Election officials often say that many Americans do not register to vote for fear of being called to jury duty. The only published study on the topic claims that aversion to jury service depresses turnout by more than seven percentage points. We use questions from the 1991 National Election Studies Pilot Study to ascertain beliefs about the sources of jury lists, and we relate those impressions to registration status. We find that barely half the public professes any knowledge of how juries are chosen, and just 42% believe that they come from voter registration records. Estimations from a multivariate analysis indicate that fear of jury service accounts for less than a one percentage point drop in turnout. We discuss the implications of this finding both for reform proposals and the rational choice theory of turnout.

Inglehart's postmaterialism thesis describes an individual-level process of value change. Little attention has been devoted to validating the responses to his postmaterialist-materialist index. The aggregate-level distributions may appear to reflect a postmaterialist-materialist dimension, even if at the individual level responses on the questions making up the index are random. The logic of the survey questions used for the index defines a baseline against which the actual distribution of responses can be compared. Using such a standard, we find that individual responses are not constrained by an underlying value dimension, in the sense that the observed patterns of responses increasingly do not differ from what one would expect by chance. Furthermore, as one would expect for a random variable, index scores are virtually unexplainable as a dependent variable, and they cannot be used to predict support for various political and social issues, said to flow from attitudes measured by the index.

Even though they contain one of the most forceful critiques of liberalism in contemporary political thought, the political writings of Stanley Fish have been neglected by political theorists. Fish's critique of liberal claims of moral and religious neutrality points to the conclusion that the liberal separation of church and state lacks a coherent justification. I offer a qualified defense of liberalism by arguing that while Fish's critique of liberal neutrality is sound, he fails to do justice to liberalism's substantive basis. Moreover, by simply negating liberalism, Fish's thinking remains within the liberal horizon in a way he fails to recognize.

Thinkers such as Derrida and Levinas locate the source of the totalitarian tyrannies of our century in totalizing thought, the view that claims the whole is perfectly explicable. Their response maintains that there is no determinate knower and thus no access to enduring intelligibles. This response, however, subverts any claims to political truth, leaving no principles as a basis for political judgment. Plato's Charmides provides a corrective of this difficulty. In this dialogue, Socrates discusses self-knowledge with Critias, who advocates a tyranny founded precisely on a claim of comprehensive knowledge and control. Socrates responds to this theory-based tyranny with a view of the elusiveness of self-knowledge that denies Critias' claim to know the human good with the precision necessary to establish his error-free society. But furthermore, this elusiveness is itself intelligible; possessing a discernible structure, it can substantiate specific political principles. Thus, Plato shows how we might resist such tyranny without subverting the very principles that allow us to judge it unjust.

Radical criticisms of liberalism's method of legal adjudication focus on its excessive formalism, its tendency to foster indeterminacy, and its naive maintenance of the separation of political from legal concerns. I examine these arguments as they appear in the work of Carl Schmitt, on the Right, and the Critical Legal Studies (CLS) movement, on the Left. Jürgen Habermas has recently attempted to refute the positions of these most scalding twentieth-century critics of liberal adjudication. I argue that by so extensively engaging these theorists, and in fact liberalism itself, on their own grounds, Habermas has abandoned some of the distinctive strengths of what he previously practiced as a critical social theory in his new reflexive or discourse theory of law.

A survey of the American public is used to model citizen political recruitment as a two-stage process. First, those who recruit others to become active in politics seek likely activists through “rational prospecting.” Second, they seek acquiescence to their requests. We model each part of the process, delineating the characteristics of individuals that make them attractive prospects and that make them likely to say “yes.” Recruiters who have information about, and leverage over, their targets are more likely to be successful. In seeking out people who would be likely not only to participate but also to participate effectively, rational prospectors select people with characteristics that are already overrepresented among participants. The net result of the recruitment process for political activity in general—and for financial contributions, in particular—is to exacerbate participatory stratification.

Although J. Judd Owen's account of my work is on target in many ways, on some points he mischaracterizes my argument by making it claim or do too much. His misunderstandings flow in part from a conflating of two assertions: (1) that our convictions cannot be grounded in any independent source of authority and (2) that our convictions are ungrounded. I certainly assert the first but never the second. Rather, it is my contention that while we have no independent grounds—grounds implicated in no particular vision of life or comprehensive doctrine—we have, because we live within them, the grounds that are constitutive of our everyday lives, their practices and routines. What are the consequences of this argument? My answer is none whatsoever. If you are persuaded that no independent grounds are available, but that the grounds of your everyday practice are sufficient, you will feel neither disabled by what you do not need nor enabled by recognizing the nonindependent foundations you have always rested on and will continue to rest on. In the end, the most salient characteristic of my argument, a characteristic Owen resists, is its minimalism.

This article responds to two critiques of the value change thesis in this issue. Davis and Davenport claim that the four-item index developed by Inglehart is invalid because respondents' first and second choices are randomly related and that it fails to predict respondents' positions on theoretically relevant social issues. We maintain that they make unwarranted assumptions about how responses to ipsative items should be related and demonstrate that the value indicators are powerful predictors. Clarke et al. argue that the trend toward postmaterialism does not result from long-term generational change but simply reflects declining inflation and rising unemployment over the past quarter-century. We show that period effects, particularly inflation, influence observed values. But after controlling for inflation, there is still a substantial shift toward postmaterialism. Moreover, rising unemployment partly offsets the effect of falling inflation.

Efforts to replicate our study of the effects of politics on trade flows between the major powers have revealed that the computer program written to calculate the estimates produced errors in both the coefficients and the standard errors. Furthermore, these errors have some consequences for the results. In this brief corrigendum, we present corrected tables for our research note and a slightly modified interpretation of the results.

Our study examined evidence to assess three arguments about how politics may affect trade. The first contends that positive political relations in a dyad result in higher levels of trade. This argument leads to two hypotheses: States in conflict will have a lower level of trade than those not in conflict, and trade will increase with the degree of common interests between a pair of states. The second argument concludes that democratic dyads will have a higher level of trade than other dyads. The third argument focuses on the security concerns of states and leads to the hypotheses that alliances will increase trade in a bipolar system but will have no effect in a multipolar system. We refer readers to the original article for a fuller statement of the logic of these arguments, their respective hypotheses, and a complete statement of our research design and operationalization of the variables (Morrow, Siverson, and Tabares 1998).

In this article I employ the resources of political theory to examine and provide an answer to the question of how liberal democracies should respond to the claims of refugees to enter and reside in their territory. I begin by considering questions of value: I argue that a convincing ethical ideal must strive to balance the competing claims of citizens and refugees. Moving to issues of agency, I show that any standard must also accommodate itself to the difficulties of predicting the consequences of entrance, the responsibilities states currently accept, and the way that politics constrains the efforts of states to assist refugees. I conclude by proposing the principle of humanitarianism as a way of reconciling the demands of value with those of agency. I argue that adherence to this principle would improve the refugee policies of liberal democratic states.

Contrary to Cameron, Epstein, and O'Halloran's article (1996), (1) racial redistricting remains vital to the election of African Americans to the U.S. House, and (2) the tradeoff between black descriptive and substantive representation is actually greater in the South than in the North. Substantive and methodological errors explain why they arrived at their findings. Specifically, their analysis ignores the effect of the presence of Latinos on the election of African Americans. Ironically, due to the very policy assessed in the article, Cameron, Epstein, and O'Halloran's data set does not allow them to examine the link between the racial composition of a district and the ideology of its representative. In addition, they do not consider that racial redistricting not only changes the aggregation of seats into votes but also indirectly boosts the Republican share of votes and seats.

In his critique of our earlier paper on majority-minority voting districts, David Lublin suggests that our conclusions with respect to the election of minorities to office are flawed, and that we incorrectly estimate optimal districting strategies for the substantive representation of minority interests in Congress. Subjecting these claims to direct empirical examination, we find that our previous results are unaltered by the inclusion of Latino voters in our estimates of equal opportunity, and that incumbency advantage cannot fully explain the recent victories of minority candidates in the South. Neither do the critiques of our results regarding substantive representation stand up to systematic analysis: Evidence at both the state level and over time confirm our conclusion that districts on the order of 45% black voting age population maximize the expected number of votes for minority-supported legislation.