Research from the United States and Europe suggests that affluent citizens enjoy considerably more policy influence than do average citizens and the poor. I examine the extent of unequal policy responsiveness in one of the countries that have gone farthest in reducing economic inequality and restricting money in politics: Norway. I use an original dataset on public opinion and public policy containing 603 specific issues over five decades (1966–2014). The results show that although policy is certainly skewed toward the preferences of the privileged, Norway stands out among previously studied cases for two reasons: (1) The preferences of the poor seem to have some sway on economic issues and (2) not all affluent citizens get their way: educational attainment appears to be the more important determinant. The Norwegian case suggests that influence need not be as dependent upon affluence as in the United States.

For incumbents to be accountable for their issue stances, voters must sanction incumbents whose positions are “out of step” with their own. We test the electoral accountability of British legislators for their stance on Brexit. We find that there is very limited issue accountability. Individuals who disagreed with their representative’s stance on Brexit were 3 percentage points less likely to vote for them. The aggregate consequences of these individual effects are limited. A one-standard-deviation increase in the proportion of constituents agreeing with their incumbent’s Brexit stance is associated with an increase of 0.53 percentage points in incumbent vote share. These effects are one and a half times larger when the main challenger has a different Brexit stance to the incumbent. A follow-up survey of Members of Parliament (MPs) shows that MPs’ estimates of the effects of congruence are similar in magnitude. Our findings suggest that issue accountability is conditional in nature and limited in magnitude even for an issue such as Brexit, which should be maximally amenable to such effects.

It is now fifty years since Woodrow Wilson wrote his brilliant essay on public administration. It is a good essay to reread every so often; there is so much in it that sounds modern, so much that will hold permanently true. “It is getting to be harder to run a constitution than to frame one.” Was this said only yesterday? No, Woodrow Wilson clearly saw the importance of governmental administration half a century ago. “Administration is the most obvious part of government; it is government in action; it is the executive, the operative, the most visible side of government, and is of course as old as government itself.” Yet democracies have badly neglected administrative principles and structural improvements. “Like a lusty child, government with us has expanded in nature and grown great in stature, but has also become awkward in movement. … English and American political history has been a history, not of administrative development, but of legislative oversight—not of progress in governmental organization, but of advance in law-making and political criticism. … We go on criticising when we ought to be creating.”

This article addresses an important issue of democratic theory and administration: the potential conflict between bureaucrats' allegiance to their agencies and to specific publics' interests. Representative bureaucracy, which emphasizes substantive interest representation in the administrative arena, embodies this potential for conflict. Empirical survey results which probe integration of substantive representation and employee allegiance among federal employees in four major agencies are presented. Evidence documents a different level of organizational involvement in an agency with a substantive representation mandate compared to employee involvement in agencies without a mandate for representation. While the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights' mandate affords considerable potential for integrating substantive representation and employee allegiance, its employees do not rank highly in organizational involvement. Even more surprising, CCR minority employees are lowest in involvement. These findings imply an important hypothesis: effectiveness in achieving an agency mandate is crucial to successful integration of organizational involvement and substantive representation.

For centuries men have speculated about the human consequences of work. Slowly, a considerable body of information has begun to accumulate concerning the relationships between people's jobs and other aspects of their lives. Investigators have pointed out the connections between certain types of jobs and certain personality disorders, job satisfaction, productivity, attitudes toward union and management, social relations on the job, leisure activities, and other things. Extending such findings, this study concludes that a particular job situation can have important effects on a man's political outlook.

Political studies have long classified individuals according to occupation, yet there have been extremely few efforts to penetrate within specific occupational categories to discover the causal triggers of occupational attitude differences.

Developmentalism is the idea that progress entails the temporal movement of societies along a universal trajectory. Prevailing accounts conceptualize Eurocentric developmental discourses as ideological weapons of imperial domination, specifically because they defer colonial claims to popular self-rule. Rejecting the idea that these historical entanglements exhaust the meanings of developmental thought, this article sheds light on anticolonial debates over developmentalism. Turning to Guyanese scholar-activist Walter Rodney, it reconstructs what I call “popular anticolonial developmentalism,” as a way of construing popular legitimation in actual contexts of anticolonial and postcolonial politics. From the premise that capitalist-imperialism “deflected” the historical motion of colonized societies, popular anticolonial developmentalism places the agencies of progressive transformation with democratically empowered popular subjects. Shifting the lens of “decolonizing political theory” from epistemic critique to worldly anticolonialism shows how developmentalism became a primary idiom for contesting and reimagining anticolonial futures. In turn, anticolonial practices reshaped developmentalism’s very conceptual parameters.

Political leaders’ willingness to use force is central to many explanations of foreign policy and interstate conflict. Unfortunately, existing indicators typically measure one aspect of this general concept, have limited coverage, and/or are not derived independently of leaders’ participation in interstate conflicts. We develop a strategy for constructing measures of leaders’ underlying willingness to use force with data on their background experiences, political orientations, and psychological traits in a Bayesian latent variable framework. Our approach produces measures of latent hawkishness for all national leaders between 1875 and 2004 that offer advantages over existing proxies along multiple dimensions, including construct validity, predictive validity, and measurement uncertainty. Importantly, our statistical framework allows scholars to build upon our measures by incorporating additional data and altering the assumptions underlying our models.

An ongoing political system requires a continuing process of recruitment in order to maintain the small but active cadre of citizens who assume the primary responsibility for the operation of the system. These political activists are involved in recruiting the official leadership, campaigning for their election, and sometimes serve as governors of the system themselves. In American politics, the recruitment of political activists is effected through processes which political scientists have only recently begun to investigate in depth. Most of the studies of recruitment to positions of political activism have investigated the social backgrounds and the patterns of recruitment of public officials. Not as much attention has been directed toward the personnel who operate the local political party organizations, and the processes of their recruitment. Our data add to the literature about political party activists at the lower echelons of the party organizations by reporting the findings of research conducted among local party officials in selected locales in North Carolina and Massachusetts. These local party officials constitute the lowest level of party officialdom in their respective party organizations. We have investigated the process of their recruitment to their party positions, and have used the data to test a model of political recruitment. Several questions guiding our research included: What are the social correlates of recruitment to local party positions? What are the patterns and channels of recruitment? What triggers political party activism—is there an identifiable “threshold” or “political opportunity structure” which serves as an indicator of political party activism? Are recruitment patterns and channels related to role definitions? We have also examined the relationship between the recruitment pattern of the party worker and his orientation to his job as party worker.

The insurrection at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, was the most dramatic contemporary manifestation of deep political polarization in the United States. Recent research shows that violent protests shape political behavior and attachments, but several questions remain unanswered. Using day-level panel data from a large sample of US social media users to track changes in the identities expressed in their Twitter biographies, we show that the Capitol insurrection caused a large-scale decrease in outward expressions of identification with the Republican Party and Donald Trump, with no indication of reidentification in the weeks that followed. This finding suggests that there are limits to party loyalty: a violent attack on democratic institutions sets boundaries on partisanship, even among avowed partisans. Furthermore, the finding that political violence can deflect copartisans carries the potential positive democratic implication that those who encourage or associate themselves with such violence pay a political cost.

Political theory's relationship with political science over the last 60 years has been fraught with ambiguity and weighed down by epistemological tensions in a manner that suggests an old and extremely prickly marriage. To some, political theory has been nothing less than the theoretical foundation of political science as a discipline—the conceptual and epistemological ground for each and every subfield, cherished and nurtured by tolerant, even ecumenical political science departments. To others, it has been merely a distraction, a needless normative diversion from the empirical responsibilities of hard social science by those who do not understand its rigors. As was perhaps more common in the first half of the twentieth century, some have continued to see in political science and political theory complementary perspectives that need and entail one another, two sides of how we establish and balance the human sciences, doing empirical science even as we assess its epistemological standards and methods. But others have regarded the two as preternaturally antagonistic. At the height of the behavioral revolution in the 1960s, a few self-styled “hardboiled” scientists dismissed theory altogether as little more than mythology: moralizing fairy tales dressed up as a kind of prescriptive philosophy that confounded facts and values. But the real crux of the debate between political theory and political science has been the relationship of political science to politics, as exemplified in historian Alfred A. Cobban's scathing comment excoriating political science as mostly a device for avoiding politics without achieving science“The political scientist, in so far as he wishes to remain a scientist, is limited to the study of techniques. A good deal of what is called political science, I must confess, seems, to me a device, invented by academic persons, avoiding that dangerous subject politics, without achieving science” (Cobban 1960, 240).. Cobban's challenge was taken up by many theorists, including Leo Strauss, whose blunt rebuke to the “new” political science suggesting that it was doing little more than fiddling while Rome was burning inaugurated a debate that in 1962 set this mostly fire-proof journal aflame“One may say (of the new political science),” wrote Strauss, “that it fiddles while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns”(Strauss 1962, 327)..

This article reintroduces a long-forgotten argument into the debate about social justice: Durkheim's argument from “organic solidarity,” as presented in The Division of Labor in Society. “Organic solidarity” is solidarity based on differentiation. According to Durkheim, it grows out of the division of labor, but only if the latter happens “spontaneously.” Social inequality creates obstacles to such spontaneity because it distorts prices, such that they are perceived as unjust, and it undermines equality of opportunity. Hence, Durkheim's argument connects commutative justice and distributive justice. The article argues that Durkheim's argument is plausible, interesting, and relevant for today. After presenting the argument, discussing its structure and methodology, and evaluating its plausibility by drawing on related contemporary debates, it focuses on the problem of the perception of social justice and the possibility of ideological distortions. It concludes by sketching the research program that follows from Durkheim's argument.

The existence of N-prisoners' dilemmas (conflict between individual and collective rationality) is a standard justification for collectivizing decision making through the state, but there is little theory about how different institutions operate to “solve” such dilemmas. The efficiency of majoritarian democracy, “selfish dictatorship” and uncoordinated individualism is explored using a simple nine-person game. Majoritarian democracy is found to produce equilibrium outcomes at the maximum social product available when the opportunity costs of “cooperating” are less than half the magnitude of the externalities, but to produce no such equilibrium when the opportunity costs are greater than that. Our research draws implications for the role of information in constitutional design, and of altruism.

This article develops a theory of bureaucratic influence on distributive politics. Although there exists a rich literature on the effects of institutions such as presidents, electoral systems, and bicameralism on government spending, the role of professional bureaucrats has yet to receive formal scrutiny. In the model, legislators bargain over the allocation of distributive benefits across districts. The legislature may either “politicize” a program by bargaining directly over pork and bypassing bureaucratic scrutiny, or “professionalize” it by letting a bureaucrat approve or reject project funding in each district according to an underlying quality standard. The model predicts that the legislature will professionalize when the expected program quality is high. However, politicization becomes more likely as the number of high-quality projects increases and under divided government. Further, more competent bureaucrats can encourage politicization if the expected program quality is low. Finally, politicized programs are larger than professionalized programs.

Political science, as an empirical enterprise, shares with the other behavioral or social sciences at least one characteristic feature: partial formalization. For a science to most reliably discharge its two principal functions, explanation and prediction, statements embodying acquired knowledge must be systematically organized in subsumptive or deductive relations. Minimally, a set of such systematically related propositions, which include among them some lawlike generalizations, and which can be assigned specific truth value via empirical tests, is spoken of as a theory. A theory, in a substantially formalized system, includes as constituents (1) an uninterpreted or formal calculus which provides for syntactical invariance in the system, (2) a set of semantic rules of interpretation which assign some determinate empirical meanings to the formal calculus thereby relating it to an evidential or empirical base, and (3) a model for the uninterpreted calculus, in terms of more or less familiar conceptual or visualizable materials, which illustrates the relationships between variables in structural form, an alternative interpretation of the same calculus of which the theory itself is an interpretation.

The virtues of standard formalization need hardly be specified. For our purposes here it is sufficient to indicate that formalization seeks to satisfy the minimal requirements of any serious knowledge enterprise: to provide for syntactical and semantic invariance without which reliable knowledge is simply not conceivable. The language shift, exemplified in any cognitive effort, from ordinary to specialized language style is the consequence of attempting to reduce the vagueness, ambiguity and tense obscurity that afflicts common speech.

This project attempts to relate a large number of potential predictors to voting data generated at the United Nations. Numerous associations were found when the predictors, 77 in all, were related to 13 different kinds of voting scores. Because of considerable redundancy in both sets of data, national attribute and voting, the results were factor analyzed and the original variables were reduced to 14 sets of factor scores representing the national attribute data, and 4 representing the voting data. Several significant associations emerged from the intercorrelation of these two sets of factor scores, with the independent variables “Economic Development,” “Democracy,” and “U.S. Relations” exhibiting considerable predictive power. When the overall relationships between the two sets of data were assessed by use of the canonical correlation technique, “Economic Development” received the greatest weight on the national attribute side, and “Eastern Voting” on the voting (dependent variable) side. These findings accord well with previous research, in that “Economic Development” seems to predict negativism as revealed by voting. Thus “Economic Development” appears to be fundamentally related to certain schisms at the United Nations, with the representatives from the most developed states appearing the most “negative” as evidenced by questionnaire responses and voting behavior. Such orientations are likely to have a significant impact on the evolution of the organization.

At a theoretical level, the present findings may have considerable relevance for both Social Field theory and Attribute theory.

This article attempts to examine alliance formation behavior as a stochastic process amenable to systems interpretation. We test two hypotheses linking the systems characteristics of bipolar distribution/tightly knit bloc structure to serial dependence and stability of alliance formation behavior and multipolar distribution/loosely knit bloc structure to randomness and process instability.

For testing these hypotheses, we have introduced a modeling strategy whereby identification of serial dependence and parameter estimation are accomplished by means of stochastic difference equations and time series autocorrelation and partial autocorrelation functions, and systems interpretation is facilitated by employing its continuous analogue in differential equation form.

We analyze data on three sets of observations corresponding to three distinct periods of international relations: 1815–1914, 1919–1939, 1945–1965. The results do confirm the proposed hypotheses revealing randomness and instability of alliance formation behavior in the multipolar/loosely knit periods of 1815–1914 and 1919–1939 and serial dependence and stability in the bipolar/tightly knit 1945–1965 period. Finally, we consider the implications of these results for the earlier findings, the balance of power model, and the probability of war.

Early in 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower presented to the Congress—and the country and his party—some 65 proposals for new legislation, over and above appropriations. This presentation was a massive affair. First came six weeks of well-publicized preliminaries: cabinet deliberations, congressional briefings, press conferences, and a fireside chat. Then, in three annual messages to Congress—a State of the Union Address, a Budget Message, and an Economic Report—the President set forth his bundle of proposals, elaborating certain aspects, outlining the rest. Along with these came seven supplementing special messages, each filling in details on some particular: Taft-Hartley, farm price supports, social security, health, housing, atomic energy, foreign aid, and trade. And following the messages Administration-approved bills, conveyors of the ultimate details, were introduced in Congress.

Throughout, one theme was emphasized: here was a comprehensive and coordinated inventory of the nation's current legislative needs, reflecting the President's own judgments, choices, and priorities in every major area of Federal action; in short, his “legislative program,” an entity distinctive and defined, its coverage and its omissions, both, delimiting his stand across the board. And—quite explicitly—this stand was being taken, this program volunteered, in order to give Congress an agenda, Republicans a platform, and voters a yardstick for 1954.

In addition to the legal and political implications of the case, the United States Supreme Court's decision in Baker v. Carr brought sharply into public focus the technical problem of how to measure legislative malapportionment. The case itself exemplifies these various dimensions of the issue, for the majority opinion of Mr. Justice Clark and the dissenting opinion of Mr. Justice Harlan disagree not only regarding the law and the public policy of judicial intervention; they are also in manifest disagreement concerning “the facts” of malapportionment in Tennessee as of the time of the decision in March 1962. Our survey of the scholarly literature on the subject of apportionment, during the past decade, convinces us that the contributions of political scientists (and other commentators on the question) have made less than satisfactory progress thus far in the direction of devising an adequate metric to assist in the evaluation of what all concede is today a major problem in the theory and practice of democratic politics. In the absence of a reliable and valid method for measuring differences in apportionment along a common dimension, it is difficult to see how rational consideration of the normative aspects of the issue may be possible.

For the ancient philosophers, constitutionalism meant classifying regimes and constructing regimes to form virtuous citizens. In the modern world it generally means checks and balances, institutional mechanisms limiting the power of government and protecting private rights. In Democracy in America Tocqueville attempts to combine both views in his interpretation of the U.S. constitutional system. He employs the regime analysis of ancient constitutionalism to understand the new phenomenon of popular sovereignty and its potential for despotic control over the minds and characters of citizens. At the same time, he shows how the constitutional devices found in the United States—such as federalism, judicial review, and the separation of powers—can be adapted to inculcate a kind of moral virtue by teaching citizens to exercise liberty with moral responsibility and to govern themselves. The result is a constitutional theory that weaves ancient and modern principles into an original and coherent whole.