The article presents a theory of class conflict between workers and capitalists who pursue their material interests under a form of societal organization that combines private ownership of instruments of production with representative political institutions. There exist economic and political conditions under which both classes would simultaneously choose courses of action that constitute a class compromise: workers consent to the institution of profit and capitalists to democratic institutions through which workers can effectively press claims for material gains. When these conditions hold and a compromise is in force, the role of the state consists in institutionalizing, coordinating, and enforcing the terms of a compromise that represents the preferences of workers as well as capitalists.

Politicians do not endorse rules of the game as reliably as is implied by traditional constitutional commentaries or by modern democratic theory. Interviews with Members of Parliament and candidates demonstrate that their views are deeply and systematically divided between alternative constitutional interpretations constructed upon foundations of party-political bias. Thus, attitudes towards nearly all rules of the game are powerfully shaped by political values such as authority and equality, values that differentiate views within as well as between the Conservative and labour parties. Similarly, patterns of support seem much affected by a disposition to boost norms that aid one's own party, depending on whether it is in Government or Opposition, and to downgrade norms that might aid political opponents. The article considers implications of these results for the viability of Britain's unwritten Constitution and for theories about the foundations of representative government.

The first section of the article establishes the political salience of macroeconomic issues to the British electorate, reviews the distributional consequences of macroeconomic outcomes, and suggests that unemployment outcomes in particular have strong class-related distributional effects.

The second part presents a dynamic model of how rational voters evaluate the governing party, based on the idea that voters evaluate the cumulative performance of the governing party relative to the prior performance of the current opposition. Since the present relevance of prior outcomes decays over time, voters weight current performance more heavily than past performance informing contemporaneous political judgments.

The empirical analyses in the third section include measures of nominal economic performance (inflation and exchange rate movements) and real economic performance (unemployment and real income fluctuations). The regression results indicate that the responses of political support among the occupational classes to macroeconomic changes are sizeable, and that the cross-class variations are consistent with the distributional consequences reviewed at the beginning of the article.

The concluding section develops the electoral implications of the empirical results and presents a novel interpretation of trends in class-related political support for the parties. The evidence shows that the argument that there has been a persistent decline of class-based political alignments in Britain is erroneous.

Professor Hibbs's article presents an ingenious model wherein political support of the government depends on “cumulative discounted relative performance.” Specifically, “the worse (better) the performance of the prior government, the higher (lower) will be the initial support of the new government… (G)overnments following bad acts by the opposition are likely to enjoy greater initial support than governments following good acts.”

This is a reasonable hypothesis, and it may well be correct. However, Hibbs offers no evidence of its correctness other than the overall performance of his model, and he reports no consideration, let alone rejection, of alternative hypotheses. Instead he assumes that the discounted past performance affects the new government's support with the opposite sign but with the same slope. Pursuit of Hibbs's illustrative example shows that the assumption is far from trivial, and that it produces some startling results.

I am flattered that a political scientist of William Keech's caliber uses words such as ingenious and outstanding to describe my work. I am also grateful that he took the time and was given the opportunity by the Review to show the implications of my theory of political support for a stylized case where unmeasured sources of support for British governments among the occupational classes are nil (aqj = 0), the only performance variable valued by voters is the unemployment rate, which has a reasonable contemporaneous impact of –0.02, and where the decay rate parameter g for past performance outcomes is set equal to the sensible value of 0.8 (implying a backward-looking discount rate of 0.25 per quarter).

A check of selected entries in Keech's Table 1 indicates they are correct, and I have no important disagreements with his interpretations of their behavioral implications. One caveat, however, about Keech's statement that my model “presumes that the performance of the old government affects the support of the new one with exactly the same slope (bn = b0 in equation A), but with opposite sign”: the absolute value of the partial derivative of Y* with respect to Zt–k in my model is b gk, which of course depends on lag k. b(bn, b0) is a scale parameter; the slope, as defined in the usual way, is given by the (time varying) derivative above.

Two models of voting are often used to explain the Nazi vote in the Weimar Republic. The first model states that the Nazis' electoral successes resulted from Protestant petty bourgeois and peasant support for fascism. The second model argues that the Nazis gained the bulk of their support from newly mobilized voters. Previous analyses of these models are plagued with serious problems due to their limited data base. This study reassesses these models with the use of an unusually complete data set for all of Germany and concludes that much of the previous work examining the Nazi vote wrongly identifies the Protestant petty bourgeoisie as the major contributor to the Nazi vote. The Nazis received important levels of support from Protestant peasants, new voters, and Catholic petty bourgeoisie.

It is regularly argued that human rights are not a Western discovery and that non-Western societies have long emphasized the protection of human rights. Such claims, however, are based on a confusion of human rights and human dignity. A concern for human dignity is central to non-Western cultural traditions, whereas human rights, in the sense in which Westerners understand that term—namely, rights (entitlements) held simply by virtue of being a human being—are quite foreign to, for example, Islamic, African, Chinese, and Indian approaches to human dignity. Human rights are but one way that has been devised to realize and to protect human dignity. Although the idea of human rights was first articulated in the West in modern times, it would appear to be an approach particularly suited to contemporary social, political, and economic conditions, and thus of widespread contemporary relevance both in the West and the Third World.

Recent challenges to traditional approaches and purposes for studying the history of political theory have raised questions about its constitution as both a subject matter and subfield of political science. Methodological arguments advocating what is characterized as a more truly historical mode of inquiry for understanding political ideas and recovering textual meaning have become increasingly popular. The relationship of these hermeneutical claims about historicity, such as that advanced by Quentin Skinner, to the actual practice of interpretation is problematical. Such claims are more a defense of a certain norm of historical investigation than a method of interpretation, and the implications of this norm for the reconstitution of the history of political theory require careful consideration.

Given the widespread moral conventionalism or historicism in contemporary social science and ethics, many have viewed Marx as arguing either that conceptions of justice simply shift historically and lack objectivity (relativism) or that notions of justice are to be understood solely as expressions of class interests (reductionism). Although metaethical ambiguities about the status of conceptions of justice influenced some of Marx's and Engels's formulations, they condemned the “crying contrasts” of rich and poor. Marx is better understood as defending a version of moral objectivity or moral realism. The paper begins with an example from the recent debate about justice in the international distribution of wealth to highlight the implausibility of a relativist or reductionist account. It then describes alternative views of the status of justice and equality in Marx and Engels and explores the logical structure of Marx's critique of Proudhon. A fourth section examines the analogy between Marx's and Engels's realism in the philosophy of science and their realist arguments in ethics, focusing on Marx's and Engels's non-relativist and non-reductionist conception of moral progress. The conclusion sets Marx's use of concepts of exploitation in the context of his overall moral judgments and suggests that Marx's social or historical theory rather than his moral standards are the most controversial part of his ethical argument.

Studies have shown that members of the U.S. Congress attempt to exploit many of the perquisites of office for their electoral advantage, but the actual impact of this exploitation has never been clear. Thus a potentially significant part of the advantage of incumbency has been subject to more speculation than analysis. This study develops a simple model that can be used to determine the electoral significance of perquisite use by officeholders. It begins by examining a particular perquisite, the franking privilege, to determine how it affects incumbent saliency and reputation among constituents. Within the context of an appropriate research design, the study finds that the distribution of government pamphlets does boost an incumbent's saliency while also creating a more positive evaluation of the incumbent. The saliency and evaluation effects erode over time, but this erosion can be mitigated through follow-up mailings. These results are incorporated into a model that is used to predict the electoral consequences of perquisite use. The model suggests that perquisites have their greatest impact in constituencies with a relatively small proportion of voters who identify with the incumbent's party.

The prime voting dynamic in the critical presidential election of 1896 was, according to the literature, the conversion of Democrats to the Republican banner. Unfortunately, mobilization of new voters has not been given much attention. To assess the role of mobilization, the vote shift possibilities from 1892 to 1896 were formalized, and all possible scenarios conforming to the aggregate data that characterized the electoral shift were analyzed by computer. Solutions to the tables representing the changes in voting from 1892 to 1896 show that in the Midwest more voters were mobilized in the 1896 election than were converted. In the Northeast, the conventional wisdom was not challenged. The findings illustrate the importance of mobilization as an explanation of large-scale electoral change.

Significant differences in the distribution of public resources among neighborhoods within the same municipality have been repeatedly reported in the literature. Previous researchers have generally concluded that these differences in the distribution of governmental benefits represent “unpatterned inequality” produced by idiosyncratic events and bureaucratic decision rules. This study of the distribution of municipal expenditures for public services in New York City comes to a very different conclusion. Municipal expenditures for social services (health, welfare, and education) increase with the dependency of district populations, which suggests a compensatory model of distribution. At the same time, municipal expenditures for property-related services (fire, sanitation) increase with tax revenues, which suggests a contributory model of distribution for these services. City expenditures for police services, however, are determined by both tax contributions and degree of dependence. These findings indicate that differences in the allocation of public resources in New York City are patterned by clearly recognizable distributional criteria.

An analysis of affirmative action data regarding levels of black employment in the civil service of forty-three U.S. cities indicates that observed variations are mainly a function of the size of the black population and the presence of a black mayor. By interpreting the size of the black population as an indicator of potential bloc voting power and by making explicit the links between the mayor's office and the personnel system, we may conclude that civil service hiring represents one tangible benefit of black political po wer. Other possible hypotheses explaining variations in levels of black employment are less satisfactory, including the argument that minority employment is mainly a function of the expansion or contraction of the public sector. The research suggests that to some degree a politics of ethnicity which involves the distribution of divisible economic goods to a particular group as a consequence of that group's political power is still a possibility in American cities.