The political transition in Spain provides a rare opportunity to monitor popular attitudes toward alternative regimes. Through the analysis of national surveys conducted in 1978, 1979–80, and 1984, we first establish that the Spanish public distinguishes not only between successive governments—the Franquist and the center-right and socialist governments of the post-Franco period—but also between Francoism and democracy as political systems. Second, we show that during the post-Franco era the criteria of legitimacy have begun to shift from formal political to social democratic values. These analytical results are achieved by comparing standard with less orthodox measures of political legitimacy and performance, and by revising conventional theories of system support. Third, we estimate the determinants of support for and opposition to the two regimes. The Franquist system remains more polarizing than does the democratic system; the constituencies of the democratic regime are considerably broader and more heterogeneous. However, while the new democratic state is comparatively inclusive and autonomous, low rates of political participation and changes in traditional socialist ideology have made the institutional bases of legitimacy ambiguous.

The defense of capitalism in America is rooted in a preference for the market's justice of earned deserts over the justices of equality and need associated with the polity. These preferences have structural roots in the way governments and markets serve different values and purposes, satisfy wants, focus on fairness or justice, enlist causal attributions, distribute or redistribute income, are limited by rights, and seem to offer either harmony or conflict of interest. Some of these “structural” differences, however, are themselves perceptual, and corrected by changed perceptions of the productivity of government and of our historic predecessors, and by a community point of view involving changed accounting systems, as well as by policies of full employment rather than guaranteed incomes. With few institutional changes, these altered perceptions may partially restore political justice to favor.

Observation is at the heart of political analysis. Observing the behavior of U.S. senators involves watching them in two contexts—at home and in the capital city. It also entails sensitivity to the sequences of events or contexts which impinge upon senatorial behavior. Contexts and sequences of legislative life have not been observed in the rich detail they deserve, because not enough political scientists are presently engaged in observation.

Norms provide a powerful mechanism for regulating conflict in groups, even when there are more than two people and no central authority. This paper investigates the emergence and stability of behavioral norms in the context of a game played by people of limited rationality. The dynamics of this new norms game are analyzed with a computer simulation based upon the evolutionary principle that strategies shown to be relatively effective will be used more in the future than less effective strategies. The results show the conditions under which norms can evolve and prove stable. One interesting possibility is the employment of metanorms, the willingness to punish someone who did not enforce a norm. Many historical examples of domestic and international norms are used to illustrate the wide variety of mechanisms that can support norms, including metanorms, dominance, internalization, deterrence, social proof, membership in groups, law, and reputation.

By-elections in parliamentary democracies are remarkable for the almost invariable loss of support experienced by governments relative to the preceding general election. There has been, however, surprisingly little research into this phenomenon. Using Britain as a test case, this article goes some way towards filling this gap. It identifies and tests three political explanations of governments' by-election vote losses, which it labels the turnout, referendum and personal vote models. No simple conclusion emerges, since different results are obtained depending on whether the models are treated as separate entities or their interplay is taken into account by integrating them into a single causal model. This latter strategy is argued to involve a superior conceptualization of the processes at work in bringing about governments' midterm vote losses.

The earliest attempts at a theoretical understanding of politics occur in the city-states of ancient Greece. Women had no place in the politics of those cities. However, the Greek tragedians and philosophers raised questions about the fundamental assumptions underlying political life by introducing women into their writings. Thus, women appear in some Greek tragedies as a counter to the male sense of political efficacy—the sense that men can create through speech and ignore the facts of physical creation entailed in the process of reproduction. A discussion of two tragedies, The Seven Against Thebes and the Antigone, suggests how the failure of male political leaders to acknowledge the demands of the physical and that which is different brings on tragedy. The Socratic response in the Republic is to overcome tragedy by making the male and the female the same. Aristotle attempts to incorporate sexual difference in the theoretical framework of hierarchy. Finally, there is a brief consideration of the role of the pre-Socratic philosophers in setting the agenda for the Greeks' confrontation with the problems of incorporating difference into the political community.

A new specification of the expected utility model of international conflict places expected utilities within a polar coordinate system; treats third-party choices in a manner more consistent with classical forms; estimates the expected utilities derived from not challenging existing policies; more fully represents the expected costs of conflict; and normalizes expected utilities regardless of system size. By assuming that the probability of escalation of a dispute increases monotonically with leaders' expectations of gain, we derive continuous functions for the probabilities of war, intervention, violence, and peace. The revised theory significantly improves our ability to discriminate between violent and nonviolent disputes and between violent disputes that escalated to warfare and those that did not in Europe between 1816 and 1970.

Despite relatively favorable citizen attitudes, voter turnout in American national elections is far below the average of 80% of the eligible electorate that votes in other industrialized democracies. The American institutional setting—particularly the party system and the registration laws—severely inhibits voter turnout, and probably also accounts for the unusual degree to which education and other socioeconomic resources are directly linked to voting participation in the United States.

Using a combination of aggregate and comparative survey data, the present analysis suggests that in comparative perspective, turnout in the United States is advantaged about 5% by political attitudes, but disadvantaged 13% by the party system and institutional factors, and up to 14% by the registration laws. The experience of other democracies suggests that encouraging voter participation would contribute to channeling discontent through the electoral process. Even a significantly expanded American electorate would be more interested and involved in political activity than are present voters in most other democracies.

Machiavelli's most famous political work, The Prince, was a masterful act of political deception. I argue that Machiavelli's intention was a republican one: to undo Lorenzo de Medici by giving him advice that would jeopardize his power, hasten his overthrow, and allow for the resurgence of the Florentine republic. This interpretation returns The Prince to its specific historical context. It considers Machiavelli's advice to Lorenzo on where to reside, how to behave, and whom to arm in light of the political reality of sixteenth-century Florence. Evidence external to The Prince, including Machiavelli's other writings and his own political biography, confirms his anti-Medicean sentiments, his republican convictions, and his proclivity for deception. Understanding The Prince as an act of political deception continues a tradition of reading Machiavelli as a radical republican. Moreover, it overcomes the difficulties of previous republican interpretations, and provides new insight into the strategic perspective and Renaissance artistry Machiavelli employed as a theoretician.

Power, subjectivity, otherness, and modernity are concepts that contemporary political theorists increasingly find to be closely interwoven. In search of an adequate comprehension of the interrelationships among these concepts, I examine the work of Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas. I argue that Foucault, although he is provocatively insightful on a number of key points, ultimately provides a less satisfactory account than Habermas. The core problem is Foucault's inability to conceptualize juridical subjectivity, something which is necessary if he is going to connect his notion of aesthetic subjectivity with his endorsement of new social movements.

The model presented here assumes that nations initiate conflict to change the international status quo across one or more issues to an outcome they prefer. Their preferences for different issue outcomes are represented by a classical spatial utility function. International coalitions are formed both to enhance the chance of a successful challenge and to counter existing challenges. Disputes are modeled as periods of competition between two coalitions through the recruitment of additional members, erosion of support for the opposing coalition and escalation of the crisis. The two-nation model is analyzed in detail, and the existence of the core for the resulting game is proved. The two main conclusions of the two-nation model are that nations have a general incentive to exaggerate their issue positions in disputes and that the possibility of issue trades enhances the likelihood of compromise.

The president's party consistently loses partisan control of state legislatures in midterm elections, a pattern similar to the loss of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in midterms. This study examines presidential coattails as a possible explanation of these losses. Aggregate state legislative election outcomes between 1944 and 1984 in 41 states are examined. The analysis indicates that the president's party gains seats in presidential elections in proportion to the presidential vote in a state, and subsequently loses seats in midterm elections also in proportion to the prior presidential vote in the state. The presidential coattail and the midterm repercussion effects are evident even when gubernatorial coattail effects are introduced, but are fairly modest in states lacking competitive parties.

Thucydides' investigation of Athenian imperialism is in part an investigation into whether imperialism as such is based on universal human compulsions, and hence cannot simply be condemned. It is generally recognized that for Thucydides, Athenian imperialism is connected to the Athenian national character, but it has not been widely appreciated that Thucydides provides a detailed account of the foundations of the Athenian character in human nature itself. That account revolves around what he calls “daring” and the human impulse of eros. The erotic and daring character of the Athenians is connected by Thucydides both to the unique democracy of the city and to its unique experience in the Persian Wars. The unique Athenian character stems from an unprecedented liberation of certain impulses of human nature. This produces Athenian imperialism and dynamism, but also destroys the city in time.

Building on a growing literature in international political science, I reexamine the traditional liberal claim that governments founded on a respect for individual liberty exercise “restraint” and “peaceful intentions” in their foreign policy. I look at three distinct theoretical traditions of liberalism, attributable to three theorists: Schumpeter, a democratic capitalist whose explanation of liberal pacifism we often invoke; Machiavelli, a classical republican whose glory is an imperialism we often practice; and Kant, a liberal republican whose theory of internationalism best accounts for what we are. Despite the contradictions of liberal pacifism and liberal imperialism, I find, with Kant and other democratic republicans, that liberalism does leave a coherent legacy on foreign affairs. Liberal states are different. They are indeed peaceful. They are also prone to make war. Liberal states have created a separate peace, as Kant argued they would, and have also discovered liberal reasons for aggression, as he feared they might. I conclude by arguing that the differences among liberal pacifism, liberal imperialism, and Kant's internationalism are not arbitrary. They are rooted in differing conceptions of the citizen and the state.

It is often argued that internationally recognized human rights are common to all cultural traditions and adaptable to a great variety of social structures and political regimes. Such arguments confuse human rights with human dignity. All societies possess conceptions of human dignity, but the conception of human dignity underlying international human rights standards requires a particular type of “liberal” regime. This conclusion is reached through a comparison of the social structures of ideal type liberal, minimal, traditional, communist, corporatist and developmental regimes and their impact on autonomy, equality, privacy, social conflict, and the definition of societal membership.

The Electoral College is a uniquely American political institution, yet its impact on both the power of the American states and the relative power of citizens living in different states is not well understood. Game theorists have broached the state power problem exclusively in terms of the size of each of the states. Empirical investigators have been less systematic, basing their analyses solely on which states have been close in a single election. In this paper we present a model of state power which combines the idea of the pivotal player from game theory with an empirical model of state voting. In doing so we provide a theoretically derived and empirically meaningful assessment of state power in presidential elections. We then trace the implications of the power of the states for the relative power of individual voters, finding large disparities between voters from different states.

How can the beneficiaries of collective action be persuaded to contribute the resources (time, energy, money) necessary for the effort to succeed? Rational and selfish players will recognize they can free ride on the successful contributions of others. If the effort is not successful, they will lose a contribution—and be “suckered.” Other than relying on altruism, organizers of the group effort can modify incentives so that players are more prepared to contribute. Laboratory experiments offer one way of assessing the effectiveness of various such modifications; we conducted such tests to see how well contributing is promoted by (1) assuring contributors that they will not lose if the group effort fails (a “money-back guarantee”) and (2) enforcing contributions if it succeeds (“fair share”). We expect the latter to be more successful because it is “stable,” unlike the former, whose success can be undermined by expectations of that success. Three experimental replications demonstrate that the money-back guarantee is no more successful than a standard dilemma, but fair-share requirements increase contributing significantly over that base. Analysis of subjects' expectations about others' behavior offers some support to the hypothesized process undermining the money-back guarantee, but motivational factors must also be taken into account for a full explanation.

This analysis of voters and nonvoters in a large sample of recent emigrants from the Soviet Union shows that nonvoting is correlated with high interest in politics, a critical political outlook, and dissident modes of behavior. Thus, voter abstention in noncompetitive balloting can be hypothesized to constitute a significant political act rather than passivity. Single-party states use single-candidate elections for a variety of purposes, one of these being the psychological reinforcement of unity between regime and subjects. In this context, the only choice left to the dissenting citizen is not to vote at all. In the contemporary Soviet Union, nonvoting is regionally focused on Moscow and Leningrad, and is associated with post-Stalinist generational change. The covert nature of vote evasion and its informal tolerance provide a new perspective on the character of the Soviet system and its political culture.

There is a glaring and potentially important discontinuity surrounding discussions of U.S. defense expenditure policy making. On the one hand, a growing body of empirically-based research questions whether the U.S. reacts in any significant fashion to the military expenditures of the Soviet Union. On the other hand, defense policy makers routinely justify defense increases as a response to similar increases by the Soviet Union. The discontinuity is resolved in the context of a multistep model of the defense expenditure policy-making process that incorporates a new estimate of Soviet defense spending and mass public opinion. Once formulated, the model provides answers to the following two questions: (1) Does the U.S., insofar as defense spending is concerned, react to the military expenditures of the Soviet Union? (2) If so, what is the magnitude of the reaction? The answers indicate that not only does the U.S. react to estimated Soviet defense spending, but that the reaction is directly responsible for a very substantial portion of the post-1978 increases in U.S. military expenditures.

This paper derives a supply price for public policy using a constrained maximization model. In the model, three sets of agents each have preferences over outcomes: organized interest groups offer campaign contributions to improve their own wealth, voters offer votes to obtain outcomes closer to their most preferred outcomes, and legislators seek both campaign contributions and votes to obtain reelection. A given legislator's supply price for policy is shown to depend on the productivity of his effort, as determined by committee assignments, priority and ability, and by the preferences of his unorganized constituency in the home district. Two extreme assumptions about the effectiveness of campaign spending in eliciting votes are used to illustrate the comparative statics properties of the model. The prediction of the model is that interest groups will, in general, seek out legislators whose voters are indifferent to the policy the interest group seeks. Thus, voters who do have preferences over policy are in effect represented, even though they are not organized.