This article identifies four fundamental modes of thought employed in the cognition of policy problems. These modes of thought are moral, cause-effect, sociocentric, and imaginative. Nine variants of these four forms are described and investigated among a small sample of adolescents. The maturation of these forms of thought appears limited during adolescence, and change is not well predicted by the respondent's level of politicization. The article concludes with some speculations about the structure of socialization theory as it relates to the development of fundamental forms of political thinking.

Contrary to the claim by Green, Palmquist, and Schickler (1998), macropartisanship is largely shaped by presidential approval and consumer sentiment. It is not the case, however, that macropartisanship mirrors the ever-changing levels of current presidential popularity and prosperity. Rather, macropartisanship reflects the cumulation of political and economic news that shapes approval and consumer sentiment. Using ECM technology, we show that, far from being the weak force that Green et al. suggest, the cumulation of innovations in presidential approval and consumer sentiment largely account for the long-term trends in macropartisanship. For forecasting macropartisanship in the near future, it is better to predict from the fundamentals represented by the history of approval and consumer sentiment up to a given moment than from current values of macropartisanship itself.

Within the past decade, a significant change has occurred in political science literature about the judiciary. The central questions have shifted from public law concerns—what is the law and its value?—to a primary focus on decision-making and process—how and why courts decide what they do, and with what political effects? The Supreme Court still dominates professional attention, but a host of new research techniques (jurimetrics and socialization studies, content and capability analysis, small group theory, etc.) vie for the allegiance of researchers.1 The variety of methods in vogue is formidable, and a testament to the borrowing power of the profession. So has been the sound and fury accompanying the change. The new approaches are perhaps too young to attempt a synthesis with traditional methods of analysis or even among themselves. Yet it is never too early to locate unities of inquiry, including common problems. The object of this essay is to air one difficulty facing virtually every student of the judicial process—the fluidity of judicial choice—and to examine some of its implications for research in and normative evaluation of judicial behavior.

The general argument should be stated at the outset. My purpose is to present empirical findings as a basis to critique some current research techniques in hopes of contributing to the analytical synthesis which must come if the discipline is to make a concerted advance in understanding judicial behavior. From a research standpoint, an unfortunate by-product of the debate between the “quantifiers” and the “qualifiers,” as Joseph Tanenhaus has distinguished them, is that extremes of advocacy have obscured the much more important things that students of the judiciary share in common than the methodological differences which agitate them.

Elite cohesion is a fundamental pillar of authoritarian stability. High-level defections can signal weakness, embolden the opposition, and sometimes, lead to regime collapse. Using a dataset of 4,291 ruling party candidates in Russia, this paper develops and tests hypotheses about the integrity of elite coalitions under autocracy. Our theory predicts that ruling elites defect when there is greater uncertainty about the regime’s willingness to provide spoils. Regimes that share power with the opposition, limit access to spoils, and lack formal institutions see more defections. Co-opting the opposition assuages outside threats but leaves regime insiders disgruntled and prone to defection. Those with personal followings and business connections are the most likely to defect, since they can pursue their political goals independently of the regime. Taken together, our results highlight important tradeoffs among authoritarian survival strategies. Many of the steps autocrats take to repel challenges simultaneously heighten the risk of defections.

This article is a first attempt to systematically examine policy design and its influence on policy effectiveness in a comparative perspective. We begin by providing a novel concept and measure of policy design. Our Average Instrument Diversity (AID) index captures whether governments tend to reuse the same policy instruments and instrument combinations or produce policy solutions that are carefully tailored to the policy problem at hand. Second, we demonstrate that our AID index is a valid and reliable measure of policy design quality with a strong explanatory power for the outcome variables tested. Analyzing the composition of environmental policy portfolios in 21 OECD countries, we show that higher levels of AID are positively associated with a country’s policy effectiveness in environmental matters. Based on this finding, we analyze, in a third step, the factors that lead countries to adopt more or less diverse policy portfolios. We find that the policy design quality is significantly improved when policy makers are not bound by high institutional constraints and, more importantly, are backed by well-equipped bureaucracies.

We suggest a method for estimating a political representative's personal ideology and its effect on his or her voting decisions. The current practice of using the ratings of a pressure group such as Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) as a proxy for personal ideology is shown to have a number of theoretical and interpretive flaws. Our technique uses the residuals from two regression equations to provide answers to two questions: Is there a systematic ideological component to the voting behavior of political representatives after taking account of other political determinants, and if a systematic ideological component exists, is it possible to determine its role in voting on particular issues? The technique developed and the currently accepted practice are compared using votes on labor issues as an empirical example.

Recent work in political economics has examined the positive relationship between legislative size and spending, which Weingast et al. (1981) formalized as the law of 1/n. However, empirical tests of this theory have produced a pattern of divergent findings. The positive relationship between seats and spending appears to hold consistently for unicameral legislatures and for upper chambers in bicameral legislatures but not for lower chambers. We bridge this gap between theory and empirics by extending Weingast et al.'s model to account for bicameralism in the context of a Baron–Ferejohn bargaining game. Our comparative statics predict, and empirical data from U.S. state legislatures corroborate, that the size of the upper chamber (n) is a positive predictor of expenditure, whereas the ratio of lower-to-upper chamber seats (k) exhibits a negative effect. We refer to these relationships as the law of k/n, as the two variables influence spending in opposite directions.

There has been a resurgence of Darwinian naturalism in political theory, as manifested in the recent work of political scientists such as Roger Masters, Robert McShea, and James Q. Wilson. They belong to an intellectual tradition that includes not only Charles Darwin but also Aristotle and David Hume. Although most political scientists believe Darwinian social theory has been refuted, their objections rest on three false dichotomies: facts versus values, nature versus freedom, and nature versus nurture. Rejecting these dichotomies would allow the social sciences to be linked to the natural sciences through Darwinian biology.

This paper starts from the premise that traditional views of political roles among married couples emphasize role-differentiation, leading to masculine superiority; more recent perspectives stress role-sharing, leading to equality. The implications for individual political participation and political socialization vary according to the prevalence of and conditions surrounding the two patterns. Interview data from a national sample of middle-aged couples reveal substantial equality with respect to command over political resources, attention paid to politics, and manifest political participation. Levels of equality remain high under a variety of controls. When inequalities do exist, male dominance is more common, but the extent of that dominance varies across the range of political labor. Superiority of either parent in one arena tends to occur in others also, suggesting fixed modes of behavior. The relative advantage in education and personal efficacy which one partner holds over the other vitally affects the political advantage. These factors and mother's employment status operate more strongly among working class than middle class couples. Age of children has no appreciable impact. To achieve political parity or superiority mothers ordinarily need extraordinary resources to overcome the built-in constraints of culturally-defined sex roles.

We examine the role that one group of party units—county party organizations—play in electoral politics, based on electoral and county party organizational data collected during 1980–84. Local party chairs report their organizations are involved in a number of electorally relevant activities, including candidate recruitment, joint planning with candidate organizations, and various independent campaign activities. The data demonstrate that county party organizations are indeed effective. The probability of a minority party's running candidates for lower-level offices, which appears to contribute to higher vote totals for higher-level offices, is a function of the local strength and activity level of the party; whereas direct effects are seen to be small. These data suggest that even if mainly at the candidate recruitment stage of the process, party organizations play an important role in local electoral politics.

Why have decades of high and rising inequality in the United States not increased public support for redistribution? An established theory in political science holds that Americans’ distrust of government decreases their support for redistribution, but empirical support draws primarily on regression analyses of national surveys. I discuss the untestable assumptions required for identification with regression modeling and propose an alternative design that uses randomized experiments about political corruption to identify the effect of trust in government on support for redistribution under weaker assumptions. I apply this to three survey experiments and estimate the effects that large, experimentally induced increases in political trust have on support for redistribution. Contrary to theoretical predictions, estimated effects are substantively negligible, statistically indistinguishable from zero, and comparable to estimates from two placebo experiments. I discuss implications for theory building about causes of support for redistribution in an era of rising inequality and eroding confidence in government.

Can gender-based “enclaves” facilitate women’s access to justice? I examine all-female police stations in India and test whether group-specific institutions assist victims of gender-based violence and female officers in law enforcement. I create an original dataset based on Indian police reports and leverage the manner in which all-women police stations were opened in Haryana state to estimate their causal effect. The creation of enclaves in law enforcement does not increase registered crime. In fact, the intervention lowers the caseload at standard stations by justifying the deflection of gendered crimes, reduces responsibilities for policewomen, and increases travel cost for victims seeking redress. The institutions formalize the “counseling” of victims by encouraging reconciliation with abusers at the expense of arrest of suspects, and survey evidence suggests that all-women stations might not be associated with positive perceptions of policewomen. Broadly, I argue that representation as separation may have unintended consequences.

Do democracies suffer higher inflation than nondemocracies? We identify two competing hypotheses regarding the impact of democracy on inflation. In the “populist” approach, inflation is the result of public demands for transfers financed by the inflation tax, suggesting that electoral competition will increase inflation. In the “state-capture” approach, inflation is a result of pressure from elites who derive private benefits from money creation, suggesting that electoral competition may constrain inflation. We present a simple model that captures both ideas and argue that the impact of democracy is conditioned by the prevailing level of income inequality. This claim is tested with data from more than 100 countries between 1960 and 1999 using different dynamic panel estimation methods to control for unobserved effects and the potential endogeneity of some independent variables. We find robust evidence that democracy is associated with lower inflation in lower-inequality countries but with higher inflation in higher-inequality countries.The authors thank Michael Bailey, Robert Cumby, Philip Keefer, Torsten Persson, Dennis Quinn, George Shambaugh, David Stasavage, and David Strömberg for comments on early drafts. The central bank turnover data used in this paper were generously provided by Jakob de Haan. Previous versions of this paper were delivered at the annual meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association and American Political Science Association. Financial support from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and research assistance from Jorge Ugaz and Mouneer Odeh are gratefully acknowledged.

Duverger's famous dictum that “the center does not exist in politics” is the starting point of an inquiry into the possible meanings of the concept of a center, and of center parties, in European party systems. This article consists of six sections; the first five sections deal with the center as a pivot in voting, the center in traditional left-right distributions, the notion of a center in multidimensional party spaces, the center in terms of mechanics, applying rather different metaphors of scales-in-balance and of centripetal versus centrifugal forces, and the center analyzed in terms of social cleavages. Following this search for conceptual meaning, in which the writings of Duverger and Sartori receive particular attention, the record of European party systems is examined to see whether the presence or absence of center parties in party systems can contribute to a realistic classification of European party systems.

W. E. B. Du Bois's observations about the links between Americans' unwillingness to acknowledge the legacies of slavery and the shortcomings of formal equality in the post-Reconstruction era anticipate the obstacles to racial justice in the “post-civil rights” era. His study of the “splendid failure” of Reconstruction indicates how a kind of willful national amnesia prevented black citizens from enjoying in fact the freedom and equality they were guaranteed by law. Arguing that the story of racial injustice is still importantly a story about memory's suppression, I use Du Bois's writings to explore the case for reparations as one element of a larger effort to expose the presence of the slave past and to undermine the continuing effects of slavery and Jim Crow. Memory—of what has been, of acts of commission or omission, of a responsibility abdicated—affects the future conduct of power in any form. Failure to adopt some imaginative recognition of such a principle merely results in the enthronement of a political culture that appears to know no boundaries—the culture of impunity.

Wole Soyinka (1999)Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the 2000 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in Washington, DC, the 2001 meeting of the Collegium for African American Research in Sardinia, Italy, and the 2002 Riker Seminar and Frederick Douglass Institute Seminar at the University of Rochester. I am grateful for the comments of all of the participants at those sessions, as well as for careful readings by Joshua Dienstag, Roxanne Euben, Frederick Harris, George Klosko, James Johnson, Joel Olson, George Shulman, Valeria Sinclair-Chapman, Jeffrey Tucker, and Stephen White.

How to promote cooperative behavior is classically solved by incentives that lead self-interested individuals in socially desirable directions, but by now well-established laboratory results show that people often do act cooperatively, even at significant cost to themselves. These results suggest that cooperative dispositions might be an evolved part of human nature. Yet such dispositions appear inconsistent with the “Machiavellian intelligence” paradigm, which develops the idea that our brains have evolved, in substantial part, for capturing adaptive advantage from within-group competition. We use simulation to address the evolutionary relationship between basic Machiavellian capacities and cooperative dispositions. Results show that selection on such capacities can (1) permit the spread of cooperative dispositions even in cooperation-unfriendly worlds and (2) support transitions to populations with high mean cooperative dispositions. We distinguish between “rationality in action” and “rationality in design”—the adaptive fit between a design attribute of an animal and its environment. The combination of well-developed Machiavellian intelligence, modest mistrust, and high cooperative dispositions appears to be a rational design for the brains of highly political animals such as ourselves.

Observers of city politics have often stated that political leadership—usually mayoral leadership—is a crucial ingredient in a city's ability to deal with its problems. And studies of successful leaders in urban systems have led to the formulation of a model of the “political entrepreneur” who is adept at accumulating political resources and pyramiding them to gain increased influence. Based on four years of observation of politics in Oakland, California, this study suggests that successful mayoral leadership and resource-pyramiding may be limited by governmental structure, the personality of the mayor, and the nature of the political system.

In Oakland, fragmented institutional authority and the council-manager form of government have created obstacles for elected officials. A privately oriented, “nonpolitical” mayor has avoided publicity and has tended to underutilize, rather than pyramid, his resources. Finally, in an amorphous political system characterized by a lack of group and party activity, a mayor is denied both information and support. By examining the ways in which the performance of Oakland's mayor diverges from a model of political leadership, we can identify some of the factors that support or limit such leadership.

Warren E. Miller and Donald E. Stokes' publication in 1963 of a preliminary report on the Survey Research Center's representation study is an important landmark in the development of empirical political theory. That report addressed itself to the crucial theoretical question of the linkage between mass political opinions and governmental policy-making. More specifically, the report found considerable policy agreement between Congressional roll call votes and the attitudes of the individual Congressman's constituency. This policy agreement was then interpreted through several causal paths and the Congressman's perception of his constituency's attitudes was found to be the main path by which the local district ultimately influenced Congressional outputs.

The main body of the report dealt with the broad civil rights issue dimension, and, by specifying the perceptual path by which constituency influence is brought to bear, documented the effect of political issues despite the generally low level of political information held at the mass level. Thus, the Congressmen, through their broad cognitive evaluations, were aware of how far they could proceed in determining their civil rights roll call votes on the basis of their own attitudes before risking the displeasure of their constituents.

Beyond such major substantive contributions the representation study introduced to political science a variance-apportioning technique similar to that developed by Sewall Wright, in 1921. Through this variance-apportioning technique, the importance of the perceptual link was isolated and evaluated. This study, then, symbolizes the growing recognition in political science of the importance of more sophisticated methodological tools in the process of theory building.

Identifying policy status quo locations is a precondition for testing key predictions of many spatial models of legislative politics, but such measures have proved to be extremely difficult to construct. This study applies a novel technique that measures policy locations in relation to legislators’ preferences. The resulting status quo estimates allow for a direct test of the policy consequences predicted by pivotal politics and party cartel theories of legislative politics. The empirical tests indicate that parties interact with pivotal politics to contribute to policy gridlock and shape policy change. By bringing pressure to bear on pivotal politics “pivots” and by blocking policy changes that would “roll” the party, parties increase the range of policies subject to gridlock in the American political system.