Building on suggestions by Isaiah Berlin, a number of thinkers have elaborated a moral theory of value pluralism. Berlin himself believed that value pluralism was consistent with liberalism, which he understood as a political theory giving great weight to the value of negative liberty. Theorists led by John Gray have argued, however, that Berlin's pluralist stance toward values is not consistent with his commitment to liberalism. Gray's critique has triggered a wide-ranging theoretical debate, and the purpose of this article is to assess that debate. I sketch the essentials of value pluralism and explore its implications for liberal political theory. I conclude that Gray's argument modifies our understanding of liberal democracy but does not drive a wedge between value pluralism and liberal democratic theory. Nevertheless, it underscores the importance of prudence and attention to specific circumstances when using liberal democratic norms to guide the reform of illiberal institutions.

I take up the question of political identity as the continuity of a community across time. In particular, I examine what it means to think of a political community as the subject of attribution across generations, that is, what is meant when it is made the bearer of responsibility for the past and a custodian of the future. In doing that, I focus on identity, memory, and responsibility and discuss that cluster of concepts using as an illustrative example the idea of constitutional patriotism and its relationship to the past.

What is the effect of regime type on public expenditures for social programs? We investigate the relationship between democracy and the change in social spending—controlling for GDP, the debt, inflation, and age structure of the population—through a time-series cross-sectional panel data set for 17 Latin American countries from 1980 to 1992. The results show that, especially in poor countries during economic crisis, democracies increase the allocation of resources to social programs relative to authoritarian regimes. This suggests that the latter are more constrained by economic forces, whereas democracies are more constrained by popular demands. Hence, calls to abandon broad categorizations of regime type appear to be premature: Democracy can matter in systematic and substantial ways.

Although manifestations of pain and loss phenomena are treated in various parts of the discipline, the focus is seldom on pain and loss as a distinctive form of political experience or as one that offers a broad canvas on which the workings of the political process can be depicted. By contrast, this article makes four arguments: (1) pain and loss experiences cut to the core of everyday lives and frequently infuse them with politics; (2) responses to pain and loss events occupy a prominent place in the domains of public opinion and issue activism; (3) these events and responses have some unique properties; and (4) major research questions can be organized around the study of pain and loss phenomena.

In an effort to put its past firmly behind, the New South Africa created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to document human rights abuses under apartheid and to grant amnesty to those confessing their nefarious deeds. South Africa's democratic experiment depends mightily upon whether truth does in fact bring about reconciliation. Consequently, we examine whether ordinary South Africans accept the theories of blame that underlie the truth and reconciliation process. Based on a formal experiment within a representative sample of South Africans, our results confirm some conventional hypotheses (e.g., leaders are judged more responsible for their deeds than followers), repudiate others (noble motives do little to exonerate violent actions), and modify still others (actors are judged by the severity of their action's consequences, although it matters little whether “combatants” or “civilians” were the victims). We conclude that the dark legacy of the apartheid past makes the consolidation of the democratic transformation problematical.

Comparative electoral research suggests that issue voting has increased and that the ability of social cleavages to account for voting patterns in most advanced industrial democracies has declined. In Israel, only the first of these generalizations holds. The capacity of social cleavages to structure the vote has been maintained along with our overall ability to explain the vote. Based on longitudinal analysis of electoral cleavages between 1969 and 1996 and on an analysis of the 1996 election, we argue that this pattern is driven by issues involving identity dilemmas that have become increasingly important in structuring the vote. Such dilemmas amalgamate policy issues and social allegiances, while reinforcing existing cleavage structures. Focusing on the 1996 election we probe the meanings of internal and external collective identity concerns in Israeli politics, their considerable overlap, and their translation into political choices.

We examine formally the link between domestic political institutions and policy choices in the context of eight empirical regularities that constitute the democratic peace. We demonstrate that democratic leaders, when faced with war, are more inclined to shift extra resources into the war effort than are autocrats. This follows because the survival of political leaders with larger winning coalitions hinges on successful policy. The extra effort made by democrats provides a military advantage over autocrats. This makes democrats unattractive targets, since their institutional constraints cause them to mobilize resources for the war effort. In addition to trying harder, democrats are more selective in their choice of targets. Because defeat is more likely to lead to domestic replacement for democrats than for autocrats, democrats only initiate wars they expect to win. These two factors lead to the interaction between polities that is often referred to as the democratic peace.

We propose a comprehensive statistical model for analyzing multiparty, district-level elections. This model, which provides a tool for comparative politics research analogous to that which regression analysis provides in the American two-party context, can be used to explain or predict how geographic distributions of electoral results depend upon economic conditions, neighborhood ethnic compositions, campaign spending, and other features of the election campaign or aggregate areas. We also provide new graphical representations for data exploration, model evaluation, and substantive interpretation. We illustrate the use of this model by attempting to resolve a controversy over the size of and trend in the electoral advantage of incumbency in Britain. Contrary to previous analyses, all based on measures now known to be biased, we demonstrate that the advantage is small but meaningful, varies substantially across the parties, and is not growing. Finally, we show how to estimate the party from which each party's advantage is predominantly drawn.

David Mayhew's Divided We Govern(1991) sparked an industry of scholars who alternately challenge or confirm the work on theoretical and empirical grounds. Still, we lack a definitive account of the proportions and causes of legislative gridlock. I revisit the effects of elections and institutions on policy outcomes to propose an alternative theory of gridlock: The distribution of policy preferences within the parties, between the two chambers, and across Congress more broadly is central to explaining the dynamics of gridlock. To test the model, I construct a measure that assesses legislative output in proportion to the policy agenda. Using newspaper editorials to identify every salient legislative issue between 1947 and 1996, I generate Congress-by-Congress gridlock scores and use them to test competing explanations. The results suggest that intrabranch conflict—perhaps more than interbranch rivalry—is critical in shaping deadlock in American politics.

I propose a new majoritarian bargaining model in which more than one implicit proposal can be on the table at the same time. Institutional differences from system to system affect the order of play, the equilibrium majorities, and the policy outcome. The ex post distribution of payoffs within a winning coalition is, however, invariant to fundamental institutional differences, and it is always proportional to the distribution of relative ex ante bargaining power. The bargaining process is modeled as a sequential demand game, in which players are called to propose a policy and to specify their desired share of the private benefits related to being in office. The order of play is endogenous, and the distribution of payoffs within an equilibrium majority usually does not depend on who is the proposal maker. The role of the head of state and the advantages to center parties are also studied.

Interest group ratings are widely used in studies of legislative behavior. Since the set of votes used is not constant over time and across chambers, the scales underlying the scores can shift and stretch. We introduce an econometric model that corrects the problem. Specifically, we derive an index, much like an inflation index for consumer prices, that allows one to make intertemporal and interchamber comparisons of interest group ratings. The adjusted scores for the ADA show a strong liberal trend in the average member of Congress during 1947–94, followed by a conservative reversal. A nonparametric test using ADA and ACU scores demonstrates the validity of adjusted scores and the invalidity of nominal scores for intertemporal and interchamber comparisons. Using two studies (Levitt 1996; Shipan and Lowry 1997) we illustrate that the choice of adjusted versus nominal scores may greatly affect substantive conclusions of researchers.

Although strategic interaction is at the heart of most international relations theory, it has largely been missing from much empirical analysis in the field. Typical applications of logit and probit to theories of international conflict generally do not capture the structure of the strategic interdependence implied by those theories. I demonstrate how to derive statistical discrete choice models of international conflict that directly incorporate the theorized strategic interaction. I show this for a simple crisis interaction model and then use Monte Carlo analysis to show that logit provides estimates with incorrect substantive interpretations as well as fitted values that can be far from the true values. Finally, I reanalyze a well-known game-theoretic model of war, Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman's (1992) international interaction game. My results indicate that there is at best modest empirical support for their model.

For more than three decades, social choice theorists and legislative scholars have studied how legislative outcomes in Congress can be manipulated through strategic amendments and voting. I address the central limitation of this research, a virtual absence of systematic empirical work, by examining 76 “killer” amendments considered during the 103d and 104th congresses. I trace the effects of these amendments on their related bills using archival sources, test for strategic voting using NOMINATE as the baseline measure of legislator preferences across a range of issues, and explore with OLS regression why some killer amendments are more strategically important than others. The findings indicate that successful killer amendments and identifiable strategic voting are extremely rare. In none of the cases examined could the defeat of a bill be attributed to adoption of an alleged killer amendment.

Sequential voting takes place when some voters make choices with knowledge of earlier decisions in the same election. Historically, voting in U.S. presidential primaries is sequential, but recent primaries have been “front-loaded” into the early weeks of the season. We explore sequential voting in drawn-out primaries and simultaneous voting in front-loaded ones theoretically and use laboratory elections to examine our predictions empirically. We find evidence that in sequential voting later voters can use early outcomes to infer information about candidates and make choices that better reflect their preferences. The ability of later voters to infer information increases with higher levels of risk aversion and information provided on early outcomes. We discover that when a moderate candidate is largely unknown, information aggregation in sequential voting can increase the probability s/he will win, which supports the contention of policymakers that sequential voting can lead to different electoral outcomes.

A key premise of partisan theories of congressional organization is that majority status confers substantial procedural advantages. In this article, we take advantage of changes in party control of the House and Senate, such as that following the Republicans' historic victory in the midterm elections of 1994, to assess the value of majority status in terms of contributions from access-seeking political action committees (PACs). We estimate that majority status in the House was worth about $36,000 per member in receipts from corporate and trade PACs circa 1994—even controlling for the usual factors cited in the literature as affecting members' ability to raise money (such as committee assignments and voting record). The value of majority status in the Senate is even larger in absolute terms, although smaller in proportion to the total amount of money raised. Our results show that majority status is a valuable asset, one worth considerable collective effort to attain.

How do Americans decide whether their country should use military force abroad? We argue they combine dispositional preferences and ideas about the geopolitical situation. This article reports the results of a representative national survey that incorporated five experiments. Findings include the following: (1) Respondent dispositions, especially isolationism versus internationalism and assertiveness versus accommodativeness, consistently constrained policy preferences, whereas liberalism-conservatism did not; (2) features of the geopolitical context—the presence of U.S. interests, relative power, the images of the adversary's motivations, and judgments about cultural status—also influenced support for military intervention; and (3) systematic interactions emerged between dispositions and geopolitical context that shed light on when and why ideological disagreements about the use of force are likely to be amplified and attenuated by situational factors. Our results are consistent with a cognitive-interactionist perspective, in which people adapt broad predispositions in relatively thoughtful ways to specific foreign policy problems.

Revisionist accounts conclude that divided and unified government do not differ significantly in the production of “important” public policy. I argue instead that when one theoretically reclaims the concerns about party responsiveness and institutional features of American politics that have animated party government scholars, unified government is significantly more productive than divided government. Employing a range of measures of important legislative enactments in the postwar period, I find that unified government produces greater quantities of significant enactments and is more responsive to the public mood than is divided government. The evidence suggests that parties do, as party government theorists maintain, generate incentives to cooperation that help transcend some of the policymaking gaps created by the Constitution.