The doctrine of human rights has come to play a distinctive role in international life. This is primarily the role of a moral touchstone-a standard of assessment and criticism for domestic institutions, a standard of aspiration for their reform, and increasingly a standard of evaluation for the policies and practices of international economic and political institutions. International practice has followed the controlling documents of international law in taking a broad view of the scope of human rights. Many political theorists argue, however, that this view is excessively broad and that genuine human rights, if they are to be regarded as a truly common concern of world society, must be construed more narrowly. I argue against that perspective and in favor of the view implicit in contemporary international practice, using the right to democratic institutions as an example.

I argue that Isaiah Berlin’s pluralistic liberalism is best interpreted as a sophisticated form of liberal rationalism, as Berlin himself suggests. His value pluralism, even if it is viewed (as his critics typically view it, with considerable justification) as claiming that any choice between conflicting incommensurable values cannot be a rational choice, does not subvert his liberalism. Rather, this agonistic pluralism emanates from his liberal rationalism, which pictures reason as too weak to resolve conflicts of incommensurables. Yet, reason remains strong enough to discover that certain basic liberal values, including those associated with some minimum core of equal rights, are far more important than any competing values created by mankind. Berlin apparently sees his pluralistic liberal rationalism as a genuine rationalism that, in stark contrast to mainstream utopian rationalisms which wildly exaggerate the power of reason, makes suitable room for the valid insights provided by the romantics.

This essay demonstrates that Niccolò Machiavelli’s political thought addresses the deficiencies of two opposite poles of contemporary democratic theory: As do formal or minimalist approaches, he specifies electoral mechanisms for elite control; and similar to substantive or civic culture approaches, he encourages more direct and robust modes of popular participation. On these grounds, I cull from Machiavelli’s Discourses a theory of democracy in which the populace selects the elites who will hold office but also constantly patrols them through extraelectoral institutions and practices, such as the tribunes of the people, public accusations, and popular appeals. Machiavelli adds to these institutional features of popular government an important cultural dimension: The people should despise and mistrust elites, and they should actively confront the injustice that elite governing inevitably entails. Finally, I explore the ramifications of this theory for debates over elite accountability in contemporary democratic theory.

I address the controversy over how judges should be selected by analyzing the electoral fortunes of incumbents on supreme courts from 1980 through 1995 in the 38 states using elections to staff the bench. Court reformers argue that partisan elections fail to evidence accountability, while nonpartisan and retention elections promote independence. Thus, issue-related or candidate-related forces should not be important in partisan elections, and external political conditions should not be important in nonpartisan and retention elections. Results indicate that reformers underestimated the extent to which partisan elections have a tangible substantive component and overestimated the extent to which nonpartisan and retention races are insulated from partisan politics and other contextual forces. On these two fundamental issues, arguments of reformers fail. Moreover, the extraordinary variations across systems and over time in how well incumbents fare with voters, which bear directly upon the representative nature of elected courts, merit further explanation.

Theory suggests that Japanese politicians have weaker incentives than U.S. politicians to keep lower court judges independent. Accordingly, we hypothesize that Japanese lower court judges who defer on sensitive political questions will do better in their careers. To test this, we assemble several new data sets and measure the quality of the assignments received by about 400 judges after deciding various types of cases. We find that judges who deferred to the ruling party in politically salient disputes obtained better posts than those who did not, and that judges who actively enjoined the national government obtained worse posts than those who did not. We also hypothesize that judges with forthrightly leftist preferences do worse in their careers. We measure the speed at which the 500 judges hired during the 1960s moved up the pay scale and find indications that judges who joined a leftist group were promoted more slowly than their peers.

We investigate how cabinet decision-making rules interact with political uncertainty to affect the outcomes of bargaining processes in parliamentary systems. Our formal models compare two types of decisions rules: (1) those that give prime ministers unilateral authority to demand a vote of confidence and (2) those that require prime ministers to obtain collective cabinet approval for confidence motions. We examine these models under assumptions of complete information and of political uncertainty, that is, party leaders lack information about the precise policies that others in the governing coalition will support. Our analysis suggests that the nature of the cabinet decision rules should influence the distribution of bargaining power, the ability to exploit political uncertainty, the likelihood of inefficient government terminations, the circumstances surrounding such failures, and, indirectly, the political considerations that parties face when choosing prime ministers during government formation. Simple empirical tests support some of these insights.

To what extent does the separation of powers affect congressional roll call voting behavior? To answer this question, I offer a strategic model of congressional decision making that asserts members of Congress pursue public policy goals when casting roll call votes. From the equilibrium predictions of a formal model, I generate testable hypotheses by computing the expected net amount of sophisticated (nonsincere) congressional behavior given changes in decision context. I test the predictions of the theoretical model with data from all civil rights roll call votes from the 83d to the 102d Congress. The results demonstrate that both the other legislative chamber and the Supreme Court profoundly constrain House members and senators when casting roll call votes. This is strong evidence of the importance of policy outcomes to members of Congress when voting on the floor.

In contrast with the expectations of many analysts, I find that raw policy-specific facts, such as the direction of change in the crime rate or the amount of the federal budget devoted to foreign aid, have a significant influence on the public’s political judgments. Using both traditional survey methods and survey-based randomized experiments, I show that ignorance of policy-specific information leads many Americans to hold political views different from those they would hold otherwise. I also show that the effect of policy-specific information is not adequately captured by the measures of general political knowledge used in previous research. Finally, I show that the effect of policy-specific ignorance is greatest for Americans with the highest levels of political knowledge. Rather than serve to dilute the influence of new information, general knowledge (and the cognitive capacities it reflects) appears to facilitate the incorporation of new policy-specific information into political judgments.

In one of the most influential works in the public opinion literature, Philip Converse proposed a “black-and-white” model that divided respondents into two groups: opinion holders and unstable opinion changers. We extend the model by allowing for a group that makes rational opinion changes over time. This enables us to (1) explore hypotheses about the adequacy of Converse’s original model, (2) estimate the percentage of the population that belongs to each of the groups, and (3) examine the evidence for Converse’s basic claim that unstable changers truly exhibit nonattitudes. Contrary to Converse’s suggestion that the unstable group is essentially giving random responses, the results imply that the response behavior of this group may be best interpreted in terms of Zaller’s notion of ambivalence. The results also undermine the measurement-error model, which maintains that unstable responses are mainly attributable to deficient survey instruments, not individual opinion change. We use data collected at four time points over nearly two years, which track Swiss citizens’ support for pollution reduction.

We develop a geometric approach to identify all possible profiles that support specified votes for separate initiatives or for a bundled bill. This disaggregation allows us to compute the likelihood of different scenarios describing how voters split over the alternatives and to offer new interpretations for pairwise voting. The source of the problems—an unanticipated loss of available information—also explains a variety of other phenomena, such as Simpson’s paradox (a statistical paradox in which the behavior of the “parts” disagrees with that of the “whole”) and Arrow’s theorem from social choice.

We reexamine the major tenets of the informational theory of legislative rules, focusing on the informational efficiency of rules with varying degrees of restrictiveness. When committees are heterogeneous, full efficiency is attainable under the unrestrictive open rule as well as the somewhat restrictive modified rule. In contrast, the restrictive closed rule always leads to inefficiencies. When committees are homogeneous, the situation is different. All equilibria are inefficient regardless of legislative rules, but the closed rule leads to greater informational efficiency than does the open rule. Furthermore, the efficiency gains under the closed rule more than offset distributional losses regardless of the degree of preference divergence. We also examine the incentives provided by the different rules for information acquisition and committee specialization.

Krishna and Morgan propose “amendments” to two of Gilligan and Krehbiel’s theoretical studies of legislative signaling. The new results for homogeneous committees do not significantly change the empirical expectations of prior works, but the results for heterogeneous committees contradict earlier claims. This note gives primary attention to heterogeneous committees and compares and contrasts the new and old equilibria and their empirical implications. The notion of signaling is somewhat nebulous in all such games but seems distinctly less plausible in the key Krishna-Morgan proposition than in previous legislative signaling games. Furthermore, the empirical literature on choice of rules—specifically, the finding of a positive relationship between committee heterogeneity and restrictive rules—is inconsistent with the Krishna-Morgan analysis but consistent with Gilligan-Krehbiel analyses, even though the former is informationally efficient and the latter are not.

This study is intended as the first of a two-volume presenta- tion of positive political theory. As the authors indicate in the preface, in this volume they develop what may be termed Arrovian direct preference aggregation, a theory that exam- ines the properties of a direct aggregation rule, f, mapping from a domain of preference profiles on a set, X. For any profile, , the image of f is a social preference relation denoted f( ). The social relation may exhibit maximal or unbeaten outcomes, mf( ), in X itself. Thus, the volume is concerned with the "classification" of all social rules that map from preference profiles into X itself.

"I continue to believe," states Brian Barry (Justice as Impar- tiality, 1995, p. 3), "in the possibility of putting forward a universally valid case in favor of liberal egalitarian princi- ples." Barry's belief is not idiosyncratic but widely shared by Western intellectuals. In fact, a traditional trademark of Western philosophy has been to insist on the universal validity of its teachings, while relegating other cultures and ideas to a merely contingent or particularistic status. The belief tends to be shared by much of Western social science.

Interest in Michael Oakeshott's political philosophy has been growing for a generation, since the publication of the original edition of his Rationalism in Politics (1962), a collection of essays dating from 1947 to 1960. Few then were aware of Experience and Its Modes (1933), a book that has since become the subject of much attention as the desire to understand Oakeshott's work as a whole has grown. With the publication of On Human Conduct (1975), Oakeshott gave us the work he hoped would confirm his place in the tradition of British political thought going back to Hobbes. Of course, his notable essays on Hobbes are now available in Hobbes on Civil Association (2000).

Too often edited volumes are a farrago of barely related essays that amount to the academic equivalent of the prover- bial camel: a horse built by committee. Lowell S. Gustafson is to be commended for compiling a coherent collection of essays that are united not only by their common conviction that Thucydides' great work does indeed possess a "theory of international relations" but also by their common desire to contrast this theory with current trends in the discipline. According to the contributors, Thucydides is not the father of "realism" or its variants because his understanding of inter- national politics is essentially moral: Every approach to international politics that studies power to the neglect of justice, necessity to the neglect of freedom, will prove to be an inadequate tool with which to understand the political deeds of human beings. However much we may be impinged upon by necessity, we remain fundamentally free, and how- ever much we may seek brute power, we nonetheless also strive to be just.

In the 2000 U.S. presidential election, the Electoral College, for the first time in a long while, did not smoothly and seamlessly select the popular vote winner. This phenomenon did not figure in the immediate controversy over the election, but it may yet have an effect, and part of that effect may be long-overdue attention to the rules for aggregating individual votes into a group decision. Those who design institutions for group decision making, or who study such institutions, may be reminded that aggregation procedures can fail to reflect important principles, even principles as simple and funda- mental as one person, one vote.

Readers of Don Herzog's earlier volumes, Happy Slaves (1989) and Without Foundations (1985), will know that they should expect a bracing time when they open his books. They will not be disappointed. This is, without a doubt, a book buoyant in tone and in content. It marks a new departure in the author's manner of writing, displays a wide historical learning, and shows a striking lack of cant in its attitude toward political thought.

Sara Monoson challenges the common view of Plato as a strong opponent of democracy. Although she acknowledges his severe criticisms of democracy, she argues that his re- sponse to Athenian democracy shows ambivalence rather than complete hostility. Not only does Plato offer some qualified endorsements of democratic politics, she contends, but also he presents the practice of the philosophic life as rooted in Athenian democratic culture. Karl Popper's cri- tique of Plato as a proto-totalitarian enemy of the "open society" is not as influential as it once was, but the assump- tion that Plato and Platonic philosophy are incompatible with democracy persists. Monoson wants to overturn that view and thus convince modern democratic readers that they may have something to learn from Plato.

What is the role of political theory in a world of partisan politics? Various approaches to this long-standing problem are raised in this stimulating collection of essays. Arlene Saxonhouse begins the volume by usefully reminding us of Plato's metaphor of the ship in book 6 of the Republic, in which self-interested sailors fight over the boat's direction "while the one who knows how to guide the boat, who can read the stars, stands aft staring upward and is considered useless" (p. 19). Similarly in the Assembly, self-interested rhetoricians may sway the crowd, without any concern for the pursuit of truth.