In 1997, just two years after their impressive show of unity on the Contract With America, the House Republicans were apparently turning into the House of Atreus. Squabbles high and low divided their leadership, demoralized their rank and file, and delighted their Democratic opponents. Many political commentators blamed this turmoil on the personal shortcomings of Speaker Gingrich and other top lawmakers. Such explanations did make some sense. At least part of the trouble stemmed from the Speaker's ethics problems and the leadership's poor political judgments about disaster-relief legislation.

But the House GOP's summer of discontent was neither a purely personal affair nor a total departure from the party's history: House Republicans suffered from serious factionalism during their long journey in the political wilderness (Connelly and Pitney 1994, ch. 2). While lacking in liberals and ethnic minorities, they still found many things to fight about, such as political strategy, institutional loyalty, and generational outlook. As Rohde (1991, 152–53) demonstrated in detail, House Republicans consistently had lower party-unity scores than Democrats throughout the Reagan years.

After they won their majority, swift House Republican action on the Contract left the widespread impression that they had turned into a lean, mean, quasi-military machine. That impression was misleading. According to an excellent analysis by James G. Gimpel (1996, 18), the Contract was a consensus document: party leaders included only items that already commanded broad agreement within the party (e.g., a balanced-budget amendment) and they excluded items that would stir dissent (e.g., anti-abortion legislation).

Mexico's 1997 midterm elections promise to democratize Mexico's autocratic and centralized presidentialist regime and thereby change Mexican politics profoundly. The electoral blow dealt the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI) by voters on July 6 brings an elected mayor to the world's largest city, places more non-PRI governors into Mexican state houses assuring that demands for decentralization will intensify, and takes from President Ernesto Zedillo the congressional basis for the six-year dictatorship that the Mexican presidency has been since the 1930s. Surely the struggle for democracy in Mexico is not over, but a critical battle has been won by democrats of all ideological persuasions. Zedillo himself claimed, in an address to the nation made shortly after the preliminary electoral figures appeared on election night, to be pleased by the progress made by his nation, saying that the day had been a “great democratic fiesta” (Zedillo 1997, 7).

Unlike most elections, the critical issues facing Mexican voters in 1997 had little to do with public policy. Although Mexico is a dozen years into a neoliberal economic restructuring program that has had great consequences for the distribution of income, for the number of Mexicans living in poverty, and for the penetration of foreign capital, goods, and services into the Mexican economy (see Otero 1996), neoliberalism was only peripherally an issue in this election. Both major parties of opposition campaigned on the issue of tax relief, specifically promising to lower Mexico's value added tax from 15% to 10% (Mayolo and Luna 1997, A1; Chacón Albarrán 1997).

One of the essential atarting points of any branch of science is a consistent, broadly understood terminology. Generally accepted definitions of key terms within a discipline are important in order to judge claims by scholars about a given topic. Fortunately, among those who work on the topic of nationalism, there is a growing convergence of definitions of “nation” and “nationalism.” Unfortunately, both terms are often still misused, used loosely, or used inconsistently, especially among those in political science who discuss these terms in passing. Authors of introductory textbooks, who are careful in their usage of other terms, often use these two words in varying—and even contradictory—ways in different parts of the same book. Because of their importance for the discipline, however, political scientists should be very mindful of their use of the terms “nation” and “nationalism.”

In this article, definitions for “nation” and “nationalism” are proposed, with each definition followed by sections on common ways the terms are misemployed in political science. I provide examples of both misuses and “loose uses.” While the line between misuse and loose use is somewhat fuzzy (a point reinforced below in the discussion of nations vs. ethnic groups), I consider a misuse to be one in which the term is used in a way that is completely outside how the term is used by nationalism scholars. A loose use is one in which the author has captured only part of the concept or has stretched the meaning of the term to an extreme degree.