One contemporary method of reconciling the conflict in methodology between determinism and indeterminism is the notion of rational choice, which allows for both regularities in behavior and artistic creation. A detailed explanation of artistry within the rational choice context has not yet been developed, so this essay offers such an explanation in terms of the notion of heresthetics or the dynamic manipulation of the conditions of choice. The running example used throughout is the decision on the Constitutional Convention of 1787 on the method of selecting the president.

Recent research on House elections has focused on the decline in congressional competition since the mid-1960s. However, this body of research suffers from three major problems: 1) an imprecise specification of the nature of change in the degree of congressional competition, 2) its exclusive reliance on a limited time frame, which calls into question the generalizability and adequacy of its explanations, and 3) its overemphasis on incumbency-oriented explanations. Using a Multiple Interrupted Time Series (MITS) analysis of trends in aggregate electoral data from 1824 to 1980, we find that current low levels of congressional competition are not historically unique, but instead constitute a continuation of a long-term trend established in the mid-1890s. In addition, and in contrast to the general thrust described in the literature, there appears to be a post-1965 trend toward greater competition, although the absolute level of competition is lower after the mid-1960s. Finally, a disaggregation of electoral results by incumbency status suggests a growth in the incumbency advantage since the mid-1890s, but that lower post-1965 levels of congressional competition are the result of a winners' and not an incumbency, advantage. Such findings cast doubt on the adequacy of explanations that focus on post-1965, incumbency-oriented factors.

Several of the earliest advocates of proportional representation upheld the “principle of free association”: that electors should be free to choose the constituencies to which they belong. This article analyzes this principle in game-theoretic terms and investigates how far the free association “game” can be simulated through proportional representation. It is assumed that each voter's prime concern is that his most-preferred candidate should be elected. If preferences are single peaked, the outcome of an election based on free association can be predicted; the same outcome would result from a modified form of the single transferable vote.

This article examines the relationship between two variables: interpretations by members of Congress of the consequences of legislative proposals and the influence of those who advocate particular actions on the proposals. The article investigates how the legislative decisions of members depend on interpretations, how the arguments of advocates shape interpretations, and how the influence on interpretations translates into influence over patterns of congressional support expressed for a legislative proposal. The major thesis is that member interpretations and hence legislative influence are unstable, a result of basic features of human decision making in the congressional context. As a result, advocates are hypothesized to have considerable influence in maintaining and expanding the size of their congressional coalitions in some legislative situations, but not others. In particular, when faced with weakening amendments or motions, advocates are unable to prevent defections among their supporters. Evidence of the legislative influence of the National Education Association during the Ninety-fourth Congress is found to be consistent with these hypotheses.

Interest group theory traditionally assumed that policies advocated by group representatives in some sense grow out of the interests or values of the group's members. Mancur Olson and others compelled important revisions in this assumption, but still left the process of interest advocacy to membership groups. It is contended here that institutions, such as corporations or local governments, occupy a dominant position with respect to interest representation in Washington, and this finding requires substantial revisions in both theoretical and descriptive formulations of the governmental process.

The conceptual meaning of and the empirical evidence for the nationalization of the American electorate is explored. Two conceptually distinct dimensions of nationalization are identified: nationlization in terms of a convergence in the level of partisan support across geographical subunits of the electorate, and nationalization in terms of a uniformity of response by geographical units to political forces. Empirical estimates for both types of nationalization are derived for the American electorate for the period from 1842 to 1970. Unlike previous scholars, we find no trend toward increasing nationalization of the vote. Possible reasons for this lack of nationalization of the vote are suggested.

Duverger's famous dictum that “the center does not exist in politics” is the starting point of an inquiry into the possible meanings of the concept of a center, and of center parties, in European party systems. This article consists of six sections; the first five sections deal with the center as a pivot in voting, the center in traditional left-right distributions, the notion of a center in multidimensional party spaces, the center in terms of mechanics, applying rather different metaphors of scales-in-balance and of centripetal versus centrifugal forces, and the center analyzed in terms of social cleavages. Following this search for conceptual meaning, in which the writings of Duverger and Sartori receive particular attention, the record of European party systems is examined to see whether the presence or absence of center parties in party systems can contribute to a realistic classification of European party systems.

Under the guise of the “incumbency advantage,” American research of the past decade has devoted heavy emphasis to what may be termed the “personal vote” in congressional elections. Is this phenomenon purely American, or is it susceptible to comparative treatment? This article contrasts the personal vote in the 1980 U.S. House elections with that in the 1979 British general election. The analysis utilizes data from surveys conducted by the Center for Political Studies and British Gallup in combination with interviews of congressional administrative assistants (AAs) and British MPs and party agents whose constituencies fall in the sampling frames of the mass surveys. The analysis finds an incumbency advantage or personal vote in Britain which is much weaker than that in the United States but of somewhat greater importance than is commonly believed. As in the United States, constituency service appears to be an important component of the personal vote.

This article extends the recent empirical work on the perceptions and role of bureaucrats and politicians in policymaking. The question of the relationship between politicians and bureaucrats and the role of each in policymaking is especially important in the case of Japan, because the prevalent models of Japanese politics and policymaking are those of the “bureaucracy dominant” or of a closely interwoven “ruling triad” of bureaucracy, big business, and the governing Liberal Democratic Party.

Data are from a systematic survey of 251 higher civil servants and 101 members of the government and opposition parties in the House of Representatives, supplemented by data from other surveys and, wherever possible, compared to equivalent data from western democracies.

The results indicate that Japanese politicians and bureaucrats resemble Western European elites both in social background and in the fact that although the roles of politician and bureaucrat are converging, there are still differences in their contributions to the policymaking process. However, politicians influence policymaking more than most models of Japanese politics have posited, and even government and opposition politicians share some consensus about the most important policy issues facing Japan. A factor analysis demonstrated that higher civil servants' orientations toward their roles vary significantly with their positions in the administrative hierarchy.

The 27-year incumbency of the LDP as ruling party has been particularly important in determining the Japanese variant of the relationship between politicians and bureaucrats. We suggest that the Japanese case shows that the bureaucracy's increasing role in policymaking is universal; however, in late-modernizing political systems like Japan's, where the bureaucracy has always been a dominant actor, the growing power of politicians in postwar politics has been the most significant actor in bringing about more convergence in the two elites. Our data on this trend argue for a more complicated and pluralistic view of Japanese policymaking than that provided by either the bureaucracy-dominant or the ruling-triad model.

Standard prisoners' dilemma games offer players the binary choice between cooperating and defecting, but in a related game there is the third possibility of leaving the game altogether. We conceptualize exiting as taking the individual beyond the reach of externalities generated in the original group, and on that basis—together with the assumption of self-interested (dollar-maximizing) behavior on the part of all players—we derive the prediction that the exit option will drain the community or group more of cooperators than of defectors.

But experimental data do not support this prediction; cooperators do not leave more frequently than defectors and, in fact, there is evidence that defectors are more prone to leave than cooperators. We consider and reject the possibility that this failure of prediction results from the (admitted) greater optimism of cooperators about the incidence of cooperation “here,” and present data supporting the hypothesis that cooperators often stay when their personal interest is with exiting because of the same ethical or group-regarding impulse that (presumably) led them to cooperate in the first place. Cooperation can be produced for a group or community either by inducing people to cooperate or by inducing those who are going to cooperate to stay in the game, and ethical considerations seem to underlie the decision to stay as well as the decision to cooperate while staying.

We suggest a method for estimating a political representative's personal ideology and its effect on his or her voting decisions. The current practice of using the ratings of a pressure group such as Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) as a proxy for personal ideology is shown to have a number of theoretical and interpretive flaws. Our technique uses the residuals from two regression equations to provide answers to two questions: Is there a systematic ideological component to the voting behavior of political representatives after taking account of other political determinants, and if a systematic ideological component exists, is it possible to determine its role in voting on particular issues? The technique developed and the currently accepted practice are compared using votes on labor issues as an empirical example.

This article explores both the influence that Montesquieu's typology of regimes exerted on Hegel's thought and Hegel's ultimate rejection of Montesquieu's monarchical order, especially its cult of honor, as a plausible candidate for containing and expressing the citizen's “claims for private judgment, private willing, and private caprice.” Can Hegel provide a substitute model of a polity, neither republican nor despotic, which corrects the particularism of Montesquieu's monarchical society? Marx did not think so. His criticism of Hegel exactly parallels Hegel's criticism of Montesquieu. Hegel's dilemma may be expressed in more contemporary terms as the difficulty in reconciling the goals of “neutrality” and “communicative competence.” The latter reflects the concerns of Montesquieu's moral geography, whereas the former reflects the rather different preoccupations of the social contract tradition.

Drawing upon a comprehensive list of political writings by Americans published between 1760 and 1805, the study uses a citation count drawn from these 916 items as a surrogate measure of the relative influence of European writers upon American political thought during the era. Contrary to the general tendencies in the recent literature, the results here indicate that there was no one European writer, or one tradition of writers, that dominated American political thought. There is evidence for moving beyond the Whig-Enlightenment dichotomy as the basis for textual analysis, and for expanding the set of individual European authors considered to have had an important effect on American thinking. Montesquieu, Blackstone, and Hume are most in need of upgrading in this regard. The patterns of influence apparently varied over the time period from 1760 to 1805, and future research on the relative influence of European thinkers must be more sensitive to this possibility.