A review of party-related articles in major political science journals over the past century reveals an increase in the incidence of such articles during the behavioral revolution and a decline in the proportion of studies that view parties holistically or in their organizational aspects and an increase in research on mass and legislative behavior. The essay calls for scholars of American parties to merge empirical findings with the generalist and normative concerns of an earlier age, to assess the recent advent of parties as ideologically focused instruments of policymaking.

That an animal, presumably a cousin of the simians and certainly very similar to them, has developed societies in which millions and even hundreds of millions of individuals live and act together in orderly relation to each other is one of the astounding facts of history; and an impartial observer would hardly be surprised if the incredibly intricate network of cooperation, overstrained, should suddenly tear apart.

The aggregation of men into huge organized groups is, of course, relatively recent. For a million years or longer men or near-men lived an animal-like existence, scattered in small groups. It was not until fifteen or twenty thousand years ago that men, perhaps as a consequence of unprecedented pressure from the environment, organized groups of any considerable size; it is only within the last three or four thousand years that large-scale societies have existed; and it is only in the last three or four hundred years that complex orderly interplay and interaction among individuals and subgroups in societies have been developed.

Students of international relations are concerned with the description, prediction, and control of the external behavior of states, particularly of their more violent types of behavior such as intervention, hostilities, and war. It is clear that mere description of a diplomatic or military event has little meaning by itself and that such an event can neither be predicted nor controlled unless account is taken of the circumstances which preceded it within each of the states involved. Among the internal circumstances which have been studied are the correspondence of statesmen, the declarations of legislatures, executives, foreign offices, and political parties, the prescriptions of constitutional law and procedure, the traditional policies manifested by the history of the state, and the understandings of treaty and international law accepted by the community of nations at the time and presumably by the states involved.

In March, 1952 the Carnegie Corporation made available to the Social Science Research Council a research grant to support a major study of factors influencing the popular vote in the 1952 presidential election. Under the sponsorship of the Council's Committee on Political Behavior this project is currently being carried out by the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan.

The study was developed around six major objectives:

1. 1. To identify the voters and non-voters, Republicans and Democrats, within four major geographical areas, in regard to

   a. socio-economic characteristics;

   b. attitudes and opinions on political issues;

   c. perceptions of the parties and the candidates.

2. 2. To compare these groups to the corresponding groups in the 1948 presidential election.

3. 3. To trace the resolution of the vote with particular attention to the undecided and changing voters.

4. 4. To study the impact of the activities of the major parties on the population.

5. 5. To analyze the nature and correlates of political party identification.

6. 6. To analyze the nature and correlates of political participation.

Theoretical discussions of civil disobedience on ethical and political grounds received special attention in this country during the Nuremberg trials, the security and loyalty controversies of the 1950's and the pre-arms control years of nuclear power. A fourth wave of interest formed after the early civil rights protests and a fifth is appearing to consider dissent from national policies on the Vietnam War. In this paper civil disobedience is viewed from a trough between the fourth and most recent wave. The phenomenon is interpreted with selected ideas from the study of political obligation and unconventional dissent. The essay first assesses recent American analysis of civil disobedience to determine what the criteria should be to distinguish it from other forms of political action and to discover its political ethics. Secondly, there is an attempt to answer the question: Is there any appreciable service that carefully defined civil disobedience might perform in American democratic thought? The complete enterprise is provoked by a need to examine new strategies for democratic citizenship in a time when the deficiencies of American political life are becoming known to increasing numbers and varieties of people instead of remaining the preserve of enlightened elites.

Party leadership in Congress has been one focal point for the sustained attack on the structure and performance of the American party system that has gone on for a decade and a half. Academic critics and members of Congress, individually and in committees, supplemented by a wide array of interested citizens and groups, have laid out blueprints for institutional reorganization. While there is some variety in their prescriptions, it is not hard to construct a composite model of party leadership in legislation on which there has been a fairly wide consensus among the reformers.

The fount of party policy would be a reformed national convention, meeting biennially at the least. The obligation of the majority party in Congress, spurred by the president if he were of the same party, would be to carry out the platform put together by the convention. For this purpose frequent party conferences would be held in each house to consider specific measures. Some would be for the purpose of discussion and education, but on important party measures the members could be bound by a conference vote and penalized in committee assignments and other party perquisites for disregarding the will of the conference. Party strategy, legislative scheduling, and continuous leadership would be entrusted to a policy committee made up, in most schemes, of the elective officers of the house and the chairmen of the standing committees. Some have suggested a joint policy committee, made up of the policy committees of the respective houses, which might then meet with the president as a kind of legislative cabinet. The committee chairmen would not be exclusively, and perhaps not at all, the products of seniority.

This paper discusses “normalization” as a problem for the liberal order through a detailed examination of the liberal political theory of Michael Oakeshott. Oakeshott links the poststructuralist normalizing problematic with the “existential” dilemma of human finitude. In liberalism, he argues, selves become disciplined and normalized when they respond to finitude with an overemphasis on instrumentality. They understand freedom as an instrumental good, a means to external ends. Oakeshott reformulates liberalism based on another response when selves appreciate experience as a self-sufficient or intrinsic good. They understand freedom as a first-order good valuable for itself and this lessens the normalizing pressure. I argue that F. A. Hayek's theory of liberalism confirms Oakeshott's warning about an overemphasis on instrumentality. I show the importance of Oakeshott's work in that he restates the distinction between the public and the private and demonstrates the limits of contemporary liberal theories insofar as they neglect the problem of normalization.

The location of a government's capital can profoundly influence the nature and quality of political representation. Yet scholars know very little about what drives the siting of political capitals. In this article, we examine the location and relocation of political capitals in the United States, including the choice of Washington, DC, as the nation's capital and the location and relocation of capitals in the 48 contiguous American states. We argue that the location of capitals in the United States followed a systematic pattern in accord with the theory of representative government developed in the new nation, especially as articulated by Madison. Based on an empirical analysis of historical census and political boundaries data from 1790 to the present, we find that decision makers consistently tended to locate—and especially relocate—the seat of government as near as possible to the population centroid of the relevant political jurisdiction, consistent with the principle of equal representation of citizens. Our analysis contributes to the study of institutional design and change, especially in the area of American political development, as well as to a burgeoning literature on the effects of geographical factors on political outcomes.

A substantial body of research shows that the entry of socialist parties to the electoral arena is linked to major political and economic reforms at the beginning of the twentieth century. However, how socialist parties have affected electoral competition and coordination has never been investigated in detail. Drawing on the debate of the adoption of proportional representation, I employ a regression discontinuity design to estimate the casual effect of socialist entry to the electoral arena on the formation of electoral alliances and the support of established parties. To do so, I use newly collected data for Imperial Germany 1890–1912. I show that established parties facing strong socialist competitors received more endorsement by other non-socialist parties and, as a result, a higher voter share. The findings suggest that established parties were able to mitigate coordination problems within the institutional setting of majoritarian electoral systems.

This article analyzes the effects on violence of electing law-and-order candidates at the local level. It argues that law-and-order politicians embedded in the police will divert resources to favor their constituency, which in violence-prone areas could generate more murders. Using ballot names of council candidates in thousands of local elections in Brazil to accurately classify law-and-order candidates, it shows that the election of police law-and-order candidates causes more homicides. Moreover, georeferenced data on police activity and homicides show neglect in areas that did not support a winning police law-and-order candidate, despite these areas being home to the majority of individuals vulnerable to violence. This favoritism, however, is not present in places where preexisting local institutions make policing more transparent. Instead of persecution directed against minorities or the incapacity to battle criminal gangs, this research shows that surges in violence can be the result of typical forms of democratic representation.

Research shows that sexist attitudes are deeply ingrained, with adverse consequences in the socioeconomic and political sphere. We argue that parental leave for fathers—a policy reform that disrupts traditional gender roles and promotes less stereotypical ones—has the power to decrease attitudinal gender bias. Contrasting the attitudes of new parents who were (and were not) directly affected by a real-world policy reform that tripled the amount of fathers’ leave, we provide causal evidence that the reform increased gender-egalitarian views in the socioeconomic and political domains among mothers and fathers, and raised support for pro-female policies that potentially displace men among mothers. In contrast, informational, indirect exposure to the reform among the general public produced no attitudinal change. These results show that direct exposure to progressive social policy can weaken sexist attitudes, providing governments with a practical and effective tool to reduce harmful biases.

Averroës is primarily known for his numerous commentaries on Aristotle, yet his most explicitly political writing was presented in the form of a commentary on Plato's Republic. Consequently, the major dispute in scholarly literature has been whether he was more of a Platonist or an Aristotelian, a dispute of concern only because it reflects the important political question of what Averroës thought about the relation between theory and practice. This essay seeks to answer that question by studying the numerous editions and translations of his writings made available by contemporary scholarship. His commentaries on the logical arts concerned with public speech and common opinion are first examined, and the teaching set forth there is then contrasted with the kind of ideas Averroës expounded in his explicitly public works.

In the commentaries on the logical arts, Averroës stretched Aristotle's arguments in order to suggest that unexamined opinion was an insufficient guide for the practical arts dependent on such opinion. Although Averroës did not claim that such arts could be guided only by theoretical knowledge, he did insist that they could be best used only by those aware of the limits of opinion. This opening for the guidance of philosophy was carried further in the public writings where the need for philosophy to direct sound practice was defended against religiously motivated attacks on philosophy. Thus, the correct understanding of Averroës's views about the relation between theory and practice is closely related to an appreciation of his views about the role peculiar to philosophy and philosophers in his own religious community.

Measuring the southern contribution to the Democratic coalition is an important task. To measure this contribution one must choose appropriate data and the appropriate unit of analysis for studying party coalitions in the United States. Two recent studies of party coalitions use the National Election Studies to estimate the southern contribution to the Democratic party, and these studies illustrate the problems one may encounter. This note demonstrates two points. First, survey research results may lead to erroneous estimates and it is preferable, where possible, to rely upon official election statistics. Second, the contribution of demographic groups to party coalitions should be assessed within the context of the political rules that make such coalitions meaningful.

On the philosophical plane, James Mill's political thinking began from a model of man quintessentially utilitarian in constitution. Starting with individual agents, it was to his account of the science of human nature that he turned in the quest for a science of politics suitable for the modern world. If James Mill's science of politics was individualist in character, it was neither automatically nor necessarily democratic in the practical political arena. On that subject, everything turned on the question of judging when (or if) individual capacity had reached an acceptable standard. This criterion proved to be sufficiently malleable to allow him to appear either expansive and democratic or narrow and elitist, as the case required.

To understand the political philosophy of Francis Bacon, or what he tried to do in political philosophy, one must make the clear-cut distinction he saw, I believe, between a provisional and a definitive political teaching. The latter, which he put chiefly in the New Atlantis and the De Sapientia Veterum, could be but imperfectly explored, because man could only build a final political teaching out of an as yet unconstructed natural philosophy. The former, on the other hand, could be known and conveyed with some precision. It was to serve the purpose of furnishing a temporary station for mankind, one that would be liveable and even comfortable as a dwelling place, and one that would at the same time, permit philosophy or science its own discovery of something better. Of the provisional political order, as Bacon saw it, there were three pillars: crown, church, and empire. The imperial pillar is certainly the most important to him of the three, and its construction required a greater boldness than the construction of either of the others.

In discussions of the United States Constitution, the phrase “the intention of the framers” is often used, but it is hardly ever adequately analyzed. The search for the intentions of the framers is made obviously in the hope of finding out what they meant by the words they put into the written Constitution. This leads to the examination of various evidences outside the Constitution, and implies a feeling that there is a lack of clarity in the words of that document.

The discussion that follows was written in order, first, to raise some of the questions that I think have to be answered before the phrase about intentions can have fullness of meaning as a tool of constitutional analysis; second, to express certain warnings against a too-confident assumption that “the intention of the framers” can actually be known; and, third, to consider briefly the possible significance today of the intention of the framers in case it could be discovered.