Both the campaign and early administration of George Bush trumpeted a theme of a more centrist, lower-volume, less confrontational approach to politics and governing. Aspects of both the campaign and the administration seemed to belie this pledge, from the Willie Horton ads to the fight over the Tower nomination and the invasion of Panama. Still, the prevailing tone and style of the Bush administration during its first year seemed far less strident than that of the Reagan era. As Edwards (1989, 3) noted, “Bush has worked diligently to create an atmosphere of reconciliation and goodwill” and has sought to avoid “politically-charged polemics.”

Yet in another respect, the Bush administration seems to have abandoned any semblance of a “kinder, gentler” politics in its dealings with Congress. Three seemingly minor aspects of Bush's recent dealings with Congress pertaining to legislative powers suggest, if anything, a singularly aggressive effort to extend the bounds of the presidency by what I will argue is a suspect invocation of prerogative powers. The actions described below have received virtually no press attention; yet they may presage a new era of presidential expansionism exceeding that which we have witnessed to date.

President Gorbachev has fundamentally changed the Soviet political system. Whether Gorbachev survives another month, year, or decade, the Soviet system will not return to the party-state command economy that preceded his tenure. Although the Soviet changes have not yet resulted in the total repudiation of the communist system, as in Eastern Europe, and a neoconservative retrenchment is possible, those of us who study and teach Soviet politics must respond to these developments with a perestroika of Soviet studies and “new thinking” about the Soviet Union.

Concepts and techniques formerly alien to Soviet studies must become integral components of our analysis. Even if we cannot completely discard such concepts as totalitarianism, Marxism-Leninism, and democratic centralism, we must begin to include theories of pluralism, constitutionalism, and federalism. Patently, oldstyle Kremlinology and “black box” analysis must be supplemented if not replaced by public opinion polling, studies of electoral behavior, and legislative roll-call analysis. Rather than thinking and teaching about the USSR in isolation or in the narrow context of comparative communism, we should look at Soviet politics from a broader comparative perspective that draws on theories and examples from Western and Third World systems. Quite simply, the restructuring of how we teach and study Soviet politics must be as fundamental and as sweeping as Gorbachev's perestroika of the Soviet system.

This article explores the complex and contradictory nature of representative government and its impact on elected officials seeking to balance the public interest with their own private concerns. “Ethics in government” controversies occupy a gray area of public-private overlap which is particularly uncertain today as the press and the public's expectations of acceptable official behavior appear to be changing. Popular pejoratives directed at elected officials include “conflict of interest,” “special interest,” and “undue influence” in contrast to the “public interest.” These terms encompass key representational functions whose precise meaning is unclear.

The uncertainty lies in our inadequate understanding of the nature of representation, that complex interaction between governmental institutions and individual behavior. As Heinz Eulau contends, “… none of the traditional formulations of representation are relevant to the solution of the representational problems which the modern polity faces.” These conceptual limitations hamper our ability to craft “ethics” laws defining appropriate legislative behavior without distorting essential representative functions and responsibilities.

The following discussion explores two contradictory notions of representation: the “trustee” and the “delegate.” Each model inherently favors particular decision-making biases and creates potential conflicts of interest. Important trade-offs are implicit in promoting one model over the other. The analysis also implies that rational and ethical decision-making can result from institutional processes which are designed to check and balance self-interested individual representative behavior.

Joseph Schumpeter, a great economist and social scientist of the last generation, whose career was almost equally divided between Central European and American universities, and who lived close to the crises of the 1930s and '40s, published a book in 1942 under the title, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. The book has had great influence, and can be read today with profit. It was written in the aftergloom of the great depression, during the early triumphs of Fascism and Nazism in 1940 and 1941, when the future of capitalism, socialism, and democracy all were in doubt. Schumpeter projected a future of declining capitalism, and rising socialism. He thought that democracy under socialism might be no more impaired and problematic than it was under capitalism.

He wrote a concluding chapter in the second edition which appeared in 1946, and which took into account the political-economic situation at the end of the war, with the Soviet Union then astride a devastated Europe. In this last chapter he argues that we should not identify the future of socialism with that of the Soviet Union, that what we had observed and were observing in the first three decades of Soviet existence was not a necessary expression of socialism. There was a lot of Czarist Russia in the mix. If Schumpeter were writing today, I don't believe he would argue that socialism has a brighter future than capitalism. The relationship between the two has turned out to be a good deal more complex and intertwined than Schumpeter anticipated.

I. The Worldwide Democratic Revolution and Its Causes

It being less than ten days after the collapse of the attempted coup by communist hardliners in the Soviet Union, the coup's outcome serves as a useful reminder of the vitality that the democratic dea has for people still living under authoritarianism. The anti-communist revolution in the USSR is of course not an isolated event. The single most remarkable macropolitical phenomenon of the past generation has been the global crisis of authoritarianism, and the spread of liberal democracy in its wake, as noted by Lucian Pye in his presidential addressto this convention two years ago. By my count, there were three democracies in 1790; 13 in 1900, 27 in 1919, and 62 today.This progress has not been linear or continuous, of course: there were 14 fewer democracies in 1940 than in 1919; democracies were overthrown throughout Latin America in the 60s and 70s. Many of the countries thathave become democracies in the past few years are very unstable or of uncertain commitment to liberal values, and it would not be surprising to see a number of them lapse back into some kind of authoritarian rule in the nearfuture, as Thailand has already done this past year. Nonetheless, th trend is there. The 62 countries I countas democracies have a combined population of 2.24 billion people, or approximately 44 percent of the world's population. Moreover, neither the Soviet Union nor China are counted among the 62, and if parts or all of either country democratizes successfully, half to two-thirds of the world's population could be said to enjoy democratic rights and liberties.

Because most of the discussion of the second volume of Robert Caro's (1990) biography of Lyndon Johnson has focused either on his charge that Johnson's victory over Coke Stevenson in the 1948 Texas Senate election was gained through fraud or on the accuracy of the extremely negative picture of Johnson as compared to the heroic portrait of Stevenson, other important issues have been overlooked. In his introduction, Caro writes that he has devoted so much attention to the 1948 campaign because it “was the new politics against the old. Johnson was the new politics: electronic politics, technological politics, media politics.” These new techniques included “scientific polling, techniques of organization and of media manipulation,” whose effectiveness was demonstrated “so convincingly that thereafter all politicians who could afford them adopted them” (xxxii–xxxiii).

Even though the image of Lyndon Johnson as a pioneer in the development of campaign technology is at odds with what has previously been written about him, most reviewers largely accepted Caro's assertion at face value.

The Western democracies have gradually developed their legislative institutions over many centuries. Today the Soviet Union is building its own powerful legislature. Perhaps a look at the Western experience will be of interest to Soviet citizens who are currently thinking about how to make their own legislature an effective part of the democratic process.

Of course the Soviet Union is quite different from the Western democracies in many ways, including not only its political system, but also its economic system, its multinational character, and its social and cultural history, and the Western experience cannot be applied mechanically to such a different setting. But precisely because the Soviet Union is undertaking such bold experiments in restructuring, concrete experiences of others might be useful in suggesting ideas about legislative procedures, competitive elections, constituency relationships, and social norms.

Legislatures were originally developed in Britain, and later in France, because the kings constantly found themselves short of money. After trying many methods of raising money by command, they eventually realized that they would have to attain the support of broader and broader segments of the society.

The cost of running presidential primary campaigns has increased dramatically since the primary replaced the party convention as the preferred method of presidential candidate selection. Much of this well documented rise in campaign spending has been attributed to the increased use of televised political advertising. Today, political parties have been supplanted by the media as the most prominent link between the voter and the election process. It is not party identification or the “get out the vote” apparatus, but slick, high tech, 30-second spot advertisements that have helped to make or break presidential campaigns for party nominations in recent years.

Today, candidates are apt to spend two-thirds or more of their primary campaign budgets on paid political advertising, and the 1992 presidential primary season promises more of the same. In addition, the '92 primaries may offer an interesting twist in campaign strategy. In the past, media battles for the nomination have been waged over the broadcast airwaves. In the future, primary watchers would be well advised to pay close attention to the role played by cable television.

“How to Recognize Democracy” and “How to Recognize Political Parties”—such were some of the newspaper articles I published after arriving in Estonia in November 1990. People expected the new freely elected Supreme Council (parliament) to pass laws quickly and with large majorities, and parties to have card-carrying mass memberships. Besides the ever-present threat of suppression by the Kremlin, democracy in Estonia was challenged internally by such superdemocratic expectations, rooted both in the earlier Soviet fake democracy and a reaction against its actual concentration of power.

Parliamentary democracy had been introduced, but parliament members were prohibited from becoming cabinet ministers. Unrealistically high quorum and majority requirements risked paralyzing legislative action, now that disagreement and absence had become possible. Perfectly sound democratic practices were denounced as dictatorial. The parliament produced major legislation at a breakneck pace, compared to its Western counterparts, yet was widely seen as too slow. Newly formed centrist parties were thought to be deficient because they lacked mass membership in the Marxist image.

While relentlessly knocking down Soviet-style authoritarian patterns, especially in attitudes toward women, I increasingly found myself reassuring Estonians that they were further along in building democracy than they dared to believe.

I. How the Placement of States Affects Their Policies

Because throughout most of the years since the second World War the United States and the Soviet Union were similarly placed by their power, their external behaviors should have shown striking similarities. Did they? Yes, more than has usually been realized. The behavior of states can be compared on many counts. Their armament policies and their interventions abroad are two of the most revealing. On the former count, the United States in the early 1960s undertook the largest strategic and conventional peace-time military build-up the world has yet seen. We did so even as Khrushchev was trying at once to carry through a major reduction in the conventional forces and to follow a strategy of minimum deterrence, and we did so even though the balance of strategic weapons greatly favored the United States. As one should have expected, the Soviet Union soon followed in America's footsteps, thus restoring the symmetry of great-power behavior. And so it was through most of the years of the Cold War. Advances made by one were quickly followed by the other, with the United States almost always leading the way. Allowing for geographic differences, the overall similarity of their forces was apparent. The ground forces of the Soviet Union were stronger than those of the United States, but in naval forces the balance of advantage was reversed. The Soviet Union's largely coastal navy gradually became more of a blue-water fleet, but one of limited reach. Its navy never had more than half the tonnage of ours.