The usual model of electoral reaction to economic conditions assumes the “retrospective” economic voter who bases expectations solely on recent economic performance or personal economic experience (voter as “peasant”). A second model assumes a “sophisticated” economic voter who incorporates new information about the future into personal economic expectations (voter as “banker”). Using the components, both retrospective and prospective, of the Index of Consumer Sentiment (ICS) as intervening variables between economic conditions and approval, we find that the prospective component fully accounts for the presidential approval time series. With aggregate consumer expectations about long-term business conditions in the approval equation, neither the usual economic indicators not the other ICS components matter. Moreover, short-term changes in consumer expectations respond more to current forecasts than to the current economy. The qualitative result is a rational expectations outcome: the electorate anticipates the economic future and rewards or punishes the president for economic events before they happen.

Using data from a national public opinion survey carried out in the Soviet Union during November and December 1989, we explore two attitudes relevant to the revolutionary changes there: (1) attitudes toward change and political democracy and (2) attitudes toward a core component of socialist ideology, the locus of responsibility for social well-being (the state or individuals?). These variables are unrelated, with the sample relatively evenly divided among the intersecting cells of a cross tabulation. While social conflict may be mitigated by the small sizes of absolutely opposing groups, consensus may also be hard to reach. Ethnicity, education, income, age, party membership, and life satisfaction have important effects on these attitudes. We discuss how attitude patterns in our data may be related to the disintegration of the Soviet Union and to problems faced by the independent successor states as they develop new institutions and foster new values.

The ideas in Graham Allison's Essence of Decision (1971) have had an enormous impact on the study and teaching of bureaucracy and foreign policy making. While Allison's work has received considerable critical attention, there has been surprisingly little examination of the content and internal logic of his models. We subject each of Allison's three models to a systematic critical analysis. Our conclusion is that the models require substantial reformulation.

American political science is a product of the American state. There are political reasons why particular subdisciplines became hegemonic with the emergence of the “Second Republic” after World War II. The three hegemonic subdisciplines of our time are public opinion, public policy, and public choice. Each is a case study of consonance with the thought-ways and methods of a modern bureaucratized government committed to scientific decision making. Following Leviathan too closely results in three principal consequences: (1) failure to catch and evaluate the replacement of law by economics as the language of the state, (2) the loss of passion in political science discourse, and (3) the failure of political science to appreciate the significance of ideological sea changes accompanying regime changes.

How does the U.S. Supreme Court reach decisions? Since the 1940s, scholars have focused on two distinct explanations. The legal model suggests that the rule of law (stare decisis) is the key determinant. The extralegal model posits that an array of sociological, psychological, and political factors produce judicial outcomes. To determine which model better accounted for judicial decisions, we used Supreme Court cases involving the imposition of the death penalty since 1972 and estimated and evaluated the models' success in accounting for decisional outcomes. Although both models performed quite satisfactorily, they possessed disturbing weaknesses. The legal perspective overpredicted liberal outcomes, the extralegal model conservative ones. Given these results, we tested another proposition, namely that extralegal and legal frameworks present codependent, not mutually exclusive, explanations of decision making. Based on these results, we offer an integrated model of Supreme Court decision making that contemplates a range of political and environmental forces and doctrinal constraints.

Democratic theories that argue for expanding the scope and domain of democracy assume that democratic experiences will transform individuals in democratic ways. Individuals are likely to become more public-spirited, tolerant, knowledgeable, and self-reflective than they would otherwise be. This assumption depends on viewing the self as socially and discursively constituted, a view that contrasts with the standard liberal-democratic view of the self as prepolitically constituted and narrowly self-interested. The importance of the social and discursive view of the self is that it highlights how standard assumptions about the self help to justify limits to democratic participation. As now conceptualized, however, the transformational assumption does not meet standard objections to expanding democracy. I sketch an approach that distinguishes classes of interests according to their potentials for democratic transformation, and strengthens—by qualifying—transformative expectations in democratic theory.

Studies of the relationship between the presidency and organized interests generally focus on presidential assistants and their communications with the interest group community. I take a different perspective. Based on presidential strategic interests and choices illuminated for several administrations through interviews with White House officials, four kinds of interest group liaison are identified: governing party, consensus building, outreach, and legitimization. These approaches are then empirically evaluated for the Reagan White House using interviews with Reagan's staff and the responses of several hundred interest group leaders to 1980 and 1985 surveys of national voluntary associations. Like the Carter administration after its first year, the Reagan White House initially emphasized “liaison as governing party” built on exclusive and programmatic ties to groups. A less activist legislative agenda and new circumstances later shifted the emphasis of the Reagan and Bush administrations to other forms of interest group liaison.

In this study, I investigate the linkage between trends in key economic indicators (inflation, unemployment, and growth in gross domestic product) and government survival in 16 postwar European parliamentary democracies. The partial likelihood method, which allows for variation in indicator values over the lifetimes of individual governments, constitutes the basic analytic tool. The findings reveal overall causal roles for both inflation and unemployment, as well as important differences in these roles between socialist and bourgeois governments and between pre-oil crisis and post-oil crisis eras. Most significant, the introduction of these indicators to the analysis helps to resolve the debate between two rival explanations of governmental stability, the bargaining complexity hypothesis and the ideological diversity hypothesis, in favor of the latter.

Democracies are less likely to fight wars with each other. They are also more likely to prevail in wars with autocratic states. I offer an explanation of this syndrome of powerful pacifism drawn from the microeconomic theory of the state. State rent seeking creates an imperialist bias in a country's foreign policy. This bias is smallest in democracies, where the costs to society of controlling the state are relatively low, and greatest in autocracies, where the costs are higher. As a result of this bias, autocracies will be more expansionist and, in turn, war-prone. In their relations with each other, where the absence of this imperialist bias is manifest, the relative pacifism of democracies appears. In addition, democracies, constrained by their societies from earning rents, will devote greater absolute resources to security, enjoy greater societal support for their policies, and tend to form overwhelming countercoalitions against expansionist autocracies. It follows that democracies will be more likely to win wars.

One of the more fruitful systematic approaches to the study of foreign policy views nations as information processors and explains foreign policy as a function of information and processing thereon. Much of such processing depends on the prior beliefs of decision makers, but for a variety of reasons these systems of prior beliefs are very difficult to analyze using “standard” empirical and modeling techniques. Computational modeling, including expert system technology, provides an alternative methodology that allows such analysis. I present Policy Arguer (POLI), an expert system model of U.S. foreign policy making in Asia. Poli has been very successful in reproducing actual U.S. responses to events in Asia from the 1950s. More important, POLI recreates policy debate in the form of the arguments and counterarguments used to justify policy alternatives. The model explains foreign policy outputs in terms of a complete process from foreign policy beliefs, through debate, to choice.

Recently, constitutional scholars have begun exploring how far constitutional discourse is governed by competing liberal and republican conceptions of the just or the good society. At the same time, political theorists have placed in doubt how far this debate rests on the metaphysical dichotomy between a radically autonomous and a radically encumbered individual. Scholars, however, have yet to investigate to what extent metaphysical conceptions of the autonomous or the encumbered individual underlie and determine strands of constitutional discourse. I analyze the deep structure of constitutional discourse in one important area—the legitimacy of prohibitions on corporate electoral activity. I show that the constitutional argumentation recurrently mounted against corporate electoral activity rests on a particular version of the radically encumbered individual and that the major constitutional defenses of corporate electoral activity assume a particular version of the radically autonomous individual.

I demonstrate that the intolerance of ordinary citizens matters for real politics even if strong linkages to policy outputs do not exist. In particular, the model I test posits that cultural intolerance constrains the liberty of individual citizens. Focusing on how people perceive political freedom, several hypotheses coupling tolerance and freedom are explored. Data from a national survey show that tolerance and freedom are connected. Those who do not feel free to express themselves politically are more likely to be intolerant of others, to have less heterogeneous peer groups and less tolerant spouses, and to live in less tolerant communities. Ultimately, the importance of mass political intolerance in the United States is that it establishes a culture of conformity that seems to constrain individual political liberty in many important ways.

We measure the extent to which military spending policy reflects public opinion, while controlling for other reasonable influences on policy. We use survey data as an indicator of aggregate public opinion on military spending and find evidence that changes in public opinion consistently exert an effect on changes in military spending. The influence of public opinion is less important than either Soviet military spending or the gap between U.S. and Soviet military spending and more important than the deficit and the balance of Soviet conflict/cooperation with the United States. We also examine the hypothesis that public opinion does not influence the government but that the government systematically manipulates public opinion. We find no evidence to support this hypothesis.

Franklin's Autobiography was written in part to provide a model for the emerging democratic individual and democratic culture of America. Franklin's teaching in the work has been subject to severe criticisms from the beginning, though it has had many defenders, too. Neither friend nor foe, however, has taken a sustained look at the Autobiography itself to explore its teaching in detail. I look at Franklin's presentation of the relationship of wealth and virtue, his utilitarianism, and his vision of democratic society and find a subtle and robust ideal deftly calculated to educate and elevate American culture.

Governments are likely to be held accountable for the success or failure of their foreign policies. Consequently, we claim that international wars can, under specified conditions, have domestically instigated consequences for violent regime change in the political systems of the participants. Drawing upon all international war participation between 1816 and 1975, we seek to answer the question, Do wars lead to violent changes of regime and if so, under what conditions? Three hypotheses set out the expected associations of a nation's initiator or target role in a war, the war outcome, and the costs of the war with domestically instigated violent changes of regime. Direct relationships are found for all three and hold even against possible threats to their validity and robustness. The results suggest that domestic politics play a larger role in national security policy than is generally believed by realist or neorealist theorists.

I explore empirically a central claim of the structural dependence thesis, namely, that capitalists' ability to disinvest fundamentally conditions policy choices in democratic capitalist systems. Utilizing time-series data for 16 affluent democracies from 1965 to 1984, I find that, indeed, low rates of business investment are associated with reductions in corporate tax burdens and that these reductions are more pronounced in periods of economic crisis. Moreover, low rates of capital formation engender cuts in personal income taxes during periods of economic stress. However, I also find that the magnitude of responsiveness of taxation to low rates of investment is relatively small and that analyses of the political context of investment and taxation indicate that governments have choices. The responsiveness of corporate tax burdens to capital formation may, under some governments, be part of a policy mix designed to maintain adequate investment and to address the demands of core constituencies.

I examine the place of self-interest in political life as given by a conception of politics that invokes ethics. This conception portrays each citizen as an individual with unique hopes and desires who is at the same time joined with others—part of, and continually giving shape to, a shared social and political life. It sees in political diversity and controversy not just conflicting interests but also competing claims about what “we”—unique individuals, linked to particular others through social roles and relationships, and together forming a single citizenry—ought to do or seek. Research that simply adopts a broad conception of utility or interest to admit nonselfish preferences or that employs typologies contrasting self-interested with non-self-interested motives will reveal neither the significance nor the limits of self-interest in this politics. Rather, we must explore how citizens' interests are both championed and challenged by the understandings of “good” and “right” to which our politics gives voice.

The primary source of divided government in the United States is voters who split their ballots between the parties. Yet there has been little comprehensive examination of either patterns or sources of ticket splitting in recent years. Instead, divergent lines of research have emerged, emphasizing such things as voter partisanship, incumbency, and a “new” (young, well-educated, even partisan) kind of ticket splitter; and their focus has been too often restricted to the atypical president–Congress pair. We seek to unify these research traditions in a comprehensive model of split-ticket voting and to test this model across the partisan ballot in a typical election setting-here, the contests for five Ohio state-wide offices in 1990. The model incorporates partisan strength, candidate visibility, and the individual characteristics that distinguish the “new ticket splitters”. The results support our partisan strength and candidate visibility explanations but provide little support for the emergence of a new type of ticket splitter.

Voters in multicandidate contests may confront circumstances under which it is in their interest to vote for a second- or even lower-ranked candidate. The U.S. electoral system, typically offering a choice between only two major contenders, rarely presents opportunities for this “sophisticated” voting. In presidential primaries, however, many plausible candidates may compete. We investigate the presence of sophisticated voting in the 1988 presidential primaries, using data from the National Election Study's Super Tuesday survey. We examine patterns of voting types based on ordinal measures of preferences among candidates and assessments of their chances of winning their party's nomination and estimate several models of choice, testing the multicandidate calculus of voting. Among both Republicans and Democrats, respondents' choices were consistent with the calculus of voting and thus with sophisticated voting.

Unraveling the nexus between agents and structures is fundamental to an understanding of political and social change. The two most prominent methodological approaches to explain revolutionary collective action involve either individual reductionism or structural reductionism. Both approaches result in theoretical inconsistencies and/or explanatory anomalies. An alternative proposed here utilizes the concept of framing developed in behavioral decision theory primarily by Quatrone and Tversky. It directly addresses the agent-structure problem by developing the proposition that individuals evoke alternative decision rules in different structural contexts. The result is greater theoretical coherence and resolution of anomalous cases. Additionally, this model begins to define a new role for ideology in explanations of revolutionary collective action.