This research challenges models of democratization that claim liberal principles affirming the equality of rights-bearing individuals equably enhance the political inclusion of groups marginalized by race, class, or gender. While such explanations may suffice for race and class, this study's quantitative cross-national analysis of women's contemporary officeholding patterns establishes that gender presents a counter case whereby women's political citizenship is enhanced, first, by government institutions that paradoxically affirm both individual equality and kinship group difference and, second, by state policies that paradoxically affirm both individual equality and women's group difference. These findings challenge assumptions about the relationship between political citizenship and democratization, demonstrate how women's political inclusion as voters and officeholders is strengthened not by either a “sameness” principle (asserting women's equality to men as individuals) or a “difference” principle (asserting women's group difference from men) but rather by the paradoxical combination of both, and provide new views for assessing multiculturalism prospects within democratic states.

We develop an informational model of judicial decision-making in which deference to precedent is useful to policy-oriented appellate judges because it improves the accuracy with which they can communicate legal rules to trial judges. Our simple model yields new implications and hypotheses regarding conditions under which judges will maintain or break with precedent, the constraining effect that precedent has on judicial decision-making, the voting behavior of Supreme Court Justices, the relationship between a precedent's age and its authority, the effect of legal complexity on the level of deference to precedent, the relative stability of rules and standards, and long-term patterns of legal evolution. Perhaps most importantly, we demonstrate that “legalist” features of judicial decision-making are consistent with an assumption of policy-oriented judges.

Political scientists normally discuss sovereign immunity in the context of international law and relations. The domestic effects of sovereign immunity are almost never examined, even though those effects are profound and implicate a range of issues of interest to political scientists. The Federal Tort Claims Act (FCTA) (1946) is a main waiver of federal sovereign immunity and is designed to allow people injured by government employees to sue for money damages. The FTCA has a number of exceptions, the most prominent of which is known as the “discretionary function exception.” This exception retains sovereign immunity for the United States when a federal employee acts “based upon the exercise or performance or the failure to exercise or perform a discretionary function or duty…whether or not the discretion involved be abused.” This simple exception expanded into a comprehensive tool of government that now confounds justice and federal governmental accountability.

Voting choices are a product of both personal attitudes and social contexts, of a personal and a social calculus. Research has illuminated the personal calculus of voting, but the social calculus has received little attention since the 1940s. This study expands our understanding of the social influences on individual choice by examining the relationship of partisan biases in media, organizational, and interpersonal intermediaries to the voting choices of Americans. Its results show that the traditional sources of social influence still dominate: Interpersonal discussion outweighs the media in affecting the vote. Media effects appear to be the product of newspaper editorial pages rather than television or newspaper reporting, which contain so little perceptible bias that they often are misperceived as hostile. Parties and secondary organizations also are influential, but only for less interested voters—who are more affected by social contexts in general. Overall, this study demonstrates that democratic citizens are embedded in social contexts that join with personal traits in shaping their voting decisions.

Court-ordered redistricting in the mid-1960s eradicated severe disparities in the populations of U.S. state legislative districts. We examine the geographic distribution of money by states to counties. Cross-sectional analysis shows that counties with relatively more legislativeseats per person prior to redistricting received relatively more transfers from the state per person. Over time, counties that lost legislative seats subsequently received a smaller share of state funds per capita. We calculate that population equalization significantly altered the flow of state transfers to counties, diverting approximately $7 billion annually from formerly overrepresented to formerly underrepresented counties, an effect missed by past studies. For those concerned with the design of democratic institutions around the world today, the American experience provides clear evidence of the political consequences of unequal representation.

According to the theory of representative bureaucracy, passive representation among public employees will lead to active representation in bureaucratic outputs. Existing research demonstrates that the link between passive and active representation exists for race but not for sex. Past research on this topic has not, however, taken into account the contextual environment that affects whether sex will translate into gender and lead to active representation in the bureaucracy. In this paper, we create a framework that specifies the conditions that affect whether passive representation results in active representation for sex and then test this framework using the case of education. We find that passive representation of women in education leads to active representation and that the institutional context affects the extent to which this link between passive and active representation occurs.

Recent evidence suggests that elites can capitalize on preexisting linkages between issues and social groups to alter the criteria citizens use to make political decisions. In particular, studies have shown that subtle racial cues in campaign communications may activate racial attitudes, thereby altering the foundations of mass political decision making. However, the precise psychological mechanism by which such attitudes are activated has not been empirically demonstrated, and the range of implicit cues powerful enough to produce this effect is still unknown. In an experiment, we tested whether subtle racial cues embedded in political advertisements prime racial attitudes as predictors of candidate preference by making them more accessible in memory. Results show that a wide range of implicit race cues can prime racial attitudes and that cognitive accessibility mediates the effect. Furthermore, counter-stereotypic cues—especially those implying blacks are deserving of government resources—dampen racial priming, suggesting that the meaning drawn from the visual/narrative pairing in an advertisement, and not simply the presence of black images, triggers the effect.

American civic engagement soared in the mid-twentieth century, succeeding an era in which national government had become more involved in citizens' lives than ever before. I examine the effects of the G.I. Bill's educational provisions for veterans' subsequent memberships in civic organizations and political activity. I consider theoretical arguments about how public social programs might affect civic involvement and advance a policy feedback approach that assesses both resource and interpretive effects of policy design. Newly collected survey and interview data permit the examination of several hypotheses. The analysis reveals that the G.I. Bill produced increased levels of participation—by more fully incorporating citizens, especially those from less privileged backgrounds, through enhancement of their civic capacity and predisposition for involvement. The theoretical framework offered here can be used to evaluate how other public programs affect citizens' participation in public life.

Decades of participation research show that political activity increases with income, but the participation of senior citizens specifically with regard to Social Security poses an exception to this pattern. Social Security-oriented participation decreases as income rises, in part because lower-income seniors are more dependent on the program. The negative income-participation gradient is especially pronounced for letter writing about the program, but even Social Security-related voting and contributing are less common among higher-income seniors. This is an instance in which self-interest is highly influential: Those who are more dependent are more active. It is also an example of lower-class mobilization with regard to an economic issue, something quite unusual in the United States.

American legislative studies in recent years have been occupied to a large degree with the question of the effects of political parties on the policy behavior of elected legislators, with most of the research focusing on the U.S. Congress. We undertake a comparative analysis of state legislatures for a window into the character and extent of party's effects. Specifically, we compare the impact of party on the partisan polarization and dimensionality of campaign issue stances and roll call voting in the Kansas Senate and the largely comparable, though nonpartisan, Nebraska Unicameral. This comparison offers us a nice quasi-experiment to assess the impact of party by establishing a baseline condition in Nebraska for what happens when party is absent. We argue that party lends order to conflict, producing the ideological low-dimensional space that is a trademark of American politics. Where parties are not active in the legislature—Nebraska is our test case—the clear structure found in partisan politics disappears. This works to sever the connection between voters and their elected representatives and, with it, the likelihood of electoral accountability that is essential for the health of liberal democracy.

Other research has shown (1) that civilians and the military differ in their views about when and how to use military force; (2) that the opinions of veterans track more closely with military officers than with civilians who never served in the military; and (3) that U.S. civil–military relations shaped Cold War policy debates. We assess whether this opinion gap “matters” for the actual conduct of American foreign policy. We examine the impact of the presence of veterans in the U.S. political elite on the propensity to initiate and escalate militarized interstate disputes between 1816 and 1992. As the percentage of veterans serving in the executive branch and the legislature increases, the probability that the United States will initiate militarized disputes declines. Once a dispute has been initiated, however, the higher the proportion of veterans, the greater the level of force the United States will use in the dispute.

This study argues that, due to selective political coverage by the entertainment-oriented, soft news media, many otherwise politically inattentive individuals are exposed to information about high-profile political issues, most prominently foreign policy crises, as an incidental by-product of seeking entertainment. I conduct a series of statistical investigations examining the relationship between individual media consumption and attentiveness to several recent high-profile foreign policy crisis issues. For purposes of comparison, I also investigate several non-foreign crisis issues, some of which possess characteristics appealing to soft news programs and others of which lack such characteristics. I find that information about foreign crises, and other issues possessing similar characteristics, presented in a soft news context, has indeed attracted the attention of politically uninvolved Americans. The net effect is a reduced disparity in attentiveness to select high-profile political issues across different segments of the public.

Exposure to conflicting political viewpoints is widely assumed to benefit the citizens of a democratic polity. Nonetheless, the benefits of exposure to heterogeneous political viewpoints have yet to be demonstrated empirically. Drawing on national survey data that tap characteristics of people's political discussion networks, I examine the impact of heterogeneous networks of political discussion on individuals' awareness of legitimate rationales for oppositional viewpoints, on their awareness of rationales for their own viewpoints, and on levels of political tolerance. Finally, utilizing a laboratory experiment manipulating exposure to dissonant and consonant political views, I further substantiate the causal role of cross-cutting exposure in fostering political tolerance.

Clyde Barrow's More Than a Historian provides a fascinating intellectual history of Charles Beard, a political scientist whom he places in the “pantheon of thinkers that most scholars no longer read” (p. xvi). With 42 books, scores of coauthored books, and hundreds of articles and book reviews, Beard can be only characterized as amazingly prolific. Yet the only book that still resonates in political science and American history is An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913). Barrow's history of Beard gives us ample reason finally to read it or read it again.

One of the essential elements of an impartial press in the United States is the “wall of separation” between the editorial pages and the pages devoted to the news. While the political beliefs of newspaper owners and editors are clearly articulated on opinion pages, their views are not supposed to infiltrate the reporting of the news. The analyses presented in this paper raise questions about this claim. We examine newspaper coverage of more than 60 Senatorial campaigns across three election years and find that information on news pages is slanted in favor of the candidate endorsed on the newspaper's editorial page. We find that the coverage of incumbent Senators is most affected by the newspaper's endorsement decision. We explore the consequences of “slanted” news coverage by showing that voters evaluate endorsed candidates more favorably than candidates who fail to secure an editorial endorsement. The impact of the endorsement decision on voters' evaluations is most powerful in races receiving a great deal of press attention and among citizens who read their local newspaper on a daily basis.

An important agenda power in parliamentary democracies is the discretion over the dissolution of parliament. We argue that variation in constitutional rules and the political environment will systematically affect the frequency of early elections. We hypothesize that dissolution will be more frequent under single-party governments, when the head of state plays an insignificant role, when neither parliament nor the cabinet can inhibit dissolution, when minority governments are in power, when the head of state can dissolve unilaterally, and later in the constitutional term. Using standard logistic and Cox-proportional hazard techniques, we test these expectations in a pooled time-series setting against observations of most OECD parliamentary democracies for the years 1960–1995. We find that parliamentary dissolutions are more frequent earlier in the constitutional term, under minority governments, when the head of state plays an insignificant role, and when the parliament or the cabinet is not involved.

Recent years have witnessed momentous political transformations across the globe. From Eastern and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union to South Africa, these changes are often described as transitions from state bureaucracies, party dictatorships, and authoritarian rule to liberal constitutional democracies and market economies. Andrew Arato, moving gracefully among the fields of political theory, sociology, history, constitutionalism, and comparative politics, redirects our attention to the originary moment of constitutional creation, when ordinary lawmaking recedes in favor of extraordinary politics and higher lawmaking. It is also a moment when fundamental constitutional norms emerge as the main point of contest within political debate and action. Combining empirical and descriptive analysis with normative considerations, Arato persuasively demonstrates how the mode of creation of new constitutions affects the democratic and institutional content of these transformations as well as the prospects for future consolidation of the newly developed constitutional norms.

How have our conceptions of politics changed, and how have these changes altered politics and its possibilities? These are the burning questions at one of the biggest campfires in political theory, and the answers are disputed as these three volumes show.

Does a typical House member need to worry about the electoral ramifications of his roll-call decisions? We investigate the relationship between incumbents' electoral performance and roll-call support for their party—controlling for district ideology, challenger quality, and campaign spending, among other factors—through a series of tests of the 1956–1996 elections. The tests produce three key findings indicating that members are indeed accountable for their legislative voting. First, in each election, an incumbent receives a lower vote share the more he supports his party. Second, this effect is comparable in size to that of other widely recognized electoral determinants. Third, a member's probability of retaining office decreases as he offers increased support for his party, and this relationship holds for not only marginal, but also safe members.

The extent to which political conflict over U.S. trade policy has led to clashes between broad-based class coalitions has varied significantly over time during the past two centuries. I argue that much of this variation can be explained by changes in economywide levels of interindustry factor mobility. Class distinctions between voters are more economically and politically salient when interindustry mobility is high; when mobility is low, industry distinctions become more critical and tend to split apart broader political coalitions. I report evidence indicating large changes in levels of labor and capital mobility over the last two centuries. These changes coincide with significant shifts in the character of American trade politics. Analysis of congressional voting on 30 major pieces of trade legislation between 1824 and 1994 provides evidence of large swings in coalition patterns.