Guttman scaling is the usual procedure for scaling legislative roll-call votes. This paper calls attention to an alternative scaling model—the proximity model. Under this model, legislators approve a consecutive set of items on the scale, without the cumulation required by the Guttman scale. Circumstances under which proximity voting is likely are discussed. Congressional voting on the Compromise of 1850 is analyzed in detail to illustrate the proximity model and to emphasize the possibility of obtaining faulty inferences if one uses the Guttman scale model when it is incorrect. Guttman scaling has been successful for contemporary Congresses, but the proximity model is seen to underlie some issues in the early 1970s. Proximity scaling is not limited to the legislative realm; it can be used in survey analysis and in attitudinal research more generally.

It is hardly surprising that most investigations of Soviet bureaucracy have emphasized the unique aspects of that system rather than its relation to broader problems of administration. Yet the importance of Soviet experience makes a beginning in comparative analysis highly desirable. The purpose of this article is to identify some (by no means all) of the ways in which Soviet administrative behavior resembles or differs from administrative behavior in Western Europe, which is assumed here to be the norm of administration in a politically and economically modernized society. Where Soviet and Western European administrative behavior coincide, it is assumed that the behavior arises from requirements of the economically modernized societies which prevail in both the USSR and Western Europe at present. Where administrative behavior differs in the two areas, tentative explanations are sought in (1) the circumstance that the Soviet economy has become modernized more recently and more rapidly than the economy in Western Europe; and (2) the difference between the Communist political system and the pluralistic systems prevailing in Western Europe.

The life of society is a struggle for law. Where life is fixed in unalterable grooves, where it moves from day to day without change or thought of change, law is also, of course, stationary, permanent, graven upon the face of affairs as if upon tables of stone. But where life changes law changes, changes under the impulse and fingering of life itself. For it records life; it does not contain it; it does not originate it. It is subsequent to fact; it takes its origin and energy from the actual circumstances of social experience. Law is an effort to fix in definite practice what has been found to be convenient, expedient, adapted to the circumstances of the actual world. Law in a moving, vital society grows old, obsolete, impossible, item by item. It is not necessary to repeal it or to set it formally aside. It will die of itself,—for lack of breath,—because it is no longer sustained by the facts or by the moral or practical judgments of the community whose life it has attempted to embody.

The poverty of philosophy, for Marx, was its formalism. The social sciences, in contrast, are blessed with the ability to adjust theory to experience. In our study of Marxist movements, however, we lack precisely the marxian flexibility we need to overcome a patrimony of ideology, misinformation and rigidity. Writers like Duverger and Selznick, for example, talk about “devotee parties” and “organizational weapons” without considering that their terminology may in some cases be misleading.

The devotee party, writes Duverger, “represents a change from the conception of the party as a class; it is the party conceived as the elite.” Its members pledge their “whole human being” to the party while its structure focuses upon “unceasing propaganda and agitation,” to the detriment of parliamentary activity. Duverger leaves no doubt that his archetype of the devotee party is the Communist Party. What he never asks, however, is whether a Communist Party may be anything but a devotee party.

With a similar focus, Philip Selznick describes “the combat party,” whose peculiar property is its “competence to turn members of a voluntary association into disciplined and deployable political agents,” and its “adoption of subversion” and “penetration and manipulation of institutional targets.” While the model is most relevant in societies in which Communist doctrine is remote and unappealing to the population, Selznick, like Duverger, holds that it “provides a fair interpretation of the Communist vanguard or combat party, wherever it is found.”

In an article, “The Paradox of Vote Trading,” (APSR 67 [December, 1973]) William H. Riker and Steven J. Brams have argued that systematic logrolling among all members of a legislature produces a paradox: While each trade is individually rational, the effects of externalities offset the potential gains from exchanging votes and each voter finds himself worse off than he would have been by voting sincerely. We extend the results of Riker and Brams to a unanimity decision rule and find that a paradox of vote trading holds for that decision rule as well as for simple majority rule. Under a unanimity rule, however, trades which would be collectively rational (i.e., which would produce a Pareto optimal result) are not individually rational; the non-trader is the beneficiary under such a decision rule. Finally, we pose the question Riker and Brams suggested: Is the paradox of vote trading inescapable? Except under very restrictive conditions, we find that it is. However, given certain assumptions about the distributions of individual utilities, we present proofs of the necessary and sufficient conditions for the Pareto optimality of vote trading and argue that in actual legislative situations, when vote trading is Pareto optimal, learning behavior should serve to extricate the members from the paradox of vote trading.

In any scholarly field, some works are widely acknowledged as classics, whereas the rest—indeed, the great majority—are little noted nor long remembered. Indeed, according to the “Iron Law of Important Articles,” the number of significant articles increases only to the extent of the square root of the number of published articles (Holub, Tappeiner, and Eberharter 1991). It follows that as a research literature grows, important articles constitute an ever-decreasing proportion of the total output.

Recent controversies over the degree of responsibility displayed by American parties have underscored at least one feature of voting in the Congress. Whatever the merits of the contending interpretations and demands, the facts adduced on both sides suggest relatively fluid, unstructured voting patterns, especially in the House of Representatives. Although the party label is clearly the single most reliable indicator of congressional voting behavior, it is admittedly somewhat less than perfect. The individual Representative may fairly often dissent from the views of most of his party colleagues, not only on matters of local or minor significance but also on issues of national or even global import.

The Representative's “independence” is most commonly, and in a good many instances accurately, ascribed to peculiarities of his constituency which generate demands for a non-conforming vote or, perhaps more frequently, are expected to be the source of recriminations and penalities if he does not display independence of his party colleagues on certain types of issues. But the Member of Congress is by no means always able to predict the electoral consequences of his choices even though he is sure that they may produce repercussions in his district.

We are witnessing increasing partisan polarization across the world. It is often argued that partisan “echo chambers” are one of the drivers of both policy and affective polarization. In this article, we develop and test the argument that the political homogeneity of people’s social environment shapes polarization. Using an innovative, large-scale pre-registered “lab-in-the-field” experiment in the United Kingdom, we examine how polarization is influenced by partisan group homogeneity. We recruit nationally representative partisans and assign them to discuss a salient policy issue, either with like-minded partisans (an echo chamber) or in a mixed-partisan group. This allows us to examine how group composition affects polarization. In line with our expectations, we find that partisan echo chambers increase both policy and affective polarization compared to mixed discussion groups. This has important implications for our understanding of the drivers of polarization and for how out-group animosity might be ameliorated in the mass public.

How does violence become publicly unacceptable? I address this question in the context of lynching in the United States. Between 1880 and the 1930s, public discourse about lynching moved from open or tacit endorsement to widespread condemnation. I argue this occurred because of increasing publicity for lynchings. While locals justified nearby lynchings, publicity exposed lynching to distant, un-supportive audiences and allowed African Americans to safely articulate counternarratives and condemnations. I test this argument using data on lynchings, rail networks, and newspaper coverage of lynchings in millions of issues across thousands of newspapers. I find that lynchings in counties with greater access to publicity (via rail networks) saw more and geographically dispersed coverage, that distant coverage was more critical, and that increased risk of media exposure may have reduced the incidence of lynching. I discuss how publicity could be a mechanism for strengthening or weakening justifications of violence in other contexts.

Previous studies have documented ethnic/racial bias in politicians’ constituency service, but less is known about the circumstances under which such ethnocentric responsiveness is curbed. We propose and test two hypotheses in this regard: the electoral incentives hypothesis, predicting that incentives for (re)election crowd out politicians’ potential biases, and the candidate selection hypothesis, stipulating that minority constituents can identify responsive legislators by using candidates’ partisan affiliation and stated policy preferences as heuristics. We test these hypotheses through a field experiment on the responsiveness of incumbent local politicians in Denmark (N = 2,395), varying ethnicity, gender, and intention to vote for the candidate in the upcoming election, merged with data on their electoral performance and their stated policy preferences from a voting advice application. We observe marked ethnocentric responsiveness and find no indication that electoral incentives mitigate this behavior. However, minority voters can use parties’ and individual candidates’ stances on immigration to identify responsive politicians.

The percentage of state legislative seats won by Democrats in nonsouthern states has increased steadily since World War II. Fiorina (1994) argues that this is because of the professionalization of state legislatures: Legislatures now meet longer and pay higher salaries; legislative positions which require more time are less attractive to Republicans, who can make more money elsewhere; higher salaries attract Democrats, who make less in the private sector. That analysis has several serious flaws. First, nonsouthern states have gradually become more Democratic at all levels as part of a long-term regional political realignment. The rise in Democrats in legislatures outside the South is due more to this realignment than to legislative professionalization. Second, trends in southern states contradict his hypothesis. Professionalization has increased, but state legislatures are becoming more Republican. Finally, Fiorina's analysis is worth careful reconsideration because it suggests that there is little connection between constituencies and partisan outcomes.

Recent years have witnessed significant democratic erosion, particularly in eastern Europe. This article suggests that the explanations of democratic backsliding, largely focused on historical and post-communist experiences of the this region, fail to note the striking and counterintuitive influence of ethnic politics. Departing from an observation that democratic practices have deteriorated significantly more in eastern European countries without mobilized ethnic minorities, this article argues for the central role of ethnic politics in buttressing democracy in the region. In countries with politically organized ethnic minorities, democratic institutions and practices remain more resilient. This is because mobilized ethnic minorities provide socially rooted electorates with almost an existential need for political rights and civil liberties. Active minority engagement in politics reinforces a constitutionally liberal pole of political competition and provides a counterbalance to the primary carriers of democratic regression—illiberal parties.

This article, by employing voting simulations in a survey of party activists, examines responses to a woman's claim to party office on the basis of her sex. The degree of acceptance of this claim or the willingness to grant what is called social representation, is contrasted with the respondents' inclinations to select candidates favorable to women's rights, or the willingness to grant what is called opinion representation. Variations in responses to the two simulations are analyzed in terms of attitudes toward gender roles, government intervention and the legitimacy of groups in the political process. Voting in the simulation involving opinion representation can best be understood in terms of the respondent's attitude toward government intervention, while the simulation involving social representation activates the attitude toward groups. Discussion of the findings focuses on the dilemma of group claims for minority representation in a liberal democratic context and the need for better understanding of attitudes toward groups among political elites.

American social welfare policy involves a politically significant fiscal interaction between short-run, pay-as-you-go constraints and long-run equilibrium constraints motivated by the contributory principle and the concept of actuarial soundness. The fiscal constraints induce conflict between benefit recipients and payroll-tax-payers. To support small election-year reductions in payroll taxes, means-tested program benefits are slightly reduced in election years (compared to non-election-year levels under similar economic conditions). The existence of the constraints and of the election-year changes is tested using a multivariate time series regression model of monthly transfer payments and contributions for social insurance during years 1948–87. Short-run dynamics are found to be weakly incrementalist, but otherwise the results support the argument. Extraordinary manipulations are identified during 1972. Special technical features of the econometric analysis are a nonlinear, dynamic specification; robust generalized method of moments estimation; and near cointegration.

The Nebraska nonpartisan legislature serves as a control setting for testing several hypotheses about the impact of party and constituency on voting behavior in legislative bodies. Specifically, in light of the data obtained from a setting where party identification is present but party leadership and organization are absent, the following hypotheses are examined: that political parties are important in structuring voting behavior because of the influence of party leaders and organization; that party is important because party identification is a surrogate for sets of beliefs and attitudes that distinguish members of one party from another; or that party is important because party differences reflect different constituency bases of the party. In a roll-call analysis of five sessions utilizing Guttman-scaling and regression techniques, it was found that in the absence of party leadership and organization, voting is highly unstructured. Further, dimensions of voting that were found are largely unexplainable in terms of standard party and constituency variables. Thus, party identification and constituency influence appear to be insufficient cues for the organization of legislative voting behavior, in the absence of party leadership.

Large-scale complex research project designs are providing a new impetus to the elimination of subfield boundaries within political science. Major projects are taking advantage of the methodology and technology of contemporary social research to include comparisons among institutions, across cultural boundaries, and extending through time. As a consequence, traditionally narrow field and subfield concentrations on segments of the political process are giving way to intellectual interests that bring together hitherto separate concerns. The full potential for discipline-unifying research will, however, not be realized until there is a strengthening of the organizational infrastructures for research, a broadening of training in research design and administration, and an increase in funding for large-scale projects. The execution and subsequent intellectual exploitation of large research projects will carry additional problems that will be solved only with substantial changes in the workways of the political scientist, but those problems are greatly outweighed by the positive contribution that such research will make to the future of the discipline.

The present trend in the comparative study of politics is a departure from the country-by-country approach and a search for analytical models based on dimensions common to all political systems. This trend is in part based on the assumption that the construction of new concepts and conceptual frameworks for comparative politics would provide the starting point for a general empirical theory of political systems. One of the new concepts which has become common currency is “political culture.” Originally proposed by Almond in 1956 and developed by Almond and Verba in The Civic Culture, the concept of political culture refers to patterns of politically relevant orientations of a cognitive, evaluative and expressive sort. It is intended to provide a researchable connecting link between the psychological tendencies of individuals and groups and the structural-functional characteristics of political systems, and to translate such concepts as “historical heritage” or “national character” into sets of cultural components more amenable to measurement and comparison across nations.

The study of political culture thus involves comparisons between the orientations of social groups towards specific political objects, between those of particular groups towards different objects, and between patterns of orientations and patterns of behavior. From a methodological viewpoint, all empirical political research is comparative research; we must therefore expect to encounter the problem of the comparability of political data, and in particular, the problem of equivalence of meaning, in all areas of political study. In the comparison of cultural data across nations the requirements of equivalence of meaning are probably more difficult to meet than in any other area. Generally speaking, there are two possible sources of differences in meaning in cross-cultural data: (a) cultural differences of a non-political nature, such as language, education or the degree of frankness or “openness” of personal opinions, and (b) cultural differences of a political nature.

Political theorists from Martha Nussbaum to Amitai Etzioni appeal to compassion as a basis that liberalism otherwise lacks for refraining from exploiting and even for helping others. However, critics like Clifford Orwin and Richard Boyd have raised this question: is compassion too weak and undiscriminating to rely on in politics? Jean-Jacques Rousseau's account of compassion helps answer it. Rousseau understands compassion as a useful manifestation of the otherwise dangerous desire to extend the self and show signs of power. Consequently, he considers compassion's relative weakness a strength and explains how it can be supplemented and complemented by other, independent motives for serving others, including gratitude, friendship, and obligation. Compassion's weakness also makes it less likely than self-love, narrowly conceived, to overwhelm reason. Rousseau excels compassion's contemporary defenders in his awareness of the complex relationship between compassion and other social passions and of the dangers that his understanding of compassion addresses.

This paper presents a conceptual analysis of the terms “virtue,” “obligation,” and “politics,” a project suggested by similar analyses currently underway in the field of ethics. The essence of the study is the contrast between politics understood in terms of virtue (as by Plato, Aristotle, and, in a way, Rousseau) and politics understood in terms of obligation (as by Hobbes, Locke, John Rawls and, in a way, Rousseau). The paper argues that obligation and virtue form the center of two separate languages or paradigms for the formulation and discussion of basic political questions, and discusses the theoretical grounds for the neglect of the language of virtue by the greater part of modern political thought. This discussion, while pointing to the possible weaknesses of the language of virtue, also serves to indicate (directly and by contrast) the limitations of the language of obligation as a way of understanding politics.

When the forces of the French Union and those of the Viet Minh accepted a cease-fire at Geneva in July, 1954, the 17th Parallel was visioned only as a temporary military demarcation line. Nation-wide elections were to be held within two years to settle the political future of the country; and it was generally taken for granted that the entire area, from the Gate of Nam-Quan on the China border to the Point of Ca-Mau at the tip of the Indo-China peninsula, an area roughly equivalent in size to that of the States of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and West Virginia combined, with a population approximating 23 millions, would fall to Ho Chi Minh and his Communists. The device of a delayed election was accepted merely as a face-saving measure to enable the French to withdraw gracefully from the scene by handing over control of the South—and hence responsibility for its future—to a native government.

That the 17th Parallel has become, instead, a political boundary separating the Republic of Viet Nam, embracing roughly the southern 40 per cent of the area and nearly half of the population, from the Communist “Democratic Republic of Viet Nam,” has been largely the work of a single man, Ngo Dinh Diem, and his closely knit group of assistants.