American political science is a product of the American state. There are political reasons why particular subdisciplines became hegemonic with the emergence of the “Second Republic” after World War II. The three hegemonic subdisciplines of our time are public opinion, public policy, and public choice. Each is a case study of consonance with the thought-ways and methods of a modern bureaucratized government committed to scientific decision making. Following Leviathan too closely results in three principal consequences: (1) failure to catch and evaluate the replacement of law by economics as the language of the state, (2) the loss of passion in political science discourse, and (3) the failure of political science to appreciate the significance of ideological sea changes accompanying regime changes.

Democratic theories that argue for expanding the scope and domain of democracy assume that democratic experiences will transform individuals in democratic ways. Individuals are likely to become more public-spirited, tolerant, knowledgeable, and self-reflective than they would otherwise be. This assumption depends on viewing the self as socially and discursively constituted, a view that contrasts with the standard liberal-democratic view of the self as prepolitically constituted and narrowly self-interested. The importance of the social and discursive view of the self is that it highlights how standard assumptions about the self help to justify limits to democratic participation. As now conceptualized, however, the transformational assumption does not meet standard objections to expanding democracy. I sketch an approach that distinguishes classes of interests according to their potentials for democratic transformation, and strengthens—by qualifying—transformative expectations in democratic theory.

Democracies are less likely to fight wars with each other. They are also more likely to prevail in wars with autocratic states. I offer an explanation of this syndrome of powerful pacifism drawn from the microeconomic theory of the state. State rent seeking creates an imperialist bias in a country's foreign policy. This bias is smallest in democracies, where the costs to society of controlling the state are relatively low, and greatest in autocracies, where the costs are higher. As a result of this bias, autocracies will be more expansionist and, in turn, war-prone. In their relations with each other, where the absence of this imperialist bias is manifest, the relative pacifism of democracies appears. In addition, democracies, constrained by their societies from earning rents, will devote greater absolute resources to security, enjoy greater societal support for their policies, and tend to form overwhelming countercoalitions against expansionist autocracies. It follows that democracies will be more likely to win wars.

I explore empirically a central claim of the structural dependence thesis, namely, that capitalists' ability to disinvest fundamentally conditions policy choices in democratic capitalist systems. Utilizing time-series data for 16 affluent democracies from 1965 to 1984, I find that, indeed, low rates of business investment are associated with reductions in corporate tax burdens and that these reductions are more pronounced in periods of economic crisis. Moreover, low rates of capital formation engender cuts in personal income taxes during periods of economic stress. However, I also find that the magnitude of responsiveness of taxation to low rates of investment is relatively small and that analyses of the political context of investment and taxation indicate that governments have choices. The responsiveness of corporate tax burdens to capital formation may, under some governments, be part of a policy mix designed to maintain adequate investment and to address the demands of core constituencies.

Voters in multicandidate contests may confront circumstances under which it is in their interest to vote for a second- or even lower-ranked candidate. The U.S. electoral system, typically offering a choice between only two major contenders, rarely presents opportunities for this “sophisticated” voting. In presidential primaries, however, many plausible candidates may compete. We investigate the presence of sophisticated voting in the 1988 presidential primaries, using data from the National Election Study's Super Tuesday survey. We examine patterns of voting types based on ordinal measures of preferences among candidates and assessments of their chances of winning their party's nomination and estimate several models of choice, testing the multicandidate calculus of voting. Among both Republicans and Democrats, respondents' choices were consistent with the calculus of voting and thus with sophisticated voting.

As agents of electoral mobilization, political parties occupy an important role in the social flow of political communication. We address several questions regarding party mobilization efforts. Whom do the parties seek to mobilize? What are the individual and aggregate characteristics and criteria that shape party mobilization efforts? What are the intended and unintended consequences of partisan mobilization, both for individual voters and for the electorate more generally? In answering these questions we make several arguments. First, party efforts at electoral mobilization inevitably depend upon a process of social diffusion and informal persuasion, so that the party canvass serves as a catalyst aimed at stimulating a cascading mobilization process. Second, party mobilization is best seen as being environmentally contingent upon institutional arrangements, locally defined strategic constraints, and partisan divisions within particular electorates. Finally, the efforts of party organizations generate a layer of political structure within the electorate that sometimes competes with social structure and often exists independently from it.

We examine the politics of the strategic agenda. Abstracting a politics on the liberal-conservative dimension, we analyze Key Vote roll call data from the U.S. House of Representatives during the Eisenhower and Reagan administrations. The data suggest that politicians set the policy agenda in a strategic fashion. Because they consider such factors as long-term political goals, the changing institutional setting, and plebiscitary presidential politics, agenda-setters propose legislation that only imperfectly reflects their and the membership's wishes on the issue at hand. Thus, as the final stage in the political process, the strategic selection of an agenda provides a means by which factors other than policy preferences affect policy outcomes. The analyses affirm the strategic agenda as a core element in political life.

The self stands in the way of understanding and appreciating consciousness. The self is a reflexive, asymmetrical bit of consciousness that displaces the whole of consciousness and the open nature of consciousness. Such displacements of consciousness are expressions of gnosticism. Some political movements (e.g., fascism) are expressions of such restrictions of the horizon of consciousness. To understand and appreciate consciousness requires a degree of selflessness on the part of the inquirer. Philosophy and myth are modes of discourse that embody and cultivate the selflessness necessary for participating in, appreciating, and understanding consciousness. Such philosophizing enhances the possibility of more inclusive joint political action.

I examine Heidegger's postmodern interpretation of technology, with an eye to exposing its weaknesses. I do this by showing that his view entails an understanding of the tradition of political philosophy that cannot do justice to that tradition's own understanding of the character of technology. I consider first Plato and Aristotle and then Hobbes and Locke in order to suggest that Heidegger's view that modern politics are stamped by technological metaphysics can be challenged on two related grounds: (1) it assumes incorrectly that the tradition is dominated by dogmatic metaphysics; (2) it prevents us from seeing how some in the tradition both understood and doubted the possibility of a technological stamp. I then suggest an alternative view of technology that might account better for the character of technology and political life.

I compare the price elasticity of economic and political preferences. My central hypothesis is that willingness to pay, whether expressed verbally or through cash transactions, is more price-elastic for economic consumption goods than for public goods. I find that increases in price greatly diminish the proportion of people willing to pay for consumer goods, such as housing or hardback books; whereas the proportion willing to pay more in taxes to support a public good, such as environmental protection or shelter for the homeless, is much less responsive to changes in price. I conclude by discussing the theoretical and political implications of willingness to pay for public and private goods.

Political legitimacy is a key concept in both macro and micro theories. Pioneers in survey-based research on alienation and system support envisioned addressing macro questions about legitimacy with the sophisticated empiricism of individual-level methodology but failed; and a succession of innovations in item wording and questionnaire construction only led to an excessive concern with measurement issues at the individual level. I return to an enumeration of the informational requirements for assessing legitimacy in hopes of finding a conceptualization that better utilizes available survey indicators to tap relevant macro dimensions. I specify formal measurement models for both conventional and revised conceptualizations of legitimacy orientations and compare the fit of the two models systematically on data from the U.S. electorate. The revised model appears preferable on both theoretical and empirical grounds.

The value of cross-national quantitative studies of the relationship between mass political violence and land inequality is challenged along three lines. First, gross and systematic errors in the political violence data of the World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators (the usual data source for empirical studies) render them worthless for Central America at least and probably much of the Third World as well. Second, conceptualizations of land inequality have been too simplistic to be of much theoretical value. Third, the temporal nature of this relationship has been inadequately considered. Responding to such deficiencies, I elaborate a broader understanding of land inequality and provide a fuller discussion of the temporal nature of its relationship to political violence. Throughout, the five nations of Central America are utilized for appropriate case material.

How should feminist theorists approach the analysis of political obligation and freedom? In her article in the December 1989 issue of this Review, Nancy Hirschmann proposed a fundamental reconstruction of these concepts. Carole Pateman agrees that liberal obligation theory inadequately treats the coercion of women and other groups under the guise of voluntary obligations. But she argues that Hirschmann goes too far, particularly in rejecting the priority of freedom. Hirschmann explicates their disagreements and her approach.