Informational theories of legislative institutions have demonstrated the potential collective gains from committee specialization due to the use of restrictive amendment procedures. For these benefits to be realized, however, the floor majority must overcome a commitment problem. I demonstrate that in a multistage game, majority rule, combined with the fact that generations of legislators overlap, allows the legislature to solve the commitment problem and to sustain legislative norms and institutions even if legislators are “finitely lived.” The model suggests that rather than restrictive amendment procedures, it is the committee's expectation of floor deference that sustains committee specialization. As a consequence, legislative norms may collapse due to an unexpected influx of new members even if the distribution of preferences in the legislature does not change. Finally, I discuss consequences for a comparative study of legislative institutions.

Can stability emerge solely from the competition and self-interest of sovereign powers existing in a state of anarchy, or does stability depend on restraints from the complex nexus of interdependencies characterizing the contemporary world economy and its associated institutions? We suppose some infinitely divisible resource, that all nation-states are endowed with and maximize and that enables them to overcome adversaries in the event of conflict. We offer a noncooperative, extensive-form model of international conflict without exogenous mechanisms to enforce agreements in order to learn under what conditions balance of power and collective security ensure the sovereignty of all states in anarchic systems. We conclude that there exists at least one world—albeit an abstract one—in which anarchy yields stability.

When citizens contact local government agencies, they generally attempt to influence service delivery decisions made by these bureaucracies. This paper examines the nature of citizen contacts, and the results of such contacts, with respect to the enforcement of environmental ordinances in Detroit, Michigan. We first examine the mechanisms responsible for the generation of citizen contacts. Assuming relations among citizen awareness, service need, and social well-being, we derive a downward-opening parabola as appropriate for describing the relationship between social well-being and propensity to contact a service agency. Using data on citizen contacts from City of Detroit agencies merged with census data, we find the expected relationship in evidence. We find that the Environmental Enforcement Division generally responds to citizen contacts, but the quality of the response varies with social characteristics of neighborhoods.

This article extends the spatial model of voting to study the implications of different institutional structures of federalism along two dimensions: degree of centralization and mode of representation. The representation dimension varies the weight between unit representation (one state, one vote) and population-proportional representation (one person, one vote). Voters have incomplete information and can reduce policy risk by increasing the degree of centralization or increasing the weight on unit representation. We derive induced preferences over the degree of centralization and the relative weights of the two modes of representation, and we study the properties of majority rule voting over these two basic dimensions of federalism. Moderates prefer more centralization than extremists, and voters in large states generally have different preferences from voters in small states. This implies two main axes of conflict in decisions concerning political confederation: moderates versus extremists and large versus small states.

The pattern of communications between representatives and constituents has become a matter of central concern to many students of legislative behavior. As Lewis A. Dexter points out, the statement that a Congressman “represents” his district is only shorthand for the fact that the Congressman “represents his image of the district or of his constituents.” This image is established, according to Dexter, by the communications between representative and constituents: “what he hears from the district as he interprets it.” Miller and Stokes explore directly Congressmen's images of their constituents' opinions. The representative's image of his district is significant because it may constitute part of the explanation for various important types of behavior, such as his roll call voting, the stands he takes on issues of public policy, and the formulation of his campaign strategies.

A portion of a representative's image of his district is composed of his beliefs about voters, his explicit or implicit theory of voting behavior. Because his position is contingent upon the approval of a majority of voters in an election, he is likely to consider at least to some degree the effect that various of his decisions might have on election outcomes. In making such judgments, the representative probably makes some assumptions, conscious or not, about the manner in which voters make their choices. If he believes, for example, that voters pay close attention to his actions, he probably feels more constrained by his district's likely opinions than if he does not hold that belief.

Minority–majority districts are highly controversial. To assess the degree to which black positions on this controversial matter were well-thought-out and fixed, questions based on Sniderman and Piazza's (1993) “counterargument” technique were included in the 1996 National Black Election Study. Black opinion instability on the issue of race and redistricting reveals the complexity of mass attitudes and the reasoning process and reflects the manner in which a set of clashing interests and core values is balanced and prioritized. Although a large majority of blacks voiced initial opposition to creating districts where blacks and Hispanics are the voting majority, most blacks changed their position in response to the counterargument. This asymmetry suggests that blacks more strongly favor the goal of increasing minority representation than the principle of color blindness in Congressional redistricting. Education and racial identification are key predictors of black opinion on racial redistricting. Less educated blacks and weak racial identifiers were less supportive of minority-majority districts and racial redistricting practices. These results support the revisionist perspective among public opinion scholars that rational, thinking individuals can hold wavering opinions upon questioning because they generally encapsulate a set of contradictory values and interests.The research reported in this paper was funded by grants to the author from the National Science Foundation POWRE Program (SBR-9743928) and from the National Science Foundation's Political Science Division (SBR-9796212). An earlier version was presented at the 2000 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Marriott Wardman Park, August 31–September 3, 2000. The author thanks Luis Fraga at Stanford University for his comments as the panel's discussant, as well as the APSR Editor, Lee Sigelman, and reviewers for their contributions to this paper. I also thank Bruce Boyd at Computing Services at UCI and Gary King at Harvard University for their technical assistance.

For decades, critics of pluralism have argued that the American interest group system exhibits a significantly biased distribution of policy preferences. We evaluate this argument by measuring groups’ revealed preferences directly, developing a set of ideal point estimates, IGscores, for over 2,600 interest groups and 950 members of Congress on a common scale. We generate the scores by jointly scaling a large dataset of interest groups’ positions on congressional bills with roll-call votes on those same bills. Analyses of the scores uncover significant heterogeneity in the interest group system, with little conservative skew and notable inter-party differences in preference correspondence between legislators and ideologically similar groups. Conservative bias and homogeneity reappear, however, when weighting IGscores by groups’ PAC contributions and lobbying expenditures. These findings suggest that bias among interest groups depends on the extent to which activities like PAC contributions and lobbying influence policymakers’ perceptions about the preferences of organized interests.

Distributive, informational, and partisan rationales provide contrasting accounts of legislative politics. Which of these theories best explains the decisions and policies of the House Agriculture Committee? We contend that all are appropriate, at various times, depending upon the particular issues and circumstances. By analyzing issues within the jurisdiction of the Agriculture Committee and the Agriculture and Rural Development Subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee in the 104th House, we demonstrate that the issue environments of both are multidimensional (even within individual bills) and that each committee has both distributive and partisan policy dimensions. Therefore, it is impossible for either committee to be representative of the chamber on all its policy dimensions simultaneously. In addition, with regard to distributive issues salient to members, we find that both committees are homogeneous, high-demand outliers. Our study has important implications for distributive, informational, and partisan theories of legislative behavior and organization.

The role of education as a significant political socialization process is widely accepted among social scientists and educators. Numerous studies point to positive correlations between education level and political cognition and participation. But beyond this point agreement ends. While many studies have demonstrated with varying degrees of certitude the formal role of curriculum and the teacher in the socialization process, the inconclusive and contradictory nature of the findings has led many students of socialization to a closer examination of the less formal environment of the school. Yet only a few studies have examined the influence of the informal school environment upon political socialization.

The purpose of this paper is to examine empirically the impact of the class climate in peer groups and schools upon the reinforcement or resocialization of political attitudes and behavior patterns.

That individual preferences may he aggregated into a meaningful collective decision using the Condorcet criterion of majority choice is one of the central tenets of democracy. But that individual preferences may not yield majority winners is one of the classic findings of the social choice literature. Given this problem, social choice theorists have attempted to estimate the probability of Condorcet winners, given certain empirical or theoretical conditions. We shall estimate the probabilities of Condorcet winners and intransitive aggregate orders for various numbers of individuals with strong or weak preference orders across various numbers of alternatives. We find, using computer simulation, a stark contrast between these estimates assuming strong individual preferences and the estimates allowing for individuals' indifference between pairs of alternatives. In contrast to earlier work, which depends on the strong-preference assumption, we suggest that the problem is most acute for small committee decision making and least acute for mass elections with few alternatives.

The concept “nondecision” was advanced by Bachrach and Baratz as a means of identifying certain areas of community power neglected by reputational and issue analysis approaches. While it is descriptively suggestive of certain possible areas of neglect, it has not been shaped into a useful analytic tool, and does not make any demands which cannot be met by decision-making analysis. Its terms are, in fact, somewhat confused since it fails to differentiate between nondecisions brought about by covert control, and those which may be more generally atlributable to a mobilization of bias. These together seem to comprise what Bachrach and Baratz describe as the “second face of power,” which has been neglected, they argue, because of inadequate consideration of the meaning of power and related concepts. But their own approach to these does not aid empirical analysis. It simply encourages concern for the minutiae of political action, whereas the simplified view of power adopted here suggests the advantages of a contextual approach.

Ethnic groups argue that a certain proportion of administrative positions should be filled by their members. This concern assumes that a bureaucrat applies to his tasks the values and interests of his social background. Evidence from Zambia, a country in which ethnic and regional differences have been highly politicized, suggests that this assumption lacks empirical support. The fundamental guidelines that appear to shape administrative behavior in Zambia are the calculations of what must be done to achieve individual career advancement. Administrators are, in addition, constrained from pursuing parochial interests by the range of authority and discretion attached to their particular positions.

Although bureaucrats do not appear to provide ideal representatives for ethnic interests, the ethnic composition of the most visible echelons of the government is of critical political significance. This is particularly evident in a country like Zambia where ethnically defined groups are contending for positions in the new postcolonial society. The symbols of power can be as important as power itself.

According to Walter Dean Burnham, party realignments “result in significant transformation in the general shape of policy.” Through the analysis of House roll-call data, the New Deal realignment is examined to determine whether, in fact, a significant transformation took place and, if so, what its characteristics were. It was hypothesized that if a new political agenda emerged at that time, at least some of the stable policy dimensions which Aage Clausen finds as characterizing the modern Congress should have developed during the New Deal period. In terms of content and level of partisan voting evoked, the government management and the agricultural policy dimensions do take their modern form during the New Deal. A social welfare dimension developed but had not, by the late 1930s, taken its modern shape. It is argued that a major transformation of policy did take place and that, in the process, the ideological distance between the parties increased. This realignment, however, did not immediately change regional voting patterns within each party.

Systematic testing of Downsian voter rationality is accomplished using a computer simulation technique on the 1964 SRC voting survey. The simulation tests both the hypotheses predicting whether an individual will vote and for whom an individual will vote. To evaluate the results of the tests we develop a statistic analogous to Pearson's r. This statistic measures the percentage improvement over a random guess technique. Utilizing this statistic, Downs explains 68.5 percent of the unexplained variance in the voters' choices of party. Three alternative interpretations of the turnout decision are then considered, each premised on a different notion of how the costs of voting are distributed among the voters. Here we use an Engel Curve technique to develop the turnout decision and explain 92 percent of the variance. The importance of the various elements of the Downsian theory are evaluated and, in contrast to some recent conjectures, the probability of making a difference on the outcome of the election is shown to have an effect on the turnout decision. Finally, to determine the viability of the results, the SRC “6 factor” model is developed in an analogous fashion and used to predict both turnout and direction of vote.

From assumptions of parties as rational actors, this study develops four measures of government performance: duration, mode of resignation, subsequent alternation, and electoral success. These measures are used in a test of competing hypotheses concerning minority government performance in parliamentary democracies. Minority governments are conventionally portrayed as poor performers, but tests of this proposition have been seriously limited. An alternative hypothesis depicts minority governments as rational cabinet solutions without significant performance liabilities. These hypotheses are tested against an extensive cross-national data set including 323 postwar governments in 15 parliamentary democracies. The conventional wisdom about minority governments is not supported by the evidence. In some respects, minority governments are clearly superior to majority coalitions. Moreover, minority government formation may enhance systemic responsiveness and accountability. The findings support the explanation of minority governments as rational cabinet solutions.

Scholarship on oversight of the bureaucracy typically conceives of legislatures as unitary actors. But most oversight is conducted by individual legislators who contact agencies directly. I acquire the correspondence logs of 16 bureaucratic agencies and re-evaluate the conventional proposition that ideological disagreement drives oversight. I identify the effect of this disagreement by exploiting the transition from George Bush to Barack Obama, which shifted the ideological orientation of agencies through turnover in agency personnel. Contrary to existing research, I find ideological conflict has a negligible effect on oversight, whereas committee roles and narrow district interests are primary drivers. The findings may indicate that absent incentives induced by public auditing, legislator behavior is driven by policy valence concerns rather than ideology. The results further suggest collective action in Congress may pose greater obstacles to bureaucratic oversight than previously thought.

The American two-party system is a constant object of study by many political scientists, yet there exists no adequate scale by which to measure inter-party competition and the stability of our two-party system. It is the purpose of this article to present a simple index by which the condition of any two-party system (national or state or foreign) can be determined in relation to its expected behavior.

The relative intractablility of the international environment poses a problem for the foreign policy of all nations. Purpose and power meet with cross-purpose and countervailing power, and most foreign policy projects face external restraints that the makers of policy can neglect only at the risk of failure. Foreign policy—the more or less coordinated strategy with which institutionally designated decision-makers seek to manipulate the international environment—generally meets with tenacious resistance, if not insuperable obstacles.

To regard foreign policy and statecraft from this perspective, however, implies a good deal of determinism. In its more extreme analytical applications, this viewpoint reduces the pursuit of foreign policy goals to a contest between statesman and environment that is already settled by the insurmountable restrictions of the international “system.” Nations are implicitly delegated to play out the roles that the international system has “assigned” to its “actors” to maintain system stability or equilibrium. Domestic political variables are largely neglected in this analytical perspective. Foreign policy aspirations are assessed primarily in terms of whether a nation has adequately “internalized” system “rules”—that is to say, whether a polity has adjusted to the contingencies of the international system, which seems to move toward a preordained historical or analytical telos. The strictures of necessity, imposed by the international environment, take analytical precedence over considerations of preferences and the possibility of choice.

In the first part of this article, we analyzed the effect of size and world location on the international relations of states and the problems of foreign policy. But more immediate in its conditioning effect is regional location—location viewed with reference to the immediate vicinity.

Like world location, regional location is a question of facts plus the significance of those facts at any given historical period. Just as it was found necessary to consider world location in relation to two systems of reference, the geographic and the historical, so the full meaning of regional location becomes apparent only after considering both the geography and the historical and political significance of a state's immediate surroundings.

Regional location determines whether neighbors will be many or few, strong or weak, and the topography of the region conditions the direction and nature of contact with those neighbors. The man who once formulated the foreign policy of Manchuria had to do so with one eye on Japan and the other on Russia; every international gesture of Belgium is conditioned by the fact that she lies between France and Germany and across the Channel from Great Britain; and the states of Central America can never for a moment forget that the territory north of them is occupied by one large power and not by several whom they might play off one against the other as their European counterparts, the Balkan states, have been able to do from time to time with their northern neighbors.

The significance of legitimacy to regime maintenance has been much neglected in recent investigations of the Third World, particularly by behavioralists and rational choice theorists. I define legitimacy, discuss factors that may have contributed to this neglect, and explore the significance of nationalism and religion as major sources of legitimacy in the Middle East. Both a misunderstanding of the role of higher values and rationality in individuals' relationship to social systems and a faulty projection applied to the mainsprings of behavior in other cultures have distorted the perceptions of a number of Western analysts. The relationship between religion and nationalism is complex. Contrary to the common assumption in the West, Islam in general has generated fairly sophisticated constitutional theories. Islamic fundamentalism in particular has been a major source of innovation and adaptation—as well as of spiritual gratification—for the Muslim masses.