From my work on my doctoral dissertation (Lipset 1950, 1968) down to the present, I have been interested in the problem of “American exceptionalism.” That curious phrase emerged from the debate in the international Communist movement in the 1920s concerning the sources of the weakness of left-wing radical movements in the United States (Draper 1960, pp. 268-72; Lipset 1977a, pp. 107-61). The key question repeatedly raised in this context has been, is America qualitatively different from other industrial capitalist countries? Or, to use Sombart's words, “Why is there no Socialism in the United States?” (Sombart 1976).

In a forthcoming book, I evaluate the hypotheses advanced by various writers from Karl Marx onward to explain the absence of an effective socialist party on the American political scene. (For a preliminary formulation, see Lipset 1977b, pp. 31-149, 346-63.) If any of the hypotheses are valid, they should also help to account for the variation among working-class movements in other parts of the world. In this article, therefore, I shall reverse the emphasis from that in my book and look at socialist and working-class movements comparatively, applying elsewhere some of the propositions that have been advanced to explain the American situation.

Research on the tendency of governments to trade off welfare spending for defense has generated diverse and often contradictory findings. This study attempts to clarify the issue of trade-offs by examining expenditure patterns since 1948 for the four major NA TO allies: United States, United Kingdom, Federal Republic of Germany, and France. When viewed from the perspective of long-term trends in shares of outlays, trade-offs are evident. When short-term changes in expenditure, which are more germane to the potential for one spending category to benefit at the expense of the other are studied, no pattern of trade-off can be detected. A three-equation model is estimated to control for the variety of possible determining factors of public resource allocation. In none of the four nations does a pattern of trade-off emerge, except in periods of wartime or postwar reconstruction. These findings are consistent with the ability of governments to finance new spending through either increased taxes or larger budget deficits. The growing disinclination to use these methods, however, suggests that the potential for trade-offs has perhaps reappeared in the 1980s.

This article presents some “rational-actor” models that depict the negotiation process between terrorists and government policymakers for those incidents where hostages or property are seized and demands are issued. The models account for the objectives and constraints faced by both the terrorists and the policymakers. Uncertainty is introduced through probability constraints (i.e., chance constraints) requiring a specific likelihood of some event occurring. Implications are subsequently extracted from the comparative static analysis as the models' parameters are changed. The last part of the article presents a club theory analysis concerning the sharing of transnational commando forces.

Why do some new representative institutions succeed and others fail? This article tests several hypotheses about the ecology of institutional performance, drawing on a ten-year study of Italian regional governments. Institutional success is greater where socioeconomic development is more advanced, where the political culture is participant and sociable, rather than passive and parochial, and where social stability is greater; these three variables alone account for more than four-fifths of the variance in institutional performance. Of particular importance is the impact of historical patterns of social solidarity and political mobilization on contemporary institutional success.

We evaluate the six-year presidential term proposal in the context of a model of the U.S. economy characterized by a short-run but not a long-run trade-off between inflation and unemployment. Votes and public welfare are separately conceptualized as functions of inflation and unemployment, which are indirectly controlled by the president through manipulation of government spending.

In a series of simulation experiments, the vote-maximizing choice of policy instruments led to less we(fare loss with six- than with four-year terms under most conditions. Ironically, vote maximizing was shown to lead not only to short- and long-term welfare loss, but also to long-run political disadvantage.

Several aggregate-level studies have found a relationship between macroeconomic conditions and election outcomes, operating in intuitively plausible directions. More recent survey-based studies, however, have been unable to detect any comparable relationship operating at the individual-voter level. This persistent discrepancy is puzzling. One recently proposed explanation for it is that voters actually behave in an altruistic or “sociotropic” fashion, responding to economic events only as they affect the general welfare, rather than in terms of self-interested “pocketbook” considerations.

It is argued here that the discrepancies between the macro- and microlevel studies are a statistical artifact, arising from the fact that observable changes in individual welfare actually consist of two unobservable components, a government-induced (and politically relevant) component, and an exogenous component caused by life-cycle and other politically irrelevant factors. Because of this, individual level cross-sectional estimates of the effects of welfare changes on voting are badly biased and are essentially unrelated to the true values of the behavioral parameters of interest: they will generally be considerable underestimates and may even be of the wrong sign. An aggregate-level time-series analysis, on the other hand, will often yield reasonably good (if somewhat attenuated) estimates of the underlying individual-level effects of interest. Therefore, in this case, individual behavior is best investigated with aggregate- rather than individual-level data.

It is also shown that the evidence for sociotropic voting is artifactual, in the sense that the various findings and evidence which ostensibly show sociotropic behavior are all perfectly compatible with the null hypothesis of self-interested, pocketbook voting.

This article reports small group experiments in which subjects may choose to contribute a fixed amount of money toward a monetary public good, and in which the good itself is supplied only if a specified number of contributions (or more) are made. Given the opportunity to communicate, our subjects organized themselves by specifying precisely the number of required contributors and who they would be. This organization, which we call designation of a minimal contributing set, always resulted in provision of the public good, and provision in a nearly optimal manner. In contrast, groups presented with the identical problem but not allowed to communicate failed to generate a sufficient number of contributions 35 percent of the time, and in slightly over half of the successful groups, overprovision produced inefficiency.

We present hypotheses about why designating a minimal contributing set works, and data indicating that the mechanism results in reduced normative conflict and felt risk, as well as increased efficiency. The essential property of the minimal contributing set, we hypothesize, is criticalness: the contributions of the members of the minimal contributing set are each critical to obtaining the public good the members desire, and they know it. It is reasonable (albeit not a dominant strategy) to contribute because reasonable behavior can be expected from other minimal contributing set members who are in the same situation. Unreasonableness is a problem that increases with the size of groups, but adaptations exist that, we argue, can reduce its seriousness.

This article combines ideas from ethics, social choice, and political theory to develop a simulation method for assessing the desirability of different voting schemes in different situations. I use the method to evaluate six well-known election systems. My results are intuitive. I find that approval voting seems to be a good voting scheme for mass elections.

A formal model of electoral behavior is developed under the assumption that candidates have policy preferences as well as an interest in winning per se. This model is shown to have an equilibrium in a k-issue space when there are two candidates. The implications of this model are compared to the implications of the Downsian-type model where candidates are interested only in winning. Testable propositions are derived via the use of comparative statics. The results of recent studies are shown to coincide with the synthesis model but not the pure Downsian model.

The theoretical model bridges the gap between formal theory and empirical research and unifies a variety of seemingly unrelated studies.

Economic voting is generally regarded as a straightforward political demand for the amelioration of economic grievances. This assumption about motives underlies the implicit theories of politicians and the imputations of interests to voters in aggregate time series models. Several recent articles have argued that voting is not self-interested but a manifestation of “symbolic” preferences at the level of the collectivity. This article places the dispute between personal and collective decision referents into the broader perspective of a multi-stage model of information processing and decision making. Personal and collective decision referents are shown to define the poles of a continuum, and several hypotheses are derived to predict the relative weights assigned to each in the voter's calculus. The model is used in analyses of both the public's evaluations of incumbent economic management and economic voting in different electoral arenas by varying issue publics. Designed to maximize comparability with aggregate studies, this research includes both objective and subjective measures of economic conditions and indexes changes in personal conditions over time from panel data.

The responsiveness of government policies to citizens' preferences is a central concern of various normative and empirical theories of democracy. Examining public opinion and policy data for the United States from 1935 to 1979, we find considerable congruence between changes in preferences and in policies, especially for large, stable opinion changes on salient issues. We present evidence that pubic opinion is often a proximate cause of policy, affecting policy more than policy influences opinion. One should be cautious, however, about concluding that democratic responsiveness pervades American politics.