Analyses of the persuasive effects of media exposure outside the laboratory have generally produced negative results. I attribute such nonfindings in part to carelessness regarding the inferential consequences of measurement error and in part to limitations of research design. In an analysis of opinion change during the 1980 presidential campaign, adjusting for measurement error produces several strong media exposure effects, especially for network television news. Adjusting for measurement error also makes preexisting opinions look much more stable, suggesting that the new information absorbed via media exposure must be about three times as distinctive as has generally been supposed in order to account for observed patterns of opinion change.

William Wilson and other scholars argue that one of the attributes of devastated neighborhoods is social isolation. We shall explore whether neighborhoods that seem to indicate significant social isolation also foster political isolation. We begin our examination by providing a description of the poor in the samples from the 1989 Detroit Area Study. We then turn our attention toward analyzing the effects of neighborhood poverty on African–American public opinion and political participation. We conclude with a discussion of how neighborhood poverty affects African-American politics and the consequences of those politics for the theory and practice of American democracy.

We use responses to a large-scale national survey designed to oversample political activists to investigate the extent to which participant publics are representative of the public as a whole. Building upon the finding that while voters differ from nonvoters in their demographic attributes, their attitudes as measured by responses to survey questions are not distinctive, we consider a variety of political acts beyond voting that citizens can use to multiply their political input and to communicate more precise messages to policymakers. In addition, we consider not only respondents' demographic characteristics and policy attitudes but also their circumstances of economic deprivation and dependence upon government programs. Although activists are representative of the public at large in terms of their attitudes, they differ substantially in their demographic attributes, economic needs, and the government benefits they receive. Furthermore, in terms of the issues that animate participation, groups differentiated along these lines bring very different policy concerns to their activity.

I develop a signaling model of mass political action. I establish that rational, self-interested individuals may have incentives to engage in costly political action despite a free-rider problem. Their political actions are informative for a political leader who rationally takes a cue from the size of the protest movement. However, some information is trapped in extremist and rationally apathetic pockets of the society. Some extremists take political action regardless of their private information, to manipulate the political leader's decision. Others abstain hoping to benefit if the leader makes an uninformed decision. Rationally apathetic moderates abstain because, being nearly indifferent between the policy alternatives, they do not find it worthwhile to incur the cost of taking action. Only activist moderates take informative political action. The political leader discounts the observed turnout for extremist political action and shifts policy if the estimated number of activist moderates exceeds a critical threshold.

We argue that the social construction of target populations is an important, albeit overlooked, political phenomenon that should take its place in the study of public policy by political scientists. The theory contends that social constructions influence the policy agenda and the selection of policy tools, as well as the rationales that legitimate policy choices. Constructions become embedded in policy as messages that are absorbed by citizens and affect their orientations and participation. The theory is important because it helps explain why some groups are advantaged more than others independently of traditional notions of political power and how policy designs reinforce or alter such advantages. An understanding of social constructions of target populations augments conventional hypotheses about the dynamics of policy change, the determination of beneficiaries and losers, the reasons for differing levels and types of participation among target groups, and the role of policy in democracy.

John Rawls has recently argued that political philosophy can significantly contribute to making democratic societies stable. He seeks moral principles that can ground what he calls an overlapping consensus and argues that his well-known principles of justice can serve in this capacity. I criticize both Rawls's general claims about the role of political philosophy and his particular defense of the principles of justice. Both arguments commit Rawls to specific empirical claims about existing liberal societies that are highly questionable. In particular, the Kantian moral views that Rawls believes to be central to liberal culture are controverted by extensive empirical research on the actual beliefs of liberal citizens. Despite the problems with Rawls's arguments, I suggest that a rather different overlapping consensus appears to contribute to stable democracies. This centers on support of the political system rather than more substantive moral principles.

I argue for a distinction between publicly oriented and privately oriented conceptions of civic virtue. I first provide a critique of two current politics of virtue (liberal and republican), arguing (1) that despite their differences, they are both publicly oriented and (2) that their problems lie in this public orientation. I conclude by arguing for the legitimacy and promise of a privately oriented politics of civic virtue, using as examples of this approach Cato's Letters from the early eighteenth century and the work of two contemporary theorists, Bruce Ackerman and Stephen Elkin.

The Keating Five case exemplifies a form of a political corruption that is increasingly common in contemporary politics but frequently neglected in contemporary political science. I focus on this form by developing a concept of mediated corruption, which links the acts of individual officials to effects on the democratic process. Unlike conventional corruption, mediated corruption does not require that the public official act with a corrupt motive or that either public officials or citizens receive improper benefits. The concept of mediated corruption provides not only a more coherent account of the case of the Keating Five but also a more fruitful way of reuniting the concepts of systematic corruption in traditional political theory with the concepts of individual corruption in contemporary social science.

One of the paradoxes of formal spatial voting models is the robustness of the theoretical result that candidates will converge toward centrists positions and the empirical observation of persistent policy divergence of candidates. A solution is that candidates are ideological (have policy preferences). When candidates have policy preferences and incomplete information about voter preferences, then platform divergence is theoretically predicted. Experimental tests of the ideological model are presented. It is shown that platform divergence is significant when candidates are ideological and have incomplete information about voter preferences. However, candidate positions are more convergent, on average, than the theory predicts, suggesting that subjects value winning independently of the expected payment.

The process of political democratization in Latin America during the 1980s created a rare opportunity to explore the political economy of elections outside of the North Atlantic basin. Using interrupted time-series analysis, I explore the impact of elections on macroeconomic performance in eight Latin American nations. The findings indicate that macroeconomic performance has fluctuated with the electoral calendar but that contrary to the traditional business cycle literature, as well as the conventional wisdom about Latin America, competitive elections have enhanced, rather than undermined, the capacity of political leaders to address outstanding problems of macroeconomic management. The analysis suggests that the relationship between democracy and economics is captured more adequately by a “political capital” model than by its traditional theoretical alternative.

Recent literature attributes the relative scarcity of open international markets to the prisoner's dilemma structure of state preferences with respect to trade. We argue that the prisoner's dilemma representation does not reflect the most critical aspect of free trade agreements in an anarchic international system, namely, their security externalities. We consider these external effects explicitly. Doing so leads us to two conclusions: (1) free trade is more likely within, rather than across, political-military alliances; and (2) alliances are more likely to evolve into free-trade coalitions if they are embedded in bipolar systems than in multipolar systems. Using data drawn from an 80-year period beginning in 1905, we test these hypotheses. The results of the analysis make it clear that alliances do have a direct, statistically significant, and large impact on bilateral trade flows and that this relationship is stronger in bipolar, rather than in multipolar, systems.

The destruction of the space shuttle Challenger was a tremendous blow to American space policy. To what extent was this loss the result of organizational factors at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration? To discuss this question analytically, we need a theory of organizational reliability and agency behavior. Martin Landau's work on redundancy and administrative performance provides a good starting point for such an effort. Expanding on Landau's work, I formulate a more comprehensive theory of organizational reliability that incorporates both type I and type II errors. These principles are then applied in a study of NASA and its administrative behavior before and after the Challenger accident.

I test two theories of the political processes of trade unions. The first argues that wage moderation depends on a centralized labor movement. The second contends that, institutional conditions permitting, unions' coordination of bargaining strategies is sufficient. Coordination is most likely to he achieved when there are small number of unions that do not compete for members, that is, when union monopoly is high. Important empirical anomalies may be resolved by analyzing the effects of union centralization and monopoly separately, rather than combining them into a composite index of corporatism. Reanalyzing comparative data from Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development countries between 1963 and 1985 largely corroborates the hypothesis that monopoly is more important than either centralization or composite indices of corporatism for national economic performance. The conceptual rationale underlying indices of corporatism should be reexamined.

The mechanical effect of electoral systems, identified by Maurice Duverger, can be estimated by means of a quantitative model. The model predicts the range within which the effective number of parties in a district should fall for a given magnitude (number of seats) of the district. At the national level, a related model predicts the effective number of parties based on the effective magnitude and the number of seats in the national assembly. The institutional variables considered—magnitude and assembly size—define a great portion of the structural constraints within which a given country's politics must take place. The model developed provides a good fit to data in spite of its having been developed from outrageously simple starting assumptions.