In making decisions on the merits, the members of the U.S. Supreme Court are often willing to provide authoritative answers to questions that have not been asked and to disregard issues that the parties have presented. What accounts for these forms of issue fluidity? Analyzing data from the 1988 term of the Court, we find that issue transformation is quite common, occurring in roughly half of the cases on the plenary agenda. We propose models of both issue discovery and issue suppression that, while successful in explaining how the justices select issues, suggest that these two forms of fluidity result from largely different influences.

That individual preferences may he aggregated into a meaningful collective decision using the Condorcet criterion of majority choice is one of the central tenets of democracy. But that individual preferences may not yield majority winners is one of the classic findings of the social choice literature. Given this problem, social choice theorists have attempted to estimate the probability of Condorcet winners, given certain empirical or theoretical conditions. We shall estimate the probabilities of Condorcet winners and intransitive aggregate orders for various numbers of individuals with strong or weak preference orders across various numbers of alternatives. We find, using computer simulation, a stark contrast between these estimates assuming strong individual preferences and the estimates allowing for individuals' indifference between pairs of alternatives. In contrast to earlier work, which depends on the strong-preference assumption, we suggest that the problem is most acute for small committee decision making and least acute for mass elections with few alternatives.

We investigate the consequences of changes in marital status for political participation, treating marital status as marking points of continuity and transition in an individual's life history and marriage as a setting that fosters interaction and interdependence between marital partners. The analysis is based on panel and pseudopanel data from the 1965–82 socialization study of parents, offspring, and spouses. We find that marital transitions affect participation in four ways: (1) marital partners adjust their activity levels to become more like each other after marriage; (2) marital transitions of any type, especially marriage among younger people, tend to depress participation; (3) the overall effect of marriage, however, is powerfully mediated by the participation level of the partner; and (4) these mediation effects are greatest for political activities that involve collective efforts or draw upon the couple's joint resources.

Much recent analysis of British politics has assumed, explicitly or implicitly, that constituency campaigns have no impact upon an electorate that draws on an increasingly nationalized media for its information. We employ data on constituency campaign spending to challenge this interpretation. Local party campaigners are rational in their use of funds, spending most in seats where the competition is close and least where there is little hope of winning. What is more, campaign spending is clearly associated with voting, increasing support for the spending party and decreasing support for its rivals. Contrary to the accepted wisdom, local campaign spending can result in important shifts in the vote. However, local campaigning seems to be of much more value to challengers than to incumbents.

In their 1993 article in this Review, Paul Teske, Mark Schneider, Michael Mintrom, and Samuel Best sought to establish the microfoundations for a model of a competitive market for public services between local governments in polycentric regions. An important part of their model focused on subgroups of informed citizens, especially recent movers. Theoretical analysis was supplemented by an empirical study of the factors shaping accuracy of Long Island homeowners' information about relative expenditures and tax rates of their school districts. David Lowery, W. E. Lyons and Ruth Hoogland DeHoog criticize the relevance of this empirical evidence, suggesting the atypical nature of education as a service (especially in this site) and challenging the sufficiency of the demonstrated levels of information for generating a competitive market. Teske and his colleagues reply by pointing out the general importance of education throughout American local policymaking and by defending the relevance of their measures and conclusions for their market model.

In this Review in June 1993 Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram argued that the social construction of target populations is an important political and policy phenomenon. Robert Lieberman criticizes Schneider and Ingram's “circular” conceptualization of public policy and social construction. He proposes a “historical-institutional” framework for understanding the role of group identities in political change. Lieberman analyzes the dual experience of African-Americans in the American welfare state as an example of political institutions and policy changes' affecting changing group constructions. Ingram and Schneider respond that their purpose is to understand how social constructions shape policy designs, which in turn affect citizen perceptions and participation, and argue that Lieberman's ideas of institutions and history yield no analytic improvement. They provide their own analysis of the case of welfare to illustrate the advantages for future research of their conception of policy targets.

In this Review in 1993 Shelley Burtt critiqued contemporary republican theorists who urge a reinvigorated citizenry steeped in the ideal of civic virtue. Christopher Duncan finds the essence of Burtt's argument to be that such a revival is not feasible given the level of self-sacrifice required from citizens. He suggests, however, that contemporary republican theorists, like their ancient predecessor Aristotle, are not calling for altruism or the forsaking of self-interest. Rather, virtuous political participation rightly understood is, in fact, among the highest forms of self-interested behavior. Burtt replies that her earlier remarks discussed a part of the republican revival that had little to do with an Aristotelian politics of virtue, which indeed offers an attractive account of political life as a crucial element in individual self-fulfillment. But she notes also that liberalism rightly reminds us of the dangers of public mobilization and concentrated power; moreover, the political and practical obstacles to private reeducation of the citizenry remain.

Rogers Smith in “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America” in the September 1993 issue of this Review argues that ascriptive inequalities (eg. racism, sexism, nativism) are neither mere deviations from liberalism nor only symptoms of liberalism. Rather, multiple ideologies coexist in uneasy tension. Jacqueline Stevens criticizes Smith for failing to attend to the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and others—whose descriptions of American ideological history, she says, provide the same insight that Smith claims as his own. She goes on to discuss how defining a “mainstream” of scholarship shapes inferences as to what counts as knowledge and further suggests that liberalism and exclusion betray an underlying consistency. In his reply, Smith recognizes the contributions of Du Bois and others, but argues that although they do foreshadow his work, they do not offer the same critique or do the same job. And he asserts that the linkages between liberalism and ascriptive inequality are political, economic, social and psychological—not logical—ones.

In this Controversy, Mary Nichols and Robert Bartlett both enlist Aristotle in support of a liberal politics. Nichols finds that the Aristotle analyzed by Bartlett in his remarks in this Review in 1994 leads us away from politics into a life of perfect contemplation. The real Aristotle, she avers, by calling attention to the “limits of reason,” leaves room for the gods, personal freedom, and shared power. Bartlett responds that the life of contemplative reflection that Aristotle praises is the foundation of knowledge of virtue, without which freedom is license, democracy, dangerous.

In this Review in 1993, Skocpol, Howard, Lehmann, and Abend-Wein analyzed the rapid enactment of mothers'pension laws in the American states in the 1910s. They concluded that the widespread federations of women's voluntary groups exerted a powerful influence on these enactments even before most American women had the right to vote. Sparks and Walniuk challenge these conclusions, noting that all 10 equal-suffrage states are among the 29 that passed mothers' pensions before 1916, and presenting new measures of suffrage endorsement and suffrage pressures in regression analyses suggesting that women's votes—actual and potential—played a major role in leading some states to adopt mothers' pensions earlier than their normal patterns of legislative change would predict. In response, Skocpol defends the 1993 conclusions. She adduces that the aggregate pattern of enactment of mothers'pensions corresponds much more closely to endorsements by women's groups than to suffrage timing and puts forth reasons to doubt the validity and significance of Sparks and Walniuk's tests.