The political groups in the Kizoku-in, or House of Peers, are of more importance than the scant attention paid them by both native and foreign students of Japanese government implies. In fact, one of the six groups habitually controls the House, which, in turn, is one of the strongest national second chambers existing today. As a result, the Kenkyū-kai, or Study Association, commands steady, the other groups intermittent, patronage in the form of appointments to cabinet or sub-cabinet positions and concessions to their legislative wishes. The political groups in the House of Peers became a concern of Japanese statesmen shortly after the organization of the Diet in 1890; they are today debated in relation to the proposals for legislative reform which have been repeatedly urged since 1932. Although but minor wheels in the mechanism, some knowledge of their place and function is essential to an adequate understanding of the operation of the complicated Japanese political machine.

The history, organization, and influence of these groups is not easy to determine; the scarcity of reliable sources, even in Japanese, makes doubly confusing the large number of diverse yet meaningless group titles which have been employed since 1890.

The Institute for Government Research is an institution incorporated under the laws of the District of Columbia and wholly supported by voluntary private donations. It received its charter on March 13, 1916, and began active operations on October 1 of the same year. Its purpose as set forth in its charter is:

“To conduct scientific investigations into the theory and practice of governmental administration, including inquiries into the form of organization and the manner of operation of federal, state and local governmental bodies and offices in the United States of America; the powers, duties, limitations and qualifications of officers; the methods of administration employed; the character and cost of results obtained and the conditions affecting the efficiency and welfare of governmental officers and employees; to carry on such inquiries, directly or with the coöperation of governments, learned societies, institutions of learning or other agencies and individuals and to make public the results of its investigations; to maintain a library for the use of the society or its members and officers and those affiliated with its work; and to prosecute such other inquiries and perform such other services as may tend to the development and application of the principles of efficiency in governmental administration.”

Stephen Salkever in this Review (“Virtue, Obligation and Politics,” APSR 68 [March, 1974]) discusses two paradigms of politics: one based on the concept of virtue (ancient political philosophy), the other resting on obligation (modern political thought). We analyze the meaning and significance of these two paradigms in terms of the cognitive-developmental moral psychology common to Lawrence Kohlberg, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget. We first present the cognitive-developmental theory and its empirical findings. We then demonstrate that the politics of obligation falls within the virtue paradigm as a necessary stage in the development of virtue, which involves placing Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Rawls within our developmental scheme. Finally, we explore the nature of understanding moral principles from within the cognitive-developmental perspective. In all this, we agree with Salkever's basic assumption that any account of political good (public as opposed to private) must be based on moral psychology, i.e., it must deal with the question of “What is good for the most inclusive of all publics, the human species?” We go two steps beyond Salkever, however, by showing the significance of the question, and by providing an answer to it (both of which bear upon the understanding of morality). An underlying purpose of our research is to present and to promote the political relevance and significance of moral psychology in general and cognitive development in particular.

The article provides experimental evidence of the effect of candidate-citizen town-hall meetings on voters’ political behavior. The intervention took place prior to the March 2011 elections in Benin and involved 150 randomly selected villages. In the treatment group, candidates held town-hall meetings where voters deliberated over their electoral platforms. The control group was exposed to the standard campaign—that is, one-way communication of the candidate’s platform by himself or his local broker. We find that town-hall meetings led to a more informed citizenry and higher electoral participation, which diverged little along socioeconomic lines. We also observe a lower effectiveness of vote-buying attempts where town halls took place. This is consistent with town-hall deliberation promoting what we call more “ethical” voters.

If, for the moment, we can conceive of Uncle Sam as being Andrew Carnegie, of Carnegie's millions as unimproved real estate, and of Carnegie's intention to die poor, as Uncle Sam's liberal land policy, we can perhaps best picture to ourselves the public land administration in the United States in a nutshell. The government, like Carnegie, is unloading its vast wealth in a manner calculated to do the most good, and it is guarding itself continuously, although often futilely, from being imposed upon and cheated. The ownership of the public domain by the United States is of the highest possible title. There is no one to dispute the government's absolute ownership of it. There are no taxes to pay. The government is subject to no obligation to dispose of its land. It can keep or dispose of the land as it chooses.

In 1789 the United States government started as owner of practically all of the Northwest Territory. Later it acquired, what some geographers call the Southwest Territory, by further cession from the States. By purchase, discovery, annexation and conquest the United States acquired further holdings, so that with the exception of Texas and private holdings the government's fee simple title in the public domain extended from the thirteen colonies to the Gulf of Mexico, and from the Atlantic Ocean on the east coast of Florida to the Pacific and the Arctic Oceans.

Writing in 1919, Mr. W. F. Willoughby declared that “at the present time few reforms of government in the United States are more urgent than that of the reorganization of the administrative services of our state governments, so as to put them upon the integrated or departmental basis.” This need for state administrative reorganization is now generally recognized, not only by political scientists and students of administration, but also by public officials and practical administrators. This is indicated by the large number of governors who, in public messages, have urged upon their legislatures the adoption of measures of administrative reform; by the investigations and reports of efficiency and economy commissions or similar bodies created in many states; and by the laws actually passed providing for administrative reorganization in Illinois, Idaho, Nebraska, Ohio, Washington, Massachusetts, and other states.

A movement of this character naturally follows the line of least resistance, and consequently the changes in administrative organization heretofore made have been through statutory enactment rather than through constitutional revision. Inasmuch as, in most states, a faulty organization of the administration is stereotyped in the constitution, thoroughgoing reorganization by mere statutory enactment is practically impossible. The constitutional difficulties which impede the movement for administrative reorganization should warn us against the insertion in the organic law of detailed administrative provisions.

This article takes as its starting point a 1961 conversation between James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, where the latter first posed the question that would recur in Baldwin’s writings in the following years: “Is it necessary to integrate oneself into a burning house?” Although the phrase is often associated with Baldwin, who mostly used it as a metaphor for the racist nation, most famously in The Fire Next Time (1963), this article shows how Hansberry’s analysis of many African Americans’ skepticism toward integration into a “burning house” was situated in a global context of anticolonial, anti-capitalist, and feminist struggle. Writing within networks of Black internationalist feminists and presenting a multivalent and relational account of home, Hansberry revealed household labor and relations of intimacy to be central to the making and maintenance of empire, racism, and capitalism, as well as their contestation through acts and affects of insurgency.