Work by Axelrod, Hardin, and Taylor indicates that problems of repeated collective action may lessen if people use decentralized strategies of reciprocity to induce mutual cooperation. Hobbes's centralized solution may thus be overrated. We investigate these issues by representing ongoing collective action as an n-person repeated prisoner's dilemma. The results show that decentralized conditional cooperation can ease iterated collective action dilemmas—if all players perfectly monitor the relation between individual choices and group payoffs. Once monitoring uncertainty is introduced, such strategies degrade rapidly in value, and centrally administered selective incentives become relatively more valuable. Most importantly, we build on a suggestion of Herbert Simon by showing that a hierarchical structure, with reciprocity used in subunits and selective incentives centrally administered, combines the advantages of the decentralized and centralized solutions. This hierarchical form is more stable than the decentralized structure and often secures more cooperation than the centralized structure. Generally, the model shows that the logic of repeated decision making has significant implications for the institutional forms of collective action.

From my work on my doctoral dissertation (Lipset 1950, 1968) down to the present, I have been interested in the problem of “American exceptionalism.” That curious phrase emerged from the debate in the international Communist movement in the 1920s concerning the sources of the weakness of left-wing radical movements in the United States (Draper 1960, pp. 268-72; Lipset 1977a, pp. 107-61). The key question repeatedly raised in this context has been, is America qualitatively different from other industrial capitalist countries? Or, to use Sombart's words, “Why is there no Socialism in the United States?” (Sombart 1976).

In a forthcoming book, I evaluate the hypotheses advanced by various writers from Karl Marx onward to explain the absence of an effective socialist party on the American political scene. (For a preliminary formulation, see Lipset 1977b, pp. 31-149, 346-63.) If any of the hypotheses are valid, they should also help to account for the variation among working-class movements in other parts of the world. In this article, therefore, I shall reverse the emphasis from that in my book and look at socialist and working-class movements comparatively, applying elsewhere some of the propositions that have been advanced to explain the American situation.

Ultimatum bargaining models of international interactions suggest that when conflict is costly and the actors are fully informed, the probability of conflict goes to zero. However, conflict occurs with some positive probability when the challenger is uncertain about the defender's reservation value. I employ a simple ultimatum game of bargaining to evaluate two traditional power-centric theories of world politics, balance of power, and power transition theory. The formal and empirical analyses demonstrate that as states approach power parity, information asymmetries are greatest, thus enhancing the probability of militarized conflict. Uncertainty is a central cause of conflict emergence and is correlated with the distribution of observable capabilities. Recognizing the relationship between the distribution of power and the uncertainty offers a more sophisticated interpretation of power-centric explanations of world politics.

In some African countries, democratic openings have intensified ethnic competition and led to protracted transitions or outright conflict. In Kenya, I argue, the stalled transition reflects the effects of republican citizenship in ethnic political communities and liberal citizenship in the national political community. This duality in citizenship engenders conflict over democracy—conceived as liberal majoritarian democracy—and results in ethnic coalitions disagreeing over which institutions are appropriate for a multiethnic state. I provide evidence from discourses over institutions from two transition periods in Kenya: at independence and in the recent shift from one-party rule. This study makes two contributions. First, it adds to current citizenship theory, which is largely derived from Western experience, by demonstrating that republican and liberal citizenships are not necessarily compatible and that the modern nation-state is not the only relevant community for forming citizens. Second, it adds to studies of African transitions by highlighting citizenship issues in institutional design with regard to ethnicity in Kenya.

It is often argued that executive powers such as the veto serve to reduce particularistic spending by the legislature. I argue that the effect of the executive veto depends strongly on assumptions about both the nature of executive preferences and the institutional structure of executive-legislative bargaining. To support these claims, I develop a model of distributive policymaking subject to an executive veto. This framework incorporates variation in presidential objectives and formal powers into a dynamic bargaining model. In equilibrium, stronger veto power leads to a lower level of distributive spending, but the effects are mitigated to the extent that the president prefers spending in some districts over others. The model also generates new insights and predictions about fiscal policy under the separation of powers, including the effects of divided government, electoral rules, and term limitations for the executive.

The political incorporation and municipal segregation of classes and status groups in the metropolis tend to divorce fiscal resources from public needs and to create and perpetuate inequality among urban residents in the United States. An investigation of data collected for a large number of metropolitan areas in 1960 reveals a number of variables associated with inequality in the distribution of fiscal resources among municipalities in metropolitan areas. The level of income inequality among municipal governments in metropolitan areas varies directly with: location in the South; age, size and density of the metropolis; nonwhite concentration; family income inequality; residential segregation among social classes; housing segregation by quality; and governmental fragmentation. The data provide support for the argument that governmental inequality occupies a central position in the urban stratification system.

Although, conventionally, vote trading in legislatures has been condemned as socially undesirable by both scholars and lay citizens, a recently popular school of scholarship has argued that vote trading improves the traders' welfare in the direction of Pareto-optimal allocations. This essay is an attempt to reconcile the disagreement by showing formally that vote trading does improve the position of the traders but that at the same time trading may impose an external cost on nontraders. In sum, it turns out that sporadic and occasional trading is probably socially beneficial but that systematic trading may engender a paradox of vote trading. This paradox has the property that, while trading is immediately advantageous for the traders, still, when everybody trades, everybody is worse off. Furthermore, vote trading may not produce a stable equilibrium that is Pareto-optimal either for individual members or for coalitions of members.

This article focuses on the link between the representation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in national legislatures and the existence of equality laws focused on sexual orientation. It addresses three interrelated questions: how many “out” LGBT legislators have served in national parliaments, what explains the cross-national variation in their legislative presence, and what is the relationship between the presence of gay legislators and the enactment of laws that treat gay and straight citizens equally? There is an established literature arguing that the representation of women and ethnic minorities “descriptively” in national legislatures improves the realization of their policy preferences and the position of the group within the society as a whole. This article draws on that literature and extends the analysis to LGBT communities. It finds that the presence of even a small number of openly gay legislators is associated significantly with the future passage of enhanced gay rights, even after including controls for social values, democracy, government ideology, and electoral system design. Once openly gay legislators are in office they have a transformative effect on the views and voting behavior of their straight colleagues. This “familiarity through presence” effect is echoed in studies of U.S. state legislatures and levels of social tolerance of homosexuality in the population at large.

The willingness to trust strangers has been associated with a variety of public benefits, from greater civic-mindedness and more honest government to higher rates of economic growth, and more. But a growing body of research finds that such generalized trust is far more common in ethnically homogeneous than in more diverse societies. Ethnic difference is believed to breed more particularistic, ingroup ties, thus undermining both generalized and cross-ethnic trust. We argue that this image is too narrow, and we propose a broader model to identify the factors that give rise to cross-ethnic trust. Using data from two minority regions of Russia, we find considerable support for the model. We also find that high ingroup or particularistic trust is no barrier to faith in another ethnic group.

Few dispute that secure property rights are critical to economic development. But if secure property rights are so beneficial, then why are they so rare? More precisely, what factors promote secure property rights? Do rightholders view private or state agents as a greater threat to property? Do they value bureaucratic commitment or discretion? I use evidence from two original surveys of company managers in Russia to assess the institutional, social, and political determinants of secure property rights. Most managers said that state arbitration courts did not work badly in disputes with other businesses, but few expected these courts to protect their rights in disputes with state officials. More importantly, managers who expressed confidence that state arbitration courts could constrain state officials invested at higher rates, even controlling for the perceived effectiveness of state institutions. Ironically, increasing constraints on state agents can increase the security of property and bolster state capacity. These results generate insights into debates on the role of state in the economy, the origins of secure property rights, the nature of state capacity, the importance of informal institutions, and the process of legal reform.

In an examination of responses to public opinion poll questions designed to assess the degree of generalized support for the wars in Korea and Vietnam, popular support for the two wars was found to follow highly similar patterns. Support was high initially but declined as a logarithmic function of American casualties, a function remarkably similar for both wars. While support for the war in Vietnam did finally drop below those levels found during the Korean War, it did so only after the fighting had gone on considerably longer and only after American casualties had greatly surpassed those of the earlier war. These trends seem to have been fairly impervious to particular events in either of the wars.

It is suggested that the greater vocal opposition to the Vietnam War reflects mainly a shift of opinion within the intellectual left on the wisdom of the two wars. Armed with new techniques of protest learned in its identification with the civil rights movement, the intellectual left has been able effectively to garner great attention for its cause during the Vietnamese War.

Also noted was the presence of a rather large body of opinion inclined to follow the President on war policy, giving him considerable room for maneuver, at least in the short run, and making public opinion in this area highly sensitive to current policy.

A crude comparison with data from World War II suggests that, while the earlier war was unquestionably more "popular" than the wars in Korea and Vietnam, support was less consensual than might be expected. The popularity of the Korean War rose slowly after its conclusion, but this sort of retrospective support for World Wars I and II may have declined as time went by and, at any rate, was quite sensitive to current events,

In repeated instances, differences in question wording were found to alter substantially the response generated to poll questions about the wars.

Perhaps the most striking characteristic of the “behavioral approach” in political science is the ambiguity of the term itself, and of its synonym “political behavior.” The behavioral approach, in fact, is rather like the Loch Ness monster: one can say with considerable confidence what it is not, but it is difficult to say what it is. Judging from newspaper reports that appear from time to time, particularly just before the summer tourist season, I judge that the monster of Loch Ness is not Moby Dick, nor my daughter's goldfish that disappeared down the drain some ten years ago, nor even a misplaced American eight heading for the Henley Regatta. In the same spirit, I judge that the behavioral approach is not that of the speculative philosopher, the historian, the legalist, or the moralist. What, then, is it? Indeed, does it actually exist?

Although I do not profess to know of the full history of the behavioral approach, a little investigation reveals that confusing and even contradictory interpretations have marked its appearance from the beginning. The first sightings in the roily waters of political science of the phenomenon variously called political behavioral approach, or behavioral(ist) research, evidently occurred in the 1920s. The term “political behavior,” it seems, was used by American political scientists from the First World War onward. The honor of first adopting the term as a book title seems to belong, however, not to a political scientist but to the American journalist Prank Kent, who published a book in 1928 entitled Political Behavior, The Heretofore Unwritten Laws, Customs, and Principles of Politics as Practised in the United States. To Kent, the study of political behavior meant the cynical “realism” of the tough-minded newspaperman who reports the way things “really” happen and not the way they're supposed to happen. This meaning, I may say, is often implied even today. However, Herbert Tingsten rescued the term for political science in 1937 by publishing his path-breaking Political Behavior: Studies in Election Statistic. Despite the fact that Tingsten was a Swede, and his work dealt with European elections, the term became increasingly identified with American political science.

The theory of patterned inequality between rulers and ruled provides a valuable analytic approach to the relationship between inequality and political violence. Under conditions of a bifurcated pattern of inequality, the probability of political violence is likely to be greater than under a more generalized inequality typically measured by the Gini index. A strong systematic relationship between patterned inequality in Latin American landholdings and deaths from political violence was discovered using the exponential distribution as a model for the lower portion of the land distribution and the log-exponential for the upper. This degree of association was far stronger than that found between the Gini index of land inequality in Latin America and deaths from political violence. Evidence supporting the theory was also found in an analysis of Middle Eastern landholdings.

In their landmark study of a field experiment, Gerber and Green (2000) found that get-out-the-vote calls reduce turnout by five percentage points. In this article, I introduce statistical methods that can uncover discrepancies between experimental design and actual implementation. The application of this methodology shows that Gerber and Green's negative finding is caused by inadvertent deviations from their stated experimental protocol. The initial discovery led to revisions of the original data by the authors and retraction of the numerical results in their article. Analysis of their revised data, however, reveals new systematic patterns of implementation errors. Indeed, treatment assignments of the revised data appear to be even less randomized than before their corrections. To adjust for these problems, I employ a more appropriate statistical method and demonstrate that telephone canvassing increases turnout by five percentage points. This article demonstrates how statistical methods can find and correct complications of field experiments.

We argue that economic links, such as supply chains, can create a common roof that protects foreign investors in host countries that lack strong institutions to protect property rights. Supply chains link the activities of firms: when a host government breaks a contract with one firm, other firms in the supply chain are harmed. These partner firms therefore have incentive to protect one another’s property rights. This leads to the key implication of our argument: host governments are less likely to violate the property rights of firms that are more tightly linked with other firms in the host economy. We test our argument with cross-national data on investment arbitration, a survey of US multinational subsidiaries in Russia, and case studies from Azerbaijan. Our findings imply that one benefit of outsourcing in developing and transition economies is the creation of a network of partner firms that protect each other’s property rights.

Attempts to determine the impact of party control on state welfare policy have produced mixed and inconclusive results, in part due to our inability to account for variations in the state partisan environments. I used CBS/New York Times surveys combined over the period 1976–88 to offer a detailed examination of the state party systems, resulting in a description of the dominant social group partisan cleavage in each state. This information is then used to examine the impact of party control on state welfare benefits. The findings show that the coalitional bases of the parties vary in important ways, both within and across the states. These differences in the state party systems have an important influence on the relationship between party control and state welfare effort. Specifically, party control has a significantly greater impact in states where partisan divisions reflect class-based New Deal-type coalitions. When examined in the context of state partisan environments, party control has a much greater impact on state welfare effort than has been suggested by previous studies.

Political science is divided between methodological individualists, who seek to explain political phenomena by reference to individuals and their interactions, and holists (or nonreductionists), who consider some higher-level social entities or properties such as states, institutions, or cultures ontologically or causally significant. We propose a reconciliation between these two perspectives, building on related work in philosophy. After laying out a taxonomy of different variants of each view, we observe that (i) although political phenomena result from underlying individual attitudes and behavior, individual-level descriptions do not always capture all explanatorily salient properties, and (ii) nonreductionistic explanations are mandated when social regularities are robust to changes in their individual-level realization. We characterize the dividing line between phenomena requiring nonreductionistic explanation and phenomena permitting individualistic explanation and give examples from the study of ethnic conflicts, social-network theory, and international-relations theory.

We construct a stochastic model of a legislature with an endogenously determined seniority system. We model the behavior of the legislators as well as their constituents as an infinitely repeated divide-the-dollar game. The game has a stationary equilibrium with the property that the legislature imposes on itself a non-trivial seniority system, and that incumbent legislators are always reelected.

The expected utility framework developed in The War Trap is revised to correct several deficiencies. Risk-taking orientations are now treated as an integral part of the model by introducing concavity or convexity into the utility functions. The zero-sum properties of the theory are largely eliminated, and the tendency toward interpersonal comparisons of utility is removed. Several earlier results are replicated with the new model, and with annual capabilities data. New propositions are deduced that identify important limitations on conflict initiation, and relationships resulting from differences in perceptions are tested. Support is found for the contention that the revised version of the theory, of which the original model is a special case, is a powerful tool for integrating many extant hypotheses about conflict and for explaining a substantial portion of the tendency for some threats to escalate to violence or warfare and for others to be resolved peacefully.