Most analyses of the 1974 congressional elections have failed to find significant effects for either Watergate or personal financial conditions, despite the prominence of both of these issues in the campaign. An alternative thesis argues that the effect was indirect, through the selection of better-than-usual Democratic candidates and weaker Republican contestants for House seats. Reanalyzing campaign finance data, we challenge this thesis and then move on to a different type of analysis from that which traditionally has been done in retrospective voting studies. With the use of the 1972-1974 panel of the Center for Political Studies, we examine separately the voting behavior of what V. O. Key, Jr. called “standpatters” and “switchers.” The former are motivated primarily by party identification, with small Watergate effects. Our probit analylsis for switchers, on the other hand, finds much weaker party identification effects, but, interestingly, much more pronounced Watergate and economic impacts. Furthermore, an analysis of the sample compared to the population of districts in 1974 suggests that a more representative sample would lead to even more pronounced impacts for Watergate and the economy than even we have found.

This study integrates models of income redistribution developed by economists, who suggest that citizens voluntarily redistribute because of interdependent preferences and rely on the state for implementation owing to the public-good nature of redistribution, and political scientists, who focus on conditions that lead to demands that the state intervene to assist the poor and on the development of institutions that facilitate such demands. We propose a testable theory of redistribution and apply it to data from the American states.

The empirical analysis addresses determinants of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children guarantee, adjusted for Medicaid and food stamps to which a family receiving the guarantee would be entitled. We posit significant links between the guarantee and both observable explanatory variables, such as per-capita income, and latent constructs, such as liberal party control. We specify observable indicators for the latent constructs and use the LISREL method to estimate parameters for the indicators and structural coefficients. The findings show that both political and economic variables significantly affect the level of the guarantee.

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.

This article is aimed at integrating two kinds of analysis of legislators' calculations of advantage. We assume that legislators operate in two arenas, in the legislative arena itself, where their calculations of advantage concern simply their effectiveness in voting (Farquharson), and in the electoral arena, where their calculations concern the rewards for their position-taking as well as their effectiveness (Fenno). Our analysis is introduced by an interpretation of voting on the Powell amendment, 1956, when some legislators apparently voted strategically and others, equally able to do so, still did not. We then develop an expected utility model of voting that accounts for such divergent choices in terms of legislators' individual beliefs about the distribution of opinions in the legislature (Farquharson) and in their constituencies (Fenno). We conclude with an analysis of the Nash equilibria of choices to vote strategically or nonstrategically.

Survey data from the preconvention waves of the 1980 National Election Study are used to estimate the effect of expectations about who will be nominated on respondents' own preferences. The results confirm the conventional belief that bandwagons play an important role in nominating campaigns; at the same time, they suggest that the dynamics of the nominating process may be more subtle than simple bandwagon models would indicate. First, preferences are strongly and consistently projected onto expectations, making the relationship of central interest a reciprocal one. Second, the bases of candidate choice appear to change systematically with political circumstances. In close, volatile campaigns, support for bandwagon candidates (like George Bush in early 1980) is based largely on favorable expectations and on relatively general, diffuse political evaluations (e.g., “leadership”). By comparison, when expectations about the nomination are very one-sided, their impact on preferences approaches zero, and more specific, substantive political evaluations become increasingly important.

Exposure to modernizing institutions such as the school, factory, and city has been found to be associated with the breakdown in traditional values, beliefs, and behaviors in a wide variety of cultural settings. Socioeconomic change has had a similar impact on the late-modernizing Islamic minorities in the USSR. Although patriarchal attitudes and behaviors have persisted in some areas of family life, extensive shifts in family values and approved gender roles have occurred, particularly in the last two decades. These trends parallel those found in nonsocialist settings.

A complex liberal version of utilitarianism is introduced which bears similarities to John Stuart Mill's moral and political philosophy and offers a promising approach to liberal democratic theory. Formally, liberal utilitarianism is represented as a type of generalized social welfare functional which maps any given set of individual vector-valued utility functions into a social ordering. The generalized social welfare functional in question relies on the experienced members of society to classify ond compare the different kinds of utilities found in individual vectors; to grant and protect libertarian rights with respect to a well-defined private kind of individual utilities; and to make the interpersonal comparisons required to aggregate over each of the public kinds of individual utilities. At the same time, it is dynamic in that it implicitly comprehends many different levels of a society's moral development from a liberal perspective.

An axiomatization of the ideal liberal utilitarian social welfare functional is provided such that, on the one hand, each person has an absolute right to individual liberty over the issues within his private sphere, and, on the other hand, has an equal voice in a liberty-respecting, strongly monotonk, anonymous and neutral public choice rule operating in a distinct public sphere. The harmony of these private and public components implies the possibility of an ideal liberal democracy.

In the course of making and justifying decisions, judges on state supreme courts often rely on precedents from other jurisdictions. These judicial references across boundaries constitute at least one means of communication and, in turn, demonstrate a complex web of deference and derogation between and among various courts. I attempt to uncover patterns of citation between the several state supreme courts and to evaluate alternative explanations for these patterns, including distance between courts; similarity of political culture; the prestige, professionalism, legal capital, and caseload of the cited court; the social diversity of the environment; differentials between courts on a number of dimensions; and presence in the same legal reporting region. More globally, I ask: Does the intensity of communications between a pair of courts result from the characteristics of the cited court or from differences and similarities between courts or jurisdictions? The results indicate the importance of legal reporting districts, distance between the courts, cultural linkages between the jurisdictions and, especially, characteristics of the cited court.

Addressing the disputed relationship between war and the expansion of governmental expenditures and revenues, Box-Tiao intervention models are applied to a number of British (1700-1980), United States (1792-1980), French (1815-1979), and Japanese (1878-1980) spending and taxation series. Distinguishing between global and interstate wars, the more intensive and extensive bouts of warfare (global wars) tend to bring about abrupt, permanent impacts in contrast to the temporary changes associated with most interstate wars. The observed displacements are reflected in both war-related and nonwar-related types of expenditure and are also observed before 1900. Although our findings are not universally applicable and are subject to various other qualifications, they may be interpreted, in general, as reinforcing the need for an appreciation of the persistent centrality of war, especially global war, in the discontinuous growth and expansion of the modern state.

To understand changes taking place within political parties we must work from a realistic theory, one that accepts these parties as office-seeking coalitions. On that premise I lay out three interacting sets of variables: 1) The structure of political opportunities, or the rules for office seeking and the ways they are treated, and 2) the party system, or the competitive relations among parties, define the expectations of politicians, and thus lead them to create 3) party organizations, or the collective efforts to gain and retain office. Hypotheses derived from the relations among these variables allow us to examine changes in American parties in the twentieth century. They explain why the Progressive era reforms, in tandem with the post-1896 party system, produced an uneven distribution of party organization and weak linkages among candidates and officeholders. The same theory also explains why changes taking place since the 1950s are producing greater organizational effort and stronger partisan links among candidates and officeholders.