Forecasting elections may be impossible, but no more so than resisting the temptation to try. As citizens following a campaign, we all indulge in private guesses about who is going to win electoral contests. Some go further and engage in illegal acts—unless done through the services of the Iowa Electronic Market—and bet money on election outcomes. Numerous political scientists have invited fame, but also ridicule, by designing sophisticated models to forecast elections; readers of PS are no strangers to those efforts. Students of elections can hardly escape this tempting opportunity any more than they can escape elections themselves. No phenomenon in our discipline comes in such a regular, precise, and verifiable form as an election.

As Republican hopefuls announce bids to run for president in 1996, while Bill Clinton is pondering his strategy for reelection, political scientists resume their tinkering with models to predict the outcome of the 1996 presidential election. Those forecasts, however, will not arrive until two or three months before election day, when the most up-to-date readings for the various predictors are available. Some would argue that such early forecasting is presumptuous any-how, since it ignores the whole general election campaign. Others will complain that those forecasts arrive too late to have more than curiosity value.

Is pork barrel spending on the wane? Many think it is, including reformers inside and outside of Congress. Citing the recent decline of earmarks in House appropriations bills for projects in members' districts, reformers suggest that a new era of congressional spending practices is dawning.

This article argues instead that the rise in number of earmarks in the last decade as well as the recent decline depends on whether Congress and the executive branch are controlled by the same or different parties. It further predicts that the Republican takeover of the House and Senate after the 1994 congressional elections could lead to a resurgence of earmarking, in a different form, as long as the Democrats control the White House.

Among scholars, pork barrel spending analysis represents a venerable specialty in the profession, generating some of the most engaging debates and finest research in recent years. This literature analyzes how members of Congress create institutions and use legislative rules to enhance their electoral goals. While not mutually exclusive, the two dominant approaches in recent years are the “distributive” and “informational” models of congressional policy making. (For a good review of the last two decades of scholarly research on the subject, see Krehbiel 1991).

Reformers in the 103rd Congress were emboldened by the success of groups such as the “pork busters,” an informal group led by Representative Harris Fawell (R-IL), who routinely offered amendments to cut pork and unnecessary directed spending in appropriations bills.

Early in the first year of his presidency, Bill Clinton floated the name of Lani Guinier to be the Justice Department's chief civil-rights lawyer. Although Guinier never made it to Senate confirmation hearings, she was well qualified by education and professional training. Moreover, as a black Jewish female, it was evident to her that majoritarian democracy is often less than fair—and she was forthright about wishing to correct it by democratic means.

Ironically, the minority veto, one of the alleged means by which Guinier wished to assure fairness, harkened back to the process of government advocated by John C. Calhoun (1782–1850). For Calhoun, constitutionalism or limited government was justified by epistemological nominalism, and was ensured by the concurrent majority and nullification.

Like that of Aristotle, James Madison, and Karl Marx, Calhoun's political philosophy was based on class analysis. Indeed, the historian of American thought, Richard Hofstadter, subtitled a chapter on Calhoun, “The Marx of the Master Class.” As Hofstadter explains, in Calhoun,

… there is discernible a rough parallel to several ideas that were later elaborated and refined by Marx: the idea of pervasive exploitation and class struggle in history; a labor theory of value and of a surplus appropriated by the capitalists; the concentration of capital under capitalistic production; the fall of working-class conditions to the level of subsistence; the growing revolt of the laboring class against the capitalists; the prediction of social revolution.