeneity of associational life in civil society. I then argue that Rawls violates his own principles by partially collapsing the public-nonpublic distinction with potentially illiberal consequences.