The significance of legitimacy to regime maintenance has been much neglected in recent investigations of the Third World, particularly by behavioralists and rational choice theorists. I define legitimacy, discuss factors that may have contributed to this neglect, and explore the significance of nationalism and religion as major sources of legitimacy in the Middle East. Both a misunderstanding of the role of higher values and rationality in individuals' relationship to social systems and a faulty projection applied to the mainsprings of behavior in other cultures have distorted the perceptions of a number of Western analysts. The relationship between religion and nationalism is complex. Contrary to the common assumption in the West, Islam in general has generated fairly sophisticated constitutional theories. Islamic fundamentalism in particular has been a major source of innovation and adaptation—as well as of spiritual gratification—for the Muslim masses.

Practicing politicians as well as students of politics have long recognized the check on presidential power imposed by the federal administrative machinery. High policy must be interpreted; it can sometimes be changed or even frustrated by the bureaucrats who apply laws and executive orders. Officials down the line have interests, loyalties, and ambitions which go beyond and often clash with the allegiance accorded a given tenant of the White House. Each bureaucrat has his own ideas about proper public policy, particularly in his field of special competence. If a career civil servant, he may identify only partially, if at all, the good of the governmental service, not to say the good of the public, with the ends sought by the Administration. And if he owes his appointment or promotion to other sources than the merit system, he may find a positive conflict between his loyalties to the President and to other politicians or political groups.

This conflict can occur at all administrative levels. Cabinet members may make up the President's official family, but some of them are at times his chief rivals for power within his own political party, or, more often, representatives of those rivals. Or the department heads may be so split with sibling political rivalry among themselves that common loyalty to their nominal leader may be subordinated to other values. An observer has lately written: “The conditions which a system of fragmented power sets for the success and the survival of a Cabinet officer encourage him to consolidate his own nexus of power and compel him to operate with a degree of independence from the President.”

Professor Sartori's 1962 article on constitutionalism in the American Political Science Review was influential in the acceptance of a narrow view of the constitution. Sartori argued that constitution meant specifically limitation on government and underplayed the role of the state in establishing a political order. This article argues that there are good historical reasons for keeping a balanced view of a constitutionalism that maintains a tension between strong government, to create a secure and stable order, and limitation on government power. It therefore attempts to reaffirm McIlwain's more traditional view of the constitution as a combination of gubernaculum and jurisdictio, power and its control.

This study attempts to explain post-World War II southern electoral politics by examining the party identifications of southerners between 1952 and 1972. Pronounced decreases in Democratic loyalties and increases in Independent leanings appear during this period and constitute a dealignment of the southern electorate. While interregional population exchanges have diluted Democratic strength, their effects are almost counterbalanced by the mobilization of blacks into politics. Instead, the principal source of dealignment is the generational replacement of the native white electorate. Its youngest members, who entered the electorate after World War II, have come to favor political independence increasingly in recent years. This behavior seems partially attributable to a tendency for young native whites in particular to bring their partisan loyalties into line with their attitudes and party images on racial issues. Even so, there are clear signs that the racial question is losing its place as the major determinant of the region's politics. For the future, one can expect a continuation of dealignment politics and little chance of a partisan realignment.

In pairwise voting, when a simple majority rule produces a winner, that winner is robust to the minority's preferences. The typical means of protecting the minority from the decisiveness of the majority is by increasing the required majority or by augmenting the simple majority rule with constitutional constraints. In the former case the required majority q becomes larger than one-half, and this implies that the q-majority rule becomes biased in favor of one of the alternatives, usually the status quo. In the latter case the augmented rule becomes biased in favor of the minority. The main issue examined in this paper is whether the amelioration of majority decisiveness can be attained by unbiased voting rules that allow some restricted expression of preference intensities. Our results clarify that the use of scoring rules provides a positive answer to the above question when voters resort to variable degrees of coordinated strategic voting. The results are illustrated in the special cases of the plurality and the Borda rules.

This paper aims at enriching the debate over the measurement of majority party influence in contemporary American legislatures. Our use of a new analytic technique, a grid-search program for characterizing the uncovered set, enables us to begin with a better model of legislative proceedings that abandons the simple one-dimensional spatial models in favor of the more realistic two-dimensional version. Our conclusions are based on the analysis of real-world data rather than on arguments about the relative merits of different theoretic assumptions. Our analysis confirms that when legislators' preferences are polarized, outcomes will generally be closer to the majority party's wishes, even if the majority-party leadership does nothing to influence the legislative process. This conclusion notwithstanding, our analysis also shows that at the margin of the majority party's natural advantage, agenda setting by the majority party remains a viable and efficacious strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to elucidate the bases of support for Mexico's Partido Revolucionário Institucional. A model is developed which identifies the major and minor variables affecting changes in PRI support in the six elections between 1952 and 1967. Throughout the paper the unit of analysis is the state; the dependent variables are voter turnout and the percentage of the total vote in each state received by the PRI.

While dimensional studies of congressional voting find a single, ideological dimension, regression estimates find several constituency and party dimensions in addition to ideology. I rescale several unidimensional studies to show their increased classification success over the null hypothesis that votes are not unidimensional. Several null hypotheses are explored. With these null hypotheses, 66%–75% of nonunidimensional roll call votes are nevertheless correctly classified by one dimension. After the rescaling, one dimension succeeds in correctly classifying 25%–50% of the votes, and second and third dimensions are important.

A fundamental controversy in political theory from ancient times until the present concerns the rationality of political actors, what it is, if it exists at all, and whether or not humans display it in politics. Many political scientists are impatient with this controversy because it remains open after so much (apparently futile) discussion. But they ought not be. The problem of rationality is necessarily imbedded in even the simplest kinds of political research, where, if overlooked, it can occasion misinterpretation and even outright error.

Suppose, for example, in an investigation of legislators one uses the notion of party loyalty as an independent variable to explain behavior. This notion seems simple and straightforward enough and not, therefore, likely to involve one in philosophical controversy. But in fact party loyalty can be interpreted in a variety of ways and the choice among them necessarily involves a choice on one side of the controversy over rationality. Loyalty can be thought of, for example, as a truly independent variable, as a product of political socialization, as an expression of affect, and hence as an essentially irrational motive. On the other hand, it may be thought of as itself dependent on bargains rationally satisfying the preferences of legislators. Such bargains may be either short term or long term so that a legislator's manifest party loyalty may result from a series of advantageous bargains with party leaders on particular bills or from an implied bargain with them on career advantage.

Contrary to the claims of McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal, our method does not estimate the ideal points of moderates significantly less accurately than the ideal points of extremists. This is true for at least two reasons: (1) there is significant randomness in voting; as a consequence, on a lopsided vote moderates often vote with the extremists; and (2) our data set includes some roll calls that require a supermajority for passage; for these we define a 50%–50% roll call as lopsided. We also show that the classification-success method of McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal severely understates the presence of party influence. Furthermore, we show that a proper interpretation of some of their results reveals a significant amount of party influence in Congress.

Terms denoting political attitudes, such as ‘conservative,’ ‘liberal,’ ‘radical,’ and ‘reactionary,’ have long been familiar both in popular usage and in the language of political science. Though sufficiently understood for ordinary discourse, their use is likely to lead to a confusion between a political opinion and the type of person who holds the opinion. There is considerable agreement as to what is meant by a radical view; but is there such a thing as a radical type of personality? If there is, we need a method for the measurement and identification of such individuals. If not (and psychologists are becoming increasingly suspicious of type classifications), we must ask what psychological characteristics in individuals are the most likely to produce a radical trend in political and social convictions. The same observation holds for the other familiar attitudes upon public questions.

A logical procedure would seem to be, first, to measure the distribution of public opinion in a representative sample, and secondly, to select from the various regions of this distribution (conservative, radical, and the like) a sufficient number of individuals for detailed study of the motives and traits of their personalities which give rise to the opinions they hold. This paper will be devoted to a preliminary report on the results of such a study.

Radical right populist (RRP) parties are often described as Männerparteien, predominantly led by, represented by, and supported by men. Yet recently, these parties have elected more women. Under what conditions do we see this increase in women MPs? This paper presents a novel argument of strategic descriptive representation: electorally struggling RRP parties with large gender gaps in voter support increase their proportion of women MPs to attract previously untapped women voters. To test this argument, we develop the most comprehensive dataset to date on women MPs and gender differences in voter support across Europe and over time, covering 187 parties in 30 countries from 1985 to 2018. Our analyses confirm that RRP parties engage in strategic descriptive representation when they are both struggling electorally and suffering from a gender gap in support. Additional models reveal that this tactic is largely unique to RRP parties.

Reagan's view of how to deal with the Soviet Union is compared to the U. S. performance record in three Soviet-American crises: Berlin, 1948-1949, Berlin, 1961, andCuba, 1962. Reagan's public statements indicate that he views the Soviets as incorrigibly hostile, so that conflict bargaining with the Soviets is a zero-sum game requiring a coercive U.S. bargaining strategy. This is characterized as a “bullying” strategy and contrasted with a “reciprocating” approach. The two approaches provide competing hypotheses for an examination of Soviet responses to U.S. influence attempts. The study tests the association between types of U.S. influence attempts and initial Soviet reactions and then proceeds to an interrupted time series analysis of the longer effects of U. S. threats of force on the mix of coercion-accommodation in Soviet crisis bargaining. The author finds a positive association between specific U.S. threats of force and initial Soviet responses in kind, and between carrot-and-stick inducements that use less specific threats and more accommodative Soviet responses. With the exception of the Cuban crisis, U.S. threats of force have not been associated with significant extended shifts in the level of Soviet hostility. The article concludes that, on balance, the performance record of the United States is more supportive of the efficacy of a reciprocating strategy than the coercive bargaining strategy implied by Reagan's beliefs.

In one of the most influential works in the public opinion literature, Philip Converse proposed a “black-and-white” model that divided respondents into two groups: opinion holders and unstable opinion changers. We extend the model by allowing for a group that makes rational opinion changes over time. This enables us to (1) explore hypotheses about the adequacy of Converse’s original model, (2) estimate the percentage of the population that belongs to each of the groups, and (3) examine the evidence for Converse’s basic claim that unstable changers truly exhibit nonattitudes. Contrary to Converse’s suggestion that the unstable group is essentially giving random responses, the results imply that the response behavior of this group may be best interpreted in terms of Zaller’s notion of ambivalence. The results also undermine the measurement-error model, which maintains that unstable responses are mainly attributable to deficient survey instruments, not individual opinion change. We use data collected at four time points over nearly two years, which track Swiss citizens’ support for pollution reduction.

This article combines ideas from ethics, social choice, and political theory to develop a simulation method for assessing the desirability of different voting schemes in different situations. I use the method to evaluate six well-known election systems. My results are intuitive. I find that approval voting seems to be a good voting scheme for mass elections.

This article intervenes in the debate on the place of religious arguments in public reason. I advance the debate not by asking whether something called “religious reasons” ought to be invoked in the justification of coercive laws, but by creating a typology of (a) different kinds and forms of religious arguments and, more importantly, (b) different areas of political and social life which coercive laws regulate or about which human political communities deliberate. Religious arguments are of many different kinds, are offered to others in a variety of ways, and the spheres of life about which communities deliberate pose distinct moral questions. Turning back to the public reason debate, I argue then that political liberals ought to be concerned primarily about the invocation of a certain subset of religious reasons in a certain subset of areas of human activity, but also that inclusivist arguments on behalf of religious contributions to public deliberation fail to justify the use of religious arguments in all areas of public deliberation.

James Russell and Quincy Wright suggested in the Review in 1933 that the danger of conflict could be diminished by looking within states to discern what contributes to the risk of war. Revolutions in game theory technology and political economy modeling are helping to advance those goals. The combination of non-cooperative game theory as an analytic tool and the assumptions of political economy models about leaders' domestic interests and incentives offer a different explanation of international relations from that suggested by realist theories and other state-centric viewpoints. Together with more macro-level theorizing we gain insights into what makes some polities more prone to international conflict than others. By adding the micro-level, game theoretic investigation of domestic factors to the analytic repertoire we have now supplemented the aspects of received wisdom that are consistent with the record of history with explanations for puzzling facts about conflict that no longer seem anomalous.

Considerable research effort has been invested in establishing the appropriate relationship between patterns of land distribution and political violence. In an article in the June 1988 issue of the Review, Manus I. Midlarsky proposed and tested a new measure of the distribution of land, which he called “patterned inequality.” He presented supporting evidence with data from Latin American and Middle Eastern countries. In this controversy, Midlarsky's analysis is challenged by Edward N. Mutter, Mitchell A. Seligson, and Hung-der Fu. They advocate an alternative measure of land inequality, test its effect on levels of political violence in Latin America, and find it wanting. In his rejoinder, Midlarsky offers new analytical support for his claims.

This paper proposes a theory about the differences in perspective that political scientists bring to bear upon their teaching, research, and writing. It also suggests a method which can be used to study such differences. The particular empirical example discussed relates to only one of the subfields of political science, but this report may encourage parallel investigations into the structure of professional academic values in other component areas of the discipline. Such a result would not merely confirm or refute the applicability of the theory as a generalization about political science; it also would enhance our present meager and unsystematized understanding of the extent to which our professional knowledge is affected by our quasi-professional (personal) biases. The development of such understanding evidently ought to be assigned a high priority in any normative schedule of goals relating to the social ecology of scientific inquiry.

The phenomenon of analyst value predisposition is by no means peculiar to social science, and most certainly it is not idiosyncratic among political scientists. Psychologist Silvan S. Tomkins recently has called attention to the universality of the problem of academic ideology in all scientific work:

This article analyzes a rich Swedish data set with information on the electoral turnout of a large sample of adoptees, their siblings, their adoptive parents, and their biological parents. We use a simple regression framework to decompose the parent-child resemblance in voting into pre-birth factors, measured by biological parents’ voting, and post-birth factors, measured by adoptive parents’ voting. Adoptees are more likely to vote if their biological parents were voters and if they were assigned to families in which the adoptive parents vote. We find evidence of interactions between the pre- and post-birth factors: the effect of the post-birth environment on turnout is greater amongst adoptees whose biological mothers are nonvoters. We also show that the relationships between parental characteristics, such as education, and child turnout, persist even in the absence of a genetic link between parent and child. The regression-based framework we utilize provides a basis for the integration of behavior-genetic research into mainstream political science.