While the economic voting literature is voluminous, comparatively little attention has been paid to the question of how—or whether—the economy affects turnout. I address this issue by examining national elections in 29 countries. Using time series data, the initial findings are replicated by a case study of American presidential and midterm elections since 1896. It is argued that the effect of economic adversity depends upon the degree of welfare state development. This relationship is argued to be nonlinear, so that mobilization occurs at either extreme while withdrawal obtains in the middle range. The importance to democratic theory, the study of elections, and the politics of welfare policy are discussed.

Numerous studies have sought to discover political business cycles in macroeconomic variables. Although voters' subjective economic expectations have been shown to influence their electoral decisions, no existing research has attempted to uncover cyclical patterns in citizens' economic expectations. Using survey data, I seek to determine whether expectations shift to benefit the incumbent president's electoral interest. The analyses show that the percentage of the public predicting an economic upturn increases before a presidential election. One explanation for the findings is that voters might extrapolate cyclical expectations from macroeconomic conditions that contain election-driven cycles. Yet the analyses show that expectational cycles still appear when the macroeconomic conditions are held constant. I conclude by drawing an explanation without recourse to macroeconomic cycles.

We address the question of whether class bias in the American electorate has increased since 1964. We analyze the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey and the National Election Studies for seven consecutive presidential elections, 1964–88. Our results show that conclusions regarding changes in class bias are sensitive to which measure of socioeconomic class is used—income, education, or occupation. We argue that income is the appropriate measure since government policies that discriminate based on socioeconomic class are most likely to do so based on income and there are measurement problems associated with using either education or occupation over time. Our analysis shows that there has been almost no change in class bias in the electorate since 1964.

Political legitimacy is a key concept in both macro and micro theories. Pioneers in survey-based research on alienation and system support envisioned addressing macro questions about legitimacy with the sophisticated empiricism of individual-level methodology but failed; and a succession of innovations in item wording and questionnaire construction only led to an excessive concern with measurement issues at the individual level. I return to an enumeration of the informational requirements for assessing legitimacy in hopes of finding a conceptualization that better utilizes available survey indicators to tap relevant macro dimensions. I specify formal measurement models for both conventional and revised conceptualizations of legitimacy orientations and compare the fit of the two models systematically on data from the U.S. electorate. The revised model appears preferable on both theoretical and empirical grounds.

We return to the literature on collective villages and reexamine its central arguments. In doing so, we focus on an institution for allocating land that we call the Rule. As claimed by its advocates, the Rule secures land allocations that result in outcomes differing from those that would be achieved by markets. The outcomes are not constrained to be efficient. But the economic costs paid fail to secure the attainment of guarantees of subsistence, greater equality, or a greater sense of community resulting from the elimination of envy. However, in the face of high levels of risk, the form of collective property rights embodied in the Rule may create what we call “communities of (mis)fortune,” in which no one can envy others' gains or losses resulting from the random shocks of nature.

The value of cross-national quantitative studies of the relationship between mass political violence and land inequality is challenged along three lines. First, gross and systematic errors in the political violence data of the World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators (the usual data source for empirical studies) render them worthless for Central America at least and probably much of the Third World as well. Second, conceptualizations of land inequality have been too simplistic to be of much theoretical value. Third, the temporal nature of this relationship has been inadequately considered. Responding to such deficiencies, I elaborate a broader understanding of land inequality and provide a fuller discussion of the temporal nature of its relationship to political violence. Throughout, the five nations of Central America are utilized for appropriate case material.

Political scientists have been increasingly interested in entrepreneurs—individuals who change the direction and flow of politics. In this research note, we synthesize aspects of an economic approach to entrepreneurship with concepts used in political science. We then tie these theoretical observations to the emergence of entrepreneurs in local governments and test components of our theory using observations from a large set of suburban municipal governments. Empirically, we identify several conditions that affect the probability that an entrepreneur will emerge in a local government, especially slack budgetary resources that the political entrepreneur can reallocate. We also find that the probability with which an entrepreneur is found in local government is a function of the difficulty of overcoming collective action problems in a community.

The increasing public attention paid to Supreme Court nominations has elevated the salience of Senate confirmation battles, raising interesting questions about the impact of constituency preferences on senators' voting behavior. In this article, we explore this relationship using a logistical regression model to examine the impacts of African-American constituency size and the proximity of reelection on the roll call behavior of senators on the Clarence Thomas confirmation vote. Our analyses indicate that these factors were both statistically and substantively significant in the Thomas case. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of such findings.

We examine the relationship between military expenditures and economic growth in the United States from 1948 to 1990, in order to gauge the potential peace dividend. Our main results suggest that military spending is a significant drain on the economy. We then examine the implications of a restructured international system for U.S. military expenditures and their resultant impact on economic growth in the 1990s. Simulations of Democratic and Republican proposals for cuts in defense spending suggest increases in economic output of between 2.5% and 4.5% over the period 1993–96.

A substantial literature on lower federal courts and state courts suggests that the “haves” usually come out ahead in litigation because they possess superior resources for it and they reap advantages from their repeat player status. We investigate the success of 10 categories of litigants before the Warren, Burger, and Rehnquist Courts to determine whether the resources or experience of litigants has effects on Supreme Court outcomes paralleling those found in the courts below. While different categories of litigants are found to have very different rates of success, those differences do not consistently favor litigants with greater resources. A time series analysis of the success of different categories of litigants over the 36 years studied suggests that the changing ideological complexion of the Court has a greater impact on the success of litigants than differences among litigants in resources and experience.

How should feminist theorists approach the analysis of political obligation and freedom? In her article in the December 1989 issue of this Review, Nancy Hirschmann proposed a fundamental reconstruction of these concepts. Carole Pateman agrees that liberal obligation theory inadequately treats the coercion of women and other groups under the guise of voluntary obligations. But she argues that Hirschmann goes too far, particularly in rejecting the priority of freedom. Hirschmann explicates their disagreements and her approach.

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.

MacKuen, Erikson and Stimson used quarterly Gallup poll data to show in this Review in 1989 that changing levels of macropartisanship, the two-party division of partisans, responded to presidential approval ratings and perceptions of the economy and predicted national election results. In a 1991 Review research note Abramson and Ostrom argued that the NES and GSS questions more commonly used by scholars generated macropartisanship measures less sensitive to short term factors and less predictive of election outcomes. In this Controversy, Erikson and Stimson respond to the challenge and present new data from CBS News and New York Times telephone surveys to buttress their earlier analyses, arguing against substantial effects of the different question wordings. Abramson and Ostrom explain their continuing reservations.

How should we explain why a state sometimes adopts a foreign policy in one region that interferes with its concurrent policies elsewhere? In their article in the March 1989 issue of this Review, Stewart, Hermann and Hermann proposed a three-level process model of foreign policy to explain such Soviet behavior towards Egypt in 1973. The analysis has continuing interest because it interprets the puzzling behavior as a manifestation of general problems of information processing in making foreign policy choices. Richard Anderson suggests that a two-level model of domestic bargaining better accounts for the causal sequence in Soviet-Egyptian relations and is in general more parsimonious. Margaret and Charles Hermann defend their substantive analysis and argue in any case for the complementarity of process and bargaining approaches.