Science involves the accumulation of knowledge, which means not only the formulation of new sentences about discoveries but also the reformulation of empirically falsified or theoretically discredited old sentences. Science has therefore a history that is mainly a chronicle and interpretation of a series of reformulations. It is often asserted that political science has no history. Although this assertion is perhaps motivated by a desire to identify politics with belles lettres, it may also have a reasonable foundation, in that political institutions may change faster than knowledge can be accumulated. To investigate whether propositions about evanescent institutions can be scientifically falsified and reformulated, I examine in this essay the history of the recent and not wholly accepted revisions of the propositions collectively called Duverger's law: that the plurality rule for selecting the winner of elections favors the two-party system. The body of the essay presents the discovery, revision, testing, and reformulation of sentences in this series in order to demonstrate that in at least one instance in political science, knowledge has been accumulated and a history exists.

The existence of a trade-off between military expenditures and social spending is widely hypothesized but often difficult to establish empirically. This article constructs a model to test the effects of changes in military spending on federal expenditures for health and education from 1941 through 1979. Important economic, demographic, and political changes are controlled. No systematic tradeoff between military spending and federal health and education expenditures is found, nor in this period was there any significant depressing effect on health and education expenditures by Republican presidential administrations. Thus, the current administration, under which there are major increases in military spending and major cuts in health and education spending, emerges as exceptional.

This article is an effort to establish a comparative theoretical framework for the study of civil-military relations in communist political systems. Although the literature on civil-military relations in polyarchic and praetorian polities is theoretically as well as empirically rich, theories of civil-military relations in the field of comparative communism are still at the preliminary stage of development. It is argued that civil-military relations, like all the fundamental dynamics of communist political systems, derive from the structural relationship between a hegemonic Leninist party and the other institutions of the polity. Although the party directs and supervises all other institutions, its political supremacy is necessarily limited by the division of labor among various institutions. The relative autonomy of the military and its relations with the party vary from one country to another and can be described as coalitional, symbiotic, or fused. These relations are dynamic, changing over time in each country in response to contextual circumstances. The role of the military in politics is complex and variegated: on ideological issues, there is usually little conflict between party and army; on issues of “normal politics,” the military acts as a functionally specific elite engaged in bargaining to defend its perceived institutional interests; and in crisis politics, the military is a political resource that various party factions seek to enlist against their opponents.

The article is a methodological examination of public choice analysis, with particular reference to the currently topical policy field of natural resources. It is also a methodological critique of public choice analysis on logical, epistemological, and normative grounds. Its purpose is to make scholars of natural resources management aware of the substantive and methodological features of the public choice approach to the field, and to make public choice scholars and philosophers of science aware of the methodological grounds of the approach.

The so-called hard core of concepts of public choice are first described in relation to the natural resource policy field, and the selection of these hard core concepts, as well as their distinguishing features from political science, economics, and public administration, are justified. The argument is advanced that the hard core is interrelated by the methodological criterion of logical consistency—one interpretation of the notion of rationality—and the criterion accounts for the impetus behind the growth of the paradigm. It is also argued that the paradigm is buttressed and protected from rival approaches at an epistemological level, and it is shown that a variety of epistemologies have been linked to the approach. Finally, I argue that the congruence of public choice with this variety of epistemologies makes many of the criticisms about the normative implications of the approach inaccurate and misleading.

Professor Sartori's 1962 article on constitutionalism in the American Political Science Review was influential in the acceptance of a narrow view of the constitution. Sartori argued that constitution meant specifically limitation on government and underplayed the role of the state in establishing a political order. This article argues that there are good historical reasons for keeping a balanced view of a constitutionalism that maintains a tension between strong government, to create a secure and stable order, and limitation on government power. It therefore attempts to reaffirm McIlwain's more traditional view of the constitution as a combination of gubernaculum and jurisdictio, power and its control.

The physician analogy in politics is not inherently elitist or antithetical to constitutional government, as modern critics have claimed. On the contrary, in its original development among the orators of fourth-century Athens, it epitomized the aims of conservative democrats, offering both a perspective that reinforced the ideal of a prescriptive constitution grounded in tradition and a conception of leadership compatible with the egalitarian animus of the restored democracy. Moreover, this conception of the political physician enjoyed the full sanction of Greek medicine. The norms, concepts, and techniques adduced in the Hippocratic writings closely parallel those of conservative democrats.

How the city, the political community, may ask its citizens to sacrifice their lives for the sake of its preservation has plagued us since the birth of political philosophy. This article examines Thucydides' presentation of Pericles' attempt to solve this problem by reconciling the highest good of the individual and the good of the city by means of the love of glory. I contrast the central themes of Pericles' speeches in Thucydides, especially his renowned funeral oration, with other parts of Thucydides' presentation of Periclean Athens, in particular his famous account of the plague, to demonstrate his doubts about the efficacy of the Periclean solution to the political problem.

Hobbes's history of the English Civil War, The Behemoth, has been neglected by contemporary scholars, yet it provides the clearest statement of the problem that Hobbes's political science is designed to solve. In Behemoth, Hobbes shows that societies such as seventeenth century England inevitably degenerate into civil war because they are founded on authoritative opinion. The claim that there is a single, authoritative definition of Tightness or truth which is not an arbitrary human choice is an illusion of “intellectual vainglory,” a feeling of pride in the superiority of one's opinions which causes persecution and civil strife. By presenting Hobbes's historical and psychological analysis of this problem, I illuminate his argument for absolutism and show that Hobbes is not a precursor of totalitarianism but a founder of liberalism.

Two experiments sustain Lippmann's suspicion, advanced a half century ago, that media provide compelling descriptions of a public world that people cannot directly experience. More precisely, the experiments show that television news programs profoundly affect which problems viewers take to be important. The experiments also demonstrate that those problems promimently positioned in the evening news are accorded greater weight in viewers' evaluations of presidential performance. We note the political implications of these results, suggest their psychological foundations, and argue for a revival of experimentation in the study of political communication.

This article argues that the differences in the findings of the incrementalist budgetary theory of Davis, Dempster, and Wildavsky and the “competition” theory of Natchez and Bupp have been wrongly attributed to the different units of analysis—program or organization—used in these studies. “Competition” as measured by Natchez and Bupp and incremental change as defined by Davis, Dempster, and Wildavsky can both be found among either programs or organizations. The differences in the findings of these theorists depend instead on the particular theoretical construction of budgetary behavior and the budget measures chosen. The same data will support either theory of budgeting if one adopts the theoretical constructs and budget measures peculiar to each theory. Thus the theories are not really in competition with each other.

There has long been a division of opinion among economists concerning the effects of economic developments on voting behavior. In his well-known study, Kramer (1971a) concluded that the fluctuations in economic activity have a systematic influence on U.S. congressional elections. His findings were challenged by various economists, including Stigler (1973).

The purpose of this paper is to extend the analysis of Kramer's results by examining the post-sample forecast performance of his models. As noted by Christ (1966, pp. 546–49), the acid test of a time series model is its ability to perform well outside the sample period. The results discussed below demonstrate that Kramer's equations have relatively good post-sample predictive ability. The findings thus support the view that short-term economic fluctuations have important effects on national elections. However, the results also suggest that economic factors alone are not sufficient to account for all variations of voter behavior.