In this first systematic and extensive application of cross-judicial methodology, we examine the members of the Rehnquist Court (1986–94 terms) with prior appellate court experience to discern any correlation with their Supreme Court behavior in terms of nonconsensual opinion writing and voting. We find that they become less consensual as justices than they were as judges in the lower court. Importantly, this finding holds after controlling for such institutional differences between the two court levels as size, ideology, case types, stare decisis, and norms. Consistent with the neoinstitutional perspective, we surmise that this behavior change is due to the modern Supreme Court being unique, a court on which the members feel it is desirable, necessary, and possible to express policy disagreements with the majority via separate opinions and votes.

John Vasquez claims to follow Imre Lakatos but distorts his criteria for judging theories and evaluating research programs. Vasquez claims that facts observed can falsify a theory by showing that its predictions are wrong. He fails to consider the puzzles posed by the interdependence of theory and fact. He places all realists in a single paradigm despite the divergent assumptions of traditional and structural realists. In contrast to Vasquez, I argue that explanation, not prediction, is the ultimate criterion of good theory, that a theory can be validated only by working back and forth between its implications and an uncertain state of affairs that we take to be the reality against which theory is tested, and that the results of tests are always problematic.

This paper investigates the dynamics of the “wasted vote” phenomenon and Duverger's Law. I construct a theoretical model in order to consider how preelection polls serve to inform the electorate about the relative chances of the candidates and how that information acts over time to decrease the support of the trailing candidate. The results shed light on how public opinion polls can aggregate information in the electorate and coordinate voters on the viable candidates in the election. Specifically, I show that in a Bayesian game model of strategic voting there exist non-Duvergerian equilibria in which all three candidates receive votes (in the limit). These equilibria require extreme coordination, however, and any variation in beliefs leads voters away from them to one of the Duvergerian equilibria. Thus, non-Duvergerian equilibria are unstable, while two-party equilibria are not. In addition, I describe how preelection polls provide information to voters about the viability of candidates and can thus be used by voters to coordinate on a Duvergerian outcome.

Plato's proposal for the equality of the sexes remains one of the most controversial aspects of his argument in the Republic. I explore this argument with special emphasis on locating it within larger themes of the work, themes whose relevance to the argument on gender equality have often been ignored. On this basis, I find that Plato's defense of gender equality is serious, but that the foundation and the consequences of that argument have not usually been well understood. Plato's argument for gender equality rests on a distinctive view of human nature, and his elaboration of the consequences of pursuing gender equality reveal that a price would have to be paid for it that few are willing to accept. His argument should be considered by contemporary advocates of gender equality.

The attempted coup in August 1991 provides an acid test of whether a democratic political culture is emerging in the former Soviet Union. This paper considers the hypothesis that active resistance to the coup was partly a function of attachments to democracy. Relying heavily on earlier models of collective action, and based on a 1992 survey of mass opinion in all the republics, this hypothesis is tested within a broader theory of rational choice and expectancy theory. Generally, it seems that reactions to the coup were not based on strictly rational calculations and that basic commitments to the collective good of democracy motivated resistance. My general conclusion is that a mass culture has emerged in Russia that nurtures democracy. The 1991 coup demonstrates that for many people in the former Soviet states there is little alternative to democratic politics.

Our article (1990) on alliance dynamics in multipolarity, which John Vasquez criticizes, differs from some neorealist approaches by incorporating variables from the theory of the security dilemma, including perceptual factors. Nonetheless, our argument meets Imre Lakatos's criteria for a progressive problem shift insofar as it explains more than the original theory, does so parsimoniously, has been successfully applied to new domains, and does not introduce new assumptions that contradict the core of the original theory.

The percentage of state legislative seats won by Democrats in nonsouthern states has increased steadily since World War II. Fiorina (1994) argues that this is because of the professionalization of state legislatures: Legislatures now meet longer and pay higher salaries; legislative positions which require more time are less attractive to Republicans, who can make more money elsewhere; higher salaries attract Democrats, who make less in the private sector. That analysis has several serious flaws. First, nonsouthern states have gradually become more Democratic at all levels as part of a long-term regional political realignment. The rise in Democrats in legislatures outside the South is due more to this realignment than to legislative professionalization. Second, trends in southern states contradict his hypothesis. Professionalization has increased, but state legislatures are becoming more Republican. Finally, Fiorina's analysis is worth careful reconsideration because it suggests that there is little connection between constituencies and partisan outcomes.

Renewed interest in the concept of political judgment—a mode of reasoning that steers a middle way between abstract, technical reasoning and willful self-assertion—frequently takes the form of a return, qualified in various ways, to Aristotle's concept of phronesis or prudence. I examine this renaissance of interest in Aristotelian prudence through a study of the works of several leading democratic theorists and Aristotle scholars and conclude that they stop short of some of the very elements of Aristotle's thought that can assist us in promoting prudence. In particular, I try to show that these contemporary advocates of political judgment undermine the case for political science (Aristotle's primary concern) and thereby risk losing the independent judgment that Aristotelian political science supports. They fail to give sufficient weight to Aristotle's claim that phronesis, while distinguishable from scientific reason or philosophy, functions best even as a practical science when it accepts certain of philosophy's guiding insights.

The critique of my 1994 article by Stonecash and Agathangelou reflects a series of misconceptions and misunderstandings—about measures, methods, arguments, and findings. In this rejoinder I attempt to correct these. In addition, I clarify my methods and findings. First, I show that a formal statistical test indicates that limiting the analysis to the northern states is justified. Less formally, the professionalism hypothesis cannot work the same in the South as in the North unless levels of Democratic legislative strength can rise above 100%. Second, although clearly inferior to a pooled analysis, I show that a disaggregated (state-by-state) analysis is far more supportive of the professionalization hypothesis than the flawed results Stonecash and Agathangelou report. Third, despite the repeated assertions of Stonecash and Agathangelou, I demonstrate that there is no evidence that a long-term partisan realignment to the Democrats is occurring, and that, contrary to their methodological recommendations, the variables included in my analysis would capture it if it were. Finally, Stonecash and Agathangelou interpret my research as indicating a lack of relationship between constituencies and who gets elected. That is simply not a correct reading of my article.

Institutional design can affect the logic of ongoing collective action in groups with heterogeneous members. This article corrects a mathematical error in a seminal article by Bendor and Mookherjee (1987) and shows how the amended result strengthens the case for centralized monitoring and enforcement mechanisms. In solving their original model, Bendor and Mookherjee neglected that groups under centralized control will become increasingly talented over time, as headquarters detects and replaces untalented members. Expected improvements in the talent of the group should heighten the incentive for its members to work and curtail the incidence of costly free riding, as well as reduce the average per-worker cost of production. These gains in efficiency will not materialize in decentralized regimes, where the fraction of talented members will remain constant over time. Depending on the effectiveness of monitoring in the centralized group and the level of patience and talent in society as a whole, centralized regimes can produce greater group welfare than decentralized ones, even when decentralized institutions operate flawlessly.

We disagree that our correspondence (Elman and Elman 1995) regarding Schroeder (1994) supports Vasquez's (1997) verdict that the neorealist scientific research program is degenerating. We argue that Vasquez's conclusion is based on a misstatement of the Lakatosian criteria of appraisal and a mistaken conflation of the neorealist research program with the proposition that balancing is a common foreign policy. We do, however, welcome Vasquez's attempt to apply Lakatosian metatheory to international relations theory, and we hope that this conversation will encourage others to follow his lead.

Schwartz and Tomz (1997) have correctly pointed out an error in our 1987 article: We had neglected to analyze how changes in group composition improve the performance of centralized institutions over time. The change affects only the case of perfect monitoring, however. We argue, moreover, that even in this special context, our main qualitative conclusion—that the centralized structure has no positive advantage over the decentralized one—continues to hold. We reach different conclusions about the relative roles of the two institutions, partly because we had in mind a positive interpretation, whereas Schwartz and Tomz select a normative interpretation of the issue of institutional choice. Finally, we believe that imperfect monitoring is essential to the theory, in order to derive conclusions that are not driven by artifacts of the model or by arbitrary equilibrium selections.

Realism is both a scientific research program and, more traditionally, a political philosophy. All realists share a pessimistic worldview that posits perpetual struggle among groups for security, prestige, and power and that denies the capacity of human reason to create a world of peace and harmony. Recent research by so-called neotraditional realists does not disconfirm Waltz's balancing proposition. Instead, these works have tended to add unit-level variables in order to transform Waltz's theory of international politics into one of foreign policy. The question is not whether states balance or bandwagon—history clearly shows that they do both—but rather under what conditions states choose one strategy or the other.

John Vasquez's assessment of realism suffers from three serious flaws. First, his reliance on Imre Lakatos's (1970) model of scientific progress is problematic, because the Lakatosian model has been largely rejected by contemporary historians and philosophers of science. Second, Vasquez understates the range and diversity of the realist research program and mistakenly sees disagreements among realists as evidence of theoretical degeneration. Finally, he overlooks the progressive character of contemporary realist theory, largely because he does not consider all the relevant literature. Disagreements within and across competing research programs are essential to progress and should be welcomed, but Vasquez's effort suggests that criticism will be most helpful when it seeks to do more than merely delegitimate a particular research tradition.