The chief social values cherished by individuals in modern society are realized through groups. These groupings may be simple in structure, unicellular, so to speak, like a juvenile gang. Or they may be intricate meshes of associated, federated, combined, consolidated, merged, or amalgamated units and subunits of organization, fitted together to perform the divided and assigned parts of a common purpose to which the components are dedicated. They may operate out of the direct public gaze like religious organizations, which tend to have a low degree of visibility. Or they may, like Congress and many other official groups, occupy the front pages for weeks at a time. National organizations are usually conspicuous; indeed, so much is this so at times that they tend to divert the eye from the great number of groups which stand at the elbow of the citizen of every small town. Everywhere groups abound, and they may be examined at close range and from afar.

The literature of many disciplines agrees, as it does sometimes in little else, on the central importance of groups to an understanding of men in their relations with each other.

“Simulation” and “case studies” are supplementary teaching aids available for university courses in political science and international relations. The newer technique, simulation, has been used at several universities to augment instruction in international relations, foreign policy making, national security policy, urban politics, and political parties and elections. In fields other than political science, similar techniques abound. The number of business games or simulations exceeds 100, and less numerous games exist for educational administration, legislatures, career choices, and diplomacy, to name a few. Case studies also supplement a wide range of politics courses, including introduction to American government, public administration, party organization, legislative processes, and public law. The case method is the hallmark of schools of law and schools of business, and it is now emulated in teaching the history of science and in training in research methodology in sociology.

Different types of simulations and cases and their uses have been described and discussed elsewhere. Evaluation of games and cases as supplementary instructional aids has almost invariably been impressionistic. The consumers of these teaching methods have reported their personal experiences with them and have advanced claims for and criticisms of them, but they have undertaken little empirical research to determine whether the claims for particular simulations or cases are valid or to compare the actual effects of alternative methods. Moreover, the Ford Foundation expended thousands of dollars to induce business schools to try business games, but their investment in evaluating the success or failure of this innovation extended to convening a conference to discuss the subject, not to carrying out research on it.

In this article I employ the resources of political theory to examine and provide an answer to the question of how liberal democracies should respond to the claims of refugees to enter and reside in their territory. I begin by considering questions of value: I argue that a convincing ethical ideal must strive to balance the competing claims of citizens and refugees. Moving to issues of agency, I show that any standard must also accommodate itself to the difficulties of predicting the consequences of entrance, the responsibilities states currently accept, and the way that politics constrains the efforts of states to assist refugees. I conclude by proposing the principle of humanitarianism as a way of reconciling the demands of value with those of agency. I argue that adherence to this principle would improve the refugee policies of liberal democratic states.

Terrorist attacks routinely produce rallies for incumbent men in the executive office. With scarce cases, there has been little consideration of terrorism’s consequences for evaluations of sitting women executives. Fusing research on rallies with scholarship on women in politics, we derive a gender-revised framework wherein the public will be less inclined to rally around women when terrorists attack. A critical case is UK Prime Minister Theresa May, a right-leaning incumbent with security experience. Employing a natural experiment, we demonstrate that the public fails to rally after the 2017 Manchester Arena attack. Instead, evaluations of May decrease, with sharp declines among those holding negatives views about women. We further show May’s party loses votes in areas closer to the attack. We then find support for the argument in a multinational test. We conclude that conventional theory on rally events requires revision: women leaders cannot count on rallies following major terrorist attacks.

Analysis of complementary data sets, a 1965–1973 panel study of young adults and their parents and the 1956–1976 Michigan presidential election series, shows that the late 1960s and early 1970s were a deviant period where participation in American politics was concerned. During this time, the young were more active politically than their elders, substantially increasing their participation from previous years, and Americans on the ideological left participated more than those at other positions along the ideological continuum. While this surge of left-wing activism was not restricted to the young, it probably accounts for the relative participation advantage enjoyed by the young. These findings challenge the “conventional wisdom” about patterns of participation in America. They are best explained by recognizing that the opportunities for political action among the American citizenry are not fixed, but instead vary with changes in the political stimuli across different periods.

This article assesses the status of diachronic research on the United States Congress. A literature review reveals a lack of truly diachronic studies, but a wealth of insightful and useful historical and contemporary studies. Drawing on organization theory, a research approach designed to facilitate and improve diachronic analysis is put forward. A major focus of the approach is on the ways in which environmental factors—both fixed and variable—shape the operations and performance of Congress. In addition, problems and strategies in analyzing the impacts of Congress on the wider political system are examined. The concluding section presents a research agenda for political scientists interested in applying diachronic analysis to the study of Congress.

Fluctuations in the volume and the value of financial remittances received from abroad affect the livelihood of households in developing economies across the world. Yet, political scientists have little to say about how changes in remittances, as opposed to the receipt of remittance payments alone, affect recipients’ political attitudes. Relying on a unique four-wave panel study of Kyrgyz citizens between 2010–2013 and a cross-sectional sample of 28 countries in Central Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, we show that when people experience a decrease (increase) in remittances, they become less (more) satisfied about their household economic situation and misattribute responsibility to the incumbent at home. Our findings advance the literature on the political consequences of remittance payments and suggest that far from exclusively being an international risk-sharing mechanism for developing countries, remittances can also drive fluctuations in incumbent approval and compromise rudimentary accountability mechanisms in the developing world.

Scholars and policy makers debate whether elites and citizens hold different views of the legitimacy of international organizations (IOs). Until now, sparse data has limited our ability to establish such gaps and to formulate theories for explaining them. This article offers the first systematic comparative analysis of elite and citizen perceptions of the legitimacy of IOs. It examines legitimacy beliefs toward six key IOs, drawing on uniquely coordinated survey evidence from Brazil, Germany, the Philippines, Russia, and the United States. We find a notable elite–citizen gap for all six IOs, four of the five countries, and all of six different elite types. Developing an individual-level approach to legitimacy beliefs, we argue that this gap is driven by systematic differences between elites and citizens in characteristics that matter for attitudes toward IOs. Our findings suggest that deep-seated differences between elites and general publics may present major challenges for democratic and effective international cooperation.

Having assumed the burden of understanding political life in two-and-a-half dozen unruly countries, political scientists who study the new states of tropical Africa must leap with assurance where angels fear to tread. We have borrowed, adapted, or invented an array of frameworks designed to guide perceptions of disparate events, and Africa is now uniformly viewed through the best lenses of contemporary comparative politics with a focus on political modernization, development and integration. Unfortunately, it appears that when we rely exclusively on these tools in order to accomplish our task, the aspects of political life which we, as well as non-specialists, see most clearly with the naked eye of informed common sense, remain beyond the range of our scientific vision. In our pursuit of scientific progress, we have learned to discern such forms as regular patterns of behavior which constitute structures and institutions; but the most salient characteristic of political life in Africa is that it constitutes an almost institutionless arena with conflict and disorder as its most prominent features.

In recent years, almost every new African state has experienced more or less successful military or civilian coups, insurrections, mutinies, severe riots, and significant political assassinations. Some of them appear to be permanently on the brink of disintegration into several new political units. With little regard for the comfort of social scientists, the incidence of conflict and disorder appears unrelated to such variables as type of colonial experience, size, number of parties, absolute level or rate of economic and social development, as well as to the overall characteristics of regimes. The downfall of what was widely regarded as the continent's most promising democracy in January, 1966, was followed in February by the demise of what many thought to be the continent's harshest authoritarian regime.

This paper will employ techniques of content analysis to examine some features of top-level communications between national policy makers during a momentous period of stress. It is concerned with the effects of stress upon: (1) the manner in which decision-makers perceive time as a factor in their formulation of policy; (2) the contrasting ways in which they view policy alternatives for their own nations, for their allies, and for their adversaries; and (3) the flow of communications among them.

Specifically, the following hypotheses will be tested with data from the 1914 crisis leading up to the Great War in Europe:

Hypothesis 1. As stress increases in a crisis situation:

(a) time will be perceived as an increasingly salient factor in decision-making.

(b) decision-makers will become increasingly concerned with the immediate rather than the distant future.

Considerable debate exists over the impact of redistricting on the partisan composition of the U.S. Congress. I address this debate by turning to an era of congressional redistricting that has received little systematic attention—the politics of gerrymandering in the 19th century. Using statewide-, county-, and ward-level electoral data from 1870 to 1900, I show that when a single party controlled the districting process, they used districting to systematically engineer a favorable partisan bias. These partisan biases affected the partisan composition of state congressional delegations and at times even helped determine party control of the House of Representatives.

In the 1988 and 1991 national elections, Mexican voters asked themselves above all whether they continued to support the long-ruling official party. Voter behavior was not well explained by attachments to social cleavages, attitudes on policy issues, or general assessments about the present circumstances and the prospects for the nation's economy or personal finances. In both elections, moreover, the parties of the Left failed to mobilize voters that had chosen to abstain in past elections. Once voters were ready to oppose the ruling party, however, differences by issue, prospective economic assessments, and social cleavages shaped their choice between the opposition parties.

Critics have long feared that America's winner-take-all electoral system would undermine the interests of minorities. Unfortunately, few available tests broadly assess how well minorities fare in a democracy. To gauge winners and losers in the American case, I introduce a new measure of representation. For any election, I count up how many voters from each demographic group vote for a candidate that loses. After comparing this new measure to its alternatives, I use data from the entire series of Voter News Service exit polls and a sample of mayoral elections to determine which kinds of voters end up losers. I find that across the range of American elections, African Americans are consistently more likely than other groups to end up losers, raising questions about equity in American democracy. The one exception to the pattern of black failure—congressional House elections—suggests ways to better incorporate minority interests.

The original plan of this paper included a general survey and critique of the leading tendencies in the study of politics during the last thirty or forty years. It was intended to compare the methods and results of the various types of political thought—to pass in review the historical school, the juridical school, the students of comparative government, the philosophers as such, the attitude of the economist, the contributions made by the geographer and the ethnologist, the work of the statisticians, and finally to deal with the psychological, the sociological, the biological interpretations of the political process.

It would have been an interesting and perhaps a useful task to compare the scope and method of such thinkers as Jellinek, Gierke, Duguit, Dicey and Pound; the philosophies of Sorel and Dewey, of Ritchie and Russell, of Nietzsche and Tolstoi; to review the methods of Durkheim and Simmel, of Ward and Giddings and Small; of Cooley and Ross; and to discuss the developments seen in the writings of Wallas and Cole.

It would have been useful possibly to extend the analysis to the outstanding features of the environment in which these ideas have flourished, and to their numerous and intimate relations and interrelations.

We argue that a variant of the sua sponte doctrine, namely, the practice disfavoring the creation of issues not raised in the legal record, is a norm with substantial consequences for the U.S. Supreme Court. Without it, justices would act considerably more like legislators, who are free to engage in “issue creation,” and less like jurists, who must wait for issues to come to them. Yet, McGuire and Palmer claim that justices engage in issue creation in a “significant minority” of their cases. We dispute this finding because we think it is an artifact of the way McGuire and Palmer collected their data. Indeed, for virtually every case in which they found evidence of issue creation, we show that the issue was actually present in at least one of the litigants' briefs. This suggests that justices may be policy seekers, but they are not policy entrepreneurs; an that briefs filed by third parties (such as amici curiae) are generally not a source of important issues considered by the Court.

Many studies undertaken in recent decades have documented the effects of socioeconomic status (SES) on political participation. As consensus has grown on the role of socioeconomic status, other factors, like ethnicity, have been relegated to secondary importance. However, variations in levels of participation can be traced, in part, to differences in ethnic political culture. Furthermore, the findings presented in this article indicate that holding socioeconomic status constant does not eliminate the independent impact of ethnicity on political attitudes that affect participation. Ethnicity is shown to have a greater effect than socioeconomic status on levels of participant political culture. How these findings might influence our understanding of social and political inequality is discussed, and students of participation are urged to give more serious attention to the ethnic factor.

The assumptions imposed in spatial models of election competition generally are restrictive in that they require either unidimensional issue spaces or symmetrically distributed electorate preferences. We attribute such assumptions to the reliance of these models on a single concept of a solution to the election game—pure strategy equilibria—and to the fact that such equilibria do not exist in general under less severe restrictions. This essay considers, then, the possibility that candidates adopt mixed minimax strategies. We show, for a general class of symmetric zero-sum two-person games, that the domain of these minimax strategies is restricted to a subset of the strategy space and that for spatial games this set not only exists, but if preferences are characterized by continuous densities, it is typically small. Thus, the hypothesis that candidates abide by mixed minimax strategies can limit considerably our expectation as to the policies candidates eventually advocate. Additionally, we examine the frequently blurred distinction between spatial conceptualizations of two-candidate elections and of committees, and we conclude that if pure strategy equilibria do not exist, this distinction is especially important since committees and elections can produce entirely different outcomes.

Principal-agent relations are replete in politics; politicians are agents of electorates, bureaucrats are agents of executives, lower courts are agents of upper courts, and much more. Commonly, principals are modeled as the rule-making body and agents as the rule-implementing body. However, principals often delegate the authority to make the rules themselves to their agents. The relationship between the lower federal courts and the Supreme Court is one such example; a considerable portion of the law (rules) is made in the lower federal courts with the Supreme Court serving primarily as the overseer of those lower courts’ decisions. In this article, we develop and test a principal-agent model of law (rule) creation in a judicial hierarchy. The model yields new insights about the relationship among various features of the judicial hierarchy that run against many existing perceptions. For example, we find a non-monotonic relationship between the divergence in upper and lower court preferences over rules and the likelihood of review and reversal by the Supreme Court. The empirical evidence supports these derived relationships. Wider implications for the principal-agent literature are also discussed.

Scholars have argued that children affect their parents’ political behavior, including turnout, through so-called trickle-up socialization. However, there is only limited causal evidence for this claim. Using a regression discontinuity design on a rich dataset, with validated turnout from subsets of Danish municipalities in four elections, I causally identify the effect of parenting a recently enfranchised voter. I consistently find that parents are more likely to vote when their child enters the electorate. On average across all four elections, I estimate that parents become 2.8 percentage points more likely to vote. In a context where the average turnout rate for parents is around 75%, this is a considerable effect. The effect is driven by parents whose children still live with them while there is no discernible effect for parents whose child has left home. The results are robust to a range of alternative specifications and placebo tests.

Why do modern states regulate and provide mass education? This article proposes a theory of education as a state-building tool that is deployed when mass violence threatens the state’s viability. Experiencing mass violence can heighten national elites’ anxiety about the masses’ moral character and raise concerns about the efficacy of repression or concessions alone to maintain social order. In this context, a mass education system designed to teach obedience can become an attractive policy tool to prevent future rebellion and promote long-term order. Consistent with the theory, I detect a cross-national pattern of primary education expansion following civil wars in Europe and Latin America. In a complementary study of the 1859 Chilean civil war, I show that the central government responded by expanding primary schooling in rebel provinces not as a concession but to teach obedience and respect for authority. The theory helps explain why nondemocracies often expanded mass education.