Using a survey of mass publics, we investigate the political legitimacy of the Court of Justice of the European Communities. To what degree does the Court have the visibility and diffuse support necessary for legitimacy? What accounts for variability in support for the Court? Are theories developed largely in the American context generalizable in Western Europe to a transnational legal institution? Do the sources of the Court's legitimacy vary across nations, and how? Our analysis indicates that relatively obscure institutions such as the Court of Justice are unlikely to build support through satisfying their constituencies' demands. Without information about the Court of Justice, ordinary citizens form their views based on its connection with the European Union and its association with broad political and legal values. As the Court moves into the limelight of European law and politics, the decisions the judges make may increasingly shape citizens' perceptions of its legitimacy.

In the now considerable literature reevaluating the reception of Locke's Two Treatises, no mention has been made of perhaps his first systematic critic, the commissioned Tory political pamphleteer, Mary Astell. Contemporaneous with Charles Leslie, who is usually credited with the honor, Astell had diagnosed Locke's political argument by 1705 and perhaps as early as 1700. Why has her contribution remained unacknowledged for so long? It is argued here that for too long commentators have been looking for the wrong person in the wrong place. Astell correctly saw that Locke's political philosophy was inextricable from his psychological and theological systems, addressing all three in works that were political, theological and homiletic. But why Locke, and why in 1700–1705? Did Astell already know the authorship of the Two Treatises, only officially established in 1704 with the publication of the codicil to Locke's will?

I shall explore the process by which firms develop their political preferences, using the case of national health reform. Although rising health costs have heavily burdened many companies, I argue that economic interests alone are unable to account for the variation in firm response to the national reform effort. Rather, institutional factors, shown elsewhere to shape government decision making, also influence corporate preferences. These are (1) the institutionalization of private policy expertise within the firm, (2) firm participation in policy groups, and (3) policy legacies. These findings challenge conventional views of business political mobilization that suggest largely autonomous agents acting on the basis of easily recognized self-interests. Preference formation and corporate mobilization transpire in collective settings as a new stratum of corporate policy managers search for solutions to social problems. The primacy of economic concerns is very real. But institutional analysis explains how these economic concerns are interpreted and acted upon.

Congressional choices about administrative procedures affect an agency's political responsiveness and the technical accuracy of its decisions. Legislators would like to design procedures so that agencies make technically sound decisions and balance the needs of competing interests in the way intended. In practice, agency procedures designed to promote technical competence often allow for political drift, and those that promote political control provide little new technical information about the consequences of policy decisions. The trade-off between technical competence and political control is captured in a model of a legislative coalition's decision about agency procedures. The choice variables are the agency's expected preferences and independence. Depending on exogenous levels of technical and political uncertainty, optimal agency procedures can maximize technical competence, maximize political control, or achieve a combination of the two.

We examine some issues in the estimation of time-series cross-section models, calling into question the conclusions of many published studies, particularly in the field of comparative political economy. We show that the generalized least squares approach of Parks produces standard errors that lead to extreme overconfidence, often underestimating variability by 50% or more. We also provide an alternative estimator of the standard errors that is correct when the error structures show complications found in this type of model. Monte Carlo analysis shows that these “panel-corrected standard errors” perform well. The utility of our approach is demonstrated via a reanalysis of one “social democratic corporatist” model.

There are many standard rules of aggregating individual preferences; majority rule is but one example. These rules determine what we typically consider to be a fair or a just solution to the problem of social choice. Yet we know very little, either about how these solutions relate to what a person, not a rule, would choose as a fair outcome or about what ethical or political beliefs would guide people in their choices. An empirical study was conducted to address these problems. As standard normative solutions fail to explain choices obtained in the study, we propose a new set of solutions, which generalize two classical principles of justice: Rawlsian and conservative. These generalized solutions fit the data remarkably well. More important, they uncover two normative dimensions within which choices turn out to be very consistent. These dimensions, we conjecture, indicate subjects' underlying attitudes. We use this theory to compare ethical-political attitudes in samples from Poland, Japan, and the United States.

Putnam's (1988) conjecture that negotiators can benefit from their domestic constraints implies that they may want to impose domestic constraints on themselves by granting veto power to an agent. I show that a negotiator's decision to employ an agent as veto player depends on the kinds of information available to the foreign country and the alignment of preferences between the negotiator and the agent. When the foreign country has incomplete information about the negotiator's preferences and the negotiator has preferences too divergent from those of the agent, the negotiator will not give veto power to the agent. However, this applies only to an agent with extreme preferences, and a surprisingly large number of agent types will receive veto power. The attractiveness of the agent veto to the negotiator is in part due to its informational effect. By granting veto power to an agent, the negotiator can transmit more information to the foreign country and capture informational gains that would be lost in the absence of the agent veto.

As demonstrated in landmark decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, American constitutional development has been fueled since the framing by disputes arising from changing labor relations in both private and public settings. This pattern is explained by the original provisions of the Constitution, the English background of its emergence, and the primacy of labor as a theoretical concept for studying political change. The Court's decisions protecting property express the status quo, the establishment against which transformations proceed. However, the property cases may also be reinterpreted along the lines indicated.

Cabinet coalitions in multiparty parliamentary democracies lead a precarious existence. Legislative majorities can typically dismiss the cabinet at will and can sometimes force early elections through parliamentary dissolution. Since coalition termination can have substantial political consequences, it is important to understand when and why such decisions are made. To this end, we develop a model of coalition bargaining in a legislature with dismissal and dissolution powers. We use the model to identify necessary and sufficient conditions for both coalition termination and parliamentary dissolution. In contrast to several widely held maxims, we find that coalition terminations need not be the automatic consequence of exogenous shocks. Nor do opportunistic parties with favorable electoral prospects always dissolve parliament to enhance their power. Instead, decisions to terminate coalitions or call new elections result from party leaders' rational responses to the constraints of legislative and electoral institutions and the anticipated feelings of the electorate.

There has been a resurgence of Darwinian naturalism in political theory, as manifested in the recent work of political scientists such as Roger Masters, Robert McShea, and James Q. Wilson. They belong to an intellectual tradition that includes not only Charles Darwin but also Aristotle and David Hume. Although most political scientists believe Darwinian social theory has been refuted, their objections rest on three false dichotomies: facts versus values, nature versus freedom, and nature versus nurture. Rejecting these dichotomies would allow the social sciences to be linked to the natural sciences through Darwinian biology.

Even though voters can have complex preferences over multiple candidates or parties, all extant electoral systems provide political representation based solely or primarily on voters' first preferences. I present a new concept of proportional representation that takes account of voters' preferences over the full list of alternatives—fully proportional representation (FPR)—and schemes for its implementation. I outline a “pure” FPR scheme, but because this scheme would have several undesirable features when used by real voters, I also discuss modifications that account for these difficulties. Although there are a variety of interpretations of the role played by voting in democracy, several can be shown to suggest FPR as a normative ideal. Fully proportional representation provides us with new ways to conceptualize existing electoral systems, a new standard against which alternative systems can be evaluated, and several feasible alternatives for approximating this new ideal.

We compare vote choice in senate and gubernatorial elections from 1986 and 1990 with two retrospective voting hypotheses: the national referendum hypothesis and an economic retrospective hypothesis. Despite the similarities between the office of U.S. senator and governor (same constituency, high levels of campaign spending, highly visible candidates, etc.), we find that different types of retrospective evaluations are used with respect to vote choice. As members of the national legislative branch, senators' fortunes are linked to the success or failures of the president. In contrast, governors, as state executives, are held accountable for perceived state economic conditions, while senators escape unscathed from the same general economic evaluations. These findings shed some light on the nature of vote choice in a political system complicated by federalism and separation of powers.

Thomas Hobbes is usually held to have been a skeptic in matters of religion and morality. I accept the claim that there is a distinctive skeptical strain in Hobbes' thought but argue that his skepticism informs his moral vision, rather than depriving him of a conception of morality. As evidence for this reading, I situate Hobbes in a tradition of “skeptical moralism,” along with Montaigne and certain other Renaissance figures. As opposed to moral skeptics, skeptical moralists think of moral agents as divided selves, pulled in one direction by law and another by conscience. Skeptical moralists use skepticism to make people aware of this tension, and I argue that (especially in his remarks on religion) Hobbes was doing just that.

Theorists of widely different persuasions are making serious efforts to understand difference and to bring the concerns and ideals of others within the reach of intellectual and political visions. Yet this attention to difference continues to be examined almost entirely through precise, rigorous, and sophisticated theoretical language. This is only appropriate if we presume that this language, the language-of-theory, is able to represent—and serve as the master interpreter of—all ideas and ideals, all senses of self and politics. I believe that this presumption is deeply flawed. Theoretical language passes over and distorts the differences it would understand. Theory more attentive to difference needs to gain access to the meanings that circulate within different lives, especially as reflected in literary writing of those who, themselves, speak and write from sites of difference.

Drawing on Emile Durkheim's Division of Labor in Society, I offer a typology of international systems. Previous uses of Durkheim to describe international systems suffer a number of conceptual errors and therefore are at variance with the spirit and intention of Durkheim's work. A deeper reading of Durkheim usefully draws attention to the moral basis for society and thus the problems with defining international systems solely in terms of power distributions. Further, rereading Durkheim offers a much richer typology than the simple distinction between mechanical and organized societies, affording in turn fresh insights into change in the international system. The abnormal forms of the division of labor offer the best description of the contemporary international system.

We examine the determinants of change in state government indebtedness from 1961 through 1989 using a pooled time series cross-sectional analysis. The analysis reveals that debt is primarily a function of economic conditions reflecting both the need to borrow and the capacity of states to repay debt. However, political factors such as culture, partisan competition, and electoral cycles also affect state debt. We also find very weak evidence that tax and expenditure limitations, ironically, may increase state indebtedness, while constitutional debt limitations have no effect upon slowing the growth of state debt.

Previous judicial decision-making studies have used party labels as surrogates for ideological orientation. In this study of state-level reapportionment cases before the U.S. district courts, I investigate the partisan reference-group identification of judges as a nonlegal influence on decisions. The partisan identification of judges is juxtaposed with the political orientations of the legislatures passing reapportionment plans. The results suggest that partisan effects are included in the pattern of decisions in cases related to the state-level district plans. While judges tend to vote against plans submitted to them from legislatures where one political party has numerical control of the reapportionment process, they vote against plans presented from legislatures of their own party at a much lower rate than in cases where the party opposite their own controls the district drawing process. The logit model correctly predicts 89.3% of the cases and produces a 60.3% reduction of error.

In recent years Richard Rorty has sought to develop an alternative to the familiar rationalist and natural rights “vocabularies” of liberalism. Unlike most critics of classical liberalism, however, Rorty eschews attempts to argue against these vocabularies, and instead seeks to persuade his readers by redescribing the aspirations of a liberal society in a more “attractive” way. I assess Rorty's redescriptive practice through an analysis of his ideal liberal polity. I contend that although Rorty defends redescription as an alternative to “normal” philosophical and theoretical argument, his redescriptive efforts fail on their own terms: not only does it appear that there is no redescription in his descriptions, but he proves incapable of offering any insights into or exits from pressing problems in contemporary liberal societies. This, I submit, can be traced back to his unwillingness to investigate and redescribe power and power relations.

We know very little about how civil wars end. Harrison Wagner has argued that negotiated settlements of civil wars are likely to break down because segments of power-sharing governments retain the capacity for resorting to civil war while victory destroys the losers' organization, making it very difficult to resume the war. An analysis of a data set of 91 post-1945 civil wars generally supports this hypothesis but only in wars over identity issues. Moreover, while military victories may be less likely to break down than negotiated settlements of identity civil wars, they are also more likely to be followed by acts of genocide. Outsiders concerned with minimizing violence thus face a dilemma.

Over two centuries ago, Adam Smith wrote of two passions that motivate those seeking public distinction: avarice and ambition. By investing these categories with appropriately concrete meaning, we develop a model of House members' career decisions. Like other individuals contemplating retirement options, politicians act with an eye to their financial interests, but not all financial interests are alike. The financial factor that matters most involves perennial considerations of post-retirement pension benefits, not fleeting opportunities to exploit ethically questionable sources of outside income. Second, we embed in the model a theory of intra-institutional ambition. Members impute value both to leadership positions they expect to retain and positions they expect to obtain. Majority members well-positioned to exert future legislative leverage are less likely to retire. Finally, several sources of electoral insecurity increase retirement probability. In the main, members may be reelection-seekers but will not pay any price to seek something they may not find.