A good deal has been heard in recent years concerning the “liberation” of peoples living under totalitarian rule, but the question of who are the men who succeed to the leadership of a state after the fall of its totalitarian rulers has received relatively little attention. Such observations as have been made on the subject, whether by political opponents of a totalitarian regime or by professional social scientists, have tended to follow implicitly—if not explicitly—the theory of alternating elites. There is assumed to be, on the one hand, a more or less homogeneous totalitarian elite, and, on the other, an actual or potential counter-elite, representing the political antithesis to the totalitarian elite. The stability of the rule of the former is said to vary inversely with the degree of organization of the latter. The totalitarian elite is variously identified with the holders of high positions in the totalitarian system, with the “responsible leaders,” with an entire ruling class, or simply with those individuals who are said to be influential in the determination of national policy. The counter-elite is identified with the active overt and covert opponents of the totalitarian elite—resistance leaders, the “vanguard of the proletariat,” prominent exiles, and “men on whose backs in concentration camps the lash has written the new gospel in blood and tears.” Both elite and counter-elite are thus seen as directly, actively involved in the totalitarian system, either as its leaders or as its opponents.

Revolution, in this schema, is identified with the destruction of the totalitarian elite and its replacement by the counter-elite. Or, conversely, the destruction of the totalitarian elite is an act of revolution and will result in the emergence of the counter-elite to power. It is an attractively simple thesis, and it warrants investigation.

Since Rousseau, and perhaps because of him, political theory has often been characterized by a disjunction between considerations of human nature and questions of justice and law. Yet, reexamining the Second Discourse as a theodicy forces us to rethink how the essential questions of political theory are related just where they seem to become separated. The core of the theodicy is Rousseau's view that we are, by nature, physical beings embedded unproblematically in nature—good, or ordered, beings in a good, or ordered, whole. Although Rousseau presents his explicitly political thought as a juridical doctrine seemingly separated from his understanding of human nature and history, his political thought is founded upon his portrait of man's existence in the “pure state of nature.” This portrait serves as a positive formal model to enable us to remake our corrupted existence through the legitimate state—itself modeled by Rousseau on the divine or natural whole.

As Thomas Kuhn noted, it is almost inevitable that scientific practitioners read the history of their field backward and perceive earlier stages as, at best, prototypical of the present. This is the manner in which political scientists, and even historians, have imaged the relationship between the debates about science and democracy that took place during the 1920s and 1950s. Despite the importance of Charles Merriam's role in the history of American political science, his work was not the discursive axis of the paradigmatic disciplinary shift that took place in the first quarter of the 20th century. It was the arguments of G. E. G. Catlin and W. Y. Elliott that most distinctly represented the transformation in both the theory of democracy and the image of science, and that, for the next two generations, set the terms of the debate about these issues as well as about the relationship between the mainstream discipline and the subfield of political theory. And, despite the theoretical and ideological differences between Catlin and Elliott, their exchange points to the intensely practical concerns that originally informed the controversy about the scientific study of politics.

This paper examines William Riker's thesis that only minimum winning coalitions form in n-person zero-sum symmetric games. It demonstrates that Riker's conclusion is false by identifying the conditions under which larger than minimum winning coalitions can form. Since these conditions are quite general it indicates that Riker's conclusion is valid only for a highly restricted class of games. This class of games is identified as those in which players not in a minimum winning coalition have no incentive to form any coalitions among themselves. These games are characterized as games inessential over coalitions of losers. Only in these games can minimum winning coalitions be expected to form exclusively. In all other games, larger than minimum winning coalitions are possible.

A large descriptive and conjectural literature has evolved during the past decade suggesting that rapid urbanization—conceived primarily as a massive demographic shift from country to city—constitutes an important agent of political instability in much of Latin America, favoring the growth of alienation and radicalism. This effect is frequently attributed to the frustration of migrant expectations for economic improvement and social mobility in the large cities, or to the processes of personal and social disorganization allegedly inherent in the migration experience. Although field researchers have long suspected the inadequacy of such theory, derived largely from the urbanization experiences of advanced Western nations, for explaining political instability in Latin America, there have been few systematic attempts at testing the various propositions and unconfirmed generalizations advanced by the “urban instability-crisis-and-chaos” theorists. This paper attempts to explore, if not to test, some of the empirical implications of the general theoretical conceptions of the urbanizing process and its socio-political consequences as developed in recent social science literature on Latin America. Mexico is selected for analysis both by virtue of its extremely rapid rate of rural-urban migration in recent years and because of the opportunities afforded by the availability for Mexico of detailed survey data from a number of independent sources to examine systematically a wide range of theoretically relevant variables and relationships posited in the urbanization literature. While in certain areas (as indicated below) the particular nature of the Mexican political system and developmental pattern may render these findings imperfect as predictors for other parts of Latin America, the analysis presented here should serve to identify the major inadequacies of existing theory and illustrate the need for new conceptual models which can encompass both stabilizing and destabilizing concomitants of rapid urban concentration in a developing nation.

The scientific study of politics requires an environment which accepts free inquiry and discussion. Scholars must be permitted to ask questions of their own choosing, gather data without hindrance, and communicate freely with one another about their findings. To be sure, freedom to investigate sensitive policy matters is limited by all governments. Moreover, political scientists themselves inevitably introduce some measure of their own values or ideological predispositions into their works. But it is obvious that without the guarantee of certain minimum freedoms, political science as we know it in the West could never exist.

Communist regimes traditionally have made independent inquiry or objective discussion of political phenomena impossible. In the Stalinist period, scholarly analyses of politics—or, for that matter, of aesthetic, literary, moral or economic questions—amounted to little more than doctrinal exegesis or the elaboration of practical measures to implement the Party's demands. An autonomous social science in Stalin's Russia or Eastern Europe was simply unthinkable.

Since the dictator's death, however, Communist governments have modified their hostility toward the social sciences in general, and toward political science in particular. A decade of de-Stalinization has been accompanied by steps to encourage the scientific study of politics. In several East European countries, political science now enjoys recognition as a discipline in its own right.

This does not mean that political science in Communist countries has freed itself of political controls, or that what is presented as political science is always of scholarly merit.

Many empirical investigations indicate that information is scarce and therefore costly to holders and seekers of public office. Indeed, some studies suggest that imperfect information may account for important aspects of the behavior of politicians. Nevertheless, there is as yet no theoretical investigation of political decision making that illustrates the impact of costly information or behavior.

In this paper the authors develop a model of electoral competition in which the candidates are only imperfectly aware of public preferences over issues and in which they may have the opportunity to increase the amount of information they hold at some cost. It turns out that the absence of perfect information profoundly affects the strategic structure of candidate competition. If information is costless, two-party electoral contests are naturally modeled as symmetric two-person zero-sum games. However, if candidates have distinct beliefs about voter behavior, the natural game-theoretic representation becomes a non-zero-sum game. This article is concerned mostly with analyzing the consequences of this transformation.

Community information sharing is crucial to a government’s ability to respond to a disaster or a health emergency, such as a pandemic. In conflict zones, however, citizens and local leaders often lack trust in state institutions and are unwilling to cooperate, risking costly delays and information gaps. We report results from a randomized experiment in the Philippines regarding government efforts to provide services and build trust with rural communities in a conflict-affected region. We find that the outreach program increased the probability that village leaders provide time-sensitive pandemic risk information critical to the regional Covid-19 Task Force by 20%. The effect is largest for leaders who, at baseline, were skeptical about government capacity and fairness and had neutral or positive attitudes towards rebels. A test of mechanisms suggests that treated leaders updated their beliefs about government competence and shows that neither security improvement nor project capture by the rebels are primary drivers. These findings highlight the important role that government efforts to build connections with conflict-affected communities can play in determining public health outcomes during times of national emergencies.

A number of liberal defenders of nationalism argue that cultural-national membership is a vital component of individual identity. Notable among these liberal “identity nationalists” is Will Kymlicka, who defends minority national and cultural rights on the basis of the importance of such membership for persons' sense of identity. Kymlicka's conception of the liberal autonomous self, however, is radically at odds with his views concerning the importance of cultural–national membership. It also privileges national identity in such a way as to lend support to an extreme and illiberal form of nationalism, one that bases the priority of national obligations on the priority of national identity. By prioritizing national identity as Kymlicka does, other nonnational sites of identity formation, such as religious communities, may receive inadequate protection in a pluralistic nation-state.The author would like to thank three anonymous reviewers and the editor of the American Political Science Review for their many helpful comments and suggestions.

This paper attempts to operationalize the concept of a foreign policy system and to test the utility of one path to empirically oriented theory: The approach is designated “structured empiricism.” The research design incorporates some of the recent innovations in political science—the concept of system, the distinction between operational and psychological environment, the notion of issue-area and the attitudinal prism or lens through which decision makers' images are filtered. The focus is on one of the most significant Israeli foreign policy decision clusters—German Reparations 1950–2. Following the designation of the decision-making group, the dissection of their psychological environment, and the analysis of the decision-making process, the critical dimension of feedback is examined. The decision flow and feedback flow illustrate the dynamic character of a foreign policy system in action. Finally, a selection of hypotheses on the behavior of decision makers is tested, and the findings summarized.

Can nativist attitudes condition support for LGBT+ rights? The sustained advance in pro-LGBT+ attitudes in the West often contrasts with the greening of anti-immigrant sentiment propagated by nativist supply-side actors. We argue that these parallel trends are causally connected, theorizing that exposure to sexually conservative ethnic out-groups can provoke an instrumental increase in LGBT+ inclusion, particularly among those hostile toward immigration. Leveraging experiments in Britain and Spain, we provide causal evidence that citizens strategically liberalize their levels of support for LGBT+ rights when opponents of these measures are from the ethnic out-group. In a context where sexuality-based liberalism is nationalized, increasing tolerance toward LGBT+ citizens is driven by a desire among nativist citizens to socially disidentify from those out-groups perceived as inimical to these nationalized norms. Our analyses provide a critical interpretation of positive trends in LGBT+ tolerance with instrumental liberalism masking lower rates of genuine shifts in LGBT+ inclusion.

When estimating the political determinants of the federal budget, scholars face a choice between using measures of funding and measures of spending as their outcome of interest. We examine the consequences of this choice. In particular, we argue that spending outcomes may serve as a poor test of the research questions scholars seek to answer, since spending data conflate competing budgetary influences, are downstream measures of the appropriations that originated them, and induce measurement error. To test our claim, we compare the spending data used in a recent study (Berry and Fowler 2016: American Journal of Political Science 60 (3): 692–708) with an original data set of military construction appropriations. While an analysis of the spending data produces a null result, the same analysis using the appropriations data provides strong evidence that legislators use their committee positions to distribute pork. Our findings have broad implications for studies that use measures of spending in the congressional and presidency literatures.

Roll-call votes provide scholars with the opportunity to measure many quantities of interest. However, the usefulness of the roll-call sample depends on the population it is intended to represent. After laying out why understanding the sample properties of the roll-call record is important, we catalogue voting procedures for 145 legislative chambers, finding that roll calls are typically discretionary. We then consider two arguments for discounting the potential problem: (a) roll calls are ubiquitous, especially where the threshold for invoking them is low or (b) the strategic incentives behind requests are sufficiently benign so as to generate representative samples. We address the first defense with novel empirical evidence regarding roll-call prevalence and the second with an original formal model of the position-taking argument for roll-call vote requests. Both our empirical and theoretical results confirm that inattention to vote method selection should broadly be considered an issue for the study of legislative behavior.

How does the central state affect public goods provision by local actors? I study the effect of state capacity on local governance in sub-Saharan Africa, which I argue depends on whether traditional authorities are integrated in the country’s constitution. I use distance to administrative headquarters as a measure of state capacity and estimate a regression discontinuity design around administrative boundaries. If traditional authorities are not integrated, then the state and traditional authorities compete with each other, working as substitutes. That is, a stronger state undermines the power of traditional authorities. If traditional authorities are integrated, then the two work as complements. A stronger state then increases the power of traditional authorities. I show that these relationships are crucial to understanding the influence of state capacity on local economic development.

Do U.S. senators adjust their policy positions or voting behavior—engage in “strategic moderation”—in their quest for reelection? In the June 1986 issue of this Review, Gerald Wright and Michael Berkman sought to demonstrate that Senate incumbents moderate their ideological positions as elections near. This endeavor was part of their larger effort to show the importance of policy issues in the selection of members of Congress. Robert Bernstein takes the view that the claims about strategic moderation rest on methodological flaws. But Wright and Berkman argue that most investigators agree on the general direction of senatorial candidate behavior. The controversy turns on conception and interpretation of analytical results.

The presidential campaigns of 1928 and 1932 are a study in contrasts. In 1928, the United States was at the peak of the boom period; the incumbent Republicans were confident of victory; and the result was a Republican victory which “broke” the Solid South and swept all but two states outside that section into the Republican column. The 1932 campaign was fought in the midst of depression and disaster; confidence was with the Democrats for the first time in many years; and the result was a Democratic victory which put the party securely in control of both houses of Congress, as well as of the presidency. What effect did the changed economic and political outlook have upon the financing of the campaign?