In the Hebrew Bible, the issue of fairness is raised in some of the best-known narratives. Cain's raging jealousy and eventual murder of Abel is provoked by what he considered unfair treatment by God, who “paid heed” to Abel's offering but ignored his (Gen. 4:4). Jacob, after doing seven years of service in return for Laban's beautiful daughter, Rachel, was told that his sacrifice was not sufficient and that he must instead marry Laban's older and plainer daughter, Leah, unless he did seven more years' service, which he regarded as not only the breaking of a contract but also flagrantly unfair.

Fairness triumphed, however, when King Solomon proposed to divide a baby, claimed by two mothers, in two. When the true mother protested and offered the baby to the other mother (whose baby had died), the truth about the baby's maternity became apparent, and “all Israel … stood in awe of the king; for they saw that he possessed divine wisdom to execute justice” (1 Kings 3:28).

Solomon's proposed solution is the first explicit mention of fair division that we know of in recorded history. But it is, of course, no solution at all. Solomon had no intention of dividing the baby in two. Instead, his purpose was to set up a game between the two women, described in Brams (1980, 118–23; 1990, 17–24), that would distinguish the mother from the impostor.

The solutions of the fair-division procedures we shall discuss are for two players.

American voters issued mixed signals in November 1994 about the preferred role of party in the nation's governing structures. Accordingly, those political scientists who advocate party government for the United States—disciplined parties committed to coherent governing programs consciously patterned on the parliamentary model—were left to debate whether the midterm election results were a glass half empty or half full.

The bad news for advocates of a “more responsible two party system” was that the voters rejected at their earliest opportunity the necessary precondition for party government in the United States: single party control of the nation's elected institutions (Committee on Political Parties 1950). By turning Congress over to the Republicans, the electorate terminated an experiment in which the entirety of the elected federal policy-making structure had been entrusted to the Democrats. That exercise of single party control was brief—and increasingly rare. In the half century since the end of World War II, one party has held the White House and both chambers of Congress just 21 years. In the last quarter century only Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton have presided under these conditions. American voters, then, apparently returned in 1994 to comfortable form in restoring divided government, commensurately discomforting those who see in parties the remedy for a host of ills associated with separated institutions sharing powers.

Yet there were also promising developments in 1994 for party government advocates. At the top of the plus side of the ledger was the way in which House Republicans shed their status as a “permanent minority.”

To a substantial extent, political scientists continue to be in a state of shock, or even denial, over the results of the November 1994 mid-term elections. This degree of surprise has been largely attributed to the failure of the 1994 elections to conform to numerous models that have successfully predicted past election results on the basis of some combination of presidential popularity and economic performance. In a broader sense, it has become fashionable to argue alternately that the voters weren't really saying anything, or that they did not know what they were saying, or that they were saying things not fit for polite company—angry, mean, and even racist things. Such an interpretation does a disservice both to our profession and to our friends and neighbors, the real people who cast those votes.

It will be some time before we are able to untangle the factors that led to the Republican sweep and to see whether it was a short-term aberration or the beginning of a long-term trend in congressional elections. Nevertheless, I would like to offer a two-part explanation for the results and the consequent academic confusion: the election models that we use as both a tool and a crutch are at the same time not precise enough and too precise.

They are not precise enough because they do not capture all that needs to be taken into account even on the dimensions of the economy and presidential popularity.

In an informative account of different electoral systems and their effects on representation Joseph F. Zimmerman (1994, 674) recommended the single transferable vote (STV) system on the grounds that it “provides […] broad representation with great accuracy.” Along with local jurisdictions in the United States the article mentions Ireland and Australia as countries that use STV, but fails to include Malta. This seemingly innocuous omission is not inconsequential; Malta squarely contradicts Zimmerman's conclusion that STV facilitates the “direct representation” of women.

Unfortunately, Wilma Rule did not remedy the neglect of Malta in her comparative overview of women in parliaments, which appeared in the same feature on “Election Systems and Representative Democracy” (1994, 690). Inclusion in the cross-national comparison would have revealed that this small island nation carries a dubious distinction: the lowest percentage of women in its unicameral parliament. As a result of the last elections, held in 1992, there is currently only one female MP. Nor did Prime Minister Fenech Adami's cabinet include a single woman, even though the number of ministries was expanded from 10 to 13 (Fenech 1992b, 1993). In the preceding parliamentary term, 3% of the seats (2 of 69) were occupied by women.

It may be argued that in social scientific inquiry and theory-building a single case does not warrant the rejection of a generalization that is otherwise sound.