A person’s egonet, the set of others with whom that person is connected, is a personal sample of society which especially influences that person’s experience and perceptions of society. We show that egonets systematically misrepresent the general population because each person is included in as many egonets as that person has “friends.” Previous research has recognized that this unequal weighting in egonets leads many people to find that their friends have more friends than they themselves have. This paper builds upon that research to show that people’s egonets provide them with systematically biased samples of the population more generally. We discuss how this ubiquitous egonet bias may have far reaching implications for people’s experiences and perceptions of frequencies of other people’s ties and traits in ways that may influence their own feelings and behaviors. In particular, these egonet biases may help explain people’s tendencies to disproportionately experience and overestimate the prevalence of certain types of deviance and other social behaviors and consequently be influenced toward them. We illustrate egonet bias with analyses of all friends among 63,731 Facebook users. We call for further empirical investigation of egonet biases and their consequences for individuals and society.

The Shapley-Owen value (SOV, Owen and Shapley 1989, Optimal location of candidates in ideological space. International Journal of Game Theory 125–42), a generalization of the Shapley-Shubik value applicable to spatial voting games, is an important concept in that it takes us away from a priori concepts of power to notions of power that are directly tied to the ideological proximity of actors. SOVs can also be used to locate the spatial analogue to the Copeland winner, the strong point, the point with smallest win-set, which is a plausible solution concept for games without cores. However, for spatial voting games with many voters, until recently, it was too computationally difficult to calculate SOVs, and thus, it was impossible to find the strong point analytically. After reviewing the properties of the SOV, such as the result proven by Shapley and Owen that size of win sets increases with the square of distance as we move away from the strong point along any ray, we offer a computer algorithm for computing SOVs that can readily find such values even for legislatures the size of the U.S. House of Representatives or the Russian Duma. We use these values to identify the strong point and show its location with respect to the uncovered set, for several of the U.S. congresses analyzed in Bianco, Jeliazkov, and Sened (2004, The limits of legislative actions: Determining the set of enactable outcomes given legislators preferences. Political Analysis 12:256–76) and for several sessions of the Russian Duma. We then look at many of the experimental committee voting games previously analyzed by Bianco et al. (2006, A theory waiting to be discovered and used: A reanalysis of canonical experiments on majority-rule decision making. Journal of Politics 68:838–51) and show how outcomes in these games tend to be points with small win sets located near to the strong point. We also consider how SOVs can be applied to a lobbying game in a committee of the U.S. Senate.

In our article entitled “The Political Science 400: A 20-Year Update” (PS, January 2007, 133–45), we presented the names and total citation counts (1960–2005) of political science faculty employed (ca. 2002) in U.S. Ph.D.-granting institutions who were among the 400 most cited in their cohort or subfield. We recognize the very important nature of our data for individual scholars and the institutions at which they teach, and we apologize to those colleagues whose citation counts were misreported, especially to those few whose counts were off by a very large amount. Yet, given that nearly 4,000 political scientists are employed in a Ph.D.-granting institution in the U.S., and given the numerous data limitations associated with using the Web of Science search engine (as we explained in the lengthy methodological appendix to our article), while we worked as hard as we could to prevent errors, having some errors in our data set was virtually unavoidable.

There are many different ways to develop rankings of Ph.D.-granting academic departments. Perhaps the most common method is reputational: we simply ask knowledgeable scholars in the discipline to provide their rankings and aggregate these in some fashion. Other ways involve more “objective indicators.” But, of course, departments have multiple attributes, e.g., we might be interested in how good a department is as a place to get a Ph.D., or we might be interested simply in the research record of its faculty, etc. Thus, we might want to use different indicators to measure different aspects of the department.

This paper is the second of a three-part series dealing with quantitative indicators of impact and prominence in the political science discipline. In these essays, we assess some of the changes in the discipline since the publication of the Somit and Tanenhaus (1963; 1964; 1967) studies that cover the first 60 years of the twentieth century. In the first paper of the series, published in the January 2007 issue of PS (Masuoka, Grofman, and Feld 2007), we focused on the individual visibility and impact of all regular faculty in Ph.D.-granting departments by using SSCI-based cumulative citation counts to their lifetime work. In particular, we identified the 400 most-cited faculty members in the discipline, and we found that citation counts are strongly influenced by factors such as date of Ph.D., subfield, and gender. This, the second paper in the series, shifts to departmental-level data and details the historical changes in Ph.D. production and placement rates from 1902–2000. The last paper in the series, to be published in the July 2007 issue of PS, will combine the individual-level citation data presented in the first paper with the Ph.D. production and placement data in the second paper to look at the factors that affect reputational rankings of Ph.D.-granting political science departments.The authors would like to thank Russell Dalton, Lee Sigelman, and the anonymous reviewers of PS for their helpful feedback and corrections. We are also indebted to the bibliographic assistance of Clover Behrend-Gethard and to the inspiration of Joe Tanenhaus' pioneering work. Any errors presented in this paper are the sole responsibility of the authors. The authors welcome corrections to the data that is presented in this series. Comments and corrections can be sent to Bgrofman@uci.edu.

Emails received by the authors since the publication of “The Political Science 400: A 20-Year Update” (Masuoka, Grofman, and Feld 2007) called attention to mistakes in the citation counts of a number of scholars. Corrections to the citation counts are posted in an EXCEL file at www.socsci.uci.edu/∼bgrofman/. Once we have entered all corrections, an erratum will appear in a later issue of PS. Please address any corrections to that article to BGrofman@uci.edu.

This essay is the first of a planned three-part series dealing with quantitative indicators of continuity and change in the political science discipline, focusing on the period since 1960. The series is inspired by the work of Somit and Tanenhaus (1967) which presented reputational rankings of both departments and individuals. For this series of essays, we created a unique database in which we recorded cumulative citation counts between 1960–2005 for all regular faculty members of U.S. Ph.D.-granting institutions ca. 2002. In addition to identifying the department at which the individuals in this data set are presently employed, we have also collected information on their date of Ph.D. and the institution from which their Ph.D. was awarded.The authors would like to thank Robert Axelrod, Nathaniel Beck, Russell Dalton, James Fowler, Ronald Inglehart, Margaret Levi, Michael Lewis-Beck, Jean Oi, Dorothy Solinger, Don Wittman, and the anonymous reviewers of PS for their helpful feedback and corrections. We are also indebted to the bibliographic assistance of Clover Behrend-Gethard, and to the inspiration of Hans-Dieter Klingemann's pioneering work. Any errors presented in this paper are the sole responsibility of the authors. The authors welcome corrections to the data that is presented in this series. Comments and corrections can be sent to Bgrofman@uci.edu.

Bernard Grofman and Scott Feld argued in the June 1988 issue of this Review that Jean-Jacques Rousseau's contributions to democratic political theory could be illuminated by invoking the theorizing of one of his eighteenth-century contemporaries, the Marquis de Condorcet, about individual and collective preferences or judgments. Grofman and Feld's claims about collective consciousness and the efficacy of the public interest provoke debate. One focus of discourse lies in the application of Condorcet's jury theorem to Rousseau's theory of the general will. In this controversy David M. Estlund and Jeremy Waldron in turn raise a variety of issues of theory and interpretation; Grofman and Feld then extend their argument, and propose clarifications.

Researchers ordinarily consider ideological consistency to be a characteristic of individuals; groups are considered to be ideological only if they are composed of ideologically oriented individuals. We show how a group as a whole can be characterized as exhibiting an ideological basis for its preferences even though many, or even most, of its members have preferences that are inconsistent with the supposed unidimensional ideological continuum. As an illustration, we show that the United States electorate of 1980 had collective preferences among the candidates Kennedy, Carter, Ford, and Reagan as if these preferences reflected an underlying left-right dimension among these candidates, despite the fact that a high proportion of individual voters had preferences among these candidates that did not fit the left-right dimension. In general, we show reasons why collectivities are likely to be more ideologically consistent than are the individuals composing them.

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.

By faithful representation we mean the delegation of decision making to a relatively small committee that, using a weighted voting rule, will for each pair of alternatives make sincere choices identical to those that would be made by the society as a whole, and with the same vote margins. We show that for any society, no matter how large, faithful representation is possible by a committee with no more than m(m − 1)/2 members, where m is the number of alternatives. We also show that for any society, no matter how nonideological the bulk of its electorate, social preferences can be faithfully represented by a committee whose members all have singlepeaked or single-troughed preferences. Thus, all societies can be faithfully represented by a committee whose members see the world in unidimensional terms—that is, representatives can share a coherent ideological perspective even though the electorates they represent lack such a perspective. We further show that the usual mechanisms of proportional representation and the modified form of proportional representation recently proposed by Chamberlin and Courant (1983) do not guarantee faithful representation, and we discuss mechanisms that may provide faithful representation, even in a context in which new alternatives can arise.