Article 16 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, prefixed to the French Constitution of 1791, reads as follows: “Every society in which a guarantee of rights is not assured nor a separation of powers determined does not have a constitution.” Without question the men of 1789 had come under the influence of Montesquieu as well as of John Locke. It is true that a separation of powers is to be found in the Two Treatises of Government; but that doctrine is set out in bolder relief and more sharply defined by Montesquieu than by Locke. However, the men of 1789 took only one half the teachings of Montesquieu; the other half they rejected. The exclusive, oligarchical, tyrannical spirit of the corporations of the ancient régime, the abuse of the principle of aristocracy—privileges without services, as Taine puts it—the growth of the spirit of equality as a result of the industrial revolution, all set men stoutly against a “corporative” (in contrast with a pulverized) structure of society. Rousseau, Turgot and the Physiocrats demanded a leveling of hierarchized society: the mountains must be brought low, the valleys filled up and a highway made for the plain man to walk thereon. It was only with the Restoration that the value of an aristocratic element—from Montesquieu's point of view a corporative element—came into prominence. It was widely discussed during that period, and Montesquieu was the authority of the day.

I provide a thematic reconstruction of Hegel's positive concept of right. Against those who charge that Hegel denies any role to substantive political evaluation, I argue that the Philosophy of Right articulates a notion of the right to recognition (Anerkennung) as the central feature of the modern state. The concept of recognition, I contend, requires not just toleration of others but a more robust notion of respect for the “free personality” that is the philosophical ground of right. The right to recognition is, furthermore, intended to provide the foundation for a new form of ethical life (Sittlichkeit), Hegel's modern analogue to classical conceptions of civic virtue. In conclusion I examine briefly two objections that stand in the way of a contemporary rehabilitation of Hegelian political philosophy.

If Sophocles were alive today to recast the dilemma of Antigone in contemporary, if less sanguine, terms, he might well seize on the problem of the citizen who refuses to answer questions put to him by a congressional investigating committee. Antigone, you will recall, was torn between two loyalties. Her religion commanded her to bury the body of her brother, while her state commanded that his body be left, unburied and unmourned, to be eaten by dogs and vultures on the open plain outside the city walls. As a loyal citizen, Antigone was required to yield her conscience to the state, to guide her conduct not by her rational moral knowledge but by the precepts of the law. As a person bound to her kin by the dictates of her religion, she was required to subordinate the instructions of Creon the king to those of her faith. She chose to obey her conscience and paid the penalty. Socrates, who—according to a traditional interpretation of the Crito—would doubtless have counseled otherwise, was also executed by the state. Thoreau, who at a critical moment followed what has scornfully been termed “the primitive attitude of Antigone, rather than the mature comprehension of Socrates,” found that refusal to obey a law resulted not in loss of life but in temporary loss of physical freedom.

Although universal male suffrage as the basis for a representative assembly existed in Germany half a century earlier than in Great Britain, the Reichstag never occupied as important a position in the German constitutional order as the House of Commons did in the British. Neither in its representative function of integrating the community (in Friedrich's terms), nor in its deliberative function as a lawmaking and supervisory body, did the Reichstag ever achieve the significance that would warrant describing the German system of government, either under the Second Empire or the first Republic, as a parliamentary system. The popularly elected Reichstag under Bismarck, in form so advanced for its time, existed under a constitutional system whose “artfully manufactured chaos” permitted, in reality, the exercise of authoritarian government with little parliamentary interference. When, during the latter years of the first World War, the Reichstag demonstrated an increasing ability to call governments to account, this apparent development of a parliamentary system gained a fleeting constitutional recognition during the last days of the Empire and paved the way for the provisions of the Weimar Constitution under which the Government was to be responsible to the Reichstag. Nevertheless, the republican Reichstag never actually fulfilled its constitutional functions, and in difficult times fell victim to the habits of the authoritarian past, manifesting themselves in the autonomy of the army and the bureaucracy, and the irresponsible behavior of the political parties and the President. “Surely the new constitution granted the Reichstag unquestioned leadership in the formation of policy,” a political analyst of the Weimar epoch has written.

Research on the welfare state has devoted considerable attention to social policy expansion. However, little is known about why governments expand social policies serving groups with limited power on issues with low visibility. I call these “benevolent policies.” This class of social policies improves population well-being but produces minimal political gains for the governments enacting them. Why do governments expand benevolent policies if political incentives for reform are weak? I investigate this question by focusing on government responses to malnutrition. Drawing on nine months of fieldwork, including 71 interviews, I argue that the origins of policy expansion can be found in the government bureaucracy. Bureaucrats with technical expertise—technocrats—can play a defining role, deploying international pressure to court executive support and orchestrate policy change. Their actions help explain the Indonesian government’s unexpected expansion of nutrition policies, which serve low-income women and children and address micronutrient malnutrition.

How does the representation of women in international organizations affect the implementation of gender mainstreaming policies? Many international organizations have adopted policies to prevent gender discrimination in their operations, but their implementation is often lackluster. We argue that these shortcomings appear due to a combination of institutional incentives and an underrepresentation of women in their staff. We test the argument in the case of the World Bank, drawing on highly disaggregated staffing data, an instrumental variable strategy, and an elite survey experiment. Our results show that most staff incorporate at least shallow gender mainstreaming in their projects. Deeper implementation of gender mainstreaming is more likely when women staff supervise projects, hold positions of authority, and are more represented as coworkers. These results contribute to understanding the disconnects between talk and action on mainstreaming policies and inform debates on representation in global governance.

We report the results of a laboratory experiment based on a citizen–candidate model with private information about ideal points. Inefficient political polarization is observed in all treatments; that is, citizens with extreme ideal points enter as candidates more often than moderate citizens. Second, less entry occurs, with even greater polarization, when voters have directional information about candidates’ ideal points, using ideological party labels. Nonetheless, this directional information is welfare enhancing because the inefficiency from greater polarization is outweighed by lower entry expenses and better voter information. Third, entry rates are decreasing in group size and the entry cost. These findings are all implied by properties of the unique symmetric Bayesian equilibrium cutpoint pair of the entry game. Quantitatively, we observe too little (too much) entry when the theoretical entry rates are high (low). This general pattern of observed biases in entry rates is implied by logit quantal response equilibrium.

In 2020, support for Joe Biden among Latina/o/x voters was 8 percentage points lower than support for Hillary Clinton in 2016, the largest drop of any racial/ethnic group. While much media and academic attention has focused on understanding the impact of misinformation, COVID-19 concerns, and racial animus on Latino voters in 2020, we take a step back and clarify the demographic and core ideological characteristics of Latino voters who voted for Donald Trump in 2020. Using a mix of national survey data, precinct returns, and voter file records, we disaggregate components of electoral change. We find evidence of an increasing alignment between Latinos’ ideology, issue positions, and vote choice. Correspondingly, we observe significant pro-Trump shifts among working-class Latinos and modest evidence of a pro-Trump shift among Latinos closer to the immigration experience. These findings, coupled with an analysis of the 2022 CES, point to a more durable Republican shift than currently assumed.

The American criminal legal system is an important site of political socialization: scholars have shown that criminal legal contact reduces turnout and that criminalization pushes people away from public institutions more broadly. Despite this burgeoning literature, few analyses directly investigate the causal effect of lower-level police contact on voter turnout. To do so, we leverage individual-level administrative ticketing data from Hillsborough County, Florida. We show that traffic stops materially decrease participation for Black and non-Black residents alike, and we also find temporal variation in the effect for Black voters. Although stops reduce turnout more for Black voters in the short term, they are less demobilizing over a longer time horizon. Although even low-level contacts with the police can reduce political participation across the board, our results point to a unique process of political socialization vis-à-vis the carceral state for Black Americans.

Glaucon's demand to be shown the inherent choiceworthiness of justice exposes the limits of dialectical argument. Acknowledging these limits, Socrates proposes that his interlocutors join him in an alternative activity, making a city in speech. This model city proves to be “entirely opposite” to existing cities, above all (as Socrates observes) because it restricts the practice of dialectical argument to those who first demonstrate a capacity for synopsis, that is, for seeing things as a whole. Socrates holds that one must be able to see things as a whole in order to benefit from the use of dialectic. I interpret the political institutions of Socrates' model city accordingly, as being instrumental to the practice of dialectic. Hence, I reject the prevalent readings of the Republic, which present these institutions either as a blueprint for public policy or as a parody of political idealism. Instead, I suggest that the interlocutors' discussion of censorship, the noble lie, and communism is propaedeutic, fostering the synoptic capacity necessary to benefit from the practice of dialectic, including dialectic aimed at revealing the choiceworthiness of justice.

As a part of its work, the committee on research of the American Political Science Association has undertaken a survey of the relation of politics to kindred types of inquiry, including psychology, anthropology, geography, biology, engineering and others. The purpose of such an inquiry is to explore the relationships that exist with kindred sciences, to facilitate coöperation with our fellow-workers, to improve our methods of investigation, and to promote the progress of political science.

The committee is not responsible for this report, for its form or content, its scope or method, its sins of omission or commission. Probably the general sentiment of the committee toward psychology would be expressed by the phrase, con amore ma non troppo.

It may be worth while at the outset to scrutinize some of the earlier relations of psychology to political science, for the friendship is one of long standing. In the earlier forms of political thinking, there are crude types of psychology that are of great interest and significance in the development of the art of political thinking. These philosophers evidently utilized all of the psychology that was current in the construction of their political systems.

If a democracy is to function successfully, the great mass of the population need instruments for communicating their views to political leaders. The chief channels for communication are parties and pressure groups. English politics provides much scope for study of these conduits, because both parties and pressure groups are highly organized and well articulated. Although the part played by party activists in policy formulation is only one small aspect of this network, the study of that part throws considerable light upon the interplay of parties and pressure groups, and challenges as well some prevailing notions about the policy demands of party activists.

The genealogy of the rural electrification idea and the story of its gradual development through the years 1914–36 may have important implications in the study of governmental and social institutions. Up to a comparatively recent date, there have been no generally recognized laws influencing progress, whether as to science, government, or society. Progress has been recognized in the main as a matter of chance, or perhaps as something like a 100-to-1 shot in poker or horse-racing. With science, however, there is noticeable the small beginnings of a workable technique for making progress along predetermined lines. This might have been expected, since in science the items under study are relatively stable as compared with actions in government and society, and are more likely to be uniform when encountered.

In recent years, many scientific inquiries have been quite adequately financed, and coöperation on a national and international basis between thousands of researchers operating in the same or related fields, with full and free publication, has become a rule of the game. Note the strategy developed for the attack first on tuberculosis, and now in formation on the much more complex cancer problem. Yet these campaigns must be considered child's play compared with what is happening in the field of atomic fission. While it is true that in science team-play has become more and more the practice, notably in the medical field, the lone worker still persists in the academic world, where it is held that organization, especially in times of peace, means regimentation.

Careful study of any period will reveal that back of all the complex happenings marking such period there have been certain fundamental impulses, certain human strivings, of which the happenings themselves have been, in great part, but the manifestations, or expression in concrete action. It is the prime function of the historian to discover, explain the rise, trace the development and make known the results of these forces which have dominated mass action in the past. Only as this is done do the myriad of events going to make up the body of historical data assume a real meaning, and historical narrative become other than a dry tabulation of detail.

A distinguished historian, E. A. Freeman, has well said that if history is past politics, politics is present history. If it is of value for the historian to trace out and place in their true light those great movements of the past, how much more important it is that the student of present-day politics should, by a similar examination of current events and efforts, seek to make known, and interpret the forces and aspirations now dictating the collective action of peoples.

This research note proposes a model in which an “equilibrium” share of the vote figures as a measurable quantity. Variants of the model are fitted to election data for the U. S. House of Representatives.