We present a model of war duration which incorporates both realpolitik and domestic political variables. We hypothesize that strategy, terrain, capabilities, and government type, among other variables, will play key roles in determining the duration of war. We test these hypotheses using hazard analysis and find empirical support for our key arguments. We find that the realpolitik variables play a greater role than regime behavior and type in determining war duration. We also find that historically, on average, mobilization and strategic surprise have little effect on war duration and that wars are not duration dependent.

India has been the one major deviant case for consociational (power-sharing) theory, and its sheer size makes the exception especially damaging. A deeply divided society with, supposedly, a mainly majoritarian type of democracy, India nevertheless has been able to maintain its democratic system. Careful examination reveals, however, that Indian democracy has displayed all four crucial elements of power-sharing theory. In fact, it was a perfectly and thoroughly consociational system during its first two decades. From the late 1960s on, although India has remained basically consociational, some of its power-sharing elements have weakened under the pressure of greater mass mobilization. Concomitantly, in accordance with consociational theory, intergroup hostility and violence have increased. Therefore, India is not a deviant case for consociational theory but, instead, an impressive confirming case.

I present a formal model of the confidence vote procedure, an institutional arrangement that permits a prime minister to attach the fate of a particular policy to a vote on government survival. The analysis indicates that confidence vote procedures make it possible for prime ministers to exercise significant control over the nature of policy outcomes, even when these procedures are not actually invoked. Neither cabinet ministers, through their authority over specific portfolios, nor members of parliament, through the use of no-confidence motions, can counteract the prime minister's policy control on the floor of parliament. The analysis also illuminates the circumstances under which prime ministers should invoke confidence vote procedures, focusing attention on the position-taking incentives of the parties that support the government, rather than on the level of policy conflict between the government and parliament.

Control over agency budgets is a critical tool of political influence in regulatory decision making, yet the causal mechanism of budgetary control is unclear. Do budgetary manipulations influence agencies by imposing resource constraints or by transmitting powerful signals to the agency? I advance and test a stochastic process model of adaptive signal processing by a hierarchical agency to address this question. The principal findings of the paper are two. First, presidents and congressional committees achieve budgetary control over agencies not by manipulating aggregate resource constraints but by transmitting powerful signals through budget shifts. Second, bureaucratic hierarchy increases the agency's response time in processing budgetary signals, limiting the efficacy of the budget as a device of political control. I also show that the magnitude of agency response to budgetary signals increased for executive-branch agencies after 1970 due to executive oversight reforms. I conclude by discussing the limits of budgetary manipulations as a device of political control and the response of elected authorities to adaptive signal processing by agencies.

Minimal winning coalitions have appeared as a key prediction or as an essential assumption of virtually all formal models of coalition formation, vote buying, and logrolling. Notwithstanding this research, we provide a model showing that supermajority coalitions may be cheaper than minimal winning coalitions. Specifically, if vote buyers move sequentially, and if the losing vote buyer is always granted a last chance to attack the winner's coalition, then minimal winning coalitions will generally not be cheapest, and equilibrium coalitions will generally not be minimal winning. We provide results relating equilibrium coalition size with preferences of the legislators and vote buyers, and we show that minimal winning coalitions should occur in only rare cases. We discuss these results in light of empirical work on coalition size and suggest other possible avenues for testing our model.

A collective goods program, such as an entitlement program, distributes benefits and costs according to constituents' characteristics. This paper presents a dynamic theory of the legislative choice of collective goods programs based on a sequential model of proposal-making and voting in a majority-rule legislature where the status quo in a session is given by the program last enacted. A stationary Markov perfect equilibrium is characterized for a unidimensional collective goods program and yields a generalized median voter theorem, comparative statics on preferences and legislative procedures, and a characterization of the dynamics of such programs. Equilibrium programs can expand or contract over time, but they ultimately converge to the median. On the path to that point, legislators may act strategically to address the durability problem—that a future legislature can undo the actions of the present legislature—by strategically positioning the status quo to limit the changes that future legislatures can make.

Many bemoan divided government and the consequent deadlock of democracy. The logic of The Federalist arguably defends it, in ways heretofore unappreciated, by appeal to a least-common-denominator definition of the “public interest.” That quasi-Federalist logic is explored, and alternative political structures are assessed against the public interest criterion to which it appeals. Another and more defensible notion of the public interest is introduced, and its very different political styles, institutions, and policies are adduced.

Rousseau inaugurated the counter-Enlightenment—that attack on secular rationalism and quest for “re-enchantment” that has, in one form or another, been with us ever since (and which, if the postmodern age has really arrived, now enjoys its heyday). The crowning expression of this event was Rousseau's effort to revive (while transforming) Christianity. Yet, paradoxically, it is also in Rousseau that the polemical core of the Enlightenment—the critique of Christianity—reached its fullest development. This strange co-presence of Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment suggests an unsuspected continuity between the two. Rousseau, by pursuing more radically the underlying goal of the Enlightenment critique of Christianity—the restoration of human wholeness—was led to extend that very critique to Enlightenment rationalism itself and thence to propose a return to religion, but to one that, rooted in sincerity, would not only avoid the dangers of traditional Christianity but also better fulfill the Enlightenment's own humanistic goal.

While recent scholarship has provoked renewed interest in the Education of Cyrus as an important work for our understanding of the origins of classical political philosophy, it has yet to produce a coherent interpretation that preserves the unity of Xenophon's vision of political life. Following a short review of three recent books on the subject, I argue that the obstacles in the way to such an understanding can be resolved by focusing on the underlying causes in Xenophon's account of the transformation of a republican regime into a universal empire and, in particular, on the various deficiencies and self-contradictions of the republican conception of the common good. I show how an understanding of Xenophon's analysis of virtue within both republican and imperial political orders can lead to a fruitful confrontation with the thought of his most famous student, admirer, and antagonist, Machiavelli.

Recently there has been a movement to embrace coalition politics both as an historically fundamental mode of action and as ethically desirable. Yet, as Bernice Johnson Reagon illustrates, coalition politics presents many profound difficulties, both in terms of its possible directions and the type of self capable of engaging in such activity. Laclau and Mouffe, embracing an open-ended development of equality and liberty, expand and clarify the possibilities that a radically democratic liberalism has available for envisioning and sustaining coalition politics. Yet, they illustrate the limits of such a project insofar as they are unable to address adequately the problems posed by Reagon. I argue that only by supplementing (and transfiguring) equality and liberty with an ethic of receptive generosity, suggested by an idiosyncratic reading of Nietzsche's gift-giving virtue, would coalition politics likely be sustainable and ethically desirable. The gift-giving virtue allows us to formulate a vision of the possible grandness of plurality that is ethically more compelling than the logics of identity and difference offered by Laclau and Mouffe.

Political scientists are becoming more self-conscious about how they connect quantitative and qualitative data in social science and about the role of systematic country studies in comparative research. As the most striking example of both practices in recent years, Robert Putnam and his collaborators' Making Democracy Work deserves more serious criticism than it has received. While Putnam's original project aimed at a precise goal—studying how a new administrative reform is institutionalized—his ultimate project aimed at nothing less than examining how differently democracy works in different sociopolitical contexts, operationalized cross-sectionally in southern and northern Italy. The sources of these differences he found in the two regions' histories, which led him to employ the quantitative interregional data he had collected for one purpose to support a model of historical development of North and South. This historical reconstruction rests largely on qualitative data; but it also rests on a set of comparative inferences about individual values and community cohesiveness in the two regions that is of questionable historical validity and innocent of structural grounding. This article applauds Putnam's joining qualitative and quantitative data but attacks his reconstruction of Italian history to fit his model of social capital.