Clear fiscal policy effects appear in American state gubernatorial and legislative elections between 1968 and 1992, independent of the effects of incumbency, coattails, term limits, and macroeconomic conditions. The results show that accountability is generally stronger following a period of unified party control than under divided government. Voter reactions to taxes and spending relative to the state economy are conditional on expectations, which differ for each party. Net of these expectations, Republican gubernatorial candidates lose votes if their party is responsible for unanticipated increases in the size of the state budget; Democrats do not and, indeed, may be rewarded for small increases. Independent of this, the incumbent governor's party is punished in legislative elections for failing to maintain fiscal balance. Taken together, these results show how electoral accountability for fiscal policy outcomes is strong but highly contingent on a complex configuration of party labels, partisan control, expectations, and institutions.

In a departure from previous research, we focus on the dyadic relationship between lobbyists and committee members in the House of Representatives in order to test hypotheses about what factors shape the decisions of individual groups to lobby individual committee members. Our primary assumption is that organized interests seek to expand their supportive coalitions and affect the content and fate of bills referred to committees. In order to accomplish these goals, they give highest priority to lobbying their legislative allies in committee; allies may lobby other members of Congress on a group's behalf and shape legislation to conform with a group's preferences. But organizations with access to a strong resource base can move beyond their allies and work directly to expand support among undecided committee members and legislative opponents. Our empirical analysis provides evidence to support our expectations.

Scholars have debated the importance of declining political trust to the American political system. By primarily treating trust as a dependent variable, however, scholars have systematically underestimated its relevance. This study establishes the importance of trust by demonstrating that it is simultaneously related to measures of both specific and diffuse support. In fact, trust's effect on feelings about the incumbent president, a measure of specific support, is even stronger than the reverse. This provides a fundamentally different understanding of the importance of declining political trust in recent years. Rather than simply a reflection of dissatisfaction with political leaders, declining trust is a powerful cause of this dissatisfaction. Low trust helps create a political environment in which it is more difficult for leaders to succeed.

Political decisions are often biased in favor of special interests at the expense of the general public, and they are frequently inefficient in the sense that the losses incurred by the majority exceed the gains enjoyed by the minority. This article explains the bias in terms of information asymmetries and the free-rider problem. First, incumbents increase their reelection prospects by biasing policy toward groups that are better able to monitor their activities. Second, because smaller groups are better able to overcome the free-rider problem of costly monitoring, policy will be biased in their favor. Third, the effect of asymmetric monitoring on voter welfare is ambiguous. The inefficiencies created by the policy bias are offset by a positively valued selection bias: Incumbents of above-average quality are more likely to survive voter scrutiny than are low-quality types.

This article explores the effect of domestic political competition on the escalation of international crises. It combines an incomplete information model of crisis bargaining with a simple model of two-party electoral choice. One state has two strategic actors—a government and an opposition party—both of which declare openly whether they support the use of force to alter the status quo. The rival state updates its beliefs and selects its strategy in response to both signals. The parties' payoffs depend upon a retrospective evaluation by the domestic electorate. The model shows that the inclusion of a strategic opposition party decreases the ex ante probability of war by helping to reveal information about the state's preferences. This finding has important implications for research on democracy and international conflict, since it suggests a mechanism through which democratic states can overcome informational asymmetries, which have been identified as a central obstacle to negotiation.

Henry Thoreau's Walden is frequently read as the tale of a disaffected Romantic individualist escaping the rigors of community and modern society to seek refuge in a pondside idyll. I argue that this is a fundamental misreading which misses the political import of the book. Walden reveals itself to be a democratic advice-book focusing on the tensions between the political ideal of free self-direction and the unfavorable work conditions that laborers often face. Thoreau's goal is to set out a strategy by which economically vulnerable citizens may enact their liberty and autonomy in threatening employment conditions. To that end, Thoreau reformats themes and practices from various ancient philosophical traditions. Walden is one of the few texts in our tradition in which strategies are thought through for the individual laborer attempting to maintain freedom while at the same time making a living. It therefore merits our closest attention.

In exploring the conflicts between individual interests and the conditions that facilitate the disintegration of a political party, this article modifies the exit, voice, and loyalty framework developed by Hirschman. The utility of that framework is examined using the recent change in Japan, that is, the demise of the so-called 1955 system, in which the predominant conservatives confined the socialists to the status of a major but perennial opposition party. The quantitative analysis focuses on the split of the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party and the internal dispute in the Democratic Socialist Party of Japan. These cases provide an interesting comparison of how individual characteristics and contextual conditions affect members' decisions to exercise exit and voice. At the same time, they illuminate how party-level changes have been influenced by intraparty factors.

Why, given a strong presumption of success, do some presidential nominations fail? Of 1,464 important nominations from 1965 to 1994, less than 5% failed. Ninety-four percent of failures were rejected or withdrawn before reaching the floor, suggesting that opponents are most effective during prefloor stages. We propose a theoretical framework based on the notion that policy entrepreneurs pursue their goals within the context of a presumption of success. Logit analysis tends to support the theory that entrepreneurs can alter the presumption of success and defeat a nomination if they (1) identify negative information about a nominee to provide a rationale for changing the presumption and (2) expand the conflict through committee hearings and the media. Presidential resources—high public approval and efforts to signal that the nomination is a high priority—increase the chances of confirmation. Contrary to previous research, divided government has no independent effect on the fate of nominations.

MacKuen, Erikson, and Stimson (1989, 1992) argue that the aggregate distribution of party identification, or macropartisanship, shifts significantly over short periods in response to changes in presidential popularity and consumer sentiment. Their results are based on a subset of Gallup surveys available from 1953 to 1988 and only those CBS /New York Times surveys conducted during the Reagan administration. We replicate this analysis using a more extensive inventory of Gallup and CBS /New York Times data and find considerably less evidence of partisan fluctuation. The amount of partisan change caused by short-term movements in consumer sentiment and presidential popularity is found to be two to three times smaller than initially reported by MacKuen et al. (1989). Our results indicate that macropartisanship adjusts to short-term shocks in a limited and gradual fashion, consistent with traditional views of partisan realignment.

Contrary to the claim by Green, Palmquist, and Schickler (1998), macropartisanship is largely shaped by presidential approval and consumer sentiment. It is not the case, however, that macropartisanship mirrors the ever-changing levels of current presidential popularity and prosperity. Rather, macropartisanship reflects the cumulation of political and economic news that shapes approval and consumer sentiment. Using ECM technology, we show that, far from being the weak force that Green et al. suggest, the cumulation of innovations in presidential approval and consumer sentiment largely account for the long-term trends in macropartisanship. For forecasting macropartisanship in the near future, it is better to predict from the fundamentals represented by the history of approval and consumer sentiment up to a given moment than from current values of macropartisanship itself.

Antony Black argues that Christian republicanism was one of the discourses at work in framing the history of Western republican thought. But he neglects to confront the theoretically unique character of the Christian approach to republican institutions. First, Christian republicanism derived from more general beliefs about the divinely ordained organic structure of the universe. Second, it evinced no necessary hostility toward monarchic rule; indeed, quite to the contrary, its cosmological premise of organic hierarchy supported the office of the king (whether papal or secular). Once these elements of Christian republicanism are supplied, the medieval contribution to the history of republican ideas takes on a complexion very different from that described by Black.

In reply to Nederman I argue that in the Middle Ages monarchy and republicanism were not mutually exclusive, and that hierarchy and organicism were not specifically Christian ideas, and should not, therefore, be seen as the Christian element in republican thought. One should not assume that Christianity or any other historical ideology has an essential core of unchanging characteristics.

In my article, “Separation-of-Power Games in the Positive Theory of Congress and Courts” (Segal 1997) I compared the theoretical and empirical validity of the separation-of-powers model and the judicial attitudinal model as applied to U.S. Supreme Court decision making. I found that the preferences of the justices often fell inside the set of irreversible decisions, and that even when the preferences fell outside the set, the justices, with the exception of Earl Warren, showed little evidence of constraint. I concluded, consistent with the attitudinal model, that the justices overwhelmingly engaged in rationally sincere behavior.

Tim Groseclose and Sara Schiavoni (1998), whom I thank for their efforts, have alerted me to two errors in my calculation of the set of irreversible decisions. First, I used the formula 2CC-G (where CC = the conference committee and G = the gatekeeper) for calculating indifference points in the constraint set rather than 2G-CC. Second, I implicitly allowed Congress to pass legislation that would be vetoed and could not be overridden. Correcting this error changes the optimal behavior of the conference committee, which will not propose legislation that can be vetoed but cannot be overriden, and the gatekeepers, who must consider the conference committee's actions.

In this note I replicate the study using the corrected data and find first that the sets of irreversible decisions are a bit broader than I had originally found. This means that fewer justices could be constrained by Congress than I had originally concluded.