Machiavelli is presented as the founder of modern political science, with due regard to the fact that he never spoke of “political science.” His usage of “prudence” and “art” in The Prince is examined to see whether, as founder, he was a teacher or a ruler of future generations. His comprehensive attack on classical political science is outlined and developed through two essential points, the cycle and the soul.

This article investigates the conditions under which cooperation will emerge in a world of egoists without central authority. This problem plays an important role in such diverse fields as political philosophy, international politics, and economic and social exchange. The problem is formalized as an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma with pairwise interaction among a population of individuals.

Results from three approaches are reported: the tournament approach, the ecological approach, and the evolutionary approach. The evolutionary approach is the most general since all possible strategies can be taken into account. A series of theorems is presented which show: (1) the conditions under which no strategy can do any better than the population average if the others are using the reciprocal cooperation strategy of TIT FOR TAT, (2) the necessary and sufficient conditions for a strategy to be collectively stable, and (3) how cooperation can emerge from a small cluster of discriminating individuals even when everyone else is using a strategy of unconditional defection.

A selective review of the literature on equal educational opportunity supports an argument for explicit use of normative models in research. The argument has two parts. First, we show that confusion over the Coleman Report (1966) was due to a mismatch between the implied reform objective and the statistical approach. The objective was to reduce black/white differences in educational achievement, but the statistics explained individual differences in achievement. Second, we partly develop and apply a normative dynamic model of the objectives of school integration over time. Normative dynamic models could be used in conjunction with behavioral data to operationalize theoretical concepts such as accountability, symbolic politics and non-decisions.

Previous research on the distribution of federal aid monies has been dominated by the donor's perspective. Different distribution formulas, political influence of congressional representatives, bureaucrats, and individual aid recipients have been studied as the sole determinants of aid allocations. Each explanation, however, fails to examine the question of aid allocations from a demand-side perspective. This omission assumes that all governmental units are equally desirous of federal assistance and that any bias in the distribution of federal aid is a function of supply-side conditions. Identifying a linkage between demand-side and supply-side determinants of aid allocations, this article proposes and tests hypotheses derived from an integrated model of federal aid allocations.

The notion that at-large elections for city council seats are discriminatory toward blacks has recently been attacked as empirically invalid. Recent studies have reached conflicting conclusions as to whether electoral arrangements or socioeconomic factors are the major influence on how proportionately blacks are represented. This article addresses this issue, using a regression-based analysis in which proportionality is treated as a relationship across cities with electoral structure as a specifying variable. Socioeconomic variables found to be important in other studies are included. The results support the traditional notion and suggest that the electoral structure begins to have a discernible impact on the level of black representation once the black population reaches 10 percent of the total municipal population. While one socioeconomic variable, the relative income of the city's black population, is found to affect the election of blacks, its impact is greater than that of the electoral structure only when the black population is less than 15 percent.

The prevailing view among students of judicial politics is that judges' background characteristics or personal attributes cannot provide satisfactory explanations for variation in their decision-making behavior. Parsimonious attribute models reported here account for 70 to 90 percent of the variance in the voting of postwar Supreme Court justices in split decisions concerning civil rights and liberties, and economics. Seven variables representing six meaningful and easily interpretable concepts achieve this success. The concepts are Judge's Party Identification, Appointing President, Prestige of Prelaw Education (economics only), Appointed from Elective Office, Appointment Region (civil liberties only), Extensiveness of Judicial Experience, and Type of Prosecutorial Experience. The impressive performance of these models is attributed to superior measurement, operationalization, and model building; to a greater similarity between personal attribute models and more fully specified ones than has been assumed; and to the possibility that the attitudes which intervene between the personal attributes and the voting of judges are causally very closely linked to voting.

This article presents a model of decision making and introduces a new theoretical variable to the literature, namely, the modes of decision making. The theoretical focus is on the face-to-face group, and the article also develops an innovative methodology for studying this type of decision-making behavior. Variation in the decision modes is explained as a function of the strategic considerations of individual decision makers. These considerations are affected by a set of four independent variables: structure of the decision group, substance of the conflict, context of the conflict, and the decision process. The data, drawn from observations of decision-making groups in Switzerland, are tested with discriminant analysis and a simulation. In both cases total correct classifications exceed 55 percent, indicating that there is a meaningful structure relating variation in the decision modes to the theoretical framework.

Individual members of the U. S. Congress work with staffs ranging in size from a minimum of 18 to a maximum of well over 100. Each member has come to preside over a personnel system and, consequently, may best be understood as an enterprise manager. In this article we examine these congressional enterprises in order to gain some insight about the autonomy of individual staffers, the stability of these member-centered enterprises, and generally, the responsiveness of staffers to member objectives. While it is difficult to observe or measure responsiveness directly, some purchase on the question is gained through an investigation of the causes and consequences of staff turnover; this is the major empirical focus of the research reported here.

Because of changes in the issues at the center of controversy, changes in rules and norms and high membership turnover, the current House majority party leaders operate in a much less predictable environment than their predecessors did. In response to the changed environment, Speaker O'Neill has developed the strategy of leadership by inclusion, a central element of which is the Speaker's task force, an ad hoc group appointed by the Speaker and charged with passage of a specific bill. The leaders believe task forces help them perform both of their primary functions—building winning coalitions and “keeping peace in the family.” By increasing the number of people working in an organized way to pass the bill at issue, the task force increases the probability of a bill's success on the floor. Work on a task force satisfies junior members' expectations of participation and fosters cooperative patterns of behavior among party members.

This article deals with the transition in House leadership from Cannon to Rayburn. The transition involved moving from a hierarchical pattern of leadership to a bargaining pattern. In accounting for this transition, we argue that it is the institutional context of the House that determines leadership power and style. Moreover, we argue that there is no straightforward relationship between leadership style and effectiveness; rather, style and effectiveness are contingent or situational. We conclude that the impact of institutional context on leadership behavior is itself primarily determined by party strength. When party strength is high, power is concentrated and leaders are task- or goal-oriented, whereas when party strength is low, power is dispersed and leaders will be oriented to bargaining and maintaining relationships.

This study shows that a simple, empirically derived rule accounts well for the outcome of multi-ballot, majority-rule conventions in the period 1848-1948 and that the same rule would have enabled one to predict correctly the outcome of all contested presidential nominations since 1952 before any candidate had achieved majority support in the Associated Press'polls of delegates. The rule's success suggests two conclusions about the behavior of delegates: (1) that their guesses about outcomes are based on objective cues, similarly interpreted, and (2) that the trend in voting for candidates, in addition to the level of support they attract, is an important element of such cues. The study's findings also suggest that delegates in recent years do not contrast sharply with their predecessors in their predilection for bandwagon voting.

Past individual-level studies of economic voting (1) have incorrectly operationalized the model they employ by using past-oriented rather than future-oriented questions and (2) have failed to examine the level of economic voting in United States Senate elections. Using the 1978 National Election Study, we show that economic voting exists in Senate but not House elections, presumably due to the differences in electoral context. Even when economic voting occurs, however, there is no guarantee that the public will influence the direction of macroeconomic policy.

This study explores the hypothesis that voting in response to economic problems is policy-oriented: voters concerned about unemployment ore predicted to give greater support to Democratic candidates, while those concerned about inflation are predicted to vote more Republican. In light of evidence from previous research, this study investigates the electoral effects of inflation and unemployment as (1) problems directly experienced by the individual, and (2) problems deemed serious for the nation as a whole. Support is strongest for the unemployment side of the hypothesis. Voters personally affected by unemployment gave a modest boost to Democratic candidates in virtually every election. And in years of high unemployment the large percentage of voters who fell it was a serious national problem voted heavily Democratic as well. This study concludes by discussing the important implications these findings have for our understanding of how economic conditions influence voting behavior in American national elections.