Few movements in the history of American politics and political thought have been of equal immediate or enduring importance with that associated with the name of Thomas Jefferson. And yet Jefferson never published anything other than very brief and inadequate discussions of the principles for which he stood. His only systematic exposition of his political ideas is found in his famous Notes on Virginia. This work, however, was written in 1781-82 and deals but remotely with the issues which were to occupy the stage after 1789. Neither in Jefferson's own writings nor in those of Madison and Monroe, his successors as official head of the Republican party and as president of the United States, do we find any adequate exposition of the theories associated with the era of Jeffersonian democracy. It is only in the extensive works of John Taylor of Caroline, a friend and associate of these men in the political battles of that period, that such an exposition is to be found. Jefferson wrote that “Colonel Taylor and myself have rarely, if ever, differed in any political principle of importance.” John Randolph said that Taylor's “disinterested principles” were “the only bond of union among Republicans.” And Timothy Pickering calls him “the Goliath of the party.” As Henry Adams has said, Taylor was regarded as a political thinker of the first rank by the Virginia school and by many other leaders of his time, but it is equally true that his writings have occupied a position of obscurity since his death. This obscurity, however, does not alter the fact that they were influential in their time and are today the best source of information concerning the principles of both the earlier and later phases of the movement initiated by Jefferson during the first years under the Constitution.

Of all the changes that have occurred in Yugoslavia since 1948, one of the most interesting is the development of a new theory and role for the Communist Party. Now officially called the League of Communists, the Yugoslav Party illustrates both the well-known dominant role of Communist parties in states where they have come to power and at the same time the peculiar nature of Yugoslav Communism that has set it apart from the Soviet variety.

Organized on the Soviet pattern and headed by men steeped in the Soviet tradition, the Yugoslav Communists even in 1945 occupied a position like that of their comrades in the USSR, where, as Stalin said, “not a single important political or organizational question is decided without directions from the Party ….” Even after the Cominform dispute had produced a new ideological pattern, a more liberal approach to Communism, political and economic decentralization and profuse professions of democracy, few could doubt that, as Stalin said about the situation in the Soviet Union, “the Party governs the country.”

The life and thought of Mahatma Gandhi continues to be a reproach to ideologies and dispositions that produced the horrors of the twentieth century. But his complex legacy suffers from a paradox. His ideas appear to be both necessary and improbable at the same time. To many, Gandhi's thought becomes even more relevant in a context in which the vision of modernity that he critiqued so powerfully has triumphed, the violence that he stood against has become an ineliminable feature of political life, and the practice of freedom has come to be dissociated from the exercise of virtue. But the very same historical momentum that inspires the authors in this volume to turn to Gandhi also seems to make Gandhi an even more distant and unlikely figure for our times. This volume, a product of sincere and careful scholarship, is largely an effort to keep Gandhi's thought alive. It focuses on the central category of Gandhian thought, swaraj (self-rule). Anthony Parel's essay usefully distinguishes between four meanings of freedom for Gandhi: freedom as national independence, freedom as freedom from poverty, political freedom for the individual, and freedom as the capacity for self-rule or spiritual freedom. This typology will provide a helpful initial orientation to readers unfamiliar with Gandhi's thought.

The legal or customary requirement that legislators reside in the districts they represent is one of the principal structural respects in which American legislatures differ from those of most other democracies. Our legislators and party leaders commonly defend the local residence rule by claiming that it ensures that each legislator will know the special problems and desires of his constituents and thus be equipped to represent them faithfully.

Some academic commentators, on the other hand, have argued that the rule is a prime cause of the parochialism which, they say, prevents Congress and state legislatures from formulating consistent and purposive general programs. These critics customarily contrast American practice unfavorably with that in Great Britain, where the last local residence rule for M.P.s was repealed in 1774. In Britain, the argument runs, the absence of the rule not only minimizes localism but, even more, it enables the national party leaders to allocate their personnel resources in the most effective way.

Thirteen major data sources for the study of American politics are examined with regard to their conceptual orientation, error structure, and inferential utility. A great deal of ephemera and measurement without theory is discovered. Few of the documents contain any serious discussion of error structure, although some do report “standard errors” based on naive sampling models. In addition to suggestions for improving the compilation of political statistics, recommendations for a basic minimum library of data sources for American politics are made: The Almanac of American Politics and the Statistical Abstract of the United States, followed by the Guide to U.S. Elections.

Ofra Bengio's book is a scholarly and methodical endeavor to analyze the way in which Ba`thi Iraq (1968-present) has been using (or misusing) the Arabic language, symbolism, history, and myths in order to legitimize its rule and policies. Bengio demonstrates how language has been twisted and manipu- lated in an attempt to terrorize political enemies, paralyze and enchant the vast majority of the Iraqis, induce them to perform or tolerate atrocities, and risk their lives in battle for leader and country. Sometimes, the regime is entrapped in its own rhetoric. The book shows how discourse, art, and symbols have been used to construct a cult of personality for Saddam Husayn, unmatched in the contemporary Middle East.

There has been scant empirical evidence linking associational membership to general trust and trustworthiness. This study explores urban youth clubs in Mali and asks: is membership in these groups associated with greater trust and trustworthiness toward society? It leverages 18 months of fieldwork, including 375 group surveys, 2,525 individual surveys, over 1,300 trust games, and transcripts from 66 focus groups. We use propensity score matching to analyze how members and nonmembers play the trust game with strangers. Members are more trustworthy; they return 12% more to their partners than nonmember peers. We do not find a systematic effect of membership on trust. Trustworthiness in the game is also positively correlated with self-reported trust and tolerance as well as real-world behaviors including volunteering and helping friends. Focus group data highlight five mechanisms by which membership fosters general trustworthiness: bonding among diverse members, bridging, public goods provision, socialization, and psychological support.

Scholars have long questioned whether and how courts influence society. We contribute to this debate by investigating the ability of judicial decisions to shape issue attention and affect toward courts in media serving the LGBTQ+ community. To do so, we compiled an original database of LGBTQ+ magazine coverage of court cases over an extended period covering major decisions, including Lawrence v. Texas (2003), Goodridge v. Massachusetts Department of Public Health (2003), and Lofton v. Secretary of Department of Children & Family Services (2004). We argue these cases influence the volume and tone of LGBTQ+ media coverage. Combining computational social science techniques with qualitative analysis, we find increased attention to same-sex marriage after the decisions in Lawrence, Goodridge, and Lofton, and the coalescence of discussions of courts around same-sex marriage after Lawrence. We also show how LGBTQ+ media informed readers about the political and legal implications of struggles over marriage equality.

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.

A long-standing debate in political psychology considers whether individuals update their beliefs and attitudes in the direction of evidence or grow more confident in their convictions when confronted with counter-attitudinal arguments. Though recent studies have shown that instances of the latter tendency, which scholars have termed attitude polarization and “belief backfire,” are rarely observed in settings involving hot-button issues or viral misinformation, we know surprisingly little about how participants respond to information targeting deeply held attitudes, a key condition for triggering attitude polarization. We develop a tailored experimental design that measures participants’ core issue positions and exposes them to personalized counter-attitudinal information using the large language model GPT-3. We find credible evidence of attitude polarization, but only when arguments are contentious and vitriolic. For lower valence counter-attitudinal arguments, attitude polarization is not detected. We conclude by discussing implications for the study of political cognition and the measurement of attitudes.