Why did Plato conclude the Republic, arguably his most celebrated work of political theory, with the Myth of Er, an obscure story of indeterminate political-theoretical significance? This paper advances a novel reading of the Myth of Er that attends to the common plot that it shares with two earlier narrative interludes in the Republic. It suggests that Plato constructed the myth as an account of a search, akin to the sorting of potential philosopher-kings that underwrites the kallipolis’ educational curriculum, for natures that have successfully absorbed the cumulative effects of their philosophical upbringing. The model of nature presented in the myth, in turn, helps us approach the category of nature as a working concept: we can recognize contexts in which it is useful to assume in otherwise complex and fluid individuals a fixed, indelible nature, while granting that our sense of what that consists in is subject to revision.

Checkpoints in the West Bank’s Hebron Governorate represent Israel’s ever-present power over Palestinian civilians. Drawing on 71 interviews conducted during the Intifada of Individuals (2015), this article inductively builds theory about the relationship between social isolation and different modalities of resistance. Rather than forcing civilians to comply with the state, checkpoint apparatus instead change the nature and texture of resistance. I suggest that checkpoints structure social connections for civilians on the ground. Checkpoint apparatus which inhibit social connection engender a feeling of hopelessness and foster support for individual, often violent, resistance. Where checkpoints isolate a community as a whole but did not disrupt within-community social connections, citizens maintain hope for the possibility of change, which facilitates a preference for collective resistance. This article identifies troubling consequences checkpoints have on civilians and highlights how oppressive state power can limit some modalities of resistance only to engender support for others.

Survey data are commonly cited as evidence of widespread misperceptions and misinformed beliefs. This paper shows that surveys generally fail to identify the firm, deep, steadfast, confidently held beliefs described in leading accounts. Instead, even those who report 100% certain belief in falsehoods about well-studied topics like climate change, vaccine side effects, and the COVID-19 death toll exhibit substantial response instability over time. Similar levels of response stability are observed among those who report 100% certain belief in benign, politically uncontested falsehoods—for example, that electrons are larger than atoms and that lasers work by focusing sound waves. As opposed to firmly held misperceptions, claims to be highly certain of incorrect answers are best interpreted as “miseducated” guesses based on mistaken inferential reasoning. Those reporting middling and low levels of certainty are best viewed as making close-to-blind guesses. These findings recast existing evidence as to the prevalence, predictors, correction, and consequences of misperceptions and misinformed beliefs.

This paper is concerned with the problem of relating aggregate coalition payoffs to the winnings of an individual player, so that some theoretical foundation might be developed for dealing with problems of coalition formation. Professor William H. Riker was concerned with this problem in his Theory of Political Coalitions; in that book he developed a formulation holding that in several common political situations players would strive to form only minimum winning coalitions. Riker based that formulation on his derivation in game theory of “the size principle,” which held that in zero-sum games among rational players with perfect information, only minimum winning coalitions would occur. The first part of this research note shows that there is a difficulty in Riker's derivation of the “size principle,” presents counter-examples to that principle, and shows that it is unsound in general. The second part of this note develops the maximum number of positive gainers principle, which shows that in the kind of games being examined there is a maximum upper limit to the number of players who will positively gain; but this does not insure that the winning coalition will be minimal.

Do political parties influence opinion when citizens have a personal stake in policy? With an experimental design that exploits a naturally occurring, sharp variation in party cues, we study the effects of party cues during a collective bargaining conflict over the salary and work rights for public employees in Denmark. Even in this context—where the self-interest of public employees was strongly mobilized and where their party went against it—we find that party cues move opinion among partisans at least as much as in previous studies. But party cues do not lead citizens to go against their self-interest. Rather, we show that party cues temper the pursuit of self-interest among public employees by moderating the most extreme policy demands. These findings highlight an unappreciated potential of political parties to moderate—not fuel—extreme opinion.

In established electorates in developed countries, voting turnout has a familiar curvilinear relationship with age. In new electorates, however, lack of experience and supposed resistance to new behavior among middle-aged voters suggest that turnout might be greater among the young. In peasant societies, the start-up costs that reduce turnout among young adults might not apply because of immobility of the population and resulting familiarity with local politics. Data from an early election in rural Kenya and from rural Turkey show that the familiar relationship holds even in these circumstances. The results suggest that increased electoral experience and resistance to newly available behavior do little to shape turnout. Mobility of the young, even in peasant populations, and psychological factors associated with aging are more powerful elements.

The term charisma—miraculously-given power—was transferred by Max Weber from its original religious meaning to politics. He described it as “the absolutely personal devotion and personal confidence in revelation, heroism, or other qualities of individual leadership.” He contrasts charisma with leadership based on custom and tradition or on competence related to “rationally created rules” of law. The charismatic leader is thus the one whose claim to rule is neither as a perpetuator of traditional values nor as one who resolves conflicting interests by reasonable and just means but as one endowed with superhuman powers to solve political problems. In the abstract, pure case he is seen by his followers as being all-powerful, all-wise, and morally perfect.

The introduction of decision making under uncertainty by Ferejohn and Fiorina is an interesting addition to the literature on rational theories of citizen participation. Decision making under uncertainty assumes, however, that the actor has no knowledge of the probabilities of the various outcomes; this is obviously no more true than the assumption of perfect information about these probabilities made in the decision making under risk model. Voters have some, but not perfect, information about the probabilities of at least some of the different possible outcomes.

Specifically, let us look at the two-party case. In Ferejohn's notation, (p3 + p4) is the probability of an individual's vote making a difference. We might expect a rational citizen to know that this probability is at most minuscule, even if he cannot calculate its exact value.

Retrospective voting is vital for democracy. But, are the objective performance metrics widely thought to be relevant for retrospection—such as the performance of the economy, criminal justice system, and schools, to name a few—valid criteria for evaluating government performance? That is, do political coalitions actually have the power to influence the performance metrics used for retrospection on the timeline introduced by elections? Using difference-in-difference and regression discontinuity techniques, we find that US states governed by Democrats and those by Republicans perform equally well on economic, education, crime, family, social, environmental, and health outcomes on the timeline introduced by elections (2–4 years downstream). Our results suggest that voters may struggle to truly hold government coalitions accountable, as objective performance metrics appear to be largely out of the immediate control of political coalitions.

Epistemic hubris—the expression of unwarranted factual certitude—is a conspicuous yet understudied democratic hazard. Here, in two nationally representative studies, we examine its features and analyze its variance. We hypothesize, and find, that epistemic hubris is (a) prevalent, (b) bipartisan, and (c) associated with both intellectualism (an identity marked by ruminative habits and learning for its own sake) and anti-intellectualism (negative affect toward intellectuals and the intellectual establishment). Moreover, these correlates of epistemic hubris are distinctly partisan: intellectuals are disproportionately Democratic, whereas anti-intellectuals are disproportionately Republican. By implication, we suggest that both the intellectualism of Blue America and the anti-intellectualism of Red America contribute to the intemperance and intransigence that characterize civil society in the United States.

A major dilemma for majority decision-making occurs when the summation of transitive individual preference orderings results in an intransitive social ordering. The problems posed by this phenomenon, which is known as the paradox of voting, can be seen in the following standard example.

Suppose there are three individuals, one with each of the following preference orders of three alternatives: ABC, BCA, CAB. Under majority rule, A would defeat B, B would defeat C, and C would defeat A, so there is no majority winner.

Most voting procedures, of course, yield a unique result whether or not the paradox occurs. But from this example it is apparent that when the paradox does occur, a majority of the voters prefer an alternative other than the one which is selected. Moreover, if a typical voting procedure is used, which of the alternatives is selected depends on the order in which the alternatives are voted on. Clearly these results have important implications, whether one is concerned with normative questions about majority rule or with the practical politics of legislative decision-making.

In the burgeoning literature on the voting paradox, surely one of the most impressive and well-known findings is Black's and Arrow's demonstration that the paradox cannot occur if the set of individual preference orderings is single-peaked. Since single-peakedness implies that the individuals and alternatives can be arrayed on a single dimension, their finding has a meaningful substantive interpretation. Namely, complete agreement on a dimension for judging the alternatives ensures that majority voting will yield a transitive social ordering of the alternatives.

To whom is the bureaucracy responsive? A study of public utility regulation in 12 states helps to answer that question. To assess potential responsiveness in the bureaucracy, we examine indicators of attitudinal concurrence. Whether we look at issue priorities or value priorities, public utility commissioners are more responsive to staff members and utility company executives than to governmental consumer advocates. However, bureaucratic responsiveness to citizens varies unexpectedly across stages of the policymaking process. Concurrence between commissioners and citizen activists is relatively high on issue priorities, relatively low on value priorities. Success at the agenda-setting stage does not guarantee success in policy formulation. In practice, agenda responsiveness may be little more than an exercise in symbolic politics.

In this paper one party leadership strategy with respect to the committee system of the House is examined. Building on several relatively clear concepts such as compliance, quality of assignment, expectation, scarcity, and exchange, a very elementary, yet explicit, theory is constructed. It is shown that the leaders pursue a strategy of accommodation. The leaders increase the number of positions on those committees prized by the members in order to guarantee a steady supply of resources to gain leverage with the members. But a steady increase in the supply of positions reduces the scarcity of positions and hence their value to the leaders. Thus, a consequence of the strategy is the need periodically to reorganize or make adjustments in the committee system.

This paper offers a critique and a reformulation of Brian Fry and Richard Winters's policy output study published in this Review June, 1970. Fry and Winters focused on the redistributive impact of public policy in the states. After devising a “redistribution ratio” that involves allocating state revenue burdens and expenditure benefits to families across income classes, they developed a model to explain the variance of this ratio from state to state. In contrast to the findings of many earlier policy output studies, they hypothesized that political variables would have more explanatory power than socioeconomic variables.

Unfortunately some methodological shortcomings detract from the potential value of the Fry and Winters study. In this paper, alternative methodologies are used to reformulate a redistribution ratio for each state, and the recalculated ratios are found to vary significantly from those obtained by Fry and Winters.

The shortcomings of the Fry and Winters explanatory model are discussed. Despite these shortcomings, however, the regression analysis employed by Fry and Winters is repeated using the reformulated redistribution ratios in order to test the impact of this reformulation. Again the results obtained in this paper vary substantially from those of Fry and Winters.

For many reasons Rousseau's writings on international relations should interest students both of Rousseau and of world politics. The former have been celebrating the 200th anniversary of Emile and of The Social Contract. Those works, and the Discourse on Inequality have been analyzed incessantly and well. But Rousseau's ideas on war and peace, dispersed in various books and fragments, some of which are lost, have had only occasional attention, and some of that is of the hit-and-miss variety. Incomplete as his own treatment of the relations between states remains, the frequency and intensity of his references indicate the depth of his concern.

Third parties often have a stake in the outcome of a conflict and can affect that outcome by taking sides. This article studies the factors that affect a third party's decision to take sides in a civil or interstate war by adding a third actor to a standard continuous-time war of attrition with two-sided asymmetric information. The third actor has preferences over which of the other two actors wins and for being on the winning side conditional on having taken sides. The third party also gets a flow payoff during the fighting which can be positive when fighting is profitable or negative when fighting is costly. The article makes four main contributions: First, it provides a formal framework for analyzing the effects of endogenous intervention on the duration and outcome of the conflict. Second, it identifies a “boomerang” effect that tends to make alignment decisions unpredictable and coalitions dynamically unstable. Third, it yields several clear comparative-static results. Finally, the formal analysis has implications for empirical efforts to estimate the effects of intervention, showing that there may be significant selection and identification issues.

The map of the child's political world is slowly beginning to be filled in. The areas best filled in so far are his view of certain government officials (President, judges, policemen, etc.) and his understanding (or lack of understanding) of the operation of specific political institutions (legislatures, parties, etc.). Of all persons in government none is as well known as the President of the United States. Even at an early age children know his name and even his party affiliation. Best documented so far is the nature of the child's affection for the President. Apparently he enjoys the child's deep respect, admiration, loyalty, and even love. Some scholars have gone so far as to imply that he symbolizes nation, leadership, and father all in one. This being the case, it seems imperative that we ask: Is the President merely a symbol of leadership who will be loved irrespective of the political stands he takes, or is he seen as a genuine political figure who stands for specific political principles, legislation, etc.?

In this first systematic and extensive application of cross-judicial methodology, we examine the members of the Rehnquist Court (1986–94 terms) with prior appellate court experience to discern any correlation with their Supreme Court behavior in terms of nonconsensual opinion writing and voting. We find that they become less consensual as justices than they were as judges in the lower court. Importantly, this finding holds after controlling for such institutional differences between the two court levels as size, ideology, case types, stare decisis, and norms. Consistent with the neoinstitutional perspective, we surmise that this behavior change is due to the modern Supreme Court being unique, a court on which the members feel it is desirable, necessary, and possible to express policy disagreements with the majority via separate opinions and votes.