Two candidates compete for elective office. Each candidate has information she would like to reveal to the voters, but this requires costly advertising. The candidates can solicit contributions from interest groups to finance such advertising. These contributions are secured by promises to perform favors for the contributors, should the candidate win the election. Voters understand this and elect the candidate they like best, taking into account their expectations about promises to special interests. There is an incumbency advantage in fundraising, which is sometimes so great that the incumbent faces no serious opposition at all. Introducing partial public financing through matching funds improves voter welfare in districts that have advertising under the decentralized system, while it can reduce welfare in other districts. The optimal policy must strike a balance between these two effects.

This essay sketches the strictures put on political scholarship from the early days of patrician amateurs to modern academic professionals, with special attention given to the emergence of political science and the methodological and ideological issues that developed within that discipline. It is argued herein that although some degree of ethno-class variety was eventually achieved in academia, there has been a lag in ideological diversity. Political heterodoxy often has been discouraged and suppressed. Nevertheless some modest democratic advances have been made in academia in the last half-century.

A growing body of research shows that democracies have more liberal trade policies than do autocracies. I argue, in contrast, that democracy has contradictory effects on different types of trade policies because electoral competition generates more information about some than about others. It generates considerable information about policies whose effects on consumer welfare are easy to explain to voters, but less information about policies whose effects are more complex. By increasing the transparency of some policies relative to others, democracy induces politicians to reduce transparent trade barriers but also to replace them with less transparent ones. I test this hypothesis by examining the impact of democracy on tariffs, “core” nontariff barriers (NTBs) such as quotas, and “quality” NTBs such as product standards in 75 countries in the 1990s. I find that democracy leads to lower tariffs, higher core NTBs, and even higher quality NTBs. I conclude that democracy promotes “optimal obfuscation” that allows politicians to protect their markets while maintaining a veneer of liberalization.

A deliberative committee is a group of at least two individuals who first debate about what alternative to choose prior to these same individuals voting to determine the choice. We argue, first, that uncertainty about individuals' private preferences is necessary for full information sharing and, second, demonstrate in a very general setting that the condition under which unanimity can support full information revelation in debate amounts to it being common knowledge that all committee members invariably share identical preferences over the alternatives. It follows that if ever there exists an equilibrium with fully revealing debate under unanimity rule, there exists an equilibrium with fully revealing debate under any voting rule. Moreover, the converse is not true of majority rule if there is uncertainty about individuals' preferences.

Racist and liberal ideals are said to anchor competing political traditions in America, but a juxtaposition of ideals obscures key processes of change in the cultural lexicon and misses much about how a political tradition comes to bear on the development of a polity. Attention to the reassociation of ideas and purposes over time points to a more intimate relationship between racism and liberalism in American political culture, to the conceptual interpenetration of these antithetical ends. Cuing off issues that have long surrounded the reassociation of John C. Calhoun's rule of the concurrent majority with pluralist democracy, this article examines another southerner, Woodrow Wilson, who, in the course of defending racial hierarchy, developed ideas that became formative of modern American liberalism. Analysis of the movement of ideas across purposes shifts the discussion of political traditions from set categories of thought to revealed qualities of thought, bringing to the fore aspects of this polity that are essentially and irreducibly “American.”

We develop and test a general argument about the conditions under which state leaders are most likely to choose legal dispute resolution over bilateral negotiations as a means to settle international disputes. Our central claim is that leaders who anticipate significant domestic audience costs for the making of voluntary, negotiated concessions are likely to seek the “political cover” of an international legal ruling. In such cases, it will be easier for leaders to justify the making of concessions if they are mandated as part of a ruling by an international court or arbitration body. We test a series of domestic-level hypotheses using a dataset comprised of nearly 1,500 rounds of talks concerning disputed territorial claims. Our multivariate analyses indicate that state leaders opt for legal dispute resolution when they are highly accountable to domestic political opposition, as well as when the dispute is highly salient to domestic audiences.

Professional lobbyists are among the most experienced, knowledgeable, and strategic actors one can find in the everyday practice of politics. Nonetheless, their behavioral patterns often appear anomalous when viewed in the light of existing theories. We revisit these anomalies in search of an alternative theory. We model lobbying not as exchange (vote buying) or persuasion (informative signaling) but as a form of legislative subsidy—a matching grant of policy information, political intelligence, and legislative labor to the enterprises of strategically selected legislators. The proximate political objective of this strategy is not to change legislators' minds but to assist natural allies in achieving their own, coincident objectives. The theory is simple in form, realistic in its principal assumptions, and counterintuitive in its main implications. Empirically, the model renders otherwise anomalous regularities comprehensible and predictable. In a later section, we briefly bring preferences back in, examining the important but relatively uncommon conditions under which preference-centered lobbying should occur.

Political science has mirrored the political culture even as it has explained it, and at critical times the gendering of political science has left it unprepared to explain notable changes in political life. Here, we examine political science as a gendered institution across three critical time periods: the founding era of the discipline, the 1970s and 1980s, and the present. For each period, we assess the presence, position, and experiences of women in the profession; the norms of gender within the discipline; and the way political science deals with women and gender as subject matter. In general, the position of women in the discipline has improved dramatically over the course of the discipline's first century, and gender-related research has become more institutionalized. Nevertheless, political science has not yet developed a full appreciation of gender as an analytical construct.

Since the 1970s, Latino politics research has evolved, alternately responding to real-world political events and demographic changes, embracing new and emerging trends in the broader discipline, and offering new insights of its own that contribute to the development of political science. In so doing, there have emerged both an intellectual foundation and a growing body of empirical results, each of which challenges long-held theories and findings in the discipline more broadly. Thus, Latino politics research is central in refining and broadening our understanding of American politics. Immigration, social marginality, and their uncertain status as a racial or ethnic minority make this population unique and raise important obstacles in applying existing interpretations and orthodoxies from the discipline's other traditions to this emerging and rapidly growing segment of American society. The major contributions of this line of inquiry are identified in five key areas: pluralism, group identity and mobilization, political participation, institutions and representation, and assimilation. We conclude with some thoughts regarding how the evolution of American society and its Latino population will pose important questions for future generations of political scientists.

Plurality-based elections between two major parties or candidates sometimes feature small, centrist, third parties. We modify the standard two-party spatial model of policy-seeking parties to incorporate a centrist third party, and we show that the presence of such a party—even if it has no chance of winning—motivates the major parties to propose policies that are much more divergent than without the third party. We derive explicit formulas for party locations at a three-party equilibrium and provide necessary and sufficient conditions for existence of that equilibrium. We show that, over time, the major parties can be expected to shift their policies in the same direction relative to each other but in the opposite direction relative to the minor party. The predictions of this model are compared with estimates of party policy locations during appropriate periods in postwar Britain.

We study the effect of social embeddedness on voter turnout by investigating the role of information about other voters' decisions. We do so in a participation game, in which we distinguish between early and late voters. Each late voter is told about one early voter's turnout decision. Cases are distinguished where the voters are allies (support the same group) or adversaries (with opposing preferences) and where they are uncertain about each other's preferences. Our experimental results show that the social embeddedness matters: this information increases aggregate turnout by approximately 50%. The largest effect is observed for allies. Early voters strategically try to use their first mover position and late voters respond to this.

This paper links the theory of interest groups influence over the legislature with that of congressional control over the judiciary. The resulting framework reconciles the theoretical literature of lobbying with the negative available evidence on the impact of lobbying over legislative outcomes, and sheds light to the determinants of lobbying in separation-of-powers systems. We provide conditions for judicial decisions to be sensitive to legislative lobbying, and find that lobbying falls the more divided the legislature is on the relevant issues. We apply this framework to analyze supreme court labor decisions in Argentina, and find results consistent with the predictions of the theory.

We posit that Supreme Court oral arguments provide justices with useful information that influences their final votes on the merits. To examine the role of these proceedings, we ask the following questions: (1) what factors influence the quality of arguments presented to the Court; and, more importantly, (2) does the quality of a lawyer's oral argument affect the justices' final votes on the merits? We answer these questions by utilizing a unique data source—evaluations Justice Blackmun made of the quality of oral arguments presented to the justices. Our analysis shows that Justice Blackmun's grading of attorneys is somewhat influenced by conventional indicators of the credibility of attorneys and are not simply the product of Justice Blackmun's ideological leanings. We thus suggest they can plausibly be seen as measuring the quality of oral argument. We further show that the probability of a justice voting for a litigant increases dramatically if that litigant's lawyer presents better oral arguments than the competing counsel. These results therefore indicate that this element of the Court's decisional process affects final votes on the merits, and it has implications for how other elite decision makers evaluate and use information.

Considerable debate exists over the impact of redistricting on the partisan composition of the U.S. Congress. I address this debate by turning to an era of congressional redistricting that has received little systematic attention—the politics of gerrymandering in the 19th century. Using statewide-, county-, and ward-level electoral data from 1870 to 1900, I show that when a single party controlled the districting process, they used districting to systematically engineer a favorable partisan bias. These partisan biases affected the partisan composition of state congressional delegations and at times even helped determine party control of the House of Representatives.

This paper explores the etiology of ideological constraint in the United States. In an effort to gain understanding of the ideational elements of political socialization, we concentrate on a provocative new theory put forward by cognitive linguist George Lakoff. Lakoff argues that many people reflexively envision proper power relations between citizens and government based on their understanding of proper power relations between children and parents: “nurturant” visions of parental roles engender egalitarian and humanitarian political values, whereas “disciplinarian” visions of proper parenting predict political individualism and traditionalism. Using data obtained from the 2000 National Election Study, we consider the empirical mettle of this account.

To judge by the absence of religion from the pages of the American Political Science Review in its first century, most political scientists have embraced a secular understanding of the political world. We explore the evolving status of religion in the discipline by examining patterns of scholarly inquiry in the discipline's flagship journal. After finding religion an (at best) marginal topic and rejecting some plausible hypotheses for this outcome, we examine the major reasons religion has received so little attention—the intellectual origins of the discipline, the social background of practitioners, the complexity of religious measurements, and the event-driven agenda of political science. Despite the resurgence of scholarly interest in religion during the 1980s, the status of the subfield remains tenuous because of the intellectual isolation of research on the topic.

Hannah Mather Crocker was the leading American political theorist between 1800 and 1820 to engage the controversial question of sex equality. In the wake of the postrevolutionary backlash against political radicalism, she became a subtle rhetorician of women's rights. She accepted how her cultural context placed limits on the realization of women's rights, yet she did not analytically conflate these temporal limits with women's capacities to contribute to their polity. She sought to normatively defend and gently extend American women's ongoing informal political participation in the postrevolutionary era and challenged the separate spheres discourse that aimed to restrict it. Through the first comprehensive study of Crocker's oeuvre, this article provides new insight into the political role and rhetorical style of women's rights discourse and women's activism in the early republic and uncovers Crocker's philosophical legacies for scholars who seek to reconcile the standpoints of equality and difference feminism.

We construct a simple model where political elites may block technological and institutional development, because of a “political replacement effect.” Innovations often erode elites' incumbency advantage, increasing the likelihood that they will be replaced. Fearing replacement, political elites are unwilling to initiate change and may even block economic development. We show that the relationship between blocking and political competition is nonmonotonic: elites are unlikely to block development when there is a high degree of political competition or when they are highly entrenched. It is only when political competition is limited and also when their power is threatened that elites will block development. Blocking is also more likely when political stakes are higher, for example, because of land rents enjoyed by the elites. External threats, on the other hand, may reduce the incentives to block.

The toll of civil conflict is largely borne by civilian populations, as warring factions target non-combatants through campaigns of violence. But significant variation exists in the extent to which warring groups abuse the civilian population: across conflicts, across groups, and within countries geographically and over time. Using a new dataset on fighting groups in Sierra Leone, this article analyzes the determinants of the tactics, strategies, and behaviors that warring factions employ in their relationships with noncombatants. We first describe a simple logic of extraction which we use to generate hypotheses about variation in levels of abuse across fighting units. We then show that the most important determinants of civilian abuse are internal to the structure of the faction. High levels of abuse are exhibited by warring factions that are unable to police the behavior of their members because they are more ethnically fragmented, rely on material incentives to recruit participants, and lack mechanisms for punishing indiscipline. Explanations that emphasize the importance of local community ties and contestation do not find strong support in the data.

Despite the postwar rise of behavioralism in political science, the Review gave surprising prominence to traditional political theory during Harvey C. Mansfield's ten-year term as editor (1956–1965), all the more striking for the prominence of Leo Strauss and his students during the first half of this period. This article considers several factors that help explain the surprising recognition given this subfield and its unexpected bargaining power.