When Minnesota's popular sitting governor, a moderate Independent Republican (IR), was denied his own party's endorsement for re-election in June 1994, political analysts nationwide took notice. Throughout the nation, perhaps the most visible manifestation of the rise to prominence of the Christian Right was the quixotic campaign of a little known, fifth generation Minnesota farmer named Allen Quist. But in the wake of Quist's spectacular failure in September's primary election, many observers drew the erroneous conclusion that, at least in Minnesota, the electoral strength of the Christian Right was vastly overstated. In looking beyond the gubernatorial race, it is clear that the Christian Right played a pivotal role in elevating a first-term U.S. representative to the Senate and driving substantial IR gains in the state legislature. Moreover, these successes—and Quist's failure— provide important clues for predicting the future of the movement in Minnesota and elsewhere.

Having discussed this issue at three meetings of our editorial board, we were already familiar with most of the arguments presented in the thoughtful essays by Gary King and Paul Herrnson. We can confirm Herrnson's supposition that the proposed policy is controversial, and that the chief difficulty has to do with the relinquishing of what might be called intellectual property before its creators have fully exploited it. Although we have decided to wait until a thorough discussion of the issue is conducted under the auspices of the APSA before finally deciding on a policy, any statement we might require of authors as a condition of publication in The Journal of Politics is likely to fall considerably short of what King recommends.

Providing good answers to the questions raised in the discussion between Gary King and Paul Herrnson requires paying attention to the full range of interests affected. Unless we pay attention, individual political scientists, research groups, departments, peer reviewers, funding organizations, data archives, journals, and presses will not be able to establish and uphold an effective set of norms relating to the collection, analysis, reporting, and preservation of data.

Everything I have published, apart from some ghost-written school speeches for my children, I have written as a social scientist. Having persuaded myself that I had discovered something worth reporting, I have attempted to persuade others that it was worth knowing. I have taken this to be consistent with the spirit of science, perhaps naively; a spirit encompassing, among other things, the value of public argument based on publicly reproducible evidence.

Forecasting elections may be impossible, but no more so than resisting the temptation to try. As citizens following a campaign, we all indulge in private guesses about who is going to win electoral contests. Some go further and engage in illegal acts—unless done through the services of the Iowa Electronic Market—and bet money on election outcomes. Numerous political scientists have invited fame, but also ridicule, by designing sophisticated models to forecast elections; readers of PS are no strangers to those efforts. Students of elections can hardly escape this tempting opportunity any more than they can escape elections themselves. No phenomenon in our discipline comes in such a regular, precise, and verifiable form as an election.

As Republican hopefuls announce bids to run for president in 1996, while Bill Clinton is pondering his strategy for reelection, political scientists resume their tinkering with models to predict the outcome of the 1996 presidential election. Those forecasts, however, will not arrive until two or three months before election day, when the most up-to-date readings for the various predictors are available. Some would argue that such early forecasting is presumptuous any-how, since it ignores the whole general election campaign. Others will complain that those forecasts arrive too late to have more than curiosity value.

In the Hebrew Bible, the issue of fairness is raised in some of the best-known narratives. Cain's raging jealousy and eventual murder of Abel is provoked by what he considered unfair treatment by God, who “paid heed” to Abel's offering but ignored his (Gen. 4:4). Jacob, after doing seven years of service in return for Laban's beautiful daughter, Rachel, was told that his sacrifice was not sufficient and that he must instead marry Laban's older and plainer daughter, Leah, unless he did seven more years' service, which he regarded as not only the breaking of a contract but also flagrantly unfair.

Fairness triumphed, however, when King Solomon proposed to divide a baby, claimed by two mothers, in two. When the true mother protested and offered the baby to the other mother (whose baby had died), the truth about the baby's maternity became apparent, and “all Israel … stood in awe of the king; for they saw that he possessed divine wisdom to execute justice” (1 Kings 3:28).

Solomon's proposed solution is the first explicit mention of fair division that we know of in recorded history. But it is, of course, no solution at all. Solomon had no intention of dividing the baby in two. Instead, his purpose was to set up a game between the two women, described in Brams (1980, 118–23; 1990, 17–24), that would distinguish the mother from the impostor.

The solutions of the fair-division procedures we shall discuss are for two players.

Is pork barrel spending on the wane? Many think it is, including reformers inside and outside of Congress. Citing the recent decline of earmarks in House appropriations bills for projects in members' districts, reformers suggest that a new era of congressional spending practices is dawning.

This article argues instead that the rise in number of earmarks in the last decade as well as the recent decline depends on whether Congress and the executive branch are controlled by the same or different parties. It further predicts that the Republican takeover of the House and Senate after the 1994 congressional elections could lead to a resurgence of earmarking, in a different form, as long as the Democrats control the White House.

Among scholars, pork barrel spending analysis represents a venerable specialty in the profession, generating some of the most engaging debates and finest research in recent years. This literature analyzes how members of Congress create institutions and use legislative rules to enhance their electoral goals. While not mutually exclusive, the two dominant approaches in recent years are the “distributive” and “informational” models of congressional policy making. (For a good review of the last two decades of scholarly research on the subject, see Krehbiel 1991).

Reformers in the 103rd Congress were emboldened by the success of groups such as the “pork busters,” an informal group led by Representative Harris Fawell (R-IL), who routinely offered amendments to cut pork and unnecessary directed spending in appropriations bills.

American voters issued mixed signals in November 1994 about the preferred role of party in the nation's governing structures. Accordingly, those political scientists who advocate party government for the United States—disciplined parties committed to coherent governing programs consciously patterned on the parliamentary model—were left to debate whether the midterm election results were a glass half empty or half full.

The bad news for advocates of a “more responsible two party system” was that the voters rejected at their earliest opportunity the necessary precondition for party government in the United States: single party control of the nation's elected institutions (Committee on Political Parties 1950). By turning Congress over to the Republicans, the electorate terminated an experiment in which the entirety of the elected federal policy-making structure had been entrusted to the Democrats. That exercise of single party control was brief—and increasingly rare. In the half century since the end of World War II, one party has held the White House and both chambers of Congress just 21 years. In the last quarter century only Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton have presided under these conditions. American voters, then, apparently returned in 1994 to comfortable form in restoring divided government, commensurately discomforting those who see in parties the remedy for a host of ills associated with separated institutions sharing powers.

Yet there were also promising developments in 1994 for party government advocates. At the top of the plus side of the ledger was the way in which House Republicans shed their status as a “permanent minority.”

Gary King has done a great service to the discipline in raising the question of how we meet appropriate standards for assuring that our published work advances the collective knowledge concerning government and politics that is in our mutual professional interest. He has done so in a truly collegial manner, stating his view, raising concerns, and inviting discussion. The editors of PS are using this publication in precisely the proper way by providing a forum in which this professional debate can be aired.

Like Gary King and Paul Herrnson, we believe that making our data accessible can strengthen and advance scholarly knowledge. King and Herrnson, however, disagree about the measures necessary to ensure that data are widely available to achieve this collective good. Herrnson criticizes King's recommendations as potentially bad for the profession. As scholars who have collected data and relied on others' data for our own research, and—equally important—as relatively new Ph.D.s in political science, we have our own perspective in this debate over replication and data accessibility.

To a substantial extent, political scientists continue to be in a state of shock, or even denial, over the results of the November 1994 mid-term elections. This degree of surprise has been largely attributed to the failure of the 1994 elections to conform to numerous models that have successfully predicted past election results on the basis of some combination of presidential popularity and economic performance. In a broader sense, it has become fashionable to argue alternately that the voters weren't really saying anything, or that they did not know what they were saying, or that they were saying things not fit for polite company—angry, mean, and even racist things. Such an interpretation does a disservice both to our profession and to our friends and neighbors, the real people who cast those votes.

It will be some time before we are able to untangle the factors that led to the Republican sweep and to see whether it was a short-term aberration or the beginning of a long-term trend in congressional elections. Nevertheless, I would like to offer a two-part explanation for the results and the consequent academic confusion: the election models that we use as both a tool and a crutch are at the same time not precise enough and too precise.

They are not precise enough because they do not capture all that needs to be taken into account even on the dimensions of the economy and presidential popularity.

Early in the first year of his presidency, Bill Clinton floated the name of Lani Guinier to be the Justice Department's chief civil-rights lawyer. Although Guinier never made it to Senate confirmation hearings, she was well qualified by education and professional training. Moreover, as a black Jewish female, it was evident to her that majoritarian democracy is often less than fair—and she was forthright about wishing to correct it by democratic means.

Ironically, the minority veto, one of the alleged means by which Guinier wished to assure fairness, harkened back to the process of government advocated by John C. Calhoun (1782–1850). For Calhoun, constitutionalism or limited government was justified by epistemological nominalism, and was ensured by the concurrent majority and nullification.

Like that of Aristotle, James Madison, and Karl Marx, Calhoun's political philosophy was based on class analysis. Indeed, the historian of American thought, Richard Hofstadter, subtitled a chapter on Calhoun, “The Marx of the Master Class.” As Hofstadter explains, in Calhoun,

… there is discernible a rough parallel to several ideas that were later elaborated and refined by Marx: the idea of pervasive exploitation and class struggle in history; a labor theory of value and of a surplus appropriated by the capitalists; the concentration of capital under capitalistic production; the fall of working-class conditions to the level of subsistence; the growing revolt of the laboring class against the capitalists; the prediction of social revolution.