Electoral victories and defeats occur repeatedly. This is especially true in democratic political systems where key governmental roles are filled through periodic elections. The attitude of defeated candidates toward the regime norms directly affects the system stability, because disaffected by defeat, these candidates may withdraw their support for the regime and may also translate such disaffection into radical political action. Despite the potential threat the defeated electoral candidates can pose to democratic stability, their political attitudes have rarely been investigated systematically in political science literature. Do defeated candidates exhibit an attitude toward the democratic rules and norms governing electoral competition significantly different from that of winning candidates? Do defeated candidates become politically less active after the election than they were before? Under what conditions do they become disaffected with the democratic rules and norms? This paper attempts, first, to compare the political attitudes of both winning and losing candidates, and second, to explore the variables which might account for differences in such attitudes.

The data used in this paper are derived from a larger study of political recruitment in Oregon. Structured interviews were conducted with both winning and losing candidates who ran for the Oregon House of Representatives in the 1966 election. The samples were interviewed at three different times: before and after the primary, and after the general election. This research strategy permits us to analyze the effect of the outcome of the election on the attitudes of the candidates. Data were collected on the candidates' degree of support for the democratic rules of competition, their expected changes in political activity as a result of participation in the election, their career ambitions, and the perceived reward-cost, i.e., the material and psychological gains or losses which accrue to the candidates as a direct result of their participation in the election.

In this article, I introduce a method that uses large-scale event data and latent factor network models to provide a new comparative measure of cooperation and conflict in public relationships among politicians, nonpartisan political actors, and societal actors. The approach has a number of advantages over existing techniques: It captures public relationships in a multitude of venues on a continuous basis, incorporates both partisan and nonpartisan actors, allows quantifying the relationship between any pair of actors, reflects that communication is not unidirectional but rather a back and forth, and can be applied to a large number of countries over time. I apply the method to 13 Western European countries from 2001 to 2014 and demonstrate that party relationships are determined by coalition status as well as policy differences. The measure is publicly available and can be incorporated into standard research designs.

We present the first field experiment on how organized interest groups’ television ads affect issue opinions. We randomized 31,404 voters to three weeks of interest group ads about either immigration or transgender nondiscrimination. We then randomly assigned voters to receive ostensibly unrelated surveys either while the ads aired, one day after they stopped, or three days afterwards. Voters recalled the ads, but three ads had a minimal influence on public opinion, whereas a fourth’s effects decayed within one day. However, voters remembered a fact from one ad. Our results suggest issue ads can affect public opinion but that not every ad persuades and that persuasive effects decay. Despite the vast sums spent on television ads, our results are the first field experiment on their persuasive power on issues, shedding light on the mechanisms underpinning—and limits on—both televised persuasion and interest group influence.

The resurgence of industrial policymaking—particularly for emerging low-carbon industries—challenges social science theories that expect such interventions from centralized states or suggest that different kinds of states specialize in various forms of innovation policy. Interventionist forms of industrial policy have made a comeback among liberal economies. Coordinated economies now make use of market-driven strategies. This paper argues that the new generation of industrial strategies is shaped by the industrial development challenges that policymakers face at the sectoral level. It proposes a new theoretical framework that distinguishes between the policy orientation (targeted or open-ended) and the central agents driving financial and technological decision-making (governments or firms). We show that the choice of strategy is shaped by the level of uncertainty and the position of the domestic industry in global supply chains, that is, whether global supply chains are emerging or mature and whether the domestic industry is an entrant or incumbent.

How do political conditions influence whether public support develops for a new policy? Specifically, does the presence of partisan polarization and a viable threat to a policy’s continuation prevent the emergence of such support? We propose a theoretical framework that considers how policy feedback may be affected by the presence or absence of both policy threat and polarization. We argue that a threat is likely to increase policy salience and trigger loss aversion, expanding policy feedback even amid strong partisanship. We examine the threat to the Affordable Care Act after Republicans won control of Congress and the White House and stood poised to act on their long promise to repeal the law. Five waves of panel data permit analysis of how individuals’ responses to the law changed over time, affecting their support for it as well as their voting calculations. The results suggest that policy threat heightens the effect of policy feedback for some populations while depressing it for others, in some cases mitigating partisan polarization, and overall boosting program support.

We use a formal theoretical framework to explore the interplay between a government's longevity and its performance. Ministers perform well when their careers are valuable; this is so when the government's duration is expected to be long; the government's survival depends on its popularity; and, finally, that popularity depends on its ministers’ performance. The feedback loop between performance and longevity means that multiple rational-expectations equilibria can arise: Ministers work hard for a popular government, but divert efforts elsewhere if they believe the government is doomed; these alternatives are both self-fulfilling prophecies. However, the presence of (perhaps small) random events that buffet the performance and popularity of a government is sufficient to pin down a unique equilibrium. We explore the dynamics that arise: A crisis of confidence involving the rapid collapse of a government's performance is sparked when a sequence of negative shocks push the popularity of the government below a unique critical threshold.

Two models of voting are often used to explain the Nazi vote in the Weimar Republic. The first model states that the Nazis' electoral successes resulted from Protestant petty bourgeois and peasant support for fascism. The second model argues that the Nazis gained the bulk of their support from newly mobilized voters. Previous analyses of these models are plagued with serious problems due to their limited data base. This study reassesses these models with the use of an unusually complete data set for all of Germany and concludes that much of the previous work examining the Nazi vote wrongly identifies the Protestant petty bourgeoisie as the major contributor to the Nazi vote. The Nazis received important levels of support from Protestant peasants, new voters, and Catholic petty bourgeoisie.

Sidney Verba has argued that the state in modern societies may function as a religion. He is certainly not the only one to adopt such a point of view. But his work is especially notable in that he has strengthened the argument by welding together a theoretical perspective that seems to be derived from structural-functional analysis and a good deal of varied and interesting, though not crystal-clear data. Verba's discussion of the functions of the state is most explicit in his article on the Kennedy assassination—in which he seeks to interpret the many studies of public reaction to the President's death. In this article, appropriately titled “The Kennedy Assassination and the Nature of Political Commitment,” Verba attempts to go to essentials. He speaks of the deeper levels of political involvement made evident by the psychological crisis of the assassination. Repeatedly he employs the term “primordial” to describe the character of the underlying political commitment to the nation-state and its symbols in modern societies—the foremost of these symbols in America being the President. But let Verba speak for himself since he is explicit about these matters: first, on the nature of public reactions and the larger meaning of those reactions:

The Kennedy assassination … illustrates the close meshing of the sacred and the secular in the top institutions of a political system. In a society in which the formal ideology is officially secular … the close linkage of religious institutions to the events of the crisis weekend is particularly striking … a larger proportion of the American population responded to the assassination with prayer or attendance at special church services and religious ceremony and imagery abounded in the events of the weekend.

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.

Whether international crises end in conflict frequently depends on the information that leaders possess. To better explain how leaders acquire information, I develop and test an informational theory of bureaucracies during crises. Time-constrained leaders delegate information collection to advisers who lead bureaucracies. A division of labor between bureaucracies breeds comparative specialization among advisers. Some emphasize information on adversaries’ political attributes, which are harder to assess; others stress military attributes, which are easier to assess. Bureaucratic role thus affects the content and uncertainty that advisers provide. I use automated and qualitative coding to measure adviser input in 5,400 texts from US Cold War crises. As hypothesized, advisers’ positions affect the information and uncertainty they convey but not the policies they promote as canonical theories suggest. For individuals advising leaders during crises, what you know depends on where you sit. Consequently, the information leaders possess hinges on which bureaucracies have their attention.

The prevailing view of both the U.S. Supreme Court and liberal theory in America is that liberal principles are neither essentially religious nor essentially secular, but somehow foundationally neutral, or in the words of the Court neutral between “religion and nonreligion.” This essay challenges the cogency of this view through a comparative examination of two strong defenders of religious freedom from the American revolutionary era: Thomas Jefferson and Isaac Backus. Jefferson, the Enlightenment rationalist, and Backus, the Calvinist-Baptist, may initially seem tailor-made for this foundational neutrality, but closer examination reveals that religious freedom for them was not only an extension of their radically opposed views on religion but also an instrument for the promotion of those views throughout society. The ambiguity of America's founding principles is best understood, not through the notion of neutrality, but as the product of a yet unsettled struggle between devout religion and secular Enlightenment.

In this essay I argue that Hegel's concept of monarchy, far from being more evidence of his supposed abstract rationalism or deference to Prussia, is the most complete modern account of the necessary political conditions of a rational state. Hegel believed that the peculiar historical development of European monarchy made the rational state politically possible. Who rules is the fundamental political problem. Some person or persons must have the final power of decision, even in constitutional and parliamentary regimes, and thus stamp the regime with their own particular views. Hegel believed that only the constitutional monarch of a modern state, bom to sovereignty regardless of his personal abilities or constituencies, limited by harsh experience and public sentiments to legitimization of public acts, could depoliticize this final power of decision. This alone would allow unimpeded public administration according to rational legal standards. Marxist and technocratic dreams of rational administration will remain mere dreams as long as the dreamers offer no alternative solution to the fundamental political problem.

Socialist thought has long contained two potentially contradictory doctrines concerning the control or management of productive enterprises under a socialist régime. One of these is the idea of workers' control: the concept that under socialism workers will no longer be merely passive victims of the productive process, but, direct participants in the control of productive enterprises. The other is the idea of central control on behalf of the entire community: the concept that socialism will replace “the anarchy of production” under capitalism with a central determination of the appropriate goals of economic activity. That there is possibiUty of conflict between these two objectives is self-evident. The decentralization of economic administration implied by workers' control may easily contradict the desire for centralization of certain kinds of economic decisions. Conceivably, one goal or the other might have to be abandoned, or at least seriously modified.

Today, for the first time in any major industrial nation, a socialist party pledged to the maintenance of democratic institutions is undertaking the task of building socialism. The achievements of the British Labor party may well determine the future goals and techniques of democratic socialists elsewhere. It is not inconceivable that success or failure of the British experiment will determine the path that Western Europe will follow. It is noteworthy, then, that during the last decade the Labor party has abandoned the goal of workers' control; in its current program of nationalization, it is making no provision for direct control of production by workers. This modification of socialist objectives, representing a swing away from the syndicalist content of socialist thinking in the direction of Fabian ideas, was achieved only after the entire socialist movement and the Labor party itself underwent the test of a protracted internal struggle, both of an intellectual and of a practical kind.

When Kant first used the term “culture,” he referred to the human capacity to will universal moral laws. Multiculturalists object to the denial of “difference” implicit in Kantian as well as all other Enlightenment forms of universalism. Their objection stems from their more particularistic understanding of culture, which for the most part everyone shares today. Plato is frequently said to be the fount of (universal) natural law theory; yet a medieval Muslim philosopher, Alfarabi, presents a Plato who denies moral universalism but acknowledges the possibility of some form of universalism, at least in the realm of knowledge. Alfarabi's Plato thereby provides a corrective for both extreme contemporary particularism and extreme Kantian universalism.

Asylum for political refugees is an ancient practice, privilege and problem. It has shown a remarkable capacity for institutional survival, albeit with accommodations, in the vicissitudes of changing international relations. I propose here to review its recent performance and consider its continued utility in the contemporary world.

I. MASS INFLUX OF FUGITIVES

Cyrus, after the conquest of Sardes, had placed Pactyas, a native, in a position of trust in the occupied city; but no sooner was Cyrus gone than Pactyas organized a revolt against the new regime. When he learned that Cyrus's troops were on the march to quell the insurrection, he fled in terror to Cyme. Cyrus's military governor then demanded the rebel's surrender, on penalty of that city's destruction. The oracle of the Branchidae, where the Cymeans sought to learn the will of the gods, advised extradition, and the city made ready to abide by the decision. One Aristodicus, however, a citizen of distinction, balked, successfully; a second mission was dispatched to seek out the oracle. The oracle stood pat. Thereupon Aristodicus, who was one of the envoys, circled the temple, removing all birds' nests within reach. The oracle's voice interceded for the birds, bidding Aristodicus to state his case. How then, he said, are you in haste to protect supplicants whilst you command the Cymeans to give one up? Said the voice: Verily, I did so order the Cymeans that they may perish the sooner for their impiety nor ever return to seek my oracle's counsel on the surrender of supplicants.