bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Method for Identifying Issues and Factions from Legislative Votes
Authors: MacRae Duncan
Published: May 2006

Roll-call votes are being used increasingly to throw light on various aspects of the legislative process. As long as these votes are neither simply unanimous nor cast purely on party lines, they contain information that can often be rendered more intelligible by the simplification or condensation of many votes into fewer variables or dimensions. The researcher interested in a particular legislative decision can thus profit by seeing whether it exemplifies a more general and repeated type of occurrence. The techniques of analysis used in studying legislative votes are broadly applicable to collegial bodies of many sorts, including municipal, state, and national legislative bodies; party congresses and conventions; the U.S. Supreme Court; and the United Nations General Assembly.

Two major questions have been asked which lead to the search for different kinds of simplifying variables in this analysis. One concerns theissuesthat divide a given group of legislators at a given time,i.e., what general matters are being argued about? The second concerns thesubgroupsof legislators within the group selected for study: what are the blocs, factions, cliques, and the like, whose more persistent existence is reflected by the division on a given vote?
Integration and Arms Control in the European Political Environment: A Summary Report
Authors: Deutsch Karl W.
Published: May 2006

At the heart of our research was a single basic question: What arms control and disarmament measures might be acceptable to Europeans in 1966, in 1971, and in 1976? And differently put: What would be Europe's attitude in those years either to arms competition or to arms control, and what particular policies would be most popular or least popular in Europe in this respect?

This basic question implied four more detailed questions. The first, What is Europe now, in 1966, and where is it going for the 1971 to 1976 period? Is it going to be a Europe of nation-states with only marginal common functional arrangements on matters not central in importance to the concerns of its citizens? Or will it be to some extent substantially integrated, with some major policy decisions made by common institutions? Or will it be a common body politic, speaking with a single voice and developing common institutions for a wide range of decisions?

Second, do Europeans in general approve or disapprove of arms control? Do they welcome the relaxation of tensions between America and Russia and between the East and West, or do they fear such relaxation?

Third, what specific arms control measures are likely to be most acceptable to Europeans, and which arms control measures are likely to be least acceptable?

And fourth, what are the strength, location, and time aspects of political support for specific policies, such as the policies of France and its President de Gaulle vis-à-vis the NATO Alliance and the United States?
Socio-Economic Variables and Voting for the Radical Left: Chile, 1952
Authors: Soares Glaucio , Hamblin Robert L.
Published: May 2006

This is the first of a number of investigations of the socio-economic basis of politics, with a special focus on voting for the radical left or right. In this case, the voting data are the percentage of votes cast for Allende, the socialist candidate in the 1952 presidential elections in Chile.
Rejoinder to Oppenheim's “Comment”
Authors: VanDeVeer Donald
Published: May 2006

I do not think that Professor Oppenheim and I are any nearer agreement, but perhaps the various forks in the road are clearer. I will try to be as fair, as clear, and to the point as Oppenheim has been. I will consider most, but not all, of his replies and will do so in the order he has followed.

Oppenheim concedes that he is relying upon the principle that a sentence is cognitively significant if and only if (briefly) it is logically significant or empirically testable, and he claims that this principle is generally accepted by contemporary philosophers of science. I do not think it is generally accepted; indeed, on the page after the one quoted by Oppenheim, Carl Hempel states that he feels “less confident” that such a criterion can establish “sharp dividing lines” between “those sentences which do have cognitive significance and those which do not.” The proper estimate of the current situation is, I think, that whether a general criterion of “cognitive” meaning can be had, and if so, just what it is—are notoriously unsettled questions. If any estimate is correct, it is that among philosophers of language there is widespread suspicion of the neat distinctions between analytic/synthetic, a priori/a posteriori, cognitively meaningful/meaningless which prevailed prior to and during the 1950's. The work of W. V. O. Quine and Noam Chomsky has only muddied the waters further.
Pareto Optimality in Electoral Competition
Authors: Ordeshook Peter C.
Published: May 2006

The core of welfare economics consists of the proof that, for certain classes of goods, perfectly competitive markets are efficient in that they provide Pareto optimal allocations of these goods. In this paper, the efficiency of competitive elections is examined. Elections are modeled as two-candidate zero-sum games, and three kinds of equilibria for such games are identified: pure, risky, and mixed strategies. It is shown, however, that regardless of which kind of equilibrium prevails, if candidates adopt equilibrium strategies, an election is efficient in the sense that the candidates advocate Pareto optimal policies. But one caveat to this analysis is that while an election is Pareto optimal, citizens can unanimously prefer markets to elections as a mechanism for selecting future policies.
Eric Voegelin's Framework for Political Evaluation in His Recently Published Work
Authors: Germino Dante
Published: May 2006

Eric Voegelin's evaluation of politics is grounded in the symbols and experiences which illumine man's participation in the process of reality. The trail of symbols and equivalent experiences whic constitute history provides the fundamental criteria by which the language of politics is to be evaluated. The central philosophical symbol is the Between (metaxy), coined by Plato. It indicates that human existence is a tension between the poles of the divine height and the cosmic depth. Politics and its language must acknowledge the limitations of this tension: that the human perspective is always from within reality. Existentially, man is a participant, not an observer looking at non-metric reality from the “outside.” The existential balance of the open psyche is the product of a perpetual struggle against the tendency to distortions. Such distortions can arise when one or other aspect of reality is allowed to absorb the whole, and individual thinkers attempt to abolish the tension by replacing it with a system which provides the “solution” to the mystery of reality.
Coalition Politics in North India
Authors: Brass Paul R.
Published: May 2006

The years 1964 and 1967 stand as two crucial landmarks in the democratic development of India's political systems both at the center and in the several states. In the three years since Nehru's death in May, 1964, Indian politics entered fully into a major test of legitimacy. Since 1964, the national leadership of the Indian National Congress has three times demonstrated its ability to handle smoothly the first stage of India's process of legitimizing democratic political authority—that of transferring power from a charismatic leader to his successors within the dominant party. After the 1967 General Elections, Indian politics moved to a second stage to confront the problems of transferring power from the previously dominant Congress to diverse parties and party coalitions in more than half the Indian states.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the implications for party development in India of the ways in which power has been transferred from the Congress to multi-group coalitions in the three north Indian states of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Punjab. Specifically, I am concerned with the structural characteristics of the developing party systems in the three states; with the roles played in the systems by parties, factions, and individuals; and with the impact of the ways in which the systems function upon government formation and stability. I will argue that north Indian political parties operate in systems in which inter-party ideological divisions are less decisive in the formation and breakup of governments than intra-party divisions.
The Competitive Solution for N-Person Games Without Transferable Utility, With an Application to Committee Games
Authors: McKelvey Richard D. , Ordeshook Peter C. , Winer Mark D.
Published: May 2006

This essay defines and experimentally tests a new solution concept for n-person cooperative games—the Competitive Solution. The need for a new solution concept derives from the fact that cooperative game theory focuses for the most part on the special case of games with transferable utility, even though, as we argue here, this assumption excludes the possibility of modelling most interesting political coalition processes. For the more general case, though, standard solution concepts are inadequate either because they are undefined or they fail to exist, and even if they do exist, they focus on predicting payoffs rather than the coalitions that are likely to form.

The Competitive Solution seeks to avoid these problems, but it is not unrelated to existent theory in that we can establish some relationships (see Theorems 1 and 2) between its payoff predictions and those of the core, the V-solution and the bargaining set. Additionally, owing to its definition and motivation, nontrivial coalition predictions are made in conjunction with its payoff predictions.

The Competitive Solution's definition is entirely general, but a special class of games—majority rule spatial games—are used for illustrations and the experimental test reported here consists of eight plays of a 5-person spatial game that does not possess a main-simple V-solution or a bargaining set. Overall, the data conform closely to the Competitive Solution's predictions.
Predicting Voting Patterns in the General Assembly
Authors: Vincent Jack E.
Published: May 2006

This project attempts to relate a large number of potential predictors to voting data generated at the United Nations. Numerous associations were found when the predictors, 77 in all, were related to 13 different kinds of voting scores. Because of considerable redundancy in both sets of data, national attribute and voting, the results were factor analyzed and the original variables were reduced to 14 sets of factor scores representing the national attribute data, and 4 representing the voting data. Several significant associations emerged from the intercorrelation of these two sets of factor scores, with the independent variables “Economic Development,” “Democracy,” and “U.S. Relations” exhibiting considerable predictive power. When the overall relationships between the two sets of data were assessed by use of the canonical correlation technique, “Economic Development” received the greatest weight on the national attribute side, and “Eastern Voting” on the voting (dependent variable) side. These findings accord well with previous research, in that “Economic Development” seems to predict negativism as revealed by voting. Thus “Economic Development” appears to be fundamentally related to certain schisms at the United Nations, with the representatives from the most developed states appearing the most “negative” as evidenced by questionnaire responses and voting behavior. Such orientations are likely to have a significant impact on the evolution of the organization.

At a theoretical level, the present findings may have considerable relevance for both Social Field theory and Attribute theory.
Coalitional Behavior among the Chinese Military Elite: A Nonrecursive, Simultaneous Equations, and Multiplicative Causal Model
Authors: Ting William Pang-yu
Published: May 2006

At least three competing proto-theories of Chinese military coalitional behavior (those of William Whitson, Harvey Nelsen, and William Parrish) have been proposed. This study attempts to: (1) reformulate these proto-theories into testable mathematical models, (2) test these reformulated models empirically, and (3) suggest an alternative theory of Chinese military coalitional behavior. I use causal modeling techniques to reformulate these proto-theories into mathematical ones and gather data on 423 members of the Chinese military elite to test the zero-predictions and structural equations of each model. The findings indicate that all three proto-theories may be misspecified theoretically. I then propose an alternative theory, which integrates features from all three proto-theories. This theory argues that members of the Chinese military elite form coalitions according to a set of affective ties and shared professional interests. This set of relationships is stated in mathematical terms, and the mathematical predictions deduced from it fit empirical data.
Selecting Cases for Supreme Court Review: An Underdog Model
Authors: Ulmer S. Sidney
Published: May 2006

In making review decisions, Supreme Court justices are predisposed to support underdogs and upperdogs. disproportionately but, also, are motivated to hide any "bias" that may be at work in determining votes.

In balancing these two values, justices may be expected to vote their "bias" more frequently (1) when that vote will determine outcome, and (2) when the "bias" will be harder to detect. The latter goal may be served by voting the "bias" more frequently in close cases and less frequently otherwise.

In an analysis of the voting patterns of five justices in the decade 1947–56, I found that two liberal and two conservative justices conformed to these expectations. A fifth, or control justice, defined as neither liberal nor conservative, did not pattern his votes in the manner predicted for liberals and conservatives. This relationship held when four projected intervening variables were controlled individually and collectively.
Policy Support within a Target Group: The Case of School Desegregation
Authors: Gatlin Douglas S. , Giles Micheal W. , Cataldo Everett F.
Published: May 2006

This study empirically tests three theoretical approaches to explaining specific support for a policy output among members of its target group. The utilitarian model posits support as a function of objective costs and benefits to the individual stemming directly from the policy. The attitudinal model relates specific support to diffuse predispositions rooted in socialization. The perceptual model holds that specific support derives from beliefs about the character of the political decision process by which the policy was formulated. Tests of these three approaches are based on survey data on specific support for school district desegregation plans among a large sample of black and white parents of public school children in Florida. In both subsamples, the utilitarian approach explained very little of the variance in support, but the attitudinal and perceptual models were corroborated. Implications of these findings are drawn for desegregation policy making and for public policy theory.
A Note on “An Axiomatic Model of Voting Bodies”
Authors: Mayer Lawrence S.
Published: May 2006

Brams and O'Leary (this Review, 64 [June 1970], pp. 449–470) generate a model of the behavior of a voting body by first applying a simple combinatorial argument to the results of voting on a single issue and then extending this model by assuming voting behavior is independent across issues. In this note we show that their argument can be extended to cover voting across issues without relying on the assumption of independence. This alternative approach gives insight into the Brams and O'Leary model and strengthens their results by making several of their indices exact instead of approximate. Thus if the modification proposed in this note is used, the indices proposed by Brains and O'Leary can be used empirically without worrying about independence.
What Happened to the British Party Model?
Authors: Epstein Leon D.
Published: May 2006

Admired during much of this century, the British party model became especially attractive to American political scientists seeking responsible-party government in the early postwar years. After the mid-1960s, the model's appeal declined as did Britain's national status and the hopes for the democratic socialism often associated with the model. In the 1970s, the model itself seems to have worked in a way unlike that of prior decades. From this intellectual case history, a few broad inferences are drawn about the changing perspectives of political scientists.
Being Intelligent about Secret Intelligence Agencies
Authors: Ransom Harry Howe
Published: May 2006

This essay analyzes selected publications since 1974 on U.S. secret intelligence agencies. Published works divide into four categories: memoirs defending the intelligence system, whistle-blowing exposés, scholarly analyses, and reports from executive and congressional studies. What do these materials reveal about the variables determining intelligence system influence in foreign policy decisions? And what do they suggest about criteria for evaluating intelligence performance and product? The finding is that little conceptual progress has been made towards defining the functions of intelligence. But a substantial amount of new illustrative material is now at hand to explore hypotheses such as (1) that intelligence agencies report what they think leaders want to hear, (2) that leaders take decisions without regard to intelligence reports, and (3) that costs often exceed benefits in covert action overseas. We need to understand better the functions of intelligence and to develop theories about the interrelations of information, action, and power within the context of American democratic values. Towards these ends, the article urges the exploitation of the variety of evidence recently published.
Freedom, Markets, and Voluntary Exchange
Authors: Preston Larry M.
Published: May 2006

A capitalist market system of social exchange is justified primarily because it protects individual freedom. This system, its advocates claim, achieves the complex task of production and distribution through a process of voluntary exchanges; coordination is effectively achieved without coercion. I argue that this claim is largely unwarranted. The negative concept of freedom that underlies voluntary choice (the absence of interference by others) is unable to differentiate between instances of freedom and unfreedom. As a result, it is not possible to determine whether exchanges are voluntary or coerced. A more adequate conception of free choice (as the relevant capacities and conditions for deliberate decisions and actions) suggests that a capitalist market broadly and systematically denies the possibility of voluntary agreements. This general failure to protect individuals' freedom is examined in relation to the acquisition of property, the transfer of property, and the process of production.
Radicalism or Reformism: The Sources of Working-class Politics
Authors: Lipset Seymour Martin
Published: May 2006

From my work on my doctoral dissertation (Lipset 1950, 1968) down to the present, I have been interested in the problem of “American exceptionalism.” That curious phrase emerged from the debate in the international Communist movement in the 1920s concerning the sources of the weakness of left-wing radical movements in the United States (Draper 1960, pp. 268-72; Lipset 1977a, pp. 107-61). The key question repeatedly raised in this context has been, is America qualitatively different from other industrial capitalist countries? Or, to use Sombart's words, “Why is there no Socialism in the United States?” (Sombart 1976).

In a forthcoming book, I evaluate the hypotheses advanced by various writers from Karl Marx onward to explain the absence of an effective socialist party on the American political scene. (For a preliminary formulation, see Lipset 1977b, pp. 31-149, 346-63.) If any of the hypotheses are valid, they should also help to account for the variation among working-class movements in other parts of the world. In this article, therefore, I shall reverse the emphasis from that in my book and look at socialist and working-class movements comparatively, applying elsewhere some of the propositions that have been advanced to explain the American situation.
A Theoretical Analysis of Transnational Terrorism
Authors: Sandler Todd , Tschirhart John T. , Cauley Jon
Published: May 2006

This article presents some “rational-actor” models that depict the negotiation process between terrorists and government policymakers for those incidents where hostages or property are seized and demands are issued. The models account for the objectives and constraints faced by both the terrorists and the policymakers. Uncertainty is introduced through probability constraints (i.e., chance constraints) requiring a specific likelihood of some event occurring. Implications are subsequently extracted from the comparative static analysis as the models' parameters are changed. The last part of the article presents a club theory analysis concerning the sharing of transnational commando forces.
Electoral Choice and Popular Control of Public Policy: The Case of the 1966 House Elections
Authors: Sullivan John L. , O'Connor Robert E.
Published: May 2006

This paper examines two neglected conditions of the linkage process between public opinion and public policy, in an effort to evaluate an explanation, other than voter apathy and ignorance, of why the linkage appears to be so weak. These conditions are: (1) Opposing candidates for the same elective office must differ in their issue-related attitudes. (2) The winners' subsequent behavior vis-à-vis public policy must be consonant with their pre-election issue-related attitudes.

By the use of data collected before the 1966 House election, the amount of choice, or issue-related differences between candidates for the same House seat, is examined in all 435 Congressional districts. Sufficient differences were found in three policy areas—foreign affairs, civil rights, and domestic welfare—to imply that the electorate was given the opportunity to determine the direction of public policy.

Adding data collected on the roll-call behavior of the 435 winners allowed us to examine the second condition. Although in some cases there were substantial differences between pre-election attitude and postelection roll-call behavior on the same issue, this is clearly the exception rather than the rule. As a generalization, the second condition appears to be true.
The President and the Political Use of Force
Authors: Ostrom Charles W. , Job Brian L.
Published: May 2006

Throughout the post–World War II period the president has been called upon to make decisions concerning the use of force as a political instrument. The explanation that is offered is based upon a characterization of the president as a cybernetic human decision maker facing limitations. These limitations, in conjunction with the complexity of the environment, lead presidents to develop and use a relatively simple decision rule. The dependent variable, which is the probability of the use of force at any point in time, is explained in terms of enduring and essential concerns, which are operationalized as coming from the international, domestic, and personal environments. Data are taken from Blechman and Kaplan'sForce Without War. On the basis of our estimation and evaluation, presidential decisions to use force are based on factors in all three arenas.
Nondecisions and Power: The Two Faces of Bachrach and Baratz
Authors: Debnam Geoffrey
Published: May 2006

The concept “nondecision” was advanced by Bachrach and Baratz as a means of identifying certain areas of community power neglected by reputational and issue analysis approaches. While it is descriptively suggestive of certain possible areas of neglect, it has not been shaped into a useful analytic tool, and does not make any demands which cannot be met by decision-making analysis. Its terms are, in fact, somewhat confused since it fails to differentiate between nondecisions brought about by covert control, and those which may be more generally atlributable to a mobilization of bias. These together seem to comprise what Bachrach and Baratz describe as the “second face of power,” which has been neglected, they argue, because of inadequate consideration of the meaning of power and related concepts. But their own approach to these does not aid empirical analysis. It simply encourages concern for the minutiae of political action, whereas the simplified view of power adopted here suggests the advantages of a contextual approach.
Images, Process and Feedback in Foreign Policy: Israel's Decisions on German Reparations
Authors: Brecher Michael
Published: May 2006

This paper attempts to operationalize the concept of a foreign policy system and to test the utility of one path to empirically oriented theory: The approach is designated “structured empiricism.” The research design incorporates some of the recent innovations in political science—the concept of system, the distinction between operational and psychological environment, the notion of issue-area and the attitudinal prism or lens through which decision makers' images are filtered. The focus is on one of the most significant Israeli foreign policy decision clusters—German Reparations 1950–2. Following the designation of the decision-making group, the dissection of their psychological environment, and the analysis of the decision-making process, the critical dimension of feedback is examined. The decision flow and feedback flow illustrate the dynamic character of a foreign policy system in action. Finally, a selection of hypotheses on the behavior of decision makers is tested, and the findings summarized.
Comment: The American Electoral Universe: Speculation and Evidence
Authors: Rusk Jerrold G.
Published: May 2006

In the last two decades the empirical approach to political science has been heavily preoccupied with the study of contemporary voting behavior. Few have been sufficiently curious about or motivated by the mysteries of our electoral past to sustain a concentrated research effort in this direction. Yet, as V. O. Key often noted, a knowledge of our electoral past provides us with a better understanding of our electoral present, with how our current system has evolved and changed over time. Only recently have scholars begun to heed the call of Key and new historians like Lee Benson and Samuel P. Hays for an empirical analysis of historical voting behavior. The initial research efforts, although often crude and unsystematic in method, have prompted interesting speculation as to “divergences” in our thinking from what previously had been assumed about past electorates. They have discovered “anomalies” in several different contexts—in earlier unconfirmed theories of voting behavior, in data-oriented contemporary work on the American voter, and even among the various historical research efforts themselves. While the presence of such anomalies characterizes the first stages of any research effort in virgin territory, unraveling the apparent inconsistencies must always be part of the process of a more fully developed cumulative research program. What is the task of the moment is to examine these anomalies in light of the theories and research of Professors Burnham, Converse, and myself—the principal elements in this continuing dialogue about the proper interpretation of our electoral past.
The ABM Issue in the Senate, 1968–1970: The Importance of Ideology
Authors: Bernstein Robert A. , Anthony William W.
Published: May 2006

Three hypotheses suggesting why senators might adopt or change positions on such an issue as the ABM are compared. The empirical analysis clearly substantiates the contention that position reflects ideology, not party commitment or potential state economic benefits. Furthermore, the influence of ideology is seen to have grown more apparent each year the issue was contested in the Senate. Virtually all the senators who changed position between 1968 and 1970 had initial positions that did not accord with their ideology, and they moved so as to bring them in accord. Virtually all those senators whose initial position was in accord with their ideology maintained that position.
Congress and the Defense Budget: 1960–1970
Authors: Kanter Arnold
Published: May 2006

It is commonly held that Congress has made only inconsequential changes in the President's requests for defense appropriations. Scholarly studies of the budgetary process, notably the work of Fenno and Wildavsky, do not include defense spending in their analyses. For nondefense spending they find that Congress has primarily afiscalrather thanprogrammaticorientation toward appropriations.

House and Senate changes in the President's defense appropriations requests were analyzed for the fiscal years 1960 through 1970. It was found that small Congressional changes in total defense spending obscured more substantial activity in particular budget categories. The concentration of Congressional activity in two of these categories—Procurement and R&D—indicates that Congress has had a significant programmatic orientation toward defense spending. Changes in the level of Congressional activity across time confirm this hypothesis.

Efforts to measure the relative influence of the House and Senate proved inconclusive. The Senate dominated the conference committee, but the Senate's influence was concentrated in the least important budget categories. The House made most of the changes in the President's budget requests, but very few of such changes were appealed by the Defense Department to the Senate.
Defending the Welfare State
Authors: Obler Jeffrey , Goodin Robert E.
Published: May 2006

An ethical defense of the welfare state may, as Robert E. Goodin has argued, adumbrate the notion that responsibility to provide for “needy strangers” flows from the same source as family responsibility. But this view of the moral responsibility for protecting vulnerable people is open to challenge. In this Controversy, Jeffrey Obler takes issue on this point, and Goodin replies.
Economic Expectations and Voting Behavior in United States House and Senate Elections
Authors: Kuklinski James H. , West Darrell M.
Published: May 2006

Past individual-level studies of economic voting (1) have incorrectly operationalized the model they employ by using past-oriented rather than future-oriented questions and (2) have failed to examine the level of economic voting in United States Senate elections. Using the 1978 National Election Study, we show that economic voting exists in Senate but not House elections, presumably due to the differences in electoral context. Even when economic voting occurs, however, there is no guarantee that the public will influence the direction of macroeconomic policy.
Change and Stability in Superpower Rivalry
Authors: McGinnis Michael D. , Williams John T.
Published: May 2006

We investigate the dynamics of superpower rivalry. Participants in policy debates within each state use information about expected future threats and economic costs to influence other policy actors, and this process of sophisticated reaction links the security policies of these two states into a single rivalry system. Analysis of vector autoregression models of U.S. and Soviet military expenditures and diplomatic hostility and U.S. gross national product supports the hypothesis that these policies approximate the behavior of unitary rational states capable of forming rational expectations of each other's future behavior. The dynamic response of this system to a wide range of exogenous shocks (or innovations) reveals the underlying stability of this rivalry system. The military expenditures of both states exhibit a cyclical response to innovations, with a shorter U.S. cycle. This lack of synchronization creates several problems for analysis and for policy change.
The Tyranny of Reason in the World of the Polis
Authors: Saxonhouse Arlene W.
Published: May 2006

The modern language of tyranny has distorted the significance of the Greek term tyrannos. In ancient Greek the term was accorded to the new ruler in the city, one whose legitimacy did not reside in his bonds to the ancient rulers and ancient families. Tyranny thus suggested a freedom from the past. Reason, as the Greeks understood it, also entailed a breaking away from the physical world. Reason and tyranny thus work together as expressions of freedom, but it is a freedom that in its transcendence of boundaries leads to tragedy. An examination of Sophocles' Oedipus draws out both the glory and the failure of the individual attempt of the political actor to rise above the historical particular and the mere body to build a world where reason alone is power.
Partisan Cycles in Congressional Elections and the Macroeconomy
Authors: Alesina Alberto , Rosenthal Howard
Published: May 2006

In the postwar United States the president's party has always done worse in the midterm congressional elections than in the previous congressional election. Republican administrations exhibit below-average, and Democratic administrations above-average, economic growth in the first half of each term, whereas in the latter halves the two see equal growth. Our rational expectations model is consistent with these two regularities. In presidential elections, voters choose between two polarized candidates. They then use midterm elections to counterbalance the president's policies by strengthening the opposition in Congress. Since presidents of different parties are associated with different policies, our model predicts a (spurious) correlation between the state of the economy and elections. Our predictions contrast with those of retrospective voting models, in which voters reward the incumbent if the economy is doing well before the election. Our model performs empirically at least as well as, and often better than, alternative models.
Machiavelli's Paradox: Trapping or Teaching the Prince
Authors: Langton John , Dietz Mary G.
Published: May 2006

In The Discourses Machiavelli extolled the virtues of republican government, yet in The Prince he advised the ruler on how to perpetuate autocratic rule. What accounts for this paradox? Mary Dietz argues that Machiavelli sought to deceive the prince, trapping him into actions that would destroy his rule. John Langton contends, in contrast, that Machiavelli was seeking to teach the prince how to govern so that the autocratic state could evolve into a republic.
Bureaucratic Politics in Radical Military Regimes
Authors: Kasza Gregory J.
Published: May 2006

Most theories of bureaucratic politics depict state bureaucracies as a conservative force in the political system. Their resistance to radical politics and innovative programs is attributed to certain typical traits of bureaucratic structures and career patterns. I summarize the arguments for bureaucratic conservatism, and then describe how civilian bureaucracies serving military regimes in Japan (1937–45), Peru (1968–75), and Egypt (1952–70) invalidated those arguments by promoting radical policy programs through the three devices of supraministerial bodies, low-ranking ministries, and new specialized agencies. I conclude that middle theories of bureaucratic politics may prove more fruitful than grand theoretical attempts to encompass all bureaucracies in a single set of propositions, and that structural and occupational explanations of bureaucratic behavior need to be modified by a greater appreciation for the role of individual bureaucratic leaders.
Asymmetric Information and the Coherence of Legislation
Authors: Austen-Smith David , Riker William H.
Published: May 2006

Legislators' beliefs, preferences, and intentions are communicated in committees and legislatures through debates, the proposal of bills and amendments, and the recording of votes. Because such information is typically distributed asymmetrically within any group of decision makers, legislators have incentives to reveal or conceal private information strategically and thus manipulate the collective decision-making process in their favor. In consequence, any committee decision may in the end reflect only the interests of a minority. We address a problem of sharing information through debate in an endogenous, agenda-setting, collective-choice process. The model is game theoretic and we find in the equilibrium to the game that at least some legislators have incentives to conceal private information. Consequently, the final committee decision can be “incoherent” by failing to reflect the preferences of all committee members fully. Additionally, we characterize the subset of legislators with any incentive to conceal data.
The Reaffirmation of a Multiparty System in France
Authors: Schlesinger Joseph A. , Schlesinger Mildred
Published: May 2006

In accord with the office-seeking theory of parties, we explore the impact of the structure of electoral competition on French parties. We speculated that the Fifth Republic's electoral structure—dual-ballot elections in single-member districts—would produce a multiparty system consisting of parties tailored to the two-ballot mode of winning. To test our proposition we devised two measures of winning for the members of the national assembly's partisan groups: the percentage of members who won the absolute majority that was needed to win on the first ballot and the average shift in the electoral margin of the groups' remaining members from the first to the second ballot. The two measures revealed four distinct ways of winning, each of which fostered a prototypical party.
The Committee Assignment Process and the Conditional Nature of Committee Bias
Authors: Hall Richard L. , Grofman Bernard
Published: May 2006

The view that congressional committees tend to be biased subsets of their parent chambers provides the foundations for a substantial body of theoretical literature on distributive politics and legislative structure. More recent revisionist work suggests that committees composed of preference outliers are in fact rare. We reject the categorical account of preference outliers a priori and elaborate conditions under which committees should be unrepresentative of their parent chambers. We argue that the most widely available and frequently used data—floor roll call votes—are inappropriate to the task of assessing outlier predictions in any form. Finally, we conduct a differentiated set of hypothesis tests within one policy jurisdiction to illustrate the characteristics of evidence and analysis necessary to evaluate alternative theoretical accounts of legislative organization. The appearance of policy-relevant biases in congressional work groups, we conclude, is not so much rare as it is conditional, and we suggest several conditions on which future models of legislative organization should build.
Cooperation by Design: Leadership, Structure, and Collective Dilemmas
Authors: Bianco William T. , Bates Robert H.
Published: May 2006

We return to the analysis of cooperation among interdependent rational individuals. We emphasize the limited impact of iteration (or repeated play) and explore the possibility of an alternative: intervention by rational agents, whom we call leaders. We show that leadership is more significant for initiating cooperation than for sustaining it. In addition, we identify two features of organizations that are critical in determining a leader's ability to initiate and sustain cooperation by structuring the incentives of his followers: the leader's capabilities (information and strategy sets) and reward structure (payoff function).
Conceptual Problems in Theorizing About International Conflict
Authors: Morrow James D. , Price Barry L. , Simowitz Roslyn
Published: May 2006

Axiomatic and deductive theorizing about international political conflict has precipitated lively debate. Much of the disputation of recent years has derived from an expected utility theory of conflict advocated by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. In the June 1990 issue of this Review, Roslyn Simowitz and Barry L. Price dissected crucial parts of Bueno de Mesquita's formulation of the theory, arguing that it suffers from errors of logic and clarity. In this controversy, James D. Morrow challenges the claims of Simowitz and Price that the reviewed theory is logically and conceptually flawed. In turn, Price and Simowitz join issue.
The Price Elasticity of Mass Preferences
Authors: Green Donald Philip
Published: May 2006

I compare the price elasticity of economic and political preferences. My central hypothesis is that willingness to pay, whether expressed verbally or through cash transactions, is more price-elastic for economic consumption goods than for public goods. I find that increases in price greatly diminish the proportion of people willing to pay for consumer goods, such as housing or hardback books; whereas the proportion willing to pay more in taxes to support a public good, such as environmental protection or shelter for the homeless, is much less responsive to changes in price. I conclude by discussing the theoretical and political implications of willingness to pay for public and private goods.
Ethnic Democracy and the Legal Construction of Citizenship: Arab Citizens of the Jewish State
Authors: Peled Yoav
Published: May 2006

The citizenship status of its Arab citizens is the key to Israel's ability to function as anethnic democracy, that is, a political system combining democratic institutions with the dominance of one ethnic group. The confluence of republicanism and ethnonationalism with liberalism, as principles of legitimation, has resulted in two types of citizenship: republican for Jews and liberal for Arabs. Thus, Arab citizens enjoy civil and political rights but are barred from attending to the common good.

The Arab citizenship status, while much more restricted than the Jewish, has both induced and enabled Arabs to conduct their political struggles within the framework of the law, in sharp contrast to the noncitizen Arabs of the occupied territories. It may thus serve as a model for other dominant ethnic groups seeking to maintain both their dominance and a democratic system of government.
The Costs of Coalition: Coalition Theories and Italian Governments
Authors: Mershon Carol
Published: May 2006

Governments in Italy both change and remain the same. From 1946 to 1992 the Christian Democratic Party always held governing power. But almost no cabinet stayed in office more than a few years, and many governments collapsed after only a few months. How can instability coexist with stability in this way? How can governments break up at such low cost and with so little effect on alternation? These questions are rooted in—but not resolved by—the available game-theoretic literature on coalitional behavior. My answer is that politicians' purposive actions can reduce the costs of coalition. I argue that the costs of making, breaking, and maintaining coalitions depend on political institutions and on the array of parties and voters in policy space. Institutional and spatial conditions structure politicians' opportunities and attempts to lower costs. Under some conditions, as I show, coalitions are cheap, and politicians can easily make coalitions even cheaper. The inference is that this framework comprehends both Italy's extremes and the degrees of stability found in other parliamentary democracies.
A revision of the fundamental rules of combinatory logic
Authors: Curry Haskell B.
Published: May 2006

The purpose of this paper is to put on record some theorems relating to improvements in the primitive frame of combinatory logic. These improvements were, for the most part, suggested by the work of Rosser, who formulated a weakened system of combinatory logic in which the rules had a simple character not possessed by those of the original system. In the latter the rules B, C, W, K were in reality axiom-schemes, and their postulation amounted to assuming infinitely many axioms. Rosser had rules of procedure such that no propositions were deducible from them except in combination with axioms (or previously proved propositions); moreover, the conclusion of each rule was uniquely determined by the premises. He also eliminated equality as a primitive term, defining it (essentially) according to the traditional method. This paper shows that these and related advantages apply to certain formulations of the full system of combinatory logic, so far as it concerns the theory of combinators.

The method of procedure is as follows. Instead of setting up a primitive frame at the start and then deriving its properties, I begin (after some preliminary explanations in §2) by stating in §3 the properties which it is desired to establish. The next few sections are devoted to the formulation and proof of certain general theorems concerning possible bases for the system of §3. These theorems are, perhaps, more general than is necessary for the immediate purpose, but they are of some interest on their own account. A formulation in terms of the primitives of original system (i.e., B, C, W, and K), which is of the same general type as Rosser's formulation, is obtained at the end of §6. In §7 are discussed the changes in this formulation which are sufficient in order to base it on the primitive combinators S and K of Schönfinkel.
Consistency and completeness of the theory of combinators
Authors: Curry Haskell B.
Published: May 2006

The consistency of the theory of combinators, when based on the combinatory axioms, the rules of equality, and the equations

was proved in my thesis; likewise some theorems expressing certain completeness properties of this theory of combinatory equivalence formed the principal subject of that thesis and a succeeding paper. Further theorems of this sort were later demonstrated by Rosser; his theorems are, in some cases, more powerful than those just mentioned, but they apply to a weakened system. The purpose of this note is to discuss the extension of these theorems to the case where the whole of the theory of combinators is taken into account, and the rules for equality are derived from more fundamental considerations.

The paper is based on a formulation of the theory of combinators contained in a previous paper, acquaintance with which is presupposed.

A key theorem in investigations of this character is a theorem proved in 1936 by Church and Rosser. It is necessary to give a brief account of this theorem together with a generalization of it.

The theorem concerns a certain formalism, which I shall here call the λ-formalism. The terms of this formalism, which I shall call λ-terms, are constituted as follows. For primitive terms we have an infinite set of variables, together with certain constants, the nature of which is arbitrary. Further terms are formed by two operations: a binary operation (analogous to application in the theory of combinators) which combines two λ-terms and to form a new λ-term here symbolized by ; and another binary operation combining a variable x and a term containing x as free variable to form a term .