The relationship between welfare benefit levels and the residential choices of the poor raises two issues for federalism in the United States. Do state benefit levels affect the residential choices of the poor? Do residential choices of the poor affect the level at which a state sets its benefit levels? Empirical studies have seldom studied the interconnection between these two issues. This research estimates simultaneously the mutual effects of welfare benefits and poverty rates while controlling for other economic and political variables. When benefit levels become high, the size of the poverty population increases. Conversely, when poverty rates become high, benefit levels are cut. The findings are consistent with the claim that state-determined benefit levels distort policy and residential choices.

When comparing states in the United States, one finds little correlation between state opinion and party control of the state legislature or between party control and state policy. Although these low correlations seeming to indicate that partisan politics is irrelevant to the representation process, the opposite is true. State opinion influences the ideological positions of state parties, and parties' responsiveness to state opinion helps to determine their electoral success. Moreover, parties move toward the center once in office. For these reasons, state electoral politics is largely responsible for the correlation between state opinion and state policy.

The United States Supreme Court has a historical role as a “republican schoolmaster,” inculcating virtues in the citizenry. The role as teacher to the republic also serves the interests of the Court. As the “weakest branch,” the Supreme Court needs public support if its decisions are to be effective. We investigate the Court's ability to win popular support for its rulings, specifically in the case of Roe v. Wade. The analysis shows that the Court's decision did affect public attitudes but not as previous work would predict. While support for abortions to protect health increased as a result of the Court's decision, the public became more polarized over “discretionary” abortions. The puzzle is what process can account for these disparate reactions. We develop a theory resting on interpersonal influences to explain these results, arguing that the social interpretation of events drives the differing outcomes. This theory is then tested against a purely psychological alternative. The closing discussion considers how these results can be extended to the general problem of public decisions and popular responses, including presidential actions and the influence of the media.

Analysis of both district-level and aggregate time-series data from postwar House elections supports the thesis that strategic political elites play a pivotal role in translating national conditions into election results and therefore in holding members of Congress collectively accountable for the government's performance. More high-quality candidates run when prospects appear to favor their party; they also win significantly more votes and victories than other candidates in equivalent circumstances. Thus, strategic career decisions both reflect and enhance national partisan tides. The electoral importance of strategic politicians has grown over time in tandem with the trend toward candidate-centered electoral politics. This has rendered the effects of national forces less automatic, more contingent, thus threatening the capacity of elections to enforce some degree of collective responsibility.

The open rule in the House is a complex set of restrictions, limiting, for example, the number of motions and the order of recognition. By incorporating constraints based on the actual set of rules into a model, I show that legislative outcomes appear more predictable than was previously thought. These rules nearly always allow the proponents of legislation to respond to an opponent's amendment, mitigating the potential damage of the latter. An advantage of the approach is that it provides a new interpretation of the changes in floor activity observed in the postreform period.

While it has been frequently asserted that the use of courts is responsive to political and social contexts, the evidence is inconclusive at best. In the case of political context the dearth of evidence may reflect focusing on the U.S. case, where there is relatively limited variation in relevant characteristics. In the case of social context it may reflect a failure to focus on periods of substantial transition. In the present study we examine court usage in Spain between 1960 and 1980. During this period Spain experienced rapid economic growth with its attendant social change and dramatic political transition from authoritarianism to democracy. Both the movement toward democracy and social development are found to be positively linked to increases in legal mobilization.

Using aggregate, survey, and in-depth elite interview data from Spain in the 1970s and 1980s, I demonstrate that the “mechanical” effect of the Spanish electoral law is as strong as that of many single-member constituency systems. But the “distal” effect of the electoral law on the party system is shown to be complex and multifaceted, not direct and deterministic. The perceptions, calculations, strategies, and behavior of party elites play a crucial intervening role between the electoral law and the overall shape of the party system.

The Soviet Union achieved its stability in the early stages of development not by institutionalizing participation but by forcing departicipation and substituting a functionally distinct form of political activity—involvement in co-production. These policies constitute essential complements in the Leninist developmental strategy. The ability of enlisted involvement to block the growth of participatory pressures tends to decline in later stages of development, however. The result is spontaneous withdrawal from the institutions of coproduction and the rise of participatory pressures. This pattern is documented with evidence from Soviet electoral and membership statistics, Soviet reports of opinion surveys, Western interviews of Soviet émigrés, and cross-national estimates of political dissidence. The Leninist crisis of participation requires a policy response to close the participation-institution gap once again. The alternative policy responses of Soviet general secretaries are characterized as totalitarian, authoritarian, liberal, and socialist.

We propose two models to explain why individuals participate in collective political action—a personal influence model and a collective rationality model. Each model overcomes the free-rider problem posed by conventional rational choice theory and left unresolved in previous research. The models are tested for legal and illegal protest behaviors, using data from a national sample and two samples of protest-prone communities in the Federal Republic of Germany. The personal influence model is supported for both forms of participation, while the collective rationality model is supported for legal protest. We discuss implications of the results for grievance and rational choice theories of collective political action.

I develop an approach for analyzing the conditions for cooperative resolution of policy conflict. I analyze certain policy conflicts as bargaining situations, with opportunity for cooperation, among opposing issue factions. As a framework for analysis, I present an informal game-theoretic interpretation of nonzero-sum policy conflict. With that foundation, I derive implications about the conditions for cooperative outcomes with respect to several aspects of the policy process: issue content, the structure of conflict, leadership, party politics, and political institutions.

This article presents an analysis of the strategic behavior of countries when there is imperfect verification of an arms control agreement. It provides a framework for determining whether an arms control agreement is desirable, shows which factors are needed for the agreement to be maintained in the absence of third-party enforcers, and develops propositions relating changes in verification capabilities to changes in the likelihood of cheating and the use of verification technology. These propositions yield several paradoxes of information (for example, the better the verification technology, the less often it will be employed). Since the analysis incorporates both simultaneous and sequential moves by the players, it provides new insights into other applied areas as well as game theory.

While dimensional studies of congressional voting find a single, ideological dimension, regression estimates find several constituency and party dimensions in addition to ideology. I rescale several unidimensional studies to show their increased classification success over the null hypothesis that votes are not unidimensional. Several null hypotheses are explored. With these null hypotheses, 66%–75% of nonunidimensional roll call votes are nevertheless correctly classified by one dimension. After the rescaling, one dimension succeeds in correctly classifying 25%–50% of the votes, and second and third dimensions are important.

In the March 1988 issue of this Review, B. Dan Wood invoked a principal-agent perspective to establish the importance of democratic hierarchies in shaping the outputs of public bureaucracies. He tested the model with air pollution enforcements of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) between 1977 and 1985. His results suggested some limitations on bureaucracies' responsiveness to elected political institutions, consistent with a principal-agent perspective with emphasis on the agent. Brian J. Cook challenges features of the design and empirical testing of Wood's hierarchical model. He questions the accuracy of Wood's characterization of the extent of EPA autonomy and power. Cook argues that a proper model requires recognition of the multiple principal nature of the U.S. system, and he advocates consideration of the normative foundations of principal-agent theory. Wood responds to both the substantive and methodological issues raised and suggests an eclectic approach in future research.