How can protectionism and “free” trade succeed one another? Our answer focuses on the changing balance of private actors' political demands. These actors acquire interests in tariff policies because their assets are spatially concentrated, and trade in these assets is subject to various limitations. Actors in regions experiencing no new investment in an established industry (“old” regions) have interests that sometimes differ from those in regions where there is new investment. We show that old regions have no reason to be involved in tariff politics at business cycle peaks; during troughs, whether a state becomes more or less protectionist depends, ceteris paribus, on the relative political strength of old import-competing and old exporting interests. If old import-competing industries outweigh the old exporters, then protection will tend to increase at the trough and decrease at the peak of a business cycle; the opposite result occurs when old exporters are more influential.

Perspectives from political science and economics are drawn on to suggest an integrated theory of governmental corruption. The theory is oriented toward policy choices, and corruption is viewed as a product of individual and structural variables that interact to produce both positive and negative consequences. Individual-level considerations such as greed and the likelihood of detection and prosecution suggest one set of policies for reducing corruption. Bureaucratic constraints, citizen participation, and the congruence of legal structures and social demands offer a competing set of concerns that must be dealt with in analyzing corrupt practices. We show that corruption, as a process, influences the optimal level of social welfare. Alternative conceptions are examined, and a model is developed to evaluate policy choices related to corruption from the perspective of welfare optimization. Applied to the analysis of corruption, the model integrates general equilibrium theory, deterrence theory, and structural conditions. Finally, policy implications are considered.

Most models of agenda control examine dyadic relations—for example, those between a committee and the floor of a legislature. Such relations, however, are always embedded in a larger context, namely, a political environment composed of voters and interest groups. In this paper we model agenda setters (a legislative committee) as decision makers with limited cognitive abilities who adjust over time to their larger political environment. The legislators' policy positions are endogenous, reflecting the relative strengths of voters wielding the district-specific resource of votes and of interest groups wielding the transferable resource of money. The resulting outcomes indicate that neoclassical models of voting and pluralist models of group influence have each told part of the story. When only votes matter, our boundedly rational agents grope toward equilibria close to those of neoclassical models; however, when mobile resources matter as well, the outcomes depart systematically from those of previous models. In particular, interest groups can make themselves worse off by capturing the committee. The results suggest that agenda control is less powerful than conventionally believed and point toward conditions shaping its effectiveness—conditions highlighting the distinctive contributions of pluralist and neoclassical thinking to a broader theory of political institutions.

A basic problem for a rational choice theory of rebellious collective action is to explain why average citizens would participate in such behavior, since they have nothing to gain (they will receive benefits of successful rebellion, in terms of public goods, regardless of whether they take part or not), but much to lose (rebellious behavior may be quite costly). According to the conventional private interest or “by-product” theory, the incentive to participate must come from the expectation of receiving selective benefits; but since average citizens in a general case cannot expect substantial private material rewards, the relevant selective benefits must be psychological in nature. In contrast to the model of private interest theory, a public goods model is proposed, stipulating that the value of rebellion in terms of public goods can be a relevant incentive for participation. Using data from surveys conducted in New York City and Hamburg, West Germany, we investigate the relationship between participation in rebellious political behavior and measures of the incentives of public goods and private interest. The results do not support predictions of the private interest model in regard to nonmaterial selective incentives. Hypotheses of the public goods model are supported.

A recent and perhaps surprising development in political theory has been the revival of neo-Kantian liberalism, with its doctrines of the neutral state and equal concern and respect. Critics of liberalism have suggested, however, that Kantian notions of rights and rationality are too thin a foundation on which to build satisfactory forms of community and political life. In this paper I examine the critique of rights-based liberalism by returning to the philosophy of Hegel. Hegel's position, I suggest, provides us with a much needed middle ground between liberalism and its contemporary critics. Like the modern communitarians he is critical of the individualistic and ahistorical conceptions of rights underlying the liberal polity, but like many liberals he is skeptical of the claims to recreate a democratic, participatory Gemeinschaft that would leave citizens defenseless before their particular communities. I conclude that like Montesquieu before him and Tocqueville after, Hegel looked to the “corporations” or intermediary associations to skirt the extremes of the market place and civic virtue.

Systematic study of changes in support for the U.S. Supreme Court across time has not been undertaken. Armed with a time series of observations from 1966 through 1984, I provide a description of the ebb and flow of public esteem for the Court. Then I outline and test several plausible propositions about the dynamics of support. Statistical analyses compel the conclusion that apart from a relatively constant core of support, increases in judicial activism, inflation, and solicitude for the rights of the accused decreased confidence in the Court; the events surrounding Watergate and increases in presidential popularity and the public salience of the Court brought about increased popular esteem for the high bench. Previous scholars, based on cross-sections of individuals, have emphasized the public's ignorance of and disinterest in the Supreme Court and judicial policy making. The responsiveness of public support for the Court in the aggregate to political events and shifts in the behavior of the justices stands in stark contrast to the conventional image of United States citizenry as singularly out of touch with and unmoved by the Supreme Court.

By faithful representation we mean the delegation of decision making to a relatively small committee that, using a weighted voting rule, will for each pair of alternatives make sincere choices identical to those that would be made by the society as a whole, and with the same vote margins. We show that for any society, no matter how large, faithful representation is possible by a committee with no more than m(m − 1)/2 members, where m is the number of alternatives. We also show that for any society, no matter how nonideological the bulk of its electorate, social preferences can be faithfully represented by a committee whose members all have singlepeaked or single-troughed preferences. Thus, all societies can be faithfully represented by a committee whose members see the world in unidimensional terms—that is, representatives can share a coherent ideological perspective even though the electorates they represent lack such a perspective. We further show that the usual mechanisms of proportional representation and the modified form of proportional representation recently proposed by Chamberlin and Courant (1983) do not guarantee faithful representation, and we discuss mechanisms that may provide faithful representation, even in a context in which new alternatives can arise.

The cube law was proposed around 1910 to express the conversion of a party's vote shares into its seat share in two-party plurality elections with single-seat districts. This article develops predictive seat-vote equations for a much wider range of elections, including those involving many parties, single- and multi-seat districts, and diverse seat allocation rules such as plurality and list proportional representation (PR). Without any statistical curve fitting based on the seat and vote shares themselves, the basic features of the conversion are predicted using exogenous parameters: magnitude and number of districts, number of parties, and total size of the electorate and of the assembly. The link between the proposed equations and the original cube law is explicated. Using an existing data base, the fit of the predictive model is examined. On balance, this model accounts well for the conversion of votes to seats, and for the deviation from proportionality in PR systems.

In this essay I develop a psychoanalytic defense of freedom of speech that is implicit in Freud's works, principally in his discussions of verbal slips and jokes. Freud argues that freedom of speech benefits people by providing a harmless outlet for aggression, suggesting that it is better to express aggression in words than in violent deeds or to repress it altogether. The psychoanalytic defense of free speech has affinities with various liberal defenses, but it is partial because apolitical; it emphasizes the emotional self-expression of speakers as opposed to the rational persuasion of listeners. The intellectual roots of the contemporary concern with “freedom of expression” (as opposed to “freedom of speech”) can be found in Freud: to focus on freedom of expression is to ignore the qualitative differences among forms of self-expression and to neglect the specifically political character of speech.

We present a model of party competition that produces more realistic patterns of results than those often emphasized in the literature. Reversing Downs (1957), we assume that parties win elections in order to formulate policies, rather than formulate policies in order to win elections. Voters are modeled first as having perfect information about candidate positions, and then under conditions of uncertainty. In simulation experiments we show that policy motivation and voter uncertainty can bring about persistent and predictable party differences in sequential majority rule elections. As the degree of voter certainty decreases, parties diverge towards their optima, whereas increases in voter certainty draw parties towards cycles in which party positions vary, but predictable issue stances are maintained on the average.

There has been a growing propensity among states to associate together in international governmental organizations, or IGOs, for a variety of purposes. Why do states join IGOs, and what are the consequences for states of membership in IGOs? In this analysis, an explanation is sought, drawing on the theory of functionalism espoused by David Mitrany and others, taking into account the number of years a state has had sovereignty, level of technology, extent of party competition, and overall power. For Third World states, membership in IGOs is associated with enhanced economic performance. An increasing number of IGOs in the system appears to lessen the states' mean proneness to war. Functionalist predictions are upheld. But functionalism needs to be supplemented both for comprehensive explanations and as a prescription for the future. Already there are so many IGOs that it is difficult for states to control them, which could make them progressively irrelevant or even jeopardize their existence.

Based on their interest in politics and knowledge of political leaders, individuals are classified into three levels of partisan sophistication: (1) those scoring high in interest and knowledge (partisan schematics), (2) a middle group, and (3) those scoring low (partisan aschematics). In this experimental study, and consistent with findings from cognitive and social psychology, partisan schematics prove better able than partisan aschematics to classify campaign statements as either Republican or Democratic and to recall the policy stands taken by a fictitious congressman. Aschematics, at the other extreme, perform at no better than chance levels in either the recognition or recall of the congressman's policy statements. There are, however, liabilities to sophistication as well: Schematics demonstrate a “consistency bias” in recalling significantly more policy statements that are consistent with the congressman's party identification than are inconsistent with it. This “restructuring” of memory is especially pronounced among sophisticates, and reflects a serious bias in the processing of political information.

Domestic support for a liberal commercial policy in the U.S. rests on a commonly accepted set of rules and norms. These rules and norms, best characterized as a defense of free and fair trade, arise from two different traditions. The first originated as a political reaction to high trade barriers preceding the Great Depression. Central decision makers took as a lesson from the depression period that short-term political forces should not determine the level of state intervention into the market. The second, to protect against unfair trade, emanates from a long history of state support for industries that claim foreign producers are pursuing unfair predatory practices. Established in statute before the Depression, these rules did not fundamentally change in the postwar period. Together, these decision rules are used to interpret American trade protectionism.

Federal agencies integrate federal, state, and local political demands at the operational level of service delivery. They balance conflicting political demands and task requirements as they attempt to develop feasible enforcement routines capable of attracting support and resources in multiple arenas without undermining central support for budgetary resources and statutory authority. Our regression analysis of annual enforcement data from 1976 through 1983 for all 50 states indicates that even the relatively isolated enforcement procedures of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration respond significantly to state-level political and task differences. Enforcement activities responded most consistently to daily enforcement contacts with interest groups. State differences in task conditions—particularly workplace accident and unemployment rates—also elicited instrumental responses, while differences in the party and ideology of elected officials elicited more symbolic actions. State agencies, with their smaller size and greater flexibility, were even more responsive than the federal agency to political and task differences. This integrative function of bureaucracy needs further attention in democratic theory.

How do political issues arise, and come to affect political party politics? We develop a theory and model of issue evolution, illustrating both by examining the dynamic evolution of the issue of racial desegregation. Our modeling concerns two central problems: (1) the structure of the evolution—a pattern of dynamic causality between the early policy cues from professional politicians, in Congress in the case at hand, and later mass response, and (2) the sequence of changes in elite behavior, changes in mass perceptions of party issue stances, changes in mass affect toward the parties, and changes in party identifications among citizens. We suggest that the causal process developed for the racial case is quite general for other times, other nations, and other issues. The theory of issue evolution is developed as a general statement of the organic connection between elite and mass behavior, a working model of the dynamics of American politics across time and issues.

This article applies theories of social cognition in an investigation of the dimensions of the assessments of candidates employed by voters in the United States. An empirical description of the public's cognitive representations of presidential candidates, derived from responses to open-ended questions in the American National Election Studies from 1952 to 1984, reveals that perceptions of candidates are generally focused on “personality” characteristics rather than on issue concerns or partisan group connections. Contrary to the implications of past research, higher education is found to be correlated with a greater likelihood of using personality categories rather than with making issue statements. While previous models have interpreted voting on the basis of candidate personality as indicative of superficial and idiosyncratic assessments, the data examined here indicate that they predominately reflect performance-relevant criteria such as competence, integrity, and reliability. In addition, both panel and aggregate time series data suggest that the categories that voters have used in the past influence how they will perceive future candidates, implying the application of schematic judgments. The reinterpretation presented here argues that these judgments reflect a rich cognitive representation of the candidates from which instrumental inferences are made.

War, postwar demobilization, and economic depression are national crises that ultimately test the state's capacity to respond simultaneously to internal and external challenges. This analysis probes the nexus between crises and domestic violence, investigating how this relationship is mediated by the influence of two variables: the severity of crisis and the presence or absence of government accommodation. Box-Tiao impact assessment models are used to estimate the separate and combined effects of American involvements in wars (the Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, and the Korean and Vietnam Wars), their postwar periods, and the 1930s depression on economic, social, and political forms of American violence from 1890 to 1970. After establishing historical evidence for the role of national accommodation, I demonstrate that strong, positive associations between severe crises and domestic violence are to be found during the tenure of nonaccommodating administrations. Accommodating governments are associated with either negative or historically weak linkages between severe crises and domestic violence. Overall, the evidence underscores the benefit of using broad theoretical perspectives for understanding the linkages between international and domestic conflict.

This paper contrasts nonguaranteed city debt with taxation and general obligation debt. Drawing upon Bureau of the Census, Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR) and Municipal Year Book data, the analysis shows that both per capita tax revenue and outstanding general obligation debt are best explained by background factors such as total population, functional scope, and region, while fiscal strain plays a secondary role. Political structures, in the shape of legal constraints on taxation and debt and of form of government, do not account for patterns of these traditional revenue sources. By contrast, nonguaranteed debt is best explained by a model in which fiscal strain has a paramount role, but with both legal constraints on taxing and regional differentiation contributing significantly to the explanation, at least for data collected prior to 1978. The findings suggest a two-tiered model of the revenue side of fiscal decision making, with historical accommodations to powerful economic and demographic factors dominating taxing and general obligation debt, while nonguaranteed debt serves as a flexible instrument of shorter-term strategy.

Throughout the post–World War II period the president has been called upon to make decisions concerning the use of force as a political instrument. The explanation that is offered is based upon a characterization of the president as a cybernetic human decision maker facing limitations. These limitations, in conjunction with the complexity of the environment, lead presidents to develop and use a relatively simple decision rule. The dependent variable, which is the probability of the use of force at any point in time, is explained in terms of enduring and essential concerns, which are operationalized as coming from the international, domestic, and personal environments. Data are taken from Blechman and Kaplan's Force Without War. On the basis of our estimation and evaluation, presidential decisions to use force are based on factors in all three arenas.

Nineteenth-century evolutionary historical schemas formulated in Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft, or status to contract terms, which underpin theories of modernization and development in the contemporary social sciences, are now called into serious question. Recent archaeological discoveries show ancient society to have been preeminently contractual; and anthropological studies of family, clan, and tribe reveal them to be more than primordial relics in modernizing systems. A careful reading of the ancient writers—particularly Aristotle, who was read as lending support to the Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft distinction—yields a very different picture, as Marx in fact appreciated. Family, clan, tribe, patron-client, friendship, and other affinal sets were constitutive of the ancient society of the polis, and have shown extraordinary durability in the modern political society of the Mediterranean basin. In the small-scale, urban, entrepreneurial, and commercial society of the Mediterranean polis, ancient and modern, which was characterized by a high degree of face-to-face interaction, people learned participation in the plethora of little-incorporated societies—familial, religious, cultic, and recreational.