Is there a case to be made for the value, amidst relatively settled institutions, of unsettling speech—speech characterized by excess, impropriety, and even the uncanny? Much of contemporary deliberative theory would answer in the negative. This article, however, proposes that we can derive a defense of the deliberative value of immoderate speech from an unlikely source: Edmund Burke's theory and practice of the rhetorical sublime. Burke's account of the sublime was developed in response to an eighteenth-century discourse of civility that anticipated the anti-rhetorical strand of contemporary deliberative theory. By reconstructing Burke's response, we can recover a forceful defense of rhetoric in the present. For Burke, the disruptive practice of sublime speech can provoke circumstantial judgment, overcoming deliberators’ aversions to judging. Drawing on Burke's rhetorical practice alongside his aesthetic and linguistic theory, this article upholds a central role in deliberation for rhetoric, even in its unruly and excessive aspects.

We argue that short government durations in parliamentary democracies increase public spending by driving a political budget cycle. We present a revision of the standard political budget cycle model that relaxes the common (often implicit) assumption that election timing is fixed and known in advance. Instead, we allow cabinets to form expectations about their durability and use these expectations to inform their spending choices. The model predicts that (1) cabinets should spend more as their expected term in office draws to a close and (2) cabinets that outlive their expected duration should run higher deficits. Using data from 15 European democracies over several decades, we show that governments increase spending as their expected duration withers and run higher deficits as they surpass their forecasted life expectancy.

The most interesting educational experiment in the world today for the student of comparative administration and business and government is the Administrative Staff College at Henley-on-Thames, England. This College is pioneering the methods which, in any industrialized nation, are needed to restore the flexibility and initiative that must always accompany free enterprise. The College also provides a new approach to leadership training in that enrollees are recruited in fixed proportions from public and private employment by a method that produces balanced management teams among the members (as the “students” are called), and the teaching procedure stresses group work and self-instruction rather than formal lectures.

This original venture, headed by Princeton-trained Noel F. Hall, was founded in 1946 and opened in 1948. Already it is being imitated in widely scattered parts of the world. Henley has turned out some 1,300 policy administrators of the average age of 39, all of whom had been tapped for higher responsibilities by their employers—who incidentally foot the bill—before going to Henley for the three months' session. Each session—there are three a year—is limited to 60 members; six of the 60 members may be drawn from overseas and the rest come from private business, the central civil service, local government, the nationalized industries, and banking.

Any middle-aged member of the political science guild in a retrospective mood might ponder a question: “What ever happened to direct democracy?” In our halcyon student days the textbooks discussed the direct democracy trinity—initiative, referendum, and recall—described their mechanics and variations, explained their origin in the Progressive Era, told us that the United States, Australia, and Switzerland were leading practitioners of direct democracy, cited a few eccentric referenda, gave the standard pro and con arguments, and essayed some judgments of the relative merits of direct and representative democracy. Latter day collegians may pass through the portals innocent of the existence of the institutions of direct government. Half of the American government texts never mention the subject; the others allocate a paragraph or a page for a casual mention or a barebones explanation of the mechanics.

A similar trend has occurred in the literature. Before 1921, every volume of this Review had items on the referendum, five in one volume. Subsequently there have been only seven articles, all but two prior to World War II. “The Initiative and Referendum in Graustark” has ceased to be a fashionable dissertation topic, only four in the last thirty years. All but two of the published monographs antedate World War II.

A little over 100 years ago John Stuart Mill wrote in his essay On Liberty that “… there ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine, however immoral it may be considered.” The sentence from which this is taken is not obiter: Chapter Two of his book is devoted to arguments, putatively philosophical in character, which if they were sound would warrant precisely such a conclusion; we have therefore every reason to assume that Mill meant by the sentence just what it says. The topic of Chapter Two is the entire “communications” process in civilized society (“advanced” society, as Mill puts it); and the question he raises is whether there should be limitations on that process. He treats that problem as the central problem of all civilized societies, the one to which all other problems are subordinate, because of the consequences, good or ill, that a society must bring upon itself according as it adopts this or that solution to it. And he has supreme confidence in the Tightness of the solution he offers. Presumably to avoid all possible misunderstanding, he provides several alternative statements of it, each of which makes his intention abundantly clear, namely, that society must be so organized as to make that solution its supreme law. “Fullest,” that is, absolute freedom of thought and speech, he asserts by clear implication in the entire argument of the chapter, is not to be one of several competing goods society is to foster, one that on occasion might reasonably be sacrificed, in part at least, to the preservation of other goods; i.e., he refuses to recognize any competing good in the name of which it can be limited.

The legacy of problems associated with Latin American development policy in the postwar era necessitates the asking of some fundamental questions about the future of development in that region. Economic growth rates have been insufficient, and the employment and distributional problems have been worsening. This situation is in large measure attributable to specific policies pursued by Latin American governments, especially the array of policies included under the rubric of “import-substituting industrialization.” Such policies are critically analyzed as a prelude to the discussion of a suggested reorientation of Latin American development policy. The goal of such a redirected, poverty-oriented development policy is the creation of “livable” (if not “developed”) societies. The effort to fashion development policies aiming at “livability” entails, at the most general level, distributional and short-run emphases. But it also involves the need for major innovations in such diverse areas as technological, agricultural, regional, and educational development. Reorientations of international development lending would also be required. The economic problems of the livability approach are formidable, but recent findings indicate that poverty-oriented development strategies may be economically viable. The political problems are equally if not more formidable, and it is likely that their confrontation will involve new ways of thinking about “political development” and about the relationship of political regime types to economic development.

In the literature on political parties in the United States Congress two points are usually stressed. First, it is said that the political party label lacks a precise programmatic content because “party government” in the British sense is absent in the American Congress. Second, however, it is contended that the party label is the single most important and reliable attribute in predicting the voting behavior of a Senator or Representative.

Between these two contentions lies a sizeable area of unexplored territory. If party is the best predictive device in analyzing voting behavior in Congress then, despite the lack of “party government,” the party machinery in both houses must have effects that deserve study. Professor Huitt has suggested the necessity and importance of this kind of study: “… the preoccupation with reform has obscured the fact that we have no really adequate model of party leadership as it exists in Congress, and that none can be constructed because we lack simple descriptions of many of the basic working parts of the present system.” Huitt himself and a few others have filled some of these gaps.

After a brief discussion of the existing literature and a description of the data set, the paper compares the role of four international institutions in two-party disputes in terms of (1) participant behavior and characteristics, (2) relationships between participants, and (3) characteristics of the disputes and institutional responses. The major purpose of the comparison is to assess various middle-range theoretical ideas that have been suggested by scholars and to determine whether the differences on the variables are a function of structural (PCIJ and ICJ versus League and UN) or historical (PCIJ and League versus ICJ and UN) variations. A final section of the paper presents a scheme for further research on the role of international institutions in the international bargaining process.

Xenophon's Anabasis, a military adventure interwoven with a story of philosophical self-discovery, is a companion piece to Plato's Republic. The Anabasis takes up in deed the two great political problems treated in speech in the Republic, namely, how a just community can come into being and how philosophy and political power may be brought to coincide. In addressing the first of these problems, Xenophon makes explicit a lesson about the limits of politics that is implicit in the Republic. He speaks to the second problem by clarifying the essential role of philosophical erôs in his emergence, at the moment of crisis, as the founder and leader of a well-ordered community. Xenophon‘s self-presentation in the Anabasis, which makes clear his debt to Socrates, illuminates the nature of philosophical courage as well as the saving integrity of the philosophical soul.

This article demonstrates that, despite David Easton's assertions to the contrary, economic conceptions play a crucial role in his version of systems theory. A comparison between Easton's model of the political system and the classical economic model of Adam Smith reveals that they share the notions of system, scarcity, allocation, competition, maximization, self-regulation, homeostatic equilibrium, goal-seeking, and feedback. This comparison of Smith and Easton not only illuminates the logical and unacknowledged historical foundations of Easton's framework, it also clarifies some common misconceptions concerning systems analysis (e.g., the idea that it is static or that it is tautological) and underscores a number of important limitations on the utility of Easton's model as a tool for political analysis (i.e., the model requires a given pattern of behavior, a particular cultural environment and a specifiable institutional complex for its operation).

In America, interest groups operate within the democratic frame of reference. Like all political organizations, they are accorded more legitimacy when they can show that they are representative of the attitudes and values of a particular segment of the population. Consequently, the leaders of interest groups frequently spend a great deal of time explaining just how democratic their organizations are. If one examines the testimony of interest group leaders at state and national legislative hearings, he is likely to find that much of it is begun with an introductory statement explaining that the leadership of the testifying group is merely the voice of the membership. The personal values of the interest group leader are played down, and his function as representative (as distinguished from delegate) is exaggerated.

On the other hand, relatively few political interest groups have systematic and formalized means of ascertaining the desires of members. We know that most of the devices used to solicit member opinion are not very effective. Truman has shown that the affairs of most interest groups are run on a day-to-day basis by a fraction of the total membership. The mass of the membership takes a relatively passive role with regard to the formation of public policies by the organization.

Communication between leaders and followers is spasmodic and cannot provide efficient guidelines for the actions of leaders. Whether or not leadership of an organization seeks to become a manifestation of Michel's iron law of oligarchy, the realities of communication within an organization suggest that most of the communication undertaken by leaders will be with other members of the leadership clique rather than with the larger body of followers in the group.

Contested elections are usually seen as precondition for constituent responsiveness. By contrast, I show that even uncontested elections can create incentives for autocratic regimes to address citizen demands. I propose that closed autocracies engage in cycles of responsiveness before uncontested elections to assure citizens of their competence and raise popular support. They do so to mitigate the short-term destabilizing effects of elections. Analyzing a unique dataset of petitions to the government of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), I calculate that response times to petitions were up to 31% shorter before the GDR’s uncontested elections. Moreover, I introduce the concept of “substantive responsiveness,” which focuses on the material consequences of responsiveness for petitioners, and show that petitions were 64% more likely to be successful. The paper advances our understanding of electoral mobilization in closed regimes and contributes to an emerging research agenda on responsiveness and accountability in autocracies.

The Problem. Chinese communist leaders generally attribute their conquest of power to the faithful pursuit of effective “mass line” tactics. They now regard a “correct” mass line as the essential prerequisite for the full consolidation of power, for the successful implementation of the ambitious and farreaching policies to which they are committed, and for the ultimate transition from the “people's democratic dictatorship” to the complete socialist order. Recognizing that large numbers of cadres adequately trained in mass line tactics are critically needed for these purposes, the Chinese Communist Party intensified its cadre training program in 1950–1951 to insure that all party (and other public) workers would be carefully indoctrinated in basic Marxist-Leninist mass line theory and practice. Training in mass line tactics ranges in scope from propaganda to public administration, but finds its principal focus in the delicate area of the Party's public relations with the great masses of Chinese people who have yet to be sold on the communist program. The problem is so serious, and the need for a solution so urgent, that the party leadership has temporarily deferred several important social reforms pending the completion of the current cadre training program.

Scholars frequently expect parties to act strategically in parliament, hoping to affect their electoral fortunes. Voters assumingly assess parties by their activity and vote accordingly. However, the retrospective voting literature looks mostly at the government’s outcomes, leaving the opposition understudied. We argue that, for opposition parties, legislative voting constitutes an effective vote-seeking activity as a signaling tool of their attitude toward the government. We suggest that conflictual voting behavior affects voters through two mechanisms: as a signal of opposition valence and as means of ideological differentiation from the government. We present both aggregate- and individual-level analyses, leveraging a dataset of 169 party observations from 10 democracies and linking it to the CSES survey data of 27,371 respondents. The findings provide support for the existence of both mechanisms. Parliamentary conflict on legislative votes has a general positive effect on opposition parties’ electoral performance, conditional on systemic and party-specific factors.

A strong tradition in democratic theory claims that only constitutions made with direct popular involvement can establish or deepen democracy. Against this view, we argue that new constitutions are likely to enhance liberal democracy when they emerge through a plural agreement among political elites with distinct bases of social support. Power dispersion during constitution writing induces the adoption of institutions that protect opposition forces from the arbitrary use of executive power without unduly impairing majority rule. However, since incumbents may renege on the bargain, the democratizing effect of politically plural constitutional agreements is likely to be larger in the short term, when the identity of negotiating political forces and the balance of power between them tend to remain stable. We find support for these arguments using an original global dataset on the origins of constitutions between 1900 and 2015 and a difference-in-differences design.

Low and uneven turnout is a serious problem for local democracy. Fortunately, one simple reform—shifting the timing of local elections so they are held on the same day as national contests—can substantially increase participation. Considerable research shows that on-cycle November elections generally double local voter turnout compared with stand-alone local contests. But does higher turnout mean a more representative electorate? On that critical question, the evidence is slim and mixed. We combine information on election timing with detailed microtargeting data that includes voter demographic information to examine how election timing influences voter composition in city elections. We find that moving to on-cycle elections in California leads to an electorate that is considerably more representative in terms of race, age, and partisanship—especially when these local elections coincide with a presidential election. Our results suggest that on-cycle elections can improve local democracy.