No modern political system, with the possible exception of a few dictatorships, can produce close to a 100% turnout of all those who are legally eligible to vote. But imagine a democratic system in which almost all citizens of voting age were enrolled on the electoral register and in which most of them actually voted, sometimes producing an estimated turnout in excess of 90% (Crocker, et al. 1987). Such systems already exist, i.e., Australia, Sweden, but producing a registration level and voter turnout rate of such magnitudes would be a sharp departure from the anemic levels witnessed in contemporary American politics. In the nation's most recent elections only about two-thirds of the voting age population were registered to vote and only slightly more than half bothered to cast a ballot in presidential election years (it was 55.9% in 1992). It is data like this that helped create the climate for congressional enactment of the National Voter Registration Reform Act of 1993, often known as the “motor voter” bill.

As we will show, achieving significantly higher levels of electoral participation are possible, but this particular reform bill is not the likely vehicle. Further, we will demonstrate that making it very easy to register and vote may not have an obvious partisan tilt in favor of the Democrats. And contrary to some advocates of election law reform, easing access to the ballot may not significantly increase turnout among the current non-voters, who are disproportionately low income, blue collar and service workers, the unemployed minority group members, and the young.

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.

The third-century Christian convert, Tertullian, once asked, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” A twentieth-century American political scientist might ask, What has Athens to do with Washington? In both cases the answer is not as obvious as the rhetorical question would imply. Historically, revelation's identity depended on its contrast with reason even as it sought reason's discredit. American democracy has always been dogged by a so-called Founding whose Fathers never intended a democracy and were scathing in their opinion of “the turbulent democracies of ancient Greece” (Madison 1961, No. 14, 84).

Tocqueville claimed to have discovered in America a democracy “more perfect than antiquity had dared dream of” (Tocqueville 1961, vol. 1(1), 34). His comparison was between Periclean Athens of the fifth century (BCE) and the New England township of the Jacksonian era. His intention was to show that American democracy was superior to any of the ancient democracies because it was stabler, more law-abiding, and respectful of property rights. Here Tocqueville was simultaneously reaffirming the virtually unanimous judgment, from Plato to the authors of The Federalist, about the innate tendency of democracy toward anarchy and expropriation of the rich, and attempting to present America as the great exception.

Do states have the authority to limit the legislative terms of their members of Congress? Up until very recently this question was merely hypothetical, pondered by those with the luxury to ask and develop answers to an assortment of constitutional “what if's.” However, the success of the term limitation movement across the nation has moved this hypothetical question to the center stage of relevant constitutional debate.

Voters in fifteen states, including California, Florida, Michigan, Oregon, and Washington, have now approved initiatives to limit the number of terms served by their members of Congress. In nine other states term limit advocates are actively gathering signatures to place similar initiatives on the ballot in 1994, some for the second time. By 1995, as many as 24 states could have adopted initiatives to limit congressional terms. In the remaining states activists continue to lobby for legislation to limit the terms of state and federal legislators.

Since a state's authority to impose term limits on members of Congress is of questionable constitutionality, it is likely many of these initiatives will end up in litigation (see Barnicle 1992; Corwin 1991; Greenberger 1991; and Kovacevich 1992). Lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of state-imposed term limits on members of Congress have already been filed and dismissed in Missouri and Florida. Legal action is pending in Nebraska and in the state of Washington where House Speaker Tom Foley has teamed up with the League of Women Voters to challenge the constitutionality of that state's term limitation initiative. The legal strategy against term limits has succeeded in overturning one initiative.

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.”

With the collapse of communism and consequent disrepute of Marxism, there is a danger that liberalism will overwhelm democracy and that liberal political theory will become hegemonic despite the efforts of “communitarians” and postmodernists. I want to suggest that, given these developments, Athenian democracy and classical political theory read in its terms is a worthy political and theoretical interlocutor for both. (For a more detailed argument see the “Introduction” to Euben, Ober, and Wallach 1993.) This is not to engage in yet more polis envy, indulge in yet more Hellenic romanticism about “The Glory That Was Greece,” or endorse the uncritical worship of “great books.” My aim, rather, is to avoid the self-congratulation, complacency, and presentism that too often attends “our victory” in the Cold War and to make a contribution to the ensuing debate about American political identity.

As this suggests, my concerns here are partly political. I want to indicate the strategies by which “Athenian democracy” is delegitimated as a challenge to contemporary democracy and question the way classical political theory is used to legitimate an antidemocratic political and educational agenda. That democratic Athens should be understood in terms of contemporary political controversies is nothing new. The Federalist Papers used it as an object lesson by which to justify limiting democracy in the name of republicanism, and debates over reform of the British Parliament and French Revolution found conservatives criticizing the politics of their own day in terms of the putative excesses of democratic Athens, much as Allan Bloom has done in our own time (Turner 1981, chaps. 1 and 5).

I will defend three premises. (1) If we take democracy to mean what ancient Greeks took it to mean—“political power wielded actively and collectively by the demos” (i.e., all residents of the state who are culturally defined as potential citizens, regardless of their class or status)—then Athens was a democracy. (2) Even granted that Athens excluded from regular political participation persons Greeks did not regard as potential citizens (slaves, women, most foreigners, children), the historical example of the Athenian experience with democracy should be taken seriously by democratic theorists interested in expanding “the bounds of the possible” (as well as “of the thinkable”). (3) The Athenian demos exercised its collective power in order to prevent elite political domination, and thus the “power of the people” was not a cover for elite rule.

These premises do not mean that the people's power was in some ontological sense “pure,” or “undistorted”—indeed it was arguably through the tightly coiled and convoluted “distortions” of social and political power that the Athenian democratic order counterbalanced elite social power. Nor can Athens, with its acceptance of slavery, exclusion of women and foreigners from political participation, and jingoistic “blood and soil” doctrine, be considered a readymade model for a just, modern political society. It can be argued (incorrectly I believe: Ober 1989a, 20-35), that democracy in Athens was fundamentally dependent upon slavery, or empire, or the exclusion of women and foreigners.

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.

Throughout the past two decades, the number of women in elected politics has been increasing slowly, but incrementally. Women remain most underrepresented at the national level, with little prospects of parity in the near future (Whicker et al. 1993). By 1992, women held only 30 or 5.6% of the 535 seats in the 102nd Congress, 28 in the House and two in the Senate (CAWP 1992). Much media focus on increased activism and advances caused the 1992 elections to be labeled in the press as “The Year of the Woman.” Indeed, the number of female members of Congress did jump to 54 or 10.1%, not quite doubling (47 in the House and seven in the Senate) (Krauss 1992), but substantial percentage gains in the number of seats held by women obscured the fact that women remained underrepresented relative to their proportions in the population by over 40%.

At the state level, the number of women is larger, but still proportionately less than their share of approximately 50% of the population. In 1991, women were still only 18.3% of all state legislators, but nationwide, their numbers had increased from 344 in 1971 to 908 in 1981, to 1365 in 1991. The numbers of women in state legislatures, then, have been increasing incrementally, if slowly (Dodson and Carroll 1991). Incremental growth in women attaining state legislative office continued in the 1992 elections. For the 1993 session, the total number of women members was 1517 (20.4%), of which 338 were state senators (17%), and 1179 were state representatives (21.7%) (CAWP).

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.

One of the question marks of the 1992 presidential campaign was how television would cover it. After the debacle of campaign coverage in 1988, television vowed to do better. At issue was the amount of substantive information vs. the time spent on the horse race, strategy, and campaign events.

Campaign coverage is important because of the role of information in democratic choice. Essential to democratic participation is the opportunity to choose among alternatives. Given alternatives, citizens can say “yes” or “no,” thereby giving consent to the policies which best represent their interests (Schattschneider 1975, 138). Schattschneider also emphasized that the alternatives must be relevant to voters' concerns. Unfortunately, television coverage of elections does not emphasize information about public issues.

Another important aspect of campaign coverage is its potential effect on election outcomes: public opinion is shaped by the tone, quantity, and content of the candidates' coverage.

Questions about the political effects of news, the nature of campaign information, and the relationship between democracy and information provide an interesting framework to examine campaign communication in 1992. Did television news offer voters adequate issue information? How did talk shows compare to news in terms of information? Finally, what impact, if any, did the two formats have on the outcome of the election?

This paper will examine Bill Clinton's news coverage and talk show appearances from June 2 to July 22.

Recent archaeological and textual studies by classical scholars give us new ways of thinking about Athenian democracy. Morgens Hansen, for example, has calculated the seating capacity of the Pnyx, the site where the Athenians held their assemblies. By figuring out how much space a seated adult Athenian male would occupy, he has concluded that the assembly in the fourth century B.C. could have held at most 6,000 people. That is a third or fourth of the potential participants (Hansen 1983, 18). Another classical scholar argues that attendance was considerably below this and concludes: “The Athenians had never seen a full meeting of the citizen body, though the very idea of democracy is predicted on it. From the very start they must have accepted that any assembly was bound to be a sample of the citizenship—and not even a random sample” (Carter 1986, 193). Other questions worthy of being asked but not asked before are now raised: How were votes actually counted? How does one calculate a closely divided vote when there are 6,000 people sitting in the assembly?

In one of the classic books on Athenian democracy published in 1957, the author claimed: “Prima facie the Athenian democracy would seem to have been a perfectly designed machine for expressing and putting into effect the will of the people” (Jones [1957] 1964, 3). Hansen, with his calculations of the seating capacity of the Pnyx, and scholars questioning the degree to which and how citizens really engaged in the political life of Athens, are motivated by this perspective on ancient democracy.