The defense of capitalism in America is rooted in a preference for the market's justice of earned deserts over the justices of equality and need associated with the polity. These preferences have structural roots in the way governments and markets serve different values and purposes, satisfy wants, focus on fairness or justice, enlist causal attributions, distribute or redistribute income, are limited by rights, and seem to offer either harmony or conflict of interest. Some of these “structural” differences, however, are themselves perceptual, and corrected by changed perceptions of the productivity of government and of our historic predecessors, and by a community point of view involving changed accounting systems, as well as by policies of full employment rather than guaranteed incomes. With few institutional changes, these altered perceptions may partially restore political justice to favor.

The earliest attempts at a theoretical understanding of politics occur in the city-states of ancient Greece. Women had no place in the politics of those cities. However, the Greek tragedians and philosophers raised questions about the fundamental assumptions underlying political life by introducing women into their writings. Thus, women appear in some Greek tragedies as a counter to the male sense of political efficacy—the sense that men can create through speech and ignore the facts of physical creation entailed in the process of reproduction. A discussion of two tragedies, The Seven Against Thebes and the Antigone, suggests how the failure of male political leaders to acknowledge the demands of the physical and that which is different brings on tragedy. The Socratic response in the Republic is to overcome tragedy by making the male and the female the same. Aristotle attempts to incorporate sexual difference in the theoretical framework of hierarchy. Finally, there is a brief consideration of the role of the pre-Socratic philosophers in setting the agenda for the Greeks' confrontation with the problems of incorporating difference into the political community.

Power, subjectivity, otherness, and modernity are concepts that contemporary political theorists increasingly find to be closely interwoven. In search of an adequate comprehension of the interrelationships among these concepts, I examine the work of Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas. I argue that Foucault, although he is provocatively insightful on a number of key points, ultimately provides a less satisfactory account than Habermas. The core problem is Foucault's inability to conceptualize juridical subjectivity, something which is necessary if he is going to connect his notion of aesthetic subjectivity with his endorsement of new social movements.

Thucydides' investigation of Athenian imperialism is in part an investigation into whether imperialism as such is based on universal human compulsions, and hence cannot simply be condemned. It is generally recognized that for Thucydides, Athenian imperialism is connected to the Athenian national character, but it has not been widely appreciated that Thucydides provides a detailed account of the foundations of the Athenian character in human nature itself. That account revolves around what he calls “daring” and the human impulse of eros. The erotic and daring character of the Athenians is connected by Thucydides both to the unique democracy of the city and to its unique experience in the Persian Wars. The unique Athenian character stems from an unprecedented liberation of certain impulses of human nature. This produces Athenian imperialism and dynamism, but also destroys the city in time.

This analysis of voters and nonvoters in a large sample of recent emigrants from the Soviet Union shows that nonvoting is correlated with high interest in politics, a critical political outlook, and dissident modes of behavior. Thus, voter abstention in noncompetitive balloting can be hypothesized to constitute a significant political act rather than passivity. Single-party states use single-candidate elections for a variety of purposes, one of these being the psychological reinforcement of unity between regime and subjects. In this context, the only choice left to the dissenting citizen is not to vote at all. In the contemporary Soviet Union, nonvoting is regionally focused on Moscow and Leningrad, and is associated with post-Stalinist generational change. The covert nature of vote evasion and its informal tolerance provide a new perspective on the character of the Soviet system and its political culture.

A basic problem for a rational choice theory of rebellious collective action is to explain why average citizens would participate in such behavior, since they have nothing to gain (they will receive benefits of successful rebellion, in terms of public goods, regardless of whether they take part or not), but much to lose (rebellious behavior may be quite costly). According to the conventional private interest or “by-product” theory, the incentive to participate must come from the expectation of receiving selective benefits; but since average citizens in a general case cannot expect substantial private material rewards, the relevant selective benefits must be psychological in nature. In contrast to the model of private interest theory, a public goods model is proposed, stipulating that the value of rebellion in terms of public goods can be a relevant incentive for participation. Using data from surveys conducted in New York City and Hamburg, West Germany, we investigate the relationship between participation in rebellious political behavior and measures of the incentives of public goods and private interest. The results do not support predictions of the private interest model in regard to nonmaterial selective incentives. Hypotheses of the public goods model are supported.

The cube law was proposed around 1910 to express the conversion of a party's vote shares into its seat share in two-party plurality elections with single-seat districts. This article develops predictive seat-vote equations for a much wider range of elections, including those involving many parties, single- and multi-seat districts, and diverse seat allocation rules such as plurality and list proportional representation (PR). Without any statistical curve fitting based on the seat and vote shares themselves, the basic features of the conversion are predicted using exogenous parameters: magnitude and number of districts, number of parties, and total size of the electorate and of the assembly. The link between the proposed equations and the original cube law is explicated. Using an existing data base, the fit of the predictive model is examined. On balance, this model accounts well for the conversion of votes to seats, and for the deviation from proportionality in PR systems.

Based on their interest in politics and knowledge of political leaders, individuals are classified into three levels of partisan sophistication: (1) those scoring high in interest and knowledge (partisan schematics), (2) a middle group, and (3) those scoring low (partisan aschematics). In this experimental study, and consistent with findings from cognitive and social psychology, partisan schematics prove better able than partisan aschematics to classify campaign statements as either Republican or Democratic and to recall the policy stands taken by a fictitious congressman. Aschematics, at the other extreme, perform at no better than chance levels in either the recognition or recall of the congressman's policy statements. There are, however, liabilities to sophistication as well: Schematics demonstrate a “consistency bias” in recalling significantly more policy statements that are consistent with the congressman's party identification than are inconsistent with it. This “restructuring” of memory is especially pronounced among sophisticates, and reflects a serious bias in the processing of political information.

This article applies theories of social cognition in an investigation of the dimensions of the assessments of candidates employed by voters in the United States. An empirical description of the public's cognitive representations of presidential candidates, derived from responses to open-ended questions in the American National Election Studies from 1952 to 1984, reveals that perceptions of candidates are generally focused on “personality” characteristics rather than on issue concerns or partisan group connections. Contrary to the implications of past research, higher education is found to be correlated with a greater likelihood of using personality categories rather than with making issue statements. While previous models have interpreted voting on the basis of candidate personality as indicative of superficial and idiosyncratic assessments, the data examined here indicate that they predominately reflect performance-relevant criteria such as competence, integrity, and reliability. In addition, both panel and aggregate time series data suggest that the categories that voters have used in the past influence how they will perceive future candidates, implying the application of schematic judgments. The reinterpretation presented here argues that these judgments reflect a rich cognitive representation of the candidates from which instrumental inferences are made.

Throughout the post–World War II period the president has been called upon to make decisions concerning the use of force as a political instrument. The explanation that is offered is based upon a characterization of the president as a cybernetic human decision maker facing limitations. These limitations, in conjunction with the complexity of the environment, lead presidents to develop and use a relatively simple decision rule. The dependent variable, which is the probability of the use of force at any point in time, is explained in terms of enduring and essential concerns, which are operationalized as coming from the international, domestic, and personal environments. Data are taken from Blechman and Kaplan's Force Without War. On the basis of our estimation and evaluation, presidential decisions to use force are based on factors in all three arenas.

This analysis demonstrates that policy issues play an important role in the selection of members of Congress. We differ with the conclusion of much of the existing research on congressional elections, which indicates that policy considerations are of minor importance. We have conducted an analysis of the 1982 U.S. Senate elections, drawing on data from the CBS News/New York Times 1982 congressional poll and from 23 statewide exit polls. We demonstrate that (1) candidates behave as though they believe issues are important to voters; (2) candidates' policy positions systematically influence voters' decisions; and (3) candidates' issue positions and voters' evaluations of the president and the economy interact to provide clear patterns of policy effects on Senate election outcomes. Policy effects are substantial and systematic in Senate elections, and cannot be omitted if we are to appreciate the importance of congressional elections in the national policy-making process.

What factors best account for the 1974 congressional election results? Were the Democratic party gains in House seats due mainly to the behavior of “strategic politicians” who sought or accepted candidacies and raised effective campaign war chests? Or were the Democratic gains due more to the impact of Watergate and the economy on voters' choices? In this Controversy, Gary C. Jacobson and Samuel Kernell defend the “strategic politicians” thesis, while Eric Uslaner and Margaret Conway stand by their more conventional accounting of the 1974 election outcome.

To resolve the paradoxical finding that economic conditions and presidential popularity powerfully relate to quadrennial movement in the House vote, but explain little individual voting variation, Jacobson and Kernell have advanced their “strategic politicians” model of midterm elections. Purportedly, the early-year political environment helps determine how many of a party's strong potential contenders risk challenging incumbents; voters in turn respond to the quality of candidates before them in November, and thus indirectly reward the party favored by this early-year environment. Despite its current prominence, however, the theory does not stand up to empirical investigation. A time-series equation of midterm outcomes regressed on early-year national conditions does not fare particularly well when contrasted with comparable equations assuming direct-effects voting. Furthermore, challenger quality has only a weak influence on individual voters—subordinate, in fact, to the effects of economic attitudes and presidential evaluations.

The effects of respondent characteristics with regard to the propensity of nonvoters to report that they voted are examined by analyzing the vote validation studies conducted by the University of Michigan Survey Research Center in 1964, 1976, and 1980. Previous research has suggested that vote overreporting derives from the respondent's wish to appear to engage in socially desirable behavior. This earlier research suggests that the only respondent characteristic that is strongly related to overreporting is race; measures of socioeconomic status and of general political attitudes are said to be at most weakly related to the tendency to exaggerate voting. These earlier conclusions are incorrect. We measure the extent of overreporting for the population “at risk” of overreporting voting: those who did not actually vote. Respondents most inclined to overreport their voting are those who are highly educated, those most supportive of the regime norm of voting, and those to whom the norm of voting is most salient—the same characteristics that are related to the probability that a person actually votes. Blacks are only slightly more likely to overreport voting than whites. The pattern of relations between education and vote overreporting is opposite what would be found if those who falsely reported voting fit the typical image of the uneducated, uninvolved, “acquiescent” respondent who is concerned primarily with pleasing the interviewer.