The 1978 CPS national election study, which includes many new questions about congressional candidates, is analyzed to discern what voters know about congressional candidates and why House incumbents are so successful at getting reelected by wide margins. Scholars have underestimated the level of public awareness of congressional candidates, primarily because of faulty measures. Voters are often able to recognize and evaluate individual candidates without being able to recall their names from memory. Incumbents are both better known and better liked than challengers, largely because they have the resources enabling them to communicate with their constituents frequently and directly. Yet the seriousness of the challenger is equally important for understanding the advantages of incumbency and why incumbency is less valuable in the Senate than in the House. Finally, public assessments of the president provide a national dynamic to congressional voting, but the effect is modest compared to the salience of the local choices.

This article compares voting for U.S. senator and representative in 1978. Analysis of data from the Center for Political Studies 1978 Election Study reveals that incumbents were better known and more positively evaluated than challengers, but House incumbents enjoyed a much greater advantage than Senate incumbents. The invisibility of most House challengers was a serious obstacle to accountability in House elections. Senate challengers were much more visible to the electorate. In addition, ideology and party identification had a greater impact on evaluations of Senate candidates than on evaluations of House candidates. Evaluations of House incumbents appear to have been based largely on frequent positive contacts between voters and their representative. As a result, ideological voting was more prevalent in Senate elections than in House elections.

The article analyzes congressional elections research following from the 1978 National Election Study. In a field where basic information was lacking, the study constitutes a major data collection effort. Results should be taken as tentative, with serious work on measurement and conceptualization remaining. Nevertheless, a number of important preliminary findings can be identified. Voters' evaluations of the congressional candidates, House and Senate, have a major influence on the vote, separate from incumbency and party and more important than presidential evaluations or other evaluations. While House incumbents receive the strongest positive support on a number of measures, there is little negative perception of any candidate in congressional contests. Finally, there are major differences found for Senate and House challengers, in voter recognition and information, but no major differences for Senate and House incumbents. House challengers stand apart from all other candidates in their degree of visibility and contact with voters. The article discusses the implications of these findings and indicates priorities for future research.

Recent campaigns have demonstrated the importance of dynamic elements in affecting the selection of presidential nominees. This paper develops a mathematical model to analyze these dynamics. The heart of the model is the assumed relationship between the ability to acquire resources and success in primaries and caucuses. The expenditure of resources leads to greater electoral success, while greater electoral success (in particular, exceeding expectations in a primary or caucus) leads to greater resource-gathering capabilities. A difference equation model of these relationships is proposed. I prove that any campaign of this form is necessarily unstable, which implies that most candidates will be “winnowed out” necessarily, while only a very few, but at least one candidate, will necessarily “have momentum.” This result is true whether there are two or many contenders. However, I also argue that the larger the number of candidates, the stronger the dynamic forces, and thus the more rapid the “winnowing out” process.

This article contrasts short-term self-interest and longstanding symbolic attitudes as determinants of (1) voters' attitudes toward government policy on four controversial issues (unemployment, national health insurance, busing, and law and order), and (2) issue voting concerning those policy areas. In general, we found the various self-interest measures to have very little effect in determining either policy preferences or voting behavior. In contrast, symbolic attitudes (liberal or conservative ideology, party identification, and racial prejudice) had major effects. Nor did self-interest play much of a role in creating “issue publics” that were particularly attentive to, informed about, or constrained in their attitudes about these specific policy issues. Conditions that might facilitate more self-interested political attitudes, specifically having privatistic (rather than public-regarding) personal values, perceiving the policy area as a major national problem, being high in political sophistication, perceiving the government as responsive, or having a sense of political efficacy, were also explored, but had no effect. The possibility that some long-term self-interest might be reflected in either group membership or in symbolic attitudes themselves is examined. While such possibilities cannot be definitively rejected, problems with interpreting standard demographic findings as self-interest effects are discussed.

The “level of conceptualization” index, introduced by Campbell et al. (1960), is commonly used to measure ideological awareness and sophistication among the electorate. Unfortunately, the validity and reliability of the original measure were never sufficiently examined. This article examines the level of conceptualization measures of Field and Anderson (1969) and Nie, Verba and Petrocik (1976). It reaches two major conclusions: (1) the measures under examination are neither reliable nor valid measures of the level of conceptualization construct; and (2) the measures reflect the rhetoric of contemporary political discourse rather than the actual process of political evaluation. These conclusions call into doubt the validity and reliability of the original measure of The American Voter.

This study assesses the electoral impact of charges of corruption on candidates in contests for the U.S. House of Representatives in five elections from 1968 to 1978. This assessment includes a consideration of the victory or defeat of alleged or convicted corrupt candidates, and an examination of the impact of corruption charges on electoral turnout and percentage of votes polled by the accused candidates. While most candidates accused of corruption are reelected, overall they appear to suffer a loss of 6–11 percent from their expected vote. The type of corruption charge is an important determinant of vote loss. Allegations of corruption appear to have little effect on the net turnout.

In this essay I argue that Hegel's concept of monarchy, far from being more evidence of his supposed abstract rationalism or deference to Prussia, is the most complete modern account of the necessary political conditions of a rational state. Hegel believed that the peculiar historical development of European monarchy made the rational state politically possible. Who rules is the fundamental political problem. Some person or persons must have the final power of decision, even in constitutional and parliamentary regimes, and thus stamp the regime with their own particular views. Hegel believed that only the constitutional monarch of a modern state, bom to sovereignty regardless of his personal abilities or constituencies, limited by harsh experience and public sentiments to legitimization of public acts, could depoliticize this final power of decision. This alone would allow unimpeded public administration according to rational legal standards. Marxist and technocratic dreams of rational administration will remain mere dreams as long as the dreamers offer no alternative solution to the fundamental political problem.

Hannah Arendt's work is of major importance primarily because of the categories of thought she originates, especially her concept of political action. But this concept has frequently been criticized for being irrelevant to, or incapable of comprehending, strategic concerns. This criticism however, is based on a misreading of Arendt on the relationship of specific motives and goals to political action. The critical interpretations of three commentators are considered here: Kirk Thompson, Jürgen Habermas, and Martin Jay. A detailed explication of the relevant texts from Arendt demonstrates the misreading of Arendt on which these criticisms are based and at the same time reveals the subtlety and power of Arendt's conception of the relationship between instrumentality and meaning in political action. Once this relationship is correctly understood, it becomes possible to appreciate the implications of Arendt's work for questions of political strategy.

The rise of the modern state has been accompanied by a decline in the importance of statutory law to the operation of Western democratic governments. Two of the strongest critiques of the modern state and of this decline in statutory law have come from Friedrich Hayek and Theodore Lowi. Each has argued that only the restoration of a rule of law can ensure the continued survival of democratic societies. Their indictments of the modern state suggest a standard by which legislative policy alternatives might be evaluated. This article develops such a standard, adapted specifically for use in American politics, and uses it to analyze legislative behavior in the House of Representatives under four different presidential administrations. The development and application of the rule of law standard provides a critique of American government from the Hayek-Lowi perspective and reveals a basic incompatibility between the imposition of a rule of law and the establishment of a responsible-party government system.

With the 1970 passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), federal regulation reached the American workplace. Given the newness of the legislation, any firm conclusion on its effectiveness seems premature. However, there is ample evidence on federal safety regulation of a specific workplace: the coal mine. The federal government has been directly involved in coal mining safety for over 35 years, operating under three major pieces of legislation, enacted in 1941, 1952, and 1969. Opposing opinions regarding the effect of this legislation can be grouped into three categories: radical, reactionary, and reformer. A multiple interrupted time-series analysis indicates that, in fact, the 1941 and 1969 regulations significantly reduced the fatality rate in coal mining. Certain conditions seem related to the effectiveness of this safety legislation: birth order, provisions, enforcement, target population, and goals. The first two conditions would appear to work for the success of the OSHA, the latter three conditions to work against it.

Although the political leaders who wrote the Constitution did not hold the idea of party in high regard, these same individuals (according to many historians) became the founders of a new party system within the first decade of the new government. This article considers the question (on which no consensus exists) of whether parties did develop. The analysis focuses upon one aspect of party development, namely, the agreement among members of Congress in their roll-call voting records. Spatial analysis (multidimensional scaling) permits a visual picture of the increased clustering of congressmen into two party blocs from 1789 to 1803, especially after the Jay Treaty debate in 1796. This very clear trend supports the idea that politics was moving away from a sectional basis to one founded more clearly on partisan grounds.