In constitutional form and in practice, the Japanese national government is parliamentary. Authority is centered in the Diet, and power is held by the parties in the Diet. Unlike the pre-war system, for example, the Diet parties really do choose the Prime Ministers.

The post-war party system changed fundamentally in 1955, when the non-socialist parties combined and formed the mammoth Liberal-Democratic Party (LDP). Since its formation in 1955, the LDP has always had a safe majority in both Houses of the Diet. But, from its beginning as a union of several political streams to the present, the LDP has been made up of several rather stable factions. These factions are the key actors in the biennial election of the party president, who naturally becomes the Prime Minister. As a general rule, votes in a party presidential election are on straight lines. So a Prime Minister is chosen by a coalition of LDP factions which controls a majority of votes at the party convention. Furthermore, the factions present nominees for Cabinet posts, and Ministers are chosen from among these nominees. Cabinet posts become rewards for the factions which voted for the Prime Minister, inducements to opposing factions to enter the Prime Minister's coalition, and buffers to soften or weaken the opposition of hostile factions. In short, the struggle over top political leadership in Japan—the president and the top officials of the ruling party, the Prime Minister, and other Cabinet members—is waged by the LDP factions. (The struggle over policy, on the other hand, is waged by other actors, within the framework established by the outcome of the factions' struggle over leadership.) And because of the wide range of opinion within the LDP, the outcomes of the factions' struggle over top political leadership are very important for Japan. A switch from an Ishibashi to a Kishi, or from a Kishi to an Ikeda, is certainly as significant as, say, the replacement of a Laniel by a Mendès-France.

Previous investigations of strategic voting equilibria in mass electorates have looked only at single-member districts. I shall investigate such equilibria in multimember districts operating under the single nontransferable vote system. What appear to be the most natural equilibria conform to the M + 1 rule, according to which strategic voting in M-seat districts produces exactly M + 1 vote-getting candidates in equilibrium, any others having their support totally undercut. This result provides the beginnings of a formal underpinning for Reed's recent extension of Duverger's Law to the Japanese case. The model also generates specific and empirically testable hypotheses concerning the exceptions to the M + 1 rule that one ought to expect in equilibrium. I test these hypotheses with Japanese data. Finally, the model also reveals a type of strategic voting that is specific to multimember districts. I use Japanese data again to explore the empirical importance of this kind of strategic voting.

In the postwar United States the president's party has always done worse in the midterm congressional elections than in the previous congressional election. Republican administrations exhibit below-average, and Democratic administrations above-average, economic growth in the first half of each term, whereas in the latter halves the two see equal growth. Our rational expectations model is consistent with these two regularities. In presidential elections, voters choose between two polarized candidates. They then use midterm elections to counterbalance the president's policies by strengthening the opposition in Congress. Since presidents of different parties are associated with different policies, our model predicts a (spurious) correlation between the state of the economy and elections. Our predictions contrast with those of retrospective voting models, in which voters reward the incumbent if the economy is doing well before the election. Our model performs empirically at least as well as, and often better than, alternative models.

Our concern here is with the nature of the individual's attachment to the body politic and, more particularly, with the value premises underlying the choices made by certain classes of voters. Our hypothesis is that some classes of voters (provisionally defined as “subcultures” constituted on ethnic and income lines) are more disposed than others to rest their choices on some conception of “the public interest” or the “welfare of the community.” To say the same thing in another way, the voting behavior of some classes tends to be more public-regarding and less private- (self- or family-) regarding than that of others. To test this hypothesis it is necessary to examine voting behavior in situations where one can say that a certain vote could not have been private-regarding. Local bond and other expenditure referenda present such situations: it is sometimes possible to say that a vote in favor of a particular expenditure proposal is incompatible with a certain voter's self-interest narrowly conceived. If the voter nevertheless casts such a vote and if there is evidence that his vote was not in some sense irrational or accidental, then it must be presumed that his action was based on some conception of “the public interest.”

We argue that large elections may exhibit a moral bias (i.e., conditional on the distribution of preferences within the electorate, alternatives understood by voters to be morally superior are more likely to win in large elections than in small ones). This bias can result from ethical expressive preferences, which include a payoff voters obtain from taking an action they believe to be ethical. In large elections, pivot probability is small, so expressive preferences become more important relative to material self-interest. Ethical expressive preferences can have a disproportionate impact on results in large elections for two reasons. As pivot probability declines, ethical expressive motivations make agents more likely to vote on the basis of ethical considerations than on the basis of narrow self-interest, and the set of agents who choose to vote increasingly consist of agents with large ethical expressive payoffs. We provide experimental evidence that is consistent with the hypothesis of moral bias.

The literature on global integration and national policy autonomy often ignores a central result from open economy macroeconomics: Capital mobility constrains monetary policy when the exchange rate is fixed and fiscal policy when the exchange rate is flexible. Similarly, examinations of the electoral determinants of monetary and fiscal policy typically ignore international pressures altogether. We develop a formal model to analyze the interaction between fiscal and monetary policymakers under various exchange rate regimes and the degrees of central bank independence. We test the model using data from OECD countries. We find evidence that preelectoral monetary expansions occur only when the exchange rate is flexible and central bank independence is low; preelectoral fiscal expansions occur when the exchange rate is fixed. We then explore the implications of our model for arguments that emphasize the partisan sources of macroeconomic policy and for the conduct of fiscal policy after economic and monetary union in Europe.

The science of politics is a science of human behavior. It concerns itself with a specific segment of the activities of humans—those which either take place in, or have a clearly discernible effect upon, the formal governmental machinery of the community. The characteristic feature of a political scientist, therefore, is not his unique theoretical framework but his special empirical interest. Two main consequences follow. First, it is trivially true, and widely recognized, that the major concepts of other behavior sciences are necessarily an integral part of the study of political behavior. Second, it is equally true that, within the social sciences, it is the responsibility of political science to develop those elements of behavior theory that are particularly relevant for the analysis of action in the sphere of politics.

Much of current empirical and theoretical work in political analysis is organized around the observation that many political data can be conceived to represent results of mechanisms for decision-making used (consciously or unconsciously) by individuals or collectivities. In a similar fashion, students of a significant number of other types of behavior have tended to formulate their problems within a decision-making framework. When one examines these apparently disparate branches of behavior theory, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that there exist potentially fruitful parallelisms among such theories as those of consumer behavior, administrative behavior, price setting, legislative enactments, propaganda, learning, foreign affairs, and social control.

Despite its normative importance, the question of why people join interest groups remains open. It has certainly provoked a wealth of theoretical attention. Regrettably, however, it has inspired only a handful of empirical tests. The introduction of this article places the empirical debate into its normative context. The first section develops a rational model of individual evaluations of group membership, focusing upon the effect of changing personal circumstances—preferences, needs, resources, insecurity, and information—on the calculus. In particular, the theory predicts responsiveness to political or collective benefits in threatening times. Analyses of aggregate changes over time in membership in the Farm Bureau, the League of Women Voters, and the Home Builders, reported in the second section, bear the model out. Finally, the conclusion takes on the complementary question of group supply, sketching a theory of group mobilization that emphasizes subsidization.

In an extensive series of articles, Rabinowitz, Macdonald, and Listhaug have launched a new, directional theory of electoral choice. According to their claims, the new theory is superior to the classical Downsian proximity model. Such a conclusion, however, is not tenable. First, it fails to take proper account of the lower falsifiability of the directional model. Second, it rests on empirical analyses that do not test the two theories on the predictions they actually make. Both are theories of individual choice, which implies intrapersonal comparisons of utility. Prior tests, however, have predominantly taken the form of interpersonal comparisons. A reanalysis based on the proper type of comparison yields an outcome diametrically opposed to that previously obtained. It also reveals an eccentricity effect that largely accounts for the apparent success of the directional model.

For the past 30 years, presidents have enlisted prime-time television to promote their policies to the American people. For most of this era, they have been able to commandeer the national airwaves and speak to “captive” viewers. Recently, however, presidents appear to be losing their audiences. Two leading explanations are the rise of political disaffection and the growth of cable. We investigate both by developing and testing a model of the individual's viewing decision using both cross-sectional (1996 NES survey) and time-series (128 Nielsen audience ratings for presidential appearances between 1969 and 1998) data. We find that cable television but not political disaffection has ended the golden era of presidential television. Moreover, we uncover evidence that both presidents and the broadcast networks have begun adapting strategically to this new reality in scheduling presidential appearances.

The purpose of this article is to assess the effect of the winner-take-all feature of the Electoral College on the allocation of resources by candidates to the states in a presidential campaign. Conceptualizing the campaign as a two-person zero-sum infinite game, it is found that the main effect of this feature is to induce candidates to allocate campaign resources roughly in proportion to the 3/2's power of the electoral votes of each state, which creates a peculiar bias that makes voters living in the largest states as much as three times as attractive campaign targets as voters living in the smallest states. Empirically, it is shown that the 3/2's rule explains quite well the time allocations of presidential and vice-presidential candidates in the 1960, 1964, 1968, and 1972 campaigns; for presidential campaigns in 1976 and 1980, optimal allocations are indicated for all fifty states and the District of Columbia. A comparison with optimal allocations under a system of direct popular-vote election of the president reveals that such a system would be less susceptible to manipulative strategies than the Electoral College as well as being compatible with the egalitarian principle of “one man, one vote.”

In 1958 only 22 per cent of the total population felt that they could not “trust the government in Washington to do what is right” all or most of the time. By the fall of 1972 that figure had climbed to 45 per cent. Furthermore, the percentage of eligible voters participating in the 1972 presidential election was the lowest it has been since 1948; crises and scandals have continually plagued the government since the Watergate revelations; and the economic conditions of the country have provoked widespread uncertainty and anxiety among the populace. There is good reason, then, for the intense current interest in attitudes of political disaffection and alienation.

Present U.S. conditions demonstrate that political alienation is a phenomenon of fundamental significance in political processes. Feelings of political cynicism and alienation may substantially diminish the willingness of citizens to participate in politics or to support programs directed at resolving the social problems that stimulate discontent. Attitudes of political alienation have likewise been related to public demands for radical political reforms during trying periods of social or economic discontent. Alienation and non-participation, however, go beyond just questions of voluntary compliance with policies or the possibilities for radical change; they strike at a very basic democratic norm. Democratic theory emphasizes voluntary consent as the basis of political obligation and legitimacy. Democratic government assumes—indeed, requires—widespread participation, political equality, the accountability of leaders and protection of the individual citizen's constitutional guarantees. The full attainment of these values is only possible when the relationship between the leaders and the public is based on mutual understanding and reciprocal trust rather than on the use of coercive and arbitrary authority.

This response to Andrew Rehfeld's “Representation Rethought” (American Political Science Review 2009) takes up his criticisms of my “Rethinking Representation” (American Political Science Review 2003) to advance a more relational and systematic approach to representation. To this end, it suggests replacing the “trustee” concept of representation with a “selection model” based on the selection and replacement of “gyroscopic” representatives who are both relatively self-reliant in judgment and relatively nonresponsive to sanctions. It explores as well the interaction between representatives’ (and constituents’) perceptions of reality and their normative views of what the representative ought to represent. Building from the concept of surrogate representation and other features of legislative representation, it argues for investigating, both normatively and empirically, not only the characteristics of individual representatives emphasized by Rehfeld's analysis but also the representative–constituent relationship and the larger representative system, including both elected and nonelected representatives, inside and outside the legislature.

It is often argued that the United States Constitution was designed so as to create a stable political order. Yet in the literature on the formal theory of democracy, there has been very little examination of constitutional provisions for their stability-inducing properties. In this paper we demonstrate that bicameralism and the executive veto tend to create stability, that the legislative override of the executive veto tends to undermine this stability, and that the interaction of bicameralism and the executive veto is likely to produce stable outcomes despite the destabilizing impact of the veto override.

In the 19th century what was meant by the term “constitution” was reasonably definite and clear. Paradoxically enough, if the word retained some ambiguity, this was because of the British constitution; that is, because the mother country of modern constitutionalism appeared to have an obscure constitution, or even—according to some of the standards that seemed very important elsewhere—no constitution at all.

Various analysts have noted that the decision to vote in mass elections is difficult to justify from the standpoint of an expected utility maximization model. Put simply, the probability that a citizen's vote will affect the outcome is so small that the expected gains from voting are outweighed by the costs in time and effort. Such analyses treat rational behavior as synonymous with expected utility maximization. In this paper we show that an alternative criterion for decision making under uncertainty, minimax regret, specifies voting under quite general conditions. Both two and three candidate plurality elections are considered. Interestingly, a minimax regret decision maker never votes for his second choice in a three candidate election, whereas expected utility maximizers clearly may. Thus, the model proposed has implications for candidate choice as well as turnout.

We develop and test a neoinstitutional model of Senate roll call voting on nominees to the Supreme Court. The statistical model assumes that Senators examine the characteristics of nominees and use their roll call votes to establish an electorally attractive position on the nominees. The model is tested with probit estimates on the 2,054 confirmation votes from Earl Warren to Anthony Kennedy. The model performs remarkably well in predicting the individual votes of Senators to confirm or reject nominees. Senators routinely vote to confirm nominees who are perceived as well qualified and ideologically proximate to Senators' constituents. When nominees are less well qualified and are relatively distant, however, Senators' votes depend to a large degree on the political environment, especially the status of the president.

We demonstrate that social media data represent a useful resource for testing models of legislative and individual-level political behavior and attitudes. First, we develop a model to estimate the ideology of politicians and their supporters using social media data on individual citizens’ endorsements of political figures. Our measure allows us to place politicians and more than 6 million citizens who are active in social media on the same metric. We validate the ideological estimates that result from the scaling process by showing they correlate highly with existing measures of ideology from Congress, and with individual-level self-reported political views. Finally, we use these measures to study the relationship between ideology and age, social relationships and ideology, and the relationship between friend ideology and turnout.

How can one analyze collective action in protests or revolutions when individuals are uncertain about the relative payoffs of the status quo and revolution? We model a “calculus of protest” of individuals who must either submit to the status quo or support revolt based only on personal information about their payoffs. In deciding whether to revolt, the citizen must infer both the benefit of successful revolution and the likely actions of other citizens. We characterize conditions under which payoff uncertainty overturns conventional wisdom: (a) when a citizen is too willing to revolt, he reduces the incentives of others to revolt; (b) less accurate information about the value of revolution can make revolt more likely; (c) public signals from other citizens can reduce the likelihood of revolt; (d) harsher punishment can increase the incidence of punishment; and (e) the incidence of protest can be positively correlated with that of repression.

For the purpose of determining the relative influence of the three potentially most important social and demographic factors on party choice–social class, religion, and language–a comparison of Belgium, Canada, South Africa, and Switzerland provides a “crucial experiment,” because these three variables are simultaneously present in all four countries. Building on the major earlier research achievements in comparative electoral behavior, this four-country multivariate analysis compares the indices of voting and the party choice “trees” on the basis of national sample surveys conducted in the 1970s. From this crucial contest among the three determinants of party choice, religion emerges as the victor, language as a strong runner-up, and class as a distant third. The surprising strength of the religious factor can be explained in terms of the “freezing” of past conflict dimensions in the party system and the presence of alternative, regional-federal, structures for the expression of linguistic interests.