This article examines attitudes towards the two major political parties in the United States from 1952 to 1980, using national election study data from open-ended likes/dislikes questions. The major trend which is found is a shift toward neutral evaluations of the parties. A reinterpretation of party decline in the electorate is offered, in which the much-discussed alienation from parties is largely rejected as an explanation. Rather, it is argued that the link between parties and candidates has been substantially weakened over the years and hence that political parties have become increasingly meaningless to the electorate.

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.

How do global sources of information such as mass media outlets, state propaganda, NGOs, and national party leadership affect aggregate behavior? Prior work on this question has insufficiently considered the complex interaction between social network and mass media influences on individual behavior. By explicitly modeling this interaction, I show that social network structure conditions media's impact. Empirical studies of media effects that fail to consider this risk bias. Further, social network interactions can amplify media bias, leading to large swings in aggregate behavior made more severe when individuals can select into media matching their preferences. Countervailing media outlets and social elites with unified preferences can mitigate the effect of bias; however, media outlets promulgating antistatus quo bias have an advantage. Theoretical results such as these generate numerous testable hypotheses; I provide guidelines for deriving and testing hypotheses from the model and discuss several such hypotheses.

Whether presidential unilateralism is normatively advantageous or parlous for American democracy may depend on the extent to which a check remains on its exercise and abuse. Because the formal institutional constraints on unilateral action are weak, an emerging literature argues that the most important checks on unilateralism may be political, with public opinion playing a pivotal role. However, existing scholarship offers little systematic evidence that public opinion constrains unilateral action. To fill this gap, we use vector autoregression with Granger-causality tests to examine the relationship between presidential approval and executive orders. Contra past speculation that presidents increasingly issue executive orders as a last resort when their stock of political capital is low, we find that rising approval ratings increase the frequency of major unilateral action. Low approval ratings, by contrast, limit the exercise of unilateral power.

I develop an approach for analyzing the conditions for cooperative resolution of policy conflict. I analyze certain policy conflicts as bargaining situations, with opportunity for cooperation, among opposing issue factions. As a framework for analysis, I present an informal game-theoretic interpretation of nonzero-sum policy conflict. With that foundation, I derive implications about the conditions for cooperative outcomes with respect to several aspects of the policy process: issue content, the structure of conflict, leadership, party politics, and political institutions.

Several recent studies have claimed to explain the post-1960 decline in U.S. presidential and congressional election turnout in terms of just a few variables. Abramson and Aldrich (1982) attribute the great bulk of the decline to aggregate declines in partisanship and political efficacy. Shaffer (1981) attributes still more of the decline to aggregate decreases in these same two variables plus age and following the campaign in the newspapers. And Kleppner (1982) attributes “virtually all” of the decline to aggregate decreases in the first three of these variables. We show how these studies measure explanation too generously and how the very short-handedness of their models makes them seem more successful than they are. These few variables, we conclude, leave most of the decline unexplained.

We provide a comprehensive assessment of the influence of television advertising on United States election outcomes from 2000–2018. We expand on previous research by including presidential, Senate, House, gubernatorial, Attorney General, and state Treasurer elections and using both difference-in-differences and border-discontinuity research designs to help identify the causal effect of advertising. We find that televised broadcast campaign advertising matters up and down the ballot, but it has much larger effects in down-ballot elections than in presidential elections. Using survey and voter registration data from multiple election cycles, we also show that the primary mechanism for ad effects is persuasion, not the mobilization of partisans. Our results have implications for the study of campaigns and elections as well as voter decision making and information processing.

The idea that rulers must seek consent before making policy is key to democracy. We suggest that this practice evolved independently in a large fraction of human societies where executives ruled jointly with councils. We argue that council governance was more likely to emerge when information asymmetries made it harder for rulers to extract revenue, and we illustrate this with a theoretical model. Giving the population a role in governance became one means of overcoming the information problem. We test this hypothesis by examining the correlation between localized variation in agricultural suitability and the presence of council governance in the Standard Cross Cultural Sample. As a further step, we suggest that executives facing substantial information asymmetries could also have an alternative route for resource extraction—develop a bureaucracy to measure variation in productivity. Further empirical results suggest that rule by bureaucracy could substitute for shared rule with a council.

In a recent essay, Richard Snyder has stated that: “[A] paradox in political science is the lack … of any systematic attention to the analysis of the decision-making behavior of judges.” It is not my purpose to argue either for or against the particular frame of reference for decision-making analysis advocated by Snyder. I do believe, however, that he has correctly identified the approach—the analysis of judicial decision-making as an aspect of political behavior—which is most likely to command the focus of interest and activity of the coming generation of political scientists whose substantive concern is with the study of political problems in the area of our discipline traditionally known as public law.

The concept “political behavior” remains sufficiently novel within the public law fraternity to impose something of an obligation to make clear what I have in mind in using the term. I shall borrow from David B. Truman who, in a Brookings Lecture not long ago, defined the “behavioral sciences” as “those bodies of knowledge, in whatever academic department they may be found, that provide or aspire to provide ‘verified principles’ of human behavior through the use of methods of inquiry similar to those of the natural sciences.”

The conception of “external” sovereignty was well established in the Hindu philosophy of the state. The Hindu thinkers not only analyzed sovereignty with regard to the constituent elements in a single state. They realized also that sovereignty is not complete unless it is external as well as internal, that is, unless the state can exercise its internal authority unobstructed by, and independently of, other states.

“Great misery,” says Shookra, “comes of dependence on others. There is no greater happiness than that from self-rule.” This is one of the maxims of the Shookra-neeti bearing on the freedom of the rastra, or the land and the people in a state. Kautilya also in his remarks on “foreign rule” expresses the same idea in a negative manner. Under it, we are told in his Artha-shastra, the country is not treated as one's own land, it is impoverished, its wealth carried off, or it is treated “as a commercial article.” The description is suggestive of John Stuart Mill's metaphor of the “cattle farm” applied to the “government of one people by another.”

Behind most political scientists' studies of nonvoting there is, implicitly at least, a theory of passive consent. This is particularly the case where nonvoting as a result of apathy is concerned. For, it is suggested, apathy tends to increase when citizens are satisfied that their interests will not be seriously harmed, regardless of which party wins. In other words: the very reasons which underlie apathetic nonvoters' failure to participate in an election testify that their inactivity is a form of passive consent to the election's outcome.

Passive consent, however, cannot be equated to the “theory of consensus” which economists have recently contributed to political science. This “theory of consensus” deals with the “welfare economics” problem of aggregating individual citizens' preferences into a “true”—indeed, into a mathematically precise—schedule of social preferences. Thus, while it is plausible that a citizen can, by nonvoting, tacitly consent to a given electoral outcome, it is also likely that the final social decision would change, however slightly, if in fact this citizen's true preferences had been admitted through voting into the social aggregation. In this case, the final choice would have popular consent without real popular consensus.

The converse can also be true. For example, while Duncan Black's Theory of Committees and Elections and Kenneth Arrow's Social Choice and Individual Values are characterized by a most impressive formal elegance, it is also true that neither makes provision for nonvoting.

We examine the interaction between partisan affect and elite polarization in a behavioral voting model. Voting is determined by affect rather than rational choice. Parties are office-motivated; they choose policies to win elections. We show that parties bias their policies toward their partisans if voters exhibit ingroup responsiveness, i.e., they respond more strongly to their own party’s policy deviations than to policy deviations by the other party. Our results suggest that affective polarization is a driver of the growing elite polarization in American politics. Importantly, this observation does not assume any shifts in the voters’ bliss points and is therefore orthogonal to the controversy over whether the American electorate has become more polarized in ideology.

We investigate how cabinet decision-making rules interact with political uncertainty to affect the outcomes of bargaining processes in parliamentary systems. Our formal models compare two types of decisions rules: (1) those that give prime ministers unilateral authority to demand a vote of confidence and (2) those that require prime ministers to obtain collective cabinet approval for confidence motions. We examine these models under assumptions of complete information and of political uncertainty, that is, party leaders lack information about the precise policies that others in the governing coalition will support. Our analysis suggests that the nature of the cabinet decision rules should influence the distribution of bargaining power, the ability to exploit political uncertainty, the likelihood of inefficient government terminations, the circumstances surrounding such failures, and, indirectly, the political considerations that parties face when choosing prime ministers during government formation. Simple empirical tests support some of these insights.

This paper revisits the issue of economic voting in the context of the 1996 Presidential Election in Russia. The election was branded as a fundamental choice between capitalism and communism, yet voters were also grappling with a large crisis of personal finances: about one in two workers experienced nonpayments of wages at the time of the elections. The analysis exploits a rich nationally representative household panel dataset to identify the impact of wage arrears on the second-round election outcome. Wage arrears reduced the vote for the incumbent President Yeltsin among workers from around 65% to 49%, which amounts to a drop of 4% in the Yeltsin vote in the second round. Support for Yeltsin vote declined with the amount of wage arrears at the time of the vote and with wage arrears in 1995. Wage arrears led more voters to believe the government to be noncaring and to favor income restrictions for the rich. Political attitudes of working men changed more than those of working women.

The purpose here is to explore certain aspects of the philosophy of science which have serious implications both for the practice of social and political science and for understanding that practice. The current relationship between social science and the philosophy of science (or the philosophy of the social sciences) is a curious one. Despite the emergence of a considerable body of literature in philosophy which is pertinent to the methodological problems of social science, there has been a lack of osteusive ties between the two areas. A justified concern with the independence of social scientific research has contributed to a tendency toward isolation which is unfortunate in view of the proliferation of philosophical problems which necessarily attends the rapid expansion of any empirical discipline. Although in the literature of contemporary social science there are frequent references to certain works in the philosophy of science and to philosophical issues relating to methodology, these are most often in the context of bald pronouncements and shibboleths relating to the nature of science, its goals, and the character of its reasoning. But what is most disturbing about the fact that social scientists have little direct and thorough acquaintance with the philosophy of science is not merely that there has been a failure to carefully examine the many logical and epistemological assumptions which are implicit in social scientific inquiry, since this task might normally and properly be considered to be within the province of the philospher of science.

Arming is puzzling for the same reason war is: it produces outcomes that could instead be realized through negotiation, without the costly diversion of resources arming entails. Despite this, arms control is exceedingly rare historically, so that arming is ubiquitous and its costs to humanity are large. We develop and test a theory that explains why arming is so common and its control so rare. The main impediment to arms control is the need for monitoring that renders a state’s arming transparent enough to assure its compliance but not so much as to threaten its security. We present evidence that this trade-off has undermined arms control in three diverse contexts: Iraq’s weapons programs after the Gulf War, great power competition in arms in the interwar period, and superpower military rivalry during the Cold War. These arms races account for almost 40% of all global arming in the past two centuries.

Reiter and Stam advance the study of the conflict behavior of authoritarian regimes in two ways. First, they clearly demonstrate the importance of using directed dyad data sets for studying mixed pairs of political regimes. Second, they have refocused our attention on the question of decisional constraints and international conflict. This response examines the dispute patterns of a specific mixed pair of authoritarian regimes, single-party regimes, and personalist dictatorships. We find that single-party regimes are significantly less likely to start militarized disputes against personalist dictatorships than is true of other types of regime dyads. In contrast, personalist regimes are somewhat more likely to initiate militarized disputes against single-party regimes than is the norm for other regime dyads. These findings indicate that the relationships among specific types of authoritarian regimes may be as consequential as the relationships between democracies and authoritarian regimes of any type. They also indicate that we need to examine further the role that institutional constraints play in shaping the conflict behavior of authoritarian regimes.We thank Chris Butler for his comments and Dan Reiter for sharing his data.

The concept of shape is considered in abstract terms drawing on approaches outside the electoral districting literature. The concept is broken down into a series of four divergences from “compactness” relating to “elongation,” “indentation,” “separation,” and “puncturedness.” Given this conceptual framework, the use of shape measures in electoral districting is reconsidered and a new shape measure is proposed. This assesses the indentation of a district shape and is based on the internal angles within the shape. It is suggested that this measure may be particularly relevant to the evaluation of proposed new districting patterns. The technique is illustrated using proposed new Congressional Districts for Iowa.

This report provides an update of major characteristics of the Democratic and Republican party coalitions for the recent U.S. presidential election. Earlier reports published in this Review have provided this kind of analysis from 1952 to 1980.

Admired during much of this century, the British party model became especially attractive to American political scientists seeking responsible-party government in the early postwar years. After the mid-1960s, the model's appeal declined as did Britain's national status and the hopes for the democratic socialism often associated with the model. In the 1970s, the model itself seems to have worked in a way unlike that of prior decades. From this intellectual case history, a few broad inferences are drawn about the changing perspectives of political scientists.