This article presents Saul Alinsky's theory of community organizing as a democratic alternative to political realism's fixation on the coercive authority of the state and the ethical problems of statesmanship. Alinsky shows how the organizer can be used as a paradigmatic political actor in developing an approach to political ethics that treats power and self-interest as ethical concepts on which to construct a radical vision of democratic politics. His “morality of power” consists of learning how to use relational power and thick self-interest to develop democratic forms of deliberation and action. In contrast to the aim of the statesman, the organizer's goal is not simply to acquire power and learn how to wield it: An organizer helps the powerless learn how to use and think about power for themselves. Organizing is realist, pedagogical, and democratic, and Alinsky's ability to hold these ideas together makes him an important theorist of democratic agency in undemocratic times.

Although political science increasingly investigates emotions as variables, it often ignores emotions’ larger significance due to their inherence in research with human subjects. Integrating emotions into conversations on methods and ethics, I build on the term “ethnographic sensibility” to conceptualize an “emotional sensibility” that seeks to glean the emotional experiences of people who participate in research. Methodologically, emotional sensibility sharpens attention to how participants’ emotions are data, influence other data, and affect future data collection. Ethically, it supplements Institutional Review Boards’ rationalist emphasis on information and cognitive capacity with appreciation for how emotions infuse consent, risk, and benefit. It thereby encourages thinking not only about emotional harm but also about emotions apart from harm and about emotional harms apart from trauma and vulnerability. I operationalize emotional sensibility by tracking four dimensions of research that affect participants’ emotions: the content of research, the context in which research occurs, researchers’ positionality, and researchers’ conduct.

Following the coalition literature highlighting intraparty politics (e.g., Giannetti and Benoit 2009; Laver 1999; Strøm 2003), I address the well-known “portfolio allocation paradox” (Warwick and Druckman 2006) by introducing a new model of government formation based on two main assumptions. First, no actor has a structural advantage in the negotiations leading to government formation. Second, all actors who can deprive the coalition of a majority (or other critical threshold size) must be included in the negotiations—not just parties. Whereas standard bargaining models are inconsistent with Gamson’s Law, the model proposed here implies that equilibrium portfolio allocations should be mostly Gamsonian but with a small-party bias, as the empirical literature has long found. Empirically, I show that my model outperforms the literature’s standard specification (due to Browne and Franklin 1973). Moreover, one of the model’s new predictions—that candidate-centered electoral rules should promote more Gamsonian portfolio allocations—is supported.

We present novel evidence that attitudes toward nonpartisan social groups structure political belief systems. First, we show that most Americans have a rich knowledge of the social groups that support and oppose group-related policies. This knowledge often exceeds people’s awareness of where Democrats and Republicans stand on these same issues. Then, we show that this knowledge promotes what Philip Converse called ideological coherence: Americans who know which groups support and oppose a policy are more likely to hold stable policy positions over time and to organize their attitudes into consistently liberal or conservative bundles. In the twentieth century, knowledge of social groups’ issue positions rivaled knowledge of parties’ positions in its ability to generate attitude stability and constraint. However, as party identification has strengthened in recent decades, knowledge of parties’ positions has become the most important source of structure in most Americans’ belief systems.

This letter explores the prevalence of misperceptions about refugee policy and tests whether correcting these misperceptions changes attitudes toward refugees. Large numbers of people hold misperceptions about both the nature and effects of refugee policy. An experiment directly compares the effects of correcting misperceptions about existing refugee policy (e.g., the refugee admission process) with correcting misperceptions about the outcomes of refugee policy (e.g., the proportion of refugees in the United States and the percentage who receive welfare benefits). Corrective information about existing policy substantially increases support for refugees, but corrective information about policy outcomes has no effect on attitudes. The results suggest that including descriptive information about existing U.S. policy in media coverage of refugees could both correct misperceptions and change attitudes.

This essay examines the tension between agenda-setting and majority rule in the writings of one of the earliest and most original theorists of participatory democracy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Exploring Rousseau's views on lawmaking and the complexities associated with legislative initiation, specifically, this essay challenges the notion that representatives or legislative experts in a democracy inevitably reduce popular participation to acclamation. Contrary to authors who believe that Rousseau surreptitiously devolves political power to an elected elite who predecide a legislative agenda for a passive majority to vote upon later, I argue that the philosopher delegates authority to initiate the laws to representatives without undermining either the sovereignty or the robustness of citizen self-rule. This argument reveals, in part, why contemporary participatory democracy is not inherently “immobile” owing to the self-reinforcing benefits of democratic participation within a well-balanced constitution.The author wishes to thank Mads Qvortrup, Benjamin Wong, and APSR's Reviewers.

Substantive foci in the study of international relations have altered in time with changes in the international system and the coming of academic age of new generations of scholars. Prior to World War I, the central substantive concepts were international law and diplomacy. Historiography was the major method, and, given the nature of the historical approach during this period, few theoretical generalizations emerged.

World War I revolutionized the study of international relations. The horrible consequences of this first modern war and the idealistic fervor of the war years were instrumental in overlaying the traditional concepts of international law and diplomacy with two new foci: current events and international organizations. Feeling that the citizen should be made aware of the international world—educated for world citizenship—and that he should be given the guidance that the diplomatic history and international law specialist did not provide, many international relations scholars began to accent contemporary affairs. This new interest, however, had no methodological underpinning except fidelity to the “facts,” and involved few attempts to delineate recurring patterns of events. The “guidance” given to the student often turned out to be little more than special pleading.

The focus on international organizations also reflected an internationalistic viewpoint. International organizations were conceived of as the structural beginning of world government and as a mechanism for international understanding and peace. This focus articulated itself in descriptive studies of the structure and rules of international organizations, past and present, and blueprints for their alteration.

Professor David Easton's widely discussed essay in academic psychoanalysis is indicative of the methodological trauma through which political science is now passing. Of particular interest is his chapter on political theory, which, according to his diagnosis, has suffered from a malady known as “decline into historicism.” His specific point of criticism is that the commentaries of Dunning, McIlwain, and Sabine have led students away from serious study of value theory. This kind of attack, however, does not get to the nub of the problem which surrounds political theory. For while political scientists seem to feel that political theory should be made the “heart” of their discipline, they will also have to acknowledge that the “heart” of political theory itself has been reading the “Great Books.” A far greater indictment than Easton's, then, is that it is an unquestioning reliance on the “Great Books” which has served to thwart any significant expansion of the scope and function of political theory—in terms of value theory or any other kind. Students are told to read the books with great care. But why they have to read them at all is a question which has seldom been squarely confronted. Hence both undergraduates and graduate students come away, perhaps somewhat pleased that they can now quote a few choice axioms from Burke, but nonethemore edified as to how the learned authors of yesteryear can aid them in understanding the science of politics.

This is a tentative outline of a systematic and comprehensive approach to the study of politics. Part I gives the method. Part II indicates some advantages of the approach. Part III anticipates likely objections to it. And Part IV suggests some applications. My purpose in presenting the paper in its present form is to encourage my colleagues to consider this approach and, if they find it potentially useful, to contribute to its refinement through criticism. As David Easton said in his “Approach to the Analysis of Political Systems,” I know “I run the definite risk that the meaning and implications of this point of view may be only superficially communicated; but it is a risk I shall have to undertake since I do not know how to avoid it sensibly.”

Major crises can threaten political regimes by empowering demagogues and promoting authoritarian rule. While existing research argues that national emergencies weaken formal checks on executive authority and increase public appetites for strong leadership, no research evaluates whether crises increase mass support for the president’s institutional authority. We study this question in the context of the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic with an experiment embedded in a national survey of more than 8,000 U.S. adults. We find no evidence that the public evaluated policies differently if they were implemented via unilateral power rather than through the legislative process, nor did the severity of the pandemic at either the state, local, or individual levels moderate evaluations of executive power. Instead, individuals’ partisan and ideological views were consistently strong predictors of policy attitudes. Perhaps paradoxically, our results suggest that elite and mass polarization limit the opportunity for crises to promote public acceptance of strengthened executive authority.

When individuals evaluate policies, they consider both the policy’s content and its endorsers. In this study, we investigate the conditions under which these sometimes competing factors guide preferences. In an effort to combat the spread of COVID-19, American President Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau bilaterally agreed to close their shared border to refugee claimants and asylum seekers. These ideologically opposed leaders endorsing a common policy allows us to test the influence of a well-known foreign neighbor on domestic policy evaluations. With a large cross-national survey experiment, we first find that Canadians and Americans follow ideological positions in evaluating the policy, with right-leaning respondents offering the most support. With an experiment, we reveal how both populations shift their views when told about their neighboring leader’s endorsement. Our findings highlight ideologically motivated reasoning across an international border, with broad implications for understanding how individuals weigh a policy’s content against its political cues.

Pleas and programs for party responsibility are not new. It is remarkable, however, how little the discussion has advanced. I do not mean that I am surprised that the path of reform has been hard but that knowledge of the subject has not grown in proportion to the length of the discussion. Proponents believe party responsibility introduces desired qualities into the policy process and makes possible rational organization of the electorate in terms of policy. Not much has been done to provide adequate support for either of these propositions. In fact, it is hard to discover a serious effort to put these propositions in some form which would permit a partial but rigorous test. Opponents on the other hand conjure up visions of polarized parties, downtrodden minorities, and multipartyism as the fruits of party responsibility. They are able to make these improbable inferences by working with an exceedingly simple model, by ignoring the functions of party competition and the complex of factors which seem to shape party systems. Some observers less involved in the argument allow that the debate may have some value since it leads to notice of important realities. But, for them, proposed reforms are not to be taken seriously because they are Utopian in two senses: (1) sweeping and incalculable; and (2) out of reach. This view seems to overlook the fact that party responsibility is a matter of degree and that incremental reform is, at least, possible in principle. Finally, very little attention has been paid to factors which may promote or inhibit party responsibility.

As the panacea for their political ills, Southern states frequently have been counseled to develop competitive two-party systems. Presumably the very demonstration of the superiority of the bipartisan system in itself would go a long way toward achieving that desideratum. Not the least of the unhappy consequences of this uncritical approach was the accompanying tendency to lump non-two-party Southern states into the single category of “the one-party South.” Fortunately, the rich diversity of Southern political processes recently has been uncovered and subjected to systematic analysis. For those states of the South which lack an effective opposition party, it has been shown that Democratic politics runs the gamut from multifactional chaos to a structured and disciplined bifactionalism. Louisiana is properly classified in the latter camp, which attests to at least some beneficial by-products of charismatic demagogy. In the absence of any reasonable expectation of the imminent rejuvenation of the Republican party in Louisiana, a realistic appraisal of the state's politics must eschew exhortation and concentrate upon an empirical examination of the operation of Democratic bifactionalism.

This article offers a measure of judicial legitimation of marginal religious groups in litigation involving the free exercise of religion clause of the First Amendment. Throughout the greater part of history, marginal religious faiths have found the path to acceptance filled with legal obstacles. Pfeffer (1974) noted that legitimation of marginal groups occurs either when the secular norms change or when such groups change their religious doctrines. The Pfeffer thesis is generally consistent with the sect-church continuum defined by sociologists of religion. In the research reported below, we examined an alternative thesis, namely that official legitimation by the judiciary of marginal religions is a function of their marginality. We compared the results of the universe of all reported state and federal judicial opinions from 1946 through 1956 and 1970 through 1980. We found substantial increases in the percentage of successfully litigated free exercise claims, and furthermore, that success in litigating these claims is closely associated with those factors that distinguish these groups as marginal.

Competition among candidates or parties is a necessary condition for democracy. But who counts as a candidate and what counts as competition? The influence of money in American elections makes fundraising an appropriate alternative to vote totals, and it provides a new vantage point to assess the quality of electoral competition. I draw on a dataset of preelection campaign receipts to measure competition in U.S. House primaries from 1980 to 2020. When competition is measured with receipts, it looks markedly worse than vote share measures suggest. Moreover, the difference between vote share and fundraising measures is largest in open-seat primaries, or the best-case scenarios of competition. The disparity between measures is driven largely by candidates who have little chance of winning. The findings shed new light on resource disparities in elections and demonstrate that our conclusions about the quality of competition are tied to our measures.