A discipline, at least to the initiated, is known more by the questions it asks than by the answers that it provides. For questions indicate goals or aspirations that answers may not reach. At certain periods, however, a field of knowledge may be more conspicuously characterized by the controversies that occur among those who work in it. When these take the form of debates over the adequacy of particular answers, as determined by agreed, even though sometimes imprecise, criteria of assessment, they are unlikely to be highly prominent, except for the immediate participants. When, on the other hand, such controversies extend to the standing of the questions asked and place in dispute the means of appraising answers, it becomes obvious to all that something is happening that has implications for the entire field. Clearly the discipline is undergoing redefinition or at least an attempt at redefinition that may sharply alter its meaning.

I make three contentions. First, Hegel's theory of bureaucracy is as comprehensive as Weber's ideal type of bureaucratic organization. I argue this by making a sociological reformulation of Hegel's model and comparing it with the Weberian paradigm. Second, Hegel adapts the Aristotelian category of practical judgment in characterizing the bureaucratic activity as subsumption. This characterization is contrary to the dominant view that bureaucracy embodies mere instrumental rationality and solves some difficulties in Hegel's political thought. Third, Hegel's conceptualization can contribute to a liberal theory of bureaucracy that apprehends modern political reality more adequately than the skepticism of classical liberals and contemporary libertarians about bureaucratic organization.

Public officials in John Rawls's well-ordered society face an assurance problem. They prefer to act in accordance with the political conception of justice, but only if they are assured that others will. On Paul Weithman's influential interpretation, Rawls attempts to solve this problem by claiming that public reason is an assurance mechanism. There are several problems with Rawls's solution: Public reason talk is too cheap to facilitate assurance, it is difficult to know when particular utterances express public reasons, and the requirements of public reason conflict with the fact of reasonable pluralism. We argue that convergence discourse—not public reason—solves the assurance problem by being a costly signal that indicates commitment to the political conception. This solution has none of Rawls's problems and has an interesting corollary: As diversity increases in society, so too does society's ability to solve the assurance problem. In short, the more diversity the better.

Incumbents in electoral regimes often retain power despite having to regularly compete in multiparty elections. We examine a specific channel through which incumbents can seek to prevent the emergence of a strong opposition that might threaten them in future elections. We present a formal model demonstrating that incumbents can strategically induce opposition fragmentation by appointing some opposition members to ministerial cabinet positions. Opposition politicians who have the opportunity to secure a cabinet position in an incumbent’s government tend to compete for office independently rather than coalescing into broad-based parties or electoral alliances. The model shows that weaker incumbents are more likely to rely on this cooptation strategy. Using original data on presidential elections across African countries during 1990–2016, we show that past cooptation of opposition politicians is associated with a more fragmented opposition field in subsequent elections.

Machiavelli's most famous political work, The Prince, was a masterful act of political deception. I argue that Machiavelli's intention was a republican one: to undo Lorenzo de Medici by giving him advice that would jeopardize his power, hasten his overthrow, and allow for the resurgence of the Florentine republic. This interpretation returns The Prince to its specific historical context. It considers Machiavelli's advice to Lorenzo on where to reside, how to behave, and whom to arm in light of the political reality of sixteenth-century Florence. Evidence external to The Prince, including Machiavelli's other writings and his own political biography, confirms his anti-Medicean sentiments, his republican convictions, and his proclivity for deception. Understanding The Prince as an act of political deception continues a tradition of reading Machiavelli as a radical republican. Moreover, it overcomes the difficulties of previous republican interpretations, and provides new insight into the strategic perspective and Renaissance artistry Machiavelli employed as a theoretician.

This article translates several explanations for contextual effects upon politics into mathematical, dynamic representations. These representations are used to consider several questions. Under what circumstances does the social context lead to durability and volatility in mass political preferences? Do different specifications of contextual influence lead to different conclusions regarding its dynamic consequences? Does the social context have different dynamic implications for individual preference and for the aggregate preferences of the population as a whole? These questions are not addressed by gathering and analyzing data, but rather by examining the deductive consequences of the various explanations for contextual influence.

The concepts of “party” and “party system” may be obscuring the nature of early national political culture. The presence of a modern party ethos before the 1830s seems to be taken for granted, as are assumptions regarding the alleged benefits of party. Historians have not yet demonstrated, however, the many dimensions of institutionalized party behavior. Focus is recommended on three observable elements of party (after Sorauf): as organization, in office, in the electorate. Studies of party self-consciousness developing over the entire 1789–1840 period are necessary in various political units. Evidence is inconclusive, but weighs on balance against a first party system of Federalists and Republicans (1790s–1820s). While relatively stable elite coalitions and even mass cleavage patterns perhaps developed at staggered intervals in different arenas, especially during the war crisis period of 1809–1816, the norms of party did not take root and pervade the polity. The era to the 1820s was transitional, a deferential-participant phase of mixed political culture roughly comparable to England's after 1832. Theories relating party to democratization, national integration, and political development, should be reconsidered.

The diminishing salience of territorial issues, the restraints imposed by the nuclear balance, the shift away from the primacy of military-strategic elements of power to the primacy of economic elements, the day-to-day realities of economic interdependence, and changes in the nature of the nation-state have produced a new international order which resembles in important ways the domestic political systems prevalent in the industrialized noncommunist part of the world. This leads to the “domestication” of international politics. At the same time competitive nationalism, the vitality of the nation-state, differing perceptions of the proper role of government in the economy, and other considerations allow not much more than a tenuous coordination of foreign policies even among similar nation-states, making it unlikely that the European Economic Community and the Atlantic alliance will proceed beyond existing structures toward tighter integration.

In this paper I will endeavor to do the following: (1) test how far certain concepts dealing with individual orientations to politics, previously used in studies of relatively advanced European societies, are appropriate to populations in developing countries; (2) ascertain how far these separate dimensions of individual political orientation cohere as a syndrome, indicating the existence of a general underlying dimension of “participant citizenship;” (3) identify elements among common orientations to politics which cannot be incorporated in this general syndrome; and (4) assess the importance of certain social experiences or forces in inculcating the qualities of participant citizenship in individuals exposed to these influences.

These objectives will be better understood if they are seen in the context of the larger research program of which this report is a part, namely the Harvard Project on the Social and Cultural Aspects of Economic Development. The project is an investigation of the forms and sources of modernization in individuals. Its focus is on the person rather than the society or the institution, and its emphasis is socio-psychological rather than purely sociological or structural. Six countries are represented: Argentina and Chile, East Pakistan and India, Nigeria and Israel. This report will not, however, emphasize national differences, but rather treat each sample as another replication of the basic design. We assume that if something holds true for six such different countries, it must be a powerful connection indeed.

Efforts to replicate our study of the effects of politics on trade flows between the major powers have revealed that the computer program written to calculate the estimates produced errors in both the coefficients and the standard errors. Furthermore, these errors have some consequences for the results. In this brief corrigendum, we present corrected tables for our research note and a slightly modified interpretation of the results.

Our study examined evidence to assess three arguments about how politics may affect trade. The first contends that positive political relations in a dyad result in higher levels of trade. This argument leads to two hypotheses: States in conflict will have a lower level of trade than those not in conflict, and trade will increase with the degree of common interests between a pair of states. The second argument concludes that democratic dyads will have a higher level of trade than other dyads. The third argument focuses on the security concerns of states and leads to the hypotheses that alliances will increase trade in a bipolar system but will have no effect in a multipolar system. We refer readers to the original article for a fuller statement of the logic of these arguments, their respective hypotheses, and a complete statement of our research design and operationalization of the variables (Morrow, Siverson, and Tabares 1998).

In recent years Richard Rorty has sought to develop an alternative to the familiar rationalist and natural rights “vocabularies” of liberalism. Unlike most critics of classical liberalism, however, Rorty eschews attempts to argue against these vocabularies, and instead seeks to persuade his readers by redescribing the aspirations of a liberal society in a more “attractive” way. I assess Rorty's redescriptive practice through an analysis of his ideal liberal polity. I contend that although Rorty defends redescription as an alternative to “normal” philosophical and theoretical argument, his redescriptive efforts fail on their own terms: not only does it appear that there is no redescription in his descriptions, but he proves incapable of offering any insights into or exits from pressing problems in contemporary liberal societies. This, I submit, can be traced back to his unwillingness to investigate and redescribe power and power relations.

Immediately after the election to the tenth Israeli parliament (Knesset), 21 students of political science, 24 Knesset members, and seven parliamentary correspondents were each asked (a) to assess the political power ratios of the 10 parties represented in the Knesset and (b) to judge the ideological similarity between them. As ascertained by Saaty's analytic hierarchy scaling technique, the power ratio judgments proved sufficiently consistent to justify the construction of individual ratio scales of perceived political power. The ideological proximities were adequately represented by two-dimensional ideological spaces. Analyses of the derived power measures showed that the higher the political sophistication of the subject, the higher the combined power attributed to the religious parties and the lower the combined power assigned to the two largest parties Likud and Labor. The derived power measures were then compared to the predictions of six power indices, three of which only consider the ideological space. Of the six models, the generalized Banzhaf power index best accounted for the perceived power of 62% of the subjects, whereas the classical Shapley-Shubik index provided the best fit for 31% of the subjects. The generalized power indices were found only partly satisfactory with a need for further revision.

Whether personality characteristics of American leaders crucially determine major American foreign policy decisions has been a matter of considerable disagreement. A test of two hypotheses drawn from interpersonal generalization theory shows such influences have probably been crucial in a number of cases in American foreign policy between 1898 and 1968. In 49 cases of intraelite disagreement on force-related issues and 13 cases of intraelite disagreement on inclusionary issues the direction of disagreement could be predicted in over 75 percent of the cases by knowledge of individual differences in interpersonal relations. A four-fold speculative typology suggests fundamental personality-based differences in orientation towards America's preferred operating style and role in the international system (e.g., introverts are drawn toward impersonal principles and mechanisms like balance of power–or in an earlier period to international law).

The evidence implies that one source of war and hard-line foreign policy is the structure of self-selection and recruitment to high office in the American political system. As well, the systematic tendency to self-expressive personalization in major foreign policy decisions probably increases the rate of error of American elites.

Debate over representation has been a continuing part of the Western political tradition at least since the writings of Hobbes. Recently, Hanna Pitkin, using the tools of linguistic analysis, has clarified, if not resolved, the debate by examining the disparate uses of the term in both political and non-political discourse. In order to elucidate the issues, she discussed such different forms of representation as formal representation, descriptive representation, substantive representation and interest representation. In this paper I will utilize the distinctions she has developed as a framework for analyzing the process of representation within the community action program of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) during its initial formative period (1964-1966) in the cities of Chicago, Philadelphia and New York City.

I will argue that 1) the manner of selecting representatives of the poor (formal representation) was a function of the political resources of competing interests in the city; 2) the orientations (interest representativeness) of the formal representatives affected their influence (actual representation); 3) the influence (actual representation) of the formal representatives affected the level of intra-neighborhood conflict, which in turn affected the representatives' orientations (interest representation); 4) the character of the actual and interest representation was affected by the type of formal representation; and 5) the social characteristics of the representatives (descriptive representation) influenced the character of actual and interest representation.

We shall address questions concerning the impact of candidate spending in congressional elections in a new way. We develop a multiequation model of congressional vote choice that takes the endogeneity of expenditures into account. We then estimate both this model and the more traditional single-equation model using individual level survey data. The substantial differences we find between the two models indicates that the simultaneity bias present in the single-equation model is not trivial. The challenger and incumbent expenditure terms are each significant (whereas only challenger expenditures are in the single-equation setup) and of much greater magnitude in the multiequation case. In addition, we evaluate hypotheses grounded in persuasive communications theory concerning the type of individuals most affected by the messages emanating from the campaigns. We find that individuals with higher education, those with greater interest in campaigns, and those with strongly held convictions are unaffected by candidate spending, whereas individuals lacking each of these attributes are greatly influenced by campaign expenditures.

The authors of the American Voter concluded that the distribution of opinions on current issues was not very important for explaining the vote of the large bulk of the American electorate. Recent studies purporting to demonstrate the increasing prevalence of issue voting in the 1960s and early 1970s fail to present evidence to satisfy the criteria for issue voting upon which the conclusions of the American Voter were based. Worse yet, the evidence of these newer studies fails to satisfy even the studies' own alternative criteria for issue voting. The apparent “increases” in issue voting prove to be largely artifacts of the measures employed or misinterpretations of the evidence adduced. When it comes to translating his issue preferences into voting choices, the average voter remains as confused as ever

Weber's commentators often accuse him of lacking a coherent political philosophy because his pluralist-elite theory of democracy seems indifferent to liberal-democratic values. I argue, however, that the core of Weber's political philosophy is a politicized neo-Kantian liberalism, one that produces an ethically significant and positive concept of politics. The problem is rather that Weber's pessimism about institutionalizing positive politics in bureaucratized societies left the ethical core of his political philosophy inexplicit. This introduced a conflict into his thought between his ethical commitments and his assessments of political possibilities. The conflict is compelling because it reflects the contemporary gap between the promise and performance of liberal democracies. At the same time, formulating Weber's problems in these terms helps identify democratic solutions that remain obscure in his assessment of conflicts between bureaucratization and democracy.

The aim of this paper is to make a modest contribution toward improved understanding of how the political process actually operates in America. It reports the results of some research on individual citizen participation in political activity and describes a tool that may be used for classifying individuals in terms of the amount of political activity in which they engage. Finally it outlines some differences that are observed when attitudes with respect to some public personalities and issues held by the politically active portion of the citizenry are compared with attitudes of the politically inert.

The research study from which the data reported here are derived is one of a long series carried out over the past five years for the Public Relations Department of the Standard Oil Company (N. J.). The primary purpose of these studies has been to find out how the company stands with the American public —to learn what virtues people credit to it and what sins they think it is committing. Research on such topics inevitably involves the question of who among the vast body of American citizens are most articulate in their feelings about big corporations and most concerned to defend or attack them. Since similar questions arise whenever the citizen's role with respect to any public issue comes up, the tools developed for corporation public relations may have much wider applicability and usefulness.

Drug traffickers sometimes share profits peacefully. Other times they fight. We propose a model to investigate this variation, focusing on the role of the state. Seizing illegal goods can paradoxically increase traffickers’ profits, and higher profits fuel violence. Killing kingpins makes crime bosses short-sighted, also fueling conflict. Only by targeting the most violent traffickers can the state reduce violence without increasing supply. These results help explain empirical patterns of violence in drug war, which is less studied than are interstate or civil war but often as deadly.

Popular discussions of the internal management of the U.S. House of Representatives in the present era generally give great weight to the ubiquity and arbitrariness of the seniority system as a significant determinant of outcomes there. Careful attention to the scholarly literature, however, should long since have modified this view. For it appears that except for relatively unimportant matters such as the allocation of office space on Capitol Hill, the criterion of seniority is generally intermingled in House decision-making with a great many other crite ria of choice, and the business of choosing is not automatic, but remains in the hands of persons having some considerable discretion. This, apparently, is the case with respect to such decisions as the allocation of Capitol Hill patronage, the initial assignment of Representatives to committees, the distribution of responsibilities within committees, and the choice of party leaders. The one important area in which seniority seems to play a role of overwhelming significance is in the matter of succession to the chairmanship of committees; this is in turn governed by the custom (not a formal rule) of seniority that guarantees members reappointment to committees at the opening of each new Congress, in rank order of committee service. It is the growth of this method of selecting committee chairmen in the House that is the subject of this paper.