In accord with the office-seeking theory of parties, we explore the impact of the structure of electoral competition on French parties. We speculated that the Fifth Republic's electoral structure—dual-ballot elections in single-member districts—would produce a multiparty system consisting of parties tailored to the two-ballot mode of winning. To test our proposition we devised two measures of winning for the members of the national assembly's partisan groups: the percentage of members who won the absolute majority that was needed to win on the first ballot and the average shift in the electoral margin of the groups' remaining members from the first to the second ballot. The two measures revealed four distinct ways of winning, each of which fostered a prototypical party.

Most applications of spatial modeling to the problem of electoral competition are pessimistic regarding the prospects for candidate equilibrium in more than one policy dimension. Probabilistic models of the vote, however, increase the likelihood of equilibrium. We expand the probabilistic model to include measured nonissue variables, thereby representing the general multivariate model of behavioral research. For this model we offer a general candidate equilibrium solution and illustrate with some simulations based on 1988 National Election Study data. The more complicated one's model of voters' motivations, the greater appears to be the chance of locating a candidate equilibrium position in policy space.

I investigate from an egalitarian welfarist standpoint the issue of whether state-guaranteed employment should be offered as a matter of right to able-bodied poor citizens who suffer chronic or persistent unemployment. An affirmative answer is defended. One consideration supporting this right to work is that provision of transfer aid in the form of jobs rather than cash screens “nonneedy bohemians” from the class of beneficiaries. The main conclusion of the essay is defended from one objection based on efficiency wage models of the labor market and from another based on the alleged impossibility of maintaining the self-respect and self-esteem of able-bodied individuals who fail to earn their own keep independently in a market economy.

The view that congressional committees tend to be biased subsets of their parent chambers provides the foundations for a substantial body of theoretical literature on distributive politics and legislative structure. More recent revisionist work suggests that committees composed of preference outliers are in fact rare. We reject the categorical account of preference outliers a priori and elaborate conditions under which committees should be unrepresentative of their parent chambers. We argue that the most widely available and frequently used data—floor roll call votes—are inappropriate to the task of assessing outlier predictions in any form. Finally, we conduct a differentiated set of hypothesis tests within one policy jurisdiction to illustrate the characteristics of evidence and analysis necessary to evaluate alternative theoretical accounts of legislative organization. The appearance of policy-relevant biases in congressional work groups, we conclude, is not so much rare as it is conditional, and we suggest several conditions on which future models of legislative organization should build.

I employ a simple game to suggest the effects of information and expectations on bargaining strategies and responses. I make use of members' predispositions in order to identify actors likely to be bargaining. Using administration headcounts, I show that while very few members misrepresent their preferences during the coalition-building process, those who do represent a large proportion of the administration's core supporters, make their misrepresentations unsystematic to avoid a costly reputation, and convert more readily than those who are not. Strategic considerations drive conversion among bluffing members, while identification with the administration determines conversion among other members. Compromise generates few conversions. A conservative estimate of bluffing suggests that the conversion of bluffers decided more than half the administration's critical votes. I speculate about a model to account for the observed bluffing.

The distribution of burdens in alliances may be explained in terms of public and private outputs. A joint product model is applied to the Triple Alliance and Triple Entente, using generalized least squares-auto regressive moving average (GLS-ARMA) techniques and time series data. Results indicate that countries regarded allies' military effort more as complements than as substitutes, though several examples of free-riding behavior are noted. The method used here may provide more accurate estimation of publicness problems than is found in the usual static tests.

Can stability emerge solely from the competition and self-interest of sovereign powers existing in a state of anarchy, or does stability depend on restraints from the complex nexus of interdependencies characterizing the contemporary world economy and its associated institutions? We suppose some infinitely divisible resource, that all nation-states are endowed with and maximize and that enables them to overcome adversaries in the event of conflict. We offer a noncooperative, extensive-form model of international conflict without exogenous mechanisms to enforce agreements in order to learn under what conditions balance of power and collective security ensure the sovereignty of all states in anarchic systems. We conclude that there exists at least one world—albeit an abstract one—in which anarchy yields stability.

Political obligations vary in force. Though we have strong obligations to obey certain laws, our obligations to obey others appear to be considerably weaker. Because the weakness of the obligations to obey certain laws has been employed as an argument against the existence of general prima facie political obligations, an adequate theory of political obligation must account for this. By employing the obligation to keep promises as a model, I sort out the factors that contribute to the force of prima facie political obligations. Their varying force can be explained according to a general theory of political obligation founded on the principle of fairness.

The perennially problematic relationship between philosophy and politics, though recognized as an important theme in the Platonic corpus, is virtually ignored in the writings of his most famous student. This is not due to the absence of the problem but the deftness of Aristotle's treatment. Attentiveness to both the requirements of moral-political life and the nature of philosophy gives rise to the rhetorical design of the Nicomachean Ethics. In the final book of the Ethics Aristotle establishes the value of philosophy by placing his argument within a broader context that reveals to what extent moral and intellectual excellence can be regarded as similar and even complementary. Without actually denying the existence of a fundamental tension between the requirements of philosophy and civic virtue, Aristotle succeeds in winning an at-least-partial acceptance of philosophy on the part of those who are (or will be) most responsible for the welfare of the city.

The developing countries' suspension of payments on their external debt is as much a consequence of the political weakness of their governments and the excessive politicization of their economic policies as it is a result of unfavorable structural changes in the international economy. Differences in debtor governments' political performances are treated as an explicit variable rather than as residuals to an economic explanation in estimating the probability of developing countries' suspending their external debt service payments. Using a logit model, I analyze fifty-eight developing countries for the years 1970–1984. The results show that political capacity can be decisive in corrrectly predicting the probability of a government's suspending its external debt service payments. The model predicts 96% of the total outcomes correctly and 80% of the debt payment suspension cases correctly.

Recent developments in Eastern Europe have created expectations of a “peace dividend” associated with reduced levels of U.S. defense expenditures. We present and empirically estimate a two-equation model for assessing the direct and indirect, immediate and delayed effects of changes in defense spending on economic growth in the United States.

The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935 represented a turning point in modern labor relations policy in the United States. In the December 1989 issue of this Review, Michael Goldfield examined the effects of worker insurgency and radical organization on the enactment of the new labor law and rejected theories that emphasized the autonomy of the state from societal forces. In this Controversy, Theda Skocpol and Kenneth Finegold argue that the growing strength of liberal Democrats in Congress following the 1934 election and the failure of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) as an economic recovery measure provided the most important causes for the passage of the NLRA in mid-1935. In response Goldfield argues that the results of the 1934 election were themselves influenced by the protest environment and that the passage of the NLRA was a foregone conclusion before the NIRA was struck down.

For centuries scholars have engaged in interpreting the meaning of Plato's Republic. In this exchange, Peter Steinberger and Christopher Duncan debate the role of guardians and philosopher-kings in the ancient city. This controversy is ignited by Steinberger's essay on Platonic rulers in the December 1989 issue of this Review.