It is a bit difficult for me to figure out the main theme of Tulis' often inconsistent commentary. For example, he ends his essay with the claim that my insights are “epistemologically equivalent” to those of whom I “seek to supersede.” Apart from gratuitously attributing to me an intention to “supersede” Main and Storing, two scholars for whom I have the deepest respect and whom I wish to correct only in one particular, my insights cannot, on Tulis' own grounds, possibly be “epistemologically equivalent” to theirs. Much of his essay is devoted to criticizing my method as an unnecessary and undesirable departure from the traditional method of rhetorical analysis by literary criticism. So, by his account, my method cannot be “epistemologically equivalent” to theirs. I suppose he meant to write “substantively equivalent.” Whatever his intent, this illustrates my difficulty with interpretation.

Electoral campaigns are a distinguishing feature, worldwide, of modern representative democracies. For most citizens in most polities, campaigns provide a compelling incentive to think about government. So campaigns thus are a, perhaps the, main point of contact between officials and the populace over matters of public policy. If, as democratic theorists postulate, rulers are responsible to the ruled, the nexus of responsibility, the time and place that we impose it, is during campaigns and the elections in which they culminate.

All our previous political experience, and especially, of course, the experience of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, offers little hope that democracy can coexist with the centralized allocation of economic resources. Indeed, simple observation suggests that a market economy with private property rights is a necessary, although not sufficient, condition for the existence of a democratic political regime. And this accords fully with the political theory of liberalism, which emphasizes that private rights, both civil and economic, be protected and secure. At the same time, our previous experience also indicates that market economies are more successful than centrally planned economies not only in producing, but also in distributing, both private and collective goods. This economic experienee is supported by neoclassical economic theory, which treats clearly defined and secure rights to private property as essential to a market economy.

In the September 1987 issue of this Review, we developed a game-theoretic model of committee or legislative decision making, showing the extent to which members may have incentives to share, or conceal, information. Because the formal analysis and statement of results for this model were in error, we offer this correction.

Legislators' beliefs, preferences, and intentions are communicated in committees and legislatures through debates, the proposal of bills and amendments, and the recording of votes. Because such information is typically distributed asymmetrically within any group of decision makers, legislators have incentives to reveal or conceal private information strategically and thus manipulate the collective decision-making process in their favor. In consequence, any committee decision may in the end reflect only the interests of a minority. We address a problem of sharing information through debate in an endogenous, agenda-setting, collective-choice process. The model is game theoretic and we find in the equilibrium to the game that at least some legislators have incentives to conceal private information. Consequently, the final committee decision can be “incoherent” by failing to reflect the preferences of all committee members fully. Additionally, we characterize the subset of legislators with any incentive to conceal data.

One contemporary method of reconciling the conflict in methodology between determinism and indeterminism is the notion of rational choice, which allows for both regularities in behavior and artistic creation. A detailed explanation of artistry within the rational choice context has not yet been developed, so this essay offers such an explanation in terms of the notion of heresthetics or the dynamic manipulation of the conditions of choice. The running example used throughout is the decision on the Constitutional Convention of 1787 on the method of selecting the president.

Science involves the accumulation of knowledge, which means not only the formulation of new sentences about discoveries but also the reformulation of empirically falsified or theoretically discredited old sentences. Science has therefore a history that is mainly a chronicle and interpretation of a series of reformulations. It is often asserted that political science has no history. Although this assertion is perhaps motivated by a desire to identify politics with belles lettres, it may also have a reasonable foundation, in that political institutions may change faster than knowledge can be accumulated. To investigate whether propositions about evanescent institutions can be scientifically falsified and reformulated, I examine in this essay the history of the recent and not wholly accepted revisions of the propositions collectively called Duverger's law: that the plurality rule for selecting the winner of elections favors the two-party system. The body of the essay presents the discovery, revision, testing, and reformulation of sentences in this series in order to demonstrate that in at least one instance in political science, knowledge has been accumulated and a history exists.

While contemporary political science (as, for example, in such subjects as political socialization, studies of public opinion, etc.) tends to emphasize the study of values and tastes (because of an assumption that political outcomes–like market outcomes–are determined by the amalgamation of individual preferences), the older tradition of political science emphasized the study of institutions. The line of research in political theory followed during the last generation has involved seeking an equilibrium of tastes; but it has revealed that such an equilibrium exists only rarely, if at all. The inference then is that prudence in research directs the science of politics toward the investigation of empirical regularities in institutions, which, though congealed tastes, are “unstable constants” amenable to scientific investigation.

Although, conventionally, vote trading in legislatures has been condemned as socially undesirable by both scholars and lay citizens, a recently popular school of scholarship has argued that vote trading improves the traders' welfare in the direction of Pareto-optimal allocations. This essay is an attempt to reconcile the disagreement by showing formally that vote trading does improve the position of the traders but that at the same time trading may impose an external cost on nontraders. In sum, it turns out that sporadic and occasional trading is probably socially beneficial but that systematic trading may engender a paradox of vote trading. This paradox has the property that, while trading is immediately advantageous for the traders, still, when everybody trades, everybody is worse off. Furthermore, vote trading may not produce a stable equilibrium that is Pareto-optimal either for individual members or for coalitions of members.

A fundamental controversy in political theory from ancient times until the present concerns the rationality of political actors, what it is, if it exists at all, and whether or not humans display it in politics. Many political scientists are impatient with this controversy because it remains open after so much (apparently futile) discussion. But they ought not be. The problem of rationality is necessarily imbedded in even the simplest kinds of political research, where, if overlooked, it can occasion misinterpretation and even outright error.

Suppose, for example, in an investigation of legislators one uses the notion of party loyalty as an independent variable to explain behavior. This notion seems simple and straightforward enough and not, therefore, likely to involve one in philosophical controversy. But in fact party loyalty can be interpreted in a variety of ways and the choice among them necessarily involves a choice on one side of the controversy over rationality. Loyalty can be thought of, for example, as a truly independent variable, as a product of political socialization, as an expression of affect, and hence as an essentially irrational motive. On the other hand, it may be thought of as itself dependent on bargains rationally satisfying the preferences of legislators. Such bargains may be either short term or long term so that a legislator's manifest party loyalty may result from a series of advantageous bargains with party leaders on particular bills or from an implied bargain with them on career advantage.