An extensive reorganization of administrative offices in Ohio was accomplished by a law enacted in April, 1921, and in effect July 1st, 1921. That reorganization is taken as the central point of this discussion, not because persons outside of Ohio are interested in details of Ohio government, but because the Ohio reorganization is one of the latest of such schemes to be put into effect and because it has been considered to exemplify relatively well the principles which our leading administrative reformers wish to see applied in our state executive departments. There is nothing of more practical importance in this connection than to examine carefully the principles upon which these reorganizations are supposed to be based. The editor of the National Municipal Review pronounces the Ohio reorganization to be “a big advance in popular government;” and Dr. W. F. Dodd, one of our leading experts in state government, says that the Ohio reorganization “is perhaps the most effective yet planned in this country, except for the fact of the constitutional limitation of the governor's term” to two years. This paper will sketch, as briefly as possible, and at certain points roughly judge, the changes made by the Ohio reorganization act of 1921, and then try briefly to indicate my general attitude towards the objects and policies of such a reorganization.

Much of the literature concerning the relative merits of alternative electoral rules is centered around the extent to which particular rules select “representative” legislatures. And an important concern in evaluating the “representativeness” of an electoral rule is whether or not the rule responds positively to changes in individuals' preferences, that is, whether or not the rule is monotonic. By explicitly considering electoral rules in the context of a complete electoral system—voting, selection of legislature, and legislative choice of policy—we argue that monotonicity in electoral systems is a nonissue: depending on the behavioral model governing individual decision making, either everything is monotonic or nothing is monotonic.

American political theory has been accused of being uniformly liberal; but its history is diverse and is worth studying to understand the development of political science and the institutions it reflects (representative government, federalism, judicial review, and slavery). While modern social science expresses a slow democratization of values, it has been compatible with many ideologies. This can be seen in Jefferson's anthropology, Madison's theory of collective rationality, and Hamilton's empirical political economy. Jacksonian democracy encouraged social history, while its opponents devised an elitist political sociology. Southern defenders of slavery were the earliest to develop a deterministic and authoritarian sociology, but after the Civil War Northern thinkers emulated them with Social Darwinism and quests for causal laws to grasp constant change in industrial society. Though social critics abounded, democratic empirical theory emerged in the universities only in the generation of Merriam and Dewey, who founded contemporary political science.

We develop a model of electoral college competition and apply it to the transformation of nineteenth-century voting rights enforcement. The Federal Election Law (1872–92) was born of an effort to secure political power for southern blacks, yet it developed into an expansive machinery to police federal elections in northern cities. We argue that the Reconstruction commitment to black suffrage gradually succumbed to the competitive structure of Gilded Age presidential elections, crowded out by a growing preoccupation with registration and voter fraud in the volatile swing states that typically determined electoral college victory. More broadly, we view the electoral college as a critical force in shaping American political development. With its structured system of competition for doubtful states and pivotal groups, the electoral college injects a unique logic into the dynamics of national politics.

While it has been frequently asserted that the use of courts is responsive to political and social contexts, the evidence is inconclusive at best. In the case of political context the dearth of evidence may reflect focusing on the U.S. case, where there is relatively limited variation in relevant characteristics. In the case of social context it may reflect a failure to focus on periods of substantial transition. In the present study we examine court usage in Spain between 1960 and 1980. During this period Spain experienced rapid economic growth with its attendant social change and dramatic political transition from authoritarianism to democracy. Both the movement toward democracy and social development are found to be positively linked to increases in legal mobilization.

Few forms of explanation of political phenomena are more common than the assertion that the success of some group was facilitated by the “apathy” of other groups with opposing interests. If apathy is not an observable phenomenon in a political context because it connotes an individual's mental state, quiescence is observable. It is the purpose of this paper to specify some conditions associated with political quiescence in the formation of business regulation policies. Although the same general conditions are apparently applicable to the formation of public policies in any area, the argument and the examples used here focus upon the field of government regulation of business in order to make the paper manageable and to permit more intensive treatment.

Political quiescence toward a policy area can be assumed to be a function either of lack of interest—whether it is simple indifference or stems rather from a sense of futility about the practical prospects of securing obviously desirable changes—or of the satisfaction of whatever interest the quiescent group may have in the policy in question. Our concern here is with the forms of satisfaction. In analyzing the various means by which it can come to pass, the following discussion distinguishes between interests in resources (whether goods or freedoms to act) and interests in symbols connoting the suppression of threats to the group in question. Few political scientists would doubt, on the basis of common sense evidence, that public policies have value to interested groups both as symbols and as instruments for the allocation of more tangible values. The political process has been much less thoroughly studied as a purveyor of symbols, however; and there is a good deal of evidence, to be presented below, that symbols are a more central component of the process than is commonly recognized in political scientists' explicit or implicit models.

The political society founded by Socrates in the Republic has been seen by many as Plato's conception of the ideal political community, his Callipolis. However, a study of the language used by Socrates as he builds his perfect city reveals an unusually heavy concentration of animal images. This language seems to undercut the ostensible perfection of Socrates' city and illustrates rather its connections to the comic world of Aristophanes, whose comedy the Birds offers the model according to which the Republic is built. It is suggested that the city of the Republic is comic and ugly, indicating the limitations of politics rather than its potentialities. The Republic argues for the need to reorient the concept of justice away from social life and towards the individual. Ultimately, the Republic suggests that the notion of social justice is laughable and fit for the comic Stage.

The jury is a paradigmatic example of a democratic institution that may be justified strictly on instrumental and epistemic grounds: its ability to yield just outcomes. Yet why should we have confidence in its ability? The jury's reliability derives from the jurors’ status as local experts (hierarchical equality), as well as near-universal eligibility and selection by lot (horizontal equality): This dual egalitarianism is a condition of the jury's epistemic value. Yet ordinary citizens thereby acquire an interest in epistemic respect or recognition of their presumptively equal competence to judge. The instrumental value of the jury and intrinsic (respect-based) value of jury service may thus be reconciled; although trade-offs between just verdicts and respectful treatment are possible, the jury's ability to attain just verdicts may be improved by reforms generated by concerns about respectful treatment of jurors. This framework sheds light on the justification of democratic institutions more generally.

Most studies of Japanese elections have seen constituency candidates and their campaigns as the major factor in electoral mobilization. In order to explore the effects of candidate campaigns and voters' images of candidates, as well as party identifications, party images, partisan issue opinions, and past voting, I develop models portraying these effects upon the vote, both separately and together, and test the models using survey data. The results show that partisan attitudes are the dominant force in Japanese parliamentary voting. The most plausible explanation for the importance of partisan factors lies in the electorate's being exposed regularly to information about parties but only intermittently to information about candidates. The plausibility of an information-based explanation of the importance of robust partisan attitudes in Japan suggests in turn that comparative differences in voting may reflect systemic variations in information processes.

When the turn of fate brings to a man the honor of speaking on this occasion, he is likely to review the remarks of his predecessors. Their practice, I find, has been, in the main, to address themselves to one or the other of two kinds of themes. They discourse either upon a substantive problem within their own specialty or upon a matter of common concern to us as members of the same profession. As our interests have become more diverse, the second alternative seems to have been followed with greater frequency. My decision to consider in my remarks the state of our discipline has, therefore, the support of precedent if not the merit of prudence.

The burden of my argument may be stated briefly and bluntly. It is that the demands upon our profession have grown more rapidly than has the content of our discipline. We are, in a sense, the victims of our own success. The achievements of our profession arouse expectations that our discipline enables us to meet only imperfectly.

We study dynamic international agreements when one of the negotiating parties faces a threat of electoral replacement during negotiations, when agreements made before the election are the starting point for any subsequent renegotiation, and when governments cannot commit to future negotiation strategies. Conflicts of interest between governments may be softened or intensified by the governments’ conflicts of interest with voters. We characterize when the threat of electoral turnover strengthens the prospect for successful negotiations, when it may cause negotiations to fail, and how it affects the division of the surplus from cooperation. We also show how changes in domestic politics—including uncertainty about the preferences of domestic political parties—affect a domestic government’s ability to extract greater concessions in negotiations.

This study of aggressive behavior by clients on public relief in Chicago in 1932–33 is intended to be relevant to two supplementary kinds of political theory. In so far as relations are found between economic changes and political activity, the findings bear upon the theory of political equilibrium, which seeks to state the general conditions under which political changes occur. In so far as relations are found which bear upon the diffusion of specific political symbols and practices, the results are pertinent to theories of political development, which emphasize the time-bound aspects of political change.

The conservative in a revolutionary period always represents somewhat of an anomaly. Were society still cohesive, it would occur to no one to be a conservative for a serious alternative to the existing structure would be inconceivable. But a revolutionary period is a symptom precisely of the fact that the self-evidence of the goals of the social effort has disintegrated, that a significant segment of society holds values which either cannot or will not be assimilated. What had been taken for granted must now be defended and the act of defense introduces rigidity. The deeper the fissure, the more inflexible the contending positions and the greater the temptation to dogmatism. Were the “legitimate” structure still universally accepted, it would not be necessary to demonstrate its validity; but the act of defense exhibits the possibility of an alternative.

Once the existing legitimacy has been challenged, no real discourse between the contenders is possible any longer, for they cease to speak the same language. It is not the adjustment of differences within a political system which is now at issue, but the political system itself.

Well-established “facts,” scholars know, are sometimes overtoppled by research. The “Piltdown man” is a recent case in point. So is the “Jukes family,” whose value to hereditists has collapsed under scientific scrutiny. Of considerably smaller magnitude is a case, just discovered, relating to the putative election of state legislators in single-member districts.

“Popular election from single-member districts is the prevailing method by which individual legislators are chosen,” a Committee of the American Political Science Association reports. Every other authority concurs. Multi-member elections, all agree, are atypical.

“With few exceptions,” Ogg and Ray informed students, “senators and members of lower houses are chosen in small, single-member districts.” Among other writers of the older texts, John Mathews cited “the prevalent system of … single-member districts.” Charles Beard asserted that “the rule of one member to each district is generally applied.” The same assertion was made by the Willoughbys, Lindsay Rogers, James Garner, and others. “For the purpose of choosing their own legislatures,” Willoughby and Rogers noted, “the states are divided into senatorial and representative districts from each of which one senator or one representative is elected.”

The great war developed many new weapons—the submarine, the aeroplane, the long range gun, the tank, the deadly gas; but one of the most novel and deadly was the propaganda—the psychological working on the war will of the enemy. It was developed first and effectually used by the Central Powers against France, England, the United States, and with terrible results in Russia and Italy. But the Allies were not far behind, and by the close of the war had caught up with their foes and probably surpassed them. In the summer of 1918, the German press complained of the relative weakness of their propaganda, and declared the enemy's pen and propaganda were worse than his sword.

After the work of the Committee on Public Information, under Mr. George Creel, had been under way for a number of months in the United States, it was deemed advisable to establish branch offices of the committee in many European countries for the purpose of explaining the war aims and preparations of our country. Such offices were established in England, France, Italy, and eventually in some thirty-two foreign countries, in charge of Mr. Will Irwin and later of Mr. Edward Lisson. For the purpose of organizing the work in Italy, the writer was sent over by the committee, arriving in Rome about March, 1918, and returning in October.

Among European émigré intellectuals who came to the United States between 1925 and 1940, a small group of prolific, influential scholars who received appointments at major colleges and universities helped to restore the comparative approach to the study of political systems. That approach had been dominant in the early years of the discipline but had been lost during its Americanization in the first quarter of the twentieth century. The teaching and writing of these scholars contributed to the formulation of theoretical frameworks designed to facilitate cross-national comparison. When the purview of comparative politics expanded in the 1950s and 1960s to include the developing areas, the advantages of multination comparisons became even more evident.

In their research note Robert Bates and Amy Curry (1992) have drawn our attention to the importance for political science of the challenges posed by the moral economic approach. Using their essay as a springboard and recasting their understanding of the idea of the moral economy, I show that the full significance of this controversy would be better illuminated by moving the debate on to a different terrain, one that captures the fundamental sources of the antagonism between the moral economic and competing approaches. I begin by setting out the central difficulty in Bates and Curry's reading of the moral economy argument and relate that to how the controversy has been framed in the recent political science literature. I then offer a sketch of the core claims of the moral economic approach, drawing out the radicalness of their challenge, and offer an estimate of their weaknesses and value. I conclude with some observations about political philosophy and the idea of the moral economy.

This article evaluates Jürgen Habermas's attempt to reopen political liberalism to religion. In trying to “take religion seriously,” Habermas goes further than John Rawls and other liberal theorists by affirming that religious traditions articulate truths on which democratic societies continue to depend for their civic and moral health. “Post-secular” societies, in his view, should learn from religion by translating its “moral intuitions” into universal secular language. Although Habermas in this way appears friendlier to religion than Rawls, unlike Rawls he also calls for the “modernization of religious consciousness.” This theological transformation not only reveals the foundationalist presuppositions of liberalism, but also points to a highly attenuated conception of learning from religion. Taking religion seriously will require us to be open to its insights not only when they agree with, but especially when they challenge, our secular presuppositions. This dimension of religion is at risk of getting “lost in translation” in the Habermasian paradigm.

A Plato opposed to democracy fills the literature, and while some scholars question whether Plato adequately captures Socrates' possibly favorable views of democracy, Plato himself remains a paragon of elitism. I argue that Plato's response to democracy is far more theoretically interesting than simple disdain for the unenlightened masses. Rather, in Book 8 of the Republic he explores the fundamental tensions of a regime identified with freedom and equality, which he presents as characterized by formlessness, and the epistemological and theoretical problems posed by the absence of forms (eidê). Eidê give structure and identity to regimes and to their citizens; they are necessary for intellection and philosophy, but they are also the grounds for compulsion. Plato's analysis of democracy thus becomes a more serious challenge for democratic theorists than previously recognized.