The following notes deal with three aspects of American political science in which the trends, we believe, will be of particular interest to members of the profession. The findings presented here have been taken from a much broader study of the discipline currently in process. Given the present spatial exigencies, we have made some arbitrary decisions in selecting the topics to be dealt with here. It may be desirable, therefore, to indicate the scope of the larger investigation and the relationship of this paper to the parent study.

We had originally planned to base our analysis of trends in American political science primarily upon the biographical and professional data contained in the 1948, 1953 and 1961 editions of the Directory of the American Political Science Association. While the data in these volumes were both useful and suggestive, we soon realized that this information alone was not sufficient for our purposes. We became increasingly convinced that any meaningful discussion of the state of the discipline required a reliable knowledge of the attitudes and views of the profession on a number of current issues and problems. Lacking this type of information, the authors of recent studies of American political science have been forced to treat their personal beliefs as reasonably representative of the membership at large; to speculate, however shrewdly, as to divisions of opinions in the discipline; or simply to ignore the topic altogether.

The working of the electoral system in Canada is investigated in this paper. The object is to identify the more important factors which go to determine the share of seats in the federal House of Commons won by a political party at a general election. Factors considered are share of vote, distribution of the vote and number of candidates in the field. The responsiveness of share of seats to variations in these factors is estimated by fitting linear equations by least squares to data for the fourteen federal general elections which took place in Canada between 1921 and 1965.

Of the many excellent studies of Congress completed by political scientists in recent years, few, if any, suggest a departure from Woodrow Wilson's apt phrase, “Congressional government is Committee government.” Despite numerous efforts to analyze legislative action in terms of roll call votes, constituency characteristics, state delegations, and/or specialized interest blocs, the committee system remains the central focal point of congressional behavior and organization. Thus, if Wilson's nineteenth century insight is still valid, then it would seem that more intensive studies of the congressional committee system—in the manner employed by Huitt and Fenno, for example—would yield many new relevant facts concerning the complexities of the legislative process.

As a case in point, the manner in which individual members of Congress are assigned to various committees has been well covered by Matthews, Clapp, and Masters. The situation in the Senate is such that each member carries at least two, and in many instances three standing committee assignments. In the House, the maximum standing committee work-load is two assignments, although most Representatives have only a single committee responsibility. However, in connection with this latter point, if one examines the standing committee assignments of all House members for the first session of every Congress from the 80th through the 89th, an interesting pattern emerges in which a gradual but steady increase in the number of double committee assignments is clearly evidenced during the past twenty years.

This essay analyzes modern and postmodern concepts of freedom and contrasts them to a Heideggerian understanding. Positive, negative, and what might be called Foucaultian or Nietzschean liberty are demonstrated to bear a common trait. In such modern and postmodern formulations, freedom is consistently identified with a form of mastery. This identification of freedom with mastery, I argue, encourages ecological abuse, supports the dangerous prerogatives of statist sovereignty, and strengthens the resilience of patriarchy. The political significance of Heidegger's alternative vision is addressed.

The credibility of election outcomes hinges on the accuracy of vote tallies. We provide causal evidence on the drivers and the downstream consequences of variation in the quality of vote tallies. Using data for the universe of polling stations in Mexico in five national elections, we document that over 40% of polling-station-level tallies display inconsistencies. Our evidence strongly suggests these inconsistencies are nonpartisan. Using data for more than 1.5 million poll workers, we show that lower educational attainment, higher workload, and higher complexity of the tally cause more inconsistencies. Finally, using an original survey of close to 80,000 poll workers together with detailed administrative data, we find that inconsistencies cause recounts and recounts lead to lower trust in electoral institutions. We discuss policy implications.

I began working on “Political Parties and Macroeconomic Policy” in 1974, delivered the paper at the August 1975 meetings of the World Econometric Society in Toronto and the APSA in San Francisco, and shortly thereafter submitted it to the Review, where it languished for more than a year before it was accepted (just barely, I sensed) after a change of editor. The article's title is somewhat misleading because the evidence pertained to the influence of government partisanship on macroeconomic outcomes.

Many political theorists dismiss Augustine as a pessimist about politics, assuming his “otherworldly” account of love precludes hope for this-worldly politics. This article challenges this pessimism by applying recent research on Augustine's “order of love” to reconstruct his implicit order of hope. Analyzing neglected sermons, letters, and treatises, I argue that Augustine encourages hope for temporal goods as long as that hope is rightly ordered and avoids the corresponding vices of presumption and despair. I then identify “civic peace” as a common object of hope that diverse citizens can share. By recovering hope as a virtue and reframing civic peace as a positive form of civic friendship, I argue that Augustine commends a hope for the commonwealth that avoids both presumption and despair. I conclude by analyzing how Augustine's vision of the commonwealth can inform contemporary political theory and practice.

One of the perennial puzzles of Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws is whether it has a coherent design. Although the dominant line of thinking is that this work has no unified structure, another believes it to have some organizing principle, even though proposals as to what it may be have failed to convince for lack of ability to account for various features of the work. I propose that The Spirit of the Laws is organized in a dialectical way, juxtaposing the antitheses of human freedom and determination. The tension between these is manifest in the first half of the work and resolved in the middle, and human freedom worked out and advanced in the second half. This article solves the long-standing question of the design of The Spirit of the Laws and reveals that the work's ultimate purpose is to champion human liberty over determination, contrary to the views of those who read the work as deterministic.

In this Review in 1993 Shelley Burtt critiqued contemporary republican theorists who urge a reinvigorated citizenry steeped in the ideal of civic virtue. Christopher Duncan finds the essence of Burtt's argument to be that such a revival is not feasible given the level of self-sacrifice required from citizens. He suggests, however, that contemporary republican theorists, like their ancient predecessor Aristotle, are not calling for altruism or the forsaking of self-interest. Rather, virtuous political participation rightly understood is, in fact, among the highest forms of self-interested behavior. Burtt replies that her earlier remarks discussed a part of the republican revival that had little to do with an Aristotelian politics of virtue, which indeed offers an attractive account of political life as a crucial element in individual self-fulfillment. But she notes also that liberalism rightly reminds us of the dangers of public mobilization and concentrated power; moreover, the political and practical obstacles to private reeducation of the citizenry remain.

It is a relatively common occurrence in American politics for state electorates to divide their partisan majorities between different parties, depending on the office contest. Observations concerning these divergent aggregate patterns are usually accompanied by speculation that the theoretical propositions on individual voting behavior, developed and tested in the context of presidential voting, hold less relevance for voting in statewide contests. Evidence presented in this paper does not bear out that view of state elections. The candidate incumbency context of state elections is introduced as an aid in predicting the partisan direction of split-ticket voting at the state level. Setting respondents in various conflict situations with respect to (1) basic party loyalties, (2) net assessments of presidential candidates, and (3) incumbent partisanship yields reasonably accurate specification of split-ticket voting patterns in gubernatorial, senatorial, and presidential contests; it also suggests at least one source of disparate partisan majorities among state electorates.

The literature on interest groups is, by and large, either heavily abstract and theoretical or highly concrete and descriptive. There are, on the one hand, several attempts to provide a theoretical framework for the study of interest groups, the major foci being either “the group basis of politics” or “mass society.” On the other hand are numerous case-studies which describe in some detail, either for a particular policy or for a particular interest group, relevant political activities which lead to inferred conclusions about the impact that such groups have on the issue or issues. What we lack, and what is needed to raise the study of interest groups to the level of empiricallybased generalization, are studies which collect data and generalize about interest groups using multiple units of analysis.

This observation is not meant to depreciate or undervalue the important theoretical and descriptive contributions which have been made in the examination of the role of interest groups in governmental systems. It is simply to state a fact about the literature and to plead for more systematic data collection and empirically-based generalization from which verified propositions about interest groups may emerge.

I think there are two major reasons why the literature on interest groups lacks a comparative base. First, many of the concepts which are employed in theories about interest groups are difficult to operationalize for data collection. Such concepts as “cohesion,” “access,” “resources,” etc., represent complex phenomena and would involve a good deal of effort to apply rigorously and empirically.

A decision-theoretic analysis of the central incident of Homer's Odyssey reveals the insufficiency of rational calculation as a guide for political prudence. Surprisingly, the poet distinguishes between two rational and formally identical calculations in no uncertain terms; he condemns one as utter recklessness and praises the other as consummate wisdom. I maintain that this discrepancy is neither an artifact of sloppy editorial patchwork nor the result of a “homeric nod” but instead points toward a politically significant distinction as yet obscured by a merely rationalistic perspective. The recklessness of Odysseus' crewmen, who deliberately slaughter sacred cattle to forestall starvation, consists in their rationalistic transgression of the limits of reason. These limits are most evident in the defiance of commensurability that characterizes the sacred. The wisdom of Odysseus, by contrast, is manifest in his learning to temper reason with respect for the sacred. By virtue of reverence, Odysseus wins his struggle to preserve his psychê, home and regime.

By and large the Congress of the United States has been studied on its own terms, as a somewhat unique political institution. Studies of Congress are usually considered to be important simply because they shed light on an important institution in the American political system. It is true, of course, that Congress is an important policy-making body and does deserve study for that reason. But there is no reason why substantive importance cannot be combined with “importance” in another sense. It is also important, for example, to develop theory within any discipline which will help explain the phenomena under study. Trivial substantive problems can be made interesting because of the theory which they suggest. And because a problem may already be substantively important does not mean that it cannot be made even more significant by theoretical development.

As a result of this substantive focus, research on Congress has produced a very rich body of descriptive data on various components of the institution, including its members and leadership, group structure, committees, party systems, organization, and rules and procedures. Studies have also provided generalizations concerning such things as the decentralized decision-making of Congress and the effects of the seniority rule on the distribution of power within the House and Senate. These descriptive data and generalizations may serve as the content to be explained within the context of a theory. As yet there has been very little effort at theory construction concerning Congress. The data are there—their organization and explication remain.

Among the various forms of indigenous political activity in Africa today, that of the nationalist parties of the British West African colonies is perhaps the most prominent. In the Gold Coast and Nigeria these parties have almost achieved self-government for their territories; they now form the government or opposition parties in elected parliaments. They should be clearly distinguished from other types of nationalist movements, such as nativistic uprisings or syncretist movements of religious or tribal associations. As Coleman says: “African nationalism is not merely a peasant revolt …. Where it is most advanced [it] has been sparked and led by the so-called detribalized, Western-educated, middle-class intellectuals and professional Africans; by those who in terms of improved status and material standards of living have benefited most from colonialism; in short, by those who have come closest to the Western World but have been denied entry on full terms of equality.” Many of the members of these nationalist parties had, in their acceptance of a European style of life, turned their backs on the politically inert peasant mass from which they had risen, although in recent years there has been a growing interest on the part of the intellectuals in indigenous culture and history. In other parts of the world, such parties achieved power through revolution; in West Africa, the British colonial governments, in collaboration with these parties, drew up new constitutions and the party members were elected to power by ballot. To retain power the politicians have had to take party politics to the smallest towns and villages, where even nationalism had scarcely existed.

This research note analyzes a key premise of the thesis of “institutional imbalance” in less developed nations, the idea that administrative modernity promotes overparticipation in the performance of political and governmental functions. Judgmental data on fifty-seven Latin American, Asian, and African nations suggest that level of administrative development is highly correlated with overparticipation, but in precisely the opposite direction from that predicted in the literature— that is, the relationship is negative. This finding indicates the necessity of reconsidering some of the conventional wisdom of comparative administration.