An important and clearly marked recent trend in American government is that in the direction of systematic planning—local, state, and national. City planning has developed for the last twenty years, and there are now some 700 city planning agencies. The activities of these boards have been halted somewhat during the depression, although some 9,000 workers under the C.W.A. aided in the development of city plans in 1934. On the whole, the cities have fallen behind in the movement they started.

The most significant single event in the urban field is the establishment of a new type of planning agency in Cincinnati, known as the department of economic security, an office through which the employment and reëmployment problems of that community are made the subject of governmental study and action, in cooperation with industry. The director is a man of wide experience and broad social vision in the person of Colonel Waite, one time city manager of Dayton and recently deputy administrator of public works

How does civilian protest shape civil war dynamics? Existing research shows that civilian protests against violence and war contribute to peace and restrain violence against civilians. There is less research on civilian protests that are at odds with peaceful conflict resolution, such as protests to salute armed actors, advocate against peace agreements, and oppose peacekeepers. This study develops a novel typology of wartime civilian protest that brings together protests to different ends, and theorizes the heterogeneous effects of protest on civil war dynamics. Using quantitative and qualitative evidence from new disaggregated and georeferenced event data from Côte d’Ivoire, the study demonstrates that—contingent on certain demands—protests were associated with violence against civilians, violence involving peacekeepers, and failed conflict resolution. These findings contribute new knowledge on how civilians shape the dynamics of civil war, and caution that nonviolent civilian action may not only be a force for de-escalation and peace.

How does racial diversity impact institutional outcomes and (in)equality? Discussions about diversity usually focus on how individuals’ identities shape their behavior, but diversity is a group-level characteristic. Scholars must, therefore, consider the relationship between group composition and the individual decisions that shape institutional outcomes. Using felony data from a large U.S. court system, I explore the relationship between racial diversity among the judges comprising a court and individual judges’ decisions. I find that as the percent of Black judges in a courthouse increases white judges are less likely to render incarceration sentences in cases with Black defendants. Increases in racial diversity decrease the Black–white gap in the probability of incarceration by up to 7 percentage points. However, I find no relationship between judge’s racial identities and disparities in their decisions. This study highlights the importance of conceptualizing diversity as a group characteristic and the relationship between institutional context and outcomes.

Because the end of the Cold War failed to produce widespread democratic transitions, it is often viewed as having had only a superficial effect on Africa’s authoritarian regimes. We show this sentiment to be incorrect. Focusing on the elite coalitions undergirding autocracies, we argue that the end of the Cold War sparked profound changes in the constellation of alliances within regimes. It was an international event whose ripple effects altered the domestic political landscape and thereby enticed elite coalitions to transform and meet the new existential threat they faced. We demonstrate our argument using cabinets as a proxy for elite coalitions, showing that their composition drastically changed at the end of the Cold War. Africa’s authoritarian leaders dismissed many of the core members of their cabinets and increasingly appointed members of opposition parties to cabinet portfolios. Such changes, we argue, represent the dynamic responses that enabled autocracies to persist.

Since Converse (1964) first proposed his “nonattitudes hypothesis,” numerous studies have confirmed that the public at large lacks ideologically consistent political attitudes. I put forth an event-based theory of attitude crystallization that explains how elections can strengthen attitude consistency and apply it to an issue domain integral to the left-right (liberal-conservative) cleavage: welfare politics. Specifically, I theorize that elections that give ideological opponents a majority will mobilize ideological predispositions, leading to more coherent welfare attitudes. I test the argument by relying on 11 Danish surveys linked to official records on local elections over four decades and using a regression discontinuity design. Evidence strongly supports the notion that elections increase attitude consistency if the majority produced goes against the individual’s ideological preferences. The findings stress the dynamic nature of attitude structure and the important role regular political events play in that regard.

Election officials often say that many Americans do not register to vote for fear of being called to jury duty. The only published study on the topic claims that aversion to jury service depresses turnout by more than seven percentage points. We use questions from the 1991 National Election Studies Pilot Study to ascertain beliefs about the sources of jury lists, and we relate those impressions to registration status. We find that barely half the public professes any knowledge of how juries are chosen, and just 42% believe that they come from voter registration records. Estimations from a multivariate analysis indicate that fear of jury service accounts for less than a one percentage point drop in turnout. We discuss the implications of this finding both for reform proposals and the rational choice theory of turnout.

The question must sometimes occur to us who are interested in political science, whether it will ever supply general principles for the guidance of statecraft. At present there seems to be little if any connection between them. Technical skill and special knowledge in history, economics and jurisprudence are appreciated and employed by statesmen, but the idea of determining state policy upon scientific principles has no place in practical politics. In memoirs of Bismarck one finds much about politics as an art and nothing about politics as a science except in contemptuous references to people who approach politics in a doctrinaire spirit. His way of expressing a small opinion of Gladstone's statesmanship was to speak of him as “Professor” Gladstone. This did not mean that Bismarck felt any contempt for professors as such—administration in Germany makes large use of the service of specialists—but that his conception of statecraft was altogether empirical and he distrusted political activities based upon abstract principles. This, I believe, is a frame of mind common among statesmen. Professor Sheldon Amos, in his “Science of Politics” remarks that “practical statesmen, immersed in actual business and oppressed by the ever-recurring presence of new emergencies, almost resent the notion of applying the comprehensive principles of science.”

Examination of manuals of political science might furnish practical statesmen with the retort that political science has no comprehensive principles to offer. Eminent authorities in political science restrict its scope, either by giving a technical meaning to the term “Political” or to the term “the State.”

The American criminal legal system is an important site of political socialization: scholars have shown that criminal legal contact reduces turnout and that criminalization pushes people away from public institutions more broadly. Despite this burgeoning literature, few analyses directly investigate the causal effect of lower-level police contact on voter turnout. To do so, we leverage individual-level administrative ticketing data from Hillsborough County, Florida. We show that traffic stops materially decrease participation for Black and non-Black residents alike, and we also find temporal variation in the effect for Black voters. Although stops reduce turnout more for Black voters in the short term, they are less demobilizing over a longer time horizon. Although even low-level contacts with the police can reduce political participation across the board, our results point to a unique process of political socialization vis-à-vis the carceral state for Black Americans.

In their search for nationhood since World War II, many peoples of Asia and Africa have discovered that independence from western rule is only the first and perhaps the easiest step. Once the foreigner has gone, the larger problem looms of creating a viable political society. Divisions and competitive strivings held in check when outsiders controlled affairs are suddenly released. Ethnic, religious and regional differences, that seemed less important so long as colonial administrators ruled, boil up after independence and more often than not come to dominate the loyalties and inspire the ambitions that move men in politics. To their dismay, responsible leaders find themselves heading not the homogeneous, modern nation state they dreamed of before independence, but a congeries of separate groups. The simple, unifying purpose of the independence struggle fades away, leaving a host of contradictions and cleavages.

Indonesia is wracked by repeated resistance to Jakarta. Burma has been beset by periodic insurrection, supported in part by regional and ethnic hostility to Rangoon. The nightmare of India's Nehru is the growth of regional and linguistic differences. Imminent disintegration of the ex-Belgan Congo dramatizes the extreme case.

Two years ago, when an astute critic made a half-century appraisal of comparative politics in the United States, he reminded us that the American Political Science Association was founded in 1903 as an outgrowth of moves to establish a National Conference on Comparative Legislation. During the more than half-century that followed, the writings in comparative government and politics have reflected the influences which have made themselves felt in the discipline as a whole. The attention given by Charles E. Merriam after World War I to “informal government,” “underlying processes and relations,” and “social bases of political cohesion” is fully appreciated now by those who are projecting comparative studies of political socialization. In the 1930s, Carl J. Friedrich's writings pointed up the need for more adequate conceptualization when combined with appropriate appreciation of empirical research. Mention should also be made of the earlier works of Herman Finer. In their respective ways, albeit in varying degrees, all of these writers recognized the need for an increased emphasis upon the informal and extra-legal factors affecting the political process, and for more concern with generalization and theory.

Students of congressional-executive relations have long recognized the weakness of legislative oversight of the Executive, and in few areas of public policy has this weakness been more pronounced than in national defense. A recent and significant change in this relationship was made when the 86th Congress in 1959 imposed upon a reluctant executive and military establishment a major innovation in the established processes of making defense policy. The innovation was deliberately intended to alter the balance in executive-congressional controls over some strategic decisions, and was in the form of a new requirement for legislative authorization of the principal weapons programs of the military services.

The emergence of political parties performing important functions in the political system has characterized the recent history of much of the African continent. The new party systems have taken various forms, including single parties with a narrow ruling elite, as in Liberia, or with mass support, as in Guinea; two-party systems where one mass party is dominant, as is the case in Kenya; and multi-party systems, as in Nigeria and Somalia. In two states, Libya and Sudan, once-flourishing political parties have been banned. Only in Ethiopia (Etritrea excluded) have there never been political parties. The Empire of the Conquering Lion of Judah can well be termed a no-party state. In Ethiopia today no organization exists that would or could describe itself as a political party.

In No. 78 of The Federalist, Alexander Hamilton wrote: “To avoid an arbitrary discretion in the courts, it is indispensable that they should be bound down by strict rules and precedents, which serve to define and point out their duty in every particular case that comes before them…” Whatever acceptance this view of the judge as automaton and of the judicial process as a ministerial function may once have had, little trace remains of it today, after ten years of experience with the “reorganized” Supreme Court. The Roosevelt Court was not, of course, the first on which judicial decisions were influenced by the personal values of its justices. Throughout the history of the Court, the autobiographical element in its output has been as important as when Justice Holmes bluntly told his colleagues in 1905 that “this case is decided upon an economic theory which a large part of the country does not entertain.” But the prevailing theory was that judges did not make law, they merely found it.

The constitutional revolution of 1935–37 changed all that. The public, as Max Lerner says, “began to see that judicial decisions are not babies brought by constitutional storks, but are born out of the travail of economic circumstance.” For two terms, the Constitution meant what Justice Roberts said it meant. After the consummation of the revolution, the forces which had been most ardent in picturing earlier conservative courts as demonstrating the workings of a government of law could only explain the strange phenomenon of a liberal court as the triumph of a government of men. Additional recent factors serving to underline the personal basis of judicial decisions have been the tossing of barbed phrases on the bench, Justice Jackson's ill-tempered public attack on one of his colleagues, and the mounting tide of dissenting opinions.

We investigate a sequential voting model in which voters' forecasts of outcomes on future issues are determined endogenously. Voters are assumed to make decisions in an environment in which future outcomes are uncertain. The uncertainty arises from two possible sources. Voters may be uncertain of other voters' preferences. In addition, events that occur before future issues are decided may affect voters' preferences on future votes. Information available to voters at each point in time is characterized. An equilibrium to the voting problem, if one exists, is one for which the outcome on the issue currently being decided and voters' forecasts of outcomes on future issues are determined simultaneously. We show that an equilibrium exists under a particular voting institution and characterize voters' forecasts for this equilibrium.