This address stresses the importance of the study of lawmaking. Three advantages in particular are emphasized: lawmaking is the core decision-making process in a democracy, its study offers an opportunity for Americanists to overcome concentrations on a single institution, and it provides a basis for comparative analysis. The discussion focuses on statute making as a primary phase of lawmaking. Four concepts—iteration, inquiry, speculation, and declaration—are identified as key, unexplored characteristics of statute making that hold substantial promise for research.

This paper develops a resource model of political participation. The resources considered are time, money, and civic skills—those communications and organizational capacities that are essential to political activity. These skills are not only acquired early in life but developed in the nonpolitical institutional settings of adult life: the workplace, organizations, and churches and synagogues. These resources are distributed differentially among groups defined by socioeconomic status. A two-stage least squares analysis shows these resources have powerful effects on overall political activity, thus explaining why socioeconomic status has traditionally been so powerful in predicting participation. We disaggregate overall activity into three kinds of acts: those that involve giving time, those that entail donating money, and voting. Each requires a different configuration of resources resulting in different patterns of stratification across various political acts.

If public opinion changes and then public policy responds, this is dynamic representation. Public opinion is the global policy preference of the American electorate. Policy is a diverse set of acts of elected and unelected officials. Two mechanisms of policy responsiveness are (1) elections change the government's political composition, which is then reflected in new policy and (2) policymakers calculate future (mainly electoral) implications of current public views and act accordingly (rational anticipation). We develop multiple indicators of policy activity for the House, Senate, presidency, and Supreme Court, then model policy liberalism as a joint function of the two mechanisms. For each institution separately, and also in a global analysis of “government as a whole,” we find that policy responds dynamically to public opinion change. This responsiveness varies by institution, both in level and in mechanism, as would be expected from constitutional design.

As arguments about the effectiveness of “muddling through” have proven frustratingly inconclusive, incrementalism—once a major approach to the study of boundedly rational policy processes—has gone dormant. In an attempt to revitalize the debate, I present a formal model of muddling through. The model, by clarifying the logical structure of the informal theory, presents a clearer target for criticism. More importantly, it establishes numerous deductive results. First, some of Lindblom's less controversial conjectures—about the benefits of seriality (repeated attacks on the same policy problem) and redundancy (multiple decision makers working on the same problem)—turn out to be correct if conflict across policy domains is absent or takes certain specified forms. But given other empirically reasonable types of conflict, even these claims are wrong. Second, the advantages of incremental (local) policy search (Lindblom's best-known and most controversial claim) turn out to be still less well founded: in many empirically plausible contexts the claim is invalid.

An important and pervasive view of campaign contributions is that they are given to promote access to successful candidates under circumstances when such access would not ordinarily be given. In this story, access is valuable as it offers groups the opportunity to influence legislative decisions through the provision of policy-relevant information. Under complete information regarding donors' policy preferences, I argue that this model predicts a negative relationship between contributions and the extent to which the groups' and the recipient legislators' preferences are similar. However, one of the more robust empirical findings in the literature is that this relationship is positive. Relaxing the informational assumption on donors' preferences, I reexamine the access story with a model in which campaign contributions can act as signals of policy preference and the (informational) value of access to any agent is endogenous.

The realignment perspective has exerted an enormous amount of influence on thinking about American politics, but recently it has fallen into disfavor. As a theory of political change, this dissatisfaction is warranted. However, in rejecting the realignment perspective, scholars risk losing a valuable concept, the notion of a critical realignment. My thesis is that, properly defined, the concept of a critical realignment can be a powerful tool in the study of electoral behavior and an important component of a broader theory of political change. This thesis derives from an analysis of presidential elections between 1828 and 1984. This analysis provides dramatic evidence for the proposition that critical realignments are important electoral phenomena. The evidence is equally clear, however, that critical realignments are subnational phenomena that vary considerably in form, not the majestic national movements some believed them to be. The analyses reported here reveal broadly based electoral eruptions of 40 to 50 points that endure for decades.

We examine the role of incumbent fundraising in deterring strong challengers. We construct a signaling model in which incumbents can use fundraising strategically to ward off quality challengers. We show, however, that only under very limited circumstances will there be an observable relationship between fundraising and challenger quality. Therefore, previous empirical tests for deterrence have systematically underestimated the effects of fundraising in decreasing electoral competition. Our analysis also suggests that by making fundraising easily observable, Federal Election Commission regulations may encourage candidates to overinvest time and resources accumulating large war chests instead of governing.

We seek to answer the question, What effect does international war participation have on the ability of political leaders to survive in office? We develop a model of political reliability and derive seven related hypotheses from it that anticipate variation in the time a national political leader will survive in office after the onset of a war. Drawing upon a broadly based data set on state involvement in international war between 1816 and 1975, our expectations are tested through censored Weibull regression. Four of the hypotheses are tested, and all are supported by the analysis. We find that those leaders who engage their nation in war subject themselves to a domestic political hazard that threatens the very essence of the office-holding homo politicus, the retention of political power. The hazard is mitigated by longstanding experience for authoritarian elites, an effect that is muted for democratic leaders, while the hazard is militated by defeat and high costs from war for all types of leaders. Additionally, we find that authoritarian leaders are inclined to war longer after they come to power than democratic leaders. Further, democratic leaders select wars with a lower risk of defeat than do their authoritarian counterparts.

Attempts to determine the impact of party control on state welfare policy have produced mixed and inconclusive results, in part due to our inability to account for variations in the state partisan environments. I used CBS/New York Times surveys combined over the period 1976–88 to offer a detailed examination of the state party systems, resulting in a description of the dominant social group partisan cleavage in each state. This information is then used to examine the impact of party control on state welfare benefits. The findings show that the coalitional bases of the parties vary in important ways, both within and across the states. These differences in the state party systems have an important influence on the relationship between party control and state welfare effort. Specifically, party control has a significantly greater impact in states where partisan divisions reflect class-based New Deal-type coalitions. When examined in the context of state partisan environments, party control has a much greater impact on state welfare effort than has been suggested by previous studies.

The political process often compensates the losers from technical change or international competition in an economically inefficient way, namely by subsidizing or protecting declining industries instead of encouraging the movement of resources to other more productive uses. We find that a dynamic inconsistency in the game of redistributive politics contributes to this outcome. To achieve economically efficient outcomes, it is necessary that those making economically inefficient choices not be given offsetting transfers. But the political process distributes income on the basis of political characteristics, which are in general different from the economic characteristics that are rewarded by the market. We identify circumstances in which the inefficient choosers have desirable political characteristics and are therefore immune from threats of having to face the economic consequences of their choices.

We find strong support for an on-line model of the candidate evaluation process that in contrast to memory-based models shows that citizens are responsive to campaign information, adjusting their overall evaluation of the candidates in response to their immediate assessment of campaign messages and events. Over time people forget most of the campaign information they are exposed to but are nonetheless able to later recollect their summary affective evaluation of candidates which they then use to inform their preferences and vote choice. These findings have substantive, methodological, and normative implications for the study of electoral behavior. Substantively, we show how campaign information affects voting behavior. Methodologically, we demonstrate the need to measure directly what campaign information people actually attend to over the course of a campaign and show that after controling for the individual's on-line assessment of campaign messages, National Election Study-type recall measures prove to be spurious as explanatory variables. Finally, we draw normative implications for democratic theory of on-line processing, concluding that citizens appear to be far more responsive to campaign messages than conventional recall models suggest.

The institutional grammar introduced here is based on a view that institutions are enduring regularities of human action in situations structured by rules, norms, and shared strategies, as well as by the physical world. The rules, norms, and shared strategies are constituted and reconstituted by human interaction in frequently occurring or repetitive situations. The syntax of the grammar identifies components of institutions and sorts them into three types of institutional statements: rules, norms, and shared strategies. We introduce the grammar, outline methods for operationalizing the syntax, apply the syntax to an analysis of cooperation in collective dilemma situations, and discuss the pragmatics of the grammar for analyses of behavior within complex institutional settings.

In the 1988 and 1991 national elections, Mexican voters asked themselves above all whether they continued to support the long-ruling official party. Voter behavior was not well explained by attachments to social cleavages, attitudes on policy issues, or general assessments about the present circumstances and the prospects for the nation's economy or personal finances. In both elections, moreover, the parties of the Left failed to mobilize voters that had chosen to abstain in past elections. Once voters were ready to oppose the ruling party, however, differences by issue, prospective economic assessments, and social cleavages shaped their choice between the opposition parties.

Presidents often lack legislative majorities, but situations of opposition-party majorities (“divided government”) are much less common outside the United States. The president's party's share of seats tends to increase in early-term elections but decline in later elections. Thus opposition majorities often result after midterm elections. Opposition majorities rarely occur in elections held concurrently with the presidential election but are more likely to do so if legislators enjoy electoral independence from their parties due to features of electoral laws.

We use computer simulation to identify a process by which cooperation evolves without iteration, and evolves better in large than in small societies. It is based on an empirically supported heuristic for deciding whether to enter noniterated prisoner's dilemma games, namely, Expect others to have the same dispositions as yourself. Players are assigned a probability of cooperating that also defines their expectations about others' behavior and thus their willingness to play. The carrying capacity of the ecology is 10,000. Players multiply by 2 if their aggregate payoff in a given round (1) places them among the more successful 5,000 and (2) is more than zero. We find that the most adaptive disposition is toward the mean of the population. That is where individuals have the optimal mix of consummated plays with more cooperative players and unconsummated plays with less cooperative ones. When encounters occur by proximity, fortuitous clusters toward the cooperative tail will grow and dominate the society. Such clusters are more likely in large societies.

The study of land tenure polarizes the field of development. Neoclassical scholars lobby for a move toward private property rights, while other economists and historians defend the maintenance of customary land tenure. I argue that the development scholars' focus on the structure of property rights obscures a more fundamental problem of land reform—that of enforcement. Property rights will not inspire individual investment and economic growth unless political institutions give the ruler of a local community or nation-state sufficient coercive authority to silence those who advocate an alternative, more distributionally favorable property rights system. At the same time, political institutions must force the ruler to establish a credible commitment to that property rights system. I illustrate this theoretical argument through an analysis of property rights institutions in Akyem Abuakwa, a traditional state in colonial Ghana.

Informational theories of legislative institutions have demonstrated the potential collective gains from committee specialization due to the use of restrictive amendment procedures. For these benefits to be realized, however, the floor majority must overcome a commitment problem. I demonstrate that in a multistage game, majority rule, combined with the fact that generations of legislators overlap, allows the legislature to solve the commitment problem and to sustain legislative norms and institutions even if legislators are “finitely lived.” The model suggests that rather than restrictive amendment procedures, it is the committee's expectation of floor deference that sustains committee specialization. As a consequence, legislative norms may collapse due to an unexpected influx of new members even if the distribution of preferences in the legislature does not change. Finally, I discuss consequences for a comparative study of legislative institutions.

I examine the effect of economic crises on domestic political regime change. Using a statistical technique known as event history analysis and a new data set that identifies all instances of regime change in the 97 largest Third World countries, I develop multivariate models of democratic breakdown and democratic transition. My main findings are that inflationary crises inhibited democratization from the 1950s through the early 1970s but may have facilitated it in the late 1980s and that recessionary crises facilitated democratic breakdown but had no effect on democratic transition throughout this period. The inflation findings—though not the recession findings—support the arguments of Karen Remmer and Samuel Huntington that the processes affecting democratization were very different in the 1980s than in earlier eras. A number of other explanatory variables emerge as significant determinants of regime change, providing support for several other contentions that have appeared in the literature.

Anorm of civility defines a standard of conduct that citizens can rightfully expect from strangers. What are appropriate norms of civility for citizens of liberal states? I argue that two approaches to civility are prominent in our political culture, one requiring “mere” tolerance, the other, that we affirm the worth of others' pursuits (and thereby the worth of those others). This split parallels a division in liberal theory between an interest-based account of liberalism (represented primarily by J. S. Mill) and a status-based account (represented principally by John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin), respectively. The exploration of this theoretical divide and how it relates to contending notions of civility helps to clarify disputes in the broader culture. I conclude that interest-based liberalism offers a more satisfactory approach to the issue at hand.

Negative campaigning is an important aspect of campaign competition but plays little or no role in existing models of campaigns. Within the context of plurality elections for a single office we model the incentives that affect the use of negative campaigning. Under simplifying but still quite general assumptions we show a number of results, including the following key conclusions: (1) for two-candidate competition the front-runner will engage in more positive and less negative campaigning than the opponent; (2) in a three-candidate contest with one candidate clearly trailing by a large margin and playing mainly a spoiler role, that candidate will only engage in positive campaigning; and (3) in any three-candidate contest, no candidate engages in negative campaigning against the weaker of his two opponents, so that to the extent there is negative campaigning, it will be directed against the front-runner or it will come from the front-runner. These results have direct empirical applications to multicandidate primaries and nonpartisan contests and can provide insight into recent general elections as well.