We present a formal game-theoretic model to explain the simultaneity problem that makes it difficult to obtain unbiased estimates of the effects of both incumbent and challenger spending in U.S. House elections. The model predicts a particular form of correlation between the expected closeness of the race and the level of spending by both candidates, which implies that the simultaneity problem should not be present in close races and should be progressively more severe in the range of safe races that are empirically observed. This is confirmed by comparing simple OLS regression of races that are expected to be close with races that are not, using House incumbent races spanning two decades.

The literature on global integration and national policy autonomy often ignores a central result from open economy macroeconomics: Capital mobility constrains monetary policy when the exchange rate is fixed and fiscal policy when the exchange rate is flexible. Similarly, examinations of the electoral determinants of monetary and fiscal policy typically ignore international pressures altogether. We develop a formal model to analyze the interaction between fiscal and monetary policymakers under various exchange rate regimes and the degrees of central bank independence. We test the model using data from OECD countries. We find evidence that preelectoral monetary expansions occur only when the exchange rate is flexible and central bank independence is low; preelectoral fiscal expansions occur when the exchange rate is fixed. We then explore the implications of our model for arguments that emphasize the partisan sources of macroeconomic policy and for the conduct of fiscal policy after economic and monetary union in Europe.

It is well established that legislators from highly professionalized bodies are more likely to win reelection than members of less professionalized legislatures. We find that the effect of professionalization on incumbent electoral success is far more pervasive. As the level of professionalism of a legislature increases, the effects of external political and economic forces (such as coattails from higher level elections and national economic conditions) on a legislator's chances for reelection diminish in strength. This implies that legislative professionalization promotes institutionalization by establishing boundaries that insulate members from external shocks. We reach these conclusions by specifying and testing a district-level model of state legislative election outcomes, using as dependent variable the probability that an incumbent will win reelection. The model is estimated with probit using data for more than 42,000 state legislators from 1970 to 1989.

We provide a general theory of collective decision making, one that relates social choices to the strategic incentives of individuals, by generalizing the Baron-Ferejohn (1989) model of bargaining to the multidimensional spatial model. We prove existence of stationary equilibria, upper hemicontinuity of equilibrium outcomes in structural and preference parameters, and equivalence of equilibrium outcomes and the core in certain environments, including the one-dimensional case. The model generates equilibrium predictions even when the core is empty, and it yields a “continuous” generalization of the core in some familiar environments in which the core is nonempty. As the description of institutional detail in the model is sparse, it applies to collective choice in relatively unstructured settings and provides a benchmark for the general analysis of legislative and parliamentary politics.

According to most scholars, Montesquieu argues that fear threatens a loss of self. Disconnected from the exercise of reason, fear is an emotion that is supposed to prevent the individual from acting with any kind of moral or rational agency. Fear is also premised on the liquidation of civil society; intermediate institutions and plural social structures are destroyed so that despots can act with unmitigated power and violence. I argue that this view does not capture Montesquieu's theory. In my alternative account, fear is intimately connected to our capacity for reason and to our sense of self. It is built on a network of elites, the rule of law, moral education, and the traditional institutions of civil society. I conclude that twentieth-century social science remains too indebted to conventional interpretations of Montesquieu's views, and contemporary theorists would be better served by the alternative analysis proposed here.

Most research suggests that the mass public knows very little about the Supreme Court and, consequently, that decisions do not affect attitudes toward the Court. I argue that where there is sufficient access to information about Court cases and when the issues are perceived as important, people pay attention and use this information in their evaluation of the Court. The research is based on a series of two-wave panel studies that examine the effect of Supreme Court cases in the local communities where the controversies began. The results show that a substantial number of residents heard about the Court's decision and subsequently changed their evaluation of the Supreme Court, especially those who live in the immediate community. The results suggest that we need to consider other circumstances in which people hear about and care about Supreme Court decisions.

Xenophon's Anabasis, a military adventure interwoven with a story of philosophical self-discovery, is a companion piece to Plato's Republic. The Anabasis takes up in deed the two great political problems treated in speech in the Republic, namely, how a just community can come into being and how philosophy and political power may be brought to coincide. In addressing the first of these problems, Xenophon makes explicit a lesson about the limits of politics that is implicit in the Republic. He speaks to the second problem by clarifying the essential role of philosophical erôs in his emergence, at the moment of crisis, as the founder and leader of a well-ordered community. Xenophon‘s self-presentation in the Anabasis, which makes clear his debt to Socrates, illuminates the nature of philosophical courage as well as the saving integrity of the philosophical soul.

The apparent ability of the American public to form coherent assessments of policy options—while being largely ignorant of political institutions, actors, and ideology—remains a persistent puzzle for political science. We develop a theory of political decision making that helps resolve this puzzle. We postulate that both the public and political elites comprehend complex policies in part through “reasoning by policy metaphor,” which involves comparisons between proposed alternative policies and more readily understood social institutions. Using data from 169 intensive interviews, we test claims about metaphorical reasoning for a particularly complex policy domain: health care reform. We demonstrate that our hypothesized policy metaphors are coherent to both elites and the general public, including the least sophisticated members of the public. We further show that elites and the public share a common understanding of the relevant policy metaphors, that metaphorical reasoning differs from other forms of analogic reasoning, and that metaphorical cognition is distinct from ideological orientation.

We present an empirical assessment of Lupia and Strøm's noncooperative bargaining model of cabinet terminations. We construct a stochastic version of the model and derive several testable implications. As the next mandatory election approaches: (1) the probability of an early election increases; (2) a cabinet's risks of being replaced without an intermediate election may be flat or even decrease; and (3) the overall chance that a cabinet falls (for whatever reason) increases. Using nonparametric duration analysis on a 15-country data set, we find qualified support for the Lupia and Strøm model. We conclude that the strategic approach is more promising than the nonstrategic alternative, but a more fully dynamic strategic model will be required to account for the dynamics of cabinet stability.

We examine how the Supreme Court uses signals and indices from lower courts to determine which cases to review. In our game theoretic model, a higher court cues from publicly observable case facts, the known preferences of a lower court, and its decision. The lower court attempts to enforce its own preferences, exploiting ambiguity in cases' fact patterns. In equilibrium, a conservative higher court declines to review conservative decisions from lower courts regardless of the facts of the case or the relative ideology of the judges. But a conservative higher court probabilistically reviews liberal decisions, with the “audit rate” tied, to observable facts and the ideology of the lower court judge. We derive comparative static results and test them with a random sample of search-and-seizure cases appealed to the Burger Court between 1972 and 1986. The evidence broadly supports the model.

Given the coincidence between America's recent migration to smaller, suburban cities and declines in civic participation, Dahl's speculations on the ideal-sized democratic polity have gained more pertinence. I explore the effects of city size on participation in four local civic activities using 1990 data. Controlling for both individual- and city-level characteristics, I find people in larger cities are much less likely to contact officials, attend community or organizational meetings, or vote in local elections. Lower civic participation is attributable partly to differences in social relations and psychological orientation between residents of larger and smaller places. People in big cities are less likely to be recruited for political activity by neighbors and are less interested in local affairs. These differences occur irrespective of the size of the surrounding metropolitan area and demonstrate the importance of municipal institutions for fostering civil society. The implications for studies of participation, suburbanization, and democratic political theory are discussed.

Corporate political activity is usually operationalized and analyzed as financial contributions to candidates or political parties through political action committees (PACs). Very little attention has been paid to other dimensions, such as lobbying, in a systematic way. On a theoretical level we address the issue of how to conceive of PAC contributions, lobbying, and other corporate activities, such as charitable giving, in terms of the strategic behavior of corporations and the implications of “foreignness” for the different types of corporate political activity. On an empirical level we examine the political activities of Fortune 500 firms, along with an oversampling of U.S. affiliates of large foreign investors for the 1987–88 election cycle.

We examine the effectiveness of political communication and deliberation among citizens during a presidential election campaign. In order for communication to be effective, messages conveyed through social interaction must be unambiguous, and the recipient must readily, confidently, and accurately perceive the intent of the sender. We address a number of factors that may influence communication effectiveness: the accessibility and extremity of political preferences, the distribution of preferences in the surrounding environment, disagreement between the senders and receivers of political messages, and the dynamic of the election campaign. The analysis is based on a study of the 1996 campaign, which interviewed citizens and discussion partners between March 1996 and January 1997. The citizens are a random sample of registered voters in the Indianapolis and St. Louis areas, and these registered voters identified the discussion partners as people with whom they discuss either “government, elections, and politics” or “important matters.”

Thomas Smith presents an Aristotelian view of the common good that resembles much contemporary political theory in that it focuses on ethics rather than politics. Smith contends that Aristotle is a potent remedy to a society in crisis due to its unconcern about the common good. Against Smith's apolitical reading of Aristotle, we examine how Aristotle's views of common advantage, the multiple needs of citizens, and political friendship support neither harmonizing conceptions of the good nor a personal “radical conversion” that makes the common good our primary political concern. In engaging the political Aristotle, we find instead that he is concerned with the necessary conflict that resists attempts to arrive at the common advantage, with the material basis of good citizenship, and with the institutions and practices that foster a good deliberative politics.

The requirement of unanimous jury verdicts in criminal trials is widely believed to reduce the likelihood of convicting the innocent. This belief depends largely upon the assumption that jurors will vote nonstrategically based on their impression of the trial evidence. Recent literature, however, has questioned this assumption, and Feddersen and Pesendorfer propose a model in which it is never a Nash equilibrium for jurors to vote nonstrategically under unanimity rule, and equilibrium behavior produces higher probabilities of both convicting the innocent and acquitting the guilty under unanimity rule than under numerous alternatives. I extend this work by incorporating two additional features of actual jury procedure: the possibility of mistrial and communication among jurors. Under each circumstance, I demonstrate that nonstrategic voting is a Nash equilibrium under fairly general conditions and that unanimity performs better than any alternative rule in minimizing probability of trial error and maximizing expected utility.

It is often argued that executive powers such as the veto serve to reduce particularistic spending by the legislature. I argue that the effect of the executive veto depends strongly on assumptions about both the nature of executive preferences and the institutional structure of executive-legislative bargaining. To support these claims, I develop a model of distributive policymaking subject to an executive veto. This framework incorporates variation in presidential objectives and formal powers into a dynamic bargaining model. In equilibrium, stronger veto power leads to a lower level of distributive spending, but the effects are mitigated to the extent that the president prefers spending in some districts over others. The model also generates new insights and predictions about fiscal policy under the separation of powers, including the effects of divided government, electoral rules, and term limitations for the executive.

I respond to Terchek and Moore by investigating the interrelationship of ethics to politics in Aristotle's thought. To this end I defend two claims. First, doing ethics requires understanding politics. Second, politics requires practical wisdom and ethics. Since even the politics wanted by Terchek and Moore requires these virtues, they are wrong to claim that my account of the common good, resting as it does on similar virtues, is impractical and dangerous.

We report the results of a randomized field experiment involving approximately 30,000 registered voters in New Haven, Connecticut. Nonpartisan get-out-the-vote messages were conveyed through personal canvassing, direct mail, and telephone calls shortly before the November 1998 election. A variety of substantive messages were used. Voter turnout was increased substantially by personal canvassing, slightly by direct mail, and not at all by telephone calls. These findings support our hypothesis that the long-term retrenchment in voter turnout is partly attributable to the decline in face-to-face political mobilization.

I develop a model of decision making in juries when there is uncertainty about jurors' preferences. I provide a characterization of the equilibrium strategy under any voting rule and show that nonunanimous rules are asymptotically efficient. Specifically, large juries make the correct decision with probability close to one. My analysis also demonstrates that under the unanimous rule, large juries almost never convict the defendant. The last result contrasts markedly with the literature and suggests that the unanimity rule can protect the innocent only at the price of acquitting the guilty.

We offer a model of multiparty elections that combines voters' retrospective economic evaluations with consideration of parties' issue positions and the issue preferences of voters. We show that both policy issues and the state of the economy matter in British elections. In 1987 voters made a largely retrospective evaluation of the Conservatives based on economic performance; those who rejected the Conservative Party chose between Labour and Alliance based on issue positions. Through simulations we move the parties in the issue space and reestimate vote shares as well as hypothesize an alternative distribution of views on the economy, and we show that Labour had virtually no chance to win with a centrist party as a viable alternative. The predictions from our 1987 simulations are supported in an analysis of the 1992 British election. We argue for multinomial probit in studying three-party elections because it allows for a richer formulation of politics than do competing methods.