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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We examine the roles of democratic politics and political institutions in shaping social welfare spending in 18 contemporary capitalist democracies. We explore the social spending consequences of government partisanship, electoral competition and turnout, and the self-interested behaviors of politicians and bureaucrats, as well as such relatively durable facets of political institutions as neocorporatism, state centralization, and traditionalist policy legacies. Pooled time series analyses of welfare effort in 18 nations during the 1960–82 period show that electoral turnout, as well as left and center governments increase welfare effort; that the welfare efforts of governments led by particular types of parties show significant differences and vary notably with the strength of oppositional (and junior coalitional) parties; and that relatively neocorporatist, centralized, and traditionalistic polities are high on welfare effort. Overall, our findings suggest that contrary to many claims, both partisan and nonpartisan facets of democratic politics and political institutions shape contemporary social welfare effort.

I develop a framework for applying existing formal models of restrictive amendment procedures in Congress to the study of the French government's use of two restrictive legislative procedures, the package vote and the “guillotine”. I test six hypotheses derived from existing formal models and from existing research on the French National Assembly. The analysis shows that the French government invokes the two procedures on the same types of distributive and jurisdictionally complex bills that frequently receive closed rules in Congress. The analysis also shows that the decision to use the restrictive procedures is strongly linked to the majority status of the government, suggesting they are used to preserve agreements between parties in the same way that restrictive amendment procedures are used to preserve agreements between individual members of Congress. Thus, existing formal models of legislative institutions can help us study how procedural structures shape strategic bargaining between political parties in parliamentary systems, especially during coalition and minority government.

Arguments about the emergence of modern political theory often claim that Protestantism's significance was that it evacuated the political world, that a more properly political ethic took its place, a “disenchanted” one. I shall consider Luther's understanding of biblical history, thoughts on the Christian prince, and view of the “bonds of union” between Christians in order to understand the relationship between the political and spiritual realms. I suggest that even though Luther argues for the separation of the two realms, his political realm is by no means disenchanted. His politics can only be understood in light of his claims about the purview of God the Father and God the Son. “Political vacuum theories,” I suggest, misconstrue the relationship between politics and religion in Protestant thought.

Since Rousseau, and perhaps because of him, political theory has often been characterized by a disjunction between considerations of human nature and questions of justice and law. Yet, reexamining the Second Discourse as a theodicy forces us to rethink how the essential questions of political theory are related just where they seem to become separated. The core of the theodicy is Rousseau's view that we are, by nature, physical beings embedded unproblematically in nature—good, or ordered, beings in a good, or ordered, whole. Although Rousseau presents his explicitly political thought as a juridical doctrine seemingly separated from his understanding of human nature and history, his political thought is founded upon his portrait of man's existence in the “pure state of nature.” This portrait serves as a positive formal model to enable us to remake our corrupted existence through the legitimate state—itself modeled by Rousseau on the divine or natural whole.

The idea of the public sphere, of an institutionalized arena of discursive interaction, is central to democratic theory and practice. The modern age has, however, witnessed the erosion of a public realm distinct from the state and the market. In response to this erosion, public realm theory, notably the work of Arendt and Habermas, attempts to theorize the minimal conditions necessary for a discursive realm free of structural coercion or manipulation. The resulting normative conception of the public sphere has come under sharp attack by postmodern theorists, including Foucault, Lyotard, and Baudrillard, who question the basic presuppositions of public realm theory. I examine their objections and show how the public realm theory of Arendt can be viewed as motivated by concerns similar to the postmoderns'. Against Habermas, I argue that Arendt's public realm theory is less concerned with the question of legitimation than with the theorization of an agonistic political subjectivity.

We address the question of whether class bias in the American electorate has increased since 1964. We analyze the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey and the National Election Studies for seven consecutive presidential elections, 1964–88. Our results show that conclusions regarding changes in class bias are sensitive to which measure of socioeconomic class is used—income, education, or occupation. We argue that income is the appropriate measure since government policies that discriminate based on socioeconomic class are most likely to do so based on income and there are measurement problems associated with using either education or occupation over time. Our analysis shows that there has been almost no change in class bias in the electorate since 1964.

Political scientists have been increasingly interested in entrepreneurs—individuals who change the direction and flow of politics. In this research note, we synthesize aspects of an economic approach to entrepreneurship with concepts used in political science. We then tie these theoretical observations to the emergence of entrepreneurs in local governments and test components of our theory using observations from a large set of suburban municipal governments. Empirically, we identify several conditions that affect the probability that an entrepreneur will emerge in a local government, especially slack budgetary resources that the political entrepreneur can reallocate. We also find that the probability with which an entrepreneur is found in local government is a function of the difficulty of overcoming collective action problems in a community.

We examine the relationship between military expenditures and economic growth in the United States from 1948 to 1990, in order to gauge the potential peace dividend. Our main results suggest that military spending is a significant drain on the economy. We then examine the implications of a restructured international system for U.S. military expenditures and their resultant impact on economic growth in the 1990s. Simulations of Democratic and Republican proposals for cuts in defense spending suggest increases in economic output of between 2.5% and 4.5% over the period 1993–96.

How should we explain why a state sometimes adopts a foreign policy in one region that interferes with its concurrent policies elsewhere? In their article in the March 1989 issue of this Review, Stewart, Hermann and Hermann proposed a three-level process model of foreign policy to explain such Soviet behavior towards Egypt in 1973. The analysis has continuing interest because it interprets the puzzling behavior as a manifestation of general problems of information processing in making foreign policy choices. Richard Anderson suggests that a two-level model of domestic bargaining better accounts for the causal sequence in Soviet-Egyptian relations and is in general more parsimonious. Margaret and Charles Hermann defend their substantive analysis and argue in any case for the complementarity of process and bargaining approaches.