Using quarterly data from 1968 to 1988, we analyze the time series properties of the various attack modes used by transnational terrorists. Combining vector autoregression and intervention analysis, we find strong evidence of both substitutes and complements among the attack modes. We also evaluate the effectiveness of six policies designed to thwart terrorism. The existence of complements and substitutes means that policies designed to reduce one type of attack may affect other attack modes. For example, the installation of metal detectors in airports reduced skyjackings and diplomatic incidents but increased other kinds of hostage attacks (barricade missions, kidnappings) and assassinations. In the long run, embassy fortification decreased barricade missions but increased assassinations. The Reagan “get tough” policy, which resulted in the enactment of two laws in 1984 and a retaliatory raid on Libya in 1986, did not have any noticeable long-term effect on curbing terrorist attacks directed against U.S. interests.

Analysts of American politics since Tocqueville have seen the nation as a paradigmatic “liberal democratic” society, shaped most by the comparatively free and equal conditions and the Enlightenment ideals said to have prevailed at its founding. These accounts must be severely revised to recognize the inegalitarian ideologies and institutions of ascriptive hierarchy that defined the political status of racial and ethnic minorities and women through most of U.S. history. A study of the period 1870–1920 illustrates that American political culture is better understood as the often conflictual and contradictory product of multiple political traditions, than as the expression of hegemonic liberal or democratic political traditions.

Analyses of the persuasive effects of media exposure outside the laboratory have generally produced negative results. I attribute such nonfindings in part to carelessness regarding the inferential consequences of measurement error and in part to limitations of research design. In an analysis of opinion change during the 1980 presidential campaign, adjusting for measurement error produces several strong media exposure effects, especially for network television news. Adjusting for measurement error also makes preexisting opinions look much more stable, suggesting that the new information absorbed via media exposure must be about three times as distinctive as has generally been supposed in order to account for observed patterns of opinion change.

The central problem for social science is to explain social order. How do people manage to live together? One can discern two ways of answering that question. The first view is normative and communal: people learn from their culture customs that provide an internal compass guiding them to act in ways that minimize conflict and ensure comity. The second view is rationalistic and individualistic: order is created by explicit and implicit agreements entered into by self-seeking individuals to avert the worst consequences of their predatory instincts. In the first view, order is natural and prior to any social contract or government institution; in the second, it is contrived and dependent on agreements and sanctions. Rules are obeyed in the first case because they have moral force, in the second because they convey personal advantage. In the first view, compliance is automatic and general; in the second, it is strategic and uncertain.

The normative view has been under heavy attack for several decades for at least three reasons: it seems to imply a complacent functionalism; it appears to minimize or deny the value of conflict; and it lacks the theoretical power found in the assumption that people always seek their own interests. I believe that one can grant, up to a point, all of these objections and still be left dissatisfied with the alternative, namely, that social order is contrived, based on calculation, and dependent on individual assent.

When scholars extend their models and hypotheses to encompass additional cases, they commonly need to adapt their analytic categories to fit the new contexts. Giovanni Sartori's work on conceptual “traveling” and conceptual “stretching” provides helpful guidance in addressing this fundamental task of comparative analysis. Yet Sartori's framework draws upon what may be called classical categorization, which views the relation among categories in terms of a taxonomic hierarchy, with each category having clear boundaries and defining properties shared by all members. We examine the challenge to this framework presented by two types of nonclassical categories: family resemblances and radial categories. With such categories, the overly strict application of a classical framework can lead to abandoning to category prematurely or to modifying it inappropriately. We discuss solutions to these problems, using examples of how scholars have adapted their categories in comparative research on democracy and authoritarianism.

We develop and test a model of joint determination of economic growth and national election results in the United States. The formal model, which combines developments in the rational choice analysis of the behavior of economic agents and voters, leads to a system of equations in which the dependent variables are the growth rate and the vote shares in presidential and congressional elections. Our estimates support the theoretical claims that growth responds to unanticipated policy shifts and that voters use both on-year and midterm elections to balance the two parties. On the other hand, we find no support for “rational” retrospective voting. We do reconfirm, in a fully simultaneous framework, the “naive” retrospective voting literature's finding that the economy has a strong effect on presidential voting. We find congressional elections unaffected by the economy, except as transmitted by presidential coattails.

William Wilson and other scholars argue that one of the attributes of devastated neighborhoods is social isolation. We shall explore whether neighborhoods that seem to indicate significant social isolation also foster political isolation. We begin our examination by providing a description of the poor in the samples from the 1989 Detroit Area Study. We then turn our attention toward analyzing the effects of neighborhood poverty on African–American public opinion and political participation. We conclude with a discussion of how neighborhood poverty affects African-American politics and the consequences of those politics for the theory and practice of American democracy.

Under anarchy, uncoordinated competitive theft by “roving bandits” destroys the incentive to invest and produce, leaving little for either the population or the bandits. Both can be better off if a bandit sets himself up as a dictator—a “stationary bandit” who monopolizes and rationalizes theft in the form of taxes. A secure autocrat has an encompassing interest in his domain that leads him to provide a peaceful order and other public goods that increase productivity. Whenever an autocrat expects a brief tenure, it pays him to confiscate those assets whose tax yield over his tenure is less than their total value. This incentive plus the inherent uncertainty of succession in dictatorships imply that autocracies will rarely have good economic performance for more than a generation. The conditions necessary for a lasting democracy are the same necessary for the security of property and contract rights that generates economic growth.

I provide a formal theory of government for a political system characterized by a proportional representation electoral system, a parliamentary government that exercises collective responsibility, and a government formation process. Political parties are assumed to be policy-oriented and to serve the interests of those who vote for them. Parties choose policy platforms that determine their representation in parliament; and given that representation, the parties bargain over the government to be formed and the policies that government will implement. The model yields equilibria with the property that parties choose dispersed policy positions. Thus, electoral incentives in proportional representation parliamentary systems need not lead to policy convergence. The theory provides predictions of party locations such as those developed in the manifesto project.

A simple model is used to compare, under different electoral systems, the incentives for candidates to create inequalities among otherwise homogeneous voters, by making campaign promises that favor small groups, rather than appealing equally to all voters. In this game model, each candidate generates offers for voters independently out of a distribution that is chosen by the candidate, subject only to the constraints that offers must be nonnegative and have mean 1. Symmetric equilibria with sincere voting are analyzed for two-candidate elections and for multicandidate elections under rank-scoring rules, approval voting, and single transferable vote. Voting rules that can guarantee representation for minorities in multiseat elections generate, in this model, the most severely unequal campaign promises.

We use responses to a large-scale national survey designed to oversample political activists to investigate the extent to which participant publics are representative of the public as a whole. Building upon the finding that while voters differ from nonvoters in their demographic attributes, their attitudes as measured by responses to survey questions are not distinctive, we consider a variety of political acts beyond voting that citizens can use to multiply their political input and to communicate more precise messages to policymakers. In addition, we consider not only respondents' demographic characteristics and policy attitudes but also their circumstances of economic deprivation and dependence upon government programs. Although activists are representative of the public at large in terms of their attitudes, they differ substantially in their demographic attributes, economic needs, and the government benefits they receive. Furthermore, in terms of the issues that animate participation, groups differentiated along these lines bring very different policy concerns to their activity.

The legislative factions of the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan are so autonomous that the LDP is typically viewed as a coalition of factions, rather than a unitary party. We focus on the electoral role of these factions, finding that the five main factions differed substantially in electoral success in the 1960–79 period, but have been so closely tied together in the 1980s that differences in their electoral fates are statistically indiscernible. In particular, we find that the so-called mainstream factions did consistently better than their nonmainstream rivals before 1980 but not after. We explain the lessening of interfactional differences in terms of a decentralization of fund-raising within factions, which tended to equalize factional war chests (on a per capita basis).

I develop a signaling model of mass political action. I establish that rational, self-interested individuals may have incentives to engage in costly political action despite a free-rider problem. Their political actions are informative for a political leader who rationally takes a cue from the size of the protest movement. However, some information is trapped in extremist and rationally apathetic pockets of the society. Some extremists take political action regardless of their private information, to manipulate the political leader's decision. Others abstain hoping to benefit if the leader makes an uninformed decision. Rationally apathetic moderates abstain because, being nearly indifferent between the policy alternatives, they do not find it worthwhile to incur the cost of taking action. Only activist moderates take informative political action. The political leader discounts the observed turnout for extremist political action and shifts policy if the estimated number of activist moderates exceeds a critical threshold.

The mass public in the Soviet Union is not enthusiastic about free-market reform. How, then, do citizens in a former communist regime develop an appreciation for free-market reforms? Different explanations for attitudes toward free market reforms are tested using data from a survey of the European USSR conducted in May 1990. First, negative assessments of recent economic performance is a catalyst for popular support for the market economy. Although very underdeveloped, there is a nascent free-market culture in the Soviet Union that makes a modest contribution to support for free-market reforms. The free-market culture that is developing in the former Soviet Union resembles that of social democracy, rather than laissez-faire capitalism. Democratic values and support for free markets are mutually reinforcing, suggesting that support for democracy makes a very important contribution to support for free-market reform.

Norwegian party politics is characterized by coalition avoidance that defies conventional coalition theory. This failure of coalescence can be caused either by policy pursuit (preference-induced) or by institutional constraint (structure-induced). We test the explanatory power of policy-based and institutional explanations, relying on content analysis of authoritative party and government documents for our policy measures. The results show that the left–right policy dimension has powerfully constrained Norwegian interparty bargaining and that policy-based coalition theory can account for many apparent anomalies in Norwegian coalition politics. A permissive institutional environment has also fostered coalition avoidance. Although core-based coalition theory can thus be successfully adapted to the Norwegian case, it rests on a number of critical assumptions that limit its general applicability.

While the idea of democracy has never been more universal or more popular, both democratic theory and the empirical study of democratic possibilities are in some disarray. We seek a productive reconnection of these two endeavors with democratic discourse through close attention to the language of democracy as used by ordinary people and political actors. Reconstructive inquiry determines how the individuals who are the potential constituents of any democratic order themselves conceptualize democracy and their own political roles and competences. We deploy an intensive method—Q methodology—for the study of individual characteristics, capabilities, and dispositions in combination with political discourse analysis. Four discourses are discovered in an analysis of selected U.S. subjects: contented republicanism, deferential conservatism, disaffected populism, and private liberalism. These results can be used to relate democratic theory to live possibilities in democratic discourse.

General deterrence, unlike immediate deterrence, has rarely been analyzed in a systematic comparative manner. We outline a research design for doing so, by studying the circumstances under which, in a set of enduring rivalries, challengers are likely to initiate militarized disputes. We indicate the conceptual and operational steps necessary to make and empirically compare predictions stemming from three often-competing theoretical frameworks: rational deterrence, a general model of rational conflict initiation, and a cognitive psychological model of behavior emphasizing risk orientation and misperception. The results of probit analysis on a pooled time series of enduring rivalries since 1945 provide support for hypotheses from each of the different theoretical models.

We argue that the social construction of target populations is an important, albeit overlooked, political phenomenon that should take its place in the study of public policy by political scientists. The theory contends that social constructions influence the policy agenda and the selection of policy tools, as well as the rationales that legitimate policy choices. Constructions become embedded in policy as messages that are absorbed by citizens and affect their orientations and participation. The theory is important because it helps explain why some groups are advantaged more than others independently of traditional notions of political power and how policy designs reinforce or alter such advantages. An understanding of social constructions of target populations augments conventional hypotheses about the dynamics of policy change, the determination of beneficiaries and losers, the reasons for differing levels and types of participation among target groups, and the role of policy in democracy.

First, I will demonstrate that Machiavelli's conception of political phenomena is richer and more varied and conforms to an adequate understanding of political reality more closely than later, more “systematic,” or “regular,” conceptions often associated with the Enlightenment. Second, I find in Machiavelli strong grounds for resisting authoritarian claims that the variegated and unpredictable nature of political phenomena must be managed with unipartite and, especially, centralized practical political alternatives. I focus upon Machiavelli's frequent use of a particular word by which he refers to politically significant occurrences, accidente. I argue that his employment of this word, especially in the Discourses, serves to accentuate his sensitivity to the irregular, nonsystematic nature of political reality—to the possibility of “exceptions.” But I demonstrate that his practical response to this reality, is not a perpetually vigilant, all-powerful sovereign but is, rather, a far more moderate answer, the mixed regime.

Realism has been the dominant paradigm in the study of international conflict. Within this paradigm, two leading alternative approaches have been deterrence theory and structural realism. We test the relative explanatory power of these two theoretical approaches on the escalation of deterrence encounters among great powers from 1816 to 1984. We derive a set of hypotheses from each model, operationalize them for systematic empirical analysis, and test the hypotheses on 97 cases of great-power deterrence encounters by means of probit analysis. The results are that the hypotheses derived from deterrence theory receive considerable support, whereas none of the hypotheses derived from structural realism are supported.