The central problem for social science is to explain social order. How do people manage to live together? One can discern two ways of answering that question. The first view is normative and communal: people learn from their culture customs that provide an internal compass guiding them to act in ways that minimize conflict and ensure comity. The second view is rationalistic and individualistic: order is created by explicit and implicit agreements entered into by self-seeking individuals to avert the worst consequences of their predatory instincts. In the first view, order is natural and prior to any social contract or government institution; in the second, it is contrived and dependent on agreements and sanctions. Rules are obeyed in the first case because they have moral force, in the second because they convey personal advantage. In the first view, compliance is automatic and general; in the second, it is strategic and uncertain.

The normative view has been under heavy attack for several decades for at least three reasons: it seems to imply a complacent functionalism; it appears to minimize or deny the value of conflict; and it lacks the theoretical power found in the assumption that people always seek their own interests. I believe that one can grant, up to a point, all of these objections and still be left dissatisfied with the alternative, namely, that social order is contrived, based on calculation, and dependent on individual assent.

We develop and test a model of joint determination of economic growth and national election results in the United States. The formal model, which combines developments in the rational choice analysis of the behavior of economic agents and voters, leads to a system of equations in which the dependent variables are the growth rate and the vote shares in presidential and congressional elections. Our estimates support the theoretical claims that growth responds to unanticipated policy shifts and that voters use both on-year and midterm elections to balance the two parties. On the other hand, we find no support for “rational” retrospective voting. We do reconfirm, in a fully simultaneous framework, the “naive” retrospective voting literature's finding that the economy has a strong effect on presidential voting. We find congressional elections unaffected by the economy, except as transmitted by presidential coattails.

I provide a formal theory of government for a political system characterized by a proportional representation electoral system, a parliamentary government that exercises collective responsibility, and a government formation process. Political parties are assumed to be policy-oriented and to serve the interests of those who vote for them. Parties choose policy platforms that determine their representation in parliament; and given that representation, the parties bargain over the government to be formed and the policies that government will implement. The model yields equilibria with the property that parties choose dispersed policy positions. Thus, electoral incentives in proportional representation parliamentary systems need not lead to policy convergence. The theory provides predictions of party locations such as those developed in the manifesto project.

While the idea of democracy has never been more universal or more popular, both democratic theory and the empirical study of democratic possibilities are in some disarray. We seek a productive reconnection of these two endeavors with democratic discourse through close attention to the language of democracy as used by ordinary people and political actors. Reconstructive inquiry determines how the individuals who are the potential constituents of any democratic order themselves conceptualize democracy and their own political roles and competences. We deploy an intensive method—Q methodology—for the study of individual characteristics, capabilities, and dispositions in combination with political discourse analysis. Four discourses are discovered in an analysis of selected U.S. subjects: contented republicanism, deferential conservatism, disaffected populism, and private liberalism. These results can be used to relate democratic theory to live possibilities in democratic discourse.

General deterrence, unlike immediate deterrence, has rarely been analyzed in a systematic comparative manner. We outline a research design for doing so, by studying the circumstances under which, in a set of enduring rivalries, challengers are likely to initiate militarized disputes. We indicate the conceptual and operational steps necessary to make and empirically compare predictions stemming from three often-competing theoretical frameworks: rational deterrence, a general model of rational conflict initiation, and a cognitive psychological model of behavior emphasizing risk orientation and misperception. The results of probit analysis on a pooled time series of enduring rivalries since 1945 provide support for hypotheses from each of the different theoretical models.

Critical theory and rational choice theory share both overlapping concerns and parallel theoretical weaknesses. Specifically, both critical theorists and rational choice theorists are preoccupied with determining what rational can mean in the realm of social and political interaction. I show in a provisional way how game theory extends and deepens the critical theorists' basic intuition that unembellished strategic rationality cannot adequately sustain social and political interaction. And I suggest how critical theory identifies a mechanism underlying the force of the “cheap talk” that game theorists introduce in hopes of circumscribing the indeterminacy generated by their models. My goal is to stimulate productive conversation between what are typically considered discordant research traditions.

Although normative questions about the role of the Supreme Court as a countermajoritarian institution have long excited controversy in democratic theory, empirical questions about how far the Court acts contrary to majoritarian opinion have received less attention. Time series analyses for the period 1956–89 indicate the existence of a reciprocal and positive relationship between long-term trends in aggregate public opinion and the Court's collective decisions. The Court's ideological composition changes in response to previous shifts in the partisan and ideological orientation of the president and Congress. The Court also responds to public opinion at the margins even in the absence of membership change. Since 1981, the relationship has vanished or turned negative in direction. The Court's ideological balance has been upset by an unbroken string of conservative-to-moderate appointments, thereby undermining the dynamics that promote judicial responsiveness and raising questions about the majoritarianism of the contemporary and future Court.

A voting equilibrium arises when the voters in an electorate, acting in accordance with both their preferences for the candidates and their perceptions of the relative chances of various pairs of candidates being in contention for victory, generate an election result that justifies their perceptions. Voting equilibria always exist, and the set of equilibria can vary substantially with the choice of voting system. We compare equilibria under the plurality rule, approval voting, and the Borda system. We consider a candidate-positioning game and find that the plurality rule imposes little restriction on the position of the winning candidate in three-candidate races, while approval voting leads to a winner positioned at the median of the voter distribution. We contrast campaign activities intended to influence voter preferences with activities meant to influence only perceptions of candidate viability.

A state in the international system implicit in realism must allocate its limited resources between satisfying its intrinsically valued ends and the means of military power. I formalize this guns-versus-butter problem in a simple infinite-horizon model in which two states must continually decide how to allocate their resources and whether to attack the other state. The analysis establishes sufficient conditions to ensure the existence of an equilibrium in which neither state attacks; shows that there is a strictly Pareto-dominant pair of peaceful equilibrium payoffs; characterizes the unique, peaceful Markov perfect equilibrium that yields them; and describes the comparative statics of the equilibrium allocations. More broadly, the analysis also suggests that the notion of anarchy has little if any substantive significance distinctively related to international politics and that the problem of absolute and relative gains is superfluous.

Plato's Menexenus is overlooked, perhaps because of the difficulty of gauging its irony. In it, Socrates recites a funeral oration he says he learned from Aspasia, describing events that occurred after the deaths of both Socrates and Pericles' mistress. But the dialogue's ironic complexity is one reason it is a central part of Plato's political philosophy. In both style and substance, Menexenus rejects the heroic account of Athenian democracy proposed by Thucydides' Pericles, separating Athenian citizenship from the quest for immortal glory; its picture of the relationship of philosopher to polis illustrates Plato's conception of the true politikos in the Statesman. In both dialogues, philosophic response to politics is neither direct rule nor apolitical withdrawal. Menexenus presents a Socrates who influences politics indirectly, by recasting Athenian history and thus transforming the terms in which its political alternatives are conceived.

We augment the survey-based studies of attitudes toward feminism with comparative, contextual perspectives emphasizing the importance of social structure and culture. In doing so, we are able to assess the relative merits of two very different structural theories. Most researchers implicitly assume a simple linear effect of social context on attitudes. On the other hand, some early works on American conservatism suggest to us that status discontent may be a better explanation. We explicate these two approaches and derive a series of testable hypotheses for each. We then examine the validity of these theories utilizing data from nine European nations.

In spite of the fact that political eras in the United States are widely (and often ambiguously) defined in terms of a general policy sentiment or mood, political scientists have done little in the way of rigorous analysis regarding this subject. I argue that shifts in domestic policy sentiment along a liberal–conservative continuum may be understood in part as responses to changing economic expectations. Specifically, expectations of a strong economy result in greater support for liberal domestic policies, whereas anticipation of declining economic conditions pushes the national policy mood to the right. Using quarterly data for the period 1968–88, I present a multiple-time-series error correction model that lends considerable support to the hypothesis.

In his article in the June 1991 issue of this Review, Ted Hopf challenged the argument that bipolar systems are inherently more stable than multipolar configurations of power. He reported that the international situation in sixteenth century Europe became only marginally more stable with a shift from a multipolar to a bipolar system. He argued for attention to the offensive-defensive balance, rather than systemic polarity. Manus Midlarsky accounts for Hopf's findings, and for evidence of multipolarity and increased conflict in the early seventeenth and twentieth centuries, by proposing a relationship between polarity and war that is contingent on scarcity of desired international resources. Midlarsky argues for more attention to contingent relationships generally and draws implications for current and future probabilities of conflict in a multipolar world. Hopf responds by pointing out the need for further development of Midlarsky's analysis, the possible compatibility between Midlarsky's formulation and his own focus on the offensive-defensive balance, and the desirability of a productive unity of the two research programs.