Viewing the African American experience through a systemic perspective tells much about the nature and operation of the political system. I suggest that a systemic perspective incorporates a broad range of factors that must be considered in a constitutional context that guides not only the choice of goals and strategies, but also signals the relative chances of success in the outcome of interest conflict. I focus on the capacity and limits of various strategies, and show how the political system generally militates against fundamental policy change. However, on rare occasions such policy change does occur, but it is difficult to implement and maintain, especially regarding the matter of race. Under the circumstances, I suggest that overcoming America's continuing dilemma of race requires extraordinary leadership and people of good will who are determined to see the constitutional-democratic system work.

The research reported here develops an explanation for the often-noted absence of international war between democratic states. This explanation is derived from a theoretical rationale centered on universal democratic norms for reconciling competing values and interests. I argue that democratic states locked in disputes are better equipped than others with the means for diffusing conflict situations at an early stage before they have an opportunity to escalate to military violence. Not only is this explanatory logic consistent with the published findings on democracy and war, but it also entails the novel empirical proposition that disputes between democracies are more amenable than are other disputes to peaceful settlements, the hypothesis I examine here. Analyses of contemporary interstate disputes reveal that even when potentially confounding factors are controlled, democratic opponents are significantly more likely to reach peaceful settlements than other types of disputants.

I present a model of electoral competition in which candidates raise campaign contributions by choosing policies that benefit interest groups and then expend those contributions to influence voters who are uninformed about the policies. Informed voters, however, vote based on those policies, so candidates face a trade-off between choosing a policy to generate funds to attract the uninformed vote and choosing a policy to attract the informed vote. Electoral equilibria are characterized for two categories of policies: particularistic and collective. In the case of particularistic policies, the equilibrium policies of the candidates are separated if the proportion of uninformed voters is sufficiently high, and the degree of separation is an increasing function of that proportion. The model is extended to include the public financing of elections and incumbency advantages. For the case of collective policies, the candidates locate at the median of the ideal points of the informed voters, and contributions are zero.

Jurisdictions are the defining characteristics of committee systems, and they are central in any discussions about the U. S. Congress; yet we know little about them. Where do committee property rights come from? Are they rigid? Are they flexible? I introduce a distinction between statutory jurisdictions (which are written in the House and Senate Rules) and common law jurisdictions (which emerge through bill referral precedents). Turf is gained through common law advances, not through formal rules changes (like the “reforms” passed by the House in 1946, 1974, and 1980). Jurisdictional change is ongoing and incremental. The analysis draws on an examination of hearings held by the House Commerce Committee from 1947 through 1990.

Voters in mass elections are notorious for their apparent lack of information about relevant political matters. While some scholars argue that an electorate of well-informed voters is necessary for the production of responsive electoral outcomes, others argue that apparently ignorant voters will suffice because they can adapt their behavior to the complexity of electoral choice. To evaluate the validity of these arguments, I develop and analyze a survey of California voters who faced five complicated insurance reform ballot initiatives. I find that access to a particular class of widely available information shortcuts allowed badly informed voters to emulate the behavior of relatively well informed voters. This finding is suggestive of the conditions under which voters who lack encyclopedic information about the content of electoral debates can nevertheless use information shortcuts to vote as though they were well informed.

American social welfare policy involves a politically significant fiscal interaction between short-run, pay-as-you-go constraints and long-run equilibrium constraints motivated by the contributory principle and the concept of actuarial soundness. The fiscal constraints induce conflict between benefit recipients and payroll-tax-payers. To support small election-year reductions in payroll taxes, means-tested program benefits are slightly reduced in election years (compared to non-election-year levels under similar economic conditions). The existence of the constraints and of the election-year changes is tested using a multivariate time series regression model of monthly transfer payments and contributions for social insurance during years 1948–87. Short-run dynamics are found to be weakly incrementalist, but otherwise the results support the argument. Extraordinary manipulations are identified during 1972. Special technical features of the econometric analysis are a nonlinear, dynamic specification; robust generalized method of moments estimation; and near cointegration.

Increasingly, it is said that the main determinants of electoral outcomes are class, ethnicity, and religion and that local political organizations occupy only marginal roles in national elections. I assess the effects of local party organizations in the presidential election of 1989 in Brazil. Given the long hiatus in competitive politics, the absence of any parties linked to the country's previous democratic experience, and the weakness of citizen identification with political parties, Brazil should be a textbook example of the collapse of local political organizations. The presidential candidates, however, acted as if party endorsements mattered, and in the context of Brazilian politics, it was rational for municipal mayors to trade blocs of votes for future local benefits. Applying a series of increasingly complex models to the vote shares of the leading candidates, I show that all candidates did significantly better in municipalities where the mayor represented their party. I also show that spatial factors affect the tactics of local politicians, and I distinguish charismatic from purely organizational components of support.

Bargaining failure has been neglected in the study of interparty coalitions. I examine the unsuccessful attempt by three Norwegian nonsocialist parties to defeat a Labor party minority government in June 1987 when the majority opposition twice failed to agree on a simple vote to that end. This failure of coalition bargaining was facilitated by incomplete information, intraparty constraints and misdelegation of authority, and by anticipation of the impending parliamentary recess. Despite these complexities, simple noncooperative games like the war of attrition can shed considerable light on this and other unsuccessful negotiations. The “Presthus debacle” demonstrates that political parties bring many different objectives to the bargaining table and that the trade-offs between these objectives vary according to organizational and institutional conditions.

The European Parliament under the current cooperation procedure has an important power: it can make proposals that, if accepted by the Commission of the European Communities, are easier for the Council of Ministers to accept than to modify, since only qualified majority is required for acceptance, whereas full unanimity for modification. The importance of this power, which I call the power of the conditional agenda setter, has not been recognized in previous scholarly work. For structural reasons explained in the text, this power is likely to increase in the future. I conclude by arguing that the conditional delegation of power to international actors (the European Parliament, Commission, and the Court of Justice) is a frequent phenomenon in European institutions. This delegation presents three important advantages: it makes possible the selection of one among many possible equilibria, it accelerates European integration, and it diffuses responsibility for politically unpopular measures.

Aristotle's science of the best regime brings to light an almost forgotten hut by no means settled quarrel between reason and faith concerning the best way of life and its political embodiments. Aristotle denies the claimed superiority of divine legislation, in favor of the guidance supplied by unaided reason. Aristotle knows, however, as contemporary political science may not, that only by confronting the divine law as such can science avoid collapsing into dogmatism. The present study attempts to sketch that confrontation by considering Aristotle's analysis of justice—the concern fundamental to both Aristotle and divine law—in order simply to encourage the kind of reflection necessary to reinvigorate rationalism, or that which, according to Aristotle, is closest to the divine in man.

Hannah Arendt never wrote systematically on the subject of democracy. In her book of greatest relevance to the subject, On Revolution, she criticized liberal democracy, and defended a conception of virtuous political “elites,” leading most commentators to view her as an opponent of democracy. I argue that Arendt defended a distinctive conception of grass-roots democracy, and that her conception of elites is distinctively democratic rather than anti-democratic. I bolster this argument by examining her historical context, and conclude by assessing the relevance of Arendt's conception of democracy.

When Kant first used the term “culture,” he referred to the human capacity to will universal moral laws. Multiculturalists object to the denial of “difference” implicit in Kantian as well as all other Enlightenment forms of universalism. Their objection stems from their more particularistic understanding of culture, which for the most part everyone shares today. Plato is frequently said to be the fount of (universal) natural law theory; yet a medieval Muslim philosopher, Alfarabi, presents a Plato who denies moral universalism but acknowledges the possibility of some form of universalism, at least in the realm of knowledge. Alfarabi's Plato thereby provides a corrective for both extreme contemporary particularism and extreme Kantian universalism.

Citizens of a representative democracy are twice removed from legislation. First, they do not deliberate and vote directly on legislation. Rather they elect assemblies that enact such legislation in their stead. Second, and less commonly remarked, citizens do not vote directly for assemblies. Rather they vote for individual candidates, with the candidates receiving the most votes elected. We examine the efficiency properties of these voting systems.

In this note we elaborate on the conditions under which on-line and memory-based strategies of political candidate evaluation can be implemented. We suggest that the structure of information may be an important contextual variable affecting the voter's choice of these strategies. In addition, we propose that citizens with less political sophistication are particularly sensitive to structural differences in the political information environment. We use an experimental design that manipulates the information-processing context to test these ideas. Our results suggest that the context in which information is presented plays a critical role in moderating the influence of individual differences in political sophistication.