Rational choice analyses of international cooperation have slighted the effect of state preference formation and the influence of cultural forces in that process. This article addresses these gaps by developing an explanation that specifies how organizational cultures of bureaucracies shape state aims and international outcomes. This approach is evaluated in a set of least likely cases—decisions on the use of force in war—where the conventional wisdom expects external material, not internal cultural, concerns to dominate. Before World War II, countries agreed to limit the use of three types of warfare, but during that conflict mutual restraint was maintained in only one. I show how this variation is best understood as a product of state preference dynamics, shaped largely by the collective beliefs and customs of military services. This result suggests ways to rethink the use of the preferences-interaction model and the role of cultural factors in that framework.

Moser analyzes the cooperation procedure using a model that assumes (1) one dimension and (2) complete information. I show that because of these two restrictive assumptions and his misunderstanding of the strategic implications of Article 189a(1) of the Maastricht Treaty (an article also present in the Single European Act and the Treaty of Rome), Moser's conclusions are mistaken. In particular, his predicted outcomes are incorrect, and his major institutional prediction (that the European Parliament plays no role in decision making except in the second round of the cooperation procedure) is contradicted by thousands of parliamentary amendments, the major part of which are accepted in the first round.

Social scientists who use history as a laboratory for theory development use the work of historians to construct background narratives which can then be coded according to theoretically relevant categories. Yet, virtually no attention has been paid to how these historical monographs are to be chosen. On most periods and themes of interest available accounts differ, not only substantively but also with respect to the implicit theories and conceptual frameworks used to establish salience or produce commonsensical explanations. Unself-conscious use of historical monographs thus easily results in selection bias. Social scientists are bound to be more attracted to and convinced by accounts that accord with the expectations about events contained in the concepts they deploy and the theories they seek to test. Consideration of recent developments in historiographical theory supports the argument that responsible techniques for using historical sources are available, but they require understanding the extent to which patterns within historiography, rather than “History,” must be the direct focus of investigation and explanation. Such an approach has the added advantage of helping to generate historically based studies where observations or cases outnumber variables.

Recently there has been a movement to embrace coalition politics both as an historically fundamental mode of action and as ethically desirable. Yet, as Bernice Johnson Reagon illustrates, coalition politics presents many profound difficulties, both in terms of its possible directions and the type of self capable of engaging in such activity. Laclau and Mouffe, embracing an open-ended development of equality and liberty, expand and clarify the possibilities that a radically democratic liberalism has available for envisioning and sustaining coalition politics. Yet, they illustrate the limits of such a project insofar as they are unable to address adequately the problems posed by Reagon. I argue that only by supplementing (and transfiguring) equality and liberty with an ethic of receptive generosity, suggested by an idiosyncratic reading of Nietzsche's gift-giving virtue, would coalition politics likely be sustainable and ethically desirable. The gift-giving virtue allows us to formulate a vision of the possible grandness of plurality that is ethically more compelling than the logics of identity and difference offered by Laclau and Mouffe.

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.

Based upon a survey of the USSR in December 1989, Finifter and Mickiewicz (1992) found that respondents with higher education were less inclined than those with lower education to support individual, versus state, responsibility, and that supporters of individual responsibility were slightly less likely than those favoring state responsibility to support political change. A recent critique challenged this analysis, arguing that higher education is always associated with support for individual responsibility and that preference for individual responsibility is always positively associated with support for political reform, and reported findings to that effect. This analysis resolves these discrepant findings and clarifies why they occurred. A replication using data from 40 societies demonstrates that the relationship between education and locus of responsibility is not universal; indeed, it appears in only a few countries. Moreover, large differences in sampling and measurement procedures and extraordinary changes over time in the real world contributed to the differences between our findings and those of our critics.

Political scientists are becoming more self-conscious about how they connect quantitative and qualitative data in social science and about the role of systematic country studies in comparative research. As the most striking example of both practices in recent years, Robert Putnam and his collaborators' Making Democracy Work deserves more serious criticism than it has received. While Putnam's original project aimed at a precise goal—studying how a new administrative reform is institutionalized—his ultimate project aimed at nothing less than examining how differently democracy works in different sociopolitical contexts, operationalized cross-sectionally in southern and northern Italy. The sources of these differences he found in the two regions' histories, which led him to employ the quantitative interregional data he had collected for one purpose to support a model of historical development of North and South. This historical reconstruction rests largely on qualitative data; but it also rests on a set of comparative inferences about individual values and community cohesiveness in the two regions that is of questionable historical validity and innocent of structural grounding. This article applauds Putnam's joining qualitative and quantitative data but attacks his reconstruction of Italian history to fit his model of social capital.

Modernization theory suggests that in the post–World War II period increased education promoted public support for democratic principles and an individual opportunities society in the former Soviet Union. Finifter and Mickiewicz (1992), however, based on a 1989 survey in the Soviet Union, found that the less well educated were more supportive of individual locus of control than were the better educated. Examining survey data collected in the former USSR during 1990, 1991, 1992, and 1995, we find consistent reconfirmation of the modernization theory, despite a major decline in support for an opportunities society that occurs between 1992 and 1995. This recent increase in preference for socialism is explained by rising nationalism, growing nostalgia for communists, and disillusionment with certain aspects of the market economy, particularly the perceived growth of social inequality.

In the process of agenda setting, the U.S. Supreme Court is limited to selecting from among only those cases brought before it. Despite this limitation, the justices possess considerable discretion and can reshape the issues in a case as a means of advancing their policy preferences. With data drawn from the Court's opinions, we find that, over the past twenty-five years, the justices have evinced a frequent willingness to expand the issues on their plenary docket and resolve questions not formally presented by the parties. We conclude that, notwithstanding informal norms that disapprove of this practice, issue fluidity is an important component in a continuous program of agenda building.