I explore possible links between liberalism and conceptions of individual virtue. I first distinguish between virtue seen as instrumental to the preservation of societies and institutions and virtue seen as intrinsically valuable, that is, as an end in itself. I argue that certain distinctive instrumental virtues are required for well-functioning liberal societies, economies, and political institutions. I then sketch different versions of liberal intrinsic virtue and explore the tensions among them and between them and liberal instrumental virtue. I conclude with some competing conjectures as to what extent necessary liberal virtues are being fostered through current institutions.

This symposium features three critiques of Gabriel Almonds argument—by Eric A. Nordlinger of Brown University, Theodore J. Lowi of Cornell University, and Sergio Fabbrini of the University of Trento.

We identify three basic elements of Rousseau's theory of the general will: (1) there is a common good; (2) citizens are not always accurate in their judgments about what is in the common good; and (3) when citizens strive to identify the common good and vote in accordance with their perceptions of it, the vote of the Assembly of the People can be taken to be the most reliable means for ascertaining the common good. We then show that Condorcet's (1785) model of collective judgment shares these assumptions with Rousseau and that understanding the implications of Condorcet's (1785) “jury theorem” enables us to clarify many of the most obscure aspects of Rousseau's treatment of the general will, including his discussion of the debilitating effects of factions and his confidence in the ability of the Assembly of the People to discern the general will by means of voting.

The core of a voting game is the set of undominated outcomes, that is, those that once in place cannot be overturned. For spatial voting games, a core is structurally stable if it remains in existence even if there are small perturbations in the location of voter ideal points. While for simple majority rule a core will exist in games with more than one dimension only under extremely restrictive symmetry conditions, we show that, for certain supramajorities, a core must exist. We also provide conditions under which it is possible to construct a structurally stable core. If there are only a few dimensions, our results demonstrate the stability properties of such frequently used rules as two-thirds and three-fourths. We further explore the implications of our results for the nature of political stability by looking at outcomes in experimental spatial voting games and at Belgian cabinet formation in the late 1970s.

Measuring the U.S. Supreme Court's policy changes is complicated by change in the content of the cases that come before the Court. I adapt from earlier scholarship a method to correct for changes in case content and use this method to measure change in the Court's support for civil liberties in the 1946–85 terms. Analysis based on this method indicates that because of changes in case content, the average difficulty of reaching a pro-civil liberties result varied during that period. With corrections for case difficulty, the Warren Court of the 1950s appears to have been more conservative, and the Burger Court more liberal, than patterns of case outcomes themselves suggest. This method, while imperfect, has utility for the measurement of policy change in the Supreme Court and other institutions and thus can serve as a building block in analyses of the processes and determinants of change.

A principal-agent perspective has been employed in recent studies to rediscover the importance of democratic hierarchies in shaping public bureaucratic outputs. I test the robustness of the hierarchy model for explaining outputs from an agency that has often been cast in the image of bureaucratic independence, the Environmental Protection Agency. Examining the effect of the Reagan presidency on EPA outputs for clean air, Box-Tiao models are constructed to explain shifts in the vigor of air pollution enforcements between 1977 and 1985. The analysis shows that the influence of elected institutions is limited when an agency has substantial bureaucratic resources and a zeal for their use. Moreover, under these conditions, bureaucracy can even move outputs in directions completely opposite from what a model of hierarchy would predict. The implication is that for some agencies it is necessary to give greater consideration to the agent in explaining implementation outcomes through time.

We use simulations based on a multiequation model of federal budgetary outcomes to assess the Reagan administrations impact on the federal budget during fiscal years 1982–86. Reagan's aggregate budget priorities represent a significant departure from the priorities of prior postwar administrations. The bulk of this shift in priorities had occurred by fiscal 1984. Defense spending and uncontrollable domestic spending were higher, and spending on domestic controllable programs lower under Reagan than they would otherwise have been. The distinctiveness of Reagan's budgetary priorities can be attributed to his tax cuts and—far from a strategy of “starving the budget by reducing revenues”—to a failure to allow fiscal pressures to restrain spending. The model projects that without tax cuts Reagan's predecessors would have spent no less on defense than Reagan. Cutting taxes increased the deficit by about $400 billion cumulatively during fiscal years 1982–86 and reduced expenditures by roughly $30 billion.

Are there appropriate limits to the application of rational choice in political decision making? Does rationalism in politics lead to absolutism? Is there a “pressing threat” to liberal democracy “posed by the irreverent conviction of the hegemony of reason”? In the June 1987 issue of this Review, Darrell Dobbs drew lesson from Homer's epic poem, the Odyssey, to argue the limits of rationalism in politics. In this Controversy, Robert Crafstein argues that Dobbs's case against rationalism is not proved. In turn, Dobbs holds to his construction of the relevance of Odysseus' nod to sacred values.

Do U.S. senators adjust their policy positions or voting behavior—engage in “strategic moderation”—in their quest for reelection? In the June 1986 issue of this Review, Gerald Wright and Michael Berkman sought to demonstrate that Senate incumbents moderate their ideological positions as elections near. This endeavor was part of their larger effort to show the importance of policy issues in the selection of members of Congress. Robert Bernstein takes the view that the claims about strategic moderation rest on methodological flaws. But Wright and Berkman argue that most investigators agree on the general direction of senatorial candidate behavior. The controversy turns on conception and interpretation of analytical results.

Recent research has altered our understanding of how voters select a candidate in U.S. presidential elections. Scholars have demonstrated empirically that issues, candidate personalities, candidate evaluations, and party identification interact in a dynamic simultaneous fashion to determine vote choice. Other researchers have shown that prenomination candidate preferences play an integral role in structuring the general election vote. We join together these two important trends to introduce and test a revised model of vote choice, using 1980 NES panel data. The results reconfirm that candidate selection is part of a dynamic simultaneous process and reveal for the first time that prenomination preferences are woven tightly into this causal web.

Taiwan has displayed a comparatively heavy defense burden and rapid economic growth. Time series data from this case are used to analyze three models of the effects of defense burden on economic growth: the modernization model, the capital formation model, and the export-led growth model. The results indicate that all these models capture parts of the empirical reality, but none can account for all the complexity of this reality. Indeed, in some crucial respects each of the models—based, as they have been primarily, on intercountry comparisons—is contradicted by the Taiwanese time series. I conclude that Taiwan has not so much been able to avoid entirely the trade-offs between defense and growth as to relax these trade-offs. The reasons contributing to this relaxation tend to set the Taiwanese experience apart from the experiences of most other countries.

Aaron Wildavsky has argued that it is theoretically more useful to think of political preferences as rooted in political culture than to entertain alternative bases such as schemas or ideologies. In the APSA presidential address in which he made his case, Wildavsky also advocated a program of research on political cultures, and welcomed “challenges and improvements.” David Laitin accepts the invitation; he variously takes issue with Wildavsky's concept of political culture.

A spirited debate has arisen over the best approach to the analysis of the durability of governing coalitions in parliamentary democracies. In this controversy, Kaare Strom enters a number of criticisms of the stochastic modeling approach offered by Eric C. Browne, John P. Frendreis, and Dennis W. Gleiber, and by Claudio Cioffi-Revilla. In turn, Browne and his colleagues join the issue.

Several recent studies have claimed to explain the post-1960 decline in U.S. presidential and congressional election turnout in terms of just a few variables. Abramson and Aldrich (1982) attribute the great bulk of the decline to aggregate declines in partisanship and political efficacy. Shaffer (1981) attributes still more of the decline to aggregate decreases in these same two variables plus age and following the campaign in the newspapers. And Kleppner (1982) attributes “virtually all” of the decline to aggregate decreases in the first three of these variables. We show how these studies measure explanation too generously and how the very short-handedness of their models makes them seem more successful than they are. These few variables, we conclude, leave most of the decline unexplained.

In the June 1987 issue of this Review, Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter offered evidence to support their argument that “the new environmental movement in the United States is partly a symbolic issue,” that elites in the news media and in public interest groups misrepresent the dangers of nuclear energy as a surrogate for more direct criticism of liberal capitalism in the United States. In this controversy, Charles J. Helm expresses skeptictem about the Rothman-Lichter line of argument; and they respond.