Analysis of data from a 1988 survey of presidential parties demonstrates that campaign leaders are better understood as true believers than as either representatives or vote maximizers. Analysis of leaders' attitudes reveals four issue groups in both the Republican and Democratic parties. The dominant coalition in the Republican party is slightly more conservative, and that in the Democratic party is slightly more liberal, than the party median. Comparison with similar 1972 data shows stable patterns of issue advocacy and intraparty cohesion over this time period but somewhat increased issue distance between the parties in 1988.

We investigate the relationship between party issue position and mass evaluation of political parties in multiparty systems. In so doing, we engage two competing theories of mass-elite linkage: the directional theory and the traditional spatial theory of elections. The alternate models are evaluated with survey data gathered in Norway in 1989. The data collection is unique in providing extensive information on the issue positions of all parties with potential for achieving representation in the parliament. Results suggest that the directional theory provides a better description of the relationship. Consistent with directional theory, we find that when parties occupy a centrist position on an issue they are not evaluated on the basis of that issue. Voters neither love nor hate a party in the middle. Thus, in order to build support on the basis of issues, parties must offer some strong stands.

Public officials are not passive bystanders in the electoral process. Rather, they actively try to shape or manage citizens' perceptions of events (particularly those involving negative outcomes) through explanations or accounts. I argue that consideration of citizens' understandings of political accountability and how these are shaped by public officials represent critical missing components of models of electoral behavior. The distinction between excuses and justifications provides a valuable conceptual framework for understanding the impact of political accounts on a variety of judgments and psychological processes. I examine satisfaction with various excuses and justifications and their impact on subsequent evaluations of the official.

Using data from a longitudinal telephone study of voting-eligible black Americans I explore the political context of black voter turnout in the 1984 and 1988 presidential elections and reexamine the attitudinal and demographic variables associated with black electoral participation. Jesse Jackson supporters were more likely to vote in the 1984 presidential election, while black opposition to Reagan was also linked to black voter turnout in 1984. Nonetheless, blacks who preferred Jackson to other primary contenders in the 1988 nominating contest were less likely to vote in the presidential election. Finally, while education, political interest, partisanship, and age were generally associated with black voter participation, race identification had a less consistent effect. Instead, church membership and involvement in black political organizations serve as alternative, community-based resources that promote black participation. This research underscores the importance of both political context and group-based political resources in stimulating the black vote.

This research is designed to generalize a referendum voting model and investigate its ability to account for the aggregate outcomes of elections for the House, Senate, governorships, and upper and lower chambers of state legislatures. Our analysis shows that these outcomes are influenced by the same systematic short- and long-term forces. In addition to this common referendum structure, the analysis reveals that there is a common response to random shocks, a subtle form of interdependence found in systems of seemingly unrelated regressions.

Campaigns play a central role in a democracy. I examine the effect of campaigns on the perception of the ideological positions of incumbent senators. The results demonstrate that incumbents affect voter perception both through their actions in office and on the campaign trail. Using the 1988 Senate Election Study, I find that the perceived location of incumbents depends on their roll call voting records, the perceived position of their party and the voter's own position. More crucial is the finding that candidates can affect the clarity of these perceptions through their campaign strategies. Incumbents who stress issues increase the clarity of voter perceptions, while challengers' attacks on incumbents reduce clarity. While elections alone increase clarity, these effects are small in comparison to the effect due to candidate campaign strategies. The results remind us that to understand the politics of elections we must incorporate candidate strategy in our models.

Past research has modeled mass opinion change as a two-step process involving reception of political communication and acceptance or rejection of that communication. I propose a two-message version of the reception-acceptance model, in which citizens are exposed to two opposing communication flows, either or both of which may affect their opinions. Variation over time in the relative intensity of the opposing communications, along with citizen differences in attention to politics and in political values, interact in the model to explain both cross-sectional patterns of mass opinion and opinion change across surveys. The model, which is applied to data on the Vietnam War, illuminates two research problems: how complex information flows diffuse through a mass audience and how this information shapes mass belief systems.

I seek to reinvigorate the study of politicians' roles by showing how motivational role theory can be used to examine the impact of goals and incentives upon behavior and thereby integrate economic and sociological perspectives. I address three reasons for the recent neglect of politicians' roles—changes in interdisciplinary tastes, conceptual and theoretical muddles, and failures to demonstrate consequences for behavior—and find them unconvincing. I further argue that the most promising framework for the new institutionalism is one that incorporates not just formal but also informal institutional structures (like roles and norms), a framework that incorporates, rather than excludes, political behavior.

Discontent theories of rebellion postulate that politicized discontent will have a strong independent effect on individuals' potential to participate in rebellious political action. Expected utility theories postulate that participation in rebellious action is motivated by expectation of reward and that discontent is relevant at most only insofar as individuals expect that collective action can be successful and that their participation is important to that end. We test these theories with data from a national sample and a sample of students at a protest-prone university in Peru, a country with significant objective conditions of discontent and a high incidence of rebellious political conflict. The results provide no evidence for the discontent models but strong support for the expected utility models. The potential for participation in rebellious political action proves to be a function primarily of discontent weighted by the expectancy of the action's success and the perceived importance of personal participation. Private social and normative rewards and costs also are relevant—but to a lesser extent—for the individual's calculation of the expected utility of participation.

Several nonrevolutionary cases of transition to democracy are modeled. Different preferences and strategic choices between the alternatives of continuity, reform, and rupture of the authoritarian regime are used to define conventional distinctions between hard-liners, soft-liners, and opposition more precisely. Six groups of actors emerge. Using game theory, the interactions among these actors are formally analyzed. The possibility of political pact in the first phase of change is identified with the possibility of cooperation between players in games in which the equilibrium is a deficient outcome. Three models of transition by agreement are established: agreed reform within the ruling bloc, controlled opening to the opposition, and sudden collapse of the authoritarian regime. Each of these models entails differences in the pace of change and in the limits of the pact and can be associated with different cases of transition in Southern Europe, Latin America, and Eastern Europe.

The problem of absolute and relative gains divides neoliberal institutionalism and structural realism. The former assumes states focus primarily on their absolute gains and emphasizes the prospects for cooperation. The latter supposes states are largely concerned with relative gains and emphasizes the prospects for conflict. Existing work in international relations theory generally traces the differences between these two theories to different assumptions about states' preferences. Using a simple game-theoretic model, this essay offers a reformulation of the problem of absolute and relative gains that links changes in the states' behavior, the feasibility of cooperation, and especially the states' concern for relative versus absolute gains explicitly to changes in the constraints facing the states. Many of the differences between neoliberal institutionalism and structural realism appear as special cases of the model.

The recent Oregon v.Smith decision's shifting of the burden in free exercise cases from legislatures to minority religious claims has brought fierce opposition, most conspicuously from leading nonpreferentialist Richard J. Neuhaus, who sees in it the foundation of majority tyranny. Against Smith, Neuhaus employs Madison's “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments,” which is universally read to argue that the superiority of religion to politics proscribes majoritarian hegemony over religious practices. I contend that the Memorial's appeals are better understood as rhetoric than as reflecting Madison's true view. I find Madison hostile not only to religious establishments but also to religion itself. This hostility was the basis of his rejection of the nonpreferentialists' utility-based argument for government support of religion. In this light, I uncover a curious historical irony: the nonpreferentialist Neuhaus seeks today to protect religion from hostility by adhering to a position that was originally animated, in key respects, by hostility both to religion and to its nonpreferential support.

I propose an alternative index to operationalize the variable number and size of parties in a party system. To support it, I present a critical overview of the two most common indices, Laakso and Taagepera's effective number of parties and Kesselman and Wildgen's hyperfractionalization, showing the causes of their weakness. Then I explain the computational logic of my alternative, “number of parties,” and compare it with the other two, using hypothetical cases. After that, I contrast the Laakso-Taagepera index with mine, using data from actual elections between 1945 and 1981. I conclude that my index outperforms the other two as an operationalization of the variable number and size of parties.

I show that restrictive registration laws do not dissuade individuals with lower levels of education from voting any more than individuals with higher levels of education. This finding contradicts the result reported in Wolfinger and Rosenstone's classic analysis of turnout. I show that their conclusion was actually an artifact of the methodology they employed. Examining predicted probabilities generated by a nonlinear model such as probit or logit may produce spurious results when used to determine interactive effects between two independent variables. By respecifying the model of turnout to explicitly include terms to test interactive hypotheses and reanalyzing the data from the 1972 Current Population Survey (as well as data from the 1984 survey), I show that in fact, no such substantive interactive effect between registration laws and individuals' level of education exists at the micro level.

Political efficacy has been studied extensively since the 1950s, hut analysts have never been fully satisfied with its measurement. After considerable testing, four new questions tapping internal political efficacy were added to the 1988 National Election Study. Our investigation shows that inter-item correlations among these questions indicate high internal consistency, that by both exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis the items measure a single concept distinct from external efficacy and political trust, that the measurement model is robust across major subgroups, and that the overall scale is externally valid and provides a good distribution of efficacy scores across the population. Further, the results of an order experiment in the survey suggest that responses are unaffected by mode of presentation. In short, the four new questions constitute the most satisfactory measure of internal political efficacy to date.

In the June 1991 issue of this Review John Orbell and Robyn Dawes have argued that prisoner's dilemma games are shaped, in part, by “cognitive misers”—players who assume other players are like themselves. In such games, this results in more play and in a higher expected payoff by cooperators than by defectors, lain McLean agrees with the conclusions of Orbell and Dawes but takes issue with their reasons and their model. In turn, Orbell and Dawes retort, arguing that players in prisoner's dilemma games do not respond as McLean assumes they will.