Rrepresentatives' votes on a series of defense budget roll calls in the first year of the Reagan administration's Pentagon buildup are related to constituency opinions on defense spending during the 1980 election campaign. The strong aggregate constituency demand for increased defense spending in 1980 is estimated to have added almost $17 billion (about 10%) to the total fiscal year 1982 Pentagon appropriation. The impact of constituency opinion was largely independent of specific political circumstances: differential responsiveness in districts with partisan turnover, intense districtlevel competition, and strong presidential coattails together accounted for less than $1 billion in additional appropriations, with the remaining $16 billion attributable to across-the-board responsiveness by even the most safely incumbent representatives.

Campaigns play a central role in a democracy. I examine the effect of campaigns on the perception of the ideological positions of incumbent senators. The results demonstrate that incumbents affect voter perception both through their actions in office and on the campaign trail. Using the 1988 Senate Election Study, I find that the perceived location of incumbents depends on their roll call voting records, the perceived position of their party and the voter's own position. More crucial is the finding that candidates can affect the clarity of these perceptions through their campaign strategies. Incumbents who stress issues increase the clarity of voter perceptions, while challengers' attacks on incumbents reduce clarity. While elections alone increase clarity, these effects are small in comparison to the effect due to candidate campaign strategies. The results remind us that to understand the politics of elections we must incorporate candidate strategy in our models.

Beginning with Hannah Arendt's depiction of the American Revolution and founding, I critically examine Arendt's reading of the Declaration of Independence, comparing it with Jacques Derrida's reading of (a draft of) the same document, in order to show that Arendt is careless in her easy dismissal of the declaration's essentialist moments. Derrida, it seems to me, has a better, more subtle appreciation of the both necessary and impossible role of essentialism in modern political theory and practice. I conclude, however, that Arendt nonetheless succeeds in theorizing a powerful and suggestive practice of political authority for modernity, a practice that is uniquely activist and appropriate for a democratic politics.

Local partisan activities of legislators and their electoral coalitions systematically influence field office activities of federal bureaucracies in their electoral districts. This alternative to centralized democratic controls over bureaucracy occurs because discretionary policy decisions made at the field office level are influenced by local resources generated through partisan activities. Our study of county-level Occupational Safety and Health Administration enforcement in New York (1976–85) finds that county, state, and federal elected officials influence local enforcement activities, with liberal, Democratic legislators associated with more active enforcement. The county political parties are most influential for activities with the most local discretion, while members of Congress are more influential for local activities more readily controlled by the national office.

Bipolar systems are inherently more stable than multipolar configurations of power, Kenneth Waltz argues. His empirical justification for this conclusion relies on the multipolar systems that preceded the two world wars and the bipolar Cold War. The weakness of Waltz's argument is the small number of cases and the failure to consider alternative explanations for different levels of war in the three periods. In another historical period of both multi- and bipolarity—Europe from 1495 to 1559—I have found that polarity cannot account for the constant level of instability across a change in polarity in the system. Instead, the offense-defense balance, which includes the technical military balance, the cumulativity of power resources, and strategic beliefs, explains instability in the period. Drawing on this alternative theory, I reassess the high level of stability associated with the Cold War and speculate on the level of stability we can expect in the post-Cold War period.

We examine contending views about the forms and mechanisms of business power in U.S. politics by estimating time series models explaining taxation and redistribution. Taxation and redistribution constitute strong cases for theories about business and class power, since all firms have an interest in reducing taxation. We find that changes in corporate taxation and in redistribution between capital gains income and earned income and between corporate taxation and individual taxation are strongly influenced by political partisanship, with Democratic administrations increasing the tax burden on firms and their owners. How far corporations engage in electoral financing—measured through the establishment of corporate political action committees—is also influential. The models show some evidence consistent with the understanding of class power conceptualized by Bowles, Gordon, and Weisskopf and the presence of election cycle effects but inconsistent with implications arising from the structural dependence of the state on capital and asset concentration in the largest corporations as a mechanism of class power.

Past research has modeled mass opinion change as a two-step process involving reception of political communication and acceptance or rejection of that communication. I propose a two-message version of the reception-acceptance model, in which citizens are exposed to two opposing communication flows, either or both of which may affect their opinions. Variation over time in the relative intensity of the opposing communications, along with citizen differences in attention to politics and in political values, interact in the model to explain both cross-sectional patterns of mass opinion and opinion change across surveys. The model, which is applied to data on the Vietnam War, illuminates two research problems: how complex information flows diffuse through a mass audience and how this information shapes mass belief systems.

Even when political interests control bureaucratic outputs, the control of policy outcomes is complicated by trade-offs between controllable versus effective implementation strategies. I use a nested game framework to explain why a cooperative strategy can increase enforcement effectiveness in the narrow administrative game and why principal-agent control problems and collective action problems associated with the strategy lead policy beneficiaries to oppose the effective strategy in the broader political games. Analyses of state-level Occupational Safety and Health Administration enforcement provide evidence that cooperation does enhance the impact of enforcement in reducing workplace injury rates but that policy beneficiaries oppose and sabotage cooperation. The interactions between administrative effectiveness and interest group politics in this and other implementation situations require that both be analyzed simultaneously, and the nested game framework can provide a systematic approach to such analyses.

Polities and organizations use and require particular languages for official business. The choice of official languages is a vexing issue. Theorists, convinced that a fair language policy cannot be efficient, have despaired of an elegant solution. To investigate this apparent dilemma, I mathematically model the problem of choosing an efficient and fair language policy for a plurilingual polity. The policy designates official languages and taxes the language groups to pay for translation among the official languages. Contrary to prevailing wisdom, this model implies that a fair language policy can be efficient. But what if language groups rationally misrepresent the costs of using a nonnative official language? Even then, the policy maker can discover a fair language policy and, under some conditions, can use a cost-revelation procedure that discovers a fair and efficient language policy. The results challenge the claim that efficiency and practicality excuse the inferior treatment of language minorities.

I examine the search for a “tie that binds, “ or “core” values, in liberal political theory, specifically Rawls's recent arguments, and in proposals concerning moral education in the public schools. Both Rawls and the proponents of moral education appeal to consensus or shared values, but the search for core values in both theory and practice is only partly successful. Specifically, this search is misguided insofar as it does not reflect how values are embedded in specific institutions and practices. The various forms of moral education in the public schools, both implicit and explicit, illustrate a consensus about a range of moral and intellectual virtues that is broader and more complex than arguments for core values allow. Comparing arguments concerning core values in political theory and moral education suggests how liberal political theory might deal with questions of consensus, justification, and the task of political theory generally.

A theory of government formation in parliamentary systems is developed from a model incorporating policy-oriented parties with spatial preferences and a formation process in which parties are selected in sequence to attempt to form a government. A government is formed when the policy proposed by the party selected is sustained on a vote of confidence. The equilibria identify the government and the policy it will implement and depend on the configuration of preferences and on the government formation process. For example, in a political system with two large parties and one small party and in which one of the two large parties will be selected to attempt to form a government, the government will be formed by a large party with the support of the small party. The policy will reflect the preferences of the small party but will be closer to the ideal point of the large party.

I seek to reinvigorate the study of politicians' roles by showing how motivational role theory can be used to examine the impact of goals and incentives upon behavior and thereby integrate economic and sociological perspectives. I address three reasons for the recent neglect of politicians' roles—changes in interdisciplinary tastes, conceptual and theoretical muddles, and failures to demonstrate consequences for behavior—and find them unconvincing. I further argue that the most promising framework for the new institutionalism is one that incorporates not just formal but also informal institutional structures (like roles and norms), a framework that incorporates, rather than excludes, political behavior.

Discontent theories of rebellion postulate that politicized discontent will have a strong independent effect on individuals' potential to participate in rebellious political action. Expected utility theories postulate that participation in rebellious action is motivated by expectation of reward and that discontent is relevant at most only insofar as individuals expect that collective action can be successful and that their participation is important to that end. We test these theories with data from a national sample and a sample of students at a protest-prone university in Peru, a country with significant objective conditions of discontent and a high incidence of rebellious political conflict. The results provide no evidence for the discontent models but strong support for the expected utility models. The potential for participation in rebellious political action proves to be a function primarily of discontent weighted by the expectancy of the action's success and the perceived importance of personal participation. Private social and normative rewards and costs also are relevant—but to a lesser extent—for the individual's calculation of the expected utility of participation.

During the past two decades a four-item battery administered in biannual Euro-Barometer surveys has been used to measure changing value priorities in Western European countries. We provide evidence that the measure is seriously flawed. Pooled cross-sectional time series analyses for the 1976–86 period reveal that the Euro-Barometer postmaterialist-materialist value index and two of its components are very sensitive to short-term changes in economic conditions, and that the failure to include a statement about unemployment in the four-item values battery accounts for much of the apparent growth of postmaterialist values in several countries after 1980. The aggregate-level findings are buttressed by analyses of panel data from three countries.

The conventional wisdom about presidential campaigning in midterm Senate elections is that presidential efforts lack impact or have negative impact. We discuss conceptual problems with the conventional view and offer an alternative that views presidential campaigning as strategic. We test this alternative and find support for it. Further, we find that presidential campaign efforts have a positive impact on the vote through the mobilization of nonvoters. Finally, in a significant number of cases, presidential campaigning may have been the margin of victory for candidates of the president's party. We discuss the implications of these findings on assessments of the president and relations with Congress during the second half of the term.

We propose a new model of cooperators' advantage depending neither on supplementary incentives nor on cooperators' capacity to recognize, and play selectively with, other cooperators. It depends, rather, on players' making the play-no play decision by the heuristic of projecting their own “cooperate-defect” choices onto potential partners. Cooperators offer to play more often, and fellow cooperators will more often accept their offer. When certain boundary conditions are met, this results in a higher expected payoff for cooperators than for defectors. Empirical support for this heuristic is suggested by expectations data from related social dilemma experiments. Moreover, its use can be justified in Bayesean terms. Our model brings behavioral decision theory's “cognitive miser” paradigm to bear on interdisciplinary concern with the evolution of cooperative behavior and shows how, if other mechanisms provide a suitable “initial kick,” cooperation can evolve in the absence of iteration and in large, mobile societies.

Much of the literature concerning the relative merits of alternative electoral rules is centered around the extent to which particular rules select “representative” legislatures. And an important concern in evaluating the “representativeness” of an electoral rule is whether or not the rule responds positively to changes in individuals' preferences, that is, whether or not the rule is monotonic. By explicitly considering electoral rules in the context of a complete electoral system—voting, selection of legislature, and legislative choice of policy—we argue that monotonicity in electoral systems is a nonissue: depending on the behavioral model governing individual decision making, either everything is monotonic or nothing is monotonic.

Several nonrevolutionary cases of transition to democracy are modeled. Different preferences and strategic choices between the alternatives of continuity, reform, and rupture of the authoritarian regime are used to define conventional distinctions between hard-liners, soft-liners, and opposition more precisely. Six groups of actors emerge. Using game theory, the interactions among these actors are formally analyzed. The possibility of political pact in the first phase of change is identified with the possibility of cooperation between players in games in which the equilibrium is a deficient outcome. Three models of transition by agreement are established: agreed reform within the ruling bloc, controlled opening to the opposition, and sudden collapse of the authoritarian regime. Each of these models entails differences in the pace of change and in the limits of the pact and can be associated with different cases of transition in Southern Europe, Latin America, and Eastern Europe.

To evaluate the comparability of the Gallup and Michigan Survey Research Center measures for studying levels of partisanship among the U.S. electorate we compare the overtime distribution of partisanship and the correlates of partisanship using the results of Gallup surveys, the National Election Studies, and the General Social Surveys. Compared with the Gallup results, both the other two surveys reveal less short-term variation and also less total variation. Compared with the Gallup results, the National Election Studies partisanship results are less related to short-term electoral outcomes and do not appear to be strongly driven by short-term economic and political evaluations. Our analyses suggest that scholars should be cautious about using Gallup results to revise conclusions based upon analyses that employ the Michigan Survey Research Center party identification measure.

Axiomatic and deductive theorizing about international political conflict has precipitated lively debate. Much of the disputation of recent years has derived from an expected utility theory of conflict advocated by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. In the June 1990 issue of this Review, Roslyn Simowitz and Barry L. Price dissected crucial parts of Bueno de Mesquita's formulation of the theory, arguing that it suffers from errors of logic and clarity. In this controversy, James D. Morrow challenges the claims of Simowitz and Price that the reviewed theory is logically and conceptually flawed. In turn, Price and Simowitz join issue.