We all acknowledge strong special responsibilities towards families, friends, clients, and compatriots. The moral basis of these responsibilities is traditionally analyzed in terms of self-assumed obligations. That analysis substantially restricts their scope, because we voluntarily commit ourselves to only a limited range of people. In this article I argue that it is the beneficiary's vulnerability rather than any voluntary commitment as such on the part of the benefactor that generates these special responsibilities. This analysis provides an argument for broader notions of responsibility, because there are many more agents vulnerable to us (individually or collectively) than to whom we have made commitments, in any sense. The welfare state is one particularly apt way of discharging at least some of these further responsibilities. Unlike more individualized responses, the welfare state can satisfy the criteria of a morally acceptable dependency relationship.

This article explores Adam Smith's attitude toward economic inequality, as distinct from the problem of poverty, and argues that he regarded it as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, as has often been recognized, Smith saw a high degree of economic inequality as an inevitable result of a flourishing commercial society, and he considered a certain amount of such inequality to be positively useful as a means of encouraging productivity and bolstering political stability. On the other hand, it has seldom been noticed that Smith also expressed deep worries about some of the other effects of extreme economic inequality—worries that are, moreover, interestingly different from those that dominate contemporary discourse. In Smith's view, extreme economic inequality leads people to sympathize more fully and readily with the rich than the poor, and this distortion in our sympathies in turn undermines both morality and happiness.

Military expenditures are often funded by debt, and sovereign borrowers are more likely to renege on debt-service obligations if they lose a war than if they win one or if peace prevails. This makes expected debt service costlier in peace, which can affect both crisis bargaining and war termination. I analyze a complete-information model where players negotiate in the shadow of power, whose distribution depends on their mobilization levels, which can be funded partially by borrowing. I show that players can incur debts that are unsustainable in peace because the opponent is unwilling to grant the concessions necessary to service them without fighting. This explanation for war is not driven by commitment problems or informational asymmetries but by the debt-induced inefficiency of peace relative to war. War results from actions that eliminate the bargaining range rather than from inability to locate mutually acceptable deals in that range.

Research emphasizing the correlates of state policy outputs and the performance of particular institutions has overshadowed the role of the citizenry in the drama of state politics. One question of basic concern is the relevance of state government and politics for the inhabitants of a state. At the level of public policy and institutional performance the answer to this is factual and straightforward. The nature, amount, distribution, and to some extent the quality of a state's services and policies can be specified. Since states perform most of the traditional functions of governmental units and since these functions affect the fortunes of the citizens, state politics has an obvious, tangible, objective relevance for a state's inhabitants. At another level, however, the answer is not so clear-cut. Here we are dealing with the idea of what is subjectively relevant. Large numbers of people apparently pass their lives being touched by political institutions in a variety of ways without becoming particularly interested in or involved with these institutions. Other people become intensely, purposively related to these same institutions. Still others fall along a continuum between these two poles. If substantial variations exist in the general salience of politics, there is little reason to doubt that the same conditions may be found in particular subsets of political matters. In the case at hand this subset consists of the cluster of institutions, actors, and processes known as state political systems.

The purpose of this research note is to suggest a potential general paradigm for the study of foreign policy processes. It is explicitly synthetic in that it combines Arnold Wolfers's notion of a continuum, the extremities of which he labels the pole of power and pole of indifference, with Theodore Lowi's efforts to affirm the nexus between issue and policy process. Two questions prove crucial in the determination of issue area: Is or is not the domestic impact of the issue symmetrical? And are the political goods at stake exclusively tangible or not? With the answers to these questions it becomes possible to specify the issue area (distribution, regulation, “interaction-protection,” redistribution) in which an event may be classified and to hypothesize the nature of the policy process (the identity of the major actors, the intensity of conflict) to be observed. Particular attention is paid to limited war as a redistributive issue area in order to make the case that redistribution, contrary to Lowi's view, is an important foreign policy process. Finally an effort is made to suggest how issue-based propositions could be utilized in the transnational comparison of foreign policy processes. It is suggested that differences in the policy process across issue areas within a given state may be as great as differences in process within a particular arena of power for two states as different in political system as the United States and the USSR.

Modern republics neglect to establish formal institutions that prevent wealthy citizens from exerting excessive political influence and they abandon extra-electoral techniques traditionally employed to keep office-holders accountable. Inspired by Guicciardini's and Machiavelli's reflections on the Roman, Venetian, and Florentine constitutions, this article highlights three forgotten practices that facilitate popular control of both economic and political elites: magistrate appointment procedures combining lottery and election, offices or assemblies excluding the wealthy from eligibility, and political trials enlisting the entire citizenry in prosecutions and appeals. I present a typology of regimes that evaluates the wealth containment potential of various magistrate selection methods, and propose a hypothetical reform supplying the U.S. Constitution with a “Tribunate” reminiscent of elite-accountability institutions in pre-eighteenth-century popular governments.

Building on suggestions by Isaiah Berlin, a number of thinkers have elaborated a moral theory of value pluralism. Berlin himself believed that value pluralism was consistent with liberalism, which he understood as a political theory giving great weight to the value of negative liberty. Theorists led by John Gray have argued, however, that Berlin's pluralist stance toward values is not consistent with his commitment to liberalism. Gray's critique has triggered a wide-ranging theoretical debate, and the purpose of this article is to assess that debate. I sketch the essentials of value pluralism and explore its implications for liberal political theory. I conclude that Gray's argument modifies our understanding of liberal democracy but does not drive a wedge between value pluralism and liberal democratic theory. Nevertheless, it underscores the importance of prudence and attention to specific circumstances when using liberal democratic norms to guide the reform of illiberal institutions.

A spirited debate has arisen over the best approach to the analysis of the durability of governing coalitions in parliamentary democracies. In this controversy, Kaare Strom enters a number of criticisms of the stochastic modeling approach offered by Eric C. Browne, John P. Frendreis, and Dennis W. Gleiber, and by Claudio Cioffi-Revilla. In turn, Browne and his colleagues join the issue.

How do social networks moderate the way political information influences electoral accountability? We propose a simple model in which incumbent malfeasance revelations can facilitate coordination around less malfeasant challenger parties in highly connected voter networks, even when voters update favorably about incumbent party malfeasance. We provide evidence from Mexico of this mechanism by leveraging a field experiment in a context where the provision of incumbent malfeasance information increased support for incumbent parties, despite voters continuing to believe that challengers were less malfeasant than incumbents. Combining this experiment with detailed family network data, we show that—consistent with the model—the increase in incumbent party vote share due to information provision was counteracted by coordination around less malfeasant challengers in precincts with greater network connectedness. Individual-level data further demonstrate that networks facilitated explicit and tacit coordination among voters. These findings suggest that networks can help voters coordinate around information to help remove poorly performing politicians.

The unification of Germany revives several questions about the future of Germany's democracy. Given the socialist-authoritarian background, how supportive are East Germany's elites of liberal democratic rights? Has the socialist-democratic experience instilled into elites a social egalitarian conception of democracies? In what ways, if at all, do elites support direct democracy procedures? I examine political elites' conceptions of democracies in the united Germany in 1991, using a survey of 168 parliamentarians from the united parliament in Berlin. I find that the socialist and parliamentary institutions in the East and the West, respectively, have substantially influenced elites' conceptions of democracies in Germany, leading to a value divergence across the East-West boundary. Yet the findings also suggest that a partial value convergence in terms of liberal democratic rights among postwar elites has taken place. The results support an institutional learning theory, but they also suggest that support for liberal democratic values has been diffused into East Germany.

Researchers ordinarily consider ideological consistency to be a characteristic of individuals; groups are considered to be ideological only if they are composed of ideologically oriented individuals. We show how a group as a whole can be characterized as exhibiting an ideological basis for its preferences even though many, or even most, of its members have preferences that are inconsistent with the supposed unidimensional ideological continuum. As an illustration, we show that the United States electorate of 1980 had collective preferences among the candidates Kennedy, Carter, Ford, and Reagan as if these preferences reflected an underlying left-right dimension among these candidates, despite the fact that a high proportion of individual voters had preferences among these candidates that did not fit the left-right dimension. In general, we show reasons why collectivities are likely to be more ideologically consistent than are the individuals composing them.

The commission plan and the city manager plan-new forms of city government launched during the early years of this century—were both devised in response to local circumstances, but were soon being heralded as improvements over the then universal mayor-council system. Enthusiasts for both of these new governmental structures claimed many advantages for them. The hopes for the city manager plan seem to have been somewhat better founded, but the passage of time has shown that both plans had limitations which the reformers did not foresee.

Almost all of the early discussion about the relative merits of the three plans neglected the role of political environment. Proponents of the different systems deduced their arguments from “the principles” on which the plans were based. A three-year study of the actual operation of manager government in the late 1930s called attention to the importance of varying local conditions. “The tremendous variety of local political conditions and administrative habits apparent in the fifty cities covered by this survey,” the authors concluded, “makes it impossible to [give general answers to] many questions about the city manager plan.”

This paper examines two neglected conditions of the linkage process between public opinion and public policy, in an effort to evaluate an explanation, other than voter apathy and ignorance, of why the linkage appears to be so weak. These conditions are: (1) Opposing candidates for the same elective office must differ in their issue-related attitudes. (2) The winners' subsequent behavior vis-à-vis public policy must be consonant with their pre-election issue-related attitudes.

By the use of data collected before the 1966 House election, the amount of choice, or issue-related differences between candidates for the same House seat, is examined in all 435 Congressional districts. Sufficient differences were found in three policy areas—foreign affairs, civil rights, and domestic welfare—to imply that the electorate was given the opportunity to determine the direction of public policy.

Adding data collected on the roll-call behavior of the 435 winners allowed us to examine the second condition. Although in some cases there were substantial differences between pre-election attitude and postelection roll-call behavior on the same issue, this is clearly the exception rather than the rule. As a generalization, the second condition appears to be true.

We test propositions about how different forms of civic engagement are related to democratic representation in American communities. Our data are for the samples of communities, their citizens, and their leaders originally examined by Verba and Nie in Participation in America (1972). Our analyses of those data indicate that membership in bridging social–capital civic associations is unrelated to democratic responsiveness of leaders to the mass public but that bonding social–capital membership is negatively associated with such responsiveness. We also demonstrate that bonding social–capital civic engagement weakens the democratic linkage processes inherent in elections.

Hitler’s rise to power amidst an unprecedented propaganda campaign initiated scholarly interest in campaign effects. To the surprise of many, empirical studies often found minimal effects. The predominant focus of early work was on U.S. elections, though. Nazi propaganda as the archetypal and, in many ways, most likely case for strong effects has rarely been studied. We collect extensive data about Hitler’s speeches and gauge their impact on voter support at five national elections preceding the dictatorship. We use a semi-parametric difference-in-differences approach to estimate effects in the face of potential confounding due to the deliberate scheduling of events. Our findings suggest that Hitler’s speeches, while rationally targeted, had a negligible impact on the Nazis’ electoral fortunes. Only the 1932 presidential runoff, an election preceded by an extraordinarily short, intense, and one-sided campaign, yielded positive effects. This study questions the importance of charismatic leaders for the success of populist movements.

Moderates are often overlooked in contemporary research on American voters. Many scholars who have examined moderates argue that these individuals are only classified as such due to a lack of political sophistication or conflicted views across issues. We develop a method to distinguish three ways an individual might be classified as moderate: having genuinely moderate views across issues, being inattentive to politics or political surveys, or holding views poorly summarized by a single liberal–conservative dimension. We find that a single ideological dimension accurately describes most, but not all, Americans’ policy views. Using the classifications from our model, we demonstrate that moderates and those whose views are not well explained by a single dimension are especially consequential for electoral selection and accountability. These results suggest a need for renewed attention to the middle of the American political spectrum.

A few questions are still hotly debated among students of the Soviet political system, but certainly the nature of Soviet elections is not one of them. Everyone agrees that they are more interesting as a psychological curiosity than as a political reality. They are seen by various writers as ritualized affirmations of regime legitimacy, as methods of involving the masses in supportive activity, as a means of publicly honoring model citizens, and as a crushing display of unanimity designed to isolate the potential nonconformist. Both Western and Soviet writers see Soviet elections from the positive side, from the side of the dutiful 99 percent who invariably vote for the single candidate on the ballot.

In fact, Soviet and Western writers are in very close agreement on the major functions of elections in the Soviet Union, although their value judgments tend to differ along the lines one would expect. Taking one typical example from the general Western literature on the Soviet political system, we find the purposes of a Soviet election defined as “a public demonstration of the legitimacy of the regime … an invaluable educational and propaganda exercise … and perhaps most important of all, … proof that the system of control is unimpaired.” In the more detailed Western works on Soviet elections we find the same approach. Thus, Howard Swearer, in a very insightful and valuable article on Soviet local elections, states that “in the Soviet Union, the formal act of voting is comparable in purpose to such civic rituals as singing the national anthem or saluting a country's flag. It is a public display of personal reaffirmation of the Soviet way of life and the party leadership.”

This article (1) sketches a general explanation for the growth of coordinative machinery and of irregular personnel in modern governments; (2) identifies both general and specific reasons for this phenomenon in the United States with special reference to foreign policy making; (3) identifies within the American foreign policy-making context the modal characteristics of irregular and regular syndromes of policy making, and the conjunction between personnel and institutional base; (4) traces the implications arising from these different policy syndromes; and (5) evaluates some proposals for improving the coherence and knowledge base of American foreign policy making. The problems of defining foreign policy authority, assuring an integrated perspective, and effectively using specialized expertise are best seen in terms of the larger problem of governance in Washington against which all proposals for reform must be abraded.

Studies have shown that members of the U.S. Congress attempt to exploit many of the perquisites of office for their electoral advantage, but the actual impact of this exploitation has never been clear. Thus a potentially significant part of the advantage of incumbency has been subject to more speculation than analysis. This study develops a simple model that can be used to determine the electoral significance of perquisite use by officeholders. It begins by examining a particular perquisite, the franking privilege, to determine how it affects incumbent saliency and reputation among constituents. Within the context of an appropriate research design, the study finds that the distribution of government pamphlets does boost an incumbent's saliency while also creating a more positive evaluation of the incumbent. The saliency and evaluation effects erode over time, but this erosion can be mitigated through follow-up mailings. These results are incorporated into a model that is used to predict the electoral consequences of perquisite use. The model suggests that perquisites have their greatest impact in constituencies with a relatively small proportion of voters who identify with the incumbent's party.

Timothy Mitchell's article “The Limits of the State” in the March 1991 issue of this Review stimulated an unusual variety of interested comments. John Bendix, Bartholomew Sparrow, and Bertell Ollman offer critiques and suggestions from quite different points of view. In response, Mitchell clarifies further the distinctiveness of his own approach and its implications.