It has been argued by Mancur Olson and others that Karl Marx's theory of revolution is logically defective in that front its premises one cannot draw Marx's conclusion that workers will unite to revolt against capitalism. Workers who might wish for large social changes are confronted with a collective action problem that Marx fails to appreciate—so runs the criticism. The critics are assuming that Marx is reasoning from a Hobbesian premise to the effect that insofar as they are rational, individuals act always to fulfill narrowly self-interested goals. This article denies the assumption. In particular it is urged that to make sense of Marx's optimistic hopes about the likely outcome of successful majoritarian working-class revolution, one must attribute to him a secular faith that most people are disposed to play fair with others. This disposition is relatively weak and only sporadically effective in determining behavior, but in the right revolutionary circumstances, Marx hopes, it might play a considerably greater role in this respect. (A circumstance on which Marx places great weight is material abundance.) Being optimistic about the future, Marx cannot be as cynical about human motivation in the present as commentators often take him to be.

The quest for unassailable “foundations” for knowledge has preoccupied Western thinkers at least since Descartes. Without some such foundation or Archimedian standpoint, it was argued, our knowledge of the external world as well as our basis for moral and political judgment would fall prey to relativism, historicism, and ultimately nihilism. Recently, though, this Cartesian quest for foundations has come under attack from some of the most powerful minds of our age.

In this article I examine the contribution of Louis Althusser to this current of thought and assess whether his critique of foundationalist epistemologies and ethics can avoid the pitfalls of relativism. Althusser is compared to other thinkers who share his anti-Cartesian persuasion (Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Foucault) and is criticized for his use of a kind of structuralism to abolish the “knowing subject” as the locus of thought and action. I conclude that Althusser's “antihumanism” has produced a convenient ideology for a new class of Marxist intellectuals to exert their claims to power over ordinary human agents who have been reduced to “bearers” or “supports” of certain systemic, structural relations.

According to Tocqueville, the most important determinant of the character of any society is its political culture (moeurs). A political culture is shaped not only by sociological conditions and laws, but also, in modern times, by ideas propounded by intellectuals. In Tocqueville's day, two dominant schools of thought were contending for influence over the public mind in Europe: philosophe rationalism and traditionalism. Neither one of these schools, Tocqueville argued, promoted a political culture that could reconcile liberty and democracy. Tocqueville conceived his “new political science” as an alternative to these schools that could meet this challenge. Unlike the opposing schools, the new political science could not be propagated directly as an ideology. Its implementation relied on an indirect strategy—using institutions to inculcate certain “mental habits” among the citizens. This in turn called for ways of limiting the role of intellectuals in influencing political culture.

Immediately after the election to the tenth Israeli parliament (Knesset), 21 students of political science, 24 Knesset members, and seven parliamentary correspondents were each asked (a) to assess the political power ratios of the 10 parties represented in the Knesset and (b) to judge the ideological similarity between them. As ascertained by Saaty's analytic hierarchy scaling technique, the power ratio judgments proved sufficiently consistent to justify the construction of individual ratio scales of perceived political power. The ideological proximities were adequately represented by two-dimensional ideological spaces. Analyses of the derived power measures showed that the higher the political sophistication of the subject, the higher the combined power attributed to the religious parties and the lower the combined power assigned to the two largest parties Likud and Labor. The derived power measures were then compared to the predictions of six power indices, three of which only consider the ideological space. Of the six models, the generalized Banzhaf power index best accounted for the perceived power of 62% of the subjects, whereas the classical Shapley-Shubik index provided the best fit for 31% of the subjects. The generalized power indices were found only partly satisfactory with a need for further revision.

The purpose of this article is to define and to prove formally the existence of an equilibrium under proportional representation, as well as partially to characterize it. Specifically, let m be the quota that represents the minimal number of voters necessary for a candidate to be elected. We show that there is a set of elected candidates, each choosing an alternative and each receiving at least m votes, such that no other potential candidate, by offering an additional alternative, can secure at least m votes for himself. We then investigate the structure, at equilibrium, of the set of individuals who support a given candidate, as well as study stability properties of the equilibrium. We also provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the equilibrium to consist of a single candidate, thus generalizing Black's median-voter result.

The central purpose of this article is to shed some light on the roles that risk attitudes and uncertainty may play in determining the durability of political coalitions. Although Axelrod theorized that polarized, or “unconnected,” coalitions would be less durable than “connected” coalitions, subsequent empirical research has found little support for Axelrod's hypothesis. In this article we demonstrate theoretically that many of the anomalies associated with Axelrod's polarization hypothesis can be explained by incorporating risk attitudes and uncertainty into a logical model of a coalition maintenance process. The model we have constructed assumes that coalition members are uncertain about their ultimate payoffs and therefore are subject to persuasion and manipulation by a coalition leader. Through computer simulation we demonstrate that polarized coalitions are indeed capable of enduring for relatively long periods of time once members' risk characteristics and uncertainty are taken into consideration.

Class has long been the preeminent source of political conflict in industrial society, but its electoral influence has declined in recent years. The sources of the decline are not yet firmly established, and moreover the implications for political parties remain unclear. The decline-of-class hypothesis states that parties on the left will decline as the working class becomes more affluent and adopts middle-class styles of conduct. By contrast, the party-appeals hypothesis suggests that as the electorate becomes more middle class, parties of the left will alter their appeals to encompass the growing middle class and so offset the shrinkage of their traditional working-class constituency. This article applies multivariate anaysis to survey data collected in England between 1964 and 1979 to test four specific hypotheses derived from the two scenarios. The results support the decline-of-class theory's prediction that economic development erodes the working-class bases of left-wing parties, but not its claim that the left-wing party's vote declines proportionately. Rather, the results suggest that parties are apparently able to change their appeals to reduce their losses, as argued by the party-appeals theory, but not to eliminate them. It seems that there are restraints on parties' ability to change their appeals, limitations not envisioned by the party appeals theory.

From assumptions of parties as rational actors, this study develops four measures of government performance: duration, mode of resignation, subsequent alternation, and electoral success. These measures are used in a test of competing hypotheses concerning minority government performance in parliamentary democracies. Minority governments are conventionally portrayed as poor performers, but tests of this proposition have been seriously limited. An alternative hypothesis depicts minority governments as rational cabinet solutions without significant performance liabilities. These hypotheses are tested against an extensive cross-national data set including 323 postwar governments in 15 parliamentary democracies. The conventional wisdom about minority governments is not supported by the evidence. In some respects, minority governments are clearly superior to majority coalitions. Moreover, minority government formation may enhance systemic responsiveness and accountability. The findings support the explanation of minority governments as rational cabinet solutions.

In this article we outline a new framework for the formal analysis of bureaucratic politics. It departs from standard neoclassical approaches, notably those of Niskanen (1971) and Peltzman (1976), in several important respects. First our approach explicitly models a system of three-way interaction among bureaus, politicians, and interest groups. Second, it allows for institutional features of each type of participant. Third, it is a model of dynamic process. Fourth, participants make choices adoptively rather than optimizing. Fifth, participants are only minimally informed.

The result is a dynamic model of adaptive behavior, very much in the spirit of Simon's (1947) behavioral tradition, that offers a new perspective on political control, bureaucratic power, and the “intelligence of democracy.”

We all acknowledge strong special responsibilities towards families, friends, clients, and compatriots. The moral basis of these responsibilities is traditionally analyzed in terms of self-assumed obligations. That analysis substantially restricts their scope, because we voluntarily commit ourselves to only a limited range of people. In this article I argue that it is the beneficiary's vulnerability rather than any voluntary commitment as such on the part of the benefactor that generates these special responsibilities. This analysis provides an argument for broader notions of responsibility, because there are many more agents vulnerable to us (individually or collectively) than to whom we have made commitments, in any sense. The welfare state is one particularly apt way of discharging at least some of these further responsibilities. Unlike more individualized responses, the welfare state can satisfy the criteria of a morally acceptable dependency relationship.

Most analyses of the 1974 congressional elections have failed to find significant effects for either Watergate or personal financial conditions, despite the prominence of both of these issues in the campaign. An alternative thesis argues that the effect was indirect, through the selection of better-than-usual Democratic candidates and weaker Republican contestants for House seats. Reanalyzing campaign finance data, we challenge this thesis and then move on to a different type of analysis from that which traditionally has been done in retrospective voting studies. With the use of the 1972-1974 panel of the Center for Political Studies, we examine separately the voting behavior of what V. O. Key, Jr. called “standpatters” and “switchers.” The former are motivated primarily by party identification, with small Watergate effects. Our probit analylsis for switchers, on the other hand, finds much weaker party identification effects, but, interestingly, much more pronounced Watergate and economic impacts. Furthermore, an analysis of the sample compared to the population of districts in 1974 suggests that a more representative sample would lead to even more pronounced impacts for Watergate and the economy than even we have found.

Survey data from the preconvention waves of the 1980 National Election Study are used to estimate the effect of expectations about who will be nominated on respondents' own preferences. The results confirm the conventional belief that bandwagons play an important role in nominating campaigns; at the same time, they suggest that the dynamics of the nominating process may be more subtle than simple bandwagon models would indicate. First, preferences are strongly and consistently projected onto expectations, making the relationship of central interest a reciprocal one. Second, the bases of candidate choice appear to change systematically with political circumstances. In close, volatile campaigns, support for bandwagon candidates (like George Bush in early 1980) is based largely on favorable expectations and on relatively general, diffuse political evaluations (e.g., “leadership”). By comparison, when expectations about the nomination are very one-sided, their impact on preferences approaches zero, and more specific, substantive political evaluations become increasingly important.