Ideology has been the subject of a surprising amount of attention during the last half of the twentieth century. Although it has been argued that the term has been “thoroughly muddied by diverse uses” (Converse 1964, 207), an empirical investigation of the pages of the Review reveals substantial convergence among political scientists over time on a core definition. This essay traces the use of the concept in the Review since its launch in 1906. It reveals changing fashions in the connotation of the term, but suggests an underlying agreement on the essential components—coherence, stability and contrast—and underlines the centrality of the concept of ideology in political science.

Although political scientists have long expressed skepticism about the prospects for experimental science, an analysis of the first hundred volumes of the American Political Science Review reveals that randomized experiments have grown in impact and prominence. We document how thinking about experimentation has evolved over the century, and demonstrate the growing influence of laboratory, survey, and field experiments. A number of experiments have transformed how political scientists think about causal relationships in specific substantive areas. There are limits to the kinds of questions that experiments can address, but experiments have made important contributions in an array of political science subfields.

James Russell and Quincy Wright suggested in the Review in 1933 that the danger of conflict could be diminished by looking within states to discern what contributes to the risk of war. Revolutions in game theory technology and political economy modeling are helping to advance those goals. The combination of non-cooperative game theory as an analytic tool and the assumptions of political economy models about leaders' domestic interests and incentives offer a different explanation of international relations from that suggested by realist theories and other state-centric viewpoints. Together with more macro-level theorizing we gain insights into what makes some polities more prone to international conflict than others. By adding the micro-level, game theoretic investigation of domestic factors to the analytic repertoire we have now supplemented the aspects of received wisdom that are consistent with the record of history with explanations for puzzling facts about conflict that no longer seem anomalous.

In this essay, I rely primarily on unpublished documents from the Rockefeller Foundation Archives as well as the annual reports of the Ford Foundation and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) to show that rather than being in a torpor, political theory in the 1950s was a large and eclectic field, marked by contest and rapid change. I focus on the Rockefeller Foundation's policy making for its program in Legal and Political Philosophy (LAPP), the largest grant program for political theory in the 1950s, both to see how the Foundation justified the creation of the program and how it defined its scope. I argue that when faced with the task of settling on a working definition of “political theory” for the purpose of awarding grants, the Foundation's officers and the academics who assisted them opted, after prolonged debate, for an eclectic definition of political theory. I read the emergence of this eclectic definition of political theory, however, not as evidence of pacific pluralism but as an attempt to contain some of the new challenges to the field by incorporating them into it, albeit in a subordinate position.

We review the relevance of the international relations articles published in the first 100 years of the Review for American foreign policy. We define a spectrum of “policy relevance” and give a brief overview of the Review's changing relationship to American foreign policy as the journal, the profession, and the foreign policy process evolved over the last century. We then look at the Review's role in key periods in American foreign policy, focusing in particular on the example of the democratic peace literature. We conclude that although the content of the journal has moved away from early aspirations to near-term and direct policy relevance, the journal has evolved toward basic research that influences American foreign policies by affecting what scholars teach students, publish in policy journals, write in newspaper op-eds, say on the media, advise political leaders, and do when they are themselves in public office.

Although in recent years there has emerged a renewed interest in teaching and learning issues in the APSA, relatively little attention has been paid to the structure of the undergraduate political science curriculum. In this article we conduct a broad survey of articles that appeared in the APSR from 1906 to 1990 and find that (1) in the past the association paid much attention to the undergraduate political science curriculum; (2) over time attention shifted from a conception of the major as promoting substantive knowledge to a conception that emphasized skills; and (3) current concerns regarding skills, sequencing, and capstone experiences were all discussed several decades before the appearance of the “Wahlke Report” in 1991. We offer an explanation for the ebb and flow of the attention curricular issues received historically in the APSA, and suggest what the future may hold for current efforts to reexamine the structure of the undergraduate political science curriculum.

In any scholarly field, some works are widely acknowledged as classics, whereas the rest—indeed, the great majority—are little noted nor long remembered. Indeed, according to the “Iron Law of Important Articles,” the number of significant articles increases only to the extent of the square root of the number of published articles (Holub, Tappeiner, and Eberharter 1991). It follows that as a research literature grows, important articles constitute an ever-decreasing proportion of the total output.

The year after the 1961 publication of Robert Dahl's Who Governs?, “Two Faces of Power” criticized the treatment of power in this about-to-become classic work. Offering a third way neither elitist nor pluralist, Bachrach and Baratz made no defense of Floyd Hunter's reputational approach and they largely by-passed the literature on social stratification. Instead of revisiting past controversy, they sought to identify a fundamental feature of the political process, offering the second face of power as a wide view of how the game of politics is played.

I began working on “Political Parties and Macroeconomic Policy” in 1974, delivered the paper at the August 1975 meetings of the World Econometric Society in Toronto and the APSA in San Francisco, and shortly thereafter submitted it to the Review, where it languished for more than a year before it was accepted (just barely, I sensed) after a change of editor. The article's title is somewhat misleading because the evidence pertained to the influence of government partisanship on macroeconomic outcomes.

Jack Walker was the author of three of the 100 most cited articles in the history of the Review. Nowhere is his creativity and imagination more on display than in his “Diffusion” article. Comparing the three articles allows some conclusions about why “Diffusion” had such a great impact and illustrates the thinking of a great scholar, mentor, and colleague.

Gerald Kramer, Steven Brams, Peter Ordeshook, Samuel Popkin, and I were MIT undergraduates interested in political science in the late 1950s. Kramer, after taking a job at Rochester under the new chairman, William Riker, spent 1966–1967 at the Cowles Foundation at Yale University studying econometrics under Marc Nerlove. He began investigating the question of whether macroeconomic fluctuations had any effect on voting behavior. After discovering, somewhat to his (and Nerlove's) surprise, that there did seem to be some effect, he began exploring the question in depth, developing a more formal theoretical framework and also using several different econometric approaches, which jointly led to this article.

In just 13 pages, Warren Miller and Donald Stokes's “Constituency Influence in Congress” established the agenda for the next half-century of research on congressional representation. Along with its sister paper, “Party Government and the Salience of Congress” (Stokes and Miller 1962), “Constituency Influence” famously documents the general impoverishment of voters' knowledge of Congress and its members. Of at least equal importance is its analysis of congressional behavior as a response to oft-ambiguous constituency views, incorporating rich interview data of the sort not seen since. It is no wonder that Miller and Stokes' paper is among the most heavily cited—and influential—of all papers that have graced the pages of the Review.

The request to interpret the meaning of the historical record of citations for our article on the “New Institutionalism” is in the tradition of asking successful entrepreneurs to explain their successes, and is probably equally misguided. We interpret the charge as an invitation not to describe the real mysteries of fashion in citations but rather to explore why this article might have been cited if citation counts reflected valid judgments of scholarly significance. The context for the article is a long history of intellectual struggle between partisans of two logics for taking, describing, or assessing human action. The first logic is one of consequences. It is a logic that sees human behavior as driven by anticipation of its consequences and evaluation of those consequences by some kind of utility function that reflects the desires of the actor. In discussions of political systems, scholars attracted to such a logic talk of the pursuit of interests and rational choice. They emphasize incentives and the complications of understanding rationality in an ecology of rational actors.

“Some Social Requisites of Democracy” is, by official count, the seventh most cited article the Review has published. If we include citations to it as it was reproduced in Political Man (published the following year), we would surely find it to be one of the most influential political science essays of the past half-century. I suggest five reasons why.

Much as we would like to believe that the high citation count for this article is due to the brilliance and clarity of our argument, it is more likely that the count is due to our being in the right place (that is, the right part of the discipline) at the right time. In the 1960s and 1970s, serious quantitative analysis was used primarily in the study of American politics. But since the 1980s it has spread to the study of both comparative politics and international relations. In comparative politics we see in the 20 most cited Review articles Hibbs's (1977) and Cameron's (1978) quantitative analyses of the political economy of advanced industrial societies; in international relations we see Maoz and Russett's (1993) analysis of the democratic peace; and these studies have been followed by myriad others. Our article contributed to the methodology for analyzing what has become the principal type of data used in the study of comparative politics; a related article (Beck, Katz, and Tucker 1998), which has also had a good citation history, dealt with analyzing this type of data with a binary dependent variable, data heavily used in conflict studies similar to that of Maoz and Russett's. Thus the citations to our methodological discussions reflect the huge amount of work now being done in the quantitative analysis of both comparative politics and international relations.

The article started as a long paper on distributional inequality in the advanced capitalist societies that I presented at the 1976 annual meeting of the APSA. Using OECD data on the post-tax distribution of income in 12 countries, I found that the extent of inequality varied inversely with the extent to which Social Democratic and other leftist parties had governed in recent years. Control of government by left-of-center parties was closely associated with the extent of and growth in the extractive capacity of the state, defined in terms of the ratio of all public revenues to GDP, and the extent of and growth in extractive capacity were closely associated with the degree of distributional equality. But there were perplexing anomalies. For example, the Netherlands, where the Left had seldom governed, experienced the largest increase in the ratio of revenues to GDP since 1960 and was the most egalitarian in terms of the post-tax distribution of income. Belgium and Ireland also experienced unusually large increases in the ratio of revenues to GDP despite infrequent control of government by left-of-center parties

I believe that the high rank of this article both indicates its importance for a transnational generation of scholars of comparative politics and international relations and reflects the enormous influence of Karl Deutsch's other writings from that time.

The initial motive for writing “A Theory of the Calculus of Voting” was not the argument that subsequently became the focus of academic discussion, the necessity for positing a D term (“citizen duty”) to render the act of voting rational. Instead, our purpose was to show that people reacted “rationally” (i.e., logically) to an election's competitiveness. Admittedly the data we brought to bear here were weak, but with the addition of D the question arose as to whether we made voting rational only by rendering the concept of rationality a tautology: rational people voted because, with D, we assumed they were rational. However, one response with which I am sure Riker would agree is to note an asymmetry in our thinking about social processes. Few people claim to eat for a reason other than satisfying their own (private) needs as opposed facilitating the (public) objective of diminishing world hunger, and positing a growling tummy as a reason for entering a restaurant is hardly taken as a instance of rationality turned tautology. Yet the argument that the benefits of voting are dominated by a private D term as opposed to some public PB calculation occasions precisely that accusation.

Next to having one's book prominently displayed on the racks of every airport bookstore in the country, receiving recognition for an article written more than half a century ago is a close second. Indeed, for some of us it is the very highest form of intellectual acknowledgment. The Shapley–Shubik power index, invented more than 50 years ago, is a familiar concept in the analytical lexicon of political science. In brief, it is a measure of the ex ante likelihood that an individual will be pivotal in transforming a nonwinning coalition into a winning one. This depends on the voting or decision rule, on the one hand, and on the number of votes or decision weight possessed by an individual, on the other. The “power” of an individual, so determined, may be aggregated to measure the power of a faction, party, proto-coalition, or voting chamber (the latter in a multicameral setting)

”Consensus and Ideology in American Politics” is one of a trio of Review articles in which Herbert McClosky (1958; McClosky, Hoffman, and O'Hara 1960) reported on the early results of his empirical inquiries into the ideological foundations of American mass and elite political attitudes and beliefs. This extremely ambitious research program engaged McClosky (who died March 13, 2006) for the next half-century, producing, among other outcomes, two major books (McClosky and Brill 1983; McClosky and Zaller 1984), numerous doctoral dissertations by his students at Berkeley, and a rich course of study in political psychology that constituted a substantial and lively subfield in his department that attracted a great many of its most promising graduate students.