Political parties in the United States are usually regarded as too weak and decentralized, too much the prey of office-seeking politicians and special interests, to function effectively as programmatic., policy-effecting agents within the separation of powers. This has been taken as a serious flaw in the U.S. version of representative democracy, prompting cycles of proposed reform; criticisms of the existing set-up as a capitalistic sham; or alternative justifications of the system as pluralist rather than strictly party democracy. Our research challenges these assumptions by demonstrating the existence of strong links between postwar (1948–1985) election platforms and governmental outputs. Platforms' sentences, coded into one of 54 subject categories, are used as indicators of programmatic emphases and are related to corresponding federal expenditure shares. Resulting regression models demonstrate the full applicability of party mandate theory to the United States, and they operationalize its U.S. variants concretely.

I use basic tools of economic theory to construct a simple model of the behavior of dictatorships. Two extreme cases are considered: a “tin-pot” dictatorship, in which the dictator wishes only to minimize the costs of remaining in power in order to collect the fruits of office (palaces, Mercedes-Benzes, Swiss bank accounts), and a “totalitarian” dictatorship, whose leader maximizes power over the population. I show that the two differ in their responses to economic change. For example, a decline in economic performance will lead a tin-pot regime to increase its repression of the population, whereas it will lead a totalitarian government to reduce repression. The model also shows why military dictatorships (a subspecies of tin-pots) tend to be short-lived and often voluntarily hand power over to a civilian regime; explains numerous features of totalitarian regimes; and suggests what policies will enable democratic regimes to deal with dictatorships effectively.

The distribution of burdens in alliances may be explained in terms of public and private outputs. A joint product model is applied to the Triple Alliance and Triple Entente, using generalized least squares-auto regressive moving average (GLS-ARMA) techniques and time series data. Results indicate that countries regarded allies' military effort more as complements than as substitutes, though several examples of free-riding behavior are noted. The method used here may provide more accurate estimation of publicness problems than is found in the usual static tests.

A systematic analysis of the relationships between the main electoral system variables (electoral formula, district magnitude, and ballot structure) and electoral outcomes (the degrees of disproportionality and multipartism) in the 20 Western democracies from 1945 to 1985—representing 32 distinct electoral systems (an electoral system being defined as a set of elections held under basically the same rules)—shows that the effects of both formula and magnitude on proportionality are very strong, much stronger than Douglas W. Rae and subsequent researchers have suggested; that on the other hand, their effects on the number of parties participating in elections is surprisingly weak; and that ballot structure affects the degree of multipartism only in single-member district systems. These findings suggest that strategic behavior by politicians and voters plays a less important role in reducing multipartism than is usually assumed.

Can stability emerge solely from the competition and self-interest of sovereign powers existing in a state of anarchy, or does stability depend on restraints from the complex nexus of interdependencies characterizing the contemporary world economy and its associated institutions? We suppose some infinitely divisible resource, that all nation-states are endowed with and maximize and that enables them to overcome adversaries in the event of conflict. We offer a noncooperative, extensive-form model of international conflict without exogenous mechanisms to enforce agreements in order to learn under what conditions balance of power and collective security ensure the sovereignty of all states in anarchic systems. We conclude that there exists at least one world—albeit an abstract one—in which anarchy yields stability.

The formal study of coalitions is active in Europe, whereas the formal study of political institutions preoccupies American scholars. We seek to integrate aspects of these two bodies of research. For nearly thirty years models of coalition government have focused more on coalition than on government. Thus, these theories are essentially extensions of the theory of voting in legislatures. Unlike passing a bill or “dividing a dollar,” however, forming a government is not the end of politics but the beginning. During the formation process, rational actors must entertain expectations of subsequent government behavior. We provide a model of rational expectations with an emphasis on the credibility of the policy promises of prospective government partners as determined by the allocation of portfolios in the new government. Portfolio allocation becomes the mechanism by which prospective coalitions make credible promises and so inform the expectations of rational agents in the coalition formation process.

The disclosure that high officials within the Reagan administration had covertly diverted to the Nicaraguan Contras funds obtained from the secret sale of weapons to Iran provides us with a splendid opportunity to examine how the foundations of popular support shift when dramatic events occur. According to our theory of priming, the more attention media pay to a particular domain—the more the public is primed with it—the more citizens will incorporate what they know about that domain into their overall judgment of the president. Data from the 1986 National Election Study confirm that intervention in Central America loomed larger in the public's assessment of President Reagan's performance after the Iran-Contra disclosure than before. Priming was most pronounced for aspects of public opinion most directly implicated by the news coverage, more apparent in political notices' judgments than political experts', and stronger in the evaluations of Reagan's overall performance than in assessments of his character.

We return to the analysis of cooperation among interdependent rational individuals. We emphasize the limited impact of iteration (or repeated play) and explore the possibility of an alternative: intervention by rational agents, whom we call leaders. We show that leadership is more significant for initiating cooperation than for sustaining it. In addition, we identify two features of organizations that are critical in determining a leader's ability to initiate and sustain cooperation by structuring the incentives of his followers: the leader's capabilities (information and strategy sets) and reward structure (payoff function).

Political obligations vary in force. Though we have strong obligations to obey certain laws, our obligations to obey others appear to be considerably weaker. Because the weakness of the obligations to obey certain laws has been employed as an argument against the existence of general prima facie political obligations, an adequate theory of political obligation must account for this. By employing the obligation to keep promises as a model, I sort out the factors that contribute to the force of prima facie political obligations. Their varying force can be explained according to a general theory of political obligation founded on the principle of fairness.

Despite the diminished importance of partisanship, greater split-ticket voting, and a growth in Senate campaign spending, a party's presidential vote in the states remains positively related to its Senate vote in recent elections. We investigate to what extent presidential coattails are responsible for this association. State election returns for Senate and presidential contests are examined in presidential election years from 1972 to 1988. The analysis indicates that (1) presidential coattails exert a modest but significant influence on the Senate vote, probably affecting the election outcomes in twelve cases, and (2) partisanship remains a significant linkage between presidential and Senate elections.

A diverse set of congressional studies portrays members of standing committees as more or less homogeneous “high demanders” or “preference outliers” relative to members of the larger legislature. Using interest group ratings of members of the Ninety-sixth to Ninety-ninth Congresses, I conduct conventional statistical hypothesis tests to discern whether standing committees are more extreme and more homogeneous than the legislature as a whole. With only a few exceptions, the tests do not allow confident rejection of null hypotheses of identical committee and chamber preferences. The absence of convincing evidence of preference outliers is broadly consistent with emerging incomplete information game-theoretic legislative research and difficult to reconcile with many previous formal theories of legislative politics.

Different members of coalition governments typically have responsibility for different aspects, or dimensions, of policy. Such responsibilities are allocated as portfolios to government members. Given a distribution of such portfolios, final government policy is derived as the accumulation of individual members' decisions in regard to their respective responsibilities. We develop a portfolio allocation model of government formation and policy decision in multiparty legislatures. In particular, we focus on stable portfolio allocations, where a stable allocation is one that yields a policy that no legislative coalition is willing or able to overturn. Several notions of stability are considered and related to the usual concept of the core. Among the results are that although stable allocations are not guaranteed, such allocations can exist with minority governments; and that final policy outcomes associated with stable governments need not be “centrist.“

We develop and test a neoinstitutional model of Senate roll call voting on nominees to the Supreme Court. The statistical model assumes that Senators examine the characteristics of nominees and use their roll call votes to establish an electorally attractive position on the nominees. The model is tested with probit estimates on the 2,054 confirmation votes from Earl Warren to Anthony Kennedy. The model performs remarkably well in predicting the individual votes of Senators to confirm or reject nominees. Senators routinely vote to confirm nominees who are perceived as well qualified and ideologically proximate to Senators' constituents. When nominees are less well qualified and are relatively distant, however, Senators' votes depend to a large degree on the political environment, especially the status of the president.

The politics of Michel Foucault remain controversial, mainly because they remain ambiguous. His critics charge that the ambiguity is symptomatic of a theory that fosters moral abandon and political impotence. This predicament is frequently attributed to Nietzsche's influence. I outline the critics' charges and investigate to what extent Foucault's thought evidences Nietzschean roots. Specifically, I examine Nietzsche's glorification of struggle and seek to demonstrate that a valorization of struggle constitutes the core of Foucault's political thought.

We investigate a sequential voting model in which voters' forecasts of outcomes on future issues are determined endogenously. Voters are assumed to make decisions in an environment in which future outcomes are uncertain. The uncertainty arises from two possible sources. Voters may be uncertain of other voters' preferences. In addition, events that occur before future issues are decided may affect voters' preferences on future votes. Information available to voters at each point in time is characterized. An equilibrium to the voting problem, if one exists, is one for which the outcome on the issue currently being decided and voters' forecasts of outcomes on future issues are determined simultaneously. We show that an equilibrium exists under a particular voting institution and characterize voters' forecasts for this equilibrium.

The perennially problematic relationship between philosophy and politics, though recognized as an important theme in the Platonic corpus, is virtually ignored in the writings of his most famous student. This is not due to the absence of the problem but the deftness of Aristotle's treatment. Attentiveness to both the requirements of moral-political life and the nature of philosophy gives rise to the rhetorical design of the Nicomachean Ethics. In the final book of the Ethics Aristotle establishes the value of philosophy by placing his argument within a broader context that reveals to what extent moral and intellectual excellence can be regarded as similar and even complementary. Without actually denying the existence of a fundamental tension between the requirements of philosophy and civic virtue, Aristotle succeeds in winning an at-least-partial acceptance of philosophy on the part of those who are (or will be) most responsible for the welfare of the city.

The developing countries' suspension of payments on their external debt is as much a consequence of the political weakness of their governments and the excessive politicization of their economic policies as it is a result of unfavorable structural changes in the international economy. Differences in debtor governments' political performances are treated as an explicit variable rather than as residuals to an economic explanation in estimating the probability of developing countries' suspending their external debt service payments. Using a logit model, I analyze fifty-eight developing countries for the years 1970–1984. The results show that political capacity can be decisive in corrrectly predicting the probability of a government's suspending its external debt service payments. The model predicts 96% of the total outcomes correctly and 80% of the debt payment suspension cases correctly.

Though liberalism has been widely criticized for its attempt to frame a detached judgment of society based on an asocial conception of individuals, insufficient attention has been paid to the particular social and political relationships this search for an Archimedean point presupposes. Using collective choice theory, I show that liberalism has adopted two distinct kinds of Archimedean points reflecting different and unjustified presuppositions about the true institutional relation between politics and society. Liberalism's Archimedean search is not merely unsuccessful but biased in a way that is significant even for positions critical of liberalism. It is possible, I argue, to have a normative political theory that avoids an asocial conception of individuals without falling victim to liberalism's specific biases concerning institutional relations. The implications for both Rawlsian- or Nozickian-style liberalism are discussed, including the possibility of a political philosophy that avoids their “analytical extremism.“

Concrete theory is defined by a cluster of attributes—emphasis on governmental and other political elites, on strategic decision-making processes freed from narrow notions of economic rationality, and on a concern with the environment and institutions within which choice occurs. The approach has been observed recently in all research-oriented subfields within political science. Eight exemplars are discussed. Concrete theory demonstrates a novel combination of strong interest in empirical political processes, formalized through models that emphasize logical structure and depth explanation. Its effect is to bridge the gap between behavioral and institutional approaches.

Many U.S. cities are becoming significantly multiminority. How does the significant presence of one minority group affect the other minority group? This research explores the question of socioeconomic and political competition between blacks and Hispanics in U.S. urban centers. Based on data from the 49 U.S. cities of over 25,000 population with at least 10 percent black and 10 percent Hispanic in 1980, findings indicate that while there is little evidence of general black and Hispanic socioeconomic and political competition, Hispanics appear to prosper less well socioeconomically and politically in cities with black majorities or pluralities.