This paper develops a game-theoretic approach to the problem of political officials' respect for political and economic rights of citizens. It models the policing of rights as a coordination problem among citizens, but one with asymmetries difficult to resolve in a decentralized manner. The paper shows that democratic stability depends on a self-enforcing equilibrium: It must be in the interests of political officials to respect democracy's limits on their behavior. The concept of self-enforcing limits on the state illuminates a diverse set of problems and thus serves as a potential basis for integrating the literature. The framework is applied to a range of topics, such as democratic stability, plural societies, and elite pacts. The paper also applies its lessons to the case of the Glorious Revolution in seventeenth-century England.

Recently, the idea of phronesis has assumed great importance among political theorists. This prominence is due to the perception that, contrary to the application of the methods of natural science to politics, phronesis preserves the distinctive character of politics in its refusal to apply inappropriate standards of precision and to find certainty where it does not exist. But precisely because of this, the following question arises: Can we ascertain a nonarbitrary standard of phronesis without denying those characteristics that make it appropriate for the understanding of politics? I address this question by considering the treatment of phronesis (wisdom) found in Plato's Statesman and, in particular, the passage that weighs the relative merits of rule by wisdom and rule by law. In this seminal consideration of phronesis Plato (unlike Aristotle) does not confine his treatment to the practical sphere; even this intensely political passage contains far-reaching reflections on the nature of humanity and the world we inhabit. These explain what we are and what our world is, such that there is a need for this cognitive capacity. As I argue, they express the conditions of phronesis that can provide a guide for its use without negating its essential character.

This essay assesses communitarian and democratic critiques of capitalist economies. Distinguishing them are sharply contrasting evaluations of markets and private property. Communitarian critics of capitalism trace its moral failure to the marketplace. Drawing on Aristotle's normative economics, this school maintains that production for gain corrodes society's moral fabric. I defend the democratic approach. Democratic critics accept the modern claim that markets are both efficient and liberating. Capitalist ownership relations are another matter, indicted because they constitute a form of private power over people's lives. I reconstruct the ethical core of the democratic school and contend that it offers a better understanding of the most objectionable aspects of capitalist economies while avoiding the dangers inherent in the communitarian approach.

Is cooperation without central authority stable? If so, how robust is it? Despite what might be the conventional wisdom, The Evolution of Cooperation did not solve this problem deductively. In fact, results obtained later by others seem to have contradicted the book's main message. Reexamining this exceptionally influential work yields a new picture. Part of Axelrod's evolutionary story turns out to be false. But the main intuition, that retaliatory strategies of conditional cooperation are somehow advantaged, proves correct in one specific and significant sense: Under a standard evolutionary dynamic these strategies require the minimal frequency to stabilize. Hence, they support the most robust evolutionary equilibrium: the easiest to reach and retain. Moreover, the less efficient a strategy, the larger is its minimal stabilizing frequency; Hobbesian strategies of pure defection are the least robust. Our main theorems hold for a large class of games that pose diverse cooperation problems: prisoner's dilemma, chicken, stag hunt, and many others.

I reformulate Mancur Olson's by-product theory of collective action as a theory of resource allocation by interest group managers. I then test alternative hypotheses about managers' objectives drawn from exchange theory and commitment theory. Financial data for 16 environmental citizen groups show that the production of public goods is subsidized by other activities, and revenues from member dues are not affected by spending on public goods. Spending on selective incentives and information generates revenues but also may contribute to the pursuit of collective goals. Estimated marginal revenues from fund-raising and selective incentives show that environmental citizen group managers are not preoccupied with maximizing revenues. Rather, they seek to maximize either spending on public goods or net resources available for influencing public policy and the environment, subject to a budget constraint.

A critical element of decision making is the timing of choices political actors make; often when a decision is made is as critical as the decision itself. We posit a dynamic model of strategic position announcement based on signaling theories of legislative politics. We suggest that members who receive clear signals from constituents, interest groups, and policy leaders will announce their positions earlier. Those with conflicting signals will seek more information, delaying their announcement. We test several expectations by examining data on when members of the House of Representatives announced their positions on the North American Free Trade Agreement. We also contrast the timing model with a vote model, and find that there are meaningful differences between the factors influencing the timing of position announcements and vote choice. Our research allows analysts to interpret the process leading up to the House action and the end state of that process.

In this work I test the proposition that normative standards of behavior can influence state actions in security-related conflicts. Specifically, I examine the construction of norms in the settlements of security-related disputes and the effects these settlements have on subsequent militarized interactions. I argue that dispute settlements alter subsequent crisis bargaining in two important ways. First, they act as normative referents that alter the interpretation of subsequent crisis bargaining behavior both by identifying a solution to the dispute which alleviates fears of demands for future concessions and by defining a set of acts which both sides consider illegitimate. Second, in combination with the response to their violation, dispute settlements inflict reputational costs on states that violate them. I test these arguments against a realist theory of crisis bargaining through an analysis of 122 reinitiated international crises between 1929 and 1979. I find strong support for the hypothesis that states can and do construct normative standards that guide their behavior in international crises, whereas realist theory receives only mixed support.

The topic of grass-roots participation in China has acquired special interest in light of the local economic and political reforms introduced in the post-Mao period. This paper explores some major modes of participation, issues motivating participation, and the determinants of participation. The findings are based on interviews held in early 1990 with probability samples drawn from four countryside counties. The analysis emphasizes three modes of “autonomous” participation: cooperative actions, voicing opinions to cadres, and contacting representatives. Participants pursued selective and collective goods and were strategic in combining particular modes with particular problem areas. Determinants of participation included traditional resource model predictors but also unique predictors in the form of holding a second occupation, being a party member, and residing in a specific county. Local activists appear to be using new and traditional methods in moving toward more proactive, collective, and strategic forms of behavior.

This study uses regression analysis of data from a telephone survey of 380 married couples to subject to rare empirical test the contention that, because women are unequal at home, they cannot be equal in the polity. The argument is often made that wives' disadvantage in comparison to their husbands with respect to control over family income, availability of free time, power over decisions, or mutual respect dampens their ability to participate fully in politics. In fact, domestic inequalities do have implications for political activity, but these effects differ from what is usually posited by being stronger for husbands than for wives. For husbands, control over major financial decisions and autonomy in using small amounts of time enhance their ability to participate in politics beyond what would be expected on the basis of their other characteristics. In short, being boss at home is politically empowering to husbands.

In this first systematic and extensive application of cross-judicial methodology, we examine the members of the Rehnquist Court (1986–94 terms) with prior appellate court experience to discern any correlation with their Supreme Court behavior in terms of nonconsensual opinion writing and voting. We find that they become less consensual as justices than they were as judges in the lower court. Importantly, this finding holds after controlling for such institutional differences between the two court levels as size, ideology, case types, stare decisis, and norms. Consistent with the neoinstitutional perspective, we surmise that this behavior change is due to the modern Supreme Court being unique, a court on which the members feel it is desirable, necessary, and possible to express policy disagreements with the majority via separate opinions and votes.

Renewed interest in the concept of political judgment—a mode of reasoning that steers a middle way between abstract, technical reasoning and willful self-assertion—frequently takes the form of a return, qualified in various ways, to Aristotle's concept of phronesis or prudence. I examine this renaissance of interest in Aristotelian prudence through a study of the works of several leading democratic theorists and Aristotle scholars and conclude that they stop short of some of the very elements of Aristotle's thought that can assist us in promoting prudence. In particular, I try to show that these contemporary advocates of political judgment undermine the case for political science (Aristotle's primary concern) and thereby risk losing the independent judgment that Aristotelian political science supports. They fail to give sufficient weight to Aristotle's claim that phronesis, while distinguishable from scientific reason or philosophy, functions best even as a practical science when it accepts certain of philosophy's guiding insights.