On March 6, 1957, the Gold Coast, now called “Ghana,” attained fully responsible status within the British Commonwealth. African nationalists, Pan-Africanists and their supporters in other parts of the world hailed the event as a milestone on the road to complete emancipation of the Africans, as proof that the “dark continent” had come of age and that all of its people were now fully capable of governing themselves.

This study of several key factors in the development of political thought and practice in the former colony was undertaken with a view toward an assessment of the stability and soundness of the country's new political institutions and practices. In a more general sense, it may be regarded as a commentary on the process of institutional transfer from colonial (European) to African political control. Since the formal structure within which the transfer took place is classifiable, nominally at least, as parliamentary-democratic, the evaluation may also serve as a commentary on contemporary performance of what, to reflect its second-hand nature, may be termed “colonial-parliamentary democracy.”

The greatest need in the field of labor legislation is the establishment of scientific standards. The chaotic condition of such legislation in this country is everywhere recognized. This lack of uniformity is due partly to the fact that, where England, for instance, has one body enacting legislation, we have fifty bodies politic, each with different industrial conditions and with different ideas as to what is constitutional. It is significant that this lack of uniformity has led to the organization of a special national association to promote scientific study of labor legislation. Forty-two states held legislative sessions during 1909. A flood of labor bills were introduced and nearly four hundred were enacted into law.

As part of the most basic process in democratic government, the laws of the various states having to do with absentee participation in elections merit consideration. In the election of November 3, 1936, it is estimated that nearly two per cent of the total of forty-five millions were absentee votes. Furthermore, all available evidence indicates a steady expansion of this figure. The number of federal employees in Washington is on the increase; from this source alone the number of absentee voters in the election of 1936 was over eighty thousand. The revival of business and industry, especially in the fields of transportation and communication, and the growing mobility of Americans generally, can be expected to add their quotas to the total number of absentee voters.

Soviet foreign policy has been a subject of extensive and intensive study ever since the painful birth of the Soviet state. All the writings and investigations, except for the purely descriptive, are based in some degree on one or several key premises and assumptions of authors who used them to explain and interpret Soviet foreign policy. This is understandable and probably inevitable in view of the enormous significance of the subject matter, the vastness of observed behavior in time and in space, and the lack of available information on policy making. Consequently, scientific, intuitive, and even merely hopeful thinking has been applied to the evidences of Soviet foreign policy in an effort to find a method of analysis, a frame of reference, a tool of orientation which might permit some systematization of the whole subject.

Clearly, a single seemingly well-constructed theory of Soviet foreign policy which purports to offer a key to broad analysis is too attractive for an analyst to ignore. But however plausible it may seem, it cannot possibly offer the whole answer. Some elements of Soviet foreign policy may be isolated, focalized, dissected, and examined, but others cannot be subject to even speculative, crude estimates.

Alan T. Waterman (retired Director of the National Science Foundation and past president of the A.A.A.S.) recently insisted that there is a considerable difference between observations and perceptual images of scientists' behavior in governmental and policy-making situations when made by scientists and when they are made by persons “outside of science.” Waterman went on to say that most natural scientists would prefer to write on “science” rather than “scientists” in policy-making. Reflection on the implications of these distinctions raises several fascinating questions. In what senses may there be a political science of science? Are only natural and biological scientists equipped to investigate and interpret the behavior of scientists in non-laboratory, public policy-formulating situations? Is it necessary to have separate “natural-scientific” and “social-scientific”—to say nothing of any number of “humanistic”—views of the political role of science? What does it mean to say that the proper focus of study is the representation of science, rather than scientists in government?

Modern versions of public reason occasionally must address disputes so profound and divisive that the adjudicative powers of reason cannot resolve them on the expectations of liberal governance. The beliefs underlying these disputes represent the legitimate pluralism of the liberal state, but they also reproduce within the languages of public reason the same divisive views that the liberal state must manage in the larger society. The effects of divisive beliefs can be mitigated, however, with a noncomputational version of public reason that allows collective terms to dominate simple merit adjudication. This type of reasoning requires a survey of considerations beyond the merits of the case at hand and opens public reason to the more general needs of the political society.

The recent Oregon v.Smith decision's shifting of the burden in free exercise cases from legislatures to minority religious claims has brought fierce opposition, most conspicuously from leading nonpreferentialist Richard J. Neuhaus, who sees in it the foundation of majority tyranny. Against Smith, Neuhaus employs Madison's “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments,” which is universally read to argue that the superiority of religion to politics proscribes majoritarian hegemony over religious practices. I contend that the Memorial's appeals are better understood as rhetoric than as reflecting Madison's true view. I find Madison hostile not only to religious establishments but also to religion itself. This hostility was the basis of his rejection of the nonpreferentialists' utility-based argument for government support of religion. In this light, I uncover a curious historical irony: the nonpreferentialist Neuhaus seeks today to protect religion from hostility by adhering to a position that was originally animated, in key respects, by hostility both to religion and to its nonpreferential support.

We develop and validate a novel experimental design that builds a bridge between experimental research on the theory of spatial voting and the literature on measuring policy positions from text. Our design utilizes established text-scaling techniques and their corresponding coding schemes to communicate candidates’ numerical policy positions via verbal policy statements. This design allows researchers to investigate the relationship between candidates’ policy stances and voter choice in a purely text-based context. We validate our approach with an online survey experiment. Our results generalize previous findings in the literature and show that proximity considerations are empirically prevalent in purely text-based issue framing scenarios. The design we develop is broad and portable, and we discuss how it adds to current experimental designs, as well as suggest several implications and possible routes for future research.

This study explores why, at critical moments, governments may withhold vital information from the public. We explain this phenomenon by what we call idiosyncratic events, or events independent of the information receiver’s state-contingent payoff functions. Idiosyncratic events often influence the receiver’s belief on the sender’s performance. If such events are correlated with the events determining the payoff functions, the sender may withhold information so as to improve his image. This result may be applied to the manipulation of information regarding a number of recent real-world phenomena, including the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011 and the ongoing outbreak of COVID-19.

This study illuminates Xenophon's teaching about the underlying psychological motives of the most fully developed political ambition. An analysis of what the Cyropaedia portrays as the interplay among Cyrus's spiritedness, justice, benevolence, piety, and cultivation of an aura of divinity leads to an unveiling of supreme ambition's deepest root: not the desire for power as such, nor the love of justice, but the desire to be a quasi-divine benefactor. The article traces the development of this ambition from its earliest manifestations in the young Cyrus's puppylike spiritedness, through his hope-filled rise to power, to his grim mature rein and his death, showing how a shadowy concern for immortality drives him in ways he is reluctant to see or acknowledge.

How do non-state armed groups (NSAGs) survive and even thrive in situations where state armed groups (SAGs) collapse, despite the former’s often greater material adversity? We argue that, optimizing under their different constraints, SAGs invest more in technical military training and NSAGs invest more in enhancing soldiers’ intrinsic payoffs from serving their group. Therefore, willingness to contribute to the group should be more positively correlated with years of service in NSAGs than in SAGs. We confirm this hypothesis with lab-in-the-field and qualitative evidence from SAG and NSAG soldiers in Nepal, Ivory Coast, and Kurdistan. Each field study addresses specific inferential weaknesses in the others. Assembled together, these cases reduce concerns about external validity or replicability. Our findings reveal how the basis of NSAG cohesion differs from that of SAGs, with implications for strategies to counter NSAG mobilization.

State repression and protest are common in modern authoritarian and hybrid regimes, yet individual responses to these events are not well understood. This article draws on unique panel data from the months spanning Zimbabwe’s 2018 election, which we view as a moment of uncertainty for most Zimbabwean citizens. Using a difference-in-difference estimator, we estimate change in individual protest intentions following exposure to repression and dissent and we assess three individual-level mechanisms hypothesized to drive responses. We find evidence that exposure to local repression and dissent are mobilizing among opposition supporters and nonpartisans. Analysis of potential mechanisms suggests that the effects of exposure to dissent may be driven by information updating, whereas relational and emotional mechanisms seem to drive backlash against repression, despite increased perceptions of risk. We find no evidence of counter-mobilization by ruling party supporters, and little effect of exposure to contentious events over social media.

Unprecedented quantities of data that could help social scientists understand and ameliorate the challenges of human society are presently locked away inside companies, governments, and other organizations, in part because of privacy concerns. We address this problem with a general-purpose data access and analysis system with mathematical guarantees of privacy for research subjects, and statistical validity guarantees for researchers seeking social science insights. We build on the standard of “differential privacy,” correct for biases induced by the privacy-preserving procedures, provide a proper accounting of uncertainty, and impose minimal constraints on the choice of statistical methods and quantities estimated. We illustrate by replicating key analyses from two recent published articles and show how we can obtain approximately the same substantive results while simultaneously protecting privacy. Our approach is simple to use and computationally efficient; we also offer open-source software that implements all our methods.

Though governments historically have been a men’s club, women are increasingly gaining access. We argue that democratic institutions are important drivers of women’s inclusion in government. This stems from the rationales of autocratic versus democratic leaders when selecting ministers. Autocrats fear a coup by inner-circle elites, who are mostly men, incentivizing them to assign ministerial positions as co-optation. In contrast, democratic leaders are accountable to the citizenry through elections and must satisfy increasing demands for gender equality. Furthermore, we argue that it is historical experience with democracy that matters, rather than the level, as it takes time to create an even playing field, change attitudes, and generate trust in democracy. To support this, we contribute with the first study using the most comprehensive dataset, WhoGov, on women’s access to cabinets. Overall, we show that democracy is a process that gradually enables women to enter the highest echelons of power.

New evidence suggests that the world recently changed for the U.S. Supreme Court owing to its decision to abrogate the abortion rights first announced in Roe v. Wade. In contrast to the conventional wisdom that Court support is little undermined by unpopular rulings, the Dobbs decision generated a substantial knock on the Court’s legitimacy. Two crucial frailties limit these findings, however. First, no one has determined whether the lost legitimacy has persisted, since earlier research relied on a one-shot survey conducted shortly after the decision. Second, no analysis has addressed the “values-based regeneration” hypothesis—that support reemerges not long after a legitimacy hit is inflicted. Based on a nationally representative 2023 survey, my analysis finds that the lost legitimacy has lingered, but institutional support may be being rebuilt owing to its close connection with democratic values. Overall, I conclude that understanding persistence is more complicated than many may have assumed.