According to the prevailing interpretation of “Politics as a Vocation,” the Weberian political leader is willing to leave morality behind and make hard-headed consequentialist calculations about political means. I argue that the Weberian political leader is more accurately described as someone who keeps calculation in its place—both in terms of assessing the consequences of pursuing certain means and, more fundamentally, in terms of a basic framework for viewing responsibility and the world. Indeed, inappropriate substitutions of “calculative” thinking for a broader, more responsive thoughtfulness about the world mark Weber's three paradigms of irresponsible political leadership: the morally absolutist politician, the bureaucratic politician, and the power politician. Further, foregrounding Weber's effort to corral calculation reveals that uncompromising ethical stands in politics need not amount to naïveté or reckless disregard for the consequences, and that morality has a continuing claim on his ideal leader.

How do racially concentrated policy changes translate to political action? Using official election returns, the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, and original data on the unprecedented mass closure of schools in segregated, predominantly Black neighborhoods across Chicago, we demonstrate that those living in the communities affected (1) increase their attendance at political meetings; (2) mobilize in support of ballot measures to avert future closings; and (3) increase their participation in the subsequent local election, while decreasing their support for the political official responsible for the policy on the ballot—at a higher rate than every other group. These findings shed light on how groups that previously participated at the lowest rates go on to participate at the highest rates on community issues that matter to them. We develop a theory of place-based mobilization to explain the role of “the community” in acting as a site of coidentification and political action for marginalized groups.

While the rules of international trade regimes prevent governments from employing protectionist instruments, governments continue to seek out veiled means of supporting their national industries. This article argues that the news media can serve as one channel for governments to favor domestic industries. Focusing on media coverage of auto recalls in China, I reveal a systematic bias against foreign automakers in those newspapers under strict government control. I further analyze subnational reporting patterns, exploiting variation in the level of regional government interest in the automobile industry. The analysis suggests that the media’s home bias is driven by the government’s protectionist interests but rules out the alternative hypothesis that home bias simply reflects the nationalist sentiment of readers. I show that this home bias in news coverage has meaningful impact on actual consumer behavior, combining automobile sales data and information on recall-related web searches.

Changes in political decision-making outputs and trading activities in the European Economic Community are examined around three quasi-experimental events (formation of the EEC in 1958, first agricultural package in 1962, and the agricultural crisis in 1965–66). On the basis of a preliminary analysis, nine variables were selected for inclusion in the study (three political decision variables and six trade indicators); these were then subjected to “interrupted time-series analysis,” through which the quasi-experimental effects of the three events were assessed for statistical significance (t-tests and autocorrelation measures) and theoretical validity (through the elimination of plausible rival interpretations).

Political integration in the EEC is viewed as (1) positive growth in system indicators, and (2) increased mutual responsiveness among the major components or subsystems of the EEC. Results of the quasi-experimental analyses suggest that despite high positive growth in the selected variables, mutual responsiveness among system parts remains quite low; therefore, the principal conclusion drawn is that the EEC is a “weakly” integrating system—a collection of structures growing rapidly in many directions, with each structure very imperfectly responsive to the behavior of others.

The paper urges and attempts to demonstrate the methodological usefulness of applying the logic of experimentation to ex-post-facto research. This approach entails the demonstration that non-random variation in independent and dependent variables has occurred, that these variables are related in some way, and that the relationship is nonspurious—that is, that the important confounding variables have been controlled by eliminating plausible rival hypotheses through statistical and analytical procedures.

Beliefs about the incidence of voter fraud inform how people view the trade-off between electoral integrity and voter accessibility. To better inform such beliefs about the rate of double voting, we develop and apply a method to estimate how many people voted twice in the 2012 presidential election. We estimate that about one in 4,000 voters cast two ballots, although an audit suggests that the true rate may be lower due to small errors in electronic vote records. We corroborate our estimates and extend our analysis using data from a subset of states that share social security numbers, making it easier to quantify who may have voted twice. For this subset of states, we find that one suggested strategy to reduce double voting—removing the registration with an earlier registration date when two share the same name and birthdate—could impede approximately 300 legitimate votes for each double vote prevented.

In 1981 a higher proportion of the multinational population of Yugoslavia chose to declare “Yugoslav” in place of an ethnic identity in response to the census question on nationality than ever before. We present arguments to support the interpretation of Yugoslav identity as evidence of shared political identity, and carry out an analysis of aggregate data on the level of social and material development, political socialization, and interethnic contact in the country's nearly five hundred counties to discover the sources of that identity. We find that with certain important regional variations, Yugoslav identity seems to be the product of interethnic contact and higher education rather than the level of material well-being. These findings support an interpretation of Yugoslav identity as evidence of diffuse support for the existence of a shared political community and suggest both the sources and vulnerabilities of Yugoslav stability.

This analysis discusses the implications of some cognitive and organizational factors for the evaluation and avoidance of failures in strategic warning. It advances three major arguments. First, efforts to assess and improve warning forecasts must take into account the policy context in which they are made and used. They cannot be based on concerns with the accuracy of forecasts alone. Second, important biases are present in retrospective case studies. Therefore, we should accept post hoc explanations of warning failures with appropriate caution. Third, a pluralistic intelligence community, as it is presently proposed for some non-U.S. systems, is unlikely to resolve the problems thought to be responsible for past strategic surprises. It may in fact compound these problems.

Delegation of powers represents a grant of authority by politicians to one or more agents whose powers are determined by the conditions in enabling statutes. Extant empirical studies of this problem have relied on labor-intensive content analysis that ultimately restricts our knowledge of how delegation has responded to politics and institutional change in recent years. We present a machine learning approach to the empirical estimation of authority and constraint in European Union (EU) legislation, and demonstrate its ability to accurately generate the same discretionary measures used in an original study directly using all EU directives and regulations enacted between 1958–2017. We assess validity by training our classifier on a random sample of only 10% of hand-coded provisions and replicating an important substantive finding. While our principal interest lies in delegation, our method is extensible to any context in which human coding has been profitably produced.

We present a contingency model of Soviet foreign policy making that focuses on decision making in the Politburo. The model is designed around three questions and shows how the answers to these questions determine the likely nature of the decision the Politburo will reach at any point in time. The questions are (1) Whose positions on the Politburo are critical to making a decision? (2) What are the positions or preferences of those who count on the issue under consideration? (3) How are disagreements among these individuals handled? The model is illustrated by examining the Soviet decision to increase significantly the numbers and types of weapons delivered to Egypt in early 1973. Of interest in this case is accounting for the shift in Soviet policy from refusing Egypt offensive weapons to providing them.

The distribution of burdens in alliances may be explained in terms of public and private outputs. A joint product model is applied to the Triple Alliance and Triple Entente, using generalized least squares-auto regressive moving average (GLS-ARMA) techniques and time series data. Results indicate that countries regarded allies' military effort more as complements than as substitutes, though several examples of free-riding behavior are noted. The method used here may provide more accurate estimation of publicness problems than is found in the usual static tests.

First, I will demonstrate that Machiavelli's conception of political phenomena is richer and more varied and conforms to an adequate understanding of political reality more closely than later, more “systematic,” or “regular,” conceptions often associated with the Enlightenment. Second, I find in Machiavelli strong grounds for resisting authoritarian claims that the variegated and unpredictable nature of political phenomena must be managed with unipartite and, especially, centralized practical political alternatives. I focus upon Machiavelli's frequent use of a particular word by which he refers to politically significant occurrences, accidente. I argue that his employment of this word, especially in the Discourses, serves to accentuate his sensitivity to the irregular, nonsystematic nature of political reality—to the possibility of “exceptions.” But I demonstrate that his practical response to this reality, is not a perpetually vigilant, all-powerful sovereign but is, rather, a far more moderate answer, the mixed regime.

This article marks an attempt to clarify the teachings of Robert Michels. It suggests that in Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (1915), Michels presented a favorable account of the compatibility of organization and democracy.

Other treatments attribute to Michels a thesis of the following kind: (1) Large, organizationally complex associations, compared with small, simple associations, are likely to be governed by cliques whose powers (disposable resources, freedom of action, security of tenure) are abundant and whose policies (use of official status and resources) deviate from the policy preferences of their constituents. (2) Increments of Organization (of scale, or members, and of complexity, or procedural formality, functional differentiation, stratification, specialization, hierarchy, and bureaucracy) augment the powers and the policy-deviating propensities of leaders vis-à-vis followers.

How do domestic political institutions affect the outcomes of international trade negotiations? Specifically, are the aggregate trade barriers agreed upon by a democratic pair lower than those by a pair composed of a democracy and an autocracy? I revisit these important questions by highlighting some problematic aspect of the analysis by Mansfield, Milner, and Rosendorff (2000). Contrary to their central conclusion, I find that whether the aggregate trade barriers are lower for a democratic pair than those for a mixed pair depends on the preferences of the decision makers involved. Thus, although domestic political institutions are important, they alone are insufficient to predict a higher level of cooperation among democracies.

While many scholars have recognized that decentralization encourages American party organizations to tailor activities to the local environment, few have studied systematically the relationships between that environment and party behavior. This study examines the impact of certain political and demographic county characteristics on the activities of a national sample of county party organizations in 1964. Three dimensions of party behavior—organization, mobilization, and persuasion—are utilized as dependent variables. The relationships between the environment and these dimensions of party behavior in the North support a revised “machine theory” of environment and party: organizational effort does not vary with environmental conditions, while mobilization and persuasion activities are opposites in their relationships with the concentration of parochially-oriented voters. Additionally, the division of partisan strength influences party activity: parties perform their “natural” activities well where they have strong support and the other party's “natural” activities well under competitive conditions. Few significant relationships are found in the South, but their similarity in direction to those in the North suggests that the normal relationships may have been attenuated by circumstances unique to that region, particularly one-partyism and decades of “whites only” politics.

John Dewey's democratic theory is celebrated as a classic statement of the theory of deliberative democracy. This article challenges deliberative appropriations of Dewey's political thought by situating his democratic theory within the contentious history of American labor politics. In his writings on direct action, strikes, and class struggle, Dewey advocated coercive and nondeliberative modes of political action as democratic means for democratic ends. Examining Dewey's writings on democracy, action, and the use of force reveals how a means-oriented pragmatism circumvents the problematic dichotomy of ideal ends and non-ideal means framing contemporary debates about idealism and realism in democratic theory. Pragmatism's account of the interdependence of means and ends in political action, as a process of creative and collaborative experimentation, combines a robust defense of coercive tactics with a consequentialist critique of violence.

Does sexual orientation and gender identity matter at election time? While previous literature has explored the effect of candidate gender and ethnicity on electoral results, this is the first study to quantitatively investigate the impact of sexual orientation. We build an original dataset combining individual-level data on more than 3,000 candidates in the 2015 UK election with sociodemographic indicators at the constituency level. In addition to sexual orientation and other demographic characteristics, we include candidate education, political experience, and campaign spending. We find that LGBT candidates generally do not have a negative impact on party vote share. Even in more conservative environments, LGBT candidates perform at least as well as their straight counterparts. This work is important to understand the consequences of descriptive representation and, relatedly, how rapid social change happens.

Multiparty governance requires compromise and this compromise can lead to electoral losses. I argue that coalition members are motivated to differentiate themselves from their cabinet partners to mitigate potential electoral losses resulting from voters perceiving them as not rigorously pursuing their core policy positions or not possessing strong policy stands. I test this argument with original data on the scrutiny of over 2,200 government bills gathered from three parliamentary democracies incorporating information on voter perceptions of partisan ideology and parties’ policy preferences as derived from their manifestos. I find that coalition partners that are perceived as more similar will amend one another’s legislative proposals more vigorously in an effort to differentiate in the eyes of the electorate—to protect their brand—and therefore provide evidence for “pure” vote-seeking behavior in the legislative review process. Furthermore, these original data provide answers to several open questions regarding the policy motivations of cabinet parties in legislative review and the role of committee chairs and external support parties on policy outcomes.

We develop a theory of electoral competition in multidistrict legislative elections when nomination decisions are made by local policy-motivated party members, and voters care about both local and national positions. We show that the asymmetry generated by different national party positions reduces or even entirely removes the competitive pressure to nominate moderate candidates. The model has important implications for our understanding of policy divergence and, in particular, of the effects of gerrymandering.

The much-discussed contemporary revival of political theory in the Anglo-American intellectual community has for the most part been a revival of liberal theory. This should not have come as a great surprise. Most Anglo-Americans are, in one way or another, liberals; all are deeply influenced by the experience of life in liberal societies. Liberal polities have come under attack from within as well as from without, giving those who think them worthy of defense both the motive and the occasion to clarify the grounds of their partisanship.

It is less often remarked that in one decisive respect, the revival of liberal theory remains rooted in the climate of moral skepticism that it has supplanted. Most contemporary liberal theorists are deeply mistrustful of what John Rawls has called “perfectionism”—the philosophic attempt to identify superior ways of life or traits of character and, once having identified them, to use them as the goals of political life. Contemporary liberal theory consists in the attempt to combine this skepticism about theories of the good life with the belief in philosophically defensible principles that regulate relations among individuals.

It is my thesis that this defense of liberalism is fundamentally misguided. No form of political life can be justified without some view of what is good for individuals. In practice, liberal theorists covertly employ theories of the good. But their insistence that they do not reduces the rigor of their theories and leaves the liberal polity unnecessarily vulnerable to criticism.

Social scientists commonly seek to make statements about how word use varies over circumstances—including time, partisan identity, or some other document-level covariate. For example, researchers might wish to know how Republicans and Democrats diverge in their understanding of the term “immigration.” Building on the success of pretrained language models, we introduce the à la carte on text (conText) embedding regression model for this purpose. This fast and simple method produces valid vector representations of how words are used—and thus what words “mean”—in different contexts. We show that it outperforms slower, more complicated alternatives and works well even with very few documents. The model also allows for hypothesis testing and statements about statistical significance. We demonstrate that it can be used for a broad range of important tasks, including understanding US polarization, historical legislative development, and sentiment detection. We provide open-source software for fitting the model.