We review the relevance of the international relations articles published in the first 100 years of the Review for American foreign policy. We define a spectrum of “policy relevance” and give a brief overview of the Review's changing relationship to American foreign policy as the journal, the profession, and the foreign policy process evolved over the last century. We then look at the Review's role in key periods in American foreign policy, focusing in particular on the example of the democratic peace literature. We conclude that although the content of the journal has moved away from early aspirations to near-term and direct policy relevance, the journal has evolved toward basic research that influences American foreign policies by affecting what scholars teach students, publish in policy journals, write in newspaper op-eds, say on the media, advise political leaders, and do when they are themselves in public office.

Politicians do not endorse rules of the game as reliably as is implied by traditional constitutional commentaries or by modern democratic theory. Interviews with Members of Parliament and candidates demonstrate that their views are deeply and systematically divided between alternative constitutional interpretations constructed upon foundations of party-political bias. Thus, attitudes towards nearly all rules of the game are powerfully shaped by political values such as authority and equality, values that differentiate views within as well as between the Conservative and labour parties. Similarly, patterns of support seem much affected by a disposition to boost norms that aid one's own party, depending on whether it is in Government or Opposition, and to downgrade norms that might aid political opponents. The article considers implications of these results for the viability of Britain's unwritten Constitution and for theories about the foundations of representative government.

“Civilian control of the military is a basic principle of the American Constitution”; so runs the commonplace. It is the thesis of this article that the cliché could hardly be more inaccurate, for actually the American Constitution in the twentieth century obstructs the achievement of civilian control. It is well known that civil supremacy was a major concern of the Framers. They provided for it in the only form in which they knew it. But civilian control in the eighteenth century is very different from civilian control in the twentieth century: the Constitution which was expertly designed to provide for it then, for this very reason, frustrates it now. In presenting this thesis, it is necessary: (1) to show how the meaning of civilian control has changed over the intervening years; (2) to describe the Framers' concept and show how it was embodied in the Constitution; and (3) to demonstrate how the provisions which they thought would guarantee it impair its effectiveness today.

The topic of party finance is a subject about which not a word appears in any of the official reports and party conference records issued by the Christian Democratic Union in the course of the decade during which it has become established as West Germany's governing party. Like their colleagues in most middle class parties the world over, the leaders of the CDU apparently believe that silence is golden when it comes to answering Socialist taunts on this score. They are content to let the Socialists remain the only German party to publish reasonably full accounts of their sources of income, which, as the SPD does not fail to point out when attacking the “hidden masters” of the government parties, are predominantly derived from membership dues. The parties of the “Bonn coalition,” on the other hand, have been extremely distrustful of both publicity and legislation affecting this sector. In 1952 the first Adenanuer cabinet felt called upon to reject a draft Parties Law prepared by officials in the Interior Ministry, and since then the government has presented no bill to translate the Basic Law's Article 21, which regulates the parties' position, into the required legislation. Thus the constitutional provision that “parties must give public reckoning over the sources of their means” remains in practice a dead letter. Not that the sources of the non-Socialist parties' funds are really kept successfully secret, for every politically informed German knows roughly how the system works. But party officials still believe it best not to acknowledge their sources publicly. “The German Michel just wouldn't understand about those things,” as a CDU functionary put it.

In the first part of this study it was suggested that it is possible to distinguish certain forms or patterns of expansion which recur constantly. We have noted that rivers served as effective boundaries only during a very early stage of economic and technical development and soon became routes of communication instead of barriers. We have noted, too, that expansion tends to follow the line of least resistance. It is not surprising, then, to find, almost as soon as states secure access to a river, a strong tendency to expand up and down the river valley. Movement downstream is the natural flow to the sea, and movement upstream is necessary for purposes of defense, since whoever controls the upper valley has a distinct strategic advantage. Control of the upper valley is necessary also in order to control and regulate the water supply. The next step is to push the frontier to the watershed on the other side of the river, since there, if anywhere, is to be found the first natural geographic and economic limit to expansion. With this movement up and down stream and across the stream to the watershed, we have the evolution of the river valley as an economic unit. The unifying influence of the river is responsible for the fact that practically all early civilizations grew up in river basins–Mesopotamia on the Tigris and Euphrates, Egypt on the Nile, the Punjab on the Indus, and China along the Hoang-ho.

The problem of inconstancy in party affiliation has generated occasional research interest for a half-century now. We still know very little about the political behavior of that segment of the electorate which presumably is highly irregular in party allegiance. We have a penchant, however, for generalizing about the extent of independent voting, the characteristics of the independents, and, particularly, the significance of the independent vote for campaign strategy and the political system. Today, with another national election approaching, a summary of the status of our research and the presentation of new findings may be in order.

When the dust settles following the reapportionment upheavals, the traditional problems of legislative policy-making will remain. This process is divided between the governor and (with due respect to Nebraska) the two legislative houses, with the governor generally taking the lead. A governor represents the totality of interests within his party. No single legislator or faction represents as wide a variety of interests as the governor. The governor proposes and vetoes and normally plays an even greater legislative role in state government than the President in the national government because of the infrequent sessions, low seniority, lack of state-wide influence or prestige and inadequate staff of the legislators. The governor's legislation is geared to please his state-wide constituency and, depending largely upon his degree of control over his party, is passed, modified or rejected.

What affects the ability of the governor to control his legislative party is a question seldom asked and rarely investigated except by the harassed occupant of the executive mansion. This is surprising, since the definition of party responsibility is closely related to executive control. By common agreement, a definition of party responsibility would include the ability of the party to control nominations, to present a united front in the election and thereafter to discipline the legislators to uphold the program of the executive in order to make a good record for the next election.

Those who investigate the behavior of legislative parties in the interest of party responsibility equate the latter phenomenon with party voting loyalty.

Lebanon's banking system is viewed as an “international regime” that held the country together in the face of all pervasive warfare. The system illustrates the underlying logic of such regimes, in that the banks' credit policies operationalized the rational choice model of an iterated prisoner's dilemma game. And just as international regimes are supposed to reflect the interests of state actors, analysis of the banks' balance sheets and income statements reveals changes in capital structure that reflect changes in Lebanon's political balance. While sustaining elite cohesion, the banks serviced political clienteles and might, if a political settlement were reached, support the restructuring of a consociational system more in line with Lebanon's demographic balance. If, on the other hand, no settlement is reached, the poor country's suicide may highlight certain aspects of international reality that seem recalcitrant to the theory of international regimes.

The longstanding debate over whether officials should be permitted to profit personally from public office has moved to the center of public discourse in the United States. As the House Ethics Manual put it recently, it is of concern simply when an officeholder “cash[es] in on official position,” regardless of whether his or her official performance was in any way impaired as a result. Although the question of private gain from public office is richly implicative of a number of fundamental issues in political theory—in particular the ongoing controversy over where to draw the borders between private and public as well as the nature of official fiduciary responsibility—it has yet to undergo political-theoretic analysis. In what follows, I examine both the conceptual and normative issues emergent in the debate over private gain from public office.

The place of the Diet in the Japanese constitutional system is a subject of some controversy. Jurists of the old school, typified by the teachings of Hozumi, tend to minimize the representative character of the legislature and to magnify the limitations of its authority, while the new school, led by Minobe, stresses the possibility of parliamentary development.

The basic difference between the two schools is found in their respective attitudes toward the theory of separation of powers. Hozumi holds that the kokutai, or fundamental nature of the Japanese state, is unique. The Emperor is not merely an organ of the state. He is the state. He retains the tochi-ken, the authority of his ancestors, or sovereignty in the modern sense. The tochi-ken is supreme, perfect, and indivisible. The exercise of this authority, however, takes a three-fold form, namely, as gyosei-ken, or the executive power, rippo-ken, or the legislative power, the shiho-ken, or the judicial power.

Dictators confront a guardianship dilemma: military agents are needed to defeat mass outsider movements, but these agents can overthrow the ruler from within. In existing theories, rulers prioritize coup-proofing measures unless they anticipate strong outsider threats. Then dictators prioritize military competence. I reframe the guardianship dilemma around the central idea that militaries can choose between dual disloyalty options. In addition to staging a coup, militaries can defect by not fending off popular uprisings or rebellions. Dictators fear competent militaries not primarily because of their coup threat but instead because they often survive intact following a regime transition. Low motivation for competent militaries to save the ruler undermines their rationale of guarding against outsider threats, even if they pose a low coup threat. Consequently, rulers prioritize competence under narrow circumstances. Only radically oriented outsider movements that pose an existential threat to all regime elites induce loyalty from a competent military.

How do citizens change their voting decisions after their communities experience catastrophic violent events? The literature on the behavioral effects of violence, on the one hand, and on political behavior, on the other, suggest different answers to this question. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we investigate the influence of indiscriminate, rampage-style school shootings on both voter turnout levels and the relative electoral support for the Democratic and Republican Parties at the county level in US presidential elections (1980–2016). We find that although voter turnout does not change, the vote share of the Democratic Party increases by an average of nearly 5 percentage points in counties that experienced shootings—a remarkable shift in an age of partisan polarization and close presidential elections. These results show that school shootings do have important electoral consequences and bring to the fore the need to further examine the effects of different forms of violence on political behavior.

In this article, I introduce a method that uses large-scale event data and latent factor network models to provide a new comparative measure of cooperation and conflict in public relationships among politicians, nonpartisan political actors, and societal actors. The approach has a number of advantages over existing techniques: It captures public relationships in a multitude of venues on a continuous basis, incorporates both partisan and nonpartisan actors, allows quantifying the relationship between any pair of actors, reflects that communication is not unidirectional but rather a back and forth, and can be applied to a large number of countries over time. I apply the method to 13 Western European countries from 2001 to 2014 and demonstrate that party relationships are determined by coalition status as well as policy differences. The measure is publicly available and can be incorporated into standard research designs.

The emergence of American labor unions to positions of actual or potential power as organized forces in election campaigns has stirred a great deal of controversy over the limits and propriety of union political activity. A decade and more after the Taft-Hartley Act provisions on that subject, argument continues as vigorously as ever about the need for, and if a need, then the nature and extent of, legal controls over the power of union leaders to enlist and commit their membership to electioneering goals. Underlying many of these debates is the complex question of union membership solidarity in political affairs. For if, to some, solidarity suggests dangers, it also indicates difficulties in the way of making controls effective. Yet we have only begun to explore the solidarity of rank-and-file attitudes toward union political activity.

The argument is made that Rawls's proposed principles of justice would not rationally be chosen in his proposed version of the “original position.” First of all, Rawls's own account of the information available in the original position provides no basis for the conclusions about “primary goods” which he believes would imply his proposed principles. Second, even if those conclusions about primary goods were to be accepted, they would not imply the proposed principles (the “general” and the “special” conceptions of justice) because the claims which Rawls cites in support of “maximin” actually imply a different conception. Lastly, an alternative version of the original position is suggested which would avoid these difficulties and which would, in addition, successfully support a maximin conception of justice. This is not meant, however, as a conclusive argument for maximin, but only as an indication that the objections advanced here do not apply to “social contract theory” as such, but only to the particular version of it which Rawls has proposed.

“Anybody we like is efficient. Anybody we do not like is a bureaucrat.” This good-natured comment on legislative attitudes toward the executive branch was made recently in Congress by an experienced lawmaker, speaking as chairman of a subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations. The epigram may be relished for its knowing humor, but its greater significance lies in the light it sheds on one of the most important problems of modern government—the problem of insuring responsible administration in the framework of democratic society.

For, of course, one way of getting nowhere in attempting a solution of this problem is to reduce it to a matter of personal preference. In the broader context, it is plainly irrelevant whether or not “we,” as citizens or as lawmakers, happen to “like” the individual administrative official we confront, or the particular public agency, or the functions that have to be performed under the laws, or the general direction in which things are moving in response to the policies of those elected to exercise political control. Nor do our likes and dislikes furnish a trustworthy criterion to mark the border line between “efficient” public service and “bureaucracy.”

And yet, for the administrative official it is a familiar experience to encounter sharp animosity on the part of some legislators, as well as some elements of the public, precisely for doing his statutory duty. In a party system like ours, which puts only a small premium on political solidarity, the frequency of such experience is increased because lawmakers exercise great freedom of dissent from legislative measures passed with the support of their own party.

States cannot legitimately enforce their borders against migrants if dominant conceptions of sovereignty inform enforcement because these conceptions undermine sufficient respect for migrants’ basic human rights. Instead, such conceptions lead states to assert total control over outsiders’ potential cross-border movements to support their in-group’s self-rule. Thus, although legitimacy requires states to prioritize universal respect for basic human rights, sovereign states today generally fail to do so when it comes to border enforcement. I contend that this enforcement could only be rendered legitimate if it was predicated on more desirable conceptions of sovereignty that supported the universal prioritization of basic human rights. Specifically, desirable conceptions would not establish and require absolute state sovereignty over borders as a necessary precondition for true popular self-governance.