Widespread distrust in politicians is often attributed to the way elites portray politics to citizens: the media, competing candidates, and foreign governments are largely considered responsible for portraying politicians as self-interested actors pursuing personal electoral and economic interests. This article turns to the mass level and considers the active role of citizens in disseminating such information. We build on psychological research on human cooperation, holding that people exhibit an interpersonal transmission bias in favor of information on the self-interested, antisocial behavior of others to maintain group cooperation. We posit that this transmission bias extends to politics, causing citizens to disproportionally disseminate information on self-interested politicians through interpersonal communication and, in turn, contributes to distrust in politicians and policy disapproval. We support these predictions using novel experimental studies, allowing us to observe transmission rates and opinion effects in actual communication chains. The findings have implications for understanding and accommodating political distrust.

Does the religious calendar promote or suppress political violence in Islamic societies? This study challenges the presumption that the predominant impact of the Islamic calendar is to increase violence, particularly during Ramadan. This study develops a new theory that predicts systematic suppression of violence on important Islamic holidays, those marked by public days off for dedicated celebration. We argue that militant actors anticipate societal disapproval of violence, predictably inducing restraint on these days. We assess our theory using innovative parallel analysis of multiple datasets and qualitative evidence from Islamic insurgencies in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan from 2004 to 2014. Consistent with our theory, we find that important Islamic holidays witness systematic declines in violence—as much as 41%—and provide evidence that anticipation of societal disapproval is producing these results. Significantly, we find no systematic evidence for surges of violence associated with any Islamic holiday, including Ramadan.

Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward (1971, 1977) have argued that mass insurgency in the United States, occurring especially between 1964 and 1969, produced a series of responses by government, one of the most significant being massive expansion of welfare rolls. Using data on which they base their claim, this study examines the hypothesis that there is a positive association between social disorders and welfare caseload increases. The conclusion is that associations specified by Piven and Cloward are not supported by the data and a plausible rival hypothesis is offered to explain the massive increases in welfare caseloads.

John Rawls has recently argued that political philosophy can significantly contribute to making democratic societies stable. He seeks moral principles that can ground what he calls an overlapping consensus and argues that his well-known principles of justice can serve in this capacity. I criticize both Rawls's general claims about the role of political philosophy and his particular defense of the principles of justice. Both arguments commit Rawls to specific empirical claims about existing liberal societies that are highly questionable. In particular, the Kantian moral views that Rawls believes to be central to liberal culture are controverted by extensive empirical research on the actual beliefs of liberal citizens. Despite the problems with Rawls's arguments, I suggest that a rather different overlapping consensus appears to contribute to stable democracies. This centers on support of the political system rather than more substantive moral principles.

I draw upon state-building and legislative literatures to investigate how constituency-based representative institutions in the Progressive Era nationalized innovative public policies, thereby expanding the authority of the federal government as a component of the modern American state developing at that time. Using state-level referenda votes as measures of grassroots views, multivariate analysis discloses the impact of district opinion, as well as party and district economy, as major determinants of House roll call voting on landmark regulatory legislation authorizing federal intervention in market relationships, state suffrage qualifications, and life-style behaviors involving intoxicating beverages.

Many social movements face fierce resistance in the form of a countermovement. Therefore, when deciding to become politically active, a movement supporter has to consider both her own movement’s activity and that of the opponent. This paper studies the decision of a movement supporter to attend a protest when faced with a counterprotest. We implement two field experiments among supporters of a right- and left-leaning movement ahead of two protest–counterprotest interactions in Germany. Supporters were exposed to low or high official estimates about their own and the opposing group’s turnout. We find that the size of the opposing group has no effect on supporters’ protest intentions. However, as the own protest gets larger, supporters of the right-leaning movement become less while supporters of the left-leaning movement become more willing to protest. We argue that the difference is best explained by stronger social motives on the political left.

The purpose of this article is to investigate distributions of influence in a legislative body, to spell out the resulting hypotheses, to introduce a method for estimating the degree of interaction between legislators, and to demonstrate the relevance of specific indicators to the study of legislative behavior. The methodological task falls somewhere between the small group laboratory situation and the more complex arena of community decision-making. Intense observation, control, and precision are sacrificed in favor of a real and vital situation. The analysis of a relatively self-sufficient political entity is lost in favor of maintaining some of the advantages of laboratory research. The universe selected for this study consists of fifty people who must directly or indirectly, but not remotely, rely upon each other in order to satisfy their official purposes.

This study examines influence relations between the United States and countries that are dependent upon their foreign trade with it. The hypotheses are concerned with political compliance expected of these dependencies as a consequence of their economic vulnerabilities to pressure from the U.S. Informed by trade-related variables and U.N. General Assembly voting behavior of the mid-1960s, the hypotheses find some support. The evidence shows that its dependencies, especially those in the western hemisphere, agree with the U.S. in General Assembly roll calls to a greater degree than do other countries. This compliant behavior, however, is confined to votes that pit the United States against the Soviet Union; when the superpowers are in partial or complete agreement, U.S. dependencies are no more in accord with the U.S. than are other countries. Throughout the study, dependencies are proposed to be vulnerable along four dimensions of their economic circumstances. Interestingly, the respective effects of these four factors are not as hypothesized. Their relative weights in contributing to compliance are largely as expected, but the nature of their partial associations is not. Finally, it happens that most of the dependencies turn out to be Latin American and Caribbean countries, a fact that complicates the interpretation of the statistical results.

Politics is both game and warfare: game when it seeks to keep uncertain the outcome of a competition and to keep the opponent not only alive but eager to play; warfare when it seeks to destroy or permanently weaken the enemy. Depending upon the issues over which it is fought, politics will be more or less game, more or less warfare. A given society may keep its politics in a state of game unless certain issues, social status or religious freedom for example, be at stake. Conversely, a society may be unable to remove its politics from a state of warfare unless some game-like issues, such as the election of a leader, be introduced.

In order to measure the power of specific political issues to modify the game-warfare content of a political system, we should first be able to determine the tendency of that system when it operates in a political near-vacuum. In the absence of publicly known issues over which to divide themselves, we should ask, would members of a given group or society tend to fight or to play, assuming that they had only this choice?

A state of total political vacuum is, of course, no more than an ideal which cannot and need not be obtained empirically. We cannot prevent subjects from smuggling into a laboratory experiment their personal political concerns, for example the perception of a hierarchy of status and authority within which they will react. But if we cannot control for private political issues, we can, at least, ensure that they do not become public, that they not be shared.

The Chicago School of Political Science, which emerged at the University of Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s, is widely known for its reconception of the study of politics as a scientific endeavor on the model of the natural sciences. Less attention has been devoted to the genesis of the school itself. In this article, we examine the scientific vision, faculty, curriculum, and supporting institutions of the Chicago School. The creation of the Chicago School, we find, required the construction of a faculty committed to its vision of the science of politics, the muster of resources to support efforts in research and education, and the formation of curriculum to educate students in its precepts and methods. Its success as an intellectual endeavor, we argue, depended not only on the articulation of the intellectual goals but also, crucially, on the confluence of disciplinary receptiveness, institutional opportunity, and entrepreneurial talent in support of a science of politics.

Recently there has been a movement to embrace coalition politics both as an historically fundamental mode of action and as ethically desirable. Yet, as Bernice Johnson Reagon illustrates, coalition politics presents many profound difficulties, both in terms of its possible directions and the type of self capable of engaging in such activity. Laclau and Mouffe, embracing an open-ended development of equality and liberty, expand and clarify the possibilities that a radically democratic liberalism has available for envisioning and sustaining coalition politics. Yet, they illustrate the limits of such a project insofar as they are unable to address adequately the problems posed by Reagon. I argue that only by supplementing (and transfiguring) equality and liberty with an ethic of receptive generosity, suggested by an idiosyncratic reading of Nietzsche's gift-giving virtue, would coalition politics likely be sustainable and ethically desirable. The gift-giving virtue allows us to formulate a vision of the possible grandness of plurality that is ethically more compelling than the logics of identity and difference offered by Laclau and Mouffe.

Concern over partisan resentment and hostility has increased across Western democracies. Despite growing attention to affective polarization, existing research fails to ask whether who serves in office affects mass-level interparty hostility. Drawing on scholarship on women’s behavior as elected representatives and citizens’ beliefs about women politicians, we posit the women MPs affective bonus hypothesis: all else being equal, partisans display warmer affect toward out-parties with higher proportions of women MPs. We evaluate this claim with an original dataset on women’s presence in 125 political parties in 20 Western democracies from 1996 to 2017 combined with survey data on partisans’ affective ratings of political opponents. We show that women’s representation is associated with lower levels of partisan hostility and that both men and women partisans react positively to out-party women MPs. Increasing women’s parliamentary presence could thus mitigate cross-party hostility.

Most analyses of the 1974 congressional elections have failed to find significant effects for either Watergate or personal financial conditions, despite the prominence of both of these issues in the campaign. An alternative thesis argues that the effect was indirect, through the selection of better-than-usual Democratic candidates and weaker Republican contestants for House seats. Reanalyzing campaign finance data, we challenge this thesis and then move on to a different type of analysis from that which traditionally has been done in retrospective voting studies. With the use of the 1972-1974 panel of the Center for Political Studies, we examine separately the voting behavior of what V. O. Key, Jr. called “standpatters” and “switchers.” The former are motivated primarily by party identification, with small Watergate effects. Our probit analylsis for switchers, on the other hand, finds much weaker party identification effects, but, interestingly, much more pronounced Watergate and economic impacts. Furthermore, an analysis of the sample compared to the population of districts in 1974 suggests that a more representative sample would lead to even more pronounced impacts for Watergate and the economy than even we have found.

In a recent article (this Review, 63 [June, 1969]), Bruce Russett attempts to answer the title question by using two-variable regression analysis to estimate the “trade-off” relationships between the defense spending proportion of Gross National Product (GNP) and the other nondefense expenditure proportions of GNP for the 1939–68 period. This paper contends that Russett's method of analysis is misleading because it does not permit the detection of possible subperiod shifts in the trade-off relationships. The results of a multiple regression, dummy variable analysis indicate that significant shifts in both the sign and the numerical values of the trade-off relationships occurred between the three war periods and the peacetime period. Two attempts to identify the reasons for the shifts produced mixed results, but our tentative conclusion is that the shifts are related to subperiod differences in the unemployment rate and the methods of financing defense expenditures.

By-elections in parliamentary democracies are remarkable for the almost invariable loss of support experienced by governments relative to the preceding general election. There has been, however, surprisingly little research into this phenomenon. Using Britain as a test case, this article goes some way towards filling this gap. It identifies and tests three political explanations of governments' by-election vote losses, which it labels the turnout, referendum and personal vote models. No simple conclusion emerges, since different results are obtained depending on whether the models are treated as separate entities or their interplay is taken into account by integrating them into a single causal model. This latter strategy is argued to involve a superior conceptualization of the processes at work in bringing about governments' midterm vote losses.

This comprehensive volume analyzing Western European government coalitions from 1945 until 1999 is an impressive and meticulously researched work. Using a uniform, cross-national collection of data the authors examine both the governing institutions and the patterns of conflict resolution in the 13 Western European democracies that have experienced coalition government during the post-World War two years.