This article tests whether economic policy in the Soviet bloc follows a cycle of change in which more mass-oriented policies rise on the agenda after a succession crisis and then fall once the succession is resolved. Changes in investment and budgetary priorities, growth rates of personal income and consumption, and finally, changes in elite rhetoric and policy pronouncements over time all support the existence of a succession cycle in economic priorities. This suggests that the mass publics do influence—albeit indirectly—the policy process in socialist states, and that chief executives change their priorities over the course of their administrations as different clienteles line up at the trough and different constraints develop. There is, then, a structural component to economic decision making in the Soviet bloc, and that component seems to be similar to the one that operates in the West—that is, the desire of politicians to expand their power and remain in office, and their willingness to use economic policy to achieve those ends.

In this Review in June 1993 Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram argued that the social construction of target populations is an important political and policy phenomenon. Robert Lieberman criticizes Schneider and Ingram's “circular” conceptualization of public policy and social construction. He proposes a “historical-institutional” framework for understanding the role of group identities in political change. Lieberman analyzes the dual experience of African-Americans in the American welfare state as an example of political institutions and policy changes' affecting changing group constructions. Ingram and Schneider respond that their purpose is to understand how social constructions shape policy designs, which in turn affect citizen perceptions and participation, and argue that Lieberman's ideas of institutions and history yield no analytic improvement. They provide their own analysis of the case of welfare to illustrate the advantages for future research of their conception of policy targets.

Governments render decisions on how resources and values are allocated in a society. In the United States, Congress is the institution in which most of the key allocating decisions are made. To the extent the U.S. political system is integrated, the coalitions that form around the issues debated in Congress should be reflected in the coalitions that support presidential candidates and those that support the major political parties. We formulate a spatial theory of political change in which new ideological cleavages appear in congressional behavior and presidential elections and gradually reorganize the mass party base. The theory leads us explicitly to consider the question of dealignment and to specify conditions under which the parties will lose support from voters.

Canons of intellectual “greats” anchor the history and scope of academic disciplines. Within international relations (IR), such a canon emerged in the mid-twentieth century and is almost entirely male. Why are women thinkers absent from IR’s canon? We show that it is not due to a lack of international thought, or that this thought fell outside established IR theories. Rather it is due to the gendered and racialized selection and reception of work that is deemed to be canonical. In contrast, we show what can be gained by reclaiming women’s international thought through analyses of three intellectuals whose work was authoritative and influential in its own time or today. Our findings question several of the basic premises underpinning IR’s existing canon and suggest the need for a new research agenda on women international thinkers as part of a fundamental rethinking of the history and scope of the discipline.

The basic institutions of modern democracy were established at a very early stage in the transformation that societies have undergone since feudalism. In their establishment, forms that had developed even before feudalism, in Greece and Rome, were copied. Thus the institutions are very old ones indeed.

When the age of these political institutions is compared to that of economic institutions, the contrast is sharp and striking. As society has become more and more rationalized, economic transactions have mirrored this ever-increasing rationality, with increasing technical sophistication, and increasing abstraction. The best indicator of this is in the role of money. From barter economies to modern economies in which bank-deposit money and credit account for most transactions, the development of economic mechanisms for effecting exchange has been very great. Yet the development of political institutions, and of mechanisms for effective political authority, has been far less great.

In this paper, I want to explore the similarities and differences between political power and the embodiment of economic power or value, that is, money. A careful examination of the differences will suggest which of the differences are intrinsic to the differing natures of economic and political transactions, and which are accidental. This will then allow raising questions about what kinds of innovations in political institutions might be feasible, and might allow these institutions to develop more compatibility with the technical and economic changes that occur with such rapidity in modern society.

It is not customary to regard Thomas Hobbes as a theorist particularly concerned with representation. Hardly any of the traditional commentaries on his thought even acknowledge that he mentions the term; and the index to Molesworth's standard edition of Hobbes's English works contains no reference to it. But the fact is that representation plays a central role in the Leviathan; and Hobbes's analysis of the concept is among the most serious, systematic and challenging in the history of political philosophy. It is an analysis both temptingly plausible and, as I hope to show, peculiarly wrong. And the ways in which it is wrong are intimately related to what is most characteristic and peculiar in the Hobbesian political argument.

A question often posed by students of American state politics is: “Do state political systems leave a distinctive imprint on patterns of public policy?” Prior to recent years the nearly automatic response of political scientists was an unqualified “yes.” More recent research has led to a qualified but increasingly confident “no.”

Several recent publications have explored relationships between various indices of state politics, socio-economic characteristics, and public policy. The general conclusion has been that central features of the political system such as electoral and institutional circumstances do not explain much of the variation in policy. There are occasionally high correlations between individual measures of voter turnout, party competitiveness, or the character of state legislatures and some aspects of governmental spending. But these political-policy correlations seem to disappear when the effect of socioeconomic development is controlled.

These are disturbing findings. They have not gone unchallenged. But the challenges, rather than reassuring those who have asserted the relevance of parties, voting patterns, and government structures, have demonstrated that the burden of proof now rests on those who hypothesize a politics-policy relationship. The problem has not been resolved.

Part of the problem may rest on the conceptualization and measurement of the central variables. Electoral balance or alternation in office is not “inter-party competition,” except in the most mechanical sense. Compare Massachusetts' loose-knit party structure to the centralization of Connecticut's. “Party competition” is not the same as “party organization.” And party competition, voting habits, and patterns of apportionment fall far short of being equivalents of “political systems.”

I develop a model of decision making in juries when there is uncertainty about jurors' preferences. I provide a characterization of the equilibrium strategy under any voting rule and show that nonunanimous rules are asymptotically efficient. Specifically, large juries make the correct decision with probability close to one. My analysis also demonstrates that under the unanimous rule, large juries almost never convict the defendant. The last result contrasts markedly with the literature and suggests that the unanimity rule can protect the innocent only at the price of acquitting the guilty.

Scholars are increasingly utilizing online workforces to encode latent political concepts embedded in written or spoken records. In this letter, we build on past efforts by developing and validating a crowdsourced pairwise comparison framework for encoding political texts that combines the human ability to understand natural language with the ability of computers to aggregate data into reliable measures while ameliorating concerns about the biases and unreliability of non-expert human coders. We validate the method with advertisements for U.S. Senate candidates and with State Department reports on human rights. The framework we present is very general, and we provide free software to help applied researchers interact easily with online workforces to extract meaningful measures from texts.

Can technological change contribute to political turnover? Influential theories suggest that technological change represents a form of creative destruction that can weaken incumbents and strengthen outsiders, leading to political turnover. This paper investigates a large-scale historical natural experiment: the impact of the green revolution on single-party dominance in India. Drawing on a theoretical framework based on models of contests, this paper argues that high-yielding variety (HYV) crops strengthened the incentives and capacity of a politically excluded group, in this case agricultural producers, to seek greater political representation. Exploiting the timing of the introduction of HYV crops, together with district-level variation in suitability for the new crop technology, instrumental variables analyses show that the green revolution played a pivotal role in the rise of agrarian opposition parties and decline of single-party dominance. The findings support theories linking technological change to political turnover, with important implications for the political economy of democratization.

In this work I test the proposition that normative standards of behavior can influence state actions in security-related conflicts. Specifically, I examine the construction of norms in the settlements of security-related disputes and the effects these settlements have on subsequent militarized interactions. I argue that dispute settlements alter subsequent crisis bargaining in two important ways. First, they act as normative referents that alter the interpretation of subsequent crisis bargaining behavior both by identifying a solution to the dispute which alleviates fears of demands for future concessions and by defining a set of acts which both sides consider illegitimate. Second, in combination with the response to their violation, dispute settlements inflict reputational costs on states that violate them. I test these arguments against a realist theory of crisis bargaining through an analysis of 122 reinitiated international crises between 1929 and 1979. I find strong support for the hypothesis that states can and do construct normative standards that guide their behavior in international crises, whereas realist theory receives only mixed support.

We analyze a dynamic extension of a parsimonious model of lawmaking in which preferences evolve over time and today’s policy becomes tomorrow’s status quo. Unlike in existing models of pivotal politics, policy makers’ voting behavior depends on the institutional environment and on their expectations about future economic and political shocks. Relative to sincere voting, the equilibrium behavior exhibits a strategic polarization effect, which increases with the degree of consensus required by the institution, the volatility of the policy environment, and the expected ideological polarization of the future policy makers. The equilibrium behavior also exhibits a strategic policy bias, which works against any exogenous policy bias embedded in the voting rule. Our analysis implies that the existing literature underestimates the inertial effect of checks and balances and overestimates the impact of institutional biases such as fiscally conservative budget procedures.

The significance of Populism is being increasingly recognized. In this day of independent voting, and of the “farm bloc,” it is unnecessary to stimulate interest in this phase of American political, economic, and agricultural history. Although its term of life was short and turbid, its relation to other movements and questions gives it importance beyond that which it would otherwise enjoy.

Many have endeavored to explain its rise. To some it represented an outpouring of the dangerous elements of the frontier combined with the beginnings of socialistic and anarchistic tendencies in the cities. An English observer characterized the supporters of Bryan in 1896 as the “forces of political and social revolution.” A western editorial writer wrote that ninety per cent of the leaders of the Populist Party were “destitute of personal or political integrity” and classed them as “vagabonds, slanderers, and demagogues.”

During the last 60 years, the proportion of careerists (congressmen elected ten or more times) has risen from 2.8 per cent to 20.0 per cent. The greatest increase occurred in the mid-1950s. The proportion of Southern Democrats numbered among the careerists has consistently been disproportionately large, with the number of Northern Democrats increasing, while Republican careerists have become relatively fewer. Fluctuations in the number of senior congressmen is not strongly influenced by national electoral patterns.

The most frequent cause of careerists' leaving the House has been retirement. During the last decade the incidence of defeats in primaries and general elections has increased; the greater susceptibility of careerists to rejection by the electorate coincides with reapportionment and the involvement of new groups in the electorate interested in new issues.

In two recent articles, Inglehart (1981, 1982) arrives at the conclusion that the decline of materialism in postwar Japan is the result of generational change and period effects. Aging effects cannot be demonstrated empirically. This article challenges his views. It will be shown that a life-cycle explanation can claim as much empirical evidence as a generational explanation, as long as the overall goodness of fit and the sign and strength of the age effects and cohort effects are the only criteria the decision is based upon. Particularly, a two-dimensional age-period model fits the data nearly as well as the cohort-period model that Inglehart proposes. Theoretical considerations, however, plead for a three-dimensional solution that includes some cohort effects beside period and aging effects for those generations that grew up in the postwar era. Such a model can also be established empirically.

How do social group boundaries evolve? Does the appearance of a new out-group change the in-group’s perceptions of other out-groups? We introduce a conceptual framework of context-dependent categorization in which exposure to one minority leads to recategorization of other minorities as in- or out-groups depending on perceived distances across groups. We test this framework by studying how Mexican immigration to the United States affected white Americans’ attitudes and behaviors toward Black Americans. We combine survey and crime data with a difference-in-differences design and an instrumental variables strategy. Consistent with the theory, Mexican immigration improves whites’ racial attitudes, increases support for pro-Black government policies, and lowers anti-Black hate crimes while simultaneously increasing prejudice against Hispanics. Results generalize beyond Hispanics and Blacks, and a survey experiment provides direct evidence for recategorization. Our findings imply that changes in the size of one group can affect the entire web of intergroup relations in diverse societies.

At the beginning of the century, the Constitution was amended to permit direct election of U.S. senators. We examine the shift to determine the extent to which an electoral reform can result in meaningful change. Variables are analyzed that tap the Senate's membership and responsiveness before and after direct election, and House data are employed to control for history effects. The results indicate that changing the mode of senatorial selection did indeed lead to alterations in the composition and sensitivity of the Senate, a finding that should encourage caution regarding the electoral reforms being advocated at the end of the century.

This article examines the causes of the dispute between James Madison and Alexander Hamilton in the early 1790s. Though Hamilton initially believed that Madison's opposition to the Federalist administration was probably motivated by personal animosity and political advantage, in later years he concluded what Madison had long argued: the controversy between Republicans and Federalists stemmed from a difference of principle. For Madison, republicanism meant the recognition of the sovereignty of public opinion and the commitment to participatory politics. Hamilton advocated a more submissive role for the citizenry and a more independent status for the political elite. While Madison did not deny to political leaders and enlightened men a critical place in the formation of public opinion, he fought against Hamilton's thin version of public opinion as “confidence” in government. In 1791–92 Madison took the Republican lead in providing a philosophic defense for a tangible, active, and responsible role for the citizens of republican government.

Whether powerful media outlets have effects on public opinion has been at the heart of theoretical and empirical discussions about the media’s role in political life. Yet, the effects of media campaigns are difficult to study because citizens self-select into media consumption. Using a quasi-experiment—the 30-year boycott of the most important Eurosceptic tabloid newspaper, The Sun, in Merseyside caused by the Hillsborough soccer disaster—we identify the effects of The Sun boycott on attitudes toward leaving the EU. Difference-in-differences designs using public opinion data spanning three decades, supplemented by referendum results, show that the boycott caused EU attitudes to become more positive in treated areas. This effect is driven by cohorts socialized under the boycott and by working-class voters who stopped reading The Sun. Our findings have implications for our understanding of public opinion, media influence, and ways to counter such influence in contemporary democracies.

Why do some men embrace society's values while others reject them? Is conformity a general trait, more uniformly manifested by some people than by others? What social or psychological forces lie behind the tendency to conform or deviate?

Although these questions obviously have significance for the conduct of political life, they have received far less attention from political scientists than from scholars in other disciplines such as psychology and sociology. In view of current challenges to the legitimacy of existing political institutions, the mounting debate over the acceptable limits of protest, and the growing disdain for democratic decision-processes shown by some segments of the population, the need for political scientists to understand the nature and sources of conformity and deviation has become, if anything, more urgent. We hope, in the present paper, to explore the psychological—and to some extent the social and political—meaning of conformity and deviation as reflected in citizen responses to political beliefs. To that end we shall review briefly the present state of psychological theory and research on conformity behavior; suggest, in light of our own research findings, some ways in which current psychological explanations might be modified and extended to account for conformity and deviation within the mass public; and furnish data that might help to explain why individuals who have different personality characteristics and who occupy different roles in the society are likely to accept or reject political norms.