We analyze the election data from the first “almost free” political contest in the Eastern bloc, the Polish election of June 1989. Voting data for state socialist societies provide a novel source of information on the political transitions in process in East Central Europe; the source of electoral support for opposition candidates in Poland affords a glimpse of the emerging political groups that must deal with continuing economic crises while attempting to reconstruct or consolidate democratic procedures. Data on turnout and on the ecological patterning of votes for Solidarność and for the government coalition are reviewed. Electoral victory has transformed Solidarność from an opposition movement with strong trade union roots to a political coalition with a rather different constituency: the strongest relative support for Solidarność candidates was found in rural areas, particularly in the southeast, rather than in the urban, industrial centers where the movement was born.

In this article I develop a simple game-theoretic model of administrative reform in Latin American democracies. The model, which is based on the incentives facing the politicians who must initiate reforms if any are to occur, yields two predictions: (1) reforms are more likely to pass the legislative hurdle when patronage is evenly distributed among the strongest parties, and (2) initial reforms are more likely to be followed by further extensions of reform where the electoral weight of the top parties remains relatively even and stable. Attention to the incentives facing legislators and party leaders also results in the expectation that certain political institutions, such as open list proportional representation and electoral rules that minimize party control over candidate lists, reduce the probability of reform. I test these predictions and expectations on a set of Latin American democracies and find them consistent with historical events.

Part and parcel of the conventional wisdom about rural publics in Africa is that populations on the periphery will accord ethnic solidarity greater significance than national consciousness. A survey of neighboring Hausa villages on different sides of the Niger-Nigeria boundary counters this myth. Probing issues of self-identity and ethnic affinity, we found that most Hausa villagers on the frontier did not place their Hausan ethnic identity above their national one as citizens of Nigeria or Niger and expressed greater affinity for non-Hausa cocitizens than for foreign Hausas. However, expressed attachments to ethnic, national, and other social identifications (such as religion) varied according to village: citizenship does make a difference in the political consciousness of villagers on the geographic margins of the state. More survey research in other transborder regions should shed further light on processes of state penetration and national integration in developing countries.

In the last 40 years careerism has hit Congress full force, yet we do not know much about the pros and cons of lengthy congressional careers. I describe the changes typically occurring over the course of extended stays in Congress and then show that these contours have shifted over the decades such that for most aspects of congressional service (electoral support, formal positions held, and constituency attention) there is less differentiation between a member's early and late career stages than there used to be. However, a major exception exists to the diminution of life cycle effects in Congress: pure legislative involvement (raw levels of activity combined with the extent to which a member's legislative agenda is focused and efficient), despite widely held beliefs about the death of apprenticeship, is now more than ever dependent on tenure. In relative terms, junior members are less legislatively involved than they were a few decades ago. While many portions of congressional service are now routinized from the beginning, legislative involvement comes not just with a subcommittee chair but only with experience. This finding has clear implications both for proposals to limit congressional terms and for perceptions of congressional careerism in general.

In previous studies of distributive politics scholars have investigated legislative influence without accounting for the policies' independent merits. As a result, they have failed to include a plausible explanation of the counterfactual (i.e., which projects would have been funded in the absence of congressional committee influence), which has led to invalid inferences regarding legislative influence. The model of distributive politics is reformulated to account for an assumed efficient and/or equitable project allocation in the absence of legislative influence. Using data from proposed Army Corps of Engineers' projects and the funding recommendations of three institutions, the findings indicate that pork barrel politics indeed exists and imposes significant efficiency costs but that both equity and economic efficiency play prominent roles in the decision-making process as well. Cost-benefit analysis is seen to play a constructive role by improving the efficiency of project choice; and the corps's cost-benefit analysis guidelines are beneficial from the agency's organizational perspective, as well.

Rrepresentatives' votes on a series of defense budget roll calls in the first year of the Reagan administration's Pentagon buildup are related to constituency opinions on defense spending during the 1980 election campaign. The strong aggregate constituency demand for increased defense spending in 1980 is estimated to have added almost $17 billion (about 10%) to the total fiscal year 1982 Pentagon appropriation. The impact of constituency opinion was largely independent of specific political circumstances: differential responsiveness in districts with partisan turnover, intense districtlevel competition, and strong presidential coattails together accounted for less than $1 billion in additional appropriations, with the remaining $16 billion attributable to across-the-board responsiveness by even the most safely incumbent representatives.

Bipolar systems are inherently more stable than multipolar configurations of power, Kenneth Waltz argues. His empirical justification for this conclusion relies on the multipolar systems that preceded the two world wars and the bipolar Cold War. The weakness of Waltz's argument is the small number of cases and the failure to consider alternative explanations for different levels of war in the three periods. In another historical period of both multi- and bipolarity—Europe from 1495 to 1559—I have found that polarity cannot account for the constant level of instability across a change in polarity in the system. Instead, the offense-defense balance, which includes the technical military balance, the cumulativity of power resources, and strategic beliefs, explains instability in the period. Drawing on this alternative theory, I reassess the high level of stability associated with the Cold War and speculate on the level of stability we can expect in the post-Cold War period.

Polities and organizations use and require particular languages for official business. The choice of official languages is a vexing issue. Theorists, convinced that a fair language policy cannot be efficient, have despaired of an elegant solution. To investigate this apparent dilemma, I mathematically model the problem of choosing an efficient and fair language policy for a plurilingual polity. The policy designates official languages and taxes the language groups to pay for translation among the official languages. Contrary to prevailing wisdom, this model implies that a fair language policy can be efficient. But what if language groups rationally misrepresent the costs of using a nonnative official language? Even then, the policy maker can discover a fair language policy and, under some conditions, can use a cost-revelation procedure that discovers a fair and efficient language policy. The results challenge the claim that efficiency and practicality excuse the inferior treatment of language minorities.

We propose a new model of cooperators' advantage depending neither on supplementary incentives nor on cooperators' capacity to recognize, and play selectively with, other cooperators. It depends, rather, on players' making the play-no play decision by the heuristic of projecting their own “cooperate-defect” choices onto potential partners. Cooperators offer to play more often, and fellow cooperators will more often accept their offer. When certain boundary conditions are met, this results in a higher expected payoff for cooperators than for defectors. Empirical support for this heuristic is suggested by expectations data from related social dilemma experiments. Moreover, its use can be justified in Bayesean terms. Our model brings behavioral decision theory's “cognitive miser” paradigm to bear on interdisciplinary concern with the evolution of cooperative behavior and shows how, if other mechanisms provide a suitable “initial kick,” cooperation can evolve in the absence of iteration and in large, mobile societies.

Much of the literature concerning the relative merits of alternative electoral rules is centered around the extent to which particular rules select “representative” legislatures. And an important concern in evaluating the “representativeness” of an electoral rule is whether or not the rule responds positively to changes in individuals' preferences, that is, whether or not the rule is monotonic. By explicitly considering electoral rules in the context of a complete electoral system—voting, selection of legislature, and legislative choice of policy—we argue that monotonicity in electoral systems is a nonissue: depending on the behavioral model governing individual decision making, either everything is monotonic or nothing is monotonic.

Governments of the Left and Right have distinct partisan economic policies and objectives that they would prefer to pursue. Their propensity to do so, however, is constrained by their desire for reelection. We argue that the ability of governments to further their partisan interests and preside over reelectable macroeconomic outcomes simultaneously is dependent on the organization of the domestic economy, particularly the labor movement. We hypothesize that there are two different paths to desirable macroeconomic performance. In countries with densely and centrally organized labor movements, leftist governments can promote economic growth and reduce inflation and unemployment. Conversely, in countries with weak labor movements, rightist governments can pursue their partisan-preferred macroeconomic strategies and achieve similarly beneficial macroeconomic outcomes. Performance will be poorer in other cases. These hypotheses are supported by analysis of pooled annual time series data for 16 advanced industrial democracies between 1967 and 1984.

The argument is presented for defining party identification by the root question, “Generally speaking, do you usually think of yourself as a Republican, a Democrat, an independent, or what?” With this definitional base, the partisan balance between Democrats and Republicans between 1952 and 1980 shows no evidence of realignment outside the South, belying the implications of the Markus-Converse and Fiorina analyses that suggest volatility in response to short-term influences. It also appears that the correlation between party identification and voter choices for president are very constant over time in the South as well as outside the South. Party line voting by party identifiers varies by region and party but did not decrease between 1952 and 1988.

How should policy innovations undertaken by states be modeled? Frances Stokes Berry and William D. Berry presented an event history analysis of the determinants of lottery adoptions by state governments in the June 1990 issue of this Review. Howard Front argues that the way Berry and Berry tested for interaction among variables is invalid on the grounds that what they take to be empirical results are only artifacts of the model specification. In response, the Berrys elaborate their original model and add alternative specifications.

To what extent and in what respects does the political thought of Michel Foucault reflect the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche's ideas? In the September 1990 issue of this Review, Leslie Paul Thiele firmly asserted Nietzschean roots for Foucault's thought. In this Controversy, Thiele's claims are disputed by J. Scott Johnson. Johnson argues that Foucault's theory is rooted as much in Marx as in Nietzsche and that Foucault himself refuted Thiele's interpretation. In his response, Thiele takes issue with Johnson's critique.