In many ways the study of political groups from a theoretical point of view can be said not to have progressed much beyond the conceptions of Arthur F. Bentley. There have been countless studies of political groups, to be sure, but it seems most have been little more than the collection and presentation of ad hoc facts obtained from the testing of ad hoc hypotheses, the concepts of “group” and of “group behavior” having been little altered in the process.

Much of the difficulty no doubt stems from Bentley's strict empiricism and the interpretation given his position by most social scientists who have aspired to translate him. When Bentley said that we know nothing of ideas and feelings but only of activity, he was merely reminding the social scientist to remain close to the operations of the phenomena he was studying. Activity, or behavior, can be worked with and studied directly, but it is questionable whether or not the same can be said of ideas and feelings. Scientific progress, Bentley would say, can be made only if one deals with what is visible and replicable. Critics as well as followers of Bentley, however, have interpreted him to mean that such matters as subjectivity are outside the pale of science, since subjectivity is presumed to be private, idiosyncratic, and nonreplicable.

As government welfare programming contracts and NGOs increasingly assume core aid functions, they must address a long-standing challenge—that people in need often belong to stigmatized groups. To study other-regarding behavior, we fielded an experiment through a text-to-give campaign in Greece. Donations did not increase with an appeal to the in-group (Greek child) relative to a control (child), but they were halved with reference to a stigmatized out-group (Roma child). An appeal to fundamental rights, a common advocacy strategy, did not reduce the generosity gap. Donations to all groups were lower near Roma communities and declined disproportionately for the Roma appeal. Qualitative research in 12 communities complements our experiment. We conclude that NGO fundraising strategies that narrowly emphasize either in-groups or out-groups, or fundamental rights language, may not be as effective as broader appeals, and we discuss implications for public goods provision in an era of growing nationalism.

Henry Thoreau's Walden is frequently read as the tale of a disaffected Romantic individualist escaping the rigors of community and modern society to seek refuge in a pondside idyll. I argue that this is a fundamental misreading which misses the political import of the book. Walden reveals itself to be a democratic advice-book focusing on the tensions between the political ideal of free self-direction and the unfavorable work conditions that laborers often face. Thoreau's goal is to set out a strategy by which economically vulnerable citizens may enact their liberty and autonomy in threatening employment conditions. To that end, Thoreau reformats themes and practices from various ancient philosophical traditions. Walden is one of the few texts in our tradition in which strategies are thought through for the individual laborer attempting to maintain freedom while at the same time making a living. It therefore merits our closest attention.

Recently, we have witnessed the politicizing effects of police killings in the United States. This project asks how such killings might (de)mobilize voters at the local level. We draw on multiple theoretical approaches to develop a theory of community contact with the police. We argue that when a highly visible event tied to government actions occurs—like a police killing—it can spur turnout. This is especially true where public narratives tie such events to government and structural causes. By comparing neighborhoods near a killing before and after election day, we estimate the causal effect on turnout. We find a mobilizing effect. These effects are larger when they “trend” on Google, occur in Black communities, or if the victim is Black. Proximity to a killing also increases support for abolishing the police. We conclude that police violence increases electoral participation in communities where narratives about racially unjust policing resonate most.

The Republican Party has adopted constitutional “originalism” as its touchstone. Existing accounts of this development tell either a teleological story, with legal academics as the progenitors, or deracialized accounts of conservatives arguing first principles. Exploiting untapped archival data, this paper argues otherwise. Empirically, the paper shows that the realigning GOP’s originalism grew directly out of political resistance to Brown v. Board of Education by conservative governing elites, intellectuals, and activists in the 1950s and 1960s. Building on this updated empirical understanding, the theoretical claim is that ideologically charged elite legal academics and attorneys in Departments of Justice serve more of a legitimating rather than an originating role for American constitutional politics upon a long coalition’s electoral success. Finally, by showing the importance of race to constitutional conservatism’s development, this article posits that the received understanding of a “three-corner stool” of social, economic, and foreign policy conservatism needs revision.

Political candidates embody possibilities as well as preferences. To some extent, their possibilities vary systematically and inversely with their preferences. Political systems often have built-in “stops” preventing left-wing candidates from doing things too far to the left of their declared positions and vice versa. The preferences of right-wing candidates make them unlikely to want to pursue policies on the far left, but at least the opportunity to do so is available to them in a way that may be denied to left-wingers themselves. Taking differential possibilities into account, it might prove instrumentaily rational to vote perversely for the right-wing candidate if you really want left-wing results and vice versa. This article sketches conditions under which that proposition will hold true, shows those conditions are empirically plausible, and suggests that politicians themselves are alive to these possibilities. This awareness should make us much more cautious in reading any policy-specific mandates into electoral outcomes. It may even make us doubt the model of instrumental rationality itself.

There is no more significant commentary on the growth of international law, both in precision and in comprehensiveness, than an estimate of the relative authority of the name of Vattel in the world of international relations a century ago and in that of today. A century ago not even the name of Grotius himself was more potent in its influence upon questions relating to international law than that of Vattel. Vattel's treatise on the law of nations was quoted by judicial tribunals, in speeches before legislative assemblies, and in the decrees and correspondence of executive officials. It was the manual of the student, the reference work of the statesman, and the text from which the political philosopher drew inspiration. Publicists considered it sufficient to cite the authority of Vattel to justify and give conclusiveness and force to statements as to the proper conduct of a state in its international relations.

At the present day the name and treatise of Vattel have both passed into the remoter field of the history of international law. It is safe to say that in no modern controversy over the existence and force of an alleged rule of international law would publicists seek to strengthen the position taken by them by quoting the authority of Vattel. As an exposition of the law of nations at a given period of its growth, the work can, it is true, lose nothing of its value, but in saying that it has thus won its place irrevocably among the classics of international law, we are merely repeating that it has lost its value as a treatise on the law of the present day.

The purpose of this paper is a re-examination of the thesis set forth by Otto von Gierke: that in medieval political theory there were certain organic tendencies which, because the jurists failed to develop the concept of the real personality of the group, ultimately gave way to an atomistic construction of the state. The paper is not concerned with the actual structure of medieval society, nor with the legal concepts of jurists, but with the theoretical doctrines of the publicists which Gierke interprets in that section of Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht which, in Maitland's translation, has become a classic for students of political theory. It is my contention that, while his treatment of subordinate issues of medieval political theory is often masterly, Gierke's main theses in regard to the medieval concepts of the nature of the group, the relation of officers to the group, and the relation of groups to one another are fundamentally inaccurate.

A predominant note in the speculations of liberal-democratic thinkers on the subject of post-war reconstruction has been an insistence on the need for “some kind of a federation.” As a popular catch-word, “federation” has undoubted propagandist value. It has come to acquire some of the magic properties once associated with phrases like “a parliament of man,” “league of nations,” and “outlawry of war.” For the pamphleteer and orator, therefore, it is a readymade formula which should be fully exploited for the purpose of engendering a readiness for international collaboration.

The objective of this paper is to model the incumbent’s allocation of efforts that maximize his electoral chances in the presence of both vote buying (persuasion) and turnout buying (mobilization). The existing literature on distributive politics concludes that political candidates should concentrate their campaigning efforts either on safe districts or on swing districts. This paper shows that when candidates can use both persuasion and mobilization strategies, and the ideology of voters is unknown to the incumbent party, a third option should be taken into account. In fact, the optimal allocation of resources—rather than focusing on safe or swing districts—should target opposition strongholds, that is, the incumbent should try to sway voters in those districts in which the challenger is favored. The intuition for this result is simple. Since the incumbent does not know individual preferences (he only observes the distribution of preferences in the districts), all voters in a given district look identical to him. Hence, when approaching voters in a district to buy their vote, the incumbent always faces the risk of buying the vote of his supporters (who would have voted for him anyway).

Statelessness, in its technical sense, is the result of denationalization by the country of origin of a person who has acquired no citizenship elsewhere. A stateless person is also referred to as staatenlos, apatride. Protection and assistance may be withdrawn by the country of a person's origin without juridical suppression of that person's nationality. Such a person outside his own country, though not fully denationalized, is in a position in some measure akin to that of the stateless, as neither has the protection of any government.

Although many refugees are stateless, statelessness is not the essential quality of a refugee, who is defined in accepted international usage as a person who for political reasons has been driven from his country of origin, or who fears the political consequences of his return. He may be stateless, or, although not technically denationalized, may have lost the protection of his government by refusing to return home when the possibility was presented. As a person without governmental protection, he loses the advantages of international rights which depend for enforcement on the action of his home government. Furthermore, an alien who is not a national of any state is denied many of the privileges of a citizen, granted reciprocally through treaties. Such treaties give to the citizens of one state privileges in other states party to the treaties, including the right to work, the benefits of social insurance (such as workmen's compensation laws), and the right to education.

None of the classic definitions of the liberty and responsibility of the press is more eloquently simple than the Declaration of Rights of 1789: “The free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the most precious rights of man. Every citizen may therefore speak, write and publish freely, except to answer for abuses of that liberty in conditions duly determined by law.” Despite many vicissitudes France has remained one of the handful of countries where these phrases are more than empty rhetoric. Even there though, they were unable to prevent freedom of information from becoming one of the earliest casualties of the Algerian war.

In his recent article, “Rousseau on Agenda-Setting and Majority Rule” (2003), Ethan Putterman examines how the democratic principle of popular majority rule might be reconciled with agenda-setting by legislative experts through an analysis of Rousseau's political theory. He argues that Rousseau accomplishes this reconciliation through a novel separation of powers between the legislative and the executive powers where the sovereign people delegates the exclusive power to initiate laws to the executive. Putterman thereby identifies as a solution to the problem of democratic self-legislation what Rousseau sees as the most important danger to it. At issue is not merely the correct interpretation of Rousseau's theory, for Putterman's argument raises far-reaching questions concerning the compatibility of democratic principles and institutions. After demonstrating that Putterman is incorrect that the sovereign people in Rousseau's state delegate the power of legislative initiative, I examine how Rousseau anticipates and addresses a related question central to contemporary democratic and social choice theory: the problem of preference aggregation through voting in the absence of agenda-setting institutions.

We examined sensitive questions on political trust and regime support in China using indirect methods. We replicated previous list experiment results confirming that a majority trusts the central government despite overreports. We also conducted novel list experiments on trust in local government and support for removal of the presidential term limit and found evidence of overreporting for both. The point estimate for local government also suggests majority trust, but the central government is both more trusted and feared. However, we did not find evidence of majority support for removing the term limit at the time of the removal, indicating that the public may negatively evaluate government, albeit indirectly, in some circumstances. Last, examining self-monitoring, a personality trait for examining social desirability, we found that it only influenced overreporting trust in the central government. The results reveal meaningful variation in political trust and regime support in the world’s largest authoritarian society.

It is well known that each age writes history anew to serve its own purposes and that the history of political ideas is no exception to this rule. The precise nature of these changes in perspective, however, bears investigation. For not only can their study help us to understand the past; it may also lead us to a better understanding of our own intellectual situation. In this quest the political theories of the 17th century and particularly of the English Civil War are especially rewarding. It was in those memorable years that all the major issues of modern political theory were first stated, and with the most perfect clarity. As we have come to reject the optimism of the eighteenth century, and the crude positivism of the nineteenth, we tend more and more to return to our origins in search of a new start. This involves a good deal of reinterpretation, as the intensity with which the writings of Hobbes and Locke, for instance, are being reexamined in England and America testify. These philosophical giants have, however, by the force of their ideas been able to limit the scope of interpretive license. A provocative minor writer, such as Harrington, may for this reason be more revealing. The present study is therefore not only an effort to explain more soundly Harrington's own ideas, but also to treat him as an illustration of the mutations that the art of interpreting political ideas has undergone, and, perhaps to make some suggestions about the problems of writing intellectual history in general.

Much of contemporary feminist theory presents itself as radically opposed to liberalism. Certain claims made by Catharine MacKinnon have contributed significantly to this view. In this article, however, I argue that certain fundamental aspects of MacKinnon's work must be understood within a liberal framework, even as she challenges the epistemological assumptions that tend to inform liberal political theories. I highlight the ways in which MacKinnon makes use of several fundamental liberal tenets, such as the primacy of individual choice, and then consider how her work contributes to an ongoing discussion about the relevance of liberal theory to contemporary feminist concerns.

How important is self-interest in people’s opinions about public policy? If a policy proposal exempts a subset of the target group from costs that others will have to pay, or denies them benefits that others will enjoy, do they respond according to self-interest? This experimental study distinguishes between true self-interest and affinity for one’s in-group by exploiting a common feature of policy proposals: age-based “carve-outs” that prevent otherwise similar subgroups of a population from being affected by the benefits or burdens of a new policy (e.g., cuts to an old-age program that exempt people above a certain age). I find self-interest effects for older Americans exempt from cuts to Medicare and younger people too old to benefit from a hypothetical student debt relief program. These effects vary in ways that are consistent with extant theory.

How can states prevent armed groups from exploiting local governance gaps to (re)establish territorial control during transitions to national peace? We report results from an experimental evaluation of Colombia’s ComunPaz program, a scalable, inexpensive intervention that sought to replace rebel governance by harnessing complementarities between state and communal authorities and by improving security and justice provision in areas once dominated by FARC, the country’s largest rebel group. We find that ComunPaz enhanced the quality of local dispute resolution, increased citizens’ trust in (some) state institutions, and strengthened coordination between state and communal authorities. It also appears to have reduced citizens’ trust in, and reliance on, armed groups. The program did not, however, increase reliance on either state or communal authorities to resolve disputes, nor did it increase citizens’ trust in communal institutions. We discuss the implications of our findings for peace-building and state-building in countries transitioning from civil war.

Women have more protectionist trade preferences than men do. We assess whether this well-documented relationship between gender and protectionism in the mass public carries over into a relationship between women’s political representation and (a) party platforms, and (b) governments’ trade policy choices. Looking across countries and over time, we demonstrate that with an increase in women’s representation, political party trade policy positions become more protectionist. For government trade policy choices, we identify more nuanced results. The protectionist effect of women’s representation is limited to the most visible products: consumption goods. Women’s representation has no effect on intermediate inputs, where firm demands for trade liberalization are more pronounced and policy makers are thus constrained in implementing a protectionist agenda. These findings contribute to scholarship on the descriptive–substantive representation link, add a new dimension to our understanding of trade politics, and demonstrate the importance of applying a gendered lens to international political economy research.

Recently a group of scholars, analysts, and diplomatists met for a weekend conference on theoretical approaches to international politics. Their discussion was inspired by the widespread and growing interest in conceptual and theoretical problems illustrated by parallel efforts in the study of politics, economics, law, and human relations. In the field of foreign relations the impulse toward theory comes from practitioners as well as philosophers. Indeed a former Secretary of State maintains that our most urgent need is for “an applicable body of theory in foreign policy.” Practical men with first-hand diplomatic experience point to the need for rational generalizations and intellectual structures to extract meaning from the jet stream of contemporary events. The intellectual processes by which practical judgments are made along a moving front of events clearly demand inquiry and analysis. Theory in the study of international politics perhaps derserves a special priority because of the urgency of the problem and the stridency of the debate generated by competing approaches each claiming to have preempted the field. Perhaps what is called for is a sorting out and assessment of the intellectual factors that go into diverse theories of international politics at varying levels of abstraction and generality. This sorting out was one of the objectives of the conferees. Similarly this paper seeks to review the nature and purpose of theory, its limitations, and the characteristics of the chief types of theory in international politics.