Glaucon's demand to be shown the inherent choiceworthiness of justice exposes the limits of dialectical argument. Acknowledging these limits, Socrates proposes that his interlocutors join him in an alternative activity, making a city in speech. This model city proves to be “entirely opposite” to existing cities, above all (as Socrates observes) because it restricts the practice of dialectical argument to those who first demonstrate a capacity for synopsis, that is, for seeing things as a whole. Socrates holds that one must be able to see things as a whole in order to benefit from the use of dialectic. I interpret the political institutions of Socrates' model city accordingly, as being instrumental to the practice of dialectic. Hence, I reject the prevalent readings of the Republic, which present these institutions either as a blueprint for public policy or as a parody of political idealism. Instead, I suggest that the interlocutors' discussion of censorship, the noble lie, and communism is propaedeutic, fostering the synoptic capacity necessary to benefit from the practice of dialectic, including dialectic aimed at revealing the choiceworthiness of justice.

This essay analyzes modern and postmodern concepts of freedom and contrasts them to a Heideggerian understanding. Positive, negative, and what might be called Foucaultian or Nietzschean liberty are demonstrated to bear a common trait. In such modern and postmodern formulations, freedom is consistently identified with a form of mastery. This identification of freedom with mastery, I argue, encourages ecological abuse, supports the dangerous prerogatives of statist sovereignty, and strengthens the resilience of patriarchy. The political significance of Heidegger's alternative vision is addressed.

This analysis investigates a formal nonlinear systems model characterizing longitudinal change in the environment as a function of oscillating partisan control of the White House. It is assumed that one political party will tend to favor help for the environment despite some economic costs, whereas the other party will generally favor economic growth over environmental concerns. These policy changes affect the environment interactively with both public concern for particular environmental problems and the economic costs relating to environmental repair. This interaction with policy changes causes a disruption in the continuously evolving balance between the social factors that damage the environment and the environment's own ability to recover. The disruptive potential to the environment is considerably ameliorated with a reduction in the electoral cycling.

Since World War II, divided government has become increasingly common in the American states. A significant component of the increase is the deterioration of Republican fortunes in state legislatures: after the 1990 and 1992 elections, for example, only five state legislatures were controlled by the Republicans. I shall examine the hypothesis that the professionalization of state legislatures makes legislative service more attractive to Democratic candidates and less attractive to Republican candidates, because full-time legislative service is incompatible with another career, and Democrats, on average, have less lucrative career opportunities than Republicans. Statistical analysis of post-World War II legislative elections outside the South is consistent with the argument: other things being equal, every ten-thousand-dollar increase in real biennial legislative compensation is associated with approximately a 1% increase in Democratic legislators.

Over the past three decades, as the Democratic party in the South has come to depend more heavily on black voters for its success, it has experienced a decline among white adherents. Power theory views relationships between groups as a function of their competitive positions in political, economic, and social arenas. In contexts where the threat posed by a minority group is high, the dominant group's response is predicted to be more hostile than in contexts where that threat is low. A pooled time series analysis of voter registration data for Louisiana parishes for 1975–90 provides support for the operation of the threat mechanism. Higher black concentrations are associated with declines in the percentage of white registered voters who are Democrats and an increase in the percentage who are Republicans. Consistent with the expectations of power theory, this relationship is conditioned by the social status of the parish.

A continuum of voters, indexed by income, have preferences over economic outcomes. Two political parties each represent the interests of given constituencies of voters: the rich and the poor. Parties/candidates put forth policies—for instance, tax policy, where taxes finance a public good. Voters are uncertain about the theory of the economy, the function that maps policies into economic outcomes. Parties argue, as well, for theories of the economy. Each voter has a prior probability distribution over possible theories of the economy; after parties announce their theories of the economy, each voter constructs an a posteriori distribution over such theories. Suppose that voters are unsure how efficiently the government converts tax revenues into the public good. Under reasonable assumptions the party representing the rich argues that the government is very inefficient and the party representing the poor argues the opposite. What appear as liberal and conservative ideological views emerge as simply good strategies in the electoral game.

Confirming Inglehart's prediction (1971) of an intergenerational shift toward postmaterialist values, a time series analysis controlling for the joint effects of inflation and unemployment demonstrates that there is a statistically significant trend toward postmaterialism in all eight West European countries for which data are available over the past two decades. Evidence from the 1981–83 and 1990–91 World Values Surveys indicates that this value shift occurs in any society that has experienced sufficient economic growth in recent decades so that the preadult experiences of younger birth cohorts were significantly more secure than those of older cohorts. Large intergenerational differences tend to be found in societies that have experienced rapid growth in gross national product per capita, and are negligible in societies that have had little or no growth. Accordingly, postmaterialism increased in 18 of the 20 societies on five continents for which we have comparable data over the past decade.

Constitutional design proceeds under the assumption that institutions have predictable consequences, but modern political science has not pursued the empirical verification of these predicted consequences with much vigor. I shall attempt to link the theoretical premises underlying one important aspect of constitutional design, the amendment process, with the empirical patterns revealed by a systematic, comparative study of constitutions. An examination of all amendments in the 50 American states since 1776 reveals patterns that are then confirmed using data from 32 national constitutions. The interaction of the two key variables affecting amendment rate can be described by an equation that generates predicted amendment rates close to those found in the cross-national empirical analysis. A constitution's length measured in number of words, the difficulty of an amendment process, and the rate of amendment turn out to have interlocking consequences that illuminate principles of constitutional design.

We address two questions: How do people form their expectations about the likely winner of the next general election? and What are the links between expectations and votes? Using data collected by the Gallup organization in Great Britain, we find that the expectations formation process (1) has a significant inertia component but also a rapid adjustment to current information; (2) reflects voters' ability to translate economic expectations into political forecasts; and (3) is “time-bounded,” possessing special characteristics immediately before and after a general election. The analysis also confirms the existence of a small bandwagon effect, whereby expectations that one party will win inflate that party's vote. The ability of voters to make reasonable forecasts without being unduly influenced by their own preferences suggests that under normal circumstances voters are expressing real preferences and not simply following the crowd.

The neorealist-neoliberal debate about the possibilities for collective action in international relations has been based on a shared commitment to Mancur Olson's rationalist definition of the problem as one of getting exogenously given egoists to cooperate. Treating this assumption as a de facto hypothesis about world politics, I articulate the rival claim that interaction at the systemic level changes state identities and interests. The causes of state egoism do not justify always treating it as given. Insights from critical international relations and integration theories suggest how collective identity among states could emerge endogenously at the systemic level. Such a process would generate cooperation that neither neorealists nor neoliberals expect and help transform systemic anarchy into an “international state”—a transnational structure of political authority that might undermine territorial democracy. I show how broadening systemic theory beyond rationalist concerns can help it to explain structural change in world politics.

Using survey data collected in Russia, Ukraine, and Lithuanian in 1990–92, we reexamine findings reported by Finifter and Mickiewicz (1992). Our analysis indicates a significant link between political and economic reform orientations. Individuals who prefer political reforms of a democratic nature also favor a decreased role of the state in guaranteeing social well-being. In addition, our finding that better-educated Soviet and post-Soviet citizens are more likely than the less-well-educated to prefer individual responsibility for well-being is in direct contradiction to the findings reported by Finifter and Mickiewicz. The differences in the two sets of conclusions give rise to very different substantive conclusions regarding the economic and political changes now occurring in these societies.

Regression analysis in comparative research suffers from two distinct problems of statistical inference. First, because the data constitute all the available observations from a population, conventional inference based on the long-run behavior of a repeatable data mechanism is not appropriate. Second, the small and collinear data sets of comparative research yield imprecise estimates of the effects of explanatory variables. We describe a Bayesian approach to statistical inference that provides a unified solution to these two problems. This approach is illustrated in a comparative analysis of unionization.

Theories of the public sphere, as standardly formulated, aim to specify the minimal, necessary conditions for a discursive realm free of coercion or manipulation. In his article in this Review in September 1992, Dana Villa urged us to reconsider this standard account. He argued that when read in light of postmodernist theory, Hannah Arendt provides the basis for a revised conception of the public sphere that privileges plurality and difference over consensus. Jim Johnson suggests that Villa's analysis is a thinly veiled polemic against critical theory. Johnson argues that, as critique, Villa's argument is neither decisive nor encompassing, and that as polemic it blinds Villa to potentially fruitful disagreements with critical theorists. Villa replies that Johnson misses the synthetic thrust of the original article because he identified public realm theory too narrowly with Habermas. Thus, he misconstrues the dialogue Villa sought to facilitate between Arendt and postmodernism.