The physician analogy in politics is not inherently elitist or antithetical to constitutional government, as modern critics have claimed. On the contrary, in its original development among the orators of fourth-century Athens, it epitomized the aims of conservative democrats, offering both a perspective that reinforced the ideal of a prescriptive constitution grounded in tradition and a conception of leadership compatible with the egalitarian animus of the restored democracy. Moreover, this conception of the political physician enjoyed the full sanction of Greek medicine. The norms, concepts, and techniques adduced in the Hippocratic writings closely parallel those of conservative democrats.

Two models of voting are often used to explain the Nazi vote in the Weimar Republic. The first model states that the Nazis' electoral successes resulted from Protestant petty bourgeois and peasant support for fascism. The second model argues that the Nazis gained the bulk of their support from newly mobilized voters. Previous analyses of these models are plagued with serious problems due to their limited data base. This study reassesses these models with the use of an unusually complete data set for all of Germany and concludes that much of the previous work examining the Nazi vote wrongly identifies the Protestant petty bourgeoisie as the major contributor to the Nazi vote. The Nazis received important levels of support from Protestant peasants, new voters, and Catholic petty bourgeoisie.

This article addresses an important issue of democratic theory and administration: the potential conflict between bureaucrats' allegiance to their agencies and to specific publics' interests. Representative bureaucracy, which emphasizes substantive interest representation in the administrative arena, embodies this potential for conflict. Empirical survey results which probe integration of substantive representation and employee allegiance among federal employees in four major agencies are presented. Evidence documents a different level of organizational involvement in an agency with a substantive representation mandate compared to employee involvement in agencies without a mandate for representation. While the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights' mandate affords considerable potential for integrating substantive representation and employee allegiance, its employees do not rank highly in organizational involvement. Even more surprising, CCR minority employees are lowest in involvement. These findings imply an important hypothesis: effectiveness in achieving an agency mandate is crucial to successful integration of organizational involvement and substantive representation.

Some rather elegant properties of linear divisor methods are derived and used to establish upper and lower bounds on the possible variation between apportionment and exact quota entitlement. A probability distribution is derived for this variation, and it is shown that the probability of the variation exceeding one seat is very small with the major fractions linear divisor method.

A less rigorous analysis of the nonlinear equal proportions method shows that in practice it is very similar to the major fractions method, but with a very slight bias in favor of small parties (or states). It is concluded that there is no “best” apportionment method, but a knowledge of the properties of the various methods enables a political choice of the most appropriate method.

It is regularly argued that human rights are not a Western discovery and that non-Western societies have long emphasized the protection of human rights. Such claims, however, are based on a confusion of human rights and human dignity. A concern for human dignity is central to non-Western cultural traditions, whereas human rights, in the sense in which Westerners understand that term—namely, rights (entitlements) held simply by virtue of being a human being—are quite foreign to, for example, Islamic, African, Chinese, and Indian approaches to human dignity. Human rights are but one way that has been devised to realize and to protect human dignity. Although the idea of human rights was first articulated in the West in modern times, it would appear to be an approach particularly suited to contemporary social, political, and economic conditions, and thus of widespread contemporary relevance both in the West and the Third World.

How the city, the political community, may ask its citizens to sacrifice their lives for the sake of its preservation has plagued us since the birth of political philosophy. This article examines Thucydides' presentation of Pericles' attempt to solve this problem by reconciling the highest good of the individual and the good of the city by means of the love of glory. I contrast the central themes of Pericles' speeches in Thucydides, especially his renowned funeral oration, with other parts of Thucydides' presentation of Periclean Athens, in particular his famous account of the plague, to demonstrate his doubts about the efficacy of the Periclean solution to the political problem.

This study re-examines Hibbs's (1977b) findings on the impact of political party on unemployment rates for the postwar United States. With the use of data through the end of the Carter administration and slightly different methods, it is concluded that party has between one-third and one-half the impact on unemployment claimed by Hibbs. Administration is a better predictor of unemployment than is party; in particular, neither the Kennedy nor Carter administration behaved as Hibbs claims Democratic administrations should, nor did the Nixon administration behave as Hibbs claims Republican administrations should. The significance of whether administration or party is the better predictor of economic outcomes is explored.

Ideology and subjective culture are examined as two systems of behavioral organization well known for their hidden but frequently powerful influences on political choices and behavior. After a brief sketch of a representational theory of behavioral organization, a research strategy based on inferences drawn from the distribution of thousands of free word associations is described and illustrated with results from several international studies. Findings on Slovenian images and frame of reference demonstrate the effects of Marxist doctrines. Korean and American data illustrate differences that are predominantly psychocultural. The analytic method outlined suggests new capabilities for studying ideology and its influence on people's perceptions, their system of representation of the world, and their organization of behavior. It may be used to assess predispositions to adopt democratic principles and procedures. It might also be used to assess the influence of ideological doctrines and their degree of integration with the cultural views and frame of reference. The most natural use will probably be in research in the field of international understanding and communication.

Recent challenges to traditional approaches and purposes for studying the history of political theory have raised questions about its constitution as both a subject matter and subfield of political science. Methodological arguments advocating what is characterized as a more truly historical mode of inquiry for understanding political ideas and recovering textual meaning have become increasingly popular. The relationship of these hermeneutical claims about historicity, such as that advanced by Quentin Skinner, to the actual practice of interpretation is problematical. Such claims are more a defense of a certain norm of historical investigation than a method of interpretation, and the implications of this norm for the reconstitution of the history of political theory require careful consideration.

Research on political tolerance has made substantial progress in recent years by improving the measures used to gauge public opinion. Much attention has been devoted to developing indicators that control for group affect. Controls for activity affect have not been pursued as vigorously. Indeed, much of the progress has been along the lines of specifying tolerance for unpopular political minorities rather than tolerance for unorthodox or threatening political activities. More generally, tolerance research has not been sensitive to the variety of contextual factors that determine citizen attitudes in civil-liberties disputes.

A new approach to measuring political tolerance is presented in this article. The measures developed in this approach disaggregate the traditional measures of tolerance (such as Stouffer's (1955) support for “a communist making a speech in your community”). In particular, scales measuring support for freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of political association are presented. As multiple-indicator measures posing conflicts among values, these scales are related to traditional tolerance measures. However, because they reflect the complexity and conflict associated with actual civil-liberties disputes, they will no doubt serve as better predictors of opinions and behaviors in actual disputes.

Hobbes's history of the English Civil War, The Behemoth, has been neglected by contemporary scholars, yet it provides the clearest statement of the problem that Hobbes's political science is designed to solve. In Behemoth, Hobbes shows that societies such as seventeenth century England inevitably degenerate into civil war because they are founded on authoritative opinion. The claim that there is a single, authoritative definition of Tightness or truth which is not an arbitrary human choice is an illusion of “intellectual vainglory,” a feeling of pride in the superiority of one's opinions which causes persecution and civil strife. By presenting Hobbes's historical and psychological analysis of this problem, I illuminate his argument for absolutism and show that Hobbes is not a precursor of totalitarianism but a founder of liberalism.

The premise of this article is that adult participation in politics is affected by strong preadult forces in addition to the contemporaneous factors emphasized by recent studies. To test this premise, data are drawn from the 1965–1973 national socialization panel study of young Americans and their parents. Four causal models depicting pathways to participation among young adults are evaluated; each includes civic orientations as intervening variables. Three of the models assess the direct and indirect effects of parental characteristics—socioeconomic status, political activity, and civic orientations. The fourth model assesses the impact of adolescent involvement in high school activities. Taken individually, each pathway is shown to have an effect on adult participation, with parent socioeconomic status and high school activism having the most impact. When the four pathways are combined in a single model to reflect the connections among them, all remain important. The combined model illustrates the importance of a variety of methods of political learning. The combined model also demonstrates the crucial role of civic orientations in converting preadult experiences into later participation. Civic orientations are the primary carriers of preadult political learning. Overall, the results rebut the critics of socialization research who have questioned the existence of a linkage between early learning and adult political behavior.

Given the widespread moral conventionalism or historicism in contemporary social science and ethics, many have viewed Marx as arguing either that conceptions of justice simply shift historically and lack objectivity (relativism) or that notions of justice are to be understood solely as expressions of class interests (reductionism). Although metaethical ambiguities about the status of conceptions of justice influenced some of Marx's and Engels's formulations, they condemned the “crying contrasts” of rich and poor. Marx is better understood as defending a version of moral objectivity or moral realism. The paper begins with an example from the recent debate about justice in the international distribution of wealth to highlight the implausibility of a relativist or reductionist account. It then describes alternative views of the status of justice and equality in Marx and Engels and explores the logical structure of Marx's critique of Proudhon. A fourth section examines the analogy between Marx's and Engels's realism in the philosophy of science and their realist arguments in ethics, focusing on Marx's and Engels's non-relativist and non-reductionist conception of moral progress. The conclusion sets Marx's use of concepts of exploitation in the context of his overall moral judgments and suggests that Marx's social or historical theory rather than his moral standards are the most controversial part of his ethical argument.

Two experiments sustain Lippmann's suspicion, advanced a half century ago, that media provide compelling descriptions of a public world that people cannot directly experience. More precisely, the experiments show that television news programs profoundly affect which problems viewers take to be important. The experiments also demonstrate that those problems promimently positioned in the evening news are accorded greater weight in viewers' evaluations of presidential performance. We note the political implications of these results, suggest their psychological foundations, and argue for a revival of experimentation in the study of political communication.

The topic of citizen-initiated contacting of government officials has received increasing attention, but research has yielded conflicting findings on the relationship of socioeconomic status to contacting behavior. Various studies find that the two are negatively, positively, parabolically, or negligibly related. Data are presented supporting the claim of a positive relationship, and reasons for the conflicting findings are explored. The need-awareness model, associated with the finding of a parabolic relationship between socioeconomic status and contacting at the aggregate level, is tested at the individual level of analysis. While the importance of the need and awareness factors is affirmed, the overall model is not supported. As with other modes of political participation, sense of efficacy is found to be an important predictor of contracting, but the positive relationship between socioeconomic status and contacting remains when efficacy is controlled.

The much-discussed contemporary revival of political theory in the Anglo-American intellectual community has for the most part been a revival of liberal theory. This should not have come as a great surprise. Most Anglo-Americans are, in one way or another, liberals; all are deeply influenced by the experience of life in liberal societies. Liberal polities have come under attack from within as well as from without, giving those who think them worthy of defense both the motive and the occasion to clarify the grounds of their partisanship.

It is less often remarked that in one decisive respect, the revival of liberal theory remains rooted in the climate of moral skepticism that it has supplanted. Most contemporary liberal theorists are deeply mistrustful of what John Rawls has called “perfectionism”—the philosophic attempt to identify superior ways of life or traits of character and, once having identified them, to use them as the goals of political life. Contemporary liberal theory consists in the attempt to combine this skepticism about theories of the good life with the belief in philosophically defensible principles that regulate relations among individuals.

It is my thesis that this defense of liberalism is fundamentally misguided. No form of political life can be justified without some view of what is good for individuals. In practice, liberal theorists covertly employ theories of the good. But their insistence that they do not reduces the rigor of their theories and leaves the liberal polity unnecessarily vulnerable to criticism.

This article argues that the differences in the findings of the incrementalist budgetary theory of Davis, Dempster, and Wildavsky and the “competition” theory of Natchez and Bupp have been wrongly attributed to the different units of analysis—program or organization—used in these studies. “Competition” as measured by Natchez and Bupp and incremental change as defined by Davis, Dempster, and Wildavsky can both be found among either programs or organizations. The differences in the findings of these theorists depend instead on the particular theoretical construction of budgetary behavior and the budget measures chosen. The same data will support either theory of budgeting if one adopts the theoretical constructs and budget measures peculiar to each theory. Thus the theories are not really in competition with each other.

Although Dante and Machiavelli are generally considered exemplars of opposed medieval and modern ways of thinking, there are various points of resemblance in their political arguments. In Dante's Banquet, there is a presentimento machiavellico that illuminates the ideas that form the basis for Machiavellianism. These ideas, in turn, may be seen as extensions of scriptural positions and as Christian modifications of classical attitudes toward hope, certainty, and philosophy.

Studies have shown that members of the U.S. Congress attempt to exploit many of the perquisites of office for their electoral advantage, but the actual impact of this exploitation has never been clear. Thus a potentially significant part of the advantage of incumbency has been subject to more speculation than analysis. This study develops a simple model that can be used to determine the electoral significance of perquisite use by officeholders. It begins by examining a particular perquisite, the franking privilege, to determine how it affects incumbent saliency and reputation among constituents. Within the context of an appropriate research design, the study finds that the distribution of government pamphlets does boost an incumbent's saliency while also creating a more positive evaluation of the incumbent. The saliency and evaluation effects erode over time, but this erosion can be mitigated through follow-up mailings. These results are incorporated into a model that is used to predict the electoral consequences of perquisite use. The model suggests that perquisites have their greatest impact in constituencies with a relatively small proportion of voters who identify with the incumbent's party.