Scholars interested in theorizing about political representation in terms relevant to democratic governance in mid-twentieth century America find themselves in a quandary. We are surrounded by functioning representative institutions, or at least by institutions formally described as representative. Individuals who presumably “represent” other citizens govern some 90 thousand different political units—they sit on school and special district boards, on township and city councils, on county directorates, on state and national assemblies, and so forth. But the flourishing activity of representation has not yet been matched by a sustained effort to explain what makes the representational process tick.

Despite the proliferation of representative governments over the past century, theory about representation has not moved much beyond the eighteenth-century formulation of Edmund Burke. Certainly most empirical research has been cast in the Burkean vocabulary. But in order to think in novel ways about representative government in the twentieth-century, we may have to admit that present conceptions guiding empirical research are obsolete. This in turn means that the spell of Burke's vocabulary over scientific work on representation must be broken.

To look afresh at representation, it is necessary to be sensitive to the unresolved tension between the two main currents of contemporary thinking about representational relationships. On the one hand, representation is treated as a relationship between any one individual, the represented, and another individual, the representative—an inter-individual relationship. On the other hand, representatives are treated as a group, brought together in the assembly, to represent the interest of the community as a whole—an inter-group relationship. Most theoretical formulations since Burke are cast in one or the other of these terms.

Understanding sources of judicial bias is essential for establishing due process. To date, theories of judicial decision making are rooted in ranked societies with majority–minority group cleavages, leaving unanswered which groups are more prone to express bias and whether it is motivated by in-group favoritism or out-group hostility. We examine judicial bias in Kenya, a diverse society that features a more complex ethnic landscape. While research in comparative and African politics emphasizes instrumental motivations underpinning ethnic identity, we examine the psychological, implicit biases driving judicial outcomes. Using data from Kenyan criminal appeals and the conditional random assignment of judges to cases, we show that judges are 3 to 5 percentage points more likely to grant coethnic appeals than non-coethnic appeals. To understand mechanisms, we use word embeddings to analyze the sentiment of written judgments. Judges use more trust-related terms writing for coethnics, suggesting that in-group favoritism motivates coethnic bias in this context.

We argue that short government durations in parliamentary democracies increase public spending by driving a political budget cycle. We present a revision of the standard political budget cycle model that relaxes the common (often implicit) assumption that election timing is fixed and known in advance. Instead, we allow cabinets to form expectations about their durability and use these expectations to inform their spending choices. The model predicts that (1) cabinets should spend more as their expected term in office draws to a close and (2) cabinets that outlive their expected duration should run higher deficits. Using data from 15 European democracies over several decades, we show that governments increase spending as their expected duration withers and run higher deficits as they surpass their forecasted life expectancy.

Partisanship has often been noted as one of the most conspicuous factors in legislative voting in the U.S. Congress. This paper attempts to trace party voting to shared policy goals. After the mean attitudes of congressmen belonging to the same party were ascertained for a number of policy domains, the effect of mean party attitudes on roll-call voting was estimated by regression analysis, taking into account the deviation of individual congressmen from their respective mean party attitudes. The results demonstrate that in all three policy domains examined, i.e., social welfare, civil rights, and foreign policy, shared party attitudes leave a strong imprint on individual roll-call decisions. The voting decisions of congressmen, in fact, are found to owe more to the shared party attitudes than to their own individual attitudes. The paper also explores the communication process through which shared policy attitudes are translated within Congress into partisan roll-call votes and points to a way of reconciling the “predispositional” and the “interactional” approach to legislative decision making.

This article demonstrates that, despite David Easton's assertions to the contrary, economic conceptions play a crucial role in his version of systems theory. A comparison between Easton's model of the political system and the classical economic model of Adam Smith reveals that they share the notions of system, scarcity, allocation, competition, maximization, self-regulation, homeostatic equilibrium, goal-seeking, and feedback. This comparison of Smith and Easton not only illuminates the logical and unacknowledged historical foundations of Easton's framework, it also clarifies some common misconceptions concerning systems analysis (e.g., the idea that it is static or that it is tautological) and underscores a number of important limitations on the utility of Easton's model as a tool for political analysis (i.e., the model requires a given pattern of behavior, a particular cultural environment and a specifiable institutional complex for its operation).

Any middle-aged member of the political science guild in a retrospective mood might ponder a question: “What ever happened to direct democracy?” In our halcyon student days the textbooks discussed the direct democracy trinity—initiative, referendum, and recall—described their mechanics and variations, explained their origin in the Progressive Era, told us that the United States, Australia, and Switzerland were leading practitioners of direct democracy, cited a few eccentric referenda, gave the standard pro and con arguments, and essayed some judgments of the relative merits of direct and representative democracy. Latter day collegians may pass through the portals innocent of the existence of the institutions of direct government. Half of the American government texts never mention the subject; the others allocate a paragraph or a page for a casual mention or a barebones explanation of the mechanics.

A similar trend has occurred in the literature. Before 1921, every volume of this Review had items on the referendum, five in one volume. Subsequently there have been only seven articles, all but two prior to World War II. “The Initiative and Referendum in Graustark” has ceased to be a fashionable dissertation topic, only four in the last thirty years. All but two of the published monographs antedate World War II.

The most interesting educational experiment in the world today for the student of comparative administration and business and government is the Administrative Staff College at Henley-on-Thames, England. This College is pioneering the methods which, in any industrialized nation, are needed to restore the flexibility and initiative that must always accompany free enterprise. The College also provides a new approach to leadership training in that enrollees are recruited in fixed proportions from public and private employment by a method that produces balanced management teams among the members (as the “students” are called), and the teaching procedure stresses group work and self-instruction rather than formal lectures.

This original venture, headed by Princeton-trained Noel F. Hall, was founded in 1946 and opened in 1948. Already it is being imitated in widely scattered parts of the world. Henley has turned out some 1,300 policy administrators of the average age of 39, all of whom had been tapped for higher responsibilities by their employers—who incidentally foot the bill—before going to Henley for the three months' session. Each session—there are three a year—is limited to 60 members; six of the 60 members may be drawn from overseas and the rest come from private business, the central civil service, local government, the nationalized industries, and banking.

Xenophon's Anabasis, a military adventure interwoven with a story of philosophical self-discovery, is a companion piece to Plato's Republic. The Anabasis takes up in deed the two great political problems treated in speech in the Republic, namely, how a just community can come into being and how philosophy and political power may be brought to coincide. In addressing the first of these problems, Xenophon makes explicit a lesson about the limits of politics that is implicit in the Republic. He speaks to the second problem by clarifying the essential role of philosophical erôs in his emergence, at the moment of crisis, as the founder and leader of a well-ordered community. Xenophon‘s self-presentation in the Anabasis, which makes clear his debt to Socrates, illuminates the nature of philosophical courage as well as the saving integrity of the philosophical soul.

In America, interest groups operate within the democratic frame of reference. Like all political organizations, they are accorded more legitimacy when they can show that they are representative of the attitudes and values of a particular segment of the population. Consequently, the leaders of interest groups frequently spend a great deal of time explaining just how democratic their organizations are. If one examines the testimony of interest group leaders at state and national legislative hearings, he is likely to find that much of it is begun with an introductory statement explaining that the leadership of the testifying group is merely the voice of the membership. The personal values of the interest group leader are played down, and his function as representative (as distinguished from delegate) is exaggerated.

On the other hand, relatively few political interest groups have systematic and formalized means of ascertaining the desires of members. We know that most of the devices used to solicit member opinion are not very effective. Truman has shown that the affairs of most interest groups are run on a day-to-day basis by a fraction of the total membership. The mass of the membership takes a relatively passive role with regard to the formation of public policies by the organization.

Communication between leaders and followers is spasmodic and cannot provide efficient guidelines for the actions of leaders. Whether or not leadership of an organization seeks to become a manifestation of Michel's iron law of oligarchy, the realities of communication within an organization suggest that most of the communication undertaken by leaders will be with other members of the leadership clique rather than with the larger body of followers in the group.

The Problem. Chinese communist leaders generally attribute their conquest of power to the faithful pursuit of effective “mass line” tactics. They now regard a “correct” mass line as the essential prerequisite for the full consolidation of power, for the successful implementation of the ambitious and farreaching policies to which they are committed, and for the ultimate transition from the “people's democratic dictatorship” to the complete socialist order. Recognizing that large numbers of cadres adequately trained in mass line tactics are critically needed for these purposes, the Chinese Communist Party intensified its cadre training program in 1950–1951 to insure that all party (and other public) workers would be carefully indoctrinated in basic Marxist-Leninist mass line theory and practice. Training in mass line tactics ranges in scope from propaganda to public administration, but finds its principal focus in the delicate area of the Party's public relations with the great masses of Chinese people who have yet to be sold on the communist program. The problem is so serious, and the need for a solution so urgent, that the party leadership has temporarily deferred several important social reforms pending the completion of the current cadre training program.

After a brief discussion of the existing literature and a description of the data set, the paper compares the role of four international institutions in two-party disputes in terms of (1) participant behavior and characteristics, (2) relationships between participants, and (3) characteristics of the disputes and institutional responses. The major purpose of the comparison is to assess various middle-range theoretical ideas that have been suggested by scholars and to determine whether the differences on the variables are a function of structural (PCIJ and ICJ versus League and UN) or historical (PCIJ and League versus ICJ and UN) variations. A final section of the paper presents a scheme for further research on the role of international institutions in the international bargaining process.

The legacy of problems associated with Latin American development policy in the postwar era necessitates the asking of some fundamental questions about the future of development in that region. Economic growth rates have been insufficient, and the employment and distributional problems have been worsening. This situation is in large measure attributable to specific policies pursued by Latin American governments, especially the array of policies included under the rubric of “import-substituting industrialization.” Such policies are critically analyzed as a prelude to the discussion of a suggested reorientation of Latin American development policy. The goal of such a redirected, poverty-oriented development policy is the creation of “livable” (if not “developed”) societies. The effort to fashion development policies aiming at “livability” entails, at the most general level, distributional and short-run emphases. But it also involves the need for major innovations in such diverse areas as technological, agricultural, regional, and educational development. Reorientations of international development lending would also be required. The economic problems of the livability approach are formidable, but recent findings indicate that poverty-oriented development strategies may be economically viable. The political problems are equally if not more formidable, and it is likely that their confrontation will involve new ways of thinking about “political development” and about the relationship of political regime types to economic development.

Contested elections are usually seen as precondition for constituent responsiveness. By contrast, I show that even uncontested elections can create incentives for autocratic regimes to address citizen demands. I propose that closed autocracies engage in cycles of responsiveness before uncontested elections to assure citizens of their competence and raise popular support. They do so to mitigate the short-term destabilizing effects of elections. Analyzing a unique dataset of petitions to the government of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), I calculate that response times to petitions were up to 31% shorter before the GDR’s uncontested elections. Moreover, I introduce the concept of “substantive responsiveness,” which focuses on the material consequences of responsiveness for petitioners, and show that petitions were 64% more likely to be successful. The paper advances our understanding of electoral mobilization in closed regimes and contributes to an emerging research agenda on responsiveness and accountability in autocracies.

How do international sports events shape repression in authoritarian host countries? International tournaments promise unique gains in political prestige through global media attention. However, autocrats must fear that foreign journalists will unmask their wrongdoings. We argue that autocracies solve this dilemma by strategically adjusting repression according to the spatial-temporal presence of international media. Using original, highly disaggregated data on the 1978 World Cup, we demonstrate that the Argentine host government largely refrained from repression during the tournament but preemptively cleared the streets beforehand. These adjustments specifically occurred around hotels reserved for foreign journalists. Additional tests demonstrate that (1) before the tournament, repression turned increasingly covert, (2) during the tournament, targeting patterns mirrored the working shifts of foreign journalists, (3) after the tournament, regime violence again spiked in locations where international media had been present. Together, the article highlights the human costs of megaevents, contradicting the common whitewashing rhetoric of functionaries.

Scholars frequently expect parties to act strategically in parliament, hoping to affect their electoral fortunes. Voters assumingly assess parties by their activity and vote accordingly. However, the retrospective voting literature looks mostly at the government’s outcomes, leaving the opposition understudied. We argue that, for opposition parties, legislative voting constitutes an effective vote-seeking activity as a signaling tool of their attitude toward the government. We suggest that conflictual voting behavior affects voters through two mechanisms: as a signal of opposition valence and as means of ideological differentiation from the government. We present both aggregate- and individual-level analyses, leveraging a dataset of 169 party observations from 10 democracies and linking it to the CSES survey data of 27,371 respondents. The findings provide support for the existence of both mechanisms. Parliamentary conflict on legislative votes has a general positive effect on opposition parties’ electoral performance, conditional on systemic and party-specific factors.

In the literature on political parties in the United States Congress two points are usually stressed. First, it is said that the political party label lacks a precise programmatic content because “party government” in the British sense is absent in the American Congress. Second, however, it is contended that the party label is the single most important and reliable attribute in predicting the voting behavior of a Senator or Representative.

Between these two contentions lies a sizeable area of unexplored territory. If party is the best predictive device in analyzing voting behavior in Congress then, despite the lack of “party government,” the party machinery in both houses must have effects that deserve study. Professor Huitt has suggested the necessity and importance of this kind of study: “… the preoccupation with reform has obscured the fact that we have no really adequate model of party leadership as it exists in Congress, and that none can be constructed because we lack simple descriptions of many of the basic working parts of the present system.” Huitt himself and a few others have filled some of these gaps.