In an effort to put its past firmly behind, the New South Africa created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to document human rights abuses under apartheid and to grant amnesty to those confessing their nefarious deeds. South Africa's democratic experiment depends mightily upon whether truth does in fact bring about reconciliation. Consequently, we examine whether ordinary South Africans accept the theories of blame that underlie the truth and reconciliation process. Based on a formal experiment within a representative sample of South Africans, our results confirm some conventional hypotheses (e.g., leaders are judged more responsible for their deeds than followers), repudiate others (noble motives do little to exonerate violent actions), and modify still others (actors are judged by the severity of their action's consequences, although it matters little whether “combatants” or “civilians” were the victims). We conclude that the dark legacy of the apartheid past makes the consolidation of the democratic transformation problematical.

David Mayhew's Divided We Govern(1991) sparked an industry of scholars who alternately challenge or confirm the work on theoretical and empirical grounds. Still, we lack a definitive account of the proportions and causes of legislative gridlock. I revisit the effects of elections and institutions on policy outcomes to propose an alternative theory of gridlock: The distribution of policy preferences within the parties, between the two chambers, and across Congress more broadly is central to explaining the dynamics of gridlock. To test the model, I construct a measure that assesses legislative output in proportion to the policy agenda. Using newspaper editorials to identify every salient legislative issue between 1947 and 1996, I generate Congress-by-Congress gridlock scores and use them to test competing explanations. The results suggest that intrabranch conflict—perhaps more than interbranch rivalry—is critical in shaping deadlock in American politics.

For more than three decades, social choice theorists and legislative scholars have studied how legislative outcomes in Congress can be manipulated through strategic amendments and voting. I address the central limitation of this research, a virtual absence of systematic empirical work, by examining 76 “killer” amendments considered during the 103d and 104th congresses. I trace the effects of these amendments on their related bills using archival sources, test for strategic voting using NOMINATE as the baseline measure of legislator preferences across a range of issues, and explore with OLS regression why some killer amendments are more strategically important than others. The findings indicate that successful killer amendments and identifiable strategic voting are extremely rare. In none of the cases examined could the defeat of a bill be attributed to adoption of an alleged killer amendment.

How do Americans decide whether their country should use military force abroad? We argue they combine dispositional preferences and ideas about the geopolitical situation. This article reports the results of a representative national survey that incorporated five experiments. Findings include the following: (1) Respondent dispositions, especially isolationism versus internationalism and assertiveness versus accommodativeness, consistently constrained policy preferences, whereas liberalism-conservatism did not; (2) features of the geopolitical context—the presence of U.S. interests, relative power, the images of the adversary's motivations, and judgments about cultural status—also influenced support for military intervention; and (3) systematic interactions emerged between dispositions and geopolitical context that shed light on when and why ideological disagreements about the use of force are likely to be amplified and attenuated by situational factors. Our results are consistent with a cognitive-interactionist perspective, in which people adapt broad predispositions in relatively thoughtful ways to specific foreign policy problems.

Three different theoretical explanations are tested for the exceptionally high level of electoral volatility found in contemporary Latin America: economic voting, institutional characteristics of political regimes and party systems, and the structure and organization of class cleavages. A pooled cross-sectional time-series regression analysis is conducted on 58 congressional elections and 43 presidential elections in 16 Latin American countries during the 1980s and 1990s. Institutional variables have the most consistent effect on volatility, while the influence of economic performance is heavily contingent upon the type of election and whether the dependent variable is operationalized as incumbent vote change or aggregate electoral volatility. The results demonstrate that electoral volatility is a function of short-term economic perturbations, the institutional fragilities of both democratic regimes and party systems, and relatively fluid cleavage structures.

This article investigates hypotheses generated by the veto players' theory. The fundamental insight of this theory is that an increase in the number of veto players (for all practical purposes, in parliamentary systems the number of parties in government) and their ideological distance from one another will reduce the ability of both government and parliament to produce significant laws. In addition, the number of significant laws increases with the duration of a government and with an increase in the ideological difference between current and previous government. These propositions are tested with legislative data (both laws and government decrees) on working time and working conditions identified in two legislative sources: the NATLEX computerized database in Geneva (produced by the International Labour organization) and Blanpain's International Encyclopedia for Labour Law and Industrial Relations. The data cover fifteen West European countries for the period 1981–91. The evidence corroborates the proposed hypotheses.

Looking at the history of democracies in the developed world, I show that electoral systems derive from the decisions the ruling parties make to maximize their representation according to the following conditions. As long as the electoral arena does not change and the current electoral regime benefits the ruling parties, the electoral system is not altered. As the electoral arena changes (due to the entry of new voters or a change in voters' preferences), the ruling parties modify the electoral system, depending on the emergence of new parties and the coordinating capacities of the old parties. When the new parties are strong, the old parties shift from plurality/majority to proportional representation if no old party enjoys a dominant position, but they do not do this if there is a dominant old party. When new entrants are weak, a system of nonproportional representation is maintained, regardless of the structure of the old party system.

Contemporary debates over liberal political theory should encourage renewed investigation of the common good, and it is appropriate to begin by interrogating Aristotle's account. Aristotle argues that injustice stands in the way of the common good. Injustice is motivated by both overgrasping for scarce external goods, such as money, honor, and power, and by excessive desires. Aristotle argues that the common good requires a reorientation away from external goods to satisfying activities that do not diminish in the sharing. He sketches an analogical account of familial and political relationships that leads us to wonder what the political conditions are for the common good. Reflecting on these conditions not only points to the strict limits of the common good but also speaks to both sides in debates over liberal theory.

The Euro-Barometer values battery has provided much of the empirical evidence for the thesis that a shift from materialist to postmaterialist values has occurred in advanced industrial societies over the past two decades. It has been argued, however, that this widely used instrument is seriously flawed because of its sensitivity to current economic conditions. We present data from experiments in Canada and Germany that tested the performance of the values battery in an era of joblessness. Analyses reveal that (1) substituting an unemployment statement for the standard inflation statement in the battery has major consequences for the classification of respondents as materialist or postmaterialist and (2) answers to the battery are conditioned by the interaction between its content and respondents' economic issue concerns. These findings support the argument that much of the shift from materialist to postmaterialist values recorded by the Euro-Barometer since the early 1980s is a measurement artifact.

Inglehart's postmaterialism thesis describes an individual-level process of value change. Little attention has been devoted to validating the responses to his postmaterialist-materialist index. The aggregate-level distributions may appear to reflect a postmaterialist-materialist dimension, even if at the individual level responses on the questions making up the index are random. The logic of the survey questions used for the index defines a baseline against which the actual distribution of responses can be compared. Using such a standard, we find that individual responses are not constrained by an underlying value dimension, in the sense that the observed patterns of responses increasingly do not differ from what one would expect by chance. Furthermore, as one would expect for a random variable, index scores are virtually unexplainable as a dependent variable, and they cannot be used to predict support for various political and social issues, said to flow from attitudes measured by the index.

This article responds to two critiques of the value change thesis in this issue. Davis and Davenport claim that the four-item index developed by Inglehart is invalid because respondents' first and second choices are randomly related and that it fails to predict respondents' positions on theoretically relevant social issues. We maintain that they make unwarranted assumptions about how responses to ipsative items should be related and demonstrate that the value indicators are powerful predictors. Clarke et al. argue that the trend toward postmaterialism does not result from long-term generational change but simply reflects declining inflation and rising unemployment over the past quarter-century. We show that period effects, particularly inflation, influence observed values. But after controlling for inflation, there is still a substantial shift toward postmaterialism. Moreover, rising unemployment partly offsets the effect of falling inflation.