We offer a comparative analysis of public and private schools, presenting data from a new national study—the Administrator and Teacher Survey—that expands on the pathbreaking High School and Beyond survey. We find that public and private schools are distinctively different in environment and organization. Most importantly, private schools are more likely to possess the characteristics widely believed to produce effectiveness. We argue throughout that the differences across the sectors are anchored in the logic of politics and markets. This argument derives from our belief that environmental context has pervasive consequences for the organization and operation of all schools and specifically that the key differences between public and private environments—and thus between public and private schools—derive from their characteristic methods of social control: the public schools are subordinates in a hierarchic system of democratic politics, whereas private schools are largely autonomous actors “controlled” by the market.

We develop and test a market-based model to explain variations in states' welfare medicine policy decisions. The empirical results support the model of state policy outputs, indicating that states' spending efforts for welfare medicine are most sensitive to the supply of services within their borders. We learn in addition that spending effort declines with demand for services, indicating that the states spending the highest proportions of total personal income for the program are those who need it most and can afford it least. Measures of political system development affect spending effort positively and significantly, suggesting that ideology, diversity of interests, and administrative professionalism increase states' welfare efforts.

Participation as amicus curiae has long been an important tactic of organized interests in litigation before the U.S. Supreme Court. We analyze amicus curiae briefs filed before the decision on certiorari and assess their impact on the Court's selection of a plenary docket. We hypothesize that one or more briefs advocating or opposing certiorari increase the likelihood of its being granted. We test this hypothesis using data from the United States Reports and Briefs and Records of the United States Supreme Court for the 1982 term. The statistical analysis demonstrates that the presence of amicus curiae briefs filed prior to the decision on certiorari significantly and positively increases the chances of the justices' binding of a case over for full treatment—even after we take into account the full array of variables other scholars have hypothesized or shown to be substantial influences on the decision to grant or deny.

Understanding why members leave or remain in groups has received little attention despite its fundamental importance for organizational maintenance. In this analysis, a theory of experiential search is proposed and applied to Common Cause. Group participation is conceptualized as a process by which imperfectly informed decision makers learn about the organizations they join. This framework makes quitting understandable and provides a link between the initial membership choice and follow-up decisions.

This analysis investigates the mass dynamics of competitive electoral politics with respect to the presidential vote during the 1928–36 realigning period for the United States. A formal system of three interdependent differential equations is employed to characterize the dynamic processes of the aggregate voter shifts between the Republican, Democratic, and nonvoter populations. The modeling strategy is used to locate substantial variations in the mass dynamics between large subgroups in the electorate as well as to identify both national and socially interactive components to the patterns of voter movements. The results show that the overall realignment period was quite complex. Vote switching from the Republican party to the Democratic party was the dominant characteristic of the 1932 election, whereas additional Democratic gains in 1936 came mostly from new voters.

The stability of democracies has been of critical interest to students of comparative politics. One question that has received limited empirical analysis is, How do we integrate class conflict into the broader concept of democratic stability? We extend the work of Przeworski and Wallerstein. Our principal thesis is that as the material bases of class exchange diminish, the state intervenes economically to expand the resources conducive to class consent. A tripartite coalition thus emerges, with the state facilitating class compromise between labor and capital through economic policies. We explore this thesis in a cross-national analysis of data collected from 20 advanced industrial democracies during the time period 1965–83, and explore the essential conclusions and the political-economic implications of our findings.

The publics of different societies are characterized by durable cultural orientations that have major political and economic consequences. Throughout the period from 1973 to 1987, given nationalities consistently showed relative high or low levels of a “civic culture”—a coherent syndrome of personal life satisfaction, political satisfaction, interpersonal trust and support for the existing social order. Those societies that rank high on this syndrome are much likelier to be stable democracies than those that rank low. Economic development and cultural change are linked in a complex pattern of reciprocal influence. Originally, Protestantism may have facilitated the rise of capitalism, leading to economic development, which in turn favored the emergence of the civic culture. But in those countries that attained high levels of prosperity, there eventually emerged postmaterialist values that tended to neutralize the emphasis on economic accumulation that earlier characterized Protestant societies.

Condcrcet's criterion states that an alternative that defeats every other by a simple majority is the socially optimal choice. Condorcet argued that if the object of voting is to determine the “best” decision for society but voters sometimes make mistakes in their judgments, then the majority alternative (if it exists) is statistically most likely to be the best choice. Strictly speaking, this claim is not true; in some situations Bordas rule gives a sharper estimate of the best alternative. Nevertheless, Condorcet did propose a novel and statistically correct rule for finding the most likely ranking of the alternatives. This procedure, which is sometimes known as “Kemeny's rule,” is the unique social welfare function that satisfies a variant of independence of irrelevant alternatives together with several other standard properties.

Once sparce and sporadic, histories of political science have proliferated in recent years. We contend that such histories are a necessary feature of the discourse of political science, because there are essential connections between the history, identity, and actual practices of any rationally progressive discipline. In light of the fact that the objects political scientists study are historically and contextually contingent, there has been—and should be—a plurality of histories to match the diversity of approaches in politicalscience. Unfortunately, most histories of political science prove either “Whiggish” and condescending toward the past, or “skeptical” and negative. The consequence has been an inadequate understanding of the relationship between plurality, rationality, and progress in the discipline. Taking into account both the deficiencies and achievements of Whiggish and skeptical accounts, we argue that context-sensitive histories would better serve the rationality and progress of political science.

The modern language of tyranny has distorted the significance of the Greek term tyrannos. In ancient Greek the term was accorded to the new ruler in the city, one whose legitimacy did not reside in his bonds to the ancient rulers and ancient families. Tyranny thus suggested a freedom from the past. Reason, as the Greeks understood it, also entailed a breaking away from the physical world. Reason and tyranny thus work together as expressions of freedom, but it is a freedom that in its transcendence of boundaries leads to tragedy. An examination of Sophocles' Oedipus draws out both the glory and the failure of the individual attempt of the political actor to rise above the historical particular and the mere body to build a world where reason alone is power.

I explore possible links between liberalism and conceptions of individual virtue. I first distinguish between virtue seen as instrumental to the preservation of societies and institutions and virtue seen as intrinsically valuable, that is, as an end in itself. I argue that certain distinctive instrumental virtues are required for well-functioning liberal societies, economies, and political institutions. I then sketch different versions of liberal intrinsic virtue and explore the tensions among them and between them and liberal instrumental virtue. I conclude with some competing conjectures as to what extent necessary liberal virtues are being fostered through current institutions.

We use simulations based on a multiequation model of federal budgetary outcomes to assess the Reagan administrations impact on the federal budget during fiscal years 1982–86. Reagan's aggregate budget priorities represent a significant departure from the priorities of prior postwar administrations. The bulk of this shift in priorities had occurred by fiscal 1984. Defense spending and uncontrollable domestic spending were higher, and spending on domestic controllable programs lower under Reagan than they would otherwise have been. The distinctiveness of Reagan's budgetary priorities can be attributed to his tax cuts and—far from a strategy of “starving the budget by reducing revenues”—to a failure to allow fiscal pressures to restrain spending. The model projects that without tax cuts Reagan's predecessors would have spent no less on defense than Reagan. Cutting taxes increased the deficit by about $400 billion cumulatively during fiscal years 1982–86 and reduced expenditures by roughly $30 billion.

Recent research has altered our understanding of how voters select a candidate in U.S. presidential elections. Scholars have demonstrated empirically that issues, candidate personalities, candidate evaluations, and party identification interact in a dynamic simultaneous fashion to determine vote choice. Other researchers have shown that prenomination candidate preferences play an integral role in structuring the general election vote. We join together these two important trends to introduce and test a revised model of vote choice, using 1980 NES panel data. The results reconfirm that candidate selection is part of a dynamic simultaneous process and reveal for the first time that prenomination preferences are woven tightly into this causal web.

Several recent studies have claimed to explain the post-1960 decline in U.S. presidential and congressional election turnout in terms of just a few variables. Abramson and Aldrich (1982) attribute the great bulk of the decline to aggregate declines in partisanship and political efficacy. Shaffer (1981) attributes still more of the decline to aggregate decreases in these same two variables plus age and following the campaign in the newspapers. And Kleppner (1982) attributes “virtually all” of the decline to aggregate decreases in the first three of these variables. We show how these studies measure explanation too generously and how the very short-handedness of their models makes them seem more successful than they are. These few variables, we conclude, leave most of the decline unexplained.