The public choice-property rights perspective is an important intellectual movement aimed at refurbishing and broadening the scope of classical microeconomic reasoning. This paper assesses the political implications of the “school”–its ability both to generate significant political insights and hypotheses and to use political arguments and findings to buttress the assumptions of microeconomic theory.

I conclude that, in the main, neither effort realizes its goal. What we do find revealed by a study of the political implications of the perspective is a well-developed, if generally unacknowledged, normative position, a position that deflects attention from the major sources of power in society and thus complicates the articulation of prescriptions or recommendation statements.

The existence of N-prisoners' dilemmas (conflict between individual and collective rationality) is a standard justification for collectivizing decision making through the state, but there is little theory about how different institutions operate to “solve” such dilemmas. The efficiency of majoritarian democracy, “selfish dictatorship” and uncoordinated individualism is explored using a simple nine-person game. Majoritarian democracy is found to produce equilibrium outcomes at the maximum social product available when the opportunity costs of “cooperating” are less than half the magnitude of the externalities, but to produce no such equilibrium when the opportunity costs are greater than that. Our research draws implications for the role of information in constitutional design, and of altruism.

Mentoring relationships have a qualitative impact on the transition from early to middle adulthood, as well as on adult life itself. This paper proposes that the exploration of the role of mentors in the lives of political leaders will produce suggestive results. The study is a case history which examines the mentor in the early and later life of the adult male, here Willy Brandt. Brandt had two mentors: Julius Leber and Ernst Reuter. Reuter is briefly discussed but we focus here on the first of these, Leber, a prominent Social Democrat during the Weimar era and a legendary member of the German resistance. The essay describes the origins, nature and termination of the Brandt-Leber relationship. The influence of the mentor on the mentee transcended the period of their actual interaction and, as the paper procedes to demonstrate, the intensity of the relationship ensured that Brandt's self-image as Leber's heir continued to affect both professional and ideological choices.

Whether personality characteristics of American leaders crucially determine major American foreign policy decisions has been a matter of considerable disagreement. A test of two hypotheses drawn from interpersonal generalization theory shows such influences have probably been crucial in a number of cases in American foreign policy between 1898 and 1968. In 49 cases of intraelite disagreement on force-related issues and 13 cases of intraelite disagreement on inclusionary issues the direction of disagreement could be predicted in over 75 percent of the cases by knowledge of individual differences in interpersonal relations. A four-fold speculative typology suggests fundamental personality-based differences in orientation towards America's preferred operating style and role in the international system (e.g., introverts are drawn toward impersonal principles and mechanisms like balance of power–or in an earlier period to international law).

The evidence implies that one source of war and hard-line foreign policy is the structure of self-selection and recruitment to high office in the American political system. As well, the systematic tendency to self-expressive personalization in major foreign policy decisions probably increases the rate of error of American elites.

This article examines the dynamics of military promotion and explores its consequences both for individual officers and for military organization. The central argument is that performance, while a necessary standard for acceptability into a rather large pool of officers from which the elite will emerge, is nonetheless a minor influence on promotion and becomes even less discriminating as an officer's career progresses, whereas visibility–the extent to which an individual has developed contacts with peers and superiors who can influence his movement in the organization–begins moderately and eventually becomes the dominant influence. To present this argument, the article first examines the prevailing concepts of performance and seniority and outlines an expanded model of the promotion process. The component variables of that model are applied to three separate military career levels–junior, middle-grade and senior officers–and are traced longitudinally through the entire officer career pattern. Finally, the impact of contextual factors on the model, particularly the differences between wartime and peacetime, is discussed and illustrated with data from general officer promotion in the army. The implications of this theory are significant for civil control of the military. Through the control of access to the elite nucleus represented by the promotion system, especially with the emphasis on visibility, the military is able to sustain a high degree of autonomy. By the time Congress or other civilian actors are able to exercise selection of the military elite, the promotion system has already preselected those individuals who most highly represent military values held by preceding leaders.

Incomplete understanding of the connection between campaign spending and election outcomes has hindered evaluation of enacted and proposed congressional campaign finance reforms. Reanalysis of the 1972 and 1974 House and Senate campaign spending data using both OLS and 2SLS regression models shows that spending by challengers has a much greater impact on the outcome than does spending by incumbents. A similar analysis of the effects of spending on voters' recall of candidates in the 1972 and 1974 SRC surveys supports the explanation that campaign expenditures buy nonincumbents the necessary voter recognition already enjoyed by incumbents prior to the campaign. The 1974 survey questions on Senate candidates indicate that, although the inability to remember candidates' names does not preclude having opinions about them, voters recalling candidates are much more likely to offer evaluative comments, and these more frequently refer to candidates personally. Aware voters offer more negative as well as positive evaluations (though positive outnumber negative); familiarity is not automatically advantageous. And voters' evaluations of candidates strongly influence how they vote. The implications of these findings for congressional campaign finance policy are readily apparent.

Many empirical investigations indicate that information is scarce and therefore costly to holders and seekers of public office. Indeed, some studies suggest that imperfect information may account for important aspects of the behavior of politicians. Nevertheless, there is as yet no theoretical investigation of political decision making that illustrates the impact of costly information or behavior.

In this paper the authors develop a model of electoral competition in which the candidates are only imperfectly aware of public preferences over issues and in which they may have the opportunity to increase the amount of information they hold at some cost. It turns out that the absence of perfect information profoundly affects the strategic structure of candidate competition. If information is costless, two-party electoral contests are naturally modeled as symmetric two-person zero-sum games. However, if candidates have distinct beliefs about voter behavior, the natural game-theoretic representation becomes a non-zero-sum game. This article is concerned mostly with analyzing the consequences of this transformation.

Within the last ten years a new conventional wisdom has surfaced in political science which tells us that presidents inexorably become less popular over time. Not much else matters. Neither the economy, nor the Vietnam War, not even Watergate seems to have had much independent effect on presidential popularity once time is taken into account. Before embracing these conclusions we need to reconsider the method that produced them. I argue that previous research too willingly accepted time as an explanatory variable, enshrouding it with theoretical meaning. To preserve its explanatory power alternative, substantive variables were shortchanged in their operational definitions and measurement. In this article I reverse the emphasis. Here, time is rejected as an explanatory variable and is employed only as a diagnostic indicator of the adequacy of the equations. A variety of alternative representations of real-world forces such as the economy and war are tested and some considerably improve the time-series correlation between the environment and presidential popularity. With these substantive variables I propose a simpler, if less glamorous, theory of presidential popularity consisting of two hypotheses: first, popularity is related to real events and conditions, and second, that it responds slowly to environmental change. Popularity is then both experiential and incremental. The findings for Presidents Truman through Nixon support this common-sense view. The Korean War (measured by U.S. casualties), the Vietnam War (measured by the number of bombing missions over North Vietnam and the U.S. war dead), the economy (especially six-month changes in consumer prices), Watergate, international “rally” events, and early term surges of approval all contribute independently to short-term fluctuations in presidential popularity. Moreover, as predicted, popularity appears to be autoregressive even when represented by an instrumental variables surrogate measure to minimize serial correlation. When the equations are specified in this way, time proves to be unnecessary in order to explain trends in presidential popularity.

Social class has long been recognized as being the preeminent influence upon electoral choice in Britain, but recent studies provide support for the argument that it has become a weakened force. These studies differ only in the interpretation that they place on its decline. Through the simultaneous estimation of the effects on voting choice of class measured by occupation, and other variables, this article shows how one of the recent studies implied an overestimate of the declining importance of occupational class. Further it shows that when the indirect effects of class on party choice are taken into account, by means of causal modeling techniques, its preeminent position in determining voting choice in Britain can still be seen. The article seeks to clarify the nature of class-based voting behavior during a period of dramatic decline in this phenomenon, terminating at the last point at which traditional measures can reasonably be used.

Previous studies of legislative-constituency representation have focused almost exclusively on pairs of Congress members and their constituencies. It is possible, however, to think of representation collectively, i.e., to consider the extent to which Congress as an institution represents the American people. Our analysis delineates this concept of representation, analyzes its existence by use of probability theory and the Miller-Stokes data, and then considers the relationship between collective representation and electoral control. We conclude that citizens probably get better representation than is suggested by the Miller-Stokes analysis, that the amount of representation may be more a function of institutional arrangements than of electoral control, and that citizen indifference towards many aspects of legislative politics is quite reasonable, given the existence of collective representation.

It is well established that various characteristics of a congressional committee may shape and, to an extent, standardize its handling of a range of policy areas. This article, however, examines the substantial variations that most committees continue to display as they move from issue to issue. Why is it that the House Commerce Committee, for example, approaches issues like major-disease research, health care delivery, cable television development, and power plant siting in such radically different ways? What determines the incentives of legislators to invest time and effort in a policy area, and to orient themselves toward broad “public” interests, once involved? Focusing on the House and Senate Commerce Committees, the article takes as its data base patterns of legislative action and inaction in major areas of the committees' jurisdiction during 1969–1974. Particular attention is given to how perceived levels of group conflict and of public salience affect a legislator's orientation toward a policy area, and to the level and direction of executive involvement as an intervening variable of major significance. High-salience, low-conflict areas (e.g., health research) generally offer the strongest incentives to congressional involvement, and low-salience, high-conflict areas (e.g., communications regulation) the weakest, while mixed cases (e.g., a high-salience, high-conflict area like health care delivery) display considerable variability. Issues may change considerably with time in their perceived levels of salience and conflict, and legislators can influence, as well as respond to, such changes. Congressional initiatives often respond to perceived “neglect” on the part of the executive, or disagreement with the content of its moves. But particularly in high-conflict areas, congressional activists will often find that their success requires executive involvement.

This article reports the findings of a series of experiments on committee decision making under majority rule. The committee members had relatively fixed preferences, so that the process was one of making decisions rather than one of problem solving. The predictions of a variety of models drawn from Economics, Sociology, Political Science and Game Theory were compared to the experimental results. One predictive concept, the core of the noncooperative game without side payments (equivalent to the majority rule equilibrium) consistently performed best. Significantly, however, even when such an outcome did not exist, the experimental results did not display the degree of unpredictability that some theoretical work would suggest. An important subsidiary finding concerns the difference between experiments conducted under conditions of high stakes versus those conducted under conditions of much lower stakes. The findings in the two conditions differed considerably, thus calling into question the political applicability of numerous social psychological experiments in which subjects had little or no motivation.

This essay defines and experimentally tests a new solution concept for n-person cooperative games—the Competitive Solution. The need for a new solution concept derives from the fact that cooperative game theory focuses for the most part on the special case of games with transferable utility, even though, as we argue here, this assumption excludes the possibility of modelling most interesting political coalition processes. For the more general case, though, standard solution concepts are inadequate either because they are undefined or they fail to exist, and even if they do exist, they focus on predicting payoffs rather than the coalitions that are likely to form.

The Competitive Solution seeks to avoid these problems, but it is not unrelated to existent theory in that we can establish some relationships (see Theorems 1 and 2) between its payoff predictions and those of the core, the V-solution and the bargaining set. Additionally, owing to its definition and motivation, nontrivial coalition predictions are made in conjunction with its payoff predictions.

The Competitive Solution's definition is entirely general, but a special class of games—majority rule spatial games—are used for illustrations and the experimental test reported here consists of eight plays of a 5-person spatial game that does not possess a main-simple V-solution or a bargaining set. Overall, the data conform closely to the Competitive Solution's predictions.

The model of comparative state policy focusing on economic development and interparty competition was reformulated by Edward Carmines to include the mediating impact of state legislatures. This study challenges his initial conclusions, poses an alternative hypothesis, and finds that interparty competition has a consistently stronger impact on “progressive” state policies among states with organizationally weak, ineffective legislative institutions, than among those with organizationally strong, capable legislatures. The findings also reveal that legislative decision-making capability is distinct from the concept of legislative professionalism.