While it has been frequently asserted that the use of courts is responsive to political and social contexts, the evidence is inconclusive at best. In the case of political context the dearth of evidence may reflect focusing on the U.S. case, where there is relatively limited variation in relevant characteristics. In the case of social context it may reflect a failure to focus on periods of substantial transition. In the present study we examine court usage in Spain between 1960 and 1980. During this period Spain experienced rapid economic growth with its attendant social change and dramatic political transition from authoritarianism to democracy. Both the movement toward democracy and social development are found to be positively linked to increases in legal mobilization.

I suggest a new explanation of cross-national differences in unionization rates: the size of the labor force. Size matters because the gains unions are able to achieve in collective bargaining depend on the proportion of substitutable workers who are organized, while the costs of organizing depend in part on the absolute number to be recruited. The comparison of the costs and benefits of organizing new workers yields the conclusion that unions in larger labor markets will accept lower levels of unionization. Statistical analysis of cross-national differences in unionization rates among advanced industrial societies in the late 1970s indicates that the size of the labor force and the cumulative participation of leftist parties in government explain most of the variance.

According to some accounts, Plato views ruling as a philosophical activity; according to others, he understands it to be a craft. Given the apparent discrepancy between philosophical and technical endeavor, it seems that the two interpretations cannot both be correct. The issue is explored in light of the relationship between guardians and philosopher-kings as it manifests itself in the basic structure of the Republic and also with respect to questions of education, character, and deceit.

From Stokes's (1963) early critique on, it has been clear to empirical researchers that the traditional spatial theory of elections is seriously flawed. Yet fully a quarter century later, that theory remains the dominant paradigm for understanding mass-elite linkage in politics. We present an alternative spatial theory of elections that we argue has greater empirical verisimilitude.

Based on the ideas of symbolic politics, the directional theory assumes that most people have a diffuse preference for a certain direction of policy-making and that people vary in the intensity with which they hold those preferences. We test the two competing theories at the individual level with National Election Study data and find the directional theory more strongly supported than the traditional spatial theory. We then develop the implications of the directional theory for candidate behavior and assess the predictions in light of evidence from the U.S. Congress.

Using aggregate, survey, and in-depth elite interview data from Spain in the 1970s and 1980s, I demonstrate that the “mechanical” effect of the Spanish electoral law is as strong as that of many single-member constituency systems. But the “distal” effect of the electoral law on the party system is shown to be complex and multifaceted, not direct and deterministic. The perceptions, calculations, strategies, and behavior of party elites play a crucial intervening role between the electoral law and the overall shape of the party system.

Recent formal work in nuclear deterrence theory has focused on brinkmanship crises in which states exert coercive pressure by manipulating the risk of an unlimited nuclear exchange. This essay extends the formal analysis of deterrence theory to the strategy of limited retaliation in which states exert coercive pressure by inflicting limited amounts of damage in order to make the threat of future punishment more credible. This strategy is modeled as a game of sequential bargaining with incomplete information. The equilibria suggest that states prefer relatively smaller, less-destructive limited options; that counterforce options are desirable even if they cannot limit the total amount of damage an adversary can inflict; that smaller, less-destructive limited nuclear options may make a nuclear exchange more likely; and that uncertainty and incomplete information may significantly enhance deterrence.

I argue that a feminist methodology can help liberal political theory get beyond the problems that it has been recycling since the seventeenth century. Taking political obligation as the focus for my analysis, I show how feminist psychoanalytic and psychological theory can help uncover the structural sexism of liberal theory and epistemology and point the way toward more consistent—and less biased—theoretical formulations. Rejecting the essentialist view of gender difference that has been attributed to this literature, I argue that it is more interesting and appropriate to read it as a symbolic language of power and as a heuristic device for uncovering the gendered dimensions of supposedly “neutral” concepts like obligation.

While candidates regularly spend much time and effort campaigning on foreign and defense policies, the thrust of prevailing scholarly opinion is that voters possess little information and weak attitudes on these issues, which therefore have negligible impact on their voting behavior. We resolve this anomaly by arguing that public attitudes on foreign and defense policies are available and cognitively accessible, that the public has perceived clear differences between the candidates on these issues in recent elections, and that these issues have affected the public's vote choices. Data indicate that these conclusions are appropriate for foreign affairs issues and domestic issues.

Survey data are used to test the basic tenets of rational choice theory. We find that (1) voters' preferences are orderly but voters do not always have preferences. When the perceived difference between two candidates is below some threshold, voters are indifferent between them. (2) Most voters choose candidates whose issue positions are congruent with their own. (3) Lack of knowledge about candidates affects choice and utility through two routes—indifference and risk aversion.

Most voters have highly structured utility functions, but the thresholds and risk aversion in these functions place relatively unknown candidates at a disadvantage in presidential primaries and other electoral situations. Moreover, the importance of knowledge in these functions suggests that social choice theorists must take seriously the classic concerns of public opinion research—the operation of the media and the dynamics of information in elections.

The Soviet Union achieved its stability in the early stages of development not by institutionalizing participation but by forcing departicipation and substituting a functionally distinct form of political activity—involvement in co-production. These policies constitute essential complements in the Leninist developmental strategy. The ability of enlisted involvement to block the growth of participatory pressures tends to decline in later stages of development, however. The result is spontaneous withdrawal from the institutions of coproduction and the rise of participatory pressures. This pattern is documented with evidence from Soviet electoral and membership statistics, Soviet reports of opinion surveys, Western interviews of Soviet émigrés, and cross-national estimates of political dissidence. The Leninist crisis of participation requires a policy response to close the participation-institution gap once again. The alternative policy responses of Soviet general secretaries are characterized as totalitarian, authoritarian, liberal, and socialist.

Recent literature typically attributes the relative scarcity of open international markets to the prisoner's dilemma structure of state preferences with respect to trade. I argue that the prisoner's dilemma representation does not reflect the most critical aspect of free trade agreements in an anarchic international system: security externalities. Explicit consideration of these effects suggests that a bipolar international political system has an advantage relative to its multipolar counterpart with respect to the opening of markets among states. Less credible exit threats and stronger incentives to engage in altruism within its alliances explain the advantage of a two-power system.

Prior scholarly analysis of Israeli military spending has focused on national security questions. We present a mathematical model incorporating security threats as well as electoral cycles and corporate profits. The parameters are estimated empirically. The results support the idea that in Israel the military budget at the margins is also employed as a political-economic instrument to help manage the economy and to provide a favorable election climate for incumbents. It is suggested that the politicaleconomic dynamic widely attributed to Western industrialized societies may be of increasing importance in other societies throughout the world.

In 1981 a higher proportion of the multinational population of Yugoslavia chose to declare “Yugoslav” in place of an ethnic identity in response to the census question on nationality than ever before. We present arguments to support the interpretation of Yugoslav identity as evidence of shared political identity, and carry out an analysis of aggregate data on the level of social and material development, political socialization, and interethnic contact in the country's nearly five hundred counties to discover the sources of that identity. We find that with certain important regional variations, Yugoslav identity seems to be the product of interethnic contact and higher education rather than the level of material well-being. These findings support an interpretation of Yugoslav identity as evidence of diffuse support for the existence of a shared political community and suggest both the sources and vulnerabilities of Yugoslav stability.

We propose two models to explain why individuals participate in collective political action—a personal influence model and a collective rationality model. Each model overcomes the free-rider problem posed by conventional rational choice theory and left unresolved in previous research. The models are tested for legal and illegal protest behaviors, using data from a national sample and two samples of protest-prone communities in the Federal Republic of Germany. The personal influence model is supported for both forms of participation, while the collective rationality model is supported for legal protest. We discuss implications of the results for grievance and rational choice theories of collective political action.

Debates over the reasons for the passage of class legislation during the New Deal era have been of continuing interest to social scientists. Of special importance has been the problem of explaining the passage of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), often considered the most significant and radical bill of the period. In this article, I examine the influence of worker insurgency and radical organization on the passage and final form of the NLRA. I argue that other analytic approaches fail to take into account the importance of this influence and the degree to which it constrained and structured the responses of key political actors. I conclude that the theories that downplay the importance of worker insurgency and radical organization are both wrong in the particulars and suspect as general theories; this applies especially to the perspective that emphasizes the autonomy of the state from societal forces.

Are local political institutions responsive to the demands of racial minorities for a more equitable share of scarce public resources? Does an enhanced political presence improve black and Hispanic prospects in the struggle for public jobs? Based upon data for 1200 cities, my analysis reveals that while minority council members make a substantial contribution to employment success, minority mayors do not. For blacks, an interactive effect was also discovered for the relationship between the level of political representation, governmental structure, and employment outcomes. This research reveals that the political process does work. However, its effectiveness for minorities is mediated by a complex of factors that includes an interaction between political power, racial polarization, and the nature of local political institutions.

Prior studies of the guns-versus-butter trade-off have focused on total military expenditures and subcomponents of welfare spending (education, health, and housing). I extend the analysis to include the major subcomponents of the defense budget. The results are consistent with Clayton's; Domke, Eichenberg, and Kelleher's; and Russett's findings of a lack of defense-welfare trade-off in the 1947–80 era but reveal very specific trade-offs during the Reagan years.

It is commonly assumed that Supreme Court justices' votes largely reflect their attitudes, values, or personal policy preferences. Nevertheless, this assumption has never been adequately tested with independent measures of the ideological values of justices, that is, measures not taken from their votes on the Court. Using content analytic techniques, we derive independent and reliable measures of the values of all Supreme Court justices from Earl Warren to Anthony Kennedy. These values correlate highly with the votes of the justices, providing strong support for the attitudinal model.

Understanding the dynamics of policy distribution requires an appreciation of federal grant programs that have achieved a prominent place in nearly all areas of domestic policy. The theoretical literature on distributive politics, however, focuses almost exclusively on a centralized, top-down view of policy distribution. By examining the role of presidents, legislators, and bureaucrats, scholars have ignored participants who have become key actors in the distribution of federal expenditures—the recipient jurisdictions. This analysis of the allocation patterns under six federal programs shows that local governments exert important influences on the distribution of federal grants and that the distributional patterns and their determinants vary over time. The analysis also points out the importance of disaggregation by focusing on programs and recipient jurisdictions, as opposed to total federal expenditures and regions, states, or congressional districts.

I develop an approach for analyzing the conditions for cooperative resolution of policy conflict. I analyze certain policy conflicts as bargaining situations, with opportunity for cooperation, among opposing issue factions. As a framework for analysis, I present an informal game-theoretic interpretation of nonzero-sum policy conflict. With that foundation, I derive implications about the conditions for cooperative outcomes with respect to several aspects of the policy process: issue content, the structure of conflict, leadership, party politics, and political institutions.