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.

Crises and disasters give voters an opportunity to observe the incumbent’s response and reward or punish them for successes and failures. Yet, even when voters perceive events similarly, they tend to attribute responsibility selectively, disproportionately crediting their party for positive developments and blaming opponents for negative developments. We examine selective attribution during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, reporting three key findings. First, selective attribution rapidly emerged during the first weeks of the pandemic, a time in which Democrats and Republicans were otherwise updating their perceptions and behavior in parallel. Second, selective attribution is caused by individual-level changes in perceptions of the pandemic. Third, existing research has been too quick to explain selective attribution in terms of partisan-motivated reasoning. We find stronger evidence for an explanation rooted in beliefs about presidential competence. This recasts selective attribution’s implications for democratic accountability.

I saiah Berlin is remembered for his positive/negative liberty distinction and his value pluralism, but he was also an active participant in the debate over the nature of political inquiry. This essay argues that his neglected contribution to this debate is central to his thought and a valuable resource in today's debate over political science's methods and ends. I first show how Berlin understood the relationship of empirical science to humanistic study. I then demonstrate that his conceptions of political judgment and the “sense of reality” were intended as alternatives to the scientific pursuit of political knowledge. Finally, I argue that his Churchill and Weizmann essays present exemplars of the moral excellence Berlin considered necessary to ennoble liberal society and the political understanding indispensable to comprehensive political inquiry. I conclude by noting how Berlin's critique of scientific political inquiry informs his liberalism and his own methods of political inquiry.

Over the last few decades political scientists have shown an understandable interest in material brought into relief by neighboring disciplines. A concern with enriching the field of political science by drawing on sociological, economic, and psychological data has led to efforts to accommodate findings derived from study in areas in which men are subjected to non-political pressures—the constraints of society, the economy, and ultimately their own physical and psychological nature. As the conventional academic boundaries are crossed, knowledge of distinctively political matters, it has been hoped, will become richer as well as more precise. This essay seeks to clarify the promise and limits of two non-political approaches to an understanding of politics, namely those which are represented by two types of psychology, and to take account of their bearings on normative political thought.

Traditionally, normative political thought has been concerned with the analysis and understanding of the ends of political action: it has been an attempt to present and elucidate them. Setting specific points of view in a larger context, it has tended to be discursive and Utopian, speculatively enlarging the realm of public possibilities and common choices. More recently, it has been concerned with presenting models designed to assimilate empirically validated propositions about political behavior. To these concerns, various forms of non-political thought have always made their distinctive contributions.

Students of American politics are told that our political system is fundamentally a representative democracy. Concepts of representaion, since Burke, have commonly employed his distinction between action taken in response to instructions from constituents and action based on an independent appraisal of the national interest. A very recent analysis has offered a refinement of this, by distinguishing three types: “delegate,” “trustee” and “politico.” Theory and history alike tell us, however, that a representative does not invariably act in only one of these roles. There have been a number of empirical studies of representatives, few of which concentrate on specific policy fields; and studies also of the play of interests in the enactment of specific legislation, but without a systematic account of the legislative committee members involved, acting in their representative capacities as they saw them. How then can we tell when to expect a representative to view his role in one way rather than another? The aim of this article is to shed a little light on some aspects of this broad question by means of a case study.

The subjects of the study were the members of the House Agriculture Committee and their action on the omnibus farm legislation (H. R. 12954 and S. 4071) in 1958 (85th Congress, second session). Most of the data were obtained from interviews with thirty of the thirty-four Committee members but, in addition, the specific stands of members in subcommittees, the full committee, and on the House floor were traced, through the printed hearings and the Congressional Record of floor debates. Finally, other interested and knowledgeable people were interviewed, newspaper accounts were studied, and the characteristics of constituencies were examined.

In the public life of modern states, political and economic motives of action are so closely interwoven that the student of politics rarely encounters a situation or institution in which he can trace and study purely political principles. Indeed, the struggle for political power and for recognized authority, the effort to give the stamp of public sanction to this or that policy, is always the focus of public life; but the action of the participants in the political drama is determined largely by non-political motives. We have to go back to the Athenean republic or to the Whig rule in eighteenth century England to see the political factor in its clearest and most detached manifestations. It is there that we see a society highly capable and cultivated, concentrating all its attention upon that dramatic struggle for power, that attempt to gain leadership over other men by ascendancy in counsel, which form the true essence of politics. Among modern nations, with their democratic organization, with vast material interests clamoring for attention, purely political considerations are apt to be overshadowed by those of economic and social import, although it always remains interesting to compare and measure nations with regard to their ability to express and deal with the principles of their life in the forms and activities of political counsel.

In The Responsible Electorate, V. O. Key urged upon us “the perverse and unorthodox argument … that voters are not fools.” He challenged the notion that the voting act is the deterministic resultant of psychological and sociological vectors. He believed that the evidence supported the view of the voter as a reasonably rational fellow. The present article offers a corollary to Key's “unorthodox argument.” It suggests that certain sociological determinants, secifically group norms regarding party identification, may, upon examination, prove to be rational guides to action. For the voter who is a reasonably rational fellow, it will be argued, these group norms may seem rather sensible.

Before proceeding to the analysis of data, some discussion of the notion of rationality seems in order. The usage subscribed to in the present analysis derives from contemporary game theory. Put most simply, being rational in a decision situation consists in examining the alternatives with which one is confronted, estimating and evaluating the likely consequences of each, and selecting that alternative which yields the most attractive set of expectations. Formally, this process entails making calculations of the following type as a basis for the decision:

where:

E(Vai) = expected value of alternative i.

P(oj∣ai) = probability of outcome j given that V(oi) = value of outcome j to the decision maker.

Using the formation of a lesbian and gay electoral constituency as a case, this article demonstrates how activists and party elites contest and construct collective identities and groups. Activist–party interactions produce identity-building feedback that recognizes some groups and identities and rejects others, creating conditions for people to see themselves as partisans. I call this process “constitutive group mobilization.” I find that, when party actors affirmed civil rights and libertarian constructions of lesbian and gay people and politics, mobilization was relatively bipartisan. Republicans’ emerging alliance with the Christian Right, however, brought activists to form the National Association of Lesbian and Gay Democratic Clubs, crystallizing civil rights as the dominant linkage to partisanship. These developments reveal how groups and identities form endogenously to parties rather than entering the party system as preformed entities with fixed interests and partisanship. Thus, the lesbian and gay case provides insights about group and identity formation previously overlooked in party and LGBT politics scholarship.

Although contemporary Americans take it for granted that a “constitution” is a written document, written constitutions were almost unprecedented at America's founding. James Wilson, one of the most significant yet overlooked of America's founders, offers a comprehensive theory of America's written constitution. Wilson argues that the written-ness of the U.S. Constitution serves two essential functions. As an initial matter, it memorializes the primacy of liberty by announcing that the authority of government derives only from a free people. Perhaps more importantly, however, the written constitution uplifts and refines the character of its citizens, and thus helps to constitute a people. A review of Wilson's writings and speeches reveals how, even in a rights-centric political order, the written constitution helps to cultivate moderate and civic-minded citizens without diminishing the fundamental importance of individual rights.

The literature discussing the responses of lower court judges to decisions of the United States Supreme Court is limited, and the few comparative analyses of state and federal judicial behavior have tended to be speculative rather than empirical. It has been suggested that a controversial Supreme Court decision is likely to be supported more strongly by federal judges than by state judges, that state courts will probably construe a Supreme Court mandate more narrowly than will federal courts, and that federal courts can be expected to move in a direction hinted at by the Court more aggressively than state courts. Since all federal judges are appointed for life, it is only logical that they should be more independent of local pressures than state judges, many of whom are elected, or appointed for limited periods. The fact that state and federal judges owe their appointments to different levels of the political party hierarchy, and the historical fact that federal judges are less likely to seek future political office than are state judges, suggest a similar conclusion. Finally, the very fact of being a federal judge may produce a sense of identification with the Supreme Court which state judges would not share.

This paper is concerned with the behavior of members of a Congressional committee in their role as overseers of an independent regulatory commission. Congressional committees seem periodically to become aware of the presence of the regulatory agencies and after a more or less spectacular examination of one or another of them, allow them to slip back to an undisturbed and unnoticed routine. Their status as “independent” agencies leaves to Congress the formal responsibility both for checking on the fulfillment of their legislative mandates and for preserving them from domination by their clientele and the President. Too little notice has been taken, however, of the nature of the control of these regulatory agencies emanating from Congress.

This study results from an examination of the House Education and Labor Committee as it reviewed the performance of the National Labor Relations Board in 1953. My sources are the public hearings of the Committee in the 83d Congress and interviews with Committee members over a two-year period thereafter.

Comparison between the methods prevailing in science and in politics began as early as the presidential campaign of 1872. Already there was a distinctly recognized scientific world which was demanding recognition in colleges and universities. The terms scientific spirit and scientific method were becoming clearly defined. The men who were at the time responsible for the conduct of public affairs were in a better position to appreciate the change involved than any after generation can be. To those abreast with the times, Darwin's Origin of Species came as a great revelation. They themselves actually experienced the transition from dogmatism and authority to experiment and demonstration. For the first time in history men had planted their feet firmly upon the solid earth; and they refused to be moved. Scientific devotees became informally pledged to each other to use their utmost endeavor to know all that man may know in the realm of nature, regardless of any moral, religious or extraneous influence of any sort. In this limited field they made truth, or actuality, their single goal. All liars, all blunderers, and all who had a disposition to believe a false report, disappeared from the ranks of the promoters of science.

Understanding of the phenomenon of political protest has been inhibited by the view that protest is fundamentally extraordinary or unconventional in character and that those who use it do so because they lack the resources to employ more conventional means of political expression. This article challenges this unqualified view by examining survey data based on black and white samples from the city of Milwaukee which relate to racial attitudes toward protest, the social characteristics of protest participants, and to the uses and organization of protest in the two racial communities. The analysis reveals widespread support for protest in the black community in contrast to the general antipathy found among whites. Both black and white protesters are found to be socioeconomically better-off than nonprotesters in their respective racial communities, but a variety of indicators suggest that black protesters are more integrated and typical members of their community than white protesters are of theirs. Data on the uses and organization of protest show that it has become an institutionalized feature of the black pursuit of urban politics in Milwaukee in contrast to its generally ad hoc and less frequent role for whites.

We may conclude from all this that protest represents a widely accepted, integral part of black politics in the city, while for whites protest is indeed unconventional, a violation of dominant social norms. This conclusion is used as a basis for speculating on the relationship of protest participation to the possession of social resources and on the capacity of social resources to offset the costs incurred in the form of social disapproval for violating white norms against protest behavior.

The key hypotheses which find support in this study of the determinants of variations among the provinces of China in the provision of health and education services are: (1) that interprovincial variations in the provision of educational and health services can be explained largely by economic and ecological factors; (2) that specific levels of education and various types of medical services are responsive in different ways to changes in particular variables. For instance, the survival of cooperative health programs in the 1970s is much more sensitive to alterations in agricultural production than is the urban hospital system, which is much more dependent upon urban economic growth. This refines Dye's findings and makes them more applicable to Third World systems. (3) Central policy choices are therefore important because choices relating to investment strategy and program structure ultimately determine the relationship between the economy and the programs.

Since 1954, the Committee on Comparative Politics has provided leadership in the comparative field, and one of its central objectives has been to construct a theory of political development. The books in the series that were published in the 1960s lacked rigorous design, although they did provide data and low-level generalizations which could be used in the theory-building task. This essay focuses primarily on Crises and Sequences in Political Development, which is authored solely by Committee members and reports on the results of their theoretical work thus far. The Committee takes the “intuitive empirical generalization” approach to theory development—in contrast with systematic empirical generalization and the analytic-deductive procedure. It is unlikely, however, that the Committee's approach will lead to the formulation of a coherent set of interrelated propositions within which empirical phenomena can be explained. But the Committee's work is not atypical of the theoretical literature in political science, which reflects the reward structure of the discipline. The building of powerful theories will be facilitated when emphasis is placed on the development of clearly falsifiable propositions rather than on the development of loose conceptual frameworks.

In the last decade, more and more political scientists have speculated on the possible applications of mathematical analysis to political phenomena. It is the position of this paper that such discussion, when in the abstract, serves little purpose, for the question of whether or not quantitative techniques can fruitfully be so applied is essentially an empirical one and can only be resolved by experiment. Yet even a specifically experimental approach becomes challengeable if it can be shown to misunderstand and hence misemploy otherwise sound techniques. The claim to have solved problems whose mathematical features have not, in fact, been comprehended seems especially harmful in a field where the application of mathematics is as yet in its infancy, and this not only because minor impurities at the base of a growing framework may assume major proportions at its apex, but because exposure of error may breed unjustified disenchantment or give solace to those who prefer a casual, imprecise impressionism in the social sciences.

What does the furor over the “politicization” of Coretta Scott King's funeral reveal about contemporary black mourning practices? What does it reveal about black political thought, rhetoric, and practice? Identifying two key modes of mourning and their concomitant conceptions of democracy, this article situates the funeral within a tradition of self-consciously political responses to loss that played a significant role in abolitionism and the struggle for civil rights. Tracing the tradition's origins, and employing the speeches of Frederick Douglass as an exemplar, it considers the approach's democratic value and the consequences of its failure. Arguing that the response to the King funeral indicates that the tradition is in decline, the article locates causes of this decline in significant changes among the black population and in the complex consequences of the tradition's previous successes. It concludes by considering the decline's potentially negative impact, both for African Americans and for the broader political community.

A “general will” is a philosophical and psychological contradiction in terms; will is a conception understandable, if at all, only in terms of individual actions. The problem cannot be glossed over by attempting to reduce the general will—as did T. H. Green—to a “common ego,” or to an analogical forerunner of Kant's pure practical reason. Why, then, did Rousseau make so unviable an idea the center of his political theory, and why has that idea continued to receive serious attention?

The general will has continued to be taken seriously because it is an attempted (though not explicit) amalgam of two extremely important traditions of political thought, which may be called, roughly, ancient “cohesiveness” and modern “voluntarism.” Political thought since the 17th century has been characterized, among other things, by voluntarism, by an emphasis on the assent of individuals as the standard of political legitimacy. One certainly finds this in many of the most important thinkers between Hobbes and Kant; and even Hegel, while scarcely an “atomistic individualist” or a contractarian, explicitly argued that while “in the states of antiquity the subjective end simply coincided with the state's will,” in modern times “we make claims for private judgment, private willing, and private conscience.” When a political decision is to be made, Hegel continued, “an ‘I will’ must be pronounced by man himself.” This “I will,” he thought, must have an “appropriate objective existence” in the person of a monarch; “in a well-organized monarchy, the objective aspect belongs to law alone, and the monarch's part is merely to set to the law the subjective ‘I will’.” If even Hegel allows this voluntarist turn in his own non-contractarian theory, it goes without saying that all of social contract theory can be seen as the supreme example of voluntaristic ideas.