Is our moral cognition “colored” by the language(s) that we speak? Despite the centrality of language to political life and agency, limited attempts have been made thus far in contemporary political philosophy to consider this possibility. We therefore set out to explore the possible influence of linguistic relativity effects on political thinking in linguistically diverse societies. We begin by introducing the facts and fallacies of the “linguistic relativity” principle, and explore the various ways in which they “color,” often covertly, current normative debates. To illustrate this, we focus on two key Rawlsian concepts: the original position and public reason. We then move to consider the resulting epistemic challenges and opportunities facing contemporary multilingual democratic societies in an age of increased mobility, arguing for the consequent imperative of developing political metalinguistic awareness and political extelligence among political scientists, political philosophers, and political actors alike in an irreducibly complex linguistic world.

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.

Political competition is widely recognized as a mediator of public goods provision through its salutary effect on incumbents’ electoral incentives. We argue that political competition additionally mediates public goods provision by reducing the efficiency of legislative bargaining. These countervailing forces may produce a net negative effect in places with weak parties and low transparency—typical of many young democracies. We provide evidence of a robust negative relationship between political competition and local public goods using panel data from Mali. Tests of mechanisms corroborate our interpretation of this relationship as evidence of legislative bargaining inefficiencies. To explore the generalizability of these findings, we analyze cross-country panel data and show that political competition leads to better (worse) public goods provision under high (low) levels of party system institutionalization. The paper sheds light on why political competition is only selectively beneficial, and underscores the importance of considering both the electoral and legislative arenas.

This letter investigates how voter transitions between parties affect parties’ policy positioning. While a growing literature investigates the role of election results as signals for parties’ policy adaption, it has mostly focused on vote changes of individual parties. However, parties do not know only whether they have won or lost in an election; they also have detailed information on which parties they won votes from and which parties they lost votes to. We make two arguments about how voter transitions should affect the strategic policy choices of political parties. First, when a party has lost votes to another party it will adapt its policy positions toward that party. Second, parties that have overall lost more votes become more likely to adapt their positions. Making use of a data set on individual voter transitions and party positions we can demonstrate that voter transitions indeed affect parties’ competitive behavior.

The relationship between age and active-passive leadership style is analyzed with direct observational data describing the behavior of a sample of 24 mayors during issue discussion and debate on their councils over a one-year period of meetings. Activity, measured as a time-based rate of verbal participation, was found to increase with the age of leaders to a high in the midfifties, and to decline for older mayors in their sixties and seventies. Political experience interacted with age to affect activity. Inexperienced mayors displayed a less active style, regardless of age; but experienced mayors in their sixties and seventies had the least active style of all. These findings held up under control f or group size, political structure on the councils, and community characteristics.

This essay introduces the reader to the contemporary literature on gender roles and feminine behavior, including the major concepts, empirical findings, and social thought which have implications for political behavior and research. Gender roles as they relate to the psychology and activity of men and women, and their systemic cultural, economic, and legal ramifications provide an explanation and a basis for understanding political behavior, including recurrent women's protest movements. Contemporary writing contributes to building a non-androcentric and accurate body of knowledge regarding political woman, and it calls into question the ideology of the biological determinism of political activity. The literature surveyed has potential usefulness for public policy: an expansion of democracy is viable with the discernment and removal of barriers which hinder substantial proportions of women from achieving political leadership and hence participating in authoritative decision making and value allocation. A bibliography of major references is appended.

One of the more fruitful systematic approaches to the study of foreign policy views nations as information processors and explains foreign policy as a function of information and processing thereon. Much of such processing depends on the prior beliefs of decision makers, but for a variety of reasons these systems of prior beliefs are very difficult to analyze using “standard” empirical and modeling techniques. Computational modeling, including expert system technology, provides an alternative methodology that allows such analysis. I present Policy Arguer (POLI), an expert system model of U.S. foreign policy making in Asia. Poli has been very successful in reproducing actual U.S. responses to events in Asia from the 1950s. More important, POLI recreates policy debate in the form of the arguments and counterarguments used to justify policy alternatives. The model explains foreign policy outputs in terms of a complete process from foreign policy beliefs, through debate, to choice.

In recent decades, the concept of “the people” has received sustained theoretical attention. Unfortunately, political theorists have said very little about its explicit or implicit use in thinking about the expansion of the American polity along racial lines. The purpose of this article in taking up this issue is twofold: first, to provide a substantive account of the meaning of “the people”—what I call its descriptive and aspirational dimensions—and second, to use that description as a framework for understanding the rhetorical character of W.E.B. Du Bois's classic work, The Souls of Black Folk, and its relationship to what one might call the cognitive–affective dimension of judgment. In doing so, I argue that as a work of political theory, Souls draws a connection between rhetoric, on the one hand, and emotional states such as sympathy and shame, on the other, to enlarge America's political and ethical imagination regarding the status of African-Americans.

Are democratic states permitted to denationalize citizens, in particular those whom they believe pose dangers to the physical safety of others? In this article, I argue that they are not. The power to denationalize citizens—that is, to revoke citizenship—is one that many states have historically claimed for themselves, but which has largely been in disuse in the last several decades. Recent terrorist events have, however, prompted scholars and political actors to reconsider the role that denationalization can and perhaps should play in democratic states, in particular with respect to its role in protecting national security and in supporting the global fight against terror more generally. In this article, my objective is to show that denationalization laws have no place in democratic states. To understand why, I propose examining the foundations of the right of citizenship, which lie, I shall argue, in the very strong interests that individuals have in security of residence. I use this formulation of the right to respond to two broad clusters of arguments: (1) those that claim that it is justifiable to denationalize citizens who threaten to undermine the safety of citizens in a democratic state or the ability of a democratic state to function as a democratic state, and (2) those that claim that it is justifiable to denationalize dual citizens because they possess citizenship status in a second country that is also able to protect their rights.

Riker and Brams have demonstrated the paradox of vote trading (“… that rational trades by all members [may] make everyone worse off”). In so doing the authors indicate the existence of an apparent disequilibrium when vote trading occurs. I extend this latter point and prove that the preference conditions required for vote trading are the same as those which produce the cyclical majority; the conditions for vote trading and the cyclical majority are logically equivalent. The conclusion briefly indicates the impact of this finding with respect to the work of a number of other authors and gives some idea of the restrictions which would be required to eliminate vote trading among rational legislators.

Studies of the relationship between the presidency and organized interests generally focus on presidential assistants and their communications with the interest group community. I take a different perspective. Based on presidential strategic interests and choices illuminated for several administrations through interviews with White House officials, four kinds of interest group liaison are identified: governing party, consensus building, outreach, and legitimization. These approaches are then empirically evaluated for the Reagan White House using interviews with Reagan's staff and the responses of several hundred interest group leaders to 1980 and 1985 surveys of national voluntary associations. Like the Carter administration after its first year, the Reagan White House initially emphasized “liaison as governing party” built on exclusive and programmatic ties to groups. A less activist legislative agenda and new circumstances later shifted the emphasis of the Reagan and Bush administrations to other forms of interest group liaison.

If the realist tradition has underappreciated the formalizable quality of Thucydides' scientific investigations, neorealist teachers and writers have generally failed to see the normative and dramatical features of Thucydides' political science, each an expression of his dialectical epistemology and ontology. Nicholas Rescher's partial formalization of dialectics as a controversy-oriented approach to knowledge cumulation and Kenneth Burkes dramaturgical approach to textual understanding are both shown to fit Thucydides' argumentation in the Melian dialogue. Thus argumentation produces new knowledge about the inner determinants of Athenian imperialism; simultaneously it dramatically reveals the constituting practical rationale of Athenian actions to be unjust. Once Thucydides' determining essences of power politics are properly uncovered, their false “eternal, mathematical necessity” can be appropriately criticized. A case is thus suggested for a “neoclassical polimetrics” more fundamentally grounded in “political argumentation” about practical choices in particular contexts than in ahistorical laws, inductive statistics or deductive mathematics.

It is often said that the foreign policy of the United States is in need of maturing and that the American people and their government must grow up if they want to emerge victorious from the trials of our age. It would be truer to say that this generation of Americans must shed the illusions of their fathers and grandfathers and relearn the great principles of statecraft which guided the path of the republic in the first decade and—in moralistic disguise—in the first century of its existence. The United States offers the singular spectacle of a commonwealth whose political wisdom did not grow slowly through the accumulation and articulation of experiences. Quite to the contrary, the full flowering of its political wisdom was coeval with its birth as an independent nation—nay, it owed its existence and survival as an independent nation to those extraordinary qualities of political insight, historic perspective, and common sense which the first generation of Americans applied to the affairs of state.

This classic age of American statecraft comes to an end with the physical disappearance of that generation of American statesmen. The rich and varied landscape in which they had planted all that is worthwhile in the tradition of Western political thought was allowed to go to waste. It became a faint and baffling remembrance, a symbol to be worshipped rather than a source of inspiration and a guide for action.

In recent years, a number of scholars have taken parties and partisanship as objects of normative theorizing. They posit partisanship as a fundamentally democratic practice and develop a model of what partisans can do at their best to contribute to liberal democracy. However, the standards the literature puts forth remain insufficiently specified to serve as empirical benchmarks. This article further conceptualizes this model of democratic partisanship and offers a theoretical framework within which to empirically evaluate the democratic merits of partisan discourses. It establishes a series of indicators for assessing the extent to which partisan discourse displays two main qualities: cohesiveness and respect for political pluralism. The article then discusses the implications of using this theoretical framework as a basis for empirical studies and shows how the model can thereby benefit both political scientists and theorists.

Two mechanisms of costly signaling are known in international relations: sinking costs and tying hands. I show that there exist four mechanisms of costly signaling that are equally general. I develop the new mechanisms of installment costs and reducible costs and contrast them with sunk costs and tied-hands costs. I then conduct experiments to test the four signaling mechanisms. I find that each mechanism can improve credibility when the costs are high, but reducible costs can improve credibility even when the costs are low.

This article analyzes the social and political conditions associated with the incidence of racial violence in a sample of 119 American cities. Data on the incidence of racial disorders are drawn from newspaper accounts compiled by the Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence during the period 1967–1969. A total of 334 disorders are analyzed.

Two alternative hypotheses are examined. The first assumes that the causes of the black urban riots are rooted largely in the disorganized environment of socially marginal individuals. The second attempts to locate the outbreak of rioting primarily within a closed and unresponsive political system. Paradoxically, the results tend to provide empirical support for both theoretical perspectives. At the same time, the data suggest the need to reformulate and revise conventional interpretations of the black urban riots. This is done by synthesizing and testing a developmental model which implies a curvilinear relationship between the incidence of racial violence on the one hand, and black political development on the other.

Research on presidential power focuses almost exclusively on the modern era, while earlier presidents are said to have held office while congressional dominance was at its peak. In this article, I argue that nineteenth-century presidents wielded greater influence than commonly recognized due to their position as head of the executive branch. Using an original dataset on the county-level distribution of U.S. post offices from 1876 to 1896, I find consistent evidence that counties represented by a president’s copartisans in the U.S. House received substantially more post offices than other counties, and that these advantages were especially large under divided government and in electorally important states. These results are robust across model specifications and when examining the Senate. The findings challenge key components of the congressional dominance and modern presidency theses, and have important implications for scholarship on interbranch relations, bureaucratic politics, and American political development.

This is a study of the relationship between local political organization, candidate recruitment, and representation in the United States House of Representatives. It seeks to ascertain the effects which different systems of recruitment have upon the kinds of men who enter public life and the public policies they espouse. A case study of metropolitan Chicago is used to demonstrate the utility of this kind of analysis. The objective is to distinguish distinct systems of recruitment in the Chicago area, describe the factors associated with each, and note the consequences of each for representation in Congress.

The choice among measures of relationship has increasingly become a matter of the interpretation of their intermediate values. Interpretations are important, but a prior question is the statistic's implicit model of a relationship—what it considers a perfect relationship, and what it considers a null relationship. A family of models based on combinations of certain maximum- and null-value conditions is analyzed in this paper. The distinction between the models can be used to shed light on the stakes involved in the choice among dichotomous variable measures as well as that among familiar ordinal statistics.

The models are ordered in terms of their leniency, and the coefficients based on each model are specified. An empirical analysis shows that the different measures are positively correlated, but those measures based on different models can differ sharply from one another. Statistics based on the same model covary regardless of differences in their interpretations. Since different models are intended to measure different concepts, multiple coefficients can allow investigators to examine their data in greater detail. Several political examples of the use of multiple models are provided.

This paper examines the sense in which rights can be said to exist. We examine various approaches to the definition and analysis of rights, focusing in particular on the compossibility of rights. Concentrating on three existing approaches to rights—social choice-theoretic, game-theoretic, and Steiner's approach—we suggest that rights are noncompossible in any interesting sense, that is, that the rights people have are nonexistent or vanishingly small. We develop an alternative account of rights—which we claim is more in tune with moral intuitions—where compossibility is not important and rights cannot form the exclusive basis of morality or a theory of justice. Rights are constructed on the basis of more fundamental moral values. We demonstrate how they are constructed and the sense in which they exist even though they might not always be exercised, while acknowledging that rights that may never be exercised are hardly worth the name.We would like to thank Cecile Fabre, Ruth Kinna, Matt Kramer, Anna Pilatova, three anonymous referees, and participants at the Analysis of Measurement of Freedom conference in Palermo, Italy, September 2001, the 2002 meeting of the Dutch Political Science Association, and the Economic Decisions Conference in Pamplona, Spain, June 2002, for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.