We usually think of description and prediction as two different things, but are they really so disconnected? Suppose I report that the temperature now is 65 degrees—that is description without prediction. But if I say that it is noon on a Spring day and the temperature is 65 degrees—that is still description, but haven't I really also made some predictions? Aren't I, in effect, predicting that during the next 12 hours the temperature will fall, but that three months from now the temperature will be higher?

When I predict that the temperature will fall during the next 12 hours it is not based on a trend, or a statistical analysis, it is because I understand that the sun causes the temperature, and that because the Earth revolves on its axis every day, 12 hours from now we will be in the shade and therefore cooler. Because I know what is happening, I know how the present is related to the past and I can predict the future. If you can't predict anything of the future it is because you don't understand the present.

Take another example: Suppose we have a group of four animals whose average weight is 85 pounds and average age is 22 years—is any prediction possible? Not much. But suppose that the description includes that the four animals are people, two children, age 9 and 11, and their mother and father, age 31 and 33.

In both scholarly and popular venues, the political philosopher Leo Strauss has emerged as the alleged father of an anti-democratic cult at odds with the principles of American democracy. The relative suddenness and uniformity of this recently evolving sentiment is intriguing. Certainly, Strauss's name and those of his self-avowed “followers” have surfaced in public before recent years. That Strauss was a controversial and iconoclastic scholar during his lifetime is certainly true, but primarily on issues such as how to read Machiavelli or the appropriate way to approach the study of the social sciences. His recent public impact, especially since his death, was therefore hardly predictable. Strauss simply was not a public man. He seldom declaimed in public, and despite a sense of professional obligation to his university and his students, clearly preferred the withdrawn, quiet, contemplative life. He showed no desire to have a public persona.

It is difficult to explain, therefore, how Strauss could occasion such intemperate remarks as those printed in the New York Times, under the heading “Undemocratic Vistas: The Sinister Vogue of Leo Strauss.” Author Brent Staples stated that “Leo Strauss contended that the Philosopher-kings (himself included) were born to rule, servants were born to serve and that only disaster came of letting the rabble get above its station. Strauss, then, was unapologetically elitist and anti-democratic. His ideas have survived him and crept into vogue in American politics.”

With the death of Deng Xiaoping, China's political future is once again in the spotlight. Debate over the viability of the current political regime in China started immediately after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown when the prospects for reform in the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the fate of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) projected by China watchers were then overwhelmingly pessimistic (Ditmer 1989; Swaine 1989). Eight years after the Tiananmen Square events, the survival of the CCP against all odds (including the aftermath of the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union) is in itself no small miracle. The post-Tiananmen political regime in China has by and large been stable. Not only has the CCP survived, it has made impressive economic progress in recent years. This new development has caused a major reassessment of the situation in the PRC among China watchers. Nicholas Kristoff, in the New York Times (1993), called the phenomenon of China's rapid economic growth in an authoritarian environment the “riddle of China.” One China specialist even posed the question whether China is where Samuel Huntington's “third wave” stopped and whether the PRC would be an exception to the fall of communism worldwide (Nathan 1993).

The most often cited factors accounting for the political tranquillity in the PRC are its remarkable economic growth and its political oppression (Nathan 1993). These two factors are certainly indispensable in understanding developments in China after 1989.

In the September 1996 issue of PS, I.M. Destler analyzes the supposed “electoral lock” that Republicans have on the Presidency due to the dynamics of the Electoral College. Under Destler's analysis, there turns out to be no great advantage in the system for either party. Destler speculates that the reason is that there are offsetting effects. On the one hand, Republicans do well in smaller states which because of the weighting bias of the electoral college system are disproportionately represented (each state, of course, has one vote for each U.S. Representative and one vote for each Senator, the latter element giving a disproportionate voice to the smaller states). Democrats, on the other hand, have been doing better in the bigger states where the winner-take-all principle helps boost their electoral college totals.

The electoral college is of course a perennial target of reformers who see it as unfair and confusing. While defenders of the electoral college argue its merits on many grounds, there are many significant problems, and few are as serious as the small state bias. Figure 1 shows this bias by comparing the actual votes that each state gets during elections in the 1990s (and 2000) with the votes each would get if the 538 electoral votes were allocated on a strictly proportional basis (the states are sorted by their non-biased electoral votes). Certainly, giving extra weight to one state over another—violating the one person-one vote principle—is more problematic than the second issue raised by Destler: the winner-take-all aspect.

“I'm extremely excited to have a prescene [sic] on the Web.”

The perpetual greeting from the campaign home page of Senator Carl Levin (1996) shows that as with the adoption of any new technology, Internet use by political candidates will undergo some early rough spots. The early stages of a technology also tend to prompt divergent claims about the merits of the new technology. Thus, while political scientist David Canon has praised campaign sites as a “positive development” for allowing the transmission of extensive information, Ted Becker, another political scientist, has been highly critical of the sites calling them “cyberfluff” (Skiba 1995). By systematically studying the content of 1996 Senate candidate home pages, this article offers some hope for reconciling the divergent claims about Internet campaigning.

Does Latin America exist?

Latin American studies centers (like African, or Middle Eastern or West European studies centers) are based on the assumption that Latin America (and Africa, the Middle East, etc.) are more than arbitary geographic expressions: they define coherent cultural regions, having people with distinctive values and worldviews that make them think differently and behave differently from people of other cultures.

The most powerful challenge to this view currently comes from the rational choice school, whose practitioners occasionally mention the importance of cultural differences but whose models almost always ignore them, implicitly assuming that in a given situation all people will make the same “rational” choices regardless of cultural perspectives. But if major differences exist between the worldviews and motivations of people in different cultural zones, a rational choice model that applies to the United States may not accurately describe the behavior of people in other cultures.

The existence of meaningful cultural areas has been challenged on other grounds as well. Modernization theory focuses on the differences between “traditional” and “modern” societies, each of which are characterized by distinctive economic, political, social, and cultural institutions. This perspective tends to attribute any differences between Latin American and highly industrialized societies to differences in their levels of economic development: with economic development, these differences will tend to disappear. Differences between various “traditional” cultures tend to be ignored.

The usefulness of “Latin America” as a meaningful cultural boundary could also be disputed on various other grounds.

Campaign finance today is characterized by an expanding political arena in which significantly increasing amounts of money flow in novel and constantly changing ways. A generation ago, the cutting edge was that, rather than relying on the political parties, candidates were raising and spending money to advance their own candidacies. Today, the candidate-centered campaign is conventional, and the trend is away from spending that is under candidates' control and towards a broad range of new actors engaged in a wide array of political activities. Whole new categories of players (e.g., bundlers and groups which spend money to communicate with voters about candidates but which do not coordinate their activities with any candidate or party) now operate outside of the rules set up for the system as it existed in 1974. And whole new categories of money (e.g., soft money and party spending undertaken independently of any candidate's campaign) are unregulated, subject only to limited disclosure.

The New Realities pose new problems. And these new problems require New Thinking; many reform ideas advanced in the past few years simply will not work in today's campaign finance environment.

Specifically, the problems of today's campaign finance system fall under three headings. We identify each of these problems and recommend steps to address it. However, before tackling reform, we note that it is time for diminished expectations; given our conflicting goals and the constitutional, political, and pragmatic restraints of the American system, regulation will not give us everything we might want.

On the final day of her American Government class last spring, one of my wife's students approached her and said, “You're a really great teacher. It's too bad you're teaching this subject. I hate politics.” The young man had begun the course getting D's and F's, but gradually raised his grades to B's. Clearly he was diving into the work, but the dislike of politics that he brought into the course remained.

Professor Linda Bennett's experience at Wittenberg University typifies what many people tell me and my observations confirm. Today's young Americans on and off campus have a visceral dislike of politics, and it is expressed in many ways.

Like many Americans over 30, young people do not trust politicians, believing many to be corrupt and self-serving. Large percentages think government is unresponsive to people like themselves, and that government is too much in thrall to well-organized special interest groups. The 1994 National Election Study found, for example, that 77% of Americans under 30 said they trusted the Federal government to do the right thing only “some of the time” or “none of the time”; 79% thought that Washington was run to benefit just “a few big interests looking out for themselves”; and 54% believed that “quite a few” of the people in government are crooked. (Among those over 30, 79% said they did not trust the government in Washington to do the right thing; 80% thought it benefitted just a few big interests; and 51% said that quite a few people in government were crooked.) Large portions of young Americans do not think that they have any political clout or that national politicians are solicitous of their opinions.

It is time for a new way of thinking about secrecy.

Secrecy is a form of government regulation. Americans are familiar with the tendency to over-regulate in other areas. What is different with secrecy is that the public cannot know the extent or the content of the regulation.

Excessive secrecy has significant consequences for the national interest when, as a result, policymakers are not fully informed, government is not held accountable for its actions, and the public cannot engage in informed debate. This remains a dangerous world; some secrecy is vital to save lives, bring miscreants to justice, protect national security, and engage in effective diplomacy. Yet as Justice Potter Stewart noted in his opinion in the Pentagon Papers case, when everything is secret, nothing is secret. Even as billions of dollars are spent each year on government secrecy, the classification and personnel security systems have not always succeeded at their core task of protecting those secrets most critical to the national security. The classification system, for example, is used too often to deny the public an understanding of the policymaking process, rather than for the necessary protection of intelligence activities and other highly sensitive matters.

The classification and personnel security systems are no longer trusted by many inside and outside the Government. It is now almost routine for American officials of unquestioned loyalty to reveal classified information as part of ongoing policy disputes—with one camp “leaking” information in support of a particular view, or to the detriment of another—or in support of settled administration policy.

The special Senate election in Oregon, held during January 1996, was the first time in which a federal election was held using a vote-by-mail format. The purpose of this survey was to address most of the relevant issues and concerns involving vote-by-mail elections and to provide an assessment of this electoral method at a crucial time in the political process.