Since the 1960s, “the stakeholder,” or affected party, has emerged as a novel democratic subject whose participation in varied institutional sites—from universities to government agencies, corporate boardrooms to international organizations—is seen as necessary for the management of complex problems. However, few specifically attend to the stakeholder as a distinct political subject and consider its implications for democratic practice. This paper presents a genealogy of the stakeholder, documenting its appearance in corporate managerialism and US public administration and showing how racial mobilization, rapid technological progress, and the political rationality of systems thinking provided the conditions of possibility for its emergence. Though orienting democracy around stakeholders permits opportunities for participation in political life, I argue that this subject is predicated on a circumscribed form of participatory politics that erodes habits of discovering a common good, erases distinctions between individuals and corporate bodies, and amplifies the problem of expertise.

How do considerations related to backlash affect the desirability of pursuing otherwise justified immigration policies? This paper argues that backlash-related considerations bear on immigration policy decisions in ways that are both more powerful and complicated than typically recognized. The standard possibility, the egalitarian backlash argument, endorses immigration restrictions in order to protect support for egalitarian distributive institutions. The paper shows that this account does not, by itself, provide a convincing rationale for restricting immigration because such diminished support is (a) likely outweighed by the benefits of more permissive immigration policies and (b) caused by the objectionable preferences of citizens. However, the paper develops an alternative account of the relevance of backlash-related considerations, the democratic backlash argument, which holds that increased levels of immigration threaten to contribute to undermining democratic institutions. This argument provides a more powerful rationale for restricting immigration, one that can—under identified conditions—justify immigration restrictions.

It must be apparent to all thoughtful readers of American newspapers that Washington has become the great national news center, perhaps the greatest single news center in all the world. This has come about partly through an ever increasing centralization of power in the federal government, power that extends in a direct line to every basic industry in the nation as well as to our political, our cultural, and our social relations. Also it has come about, in part, through the movement to Washington of literally hundreds of national and international organizations.

Practically every interest in our life as a nation responds in a degree to the activities and vibrations of some agency of the government. These interests, either consciously or unconsciously, have learned to listen for their master's voice in Washington. The great banking and credit system, for example, looks to the Federal Reserve Board for its inspiration. Wall Street, sometimes regarded as a sort of super-government, is reacting more and more to federal orders, decrees, or mere gestures. The railroads bend to the will of the Interstate Commerce Commission; the mercantile marine to that of the Shipping Board. Agriculture seeks its paneceas at the hands of Congress. Organized labor lives side by side with that body. Education is yielding to federal supervision, as is highway construction, water-power development, scientific research, foreign trade, commercial practices, and a score of other interests, great or small. There was a time when the federal government concerned itself primarily with the national defense, delivery of the mails, maintenance of navigable rivers and harbors, enforcement of federal statutes, guardianship of the Indians, currency, payment of pensions, control of public lands, and a few minor matters. But that time has passed; indeed, it is almost forgotten.

This article explains why previous empirical tests of the size principle have failed to produce conclusive results. Particular stress is given to seldom considered aspects of constitutional choice; their implications are explored by means of a simple simulation. Then I propose a test of the size principle and report some initial empirical findings based upon this test.

The paper argues that while the state of mind of an agent exercising power is relevant in analyzing the concept of power, much of the discussion about whether an intention must be complied with for there to be an exercise of power misconceives the issue at stake because it overrates the extent to which human behavior is ratiocinative. The argument is developed in the course of a discussion of several hypothetical examples. One conclusion is that for a person to exercise power it is normally necessary that he should have a favorable attitude to the effects in question, the word “favorable” being used because it is highly general and hence relatively non-restrictive. The final conclusion is that the very generality of this criterion makes a precise conceptual analysis of power impossible.

Political scientists normally discuss sovereign immunity in the context of international law and relations. The domestic effects of sovereign immunity are almost never examined, even though those effects are profound and implicate a range of issues of interest to political scientists. The Federal Tort Claims Act (FCTA) (1946) is a main waiver of federal sovereign immunity and is designed to allow people injured by government employees to sue for money damages. The FTCA has a number of exceptions, the most prominent of which is known as the “discretionary function exception.” This exception retains sovereign immunity for the United States when a federal employee acts “based upon the exercise or performance or the failure to exercise or perform a discretionary function or duty…whether or not the discretion involved be abused.” This simple exception expanded into a comprehensive tool of government that now confounds justice and federal governmental accountability.

Scholarly analysis of contemporary Soviet realities has faced increasing difficulties in recent years. Direct access to the Soviet Union is denied to all except a handful of diplomats, journalists, and business men on special missions, and even the very few who gain access find themselves largely cut off from all except carefully controlled official contacts. There is still a substantial quantitative flow of books and periodicals from the Soviet Union, but compared with the rich and revealing documentation of the first decade of the Soviet period, the current output appears arid, formalistic, and deliberately designed to confine the circulation of data and ideas to the bare minimum required by the regime's internal communication needs. Given skill, insight, and background, there is still much to be learned from official publications and the samo-kritika (self-criticism) which they contain, but the obstacles are formidable, and the search for meaningful patterns of fact and motivation is at the best an elusive and tantalizing adventure.

John C. Calhoun's Disquisition on Government is that rarity in American political thought-a work that explicitly declares itself a theoretical study of politics. By purporting to give a comprehensive and systematic account, by claiming to have explored new territory beyond the range of American discoveries, Calhoun in effect put his Disquisition in a class of which it is almost the sole example: an American political theory. But this claim to esteem and originality has been disputed; and in the subsequent debates among his interpreters, we have yet to find a satisfactory solution to the problem that Calhoun represented in such clear shape. Those who have rated him as a statesman and thinker—be that assessment high or low—and those who have accepted or denied his claim to originality have all failed to solve the peculiar problem of how to study and interpret the writing of a man of theory-and-practice. Until that problem is met, our understanding of the Disquisition is not clear and we remain without a way of evaluating Calhoun's merits and originality.

How, then, ought Calhoun's Disquisition, or his high theoretical pretensions in general, best to be understood? Reducing his theory to practice, or saying in effect that the Disquisition was only another string to his pro-slavery bow, forecloses the question of what Calhoun can teach us. Reducing his practice to theory places what is almost a superhuman burden upon a man who was at or near the center of the national political stage for forty tumultuous years. A more moderate procedure would seem to be indicated.

A leading English economist once said, “It matters nothing to the seller of bricks whether they are to be used in building a palace or a sewer; but it matters a great deal to the seller of labor, who undertakes to perform a task of given difficulty, whether or not the place in which it is to be done is a wholesome and a pleasant one, and whether or not his associates will be such as he cares to have.”

This statement strikes the keynote of the activity in the field of labor legislation during 1910. All down the ages the worker has been protesting against being required to sell his life or his health in addition to his labor, even though he was assured by most political economists that he was getting higher money rewards for dangerous or disagreeable work; and the moralist, too, was telling him that accident and disease were acts of God to be met by prayer and fasting.

In the spring of 1953, with the approach of the regular parliamentary elections, the West German Bundestag began its deliberations on a new electoral law. The original law of 1949 had been enacted for the sole purpose of electing the first Parliament under the new Bonn Constitution. It was therefore necessary for the expiring Parliament to re-enact the old law, to modify it, or to supersede it with an entirely new system.

It soon became apparent that there were wide differences of opinion among the various parties represented in the Bundestag. The Chancellor's party, the Christian Democrats (CDU), presented proposals to establish a single member district system, eliminating proportional representation. The Social Democrats (SPD) presented a draft which largely re-enacted the 1949 law. The official government proposal, which was something of a compromise, leaned very heavily in the direction of the so-called Mehrheitswahl but also had provisions permitting a combination of party lists and additional votes (Hilfsstimmen). It bore some similarity to the law which de Gasperi had pushed through the Italian Parliament shortly before this time, but without the same justification. The various proposals were discussed on first reading on March 5, 1953, and again on March 18. After the report by the Election Law Committee, amended proposals were again discussed on second and third reading on June 17 and 19 and passed on third reading June 25.

The appropriate model of international conflict and war has been much discussed in recent years, and considerable progress has been made in modeling. Nevertheless the assumptions, conditions, and specifications for international conflict models remain eminently debatable. In the December 1986 issue of this Review, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and David Lalman presented a generalized expected utility model of international conflict. Here Seif Hussein takes issue with their model in various particulars, aiming to perfect and strengthen the model. Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman respond.

The time has come to prepare in advance everything that can legitimately be prepared for the revival of international activities after the present catastrophe. Since there are too many unknown factors, it is impossible to envisage the international machinery of the future in all of its details. We cannot as yet foresee the shape that the agency or agencies eventually superseding the League of Nations will assume. The international organization-to-be will certainly assume a striking difference in character, dependent on whether the League is reconstructed or a different type of international agency is created. From an administrative point of view, however, the problems will not be so different from what they were before; it will therefore be fruitful to discuss some of these problems in the light of the Geneva experience.

This article revisits the critique of political science outlined in Bernard Crick's (1959) The American Science of Politics. Although this work inspired a number of subsequent critics of the discipline and survives in the footnotes of many historical accounts of political science, its contents are now largely overlooked or forgotten. Having reconstructed its main arguments, I explore the mixed critical response this work elicited on publication, and then seek to explain why its influence was so short-lived. An important reason for its inability to deflect the discipline from its chosen course lies in the very distinctive republican–liberal project that guided Crick's thinking in these years. A critical reengagement with this text is worthwhile, I argue, both because it illustrates the importance of the migration of ideas and thinkers to the tradition of political science critique, and because Crick provides a strikingly different kind of argument for methodological pluralism and political relevance than that which is offered today by critics of political science.