Norms provide a powerful mechanism for regulating conflict in groups, even when there are more than two people and no central authority. This paper investigates the emergence and stability of behavioral norms in the context of a game played by people of limited rationality. The dynamics of this new norms game are analyzed with a computer simulation based upon the evolutionary principle that strategies shown to be relatively effective will be used more in the future than less effective strategies. The results show the conditions under which norms can evolve and prove stable. One interesting possibility is the employment of metanorms, the willingness to punish someone who did not enforce a norm. Many historical examples of domestic and international norms are used to illustrate the wide variety of mechanisms that can support norms, including metanorms, dominance, internalization, deterrence, social proof, membership in groups, law, and reputation.

A new specification of the expected utility model of international conflict places expected utilities within a polar coordinate system; treats third-party choices in a manner more consistent with classical forms; estimates the expected utilities derived from not challenging existing policies; more fully represents the expected costs of conflict; and normalizes expected utilities regardless of system size. By assuming that the probability of escalation of a dispute increases monotonically with leaders' expectations of gain, we derive continuous functions for the probabilities of war, intervention, violence, and peace. The revised theory significantly improves our ability to discriminate between violent and nonviolent disputes and between violent disputes that escalated to warfare and those that did not in Europe between 1816 and 1970.

The model presented here assumes that nations initiate conflict to change the international status quo across one or more issues to an outcome they prefer. Their preferences for different issue outcomes are represented by a classical spatial utility function. International coalitions are formed both to enhance the chance of a successful challenge and to counter existing challenges. Disputes are modeled as periods of competition between two coalitions through the recruitment of additional members, erosion of support for the opposing coalition and escalation of the crisis. The two-nation model is analyzed in detail, and the existence of the core for the resulting game is proved. The two main conclusions of the two-nation model are that nations have a general incentive to exaggerate their issue positions in disputes and that the possibility of issue trades enhances the likelihood of compromise.

Building on a growing literature in international political science, I reexamine the traditional liberal claim that governments founded on a respect for individual liberty exercise “restraint” and “peaceful intentions” in their foreign policy. I look at three distinct theoretical traditions of liberalism, attributable to three theorists: Schumpeter, a democratic capitalist whose explanation of liberal pacifism we often invoke; Machiavelli, a classical republican whose glory is an imperialism we often practice; and Kant, a liberal republican whose theory of internationalism best accounts for what we are. Despite the contradictions of liberal pacifism and liberal imperialism, I find, with Kant and other democratic republicans, that liberalism does leave a coherent legacy on foreign affairs. Liberal states are different. They are indeed peaceful. They are also prone to make war. Liberal states have created a separate peace, as Kant argued they would, and have also discovered liberal reasons for aggression, as he feared they might. I conclude by arguing that the differences among liberal pacifism, liberal imperialism, and Kant's internationalism are not arbitrary. They are rooted in differing conceptions of the citizen and the state.

How can the beneficiaries of collective action be persuaded to contribute the resources (time, energy, money) necessary for the effort to succeed? Rational and selfish players will recognize they can free ride on the successful contributions of others. If the effort is not successful, they will lose a contribution—and be “suckered.” Other than relying on altruism, organizers of the group effort can modify incentives so that players are more prepared to contribute. Laboratory experiments offer one way of assessing the effectiveness of various such modifications; we conducted such tests to see how well contributing is promoted by (1) assuring contributors that they will not lose if the group effort fails (a “money-back guarantee”) and (2) enforcing contributions if it succeeds (“fair share”). We expect the latter to be more successful because it is “stable,” unlike the former, whose success can be undermined by expectations of that success. Three experimental replications demonstrate that the money-back guarantee is no more successful than a standard dilemma, but fair-share requirements increase contributing significantly over that base. Analysis of subjects' expectations about others' behavior offers some support to the hypothesized process undermining the money-back guarantee, but motivational factors must also be taken into account for a full explanation.

Most models of agenda control examine dyadic relations—for example, those between a committee and the floor of a legislature. Such relations, however, are always embedded in a larger context, namely, a political environment composed of voters and interest groups. In this paper we model agenda setters (a legislative committee) as decision makers with limited cognitive abilities who adjust over time to their larger political environment. The legislators' policy positions are endogenous, reflecting the relative strengths of voters wielding the district-specific resource of votes and of interest groups wielding the transferable resource of money. The resulting outcomes indicate that neoclassical models of voting and pluralist models of group influence have each told part of the story. When only votes matter, our boundedly rational agents grope toward equilibria close to those of neoclassical models; however, when mobile resources matter as well, the outcomes depart systematically from those of previous models. In particular, interest groups can make themselves worse off by capturing the committee. The results suggest that agenda control is less powerful than conventionally believed and point toward conditions shaping its effectiveness—conditions highlighting the distinctive contributions of pluralist and neoclassical thinking to a broader theory of political institutions.

Systematic study of changes in support for the U.S. Supreme Court across time has not been undertaken. Armed with a time series of observations from 1966 through 1984, I provide a description of the ebb and flow of public esteem for the Court. Then I outline and test several plausible propositions about the dynamics of support. Statistical analyses compel the conclusion that apart from a relatively constant core of support, increases in judicial activism, inflation, and solicitude for the rights of the accused decreased confidence in the Court; the events surrounding Watergate and increases in presidential popularity and the public salience of the Court brought about increased popular esteem for the high bench. Previous scholars, based on cross-sections of individuals, have emphasized the public's ignorance of and disinterest in the Supreme Court and judicial policy making. The responsiveness of public support for the Court in the aggregate to political events and shifts in the behavior of the justices stands in stark contrast to the conventional image of United States citizenry as singularly out of touch with and unmoved by the Supreme Court.

In this essay I develop a psychoanalytic defense of freedom of speech that is implicit in Freud's works, principally in his discussions of verbal slips and jokes. Freud argues that freedom of speech benefits people by providing a harmless outlet for aggression, suggesting that it is better to express aggression in words than in violent deeds or to repress it altogether. The psychoanalytic defense of free speech has affinities with various liberal defenses, but it is partial because apolitical; it emphasizes the emotional self-expression of speakers as opposed to the rational persuasion of listeners. The intellectual roots of the contemporary concern with “freedom of expression” (as opposed to “freedom of speech”) can be found in Freud: to focus on freedom of expression is to ignore the qualitative differences among forms of self-expression and to neglect the specifically political character of speech.

Federal agencies integrate federal, state, and local political demands at the operational level of service delivery. They balance conflicting political demands and task requirements as they attempt to develop feasible enforcement routines capable of attracting support and resources in multiple arenas without undermining central support for budgetary resources and statutory authority. Our regression analysis of annual enforcement data from 1976 through 1983 for all 50 states indicates that even the relatively isolated enforcement procedures of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration respond significantly to state-level political and task differences. Enforcement activities responded most consistently to daily enforcement contacts with interest groups. State differences in task conditions—particularly workplace accident and unemployment rates—also elicited instrumental responses, while differences in the party and ideology of elected officials elicited more symbolic actions. State agencies, with their smaller size and greater flexibility, were even more responsive than the federal agency to political and task differences. This integrative function of bureaucracy needs further attention in democratic theory.

This paper contrasts nonguaranteed city debt with taxation and general obligation debt. Drawing upon Bureau of the Census, Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR) and Municipal Year Book data, the analysis shows that both per capita tax revenue and outstanding general obligation debt are best explained by background factors such as total population, functional scope, and region, while fiscal strain plays a secondary role. Political structures, in the shape of legal constraints on taxation and debt and of form of government, do not account for patterns of these traditional revenue sources. By contrast, nonguaranteed debt is best explained by a model in which fiscal strain has a paramount role, but with both legal constraints on taxing and regional differentiation contributing significantly to the explanation, at least for data collected prior to 1978. The findings suggest a two-tiered model of the revenue side of fiscal decision making, with historical accommodations to powerful economic and demographic factors dominating taxing and general obligation debt, while nonguaranteed debt serves as a flexible instrument of shorter-term strategy.

There is conventional political wisdom that high voter turnout in a U.S. presidential election advantages the majority party. Because the Democratic party has been the dominant party in recent decades, this turnout advantage is often believed to accrue to Democratic presidential candidates. In an article in the June 1980 issue of the Review, James DeNardo challenged this conventional view. Indeed, he claimed that the majority party was likely to suffer with increased turnout when the behavior of core and peripheral voters is taken into account. Harvey J. Tucker and Arnold Vedlitz take issue with DeNardo's reasoning and evidence, and DeNardo embellishes and underscores his original case.