Analysts of American politics since Tocqueville have seen the nation as a paradigmatic “liberal democratic” society, shaped most by the comparatively free and equal conditions and the Enlightenment ideals said to have prevailed at its founding. These accounts must be severely revised to recognize the inegalitarian ideologies and institutions of ascriptive hierarchy that defined the political status of racial and ethnic minorities and women through most of U.S. history. A study of the period 1870–1920 illustrates that American political culture is better understood as the often conflictual and contradictory product of multiple political traditions, than as the expression of hegemonic liberal or democratic political traditions.

Under anarchy, uncoordinated competitive theft by “roving bandits” destroys the incentive to invest and produce, leaving little for either the population or the bandits. Both can be better off if a bandit sets himself up as a dictator—a “stationary bandit” who monopolizes and rationalizes theft in the form of taxes. A secure autocrat has an encompassing interest in his domain that leads him to provide a peaceful order and other public goods that increase productivity. Whenever an autocrat expects a brief tenure, it pays him to confiscate those assets whose tax yield over his tenure is less than their total value. This incentive plus the inherent uncertainty of succession in dictatorships imply that autocracies will rarely have good economic performance for more than a generation. The conditions necessary for a lasting democracy are the same necessary for the security of property and contract rights that generates economic growth.

The legislative factions of the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan are so autonomous that the LDP is typically viewed as a coalition of factions, rather than a unitary party. We focus on the electoral role of these factions, finding that the five main factions differed substantially in electoral success in the 1960–79 period, but have been so closely tied together in the 1980s that differences in their electoral fates are statistically indiscernible. In particular, we find that the so-called mainstream factions did consistently better than their nonmainstream rivals before 1980 but not after. We explain the lessening of interfactional differences in terms of a decentralization of fund-raising within factions, which tended to equalize factional war chests (on a per capita basis).

The mass public in the Soviet Union is not enthusiastic about free-market reform. How, then, do citizens in a former communist regime develop an appreciation for free-market reforms? Different explanations for attitudes toward free market reforms are tested using data from a survey of the European USSR conducted in May 1990. First, negative assessments of recent economic performance is a catalyst for popular support for the market economy. Although very underdeveloped, there is a nascent free-market culture in the Soviet Union that makes a modest contribution to support for free-market reforms. The free-market culture that is developing in the former Soviet Union resembles that of social democracy, rather than laissez-faire capitalism. Democratic values and support for free markets are mutually reinforcing, suggesting that support for democracy makes a very important contribution to support for free-market reform.

Realism has been the dominant paradigm in the study of international conflict. Within this paradigm, two leading alternative approaches have been deterrence theory and structural realism. We test the relative explanatory power of these two theoretical approaches on the escalation of deterrence encounters among great powers from 1816 to 1984. We derive a set of hypotheses from each model, operationalize them for systematic empirical analysis, and test the hypotheses on 97 cases of great-power deterrence encounters by means of probit analysis. The results are that the hypotheses derived from deterrence theory receive considerable support, whereas none of the hypotheses derived from structural realism are supported.

Democratic states are in general about as conflict- and war-prone as nondemocracies, but democracies have rarely clashed with one another in violent conflict. We first show that democracy, as well as other factors, accounts for the relative lack of conflict. Then we examine two explanatory models. The normative model suggests that democracies do not fight each other because norms of compromise and cooperation prevent their conflicts of interest from escalating into violent clashes. The structural model asserts that complex political mobilization processes impose institutional constraints on the leaders of two democracies confronting each other to make violent conflict unfeasible. Using different data sets of international conflict and a multiplicity of indicators, we find that (1) democracy, in and of itself, has a consistent and robust negative effect on the likelihood of conflict or escalation in a dyad; (2) both the normative and structural models are supported by the data; and (3) support for the normative model is more robust and consistent.

The assumption that individual preferences, or attitudes, are fixed and exogenously determined is central to many studies of political and economic institutions, such as markets and elections. We present a Bayesian model of adaptive preferences and empirical evidence consistent with that model to argue that preferences are not always exogenous and fixed. The changing relationships between partisanship and preferences on civil rights issues between 1956 and 1964 and on the Vietnam War issue between 1968 and 1972 coincide with significant changes in the major parties' positions on these issues, suggesting that preferences are endogenous to the electoral process. We conclude with a discussion of the positive and normative implications of endogenous preferences.

Scholars studying congressional committees have noted the potential for members to seek membership on particular committees, leading to bias. Underpinning this line of scholarship is what might be termed a theory of comparative committee statics, characterized by a cross-sectional empirical approach. We present a new approach that focuses on the dynamics of jurisdictional control. By following a series of issues through the committee hearing process, we show that there is indeed significant issue bias in particular committee venues. However, we also find that new committees often claim jurisdiction over issues as they are redefined in the political process. The degree of jurisdictional monopoly enjoyed by different committees has been overlooked in the literature on this topic in spite of its importance in determining the nature of representation of interests in Congress.

By incorporating emotionality, we propose to enrich information-processing models of citizens' behavior during election campaigns. We demonstrate that two distinct dynamic emotional responses play influential roles during election campaigns: anxiety and enthusiasm. Anxiety, responding to threat and novelty, stimulates attention toward the campaign and political learning and discourages reliance on habitual cues for voting. Enthusiasm powerfully influences candidate preferences and stimulates interest and involvement in the campaign. The findings support a theoretical perspective that regards cognitive and emotional processes as mutually engaged and mutually supportive rather than as antagonistic. We suggest that the democratic process may not be undermined by emotionality as is generally presupposed. Instead, we believe that people use emotions as tools for efficient information processing and thus enhance their abilities to engage in meaningful political deliberation.

Mothers' pensions were the first explicit welfare benefits established outside of poor relief in the United States. Contrary to established wisdom in political science, their enabling statutes spread very quickly across most states in the 1910s, with smaller, nonindustrial states often in the vanguard. Previous research concerning the predictors of state-level policy innovations has focused on a small subset of possible explanatory variables, typically economic or electoral conditions. We operationalize and test hypotheses about the influence of economic conditions, culture and ideology, electoral politics, governmental institutions and prior public policies, and the role of business, labor, and women's voluntary groups on the priority of state enactments. Our findings indicate that widespread federations of women's voluntary groups exerted a powerful influence on mothers' pension enactments even before most American women had the right to vote. We demonstrate the value to empirical political science of theories and variables referring to gender and women's politics.

The Tiebout model of competition in the local market for public goods is an important and controversial theory. The current debate revolves around the apparent disparity between macro empirical studies that show greater efficiency in the supply of public goods in polycentric regions compared to consolidated ones and micro evidence of widespread citizen-consumer ignorance, which has been used to argue that individual actions cannot plausibly lead to efficiency-enhancing competition between local governments. We argue that competitive markets can be driven by a subset of informed consumers who shop around between alternate suppliers and produce pressure for competitive outcomes from which all consumers benefit. Using data from a survey of over five hundred households, we analyze the role of these marginal citizen-consumers and incorporate the costs of information gathering and the strategic interests of local governments into the competitive market model.

Each year thousands of cases and litigants come to the Supreme Court. How can the Court find the most important cases to decide? The law of obscenity illustrates particularly well the Court's problem as it constructs its plenary agenda. Using data drawn from petitions for certiorari and jurisdictional statements filed with the Supreme Court from 1955 to 1987, we formulate and test a model of case selection in which professional obscenity lawyers and organized interests figure as critical elements in the process of agenda building. We also encounter strong evidence of the Court's differential treatment of several different litigants. Moreover, the calculus of selection changed markedly over time, as the Court itself changed; the Burger Court and Warren Court weighed several of the criteria quite differently.

Modern realism claims that the fear that others will enjoy relatively greater benefits frequently impedes international cooperation. Recent articles in this Review by Duncan Snidal and Robert Powell modeled conditions under which the impact of relative gains varied. Joseph Grieco criticizes Snidal's model as based on assumptions that allow him to avoid, rather than confront, the realist arguments. He also argues that Powell's model, while constructive, ignores important additional sources of sensitivity to relative gains. In response, Powell discusses the value of alternative assumptions about preferences and constraints in international relations. Snidal defends his analysis and presents an additional proof to support the independence of his central result—the diminishing impact of relative gains with increasing numbers of states—from assumptions of concern to Grieco. Both responders emphasize their work as contributing to a contextually rich theory of international politics that builds on elements of both realism and neo-liberalism.

In their 1990 Review article, Ian Budge and Richard Hofferbert analyzed the relationship between party platform emphases, control of the White House, and national government spending priorities, reporting strong evidence of a “party mandate” connection between them. Gary King and Michael Laver successfully replicate the original analysis, critique the interpretation of the causal effects, and present a reanalysis showing that platforms have small or nonexistent effects on spending. In response, Budge, Hofferbert, and Michael McDonald agree that their language was somewhat inconsistent on both interactions and causality but defend their conceptualization of “mandates” as involving only an association, not necessarily a causal connection, between party commitments and government policy. Hence, while the causes of government policy are of interest, noncausal associations are sufficient as evidence of party mandates in American politics.