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.

There is wide recognition that in the non-Western world profound social and cultural changes are taking place as traditional societies have been exposed to the ideas and the ways of the West. There is also general agreement that new political patterns and relationships are evolving in these countries. However, with respect to most non-Western countries, it remains difficult to foresee whether the consequences of social change are to be stable, viable political practices or endemic instabilities in government. In many cases, it is still an open question whether the future will bring them a liberal democratic form of politics or some type of authoritarian rule such as communism.

This state of affairs can be a challenge to the comparative method of political analysis. This is particularly so because most of the non-Western political systems have many features in common. They are generally the product of a traditional past in which the administration of government was the preserve of a select few. Many show the influence of a previous colonial rule, some even that of the same country. More important, they are often quite self-conscious about the problem of moving from a definite past to an idealized future.

Career mobility is conceptualized in terms of the amount and bias of organizational, occupational, vertical and geographical movement. An operational measure is offered for the amount of mobility (not the bias) which permits comparative generalizations to be made about officials based on simple sampling procedures. For illustrative purposes, the amount of organizational mobility is measured for two samples of federal officials: David T. Stanley's sample (N = 557) of higher civil servants and a sample (N = 300) of foreign affairs officials. Several dichotomous background variables are included for both samples of officials including: age, rank, and education. Varying background characteristics is found to make only a small mobility difference for higher civil servants and a much greater difference for foreign affairs officials. Several speculations are offered to explain the political significance of the empirical findings, and a comparative typology of career mobility is developed.

How should policy innovations undertaken by states be modeled? Frances Stokes Berry and William D. Berry presented an event history analysis of the determinants of lottery adoptions by state governments in the June 1990 issue of this Review. Howard Front argues that the way Berry and Berry tested for interaction among variables is invalid on the grounds that what they take to be empirical results are only artifacts of the model specification. In response, the Berrys elaborate their original model and add alternative specifications.

The House Committee on Ways and Means, according to its members, is assigned the responsibility of resolving some of the most partisan issues coming before Congress: questions of taxation, social welfare legislation, foreign trade policy, and management of a national debt which exceeds $300 billion. Yet members of the Committee also contend, at the same time, that they handle most of these problems in a “responsible” way. A Republican member of Ways and Means echoed the views of his fellow Committee members when he said “it's the issues that are partisan, not the members.” A Democratic member went so far as to claim that Ways and Means is “as bipartisan a committee as you have in the House.” And a Treasury Department official who has worked closely with Ways and Means for several years believes that it is a partisan committee in the sense that you get a lot of partisan voting. But while you get a lot of party votes the members discuss the bills in a nonpartisan way. It's a very harmonious committee, the members work very well and harmoniously together. Sure there is partisanship but they discuss the issues in a nonpartisan way.

We propose a simple game-theory model of single-member plurality electoral systems, two parties with unequal resources being the players. Strategies consist of allocations of resources among the n contests, and a party's payoff is the number of contests to which it has assigned more resources than the other party. Mixed strategies exist which are asymptotically optimal as n increases. Identifying a party's proportion of total resources with its total vote proportion, we predict that the swing ratio, or marginal seat proportion per vote proportion, is 2. This compares to empirical findings which range between 2 and 4, and to the hitherto unexplained cube law, which predicts 3. We suggest that the strategic problem modeled by this game accounts for the major part of the swing ratio effect. Factors which vary from system to system, such as proportion of hard-core support attached to parties, may amplify this effect.

The application of several European Free Trade Association (EFTA) countries for membership in the Common Market (EEC) is viewed in Washington with great pleasure: the development of a United States of Europe is widely anticipated. Many observers have already calculated the combined manpower, economic resources, military power, etc. of the new union, and have pointed to the decisive advantage the United States, in coalition with this “third power,” will have over the Soviet Union. Even the fact that the EEC and EFTA, if completely merged, would have 13 members is not considered unlucky: after all, the United States itself evolved out of a union of 13. It may however, be premature to prepare a celebration for the birthday of the United States of Europe. The following theoretical excursion suggests that loading the EEC with new members may well reduce it to the level of a glorified customs union rather than forward it to a political federation. Moreover, I shall argue, political communities often unify not by increasing their membership, but in a dialectic fashion: two or more groups form; they appear to be moving in opposite directions until each is well integrated, then they are “synthesized” (not merged) in a superior union. That is, they form one encompassing union without dissolving the bonds that held together the units that composed a group before the larger unification. The earlier autonomous groups become sub-groups in one union, adjusting to the new over-riding bond without being fused into one group that knows no internal divisions.

This study offers an empirical description of the voting alignments that dominated the American Constitutional Convention as the delegates struggled to produce the final report of that historic assembly. Its conceptual roots are firmly planted in the theoretical traditions of Schattschneider on conflict and cleavage, and of Key, Burnham and Sundquist on critical realignment of the American party system. I demonstrate that dynamic processes analogous to Key's conception of “critical elections” at the macro-level of national politics can also be identified and analyzed at the micro-level of the constituent assembly. Therefore, I argue that one of the “mainsprings of American politics,” as Burnham calls the critical election phenomenon, permeates all levels of the American political system and not simply the national level of electoral mass politics. More specifically, this clear description of coalition alignment, operation and realignment in the Constitutional Convention, when informed and enlightened by the “critical realignment” model, greatly facilitates the more traditional discussion of debate, conflict and ultimate decision on the central issues before that body—representation, federalism, senatorial authority, and the nature of the executive in a republican government.

Citizens of a representative democracy are twice removed from legislation. First, they do not deliberate and vote directly on legislation. Rather they elect assemblies that enact such legislation in their stead. Second, and less commonly remarked, citizens do not vote directly for assemblies. Rather they vote for individual candidates, with the candidates receiving the most votes elected. We examine the efficiency properties of these voting systems.

We examine the effect of electoral institutions on two important features of representation that are often studied separately: policy responsiveness and the quality of legislators. Theoretically, we show that while a proportional electoral system is better than a majoritarian one at representing popular preferences in some contexts, this advantage can come at the price of undermining the selection of good politicians. To empirically assess the relevance of this trade-off, we analyze an unusually controlled electoral reform in Switzerland early in the twentieth century. To account for endogeneity, we exploit variation in the intensive margin of the reform, which introduced proportional representation, based on administrative constraints and data on voter preferences. A difference-in-difference analysis finds that higher reform intensity increases the policy congruence between legislators and the electorate and reduces legislative effort. Contemporary evidence from the European Parliament supports this conclusion.

Women in Congress are highly effective legislators. Yet, if women are more likely than men to be interrupted during committee work, they may face a gender-related impediment. We examine speech patterns during more than 24,000 congressional committee hearings from 1994 to 2018 to determine whether women Members are more likely to be interrupted than men. We find that they are. This is especially true in Senate committees—where women are about 10% more likely to be interrupted. Furthermore, in hearings that discuss women’s issues, women are more than twice as likely to be interrupted than while discussing other issues. We see a similar pattern for rapid-fire “interruption clusters,” an aggressive form of interruption. We further consider a range of moderating factors, which yields little evidence that women change their communication strategy as they gain experience in Congress. We also find suggestive evidence that interruptions are driven by mixed-gender interactions.

This article studies the consequences of strategic voting by outcome-oriented voters in elections under proportional representation (PR). I develop a model of elections under PR, in which voters choose among an arbitrary finite number of parties, and the policy outcome is determined in a postelection bargaining stage. I use a new solution concept, robust equilibrium, which greatly mitigates the well-known problem of indeterminate predictions in multicandidate competition. Applying the equilibrium concept to the model, I find that PR promotes representation of small parties in general, even when voters are strategic. However, the median voter plays a critical role in shaping policy outcomes, which reflects the majoritarian nature of parliamentary policy making rules. Thus, PR may not be incompatible with the majoritarian vision of representative democracy if voters’ main concern is policy outcomes.

Since 1972, campaign spending by House incumbents has skyrocketed, particularly in those districts with marginal support for the incumbent's party. At the same time, parties in the House have become much more cohesive in the way they vote, producing more precise and informative party brands. We argue that these two phenomena are fundamentally linked. As parties have developed more precise reputations, incumbents in these districts must spend much more to attract voters in “marginal” districts, who would be willing to vote for a candidate with the particular incumbent's legislative record, but not the average member of his party. Increasingly precise party reputations provide voters with stronger priors that incumbents are just like the rest of their party, and incumbents in marginal districts must spend more to overcome these beliefs. We demonstrate this using a simple formal model and test it empirically using campaign-spending data from 1972 to 2008.

This article presents an analysis of the strategic behavior of countries when there is imperfect verification of an arms control agreement. It provides a framework for determining whether an arms control agreement is desirable, shows which factors are needed for the agreement to be maintained in the absence of third-party enforcers, and develops propositions relating changes in verification capabilities to changes in the likelihood of cheating and the use of verification technology. These propositions yield several paradoxes of information (for example, the better the verification technology, the less often it will be employed). Since the analysis incorporates both simultaneous and sequential moves by the players, it provides new insights into other applied areas as well as game theory.

(Sartre to Camus): You blame the European proletariat because it has not publicly stigmatized the Soviets, but you also blame the European governments because they allow Spain into UNESCO; in this case I can see only one solution for you: the Galapagos Islands.

Vilfredo Pareto completed his Treatise on General Sociology in 1912, although it was not published till 1916. It is a vast work of one million words; sprawling, disorderly, and stuffed with minor masterpieces of often pointless erudition. The first three-quarters attacks the scientific status of practically all the various political and moral theories that have sought to pass themselves off as scientifically grounded and it is worth noting that even the most dedicated critics of Pareto have acknowledged the effectiveness of his onslaught. Among the positive contributions of the Treatise, five propositions stand out. First, Pareto affirms that social phenomena are not “caused” by any single factor but that all elements in society influence one another reciprocally. Secondly, social phenomena recur in cycles. Thirdly, the bulk of human behavior is not “logical” but only “logicalized”, or, as we should say today, not rational but merely rationalized. Fourthly, irrespective of constitutional forms, every society consists of the minority elite governing (leading?) the majority non-elite. Fifthly, parliamentary democracy, or to speak more accurately, “pluto-democracy”, is no exception: it comprises a governing elite of highly skilled operators who contrive to remain in power by persuasion and manipulation of the masses. Principally it is for the last three contentions that Pareto is today remembered, or, as I shall show, misremembered, as a “proto-fascist”.

It is axiomatic that some supreme courts are more influential than others. A dictum by one judge may carry more weight than a decision by another. Anyone who has studied the opinions of our highest courts is constantly assigning values to them, and the combination of these impressions may determine the relative standing of these tribunals for that individual. That this process of appreciation or depreciation is usually unconscious, and frequently irrational, does not make the prestige which results from it any less real or less potent a factor.

For incumbents to be accountable for their issue stances, voters must sanction incumbents whose positions are “out of step” with their own. We test the electoral accountability of British legislators for their stance on Brexit. We find that there is very limited issue accountability. Individuals who disagreed with their representative’s stance on Brexit were 3 percentage points less likely to vote for them. The aggregate consequences of these individual effects are limited. A one-standard-deviation increase in the proportion of constituents agreeing with their incumbent’s Brexit stance is associated with an increase of 0.53 percentage points in incumbent vote share. These effects are one and a half times larger when the main challenger has a different Brexit stance to the incumbent. A follow-up survey of Members of Parliament (MPs) shows that MPs’ estimates of the effects of congruence are similar in magnitude. Our findings suggest that issue accountability is conditional in nature and limited in magnitude even for an issue such as Brexit, which should be maximally amenable to such effects.

Democratic governments produce more policies than they can effectively implement. Yet, this gap between the number of policies requiring implementation and the administrative capacities available to do so is not the same in all democracies but varies across countries and sectors. We argue that this variation depends on the coupling of the sectoral bureaucracies in charge of policy formulation and those in charge of policy implementation. We consider these patterns of vertical policy-process integration an important feature of bureaucratic quality. The more the policymaking level is involved in policy implementation (top-down integration) and the easier the policy-implementing level finds it to feed its concerns into policymaking (bottom-up integration), the smaller the so-called “burden-capacity gap.” We demonstrate this effect through an empirical analysis in 21 OECD countries over a period of more than 40 years in the areas of social and environmental policies.