It is unfortunate, in my opinion, that the terms monism and pluralism have been injected into the discussion of political theory and doubly unfortunate that they have been put forward as rival theories between which we are expected to choose. Both words are in fact very general, both are capable of many meanings and both have about them the connotations of centuries of philosophical dispute. And yet the one clear lesson from these disputes is that both monism and pluralism are inescapable aspects of our world and as such can neither of them be neglected. An effort to set the two in opposition, to picture them as incompatible, and to force a choice between them is surely wasted. The truth is that monism and pluralism are not theories but points of view or modes of attack, and any reasonable political theory will have to take account of both and both will have to be interpreted in such a way that they can be joined in one theory. It is not the purpose of this paper to undertake so large a task as this final reconciliation; but merely to state as exactly as may be what is connoted by such phrases as “a monistic theory of the state” and “a pluralistic theory of the state,” in order that the different points of view may be made as clear as possible and may be compared.

By political monism I understand a theory which holds that the state is ultimately a single indivisible authority, not subject to any other authority and therefore able itself to fix the limits and the content of the obligations to which it gives rise.

It is a commonplace to assert that science should be independent of politics. By this one usually means that the search for truth, which is the essential function of science, should not be influenced by political interests, which are the interests concerned with the establishment and maintenance of a definite social order or a particular social institution. Politics as the art of government, that is to say, the practice of regulating the social behavior of men, is a function of will and, as such, an activity which necessarily presupposes the conscious or unconscious assumption of values, the realization of which is the purpose of the activity. Science is a function of cognition; its aim is not to govern but to explain. To describe the world is its object. Its independence of politics means in the last analysis, that the scientist must not presuppose any value; consequently he has to restrict himself to an explanation and a description of his object without judging it as good or bad, i.e., as being in conformity with, or contrary to, a presupposed value. This implies that the statements by which a scientist describes and explains the object of his inquiry must not be influenced by values in which he himself believes.

Few, if any, elected representatives are capable of unilaterally implementing their platforms. Rather, they choose between options generated by other actors and/or external events. We present a theory of voters’ preferences over representatives who will cast votes on their behalf, and show that in this setting voters’ preferences over candidates’ platforms will not look like voters’ preferences over policies. We demonstrate that these induced preferences for representation tend to favor more extreme representatives, and we present two models of electoral competition in which induced preferences over representatives lead to elite polarization.

Most scholarship on the moral dimensions of Tocqueville's analysis of democracy focuses on the doctrine of enlightened self-interest. Surprisingly little has been written about his account of the underlying moral shift that makes this doctrine necessary. Drawing principally on Volume II of DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA, but also on Tocqueville's letters and notes, I unearth his fascinating and compelling account of why modern democratic man loses his admiration for devotion and embraces self-interest. That account begins from individualism, but also includes democratic man's intellectual and aesthetic tastes, his low estimation of his moral capacities, and weakening religious belief. After examining what Tocqueville saw as the causes of the new moral outlook, I consider what he saw as its most profound implications. Departing from recent trends in Tocqueville scholarship, I argue that is in Tocqueville's account of the modern democratic condition as such that he has the most to offer us today.

When is speech on social media toxic enough to warrant content moderation? Platforms impose limits on what can be posted online, but also rely on users’ reports of potentially harmful content. Yet we know little about what users consider inadmissible to public discourse and what measures they wish to see implemented. Building on past work, we conceptualize three variants of toxic speech: incivility, intolerance, and violent threats. We present results from two studies with pre-registered randomized experiments (Study 1, $ N=\mathrm{5,130} $; Study 2, $ N=\mathrm{3,734} $) to examine how these variants causally affect users’ content moderation preferences. We find that while both the severity of toxicity and the target of the attack matter, the demand for content moderation of toxic speech is limited. We discuss implications for the study of toxicity and content moderation as an emerging area of research in political science with critical implications for platforms, policymakers, and democracy more broadly.

Much recent political thought has been devoted to the proposition that neither political endeavor properly understood nor theorizing about such endeavor is or could ever be a kind of rational activity. I examine three broad approaches that celebrate, respectively, rhetorical practices of political persuasion, agonistic conceptions of democracy, and, more generally, a kind of hard-headed critical realism rooted in the plain facts of political life. I argue that criticisms of rationalism in politics associated with these approaches systematically ignore central tenets of what might be called a post-Kantian convergence of recent and important philosophical perspectives and that such perspectives can be enormously useful in addressing and critically evaluating the underlying intellectual structures of political life.

Legibility and political authority are often conflated in debates over formalization processes, including land titling. This can lead to a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is that citizens anticipate would strengthen their property rights. This study examines the effects of legibility on citizens’ evaluations of property rights in Malawi, a country with limited but increasing land titling. We argue that legibility is a strategic resource for citizens, which has value in itself. To disentangle the effects of legibility and authority on tenure security, we employ a survey experiment. Our findings show that respondents perceived land with written property rights to be more secure and more desirable regardless of whether a state or customary authority granted these land rights. In contrast to scholarship that examines legibility as a technology of state control, this research suggests that legibility can help citizens advance their interests.

Time-series cross-section (TSCS) data are prevalent in political science, yet many distinct challenges presented by TSCS data remain underaddressed. We focus on how dependence in both space and time complicates estimating either spatial or temporal dependence, dynamics, and effects. Little is known about how modeling one of temporal or cross-sectional dependence well while neglecting the other affects results in TSCS analysis. We demonstrate analytically and through simulations how misspecification of either temporal or spatial dependence inflates estimates of the other dimension’s dependence and thereby induces biased estimates and tests of other covariate effects. Therefore, we recommend the spatiotemporal autoregressive distributed lag (STADL) model with distributed lags in both space and time as an effective general starting point for TSCS model specification. We illustrate with two example reanalyses and provide R code to facilitate researchers’ implementation—from automation of common spatial-weights matrices (W) through estimated spatiotemporal effects/response calculations—for their own TSCS analyses.

Academic studies of roll-call voting in Congress have tended to stress two factors: (1) the substantial degree of party cohesion in Congress on most issues, and (2) the importance of constituency factors in explaining deviations from party votes within parties. These studies indicate that party is the single most important predictor of roll-call behavior, and that constituency factors explain most of the deviation from party votes. No such study, however, describes constituency differences between Democrats and Republicans on the national level—that is, inter-party differences on constituency variables as opposed to intra-party differences. We will attempt, in this study, to demonstrate that differences between Democrats and Republicans are not merely a matter of party label or ideology (few really contend otherwise), but that they are rooted in basic differences in the kinds of constituencies from which Democrats and Republicans come. We will then go on to show that these constituency factors are also important in explaining intra-party differences in voting in Congress, but only by way of supporting the hypothesis that party voting patterns reflect constituency differences.

The general theory underlying this analysis posits gross relationships between sociological variables and political behavior, especially in democratic systems which permit relatively wide latitude in political activity. Since shared attitudes about various problems confronting people are often the result of sharing similar environments, and since economic and social environments vary widely in the United States, it is not surprising to find people located in similar environments choosing up sides in similar ways on matters of public policy, and differing with those who do not share the same environment. These effects should be most noticeable in relatively small areas, such as congressional districts.

Thirteen years ago, the American Political Science Association directed its attention to the changing relation between our national government and the states. One of the speakers discerned in the tendency toward aggrandizement of national power, manifestations of the principle that sovereignity, unprovided for in extant forms, seeks to embody itself in new forms. The signal incompetence of the states in dealing with economic questions, together with their mendicant attitude towards the national government, was seen as the cause of the transfer to national authority of control over currency supply, transportation rates and methods, and the seeming disposition to transfer control over all corporations. Other speakers called attention to the great increase of national power under the commerce clause and under the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution; and one, in a most thoughtful paper, openly challenged the federal system as established in this country, asserting that it showed disadvantages of increasing magnitude in comparison with a unitary system, and was out of harmony with the general environment of modern industrialism.

Liberalism doubts that a sound theory of politics can be built from a theory of the human good. In pursuit of its authorized ends, the liberal state can establish incentives and disincentives, it can require reparations, and it can restrain dangerous persons. But can liberals punish? By distinguishing punishment from related phenomena and comparing its presuppositions with central tenets of liberalism, I tentatively conclude that they cannot. An analysis of efforts by leading liberal theorists to come to terms with punishment confirms that suspicion: their theories do not authorize punishment or do so at the expense of their more fundamental principles. I conclude that the ability to punish criminal is part of a larger moral experience and capacity that is lost with liberalism's expulsion of the human good from politics, and further, that without reference to the human good, liberalism's central concepts of liberty and equality are left weak and empty.

On May 10, 1959, Austrian voters, in giving overwhelming support to the coalition that has been governing them since 1945, split their ballots about as evenly as possible between the two competing coalition partners. The Socialist Party (SPOe) obtained 50.3 per cent of the vote cast for the coalition parties; but the People's Party (OeVP), despite a rigorous system of proportional representation, moved into the new Parliament with 79 seats, a plurality of one over the SPOe. The election of 1953 had shown strikingly similar results. Then, the Socialists had not been able to translate the electoral tie into a complete governmental equilibrium. This time, stung by losses sustained in the government negotiations after the OeVP's victory in the 1956 parliamentary election, and encouraged by its own victory in the 1957 presidential election, the Socialists demanded the formation of a government based on perfect equality of the two partners. They had waged the campaign with a plea to the voters to place the ship of state in equilibrium, and the voters had responded. For eleven weeks following the balloting, OeVP and SPOe engaged in coalition renegotiations which are recounted and analyzed in this study because of the light they throw on the nature of the rigid coalition that has become postwar Austria's contribution to the taxonomy of political institutions.

The authors of the Constitution of the United States regarded it as a triumph for the human spirit in America that a new form of government could be established by the process of discussion, deliberation, and popular action, as distinguished from the age-long processes of violence. Looking backward from their time and forward into our own, we may say that they were justified in their celebration.

With reference to a far less momentous occurrence, this modest occasion, we may properly regard as a triumph for the same spirit a voluntary action of public officials and interested citizens looking to the resolute and continuous improvement of the public services. It is this action, the establishment of a Society for Public Administration, that we are ratifying and approving today. These officials and these citizens are no hirelings of a despotic power, taking orders from above. They are not seeking the aggrandizement of a class, bent on exploiting and holding down a subject people. They are not concerned primarily with emoluments, promotions, and honors as such. On the contrary, they are proposing to search their own hearts and minds, to study ways and means of making more efficient and economical the services rendered by government to the people. They do not wish to diminish either civil liberties or individual responsibilities in society. On the contrary, they cherish these eternal values and intend to discover and develop schemes and methods of administration deliberately adapted to the perpetuation of these precious elements in the American heritage.

Le Pouvoir est la manifestation supreme de la peur que l'homme fait à luimême par ses efforts pour s'en libirer. Là est peut-être le secret le plus profond et obscur de l'histoire. Ferrero, Pouvoir, p. 43.

The current discussion of a future world order has made it plain that the problem of coming international relations is of a magnitude surpassing even that of winning the war. It is not intended here to add to the rising tide of concrete plans in this field, but rather to elucidate certain proposals in the light of some basic features of the present system of international relations and, starting from a clearer picture of what is, to seek to discriminate between what is desirable and undesirable, possible and utopian. Wrong concepts of the forces underlying the present system have too often produced “peace plans” built on the sands of wishful thinking, and therefore bound to be wrecked on the rocks of reality. Disappointment caused by the failure of ill-conceived devices, in turn, is apt to produce a “realism” which ridicules any attempt to discuss international relations in terms of a possible evolution toward a more integrated stage.

Power, in modern international relations, has been the ultimate means of deciding issues and adjusting relationships among the units constituting international society. The states have regarded themselves as “sovereign” entities, not subordinated to any superior political power nor guided in their power politics by considerations of an a-political, i.e., power-alien, nature.

World War II and Cold War I have influenced the moral appraisal of diplomacy much as they have influenced all systematic analysis of international relations. Commentators are now more aware that the wide gap between what is and what ought to be cannot be nullified by exhortation or legal formula or inexorable institutional evolution. They appreciate more profoundly the structure and function of power. They have learned from Mukden, Wal-Wal and Munich that accommodation can be more costly than resoluteness, and that an ethic dissociated from the world in which men live cannot give adequate moral guidance for men's living. Nevertheless the commentators remain reluctant, on both political and moral grounds, to accept Realpolitik's ethical outlook on the use of force. The shortcomings of yesterday's total victory have been too sobering; and Hiroshima's destruction has left a scar upon the conscience. Moral judgments on diplomacy are accordingly less simplist, less absolute, more troubled and uneasy than in the pre-war decades.

The moral theories that have attracted most attention among students of international politics are either Protestant Christian or secular humanist in their basic orientations. This is not to say that these orientations are clearly distinguishable in any particular statement; more or less of them can be found in Niebuhr, Wolfers, Butterfield, Lefever, and Osgood among others. Less well known is a view that can be classified as Catholic or Scholastic. In the hope that this could illuminate, if it does not modify, the problems and the answers as conceived by the better known theories, the present study will put forth such a view. The position will be stated first, with such explanation as might be needed for understanding it, and some indication of differences from the Protestant and humanist conceptions. The theory can then be applied to varying hypothetical projections of the contemporary international scene.

How should inquiry into ethical-political life come to terms with “depth experience?” By this, I mean extraordinary experience that breaks into the familiar frames of meaning and reasoning that undergird everyday life, bringing some sort of transformation or significant solidification of basic commitments or identity. Stated in this abstract fashion, my question is likely to seem rather bewildering or uninteresting for the study of politics. But its potential significance becomes apparent if one mentions George W. Bush and being “born again.” This article speculates more broadly about such experience, expanding the focus beyond theists and “limit” experiences. When one does this, depth experience need not be thought of as anathema to political theory. Rather, I show that it can be cultivated in such a way as to animate an admirable “bearing” on the part of citizens of affluent, late-modern societies and cohere with certain fundamentals of deliberative democracy.

In this paper I propose to examine the tendency towards single-party systems in West Africa, particularly in relation to the social structure and the historical circumstances in which the parties emerged. I shall therefore point up the distinction between “mass” and “patron” parties, and then consider the new single-party governments, most of them based on mass parties, in relation to the prospects of of democracy in West Africa. My argument is that mass parties are created by African leaders out of the very liberating and egalitarian forces we in this country generally associate with democracy. Some of the mass parties encourage the growth of forces and institutions which may ultimately make possible the machinery of democratic systems familiar to us: as, for instance, competition for every citizen's vote by more than one organized team of candidates. At this stage of West African party history, it seems to me, the number of parties is far too simple a criterion upon which to decide whether or not a system is democratic.

General statements about parties in the new West African states can be made only tentatively. Significant rights to vote and organize parties came to West Africa only after the Second World War. Since then formal institutional change has taken place at a rapid pace. The constitutional framework in which the parties grew changed continuously. The franchise expanded until it became universal, the powers of African elected representatives grew by stages from consultative to legislative and eventually to executive, and the locus of political power shifted from London or Paris to Africa.