The essay is concerned with justice in the Oresteia and the way the Oresteia contributes to the justice it celebrates. It begins by examining the place of tragedy in Athenian politics as a preface to an analysis of the trilogy's understanding of justice. That understanding is explored using two examples of fundamentally conflicting forces which are reconciled in the play to create a whole larger and more just than either force alone. The essay goes on to argue that the form of tragedy recapitulates and reinforces the substantive teachings on justice previously analyzed. Here four elements are considered: the balances between intelligence and passion, action and boundaries, political discourse and poetry, and the Euminides and Agamemnon.

Fundamental to the logic of American constitutionalism is the bonding of language and politics, the equivocal linkage of two quite different orders of composition. Unabashedly, the constitutional enterprise purports to infuse writing with power and to shape power with the written word. Such a theory of what it means to organize a political order according to a written design should systematically regulate the ongoing processes of constitutional interpretation. The result is a two-text framework of interpretive methods which is justified by the nature of the American constitutional enterprise, a system of signification that coordinates constitutive language, the authoritative modeling of the polity in words, and political legibility, the readability of the resulting scheme of government in operation. The Interpretable Constitution, as such a construct, reflects in its divisions the interconnection between document and polity and demonstrates the bond and tension between the Constitution as a linguistic artifact and the constitution as a political product.

From the onset of industrial capitalism in Latin America, urban workers have been dependent on the state. This is particularly true in Brazil, where urban workers are still in a situation of extreme dependence on the state. Thus, the Brazilian setting provides an ideal opportunity for the study of the consciousness of dependent workers as well as an important point of reference for comparative study of working-class consciousness. This paper outlines the general characteristics of the situation of state-dependent workers in Latin America, with special attention to the Brazilian worker, in order to show how their dependence is reflected in their consciousness. The evidence for our interpretation is based on the attitudes of 617 urban workers who are part of a larger probability sample of the population in central and southeast Brazil.

Despite or because of a decade of research that yielded conflicting results, the question of whether or not military coups or regimes brought into power through coups have an impact on subsequent military spending remains open. A review of the relevant literature suggests that part of the analytical problem may result from assumptions about military political behavior as well as various limitations associated with cross-national analyses of change, and the use of exclusively cross-sectional or longitudinal research designs. In addition, some of the disparity in research findings may result from the reliance on different indicators—both dependent and independent—by a number of different analysts. In response to these potential technical problems, this analysis of military spending patterns in 66 less-developed states applies a GLS routine, pooling cross-sectional and time-series data, to the 1967–1976 relationships between two measures of military spending and several predictor variables, including regime type, coup occurrences, level of conflict, economic development, arms imports, and previous military spending. Although the empirical outcome varies according to which dependent variable is examined, we find, in general, that information on the distribution and timing of regime types—military, civilian, and mixed—and successful military coups is not very helpful in predicting post-coup military spending policies. This finding suggests, in turn, that the crucial presumption that military personnel participate in politics primarily to defend or advance their corporate interests is not a very useful predictive foundation for the examination of post-coup military spending.

This article addresses an important issue of democratic theory and administration: the potential conflict between bureaucrats' allegiance to their agencies and to specific publics' interests. Representative bureaucracy, which emphasizes substantive interest representation in the administrative arena, embodies this potential for conflict. Empirical survey results which probe integration of substantive representation and employee allegiance among federal employees in four major agencies are presented. Evidence documents a different level of organizational involvement in an agency with a substantive representation mandate compared to employee involvement in agencies without a mandate for representation. While the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights' mandate affords considerable potential for integrating substantive representation and employee allegiance, its employees do not rank highly in organizational involvement. Even more surprising, CCR minority employees are lowest in involvement. These findings imply an important hypothesis: effectiveness in achieving an agency mandate is crucial to successful integration of organizational involvement and substantive representation.

This study re-examines Hibbs's (1977b) findings on the impact of political party on unemployment rates for the postwar United States. With the use of data through the end of the Carter administration and slightly different methods, it is concluded that party has between one-third and one-half the impact on unemployment claimed by Hibbs. Administration is a better predictor of unemployment than is party; in particular, neither the Kennedy nor Carter administration behaved as Hibbs claims Democratic administrations should, nor did the Nixon administration behave as Hibbs claims Republican administrations should. The significance of whether administration or party is the better predictor of economic outcomes is explored.

The premise of this article is that adult participation in politics is affected by strong preadult forces in addition to the contemporaneous factors emphasized by recent studies. To test this premise, data are drawn from the 1965–1973 national socialization panel study of young Americans and their parents. Four causal models depicting pathways to participation among young adults are evaluated; each includes civic orientations as intervening variables. Three of the models assess the direct and indirect effects of parental characteristics—socioeconomic status, political activity, and civic orientations. The fourth model assesses the impact of adolescent involvement in high school activities. Taken individually, each pathway is shown to have an effect on adult participation, with parent socioeconomic status and high school activism having the most impact. When the four pathways are combined in a single model to reflect the connections among them, all remain important. The combined model illustrates the importance of a variety of methods of political learning. The combined model also demonstrates the crucial role of civic orientations in converting preadult experiences into later participation. Civic orientations are the primary carriers of preadult political learning. Overall, the results rebut the critics of socialization research who have questioned the existence of a linkage between early learning and adult political behavior.

The topic of citizen-initiated contacting of government officials has received increasing attention, but research has yielded conflicting findings on the relationship of socioeconomic status to contacting behavior. Various studies find that the two are negatively, positively, parabolically, or negligibly related. Data are presented supporting the claim of a positive relationship, and reasons for the conflicting findings are explored. The need-awareness model, associated with the finding of a parabolic relationship between socioeconomic status and contacting at the aggregate level, is tested at the individual level of analysis. While the importance of the need and awareness factors is affirmed, the overall model is not supported. As with other modes of political participation, sense of efficacy is found to be an important predictor of contracting, but the positive relationship between socioeconomic status and contacting remains when efficacy is controlled.