The 1992 election was influenced by a number of factors. The personalities, or characteristics, of the candidates clearly played a role, as did the kind of campaign they ran. Economic conditions were particularly important. However, it is interesting to note that statistical models by economists predicting election results, which emphasize economic trends, were less successful in 1992 than in previous years. Political scientists were more successful.

Models and Perceptions

Four years ago, Ray Fair, an economist at Yale, was hailed for an incredibly accurate prediction. Applying a model that did not include data more recent than six months before the election, he anticipated the outcome of the 1988 contest within .3 of 1%. This model did not include Willie Horton or even Dukakis. It simply analyzed the way in which parameter data anticipated support for the incumbent and the opposition. Other economically based models were also quite accurate.

Successfully applying such models is enough to make journalists and politicians ill, as it suggests that everything they do or write about is useless—that the outcome of elections is determined by pre-existing structural factors, not by candidates, campaign tactics, or ideology. This time Fair was wrong! He predicted that Bush was going to win, since the economy was really not that bad. The 1991-92 downturn was more moderate than the Reagan 1981-82 recession, or the Carter 1977 decline, while the misery index—unemployment plus the inflation rate—was much worse in 1979-80. But Bush was never able to get this message across.

Forecasting presidential elections has become a growth industry in political science. Econometric models used to predict the presidential election that were once viewed as part of “recreational political science” are now being taken seriously. The widespread belief that these models have been highly successful at predicting election outcomes has enticed a score of political scientists to propose new models hoping to share in the triumph of political science over the pundits and polls. Unfortunately, there has been very little critical examination of the models used to forecast presidential elections. A close review reveals that existing quantitative models are not useful predictors of presidential races. In addition, most of the new proposed models have adopted an approach that is unlikely to lead to better forecasts.

The 1992 conventions of the Democratic and Republican Parties saw the culmination of trends that have been developing for 20 years. The two major political parties have now completely polarized around feminism and the reaction to it. Each party's position has become institutionalized to the point where it is not seriously questioned within the national party and where the differences are clearly evident to the voting public. On feminist issues and concerns the parties are not following the traditional pattern of presenting different versions of the same thing, or following each other's lead into new territory. They are presenting two different and conflicting visions of how Americans should engage in everyday life.

Although the party platforms and the speeches at the conventions devoted many words to many issues, each party's vision can be summed up in a slogan. The Republicans articulated theirs clearly in the phrase “family values.” While their platform does not define this slogan, both the document and the speeches indicate that it stands for programs and policies that strengthen the traditional two-parent, patriarchal family in which the husband is the bread-winner, the wife is the caretaker, and children are completely subject to parental authority. The Democrats attempted their usual strategy of pre-emption and co-optation by borrowing the Republican's phrase to use in a different context, but their very use of it belied its content. In reality the Democrats have incorporated the feminist demand that “the personal is political” and have put on the public agenda issues that were once deemed to be purely personal.

It is tempting to look at the results of the 1992 election season and to observe women candidates' successes and say, yes, it was the “year of the woman.” It might also be inviting to attribute women's electoral gains to the attention that the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings received and the anger many women felt towards the all-white male Senate Judiciary Committee with its cavalier treatment of Anita Hill and its insensitivity to sexual harassment. Yet, women's electoral gains must be viewed within the wider lens focus of changing patterns of American politics.

The Thomas-Hill interaction was seen by some as a reflection of institutionalized gender inequality and insensitivity (Palley and Palley 1992). It underscored the need to press forward with the liberal cultural agenda, which incorporates feminist concerns with gender equity and electoral opportunity. Though the Thomas confirmation hearings made many people aware and angry, other conditions also helped to make 1992 an opportunity year for women and minorities. In particular, there was redistricting, a large number of retirements from Congress, and anti-incumbency feelings running high among American voters. Furthermore, though women were serving in political office, albeit in state and local positions and thus were in “the pipeline” and ready for the opportunity to contest state-wide and congressional positions, they were often seen as the ultimate outsiders. To be perceived as an outsider in an anti-incumbency era enhanced the candidacies of many women. Also, due to redistricting, many seats which women candidates contested were open seats for which their opponents lacked high degrees of political organization and the ability to “call in favors.”

American political scientists have paid very little attention to our northern neighbor and leading trading partner. Yet as the following essays make clear, Canada poses a number of important issues of concern to scholars of American and comparative politics, including the difficulty of building coalitions for institutional reform, the development of minority group identities, and the political dynamics of direct democracy instruments such as referenda. In the following essays, three Canadian political scientists examine the constitutional crises that have repeatedly engulfed Canadian politics over the last quarter century. These crises had their most important root in efforts to find a new constitutional order that would meet the demands of the francophone-majority province of Quebec for increased autonomy, but the evolving process has attracted more participants and more demands. By the time of last October's referendum on a package of constitutional reforms known as the Charlottetown Accord, the constitutional agenda had become so overloaded that it sank under its own weight. Peter Russell's essay traces the tortuous history of Canadian negotiations over constitutional reform. Stéphane Dion examines the ebbs and flows of Quebec nationalism.

On October 26, 1992, the Canadian people, for the first time in their history as a political community, acted as Canada's ultimate constitutional authority—in effect, as a sovereign people. In the referendum conducted on that day, a majority of Canadians in a majority of provinces, said “No” to the Charlottetown Accord proposals for constitutional change.

Though the referendum was only consultative and not legally binding, nonetheless the governments that supported the Accord—and these include the federal government, all ten provincial governments and the two territorial governments, plus organizations representing the four groupings of aboriginal peoples (status and non-status Indians, Inuit, and Metis)—will not proceed with ratification of the Accord in their legislative assemblies. The politicians will respect the vox populi.

The referendum may have killed more than the Accord. It may very well be the last time this generation of Canadians attempts a grand resolution of constitutional issues in order to prevent a national unity crisis. If in the next few years Canada plunges once again into the constitutional maelstrom, it will be because it is confronted with an actual, not an apprehended, crisis of national unity.

The current Canadian constitutional crisis has many roots: the alienation of the western provinces, the increasing difficulties of the federal government in funding poorer provinces, aboriginal renewal, the intrusion of a Charter of Rights and of a powerful Supreme Court into a parliamentary Westminster system. But only one factor challenges the unity of the country: Quebec secessionism.

Quebecers have freely elected pro-Canada politicians since the beginning of the federation in 1867. Their situation cannot be compared with new democracies issued from decaying totalitarian regimes, like the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, or Czechoslovakia. The Quebec question bears more similarity with the re-emergence of pro-autonomy movements in some West-European countries. But neither Scotland, Catalonia, nor any other region in Western Europe is as likely as Quebec to become an independent country in the near future. Quebec is a striking case that may have important leading effects on what will happen in Europe.

Why in this era are many Quebecers so nationalistic that they wish to exit from a country that is envied around the world? Secessionist movements are rooted in two antithetical feelings or incentives shared by any linguistic, religious, or ethnic group looking to leave a union. First, is a fear of being weakened or even of disappearing as a distinct people if the group stays in the union. Second, is a confidence among the group that it can perform as well, or even better, on its own and that the secession is not too risky. A third feeling of rejection, the sensation of no longer being welcomed in the union, may also occur. Secession is most likely to take place when these feelings are all at high levels.

In the constitutional referendum held on October 26, 1992, Canadian voters said “No” to a constitutional package, the “Charlottetown Accord,” contrived explicitly to win pan-regional support. Instead, it evoked pan-regional opposition.

The package Canadians rejected was formidably complex. It became so by a decade's accretion of elements, each calculated to appeal to, or to offset concessions to, groups excluded at an earlier stage—Quebec, the western provinces, and aboriginal peoples. Negotiators hoped that by 1992 they had finally found an equilibrium, a logroll sufficiently inclusive to survive referral to the people. Instead they seem to have gotten the logic of the logroll upside down: they may have overestimated both how much each group wanted what it got and how intensely some groups opposed key concessions to others.

Quebec. At the heart of the package were proposals contrived to induce the political class of Quebec to acquiesce in the political settlement embodied in the Constitution Act, 1982. Although the government and legislature of Quebec had rejected the 1982 settlement, no one contested that it applied to the province. But many agreed, on grounds of either justice or expediency, that the pill had to be made less bitter. The first attempt to bring Quebec on side was the Meech Lake Accord, struck in 1987 and buried in 1990. The failure of this attempt was the immediate background to the 1992 events.

This note questions both some of the premises and some of the conclusions of Theodore J. Lowi's diagnosis, in the March 1992 American Political Science Review, of the state of the political science discipline. Since I am given a prominent, if undeserved role, in his analysis of historical trends, perhaps I may be pardoned if it begins by refuting that part of his argument.

Surely one should feel great (and devilish) delight at learning that one has exercised diabolical influence over the shaping of political science. Alas, I am wholly lacking in the power that Professor Lowi attributes to me in his paper. Alas also, if I were armed, my gun was not aimed in the direction he supposes it was. I am not at all in sympathy with the Third American Government whose (confused) economics-based ideology he presumes I created, as anyone will recognize who has read the foreword to the recent re-issue of the Simon-Smithburg-Thompson textbook, Public Administration, or the earlier work, Administrative Behavior (AB), or the more recent Reason in Human Affairs. Are these books written so obscurely that Professor Lowi could not see that the rationality celebrated in them (if any rationality is celebrated at all) is a weak, muddled, bounded rationality that is rejected out of hand by the economists who espouse public choice and neoclassical laissez-faire theory?

Dear Professor Simon:

It is an honor to be read, and read carefully, by someone of your distinction. But since you missed the major premise of my March 1992 essay, it is virtually impossible to engage in a point-by-point rebuttal. In fact, few of your propositions I'd care to rebut, not only because they are irrelevant to my argument but also because I tend to agree with you. After all, I am a product of your work of the 1940s and early 1950s, as I am of the writings of the various Chicago political scientists you singled out for praise—having read their every word, including yours, and having studied with some of them as a student and served with some as a colleague. I contributed to the revival of Gosnell's Machine Politics—Chicago Model with a foreword (1968), in which I said, among other things, “It is a masterpiece in the imaginative use of aggregate data in the study of political phenomena. A direct predecessor to the work of V. O. Key, this study is unexcelled to this day as an effort to understand political behavior in its institutional setting” (vii).

It is June 30, 1992. The Supreme Court handed down its decision yesterday in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and now the analysis and debate over its immediate and longterm impact on abortion law and reproductive rights will begin for legal scholars and political leaders. But for public law specialists in political science, the intellectual curiosity about this case began many months ago, and the announcement of yesterday's decision was only the latest in a string of actions that many had already followed with great interest. In the rush to explain the significance of Casey to the public, the route by which it got to the Court and the arguments that shaped the ultimate result may be easily overlooked and dismissed by some as no longer relevant: what matters now will be to feed the public's appetite for a fastfood explanation of a high-profile case. But to public law specialists, what went before matters very much, indeed. A case is more than its outcome, and the parts that came before deserve some attention for the role they played in contributing to the final result.

In this era of superpower reconciliation, European Community harmonization, and German reunification, the reunification of Korea is a distinct possibility. South Korea has pursued the “Northern Policy” for several years to facilitate the process. The initiative, aimed at creating economic and diplomatic links between South Korea and socialist countries, produced ties with former Soviet satellites, the Soviet Union itself, the People's Republic of China, and, most recently, a majority of the members of the new Commonwealth of Independent States (the former Soviet Union). By building relationships with the allies of North Korea, the South hoped to coax the North into a more conciliatory position (U.S. Embassy of the Republic of Korea 1992).

Before the “Northern Policy” was implemented, North Korea showed no inclination to reconcile the differences between the North and the South, steadfastly refusing to recognize or negotiate with the government in Seoul. However, the rapid fall of the Berlin wall, the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, and the disintegration of the Soviet Union permanently changed the political climate for North Korea. When, early in 1991, the People's Republic of China and the former Soviet Union did not stand in the way of South Korea's entry into the United Nations, the handwriting was on the wall. In September 1991, North Korea accepted simultaneous U.N. membership for both Koreas (Whiting 1992).