In this article, I examine critically Donald Winch's interpretation of the politics of Adam Smith. I explain how Winch wrests Smith's political thought out of the larger vision of commercial society that is found in his moral, political, and economic writings, and how Winch misreads Smith's understanding of particular political problems such as the dehumanized workforce and the standing army. I also show how Winch's civic humanist reading of Smith's political thought fails to appreciate Smith's liberal conceptualizations of corruption and public-mindedness in a modern commercial society. Finally, I suggest that our failure to understand the politics of Adam Smith does not lie in our liberal interpretation of his work, as Winch claims, but in our understanding of what constitutes liberal political discourse.

We suggest a method for estimating a political representative's personal ideology and its effect on his or her voting decisions. The current practice of using the ratings of a pressure group such as Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) as a proxy for personal ideology is shown to have a number of theoretical and interpretive flaws. Our technique uses the residuals from two regression equations to provide answers to two questions: Is there a systematic ideological component to the voting behavior of political representatives after taking account of other political determinants, and if a systematic ideological component exists, is it possible to determine its role in voting on particular issues? The technique developed and the currently accepted practice are compared using votes on labor issues as an empirical example.

Existing rational choice treatments of collective violence have consistently discounted the role of the public goods component of the individual's decision calculus about whether or not to participate in such acts. By assuming free rider effects with respect to the public goods, these theories are unable to account for the initial inception of violence or for the later nonlooting behaviors that constitute aspects of a riot and, indeed, are preconditions for the inception of looting, the only riot behavior for which these theories can offer any explanation. Five dimensions of discrimination are defined in rational choice terms and their elimination (or reduction) is defined as the creation of a public good. I use existing theories of individual contributions to the provision of public goods to demonstrate that free rider effects need not be assumed and that the inception of a riot and later nonlooting riot behaviors can best be explained as individual contributions to the provision of the public goods represented by the elimination of the several forms of discrimination.

One of the critical questions in the debate about the concept of party identification is its stability over time, particularly its stability relative to that of voting behavior. This article utilizes data from a new three-wave panel study to assess the properties of party identification in Canada, and to compare levels of partisan stability in Canada with those in Great Britain and the United States. In addition to directional stability, other features of the party identification concept and its applicability to Canada are examined, notably the constituency of identification across levels of the federal system. Analyses indicate that party identification in Canada is subject to considerable fluctuation, and that the U.S. pattern of relatively stable party identification coupled with substantial short-term swings in voting behavior reflect the institutional characteristics of the U. S. electoral system. The article concludes by suggesting that patterns of partisanship in Canada, although distinctive in certain respects, probably have important commonalities with those in many other contemporary liberal democracies.

A considerable amount of the international politics literature attempts to explain international conflict on the basis of the distribution of power between and among nations. There are, however, divergent views of this linkage. One view argues that wars are most likely to take place between nations of similar power, while another asserts that wars are most likely when power is unequal. Research seeking to explore this phenomenon has not investigated the capability augmenting effects of alliances on power relationships and has tended to focus its attention upon the occurrence of wars. This research examines the individual and joint effects of power and alliance upon the probability of 256 conflicts to escalate to reciprocated military action. The main finding is that equality of power, supplemented by alliance with a major power for those nations that are weak, tends to restrain the likelihood that a conflict will escalate.

Despite their widespread influence, Martin Heidegger's works have rarely been assessed for their own direct significance as political theory. In this article I undertake such an assessment by drawing out the political implications of Heidegger's understanding of freedom and community in two of his early works. Specifically, I argue that, although Heidegger's thought has been interpreted as advocating political conservatism, it in fact propounds a new kind of radicalism which is neither precisely conservative nor progressive, although decidedly revolutionary. When this is brought to light, it is easier to see the connection between Heidegger's works and the earlier Philosophy of Freedom, as well as ways in which they anticipate important trends in contemporary political thought.

This article explores both the influence that Montesquieu's typology of regimes exerted on Hegel's thought and Hegel's ultimate rejection of Montesquieu's monarchical order, especially its cult of honor, as a plausible candidate for containing and expressing the citizen's “claims for private judgment, private willing, and private caprice.” Can Hegel provide a substitute model of a polity, neither republican nor despotic, which corrects the particularism of Montesquieu's monarchical society? Marx did not think so. His criticism of Hegel exactly parallels Hegel's criticism of Montesquieu. Hegel's dilemma may be expressed in more contemporary terms as the difficulty in reconciling the goals of “neutrality” and “communicative competence.” The latter reflects the concerns of Montesquieu's moral geography, whereas the former reflects the rather different preoccupations of the social contract tradition.

As no passage in Thucydides is more important, so none is more dramatic than the Mytilenaian Debate. Having resolved to punish harshly a rebel city, the Athenians repent and reconsider. Exhorted by Kleon to maintain their original decision and by Diototos to abandon it, the Athenians must scrutinize the relationship between justice and expediency. Diodotos, who professes to argue from interest only, narrowly prevails in the debate. There is, however, much more to his speech than meets the eye. For it proves misleading to say that he is arguing merely from interest—and then, on a deeper level, to say that he is arguing from justice. In fact no passage in Thucydides, including the Melian Dialogue, raises starker questions about the status of political justice.

Drawing upon a comprehensive list of political writings by Americans published between 1760 and 1805, the study uses a citation count drawn from these 916 items as a surrogate measure of the relative influence of European writers upon American political thought during the era. Contrary to the general tendencies in the recent literature, the results here indicate that there was no one European writer, or one tradition of writers, that dominated American political thought. There is evidence for moving beyond the Whig-Enlightenment dichotomy as the basis for textual analysis, and for expanding the set of individual European authors considered to have had an important effect on American thinking. Montesquieu, Blackstone, and Hume are most in need of upgrading in this regard. The patterns of influence apparently varied over the time period from 1760 to 1805, and future research on the relative influence of European thinkers must be more sensitive to this possibility.