Citizen participation is the main way in which the public communicates its needs and preferences to the government and induces the government to be responsive. Since participation depends on resources and resources are unequally distributed, the resulting communication is a biased representation of the public. Thus, the democratic ideal of equal consideration is violated. Sample surveys provide the closest approximation to an unbiased representation of the public because participation in a survey requires no resources and because surveys eliminate the selection bias inherent in the fact that participants in politics are self-selected. The contrast between the participatory process and the sample survey is used to highlight the nature of the bias in the former. Surveys, however, are not seen as a practical way of providing more equal representation.

Conventional accounts of the institutional development of Congress suggest that expansion of the size and workload of the House led members to distribute parliamentary rights narrowly: Majority party leaders accrued strong procedural powers while minority parties lost many of their parliamentary rights. I offer an alternative, partisan basis of procedural choice. Using an original data set of changes in House rules, I present a statistical model to assess the influence of partisan and nonpartisan factors on changes in minority procedural rights in the House between 1789 and 1990. I find that short-term partisan goals—constrained by inherited rules—shape both the creation and suppression of rights for partisan and political minorities. Collective institutional concerns and longer-term calculations about future parliamentary needs have little impact on changes in minority rights. The findings have important theoretical implications for explaining both the development of Congress and the nature of institutional change more generally.

Most scholars agree that members of Congress are strongly motivated by their desire for reelection. This assumption implies that members of Congress adopt institutions, rules, and norms of behavior in part to serve their electoral interests. Direct tests of the electoral connection are rare, however, because significant, exogenous changes in the electoral environment are difficult to identify. We develop and test an electoral rationale for the norm of committee assignment “property rights.” We examine committee tenure patterns before and after a major, exogenous change in the electoral system—the states' rapid adoption of Australian ballot laws in the early 1890s. The ballot changes, we argue, induced new “personal vote” electoral incentives, which contributed to the adoption of “modern” congressional institutions such as property rights to committee assignments. We demonstrate a marked increase in assignment stability after 1892, by which time a majority of states had put the new ballot laws into force, and earlier than previous studies have suggested.

The Condorcet Jury Theorem states that majorities are more likely than any single individual to select the “better” of two alternatives when there exists uncertainty about which of the two alternatives is in fact preferred. Most extant proofs of this theorem implicitly make the behavioral assumption that individuals vote “sincerely” in the collective decision making, a seemingly innocuous assumption, given that individuals are taken to possess a common preference for selecting the better alternative. However, in the model analyzed here we find that sincere behavior by all individuals is not rational even when individuals have such a common preference. In particular, sincere voting does not constitute a Nash equilibrium. A satisfactory rational choice foundation for the claim that majorities invariably “do better” than individuals, therefore, has yet to be derived.

The topic of authority only rarely figures into theories of deliberative democracy, no doubt owing to the widely held view that authority is inherently undemocratic. But deliberative democrats need a concept of authoritative decision making, not least because the scale and complexity of contemporary societies radically limit the numbers of decisions that can be made by deliberatively democratic means. I argue for an inherently democratic conception of authority, in large part by examining and rejecting the view—held by radical democrats, conservatives, and most liberals—that authority involves a surrender of judgment by those subject to authority. In contrast, I develop the view that authority, particularly in posttraditional contexts, involves a limited suspension of judgment enabled by a context of democratic challenge and public accountability. An important point is that democratic authority supports robust deliberative decision making by enabling individuals to allocate their time, energy, and knowledge to the issues most significant to them.

While the writings of Hannah Arendt have received an extraordinary amount of scholarly attention, few commentators have seen her as a theorist concerned with questions of human rights. I argue that the problem of human rights was central to Arendt's political theory. While she does not elaborate a theory of human rights as such, and while she avoids the juridical approaches so common among human rights theorists and advocates, her conception of political action is intended to secure an elemental human dignity that is systematically jeopardized by the imperatives of national sovereignty.

Aristotle is no misogynist, but the way this charge is answered can skew the understanding of his political theory as a whole. Those who dismiss the charge of misogyny on grounds that Aristotle covertly advocates women's participation in civic affairs tend to obscure the leading thesis of the Politics, namely, that polis and household differ in kind, not merely in number. I argue that Aristotle condones the exclusion of women from civic affairs because this practice conforms to the natural complementarity of the sexes and because it fortifies the naturally pluralistic structure of society. By securing these underpinnings, Aristotle frames a constitution that best supports women and men in their pursuit of human excellence.

In this article I offer an historically situated model of the self as an alternative to liberal, communitarian, and Foucauldian conceptions. Through the example of John Milton, I show that the conscience gave rise to a self that was jointly individual and ethical. By participating in public debates at the behest of his conscience, Milton recognized himself as an individual possessor of moral authority. Conscience thus liberated Milton from traditional identifications and beliefs as it bound him to act for his society. The self founded on conscience therefore differs from both communitarian and liberal variants. Moreover, whereas conscience in the Foucauldian account renders the self docile, it empowers the self in my account. I conclude that the self predicated on conscience challenges the divisions between private and public realms, self-regarding and prosocial actions, and self-creating and culturally determined persons.

Several recent explanations for major-power war focus on purported cycles in global economic activity or in global political order. I shall argue that a better understanding of interrelationships among the economic long wave, the global leadership cycle, and armed conflict can be gained if we (1) expand the study of interstate conflict beyond the limited domain of great power or systemic wars and (2) treat the long wave and the leadership cycle as quasi-independent and interrelated processes, each contributing to the conflict dynamics of the interstate system. Theoretical foundations for these two recommendations are drawn from the core works in this field. A model based on this new approach is developed and tested empirically along with four formal representations of the core frameworks. Poisson regression is employed using data on interstate disputes (1816–1976) to test resulting hypotheses. Analysis shows that broadening the explanatory domains of existing frameworks is valid and that the “coevolving systems” model is measurably superior to all tested competitors. I conclude that these two global processes are best viewed as coevolving systems and that future studies of systemic conflict should take this approach.

Rational choice analyses of international cooperation have slighted the effect of state preference formation and the influence of cultural forces in that process. This article addresses these gaps by developing an explanation that specifies how organizational cultures of bureaucracies shape state aims and international outcomes. This approach is evaluated in a set of least likely cases—decisions on the use of force in war—where the conventional wisdom expects external material, not internal cultural, concerns to dominate. Before World War II, countries agreed to limit the use of three types of warfare, but during that conflict mutual restraint was maintained in only one. I show how this variation is best understood as a product of state preference dynamics, shaped largely by the collective beliefs and customs of military services. This result suggests ways to rethink the use of the preferences-interaction model and the role of cultural factors in that framework.

Based upon a survey of the USSR in December 1989, Finifter and Mickiewicz (1992) found that respondents with higher education were less inclined than those with lower education to support individual, versus state, responsibility, and that supporters of individual responsibility were slightly less likely than those favoring state responsibility to support political change. A recent critique challenged this analysis, arguing that higher education is always associated with support for individual responsibility and that preference for individual responsibility is always positively associated with support for political reform, and reported findings to that effect. This analysis resolves these discrepant findings and clarifies why they occurred. A replication using data from 40 societies demonstrates that the relationship between education and locus of responsibility is not universal; indeed, it appears in only a few countries. Moreover, large differences in sampling and measurement procedures and extraordinary changes over time in the real world contributed to the differences between our findings and those of our critics.

Modernization theory suggests that in the post–World War II period increased education promoted public support for democratic principles and an individual opportunities society in the former Soviet Union. Finifter and Mickiewicz (1992), however, based on a 1989 survey in the Soviet Union, found that the less well educated were more supportive of individual locus of control than were the better educated. Examining survey data collected in the former USSR during 1990, 1991, 1992, and 1995, we find consistent reconfirmation of the modernization theory, despite a major decline in support for an opportunities society that occurs between 1992 and 1995. This recent increase in preference for socialism is explained by rising nationalism, growing nostalgia for communists, and disillusionment with certain aspects of the market economy, particularly the perceived growth of social inequality.