The public choice-property rights perspective is an important intellectual movement aimed at refurbishing and broadening the scope of classical microeconomic reasoning. This paper assesses the political implications of the “school”–its ability both to generate significant political insights and hypotheses and to use political arguments and findings to buttress the assumptions of microeconomic theory.

I conclude that, in the main, neither effort realizes its goal. What we do find revealed by a study of the political implications of the perspective is a well-developed, if generally unacknowledged, normative position, a position that deflects attention from the major sources of power in society and thus complicates the articulation of prescriptions or recommendation statements.

Today it is all the rage for political theorists and even philosophers to have theories of justice. Looking back on the history of political thought, we cannot help but notice that not all previous philosophers have taken justice and theories of justice so seriously. Among those who did not was Aristotle. To be sure, he had a theory of justice, and from this fact we might infer that he thought it necessary to have one. But I shall presently argue, primarily from Aristotle's treatment of the problem in the Nicomachean Ethics, that Aristotle thought all theories of justice, including his own, to be unsatisfactory. In his opinion, a politics that understands its highest purpose as justice and a political science that attempts to comprehend all political phenomena within a theory of justice are practically and theoretically unsound.

Approval voting is a method of voting in which voters can vote for (“approve of”) as many candidates as they wish in an election. This article analyzes properties of this method and compares it with other single-ballot nonranked voting systems. Among the theorems proved is that approval voting is the most sincere and most strategyproof of all such voting systems; in addition, it is the only system that ensures the choice of a Condorcet majority candidate if the preferences of voters are dichotomous. Its probable empirical effects would be to (1) increase voter turnout, (2) increase the likelihood of a majority winner in plurality contests and thereby both obviate the need for runoff elections and reinforce the legitimacy of first-ballot outcomes, and (3) help centrist candidates, without at the same time denying voters the opportunity to express their support for more extremist candidates. The latter effect's institutional impact may be to weaken the two-party system yet preserve middle-of-the-road public policies of which most voters approve.

The growth of the public sector in recent years has been accompanied by both centralization and decentralization. More important than any such shifts of power or function between levels of government, however, has been the emergence of new arenas of mutual influence among levels of government. In this way recent developments in intergovernmental relations are adding a new dimension to the national system of representation. That the federal division of powers should serve a representative function is entirely in accord with the original design. A look at this design in the light of the theory of its founders helps one perceive this distinctive purpose. Then as now American federalism was primarily an instrument of national democracy. Current American experience with this aspect of intergovernmental relations, moreover, suggests questions for comparative study of the contemporary welfare state.

The existence of N-prisoners' dilemmas (conflict between individual and collective rationality) is a standard justification for collectivizing decision making through the state, but there is little theory about how different institutions operate to “solve” such dilemmas. The efficiency of majoritarian democracy, “selfish dictatorship” and uncoordinated individualism is explored using a simple nine-person game. Majoritarian democracy is found to produce equilibrium outcomes at the maximum social product available when the opportunity costs of “cooperating” are less than half the magnitude of the externalities, but to produce no such equilibrium when the opportunity costs are greater than that. Our research draws implications for the role of information in constitutional design, and of altruism.

Methods to allocate seats in proportional representation systems are investigated in terms of underlying common-sense properties. Important among these are concepts of stability, coalition encouragement and schism encouragement. In addition, a new concept of uniformity is introduced which seems inherent in the very idea of the word “method, ” and it is shown that this concept is essentially equivalent to a previously investigated property called consistency. These and other criteria are shown to uniquely determine certain methods. In particular, the Jefferson method (incorrectly credited to d'Hondt) and the Quota method are given characterizations which commend them as the principal candidates for use in PR systems.

After the drastic relaxation of voter registration requirements in the 1960s, do present state laws keep people away from the polls? More specifically, which provisions have how much effect on what kinds of people? We have answered these questions with data from the Current Population Survey conducted by the Census Bureau in November 1972.

State registration laws reduced turnout in the 1972 presidential election by about nine percentage points. The impact of the laws was heaviest in the South and on less educated people of both races. Early deadlines for registration and limited registration office hours were the biggest impediments to turnout.

Contrary to expectations, changing these requirements would not substantially alter the character of the electorate. The voting population would be faintly less affluent and educated; the biggest difference would be a matter of one or two percentage points. In strictly political terms, the change would be even fainter–a gain for the Democrats of less than half a percent.

The central theoretical chapters of the Prince(chapters 15 ff.) yield forgotten justifications of the road the West has traveled. Machiavelli relieves us of our qualms; in chapter 16, over dangling the carrot; in chapter 17, over brandishing the stick. He thereby lays the moral foundations for societies based, as all modem societies have been, on collective aggrandizement recognizing no limits in principle, and on justice understood as the enforcement of “equal (but otherwise boundless) opportunity.”

Mentoring relationships have a qualitative impact on the transition from early to middle adulthood, as well as on adult life itself. This paper proposes that the exploration of the role of mentors in the lives of political leaders will produce suggestive results. The study is a case history which examines the mentor in the early and later life of the adult male, here Willy Brandt. Brandt had two mentors: Julius Leber and Ernst Reuter. Reuter is briefly discussed but we focus here on the first of these, Leber, a prominent Social Democrat during the Weimar era and a legendary member of the German resistance. The essay describes the origins, nature and termination of the Brandt-Leber relationship. The influence of the mentor on the mentee transcended the period of their actual interaction and, as the paper procedes to demonstrate, the intensity of the relationship ensured that Brandt's self-image as Leber's heir continued to affect both professional and ideological choices.

Taxonomic definitions of politics are chronically unable to extend class properties to the heterogeneous scope of political events, leading to the view that “politics” may be a standard cluster concept. Clusters of properties, however, may be arranged around core terms strongly retentive in ordinary uses of a concept. Some terms are even rigid designators, necessary and sufficient conditions for reference in all possible worlds. The concept of “politics” provides two core terms, “directiveness” and “aggregation,” though not rigid designators. Such a core structure concentrates the standard cluster-analysis of “politics” on extension, not carrying over to all aspects of sense, thus permitting a weak and revised case for taxonomy on nonidentifying core terms. The implications of core terms in the concept of “politics” include the restriction of research-utility as an adequacy criterion and the acceptance of conventional status for distinctions between political and nonpolitical events.

This article examines the basic social science concepts of “power” and “social exchange” in order to determine the possibility and desirability of integrating them. It is argued that: (1) all exchange relationships can be described in terms of conventional power concepts without twisting the common-sense notions that underlie such concepts; (2) most–but not necessarily all–power relationships can be described in terms of exchange terminology; (3) there are some advantages to conceiving of power in this way; (4) recent social exchange theorists have neither illuminated nor recognized most of these advantages. After a preliminary examination of the concepts of “power” and “exchange,” the discussion focuses on the analytical and conceptual problems associated with volition, exchange media, asymmetry, sanctions, and authority.

Several studies in recent years have examined the question of mass issue voting in the United States and have found that people vote more frequently on the basis of policy questions than has heretofore been thought. It would seem to be useful for the study of comparative politics to explore mass policy voting in other democratic countries. The colored immigration issue in Britain is a particularly appropriate one to examine because of the controversy surrounding its impact on voting behavior, especially in the 1970 election. Are the policy preferences of the electorate related to their voting behavior? This question is examined longitudinally through a secondary analysis of the Butler-Stokes election surveys of 1964,1966, and 1970 for England.

After utilizing controls for a large number of variables, one finds that theimmigration issue had no significant impact on electoral behavior in 1964 and 1966. In the 1970 election, however, the Conservatives gained an estimated increment of 6.7 percent in votes because many people perceived them to be the party more likely to keep immigrants out and voted in accordance with that perception. This impact can be attributed to Enoch Powell's associating the Conservative party with restrictive immigration control in the public mind.

Whether personality characteristics of American leaders crucially determine major American foreign policy decisions has been a matter of considerable disagreement. A test of two hypotheses drawn from interpersonal generalization theory shows such influences have probably been crucial in a number of cases in American foreign policy between 1898 and 1968. In 49 cases of intraelite disagreement on force-related issues and 13 cases of intraelite disagreement on inclusionary issues the direction of disagreement could be predicted in over 75 percent of the cases by knowledge of individual differences in interpersonal relations. A four-fold speculative typology suggests fundamental personality-based differences in orientation towards America's preferred operating style and role in the international system (e.g., introverts are drawn toward impersonal principles and mechanisms like balance of power–or in an earlier period to international law).

The evidence implies that one source of war and hard-line foreign policy is the structure of self-selection and recruitment to high office in the American political system. As well, the systematic tendency to self-expressive personalization in major foreign policy decisions probably increases the rate of error of American elites.

In spite of the traditional legitimacy accorded the market mechanism of the private sector in advanced capitalist nations, governments in those nations have become more influential as providers of social services and income supplements, producers of goods, managers of the economy, and investors of capital. And in order to finance these various activities the revenues of public authorities have increased dramatically–to a point where they are now equivalent to one-third to one-half of a nation's economic product.

This growth in governmental activity in advanced capitalist society is examined by considering the causes, and some of the consequences, of the expansion of the public economy–defined, following Schumpeter's discussion of the “tax state,” in terms of the extractive role of government. The primary concern of this article is to discover why some nations have experienced a far greater rate of increase in recent years and, as a result, have a much larger public economy than other nations. Five types of explanation are elaborated to account for the growth of the scope of governmental activity: (1) the level and rate of growth in the economic product; (2) the degree to which the fiscal structure of a nation relies on indirect, or “invisible,” taxes; (3) politics–in particular the partisan composition of government and the frequency of electoral competition; (4) the institutional structure of government; and (5) the degree of exposure of the economy to the international marketplace. The article evaluates the five explanations with data for 18 nations, and concludes by discussing some implications of the analysis.

Despite their prominence in political affairs, values have rarely been studied through survey research. This article offers groundwork for quantitative investigations of politicians' values by describing the development, administration and assessment of a ranking technique in the British House of Commons. It uses tape-recorded interviews which suggest that values are intelligible components of politicians' belief systems and help identify difficulties in conceptualizing and measuring them. The ranking instrument employed to measure values demonstrates its adequacy by reproducing familiar cleavages between political camps, distinguishing ideological party factions and generating data related to themes MPs put forward when discussing institutions and policy problems.

This article elucidates and critically evaluates the Marxian ideas of justice and alienation by distinguishing between the class structure of capitalism and the use of the market as a mode of allocation. The argument is that the social relations of production, not the market mechanism, are primarily responsible for exploitation and alienated labor under capitalism. It follows from this that both the labor theory of value and the marginal theory of productivity, as theories of the market, are consistent with the Marxian theory of exploitation. An additional implication is that market socialism, the use of market arrangements against the background of socialist productive relations, is not only compatible with, but required by, the values that define a socialist society.

The political society founded by Socrates in the Republic has been seen by many as Plato's conception of the ideal political community, his Callipolis. However, a study of the language used by Socrates as he builds his perfect city reveals an unusually heavy concentration of animal images. This language seems to undercut the ostensible perfection of Socrates' city and illustrates rather its connections to the comic world of Aristophanes, whose comedy the Birds offers the model according to which the Republic is built. It is suggested that the city of the Republic is comic and ugly, indicating the limitations of politics rather than its potentialities. The Republic argues for the need to reorient the concept of justice away from social life and towards the individual. Ultimately, the Republic suggests that the notion of social justice is laughable and fit for the comic Stage.

This article examines the dynamics of military promotion and explores its consequences both for individual officers and for military organization. The central argument is that performance, while a necessary standard for acceptability into a rather large pool of officers from which the elite will emerge, is nonetheless a minor influence on promotion and becomes even less discriminating as an officer's career progresses, whereas visibility–the extent to which an individual has developed contacts with peers and superiors who can influence his movement in the organization–begins moderately and eventually becomes the dominant influence. To present this argument, the article first examines the prevailing concepts of performance and seniority and outlines an expanded model of the promotion process. The component variables of that model are applied to three separate military career levels–junior, middle-grade and senior officers–and are traced longitudinally through the entire officer career pattern. Finally, the impact of contextual factors on the model, particularly the differences between wartime and peacetime, is discussed and illustrated with data from general officer promotion in the army. The implications of this theory are significant for civil control of the military. Through the control of access to the elite nucleus represented by the promotion system, especially with the emphasis on visibility, the military is able to sustain a high degree of autonomy. By the time Congress or other civilian actors are able to exercise selection of the military elite, the promotion system has already preselected those individuals who most highly represent military values held by preceding leaders.

This paper specifies and estimates a model of the structural determinants of coups d'état for the new states of black Africa in the years from 1960 through 1975. Results indicate that (1) both social mobilization and the presence of a dominant ethnic group are destabilizing (these effects are additive); (2) multipartyism is destabilizing while electoral turnout in the last election before independence is stabilizing; (3) multipartyism is particularly destabilizing where a dominant ethnic group exists; (4) the presence of such a group reduces (but does not eliminate) the stabilizing effect of turnout; and (5) multipartyism has no pronounced effect on elite instability where turnout is high. Taken together, these patterns account for over four-fifths of the variance in coups d'état in black Africa in the period.

Many students of citizen participation claim that one solution to the problem of political inequality in liberal democracies lies in the establishment of direct participatory channels in decentralized socioeconomic and political institutions similar to those found in Yugoslavia. Others argue that the availability of participatory channels in the workplace leads to the domination of these channels by a technocratic elite. Still other students of participation in Yugoslavia claim that participatory channels are dominated by the political elite, the League of Communists.

In this paper, we examine this set of conflicting hypotheses by using data which come from an extensive survey of participatory activities in four Yugoslav republics. Our findings are consistent with the interpretation that workers' councils open channels for a more technocratically oriented participation. When it comes to other kinds of activity, affiliation with the League is more important than socioeconomic or professional status in determining who participates. But because League members come disproportionately from upper-status groups, there is not a marked difference in the extent to which membership in workers' councils and participation in other kinds of activity are biased in favor of the advantaged segments of Yugoslav society. In each case, but for different reasons, it is the upper-status citizen who is likely to be active.