Looking over the political scene of contemporary Europe, we observe that the European states are aligned in two fundamentally antagonistic camps of political institutions and ideals. Democracy and liberal institutions are still in force in Great Britain, the Irish Free State, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland, in Switzerland, and in Czechoslovakia; while autocracies at present embrace Russia, Turkey, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Austria, Poland, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Rumania, and Hungary; also among the Baltic states, at least Latvia and Estonia may be so classified. As for Spain and Greece, notwithstanding that democratic constitutions are nominally still in existence, it is at least open to doubt whether or not they at the present moment should be classified as democracies. By far the greater part of European territory and of European population is under dictatorial rule of one type or another. It might seem, therefore, appropriate to weigh the possibilities of a further expansion of the systems of government which, loosely but rather adequately, are termed dictatorships or autocracies.

“Responsiveness,” “responsibility,” and “majority rule” comprise a trio of terms that are basic to the discipline of political science, and particularly to the analysis of democratic political institutions; yet so undeveloped is our science that they represent apples of discord rather than areas of agreement. Where we should have clear concepts for scientific analysis, we are confronted rather with thought receptacles whose unexplored ambiguities constitute standing solicitations to fallacy—solicitations, it may be added, that receive a bountiful response. In view of this situation, it is little wonder that, when we go beyond description to evaluation, we find the doctors in violent disagreement.

This article is not limited to definitions. The writer takes a stand on more than one of the issues that plague and divide students of the democratic political process. It is written, therefore, not only in the firm belief that terms ought to be defined, but also with the conviction that in this case an analysis of meanings will lead almost automatically to a resolution of some of the mooted issues, while contributing substantially to a rational appraisal of others.

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.

When does collective memory influence behavior? We highlight two conditions under which the memory of past events comes to matter for the present: the associative nature of memory and institutionalized acts of commemoration by the state. During World War II, German troops occupying Greece perpetrated numerous massacres. Memories of those events resurfaced during the 2009 Greek debt crisis, leading to a drop in German car sales in Greece, especially in areas affected by German reprisals. Differential economic performance did not drive this divergence. Multiple pieces of evidence suggest that current events reactivated past memories, creating a backlash against Germany. This backlash also manifested in political behavior, with vote shares of anti-German parties increasing in reprisal areas after the start of the debt crisis. Using quasi-random variation in public recognition of victim status, we show that institutionalized collective memory amplifies the effects of political conflict on economic and political behavior.

This article argues that Hobbes constructed the sovereignty acknowledged among European states on the supposition of the absence of sovereignty in the New World. The notion of international anarchy found in Hobbes before the twentieth century was not the anarchy of interstate relations later posited by realism, but the anarchy of prepolitical societies outside the ordered system of European states. The modern geography of sovereignty that Hobbes established is demonstrated with reference to the cartographic traditions that informed his representation of the state of nature and the civil state, and to the historical context of the law of nations as it was understood to manage colonial rivalry in the seventeenth century. By constructing savages as absolutely free individuals in the state of nature, he precluded their recognition as free sovereign states. He thus contributed a set of premises to natural jurisprudence that denied indigenous societies statehood and excluded them from the family nations. A sketch of the Hobbesian legacy among theorists of the law of nations and international law is made, showing how his motif of savage anarchy remained central to our conceptualization of the sovereign state within the international realm into the twentieth century.

Although the political leaders who wrote the Constitution did not hold the idea of party in high regard, these same individuals (according to many historians) became the founders of a new party system within the first decade of the new government. This article considers the question (on which no consensus exists) of whether parties did develop. The analysis focuses upon one aspect of party development, namely, the agreement among members of Congress in their roll-call voting records. Spatial analysis (multidimensional scaling) permits a visual picture of the increased clustering of congressmen into two party blocs from 1789 to 1803, especially after the Jay Treaty debate in 1796. This very clear trend supports the idea that politics was moving away from a sectional basis to one founded more clearly on partisan grounds.

Do big cities exert more power than less populous ones in American state legislatures? In many political systems, greater representation leads to more policy gains, yet for most of the nation's history, urban advocates have argued that big cities face systematic discrimination in statehouses. Drawing on a new historical dataset spanning 120 years and 13 states, we find clear evidence that there is no strength in numbers for big-city delegations in state legislatures. District bills affecting large metropolises fail at much higher rates than bills affecting small cities, counties, and villages. Big cities lose so often because size leads to damaging divisions. We demonstrate that the cities with the largest delegations—which are more likely to be internally divided—are the most frustrated in the legislative process. Demographic differences also matter, with district bills for cities that have many foreign-born residents, compared with the state as a whole, failing at especially high rates.

By means of the Survey Research Center's national public opinion polls of the electorate during the 1956, 1960, and 1964 elections, the opinions of volunteer activists in the Republican and Democratic Parties were compared to those of rank and file members. On issues that divided rank and file Republicans from rank and file Democrats, Republican activists were found to be far more conservative than ordinary Republicans. Democratic activists, however, had about the same distribution of opinion as rank and file members of their party. Moreover, Republicans were proportionately far more active than Democrats. It was inferred from these findings that the two parties were different kinds of organizations. The Republican Party, it was argued, was a high participation party with an amateur base composed of right wing ideologues, while the Democratic Party was a low participation party with a professionalized base not dependent on ideological incentives to activism.

The student of American politics has displayed an increasing interest in the states as units of analysis. Since the states share a common institutional framework and cultural base, and at the same time differ in respect to economy, politics, and social structure, they provide excellent material for comparative studies. The political scientist has at hand a group of political units in which some of the most elusive variables are held constant. In the comparative study of American state politics, then, there is the promise that hypotheses about politics in general may be formulated and tested.

The first stage of analysis is classification. Since competition between political parties for public office is a basic concept in the study of American politics, the nature and degree of party competition provide important criteria for a classification of the states. It is the purpose of this paper to point up the difficulties involved in formulating a classification of the states according to their party systems and to suggest possible categories of party competition which such a classification might include.

The primary raw material of Communist power in economically less developed regions of the world is neither the landless peasant with outstretched rice bowl nor the intellectual in search of a cause. Even more basic than these frequently summoned symbols, the realpolitik of social tensions determines political events where economic scarcity aggravates the particularisms dividing man from man.

This contention gains strength from a study of Communist fortunes in a representative Asian setting. With little or no industrial economy to ease population density and underemployment, Andhra State on the southeast coast of India bears the familiar marks of Asian poverty. Here has emerged the most successful regional Communist movement in India. Yet the explanation for Andhra Communist strength does not lie in economic factors. The postwar decade in Andhra demonstrates that social factors can relegate even unusually powerful economic factors to a position of secondary importance.

Censorship has traditionally been understood as a way for dictators to silence opposition. By contrast, this article develops and tests the theory that certain forms of censorship—in particular, prohibitions on popular culture—serve not only to limit political information but also to reward dictators’ supporters. Using text analysis of all 8,000 films reviewed for distribution during Chile’s dictatorship, I demonstrate that rather than focusing only on sensitive political topics, censors banned movies containing content considered immoral. Through a combination of qualitative and quantitative evidence, I show that these patterns cannot be explained by masked political content, distributor self-censorship, or censor preferences. Instead, they reflect the regime’s use of censorship as a reward for supporters, particularly conservative Catholic groups. My findings suggest that even repressive measures can be used in part to maintain support for authoritarian regimes.

I am grateful for the opportunity to respond to the rejoinders to my article, “The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory” (Rosato 2003). In each case, I summarize the core issues at stake and explain why I do not believe that my critics have succeeded in casting serious doubt on my original argument.

Recent challenges to the modern secular state invite us to reexamine the arguments made by its theoretical founders, especially Hobbes. Hobbes argues that the desire for security is the most reliable and rational desire of our nature, and the state based on satisfying that desire is fully in harmony with human nature and therefore fully capable of solving the problem of anarchy. I will examine his argument that anarchy, although in some sense the natural human condition, can be overcome once and for all through political institutions that ensure the rational fear of death will control humans' destabilizing hopes and longings for immortality. I then turn to Thucydides, the classical thinker whom Hobbes admired most and who seems closest to Hobbes in outlook, and consider his more somber thesis: Because human hopes for immortality are more powerful than the fear of violent death, anarchy will return over and over again.

This article proposes an authority based conception of the phenomenon of institutionalization. Whereas most social science writing on the subject focuses either upon the organization's internal structural integration (such criteria as well-boundedness, universalism, complexity, and coherence often are employed) or upon its ability to cope with environmental challenges (the concepts of adaptability and autonomy have been suggested), I propose that an organization's offensive capabilities vis à vis environmental actors be viewed as a measurement of its institutionalization.

Principally based upon fieldwork in New Zealand bolstered by additional research in Scandinavia, Britain, and Hawaii, this study focuses upon the institutionalization of the ombudsman—an increasingly popular bureaucratic control mechanism. A sociometric analysis of ombudsman-bureaucratic interaction is undertaken, and four questions are investigated: How extensive is the interaction? How consequential is the threat posed by complaints? What demands does the ombudsman make? How cooperative is the agency in responding? The investigation provides answers which are indicative of the ombudsman's successful institutionalization. That is, the office performs its mission and has established itself with the environmental actors as an authority figure.

Using Habermas' theory of communicative action and his remarks on the legitimacy of the state under modern social conditions as a starting point, I combine normative democratic theory with the critique of ideology. I first outline four necessary-but-not-sufficient conditions of communication for democratic decision making: such agreements must (1) be formally and procedurally correct, (2) be cognitively adequate, (3) concern issues on which consensus or compromise can be reached, and (4) be free of ideology. The first three conditions form the core of a normative democratic theory, one that is not purely procedural, as many have argued it is. I then discuss the fourth condition and establish the relation between ideology and democracy. Taken together, these conditions not only provide an answer to troubling questions for democratic theory but also delineate the extent to which politics is rational and political claims are “truthlike.”

How do American Indian tribal governments relate to nearby local governments? Do insights gleaned from these cases illuminate the constraints and opportunities that marginalized groups face within any system of federalism? What circumstances of marginalized governments help or hinder their effectiveness? Although some Native American tribes have transformed their fortunes with highly profitable casinos, most continue to face stark disadvantages. Some tribal governments, despite limited opportunities prevail locally by cultivating policy and political expertise. This analysis demonstrates that such expertise can be developed, even when resources are scarce.

Geographically based intermediary groups in cities, primarily the political party structure and community groups, can potentially affect the distribution of public services to neighborhoods in three ways. First, they can stimulate citizen demands for services, which urban bureaucracies transform into outputs; more demands yield more services. Second, urban service agencies may grant special consideration to demands mediated by the intermediary structures, producing more output per demand for mediated demands. Finally, parties and groups may intervene in neighborhoods to co-produce services, gaining more impact from agency efforts than in neighborhoods not represented by strong intermediary structures.

Using data on citizen complaints, agency outputs and service impacts in neighborhoods, this study of building code enforcement in Chicago finds that the party structure is efficacious at all three stages of the service provision process, but that groups are not effective at any stage.

Like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, the study of American city government is faced with desiccation upon a sea of plenty. While the literature of municipal government continues to grow, fed by bureaus of government research and the teaching concerns of political scientists, there is very little in this literature that is of substance sufficient to rise above the level of specialized reporting and into the general stream of political science. Indeed, if the pages of this Review be taken as an index of the research concerns of our discipline, then municipal government would seem to be a stagnated area of political science, for not one article on this subject has appeared in this journal for over six years.

Despite a century of efforts to constrain money in American elections, there is little consensus on whether campaign finance regulations make any appreciable difference. Here we take advantage of a change in the campaign finance regulations of half of the U.S. states mandated by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. This exogenously imposed change in the regulation of independent expenditures provides an advance over the identification strategies used in most previous studies. Using a generalized synthetic control method, we find that after Citizens United, states that had previously banned independent corporate expenditures (and thus were “treated” by the decision) adopted more “corporate-friendly” policies on issues with broad effects on corporations’ welfare; we find no evidence of shifts on policies with little or no effect on corporate welfare. We conclude that even relatively narrow changes in campaign finance regulations can have a substantively meaningful influence on government policy making.