One week before the mass demonstrations that led to the collapse of the Czechoslovak Communist regime in November, 1989, a Charter 77 activist, Jan Urban, proposed that the group contest the national elections to be held in June of 1991. Urban's friends laughed at his proposals for being hopelessly Utopian. But a week later, thousands of students filled Wenceslas Square, a general strike was called, and the regime collapsed. The leaders of the future Civic Forum, who had been carefully watching events in Hungary, Poland and the GDR, had little idea that their own country was ripe for revolution.

Charter 77 would not have fared much better had it consulted Western social scientists, because our models for understanding the emergence of new social movements and their spread and outcomes are woefully inadequate. While prediction in social science is always hazardous, our lack of preparation for the recent wave of mobilization in Eastern Europe is particularly glaring, given the vast body of research and theorizing that has developed since the 1960s both in Western Europe and the United States.

The “Autumn of the People” of 1989 was a dismal failure of the predictive power of political science. Any retrospective explanation of the fall of communism must not only account for the historical developments but must also identify those theoretical assumptions that prevented us from anticipating these developments. If we are so wise now, why were we not equally sage before?

As I learned recently, most terminal cancer patients die of pneumonia. Social science is not very good at sorting out underlying causes and precipitating conditions: witness the 50 years of controversies over the fall of Weimar. And the response to the question “why communism collapsed?” is not the same as to “why did it collapse in the autumn of 1989?” It is easier to explain why communism had to fall than why it did.

The theory of “totalitarianism” could not answer either question: it could not diagnose the cancer and hence the vulnerability to pneumonia.

This paper explores the relationship between economics and politics in the creation of democracy. The first section examines the shaping influence of the revenue imperative; the second, of end-game bargaining between retreating despots and insurgent democrats; and the third, of human capital. The paper is informal in argument and playful in spirit. It is designed to stimulate and provoke rather than to educate and inform.

I do, however, seek to maintain a consistent set-up for the analysis: On one side stands a sovereign—in an earlier period, most likely a monarch; in the present typically a political party. The sovereign maintains a monopoly over the formulation of public policy and possesses the power to extract resources from the economy. On the other side stand the citizens. They own the factors of production: land, labor, and capital. They care about public policy, but they cannot make it. However, the decisions they do make influence the level of economic resources that can effectively be mobilized by the sovereign.

Why not use swing as a measure of electoral change in the United States? ask David Butler and Stephen D. Van Beek in PS (1990). This article shows why one should look before one swings, for the conditions of meaningful use are so limiting that swing is unsuited for the great majority of countries, including many elections in the United States and Britain. Instead of swing, it is better to employ a more precise and more robust measure of the ups and downs of parties.

Definition

Swing is the average of the change in the share of the vote won by two parties contesting an election. If party A gains 5 percent of the vote between election x and election y, and party B loses 5 percent, then there is a swing of 5 percentage points from B to A. By definition, swing is a measure of movement between two, and only two parties. In an attempt to control for the effect of other parties, the two-party measure of swing treats the votes for parties A and B as equal to 100 percent of the total vote, whatever the share of the vote taken by one or more “third” parties.

Are the movements transforming Europe about to cross the Atlantic and pass the baton of reform from the old world to the new? If so, then the transfer may be in the form of constitutional amending rather than revolutionary upheaval.

After the two U.S. House elections of 1986 and 1988, with their 98% reelection rates for incumbent members, resentment has intensified against the skillfully crafted techniques whereby incumbents secure homesteads for themselves in Congress. Indeed a Gallup poll conducted in January 1990 found 70% of Americans supportive of restricting congressional tenure. And in Oklahoma, Colorado and California—the three states where a systematic constitutional application of term limits appeared on the ballot—rotation in the legislative branch won handily.

Yet the election results in 1990 (96% reelection) showed the same electoral dominance by incumbent House representatives that has prevailed since World War II. For the last few elections at least, public support for rotation in office has run high, while hardly a blip has appeared in the trend toward incumbents at the ballot box.

Both the campaign and early administration of George Bush trumpeted a theme of a more centrist, lower-volume, less confrontational approach to politics and governing. Aspects of both the campaign and the administration seemed to belie this pledge, from the Willie Horton ads to the fight over the Tower nomination and the invasion of Panama. Still, the prevailing tone and style of the Bush administration during its first year seemed far less strident than that of the Reagan era. As Edwards (1989, 3) noted, “Bush has worked diligently to create an atmosphere of reconciliation and goodwill” and has sought to avoid “politically-charged polemics.”

Yet in another respect, the Bush administration seems to have abandoned any semblance of a “kinder, gentler” politics in its dealings with Congress. Three seemingly minor aspects of Bush's recent dealings with Congress pertaining to legislative powers suggest, if anything, a singularly aggressive effort to extend the bounds of the presidency by what I will argue is a suspect invocation of prerogative powers. The actions described below have received virtually no press attention; yet they may presage a new era of presidential expansionism exceeding that which we have witnessed to date.

Because most of the discussion of the second volume of Robert Caro's (1990) biography of Lyndon Johnson has focused either on his charge that Johnson's victory over Coke Stevenson in the 1948 Texas Senate election was gained through fraud or on the accuracy of the extremely negative picture of Johnson as compared to the heroic portrait of Stevenson, other important issues have been overlooked. In his introduction, Caro writes that he has devoted so much attention to the 1948 campaign because it “was the new politics against the old. Johnson was the new politics: electronic politics, technological politics, media politics.” These new techniques included “scientific polling, techniques of organization and of media manipulation,” whose effectiveness was demonstrated “so convincingly that thereafter all politicians who could afford them adopted them” (xxxii–xxxiii).

Even though the image of Lyndon Johnson as a pioneer in the development of campaign technology is at odds with what has previously been written about him, most reviewers largely accepted Caro's assertion at face value.

The cost of running presidential primary campaigns has increased dramatically since the primary replaced the party convention as the preferred method of presidential candidate selection. Much of this well documented rise in campaign spending has been attributed to the increased use of televised political advertising. Today, political parties have been supplanted by the media as the most prominent link between the voter and the election process. It is not party identification or the “get out the vote” apparatus, but slick, high tech, 30-second spot advertisements that have helped to make or break presidential campaigns for party nominations in recent years.

Today, candidates are apt to spend two-thirds or more of their primary campaign budgets on paid political advertising, and the 1992 presidential primary season promises more of the same. In addition, the '92 primaries may offer an interesting twist in campaign strategy. In the past, media battles for the nomination have been waged over the broadcast airwaves. In the future, primary watchers would be well advised to pay close attention to the role played by cable television.